Sheila Writes

100 Odd Words #4 - The Question and the Answer

2012-01-28T15:05:00.000-08:00

I dreamed that I stood before the throne of God, pointed at Him, and said “So if you’re such a big deal, why aren’t you doing something about poverty and war and oppression? Why are you just sitting there while the rich put their boots on the necks of the poor and your precious creation is being laid waste to by the greedy and shortsighted? Why aren’t you doing anything about the suffering down on Earth?”

God shifted in His seat, tilted His head, smiled slightly, and replied: “Funny, I was just about to ask you precisely the same questions.”

Excuse Note 1/24/2012

2012-01-24T19:06:00.000-08:00

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as far too much of her evening was taken up wrangling with tech support over the state of her WiFi router. Thank you.

Excuse Note 1/23/2012

2012-01-23T17:46:00.000-08:00

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she had a full day working at a new temporary assignment and is still not fully decompressed from Chattacon.

100 Odd Words #3 - The Lavender Man

2012-01-21T10:50:00.000-08:00

There’s a man in a lavender suit with a featureless face standing on the corner. He’s flipping a silver coin that glints with a white flash every time it peaks just before the fall back to his gloved hand. He asks nothing, says nothing, just keeps the coin spinning, spinning, spinning again. I can tell that he’s waiting for me to come up and ask what he’s doing, ask how to play, ask what bets to place and what I’ll get if I win. I’ve seen him before. I know his kind all too well. I’m not playing his game.

Excuse Note 1/19/2012

2012-01-19T17:10:00.000-08:00

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she has to make preparations for a trip to Chattanooga. She is bringing her laptop in the hope of getting work done over the weekend, but don't expect much. Thank you.

Getting Nooky

2012-01-18T08:34:00.000-08:00

I did a shameless plug of Catbooks and Other Methods on a prominent writer's blog and somebody tweeted me to ask if it was available for the Nook. Then two of my relatives received Nooks for Christmas and I decided it was probably time to look into that particular publishing avenue.

Thankfully, Nook uses the EPUB format, as Apple does, which means I didn't have to burn up yet another ISBN for another ebook format. So last night we set up an account with PubIt! for Lullwater Press and this morning I did all the uploading and filling out of details.

It should be up in the next couple of days and when it is, I'll be yawping about it all over the Internet.

100 Odd Words #2 - True Story

2012-01-14T09:57:00.000-08:00

I have no clear memory of this incident (I was three years old at the time) but my mother does and I have no reason to doubt her.

I was squabbling with one of my siblings over a particular toy. (Which sibling? Which toy? The details are lost to me and of no relevance to my mother’s retelling.) My mother was called on to intervene and decided the case in my favor.

Instead of celebrating, my response was to fling the object of contention at the feet of my rival.

“Have it,” I said. And with that, I walked away.

100 Odd Words #1 - Stage Fright

2012-01-07T06:32:00.000-08:00

Boards creak as she steps up on the stage. There is a carpet in the center, a cheap mimic of a Persian rug, worn in spots and coated with a layer of beige grime. A dented microphone stand waits just at the edge.

The spotlight--pale as the moon, blinding as the sun--reduces all that she faces to an indefinite void. The seats are shadows--full or empty, she cannot tell.

An electric fence tingle dances across her lips as they brush the wire mesh of the microphone. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I can’t think of anything to say.”

Excuse Note 1/1/2012

2012-01-01T20:43:00.000-08:00

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she was setting her New Year's Resolutions in place and seeing Karen Wurl perform at Java Monkey. Thank you.

100 Odd Words

2012-01-01T13:42:00.000-08:00

Every once in a while I get clobbered over the head with a crazy idea and the next thing you know I've decided to draw and give away ten thousand flowers to people or something. Last night, as I was celebrating New Year's Eve at my friend Lake's backyard bonfire, I came up with something that had me grabbing my catbook and scribbling it down before it got away. In the clear light of day, after weighing the possibilities, this is what I've come up with:

Once a week, I will post 100 Odd Words on this blog. It might be a one hundred word poem, one hundred words of flash fiction or even one hundred words of description or dialogue. It must be exactly 100 words and I will post one every Saturday. If I remember to, I'll probably tweet and hashtag it with #100oddwords.

Fortunately, today is Sunday, so that gives me a week to come up with something. Or several somethings, to account for the weeks that stuff happens. Hey, if I can draft 50,000 words in thirty days, surely I can come up with 4,800 words in the space of a year.

Excuse Note 12/31/2011

2011-12-31T16:13:00.001-08:00

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she is spending her New Year's Eve clearing the decks for the upcoming year.

The Ugly Handsome Man

2011-12-30T09:06:00.000-08:00

So I was doing my Three Daily Pages (most folks might know them as Morning Pages, but I'm not always up that early) and this strange and crazy thing poured out that I'm transcribing here for future reference.

If you've ever done any kind of serious writing, it's a safe bet you've had to deal with The Thing In Your Head That Keeps Stopping You From Writing. There are a lot of names for it--Resistance, the Inner Critic, the Shitweasel. I sometimes call it the NoMonster. When I was writing this, the thing took on a persona I described as The Ugly Handsome Man. (I picture him as a blond guy in a suit with a face that's just a little too . . . tight, in some way.)

This is a speech given by said Ugly Handsome Man, laying out the strategies to my various gremlins for stopping me from working on my current novel. I suspect these strategies may not be unique to my inner battles.

I suggest a three-pronged strategy. Three lines of defense. I'd prefer she not make it past the first, but we should have the extra lines ready in case she does.

The first line of defense is, of course, to keep her from the page at all. Suggest that she should wait until she's in the mood. Tell her she should finish more important things first--things like cleaning the house, doing things she hates, getting the last word in on Facebook arguments. Distract her with a quick glance at her usual Internet time sinks and keep her hooked with the threat that if she stops, she'll have to quit for good. This will trigger her to gorge herself on such things even if, as it turns out, she never does stop for good.

Convince her that the page is a reward that can only be touched after all the vegetables have been eaten. Convince her the page is a burden that can be borne later when she has the strength for it. Remember, the arguments against sitting down and doing the work don't have to be consistent; they just have to be effective. Have her wait Just A Moment and let those moments stretch out as long as you can.

If, however, she does sit down, all is not lost. If we cannot stop her from working, then we can still minimize the damage done. The moment she gets anything down, assure her that it is sufficient for today and more can be done tomorrow, when she feels more inspired and more ready. If she persists, try slowing her down by telling her how terrible it is and who on earth is she kidding. If you can keep her writing and rewriting the same sentence endlessly, the battle is half-won. If she does plow forward and promise herself to fix it in the rewrite, make sure you make the experience as unpleasant as possible so she'll be less inclined to return to it the next day.

After a successful--or, rather, catastrophic from our perspective--round of writing, you may think the war is lost, but we still have our third line of defense. One is to chide her for enjoying herself too much. Remind her that there are people out there suffering in real jobs and she shouldn't expect people to hand her money for having fun like that. Tell her that even if you did everything you could to make the process hellish. Remember, the only consistency we're interested in is keeping her away from the work; it matters not that the arguments we use are contradictory. Once she's done, have her read over what she's written and remind her it's not enough. What she's done isn't relevant. We must tell her it's not enough and thus discourage her from doing any more.

After that, we rebuild our defenses for the next round, by telling her that she's already won, she's ahead of the game and that a day off will hardly hinder her progress. Once you've staved her off from working for a few days, the old hardened habits can resume and she is again rendered harmless.

The main thing is to keep her from the page for as long as possible. When she does make it to the page, our job is then to minimize the damage. You all know her well enough to know what triggers and buttons to press. Go to your work.

Yeah. This guy kinda scares me, too. But it's also really fun to piss him off.

I've decided to resume the practice of excuse notes for my current work in progress, and I'd best get something done so I won't have to write an excuse note for today.

On Being a Writer

2011-12-07T14:17:00.001-08:00

There's a riddle I learned from a book or a magazine when I was about eleven years old. Goes something like this:

A truck driver was going the wrong way up a one-way street. A policeman saw him, but didn't stop him. Why?

The answer hinges on a couple of bits of linguistic sleight-of-hand. One is the careful ambiguity of the verb--you can substitute the word travelling for going but cannot use the word driving. Because the answer is, of course, that the truck driver was walking.

The second bit of linguistic sleight of hand hinges on the nature of titles that are derived from verbs. Truck driver is a job description and thus one can be called a truck driver even if one isn't actually driving a truck at the moment. Truck drivers also do things like eat, sleep, watch television and, occasionally, walk places in between the business of driving trucks.

To be known as a writer is a good deal more glamorous than to known as a truck driver. When somebody asks you the ice-breaking question of "so, what do you do?" if you answer "I'm a truck driver" the best you can hope for is an empathetic nod and a remark that it must be hard work. If the answer is "I'm a writer" the questions that follow are numerous but tend to veer towards tactfully phrased versions of Are you rich? Are you famous? Have I heard of you?

Being a Writer punts you to the top of the Geek Hierarchy. Being a Writer means you can look the gods of literature in the eye and talk shop with them. Being a Writer means your name can potentially endure long after your death.

Or, at least, that's the popular myth of Being a Writer, a myth that dazzles people to the point that Being a Writer is more important to them than the act of writing itself. People who want to Be Writers don't always write--they talk about the great ideas they have for novels, they compose acceptance speeches for awards in their head, they do everything short of actually sitting down and facing the blank page and putting words together. Because that's when the hard part shows up, when the brilliant ideas come out crushed and mutilated in the transition into words. Or, worse yet, seem brilliant at first and then reveal their clumsiness as one's skills improve with practice and the Dunning-Kruger Threshold is crossed.

My brother-in-law, Peter David, once received an angry missive from a young man who was furious at a certain plot point that Peter had introduced into a comic book series he was writing for. The young man said that his dreams of "being a comic book writer" had been dashed because his brilliant notion for some particular character was now ruined by this revelation. More recently, Quentin Rowan was found to have plagiarized nearly his entire debut novel from other works and confessed that the fame of being a writer was more important to him than making the effort of writing his own words.

As I write this, I have not yet ascended to the ranks of the professionally published. (Give or take a couple of poems in anthologies and, oh, yeah, I have this ebook thingy.) I have a virtual trunk of unpublished (and mostly unpublishable) novels. Am I qualified to claim the title of writer? I honestly don't care if I am or not.

The verb matters more than the noun to me. I write. It's what I do. I'm a lot happier writing than I ever could in trying to Be a Writer.

Keeping Track

2011-11-14T10:30:00.001-08:00

NaNoWriMo comes with some lovely stats pages so you can see where you are and where you should be by now in your wordcount. But I realized that I'd forgotten my own personal tracking method which works as a surprisingly good motivator. I figured I'd share it here (nearly halfway through the month--go figure) in case anybody else might benefit from it.

My amazing high-tech word count indicator and motivation device consists of a sheet of graph paper from a pad I picked up somewhere for cheap and still haven't used up. There are fifty lines to a sheet and forty-one squares to a line. I mark off a block of forty-by-fifty and notch it at intervals of four along the top and intervals of ten along the side. Each time my wordcount advances by twenty-five words, I put an X in one of the squares. Four boxes adds up to one hundred words and each line of forty adds up to a thousand.

Twenty five words isn't much. Twenty five words can be something as simple as:

"Can you take me back?" she asked.

"I can, in theory, yes," he said, "I'm not entirely sure that would be the best thing for you."

