Best Music to write to

Good evening fellow writers.  Hope it's been a good week and it has been very busy here.  Here in Georgia we have a drought, but the cold weather is coming and I am going though our baby's winter clothes to see if they fit among some fall cleaning.

I found an awesome station that plays a variety of music, 80s, 90s, and 70s and today's.  Music like Depeche mode, U2, INXS and all the goodies that brings me back to high school days.   I cannot leave out music by Sting.  The very best that keeps the creativity going.  I particularly like to listen to soundtracks or music that fits the scene that I am writing.

Enya is on my list, as it seems to fit the many scenes in part two of book 2.   If it is a romantic scene, something with violin or definitely classical.

I also found some of these, of which are on my list.  My Amazon list keeps growing as do my ideas. 

What do you prefer with your writing?

https://www.buzzfeed.com/danieldalton/write-music

Author Highlights

Though J.R.R. Tolkien passed away in 1973, he has never really stopped publishing. For decades his son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien has painstakingly catalogued and edited his father’s papers, creating new books out of unfinished and unpublished manuscripts. Most of those tales delve deep into the history of Middle-earth, the fantasy realm where Tolkien’s best known works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series take place. Now, it’s likely that work will come to an end with one last Tolkien book. Critic Andrew Ervin at The Washington Post reports that The Fall of Gondolin, which will be released tomorrow, is likely J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien’s swan song.

While this story may be the last Tolkien book to be published, it is actually an early tale and foundational to the author’s entire concept of Middle-earth. It was first written in 1917 while Tolkien was recuperating in a hospital from trench fever after the Battle of the Somme. “It’s a quest story with a reluctant hero who turns into a genuine hero—it’s a template for everything Tolkien wrote afterwards,” John Garth, author of a book about Tolkien’s experience in World War I tells Alison Flood at The Guardian. “It has a dark lord, our first encounter with orcs and balrogs—it’s really Tolkien limbering up for what he would be doing later.”

Christian Holub at Entertainment Weekly explains that the new book tells the tale of Tuor, a man living in an age where the world is dominated by the dark lord Melko—known in other Tolkien books as Morgoth. Only one place, the hidden Elvish city of Gondolin has resisted his reign, and Tuor is sent to find the place. He does, but so do the dark forces of Melko. In the grandest Tolkien battle scene outside of The Lord of the Rings, the author describes a mechanized army, similar to the newly introduced mechanized warfare he’d witnessed during the Great War, falling on the city.

The new book, however, isn’t just one tale. Instead, Holub explains that Tolkien rewrote the story several times, changing details and character attributes. In 1951, he took a stab at writing a more narrative version of the story versus the mythological and epic versions he produced before, but abandoned that work when his publisher showed little interest. The new volume collects all of the versions including historical notes and explanations from Christopher Tolkien.

Last year, Tolkien the Younger, who is now 93 years old, published Beren and Luthien, the second of what his father considered the three “great tales” of early Middle-earth. In the preface to that work, Christopher Tolkien suggested it was the last work he would edit, and possibly the last official work in his father’s oeuvre. So fans and literary scholars were surprised when earlier this year Tolkien announced that he was planning on publishing The Fall of Gondolin, the third and final Great Tale.

While none of the tales are quite as compelling as the journey of Bilbo or Frodo Baggins, they are remarkable for what they represent. Before Tolkien set his hobbits off on their adventures, he spent decades creating an entire world, including an entire ancient history, to couch them. It’s a feat of world-building that few, if any, other authors have achieved so successfully. “What makes The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings work as well as they do is that they are set into this cultural background with its own history and languages,” Alan Lee, who created color illustrations for the new book and the other Great Tales tells Holub. “You get so much more from those particular stories if you actually delve back and enjoy the mythology of Middle-earth. In that process of the myths changing and developing, you get all these echoes of the earlier stories running through the later ones. It makes the whole thing richer and more satisfying and more dense.”

It’s unclear whether someone else will step in and scour Tolkien’s papers for other unpublished or unfinished works, though it’s hard to imagine there’s much left to find. Since the 1970s, Christopher Tolkien has edited 24 books of Tolkien’s writing including The Silmarillion, a history of the elves, a 12-volume History of Middle-earth series, the most recent Great Tales, as well books of his father’s academic writings.

