Blog Archives
Finding the Silver in Pain
Psychologists believe (and rightly so) that the vast majority of humans will go out of their way to avoid pain. Americans are notorious for our propensity to pop pills instead of just bearing the pain. Most of us have never known levels of pain beyond the occasional headache or broken bone or scraped knee.
Pain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As a reader, I’ve read shelves worth of books where the characters undergo immense amounts of pain and torture. I’ve noticed that some authors forego description of the actual sensations and just say “pain lanced through her” or “ripples of pain cascaded over him.”
I’m just about to finish Jacqueline Carey‘s Kushiel Trilogy, and her approach to pain has made me reconsider how I write this difficult human experience in my work. Her protagonist is an “anguissette,” a woman marked by their punishing god Kushiel and fated to always experience pain and pleasure as one. Yes, the books are NC-17 in parts — but if you are a reader who values the honesty of human emotion and stories that leave you wondering what’s real, take a chance on them.
First edition cover (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I got my first migraine in 8th grade. I remember sitting in class, trying to look at the white board, struggling to see the words there, having to look down at my dark-colored binder to give my eyes a respite. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I’ve seldom experienced the nausea that accompanies many people’s migraines, and mine often end after 10-15 hours, but in recent years, my migraines have taken a turn for the unbearable. What they lack in duration, they make up for in intensity.
I had one last night, and I struggled to finish the last four hours of my cocktail shift with the strange blurred aura around my vision and each oppressive light bearing down on me. I woke this morning with a pounding heart and shallow breath, not a little surprised that I had survived the night. Does that sound melodramatic?
I’ve always been someone to hurt myself a lot. I still have scars all over my legs from multitudinous skinned knees and run-ins with sharp objects. I’ve a scar on my thumb from mistaking the knuckle for a potato and removing my skin with the peeler instead of the tuber’s. I’ve had head wounds and broken bones, one bash on the skin that went down to the bone, and I’ve impaled my leg on a fence.
Beyond that, I’ve always suffered from severe menstrual cramps bad enough that they’ve caused me to lose consciousness. And there’s the migraines.
Last night, just driving home felt like torture. I almost never use the mirror flip on the rearview mirror to dim the lights behind me, but I used it last night and drove the 15 miles home with my left hand blocking out the reflection in my side mirror. I kept thinking, “Five more miles. Two more miles. One more mile. Three more turns, then home.” I came inside to only dim light and had to stand in the hallway to blearily tell Spouse I was going straight to bed.
I laid in darkness, first consumed by relief at the lack of light. But my migraines are not so forgiving.
When my kitten woke me up from a fitful sleep, pressure mounted in my head. My husband had come to bed and lay sleeping in the dark, but dawn had begun to light the sky and even the pastel dimness of the early blush of sun made me gulp with panic. I struggled to the hall closet in the dark, found a bottle of ibuprofen by touch alone, and counted out five into my shaking palm through waves of pressure that felt as though they preceded a nuclear bomb.
Laying in bed again, my heart gulped shallow beats against my chest. My head felt as though someone had taken an ice cream scoop to the inside of my skull and tried to fill the remaining cavern with too much air. I buried my face in my pillow to battle the blossoming dawn. And melodramatic though it might sound, I doubted my body’s ability to withstand the mounting pressure, ever-increasing and relentless.
I finally had to wake my husband. If I get a migraine during the day, he massages my head, helping to spur the blood flow in my neck muscles that have turned to concrete and the fissures in my skull that seem about to rend themselves with every passing breath. His fingers released the pressure in tiny spurts, careful and deft. My fluttering pulse began to strengthen. My panicked breathing subsided. And after a long while, I slept.
So today I woke, feeling shaky and abused. I couldn’t think of what to blog about. All I could think of was the ten hours of last night that the migraine claimed. I scarcely remember the last few hours at work, and the drive home exists only in flashes of bright light and cringing. Migraines, at least mine, create a phobia of light. Where every patch of glowing brightness makes me flinch away and I trade breath for darkness as I bury my head under pillows and blankets — even then there is a spotlight glaring behind my eyes, illuminating the inside of my head as if I’m staring at the sun with no eyelids to shield me, no way to blink, no way to scrunch them shut.
As a writer, I have to embrace these experiences. Maddening and frightening though they can be, they are gateways. My inability to escape them makes me vulnerable, but being forced to wade through them liberates me from using descriptions like “pain lanced through her.” If you read the description of my ten hour ordeal, you will see that I never once used the word pain.
