Posts Tagged Writing

Yes, yes, I know I’ve been a bad blogger lately.

Truth is, I’ve just been crazy busy. My days have been pretty much going like this:

• Get up, get dressed, feed cats.
• Go to work. Do work.
• Come home, feed cats, Exercise!
• KNIT! SEW! KNIT! SEW! COSTUMES MUST BE DONE!
• Collapse into bed.
• Repeat.

Somewhere in the middle of this, I also received my first commission. That is, someone asked me to write a story. In return for this story, I will get money.

This terrifies me. This is the exact opposite of how my story writing usually goes. Usually, I write the story first, and then look for a place to sell it,  receiving the requisite handful of rejection letters (or emails) before I find a place for it, if I ever find a place for it.

This is the first time someone’s offered to pay me before the story is even written. What if the story I write isn’t what they were really looking for? What if they don’t think it’s really good enough to merit their payment? Eeeep! There’s that panic!

So the last few weeks pretty much every ounce of spare time that I’m not spending working on my costumes for DragonCon (OMG ALMOST HERE), I’ve spent working hard on that story.

So in the middle of all that writing and sewing and knitting and writing and sewing and knitting….there hasn’t been a lot of room for blogging. Worry not, though, folks! I think I’ll queue up some excerpts from “The Boy Ran” for the next couple of weeks, and I’ll be liveblogging DragonCon again this year!

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Sometimes even when you think your latest story is going magnificently, it doesn’t turn out to be nearly as magnificent when you go back and read over what you’ve written.

Little things, most of the time. Big things sometimes. Like how I somehow managed to completely forget plot in the middle of my new story “The Boy Ran” and somehow wrote several nearly identical chapters that could be summarized by “We woke up, we walked, we went to sleep.”

I finished the story up toward the end of last week, ending up at somewhere around 42,000 words. I usually try to put a few weeks between finishing up a story and going back to read over it again, so that it’s new and fresh to me when I start the initial proofreading process.  However, this time I tried a new writing method where I didn’t go back and read over anything at all the whole time I was writing. I’d been having a lot of little projects that I’d started and never finished – generally because I start second-guessing myself about halfway through.

So, I refused to go back and re-read while the story was in progress. I would get it finished first.  And I did. If nothing else, this method has worked to ensure that my doubts didn’t get in the way of my writing.  However, it also means that this first draft is a lot less polished than I’m used to dealing with when I go through my first proofread.

For one thing, there’s those repetitive chapters, which have now been cut out almost entirely, except for a few gems of paragraphs and dialogue that I condensed down a great deal.  I just cut almost 20,000 words out of my story at one go.

So yeah, that novel? It won’t be a novel by the time I’m done with it, I don’t think. Going back over my plot and organization, I realize that this is a story that is probably best told in a short form anyway.  It’s a departure from my usual writing, particularly considering the age of the protagonist and the prospective audience.  It’s also set in a world that is extremely close to home, dealing with some extremely difficult subjects.

I know that it’s possibly one of the most honest and difficult stories I’ve ever written. Perhaps, like dark chocolate, it is a story best enjoyed in small amounts. The words are getting in the way right now.  I’m hoping that by the time I’m done with editing (and sending it out to my betas for their critiques) that will no longer be the case.

I think I got too caught up on hitting that big word-goal and lost the focus of my story in the process.  Sometimes a story doesn’t need to have a lot of words to make a point.

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Work’s been really slow lately.

That said, I’ve been working really hard.  One of the things about a slow day at the office is that it allows for a lot of time to write, and I’ve been working on a story that is almost a complete departure from anything I’ve ever written in my life.

For one, it’s set in a world I know like I know my back yard, mostly, because it is in my back yard – the swamps and rivers of Southeast Georgia. For another, the protagonist is not a cynical, world-wise woman but a skinny bookworm of a twelve-year-old boy.

It’s a story that gave me a slight WTF moment when I started writing it simply because it is such a departure from my usual, but at the same time I feel the urge to find out how the story comes out like I’ve never felt before. Because I don’t know. These aren’t characters I’ve lived with for ages, these aren’t old friends who’ve always haunted my mind – these are people that sprung out of the ether in the middle of the night out of nowhere, and they’re taking me on a trip I didn’t really agree to go on.

I have to finish this story.  It’s like a constant itch at the back of my mind that won’t let itself be ignored, something that I’ve experienced only rarely with a story.  The thing about that itch, though? When it happens, and you pay attention to it, what it gives you is inevitably something wonderful.

I don’t want to talk about the plot or the characters, I don’t want to discuss the story at all until I get finished with this first draft, because I don’t want to soothe that itch in any way other than actually writing it out.  I want the impetus to write this story to stay at the level it is now.

But I will give a little taste.  The following scene is from somewhere fairly deep in the first chapter:

“Well, what’s yer name, boy?” the old man asked.

“Nate,” the boy said. “What were you running from the police for?”

“They figure I stole some food,” the old man said with a smile. “They figure right, but I was hungry, and it wouldn’t cause no harm to nobody. What’re you runnin’ from, since we’re askin’?”

Nate bit the inside of his cheek.

“There’s a man…” he said.

