Sunday Update - Cocooning in Quilts

Very very cold again.  But weirdly so.  For the past few days we've had single digit and sub-zero temps in the day, and then we'll have a "warm" front of temps in the teens and even lower twenties at night. ????

The feral cat is not only accepting that she can't go out... she's refusing to go out.  (She realized she can make do hunting basement spiders.  The spiders have decided they can make do hiding under the washer.)

I've been making do baking brownies, bread, more brownies, hot wings, and more bread.  I suppose this is the time when I should be baking bread to freeze for the summer when it's too hot to bake.

Otherwise, I've been snuggling under a cat and a quilt, with five layers and fingerless gloves on, flitting from story to story and doing art while listening to the dirt on the latest political scandals. (Reality can be much more entertaining than reality TV.)

I suppose I should be doing artwork that relates to cold, cats and warm quilts, but I've been doing ... odder things, which I can't show you because they aren't done.  But I do have a few more covers up at Self-Pub Book Covers.  Such as these with an Asian theme....

Or these -- a western and a non-fiction business type covers. (Charts and Chaps, you could say.)

As For The Blog Schedule....

I'll do two posts on plot this week, all about the "Set Up" section of a story -- that's the section which happens before the "Inciting Incident" -- approx the first 15 minutes of a movie or first three chapters of a novel.

On Tuesday, we'll try to pull together all of the various theories and ideas of what belongs in that opening section.  We'll probably talk a lot about Blake Snyder, and maybe Robert McKee and others.  Also that know-it-all kid in my first writing class. I'll try to pull it all together, and if there's room, sort it back out again.  (If there isn't room, well, we'll be talking about this section of the story in depth for a while.)

On Friday, we'll talk about about some of the specific elements we mention on Tuesday, in particular the Opening Image or Paragraph.  We'll discuss the opening of Fargo.  (And if you've seen Fargo, the opening image you have in mind is probably not the real opening image!) We'll probably talk about some other stories too.

See you in the funny papers.