Hang in there!

And now for the second half of the hookers and hanger’s blog fest hosted by the lovely ladies over at Falling for Fiction. Check them out, they’re a great follow.

These are my three favorite hangers from my current work in progress, PRINCESS SINGULARITY (that’s a working title). 

Chapter 9

Magic was real, wishes came true, and it was only Wednesday.

Chapter 13

The problem with fancy dinners: I couldn’t decide which fork to stab him with.

Chapter 28

“No one screws with my happily ever afters!”

I wanted to lay a big thank you out to the organizers because this has been a fantastic blog hop. I’m always hesitant to sign up, and every time I do, I have the best time, so thanks again! (Seriously people, go check out Falling for Fiction, they are awesomesauce on Crème Brule).

A Bloghop!

So today is the start of the Hookers and Hangers Blog hop hosted by the lovely ladies over at Falling for Fiction. I’m going with my first three chapters, and already I can see that I need to work on these. I usually don’t write with the intent of making a sensational first line (except for chapter 1, but I already know that I need to cut that part out and stick it where it belongs almost 100 pages later). Hop on over to Falling For Fiction, sign up and spend some time reading around. (I can’t wait to see what other people have!)

Chapter 1

Shoes. If anyone ever asks what I was thinking as I fell through the interdimensional portal to Underhill, I can honestly say, "shoes."

Chapter 2

While holding a love letter from the crush of my dreams to my dear best friend, I did what any sane girl would do: I fled to the bathroom.

Chapter 3

I waited until I heard the janitors.

Did I really just see that?

Ever have that moment where you walk in on a scene and it takes your mind several trips over the scene to fully understand what’s going on?

I just had one of those.

I came out into the living and saw that my daughter was watching TV. It registered in my mind that she was actually dancing. Then I realized she was nekked. And the song was the end credits to Rainbow Brite.

Yeah, that was my three-year-old rockin out to Rainbow Brite in her birthday suit. There just aren’t words.

Happy Monday.

Villains

 I was talking to Elizabeth over at Myself Without the Shell the other day and we had a great conversation about villains and plot, and it occurred to me that I’m very lucky. Whenever I hit a snag in my stories, I bounce them off my resident psychologist who is an avid fan of Joseph Cambell’s works. So much so that we have two copies of a Hero with a Thousand Faces, one hardbound for reading, one paperback for marking up.

The reason this makes me luck is that when I get stuck, gems of absolute brilliance rain down from the sky. And the gem that fell out of the sky and nailed me in the head was this “Make your villain smart.”

Smart. Intelligent. Thinking, planning, scheming, conniving and competent.

It’s strange how we will not tolerate incompetence in our main character, but incompetent villains are sort of expected. And when they’re not, they are scary.

I have some friends who spent time in law enforcement, and the number one issue they have is with smart criminals. If you don’t believe me, read the arrest reports for any given weekend and you’ll laugh your tail feathers off because the criminals who get caught do so because of the stupidest things. The arrest report is like a comedy of errors. But the smart crook? That sends people into a panic for weeks or even years. Serial killers? Usually very intelligent. The DC sniper? Smarter than the average criminal. The UniBomber? College graduate. Ted Bundy? Really smart. Leonard Lake? Working on a college degree at the time he was caught (my mother ran the computer programming lab where he went to school; that’s creepy scary stuff).

These thinking people are the stuff of villains. My examples are all criminal cases, but the villains should be at least as calculating as these people. When our villains start thinking for themselves, planning, and thinking of the future, something happens to the story. The outcome becomes uncertain. If we know that the bad guy is smart, maybe smarter than our MC, we aren’t sure who’s going to win.

You’ve seen this before. It’s fun to watch a football match where your team scores two goals (touchdowns for American football) in the first quarter of the game. You’re already secure in the win. There’s a cushion. Life isn’t as tense. And even though it’s fun, the win doesn’t have much of a pay off. It was easy, and you sort of already knew it was going to come. No big deal.

Oh, but take that same match and have each goal matched by the other team, and the clock is ticking down, and the gold medal rests on the outcome, and you hate the other team because they are {insert silly reason to hate the other team, but we’ll go with known cheaters}, and your team has the ball with twenty seconds left on the clock.

Man, that’s a nail biter full of hope.

Give the opposing team the ball with the score tied up and twenty seconds to go, put all your star players on the bench, and suddenly it’s your second or third line up against their aces with only seconds on the clock and that’s another game too.

Then the rookie with a checkered pass steals the ball from team villain and chips it up to worn out, told he’d never play again due to injury fading star, and he heads the ball into the far corner of the net.

Crowd goes wild.

That’s what you have to do with a story to make it feel like a victory. Sure, winning is fun, and a nice secure win is great. But a win you could only hope for that you manage to scrape together in the last seconds? That is the stuff of dreams.

But to show our readers these places of emotional highs and lows, we have to have someone to play against. We have to have team Villain.

So, I don’t know about you all, but I’m going to head back to my WIP and see how much harder I can make the journey for my MC. I’m off to go build up my villain, create his plans, and order up his army of faithful minions (who really need to have a great reason for being faithful).

Got a favorite villain? I’m pretty fond of Loki right now because he is one interesting bad guy, and I can’t shake the feeling that he let the Avengers win so he could fly back to Asgard in First class… Now that’s the kind of planning I’m talking about.

Drafts vs Edits

I’m sure you’ve all been where I am right now:

I have this manuscript that I keep thinking is done but then I get feedback on it, and it’s back to work on the manuscript. This is problematic because, well, I started querying with project (you know, when I thought it was “done”) and because I’ve already started my next work in progress. Not being able to work on my shiny new idea is problematic because that’s what I LOVE RIGHT NOW! Not being able to hand over my sparkly now-with-more-polish manuscript, that’d cause issues with agents (if you’re an agent and reading this, don’t worry, it’s been finished; this is a retrospective piece).

