Long time no see

Well, after an entirely too long hiatus, I've decided to come back. I was inspired by my friend Danielle, whose 63-consecutive day blogging streak continues unbroken. And it makes me feel like poo.

So I'm going to start back writing, and break my dry spell... I haven't written a word of fiction since November 30, 2007. Not good.

So. Now I'm gonna write. And I'm gonna write here.

http://creativewritingprompts.com/ - Here's where I'll start to get back into the groove.

#302

It's dark in here. Why does it always have to be dark? I mean, I've always thought of myself as a good spoon. I do my job. I put up with other people's crap. Would it kill you to brush your teeth before dinner? Just because I don't have a nose doesn't mean I can't smell that halitosis.

I like it when I'm set out. The dining room is gorgeous. Love the drapes, by the way. They really offset the gold in the chandelier. Well. I guess you can call it a chandelier. You must have paid at LEAST twenty bucks for that thing, right?

So now I'm chilling out, here in the dark, wondering when someone's going to bother to flip the damn switch. That lasagna has been on my back for days. There's something crawling around below me, and honey, I KNOW there's no way in but that front door, so please do something. This stinks. I'd rather have three day old cake splashed on my face than have to smell this.

I hear you out there. Laughing. Talking. Ignoring me.

I work hard for you. I sit in that dusty drawer day after day, I deal with your foul breath, and I take food to your disgustingly unclean mouth. Granted, whoever does your cooking really knows their stuff, but that's no excuse.

Just. Turn. On. The. Dishwasher.

Please?

Changing my technique

Yesterday, I wasted so much time. I spent all day saying "I'm going to write tonight, and catch up."

I didn't. Come 10:00? I was -worn out-, completely. No energy to lift my hands to the keyboard, much less think. So I wound up writing only around 1200 words.

Today? I've decided I'm going to handwrite during the day, and type it up at night. It got me my 6 and 5k days the first couple of days... I'm going to do it again. And it's working. Fewer distractions (hard to ignore that new email icon)

I've got five handwritten pages, college ruled, front and back. And it just feels so right to get ink on my hands, just like I used to. This has another added advantage... when it's cold? The living room is much warmer than the kitchen, where the computer is... so my fingers aren't as stiff.

I don't know what my word count for the day will be, but it will be substantially better than yesterday's.

The good thing is, I've just gotten to the scene where the antagonist captures my MC... and keeps her captive for a while. It's going to mess with her head, and maybe crack her psyche a bit, as well as serve for the impetus to seek out the final confrontation.

Helloooo turning point.

IN official NaNoWriMo news? Official word count widgets have been released, so now you can see my progress!

That really crappy day you see on the third was when the site crashed, and almost no one got to input their word counts. You see the impressive day four? Yeah, that's day 3 and 4 combined.



Click on the image to see my profile, excerpt, progress graph, etc. :)

Picking up the pace again

After hitting a sluggish spot, I had to do a little reworking to get things moving again. After renaming the character, I did a major shift in the action in that dragging, boring scene, and then terminated it, and jumped to the next chapter and scene mercilessly.

It seems to be working. I want my curve back to pointing at the sky, dagnabit! Not to mention, one of my fellow local wrimos has caught up to me not once, but twice! That is just not going to fly. So tomorrow, I'm devoted to getting a much more comfortable margin between us than the paltry thousand or few hundred we've been having. I would have had more tonight, but OpenOffice crashed on me for no apparent reason and I lost around 1,500 words. I did manage to get a screencap of some of it before the program terminated, so it was just retyping, but I'd have a much higher count if not for that. Ah well. I'm a compulsive saver and backer-upper.

Just moved up the plot a bit, have introduced a major villain and set Auriel on his path.

Let's get this party rolling!

Renaming a major character

I'm 17,500 words in, and suddenly realized that I hated one of my main character's names. I mean, really hated it. Not that it was a bad name, I just didn't like it for this character.