Which is actually twenty-six words, but I didn't want to cut things off abruptly. But that's the beauty of this technique--each time you nudge things forward by twenty-five words, you wind up adding just a few more words and then, hey, it's only a few more words to the next box checked off and then, oh look, you just wrote three paragraphs. Or you wind up plowing through an entire scene and when you come up for air you realize that you have a lot of boxes to check.

I suppose you could give yourself little rewards after you check a certain number of boxes, but I've found that the simple act of checking off a wee box on a sheet of paper does nicely in terms of pinging my brain's reward system and providing me with a sense of progress.

By the way, even if you're already a good ways into your NaNovel, it's not too late to use this technique. In point of fact, I just drew up this year's sheet this very morning (and man, did I have a lot of boxes to check to catch up on!) I may be posting pictures of my progress periodically, at the very least on Twitter and possibly here.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some words to write and boxes to check.

The M.A.R.T.A. Write-In

2011-11-05T06:53:00.000-07:00

So today, the crazy folks at NaNoLanta have organized the Mad Authorial Rampage Through Atlanta (M.A.R.T.A.) Write-In. I've decided to sign up. I'll be tweeting when I can (@wonderbink) with the hashtag #NaNoMARTA and if I can get to a WiFi signal, I'll be updating this entry on the fly.

It starts near Lindbergh Station and ends near Dunwoody Station, which means I can catch the 5 there and catch it back home as well. Too perfect to pass up.

I'd better start by packing up the laptop I'm typing this on, so . . .

Two Things That Happened on November the First

2011-11-04T14:21:00.000-07:00

The first, of course, being the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, my favorite November pastime. I have again submitted myself to the process and I'm about five thousand words into a novel called Dave the Wanderer and the Circle of the Sun. Dave's a character who showed up in a notebook of mine about fifteen years ago. Just now I'm getting to write about him. He's a hell of a lot snarkier than I expected him to be.

The second being the official publication (or maybe just the first day I was able to be sure it existed, I'm not sure) of Catbooks and Other Methods on the iTunes Bookstore. I've been a bit bad about getting the word out, but I guess I'll have to become That Gal Who Won't Shut Up About Her Book On The Interweebs. Apologies in advance for that.

I'm about a day behind on my NaNo efforts since I've done very little in the way of wordcount what with grocery shopping and laundry and taking advantage of early voting. However, I'm embarking on a rather insane adventure with the folks from NaNoLanta which involves writing on and around MARTA for most of Saturday. That should give me a chance to catch up, I think. If I get close enough to some WiFi, I'll try to post updates during the day.

Did You Hear That?

2011-10-19T11:32:00.000-07:00

There's a sound that Apple programs make, a chime of three ascending notes, that signals that something has been successfully brought to completion. It's the sound you hear when a program has finished installation or a CD has been fully uploaded to iTunes.

I never knew that sound could be as delightful and terrifying as it was when it rang out to inform me that the upload of my book for purchase via iTunes had gone through.

I resorted to using Pages to translate my words into EPUB format, which was a touch more aggravating than I would have liked and forced me to relinquish a great deal of control over how I wanted it to look. But once I relaxed and put my emphasis on the words I wrote rather than my font and formatting choices, it fell into place a little more easily. I can only hope that those willing to lay down the ninety-nine cents to purchase this wee book will be forgiving of any lingering twonkiness in the layout.

I'm guessing that the folks at Apple will be giving the thing one more spot-check before offering it for sale via the wonders of iTunes. Once it's gotten past that hurdle, I'll officially declare the thing finished and make myself some baked salmon with lemon to celebrate.

Breaking Into the Walled Garden

2011-10-18T11:13:00.000-07:00

Catbooks and Other Methods has sold a handful of copies on the Kindle but I've been putting off doing any serious promotion of it until after I'd gotten the EPUB version up and running in the iTunes Bookstore.

Unfortunately, I've also been putting off the "getting the EPUB version up and running" part as well. Part of it is my usual procrastinative tendencies but the main reason is that Apple is the opposite of Amazon in terms of ease of publication.

Publication for the Kindle can be summed up in three steps:

1. Write a book.

2. Set up a Kindle Direct Publishing account.

[Steps one and two can be done in either order, to be honest.]

3. Upload your book.

That's all you have to do. This is both good news and bad news, as this means that the book you spent ages perfecting is sharing space with the sorts of manuscripts that would normally be languishing in a publisher's slush pile and the ebook equivalents of SEO spam. It takes a lot of external effort to raise your signal above the noise.

Publication for the iPad can be summed up in roughly the same steps, but those steps are far more complex. Setting up a Kindle Direct Publishing account requires an email address, a bank account to send payments to, some kind of tax ID number (EIN or Social) and that's about it. Apple asks for an email address, a bank account, tax ID number, an ISBN for each book and the names, job titles and phone numbers of the individuals in charge of Senior Management, Finance, Technical, Legal and Promotions. Even though I'm doing this through a small enough operation that these questions are easy enough to answer, it's still pretty damned intimidating.

I've also discovered, as I attempted to upload my work today, that the EPUB that plays nicely with my iPad will not play nicely with iTunes Producer and I'm going to have to take a step back and figure out how to convert it into a form they find pleasing. Fortunately, it's a short and simple enough book that it won't be a massive effort that it might be if I decided to inflict my first novel on the world.

I don't resent these obstacles, though. In a funny way, this is the legacy of the late Steve Jobs--acceptable was never good enough for the man, he wanted things to be "insanely great." I'm not sure if my book is up to "insanely great" standards, but Apple's standards certainly force me to take what I do that much more seriously and I can hardly complain about that.

And It's Up . . .

2011-08-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

Rather sooner than I'd planned, mind you, but I was under the impression I'd be able to set up a postdated release date for the Kindle. No such luck. It's up and I've just got to deal with it.

You can get the Kindle version so far. As of this writing, I am still waiting to hear back from Apple about setting up the EPUB version in the iTunes bookstore.

It's still something of an odd abstraction at this point, but I'll be posting soon about what I've learned from the process.

Completion

2011-08-12T16:34:00.000-07:00

I've finalized the ebooks and sent copies to my publisher.

Going to have a long and quiet evening at home to celebrate.

One Step Closer . . .

2011-07-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

ISBNs have been acquired. I'll be meeting with the head of Lullwater Press this evening. (A fancy way of saying "I'm stopping by Mom and Dad's house for dinner.") Guess it's time to do one more grind and polish on the book itself.

I'm sure there are folks out there who are curious about the nuts and bolts process of ebook publishing, so I'll do my best to keep you posted.

Closer to Completion . . .

2011-07-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

The acquisition of ISBNs for my upcoming ebook has hit a slight snag, as it seems Bowker is confused by the fact that Lullwater Press previously obtained the ISBN for their first publication via LuLu and is now asking for a batch of them directly. I figure I can at least work on a final grind and polish while waiting for this matter to sort itself out.

The next phase is going to have to be the dreaded M-word: marketing. It's not my strong point by any means, and certainly one of the reasons I steered clear of the very thought of self publishing for so long. Granted, by putting these out as electronic editions, at least some of the heavy lifting in the Letting People Know It Exists Department will be handled by large, scary corporations. But I know from experience that merely offering something for sale on the Internet is no assurance that anybody will notice, let alone make a purchase.

Non-skeevy marketing in the Internet age seems to break down to three simple (if not always easy) steps:

1. Find your people.

2. Connect with your people.

3. Love your people.

"Find your people" means to figure out what sort of person would enjoy your book or find the information in it useful to them. "Connect with your people" means to go to the places on the Internet where those people hang out and get to know them. As they learn about you, some of them will notice that you have a nifty book that you're awfully proud of and will decide that you are a sufficiently cool person to be worth spending money on. At which point you love those people thoroughly, celebrate them and keep in touch with them about other nifty things that you're doing and if they continue to like you, they will continue to spend money on you.

That's the bare-bones gist of it. (Which many people will pad out into enough pages to fill a PDF ebook that they'll either sell you for twenty-seven bucks or give to you for free if you sign up for their mailing list.) I'm currently stuck a bit at Step One. I do think that this book will be useful to introverted souls like me who could use these tools for making their lives better. Now I have to figure out where to find them. (Introverts, after all, don't tend to hang out in the open the way extroverts do.)

Come to think of it, figuring this out might be a job for a Sub-C Session. How convenient.

Final Steps

2011-06-30T05:48:00.000-07:00

I've given the words themselves one more going-over--by printing it out and scribbling corrections on the pages, funnily enough. It was a little trickier making the corrections directly in the HTML code, but I kept an eye on the results in my favorite browser and reloaded with each change to make sure I didn't bork anything.

Unfortunately, I still did bork something, but it was undetectable until I converted the results into ebook form. Since I'd been using Calibre for conversion, I also took advantage of the ability to construct a Table of Contents that certain ebook reading devices can access. This requires using HTML tags at the start of each chapter and then telling Calibre which ones to detect and use accordingly. Initially, I'd used 'a name=' tags so I could also construct a working Table of Contents within the book itself. This did odd things to the TOC when I read it on my iPhone (it kept duplicating each chapter heading each time the book was opened) so I swapped over the the ever reliable 'h1' tag after a quick lesson in how to tweak the CSS code to make it look a little less out of place. This played nicely with iBooks, but resulted in the MOBI version being unopenable on the Kindle app I've been testing my drafts on. So now I've forked the code, if you will, and saved one version for iBooks (with h1 tags intact) and another for the Kindle (with h1 tags removed.) Both are now fully functional on my iPhone and iPad on three different reading apps and I think we're about ready for prime time.

As it is, I needed to construct two separate versions anyway since I'll need two different ISBNs to identify them. After sniffing around and finding how much a pack of ISBNs cost, I've cut a deal with Lullwater Press to obtain the ISBNs and put the books out under their imprint. (Note that "cutting a deal with Lullwater Press" is a formal way of saying "Um, Dad, I need some ISBNs, can you help?") Were I not in such deprived financial circumstances, I would have sprung for the $250 for a block of ten ISBNs myself, but it's not an option right now.

So I'm this much closer to joining the ranks of the e-published. No telling what comes next.

No Excuses

2011-06-23T12:46:00.000-07:00

So a little HTML hackage in TextWrangler and some Calibre magic have provided my ebook with a workable Table of Contents that links directly to the chapters. The nice thing about HTML as an ebook writing medium is that you can check the formatting in short order by firing up your favorite browser and opening the file with it. This way I was able to test my tags and fix them instantly instead of loading things onto the iPhone and then finding out that they were borked.

It's still a rather short work, some twenty-odd pages on the iPad, but this is a how-to book rather than a novel, so I can hope that its utility will make up for its brevity. I'm not planning on charging more than a buck or so for it anyway.

I think the next steps are one last going-over for revision, finalizing the cover and then getting it set up on iBooks and Amazon. Yikes.

Ebook Progress

2011-06-23T09:37:00.000-07:00

After a long pause and much procrastination, I've resumed work on hashing out my wee little ebook. A few things I've learned:

1. Calibre works wonders for rendering .odt files into something resembling an ebook. So far I've done a few test drafts that I've been able to look at on my iPhone and iPad in three different reading apps (Stanza, Kindle and iBooks) to catch and mend the flaws and glitches.

2. Optimal size for an ebook cover image is 600 x 800 pixels. This allows it to play nicely with the Kindle and looks fine on iBooks as well. My test cover was originally rendered as 6000 x 8000 pixels (slow going, but still functional) and then scaled down to fit. PNG looks better than JPG, by the way.

3. Get rid of the double space after the period. It looks funny when rendered on a page, even an electronic one.

4. Make sure there are no gaps before the page break, or you may wind up with a blank page in the middle of everything, depending on how the pages come out.

