stacyadmin, Author at Stacy Lyn Jensen

52 Book Challenge 2023

Last year, I stumbled across the 52 book challenge 2023. I thought it sounded like a fun idea, and decided to give it a try. I’m a busy mom, and a full-time employee, so I wasn’t sure if I was up to the challenge. I wasn’t going to put too much pressure on myself. However, I did want to discuss what I got out of the challenge, where I ended up. And my favorite books of 2023.

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52 Book Challenge 2023

What I got out of it

There are several things that I got out of the challenge. The first one was to actually keep track of how many books I was reading. I have a tendency to read whatever I feel like, and possibly put a book down if I’m not feeling it anymore. This is mainly because, since I did major in English, I like to read for pleasure. The pure joy of the thing. But, with the challenge, I pushed myself to continue reading. This was a good thing, because a lot of books have those ‘saggy’ middles. But are completely worth the read in the end.

Another thing that I got out of the challenge was reading some books that I would have never picked up otherwise. Long gone are the days when I browse shelves reading the backs of books, or the inner covers, just looking for something that catches my eye. But, with this challenge, I was constantly on the lookout for a new book to read. Because of that, I was either in different forums searching for books, authors, even titles that caught my eye, or even looking through the Libby app for a book that just sounded good to me. This reminded me of being a kid in the library, just wandering around and discovering new books.

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I am a big reader of series, I have different authors who I follow and cannot wait for their next book to come out. I think anyone who is a lifelong reader has their favorites. But, because of the challenge I was able to discover new authors who I can now read their catalog, and also enjoy their newest works once they come out.

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52 Book Challenge 2023

Where I ended up

I did not read 52 books. As I mentioned, I didn’t want to put too much pressure on myself. I ended up reading 35 books for the year 2023. I did not count any audiobooks. I don’t know how many audiobooks I listened to. That works out to be 2.91 books a month. Which is not bad. I noticed when I was in the middle of the challenge that during the summer when I was busy in my garden and with my kiddos when they were out of school, I did not read as much. This challenge is something that was done for fun, and to keep track of the books that I was reading.

52 Book Challenge 2023

My favorite reads

I read a lot of books that I enjoyed immensely in 2023. Some of my absolute favorites were: Station Eleven, The Sea of Tranquility and The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, Mister Magic by Kiersten White, The Running Graves by Robert Galbraith, Holly by Stephen King and pretty much all of Sarah J Maas’s work.

My favorite new author that I found in 2023 was Emily St. John Mandel. Not only did I read Station Eleven for the first time last year, but I also watched the series on HBO for the first time last year. I cannot stop telling people about how amazing the book and the show are. I am a fan of Emily’s. Her prose is spare and sophisticated, and she has a lovely way of thinking about the future and the past and life that just speaks to me.

I will be writing about each book later on. Did anyone else do the 52 book challenge in 2023, and did you read anything you didn’t expect to like but loved?

stacyadmin

The Long Way: An argument for not taking shortcuts

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I think we’ve all come across a million videos about a shortcut for better bread, or a worksheet to help you outline in ten minutes. I was thinking about this last night, and it occurred to me that no one is arguing for the long way. So, I’m gonna do it. Here you go, an argument for not taking shortcuts.

When was the last time you read an inspirational sports story? Did it talk about the athlete–who has achieved so much in their life. That they decided to call it quits every day a couple of hours early; and how they didn’t show up sometimes? Or did it talk about their shortcuts? No, these stories are always about the amazing perseverance, grit, and endurance the athlete has to reach their amazing level of success.

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Author or Hobby Writer

The long way

When you think about your writing goals, are you the kind of person that is looking for a quick fix to put a bandage on a problem for the moment? Or, are you the type of person that is looking to master your craft? The difference in these two ideas is really the difference between the author or the hobby writer.

Mindset Differences: The long way

A person with an author mindset. When faced with setbacks on their writing journey; they will for solutions. For example, if they are mentally exhausted and cannot imagine writing to their 1000 word goal. They may decrease the goal for a time. So, instead of writing 1000, they are writing 200. This may not allow for fast progress. But it will be progress.

A hobby writer may decide to stop writing for a while, or maybe they’ll see if they can find some tips and tricks to help them. But since the writing is a hobby, it’s not that big of a deal if they decide to stop for a while.

