Category Archives: the silver thorn chronicles
Glass in a Minefield
Today is sort of my day off.
And yet the words seem to be stuck somewhere, jammed in my knuckles on the way to the keyboard. I could make a list of everything that needs to be done yesterday. (Cou-this blog-gh.) Somehow I have an inkling that it would be less than helpful.
My normally underwhelming life has taken a turn for the over, between finances and bills that line up with not-so-polite sniffs and a week without income during my job switch. Okay, so I made $24. That’s barely half a tank of gas. Hovering just behind my right ear is the rewrite of my novel. I’d like to think the last few maundering weeks have been ideas stewing in my head like a crock pot full of glory, ready to serve themselves up into bestseller history the second the timer goes off.
Move over, Jo Rowling. I claim this one. (Just kidding. Eilean Donan is way too public.)
No, chances are a few more rewrites and a lot more tooth gnashing stands between me and any real changes in my finances, though this new job will help significantly. So what do I do? Buckle in and dig down? Mix up some metaphors? Nope.
I turn to the dark side.
I make muffins.
Sure, they’re really good muffins. Lemon curd and blueberry. They’re delicious. I already ate four. But unfortunately for them, they aren’t that inspirational. They sure don’t help my behemoth of a project. Now it’s already 1:20, and I have to go to work and take a test on beer and food that I feel 72% sure I will fail (the food part, not the beer part — four days isn’t much to memorize a menu).
So why am I spending my evenings watching Veronica Mars again instead of working on my rewrite? Maybe it’s because every time I sit down to write, every sentence ends up punctuated with, “Buffy! Easy!” as the puppy makes the cat squeak or “Willow, down!” as the kitten sticks her face in my breakfast. By the time they settle down, the puppy needs to go outside (or has gone inside), and I can’t remember for the life of all things fuzzy what I was doing.
Nah. I could blame them, but they’re just being babies.
It’s my own fault I’ve been so lazy lately. There’s a word for it, and that word is discouragement. If I were to scrunch my eyes shut and stick out a finger, that finger would land on an innocuous little sticky note with four lowercase letters written on it.
Yeah, that's the one.
I think I haven’t felt like working on my rewrite because of fear. I’m afraid of the mountain of debt under the carpet of our apartment. I’m afraid that this gamble I’m taking of working as a server while I try to get my writing off the ground will just make me into a 30-year-old with no real “experience” in a traditional field. I’m afraid I won’t be able to provide for my family. Those are harsh fears, sharp and cold and sterile fears. They’re fears I don’t much know how to address or conquer.
It’s not just about the writing. It’s the other things that squeeze in on me. Each distraction, each new envelope that comes in the mail is a reminder that we’re just sprinting to catch up. Each batch of muffins seems to be made of lead. As much as I would like to believe that getting this rewrite done will change something, that belief is as fragile as looping blown glass in a minefield, and as I dance around it, I wonder which step will create the booming symphony of that glass crashing into shards.
I think I turn to baking and cooking because I have to believe that something I make with my hands can sustain us. There’s a power in that belief that can turn blown glass to diamond hardness, if I only knew how to harness it.
So for now, I’ll drink my Thai tea, eat my muffins, and fixate on the irony of the mug I chose quite by accident.
Like this:
Big “Fuzzy” Bad
Me. Sometimes.
I’ve been writing through the third book for a couple weeks now. I’m about 30,000 words in, which is really exciting. So exciting I might start bouncing.
One of the key developments in this book is that we not only get to meet the mysterious redhead who has been flitting about everyone’s visions for two books and learn her back story, but we find out that her back story includes one of the series Big Bads…before he was a Big Bad. Back when he was just Kinda Naughty and didn’t know what to do with himself.
The Big Bads often have some sort of Traumatic Life Event that takes them from being Kinda Naughty and maybe even contemplating Being Good to becoming the Big Bad. They don’t seem to cope well with stress.
I made a little graphic for you to illustrate this transformation, but I am a computer genius technologically illiterate, and its glory would burn your eyes so you have to click this link instead.
