The Interregnum

So, I’m sure many of you know, I’ve been lurking around the boards at WriteOnCon.com trying to hook up with some critique partners. 

It’s really great to meet other writers, and I love reading first chapters. I learn so much about what works and what doesn’t when I’m reading other people’s first chapters. It’s one of those things that I’m completely blind to with my own work. I just can’t even see what the problems are in my own work. It takes a long time before I can actually look at my story and see what needs to happen with it to make it good.

And that brings me to today. 

Today I started on my interim project, the story between the first draft and the real revisions. And I’m so excited about it, I just can’t help but blab about it. 

It’s adult fiction, Sci/Fi or speculative fiction (whichever you prefer), about an FTL ship during a human vs. alien interstellar war. It’s sort of complicated, but I’m on the second chapter (having already mangled the first chapter no doubt), and I’m still really excited about it. Enough explosions to make Michael Bay happy… well, okay, not *that* many explosions, but plenty for sure. Rogue AIs, Faster Than Light travel, Alien technology, experimental drives, guns, stun rays, and nukes, I’m looking forward to this bag of trouble…

So, here’s the brief on the new WIP:

Title: A Battleship Named Hope

Description:

Hope Darrington thought it would look good on her transcripts: AI donor. Her brain was fast enough, good enough, strong enough that she was put on the list in case something happened. Then it did. When Hope woke up after the jet crash, she was a space ship, and there were other space ships firing at her. She panicked (who wouldn’t), and people died. 

She was tried for dereliction of duty, found guilty and sentenced to dismantling. 

That was thirty years ago. A previously peaceful alien race has launched a surprise attack on a human colony, wiping out all communications and destroying all the ships capable of reaching help. All ships but the forgotten convict, the rogue AI who thinks she’s human. Now a ragtag group of space marines are going to try to fly the ship to get help, but without Hope’s help, they might as well be bait.

Okay, so the brief needs a little love, but I’m working on it. I still need to figure out her personality a little more to really get the feel of this. And besides, it's just a project to help me not think about my other project. 

Stupid stuff that makes me smile

This morning I popped open a fresh box of tea. I love the smell of tea. It is ridiculous. I love it brewed, I love it in leaves, I love tea. And of course, in the afterglow of awesome breakfast tea smell, I started thinking about all the other great but stupid stuff that makes me smile. 

For instance, I love the smell of pepper tree blossoms; the taste of fresh cut hay; the smell of rain on cement (not asphalt); the sound of the rain on my roof; the feel of falling into water when you’re still all dry; that feeling of relief when you finish all your classes for the semester; when my cat sits next to me on the couch and purrs; the smell of a new book.

My list could go on forever, but I gather we’ve all got stuff to do today. 

What silly things do you love?

More process

First an announcement. If people haven’t heard or seen, there’s a crit partner match up over at WriteOnCon.com. 

There’s also a tweet-pitch off over at Love Ya that starts tomorrow (which by the time most people read this is today).

More on my process: editing

I guess all writers are pretty strange and otherwise unfathomable. I know a ton of people in revisions land right now, and that got me thinking: what is my process?

See, if curling up in a corner to cry was a process, that would probably be mine, but at some point I finished a novel. Then I went back over it. Then I went back over it. And then, because I wasn’t really sure, I went back through it three more times. I think you get the drift. The only way I can start to see the problems with my manuscript is through repetition. If I have a hard time staring down a passage for the seventh time, then there’s probably a reason.

I think there’s this sort of evolution in writers. Maybe I shouldn’t be so general: I went through a sort of evolution. The first time I wrote a novel, I loved it so much I wouldn’t have let anyone change a hair on its pretty little head. I was twelve. The second time I finished a novel, I was 24. I loved, loved, loved that novel. In fact, I loved it so much I was willing to rewrite huge portions of it. Oh man, I loved that novel. It’s one of the few projects I’d be willing to consider tackling from the “Once upon a time…” and no, I don’t start stories like that. I didn’t write another novel for six years, but I loved it so much I tore it to pieces, reassembled it, ran it through the grinder of every person I could bribe into reading it, then took that feedback back to my manuscript one more time. Then I started putting it out there, and getting feedback from professionals, that’s how much I loved that story. I loved that story enough to brave the dreaded land of queries for it.

