Trolling Around the Blogosphere

I'm at loose ends this morning.  Since I woke up early, I've already been working on the edits.  I exercised.  I don't have any errands to run this morning.  And I really don't feel like washing the kitchen floor (no matter how much it needs it).  What's a girl to do?  Heh, I decided to troll through some of the blogs I have bookmarked but never get a chance to visit.

Here are a few of the interesting posts I read in my wanderings:

Learning From Mistakes and Progress over at The Adams Zone - wherein Linda Adams talks about her time in the service and how an exercise there helped her identify the positive and the negatives in her writing process.  She's got some really good ideas there that might help other writers.  Like "Make a quick reference list of all the character names".  I know once I started doing this, it was easier to not call one character by another's name.  (Especially helpful if you change names midstream.  I turned a Pat into a Tony once and spent forever trying to keep him straight in my head.)


On March 3rd, Tess Gerritsen talks about something that I'd never heard about before - The Lexile Index - which rates books on ease of comprehension (or some such nonsense).  It's supposed to help teachers and parents identify which books are best for which kids.  Now, I love Ms. Gerritsen, but rating her books under a system created for kids seems a little foolhardy.  I'd think she'd be way too graphic for most of the under-18 set.

At the Romance Divas blog, Victoria Janssen has a wonderful guest post about Being Done.  "I think recognizing when I’m Done is a necessary stage of my writing process. If you’re never Done, you can’t move on to write something new and better."  She's so right, it's scary.  At some point we all have to know when a book is Done.  Heh, but she's also right when she says: "There’s a saying that no novel is ever finished, only abandoned."

This is quite possibly the funniest diet post I've ever seen: In which my hips and inner thighs speak rapture. I and my ever-widening ass feel for you, Amber.

And finally because it's been linked in several of the blogs I regularly and not-so regularly visit, (and because I've frittered away too much time already this morning), here are the Ten Rules for Writing Fiction as posted by The Guardian. (Which has more than ten rules, btw, although no more than ten from each writer they interviewed.)

Seen any good posts lately?  Do you ever get to the bottom of your blogroll?  Or is it just me that has so many bookmarked blogs I can't read them all in less than 8 hours?