Last year, Tolkien resigned as director of the Tolkien Estate. But there’s more Middle-earth content on the way, even if it didn’t originate at J.R.R. Tolkien’s pen. Soon after Christopher Tolkien’s resignation, the estate sold TV rights to Amazon, which is in the process of creating a new television series, and possibly more than one, based in the fantasy world.

Though I personally never read his work, I want my style to be my own and not fringed on by others.  I did see all the movies, though, but the books I am sure are far more better.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/jrr-tolkiens-final-posthumous-book-published-180970164/

Best Productive Time

Most writers have a fixed time they start on their work.   Before the kids, my old schedule was get up at 5:30 AM and work on the first chapter or scene in progress. I would work until 12 PM and have lunch, and tend to home chores or other stuff that the home front needed.  I would work Monday thru Friday, and use Friday as my review day what was written and see what needed to be revised and so on.  Now with kids and the routine change,  put my writing a bit on the back burner.  Priorities especially when we don't have a sitter and I am slow to trust anyone besides family to watch our children. Things just slowed down a bit, however reading took the place of writing when I had about an hour or so.

Now that my schedule is almost again at the old schedule, my productivity has increased as well having a peace of mind that my story flowed better and getting closer to the finish.  Remember to save your work!  Don't assume a flash drive does it all as some may recall the dilemma that happened last May.

What is your usual work routine on your writing? Some love working into the night.  I used to in my younger days, write till 3 AM especially on a scene that was intense and my brain was still awake.  With kids my sleep time falls around 9:30 PM to 11 PM if it is a writing night.  It depends on the level of energy I still have.

Good luck on your manuscripts!

Anne River Siddons

Her Legacy, her Writing Way
gone at 83

Anne Rivers Siddons, best-selling author of "Peachtree Road" and a member of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, has died.  

Her stepson David Siddons confirmed her death in the Charleston Post and Courier. He said Siddons, 83, succumbed to lung cancer Wednesday at Medical University Hospital in Charleston.  

Born Sybil Anne Rivers on Jan. 9, 1936, in Fairburn to Katherine and Marvin Rivers, a school secretary and a lawyer, respectively, Siddons attended Campbell High School, where she was a cheerleader and homecoming queen. After graduation she attended Auburn University, where she was a member of Delta Delta Delta sorority and wrote for the student newspaper, The Auburn Plainsman, which famously fired her for writing columns in favor of integration. The incident inspired the plot for Siddons' debut novel, "Heartbreak Hotel" (1976), which was made into the feature film "Heart of Dixie," starring Ally Sheedy, Phoebe Cates and Treat Williams, in 1989. 

Before she became an author, though, Siddons worked as an advertising copywriter, and as a writer and editor for Atlanta magazine alongside founder Jim Townsend. In 1966, she married Heyward Siddons, a Princeton graduate and a partner in Phoenix Printing, who made her a stepmother to four boys.  

Success as an author came easy to Siddons. In 1974, after reading one of her articles in Atlanta magazine, an editor at Doubleday sent Siddons a letter requesting a manuscript for possible publication. 

"I literally thought a friend of mind had stolen some Doubleday stationary," Siddons told the AJC in 1986.  

She sent him a batch of previously published work, a collection of personal essays about her youth, her career and her hometown, and it was published in 1975 under the title "John Chancellor Always Makes Me Cry." 

Two years later she published the first of her 19 novels, many of them set in Atlanta and all of them centered around strong Southern women. Her most commercially successful novel was "Peachtree Road" (1988), a saga that spans 40 years and follows an ill-fated romance that links two wealthy Buckhead families. "Prince of Tides" author Pat Conroy called it "the Southern novel of our generation." 

Siddons and Conroy were close friends, and their ascension among Atlanta's literati coincided during a publishing heyday in the city when their mutual friend, Cliff Graubart, owner of the Old New York Book Shop, had a storefront on Piedmont Road and later Juniper Street, where he hosted legendary book signings and parties in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Their social circle also included cookbook authors Nathalie Dupree and Graubart's wife, Cynthia. 