Anyway. The point of all this is that my Big Bad has a couple of sympathetic moments, especially when you realize he’s the dude from the the flashback. I thought about making him super conflicted and broody for a while, and while he kicked and screamed and dragged his legs behind me like a tantrumming toddler, I came to the decision that he wouldn’t do that. This guy is nothing if not decisive. He knows what he wants from life and the choices he’s made.
So no tearing him up inside. Because he’s already dead inside. The parts of him that could store any sympathy or compassion pretty much rusted away years ago. Besides, their story is tragic. It’s supposed to be. And he’s not a part of her life anymore — he’s just not.
So my Big Bad is not a Big “Fuzzy” Baddie. He’s not going to get any less terrifying. I thought he might for a minute there, but what do Big, Traumatized Bads do when someone makes them feel weak?
Something really, really Nasty.
Even though I know what happens in my story, I know how it all plays out, and I’ve known for a while what the Ultimate Big Bad was up to, seeing it coming just over the horizon now is rather sobering. It’s going to put my protagonists through hell, along with a big chunk of the world.
When all is said and done, though, I think it’s shaping up to be pretty…epic.
If ONLY it could be this epic.
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The Power of Three
Not in a Charmed sort of way, or not exactly. I began my current project with the idea that it was a standalone novel, but about fifty pages in, I realized that it needed to be a trilogy. A lot of my favorite books have been part of trilogies — from growing up with L.J. Smith’s Forbidden Game, Secret Circle, and Dark Visions (and for a while, Vampire Diaries before that got serialized) to Lord of the Rings and the Song of Albion trilogy by Stephen Lawhead. I like the possibility that exists within trilogies, but in the last couple days, I’ve been asking myself about the structure of the individual novels within a trilogy. I just read phenomenal series on structure by bestselling author Kristen Lamb, which you can find on her blog. (Start with the first installment; there are seven.) It made me rethink the structure of my first novel in particular, especially when it comes to the Big Bad. I love my Big Bads — they’re insidious and sometimes insane, and a couple of them have some great back story.
Andrew's depiction of the ultimate Big Bad: The First
Anyway, one of the points she makes is that each book should show the protagonist defeating that book’s Big Bad for the climax. It’s the way fiction has been done for ages, and I can’t say I disagree. While at first I felt a wee bit trod upon by the statement, it made me think seriously about the way the structure of a novel affects the experience readers have with it. Must every book end with the Big Bad dead? No. Sometimes the Big Bad is as incorporeal as the big, dumb The First. But there is a reason things like “rising action” and “climax” exist.
It’s a little bit like sex that way, I suppose. No one really wants to get busy, get bored, and then have it be over. I find it interesting that terminology for plot corresponds pretty directly with terminology for sex, if you substitute “introduction” for “arousal,” but really when you write a novel, you want your intro to get your reader so hot and bothered that they can’t stop.
That paragraph ended up in a different place than it started out.
I’ve started the third book of my trilogy, and coupling (aaaaah, sexy words, get outta my blog!) that with the series on structure I just read, it’s gotten me thinking about how my books “flow.” As Ms. Kristin Lynn (different Kristen) said the other day, that word is annoying and nebulous. I’m not even sure what it means without using it to define itself, and that’s just silly. Unfortunately, that misty little concept manifests itself in the way of poor plot sometimes. What I don’t want is for my readers to be reading along, reading along, then BAM ZING POOF, big scene, then reading along for another 100 pages until the end leaves them unfulfilled and lonely, sobbing in a corner.
So structure is important, especially in the situation where you want your readers to pick up the next book. That’s a tricky thing to juggle — you need to resolve the plot of the first book whilst simultaneously tickling their fancy enough to buy the second and third. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Then you can do THIS!
Ideally, a trilogy should be structured something like this:
Book 1
1. Introduce protagonist, who should be super cool and sympathetic.
2. Introduce antagonist, who should be scary/obnoxious/full of boogers. This includes the Little Big Bad and the Big Big Bad (who probably will exist until the last book).
