I've Been Hit!

Oh, wait, maybe I’ve just been tagged…

That’s right, the lovely Sarah Ahiers tagged me as part of the Liebster Blog Award Blog. Go say Hi and or thank her for tagging me (or you know, if this bores you, you can shake your fist in her general direction for giving me an opportunity to yammer on about my WIP). I have a ton of WIPs (hint, they’re “In Progress” until they’re published), but I’m going to go with ACTION FOUR

What is your WIP About?

ACTION FOUR, NEWS YOU CAN COUNT ON, is about an action reporter, an on the scene reporter known for bringing the news live from location. She is reporting from a near future Earth where super powers have started manifesting, but linked to the psychopath gene – so there are supers, but only of the villain variety. When my MC gets scooped, she loses her job, and she starts faking super villain activity to get her job back.

How long have you been working your WIP?

Well, this is embarrassing. I started writing this novel last year for NaNo. I picked it up again for NaNo again this year, but… well, I had other writing obligations. So I’ve been working on this book forever.

Who is your MC?

Alicia Rodriguez is my action reporter. She’s the brains behind the master plan. She also suffers from cultural whip lash as her mother is from a strictly Italian family, and her father is from a traditional Mexican family. She introduces herself to people as a mexitalian.

What are some of the themes you’re exploring?

Do explosions count as themes?

Nah, I’m kidding. One of the things I always come back to is the idea of heroism. Some people have it, some people are cowards. And some people, despite being cowardly are willing to stand up even when their legs shake. There are people willing to sacrifice themselves for things greater than themselves, and I’m always exploring who these people are. I’m curious about them because people always talk about so and so is a hero, but when interviewed the rescuer says stuff like “just in a day’s work” or “anyone would have done it.” I find that fascinating. Are people all heroes underneath, or is there some magic juju? Or more fascinating, is the possibility to be a hero within all of us, and only some people choose to be heroes.

What song would represent your story or MC?

Umm, I don’t know. This story has so little music in it. Maybe the theme from Mask of Zorro (the one with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Antonio Banderas).

If you were casting your story as a movie, who would play your main character?

Man, I just don’t know, I haven’t been following actresses lately, someone good who really looks the ethnicity. I shouldn’t be hung up on stuff like that, but I see the whitewashing of visual media. Whitewashing really damages people and the way they view themselves. I grew up with a poor body image partly because girls are always petite in movies, and I’m tall, broad and strong. They don’t make movies with women like me, but they have the same hair color and eye color as me. I remember how distant movie stars felt when I was growing up, and I don’t think it’s fair that people feel even more distant because there aren’t nearly as many people of the same color in those roles (also, did I mention I'm still a little cheesed that of all the people of Earth, the only people with courage enough to be GLs are male? Lame).

What is your favorite line in your WIP so far?

Biggest joke of the century―God gave us supers, just none of them of the hero variety.

If your MC were to have a pet, what would it be?

A chinchilla named Chupacabra.

When do you think your WIP will be done?

A cold mountain shy of never seems to be my standard opinion. It isn’t that I don’t get done with projects, but this one just seems to be going at me, one slow chapter at a time. I’ll dive back in, but so far, it’s been interrupted by three other projects, and that’s pretty unlike me. So we’ll see.

Who is your favorite side character in your WIP and why?

Jerhome because that man knows how to make a drenched rat look fabulous. He could turn any liability into a commodity in a heartbeat. When life is full of lemons he’s like “Oh hell no, it is time for tequila. You give me those lemons, and I’ll use them in cookies or something. It is time for a Margarita.”

What’s your MC’s favorite food?

Alicia loves tamales, but she loves meat balls and marinara. And to be fair, she sometimes mixes the masa from the tamales into the marinara sauce. She would, of course, never fess up to it, but she dreams of making meatball tamales, but she knows she’ll have to wait for her Nana to pass before she could get away with profaning the holy trinity (celery, carrots, and onions sautéed in virgin olive oil before being added to tomatoes) with masa.