5. Don't break your brain worrying about widows and orphans, because every page is going to come out differently depending on the size of the screen and which end is up.

I'm thinking about doing an HTML rendition so I can get under the hood to tweak the code directly and then running that through Calibre to see how it looks. I'm glad I picked such a short book to start this experiment with--I think if I'd tried this with my novel I'd be close to dead by now.

I'm going to resume the practice of excuse notes on this blog until the thing is complete and available for sale to the public. Which means I'd better get some work done on it if I don't want to write an excuse note for today.

Starting Where I Am

2011-04-25T12:06:00.000-07:00

What I have so far:

1. A tentative title. (Catbooks and Other Methods: Free Writing for Mood Improvement, Problem Solving and Making the Waiting Room at the Dentist's Office a Better Place to Be)

2. A draft manuscript. I cranked out an early draft in Scrivener and later transferred each chapter to my Wonderbink blog as a series of entries there.

3. A potential publisher. As I've mentioned earlier, my parents set themselves up as Lullwater Press and my father is willing to add my little book to their catalog. I could also just as easily set up my own gig through LuLu and simply lean on their expertise in the process. Still deciding.

I guess that's as good a place as any to start. Next step is revision, I think, as well as getting a feel for what I'll need in order to render these words into a booklike form.

Ebookishness

2011-04-20T12:04:00.000-07:00

Two and half years ago I wrote a blog post called The Wrong End which asserted that self-publishing was less than ideal for the aspiring writer.

Obviously the landscape of publishing has shifted in the intervening time. Now that there are more ways to publish and distribute books in electronic formats than there were in 2008, one can set up shop as a self-publisher and not be saddled with boxes of books to lug around and wave in people's faces and you can have large corporations like Amazon and Apple do the heavy lifting of making your work available to the world.

This doesn't mean I entirely rescind what I said previously about the hard work from the wrong end. The ease of distribution still doesn't mean that the hard work of polishing the work to be the best it can should be ignored. Even having the wonders of social media to tell the world about your book won't help much if the book isn't that good to begin with.

But I am curious about the possibilities of ebooks and I'm embarking on a little experiment with it. I have a rough draft of a wee advice book on free writing techniques, which I'm looking at revising and expanding to publish as an ebook and possibly on paper via LuLu. I'll probably post a bit about the process as I go and naturally I'll pass on the link so you can buy it when it's done, if you are so inclined.

Next post, I'll talk a bit about what I've done so far and what I still need to do.

Possibility and Impossibility

2011-03-30T09:42:00.000-07:00

So I've snuck Soft Places just under the wire for Open Door Month at Angry Robot Books. I had a month to perfect it but, true to form, I just put it off instead until there was no other choice.

The thing I've come to understand about my tendency to procrastinate such things is that in a weird sort of way the part of me that puts things off is trying to protect me from the disappointment of failure. The imaginary victory of contemplating what you could have done can be pleasurable in its way, while the pain of genuine defeat is not one that anybody I know rushes to embrace.

I came across a rather odd insight that has changed my perspective on a lot of things--what I can imagine will inevitably surpass what reality can provide. This seems a bit obvious when attempting to become a writer of fiction, particularly fantasy-type fiction but it hit me that this doesn't just apply to stories but also to the imaginary conversations I have with people I'm on my way to meet, the well-spun plans for What I Will Do When The Novel Sells and, honestly, any such vision in my head of things that have not yet come to be.

Motivational hucksters spout pithy statements like "If you can imagine it, you can achieve it!" Devotees of the so-called Law of Attraction picture their dream mansions in Beverly Hills, cut out pictures of their perfect homes, focus on visualizing and feeling it into being and wonder what's wrong with them when it hasn't shown up yet. Even if we haven't fallen into that particular mental trap, it's not uncommon to still have blueprints in our heads for dream homes and dream jobs and feel that our lives are somehow lacking because we didn't grow up to become the rock star we'd hoped to be when we were ten.

But here's the thing--my imagination is broad and wide enough to encompass things that are physically impossible. I can visualize a mansion of pure crystal suspended on a cloud over a waterfall of molten gold. I can picture a teahouse where the tea is poured by a waiter in a red brocade jacket with the head of a black lynx. I can walk through a desert in my head where the sand is green and the dunes punctuated by jagged blood-red stones. From childhood onward, I've always had a tactile, visual and absurdly extreme imagination. (This is one of the reasons I write in the first place, I suppose. So the impossible things in my head have a place to live outside of my skull and can even be transmitted, however imperfectly, to other people's imaginations.)

In the same way, every possibility I could have in this life for fame and fortune will always fall short of what my mind can conjure up. Should I blame my imagination for being too large? The world for being too small? Or should I blame the strange expectation that the latter can somehow be made to live up to the former and that my life isn't complete until and unless it does? If there's nothing wrong with me because I don't have that crystal mansion, why should I feel there's something wrong with me for not having a stack of bestselling novels by now? While a bestselling novel is indeed physically possible, my dreams of what could happen are still going to skip a few steps ahead of what reality can provide at every point in the process.

I don't think the solution is to rein in the possibilities in my head. I think instead I choose to let them gallop as far ahead of me as they are inclined, note the tracks left behind and focus on where I am and what the next step is along that path. I may never catch up all the way, but I'll certainly be farther ahead than if I'd just stood still.

Chiseling

2011-02-10T11:26:00.000-08:00

I have recently resumed the practice of a mere minimum of twenty-five words a day on my current project. (Again, the luxury of the amateur to slow things down to that level without anybody but myself to worry.)

Usually a few more words get in before I set it aside to tackle the rest of my day. But what even that tiny effort does is get me in the regular habit of thinking about the thing, figuring out what happens next and how to get there.

Last night I did a little bit of brainstorming and two stuck places cracked themselves open and a stream of ideas came forth. If this, then THIS, and, oh, what about THAT?

It feels good to have that again. Even at a mere twenty-five words a day.

Surviving NaNoWriMo

2010-11-30T16:10:00.000-08:00

So in the early morning hours of today, I pounded out the last few words of my efforts for National Novel Writing Month.

It's a bit odd to see how controversial the thing seemed to be this year. There were dismissive articles about NaNoWriMo and, unsurprisingly, a number of people leaped to its defense in response. Some of the criticisms seemed to be along the lines of Stop Having Fun, Guys and a curious and unproven allegation that the slush piles of December are glutted with NaNovels.

But there was also the concern, and I think it one that needed to be addressed, that people who fall short on NaNoWriMo wind up getting mauled by their internal gremlins, the ones who threw everything at them to get them to stop and then turned around and kicked them for not succeeding. (Nasty buggers, those gremlins. Every word I write for the world to read is a tiny victory against them.)

This year I almost didn't make it. Part of it was perhaps simple overconfidence--I'd done it five years running, surely I know how to handle this, right? There was also the fact that I spent the month doing some time-consuming online work in order to keep my mortgage paid and my lights on, since my unemployment insurance has completely run out. I never hit the purple this-is-where-you-should-be-by-now line on the NaNo Stats page until the very last day. And yet I persisted, in part out of stubborn pride but also because, honestly, as unpublishable and useless a mess as I ended up with, I wound up enjoying the time I was spending with these characters and wanting to see how it worked out for them.

There are undoubtedly quite a few souls out there who didn't make it to the finish line, who got overwhelmed, who fell so far behind they saw no way of making it in time and didn't see the point of persisting. Some people throw their hands up and say "Ah, well, maybe next year" but others wind up feeling that if they can't even squeeze out fifty thousand words of crap by the deadline, what the hell good are they?

Falling short on NaNoWriMo does not make you a failure as a writer. It might just mean that you had other priorities, that the story wasn't holding your interest or, more than likely, that the thirty-day-deadline method doesn't work for you as a writer.

There are two ways you can do the math, when you look at your final wordcount.

Take 50,000.

Subtract your wordcount.

This is the number you fell short.

This is the way most people are inclined to do it, even as it makes them miserable.

Consider this equation:

Take your wordcount.

Subtract zero.

This is the number you came out ahead of where you would have been otherwise.

I much prefer the latter to the former.

The War of Art eBook

2010-10-20T14:20:00.000-07:00

Steven Pressfield's The War of Art is one of my personal creative scriptures.

The eBook is available for purchase and if you buy it between now and Thursday, October 21, 2010, it will be a mere $1.99.

Buy it. Now. Even if you don't have an e-reader, you can grab it as a PDF. You can thank me later.

http://www.stevenpressfield.com/2010/10/two-days-only-war-of-art-ebook-for-1-99/

What Sam and Charlie Taught Me

2010-10-15T15:36:00.000-07:00

I first signed up for NaNoWriMo in the year 2004, and started a novel called Sam and Charlie Go On A Roadtrip, which was about two girls, Samantha (Sam) and Charlotte (Charlie) who took a roadtrip down to Florida.

I stalled out at 8,881 words.

My usual line is that I got my characters as far as Florida and got stuck. I've been told that Florida has a reputation for that sort of thing, but there were other factors involved.

1. Not actually having a plot in mind. The novel was written as alternating diary entries and I figured that just rambling about travel from place to place would be an easy way to rack up words. Wrong. That's not even what we read novels for, anyway--we pick up books and keep reading them because we want to know what happens next. If there's no tension, no conflict and no potential gain or loss, there's nothing to drive things forward.

I almost made the same mistake in 2005, starting on a fantasy story that was supposed to be somebody dictating her memoirs to the court historian, but I realized that I had very little idea where it was going, so I tore it up and started a new story about ten days into the month. It was one of the most basic plots in the world--the Cinderella story, effectively--and I wound up crossing the finish line for the first time.

2. Setting it somewhere that needed too much research. For reasons I'll not get into, I thought it would be a great idea to set Sam and Charlie in the year 1990. This was, in fact, a really bad idea because then I had to make sure I wasn't inserting any anachronisms like having them listen to albums that hadn't been released yet. I found myself constantly second-guessing things as I went and was hesitant to go into certain details because then I'd have to fire up the internets and make sure they were accurate.

Again, 2005 almost fell to the same mistake, because I was setting it in a pre-gunpowder setting and was still determining the world it was set in. The story I started after I tore that one up was set on a space station in the far future, so I could pull any damn thing out that I wanted and potentially get away with it.

3. Trying too hard to be cool. By hampering myself to keep things cynical and realistic, I cut myself off from a great deal of passion and excitement.

In 2005, the novel I did finish was a mushy, shameless love story and I held nothing back. (Indeed, I enjoyed hanging out with those two characters so much that they showed up again in 2008 and 2009 and I told the stories of their happily-ever-after.)

While it would have been nice to have a unbroken record of complete success from 2004 on, I am actually glad for my first spectacular failure because it taught me exactly what didn't work, so I've been able to complete NaNoWriMo successfully for every single year ever since.

Countdown to NaNoWriMo...

2010-10-03T08:17:00.000-07:00

National Novel Writing Month is less than a month away. The good news is, last night I just got clobbered over the head with an idea that should work very easily within the demands of that particular event. The better news is, I've got a month to ponder the possibilities before committing anything to the page, so I should be ready to hit it as soon at November 1 rolls around.

The, um, not so good news is that I'm still logjammed at about 23,000 words on my current project and I'm not sure I'll be able to wrap it up by the end of this month. I think I may just do what I can in the remaining time and then shelve it while I plow through NaNo and then return to it in December. (One of the luxuries of being as-yet-unpublished is that I can do things like this without sending editors into cold sweats. Though, speaking of, I do need to get my other manuscript packed up and sent out again. Two rejections is hardly enough to prove the thing useless.)

