Camping on the Story

I hit my goals yesterday; yes, I did.  I blogged, I wrote an article that took up much of my afternoon, and then, after Doctor Who was over and done, I got down to working on my story, because these stories just sort of languish and do nothing on their own.  It’s like you have to write all the words for them.

The first part is sort of strange, because I was free forming as I went along.  I have a feeling that when I go back over this story, I’m going to end up rewriting a lot of this part.  But it’s a good set up; it gave me the feeling that something is different about this place in the woods, so when things happen, the reader shouldn’t be taken by surprise.

There was one big change that I had to do before heading off to bed, though.  I was looking something up–research, you know–and I just happened to take a closer look at the name of the place where my story takes place.  And that was when I discovered (let me say this in my Hermione voice), it’s not Harmony, it’s Harmonie.  Oops.

Hey, even the best research can be wonky when you’re looking at Google Maps at ten at night after being up for seventeen hours.

A was a bit bummed out, but not so much that I went into a mental tailspin from which I couldn’t recover.  No, I was level headed about the matter, since all I had to do was change the name of the story and rename the project.  Ergo, the story is now known as Fantasies in Harmonie, which gives it an even nicer ring than what had gone before, don’t you think?

there wasn’t a whole lot of writing last night; when I was finished with the scene I’d only written around five hundred words. I wasn’t looking to do a lot of writing last night because I was doing a set up and I knew it was going to take a little finagling to get the words right.

Also, I’m a bit more careful when I write these days.  I found myself writing then stopping so I could look over what I’d written.  If it looked good, I went on.  If I didn’t, I read the lines until I knew what I wanted to write, and then wrote that.  It’s sort of editing on the way, which slows you up, but ultimately helps me keep the text as clean as possible.

I checked my timelines, because if there’s one thing I am, it’s attentive to the time it takes to do anything.  From the time I finished Suggestive Amusements to the time I published Her Demonic Majesty, about seven weeks went by.  That time was spent in edits, getting covers made, and setting up my accounts on Smashwords and Amazon.  As I told a friend the other day, writing is work, and publishing things correctly takes even more work.

So the more I get right up front, the less I have to react to in order to finish my work correctly.

Slowing down now so I don’t have to rush latter is a great idea.  Just like finding a good cabin in the woods, you gotta take your time.

 

Early to the Cinema Show

I was tired last night and thought with nothing going on today I could sleep in.  I was wrong:  up at five forty-five with nary a bird in sight to wake up as the sky brightened.  There are times when I do wish I could sleep until nine in the morning and crawl out of bed refreshed and ready for the world.

Screw that:  I’m up.  The world will have to deal.

This week has been a combination of getting Her Demonic Majesty published and uploaded to various platforms.  With the exception of some tweaking here and there, it’s a done deal.  With that out of the way I’m onto the next big thing–or whatever passed for that.

As I told someone last night, my day looks like this:  I blog (doing that now), then I start work on an article.  I know what I’m going to write, it’s just a matter of writing, editing, and submitting to the website.  And doing a bit of research while it’s going on.  I figure that’ll take most of my morning.

Then it’s time to make the story.  Going back through the milestones on my Author’s Page, I see I finished Suggestive Amusements on 24 March.  It’s now 18 May, which means I’ve spent two months getting my novel ready and published, and I haven’t been working on anything new.  As may be said in Glengarry Glen Ross, “A, B, W.  Always.  Be.  Writing.”  Of course, I’ll won’t be told to stay away from the coffee, and I already know Blake’s name . . .

Sometime this afternoon I’ll start in on Fantasies in Harmony, and get the words going on that.  The pieces are all together, the project is set up, and the map of my mind–if there is such a thing–is inside the document ready to show me the way.  All that remains are to take whatever words come into my head and get them into the computer

While all this is ongoing I’ll have the music playing.  Since getting up this morning I’ve have a live version of The Cinema Show playing, a recording from 1978 of one of the last times Genesis played the song in its entirety before moving the instrumental bridge into a “Greatest Hits” melody they started with In The Cage during their 1980 Duke tour, and played throughout the Mama Tour in 1983.  Yeah, doing this keeps me awake, it keeps my mind running at something close to nominal speed–and it’s enjoyable.  Plus, I hate silence.  I work in it enough that I like to have sound around me when I’m home.

Lurking in the back of my mind is the notion of what I should publish next.  I said I was going to do four things this year, and I’m going to try just that.  One down, and seven months to get three more out.  If I keep things nice and short I should be able to do that–after all, I only need editing and covers and proofreading and a few other things–

I’ve got the accounts, so the hard work is out of the way.