3. Introduce small and large goals (large goals further the series, small ones further the book.
4. Build tension (think power chords and minor keys).
5. BIG CLIMAX!!!
6. Resolve Big Climax, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that lead you to….
Book 2
1. Introduce/refresh protagonist.
2. Reiterate Big Big Bad and introduce Little Big Bad.
3. Big “You Are Here” in terms of big goals, introduce little goals.
4. Tension, Tension, Tension! Bah, bah, baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!
5. BIGGER CLIMAX!!!
6. Resolution and more bread crumbs. Maybe a couple chunks of baguette instead of just crumbs. If you’ve done your other steps right, your readers should gobble them up and cry that there’s no more until…
Cue credits.
Book 3
1. In my humble opinion, this should intro protagonist(s) and establish good tension from the beginning, especially in a fantasy series. Your readers have been hurtling toward destiny like the prologue script in a Star Wars movie, and they should already have some momentum saved up for Le Grande Finale.
2. OMG, Big Big Bad!
3. Goals like a heat-based missile…neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyuuuuuurm ……PPPPSSSSHGHGHGH. (See above.)
4. Tension so thick you could land an airliner on it!
5. GINORMOUS CLIMAX!
6. Resolution, nostalgia, and sniffles.
All of that is just my opinion, and it’s definitely a big fat generalization of plotting (which I’m only reluctantly admitting is necessary), but there it is. If those things are done, your trilogy (and hopefully mine) will be dynamite!
Hopefully more successful than this guy.
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Realism and Urban Fantasy
Last night I wrapped up the second book of my trilogy and began on book three. While book two definitely posed some challenges and obstacles (hell, I stopped in the middle and wrote book one when I realized the story didn’t really start there), this last one is going to be the most involved in some ways.
For starters, my primary POV protagonist (though it will switch between Sarah and Anna as well) is a 400-year-old vampire. Her back story is fascinating to me as well as being integral to the progression of the series, so last night I wrote upwards of 3,000 words of historical fiction.
I already know some stuff about 17th century Poland — or more correctly, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that existed at the time. I know in 1655 the Swedes invaded (that’s when her home was burned to the ground and she ended up becoming a vampire), but other things I had to look up, like this dude:
Fabulous hat, sir.
Regardless of the fashion of the times, I want to create little forays into the past that pluck the reader out of the 21st century and punt them backwards, so they feel the grit, the reality of a life back then.
For my dear little Ewunia, she has a rough go of things. So there are a good number of things I need to look up and figure out. For instance:
What would have been the role of a widowed merchant’s only daughter? Would she have been educated at all? What sort of practical skills might she have, if any?
How exactly were women of the day treated? Would she have been on the cusp of being married to someone twice her age? Probably.
What would an invading army do with stray women? (I think I already know the answer to that — it hasn’t changed in five thousand years since the dawn of time.)
Muskets or arrows or bolts?
What would Ewunia have worn given her sex and social class? What did 17th century Poles eat?
In spite of the relatively short amount of time my book will spend in the 17th century, I need to go back there to hunt myself. I need to learn more about this world Ewunia is at the mercy of once her father is dead and her home burned to the ground. Because ultimately, I want readers to understand why she makes the choices she does, and her background will determine a lot of that. Not to mention the vampire who makes her one — he is very important to the story, and his development gives me some chills to think about. He’s a little bit like Anakin Skywalker, but with fangs and an old Swedish name instead.
Speaking of him, his name is the one I had to change, as was Ewunia’s, to protect the validity of their characters. They’re supposed to be centuries old, so his name wouldn’t be Damon. Plus, Ewunia begins to go by Elaine later, and I realized the Polish version of that is Elena (and not common)…Elena and Damon? Dammit, Vampire Diaries.
So yeah, they’re now Ewunia and Einarr, circa 1655. I like “Einarr.” It means one warrior, which suits him. And his chosen replacement name later will be nice and ironic.
I’ll probably have a wee bit more to say on this as I continue to write, gentle viewers. Until then, love your characters, love your story, and be true to it however you know best.
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Day 10 and Novel 2
Day 10 winds its way to a close with some fabulous news.
Elemental is finished.