Rejection differences

When facing negative feedback, or rejection, there is going to be a difference in mindset between the author and the hobby writer as well. When receiving negative feedback, and author will take some time to process and then look back at their work to see if the thing makes the piece stronger. It’s also possible, when faced with several pieces of feedback from different sources, they may sort through them to find the ones that work best with their overall goals.

A hobby writer may find feedback to be a difficult and painful process, they may feel personally attacked or ridiculed. It is not that an author doesn’t feel these feelings. It’s simply that the author can put them aside in order to make their work stronger. The same basic things happen with rejection. The author can take it as part of the process and then move onward. The hobby writer will have a hard time with rejection, and take it as a rejection of themselves as a person.

Finishing a Draft: The Long Way

Once the author has finished a rough draft, they will put it away, and then start the revision, re-writing process after some time has passed, and they have gained some distance from the work. A hobby writer, once they have finished a draft, they may be so excited to revise that they start right away, or they may want to start querying/submitting, or they may even self-publish right away.

Everyone starts somewhere. Everyone wants to use shortcuts/has used shortcuts. The difference between a hobby writer and an author is time, experience, and mindset. It is perfectly fine to be a hobby writer. It is perfectly fine to be an author or aspiring author. My point here is that the long way around is normally the best way to get to where you want to be.

There are no shortcuts for writing and reading. Is there a time when you couldn’t hit your writing goals? What did you set them at so that they felt attainable?

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Rewrite: Pancaking

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I recently finished a draft of my current work. I also changed computers and am not sure how to get my word processing program to work on my new one. Because I don’t want to worry too much about the draft I had. I knew it was full of problems.I’m going to be rewriting.

Awhile back, I went to a very small writer’s conference (I don’t know if it would really qualify) in my town. One of the classes there was about doing “pancake” drafts. Essentially, you do a full re-write with each draft.

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While I don’t want to re-write my project more than once. I will be completely writing the story over now.

Reasons for Doing a Pancake rewrite

I have a couple of reasons for wanting to rewrite the story instead of revise. They are:

One of my main characters is lacking motivation. In order to fix that, I need to change a bunch of stuff.
Sometimes, my characters are just talking, it’s a little boring. I think that I can make those parts more active.
My antagonist needs a better reason to act.
I’m thinking of pulling a POV character, and possibly changing the POV completely.

The idea of a pancake draft is you completely put away your previous draft. Meaning, you aren’t looking at the last draft. You aren’t checking on how things are working out from draft to draft. You are simply going to write again. The nice thing about doing it this way, is that you already wrote the story. You know how it goes; you are just ironing out the kinks.

I would suggest not using a pancake draft if you have a really nice draft that doesn’t have large problems that need fixing. I would also suggest doing it with caution, because writing an entire draft is a lot of work.

Finally, I decided to do a draft this way, not only because I wanted to try it out. But, because I feel like my work has some good things. It has many problems and will benefit from a full rewrite. Let me know if you’ve ever done a pancake draft. If so, what did you think of it? Did you feel like your next draft was stronger?

Stacy Jensen

Stacy has a Bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in Human Resources Management from USU and is currently working on her masters in Learning Experience Design. When she’s not busy with school or her home life, she loves reading all things horror and sci-fi fantasy, and writing, writing, writing.

Final Draft: How do you Know When you’ve written it?

I finished a first draft of my latest project a little while ago. Ever since I wrote the end, I’ve been both excited to move on, and also scared of the process. I’d like to discuss all the expected steps in writing, and help people realize when they’ve come to the end. First, we’ll discuss the steps, and then how you know if you’ve arrived at your final draft.

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Steps

Outline
Zero Draft
First Draft
Second Draft
Third Draft
Final Draft

Outlining

This step can take a lot or a little bit of time, depending on which type of writer you are. Even the most seasoned of discovery writers will still have at least some idea of the plot before they sit down to work.

An outline can be as simple as a couple of index cards that have a few vague sentences about your plot. Or as complex as a codex with character backstories and sketches, along with the economy of your fantasy world going back 1000 years.

At the end of the day, the outline should help you get started. They do say that you either spend a lot of time in edits later, or you plan everything in our outline and don’t have to do so many edits at the end to figure out how to make your plot work together.