As much as humans want to avoid it, pain is an essential human experience, and one that is as inevitable as the earth’s continual circling of the sun. It may be unpleasant, but in ways it is exquisite.
Writers, consider this challenge: next time you are writing of love, of pain, of death, of hope…do so without using those words. And readers, glut yourself on the wealth of description in books. Let your favorite characters be your avatars of experience. For better or for worse.
Related articles
- Kushiel’s Dart – Book Review (mycogds.wordpress.com)
- Migraines…are they weather related? (jenlynn401.wordpress.com)
Like this:
Murder, Tea, and Piggles
This week I began another rewrite for my first book. For the first time, I feel like my protagonist has something going for her. I’ve probably rewritten the same first chapter twelve times over the past six years, trying to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again. What I needed was for someone to come along, look at it, shake their head and say, “Nope. You’re facing the wrong way. Look over there.”
Last week, the lovely Julie Kenner did just that for me. The result has been oddly liberating. Not only do I feel able to better express a more fully-realized protagonist, but the new goals I wrote for her can be woven seamlessly into the rest of the book. Instead of feeling like I’m reinventing her, I actually feel like I was able to peel back her exterior to figure out exactly what it is that she needed to be. It works — she is much better this way. There are so many little Easter eggs to sprinkle through the book now, and I think that will ultimately make it a more satisfying read for people. I’d love to tell you about them, but as a whole one or two of you have actually read the thing, it wouldn’t make any sense. So you’ll just have to wait. Until I find an agent, sell the book, and it someday gets published.
Yesterday, Karen McFarland hosted New York Times Bestselling Author Bob Mayer on her blog for a great guest post about creating unforgettable characters. I would highly recommend that you check it out. There were some nuggets in there that I definitely intend to keep in mind when I continue this rewrite.
What struck me most about the advice and feedback I’ve gotten lately is that people need motivations for things. They may not be positive things — in fact, I think that often people are more motivated by the threat of something negative than the possibility of something positive — but they have to be present. Whether it’s trying to get your reader to accept why your protagonist is trusting that stranger or why she is so determined to keep something secret, the reader has to be able to say she understands even if she wouldn’t make the same choice.
So as I strike out on this new path (hopefully not in the baseball sense of the phrase), my protagonist has a few new things in her backpack, including a cat named Piggles. My friend has a cat called Miggles, and when I was thinking about her cat, I was thinking of him going hungry and being mad about it, and voila — Piggles was born. He should be an interesting kitty to play with.
This is about how I picture Piggles. A dog kitty (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The past few weeks, I’ve been acting as a beta reader for three friends. It’s been a really fascinating experience, both because it has shown me some amazing writing from three people who will certainly be big names in fantasy/paranormal fiction before long AND because it’s helping me to look more critically at my own work. All four of us are unpublished writers, and I think we’ve all felt the frustration of running into walls with our work. Sometimes you just get too close to something to be able to see what needs to be fixed. None of us are professionals, but we all have completed novels and all have the goal of being traditionally published. I think we’re all happy to have the chance to get feedback on our work from writers in the same genre.
I think we’re all guilty of getting too close to things, whether you’re a writer or not. Sometimes we get so focused on whatever goal is floating in front our faces that we get lost in that metaphor about seeing the forest through the trees. It’s hard to see the forest when your nose is stuck between a couple creases of bark.
Forest? What forest? Bark of a Pine tree showing normal sloughing of plates of bark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Sometimes we can get perspective on our own, but other times we need that gentle readjustment in our thinking to come from the outside — or sometimes we just need a bap on the head with a yardstick. I’m setting out on a new journey with some new goals this month. Instead of completing book three by April 15th, my goal is to have a submission-ready book one by June 1.
What have you needed perspective on in your life lately? Yardstick or gentle turn? Have you had to reevaluate your goals?
Like this:
Treading the Tightrope Between Worlds
I’ve just started reading a new vampire novel. Sunshine by Robin McKinley. It’s made me contemplate the world-building that happens within the genre of urban fantasy in series and standalone novels like Sunshine and the Hollows (Kim Harrison) and Anita Blake (Laurell K. Hamilton), etc.
Urban fantasy is interesting because it explores worlds within our own, and has to walk a fine line between making the reader feel at home in our world while simultaneously changing certain aspects and creating a believable reality subsumed within it. Throw too much “other” in there, and readers will be lost or lose their SOD (suspension of disbelief, not rolled up sheets of grass).