So, even though it's being read as I type (I post the day's progress in a locked journal post for a limited audience), I changed his name. And I like the one I chose.

I also did a nice jerking redirection of the scene's action, because I was BORED.

This is one of the greatest things I have learned from NaNoWRiMo. When things aren't working? CHANGE THEM. So what if it's a complete 360 from the previous paragraph. You can fix it when the first draft is done.

So, my story just got a wrenching change. And I feel motivated all of a sudden.

NOw, I've got less than three hours before Heroes, so I'd better get writing.

NaNoWriMo - Heaven's Bounty

Hola, dear readers!

Yes, of course I'm doing NaNo this year... duh. My word count for day two ended at 11,296... I'd say I'm off to a good start.

I have been doing a little handwriting... I must admit it feels good to have ink on my hands again. The end result is better, too. I positive edit (adding, not taking away) while transcribing, and I have more time to think about what I'm writing, since I write much slower than I type.

This year's nano started out as a fantasy, but decided it was a science fiction story. Gengineered animal-people, a winged bounty hunter, and shapeshifting mutants which threaten the world... it's fun already, and I adore my main character. Here's the blurb I wrote in my planning notebook:

Auriel Shiftal must use every resource at her disposal to find the source of the power that one held her captive in torture. With the aid of her half-tiger partner and a man she wants to love but cannot trust, she will uncover the secrets that once felled the most powerful nation on earth... and may do so again!

It's set in the far future, in a post-governmental collapse New Atlanta... a sprawling urban center that really did devour the countryside and suburbs around it to make a massive megacity that stretches from horizon to horizon.

It's got a few standard sci-fi elements, but I'm really enjoying the characters so far.

If you care to track my progress, here's my profile... web site widgets haven't been released yet, since the site has been dealing with significant traffic slowdowns since October.

Wow, thank you!

Thanks to all of you who jumped on my bandwagon to support the Snellville elementary school kids. Their proposal has been completely fulfilled! That is so awesome.

http://www.donorschoose.org/donors/proposal.html?id=110898

Couldn't have done it without you guys. Such a small need, and yet it will help many students, and so much more to come! If even one kid starts to love books because of this, I'd say we've done a good thing!

Help some kids get into reading!

Hey folks! Wanna donate to a school-related semi-local project?

Six Apart (the company that owns LJ) is donating $30 gift certificates to anyone who emails them for one to give to the project of your choice at DonorsChoose.org - and I found one that was very modest. $250, for 25 copies of the first book in the "The Series of Unfortunate Events books, by Lemony Snicket" series. It's for a Snellville, GA elementary school, third grade class.

The LJ certificates are free, and the info can be found here:

http://community.livejournal.com/lj_biz/242903.html

The project I'd like to support is here:

http://www.donorschoose.org/donors/proposal.html?id=110898#

I think it would be cool if some of my readers could pitch in to help these kids get some books. It's not much, and wouldn't take long. Even if you miss the window on the freebie certificates, a few bucks of your own could really make a difference!

Deadline for the freebies is 5 p.m. PT on Monday, October 1, 2007. We'd only need 8 or 9 people (8.3, to be exact) to donate these certificates to fund this class prohect... And I'm donating mine!

Didja miss me?

Course you did.

Things have been hectic, so getting to my blog has been hard. Three lightning strikes, which took out our stove, television, and telephone respectively. My toddler also overdosed on acetaminophen, which resulted in a three-day hospital stay. I'd rather that not be repeated.

This year's NaNoWriMo is gearing back up. Forums have been shut down, to reopen on October 1. I've already re-signed up as an ML, and have big plans this year.

Since I've proven that I can write a novel in 12 days, and in 14 days (with some risk to myself, I might add) I feel compelled to set the bar higher. NaNoWriMo is about challenging yourself, and it's a great tool for me.

So this year, I'm writing TWO novels. That's write. I'm trying for TWO. One will be under my usual name of Dragonchilde, and the other will be written under our mascot for my area, Mickey Moose. I haven't decided on what I'll be writing for them, yet, though I have a few ideas lying around.

