st louis « Robin Writes

Had a blast camping this weekend, GS camp staff reunion, in spite of a few small glitches:

We arrived at the site, and while I was unloading the truck, I called my husband. Unfortunately, I heard his phone ringing in both ears—he’d left it in said truck, and there it sat, all weekend. The kid has a phone, naturally, so we communicated that way.

I actually turned off my phone most of the time, checking it once in a while. It was kind of nice, especially since one kid had decided that I was Directory Assistance and the other one had a few issues with her car being towed—not that I could have helped, as she lives 300 miles away . . .

Of course, leaving the phone off also meant that I didn’t get a lot of pictures this year.

We set up the tent, put the handwashing jug on a stump, filled the fire buckets. I started to put together my cot, and was missing a critical bar—pretty sure it’s in the towed car, 300 miles away . . .

It’s all good, we’re Scouts after all. I used Pokey Senior, my original fire-poking stick, and slept like a baby.

Well, a baby in the woods, at temps down to 55; a baby with a touch of arthritis. But it worked out okay.

So we cooked out, we talked, we stayed up too late and got up too early. Well, some of us . . .

After breakfast on Saturday, we did some leather tooling—awesome—and then I tried to take a nap. Laid down on my cot, put up my feet, gazed up through the roof at the trees, listened to the birds singing, watched the clouds. And then a group stopped at the adjoining picnic area. With remote control cars.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZip. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZip. VROOOOOOOOOOOM.

Yay. Fun. For them.

No, I didn’t yell, “GET OFF MY LAWN.” But I nixed the nap.

And then we had a visitor: Sam, the horse! A lady was trail riding around the park and stopped to have lunch with us. Sam was a doll—I offered to keep him for a few days, but the lady wasn’t going for it. Bummer for me . . .

Not long after, the rest of the old, er, former staff began to arrive. We’d reserved the lodge up on top of the hill—and what a hill it is—for those who wanted to sleep inside; there’s a nice covered porch too, and a firepit just a few steps up the hill.

Had a WONDERFUL time! Around 10:30, those of us camping “downstairs” decided to head on down the hill. Turns out, we had the after-party going until around midnight.

Sadly, we couldn’t convince anyone to do a White Castle run for us . . .

Sunday morning was gorgeous. And painful. Uneven terrain, hills/mountains (yes, I know the difference; I lived in Colorado for a couple years, but trust me, this felt like a mountain). Breakfast, goodbyes . . . until next year.

What does this have to do with prepping?

Well, quite a lot, actually. Anyone can go camping—but your comfort level may depend on certain things. The more prepared you are, the better experience you’ll have. Of course, there are different types of camping: RV, camper, tent, hammock, car, all based on your sleeping choice, but any of the comforts associated with these can be combined or changed up according to your preference.

Now, I’m a purist (oh, shut up—I know I brought technology with me, but really, who leaves home without it anymore?) and I like to do things the hard way. And the safe way.

Take a campfire, for instance. We don’t leave our fire unattended while it’s flaming, and we keep two big buckets of water right there, just in case.

I see it all the time, newbies come out and start a big ol’ blazing fire and there’s nothing around to stop it if it gets out of control. Use the right size fire for whatever you’re doing, and make sure you can put it out when you need to.

Plus, the buckets double for washing dishes.

But stop and think for a minute: if SHTF, who’s going to be more prepared to bug out? Someone with organized camping gear, the stuff that makes it pretty easy to load and go and actually live in the woods? Or someone who has to grab whatever they can find quickly and throw it in the car and hope they got the right things?

Or even someone who has to first gas up the RV and then try to figure out which roads are accessible, besides the highways? And if you run out of propane? Can you start a fire? Can you put one out? Can you figure out which way is which without a GPS? Can you remain healthy?

Lots of questions, and everyone should be able to handle the basic skill set, even if they don’t enjoy camping on a regular basis, or enjoy it at all.

But those people who don’t like camping? Yikes, I’ll stop—I know almost exactly WHO is going to comment at this point! J

Before you send off your manuscript to an agent or publisher, you must participate in editing, also known as “pulling out one’s hair,” “screaming and crying as you continually hit the wrong keys,” and “repeatedly beating your head against the desk while yelling obscenities.”

Many writers have given up at this point.

First, send your ms off to beta readers. Their job is to read the story—THE STORY. Not to edit, not to proofread, but to read. You know, like a book.

I’ve covered this in other posts, and in my marketing book. So, once you get comments back from them, you might make adjustments to the ms. Or not. Up to you.

Second, run MS Word spelling and grammar check. Yeah, I know, it’s nearly worthless. Some of the time. But you can make adjustments, like adding words to the dictionary (for example, I’ve edited books with Gaelic and Hebrew lines; thanks, Debbie!); or perhaps you have a character name with an odd spelling.

You can also set options in Word to keep things consistent, like ellipses and dashes and hyphens and spacing—as in between sentences. If you justify that right margin, the ms looks a lot cleaner. And more professional.

Third, go over that ms line by line, word by word. Say stuff aloud if you have to; some recommend reading the entire thing aloud, but I think that might be overkill. Pretend you’re a regular reader. If you notice something weird, so will your readers. Fix it.

You may notice that you repeat the same mistakes, over and over again. A reader will see them too. Or maybe you use the same word, over and over again. Yes, a reader will catch that too. If you think you’re doing that, do a simple “find” in Word and see how many times it comes up. You might be surprised. You might be embarrassed . . .

The fourth thing you could do is send it off to an editor. Please, please, make darn sure that editor is actually competent. I can’t tell you how many mss I get that are FULL of errors, basic mistakes like two spaces between sentences and periods outside quotation marks, the wrong words capitalized, italics used incorrectly, etc., etc.

Before you pay someone, make sure you’re getting your money’s worth. In order to accomplish this, of course, YOU have to know the mechanics of writing. Otherwise, you won’t see the problem.

The last thing to do is check the submission requirements and make sure your ms complies. It doesn’t matter if you think those recommendations are silly, the agent or publisher does not, I assure you. They are there for a reason, and you may not know the reason. Doesn’t matter. Make.Sure.It.Complies.

Writing is an art, a craft. You don’t just sit down and type something, not even 80K words of something. I’ve had people ask me why writing a book takes so long; they figure they can type 120 words a minute, so a book should only take a week or so, right?

And then you have to fix it, aka, self-editing.