Not this kind of sod. Image from brandsavant.com
I realized while reading, that it took me about fifty or so pages into Sunshine to realize how different the world of the story is from our world. Yes, there are vampires, etc., but the protagonist works in a coffeehouse and goes to the library, and for the first chunk of the book, there are very few hints about the extent of the world. The odd bit of slang that doesn’t quite fit 21st century speech, a few other little things.
If you want to bridge our world and a fantasy world, you first have to lull the reader into a sense of comfort. Even if you introduce the fantastical right off the bat, you still have to show enough “normalcy” to entice your reader to believe your story, whether that’s setting, description, or the every day life of the characters. Writers even do that in epic fantasy when they are creating a whole new world with a completely different history and landscape and everything. How many fantasy series begin with a rural hero living a quiet life on a farm? I can already think of three, and I’m not even trying. Because while we may not immediately “get” Middle Earth or Emond’s Field or Sendaria, we get farms as being something normal. When the magic starts happening, we’re already invested.
So when we write urban fantasy, we may not know off the bat what a writer means by “sheer” or “bad blood cross” or “Hogwarts” or “the Hollows,” but we get cars and bars and rush hour and the home of that anal-retentive aunt. As a writer, the more you pad your way across the tightrope stretched between this world and yours, the more you see of the new. It might come in bits and bangles at first, but if you take the time to build a world block by block, your readers will be steeped in it before you know it, and they won’t want to be evicted.
Good world-building is what keeps readers immersed into the wee hours of the night. Sometimes it happens quite by accident, as it was with the creation of Aloria and the world of David Eddings‘s Belgariad. His began with a doodle on a napkin that he didn’t expect to become anything until he realized that The Lord of the Rings was in its 78th printing years later and discovered that people enjoyed fantasy. From that napkin doodle came this world:
Not bad for a napkin. Image via davideddings.wikia.com
As I revise Primeval, one of the big texturing projects I am undertaking is to ensure that as my protagonist becomes more embroiled in a new type of world, the more quirks of that world she begins to see, then use herself as she adapts. I want to make sure the reader can take that journey with her. There are some structural things that need work, but I look at this revision time as sort of sitting on my egg. Most of the structure is there, but I have to keep it warm and cuddly so that life peeks out of it when I’m through.
How do you build your worlds? How do you decide what to introduce and when? How do you keep from overwhelming your reader even if you need to overwhelm your protagonist? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Keep creating.
Related articles
- The Hollow Series by Kim Harrison Might Be Coming to the Small Screen (houseofvampires.wordpress.com)
- Urban Fantasy’s Hammer (emmiesmeanderings.wordpress.com)
- Writing Reality (emmiemears.wordpress.com)
Like this:
Caught Up
Well, gentle viewers, just color me sheepish.
I meant to post about something else today, but I got a wee bit caught up with my revisions. I’ve been polishing up my “final” draft of Primeval, and I got sucked in. It’s a good feeling, getting sucked into your own book. I fixed a bunch of little things, textured some other stuff up a bit, wrote a new scene or two that needed to be in there, and generally read along to make sure things were going the way I wanted them to. For the most part, it’s there, but the biggest patch I was worried about is still to come, so I’ll tackle that tomorrow.
On another note, there is a raccoon living in my ceiling. The husband banged on the ceiling last night at three in the morning, and we heard its lumbering body scamper away. It thumped right where he had his hand, and he hollered — apparently he felt the weight of its body. No squirrels, then. Definitely a big critter up there…crittering.
How it managed to find its way into our third-floor ceiling is beyond me, but it’s definitely not on the roof.
Picture this guy running roughshod over your head every night. Thump, thump, scuffly-slide thump. Thanks, Wikipedia for giving him a face!
Related articles
- Critters in the Attic Update (kwrites.wordpress.com)
Like this:
Birthing the Baby Elephant
Baby Elephant, Take One.
(That reference will come clear a bit later.)
(I just erased about 150 words.)
I has a lot of thoughts, but the words escape me. This picture from Cheezburger.com helps!
I woke up this morning knowing that I wanted to write about a certain quote, which I will share in a bit. And when I sat down to do it, my brain very helpfully turned into a humming blank.
