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NaNoWriMo Week 1: Aerial Silk Classes!
Once a year, the writers of the world rally together in attempt to each write fifty-thousand words in one month. It’s called NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. It’s an exercise in both writing prolifically, but also in camaraderie. Along the way, we’re treated to pep talks from amazing authors, and everyone who reaches 50k “wins.” I made my first NaNoWriMo attempt in 2012, learned a few lessons, and successfully reached 50k when I tried again in 2013. I didn’t come back to it because, well, it’s a time-suck and the manuscript I wrote in 2013 was too rushed to create any usable material. I felt like NaNoWriMo was a…
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I Got FIVE More Rejections! (6-10)
Click the following links to read… My First Rejection Letter My Second Rejection Letter My Third Rejection Letter My Fourth Rejection Letter My Fifth Rejection Letter I’ve hit a major milestone in my writing…I’ve received five more rejections, and finally got my tenth! And I must say, these last ones led to some special moments. My seven year old, Bubs, was in the room when I got one of them and I thought he might be interested in seeing it. I showed him my “rejection binder” where I print them all out so I can flip through them. “Wow! That’s a lot of rejections!” he said when he looked at it.…
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My Best Writing Advice Part 3: How I Write for Six Hours a Day
This is the (very long) third installment to my “Best Writing Advice” series.Click here for My Best Writing Advice Part 1: “Riding” Like a ProfessionalClick here for My Best Writing Advice Part 2: The Three Keys to a Professional Routine Without further ado, Part 3: In August of 2017, I had a little bit of a meltdown. I had finished the novel I’d been working on since my childhood, and had decided to shelve it. While I’d planned for the book to be the first in a series, I realized it would work much better as a sequel, and the new “first book” had yet to be written. I even…
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My Best Writing Advice Part 2: The Three Keys to a Professional Routine
Last week I drew out a very long analogy to demonstrate why having a professional writing routine before publication is, in my opinion, one of the most important skills you can develop as an unpublished author. I claimed that, “Having a predictable, productive, and sustainable approach to your writing is just as important as writing well.” Now, if I’m going to claim that predictability, productivity and sustainability are the three keys of professional writing, I should probably define what I mean by those terms. Key 1. PREDICTABILITY I work analogous to a lot of women who, on top of writing, carry the majority of the domestic duties in their home, such as parenting,…
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My Best Writing Advice Part 1: “Riding” Like a Professional
Imagine you have a horse, a newborn foal, fresh out of the caul and at first it can’t even stand on four legs. It learns to walk, awkwardly, and you fall in love. Let’s say there’s a parade coming up in a few years with a prize for the best horse, and you believe in your horse and want to get that prize. So you feed your horse and give it water. Sometimes you give it treats — apples and carrots — and it nuzzles you and oh, isn’t everything just wonderful? It comes time to train the horse, which you thought would be easy, since you and your horse…
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Game Recommendation: Broken Age
So there’s this game called Broken Age that came out five years ago. It’s a point-and-click adventure game, which means you have an interactive story that moves along as you solve puzzles. It has gorgeous two-dimensional art, a fantastic story, superb voice acting, and a live score featuring the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and a small ensemble of San Francisco musicians. In short, it is a marvelous game and I can’t believe I’d never heard of it until recently. (Come on, Big Brother, if you’re going to violate my privacy and use consumer algorithms to inundate me with ham-fisted advertisements, you should probably have figured out what games I like by…
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What I’m Working On: Autumn 2018
Hey guys! I know I just did one of these updates last month, but Autumn starts on September 22nd this year, so I’m going to go ahead and give you the fall writing slate. I also wanted to let everyone know that I’m planning a series of blog posts about HOW I get so much writing done, because that seems to be what a lot of you are curious about. I’m excited to share my secrets with you — as soon as I can organize them into neat little posts! IN DEVELOPMENT: NEW! History 100 Essay A historical essay about the scientists who aided in the creation of the atom…
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Meet JJ and CC – The First Tylerbots!
This is CC (below left) and JJ (below right), the new mascots for ChristineTyler.com. I’ve actually wanted some robot mascots for several years now, and started collecting materials when I was in Japan. CC’s music box, for instance, plays Always With You from Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. I knew I wanted a robot theme for my blog images when I rebooted the site, but since I hadn’t made the robots yet I had to settle for stock images. Apparently taking pictures of adorable little robots doing daily tasks is already a thing! Now that I have my own robots though, I can take much more specific pictures + I don’t have…
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Quick! I Need Help Choosing Some Art!
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My Writing Space (featuring: the Happy Board)
Want to see what my writing space looks like? Or, at least what my desk area looks like? I actually enjoy switching up my routine and writing in different places around my house, because I tend to procrastinate when things feel too familiar or repetitive. But I do have a “writing base,” as you will, and my favorite part of it is my Happy Board. This is where I like to put things that inspire me or make me feel inexplicably happy when I look at them. So, for those of you who are curious, I thought I’d diagram some of my favorite components of my Writing Base and Happy Board.…
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What I’m Working On: Summer 2018
I think we’re overdue for an update on my current projects! I picked the picture of the robot juggling all the lightbulbs because…well… IN DEVELOPMENT: “SETI@home” A 1-2k word personal essay about my late grandpa and a nostalgia-driven look at the SETI@home project. SETI stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” It’s the program Jodie Foster was working on in the 1997 movie Contact. The SETI@home project was a small offshoot of SETI, developed in 1999 as a way for everyday people to donate their CPUs, or computer processing cycles, to help process radio signals from space. The most exciting part of this is that I’ve contacted the director of the SETI@home…