I am encouraged by the fact that when I described the first scene of my NaNo idea to someone, his response was "That's kinda creepy." "I know!" I said cheerfully, "But you want to find out what happens next, don't you?"

Heck, I know I do. The annoying part is, even as I can plot out the generalities in advance, I'll have to wait until November to find out exactly how it unfolds.

A Few Drops at a Time

2010-09-27T15:41:00.000-07:00

The words are still coming with some reluctance but the books stacked on my table are looking like a reward instead of a duty, so I think I'll roll things in that direction.

Going Back Over

2010-09-23T19:47:00.000-07:00

One of the disadvantages of going at the slow crawl I'm going now is that I wind up losing track of things that happened only a couple of pages ago.

For example, I did a quick reread of the scene I'm working on and realized oh, wait, they're still naked, aren't they? Hell of a thing to forget.

My brain is still in ravenous devouring mode, so I checked some books out of the library to feed it with--a book about alchemy and a couple of volumes of the collected works of Carl Jung. Yes, really.

Breathing In

2010-09-22T14:26:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if this is true for other people, but I find that my brain tends to go in a kind of cycle between craving input and spewing forth output.

On the "Input" part of the cycle, I plow my way through books, go out exploring new places and spend perhaps a little too much time on the Internet. I am ravenous for new sensations and new experiences. On the "Output" part of the cycle, I fill pages upon pages, scribble my attempts at artwork and find myself overflowing with ideas, though I may also want to retreat to more stable routines instead of taking in anything else.

The problem with the "Input" cycle is that the words don't come easily, even if I need to produce them. (But I can catch up on my reading like crazy, let me tell ya.)

Every indication is that I'm currently in an "Input" cycle. Instead of beating myself up for it, I figure I'll just stuff myself until I'm satiated and see if that helps any.

247 words today

2010-09-21T18:02:00.000-07:00

Still chiseling it out, it seems, but part of the issue is that my time and energies are being taken up with other matters, so what little bits I get in are better than rationalizing that I'll get back to writing when these things blow over.

I stopped at the question "Are you all right?" so it should be easy enough to pick up when I return to it.

There are days . . .

2010-09-20T12:44:00.001-07:00

. . . when a mere forty-three words feels like a victory.

Today, apparently, is one of them.

I Think They Call This The Hard Part

2010-09-14T08:17:00.000-07:00

Two submissions, two rejections. Yes, I know, it's what's supposed to happen.

Labor Day weekend was spent at Dragon*Con, where I was able to talk with all kinds of smart people and get different kinds of writerly advice from various writerly types. I also had a few people ask to read the novel, so I'll be gathering email addresses and sending out PDFs to them soon.

I'm also 21,000 words into another book and STUCK AS HELL on it. I think I need to grab a looseleaf notebook and do some free writing to get through the logjam.

Thanks to a link on the Absolute Write forums, I came across Query Shark, which has been enormously helpful for giving me ideas on how to tighten and refine my query letter. It does help to learn from other people's mistakes. I've just put my own query on the block and we'll see if I get a response on it, but I'm not going to let that be an excuse to keep me from sending the thing out anyway. I've fallen for that trap before and I'm not eager to repeat it.

I'll probably be resuming the habit of excuse notes to keep me moving on the new book. My excuse note for today is as follows:

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she was working on the query letter for her previous novel and that took up most of her writing time. Thank you.

Just To Let Y'all Know . . .

2010-07-28T10:05:00.000-07:00

The spam from China has been coming thick and fast enough that I have to switch on comment moderation. Sorry about that. The notifications go to an email address that I check pretty regularly, though, so comments from actual human beings who are reading and responding to the entry and not planting links at random will show up soon enough.

The new book is coming along by degrees, and I've taken everything I've learned from NaNoWriMo about forgiving imperfections and applying it to this draft. It's a mess at this point, but it's a start, and as I've said elsewhere, there's no way to sharpen a blade before it's been forged.

And It's Been Sent . . .

2010-07-26T10:48:00.000-07:00

Took me all morning to muster up the nerve, but there you are. Soft Places has been submitted to an agency and I will keep myself occupied with my next book while waiting for a reply.

Oh, yeah, by the way, I started writing another book. I'll probably resume the habit of excuse notes here until I've at least gotten the first draft hashed out.

That is all.

Almost There . . .

2010-07-14T07:13:00.000-07:00

I think I'm finished with the final pass of revisions on the manuscript and I'm getting it ready for submission to an agent.

Yikes.

The Dunning-Kruger Threshold, or, Congratulations, You Suck

2010-03-05T09:21:00.000-08:00

The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.
--Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

In December of 1999, Justin Kruger and David Dunning published a paper entitled Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. In it, they described what has since become known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

If you’ve ever seen a craptastic poet who thinks he’s some kind of genius, you’ve seen the Dunning-Kruger effect. If you’ve ever seen a brilliant artist fret over the tiny flaws in her work, you’ve also seen the Dunning-Kruger effect. The gist of the paper, as the title indicates, is that the worse you are at something, the worse you are at determining just how bad you are at it. The flip side of this is that the more skilled you become, the better you get at assessing your ability.

In the course of the original research, Kruger and Dunning also found that as people improved their skills, their ability to self-assess improved as well. What the research doesn’t mention, but many people can tell you, is how discouraging this process can be. The Dunning-Kruger Threshold is my term for the point at which you become competent enough to see just how incompetent you’ve been. You can also call it the Oh My God I Suck Moment.

Anybody who has flinched when confronted with their earlier work will know what I mean, whether it’s the cheesy spy stories you wrote after seeing that James Bond movie when you were a kid or the angsty poetry you wrote as a teenager or that first try at a novel you wrote in college. I also suspect that a certain baseline of metacognitive ability can be absorbed through the osmosis of appreciation. For example, I’ve listened to enough music to know what a guitar is supposed to sound like and that what comes out when I pick the thing up is definitely not it.

So what do you do when you’re good enough at something to realize just how bad you are? (And I mean genuinely gut-level aware, not just deliberately self-effacing in the hopes of a pat on the head and reassurance that you’re not that bad, really.) As painful as it can be, it’s an encouraging sign. It means you can see more clearly what needs to be fixed and work on advancing your abilities in order to fix it.

And if you think that everything you create is unmitigated brilliance? Be very, very worried, because that means you still have quite a long way to go.

A Random Observation About The Writing Process

2010-03-04T07:38:00.001-08:00

. . . which probably isn't news to anybody who has written anything, but struck me as a bit amusing.

Sometimes the work bears a remarkable resemblance to doing nothing at all. Anybody who observed me over the past half hour or so would have seen me staring out the window, occasionally pulling at my hair and drinking my orange juice. Those were my physical actions. Internally, I was mulling over the possibility that an abandoned short story idea of mine may well be the seed of another novel. It's something like watching a Polaroid picture develop from hazy shapes into a detailed photograph.

I've come up with a few becauses for the whys that I've raised. I have the place figured out but I still need to determine the time, since setting it in the present day would create a very different story than setting it in the time period that the idea originally sprang from.

Maybe another NaNo, maybe something else. We'll see.

Why I've Given Up On Amazon.com

2010-02-03T12:27:00.000-08:00

I just canceled my Amazon Prime membership.

First off, I'm not sure if the money on shipping that I was saving was that much more than what I paid for the yearly membership. It came in handy when getting birthday and Christmas presents shipped to my nieces (which is pretty much what I've been using Amazon for) but I'm still too broke to do much book shopping for myself, and I have this thing for browsing in physical bookstores anyway.

The main reason, though, is that Amazon has been acting like the 900-pound gorilla of book sales and doesn't seem to realize that it's not the only gorilla in the jungle anymore.

The standoff between Amazon and Macmillan has been documented in more detail elsewhere. John Scalzi has provided the snarkiest coverage (and is where I was first made aware of the issue) and Tobias Buckell perhaps the most detailed. Short answer for those who don't feel like clicking on links--Amazon has stopped selling Macmillan titles because Macmillan doesn't want to sell ebooks at the loss-leading price of $9.99 anymore. At last word, they had supposedly backed down from this, but the Buy Now links on Macmillan titles are still mysteriously absent.

It's possible I might feel more sympathy for Amazon versus the Big Bad Publisher if Amazon hadn't screwed up so royally previously, when they abruptly reclassified all gay-related titles as "adult" and thus excluded them from sales rankings. They did at least correct that mistake, but waved it off as a mere 'glitch' and I mentally filed Amazon under "corporations not to be trusted an inch further than they can be thrown." Now with this debacle, I think it's time to find other nice places to get my book fix. There's no rational reason to wait for Strike Three.

IndieBound is a marvelous site devoted to helping people find Real, Live, Independent Bookstores in their neighborhoods.

The Book Depository is based in the UK, but ships all over the world for free. I think I'll be hitting them up should I need a book shipped to me in future.

Meanwhile, on my other blog . . .

2009-12-07T10:45:00.000-08:00

I sometimes wonder if I separate things out a bit much in terms of blogging, but for those of you who only follow me here, I have another blog called Wonderbink.com where I talk about free writing and the various ways I make use of it.

This marks the start of something potentially amazing. I'm not sure where it might lead. But I do know that there's no going back from it.

Whew!

2009-11-29T19:52:00.000-08:00

Yes, I won NaNoWriMo. As of yesterday, actually. Final count: 50,114 words.

These are characters I've been noveling about, off and on, since 2005 and I think I've written about as much about them as I'm ever going to need to. I've enjoyed playing with them in my little self-indulgent way and I'll probably go back and reread the results now and again for fun. I doubt I'll be inflicting the results on anybody else, though.

Having gotten all of that out of me has had a surprising effect--I'm now contemplating no less than three different ideas for other novels. And I think I may well go ahead and get started now instead of waiting for November.

So you may be seeing a little more activity here as I sort out the possibilities.

NaNoWriMo, Day Five

2009-11-05T10:03:00.000-08:00

Just crossed the 17,000 word threshold (17,015 to be precise) and I've still got an afternoon ahead of me. (I suspect a lot of novels will be written this month by my fellow Victims Of The Economy.)

For those of you reading who haven't cracked 10,000 yet and are feeling worried, despair not--first off, what I'm writing is so pointless and aimless I'm not even trying to get much of a plot out of it and secondly, if I can crank out 17,000 words in five days, well, so can you and you still have twenty-five days left to work with.

Permit me to offer a bit of advice for those who may be reading who are new to NaNo, which occurred to me as I was driving back from from running a few errands (and doing some obligatory writing-in-a-coffeehouse while I was out in the world with my laptop.) I live along the length of a very busy road (technically a highway) that crosses Interstate 285. As I was making my way home, I found that the traffic to get onto 285 was stacked up so badly as to slow my progress to a stop-and-start crawl. I knew that once I made it past the interstate, the going would be much smoother and it was only a short distance from where I was to my doorstep.

I refused to put myself through it, though. Instead, I ducked into a shopping center, went out the back way and took a winding series of much less crowded streets to get to my destination. It probably took about as much time as it would have if I'd sat through the logjam of traffic on the straight route. But I didn't care. I was moving, I was getting somewhere and that feels a hell of a lot better than waiting for traffic to inch its way forward. (Plus, the view was much nicer, now that the leaves are starting to turn here.)

In NaNo, you must do the same. If you find your characters need to get from A to B and the way how just isn't coming to you, send them over the long way round. Just keep moving. Throw in another character, have a sudden catastrophe happen, or even write down every little detail of the journey while your subconscious continues to gnaw on what exactly is going to happen once they arrive (which is probably what's stopping you from just getting your characters there.) But don't let the traffic jam get in your way. Just keep writing and you'll find your way there.