I started writing a little about how people don’t necessarily accept the creative fields as legitimate unless we make millions doing it. Then I decided that came off as more ranty than I meant to be. Then my husband brought me a video from Conan of two people getting married who had never kissed before — and we both had a laugh at the extreme awkward. (You can see that rather sad moment here and have a laugh and a shudder for yourself. I am personally very glad my husband and I knew how to kiss on our wedding day.)
So here I am, almost two hundred words in, and I haven’t said anything at all. Shame on me.
I’m here though, writing. Why on earth am I here writing when I don’t know what to write about? (Woohoo! I found my nugget!) I’ll tell you.
It’s because that’s what I do. Even though I have very little time to do much of anything outside of work, I realized yesterday that if I were to stop updating this blog every day, I would be quite sad.
Me. If I abandoned all of you gentle viewers. Image via pavley.com
Something happens to me when I don’t write. It’s like the thriving, glowy bit that exists somewhere in my core begins to shrivel up like when you put an aluminum can in a fire. At first you can’t see the difference, but after a bit, the outside starts crumpling inward. The bright colors fade into ashen grays, and the metal begins to collapse in on itself until it’s nothing but an empty, thin shell of rubbish.
This is not to say that my writing all comes from a shiny soda can in my heart, but I believe you get the point.
The part that holds the words reacts in a sort of inverse relationship to that crinkling can. If I don’t write, all those words pour into an inner page. They get jammed on top of one another. They jostle each other. They press down too hard and pebble the backside of the page. Over and over it happens while my can is wrinkling and I’m going about “normal” life. Those word pile up until they cannot be contained anymore. It’s like the more of them that fill that page, the more they transmogrify it into a pulsing, breathing being that flexes its muscles as the millions of built up words in varying degrees of pen and pencil scroll across its skin — until it erupts out of me.
I’m supposed to write every day, you see. I could show you a shelf of journals I kept over the years. It was long ago I realized that I had to write. I needed to write. Those words needed to come out before I collapsed in on myself or exploded or did both at once.
That’s where Mr. David Eddings comes in. Because he said it so well, I’m not going to paraphrase his perfect words. I’m going to offer them to you with a scarlet ribbon trailing down the side of a white package, a package that holds a slight shimmer when you turn it this way or that. It’s for you to tug on that ribbon and peel back that gold-kissed paper and see what he has to say. So here it is. Go ahead. Take it.
This is what I was talking about earlier when I suggested most aspiring fantasists will lose heart fairly early on. I was in my mid-teens when I discovered that I was a writer. Notice that I didn’t say “wanted to be a writer.” “Want” has almost nothing to do with it. It’s either there or it isn’t. If you happen to be one, you’re stuck with it. You’ll write whether you get paid for it or not. You won’t be able to help yourself. When it’s going well, it’s like reaching up into heaven and pulling down fire. It’s better than any dope you can buy. When it’s not going well, it’s much like giving birth to a baby elephant.
That’s why it doesn’t matter if people think we have zero chances of success in these fields. It doesn’t matter if today was me spending an hour in labor to birth this baby elephant instead of pulling down fire from the sky. The fire will come back another time.
Until then, gentle viewers, be writers.
I of course couldn't end this without a picture of a baby elephant. See how adorable! Image via Wikipedia
Like this:
In Which Emmie Makes a Novel Pie
Today I made a pie.
I got the urge the other day. Which was strange, because a pie-making urge is not one of my normal desires.
I was making a carbonara penne for dinner, and the recipe told me to discard the three unused egg whites. I immediately felt insulted and decided they would better be used as a meringue. So today, what did I do? I rolled out of bed, had some Honey Nut Cheerios, finished Robopocalypse, and made a lemon meringue pie. Like ya do.
That's me. Image via watchmelooseit.com.
I constructed my pie crust by the recipe in my Newlywed Cookbook (we suddenly have several of these) and chilled it as specified. I rolled it out and plunked it into my pan after tinkering with sugar and cornstarch and lemon juice for a bit, only to discover that the crust didn’t quite reach the edges of the pan.
No worries, I thought. I just pinched the edges and popped that bad boy in the oven.
Silly, silly Emmie.
When it came out, it resembled a small child hiding under a blanket on a large bed. The edges of the crust didn’t quite reach the edges of the pan when it went in, but now it had sunk into the belly of the pan completely. I should have looked at the measurements of the pan — I suspect it’s 10 inches instead of 9.
I gritted my teeth and finished the pie anyway. My filling and meringue look beautiful (and taste addicting).
