Best places to be

 

Buzzfeed put together 30 photos of the best places to be if you love books. Check them out!!

 

http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-best-places-to-be-if-you-love-books

 

Where do you read?

Lovin’ Lamar

Lots of writers choose picturesque settings for their novels. Tropical beaches, quaint French villages, or exciting cities set the stage so that authors can take trips, gathering research.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda.

Rather than choosing say, Tahiti, I set my latest manuscript in Lamar, Colorado: home of a high school nicknamed ‘the savages’ as well as the Cow Palace hotel, a trucker’s paradise. Truth, not fiction.

Like any diligent writer, I did my research on-line, but decided I needed to take the trek and live it first-hand. While visiting Eastern Colorado, I stayed at the Cow Palace for one night, while doing research. While it wasn’t the Bahamas, they did have a kidney-shaped pool complete with plastic palm trees. Woot! Their breakfast special consisted of six pieces of sausage, six pieces of bacon, two eggs, and two biscuits and gravy. I didn’t starve. When I checked in, I asked for a quiet room on the second floor of the motel. A scruffy eighteen-year-old stared at me as if I’d arrived from OZ. For a minute, I thought he might say it was haunted. Instead, he told me they didn’t put people on the second floor because there was no elevator and that a set of stairs required exercise. Even if I’d been writing a book about obesity, I don’t think I would have thought of that nugget. Truth is odder than fiction.

Lamar was everything I remembered from a brief encounter years ago. It did not disappoint. And while I am slightly sorry I didn’t choose a tropical island to set my story, Lamar offered rich ambiance.  Sometimes a story set in a unique place can offer an abundance of interesting characters and new sensory awareness. What?  Tahiti doesn’t smell like chlorine and manure? Nope. You can only find that, in Lamar.

Take Charge of Your Writing

1. Carve out time to write, even if it’s only fifteen minutes a day.
2. Create an atmosphere for good writing habits (no laundry allowed).
3. Be flexible. If you can’t focus on a chapter, write a character sketch instead.
4. Observe.
5. Read.
6. Subscribe to a new blog.
7. Join a critique group.
8. Sign up for a class or a workshop.
9. Edit your work, again.
10. Write.

Twitter Me

Help! I’ve been sucked into twitter! Why this is a good thing for you? I’m following lots of agents, editors, and writing folk,  often re-tweeting the really good stuff.

 

So, please follow me! https://twitter.com and search carrie brown-wolf!

 

Thanks.

Guns or Mental Health? Is that the Question?

Is it a matter of guns or mental health? Since tragic shootings have increased, Americans have divided into camps about how to best reform our country: gun control or better mental health care?

As the debate rages, I can’t help but wonder how and why we’ve become a one-issue country. Is there a single, simple solution to keeping our children safe? Can we stop someone from shooting bullets into a movie theater, a school, or a grocery store parking lot with one reform? Of course not. So why do so many people insist that their camp paves the way to peace with offering only one solution?

Unfortunately, America has become a country divided. We are blue or red. We are saved or unsaved.  We are followers of CNN or Fox news. We are almost never both.  Where is the middle ground? What will it take to accept and understand that differences are okay? Differences are, in fact, the fabric of American culture.

In the wake of such devastating shootings, we must stop to consider the possibility that one answer is no answer at all. So what is? I can’t possibly know, but as a parent, an educator, and a writer, I created ten starting points that have nothing to do with gun control, mental illness, stopping the development of technology, cutting violence from video games, or arming ourselves with an arsenal of defense mechanisms.

1. Listen to our children.
2. Find a spiritual path.
3. Understand yourself.
4. Create time to think.
5. Develop healthy relationships.
6. Respect each other.
7. Breathe in nature.
8. Live and be in the moment.
9. Take time to unplug.
10. Love.

It may sound like new-age, hippie rhetoric, but nothing gets more basic than understanding one’s self. We can’t stop shooters if we can’t recognize what’s lacking in our society. When people focus on single issues and worry about who’s right and who’s wrong, they’ve lost site of basic fundamentals like respecting and listening to each other.

Our country’s become so ‘advanced’ that we’ve lost sight of simplicity and of ourselves.

 

Travel Journals

In two weeks my husband and I are taking our two teens and one tween to Asia. We’ve been planning the trip for some time. We plan to live with my college roommate and her family in Hong Kong, then travel on to Vietnam and Cambodia. We’ve made lists, gotten shots, and figured out foreign currency. We’ve packed pills, books, and cards for the grueling flight. What we’re not doing? Bringing a computer or allowing the kids to bring their devices. I sincerely hope they don’t revolt.

Instead, we are buying them each a journal­­­—the old fashioned kind with real paper. I might even let them pick out a special pen. Of course, I could be asking for complete mutiny.

When I travelled as a kid, my mom wrote travel diaries, recounting what we did every day. I’ve written journals describing scenes, smells, and sometimes, my feelings. There is something to learn by putting pen to paper and recounting what you see. I hope that by bringing travel journals, our kids will learn to be better observers. Will they notice what people eat on the street? Will they notice people living on the street? Will they hear mosquitos buzz in their ear and smell exotic spices? I don’t know. But I know that by limiting technology for a few weeks will help them in some way, even if it’s how to plot a rebellion.

Writers are observers. What do you notice?

More Quotes

When my horse is running good, I don’t stop to give him sugar. –William Faulkner

 

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer. –Barbara Kingsolver

 

 

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe