Strange young adult kinda dream

I was young, pretty, white.  I loved him and he was gone, my only lead--only REAL lead--a phone number.  So I dialed and found this weird network like nothing I ever experienced before.  And it wasn't him, but I was closer.  I dialed again and again, til I had to take a break.  I didn't like going out of his room, seeing his family trying to be normal while I was a stranger in their home so nothing could be normal.  Mom cooked, twin boys tried to play only to freeze when they saw me.  He got his parents to say yes to my coming by promising I'd stay in the kid sister's room, but I haven't done that since he disappeared and she looks at me with this longing like I'm still supposed to still stay up late braiding her hair and whispering Older Girl secrets.  Kid brother's worst of all cuz he's just a couple of years younger than us, all punk rock/skater hot and getting closer to me while we looked for HIM.


I'm getting out of that house and freeing us all, but just one more round of calls.  I hide out in the bathroom upstairs and dial.  There's an answer, it sounds like a party, and I thinking YES!  I'll be pissed when he answers, demand why he didn't just say that things were too intense...or no, I love him so much I can let him go without that scene if he just picks up the phone....But I see IT, one of the visions I'd had through all the phone calls, this a repeat of the first where he's walking along the shoulder of a dark road and van pulls up, he gets in, and vanishes...


There's a clicking sound on the phone and the party noises disappear.  The phone pressed to my ear rings as though I'd just dialed a number, and I can hear the echo of a phone ringing somewhere in the house.  My stomach seems to drop, an shadow of the sinking feeling felt throughout my soul.  Both rings stop and I'm already moving to hang up before I hear the little sister answer the phone.


There's a knock.  "Come in."  I'm scrubbing at my eyes when kid brother walks in, seriously hot, but not the one.  He holds up a portable phone.  "Were you...calling the house phone from a house phone? How is that possible?"


.....That last bit's not true.  It's already morphed in the recording.  It WAS the same number, so the best I should have gotten would have voice mail, but that's not what he said.  It had been something about Lucy thinking I might need something...I said, "Um?  Toilet paper?" and we both looked at the roll--not full, but full enough so that if I needed more I was probably about to go through something no one wanted in their bathroom.  I shared a smile with him, but it was almost like there were two of me--the one sharing a moment with him and the one still totally engrossed by the search for HIM.


The dream ended with flashes of vision and...a Damien Rice song playing on loop. 


______________________________________________


The dream that I had left this page open to write about was kind of like that.  In a way, it was totally different--the woman I was in then was more solidly grown, a woman of color.  There had been less urgency with no missing lover.  But it was the sort that, upon waking, I knew was a story, not some sort of working things out from real life.  I'd gotten up from that dream and wrote about it in a hard copy note book.  Then, I'd set about trying to build a plot around the character study I'd been given in my sleep.


That was about two weeks before NaNoWriMo had started.  We're a week into and I'l still trying to build a plot, plodding along well behind writing schedule.


There's still lingering urgency from this morning's dream.  I feel like I could figure out what was up with that phone network, and spend the day writing the book, each bit missing from the dream unraveling as I reach.  Reality's throwing cold water on that fantasy.  Having a lupus flare, I phoned in all of last week, so I cannot skip class today.  If I did, I would probably end up spending hours just trying to make sense of the phone thing alone, hours writing the opening (if I dove right in rather than hours spent outlining), and I'd hit the middle and run out of steam.


But it's recorded (shifts in tense and any other flaws) so I can come back and revisit this if I ever need/want to and you can see how this kinda, sorta works for me.  Sometimes.

No matter what I do, Friday keeps coming

Soon, school will begin again.  I'll need to get up around the time that's been passing as a bed time for me, and the whole cycle of not-sleep-enough, get up, get the kid ready for school, somehow manage to get myself ready for school, come home study/cook/find time to write then not-sleep-enough will begin on Monday.  I will join all the others who breathe a sigh of relief on hump day and eventually get to thank God it's Friday.