During my many hours at Panera today for my Corridor Writers write-in, my word count for the novel hit 111,000, and as tomorrow is 11/11/11, I decided it was done. Just kidding. That wasn’t my reasoning, but I found that the story didn’t need another 10,000 words. More might happen in the rewrite, but for now it’s finished.
You know what that means?
That means I have written TWO WHOLE BOOKS!!!!!!!
Yeah, sorry for the spaz attack. I felt it was merited. Two whole books, and a quarter million words. Geez oh Pete’s, that sounds like a lot of words. Probably because it is.
I am now about 2,500 words into book three, going way back in time and into some nitty gritty historical urban fantasy for the prologue, which is interesting but exhausting — and torturing a character is never that fun for me. I feel bad for her. She’s a little shaky, but she will evolve. And we’ll get to see that happen.
We will also learn the back story of one of the trilogy’s major antagonists, one of the superbad baddies. And that is worth it, for sure. He will grow a sympathetic side for a time — although that time is four hundred years ago.
So here we go. Book three of three. Wish me luck.
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I Wear My Sunglasses At Night
Time to wrap up The 25, folks! And we’re going to do it with style.
No, really. The last bit is style.
25. Style
Writers sometimes speak of style as if it were an ingredient to be added to their story or poem or memoir. Instead, style is the thing itself. E.B. White said it best, writing, “Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, ‘Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.’” The key, then, to developing one’s style is to write, as White states, “in a way that comes naturally.”Sound easy? It’s not. In fact, finding the “way that comes naturally” can take a lifetime, and the way can change with each piece you begin. One key to beginning that journey is to think about style not so much as a matter of addition, but subtraction—casting off feelings of awkwardness and self-consciousness, affectation and pretension. Focus on presenting your piece clearly, in a way that connects with readers. For practice, imagine a single reader sitting across a table from you. Spend a half-hour relating your piece to that reader, as clearly and honestly as possible. Spend another half-hour striving to make the piece more clear, more honest, more affecting. Then spend another half-hour making the piece more clear, more …
—Heffron
I think the point Heffron makes is an insightful one. Style isn’t about imitation or any other kind of flattery to others. Because of that, I can understand why it’s one of the more difficult aspects of writing to make authentic, because it’s one of the age old bits of advice that people tend to find very difficult: Be yourself.
I remember being a child/adolescent/teen/undergrad and having people tell me that. “Just be yourself, Emmie.” As if it came second nature to them, but I suspect it doesn’t really come first nature to anyone, really. There is, of course, a lot of wisdom in those two little words, but if we’re all honest, we know that human beings spend a lot more time trying to blend in than stand out.
With a lot of things in life, I can see why we do it. It can be dangerous to stray from herd, especially when that herd is full of pubescent females who have grown massive retractable claws along with their burgeoning busts. Boys aren’t much better. We might go through a rebellious stage and put strangely colored things on our heads (or in our heads), but people have a massive drive to fit in.
Going against that grain is a painstaking uphill climb, and other famous cliches.
When you can take that advice, something changes in your life. I know we’re talking about writing here, but I’m going to give you a little of my history to illustrate how my style has grown because of those two words. I still have an evolving style (I might even call it a revolving style), but my writing now is much more interesting than it used to be. I spent most of high school just trying not to be noticed. I spent the first year of college realizing that people like what they expect, and get a wee bit upset when you do something that doesn’t jive with that. In my case, it was me beginning to realize that I didn’t believe in Christianity anymore — in my second semester at an expensive, private Christian university, no less. I lost a lot of friends over that. When it comes to religion, for all the prayer and convincing and Bibles and whatever else, there is this little fork in the road. One sign points at “You Believe,” and the other just yells, “BULLSHIT!” Three guesses which fork was me. You can’t force yourself to be something you’re not, so I quit trying. And I took off across an ocean.
