Inspiration Rx Archives - Page 6 of 10

December 1, 2015

We did it!

Nanowrimo winners

Firstly, let me wish you all a belated Thanksgiving, we are always so very grateful for your visits, support and kind words! Secondly, when I had my daughter I wasn’t sure if I ever would get a chance to read a novel again let alone WRITE one! That’s right my friends, Michelle and I actually completed and won our first Nanowrimo! We are both in shock and are giddy with accomplishment. My husband whom I abandoned this month asked me, ‘So, what are you going to do with all your free time now that the project is over?’ Without missing a beat I answered ‘Edit’. Michelle and I are thrilled with the start of this ‘novel’, we know that we have a lot of work ahead of us, but we have come this far and we don’t want to abandon this labor of love.

~~We would love to continue working on it, polishing this little lump of coal and hopefully it will turn into a brilliant diamond.~~

~~We would love to continue on this journey and see what exciting landscapes we can conquer.~~

~~We want to continue our explorations and see where we may land.~~

We want to spend more time with our characters, we have grown quite found of them and their adventures and it would be heart-rending if we didn’t have an opportunity to enjoy their company for a little while longer. We thought we would leave you with a tiny snippet of a beloved character:

Emeline Thames was a born charmer, not of snakes but of people. It is said that the doctor who delivered her was so startled at his urge to claim her for his own, that he gave up medicine and moved to Mexico the very next day.

We look forward to sharing more of our story in the near future!

P.S. We didn’t just abandon you for our novel writing endeavor but have been hard at work with client work, some new Foto Rx sets, a new Photoshop class and a super top secret project that we keep pinching ourselves that it is actually coming to fruition!

Miss Tristan B. is the co-creator of the world’s best + easiest product photography editing tool-Foto Rx | Shopkeeper’s Helper and one of the writer’s of this delightful blog. Her lofty goal here is to make this a creative resource repository and to inspire you to fall truly, madly, deeply in love with your life.

November 23, 2015

When elephants fly | Nanowrimo update

Can you even believe that this month is nearly over? Heck, that this year is nearly over? When we started this month, Michelle and I mentioned that we were participating in National Novel Writing month. It truly was a particularly absurd thing to add to our already very long list of to-do’s. The thing is I’ve always wanted to write a novel, it has been one of my deepest, most cherished ‘secrets’. I suppose a lot of people have this same desire or else Nanowrimo wouldn’t have over 300,000 participants this month alone! I have always enjoyed writing and have felt at times creative, but I never had the discipline or the ‘vision’ to write something that remotely resembled a novel. Sure, I could write a lot, but nothing that had any sort of cohesion. It never crossed my mind to work with a writing partner, maybe because I have never met anyone as wildly creative as Michelle before? Individuals like Michelle are about as hard to find as a Yeti or pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, let’s just say impossible. We started this month with a few loose ideas and characters, ‘loose’ would actually be quite generous. We had one real goal in mind and that was to write every day, try to piece the story together and of course to hit the 50K word mark. This has been one of the most masochistic tasks I have ever taken on, it has also been one of the most rewarding. Michelle did a tally of words on Monday and we were at nearly 30k?! What? I couldn’t believe it! We of course have six days left in November to reach our goal and I am hoping we can do it, Michelle wrote me an email, ‘Let’s be winners’, yes, let’s. It’s too early to go into details of our ‘novel’ but all I can say is that I have enjoyed the process immensely, that I can’t get the characters out of my head and I love being immersed in their world. I haven’t let my imagination run rampant like this since I was a kid and I am just feeling so grateful to have had the opportunity to even attempt anything like this. No matter what happens from here, I feel like we have accomplished something huge.

photo by beata bieniak

P.S. No, our novel does not include flying elephants with top hats (although what novel couldn’t benefit from that?), but this photo was sure to make you stop and read the post, no?