But for now, whether I settle onto the blog window or not, Friday means I'm looking at my writing productivity and lack of it.

....And, like now, sometimes that means I quickly do something else until Saturday.

That's not true, really.  It's not that I go into avoidance mode, it's that I get stuck in what I *have* to do--and how silly is that when I don't have to post here at all?  I don't have a boss who will pay me or not depending on what I produce.  Can't tell you how much I appreciate my recurring readers, but I don't think your weeks are incomplete until you check out my latest babble on reading and/or writing.

Theoretically, I could write about anything (hopefully, but hell, not necessarily within the scope of the blog).  Yet, I don't.  I think "I have to get this down" or "I've gotta tell them this" and "ugh, I haven't mentioned that project in a long time..."

And since I don't give a crap about any of that at the time, I go on to read someone else's blog(s) and watch a season of La Femme Nikita, or something.

My writing is like that, too.  The Hidden (generally known as Quinn's story to all you lovelies who have read chapters), might end up really being my first published novel....or it'll be the one in the bottom drawer forever (it doesn't suck, but it's got a fatal flaw that I may or may not be able to fix).  My need to have it ready for the world and sent out is a good one.  No one ever got published by leaving a work unrevised on her hard drive. But being unable to fix that flaw and unwilling to move on means nothing gets done.

Solution?  Do something.

Not just any something, since for me, that can mean playing three hours worth of Plants Vs. Zombies. But if I'd written down all the ideas that have come at any given time while I wasn't blogging, I'd have enough to post for the next two months.  While I was running around like a nut before my MiL came, I (in the true spirit of procrastination--in this case doing something productive to get out of doing something else productive) started two stories, each in a (slightly) different genre.

My new trick will be to build on that.  The next time I've got the kid in bed with hours to go before the spouse expects attention, and I'm NOT revising The Hidden,  I'll be writing something else.  Anything else, so long as  it's meant to be shared..no, sold.  I have a funny resistance come up when writing that, which tells me that I need to call on my inner Harlan Ellison*.

I am, have always been, a storyteller.  This is a truth of my being whether I ever make a living at it or not.  It's like being right handed; it just...is.  That gets all mixed up when the notion of money comes into play.  "You should be focusing on the work, the craft, your ability to entertain and, in the right circumstances to enlighten" meets "What?  Are you doing this for the money now?  If it's about money, you should just quit!"

Bullshit.  Yeah, the initial work needs to be for me, for the fun of a good story and the other joys I get from writing.  But if I *can* succeed at it, I *deserve* to be paid for my work, just like a builder or doctor.  Too many of us artsy types let ourselves believe that our work is worth less.  I'm officially taking myself out of that trap.

So...If three hours are scheduled to write fiction in hopes of a sale, then that's what's going to happen for three hours.  No blogging, gaming, or whatever instead.  If it's time to blog, then I'm blogging.  No fixating on blogging something I don't want to be bothered with because I got it stuck in my head that I HAVE post about that.  Got it?  Good.

*Ellison is famous for a lot of great spec fic writing, infamous for a couple of minor scandals that I don't currently care to seek out and link to, but perhaps best well known to me (besides for Deathbird Stories) for being out and loud about getting paid as a writer.

Breaking the Block

A week ago Thursday, I decided that the Friday-post-that-never-was should start with: "A year from now, I'm going to write a post filled with all the good advice that I don't know to use now."

Thinking of that, I realized how much advice I've taken in over the years.  And that advice you don't take isn't particularly helpful...

Everything, from seeing a shot of Vin Diesel as I channel surfed to waking up with the chorus of a once heard song in my head, has been giving me ideas for characters and setting.  Meanwhile, the collaboration was staring at me with accusing eyes and a stagnant word count.  I told myself to focus...and ended up playing a lot of Plants Vs. Zombies and Bejeweled. 