In 2004, I moved to Scotland for the summer. I spent two months there by myself. Away from expectations, away from anything I was familiar with, yet I was home the second my toes touched the tarmac at the Prestwick Airport south of Glasgow. I spent those two months flitting throughout the country alone. I met people who are still in my life, namely a UT student named Marshall who is now a barrister in Leeds, and a fabulous Punjabi-Scottish man who makes chai from scratch and speaks Gaelic with equal facility called Jordan, but I just call him my best friend. He was man of honor in my wedding last month. I also met a young man named Pawel, who was the first Polish person I ever met. I heard the sounds of his language and had to learn it.
The next summer I flew to Poland with four other women, and I returned to Scotland, where Jordan introduced me to my soulmate, a beautiful, intelligent, hilarious woman named Julia, who joined him on October 2 as my maid of honor. She was just selected from a pool of hundreds of applicants to join an organization (the only organization) that does systematic research on the G20 Summit. I’m so proud of her I could burst. Six months later, I packed my bags and moved across the Atlantic. I didn’t come back for almost two years. Those people I met are still a part of me, a part of my life. None of them knew much about my life growing up. They met me in places I felt utterly at home and comfortable, and those were my first lessons about being myself.
It was then I began to write Elemental, the book I’m currently trying to finish for NaNoWriMo.
I knew I had something the moment I began it. You know the thrill, gentle viewers. The electric pulse that flits through you as the ragged curtains between worlds ripple back with an unseen wind and reveal a Story to you. I ended up realizing that that story wasn’t the beginning, and I put it aside to write Primeval, which is the first book in the trilogy. Now five years later, Primeval is getting ready for takeoff, and I’m writing the final pages of Elemental at last.
The point of all of this is that your style evolves when you put those two little words into practice. It will sprout out of what you thought was barren dirt and sneak tendrils into your skin. It will begin to take you over until who you are manifests on every page. I’m no Shakespeare, and I’m still a work in progress much like my writing, but there’s a lot more of me on the page than there ever was before.
So to wrap up The 25 (but certainly not my daily posts), style is what happens when you be yourself. Love yourself. The rewards are still untold, though I think I’ve gotten more from life than any woman deserves even now in the three people who form my personal triumvirate of true love. They’re what pushes me forward on this path. Who pushes you?
If I can do it, a girl who grew up with no pot to piss in (literally) and who kept her mouth shut for a decade — so can you.
- True love happens. Image by Jordan Jaquess Imaging.
- Three times for me. Image by Jordan Jaquess Imaging.
EDIT: I apologize for the weird formatting on this post. I tried looking at the HTML for a whole five minutes before I gave up. Not really sure what happened — never had trouble with copy/paste resetting font before. Weird.
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The Wee Hours
Well, to me it is. I seldom see this side of noon excepting when I sneak up on it from behind, or if I have to be at work at 10. And even then, I repress any morning experiences for the first two hours — by then it’s afternoon, and all is right with the world.
Me.
I am not a morning person.
I used to be sort of passive about it. “Yeah, I don’t like mornings, la dee dah…” and then I got a job where I regularly had to be at work by 7:30 and still could never sleep until 3 or later, and it stressed me out to the point that the mere sound of my alarm triggered a stream of expletives and near-panic attacks. Sleep. I value it. It’s one of the reasons I don’t have a “real” job right now.
But lo, it’s 9:41, and I’ve been awake for about an hour and a half. Strange miracle, but here we are, with the opportunity to blog today when I thought I wouldn’t have the time. Once I go to work in 45 minutes, I won’t be home till almost 11.
Gentle viewers! We are almost done with The 25! In fact, we are on…
22. Objectivity
The perils of subjectivity arise largely from overidentifying with a subject, narrator or character in a narrative, and making it (or him or her) the vehicle for a thematic point in which the author himself is overly invested. The antidote is at least as old as the New Testament, specifically Matthew 5:43–48, where Christ instructs his followers to love their enemies. If what I have to say seems old hat, therefore, I’ll be neither disappointed nor surprised.If you find yourself overidentifying with a topic or character, try to identify within the sympathetic subject, narrator or even oneself a trait or belief or habit that is repellent or inexcusable or just plain odd. In doing so, you’ll enhance the psychological or moral distance between yourself and the object of familiarity
or allegiance.Another possible strategy is to rewrite the scene or section from the point of view of someone other than the object of sympathy. This forced disconnect can achieve a similar effect.
