Betsy Horvath

Author: Betsy Horvath

  • A Need for Structure

    Here’s one thing I learned while I was on vacation last week.  I need structure. 

    I mean, I kind of knew it before, but I’ve been trying to deny it.  I want to believe that I’m footloose and fancy free. That I’m bohemian. That the only thing keeping me from writing a novel a week is the fact that I have to work to pay bills and keep the indoor plumbing, but if I just had the tiiiimmmmeeee… 

    The problem is, when I’m just hanging around the house all day and have all the time in the world, I just don’t seem to get much done. 

    When I’m at the day job, I’m pretty productive. I have a structure. I need to be here or there at a certain time. I have to perform this or that task. When I’m at work, my entire day is structured by various expectations.  When I come home, there are tasks that must be performed in a set amount of time. 

    But when I have free, unstructured time, whether during the week or when I’m on vacation, I tend not do anything productive at all.  I find myself staring at the computer screen or skimming through Facebook or Twitter.  I get distracted by the internet or tv. And then I rouse myself to find that my precious hour or two has gone and I’ve accomplished nothing worthwhile.  Since I am trying to be a productive and prolific writer, this is a problem.

    But last week I actually did get some writing done.  This was mostly because I had set certain daily goals and wrote about them in my blog.  And because I’d put the goals out there, I had some incentive to try to meet them. I had created expectations and the desire to meet those expectations gave structure to my day.  Hence, I was productive.

    My takeaway from all of this is that I’m going to need to come up with a structure, a business plan if you will, for my free time.  The challenge I issued to myself is a good foundation, but it will have to continue beyond the end of June and become a discipline. Then the discipline can give me a foundation for the productive use of my free time.  If my free time is used efficiently, I’ll actually be able to move forward and go anywhere I want to go.

    Otherwise I’ll just be looking for the next bag of chips, brushing the salt off the corners of my mouth while I play video games in my underwear. Not that I do that. Um….no.

  • Self-Challenge Update

    As you may, or may not know, last week I issued myself a challenge.  Basically, starting May 1st, I challenged myself to 1) write every day for 58 days, 2) write at least 1000 words a day (1500 words on the weekend), and 3) finish the first draft of my WIP before the RWA convention at the end of June.  Since today is the end of the first week, I thought I’d let you know how things are going.

    First of all, I have to admit that I was on vacation this week so I didn’t have the problem of fitting writing into my regular work schedule.  I did, however, have some other issues getting down to business, and I’ll talk about those in my next blog post on Tuesday.

    How did I do with #1? Did I write every day?

    No.  I wrote 400 words on Sunday, May 1.  I did not write at all on Monday and Tuesday.  I did write every day for the rest of the week.  So my consistency left something to be desired.  Part of the reason is I was just plain tired.  Part of it was that I was out shopping for the RWA conference.  But regardless, I did not meet this particular goal this week.

    #2 – write at least 1000 words per day, 1500 words per day on the weekend.

    At the beginning of the week my WIP was at about 6,200 words. Today (before today’s writing block), I am at 18,873.  That’s about 12,600 words this week, or an average of 1800 words per day.  So even though my consistency left something to be desired, I did hit my word count goal for the week (and then some).  I have to admit that I probably was able to pull it off because I was on vacation, so once I actually put my nose to the grindstone, I had the time to keep it there for a while.

    And how am I progressing towards #3?

    Quite well, actually.  HOLD ME, the book coming out at the end of the summer, is about 104,000 words.  I’m aiming my work in progress to be shorter – probably around 50-60,000 words, or the length of a category romance.  That means I’ve made good progress this week.  I know there are a couple of scenes I’ll eventually have to delete because the characters are changing as I work with them, but it’s still moving right along.

    So, all in all – a pretty good week.  And now next week the real challenge – fitting it all in with the day job. Wish me luck!  😀

    How about you?  Did you issue your own challenge?  Are you moving towards it?  I hope so!  That way we’ll both make it to the finish line.

  • The Entertainer

    I’d like to state for the record that I love William Shakespeare.  My first cat was named Shakespeare. My college senior semester was in Shakespeare’s tragedies. My college senior thesis was on Ophelia from Hamlet.  I have a Shakespeare bobble-head. I have a life-size poster of Shakespeare. I’ve read most of the plays. I’ve seen most of the plays. I own most of the plays on DVD.  I love Shakespeare.  Love. Him. Love him.

    It seems to me that we modern folk tend to focus on Shakespeare’s fancy language, forgetting that it was just the way people talked back then.  We forget that Shakespeare wrote plays for the regular guys.  Writing and putting on plays was how he made his living, after all.  And if he was going to pack the house night after night and increase his percentage of the take at the door, he needed to appeal to the common rabble – there just weren’t that many aristocrats around.

    So I’d like to share a little secret that your English teacher isn’t going to tell you.  William Shakespeare wrote to please the masses so they would keep buying tickets. 

    He pleased them by throwing bawdy, rowdy humor into almost every play, no matter how serious the overall story. He pleased them by writing the worst kind of hacker /slasher trash (Titus Andronicus– ick). He pleased them by using special effects (“exit – chased by a bear”). Basically he pleased them by being pretty lowbrow in a lot of ways.  Because if he didn’t please them, they would throw food and…other things…at the actors. And they wouldn’t come back and buy more tickets.