When you are done with your outline, you move onto…

Zero Draft

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The zero draft is the draft that you are okay to mess up a bunch. I like the term zero draft, because it feels like, with this draft there are no stakes. One of the best things you can do for your writing habit is to take the pressure off. If you feel like you need to have a certain feeling, or write during a certain time or in a specific location or using something special; you are putting too much pressure on yourself.

If, because you have to be in a certain place or use something specific to write, and you find yourself not wanting to do so because of it. Then, stop. Writing is a difficult and messy process. There is no reason why, if you are thinking about something, not to jot it down anywhere. You can write on and with almost anything. Although, I wouldn’t suggest trying to write the great American novel with blood. Ha.

The zero draft is the first time the story that’s been in your head for so long will come together. Even if you’ve been outlining for weeks and feel like you know everything that will happen, at least in my experience, it will change. The zero draft gives you permission to make the changes, to allow all the messy nonsense to happen on the page.

Then, after you’ve finished your draft, you’ll move onto….

The First Draft

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It’s okay for your first draft to be messy. You also want to go through and begin clean up.

It’s always important to think globally before you think locally. By this, I simply mean to fix big problems before you start fiddling with the small ones. So, if you’ve outlined a lot maybe you don’t worry so much how your plot hangs together, but it is important to be aware of all of the big idea items. Make sure that the gun that was on the wall in act 1 is used during the climax in act 3.

After you finish a first draft, you may feel like giving it to an alpha reader. That’s fine. Not necessary, but fine.

Then, you’ll move onto…

The Second Draft

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When your work is ready to be considered a second draft, it should have a plot that makes sense. It’s okay to still have grammar errors at the second draft.

This means, that during the second draft, you should start working through which characters are doing what and why, does it make sense for the overall plot? You should have a working understanding of all of your characters and their motivations, you should know if it makes sense for a character to run into a dangerous situation, and if it doesn’t make sense but you need it for the plot, then you need to figure out what kind of extraordinary circumstances they would require in order to go into the situation, and then make those present in the work.

Once the plot is in line, and the characters are acting in ways that make sense, you can send the draft to an alpha reader. Still not required, but definitely going to be a good option.

Then, you’ll move onto…

The Third Draft (not the final draft yet)

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Edits. This is where you will want to start editing. You want your syntax to shine. The words should work together to build the story you are trying to tell. Editing also happens from “big” to “small.” As you’ve gone through the drafting process, you will have already done some editing. The first type of editing, developmental editing, is what you are going through as you get your plot in line, and make sure your characters make sense.

In the third draft, you get more granular. Starting with line editing. Line editing is where you focus on the flow and style of your prose. Then, you’ll want to do proofreading, where you identify and correct your grammar and spelling errors.

Now, it is absolutely time to give the draft to several beta readers for feedback. You can always give them a list of things you are concerned about, and make sure to get feedback on those things. It is not helpful to have a couple friends read your work, and tell you it’s amazing. If you want to feel good, it’s wonderful. But, if you want constructive feedback, you’ll most likely need to find people who are going to be impartial judges of your work. That is the best way to get it to shine

Final Draft

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Once you’ve received and corrected the novel as much as you can, taking into mind all the feedback from your readers, then it will be time to send it out to wherever you want it to go.

Congratulations on finishing!!

Horror Tober

Every October I love to watch a new horror movie everyday. Some days I sit with my kiddos and we watch a classic movie that I loved as a kid, like Hocus Pocus or The Nightmare Before Christmas. Other days I want something visceral, maybe some body horror. Still other days I want psychological scares, or those movies that everyone is talking about, but I just haven’t seen yet.

So for this year, we have watched, or at least attempted to watch something scary or Halloween themed every night. Our list so far is:

The Thing (1982)

The Thing (2011)

The Shining mini series

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Ghostbusters

The Haunted Mansion

Saw

Saw 2

A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place 2

Before I go to Sleep

Haunted Mansion

Tales from the Crypt

Treehouse of Horror

Halloween Baking Championship

The Nun

Nightmare on Elm Street

Movies or shows I would like to watch:

Cabin in the Woods

Talk to Me

Suspiria

Lake Mungo

VHS

Cannibal Holocaust

Midsommar

Hereditary

Zombieland

The Stand (old)

It (new)

Get Out

Beau is Afraid

I’ll add more as I think of them.

