Writing, Lifestyle, and Attitude: A Year of Weekly Essays, #2

By Leah R Cutter

At the beginning of 2020, I started writing articles on Medium. I had originally believed I'd write only one a month, but it quickly turned into a weekly thing as I had so much fun.

 

So I kept writing them, week after week. This is the second year of articles collected. There's a lot more about writing in this volume, as well as the continuing plague, living with aging, and some DIY stuff as well.

 

Finally it concludes my farewell to Medium. I'm still writing essays once a week, but I've moved everything to Patreon instead.

 

So come explore something new! Learn about the craft, and business, of writing, as well as living with attitude.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Knotted Road Press
• Release date: Mar 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781644702598

Book preview

Writing, Lifestyle, and Attitude

WRITING, LIFESTYLE, AND ATTITUDE

A YEAR OF WEEKLY ESSAYS: VOLUME TWO

LEAH R CUTTER

KNOTTED ROAD PRESS

CONTENTS

DIY-ists

Make Me Care

First Readering

Building Habits

Productivity

Excess Stimulation

Eat Your Veggies

Enough

Writing the Heroine’s Journey

Yet Another Pandemic Anniversary Post

Nasal Breathing

Seven-Point Plot Structure

Recreating Childhood Favorites

Three Act Structure

Genesis of a Story

That In-Between Time

The Hero’s Journey

Reading as a Writer

Quest Structure

Script Immunity

The Travelogue/Milieu/Buddy Movie Structure

Formatting

Plot Coupon Structure

Dealing with Aging

The Unplanned Writing Marathon

Epistolary Structure

Planning for the Future

Rags to Riches Structure

With a Little Help…

Horror/Overcoming the Monster

Closing Up Again

Project Focused

How To Write For Anthologies

The Art and Practice of Tiling

Streak Freeze Amulet

Grouting Tile

Pandemic Fatigue

Sleeping Amid the Chaos

Writing Under Stress

Full Knee Replacement

Making a House a Home

Knee Replacement Recovery

Risk Assessment

Stealing Spoons

Rebirth

And Days

Comedy

Information Flow

Tragedy

Recommended Books: 2021

Delayed Life

Farewell to Medium

About the Author

Also by Leah R Cutter

About Knotted Road Press

DIY-ISTS

ON DOING IT YOURSELF – A LOT

It occurred to me the other day that my sweetie and I do a lot (and I mean a lot) of DIY sorts of things. I decided to try to list them.

We live on a little over six acres of land, and we have our own well. So I guess we start there. We don’t have city water. We have our own septic system. We are not tied to the grid in that way.

If we could, we’d have solar and be completely off the grid. However, the roof of the house is too shaded for that. We have talked about putting up solar panels elsewhere, but we haven’t made that leap yet.

We don’t have garbage service to the house. We could get it, but A) it’s incredibly expensive and B) carting the trashcans up and down a quarter-mile driveway is honestly not something I want to have to do every week.

Instead, we haul garbage to what’s euphemistically called a transfer station. We pay $25 for a load. But we separate out a lot of stuff from the regular garbage before we haul it in.

We compost, so that takes care of almost all of the food waste.

Not all of it goes into the composter, though.

I make bone broth regularly, which takes a lot of the veggie scraps, as well as any spare bones. When we have a meal that has bones, I put the bones into a bag that I keep in the freezer. Also, I make a lot of salads. I put the scraps from the salads into another bag in the freezer, that I also use in the bone broth.

We recycle, as much as we possibly can. This means additional trips to the transfer station, however, recycling is free.

We also burn everything that’s burnable.

So after we sort out the rest of our waste, we only have to haul the garbage in once every couple of months. This is so much cheaper and easier than regular garbage service.

Now, let’s talk about the other stuff, that you normally think about with DIY.

Both my husband and I are what you call, handy. (He generally prefers the term red-neck, but I digress.) Last summer we re-roofed an old barn that’s on the property. I also built a patio.