—Corbett
I find it rather appropriate that this is today’s. In my frantic writing sprint (or spring, as Twitter would have it) last night before bed, I wrote a scene that bothered me immensely. The protagonist from my first book becomes….sort of an anti-hero if not a downright antagonist in the second. Basically, she starts acting like a massive twit. It drives me nuts, and I want to smack her. I found myself last night trying to put words in her mouth, make her more sympathetic in a scene where she is downright cruel. And I knew that as I was trying to do that, it wasn’t true to her behavior. She has a lot of reasons for acting the way she does — some of them more valid than others — but the bottom line is that she’ll get over it eventually, and until she does, I have to let her be a bitch. I find the whole concept exhausting. It’s like putting up with a temper tantrum because you know your child will eventually grow out of them.
It’s one reason I like different POVs in fiction. I love seeing a story told from different angles and getting inside different heads. I also enjoy a good first person POV, but there’s something to be said for different POVs. Sometimes a big story just needs to be told that way.
It all boils down to one little sentence, in my opinion: tell the truth. Listen to your story and your characters, and let them drive your story forward. If you want to give it a shot, find a scene in your story where things fall a little flat and subjective and rewrite it from the viewpoint of an antagonist, or even someone who just doesn’t like your main character very much. See what happens. If you’re NaNoing, just keep plugging along at your word count. 
Also me.
I was going to post a picture of a pretty morning to enhance the objectivity of this post, but then I changed my mind. Google gives mornings some damn good PR. So instead, I give you Garfield.
Happy Sunday!
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A Twilit Diatribe and Other Sordid Stories
This post has been milling around in my brain like a school of directionless fish for the past several weeks. I thought about re-reading the entire series before writing it and then decided it wasn’t necessary. So here I am to tackle one of the literary phenomena of this decade:
Twilight.
Before I get started, I want to make plain and clear that I am in no way attempting to demean Stephenie Meyer or her work.
I’ve read all the books. I will begin with that. And I wanted to read them. I picked up Twilight in the hot, humid Tennessee of 2008, and after plowing through the first volume, went out and bought the second and third. And then I went to the midnight release of Breaking Dawn at the Nashville Borders where I used to have my writing group. I even went to a book discussion group about it. Through all of that, I wouldn’t call myself a Twi-hard. I read them again a little while later, and things started to bother me.
I had just gotten out of a bad relationship. Suffice it to say that this man wouldn’t take no for an answer. Re-reading Twilight, I started to ask how it was okay for a man (one ultimately decades older) to sit in a high school girl’s bedroom and watch her sleep. Any man. As their relationship progressed, I wondered why Bella put up with the fact that Edward seems to think any decision she makes is stupid, and that he knows better always.
Let me interject here that I do not think any of that was Stephenie Meyer’s conscious intention.
The fairy-tale lover inside my head at this cries, “But he loves her!”
The part of me who has dealt with abuse both first and second hand responds, “Controlling, boundary-crossing love is not love.”
I get the forbidden love thing. I do. It’s enticing and seductive. But there’s a lot of wisdom in throwing that kind of love out the window from the get-go. Because even though Edward and Bella got one, in the real world, happy endings don’t exist. I actually said this in my wedding vows: Anyone can get on a shiny horse and trot westward, but it takes a truer and more perfect love to be there when the sun comes up, or when the sun is obscured by clouds, or when life happens. True love is only found on the other side of the sunset.
As I re-read the books a couple times, I began to be a bit irked by the writing. Lots of passive voice, some inconsistencies (one moment Charlie’s eating one thing, the next something else entirely). From a literary standpoint, the books are far from perfect. This is something I blame a lot more on Meyer’s editor than on herself. The books also improve in quality as the series progresses, as well they would.
I stumbled across a blog once devoted to ripping Twilight to shreds. Line by line. Impressive endeavor — that’s a lot of lines to rip apart. At first, I felt like someone had torn scales away from my eyes. “Really?! That happened?” But after a while I began to feel pretty bad for Stephenie Meyer. If anyone took that much time out of their lives to put my book through a wood chipper, I would probably be a sobbing mass of snot and tears.