So much going on

A trip to the ER, a positive pregnancy test, and a vacation later...

I'm here. :)

Last night I had a dream. I dreamed of a military group, underground, complete with barracks. A resistance, but with a full army at the ready.

I'm not sure what they're fighting, or why, or what they're going to do. I know there is a white woman and a black man, and she is rewarded with a command and him as second in command so they can have private time together thanks to an extreme act of heroism/sacrifice. (Holy runon sentence, batman!)

I realized that this is my childhood tale of the Wildcats, a silly little story of an orphan who discovers a massive underground military society in the woods behind her orphanage. The man she eventually fell in love with was named Leapard (and I deliberately misspelled it, thinking it was cool.)

It was a silly story, but there's a grain of potential there. I think that with some polished steel, airships, space capability and advanced computers, I could make a decent sci-fi out of it. I'm going to have to work hard to keep it from becoming romnace-ish. The relationship isn't the point, it's simply just a part of the story. I also vow to have more than two characters. With a facility as large as the one I dreamed of last night, there HAS to be more.

Time wasters

One of the things I like to do when I'm NOT writing is to read webcomics. Right now, I've got three that I check several times a week, and that are long-running and frequently updated:

Something Positive - So much anger. So little time.

Clan of the Cats - Urban fantasy, great art, interesting storylines

Templar Arizona - weird alternate-reality thing. I haven't figured it out yet. but I likes it.

Zombie Hunters - Zombies. Blood. Gore. Humor. What's not to like? It has been running a little slow the last couple of weeks (could we advance the storyline? Please?) but I still like it.

How to make a million dollars writing

Write.

Amazing, isn't it? I bet you thought I was going to sell you something, or tell you a secret that only a select few knew.

Nope. Just write. Writing well helps, but isn't necessary. It really helps, though.

Do not do what I'm doing at the moment, which is surfing blogs, writing blogs, reading webcomics, and not writing.

I'm going to take my own advice now, and write.

Royalties

You know, I was very amused by something in this post by The Rejecter:

It was a high amount for author royalties, too, something over a thousand dollars (which, by the way, the majority of authors will not see in a year).

So many of the people in the comments were talking about how little money that is. I think this is one thing being very poor has taught me; that's a whole lot more money than many people think it is. I hear of "small" advances being only a couple of thousand.

Darlin, when you're living below the federal poverty line? That's not a small amount of money. It's all about perspective. :)

What Dreams May Come

Had a fascinating dream last night that gave me the change in story direction I needed to get Hacker Dragon back on track. I was writing, but it was slow as molasses... and then I came up with the next twist to get it moving again.

I get a lot of material from dreams. I have very brilliant, colorful, vivid dreams. Sometimes very strange ones, at that. I've got another tale in the works, a seed of an idea that is germinating as we speak. It came straight out of a very bizarre dream involving a blue dragon, hiding in a mudslide, and a strange post-war environment of refugees. I've now got a tale in my head that tells the story of an amnesiac sniper who must discover his identity... all the while he is now working against the people he used to work for.

I don't know where it's going, but I do know what the final confrontation will look like.

Dreams are a fertile source of ideas for me. I was trained very early in life to remember my dreams, and I've gotten quite good at it. I usually lose a little of the "feel" of a dream, but I do remember most of them. Enough to build my stories on. I also tend to work out nasty plot knots as I lie in bed, trying to fall asleep. Given that it generally takes me at least an hour to fall asleep (sometimes longer), that's usually a lot of very focused concentration. Which usually leads to more dreams, more ideas, and I literally work out my novel's problems while I dream.

It's a good system, and works for me.

Obsession and time

I hear about this sort of thing a lot, especially on the NaNoWriMo forums. Someone will talk about a story that they've been writing for years, often five or more. You'll hear about a book that took seven years to write, and now the writer is trying to find (unsuccessfully) representation for it. Justine Larbalestier wrote of one such who is so defensive about their magnum opus that they literally will NOT ever accept any criticism, positive or negative, regarding their work. They still have no representation.