Writing Inspiration: The Backrooms

This is the third time I’ve posted about writing inspiration. The first two times I talked about how folklore is inspirational to my own writing, and then I wrote about why you may want to look for things that are inspirational for your writing, and times when it’s not a great idea. But for post number three, I would like to talk about a particular piece of folklore that I find bizarre, strange, and something that provides me with writing inspiration.

The Backrooms

The backrooms started as a simple comment on 4chan. The idea is that a person can accidentally ‘noclip’ out of reality. The person then falls into the backrooms. The original comment about the rooms: “If you’re not careful and you noclip^[a] out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms)

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There are a lot of pieces of media about The Backrooms. I find the idea fascinating (obviously, I am not alone). Thinking about a place that is maybe another dimension. But it’s full of empty spaces, ones that are supposed to be filled. The horror of the idea comes from the wrong-ness. Think about walking into your office one day and it’s empty. No people, no office equipment. Just you and the lights buzzing above you, and you can’t find your way out.

They say that the game Control was inspired by The Backrooms. Which I can see. Although, I think the spaces in the game are more haunted or infected rather than empty.

I think that falling into a separate dimension. One that appears empty, but has monsters lurking. It is fascinating, frightening, and ripe for story. The videos that you can find on YouTube all show people fall into The Backrooms. They then wander around as if they are okay with the situation. If I fell into an alternate dimension that was full of empty offices, I would be the opposite of okay.

I wouldn’t wander around until something ate me. But, that’s where good plot lies, it’s in those bad decisions. I think, that if I fell into another dimension. I would scream. And yell. I would ask for help. I wouldn’t wander around unless a lot of time passed. And I was hungry.

Writing Inspiration

There are a million different stories here. There is even a genre. Portal jumping, it’s called, when a person from one place lands in another. The portal that people fall into is malevolent. It wants to kill the people who fall into the world. The only thing that inhabits The Backrooms is a monster.

On my last post, I talked about making a list of things that inspire you. On my list would be The Backrooms. I will go back to it, when I am done with my current project. I’ll think about what I can pull from the idea of The Backrooms, how it can inspire my writing.

Thank you for reading, and please let me know if you would like to know about other pieces of folklore or other things that are writing inspiration to me.

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Inspiration Part 2

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In my last post, I talked about how I was going to talk about things that inspire me. I feel like it’s a little disingenuous to talk about those things without first talking about why it’s okay to find inspiration or look for inspiration, as long as you have your writing habit.

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First, let’s talk about times when waiting for inspiration may not be a good idea.

You have a deadline approaching.
You are in the middle of a piece of writing.
You are collaborating, and your writing partner(s) need you to write your part, so they can write their part.
Your editor/agent/publisher is waiting on your writing.

Essentially, when you have a piece that you are actively working on, you have a deadline, or you have someone that is waiting on you. You need to write, not wait for the inspiration to strike for the perfect piece of writing.

So it’s important to make sure that you have a writing habit when you have deadlines or when other people are counting on you. Because you can’t just sit around and hope to come across something that will inspire your best work in these cases. It’s always good to have the habit ingrained so that when you come to the point where you have to do it, you are already doing it anyway, so you don’t feel like it’s a huge deal to sit down and do it.

When is it okay to wait for inspiration?

You are in between projects.
You don’t have deadlines.
No one is waiting for you to write your piece.
You aren’t in the middle of anything.

In my opinion, if you just finished a draft, or you just turned something in. Go ahead and give yourself some time. Take a break. Inspiration should be something that you are constantly gathering while you are working on anything, at any time.

Tuck that inspiration away. Make a list on something. Say a movie had a great world, but it didn’t dive into an aspect, you want to know more. That’s inspiration. Write down the name of the movie. But, do NOT start a new project. Finish your current project, write to the end. Then, when you are done, go back to your list of inspirational things, and see what feels the best, what feels like the story you want to write?

If you have a list, you can go back to all the things that were inspiring to you, and you can watch them, or read them again, or look at them or whatever, and they can inspire you all over again. It’s important to allow everyday life to be inspiring, and to remember what is inspiring. But it is also important not to just sit and wait, to keep your writing habit and write every day.

So, in conclusion, it’s okay to look for inspiration when you don’t have a writing project. But it isn’t a good idea to wait around for inspiration when you have a deadline and others waiting on you. It is also very important to keep your writing habit and to write every day. So, even if you are in between writing projects, still write something.

