Birth of a novel, or Why Rewriting Sucks

Today is another installment of Birth of a Novel. If you haven't heard of this, hop on over to Charity's Blog, and sign up on the linky. 

I try not to talk about my troubles, but let’s face it, I’m TMI waiting to happen. So when I found myself full of free time I thought, “Oh hey, I’ll crank out the rest of this novel in like a week.” That was pretty much three weeks ago now. Yeah. That’s not really going the way I’d planned.

At first I thought, Oh, this is just the usual writer anxiety, it comes and it goes. In the mean time, I’ll just watch Dance Academy (a surprisingly good Australian Ballet drama). And when I’d plowed through those, I thought, “Oh, well, I’m just redefining myself as a person rather than a job.” That’s when I started watching Glee.

And still, no writing. I blogged. I talked with people, I cleaned house, anything to not write. What was killing my words?

Then it hit me, I was avoiding my novel.

Writing a novel is full of ups and downs. The ups sound like “Oh my galena, this is the greatest story, and I wish I could ship it off to agents Right NOW so it can hit the New York Times bestseller list sooner.” The downs: “Well, that was a complete waste of time. I wonder if I should even finish drafting it. I mean really, who’s ever going to pay money for this trite POS?”

But when you’re rewriting, it’s worse. With a rewrite, there are no really big surprises, you’ve already done that. You’ve already been there. You’ve already explored all the original (well, original to you) points that made you think you had the novel of pure awesome. In a rewrite, you see that not only has it been done before (by you) it’s been done before by like fifty other people over the last ten years. Yikes. It seems old, worn out, and you start to doubt.

Why am I even rewriting this novel? It wasn’t that good to begin with, and now that I’m rewriting, I know that it sucks. I’ve had vacuums with less suction than this novel.

And it’s not nearly as exciting because you’ve already done it.

So I started writing again. I gave myself permission to suck, because even though this is a rewrite, so much has changed that it’s back to a first draft. And first drafts suck. Sure this first draft might be a little more focused, you know, with the whole actually knowing the plot and the point of view (both aspects I’d screwed up the first time).

Now if I can just keep that Shiny New Idea at bay and finish...

So what about you, do you hate rewriting as much as I do? Or do you view rewriting as an opportunity to sweep all those mistakes under the revision rug?

Goals:

* Finish the rewrite of PRINCESS SINGULARITY by next week (this should be less than 10,000 words, so this shouldn’t be a problem).

* Make a decision about revising the super hero novel

* Draw more maps for the Shiny New Idea, more on that one later

Birth of a crazy—I mean novel

I’m typing my little fingers off over here because I’m working on too many things all at once. For Birth of a Novel, my goals were to meet my word counts. Check! For my dissertation, my goals were—you know, it’s pretty boring to read about how I set some goals and made them. No one wants to read about how I’m a goody-two shoes who’s learned over the years that either I make my goals, or I don’t.

But my guess is that most people don’t have an almost 4 year old singing about the coming apocalypse. Yeah, my family is known for overachievers.

See, my daughter has been learning Christmas carols. Sweet mother of science, why didn’t someone warn me about Christmas carols? I should have remembered, after all, I was a prime offender in my youth. I guess I’d just forgotten. But the problem is that she’s still a kid with a bit of a speech impediment (they all grow out of them).

But until she grows out of it she sings “Joy to the world, the warg has come.”

The Warg.

You know, the Warg:

How’s your November going? Preparing for the invasion of family or on the side of the invaders? Good luck one way or the other, and for those of you in writer’s bliss (or hell depending) To NANO!

Birth of a Novel

Write, so I was supposed to post a progress report for Birth of a Novel, but two annoying/upsetting things happened. First the kid got a stomach bug, and second, like the complete idiot I can be, I caught the puck during my Wednesday night hockey game. Wait, no, let me say that again: I caught the puck with my hand on the part of the glove that’s worn through from overuse. I didn’t break anything, but two days later and still hurts. I didn’t do much typing yesterday (part of my NaNo word count was actually from the day before and I just hadn’t reported it).

Right. So back to Birth of a Novel.