The point of all of this is that a pie crust is a structure, much like the development of a novel. Even if you have all the ingredients right (plot, characters, setting, conflict, tension, climax, denouement, etc.), sometimes you find that your pan is just too large. Or too small. And that your story flaps around outside it or bubbles up inside in a way that might taste pretty good still, but when held up to the scrutiny of readers and critics would lose marks for presence and basic things.
In the revision of Primeval, those things are what I’m looking for. I’m going back to measure the pan, calculate the ingredients, and make sure that the recipe I’m using creates just enough pie crust to look like this:
Mine won't look this perty. :/ Image via Wikipedia
Why the trouble? If you have all the ingredients right and it tastes pretty good, why worry about the structure?
Because it’s not as good as it can be.
When you take the road to publication, and you want your novel to wow readers and climb the charts and establish a career for you, it needs to be as good as it can be. Without the proper structure and base, your story might look pretty good on the outside, but people who know stories will know something’s off. They’ll know you skimped on the pie crust and covered it with meringue to hide it. They’ll know that happened because you were too lazy to check a couple facts before presenting it.
Perhaps that’s a bit harsh. Everything has a few mistakes — growing up, my NeeNee (my mother’s partner) taught me a lot about cooking and art and life. That woman could make a delicious, beautiful pie crust. She created beautiful beaded hair clips and leatherwork. She taught me that in many Native American cultures, artists will add a mistake even if there isn’t one because nothing can be perfect. As writers, we don’t have to worry about adding a mistake — we can be well assured one will be in there regardless of how many edits we go through. But we can’t make a beautiful story without the right structure.
My pie looks mostly pretty, but if you look closely, something's missing.
My pie will probably taste great. But it’s missing something vital. It’s missing that golden brown ruffle around the edges that its real structure would lend to it. That finishing rim that shows I put in the work to make this pie not only serviceable, but presentable. Something to be proud of.
So the goal for me is to not be lazy. To read the instructions and follow them. To make certain that my novel pie has a visible, golden, flaky crust. That its insides are gooey and melt in your mouth. That the meringue on top is crisp and lightly browned. That all the elements that make up my story come together in a harmonious blend that leaves readers no choice but to beg for another slice…and another.
Would you like some pie?
Related articles
- Yes! Lemon Meringue Pie for Dinner! (explodingpotatoes.wordpress.com)
- Coconut Cream Pie (threegirlscook.wordpress.com)
Like this:
Tick, Tock
My boss seems to hate my writing.
This is what I picture. Yes, that's you, Mr. Manager. Image via the all-knowing icanhascheezburger.com
At least, when I look at the schedule for the next ten days, it feels that way. No, no. I don’t really think he sits there writing the schedule, drumming his fingertips together and grinning in malicious glee as he schedules me seven shifts for the upcoming week, but that’s what happened anyway.
And today, I have to be at work at 4, which is in a little over two hours. I’ll be there till about 3 a.m. and then return at 11:30, and I will remain there until 11 at night. So when am I going to write?
The point of this isn’t to bemoan my schedule or to violate the terms of the “Acceptable Social Media Usage” section of my employee handbook — the point is that all writers have scheduling issues. All of us have families, friends, commitments, puking dogs and/or children, car trouble, a significant other who missed the bus, late shifts at work, and precious, precious moments to be used writing.
That’s precisely why the monsters in yesterday’s post are so insidious — they infect our shining treasure that is time.
If you’re anything like me, you would rather spend your days just writing. You probably slump a little bit each time a large bill or rent is due, wishing you could hand your landlord or Verizon a completed section of your novel in lieu of a check. But for most of us at this stage, it doesn’t work that way.
Put the time in the bowl. And we won't have a problem. Image property of Tristar Entertainment.
We stare out into the quickly ticking clocks of the world asking if we could just have some more time. Time won’t wait for us. We have to make it do what we need it to. Which brings me today, as that blasted clock keeps moving closer to 4.
I have about forty chapters of novel to organize and revise, and less time to do it in. Which means I have some decisions to make. Home is a comfortable place, and my desk chair is decidedly not. It hurts my butt and strains my neck, which makes me all too apt to stay in my living room on our cloud-like bed sofa. The problem is that my computer has been effectively turned into a desktop because the battery is like an alcoholic in withdrawal. If I unplug it, it gets the shakes, it moans, and then it shudders and passes out.