Growing desperate, I desperate, I dusted off the my copy of The Artist's Way and started to do an exercise that had given me success in the past.  It's a long term recovery sort of thing, so I also started to follow my own advice.  "Just one line."  I had a few days in a row where that's as far as I got on my little section of story.  Then someone had posted what I'd been ignoring: use the ideas that you have.  Instead of blocking out the inspiration that was coming to me and sitting on the story that was blocked, I wrote the ideas down.

It wasn't exactly a floodgate, but when I went to write "just one line" that afternoon, I was able to write to the end of the chapter.

Somewhere in there, you know, if you happen to be stuck, is my advice to you.

Connections...

When I was...a junior, maybe a sophomore...in high school, I hung out with this particular senior.  I don't think we had anything in common besides a love of Julian May books, but that isn't the point.  He lived on Beacon Hill, a place that circumstances had me near all the time, and he dragged me around one night.  He showed me his job--some shop that I no longer remember--and took me into the cellar to show me the tunnel that had been used first for the Underground Railroad.  It was, for a few feet in, anyway, just extra storage by then, but he said that there were lots of secret holes and tunnels in odd places about the Hill.  He had me at "secret."

My mind would wander to those tunnels over the years, wondering if they connected to the subway at any point, if Fairies had moved within like sidhe mounds now that they've been abandoned.  I've searched the net--you know, now that it's decades later and ordinary people can search the net, for info that's never there.

Beauty and the Beast - The Complete Series introduced me to ordinary (and in Vincent, not so ordinary) tunnel dwellers back in 1990, while Gaiman's Neverwhere: A Novel made the idea more magical, and took me to the rooftops and over suspension bridges in 1998.

This morning in the shower, for no reason in particular, I imagined a Boston where the fay rule the underground, urban shape shifters mingle with humanity in the streets, and vampires and angels fight for supremacy in the skyscrapers.

That's usually how it works for me.  Rather than a lightening bolt of inspiration that develops into a book, I have a spark, that might sit in my mind or in a notebook for years, meeting other sparks along the way until I have something to work with.  I have built stories from flashes of inspiration, but those are all waiting for pieces to make them whole, while the book that I'm revising to eventually send out came from bits and pieces collected over a good handful of years.

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.

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. 
__________________________

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.

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. 

Is it that time again?

I ache.  I'm trying to see it as a good thing since it's keeping me in when I'm supposed to be at a party.  How anti-social does that sound?  Fact is, I do tend to be hermit-like, but this is a kid's party for the nephew I see five or so days a week, and who assures me that I won't be missed tonight. At all.  (I was not too sick to throw pennies at him while he giggled at me.)

Anyhoo, this means I've got a little bit of time alone to write.  What should be recorded about the past week?

~I spent some time working from the villian's point of view; didn't get far.
~Itching to get started, I let someone talk me into doing sprints; discovered that is not my preferred way to begin a story, but it was still good to actually begin.
~It's possible to plot and "pants".  I think.  We'll see if I succeed.  But I need a solid knowledge of the first act--to actually see how it unfolds and what the details are, before I can outline the second act.  I'm thinking a little combination of technique is what I need.

Mostly, I need to get back to it.  Parting thoughts...

From my notes:
John Grisham's Ten Commandments:

(rumored to be sitting beside his typewriter)

Start with action. Explain it later.


Make it tough for your protagonist.


Plant it early. Pay it off later.


Give the protagonist the initiative.


Give the protagonist a personal stake.


Give the protagonist a short time list. Then shorten it again.


Choose your character according to your own capacities as well as his/hers.


Know your destination before you set out.


Don't rush in where angels fear to tread.


Don't write anything you wouldn't want to read.

pre-coffee process post

OK, I wrote the title then made a cup of coffee.  I couldn't take it.  I'm only a few sips in, so forgive me if I'm foggy.