NaNoWriMo, Day One

2009-11-01T17:08:00.000-08:00

I started just after midnight. Skipped the headliner at the EARL just so I could get home, fire up the laptop and get started. I even wrote some preliminary lines in my catbook as I waited at stop lights all the way home. Got a few hundred words in, went to bed, took advantage of the extra hour of sleep and then got up and wrote some more in between my usual Sunday business.

I'm at 2500 words already and I could call it a day easily, but this thing has already become an addiction--just a few more lines, a few more words, one more scene and then I'll quit. Really.

The compulsive quality is probably helped by the sheet of graph paper I'm using to visually track my word count, so I nudge myself to just a few more words to fill in just one more square and the next thing you know I've hashed out a paragraph.

It's . . . pretty crap, but I'm still enjoying writing it, and at least one or two good lines manage to slip through as I progress.

And I think I'm going to try and get just one more sentence in . . .

Countdown to NaNoWriMo . . .

2009-10-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

Yep, I'm doing it again. National Novel Writing Month starts in three days and the ideas are already percolating in my head.

This year, like last year, will be utterly self-indulgent fluff and I can't wait. I'd thought about tackling a more complex idea, but it doesn't quite feel ready yet, so I'll give it another year or perhaps even work on it outside of the bounds of NaNo, since it requires quite a bit of research.

So I'll be posting periodic NaNo updates here over the course of November. Might even resume the Excuse Note practice to keep myself honest.

The novel I started this blog over is still in limbo, as I'm still waiting on feedback from my inner circle. So I'll be keeping myself amused in the meantime with this.

Here We Go Again . . .

2009-09-11T15:34:00.000-07:00

If I were ever doing any of this properly, my job at this point would be to start on My Next Novel while waiting to hear back from the select circle of readers tasked with reviewing my first draft.

Then again, I've been (as the Internet likes to say) Doing It Wrong from about the very start. Why start following the rules now?

I just got whacked over the head with a notion that will start with changing one or two lines of dialogue, reviewing all events that follow those lines of dialogue with an eye to that change and rewriting the ultimate outcome in a way that is subtly different but much more satisfying.

The line that will mark this shift will probably go something like this:

"That's okay, thanks."

Poking At Things

2009-08-13T14:38:00.000-07:00

So I sent out copies to the short list of folks who I felt I could trust with my novel.

The only response to the manuscript itself has been "um, why did you do your paragraph breaks that way?" coupled with a promise to read in more detail when time was available.

I held my breath for a month and a half and avoided even looking at the thing, lest I find myself changing words and then having to send the thing all over again. Then, a few nights ago in a fit of insomnia, I finally reached some kind of breaking point and ended up rewriting two scenes in one particular chapter.

I packed up the revised chapter and sent it out. This time, I got a few responses of the "life's been crazy busy" variety. Can't really complain about that, given that I knew that was likely to be the case going in. Any response I get at all is a gift, and I accept that.

I think I will probably continue to refine the language and restrain myself from any rewrites that will significantly affect the structure of the novel itself until I get some feedback from my inner circle on whether the story itself holds up or not, which is the main thing I'm worried about.

So we shall see.

Oh, crap, what have I DONE?

2009-06-20T07:57:00.000-07:00

Is there such a thing as "submitter's remorse" when one sends out a manuscript? Heck, I haven't even sent it out for publication, just for an initial read by some friends of mine and now I'm thinking "Ack! What was I thinking? This is a self-indulgent mess!"

Then again, I'm grappling with a slight case of depression, so that may just be the serotonin deprivation talking. I suppose I'll find out whenever I hear back from the folks I sent it to.

gulp!

2009-06-19T14:45:00.000-07:00

So I did one last read-through, transformed it into a PDF and sent it to a short list of people I trust.

I feel like I just jumped off a cliff and have no idea what I'm going to land on.

Argh!

2009-06-17T11:44:00.001-07:00

Okay, remember that scene I'd retrieved from a previous draft and added back into the manuscript?

I took it back out again.

The perfect final ending I came up with didn't fully jibe with the scene before it and I realized that it needed to be excised for the thing to flow properly. I spent some time coming up with a better way to conclude the penultimate chapter and after a few tries I think I have something that works.

I'm still in the process of reading the entire thing aloud to catch any missed fuck ups and to purge any awkward language. Once that's done, then it's time for conversion and handing it to my initial readers.

Eek!

2009-06-10T20:30:00.000-07:00

I think it's at a point where I can show it to people. Not quite ready to be published, but ready to be run past some People Who Are Not Me to get a feel for how it looks from other angles.

I'm kind of elated and frightened at the same time.

I think one more read-through and then I'll be dealing with formatting and converting the result into a PDF and figuring out who to send it to.

Endings, again . . .

2009-06-10T11:55:00.000-07:00

So I was at a networking meeting thingy this morning and somewhere in the middle of it I got clobbered over the head with a scene that I feel brings the novel to a proper conclusion. I rushed home to hash it out the moment I had a chance.

I think it's a good sign that when I read the last lines I thought "Yeah. Yeah, that's it."

There are a couple more scenes that I want to revamp, followed by one more going-over of the novel in total and then the next step will be rendering it into a PDF and finding people I can trust enough to show it to. I still don't think it's fully ready for publication but it is at a point where I can solicit feedback without whimpering in shame at the obvious flaws.

I Suppose I Should Explain That One, Hm?

2009-06-08T11:42:00.001-07:00

As I wrote in my excuse note, yesterday I didn't get any work done on the novel because I was sitting in a parking lot watching people trade stories for drinks. Yes, really.

Once a year, the Starlight Drive-In (one of the last surviving drive-in theaters in the country) hosts an event called Rock n Roll Monster Bash, which features rock bands during the day and a double feature of monster movies when it gets dark. The Venn diagram of people who like rock music and people who like B-movies has a pretty significant overlap, so it draws quite the crowd. So what does this have to do with people telling stories for drinks? Officially, nothing, but my older brother has established a tradition whereby he brings his portable bar and offers people drinks in exchange for interesting stories about their lives. When people scratch their heads and say they don't have any interesting stories, my brother prompts them with the following suggestions--arrested, almost arrested, could have been arrested or naked. Pretty much everybody he says that to will light up and say "Oh, wait, I've got one!"

I mostly stayed in the tent we'd set up and watched people tell their stories. It gave me some interesting insights into what makes a good story. (In the interest of privacy, the examples here are composites of the kinds of stories we would get, rather than specific ones.)

1. Detail is good. Telling me about the time you were fleeing the police is not nearly as fun as telling me about the time you were fleeing the police, spilled your PBR in your lap and nearly set fire to your backseat when your cigarette flew out of your mouth because you had the windows open.

2. Plot is better. Okay, I know where you grew up, I know what drugs you used to take, I know you really love that band and, yes, that's a pretty nice tattoo. But that doesn't quite add up to a story.

3. Mystery is especially good. We've had more than one waking-up-and-not-sure-how-one-got-there narrative over the years, but the better ones start with the waking up and end with finding out what happened, rather than starting with the events that led up to the amnesia.

4. Peril is also good. While not every story involved people coming precariously close to arrest, deportation or death (and they don't always have to, honestly) I must say that the ones that did certainly stuck with me.

5. Humor helps a lot. Particularly when dealing with peril, as noted above.

6. A story should be exactly long enough to tell everything that's worth telling, but no longer. Some stories were almost frustrating in their brevity, while others, well, I know I was losing interest when I started to feel sorry for the folks in line behind.

Our compulsion--indeed, our very ability--to tell stories is one of the things that makes human beings such a unique creature on this planet. Other animals may be able to communicate, but I don't know of another animal that can communicate in a way that surprises and delights the way storytelling does. I hope I can keep these lessons in mind as I continue the process of revision.

Excuse Note #7

2009-06-07T20:52:00.000-07:00

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she spent most of the day in a parking lot, watching people trade stories for drinks.

Endings

2009-06-02T18:20:00.001-07:00

So I added back an additional scene that I'd lopped off and grafted it to the ending.

I'm still not 100% sure about it. But it seems to work better than where I'd originally left off and it was nice to retrieve some of those clever lines that I'd tossed away. (Thank goodness for saved drafts.) And now I'm already pondering ways to rewrite the returned lines into something a little more plausible than what I'd put down in the flurry of NaNo.

I think I'll go do that now.

Kablam!

2009-06-02T05:37:00.000-07:00

Just at the point when I think, oh, man, I'm so stuck, I'm never going to finish this thing, I wound up devoting all three of my morning pages to writing about it. It's a sort of ramble about something that happens 'offstage' and now I'll have to rewrite the scene it leads up to now that I know more about what happened beforehand.

I sometimes wonder if there's going to be a word left standing of my original draft by the time I'm done with it.

Take One Take Two

2009-05-30T18:22:00.000-07:00

I'm now looking at two different versions of Chapter One for the novel.

I wrote the new beginning as something of an experiment--a way to get a clearer picture of what came before. Now I'm thinking it might do better as the start of things as a more detailed way of setting the scene. But I've gotten so used to the notion of the book beginning where I first began it that I'm reluctant to throw it away completely. So right now I have two different Chapter Ones saved in Scrivener and I'll be figuring out which one works best as I go.

I must say that the new opening seems to have refreshed my interest in working on it.

Excuse Note #6 and Tropes

2009-05-27T13:26:00.000-07:00

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel yesterday as she had her time devoured by TVTropes.org. She did complete work on her novel today.

If you didn't shudder in recognition, you probably aren't familiar with TVTropes.org. It is an extensive wiki that started as "Television Tropes and Idioms" and eventually sprawled into just about every storytelling medium. It is also an enormous timesink because there is so much of it to read and each link tempts one to click, if only to find out what the heck a "Big Lipped Alligator Moment" is. (In case you wondered, it's a scene that comes completely out of nowhere, has no bearing on the plot and is never spoken of again.)

Tropes are things like plot devices, characters or settings that are seen over and over in various iterations. Anybody who thinks they have the most amazingly original idea in the world can quickly be disabused of that notion with a trip to TVTropes.org, where they can find entries for just about every little thing that they thought unique about it--with a long list of examples from various media.

I've come across a number of tropes that apply to my work-in-progress. It's simultaneously enlightening and humbling. I'm a touch relieved that none of the tropes I've discovered in my work appear to be particularly threadbare ones (the term "Dead Horse Trope" is used for those) and some even seem to be popular in a way that suggests that there is indeed an audience for this work beyond myself.

I'm tempted to insert my own examples once the book is published, though that's probably cheating. I know I'll have definitely achieved my dream if a complete stranger reads my book and loves it enough to make sure it's properly indexed there.

When Ideas Attack

2009-05-25T17:10:00.000-07:00

I spent my Memorial Day at home because I decided to start working on this nifty idea I had for a sort of instruction book on different free writing techniques I use. I think I may have gone and drafted the thing. It's more of a pamphlet than a book, but it's out of my head and in a Scrivener binder, so I can figure out what to do with it from there. May add to it a bit, but the main methods I use are in there so far (including the odd names I have for them like "Sub-C Session", "Catbook" and "Clicktappity.")

If nothing gets done on the novel between now and the end of the day, this may serve as my Excuse Note.

Wait, why am I doing this again?

2009-05-23T16:48:00.000-07:00

On the plus side, obviously, I've been working steadily enough to avoid having to post Excuse Notes here.

On the minus side, some of the work has been on the level of rewriting one sentence and scampering off into the night.

