Tag: The Year of the Brave

Songs for you, truths for me

Tina 3 Comments

First off: no, this is not a review or something of James Morrison’s album (even if I loved that album). I am borrowing that title, though, because it seems like the best one to use for this post. (So thanks, Papa James, hihi ♥)

Remember that 2012 mix tape post I wrote last year? I realized that I enjoyed writing that post so much that I should have another one. Of course, this is more appropriate at the end of the year 2013, but then it’s too far away and there are too many songs that I’d want to include in that list based on how 2013 has been so far. This is a little cheat, so I can list more songs. ;)

A little fact: My current mood is almost always connected to the music I listen to (or in the lyrics I tweet). I’m a lyrics person so I relate quick to them, and you can almost always tell the state of my heart based on the song I have on repeat for several days/weeks. I’m sort of transparent that way.

So do expect that this half-year playlist has a lot of #feels, because that’s really just how I roll. :)

Image from we heart it
Image from we heart it

1. Winter Snow by Chris Tomlin feat. Audrey Assad

[youtube v7PQhGTCRuU]

Your voice wasn’t in a bush burning
No, Your voice wasn’t in a rushing wind
It was still, it was small, it was hidden

This is actually a leftover from Christmas, and this turned out to be one of my favorites until the year ended. It’s a Christmas song, but it doesn’t sound like a Christmas song, which is great because I still listen to it even now. This song can still calm my heart. :)

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Words fall like rain (#romanceclass lessons)

Tina 7 Comments

I figure it’s time to document this experience, even if I haven’t really said much about it except for one post that I connected to musings about my personal life. But since I’ve been itching to blog, and the other things I want to blog about aren’t really bloggable just yet. I’ve been meaning to post about my lessons for this class, though, since it’s kind of a BIG! THING!, so here we go. :)

So like I mentioned in a previous post, I joined Mina V. Esguerra’s Contemporary Romance novella class (aka #romanceclass) because I figured it’s about time I do something like this. I actually wrote “THE END” on my novella about a week before the manuscript was due. It was finished, but I didn’t want to submit it just yet because I knew I had some work to do, like bridging gaps for the parts that I kind of skipped. So I spent the next weekend writing and re-writing and figuring out how to fix my scenes, and trying to see if they’re somewhat coherent before I send my manuscript + book description. I finished it sometime around five in the afternoon on the deadline, and then I started flailing at home because Hey, I actually really finished something this time. After 7 years of “novelling.” Omg. Let us celebrate!

Image from we heart it
Image from we heart it

So, what did I learn from my #romanceclass experience?

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Happy Middles

Tina 9 Comments

I joined this romance novel(la) writing class at the start of the year. I didn’t want to, because I’ve always been insecure about my writing and joining an actual class scares me, but I joined anyway because:

  1. The class was free
  2. It is the year of the brave
  3. The class was free is facilitated by one of my favorite local authors.

So I figured: If not now, when?

Fast forward to a couple of months later, I am in the middle of my writing my novel, rushing to meet the class deadline and I realized two things:

  1. The novel is a mess
  2. I don’t like middles

It’s understandable that my novel is a mess right now because it’s a rough draft, and all my novels that went through this phase is such a spectacular mess that most of them get buried underneath all my files in my hard drive. But one thing I realized as I worked on my outline and wrote the story is that writing the middle is always the hardest part.

.

“But the middle is how you get to the end!” A writer friend told me when I lamented on this fact over Twitter. I know. Don’t get me wrong — I love reading very good middles, but it can get a bit frustrating when I’m the one writing it. It’s easy to start, and I always know how I want my story to end. I can see those two parts clearly. I know some bits of the middle, of course, but I realized that the ones I have now aren’t really enough to get me to the end. Or, they’re just vague ideas of what I want to happen, but they’re not always connected. They’re little scenes that I know would bring them to that end, but they don’t necessarily form a smooth transition from one part to another, making the readers see how these characters get from Point A to Point Z (or their fictional happily ever after). They’re awkward at best, which isn’t really a problem because I can always refine it. But they’re so hard to write sometimes because it’s not as exciting as that ending I have in my head.

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