In short, the more I love a story, the more I’m willing to work on it. That seems simple right? Well, it isn’t. We all get those SNI, and how do we know that they’ll turn into a story we love enough to rewrite it. My guess is, this is what agents and editors are always talking about when they say write the story you want (need!) to write, not the one you think will sell. (Do I sound like an afterschool special yet?)

So, right now, my process is this: write story I fall in love with. Write a different story so I’m not all googly eyed at the first story. Reread the first story in preparation for edit. Tear first story to little bitty bits. Take a look at second story to see if it would be any easier to beat into shape. Nope, back to first story. Beat it into shape (I do this by going over it repeatedly and talking plot points with people I trust). Edit it. Revise it. Edit it some more. 

Basically, my editing process is a Mandelbrot set. (I’m super nerdy right now). 

My process

So there’s been a lot of talk around the interwebs about people and their process. I almost hate talking about my process because I feel very much the amateur. Usually, I’d step aside and say something like, “I’ll tell you why feeling like an amateur is so scary to me another day.” But not today. Today, you get the whole story. 

Once upon a time, I wrote a novel. It was a story that was too big for its britches, but I wrote it anyway. I was too dumb to realize the mistakes I was making, and in retrospect, I learned a ton about writing. At the time, however, I thought I’d be the next hot thing. Thinking my manuscript was awesome sauce on toast, I gave it to a friend of mine. He had a degree in English (isn’t that the degree you’re supposed to get if you want to write?), and I had a degree in Geology. I figured that my grammar might be a little unfortunate, but what the heck, anyone can fix grammar. Neither of us knew anything about critiquing, good, bad or otherwise.

After he read my manuscript, he sat me down (first clue things weren’t going to go well) and said to me “This is hopelessly amateurish.”** Then he went on to say that it would be too much work to give a real critique because it was so bad. A whole novel boiled down to one line. I won’t lie, it was crushing, but even as my poor heart lay bleeding on the floor I felt like my 75,000 words deserved more than a four word sum up. I’d been reading and commenting on his manuscripts for eons by this point, so I figured I deserved something more than amateurish. He thought my manuscript was so hopeless that it didn’t even deserve the time to say things like “I found your main character to be unbelievable, if you added some details about her life, it might have cleared things up,” or “I have a hard time visualizing your world because you don’t set the scenes well.” Nope: hopelessly amateurish.

I was so thoroughly disregarded that I’m forever fearful of being amateurish again. From that one incident, amateurish became synonymous with worthless, hopeless, and not even worth the time it takes to scrape dog s&*t off the bottom of your shoe.

At this point, I’m so scared that I’ll be perceived that way again, that I can’t even start working on something until it’s the only thought in my head. I wait until I can’t contain so much as one more thought about a novel before I start writing it. In that obsessed place, even my fear gets blotted out and all I can do is write. If it all goes to hell, then at least I’ll have gotten that damned novel out of my head, because seriously, I have other things to do than obsess over ideas that aren’t even on paper yet.

So the short break down of my process:

Step 1: Get initial idea. I usually refer to this as the lightning strike because I get these in crazy flashes. Sometimes it feels like the muse opens my brain and sticks a whole novel inside my head in the space of a microsecond. (note: my most recent draft was not the product of a lightning strike, more to prove to myself that I could write a novel that wasn’t given to me by some arcane flash of whatever).

Step 2: Wait to finish whatever is currently on my docket. This is the hardest step. During this time, I usually start dreaming about my next project. Sometimes this phase is much longer than expected. It’s really difficult to finish up a piece of writing when you want to be working on something else. This is the step where fear bogs my every step. I find myself thinking things like, well, it would be great, but if I write it, it’ll suck because it will sound like an amateur n00b wrote it. I basically have to wait until that voice is completely destroyed before I can move on to step three.

Step 3: when brain is ready to explode, write novel. I seem to take right around three months regardless of the length of the novel. I have a 120,000 word novel that took 10 weeks, and a 60,000 word piece that took every scrap of three months. I don’t know why, it’s just the way it is for me.

So there you have it, my writing process. Subject to change.

** It should be noted that my friend has since apologized profusely for giving such lame criticism (his words not mine). I won’t relay his excuses, but if you keep writing, you’ll end up with an experience almost word for word like mine. It’s just the way things are. But forewarned is fore armed: at the time my friend actually didn’t know much about providing feedback to other people (he’d been getting it from me for free for years, and just hadn’t thought about how to apply it to other manuscripts).