Because of that, here I am at my cluttered desk, looking at a prescription bag, a hefty pile of notebooks and books, a rainbow flag someone gave me at D.C. Pride a couple years ago, and a sheet of Toy Story stamps half-obscured by a CVS bag. My husband hates this room. My desk has never been an organized place.
In spite of its foibles, this is where I need to will myself to be for the next several weeks. I am committed to making something happen in January with my novel, whether an agent asks me to send her a query or simply tells me to scrap the idea. Something to move me forward.
It’s that commitment that sets me in a race against the ticking of the clock. It’s the drive to write set against Einstein — we all know that it ticks faster when there’s work to be done and a deadline to meet. And so, gentle viewers, today I want to ask you to take on the clock with me.
How many of you struggle to get your word count goals or revision goals finished with your schedule? How many of you feel like the clock is always set against you? For the month of December, this is my challenge: to create a polished product to present to agents. Yours is probably a different goal, and you might well whine at me for making this a December thing. It’s the holiday season — believe me, I know there are other demands on your time in addition to your normal schedules.
That’s why it’s a challenge, isn’t it?
I have an hour and a half to get ready for work, to eat something, and to format a few more chapters into Scrivener. I’m going to challenge myself. Will you?
Let’s show that clock (and December) who’s boss.
Like this guy. For realsies. Own this image like Chartoff-Winkler Productions does. Be the image.
Like this:
Horrors of Writing: The Things That Go Bump
Ms. Jess Brown’s post about Procrastination, Fear, and Big-Foreheaded Witches rather inspired me. I was thinking about the things that dog our steps as writers, thinking about a lot of the comments and dismayed head-to-wall sounds I’ve heard over the years, and I decided that monsters exist.
If you, gentle viewer, have chosen to take the path of a writer, you have opted for a lonely path. An often solitary path. One through a tangled jungle in the center of a raging hurricane with only a canoe and your little toolbox to see you through. There are monsters in these parts. Big ones.
There are several little impy monsters that run around as well, but today, we’ll just talk about three of them. The Ego Monster, the Procrastinate Monster, and everyone’s favorite peach, the Regection Monster. (If you’re wondering why I spelled it that way, you clearly need to click this link, something like now.)
Let’s start with the Ego Monster.
I wish my monsters all were Nathan Fillion. Image via reeksofapathy.tumblr.com, but it's property of Joss Whedon.
Okay, so if you’re anything like me, your monster doesn’t look like this most of the time. Sure there are probably moments when you envision yourself as the next Jo Rowling or Janet Evanovich, but for most of us, I think our Ego monsters look a little more like this:
Shudder. Blame this horrifying image on advisormarketingsuccess.com.
I think we’re all familiar with this guy. He’s the one chasing you through the jungle telling you that not only will you not be the next Jo Rowling, but you could never even manage to pull off being the next Numa Numa guy, because you’re lousy and smelly and no one will every want to read what you have to say, not even if you get past the Poom stage.
In spite of the differences, the Ego Monster is all one beast. I’m sure we’ve all heard the quote that says that “only bad writers think their writing is really good.” I don’t entirely agree with Anne Enright on that one, but I do concede the point that if someone waxes eloquent about how their work is better than Shakespeare, it’s safe to say they’re the one shaking a spear. (Okay, that was reaching.)
The next monster is the Procrastinate Monster.
Don't let the face fool you. Image of this monster from goodwp.com
I know, I know.
Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
Stop it.
The most insidious thing about the Procrastinate Monster is that it looks so innocuous. Cute, even. Look at it. Don’t you just want to…stick your face in its fur?
NO!
You can’t do that. Because if you do that, you won’t be writing. And you’re supposed to be writing!
Besides, that cute little puppy’s actual form is this:
Not so cute anymore, is it? IS IT? Image property of Universal Studios, via drafthouse.com
Again, I say shudder.
The final monster of the day is the Regection Monster. For many of us, he might both be the most prolific monster and the most terrifying.
"You have fruit punch mouth." Image created and owned by the fabulous Trev Murphy. See note below.
This monster looks terrifying. He’s got your blood all over his face from sinking his teeth into you over and over again, for god’s sake. And yet, I know something about this monster. A secret.
Come a little closer, and I’ll show you.
Gachnar, the Fear/Regection Demon. Image from buffy.wikia.com
The secret behind the Regection Monster is his caption.
Fir Meit.
It means “Actual Size.”