Which got me to thinking. Yes, there are some things wrong with the series. I don’t think that Edward and Bella have a very healthy relationship, and Jacob isn’t any better with his rape-y kisses. I’ve always hated romance novels that begin with a big strong man stealing a woman and raping her into loving him. It’s a big, sick exercise in Stockholm Syndrome, and it perpetuates some very, very nasty myths about women. All that said, for all you can pick apart Meyer’s books until Edward’s old and gray, there is one vital little fact that Twilight critics miss.
She did something right.
In spite of all the nit-picky (and some glaring) things, Stephenie Meyer accomplished something that just about every writer yearns for. She wrote four books that not only set her up for the rest of her life, but forged an intensely loyal and devoted fan base. She branded herself. Very few authors ever achieve that. Millions of fans around the world love her books, and I have a feeling that although the literary critics might hang themselves at the prospect, her books are going to stick around for a long time. More than the money, she has fans who adore her. Her pages grabbed hold of millions of people and dragged them through her story.
No matter what you think of Twilight, you have to admit that she did something very, very right. You can’t fabricate the kind of response she has gotten. Yes, she’s had some seriously good marketing and publicity, but face it: the response of her readers is genuine. And you can pour as much money into books as you want, but you can’t buy that. She found a bit of magic, and she communicated it to her readers in a way that keeps them coming back for more. Begging for more. Hysterically crying at the thought of having more. Twilight fans are so rabid that I can’t go see the movies in the theater unless I find a time all the kids are in school and I’m the only one there — I can’t stand all the screeching every time Robert Pattinson or Tayler Lautner shows his face.
Regected Riter is My Hero
While I don’t expect my books to take over the world like Stephenie Meyer or J.K. Rowling did, having even 10,000 readers like theirs would pretty much make my life. Having a readership that thinks of your characters as friends, who thinks about what they would do, who gets to know them and the story to the point that they have whole conversations about it — that is the dream, gentle viewers.
So as we trundle through NaNoWriMo and frantically try to achieve our word counts for the month, I’ll be thinking about a woman who has inspired both undying love and virulent vitriol. I’ll be pondering Stephenie Meyer and what she did right, trying to figure out what my magic is.
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Into the Breach
Good afternoon, gentle viewers, and a Happy Halloween to you! Or a joyous Samhain, if that’s how you roll. Or you know, Dia de los Muertos is tomorrow, I reckon. Holiday season is in full swing! And I have the tea to prove it. Nom nom nom.
Twelve short hours before NaNo begins. I looked around for a midnight write-in, but the closest one to me was downtown D.C. (snore), and I’m not driving over an hour to hang out in a Starbucks at midnight. It does look like there are some serious NaNo events throughout the month in Maryland, though, so I should be able to find something. In fact, I am going to a write-in on Thursday because it’s close and my day off. Woohoo!
Apart from my NaNoRebels challenge goals (1,500 words a day, an hour or more a week refueling), I’ve set a few goals for myself for the month. Here they are!
1. Finish the first draft of book two (almost there!). This is so that when I pitch to agents in January, I will not only have one bright and shiny work to show them, but two! That’s right, people. For the low price of ink on paper, you get two — count ‘em — two finished works! If this woman can write two, she can probably write more.
Salesman Jesus wants you to publish my books.
2. Get a start on book three for the same reasons as Goal #1, if you change “two” to “three.”
3. Behind Goal #3, we have one last little thing to say on my goals! While in general the idea for NaNoWriMo is quantity and not so much quality, my personal goal is to write lucid and cohesive work this month. I don’t want to have to spend another month making it readable when I go back and edit.
Anyhoo. I wrote almost 3,000 words yesterday, finally pushing book two forward in plot and action. That’s a huzzah moment. I also went back and read it and liked what I had, even though I wrote it with my pink earbuds glued to my ears rocking Daft Punk at 3 a.m.