I’m tagging:

Tara Tyler

Annalisa Crawford

Elizabeth Poole

Elizabeth Seckman

I’ve gone lazy with the holidays, so I’m going to steal Sarah’s questions.

Hiatus Over! And Stats from Brenda Drake's Pitch Party

I’m back from my hiatus. I’ll be slow catching up and getting back into the swing of things, but it’s looking like I’m going to be moving to a two-day-a-week schedule because reasons. I love blogging or I wouldn’t keep coming back, but it’s time to be realistic—and the 5h!7 is getting real as of late (more on that at a much later date).

Writing news that isn’t really news: the WIP isn’t done because I took three weeks off (bloody pirates). Yeah, I know, I need to keep moving forward and all, but I NEEDED those weeks. That being said, I think we’re a week or two from the “You’re going into the stew pot” party (that’s nerd speak for I’m almost done with the rough draft). When that’s finished I’ll probably start waxing poetic about the novel I’ll be revising. It would appear that I fall back in love pretty easily since all I can think about lately is the novel I’m about to be revising (more on that after I put the pirates in the stew).

I’ve been entering contests like a mad woman, so I’m going to take a break from those and absorb all the feedback. Even if that feedback doesn’t go into Query Bait, I’ll keep it in mind for the next run. And speaking of contests, here are the stats from Brenda Drake’s Adult Pitch Party!

Genre	Number Entered	Number of requests
Women’s Fiction	11	11
Historical Fiction	11	4
Paranormal Romance	5	3
Thriller	11	3
Urban Fantasy	17	6
Fantasy	10	1
Romance	20	31
Science Fiction	9	13
Mystery	7	9
Commercial Fiction	4	5
Total	108	95
New Adult Romance	6	7
New Adult everything else	15	7
Total	21	14

A few caveats: This contest leaned heavily towards romance, and with numbers like these, we can’t really call it statistically significant. So it looks like a really rough time to be writing fantasy, but there’s no way to tell if the ten manuscripts were actually representative, or if they were all unlucky in that they were really similar to the requesting agents’ lists. Which is to say, even though these are fun, they don’t really tell us all that much.

What I can say about contests is this: They are really good for you, and not always for the reasons you think. Yes, the feedback and friends are invaluable, but there’s more. There was an agent who requested my material, and I never would have thought she’d take a second look at Sci Fi. Nothing in her profile indicates that she does genre fiction, so for everyone out in the query trenches: QUERY WIDELY. I would have never, ever—not in a million years!—suspected that agent might have even the slightest interest in that work. I’d even passed up contests where this agent was one of the judges because I didn’t think there were enough agents in my genre to be worth my while! How crazy is that??

Okay, enough of that. Get back out there and write/query/revise/skip rocks across the gazing ponds of life.*

*The Get Back out there and fight is a direct quote from my single favorite arcade game of all time, T-Mek. If you know where there’s still a functional cabinet, let me know, I would seriously travel to play it again! (enter arena, turn left, hit the guns)

A PSA to Writers or OMG! MY BOOK IS SO AWESOME LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT IT!!!!!!!!!

Writing is definitely one of those processes where you have to watch yourself because the crazies are just around the corner. I just blabbed for nearly twenty minutes on the mechanics of sky ships in my WIP. I mean really? Really?

Okay, so on the plus side that means I’m super excited, but on the down side, it’s clear I’ve moved straight from “This is hard!” to “OMG, let me tell you every detail about my novel and why it’s so freaking clever!”

But Rena, you ask, why is that a problem? Right, well this is generally a problem because I usually pay attention to how I’m holding the attention of people I’m talking too, but when I’m excited about something, that skill goes away. I can’t see their eyes glaze over as I talk about using blasting caps to start the engine (totally legitimate) in a society without reliable electricity and batteries. They don’t care that my favorite cure for a dull scene is to have someone shoot someone else (not even out of character, mind). I can’t tell that they aren’t interested in my word count.