While I didn't build the shell or do the plumbing, I did do all the interior work on my tiny house. That included all the electrical work, insulation, putting up the sheetrocking, tiling, flooring, etc.

When the plague hit, there was a shortage of hand sanitizer, as well as rubbing alcohol. So we made our own. Took 100 proof vodka and distilled half of it, then poured it back into what remained. That left us with a bottle of about 72 proof.

On a more regular basis, we make our own rum. As I generally follow a keto diet, hard alcohol is better than wine, as it generally has fewer carbs. (You add yeast to the sugar and molasses. The yeast eats the sugar and farts alcohol. You let it ferment long enough and there’s no sugar left.) Then we distill half of what we made, pour the distillation back into the non-distilled part. We mellowed out the latest batch by infusing it with vanilla beans. (Can I just say WOW.)

We make our own healthy gummies. These make it easy to consume things like hyaluronic acid, glucosamine, and chondroitin. (And by we, I mean my husband. He makes these.)

I eat a lot of salad. I generally have a huge salad every day. I’ve now started to make my own salad dressing. That’s been fun. As I don’t like vinegar, I’ve found some really good recipes for dressing. I’ve also substituted lemon juice for vinegar in some cases.

I’ve started growing a lot of my own lettuce hydroponically. Every couple of weeks I can now harvest enough that all my greens come from what I’m growing. I keep expanding my system. Eventually, we’ll have an entire greenhouse.

I make my own bone broth. The batch I just made last night used turkey necks as well as chicken bones.

Both my husband and I eat offal. We buy a bunch of different types of offal, such as chicken livers, hearts, and gizzards, beef liver, and pork liver. Over the holidays we picked up a lot of turkey gizzards. Then we grind 7-8 pounds together, making an offal mix. After that, we carve out chubs to freeze. My husband adds offal his breakfast casserole that he makes every week. I make a bacon-offal pate that I eat every morning.

I regularly make my own kombucha. Not only does it taste wonderful, it also helps in terms of keeping my system regular. If you have any interest, you should try doing it.

What’s the point of doing all of these things on our own? I find it’s delightful. I enjoy doing these things. I have a lot of food allergies, as does my husband. Doing all of this on our own means that I can guarantee the purity of the ingredients. I’m eating whole foods, not chemicals.

I strongly feel that if you can do it yourself, you should. But only if you’re going to enjoy it. Both the success and the failures can be educational.

Try it. You might like it.

MAKE ME CARE

WRITING BOTH LIKABLE AND UNLIKABLE CHARACTERS

Itry to read a book a month. I know, for some people that’s a laughably small accomplishment. For others, that’s way too much.

Reading is important to me. It’s refilling the well of story, which I draw from regularly. It gives me ideas for things that I want to try that are off the wall or outside the box, as it were. I enjoy it. More importantly, when I read I feel better about myself. If all I do is play stupid games on my phone, I feel worse about myself. Reading is good for me, all around the board.

What I am reading depends on what I’m writing, in particular, the genre I’m writing in. If I’m writing an epic dark fantasy novel, I want to read science fiction or mystery. I regularly switch between the three genres in terms of both reading as well as writing. There have been times when I’ve mainlined non-fiction books as well. I haven’t been doing as much of that lately because I’ve been reading too many news blogs. (Here’s hoping that the news becomes a little bit less dire and I can look away more.)

I recently picked up a new-to-me author of what looked like a fantastic space opera series. It had all the lovely ideas and tech that I was craving. A keyboard that folds up into a little square? Check! Robot POV character? Check! AIs, telepaths, cool spaceship drives, and powered battle armor? Check!

However.

Each chapter was written from a different point of view. I'm okay with that. Gives me a better, more complete view of the world.

The first few chapters were all from the POVs of a crew on a pirate spaceship. (Oh yeah. Space pirates. I’m so there.) I read the first twenty chapters of the book, and some characters had had more than one POV, allowing me to see them better.