“Ahhh,” the old man said. “Ain’t there always? Well, that’s alright then. Sometimes you just got to run. M’name’s Jack.”

The boy looked back over his shoulder.

Don’t worry none, we’ll hear ‘em with plenty of time to get away,” the old man smiled. “They’re noisy, tell everything in the woods that they’re coming while they’re still miles away.”

Nate nodded and shrugged off his rucksack, leaning it against the stump.

“Are you a wizard?” Nate asked.

“Whazzat?” the old man asked. A pouch of chewing tobacco appeared in his hands from some pocket somewhere, and he tucked a bit of it into his bottom lip.

“In this book I like, there’s an old man who does magic. He’s a wizard.”

“I don’t know nothing about magic or wizards,” Jack shrugged.

“But I saw you!” Nate said. “I mean, at least I think I did. It was dark. But you turned into a bobcat!”

Jack chuckled. “Mebbe I did, Mebbe I didn’t, but I ain’t done no magic. If I could do magic, I’d magic me a mansion up on one of them hills with plenty of food in the fridge, and I wouldn’t never get rained on again. No, I don’t know no magic, my boy.”

© 2010 Jennifer L. Davis

Well, I made it to my Script Frenzy goal of 100 pages over the weekend, with a whole week to spare. The script at that point wasn’t quite finished, though, so I spent the last few days working on that final scene and uploaded my script for verification today.

Script Frenzy was an interesting challenge and one I’ll definitely look forward to facing again next year. As someone who writes almost entirely narrative prose, it was a bit difficult to adapt my normal writing style to drama.

I found that while writing I tended to focus more on the visual settings and the actions of my characters and not on the internal.  With a dramatic script you are forced, as it were, to obey the old writing rule of “show, don’t tell” in the strictest sense possible.

The mechanics of formatting the thing turned out to be less of an issue than I thought, mostly due to the fact that Scripped made all of that so completely simple, even for someone so unfamiliar with the form. All I had to do was select from a menu whether I was writing action, dialogue, a scene heading, etc.

Now it’s just a matter of getting my script through my initial proofreading and then sending it out to beta readers. Sometime in the next few months I hope to have it up in my writing portfolio here.

It’s getting easier and easier to sell self-published books even through mainstream dealers like Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com, largely thanks to the e-book “revolution.”  However, I’d warn my fellow writers against doing such a thing unless they are already well-established and guaranteed good sales. (Wil Wheaton self-publishes through Lulu, and though he has a niche fanbase, it is well established and he already has reliable sales-numbers.)

It may be incredibly gratifying to finally see your name on the cover of a book, in a store, but for an unestablished author, this may be shooting yourself in the foot. Say you self-publish that first book and it sells a few copies, mostly to friends and family, of course, and a few others. Then, miracle of all miracles, your next book gets picked up by a Big Name Publisher. Big Name Publisher has more resources at its disposal and wants to make money from your book, so it will go out and promote it heavily.

However, the bookstores they try to market your book to pull up your name as the author and look at how many of your other books it has sold, and the number of books it buys is based on that. Big Name Publisher sees that the bookstores aren’t interested in selling your books, and that’s that.

There have been authors who have had to change their names just to get away from the low sales figures attached to their initial self-published books. This is not the path to a spot on the Bestseller lists, it is actually likely to work against you ever having that opportunity, no matter how good your writing is. If you choose to self-publish in spite of the problems with it, I’d recommend using a pseudonym. You can always come back and “reclaim” the book under your real name later if you do get the real big break, as Stephen King (aka Richard Bachman) and Anne Rice (A. N. Roquelaire) have done.

Offering writing for free over the internet to gain an audience is, however, a good way of promoting yourself, but even then you have to be careful. The same easy self-publishing platforms that authors are beginning to take advantage of are being used by unscrupulous publishers to steal content and offer it for sale.

Creative Commons offers an easy way to protect and license your content, but be careful that you do not accidentally sign away your rights to any money that is made from it.  If you choose to license your work with Creative Commons, make sure to choose a license that ensures that your work can only be used and shared non-commercially – that is, people are free to download, read, and share, but not sell, your work.  You can still offer your books for free over the internet with a full copyright rather than a CC license without giving up any rights to it at all.

Like I say, though you earn nothing from it, offering free samples or even complete books for free can be an excellent way to begin to gain an audience, as well as giving you a place to direct potential agents and publishers to so that they can easily see what you’ve done. The trick is to be careful and to keep a watch on the most popular self-publishing and e-book publishing websites to ensure that your work does not get stolen.

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So, this year’s NaNo is likely to be a NoGo for me. My story, as stories are sometimes wont to do, turned out to not work very well.

Part of my problem, I think, is that I forgot that age-old rule for all writers: Write What You Know.  Except, perhaps, in this case, it should be amended to “Write What You Believe.”

I read a lot of speculative fiction. Generally, it’s my favorite broad genre, and within that genre I read pretty much every end of the spectrum, from the most realistic of hard sci-fi to the most fantastical fantasy, though my usual preference is something somewhere in the middle of those.