November 5, 2015

Carson Ellis Illustrator

Carson Ellis is one of our favorite illustrators, Michelle and I recently finished The Wildwood Chronicles series and both agree that although the prose was wildly creative, it was made that much better by having Carson Ellis’s illustrations included. I went on to read the children’s series The Mysterious Benedict Society in which Ellis illustrated the first cover for (fantastic!), Diana Sudyka finished the rest of the series covers, which she did a wonderful job with, it still had the same vibe as Ellis’s but remained true to her own style (she’s another super talented illustrator).

On Ellis’s site she has this wonderful FAQ that we thought you might like to read, it includes her preferred art supplies and even mentions the nibs she uses for lettering! She seems like a very down to earth individual and is wickedly witty, we hope you enjoy reading it!

P.S. I used this Fairy Tale font for Carson’s name!

November 4, 2015

Children Book Covers Re-imagined

We spoke a lot last week about personal projects igniting creativity, they can also be used to help build out your portfolio. Here are some artists that took on the self-initiated challenge of re-interpreting children’s book covers, I think this is particularly difficult as we all seem to have memories attached to the original illustrations and it would take quite a bit of talent to make you actually acknowledge that the new designs are good or dare I say better than the originals? Michelle and I have been discussing doing this for a shared favorite author that we feel their covers do not do justice for the stories, just dreaming up the images has been a happy creative exercise (we do like to do a lot of dreaming around here). We thought we would share some of our favorite finds here!

October 30, 2015

Writing Software

You really don’t need any special software to write, a pen and paper will do just fine. Michelle and I are finding in getting ready for Nanowrimo and doing our practice runs to see if we can actually hit the daily 1667 word mark (so far no dice) that long form writing can get disorganized very quickly. We are currently using a shared Google Drive folder, the new ‘document’ feature is very much like Word so it’s not like you have to re-learn any new software (a plus), and the other plus is that we both can access the drive on line and in real time. The downside is that it is a virtual blob of all of our thoughts and the documents are rapidly piling up into what could only best be described as total chaos. We decided to look into software, not wanting to invest too much, but if something seemed a fair price then maybe. We not only discovered fair we discovered to our great delight generous! We compiled some resources (mostly Mac since that seems to be harder to find than a pc compatible software and that’s what we use).

Scrivner

This was the first software we looked into because it was developed specifically for Mac’s (but is now available in a PC version too). We looked through the tutorials and it seems very straightforward for us to learn. It also looks thoroughly organized and we can organize the way that best suits our style and if our style changes midway through this project we can re-organize a totally different way down the line. It’s very affordable at only $45 USD, but here’s the generous bit–the Scrivner developers Literature and Latte offer Nanowrimo a free trial for the entire month of November and extend it until December 7th for good measure, if at the end of November you reach your 50k word win/goal they offer the software at 50% off! We’ve read nothing but good things about this software and this is the one we are leaning most towards. Nanowrimo 2015 offer.

Ulysses

Their motto is ‘Write anything. Anywhere.’ It’s an app for Ipad and IOS systems (your Iphone) it is lauded for its minimalist design. Ulysses is free for anyone writing during Nanowrimo 2015! This app is not just for aspiring novelist either, journalist love it as do bloggers! Free extended trial here.

Storyist

I love that you can download the desktop, Ipad and Iphone version and sync! It always seem that you get a brilliant idea when you are no where near a computer, but your phone? Well, that thing is usually glued to you right? Storyist has a free trial and is also offering a 50% off to all that meet the 50k word goal at the end of November

Lastly a little extra help…

Grammarly

Grammar is my Kryptonite, a bigger person might never put words out in the world if their grammar was as poor as mine, but my desire to write eclipses my fear of looking like a dolt. For you dear friends I brave the grammar police daily, hold my breath and hit ‘publish’ with aplomb. Luckily there’s a new tool to help those that feel baffled in the face of punctuation and it’s called Grammarly. It’s a subscription based tool where you can upload your writing and get your grammar checked, yes, I do need this.

If you have been on the fence with writing software maybe these free trials might offer more incentive to give them a go. Again, totally not necessary to write, but as we are quickly finding out, could be super help for more long form writing (which both Michelle and I don’t have any experience with). If you have tried any writing software that you love please let us know, we would love to share the resources! Here’s to happy writing for this November challenge!