I stayed up late working on the outline until it became staying up late not working on the outline, or at least hitting a certain block in the road and not making anymore progress.  Maybe my erstwhile title of Queen of the First Chapter should have been Queen of the First Act (all right, sure, maybe I was just a princess).  Up in the wee hours, I finally realized that I've stumbled in this same spot again and again; maybe it wasn't obvious before because I have managed to move a bit past in a story or two, only to hit the middle and stall out (even if I kept writing to the end).

Here's a wiki on Three Act Structure for anyone not familiar.  There are unboubtably better ones or ones more directed toward printed fiction, but again, first cuppa.

So I hit the end of Act One....and I got nothin'.  Zip.  Nada.  While outlining (rather than writing by the seat of my pants) leaves me a little vague on the opening scene--I know what should happen with none of my usual vision on just how it happens--at least I have something to go on.  I get to the end Act One...surely there's an organic "something" that'll rise out of the story....

...That until now has focused solely on the reactions and actions of my main character while the antagonist has sat thumb twittling in my notebook with just a wee bit of diabolical masterminding to get the ball rolling.

Good thing yah can't see me blush. 

The rest of Week 3..and a vampire!

Gotta be quick, 'cause I've been a bad, bad girl.  I cheated.  I should have studied more and rested more and done more story background.  It wasn't all naughtiness; I've been sick and dealing with sick child (who seems determined to defy gravity when my back is turned).  But I kept peeking at a book until I ended up reading it, so I feel like I've committed adultry against my school work, the books that were already in the queu to be read and reviewed, and my own story waiting to be born.

I'd hesitated getting Raphael, and not just because each of my classes demands an uber amount of reading.  The author and I had a...disagreement about a character in someone else's novel.  We were both speaking (well, writing) English, but her words made no sense to me...Until I realized that I was reading the urban fantasy the story's creator meant it to be but she was reading a paranormal romance.  Made me worry about how I would react to her characters.

No need for a genre rant (I've sworn off them, really) because I loved them.  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. 

Check it out.  Urban fantasy fans will find that the heat between Cyn and Raphael doesn't overpower the investigative plot, paranormal fans will find that the heat is worthy of their time.  Readers of either genre, or not hung up on genre at all, will find great character establishment and worldbuilding--a win for everyone.

Now I'm going to go peek at her web site for info on the next book before I finish plotting out my own act one.  See?  I'm still workin'.

Week 3, part of it anyway

Day One--
I woke to news of an earthquake in Chile.  One of my very best friends is in Chile, so I spent the morning...and afternoon...and early evening hovering about Facebook waiting for news.  I cursed her husband for dragging her down there for a season every year.  I cursed myself for not being psycho enough of a friend to have gotten in the way of that.  I prayed.  Now I'm writing this, not so that she'll read it someday and want to kick my ass, but because reading this someday might bring back that sense of moving from task to task, tearing up, coming back to the computer in case there's news...

What are those lines in the U2 song?  "Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill their inspiration/and sing about their grief."  I don't know about killing my inspiration, but now that the news has reached me that my girl is okay, I'll all right with mining those feelings later.

During my aimless wandering about the house, I turned on the TV (catching up on Past Lives via Hulu might have distracted too much from Facebook hovering).  There was an old episode of Grey's Anatomy playing a song that clicked...


One of my attempts at writing Wade happened during NaNo.  In those early hours of the month, recreating the story by the seat of my pants, I found her falling for the most inappropriate hero.  (As a total aside, that scene/storyline was surely born of the earlier mentioned best friend and I walking down a stone paved street in Austria and falling hopelessly for a gorgeous priest/monk as only teen-aged girls can do.  Almost 20 years later, it just appears in my writing.)  I'd been considering dropping it; it had been fun, but...That woman's voice and those lyrics told me keep that bit.  And that led to a few things that will have to happen...so plotting and the start of a soundtrack where I least expected it.

Day Two--I started off with some story work, but, knowing that I was clueless on a paper due Tuesday.  I wish I were still clueless.  It ate my whole day, and I still don't feel prepared to write the thing.  Or, to be more honest, I expect As out of my papers, and this material makes me feel like I'll produce a C.  I want to fight Andy Warhol, mostly because he's dead growling at him is less dangerous than growling at the man who will grade my assignment. 