You see, the nice thing about monsters, is that you can kick their butts. That little Regection Monster is squashable. Donald Trump the Ego Monster (oh, in so many ways) will probably go down with a good right hook or an uppercut. Captain Hammer will disappear if you bring out your inner Doctor Horrible, and as for the Procrastination Monster — its weak spot is seeing it for what it truly is.
It’s not a fuzzy little husky puppy begging for you to snuzzle it.
It’s a vicious, body-stealing, slimy, grotesque monster that wants to shove its tentacles through you until you can’t do anything anymore, let alone write.
Those are the horrors of writing. Yeah, I know they’re scary — but they can be fought.
Now go write.
***As promised, a note about that last picture. I discovered the creator, Trev Murphy, sort of by accident. His work is phenomenal, and I very much enjoyed checking out his website. He has his own website, and you can also find him on DeviantArt and all the requisite social media sites. You can visit his website, which is trevmurphy.com – I hope you all go show him some love.***
Like this:
Crash, Crash, Boom
That’s the sound of my Scrivener Beta tonight. I got all excited thinking that today I could get my NaNo winner’s discounted full version, only to be punctured with a big, shiny pin that has “DECEMBER 2″ engraved across its length.
My hopes and dreams, as depicted by www.loveourcanucks.com.
I’ve been working away in spite of the many (many, many) times Scrivener has crashed on me. I’m awfully lucky it saves all the time. Aside from its seeming inability to stay open for more than thirty minutes at a time, I love Scrivener. I love that I can separate my beast of a novel into chapters and further into scenes. That’s what has occupied my time for the last couple hours, along with fixing some punctuation that didn’t import correctly with the rest of the file. It organizes everything neatly into easy-to-manage bits instead of having to wield a novel and try to edit the thing like trying to sculpt Mount Rushmore with a hammer and a chisel.
Get out your tools. Image via Encyclopedia Brittanica, credit Getty Images.
As I have a heap of work to do on this monstrosity in the next fifty days (!!!), I love the features that allow me to move around those chunks of text within the manuscript and restructure things, insert others, and just generally act like you are writing with building blocks instead of 120,000+ words that need painstakingly detailed arrangement.
Much easier. Image via www.startbreakingfree.com
In short, I love it. I can’t wait to get my NaNo winner’s discounted full version tomorrow. (Grumble, grumble — wanted it today.) I just hope it doesn’t bug out on me after I install the full version. Even if it does, I tweeted the company, and got a response in seconds letting me know that there is a responsive support staff available, so that makes me more confident.
I’m really itching to get this novel polished and pretty. I know it’s a lot to expect in 50 days (again I say !!!), but I feel pretty confident that I can make it happen. Here’s what’s going on in this revision:
1. Name changes. I realized, much to my dismay, that a few of my character names bore resemblance to other series’ characters, and I changed the name of my protagonist from Sarah to Tarah (pronounced TAR-uh). It’s close enough that I won’t sit in a befuddled wash of confusion trying to remember what to type, but sounds different pronounced. I also changed another character’s name from Damon to Gabriel. He’s a Big Bad, and as his back story is entwined with a character named Elaine’s, he needed to change. (Growl, Vampire Diaries.) Luckily, those sorts of changes are as simple as running a quick Find and Replace. Done and done.
2. Switching my underlines to italics. So once upon a time (and verified today), I read that agents and publishers prefer to have paper manuscripts formatted in Courier font with underlining instead of italics because of some very important reason that has slipped my mind at the moment. When I wrote the second draft of Primeval, that’s exactly what I did in an effort to save myself the inevitable migraine I get when trying to format a large document in Word in one fell swoop. Then I read that most don’t care as long as the font is legible (I’m sticking with Courier to play it safe), and that italics are okay. I’ll venture out into italics, because underlining looks stupid to my eyes.
3. Structure. I know. Ouch. This is supposed to be the polishing draft, no? Why am I doing a major structural revision? Well, a couple reasons. *Big Announcer Voice* Are you ready for bullet points?!
Get it? Bullets, with points. Get it?!! These ones came from portwallpaper.com
- I have three acts, but the climax fell into a weird place.
- I have no Big Bad to defeat, really. It’s a trilogy, so the ultimate Big Bad won’t be defeated till the last book, and Mr. Gabriel is necessary to keep around for a while because he is deliciously fun to write and has some parts to play later on.