The problem was that at least three of the five crew members were actively working against the rest of the crew.

Lots of potential for future conflict, so I understand why this might be a way to approach the story.

The problem? I didn’t care.

I didn’t care that these characters didn’t like each other. I didn’t see any reason to care about any of these characters. I’d seen some cool tech, which was good. I think the story could have been interesting.

I didn’t care about any of the characters, though. And if you want me to continue reading along, you must make me care about the people. At least this reader. I know (because this is a popular series) that for other readers, the cool tech was enough.

Not for me.

So how do you make a reader care about a character?

These are some broad strokes for how to do that. As always, YMMV and you may have additional cool ways of doing it.

One of the easiest ways is to have the character succeed at something right off the bat. It doesn't have to be a long, involved scene. It can be as small as a few sentences exchanged between a patient and a doctor, thanking her for saving his life. It could be a father handing back a much-loved toy to his son, all fixed. Maybe it's an android chef who's just served the best meal of their life.

After you’ve given me a reason to care about the character, you can blow up their world. I will care more about what happens to them later in the novel, as I should. But at least you’ve given me a reason to care.

It’s the start of the relationship. One of the things to think about is whether or not you’d want to invite this person into your house to have a beer. If you, the writer, can’t imagine that with your major characters, then why should the reader invite them in for a while?

This trick works with characters who are anti-heroes as well. Think about the TV series Dexter. He’s a serial killer. This is what he does. The first scene of the first episode shows him killing someone.

However, the person who Dexter killed was more vile. So that makes Dexter more sympathetic. Some of the audience is never going to want to invite him in for a drink. That's the nature of the work, not the character himself.

Another way to get me to care about a character on the first page is to have good dialogue with someone else. Snark or witty repartee will always win the day with me. Showing that your character has friends means I’m more likely to want to be friends with them as well.

One of the other ways is to show that the character cares for someone else, outside of themselves. I read a book once that was all about how the POV character was going to get revenge for the death of her friend. The POV character was a sociopath, boarding on psychopath. She did not understand what it was to be human. Was completely, utterly selfish in every respect, except for how she cared for this friend. And even that, at some level, was selfish.

But while I didn’t necessarily really like the main character or the extremes to which she was willing to go, I went along for the ride because I cared about her. She cared about her friend. She was redeemable. And she got full, total revenge. The asshole deserved it.

As I said earlier, these are just a few ideas of how to make me care about a character. Because honestly, if I don't care, I'm gone. And I'm not the only one.

FIRST READERING

WHAT CAN A FIRST READER BRING TO YOUR WRITING?

Like most writers, when I started, I fell in with a critique group. However, unlike most writers, this group was awesome . Just to give you some perspective, I joined this group in the late ’80s. This group is still around, still working. Their website is still active.

One of the reasons why this group was so successful was because it operated more like a first reader group, not a critique group.

They would tell you what was wrong with your story.

HOWEVER.

If someone didn’t find anything wrong, they would say so. They would also tell you what worked in terms of the story.

Most critique groups are there to critique. Their job is to tear things apart. They won’t tell you when something is working, or when you’re doing something right. Many times people in a critique group will feel as if they’re not doing their job if they don’t find something to criticize. So they’ll make stuff up. (Not going to turn this into a commentary on gaslighting, but I’ve seen it happen.)

I believe that most critique groups are actively detrimental to young writers. The writer gets torn apart and when they break the rules they get strictly corrected. (The only rules that exist are Heinlein’s rules. Look that up if you don’t know what I’m talking about, in particular, Dean Wesley Smith’s posts on it.)

Critique groups tear the heart out of a piece. They insist on rewrites that will polish and remove whatever voice you may have. I’d so much rather have a piece that is rough and from the heart with no rewrites than one that has gone through three critique groups and is all pretty and shiny and about as lifeless as a glass heart.

This is where the concept of the first reader comes in.

One of the sayings that I picked up (I believe from Neil Gaiman) is as follows:

If