I hear Nathan Fillion's voice in the other room, so I'll cut my bitching short and move on to...

Day Three--I've got many hours left on this day, but I stumbled on a post about a guy who has 11,000 rejection letters, and if that's not worth sharing, I don't know what is.  If nothing else, THIS is the guy I need to track down to teach me about organization.  How does he find the time?!  Sure the message is supposed to be "keep at it!", but I'm finishing my bachelors almost 20 years late, with nothing ready to send to be rejected, while he's gotten seven degrees and that many rejections plus 100 shorts published.  Damn.

These distractions aside, I've been itching to actually write the fiction I've been working on.  I'm off to create that infernal paper so I can get to it.

Week 2--Can dreaming dangeriously be scheduled?

Day Zero--
Wade has always been pretty kick-ass, both in actual game play and in my attempts at novelization.  As I focused on reworking her story, I found myself longing for the urban fantasy that was less kick-ass and more mythic.  Sleeping in the 'tween time between weeks, my subconscious said, "Why not have both?"  And it played "Landslide" on a mental loop--Billy Corgan singing.  Maybe that last bit is neither here nor there, but I woke up with a new challenge and theme song for Wade's softer side.

Day One--
I worked on the "what if", or in this case the, "wait! why?"  Basic to the background of this character is her being one of three, separated at birth and hidden away.  This should be more than background!  Babies are adopted everyday, but there was a great mystery aound these triplets that has never been solved.  I got a few basic ideas on that, and jotted down a few thoughts about themes.

Days Two-Six--
Classwork, motherhood, and a wee bit of writing group moderation.  Two weeks in and the picture is already forming.  I've got to find a way to organize my life so I can be a good wife/mother/student without disengaging from writing for days at a time.  Other people manage it, so I know it's not some unreachable goal.  BUT, my life has been categorized by disorganization for so long, I have no idea where to begin.

For now, I'm going to shower and get back to working on characters.  Another failure in my past has been devotion to primary characters and near ignoring everyone else.  So...shower, characters, more on setting, plot, fold laundry, clean daughter's room, and give some attention to the texts that I'm more than a hundred pages behind on.  (Food and sex will happen without any lists.)

Week 1

Free of "The Hidden" by way of a kindly beta reader, I began posting "Becoming" for critique.  Written as a NaNo novel one November, "Becoming" has a lot of promise, and I know just where it went wrong--written in haste, I left out a lot of the background that made the world as interesting to me as the characters.  Unfortunately, I discovered that this was not the only way I screwed up.  Aware of how many times computer crashes have wiped out my work, I saved it on both a hard and a flash drive...I thought.  You know how when you "save as", a file will continue to save that way until you do it again?  I forgot. 

Yeah, that sucked. 

With most of the story lost, I didn't have the heart to pick right up.  I decided to work on another old story that has (for me a least) enjoyable characters amid a mess of plot.  A zillion years ago, I played in an online story (shout out to Phoenix by Night!) with great potential for novel translation.  I've explored it a little bit, recreating the characters since I technically only had the right to my own, fleshing out her story...and setting it down because her story was too interwoven with the other characters and the game's storyteller had pretty much just ripped off Clive Barker.

Still, Wade persists as one of my favorite characters.  So...

DAY ONE-- I decided that I would, indeed, write Wade's story.
DAY TWO-- I got a notebook and started writing down everything I know about Wade.  Decided to do the same for the other characters and the setting...and didn't.
"I didn't" pretty much covers the rest of the week.  I revised an English paper, completed by Pre-1877 assignments, and still failed to catch up to my 1960s reading, but I didn't do any work on the story.

I did decide to blog about it.  I need to get a clear view of what works for me and what doesn't.  And you, dear few gentle readers, might be able to say, "Wow, look how An crashed and burned.  I can think of a better way to get my novel written."

