If too many cooks spoil the broth, what do too many writers do?

We have fun...and maybe some frustration, but mostly fun!

After months of pretty good activity, my little writer's group got an infusion of new blood from the larger group.  I don't know how twice as many people translated in half as many posts, but it did.  Poking Julie (the muse and task master) to have something for the group next month, we found we're in the same boat--working on edits with nothing else we're prepared to share. 

A couple of jokes later and we started to work on a pretty serious collaboration.  

My experience working with other writers pretty much consisted of two childhood friends and I doing rounds for a few pages and then not, and with my husband who lays out fantastic story ideas and then decides that his work there is done.  Yep.  I've had experience in *not* collaborating. 

I went in search of advice on the web and found a ton of crap.  But knowing I'd seen something worth while out there, I went through a few blog archives until I found Holly Lisle's How To (and how not to).  It covers the obvious issues of who writes what, and also the the business aspects that you might not consider when you think, "Hey, won't this be fun!"  And Julie linked me to the two authors writing as one Moira Rogers--a good look at joint writing from a pair successfully doing it.  

For me, the last 24+ hours  have been a crash course in compromise.  It certainly started easy: she took my not-really-kidding joke seriously and we discussed genre, then narrowed down the genre elements.  For good or for ill, I "said", I've had this idea that fits, but I've never fully developed it.  Instant progress!  But as we developed the idea, it went places I would never take it.  That was a little less fun.  But part of collaborating is having that fresh mindset and seeing beyond your own point of view, right?  Right.  

It got later.  She presented me with a host of ideas for the main character that, if I saw them on the back of a book cover, I'd put it back on the shelf and look for something better.  I knew, even in my tired and grumpy state, that "better" really translates into "more my taste," but tired for me translates into bitchy, so I think I just projected, "You're wrong."  Lucky for our friendship, if not for my mood, being sleepy becomes being silly for Julie, so the ideas she gave got more and more humorously away from what we were trying to do, but she never told me to go to hell.

Sleep came to our rescue.  In the morning, destructive personality quirks were gone and we were able to get down to business; for me, that meant I could articulate the flaws I saw in certain things and stop holding on to others that kept my world from becoming ours.  After a few hours, magic happened--we'd type the same thing at the same time, like old friends who knew each other's mind.  Then we were back to negotiating, 'cause this stuff isn't easy.

If you must be distracted, may it be by books!

I should not have started reading the sequels I ordered, but I couldn't help myself.  At first, I used them as rewards: finish some bit of homework and I could read a few chapters of Jabril.  Fortunately, I got a lot of work done before I reached the point that I couldn't put it down.  Now I've gobbled up all three, and I think I'm having Seanan McGuire withdrawal.  Not that the others weren't great, too, mind.  But finishing A Local Habitation had me walking around the house like a junkie, as though if I looked long and hard enough, I'd find the remnants of some former stash (or, ah, the next book would just appear in my apartment, four months before it's supposed to hit the bookstores).



In my original Raphael post, I wrote: "Cynthia Leighton is an ex-cop P.I.--I know, I know, been there done that.  BUT she's her own character, not a rip-off of any P.I.'s we've seen before.  She's "smart, tough, and sexy" without crossing the line into obnoxious.  When a certain powerful vampire (and yes, he's a hottie alpha male) hires her, she holds her own against the creatures of the night with her brain and a few high calibur weapons, and without losing her humanity."


Hmnph.  I so hate spoiling anything that my "reviews" are terribly vague.  It's worse for sequels, generally, since telling you about them may reveal something you wanted to find out for yourself from book one.  Can I be more detailed without giving things away?  Maybe.  I'll tell you this: Jabril doesn't disappoint--in fact, the danger was pushed to a higher level.  Cyn gets called to Texas to find a missing girl, only to discover that the girl, and the sister still trapped by the vampire that hired her, need to be rescued.  She's in strange territory and working under circumstances where even winning might mean her death.  


For those of us who read a lot of paranormal/urban fantasy, there's a little voice in our minds going, "Yeah, sure.  Even if she 'dies', she'll survive."  But the mortal danger to the girls, and the possibility of other damage to Cyn, was so real that I was held captive until the end.


 
My post for Blue Diablo (click to go to it) was more detailed, so I'll let that stand. Hell Fire (Corine Solomon, Book 2) gave me pause.  It seemed a little more "American Gothic" than I was in the mood for reading.  Though delving past the preview chapter left me with that same sense, in typical Ann Aguirre fashion, the book was just too good to set aside for something else.  Corine made a deal with Chance in Blue Diablo--if she helped him with his problem, he would help her discover who killed her mother and why.  In Hell Fire, he makes good on that promise.  