And that dichotomy of problems really sums up my writing right now. I write first drafts because I absolutely, positively, without a doubt will explode if I don’t get to write my stories. No seriously, I’ve always talked about how I don’t write a first draft until I feel like I’m going cross eyed trying not to write it. I write because I love it; because I have to: because I couldn’t live with crazy me, the one who doesn’t write. I write for me.

Editing… well, that’s a bit different. I don’t like editing. Well, I don’t like editing the way I passionately love telling a story. There are parts of editing that I don’t mind. Like when I go through a scene in the first draft and I know it didn’t work, so I rewrite it from scratch. Usually those turn out much better when I’ve had an opportunity to think about them. No, the part of editing that I hate are all the ways I’ve been a moron. I hate that about editing. It’s like before I can edit I have to really truly accept that I might have crutches that I lean on in my first drafts, that I might be human and full of bad grammar. I’m a bad speller and I can’t keep my tenses straight. My comma placement? Atrocious.

Seeing all of these issues with my writing is absolute torture. I’d rather do anything than comb through my work and find paragraphs where I’ve swapped from present to past to present again. Or worse, read through and find where someone else had to point it out to me first because I was too lazy to find it on my own (OMG, Thank you awesome CPs, you rule).

And really, this boils down to the whole thing that people have been blogging about lately, writing for fun and writing for publication. See, I could be a writer without all that grueling editing stuff. But as you might have guessed from the mention of agents, writing isn’t the extent of my goals. If I just wanted to write for me, then I’d be done. I’d be more than ten novels into my writing for myself career. That’s not what I want. I want to share my stories with the world. I want other people to be able to read my work and relate, or, my not so secret hope and desire, be able to read my work and say ‘I thought I was the only one’ and feel that the world isn’t as terrible and lonely as it was before my story.

But if I want to get my books to other people, I have to edit. Edit. Edit. Revise. Edit. Edit. I think you get the picture.

So to sum up: I write for me. I edit for publishing. Where are you on that scale? I’d love to hear from the avid editors and the first draft for the win (FDFTW).

IWSG July 4th, or why I'm scared of giving feedback

Well, since everyone is doing it early, I guess I'll post for today too (I know, what a silly reason, but sometimes, I'm more sheep like than I like to admit). If you haven't heard, this is the Insecure Writer's Support Group, and we are lead by the Captain Ninja, Alex. Go, sign up, and release your fears into the world. 

I’m terrified of giving people feedback. Terrified.

It’s scary because there’s no way to gauge their reaction. Will they suddenly hate you for your suggestion? Will they flame your blog forever more? Will your helpful suggestions be the last straw that puts someone over the edge to trunk their novel for the end of their days?

Will they hate me?

Long ago, in a galaxy far far away, I received some bad feedback. I gave some bad feedback too. In fact, if you tally all the feedback I’ve received versus how much I’ve given, well, I’ve got a lot more bad feedback to receive before I’m square with the universe. The point is, that feedback hurt. We’ve all been hurt.

And almost as annoying, I’ve given someone heartfelt feedback and in return I received a “Well, it’s clear you don’t get my work, but thanks for trying, I can see we won’t work out.” While honest and much harder to say, I was pretty urked that I’d sunk in time, and the other writer didn’t give any return feedback. That was solidly not fair.

In short, I’ve been judged on the feedback. The other writer didn’t even take the time to look over my work, just wrote me off as worthless, and since they’d gotten what they wanted, they were done with me.

That was frustrating, but then there are times when you read someone else’s work and all you can see is how terrible it is (no, this isn’t anyone’s work I’ve read in years). How do you give feedback on unmitigated disaster?

Worse, is it really an unmitigated disaster? What makes me qualified to say so? How do I handle that?

I’m always worried that when I give feedback on public feedback sessions (MSFV for example), the other participants think I’m a raging bitch because I didn’t keep my feedback to “Wow, this is so wonderful.”

For the record, I’m a scientist, I don’t do fluff. If I say I’d love to read something, it means I would be genuinely thrilled to read that thing.

Which leads me to the problem I have. I think the reason that I get nervous about giving feedback is that I don’t code things. There’s nothing to read into my words. I’m a scientist. I try really hard to say what I mean. Sometimes I fail miserably, and sometimes I get it just right. I am honest. Over the years of giving horrible feedback, I’ve learned that straight honesty isn’t all of it. There’s the sandwich method, the straight talk method, the comedy method (DO NOT DO THIS! IT DOESN’T WORK! EVER), and even the bereaved method.

I know how much time and effort writers put in to understanding an agent’s form rejection letter, how much time are they putting in to decoding my feedback? And there’s nothing to decode! Am I accidentally sending mixed signals? Is there a secret way of saying ‘you and your book suck’ that I just don’t know about? Is there some secret language that I’m just too dumb to have found? Is “I love this,” code for “Not another one?” What does it all mean?

Right, that might be a little extreme, but that is exactly why giving feedback scares me.

::sigh:: back to the trenches.  

Sometimes, a song says it all

I've been into epic fantasy for many years. Seriously, I read Lord of the Rings by the time I was 10. I've read a number of tomes I had to read at the table because they gave me carpal just to hold them.

But there's a problem with epic fantasy. If you read Robert Jordan, you know what I mean: time. Yup, it takes time to write those monuments to literature. Lots and lots of time. So if you're a fan of  the Game of Thrones (Song of Ice and Fire), you might enjoy this song.

Now back to trenches.


(I got this from a friend, Circia, who picked it up from Wil Wheaton, so I'm not awesome enough to get this stuff originally, I just pass it along like a disease vector.)