Well, it's An Again

"I have done nothing with time."

I know I'm entering a funk because snatches of Jim Morrison poems keep coming to mind.  Maybe it's the nearness of the "spring" semester (which won't seem silly to me in March, but sounds misleading while we're celebrating days when the temp goes up to 35 degrees F.); I had big plans for a revisions push during the break, but all I managed was one slip into a rabbit hole and many hours of staring at the screen.

A dear friend announced that I'd been at it too long and I should give the project to her to look over, and start something completely fresh.  Brilliant idea!  Er, in theory.

After handing it off and working on something brand spanking new...I was shocked to find that new sucked.  Fascinating world, a half-baked character, and no plot to speak of.  And the more I worked on the plot, the more it sucked. I didn't just spend a long time writing The Hidden, I spent a long time pre-writing.  An idea--just a whisp of a thought--crossed my mind while I was doing dishes one night long, long ago.  I recognized it as something worth persuing, so I dried off my hands, wrote it down, and then went back to doing dishes.  It was months before a  minor character in another (never to be finished) story said, "Hey, that's about me."  And ever so many more months later, I understood him and what his story was about. 

"To make works in the face of the void..."

If it takes me that long just thinking about it...

Why share this funk?  Well, because it's my blog, and I can.  Because I'm thinking of keeping a log like some messed up food diary, but instead of counting calories I'd count minutes, days, hours passed not writing.  Because I want something to click while I'm typing.  Something that will begin a great change and I will go from someone who has taken years to produce a not-really-done book to someone who creates several fabu works in a year.  And because after I get this crap out of my system, I can move through it and get things done.

For fun?

Even when I just do it for fun, I don't just do it for fun.

I realized that last night while IMing to a writing friend. I've had no time, as evidenced by the long gap between the last post and this. Like so many others, my family has been hit hard by the massive economic drop. In the years prior, I was a work-at-home and then a stay-at-home mom, and that had to change. My spirit was willing, but my use to employers was weak; there are too many people who have not been out of the work force for so long and who have the proper skills and/or degrees competing for the same jobs. I decided there would be no better time to return to college and get that degree.

Jumping in head first and late, I selected five classes for my 'add/drop' plate (one more than required for full time in case I didn't get one of the others), never realizing that they would all be reading (and most also writing) heavy. I'm having a horrible time balancing full time student with wife and mother, other things in my life are being neglected, yet I decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month again this year.

My brother pushed a small (but still heavy and painful, damn it!) T.V. on my head when we were little and apparently the effects are just being seen now.

There are better reasons for me to do NaNo than insanity. It's tradition. I do it every year and fall short of the goal; why change now that I have good reason to fall short? It might actually force me into better time management skills. I love the feeling of community NaNo brings. And I haven't really written fiction since school started, and I miss it.

So I was chatting with my friend about NaNo and explained my big idea...See, with no plot or characters calling me into November, I'd decided to use pre-NaNo October to populate a city. I dedicated a spare notebook, and in between studies or riding on the train, I could jot down character ideas. At midnight, when Halloween becomes All Saints', I would sit and write for whatever character "has the most to say."

Why not? It's just for the joy of it and to get the creative juices flowing. But then came my "ah ha moment." Wouldn't it be fun to make a play on all the mystery books/movies that have a killer staging murders out of some hapless author's books? What if some psycho ill-casts all the characters into urban fantasy scenes? It sounds, to me, dumb and brilliant and a blast to write.

I went on about the legalities to my friend who said something like, "Who cares? It's just for fun. Don't worry about that until you're getting published."

Heh. I treat every story like it's going to get published, don't I? Is that a good thing? A sense of striving that will someday push me over from would-be novelist to novelist actual? Or is it part of the pressure that gets me hung up on poorly paced middles and unsatisfactory endings--so hung up that these things never quite get fixed in revision? Hmmm....

Soundtrack Revisions?