That's probably not too helpful. I mean, it may well get it done, but I'd like to have this thing finished by the end of the year, not the end of next decade. Since I'm not working under any external deadline and I do have other matters to attend to (such as finding a job before my unemployment insurance runs out) it's all too easy to file it under Things To Be Done Real Soon Now.

I pondered this in my morning pages (yes, I do morning pages, yes, I know this makes me a cliche, no, I don't actually give a damn as long as it works for me) and it occurred to me that part of my reluctance comes from a lack of focus on the reasons why I'm writing, so the reasons why not wind up driving my actions. Since the only Reason Why that I've been paying attention to is avoiding having to write an excuse note, I put in the minimum to satisfy that requirement and that's the end of it.

The Reasons Why Not are various--not wanting to waste effort on something that may well wind up rejected, not wanting to go over the flaws and be reminded that I'm not that great a writer on the initial draft, indeed, not wanting to confront the possibility that I'm not that great a writer at all.

What, then, are The Reasons Why? I have quite a few of them, some noble, some petty, but perhaps worth mentioning here so I can remind myself of them when I have need.

Because I really don't want to become that typical white person who talks about the novel she's working on and never actually finishes it.

Because the idea for this novel has been kicking around in my head for something like ten years and it's not going to stop haunting me until I've brought it into the world one way or another.

Because I like the idea of leaving something of myself behind, even if it just winds up on a dusty shelf after I'm gone.

Because it's a love letter to the art and music scene in Atlanta that I'd hate to leave undelivered.

Because people will undoubtedly take me more seriously as a writer if I have a published book with my name on it.

Because Tanith Lee said she was looking forward to reading it.

Because I've started this dang blog about it, so I might as well make it worth the bandwidth.

Excuse Note #4

2009-05-06T18:48:00.000-07:00

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel yesterday as she had . . . just a really weird day, okay? She did work on her novel today. Thank you.

We Interrupt This Blog For A Very Important News Item

2009-04-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

I have managed to avoid Excuse Notes for a few days running (and there's one day in particular that I want to write an entry about) but I have to get this out first.

I am delighted to discover that the domain poetry.com has a new owner.

Poetry.com was previously owned by the International Library of Poetry, a literary scam outfit that had been kicking around for decades. Originally, they solicited poems for their "poetry contest" in newspaper ads (I remember seeing them when I was a kid) and with the advent of the Internet, it became easier than ever for them to solicit submissions.

The trick of it was this--every single poem was a 'finalist' in the contest and they would offer to sell you an overpriced hardbound book of 'finalists' that included your poem. So, excited poets (or their proud parents) would pay a chunk of change for an 'anthology' of, well, twenty-line attempts at poetry and look, there's yours on page 187, crammed on a page with five or six other contest entries.

Many a writer tried and tried to write a poem that was just awful enough to get rejected. I even made my own attempt with an obscenity-laden spew of invective that I'd written in my more bitter days on the poetry scene, when I was trying to prove that any pile of crap could be presented as a poem. I submitted it via the site, provided my Mail Boxes Etc. address as a mailing address, and got hit with loads of junk mail about how marvelous my poem was and offering me awards that I could purchase, er, pay the rather considerable "shipping costs" for and inviting me to a poetry convention. (Read here for an account of how the convention held in August 2000 went.)

Surprisingly enough, I did later succeed in writing a poem that was rejected. (They didn't formally reject it, as such, but I received no acceptance notice whatsoever for it.)

Test

This is a test.

Had it been an actual poem

it would have said something.

This is only a test.

I thought it was a nice little bit of popcultural meta, but apparently the notion was lost on them. But it allowed me to succeed where so many other poets had failed. (I know of one other individual who managed the same feat by cutting and pasting twenty lines from a Nigerian scam letter.)

At any rate, it is a distinction that no other poet can claim. While the domain poetry.com still exists, it is no longer run by the International Library of Poetry, but, instead by LuLu.com.

So, yes, it's still owned by a vanity press, but at least it's a vanity press that is run by folks who are open about their business model. They make no false claims to exclusivity--they'll print anything as long as it's legal and somebody pays for it. (As I've mentioned here before, my mom used them to print her clinical instruction book.)

They're even running a poetry contest, but from what I can tell the entries will be judged by popular vote. Whether this results in better poems winning, well, that's yet to be determined, but it's certainly encouraging that they're crowdsourcing the judging instead of leaving it to some shadowy cabal of 'poetry experts.'

So, raise a glass to the demise of the International Library of Poetry. Now, if we can just get rid of PublishAmerica . . .

Excuse Note #3

2009-04-20T17:27:00.000-07:00

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she visited the library and ended up checking out four books, which she takes as a clear sign that her brain is in inhale mode rather than exhale mode at the moment.

Excuse Note #2

2009-04-19T20:46:00.000-07:00

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she spent most of the afternoon unconscious and most of the evening attending a dear friend's birthday party.

Excuse Note #1

2009-04-10T12:17:00.000-07:00

Please excuse Sheila from working on her novel today as she dealing with a distracting level of stomach pain and needs to be as well-rested as possible in order to play with her niece this evening, as promised.

Excuse Notes

2009-04-08T13:16:00.000-07:00

I've decided to try something with this here blawg to motivate me to keep working on the manuscript. For every day that I don't do at least something on it, I will require myself to post an Excuse Note explaining why.

For example, today I might post something like:

Please excuse Sheila from working on her manuscript today as she spent the morning in a networking meeting, the afternoon in a nap and will be spending this evening visiting her family and then visiting a friend.

. . . except that today I don't need to do that, because I just made some cuts to the manuscript in anticipation of inserting a revised scene that deletes an extraneous character. So there.

Why Is This?

2009-03-20T14:47:00.000-07:00

I can spend an afternoon reading my manuscript from beginning to end, making a few cuts and rewrites as I go, taking notes of which scenes need some serious reworking and then end up feeling vaguely weird and guilty, like I should have been doing something productive.

The Myth of Time

2009-03-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

One of the common myths that stands between people and completed manuscripts is the myth of 'time.' I'm sure you've heard it. "If I just had the time, I'd be able to Write My Novel." But our time is a limited resource, consumed by forty-hour-a-week jobs with hour commutes each way and all the other obligations of the business of living. If only, one sighs, one could have time to oneself, time to write without all those pesky distractions, then one could finally write that novel that one has been promising oneself that one would, one day.

One is, of course, bullshitting oneself. The beautiful thing that NaNoWriMo did for me--and, I'm sure for many others--is thoroughly debunk that myth. The raw material for the novel I'm trying to hammer into a publishable form was drafted in the space of two separate months of do-or-die typing (supplemented with some scribbling to allow me to keep the plot on track) while still holding down a job and everything else.

The problem for me now is that I have no deadlines on the revision process, and thus it has been dragging on for over a year and counting. And now one of the most prominent excuses--that forty-hour-a-week-job-thingy--has been removed from me as of last month. (Yes, hello, I've joined the ranks of Victims of the Economy. We'll not go into details here.) This has forced me to confront the flip side of the "time" myth--the fact that even when one does have the time to spare, the time has a curious habit of slithering down other channels instead of flowing towards the novel itself.

Which is not to say that I've done nothing on it at all. In between hunting for a job and working on some other projects, I've continued to work on tightening the dialogue in certain scenes. And, as unproductive as it may seem, I've been thinking about it. I've been turning things over in my head, asking questions about the characters, pondering things that could be seen as inconsistencies and trying to understand or resolve them.

There is, I understand, only so much thinking I can do before I have to sit the hell down and turn my bright ideas into words. And, as time goes on, fewer and fewer excuses for not doing so. (On second thought, that's probably not true; like most people I am capable of manufacturing a nearly limitless number of excuses.) So we'll see. Knowing my luck, I'll probably wind up getting hired or something just when I'm getting into the groove of having this kind of time to work with.

"So, what's it about?"

2009-01-13T19:12:00.000-08:00

It's about eighty thousand words, give or take, at this point.

Since the full arc of the story is still in an odd state of flux, I don't feel fully comfortable explaining what it's 'about' to people. But I am now at a point where I'm willing to at least tell people how the story begins, since I've read the opening scene aloud at a few events and it looks to be one of the firmly anchored points of the thing. And it seems to serve well to give an impression of the kind of story I'm hoping to tell.

The narrator, June, is sitting in the Majestic, a 24-hour diner that's an Atlanta institution, having just wandered up the street from seeing her favorite local band at the 10 High. She realizes that her wallet is not in her pocket. She decides to sit tight for a bit, digs up enough pocket change to pay for a cup of coffee and when the guy behind the counter asks her if she wants anything, she explains that she can't find her wallet.

"It's in your jacket pocket," someone tells her.

She checks and can't find it.

"The inside one on the left," he continues.

And there it is. She turns to thank her benefactor and sees a man sitting next to her with three most curious qualities. His face is flawless, his hair is stark white and, as she rapidly comes to realize, she is apparently the only person in the room who can see him.

It kinda goes from there.

Deep Cuts

2008-12-21T18:21:00.000-08:00

One of the tricky things, I'm discovering, about revising a NaNo draft into presentable form is culling out the parts that I threw in simply for the sake of wordcount. I've hacked out several scenes already and just tonight I decided that the story really ended about eight thousand words before I stopped typing. So out they went. The resultant ending is a touch abrupt, but further revisions should allow it to flow more naturally.

The manuscript has dropped down to approximately 78,000 words in total. I have a few other scenes in mind for the cutting room floor as well, and they can depart more easily now that the extended ending has been lopped off.

It's almost like finding the statue in the block of marble--chipping away the extraneous material to get to the story I'm trying to tell. I'm not sure if this is an optimal method for a working writer, but since I still remain in the ranks of hobbyists, I suppose it will have to do. It at least feels better, as I think I may have said here earlier, to be talking about the manuscript I'm revising as opposed to the neat idea I have for a novel.

In the Valley of the Shadow of Doubt

2008-12-14T17:59:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I wonder what the heck I think I'm doing with this novel.

Lots of people, of course, dream of being professional writers. I've wanted to be one pretty much since childhood, when I discovered that people could write stories for a living. My parents, avid readers themselves, encouraged me on this path, but suggested I have some useful talent in the back pocket to support myself whilst establishing myself as a fiction writer.

Unfortunately, I didn't really put that advice to much use. I graduated with my shiny Creative Writing degree into the 1992 recession and jounced madly from a vague attempt at a journalism degree to an even vaguer attempt at an MFA with a number of odd jobs in between.

Since I spent a lot of time in science fiction geekdom, I moved in the circles of science fiction/fantasy/horror writers of varying levels of success. The general expectation in that particular genre is that one starts with short stories and then gets published in enough places to have something to put in the cover letter when submitting a novel. While this is not an absolute path, of course, it's certainly an easier one than writing an entire novel and casting it to the mercy of the slush pile. I did manage to write some things, but the usual hard knocks of rejection and criticism made me increasingly reluctant to put myself out there. (Poetry was a nice refuge for a while, since all you have to do is be halfway decent to impress people at an open mike.)

Over time, I've gotten increasingly disenchanted with the tropes, the expectations and the outright badness of a lot of the genre. No, I'm not saying that sci-fi/fantasy is automatically crap. But because of its huge and fanatical built-in audience, it doesn't have to try very hard.

I want to be better than that. I want to write something that people remember and think about. I want it to be more a few hours of disposable entertainment. And there are times, like now, when I seriously wonder if I'm up to the task.

Surviving NaNoWriMo

2008-12-03T19:15:00.000-08:00

I did, in fact, make it. Barely. I was vexed by the fact that the site temporarily went down in my final stretch of Sunday afternoon wordcount, and when I resorted to what Word told me the wordcount was, it lied to me. Or, at least, exaggerated a bit compared to what the NaNoWriMo site decreed.

