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Friday Flash You

28
Oct 2011

Remember Blackbloom?

The new challenge is to create gods for the world created by the winning choices. Here’s my entry:

Fate

One of the elder gods, Fate is often considered to be the father of Chance, Perseverance, and Poker. No one knows who their mother is.

Fate is the god most often associated with the Games. In ancient times, competitors often sacrificed their first-born children as an attempt to win his favor. Now he’s often a judge and therefore accepts bribes rather than supplication. Everyone agrees this is a better system, apart from those who don’t particularly like their first-born children.

Note: Fate is not to be confused with fate, the concept of the prewritten destiny. That doesn’t exist.

You should go create a god! It’s a great NaNo warm up exercise. Kind of like lunges, but without the burning thighs.

Thanks Chuck Wendig! I’m enjoying these mightily.

ETA: AUGH! I just noticed how often I used the word often.  Rats. You’d think with all the editing I’ve been up to I would have noticed. Amazing how the eye skips right over stuff like that.

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Pain

19
Oct 2011

I had dental surgery last week. I am not a happy camper, nor is my face. Throbbing is a sign of affection, right? Or was that infection…

I count myself lucky though, because experiencing pain gives me a chance to sympathize with my characters as I prepare for NaNoWriMo.

See, I want them to suffer. Their lives should hurt, they will bleed. Caroline (remember her?) is going to lose everything she holds dear and her entire life will turn sideways before she regains her sense of self. If she regains it at all. This novel is a lot about hurt, a lot about pain and fear and anguish and suffering.

Yes, my mouth hurts that much. Shut up.

In unrelated news, I’m trying to sit on a large exercise ball instead of a chair to help my back.* So far, I’ve found that I bounce around a lot but it I can’t get close enough to the table to make it work. Plus I think it is losing air and I’m getting lower and lower every day. I’m not impressed, but I do look ridiculous. That’s something, right?

*Kids, when you turn 30, your body begins to die in pieces. Teeth, back, knees. Might as well just accept your inevitable mortality, because there’s no avoiding it. Sigh.

 

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NaNoWriMo–my tips

09
Oct 2011

I’ve read a lot of great articles on getting ready for NaNoWriMo, all about writing and plotting and planning and whatnot. Great tips, certainly. Well shoot, I thought to myself, I am a NaNo veteran at this point. I have five winning NaNos (and one 20K loser)  under my belt. I have things to share that could make NaNo easier. I have pearls of pearly wisdom. I must share them with the newbs! So here are my NaNo tips:

1. Buy discount Halloween candy on November 1st. Trust me, the sugar rush is good for at least an extra 500 words. As a bonus, by the time December rolls around you won’t crave the holiday goodies because you’ll be sugared out.

2. Clean your house now. Or, alternately, let it get really messy so you have a way to plot and procrastinate during November. My house gets really clean when I’m stuck on a scene.

3. Either plan meals for the month and shop early, or get really comfortable eating food you can eat with one hand that comes from a drive thru. Either way is acceptable.

4. Stock up the coffee. You do NOT want to be stuck at midnight with no coffee.

5. If you have housemates, children or spouse(s), be sure they know they are officially alone. Come November, all they will hear from you is either dialogue or frantic mumbling.

6. Pie is a great motivator.

7. IHOP is the perfect place to go out. I know you’re thinking a coffee shop, but you’re wrong. At IHOP the waitstaff BRINGS you coffee. Not to mention pancakes.

8. Certain… favors… make happier NaNo widows and widowers. Your call.

9. Use a daily word count calendar as your desktop. I’ve used one every year, and they are great for quick checking what you need and also guilting you into working instead of playing Warcraft. Or maybe that’s just me. (Check the forums or deviantart if you’re not an artist yourself.)

10. Contractions are one word that could be two. Chapters can have awesome titles and also numbers and also quotes at the top. Any word on either side of an em dash–like this–will be subtracted unless you add a space. Real Writers(tm) do not stoop to this level of course, but sometimes we just need a little ego boost round about week two. This is a way to get it. In exact opposite advice, editing a NaNoWriMo novel is made much harder if you use these tricks. Much. Harder.

11. Speaking of week two, it is like you were flying and then you crashed into a swamp with man eating crocodiles and you have to drink your own pee to survive. Just try to get through it and pretend it never happened. I swear to you things will get better again. I’d love to see stats on how many people quit during this hell week. (This year, I’m starting NaNo with a novel entering week 2 word count. I’m a masochist.)

Okay, really:

–Take advantage of the first night boost. Stay up until midnight on November 1st and do your first day’s word count then (1667). Then when  you wake up November 1st, do another day’s count. That buffer has saved me more than once.

–Try out your local meet ups. Writing sprints have been historically good for my word count. I often get double count at write ins. Plus, I met a few of my dearest friends through NaNo.