Writing Inspiration: Folklore

One of the common pearls of wisdom about writing is to do it everyday. Another is that you aren’t supposed to wait around for inspiration. However, in my experience, writing inspiration is an important piece of the overall writing journey. And I’d like to start discussing this by talking about folklore.

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Writing Inspriation

Folklore

Folklore is something that is misunderstood. People think of folklore as the fairy or folk tales, or maybe the old wives tales that were told by the people of “long ago” and while those things can be helpful in finding some types of inspiration; I am thinking about the broader definition of folklore, the one that folklorists use today. The one that says that folklore is the expression of the body of culture shared by a particular groupd of people.

Definition

This definition means that folklore is everywhere. It can be as simple as a song that your work team plays every time a new member is added, or leaves. That is a piece of folklore for your team’s subgroup or group culutre at work. And as a writer, you can stuff that little piece of culutre away for future use in a story.

Writing Inspriation:

Folklore and the Internet

Another place rife with folklore and therefore inspiration is the internet. The internet has memes, which are folkloric, in fact, there are folklorists that study memes, meme-culture and where memes come from. You know those websites that discuss the origins of memes? Those have to have been started by folklorists, because they are fascinated–not only by internet-culture–but specifically by meme-culture. These are people who have masters degrees mind you, and they work “in the field” gathering information. Something to think about. I know I do. There are archives, in libraries gathering information on memes for future generations of academics to ponder and write papers on.

One of the internet places that I find absolutely full of inspirational, and also one that is completely folkloric, is the urban legend. There are almost too many to choose from. Typically, when these were told to one another, it was always someone’s sister’s cousin who heard the thing. But now it’s on websites where these legends begin. I want to take some time to explore the different sites, talking about the inspiration that I’ve found. And how they have inspired me and to what end.

Thank you for reading this far, I am looking forward to diving into the things thave have brought me writing inspiration lately and sharing them.

Station Eleven Book Review

I have been challenging myself this year to read a book a week. Since beginning this challenge, and exposing myself to many genres or literary novels. I have found some real gems that I would like to share what we can learn from their genius works. The first one I would like to discuss is Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Without further ado, here is my Station Eleven book review.

This book falls into the dystopian genre, if you wanted to put it in a genre. However, it is more literary in the way that it was written. It begins with the end, if you will. The way that it is written, is what I would call non-linear. It is something that would take most readers by surprise. I think that most people have an expectation of a linear storyline, they want A, B, and C to happen in order, and then X, Y and Z wrap the story up at the end. That is how a normal story will advance, and what a reader expects. This story doesn’t work that way, but it does work.

Station Eleven Book Review

Character Development

All the important characters, have lives that weave in and out of each others. The beginning of the book starts with a death, it’s this person’s death that is the glue that all the rest of the character’s lives spin off of. This is a moment that affects not only the world of the novel, but all the character’s lives.

Writer’s takeaways

The way that this book is written is very unconventional. As I said earlier, it’s not linear, it’s in categories. Each category is important to the world of the book. In addition to the categories, the book centers around characters that have rich backstories that the book discusses in detail. The book is interested in the ways in which each character handled the end of things, which varied, depending on the age of the character. The book also uses the end of the world to study the ways in which people will continue to gather, the ways in which smaller societies will develop as larger infrastructure crumble.

I think it is worth studying this type of work, looking at non-linear storytelling and how well it can work when it’s done right. And then looking at how important it is to care about the characters, even in a story with high stakes. A person’s life may be on the line, but, you need to care about them in order for it to matter.

Thank you for reading my book review of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Please let me know what you thought of the book, and if you think it was amazing as I did, Thanks!

52 Book Challenge 2023

What I got out of it

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52 Book Challenge 2023

Where I ended up

52 Book Challenge 2023

My favorite reads

Author or Hobby Writer

The long way

Mindset Differences: The long way

Rejection differences

Finishing a Draft: The Long Way

Reasons for Doing a Pancake rewrite

Stacy Jensen

Steps

Outlining

Zero Draft

The First Draft

The Second Draft

The Third Draft (not the final draft yet)

Final Draft

The Backrooms

Writing Inspiration

Writing Inspriation

Folklore

Definition

Writing Inspriation:

Folklore and the Internet

Station Eleven Book Review

Categories

Character Development

Writer’s takeaways