So I pasted what Word told me was 50,000 words and the robots counted and spat back the number 49,911. Ouch. And I had come to a pretty good line to end on, so I didn't want to drag it on beyond that. Fortunately, we live in an age where backing up and inserting things is a matter of a few points of the mouse. (How did people manage to write novels on typewriters? What did they do when you needed to add a whole new paragraph on page 98? I shudder to think of it.) So I took a few scenes that had been written in haste (given that was, well, nearly all of them, it didn't take much digging to find such) and added some marginally more detailed descriptions. I nudged the word count up, paragraph by paragraph, until it reached 49,995.

I added five words: "Good riddance to bad rubbish."

And thus I obtained my nifty winning certificate.

It was a shameless, wish-fulfilling, self-indulgent romp and I did enjoy writing it, even when I was pounding out words for hours at a stretch over Thanksgiving weekend and neglecting to shower. I am, however, neither egocentric enough nor masochistic enough to want to inflict the results on, well, anyone who isn't me.

So what was the point? The point was, I got to spend time with some really fun characters, try out some ideas and discover how nonstop bliss needs a little disruption to be worth writing about.

After this little vacation, I hope to return to my waiting manuscript and revise it with a new eye. I'm a little more aware of my own weaknesses as a writer after this particular effort, and perhaps I can work on strengthening those weak points in my revision, even if what I'm revising is completely different from what I just wrote.

I broke 10,000 . . .

2008-11-04T20:17:00.001-08:00

. . . and it's only day four. Not bad.

I have a class tomorrow night, so I prolly won't get as much done. But I've got a comfortable lead to fall back on.

And I can sleep a little more soundly tonight, I think, for other reasons . . .

Why, Yes, I Am Crazy . . .

2008-11-03T17:13:00.000-08:00

I'd initially planned to sit out this year's NaNoWriMo, on the basis that I had a novel to revise and a number of other projects on my plate.

Suffice to say that one such project got removed from my plate and left enough room that I figured, what the heck, let's give it another go.

My current tally is over eight thousand words. And, to make it even more ridiculous, it is a sequel to the very first NaNoWriMo I successfully completed. So next year, I'll pretty much be stuck writing something new.

I am enjoying it immensely. It is light, fluffy, self-indulgent, utterly unpublishable and exactly what I needed to be doing.

So the next month or so will be taken up with that. I'll poke here periodically and let y'all know how it's coming along.

Wrinkles

2008-08-06T18:44:00.000-07:00

So yesterday evening, I decided to save a few ounces of gasoline and walk to the grocery store instead of driving. It was a longish walk, but not impossible, and it gave me loads of time to think.

And as I walked, I came up with two ways to rewrite two crucial scenes that made so much more sense. I got so excited, I went ahead and plowed into one of those scenes and wound up staying well past my bedtime hashing it out.

I'm still figuring it out exactly. But one of the downsides is that all the subsequent scenes that refer back to that moment now have to be rewritten. The little wrinkle it leaves has to be pushed all the way to the edge of the table.

I think before I tackle the other rewritten scene, I should read through to keep track of what other parts refer back to it, so I'll know where I need to smooth things once I know what it's been changed to.

But it's starting to get addictive again, which is a good thing at this point, I think.

The Wrong End

2008-08-03T09:20:00.000-07:00

Once in a while, when I mention that I've finished a manuscript and I'm in the middle of revising it with the intent to submit it for publication, someone will suggest something along the lines of "Well, if that doesn't work out, you can always self-publish, right?"

I sort of smile and shake my head when people say that.

I think the digital printing revolution is a marvelous thing, I truly do. My parents actually created their own small press, using Lulu as a printer, so my mother could create a simple and inexpensive textbook for clinical nursing instruction. And, of course, my years in the poetry scene have introduced me to many a traveling poet selling self-published chapbooks in order to have enough gas money to make it to the next gig.

But for novel-length fiction, self-publishing is doing the hard work from the wrong end.

My intent is to do the hard work at the front end--at grinding and polishing this chunk of prose into something that makes it to #14 on the Slushkiller list. (At this point, I think I'm at least at #7 but probably no higher than #9.) Because once I reach that point, I can relax. The contract is signed, the book is printed, the books go to bookstores and (I sincerely hope) people buy them.

But if I take what I have, take it to Lulu, slap a cover on it and say "Yay! I'm published!" then the hard work has just begun. Then I have to find a million ways to wave this book in people's faces and say "Hey! Ya wanna buy a book?" And believe me, that's a hell of a lot harder to do when people can't go to your local Borders or B&N and pick the thing up, thumb through it, think "hm, this looks interesting" and put down the cash for it.

Yes, there are self-publishing success stories of people who have managed bookstore placement by acting like a small press. Here's the thing--they weren't fiction. When you're dealing with information, it's easier to determine if the book will be successful because it can be measured in how useful the information is. When you're dealing with art, it's much harder to quantify. And, the fact of the matter is, there is already a metric ton of self-published novels by people who were too impatient to polish their work to the level it needed, so the moment a bookstore buyer sees self-published fiction, the assumption is that it will be crap. And it's a pretty safe bet.

I have no interest in having to struggle to reassure people that, really, it's not as bad as the pixelated cover might imply. Frankly, I don't want to have to reassure people of anything--I want them to buy my books in such a way that I never see them do it.

And, yes, that's ambitious. Which is why I understand I have a lot of work left to do.

More Scenes to Murder

2008-07-10T18:57:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much time to work on the manuscript, because several other projects are demanding my attention, but the thing was in a pile on the floor for several days after the last time I did some work on it and I just tidied the stack a bit and put it in the bag I've been keeping it in.

As I was going through the pages, I came across a note I'd scribbled at the bottom margin of a certain scene.

Is there a point to any of this?

It looks like I have many more darlings to kill. My plan of action at this point it to chop out the meandery and cringeworthy bits and then start adding all the details I glossed over in my race to the November 30 finish line. Subtraction before addition. We'll see how it works.

Taking the Gun Down

2008-06-17T16:40:00.000-07:00

If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act. --Anton Chekhov

The term Chekhov's Gun has its own Wikipedia entry, as I discovered as I was trying to track down the exact quote. (As it turns out, there is no exact quote, since Chekhov reiterated the point in a number of places--I used the quote from the footnotes to the entry.)

The point being, if you introduce an element into a story, then you need to follow up on it. I just changed two lines in the novel, simply because they hinted at something that ended up not happening. At the time I wrote it, things were still in an open-ended state of flux and it was a distinct possibility, but ultimately there was no need for it to happen and it didn't.

So I cut the line, replaced it with something that emphasized what did end up happening and I could feel the whole thing weaving together a little more tightly.

There are still a lot of loose spots that need to be tightened (or cut!) but I'm feeling more confident with each change that this thing could indeed be shaped into something worth reading.

I've also been going through the slightly embarrassing process of what might be termed de-Sue-ifying my narrator. There are, I must confess, a few too many times where she is reassured of her wonderfulness in the course of the draft. Old fanfic habits die hard, I suppose. So I'm paring those down and trying to make people's reactions more like those of actual human beings (where applicable.) Having seen the horrors that result when the author identifies a little too closely with the narrator, I know I have to watch myself.

I also have to be careful I don't end up spending more time blogging about the process than actually engaging in it.

Killing a Darling

2008-06-12T19:40:00.000-07:00

I just removed an extended scene from the manuscript that dropped the wordcount by some five thousand words.

And you know what? The two points between fit together seamlessly.

There are some lovely bits in there, and I'll miss them, but I can always go back to the raw draft and revisit them if I really feel the need to. But when I read over the pages, I realized that as much fun as it was to write and as clever as some of the lines were, the entire sequence served no purpose except to kill time. Which is great when you're trying to hit the 50,000 mark by the end of November, but not so great when you're trying to shape it into something compelling.

There's one bit I may have to extract and insert elsewhere. I haven't decided yet.

Right now, a lot of my energies are being taken up with some other projects of mine, but it felt good to sneak in and do that one simple thing.

Oh, yeah . . .

2008-05-26T19:20:00.000-07:00

I just spent two hours with my manuscript and a pink pen, marking inconsistencies and designating entire scenes for the writerly equivalent of the cutting room floor.

It felt great.

The Blue Shirt Theory

2008-05-21T16:45:00.000-07:00

I've decided that what I really need to do is print this baby out so I can see it tangibly and scribble on it where I need to. So I figured I'd get a bloggy posty thing in while I'm waiting for the pages to grind out of my little ink-jet printer.

The critique group at Orbital was extremely helpful and quite encouraging. And it gave me a certain insight into how to take constructive criticism that I wish to all heaven I had figured out ages ago.

In my younger days as a writer, I dutifully took the short stories I wrote and ran them past a certain circle of writerly types in my acquaintance. Some of them had actually been published and I made the fundamental error of assuming that since they had ascended to the ranks of the published, they knew more than I did about how I needed to be writing.

I think part of the problem was, they were perfectly good writers, but not terribly good critiquers. One in particular (won't name names) had a tendency to suggest things that were How He Would Have Done It, even though the way he thinks and the way I think are so fundamentally different that we can debate the questions of the universe for days. Which makes for lively conversation, but not the best of writing advice.

Ponder this metaphor--you're picking out an outfit for a certain social event. You want to make a good impression, so you ask your roommate (for example) what she thinks of it.

"Hmm," she says, "First off, your shoelace is untied. And the pants look good, but I'm not sure if they go with the red shirt. How about that blue one you have?"

Finding mistakes in grammar, punctuation, et cetera, are the equivalent of "your shoelace is untied." They're things you don't always catch, especially if you've been staring at the same pages for ages on end, and those are always good things. (Something that's technically a grammatical mistake, but done for effect, might be the equivalent of "your jacket is all wrinkled" to which your response might be "Um, it's crushed velvet, it's supposed to be wrinkled.")

The blue shirt, is a little trickier. The blue shirt can be things like "this character seemed like a rather sensible type; why the hell did she suddenly decide to jump on the back of a motorcycle with a complete stranger after only three lines of conversation?" That's the moment that you notice that the red shirt has a slight pattern to it and the pants are pinstriped and one or the other has got to go.

There are different ways to react to a blue shirt criticism. Sometimes you realize they have a point, and the blue shirt really does work better. Sometimes they have a point that the red shirt doesn't quite work, but the blue shirt they're suggesting doesn't quite work for you either, though you do have this purple one that you try on and matches perfectly.

And sometimes you look in the mirror and think about it and decide that the red shirt is just fine. But you at least tie your shoelace.

It is probably best to find a critique group who has the same taste in clothes (if you will) that you do. At the very least, they should be familiar enough with your work and sensibilities to know what your mental wardrobe looks like.

But when it comes to writing, it really is best not to wear other people's clothes. They won't fit you properly or look right. Take the advice, try what fits and tailor it to what you're trying to create.

Greetings from Orbital . . .

2008-03-23T06:42:00.000-07:00

So I'm here at Orbital 2008, which is this year's Eastercon. The Eastercon is apparently a long-running thing in the UK--it's a science fiction convention of a more literary bent, a bit like WorldCon, only not quite as enormous. It's held on Easter weekend, because that tends to be a slow weekend in the hotel industry, so it's easier to find a place to hold it for a reasonable rate. (Interestingly, there's a convention in Atlanta called Frolicon that likewise is held Easter weekend for much the same reason. A rather, um, different kind of convention, though.)