Right now I’m at about 87,000 words, which should be right on track for the end to be at around 120,000 for the first draft. It’s long, but I wanted hefty books. They’re supposed to be chronicles, for FSM’s sake, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t be 250-pagers.
The fun thing about this trilogy is writing different characters who are also different species. The first protagonist was a seer and a shapeshifter (she’s still around), and the second is a witch who was forcibly turned into a vampire against her will. That gives me some fun things to work with and to explore the magic of the world a lot more in the second book rather than having to look at it solely from an observer’s point of view. Anna gets to be actively involved in the magic aspects of things.
My chunk from last night also introduced a new character who will be awesome. He is going to be tricky to write for a lot of different reasons (not the least of which that he is completely batshit insane), but he’s got a lot to offer the story and the other characters. Plus, I got to hear him say, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty” to Sarah. Ha. She deserved that.
It’s Halloween time, gentle viewers! Get your spook on!
Like this:
Pawing the Ground
Picture me as I look ahead at the month of November. It’s getting cold outside. The challenge is before me, waving its little red flag. My feet start to paw the ground in front of me. I might even snort a little, bursts of steam in the chilled air. The arrival of November will launch me forward to tackle that challenge. So what am I doing to prepare?
I’ve focused myself on the fact that no matter what, the challenge of writing 1,500 words of fiction per day plus spending time actively nursing my psyche each week and working and planning for the holidays will be just that. Challenging. It’s going to require discipline more than anything — to get up early and write before work if I’m going to be working a double close (which they have me scheduled for next Sunday), to get my body back in shape, and to continue posting here every day to cheer the rest of you on who have decided to travel those thirty days of insanity with me.
I get to wave the flag for you to paw at the ground. I hope all of you end up ripping that red waving flag to bits with your horns as you conquer the challenge.
Rar.
As many have said before me, writing can be a lonely calling. We spend a lot of time closeted with our thoughts in our own little world and don’t necessarily interact much. But I’ve seen a trend pop up toward social writing, where writers involve one another, support one another, and ultimately help each other grow. That kind of community is as precious as a golden septum piercing.
Well, I think it's hella tight.
So in addition to the personal pep talks and being my own personal cheerleader, I’ve tried this week to get practical. To figure out what my goals are for NaNoWriMo and give myself more focus than just “getting through” the thirty days of November. For those of us participating in the NaNoRebel group (or even if you’re doing it classic style), there are some questions to ask yourself before the first comes up and gooses you.
1. If your goal is to work an existing story, do you know where it’s going? This can mean an outline if you’re the plan-y type, but if you’re like me it can mean immersing yourself in your story and feeling it out. Watching your characters unfold in your head to see what lies beyond the turns. That can help stave off writer’s block before it starts.
2. Are you trying to finish a story or just get one started or to do a big push in the middle to get stuff out? (That sounded like toilet humor, but it wasn’t. I promise.)
3. If you’re starting from scratch, do you have a feel for your story from start to finish? Any notes you can jot down can be helpful if flying blind scares you.
4. If you’re re-writing this month, what are your goals for your new draft? Write them down and keep a list of your insidious first draft foibles that always need editing out (some examples: passive voice, use of adverbs, issues with dialogue attribution, a tendency to let the readers see you set the scene instead of lifting the curtain on an already hot set).
5. Are you aiming for just quantity or do you want quality as well? I’ve heard many people say they end up with 50,000 words of crap at the end of the month. This doesn’t have to be true, especially if you do some of the above.
6. Are you doing this just because or are you doing it because you feel the tug of the words? Regardless, this is a big commitment and a lot of work. As long as you’re doing it for yourself and your story, you’ll get something out of it. And if you share your whiz-bang awesome progress with me, I’ll give you a cookie. (Or some other prize. See this post for details.)
All that said, I’m spending the rest of the day before I have to go sling beers reading what I have of my second book. So far, so awesome, but I have a ways to go, and I need to get to the end to decide what my goals are for NaNoWriMo. 50,000 words would easily take me to the end of book two and partway into book three, which is most likely the goal, but we shall see.
See you all later, gentle viewers. I’ll be here pawing the ground.