–Your word processor WILL have a different word count than the offical NaNo counter. Be sure to test it out before the big validation, so you don’t find yourself at 11:59 on November 30th needing 500 more words. That sucks. I find Word is usually somewhere between 200 and 500 words ahead of the NaNo bot.

–Back up your shit. Seriously. Do it.

–Have fun. Do not take this crap too seriously. Haters like to hate on NaNo which–unless you’re an agent/editor getting shitty queries–I don’t get. NaNo is fun. Have fun with it. Don’t worry about people who want to shit on fun–they probably don’t like rainbows or Disneyland either. Whatever.

I hope these tips help you have a happy, successful and sugar-rushed novel writing experience :) If you want to be writer buddies, I’d love to friend you on the NaNo site. User name Janon (er, assuming all stays the same with the new site launch, anyway.)

Category: Uncategorized  8 Comments

Friday Flash

07
Oct 2011

I FLASH YOU!

Over at Terrible Minds, there’s a little flash project going on that is absolutely fascinating:

These are the only things you know about Blackbloom.

First, that is its name. Blackbloom.

Second, it is a place where human and non-humans alike dwell.

Basically, it is a world building exercise. Write a little bit about Blackbloom. The entries are fantastic, lots of variation and I find myself wishing the stories existed. Go check them out!

For fun and profit (???), here’s my addition:

Blackbloom: a space station orbiting Europa. Earth is in desperate need of fresh water.

Drilling is going well, popular opinion polls tell us we are favored among the human race. Living far from home is weird, but not in a bad way. Last week, A comet flashed by us trailing a cloud of ice crystals. Everything looks different here, so far from the sun.

We’d be perfect if it weren’t for the black tar that gums up the works of the drill. Every day half of us drill and half of us burn away tar. The brains are working on a solution, but so far, burning it off seems to work just fine.

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The good news

05
Oct 2011

Because I’ve been boobs-deep in edits of Waking Kiara, my first draft of Worse Things has moved to the back burner. Which means, I have a project for NaNoWriMo! Even more exciting, I actually have a project I can finish. I’ve got the first 15K done, so add another 50K and I get a very close to completed tale.

Finishing a first draft during NaNo–I could weep with joy. Plus a lot of the preliminary work is done on world building and plotting, so no pantsing for me. Wooohooooo!

We shall not discuss the fact that this book still contains a fairly murky “and then some stuff happens” middle section. No, we shall not.

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Ideas

03
Oct 2011

Whenever I read about writing, I always read about people who have so many ideas they simply can’t record them all. They are so busy with ideas and people in their head, they can’t get it out fast enough.

I confess, I’ve felt some ugly jealousy with regard to writers with ideas. I don’t get them like that. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night with ideas (well, once I did, that’s gonna be a weird book). My muse isn’t as much a pretty lady wearing a toga as this:

I read about King’s muse in On Writing. He describes his as a cigar chomping dude in a basement. That image appealed to me for years before I finally stumbled on my own mental muse: a radio. A badly tuned, ancient radio.

Mostly I get static. Especially when I’m looking for a channel. I can spin the dials all I want but all I get is white noise (that’ s a thing, kids, use the googles. Man I’m old.) Every once in a while, when I’m driving or eating dinner or somewhere with no computer or paper, the dial will spin itself and BAM, I’ll find a station playing in my head.

There’s several channels broadcast via Radio Muse, but trust me, none of them are on all the time. Often, the wrong one is on at the wrong time. I panic whenever I’m needing ideas because I don’t get them like that. They aren’t there all the time, they are there when the radio feels like turning on. I get an idea when I’m reading about a Goldilocks planet (last year’s NaNo). I get an idea when my husband has a dream (NaNo ’09). I get an idea while getting tattooed (Worse Things). The ideas are sparse, badly formed and often before I can grab onto them they have slipped away and the radio is back to white noise again. Laughing at me, I think. That radio creeps me out.

All that said and bemoaned, I do get ideas. I’ve got a backlog of ideas now, even, many in messy first draft forms already. I’m so thrilled at this moment, because I actually have things to play with. Books to write. Books to edit. I can actually see myself finishing things and starting new things. The radio finally gave me enough to play with that I feel like I can be a Real Writer ™. I think once I am willing to listen, it gives up a little more each time. Which means I have to keep listening, even when I should be doing other things.

So if you see someone in a minivan lingering at a red light, just give me a little honk. I was probably listening to the radio.

Category: Inspiration  Tags: , , ,  2 Comments

Edits! We have edits! We have lots and lots of… yeah.

23
Sep 2011

I tell you, it is good to review the basics now and then. I have learned so much about writing, it all starts to conflict in my head.