And here I was finding myself writing a hard sci-fi novel. Immediately I hit roadblocks with having to research things. I’m an English major, not a scientist, and my general approach to science tends to be one of awe. I appreciate science and scientists, and I believe in their work. However,  other than a grasp of the scientific process and the means used to ensure objectivity, I can’t claim to really understand science, particularly medical science (which is what my novel dealt with) very well. I’m a little better off when it comes to technology and gadgets and mechanical things, due to a gamer geek’s love  of computers, but still, this was a difficult genre for me to attempt from the onset.

However, given the time to research the material that I needed to research, this limitation could have been overcome in the editing process if not for the one unforgivable problem plaguing my novel.

I had no emotional attachment to it. The world was not one that I could find myself moving comfortably into and staying there a while, perhaps because it was too close a representation of the real one.  The characters didn’t seem to be living and breathing as they should be, especially by that point in the novel.  I didn’t care, really, what happened to them, one way or the other, and I knew that if I couldn’t care about or identify with these characters, my readers wouldn’t care either.

So I set it aside.  But I have continued to use NaNo as a tool for what I’ve always used it for: A refresher course in Discipline.  I picked up new project instead.  I’m writing 1000 words a day, at least (usually more), and plan to continue doing so.  1000 words is, I’ve found, an easily manageable daily goal, and it builds up faster than you’d think.

I won’t win NaNoWriMo this year, but I have been successful in reawakening Good Writing Habits, which was the whole point of the exercise to begin with.

This is probably my last regular post for the next month, as I expect that with NaNoWriMo, my blogging schedule will be rather disrupted. I’ll be furiously typing away at those 50K words, and while my ordinary blogging may be disrupted, you’ll still be able to follow my progress and even read my work as it grows here, though keep in mind that NaNo Novels are more first drafts than actual novels.  Novels come after months of editing.

For folks who want to see how I’m doing, I’ve got a nifty progress meter up there → somewhere near the top corner of my blog.

For folks who missed it, you can click >>here<< for my NaNo site information.  I’m still looking for willing charitable donors to sponsor me in my endeavors – just a dollar or two, nothing extraordinary, but it does add up when enough folks do it!

Folks that want to read along as I write can find the work-in-progress in this Mini-Blog – I welcome your comments as I go!

Plan of Action: (This is what has served me well in the past, to ensure I get my 50,000 words in time.)

• 1700 words per day, 2000 if possible, and even more during the first few days to get a buffer in, in case I get behind later.
• Do not stop and edit. Do not delete. Do not second-guess.  Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.
  • November is for writing. December is for Editing. It might be crap. It probably is. But I don’t have time to fix it right now.  (I have *real* trouble keeping to this rule, but it is necessary for my sanity and to finish the competition!)
• Enforce “Electronic Black-outs” until word count goal for each day is achieved. No twitter, no phone, no chat, no TV, no Warcraft.

Here I go, wish me luck, and I’ll see you all on the other side! (I hope! If the plotbunnies don’t eat me!)

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"Plot Bunny Stew" by nodigio via Flickr

This year’s novel is contemporary hard sci-fi. The idea came from reading an article regarding a study showing that crime and mental illness was lower in places where lithium occurred naturally in higher levels in the water supply, and the idea that some governments are considering adding lithium to the water supply based on that research.

I, naturally, am taking it to the next level: Government sponsored medication of people without their knowledge and consent, through the drinking water supply, using artificial pharmaceutics.  Right now, the working title is “Medicine.”

I’ll be posting each day’s wordcount to the final completed paragraph each day as I go.

It looks like we’re going to be shorthanded at work this week, as this little office really needs two people to keep it running smoothly, and one-half of that equation is out sick with the flu.

I suppose I’m the lucky one. No flu, but I get to try to do the job of two people, so I’m scurrying around at work, and worn out and brain-fried when I get home.  I’ll try to get some content up, but most of it will probably be links and Neat Things I Found When I Got a Breather.

For that first neat thing, in the bitty bits of space I’ve gotten between phone calls and craziness, I’ve been participating in BBC Audio’s little twitter experiment, writing a crowd-sourced audiobook begun by Neil Gaiman, and finished by his loyal tweeps.  Scene One and Two are finished so far, and I actually got one of my tweets in on Scene One (I’m @meadhbh).  It’s a really fun experiment, and I’ve been having fun trying to keep up with what’s going on in the story, when I’ve been able to check it.  When the story is finished, it’ll be put into an audiobook format read by Neil Gaiman himself!

Yes, so I know it’s silly to be so excited that one sentence I wrote (and not even a particularly good sentence) is going to be read by Neil Gaiman…but…WHEEEE!

There. Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system….(*wheeeeeeee*)…ahem… I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep to my usual posting schedule this week (I’ve already slipped off of it somewhat, since this is gong out Tuesday instead of Monday).  I’ll be trying to keep from getting the flu, writing tweet-novels with Neil Gaiman, and trying to come up with a price list for my baked goods. So I can bake things. And, you know, sell them.

Also, it’s a bit late, but I hope everyone had an excellent Coming Out Day yesterday, and I’d still like to encourage everyone to get the word out and send out your letters regarding the injustice done to poor Jonathan Escobar.

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