Melding of Minds

When there is no writing, then it’s time to write, yeah?

That was me last night.  The novel was in the can, so to speak, and up for sale.  No more to do there, so what’s next?  As someone may say to me, “Shouldn’t you be writing?”

I’ve spoke about doing this erotic fantasy story just for laughs–and money, don’t forget the money–so I figured, what the hell, might as well get my project started.  That meant firing up the Big Scrivener and setting up the story.  I do this all the time; it’s become second nature for me.

Therefor the project was created, the story named, and . . . well, this is where it gets to be fun.  Most of the time I’ll start plotting things out just a bit.  By “plotting” I mean I set up chapter cards and put some meta data on each card to give me an idea as to what’s going to happen at that point in the story.  It’s not like I’m deciding at that point what’s going to happen right down to the moment, but it’s a good way to figure out the main focus of the scene.

This time, though, I wanted to try something else.  With one of the recent updates of Scrivener came the ability to import mind maps into your project.  I’ve played with FreeMind, which is a great mind mapping tool, and I like using it to see if my ideas for a story–or, like the first time I used it, for a new chapter–are going to work, or if they’re way off base.

A few weeks back I decided to map out Fantasies in Harmony because I knew what I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure if it was going to make any sense.  So I did a couple of hours of thinking through what I wanted to in the story, and mapped the action out.  When I was finished I had a story, more or less, in mind mapped metadata.

Given that I had a mind map, and given that I could import that into Scrivener, I was curious to see what would happen.  I mean, if it didn’t work out well, I could always delete stuff.  So I found the Import option, selected Mind Map to import, and hit the Okay button–

All sorts of stuff appeared in the document:  lots of note cards with nothing written inside.  I was a bit confused, so I deleted everything and tried it again, getting the same results.  I’m expecting to see the visual map in my document, and here I’m getting all these note cards–

That’s when it hit me:  every card corresponded to an idea I’d placed in my mind map.  When I imported the map, Scrivener broke out every idea and turned them into their own scene–so now, if I wanted to elaborate on those ideas, all I had to do was write up what actually happened.

I’d just opened up a whole new world of possibilities for doing my stories.

All those notes have been moved under the scenes I was creating.  Given how Scrivener compiles scenes, I could actually write everything in short scenes and put it all together in the compile.  Which I’m considering doing–

Hey, I can have my fun while writing, can’t I?

Mindmelding Elements

Made it through a good day yesterday, one of the better I’ve had in a while, and today–well, that’s another story.  I’ll get through all the “The Forth Be With You” crap and probably remind more than a few people that my 4^th of May involved hearing about four college students being shot to death.  Yeah, Yoda can bite my ass.

Where to go now, dear Cassidy?  How is your new project coming along?  Glad you asked–

Yesterday also dealt with the upcoming story, because I was talking a few ideas to some people, and though I’ve joked about how I’m going to just “write smut” so I can make a quick buck or two, I still want this to be a good story.  I can’t help it:  even my erotica has to be about more than just fucking.  I’m strange that way.

For example, when I’m talking about the cabin where my story will take place, I bring up a cabin.  What does my cabin look like?  Gander to the right, if you will . . .  I was speaking with Annie (yes, she was around!) and we discussed how sometimes you have to see something in order to describe it.  I’ll admit, I never used to be that way, but when it comes to buildings and apartments and the like, there are times when I need to know how everything is laid out.

I created the interior using Sweet Home 3D, which is a fantastic open source modeling program (check them out, download, and drop them a few bucks for the effort).  I only needed a few simple templates to show me how everything is suppose to look, and with the split screen I can design and get a 3D look at everything in real time.  (One of the great things I liked was as I moved objects onto the design screen, I’d see them moving around in the 3D screen, and if I adjusted then in modeling, they’d adjust in 3D.  It’s like moving furniture in your house, only you’re doing it on a computer with a lot less back strain.)

So now I have a good idea what things sort of look like, so when the action gets hot and heavy, and I need to knock things over because of way too much Sexy happening, I’ll know where the knockage occurs, and how it’s going to break.

It’s not only the look of the story I want right, but I started wondering, late last night, if my mental flow is going the right direction.  So I brought up FreeMind and began mapping out my ideas into something logical.  This is another open source program I use from time to time, when I need to “think” about how I want a scene–or, in this case, a story–to flow.  It’s another great tool if you feel yourself stuck on something and you want to shake your mind loose . . .