- I want my books to sell, and the (possibly unfortunate) truth about that is that you have to bow to the Gods of Structure if you want that to happen. Structure Scripture dictates that your protagonist defeats a Big Bad, even if there’s going to be a Bigger Bad next time around. I’m not saying it’s impossible to buck that trend, but let’s face it. When did you last read a bestseller that left the primary antagonist sitting around picking his nose at the end?
Suffice it to say that I’ve gots me work cut out for me. Now if I can keep my new toy open, I’m going to get back to work.
Have a lovely evening, gentle viewers, and try not to pick your noses too much.
Like this:
The Pyramid of Glasses
I just finished The Hunger Games trilogy and loved it. Even the things that the critics have used to skewer pieces of it didn’t bother me. I thought that it wrapped things up in a way that, while perhaps not 100% thorough, were believable in the context of the story. And now I’m back to a book the Science Fiction Book Club sent me a while back, Robopacalypse.
I like the book a lot so far. It’s a classic sort of diorama for a story — humanity versus machine, and it’s told in a similar style to World War Z, as an oral history of sorts. I was reading along today, completely engrossed, when this blog post sneaked up behind me and goosed me.
Actually, it was more like it burst the bubble of story that had walled me off into that world. And it wasn’t so much the blog post as the reason I’m writing it. Some people call it suspension of disbelief, others building a world or staying in character.
I call it the Pyramid of Glasses.
When you write fiction, each sentence you write needs to reside, breathing and beating within the world of your story. Each word, each phrase, each sentence adds a glass, painstakingly constructing this shining pyramid.
Photo by javno192
With every word we write, we build. We lay the foundation, then add on the layers, the multi-faceted texturing and dimensionality of our stories. Today I was reading a vignette in Robopocalypse where a teenager in London was outsmarted by his own cleverness and discovered that his elaborate pranks had inadvertently led him into quicksand — quicksand inhabited by an entity of malicious artificial intelligence. His dialogue is convincing — I actually took note of how the nuances of speech reminded me so much of my time in London.
And then I saw the unstable glass that brought the entire pyramid crashing down a split second later into splinters of glittering jagged edges.
Not champagne glasses, but you get the point. Photo by Ken Tuvman
What was it, you ask? What burst the bubble and knocked the teetering glass over to start the avalanche and buried my suspension of disbelief? It went like this:
“I was f—g brilliant, Lurker. I called the headquarters of the Associated Press and spoofed my phone as the Bombay consulate. I posed as a bloody Indian reporter calling from –”
“That’s great, mate. Fantastic. You want a f—-g cookie?”
Record scratch.
Pyramid gone. Pile of broken glass. Did you catch it? If you’re familiar with English speech patterns at all, you probably did.
British people don’t have cookies. They have biscuits. That one little word ruined my moment. Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite fond of cookies — but in all the time I’ve spent in Scotland and London, I’ve never heard one of the natives use the word in normal speech.
You see, some people might gloss over that sort of thing. The editor didn’t catch it. The author didn’t catch it. But it’s the author’s job to catch it. It’s the author’s job — that’s you — to make your Pyramid of Glasses shining, stunning, and flawless. No teetery bits that can send the lot of it crashing to the ground.
I can accept that perhaps the word is becoming more common, as language tends to fluctuate and transmogrify itself into a new beast when it comes in contact with media and outside influences, but it still strikes me as a very out of place word. And as a reader, you can’t really control when the world of the story you’re reading comes crashing down. Plot holes do it too — like if a character’s car is totaled and she has no time to get a rental, but somehow drives to a meeting the next day. It is a record scratch. It stops forward momentum, and while you can get it back, it’s far better to just weed that stuff out from the start of it.
The average little plot hole is just a bump in the road, but it can grow if you don’t pay attention to it. Writers have to be even more cognizant of subjects they are less than familiar with, and dialects of characters are a huge part of that. My stories have a few Scots in them. Before I ever let my book go to press, I am going to make it my mission to have a few Scots read it, just to make sure that the language is correct. The same goes for the Polish bits (except for the part about having Scots read over those bits). As we write, it’s our job to be as meticulous and painstaking as possible as we pile those glasses on top of one another. If we’re lazy, it will all come crashing down around our readers’ ankles. It’s a fickle thing, but carelessness with our pyramids can turn a potential bestseller into a C-list out of print mass market paperback.
It’s far from impossible to build a Pyramid of Glasses — you know your world the best, and you have the means to explore the glasses that have uneven stems or cracked bases. Repair them or replace them.