The workshop just started and while I’m not quite under an NDA, I’m not going to detail it word for word here. I will say that going over the very basics of grammar, punctuation, spelling and common errors at first seemed a bit tedious. However now that I’ve run through some of the exercises, I’m glad I’m doing it. These are great tricks to catch mistakes that can improve the polish of my writing and can help me do that without help from a crit partner (although I love crit partnering).

Often, a grammar error is nestled inside a paragraph or sentence I haven’t paid much attention to. I can fix the grammar and the style all in one go. Nifty.

Slightly related: my cats really like to lay on my analog novel board. This makes it very difficult for me to use it. I’ve got cards to move around! I went to take a picture of the ungrateful jerkcat and he shot laser eyes at me. Maybe I’ll just leave him alone…

Cat on a hot tin novel board

Category: Process  Tags: ,  One Comment

Hitting Send

20
Sep 2011

In my eternal quest to get Waking Kiara into some kind of shape other than “tepid mess,” I’ve signed up for a self-editing workshop. I’m pretty excited to see what they have to teach me, especially since the creator of the workshop is an editor at Carina Press, one of the places I’m thinking of sending the coyote shifters.

If you’re interested, I think there’s a few slots left, but the workshop starts Wednesday so get your rear in gear.

In life news, I am covered in bug bites, but I saw Train and Matt Nathanson on the lawn last night. GREAT CONCERT! There is no doubt that the pair of bands sang mostly what you might call “lurve songs,” but I have a special place in my heart for both bands.

Plus–if my hero could sing to my heroine in Waking Kiara, he might sing this:

Marry Me, Train

(He’s head over heels for her while she’s still sort of worried he’s a bad guy. Sad.)

Wish me luck in editville, I think I’m going to need it.

 

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Invisible People

13
Sep 2011

I thought this article at the Publisher’s Weekly blog was pretty interesting, and more than a little scary. Not surprising though.

Worse Things, the first draft I’m working on now, features a young lesbian main character. There’s no preaching or issues in the novel, she’s simply who she is. One of the overarching themes I hope to address in the novel is how parents and children connect when they’re very different people. Caroline’s sexuality is simply a part of that difference, one that keeps her isolated from her father.

The truth is, when I started daydreaming this novel to life, Caroline was gay from the beginning. There was no option for her to be straight–it just didn’t fit her. She’s a lot of things–emotional, a little punky, a little bit trouble but not the real kind, defiantly angry at society (aka a teenager), a talented artist, etc. Being gay is one of them, and while it informs her identity it isn’t her identity. But to make her straight? That wouldn’t be Caroline anymore.

Sometimes I get accused of being militant about things. I’m trying to write stories that are entertaining and engaging. Some people are gay. There’s no message or protest here, just the simple fact. Why are we trying to edit away facts?

 

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Quandary

07
Sep 2011

I have two projects underway now, both sadly suffering for my day job (and honestly, I took Sunday and Monday off–all work and no play and all that).

They are very different projects, editing one novel within an inch of its life and writing the first draft of another, much more carefully wrought novel. At least, I hope it is more carefully wrought. I do not want to do this level of editing a second time.

For Worse Things (the draft), I’ve been taking things very slow, limiting myself to a small word count with each sitting. I want to focus more on story progression and writing quality the FIRST time, so that when I go back through the story isn’t a hot mess. That has been going really well. I have about 15K now (need to update the word count widget). The book is fast paced and hopefully interesting. I’m struggling with each scene to make it the one I want, to deliver the story in a controlled way. I feel like I know my world, and my characters, and now it is a matter of unfolding all this information in the right order.

Waking Kiara is a lukewarm mess, and that’s after a major revision already. I can definitely see my progression as a writer from 2006 when I first wrote Kiara through to now. I hope in ten years I can say the same thing! I like the story, I LOVE the world, and I think I can fix her, but it is taking a lot of effort (and the awesome analog project board). On the plus side, she’s not a HOT mess anymore, just tepid. That’s doable.

But what is the quandary? I also have NaNoWriMo coming up fast! These two projects are super important to me, and I want to put my writerly energy into them whenever I can. At the same time, I am pretty committed to NaNo. It gets my mind jogged and my fingers typing, even in the worst of circumstances (my one losing year still gained me 20K, and that was on the heels of some MAJOR bad shit in my life).

So here is the question: what do I do? I’m tempted to work out the end of Worse Things, but if I keep my pace up I’ll be past the need for 50K by then. I have the option of sketching out a novel from Kiara’s world, centered around two of her sisters. I’m not sure what their story is yet, and I know that 50K won’t finish that story and I’d really like to FINISH SOMETHING. You know. Someday.

What do I do? I don’t know, but I’m hoping my ever patient and loving goddess Seshat might be holding the answer in her head and if I seduce her right, she’ll share with me.

(Unrelated: I had no trouble uploading gifs before, but all of a sudden gifs aren’t cooperating with WordPress. Wtf?)

 

Category: Inspiration, Process  Tags: , , ,  4 Comments
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