One who panics

So, I don’t know how many of you have ever been in a place where you have a piece of writing that’s been… well, the nice word is critiqued. The truth is, someone tore a mile wide hole in it. There’s enough red ink to start a blood bank. This happened to me, and it made me mad. The whole thing wasn’t just a problem here or there, it was major ‘this whole section sucks’ kind of comments (over 100 of them, for a 20 page paper). And while I fumed and wallowed in my “But how can this be, we talked about this, isn’t this what he asked for? It’s impossible to fix this,” I had *that* moment. 

If you’ve never been in the place where your job depends on a piece of writing that’s been kicked back with the big ole “Really? My two year old could have done better,” you know what I mean. It’s terrible. Your back is against the wall, and if you don’t figure out how to fix your unfixable pile of crap, that’s it, no job. It’s a lot like saying “I’ll query 75 agents before I trunk this project,” and then getting 75 form rejections. 

But then, back against the wall and in a dark place, you see things differently. With novels, it could be the moment you trunk it (for the time being), or maybe it’s when you realize that if you do a complete rewrite everything will work out. Cornered and in a panic, the world looks different, and for me that’s really good. 

I don’t talk about it too much, but I’m dyslexic. Not terribly, mostly with the little things (pbqd—I hate these letters) and I read very slowly. The big problem is that my brain and my writing are products of my coping mechanisms. I skip things. I’ve never read the whole word, I read a few key letters and guess what the rest of it is (reading is really hard). And then I write like that. I skip logical steps (hence the comments about 2-year-olds out performing me), and I have circuitous ways of explaining things in my own head. They don’t work for other people. Sometimes, I can pull myself back and look at the world from the eyes of other people, and sometimes, not so much. 

Sometimes I need panic. 

I had to scrap the pile of poo, but I know how to write it now (sadly, this doesn’t mean cranky mean professor will like it). My guess is, this is one of those moments people mean when they say “Dig deep.” It’s not a pretty place, but the results of that place are incredible. I’m always amazed at how suffering taps into abilities not available in normal, everyday life. Someday, I’ll be able to just go there without being prodded with red hot pokers.

It feels awesome to type The End

I’m always amazed at how accomplished finishing a first draft makes me feel. It’s not like I haven’t typed “The End” before, but every time, I feel like I should go shout it from the mountain tops. I love that feeling. It’s a powerful drug, and I’m surprised I was able to overcome its addictive qualities when I first wrote those words at the ripe old age of twelve (that was the pegasus/starship Enterprise Fan fic, for those keeping track). This work has been harder than most. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I feel like I had to dig down and pull this one out in the clutch. Most of my work just flows, but I had to bleed for this one.

And so, in celebration of finishing a completed rough draft I’m putting up the query letter for some help (no, I’m not planning to query for a long time, heck, I’m not even going to start the rewrite until August, and I’m not querying with a project that hasn’t been through the meat grinder editing force of my beta readers).

First, some stats because it’s as close to statistics as I’ll ever get.

Title: From the Blood of Dragons

Words: 60,000 (that makes it the shortest rough draft I’ve had so far)

Date started: April 9, 2011

Date finished: July 1, 2011

Words per day: 712 (see, when you put it like that, writing a novel must be easy)

FROM THE BLOOD OF DRAGONS (working title, as in, I’m trying to figure out if it’s working).

Like most girls her age, Allyson Carter hates everything about herself. She’s had acne to shame a pepperoni pizza since she was ten. Her asthma’s so bad, she keeps three inhalers (backpack, pocket, bed stand). She can’t catch the eye of her crush at school, Steve, and her best friend is a troll. Okay, technically Beth’s only half troll. When a group of kidnappers corners Allyson and her friend at the mall, all hell breaks loose when Allyson spits fireballs to escape. Allyson is half dragon and never knew it. Her acne? Emerging scales. Her asthma? Actually a fiery breath weapon.

After they escape the kidnappers, Allyson learns that Steve has disappeared, and he wasn’t just any hot guy from school. Steve is descended from unicorns. The police think it’s a simple runaway case, but Allyson knows better. Someone is kidnapping the other halfs and taking their powers. If the police won’t find him, Allyson will.