I am here because one of the guests is a writer named Tanith Lee. There's also a writer named Neil Gaiman in attendance, and it's been groovy to see him, but I honestly wouldn't have come if it had just been him, since he actually shows up in America more often than not. Tanith Lee hasn't been to America in some time, so if I wanted to see her, the mountain had to come to Mohammed.

My sister had a large collection of Tanith Lee books on her shelves and I read my way through them a number of times. The one that particularly stuck with me, especially in my adolescence, was a book called Don't Bite the Sun. I love that book to bits, I will pimp it to everyone until the day I die. (By the way, it's back in print, bound along with its sequel Drinking Sapphire Wine under the name Biting the Sun. Look in science fiction paperbacks under Lee. You can thank me later.)

She also wrote many other books that I read over and over again,, weaving their way into the fabric of my inner life--The Birthgrave, The Silver Metal Lover, the Flat Earth series . . . I could go for days listing titles, but I'll spare you. I consider her a huge influence on my writing, perhaps not in a direct I-want-to-write-just-like-her way, but a lot of my clumsy first efforts at fantasy stories owed a lot to her. (Thank heavens there was no internet back then, or some of the things I wrote might still be out there to be Googled. At it was, the internet was still in its infancy in those days, so my bad writing in public was largely confined to computer bulletin board systems that are now utterly obsolete.)

So I bought my membership ages in advance and when it came time to decide if I was going or not, I booked the flight. I made it one of my New Year's Resolutions--Attend Orbital 2008.

Orbital is a very relaxed little gathering of geeks. Reminds me a bit of Chattacon in Chattanooga--panels where people talk about geek stuff, including panels about writing and the almighty question of How To Get Published. As I mentioned, I submitted the first 3,000 words of my novel and I'll be getting it critiqued on Monday. I met Martin Owton, who was organizing it and he introduced me to Gaie Sebold and Sarah Ellender, the lovely ladies who will be doing the critiquing. (When I gave them my name, one of them said "Sheila O'Shea! Oh, Soft Places, right?" I guess that's a good sign if they remember the title.) I've been to a few writerly panels and it's been really inspiring and made me that much more determined to whip this thing of mine into shape and get it sent out.

And I met Tanith Lee. She was a sort of foyer area, talking to a few people and I hovered a bit and finally found a moment, steeled my nerve and walked up to her.

"I came all the way from the United States of America to see you," I said, "And I think that probably says it all."

And then I burst into tears.

Thankfully, she didn't seem to be too disturbed by this. She was genuinely surprised that someone would go to such trouble for her. I tried to explain, between sobs, how much her work had meant to me, how Don't Bite the Sun had been a mirror for my awkward adolescence, how I felt much like the protagonist who had too much of an imagination to fit in her head, lived in a kind of paradise and yet didn't quite fit in.

It is such an amazing moment to be able to look someone in the eye, someone who has created things that uplifted you, that inspired you, that filtered their way into your sense of self and to be able to tell that person how much those creations meant to you.

Ms. Lee (I still feel weird calling her Tanith) was very kind and very inspiring to me. She said she hoped that I wasn't too disappointed to find out that she was merely a human being. I assured her it wasn't a problem. She asked if I was a writer; I told her I was and I told her about the novel that I'm bashing into shape right now. She said she was looking forward to reading it when it was published.

I met her again the next day, and she signed my copies of Don't Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine. She wrote a lovely note, pointing out that what we get out of books comes from within us. "You are the magician," she wrote.

I'll wrap this entry up with this--when I arrived on Friday morning, I had to fill out a something called a Landing Card which they make you fill out if you're an alien entering the UK. They had a line for "Occupation." I filled it in with the word WRITER.

On one level, it's not like they're going to track me down and say "You lie! Your bills are paid by being a paralegal!" On another level, it is a signal sent to the universe, a signal of intention, the intention to make that declaration a completely honest one.

"So, when do I get to read it?"

2008-03-11T18:03:00.000-07:00

Not everybody asked that, of course, when I mentioned I just finished my draft, but quite a few people did. Somebody even asked me that when I was still in the midst of burrowing through the tense-shifting rewrite.

The answer is, at this point, "not yet."

When I crossed the finish line in 2006, I did send out copies of the result for people to read. Only one person managed to read it all the way through and tell me what he thought of it. (He liked it, which was quite encouraging.) That's sort of reason number one--I don't really feel like hanging on the edge of the "what did you think of it?" seat until the next step is figuring out what literary agents might be interested in it.

When I crossed the finish line in 2007, I was even more reluctant to show the world the result, because there was a lot I put in there in haste that I feel downright embarrassed by. So that's the other part of it--I need to clean up those bits so I'm not cringing when I'm reading them. Because if I'm cringing to read them, I can't imagine what someone who isn't me would think of them. And if, for some weird reason, they liked it, I'd be put in the unfortunate position of writing to please someone who enjoyed something that I'm not altogether thrilled with myself. That's no way to be creating art, as near as I can tell.

I have come to terms with the fact that I'm not all that good a writer on the first pass. When I read things I've dashed off quickly, I kick myself for overusing words like "actually" and repeating clever phrases twice in one paragraph. Backspace, cut and paste, edit buttons . . . these tools are my friends.

(Funnily enough, my vague reputation as a spoken word artist is maintained by avoiding these things entirely. Every Sunday night at a little coffeehouse called Java Monkey, there's a poetry reading called Java Monkey Speaks. For longer than I care to contemplate, my usual thing there is what I call my "hat trick"--I arrive just as the sign-up sheet is put up, I put my name on the list and then in the half-hour or so before the show, I write in a notebook until Kodac Harrison starts the show. Then when my turn comes up, I get up and read what I just wrote. It goes over surprisingly well, but it probably helps that it's spoken into the air to dissolve instead of sitting on a page for you to read and notice how crap it is.)

While perfectionism has stymied me from even starting to write for far too long, now that I've mastered the art of setting it aside to get the words down, I think I'm ready to let it back in for a spell and see about fixing things up a bit.

In the meantime, no, you don't get to read it.

97,769 words . . .

2008-03-08T16:32:00.000-08:00

It's a start. I have now officially fused my past two NaNoWriMo efforts into a unified manuscript.

For those of you wondering how 50,000-odd words plus another 50,000-odd words adds up to less than 100,000 words, allow me to clarify. My NaNo 2006 effort (Soft Places) was written in the form of diary entries by the narrator. (I even dated the entries contemporaneously, and threw in things that were happening at the time.) The 2007 NaNo (The Things Behind the Sun) was written in first person present tense (though I did include references to the narrator continuing to write things down in her diary.)

I decided, ultimately, to do the entire thing in first person present tense. This meant I had to take the diary entries and rewrite them accordingly. At first, I was trying too hard to rewrite and perfect everything as I go, then I decided it would be faster and more effective to just cut, paste, redo the verbs and do a little rewriting here and there to smooth the transitions.

So I have finally, as of tonight, completed that process. I have a relatively unified manuscript of 97,769 words, according to the Word Count function on Microsoft Word.

It still needs work. A lot of it. I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail about what the book is about (it's about ninety-eight thousand words, at this point, and that's all you're really getting out of me) but I'll continue, I hope, to talk about the process as I go.

There are still many things about it I'm not 100% happy with, things that I plowed on past on the first pass because, hell, it's NaNo, just get the words out and fix it later. (That's another reason the word count dropped slightly on the rewrite--there were quite a few things I decided to go ahead and excise while I was at it.) But at the same time, it feels good to be able to talk about The Manuscript I'm Working On instead of about This Neat Idea I Have For A Novel.

I've also taken the first 3,000 or so words and submitted them to a writing workshop that's going to be held at Orbital 2008, a writerly sci-fi type convention that's being held in the UK. (I'm flying all the way from Atlanta, Georgia, because one of the guests is Tanith Lee, who is one of my favorite living authors in the history of the written word.) It should be genuinely interesting to see what someone who isn't familiar with the places I'm describing will think of it.

So. Well. There we are. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to run around in circles and jump up and down for a bit.

What's This Thing About, Anyway?

2008-02-28T19:17:00.000-08:00

So now that I've gone and told a couple of people that this blog exists, I might as well explain what it's about.

This is the first blog I think I've done under my real name. Googling me doesn't turn up anything about yours truly until page six, I think, and I felt I needed to rectify that.

This blog is about me and writing. I have another blog for the sort of 'had lunch' details of my day-to-day existence, this space is more for me to talk about the process of writing, and, eventually, the product that I hope will result.

My qualifications to pontificate on such are not wildly impressive, but they're not utterly nonexistent. I am one of the first graduates of the Creative Writing program at Emory University. The leftover poems from my classes gave me enough material to make a minor name for myself on the Atlanta spoken word circuit in the mid-nineties. I have a couple of poems in actual bound books (that I didn't have to pay for) and I've done a bit of music reviewing for some local publications. So there's that.

I am currently working on taking my past two NaNoWriMo efforts and fusing them into a unified work, which I hope to revise and submit for publication. I decided instead of waiting until after the thing's published (should it happen--knock wood) I'd go ahead and blog about the process itself and see what comes of it. It could either be a lovely Cinderella story or a tragic farce. I have no way of knowing until I set things in motion. And I invite you, gentle reader, to come along with me and see where it leads.

tap tap . . . is this on?

2008-02-22T19:40:00.000-08:00

I decided I needed to get a blawg with my real name for my writerly endeavors . . . and here it is.

More shall come later. For now, I'm going back to working on my novel.

Sheila Writes

100 Odd Words #4 - The Question and the Answer

Excuse Note 1/24/2012

Excuse Note 1/23/2012

100 Odd Words #3 - The Lavender Man

Excuse Note 1/19/2012

Getting Nooky

100 Odd Words #2 - True Story

100 Odd Words #1 - Stage Fright

Excuse Note 1/1/2012

100 Odd Words

Excuse Note 12/31/2011

The Ugly Handsome Man

On Being a Writer

Keeping Track

The M.A.R.T.A. Write-In

Two Things That Happened on November the First

Did You Hear That?

Breaking Into the Walled Garden

And It's Up . . .

Completion

One Step Closer . . .

Closer to Completion . . .

Final Steps

No Excuses

Ebook Progress

Starting Where I Am

Ebookishness

Possibility and Impossibility

Chiseling

Surviving NaNoWriMo

The War of Art eBook

What Sam and Charlie Taught Me

Countdown to NaNoWriMo...

A Few Drops at a Time

Going Back Over

Breathing In

247 words today

There are days . . .

I Think They Call This The Hard Part

Just To Let Y'all Know . . .

And It's Been Sent . . .

Almost There . . .

The Dunning-Kruger Threshold, or, Congratulations, You Suck

A Random Observation About The Writing Process

Why I've Given Up On Amazon.com

Meanwhile, on my other blog . . .

Whew!

NaNoWriMo, Day Five

NaNoWriMo, Day One

Countdown to NaNoWriMo . . .

Here We Go Again . . .

Poking At Things

Oh, crap, what have I DONE?

*gulp!*

Argh!

Eek!

Endings, again . . .

I Suppose I Should Explain That One, Hm?

Excuse Note #7

Endings

Kablam!

Take One Take Two

Excuse Note #6 and Tropes

When Ideas Attack

Wait, why am I doing this again?

Excuse Note #4

We Interrupt This Blog For A Very Important News Item

Excuse Note #3

Excuse Note #2

Excuse Note #1

Excuse Notes

Why Is This?

The Myth of Time

"So, what's it about?"

Deep Cuts

In the Valley of the Shadow of Doubt

Surviving NaNoWriMo

I broke 10,000 . . .

Why, Yes, I Am Crazy . . .

gulp!