    The real awesomeness of Shakespeare, in my humble opinion, is that he did all of this – he provided raucous entertainment that literally kept people standing for hours – while at the same time managing to convey pure and heartbreaking truths.  He pleased the masses, yes, but he (usually) did not compromise his story to do so. He talked about real people, in a real way, with honesty. And because he did, we love him more than 500 years later.

    The lesson I take away from Shakespeare is not only that he wrote beautifully, honestly and well.  It is that he wrote beautifully, honestly and well, while at the same time entertaining the tunics off those schlubs in the theater.

    Because entertainment and thoughtful insight do not have to be mutually exclusive.

    It only seems that way sometimes on tv. 

  • My Vacation with the LOL Cats

    I am on vacation this week, which means I have some extra time to play around with my blog. Oh, and my WRITING. Yeah, my writing.

    Anyway.

    Because I have extra time, I had planned to write a post of epic scope. A post that would make you laugh and cry. At the same time. A post that would teach you the meaning of being human. A post that would encourage you to reach for the moon – even if you miss you’ll end up amongst the stars. THAT kind of post.

    But I just don’t feel like it.

    So instead I went out onto the “ICanHazCheezburger” site and downloaded some LOL Cat pictures that will give you a sense of how my vacation is going thus far. Although they didn’t have a picture of a cat shopping, and I think that’s where I’ve spent most of my energy.

    Otherwise, though, these are pretty fair representations of my week:

    Reading –

    Sitting (so obviously this is a guy – but I did have that same expression on my face just yesterday…)-

    Trying to concentrate –

    Catering to whims that are not mine own –

    Welcome to my life. It’s good to be in charge. If I didn’t have opposable thumbs and could open food cans, they wouldn’t have any use for me at all. 🙂

  • Poetry: The Early Years

    My friends, everyone must start somewhere.  And thus it was with my humble self.  I did not spring full grown from my father’s head.  Little Betsy took her tottering steps towards a writing future just as every other writer does.

    In proof of this fact, I offer up the following limerick, which was published in my fifth grade newsletter to great fanfare.  If I remember correctly, which is kind of chancy at this point in my life, I was the absolute Queen of the Limerick in fifth grade. This one’s the best, though. Well, okay, it might not be the best, but it’s the only one I remember. And I thought I’d share it with all of you.

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    Untitled
    by
    Betsy Horvath in Fifth Grade

     

    Whenever I go far from home
    I send not myself, but a clone.
    The other five me’s
    Sit in the trees,
    Have fun and are never alone.

     

    Honestly, I’m not quite sure where the whole “sit in the trees” thing came from. I did have a favorite tree back then, a tree that was honored in my multi-stanza epic poem “My Tree and Me” (My tree and me / are as happy as can be).  It also might have come from “The Sound of Music”. The scene where all of the kids were hanging out of trees wearing outfits made from old draperies did make quite an impression.

    When I quote this poem as an adult, I tend to change the line to “the other five me’s / will do as we please”, but I wanted to give you the original unaltered version.

    Fifth grade was a year of significant growth in my art, and then in sixth grade my opus maximus “Herman the Unhappy Loaf of Bread” was published. Someday Herman may find his way here too.

    And now I think I shall go out and sit in a tree for a while.

    Thank you for your time.

  • Challenge

    I’ve been doing some soul-searching recently, thinking about my life and where I’ve been and where I’m going.  Thinking about goals.  Thinking about challenges.

    It’s so easy to turn away from challenges, to stick with the normal and the mundane.  It’s easy to believe that your life will just coast along in the same path forever.  But time passes and none of us lives forever and things happen and change comes.  And one day you’ll wake up and say “hey? how did I get here?” (thank you, Talking Heads) 

    So, what do you want out of life?

    That’s the question I’ve been asking myself.  And one of the answers is – “I really want to write.”  Tha’ts not the only answer, but it’s an important one.  And when I say “I want to write”, I mean, I want to write productively, and consistently and well.  And blogging doesn’t count. 🙂

    And then I asked myself – “Have you been doing this? Have you been writing productively and consistently and well? And the honest answer is – no.  My writing has been sporadic.  There are reasons for this, and some of those reasons have given rise to other goals, but as I’ve said before, if you want to be a writer, you have to make a commitment.  A commitment to yourself and to your craft.

    So, I’ve issued myself a challenge.  I’m making a commitment, and I’ll track it on Facebook and here so I have some accountability (well, to the 3-4 people who might eventually read this – LOL).  Here goes:

    1.  Starting May 1, I’m going to write every day for 58 days.  (this is 58 days instead of 60 days because I’m going to the RWA conference on June 28)

    2.  I’m going to write at least 1,000 words a day during the week, and at least 1,500 words a day on the weekend.

    3.  I’m going to finish the first draft of my next book by the RWA conference. 

    I’d issued a similar challenge to myself earlier this year, but then it fell apart when I got the edits for HOLD ME and had to concentrate on them.  So I’m going to start over again.

    I’ll be posting to tell you how it goes.  But I am committed, and I do want this to work, and I do want to establish the discipline. The desire to succeed will help as I move forward. Or so I tell myself.

    And now for you.  What do you want to do with your life?  I know not all of you dream of being a writer, but what do you dream of?  What steps do you need to take?  What goal can you move towards productively, consistently and well?  What is the desire lodged deep in your heart?  If you don’t know what it is, well figure it out!  And then challenge yourself!

    And get moving – neither one of us is getting any younger. 🙂