Part of being a writer is learning that no matter how wonderful you think a scene, a character, or even an entire novel is... that other people can and probably will think differently. When you invest so much of your life and heart into one work, you literally become unable to separate yourself from it in any useful fashion. I see truly talented writers get lost in a sea of obsession over a single piece, a single character. I've seen good novels go in the toilet because of a single scene that detracted from the meaning, but the writer was too invested in it to cut it.

Being a writer, a successful one anyway, means being able to step back and look at your work objectively.

Not only that, if you spend all your time and effort on one tale, your other tales get lost by the wayside. When and if you finally get published, your agent and your publisher aren't going to want you to stop there. They'll want you to keep writing, because that's what a career is: writing books. Plural. So if you've spent all your life writing one, you're not going to really KNOW how to write the next.

All writers need distance from their work in order to really be able to improve it. I spent five years away from Nightblade's Fury. That was probably longer than I should have gone, but my life was tumultuous. When I did finally pick it back up, I was able to read it with fresh eyes. If I couldn't see where something was going, I knew that my readers certainly wouldn't be able to. It gave me perspective, and I was able to whip out my red pen and brutalize it.

Here's what my novel looked like when I picked it up after five years and started reading:


2576 x 1932 (807 kb)

Do you really think I would have been that brutal with it right after I was done with the first draft? I cut whole chapters... probably half the novel, lost to the red pen. But when the chaff was gone, I had wheat. And I had a product that I was actually not ashamed to show to others. It's not perfect, and still needs a lot of work, but I think that the end result will be great, and salable. But I won't stop there; in fact, even though I'm not done with this one, it's out of my hands, and I'm already working on the next project. An object at rest tends to stay at rest. Thanks to my completion of Nightblade's Fury, I've got motivation to really work on other things... I want a backlist of novels to submit. When Nightblade goes out to the agents? I'm going to keep writing. Because it may not get accepted, no matter how great I think it is. I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket.

The most dreaded question

We've all got one. The one that is asked when people find out you are/have writing/written a book. It's the one that makes us cringe, and makes us wish we were elsewhere. The one that makes us wish we'd never brought it up in the first place.

Mine?

"So what's your book about?"

It's exponentially worse when you know the person you're talking to doesn't read the genre you've written in. Exponentially worse than that is when the person you're talking to doesn't even really read at all.

And if you write fantasy like me? Well, might as well just go ahead and take off your hat and take the shame like a man. Err, woman. Because even science fiction gets more respect than fantasy.

My mother broke my heart the other day when she said "Why don't you write something other than that fantasy stuff? Like something about your dad."

Mom, I love you (And I can say this because I know she'll never read this), but no one wants to read about my dad. He was an amazing man... but his story is not remarkable, and it's unlikely it would ever sell. Not as a debut novel, anyway. I'll think about it one day, but I prefer my life to stay out of my writing, at least on the surface.

When I mention that my current work in progress is about an assassin hunting for a demon, I can see their eyes glaze over. They don't get it. And usually, they spout out the usual "I keep meaning to write a book one day." No one ever says "I keep meaning to paint a portrait one day."

There's always this sense that writing isn't a difficult art, that anyone can do it, regardless of actual writing ability, and regardless of the fact that they've never written a word that wasn't for a grade in their lives. And they always think their life story would be interesting to someone else.

But that's a rant for another day.

So tell me, dear readers. What is your most dreaded question?

You know, it's funny

When you finish a novel, I mean really finish it to the point where no more changes can be made before you send it off to the printer (for the critique group, in my case... I don't do that self-publishing crap), its a strange feeling. I'm done, and have been working frantically to BE done for the last week, but now, I really am. No more changes before handing it off to someone to be READ.

It's scary, exhilarating, and now I'm feeling a little bereft. Now don't get me wrong, I still have plenty of other projects to work on, including one I just started typing up a few minutes ago. It's just that this one has been taking up so much of my mind that it's weird to not be worrying over it.