I have my thoughts and ideas collected here, as you can see.  I know how to read the flow of the picture to the right, and there are arrows to show me where I need to go from one set of ideas to another.  I’m not finished laying it out all–after all, I was working on this until about eleven-thirty last night, and the eyes were starting to burn a little–but I’ll have it all worked out and into Scrivener by this afternoon.

There was a point last night when two questions came to mind:  one, am I spending way too much time developing a story that’s suppose to be a short (for me), quick, tale of fantasy screwing?  Finally, two:  is there enough hot sex going down?  I mean, yeah, I do erotica, but I also write about characters, and knowing why you wanna get laid is just as important to me as getting there.

Ah, well, perhaps I’m over-thinking this story.  Then again, it is my story–

I can do that if I want to, you know.

Harmony is Me

More than a few writers have not only accused of being a plotter, but of sometimes overplotting my work.  I have heard from a few people, who will remain nameless, that I have moments when I get too deep into the story and end up spending a lot of time doing something called “research”.  You know:  that thing you’re suppose to do to make sure you get things right?

I first started hearing this in October, 2011, when I was prepping myself for NaNoWriMo 2011.  I had a few people telling me, “Don’t do that!  This is NaNo:  you just write!”  However, that wasn’t how I worked, and I needed to get a few rules in place prior to getting word into the computer.  Hence, there were a few people who began saying that I was doing it “wrong”, that I wasn’t really following the “rules” of NaNo, and whatever I was going to write probably wouldn’t be that good, anyway.  (Just as a side note:  I heard many of the same things prior to NaNo 2012, with one gentleman even going so far as to say that anyone who did any plotting would end up writing “formulistic crap”.  Well, I never!)

Of course, the nay sayers are still working on their novels from 2011–maybe–and I’m in the last stages of getting mine self published, which means . . . well, it actually means nothing.  It just means I’ve stuck to my plan to not only write, but to publish one way or the other, and that’s what I’m doing.  Maybe what I’m putting out will be crap, but it’s my crap, and it has covers.  You can’t take any of that from me.

Where is this going?  Straight into my next story, trust me . . .

Last night I was, among other things, looking for a place to put my cabin for my next story, given the way-too original title of Cabin Fever.  The idea is for my trio of literary lovely to spend a week in a cabin writing, and then have strange things happen to them, after which–well, you can imagine.  Or not.

In a way I need to know everything before I start writing.  Even something as inconsequential as the location of a cabin might not seem like a big deal, but I have to know where it’s located.  There might no be more than an off-hand remake about where the cabin is, but it’s a touch that I use to ground my story–sort of like how when De Niro played Al Capone in The Untouchables, he had the place that made Capone’s silk boxer shorts make the same for him to wear while filming.  You never saw them, but it was a touch he wanted.

I knew I wanted to have the cabin in Indiana, and I wanted it to be close to water for some reason.  So I looked at sites concerning state parks, trying to figure out which ones had cabin rentals, and then found those places on Google Maps so I could really see the places.  It was a bit of a search, because while some places sounded great, they didn’t look that way.  I needed to have something that fit just right . . .

Then I found it.  One of the state parks that had cabins, and was bordered by a river, and had lots of room–room for a lone cabin, a strange cabin, where three ladies could find their lives changing in very different ways–

And as soon as I had the location, I had the new title:  Fantasies in Harmony.  As I told another writer, you’ll see how that works at different levels.

I spend too much time on my stories?

You have no idea.

 

 

Oh, and it’s my birthday.  Happy me, yay . . .

Backwards to the Summit

A year ago, something strange happened.  I wrote this post.

I didn’t there was anything out of the ordinary about that post.  In fact, I dashed it off early in the morning before heading off to The Hole That Was My Job, located at The Undisclosed Location.  I was up early because I was having trouble sleeping, probably because of the cold that was developing that day, and would remain with me the entire month of May and well into June.

I popped it off, went to work, then went to dinner.  When I returned home and fired up the computer, I checked my stats–

The post had seen over two hundred views, and that day ended up becoming the most on-site views I’ve ever received.

I’ve tried hard to figure out what it was that drew all those people to my website.  I don’t think it was the tags, or how it appeared on Google, or even the subject.  The reason for the popularity is puzzling, because I’ve written far better posts than that, and they’ve had to go begging for hits like an out of work bicycle messenger who hocked his single-gear speed buggy for meth and is now hovering above the rocky bottom.

It’s strange how things like that happen.  You can bust your butt over something that you think is going to set the world on fire, and the collective sighs of a tiny group of readers can be overwhelming.  At the opposite end of the spectrum are those things you dash out almost as an afterthought, and your fans lose their shit in rapture-like ecstasy.

