Ang Shaef Writes

In the last couple of weeks I went to Portland with two of my four sisters to see Benson Boone. One of my children is a "flipper" which made Benny B's numerous back flips off the pianos even more endearing. He's a fantastic performer! We spent a day shopping and window shopping in Burnside's furniture district, but really it was late afternoon because we spent the entire morning  in our hotel room talking and talking and talking. Do you have sisters? The end of the week my husband and I and our friends closed our Colorado ranch for the winter. I even tossed in a line for the first time in years. The next morning we woke up to this big guy bugling, herding over 80 elk in our yard! After a non-stop spring and summer, I'm organizing drawers, which clears out my brain and getting ready to write again!

It's been a dream come true hosting and "guesting" at book clubs this summer and fall!   Jill, Jake, Matt, Henry and Grandpa are now out in the world and  known and loved by friends, family and even friends I've never met.  Thank you! I didn't get a photo with my church book club  or with the Zoom book club with my dear friends' family book club. But I adore hearing about scenes that resonated with you and  sharing about my writing experience and influences!!

Ten minutes from home and I'm in the mountains. Every red tree is a treasure, every colored leaf a jewel. Just as I put my camera away, I'm pulling it out again. For ninety days we partake of a spectacle, a wonder that never grows old year after year. When the last leaf falls, and the skies flatten to gray, a white flake whispers, drops, and a new feast begins.  

Over the last six weeks I've been enjoying a vacation from social media and have focused on my family!  I've spent time at our cabin with friends, discussed The Things They Didn't See at four book clubs, spent a wonderful week back at the cabin with my daughter, son-in-law, their baby, a few of their friends and a surprise arrival of another son and his girlfriend! And topping it all off, I was in New York for ten days holding my newest granddaughter  and playing with her big sister. Each night I made dinner and the kids wandered "home" at varying times after work and school just like the old days when they were children and teenagers and you never knew when someone would arrive and another would have to leave. It was a dream come true to once again have my children around my table multiple nights in a row, juggling babies, parents eating with one hand, a preschooler running from one room to the next to help, to show us something, to go potty. A jumble of conversa...

Friday Author Q & A! Did your story change much from when you first started writing until the final draft? Originally, my opening sentence was the four short sentences of everyone “needing Jill” all at once: “Mom, did you pack my hat?”  “Jill, where should we store the extra drinks?”  “Babe, can you hand me the sunscreen?”  “Mommy, sit by me!”   I loved starting off showing how a mother wears so many different hats and needs to be everything to everyone all at once.   But in workshops, because readers didn’t know anything about the family or even where they were when the scene begins, nothing made sense. Learning the problems starting off this way was all part of the process of me learning to write well.  In a master class I spent days reworking a better opening sentence. Literal days—hour after hour working on one sentence! Even a single word can change a meaning or the cadence of how its read. At one point it sounded like the lyrics to a bad country...

Friday Q & A on writing and publishing! How do you handle writer’s block? Skip the scene that’s holding you back and start somewhere completely new—a much, much later part of your story. Don’t worry about what happens during or after the scene that’s stumping you and write something completely different. I pants’d my novel for this very reason. I was stuck for days (months?) with what happened the day after the accident. So I moved forward to what I did know. Jake and his mom were bugged by each other and what did that look like. That’s something I could envision and I started writing those scenes instead. How did you design the cover for The Things They Didn’t See ? I worked with Damonza, a company that specializes in quality covers for self-published books. They’d made some mock-ups with wind chimes, a lake, mountains, etc.  We’d had a little back and forth, but then I saw an Instagram post about a local artist showing in an upcoming show near me. The painting was a car drivi...