Whenever I hear anything off the Violent Femmes debut album, I'm sixteen again, just for a little bit. "Blister in the Sun" in particular brings me back to summer days spent with my friends, screaming lyrics out in a buddy's garage.

Tori Amos's album, "Little Earthquakes", isn't actually about multiple generations of a psychic Franco-American family struggling with their powers while the world teeters on the brink of catastrophic war, but you wouldn't know that by me. The CD was on such heavy rotation while I read Julian May's Intervention (out of print again, but worth getting used) that hearing one of the songs brings certain scenes or characters right into my mind.

My Work in Progress has been years in the making. I'd been working on a story that was important to me, but wasn't going anywhere. I had the main character and the idea, but idea does not equal plot. Then things came together, like they sometimes will in writing. I'd started fleshing out secondary and lesser characters in hopes of creating story from conflicting motivations. One of them insisted (in that way that is not schizophrenia) that he deserved attention. Low and behold, I'd already started telling his story in bits and pieces, I just hadn't known it belonged to him. When his theme song popped into my head, I knew that I knew this guy.

As important as knowing him, was being able to find him again.

Sometimes I suffered from writer's block. OK, I felt blocked a lot. Other times, I succumbed to the imaginary pressure from being surrounded by romance and paranormal romance writers. Was there a place in urban fantasy for my non-female driven work? Quinn got put on the back burner as I explored stories that didn't mean much to me but might mean something to one of the many editors seeking the next kick-ass heroine. I'd lose the feel of him. A play through (or five) of his song, though, and I was back in his head space.

Considering all that, plus that I've discussed the use of music while writing in various forums, I have no idea why it took a post over at Something Wicked to get me to expand Quinn's theme song into a full soundtrack. I have yet to write with the playlist, but it's already helped to block out the dozens of distractions that tend to suck me right out of my story and send me down various rabbit holes.

But you can't always let it stew, can you?

In my last post, I wrote a little bit about my process. In short, nothing comes as a fully packaged idea. I'll get a bit here--the first spark of inspiration that gives me a character--then work out what's happened in this person's life to make them who they are. Later, something about their personality will give a clue as to the story around them. And going from story idea to actual plot is the bulk of the work.

Sometimes, this can be relatively short. Maybe a month ago or so, the idea of writing about a sympathetic Satanist bloomed in my mind. I had a vague idea of what she looked like and knew that, other than her religion, she'd be relatively ordinary. No fangs or fur, and if she used any magic at all, it would the sort that modern witches believe in that skeptics pass off as coincidence. Bits and pieces filtered in as I let this sit on the back burner. The male lead appeared...there was some sense of what her story would be about, though the more I tried to put it together, the more it slipped through my mental fingers.

For the most part, I left it alone, having my other example of "letting it stew" to calm me. See, while "Satana" (I know, my working titles suck) is coming along in a matter of weeks to months, I had the initial thought that became Quinn's Tale back in 2003. I was doing the dishes and thought, "A banshee howled when I was born." I dried my hands, wrote it down, and went back to what I was doing. It was many months before I found out who that statement belonged to, and years before he'd cooked long enough to start demanding his story be told.

Which brings me back around to Satana and why I'm writing this entry. I woke up a little bit ago (which is why this may be a little rambling, btw) and suddenly had it. Whether in the forefront or on the back burner, I've been trying to figure out the catalyst...the crime...that gets a police detective knocking on the door of the ex-girlfriend he'd dumped when he found out she was a Satanist. More importantly, what would get her involved rather than calling him an intolerant bastard and slamming the door in his face?

Now I have the answer. After this, I'll pull up my OneNote file and jot it down. But here, finally, is the question...Am I going to have to break my stewing habit and force myself to use a different process? I mean, this is great for a wanna-be. The characters feel real when I'm writing. I enjoy what I do, and I get fantastic reader reaction. But the goal isn't to have fun with my hobby. The goal is to eventually do what I love for a living. I don't see a publisher giving me a contract for "whenever". Have I set myself up with another way to fail?