Kilmer, Georgia has more secrets than the mystery behind Corine's mother's death, and someone is ready to kill to keep them.  The town seems lost in time--so cut off that neighboring towns don't even know it exists.  Something dark and hungry haunts the woods around Kilmer.  While it reads more like horror than urban fantasy, it's a damn fine story.  The only draw back is an ending that makes you want to know what happens next NOW, but the book three won't be out until April 2011.


 
Of Rosemary and Rue, I originally wrote: "It struck me as a fantastic blend of the "old" urban fantasy with its emphasis on the mythic and the "new" hard-boiled/kick-ass urban fantasy."  October Daye was...a Changeling knight, a P.I., a wife, a mother... At the start of her story, she's on the case for her liege lord, thinking she'll be home in time for dinner.  Caught in a fairy trap, October becomes lost to the world for fourteen years.  Unable to understand what happened, her human husband and child want nothing to do with Toby.  Faerie wants her back, but having lost so much to it, she refuses.  A spelled phone call takes the choice away from her; Toby must solve a murder mystery or die herself.


See?  That's the problem with reviews...with the appearance of book two, you know that Toby lives.  What you really should know is that this is a world where the magic of Faerie is alive but hidden in the streets of San Francisco.  Kelpies lurk in foggy shadows ready to run into the sea with anyone foolish enough to ride them.  The King of Cats slinks through alleyways and a flock of pixies makes its home in the produce section of a local supermarket.  


Did I mention I'm going through withdrawals?  Finishing any good book makes me want to read more by the author, but Seanan McGuire has become an instant favorite.  I don't know how I'm going to make it until book three's release in September!

Kill your distractions!

Well, don't kill all your distractions; I love my family and murder is illegal, so I'll just continue to grumble at them.  But the others...

For me, it's people being wrong on the internet.  There's a graphic out there for that somewhere, but finding it would be just another distraction...

I wake with coffee and the internet on weekends (I can't spare the time Mon-Fri).  Mostly it's seeing what witty thing my brother has posted as his Facebook status or reading the political battles between old high school "friends" that have landed on the far left and far right with a libertarian (big L, in my mind) in the mix to make it worth my time.  But today, I clicked over to Livejournal, too.

Oh, my!  One link lead to another, and another, until I was reading the long Tweet by Tweet (by post, by comment, by...) of how Neil Gaiman is a racist asshole--you know, if you choose to take his words completely out of context to further your (albeit worthy) agenda.  I managed, just barely, to keep myself from writing, "yes, but what you're saying has nothing to do with what he was talking about."  He's a big boy, who replied for himself, not to mention his many fans.  Still that controversy and the one that lead me to it lasted through several cups of coffee, getting the girl dressed for the day, moving on to a whole other meal...

If I don't kill it, I won't get any of the research done that I need for my academic survivial, nor the revisions written that I need for a healthy psyche. 

Ordering Jabril, A Local Habitation: An October Daye Novel, and Hell Fire (Corine Solomon, Book 2) (yay sequils!) helped, and writing this out helped more.  Baking with the Wee One should put the final nail in the distraction's coffin, and I will be free--once she's settled--to get down to some serious writing.

What are your distractions and how do you kill them?

Update...

...because it's awful when so much time passes between posts.

Nearing the end of the semester, and all things academic are coming at me fast.  Little time for anything outside of that and mommydom, BUT... I've got the feedback from Ms. Beta Reader Supreme, so I'm slipping in revisions.

More to come!

Late night posting...or....what week is this again?

As I write, my clock just hit 1am.  I feel like I'm type-whispering.  Shhh...

My mind's a jumble, but I'll try and spin a few things out coherently.  Last thing first: after I tweaked the layout*, I went bouncing about to catch up on a few things.  Brooke, from the aptly named Brooke Reviews, has a new post spotlighting Anton Strout's urban fantasy series.  Yay!  Not only do I like seeing other people's points of view, but I wanted to link this one because I prefer it to my own.  Strout's cool.  Granted, I know him only so well as you know anyone you've never met whose words you read every other day in passing, but I appreciate his online persona.  I don't necessarily appreciate his fiction, so I point you to Brooke.

 Dead To Me starts off with a brilliant opening scene that manages to be hillarious at the same time that it's informative and even touching.  Speaking of touching...(::waggles brows::) Simon's a psychometrist.  He touches an object and knows it's history--that came in useful in his earlier life as a thief, but catching flashbacks of your would-be-lover's past hot fling will keep you single.  Unfortunately, reading the book, I felt like each time I scratched the surface, I found a lot more surface.  The geek in me requires a certain amount of detail that Strout didn't provide.  Go judge for yourself!
__________________________

It's 12 hours later, and my mind is no less jumbled. 
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Seven and a half hours later still...and I'm less jumbled.  I was going to post about gender in response to the last line of Brooke's review.  And then I was going to write about race because I stumbled upon this while looking for something else completely. 