"Annie was a magnificent cook, fed us all, lived in a beautiful house, which none of us did then," Conroy said about those days in "My Exaggerated Life" (2018), his posthumously published memoir as told to Katherine Clark. "Annie and Heyward's was this post of civilization that we could always go to, were always invited to. They were an adult couple who were running a household that looked like a household, as opposed to the rest of us who lived in the inside of potato chip bags. If they ever had arguments, I never saw it. If they ever got mad at me, I never knew it. Those two people brought great kindness, great times of happiness into my life."  

In 1993, Siddons published "Hill Towns," a novel about a band of friends touring Italy that was inspired by the Graubarts' European honeymoon, on which Conroy, Dupree and the Siddons tagged along.  

Also notable among Siddons' novels is "The House Next Door" (1978) about a woman who moves into a home occupied by an evil presence that preys on its inhabitants' weaknesses. Made into a TV movie starring Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Lara Flynn Boyle for Lifetime in 2006, the novel is cited by the master of horror writing, Stephen King, as one of the best horror novels of the 20th century in his nonfiction assessment of the genre, "Danse Macabre" (1981). 

Despite her commercial success and her admiring colleagues, Siddons' work did not garner the critical praise she'd hoped. 

"I would like to be taken a little more seriously in New York, but that's not going to happen," she told the AJC in 1998. "I will never be considered anything but a regional writer by the New York Times."  

The criticism she received for her third novel, "Fox's Earth" (1981), was particularly brutal. The manuscript for her follow-up novel was returned by her publisher, who requested a complete rewrite. 

"I just couldn't do it," she told the AJC. "So I sent the advance back." 

Six years would pass before Siddons published another book, during which time she battled depression. She credited therapy and medication for aiding her recovery and restoring her desire to write, which she did with a vengeance, publishing 11 books over the next 13 years. 

Citing traffic, unbridled development and the destruction of historic buildings, Siddons and her husband left Atlanta for Charleston, S.C., in 1998. 

"Atlanta had a very specific feel to it in the ‘60s," she told the AJC. "It doesn't have that feel anymore. It seems too homogenized. In Charleston, there's development, but more historic buildings have been saved here than in any other big city. And here they celebrate the past. They don't pretend it never happened." 

An unwavering champion of his wife's work, who read her novels-in-progress aloud every night, Heyward Siddons died after a brief illness in 2014. 

"The great, unseeable reward I received from watching the marriage of Heyward and Annie Siddons is to be a witness to the greatest love story it has been a privilege to watch," Conroy wrote on his website in a piece titled "A Eulogy for a Southern Gentleman." 

Siddons, according to the Post and Courier obituary, is survived by four stepsons: Lee Siddons; Kemble Siddons and his wife, Carol; Rick Siddons and his wife, Julie; David Siddons and his wife, Tracy;, and three step-grandchildren.

https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta-novelist-anne-rivers-siddons-dies-at-age-83/985573325

Writers that Best Express their work

Happy Saturday writing fans.  Hope it has been a productive week and you got priorities done with a little bit of fun.  It is still like summer here in Georgia, the deep south.  I recall a recent comment started by one of our followers  RJordan who sparked a topic discussion here on writers expressing their work best through body language and dialogue that compliments communication in a manuscript. 

List some authors if you recall those that did this brilliantly in their craft.  Thank you!

Laura J

@disqus_ZAeDCzsqoJ:disqus

Finding Time to Edit

With my busy schedule like everyone else, you find the time.  Except with kids and daily routine such as priorities that come up I have to work around it all and go with the flow.  Many times I have no choice but be a mom, keep the house front clean and make sure our fridge is replenished.  

My best time to edit and write were early nights from 7 PM to 12 or 1 AM.  I sleep in the next day, preferably Saturday and husband takes care of the kids.   With my son now 3 going to school, I can go back to my near old schedule.  I have about six hours during the week to catch up on writing a scene or such.  Fridays were my review days to see what was written so far on the story.   The story has been revised over the years and for the most part I am happy with it.  

What is your schedule?  How you make it work for you? Mornings are get kids to school times and keeping up with other tasks.  I drink a bit of coffee to warm up for the day. I also remember to make a cognitive meal the night before if I am going to use a lot of organizing and writing out ideas so my brain doesn't sputter out.  It does have a time when it says I'm done.   So this is the pile to work through.  I forgot to use double sided printing so there's more in the Amazon box and the notes.  If all goes well, next week is the plan between the project so the idea is to stay focused.  Happy writing and good luck on your projects!