And it also energizes me to want to finish ANOTHER project. It feels really good to finally be done.

I mean, I've written novels before, but never for someone else to critique, and this is a big step towards publication. It feels good to have a 'finished' product that I'm not too shy to hand to someone else to read!

Final word count: 60,546
Final Page Count: 220

It feels right, lengthwise. Lean and mean, with few frills. I like it. I was shooting for around 80k, but to make it larger at this point will be adding unnecessary bloat. It's possible that post-critique it will make it to that size, but for now, I'm pleased.

Done!

Nightblade draft 2 is complete. A very un-impressive 57k.

However, I've got some major theme reworking to do, and hopefully I can up that a good 20k. I'm about to go over it with a fine-toothed comb and give it some real depth.

Feels good to be finally in possession of a complete manuscript, though, however rough it may be. Here's to the bubbly. And since I don't have any champagne, I'll break out a bottle of Smirnoff Triple Black.

I'll save the champagne for the final manuscript.

How the mighty have fallen

Miss Snark is retiring.

You heard right. Her Snarkiness will be no more.

One of the most frequently updated and amusing agent blogs is no more.

What brought this on? Burnout, I'd guess. For the past couple of months, very few people have asked any questions that aren't completely stupid or already been answered. She's answered them all, folks.

I think her last round on the COM is probably a big factor, as well. She took on too much. She probably also wants to continue running a successful agenting business, so to do so, she doesn't need to be spending hours a day responding to her readers.

She will be missed.



Image courtesy 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. Get one and spread the love.

An excellent week

It took some work to get over the hump, but I'm over it in a big way. Approximately 15,000 words since Monday, and that's taking a break Tuesday.

The end is a little slow, and I've had to do some serious thinking on the overall theme. Somewhere, I lost it. Nightblade is a driven character, but her eventual redemption comes literally out of the blue... a genuine deus ex machina.

I have to do some buildup to that, so that it doesn't come completely out of left field.

Current word count: 54,551. I think adding some depth to the plot and introducing one of the characters as a participant in the story sooner will help pad it to a more respectable word count.

On Rejection Letters

I've been not-writing by reading the Rejection Collection.

A bigger bunch of whiners and wannabes there never was. So many people get so many rejections, and the most anyone can say is "they obviously didn't get my magnum opus" or "stupid poopyhead" (that's a quote, not a paraphrase.

People, come on. I see folks bitching about a personalized rejection... which means the agent cared enough to actually give you some feedback. I see others bitching about receiving nothing but form rejections, and never once considering the problem just might be their writing!

My favorite is here:

http://rejectioncollection.com/rcollection/index.php3?story_id=818

The agent thought it was so awful that he/she went ahead and included a rejection for any future attempts.

THAT is dedicated agenting. If only more would do that!

I'm very amused.

What amuses me even more is the number of people who follow directions and expect a person response because they did so. "I followed their submission guidelines to perfection and all they could do was send me a short paragraph form rejection letter?"

Boo-freakin-hoo.

And the clincher? This tl;dr boatload of drivel bemoaning the state of the industry.

This person spent FOUR YEARS writing ONE novel. One. They have an english degree, and say "At 25, with only 1 book, I feel like it is impossible to be a writer."

Why aren't you writing number 2? If you've gotten standard form rejections with no explanations at all from all 28 agencies you've queried, something isn't working. Get thee to a critique group. Or better still: start something new.

And throughout this entire rant, this person doesn't consider the obvious: the whole thing sucks. If it it was just one or two things, then you'd get personal rejections. The writing is probably great on a technical level; but if it were only technical skill that got you published, it wouldn't be such a tough biz. English degrees are 100% meaningless. They qualify you to teach: no more.

And then, we come to the point: her manuscipt is 853 pages long. Good GOD. No wonder she got so many rejections. The whole damn novel is tl;dr.