As it turns out I’ve been tagged for the next big thing a bunch of times, but I haven’t done it. Since the birth of a novel blog hop is just getting started I thought today would be a good day to pass it along.

1. What is the working title of your book?

THE PRINCESS SINGULARITY and I can’t decide if it’s the greatest title ever or a complete failure of nerdity. The previous title was ACCIDENTAL GODMOTHER, but one agent said “I think I’ve read this already.”

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

The idea for this book came after my daughter fell in love with Cinderella. On the fifty bazillionth watching of it, I thought about how funny it would be if there was someone whose magic was always destined to reproduce plot points from stories with similar spells. For instance, if the mage needed to get somewhere in a hurry, but didn’t have a cart, but she had a love sick girl and some mice, she could recreate the carriage and dress from Cinderella to get a ride to the nearest town or village. The only problem is that at that inn or village, for whatever reason, there would be a prince there, and he would fall madly in love with the girl (not the mage). Because of this chance meeting the whole region would be destabilized politically, and so on and so forth. It’s changed a lot since then, but that was the start of it all (hence the original working title of Accidental Godmother).

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Genre, you prickly thorn in my side. So if this were a perfect world, I could say YA fantasy. But this isn’t a perfect world, and people tell me “Oh, those themes make it MG, or this is too mature for YA, so it has to be adult.” So right now, I’m writing with a genre in mind, but I’ve read enough YA to say, it’s not like your typical YA because it doesn’t revolve around a romance. Sure there’s some in there, but my story is about defeating an evil wizard who wants to take over the world (for some very valid reasons, mind you). My book is a lot of action and adventure in a magical world (and our world, too).

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I know he doesn’t do bad guys, but—absolute swoon—Neil Patrick Harris.

The villain would of course be married to Cate Blanchet… And these are the love interest’s parents.

As for the main character, I think Selena Gomez would do a great job with it. Although, Anne Hathway from Princess Diaries wouldn’t be a bad choice either (but she is getting a little old to play a teenager).

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

I suck at this, but here it goes:

When Tessa’s best friend is kidnapped by an evil wizard who has mistaken her best friend for Tessa, she has to hunt down the evil wizard and steal back her friend.

6. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

The first draft of the manuscript took 12 weeks. This draft, a full rewrite, has been a hot and cold affair which I’m working on for NaNo (To NaNo!)

7. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

This is another one of those things I’m supposed to be good at, but actually totally suck at. See my big problem is that there’s not a lot of adventure YA. There’s a crap ton of romance in weird settings, but not a lot of adventure. So to compare, I’d say if Jim Butcher got together with L. Frank Baum and George RR Martin to write a book featuring a teenage girl, this would be it (note that I recognize the fact that L. Frank Baum did write a book about a teenage girl, but he didn’t have voice like Mr. Butcher… not that I do, but you know what I mean).

And I think that right there is why I have such a hard time comparing my books to other books, I feel like I have no right to say my book is what you would get if you had a book with voice by Butcher, politics by Martin, and world building by L. Frank Baum.

8. Who or What inspired you to write this book?

What inspired me to write this book was that I was going completely insane. No, really I was going COMPLETELY INSANE. At the time, my little girl was only 8 months old, and I had exactly one day of child care, during which I had to teach a five hour class and get as much research done as possible. So on this one day off from raising an 8 month old, I would arrive at work wrangle analytical equipment all morning, and teach all afternoon (often without lunch). Anyone who’s ever done the kid thing knows what I’m talking about, no sleep, I was actively doing research and writing my dissertation and teaching. I had the equivalent of three fulltime jobs. I was going insane. Then this idea for a novel struck struck like lightning. I had to write it.  

9. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Who doesn’t want to see the prom queen break out a giant sword to go chop off the wizard’s head? Or how about an MC who decides to turn herself into a dragon to take out the wizard even though she knows it’ll probably kill her?

So yeah, this is a silk, swords, and sorcery book. And I wrote it because I haven’t been seeing nearly enough of these in my life. (that should tell me that they don’t sell well, sigh.)

As for who I tag:

I’m tagging everyone on the Birth of a Novel Blog hop. And if you want, feel free to sign up, just go here and jump on the linky.