Before and after, I had coffee, fed the kid, showered, bathed her, sketched out the 1000 words of imaginary history I have to write by 11am tomorrow (and glad I took another look at that since the deadline has been moved up an hour), did too many other wife/mommy things to jot down, took the kid out with Grandma, came back, and tried to focus on two things at once until my Task Master beat me over the head and got me writing.

So let's talk about writing buddies!  A year ago, I wrote my plug for joining a writer's group.  In general, I think they're a good idea so long as you find one that works for you.  If you find one where everyone just loves everything you write and you don't need any corrections because you're just so fab, run.  Ditto if you find yourself in one in which all the "encouragement" feels like a punch in the gut. You don't need a group that will hold you back either by giving fake critiques that never show you what to improve or one that's so critical that you end up feeling that suck beyond any chance of improvement.

Maybe you don't need a "group" at all.  I appreciate everything I've learned in mine, but it's got a serious draw back.  You can post one chapter/section of writing a month, 3,500 words or fewer.  Sometimes, you can't wait (grabbing the nearest book to me) a year and a season to have your work critiqued.  If learning to look critically at my own work is the best thing I got from the OWG, Julie comes in right after...As my muse, she's there to bounce ideas off of and to take the work I've been staring at until gray matter began to leek from my ears (ok, only in my imagination) to view it with fresh eyes.  As my task master, she's bullied me er, encouraged me to set a 200 hundred word goal a day**--something small enough that I can slip it in around all the student/mommy/wife stuff.  Sometimes I get to the goal and think, "great, that much more crap to delete later."  But sometimes, I get there, have plenty more to say, and keep going.
In the comments for my last (real) entry, the man behind Falcata Times wrote:

Great blog and one that is always of use especially when writing is concerned as it does feel at times that you're the proverbial hermit stuck in the cave with no other contact.

How sweet was that? I'm glad that this is being received in the spirit in which it's offered.  And that reminds that before the OWG and task master Julie, there was a blog that I read religiously.  She'd post her word counts and I'd try to keep up, as well as picking up any tidbits of writing advice.  Maybe that's where you are now; there's nothing wrong with keeping your writing to yourself for a while longer.  But while you're interacting on the internet or with other friends in your real life who like to write as well, keep your eyes out for that person who gets what you're going through, and who may be willing to help you get to the next phase.



*Yay Blogger for finally offering something better than the lame-ass templets of yesterday.  Miserable with them, I'd tried for an outside source.  It was lovely...and it ate a lot of my old info (...and if your blog was some of that info swallowed from the original Blog roll, drop me a line).

**While she dragged me to 200 words earlier (I spent a lot of time staring at the screen; every once in a while, she'd IM me her word count--usually something like 580--and I'd reply with mine--usually something like 31) she told me she had something for me to see once I reached goal.  Seems I'm not alone in taking my bite sized chunks.

Insert blog post here

I'm late.  I'm off.  I'm...

Um, you know.  I'll catch up tomorrow.  Um..or so.

Things I found wandering around book industry blogs...

Agent Janet Reid tells us to make MORE mistakes, not fewer--great advice for any of us who's fear of "not getting it right" has kept us from getting anywhere at all. 

I've had mixed feelings about starting Wade's story.  On the one hand, I was itching to write, but on the other, any story that I've gotten anywhere on has come from some flash of inspiration, not by following an outline alone.  I pushed out the intro, but since have been writing a line at a time...Seriously...a line, then maybe doing four hours worth of laundry or catching up on Lost or whatever, then coming back to force another line out.  I've been keeping Reid's post in mind to get me to not junk the whole project in order to wait (foolishly) for the type of inspiration I require.

So it doesn't thrill me.  The opening does what I need it to do, and I can edit it into literary joy-joys later.  Maybe it feels like a mistake, but I need to get through it to produce something better.

I've been casually watching Jim C. Hines gather information for a survey of how writer's broke into publishing.  Here's his first results post, complete with graphs!  While the first entry deals with how the writers in his survey broke in--short stories first, no short stories, agent or direct to publisher--the second covers how long it took. 

As you can guess from scattered reviews of books that have just come out mingled with long running series and things that are just new to me, I don't spend a lot of time worrying about what's next on the horizon.  Still, it's nice to get a heads up from time to time.  The lovely Tez has a list of April releases that reminds me to put two of my favorite authors' work back on top of my TBR list, and informs me that another favorite has turned to Young Adult books--something I'll be sure to check out.