Stories are like that.  You put your heart into something that seems to speak to you in special ways, and it seems the indifference is suffocating–then you have some fun with a story that’s not meant to be taken too seriously, and you watch the money roll in.  Now, I don’t think that’s going to happen with my next story, but the way things work in my life, who knows?

I started putting my next story together last night.  Right now the title is about as original as it gets:  Cabin Fever.  As in, “I gotta fever, and the only prescription is hot women having sex!”  It’s the sort of simple title that can catch an eye, though it seems as if there are way too many cabins with fevers on Smashwords, so I’m going to need to rethink my approach.

I have the names of my characters, and a short outline of their lives.  It was while I was playing with this that I discovered something about the Scrivener Name Generator:  once you have your selected names in the “short list” box, you can transfer that list to an existing card or folder, and then play with the contents as you see fit–or even append the name at the end of a line currently being written.  That’s a function that I’d not played with, and now that I know it exists, when I need a quick name, and I throw it in and create a character card for that person at the same time.

This is how I go about getting a story ready:  I develop, I do my research, I lay things out.

And then, when I’m ready . . .

I see to things really get laid.

Blessed Be the Cabin

Blessed Beltane, Happy May Day, Good International Workers Day . . . whatever is getting you in the right frame of mind today, I’m there with you.  At least I’m trying; I spent the better part of a couple of hours writing code with the payoff of getting two items to come out in the correct order on a report.  Can I get a “yay”?  Yay . . .

The 1^st of May is the traditional beginning of summer, regardless what they might say in America, where we make our own holidays to keep from making the Commies happy.  It’s a time of change, a time of transitions, a time to make a new start.  It’s a good time to go around and leave goodies for your friends and neighbors, though I’m tired of the kids around me playing in the street and looking at you like you’re some kind of idiot when they decide they won’t get out of your way.  So no goodies for you . . .

Here I am, however, at the start of summer, and I’ve no project ongoing.  My novel is being reviewed, and the final edit awaits.  I likely won’t see it back in my inbox for at least a week, so I’m in the process of cooling my heels on the writing front.

But I can’t.

Last night I sat around and wondered about what I was going to do.  I pulled up the idea file and started puttering about, thinking about the things before me.  I looked at the story I want to do for Camp NaNo July, my little erotic fantasy that will take its place among the Smashwords elite.  I looked at it and thought, “What can I do?”  And the answer was, “Build a cabin.”

It’s like this:  the story takes place in the middle of nowhere, with three writer friends deciding a great way to spend Camp NaNo July is to go out and actually rent a cabin, and spend the weekend writing.  At some point during this endeavor, something magical happens–literally–and the writing degenerates into . . . well, I know what happens, you’ll have to buy the story once it’s published.

I found an open source floor plan designer and started in on my house, because if there’s one thing my precious Annie taught me, it’s that you sometimes need to see a design before you can imagine the stories there.  I designed the cabin, put in doors and windows, added a kitchen, put in the furniture, added the sofas and the beds–

The scene is built.  Now what?

Now I write, that’s what.

I have that bug where when I get these ideas I have to act upon them.  With nothing to do right now I feel a bit lost, and not in an Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 way.  I feel like I should do something, because when I’m home at night I feel like I’m without purpose.

I feel I should write, because that’s what writers do.

So the hell with Camp NaNo July, I gotta write this sucker now.  I’ll get my thoughts together, give my characters names, determine my locations, and crank out the story.  Oh, and I need a sexy writer’s name, ’cause I’m thinking it might not be a good idea to put this out under my name.

Then again, why not?  This story could be like a milkshake–

It could bring the fans to my front yard.

 

Cake or History

When you have little to do, your nights get a lot longer.  I ran into that last night, while I looked for something to occupy my time while I had . . . nothing to . . . write.  *sigh*

There was some good news, however:  the woman looking at the full manuscript for Her Demonic Majesty told me she found one typo per page for the first few pages, then didn’t see anything for like a full chapter.  After all the freaking out about how I was a total failure at getting my editing done, this made me feel a hell of a lot better.  At this point I just wait for her to finish her reading, and her markings, and do what is needed when the manuscript comes back.

So I played around.  One half of my mind was trying to figure out how to import images into Scrivener, and the other was working on an idea for a story.  It helped that I was in my Story Ideas project, where I jot down ideas when they come to me, and try to flesh them out little by little when the mood strikes.  So I was in the right place to mull over two ideas . . .