That’s because talking about a book that exists only in your head or your hard drive is not something you can have in common with anyone else (except writers and a few betas). No really, if you dreamed it up, those victims listening to you blather on about your WIP really have no point of reference. Which sort of means it’s almost rude to talk about your lovely novel.

On the flip side, your WIP is probably consuming your life, eating every second of everyday. I don’t know about you guys, but when I’m writing a new piece, everything reminds me of my WIP. Driving down the road and a car’s exhaust drowns my car in fumes and I think “Oh, shoot, did I give that engine belching burnt oil enough description? I could add smell… wait, would it smell the same as refined oil in the suburbs? I’ll have to look that up.”

When I'm totally obsessed with my WIP, I know it’s time to watch what I say. It’s not the end of the world to talk someone’s ear off, but trust me, it’s all about you, not them. Every conversation should be a give and take.

PSA over. Now get back to writing.

Harder than Anticipated (Now, there's a shocker)

So I have this WIP that I love. No, no: LOVE! I’m so head over heels in love with this WIP that when I realized it was sort of built on a shaky world with poorly motivated bad guys, I had to fix it. But the only fix was to scrap the draft I was working on, and start over from scratch.

At first, I thought this was a brilliant idea because I am completely IN LOVE. Now that I’m 10K into it, I realize that I R dumb.

I thought this would be easy for a few reasons. First, of course, is my utter and complete love of the project. This one qualifies as a baby. I’m going to cry when I get the inevitable rejection letters for this project (I know, I’m really setting myself up for some major pain down the road here). So I thought that because I love it sooooo much, it would be easier to rewrite it, reimagining the awesome from last fall.

I also thought this rewrite would be a good idea because my voice has changed. You have to realize that the first novel I wrote thinking it might have a chance at publication I wrote in third person boring because everyone from my childhood had written that way. I guess I must have thought it the polite and proper way to write (Wow, when did I become a Victorian era lady from London?). Suffice it to say that me and third person (boring, entertaining, or otherwise) do not mix. I wrote three books in third person. Then I said, “oh to hell with publishing” and I wrote a book just for me. And my voice changed. My voice changed throughout that whole project, right into the next (abandoned) project. By the time I started in on my SuperHero WIP I knew it was changing faster than the Climate, and all I would be able to do was mitigate Sea Level rise.

And then, it settled. It settled on overwritten, but I feel like it finally worked. I was at the 2/3 mark of the Super Hero of Awesome project (not it’s actual name). But to make the last third of the novel work, I needed that world building. If I had just finished, it would need so much RetCon*, it could sell tickets and people would come dressed up in their Steam Punk costumes.

Enter the rewrite.

I thought it would just go awesome because I had so much more I wanted to put in. I’ve never rewritten a project from top to bottom (maybe I should have started on a smaller project), so perhaps my naivety can be forgiven. But let me just tell you, a rewrite is hard, like pull out your fingernails hard.

For me, the problems are that I remember how I wrote certain parts the first time, and I liked them. It wasn’t like I’d done a particularly bad job the first time, there just wasn’t enough. So the whole time I’m wondering “Is this enough? Is it too much? Am I ruining the parts about it that everyone loves with my messing around like this? Is my voice really different enough to justify starting over from scratch? Oh crap I forgot to put in that pivotal part about that alien race so there can be more tension in the climax. Why do I suck so much? Uh-oh, did the first try suck this bad too? Was it worse? Was I just completely incapable of seeing how crappy my voice is?”

It ain’t pretty, I’ll tell you that.

So just like every other part of writing, rewriting is hard.

*RetCon is a term for retroactive continuity. It’s the “I wave my magic wand and the crap at the beginning of the novel doesn’t count because someone had a brilliant idea right at the end.” It’s not a good tool.