One of the ideas has to do with a . . . lets call it “fantasy smut” story I wanted to write for Camp NaNo July.  It all came about during a discussion with another writer, where we were making fun of some of the stories that show up on Smashwords–you know, stories about incestuous stepkids, werewolf breeding, and horny unicorns looking for wimmin.  It was during one of those discussions that I went, “Screw these losers:  I can write something like this, only it’ll be Better!” and then my mind started working.

I used to write strange, fetishy fiction, so coming up with something that would involve sex and fantasy shouldn’t be a problem.  I have the characters in my mind–borrowing liberally from friends I know, and who have already been told they’ll be in a story–I have the location set, I have the sex ready to roll.  I do need a title, though, and a set up, which is what I was thinking about last night.  And a little bit this morning when birds woke me at four AM.

I’m considering just “doing it” and writing the story the month of May.  It shouldn’t take much to do, and shouldn’t be that long.  Actually, I’m going to keep it short, or as short as possible.  It’s going to be all about Teh Sexy, so character development is out.  Okay, maybe a little development, because I don’t write smut.

The other thing I was working on was a time line for another story idea.  I posted it on my Facebook wall last night, because I do things like that.  What I was plotting out was a “What If?” sort of alternate history of space from the 1960′s through the 1970′s.  I didn’t include everything in the time line; I was mostly adding missions that never flew but could have, so that I could establish a different history for those who grew up in that time–namely, the characters in my possible story.

I love doing alternate history, and while it might not be something that a few people would consider realistic–hey, it’s my universe!  Get your own alternate space history!

Don’t you just love having an imagination?

Cascading Realities

Another chapter down, another step closer to publication.  Tonight there will be the largest chapter of Part Three, but this one is clean, it’s good, and I don’t believe I’ll have a lot of work ahead of me.

Tonight will be a good night.

I had a little talk out last night about the fears I was feeling, the ones I spoke of yesterday.  That’s pretty much past now, because why dwell on it?  The novel will sell, or it won’t.  If I’m going to freak over the fact that the hard work will amount to nothing in return–that’s the curse of every creative project.  The world is full of people who’ve been ignored by the Honey Boo Boo crowd, and given that most people these days feel that entertainment is too–what’s the phrase?  Oh, yeah:  Hard to Understand, don’t expect to see trends change anytime soon.

So keep on keeping.  It’s what keeps the dream alive.

Speaking of dreams, I’m already thinking about what comes next.

I have two works lined up that could be ready to go by the middle of the summer.  In June I will write something for Camp NaNo–yes, I’m going to find a cabin and hang with my gurlz while I write tales of sexual depravity–but the rest of the time can be spent on editing and ebook formatting.  While I want to keep the new material coming, I need to get the old out, least they just sit there and sing Pictures of Lily while I stare at their unpublished goodness.  (If you know your Who, you’ll get the reference.  If not, just ask.)

Replacements I’ve just finished editing, and it wouldn’t be that big of a deal to get it out.  It’s one of the stories I have on tap to publish this year, and it could be a quick, easy turn around for me because of the length.  But there’s another I want to get out as well, and it’s been waiting in the wings for a year to see the light of day–

I’m talking Couples Dance.

This strange little novel was something I sent out almost a year ago, with no comments from the publisher beyond asking to see the full manuscript.  I’ve contacted them a couple of times since then, and there will be a third time, after which I’m going to put the ball in play and get it ready for my own publishing attempt.

Being a short novel I can sell it at novella prices, and being that it’s erotic horror–is that such a thing?–that could make it even more of a draw than my other stories.  Yes, I’m already thinking marketing, because there is sex inside, but there’s also a couple of visits to the library, and not to do the hot looking girl in glasses on the shelf where Poe is kept.  This means the people looking for hot, non-stop sex will have to take a break a read a chapter where someone is tortured–

Oh, did I say that?  My bad.

Anyway, the road trip continues.

Looks like I’ll be pulling into The Stanley next . . .

Closing Doors

And so it came to be that Replacements was pushed into Final Draft status, and all the remains is the formatting and the cover, and the author saw that it was good, and relaxed.

Or something like that.  Sounds a lot more complicated than it was, but the reality is far more boring than the truth.

With only a couple of chapters left I figured I better get to editing, ’cause chapters don’t edit themselves, as much as writers wish they would.  I’d already edited nine chapters–two of which were brand new–and I was hovering about the sixteen thousand word limit for a couple of days.  I did not want to go over seventeen thousand five hundred words, because then I was on novella territory, and if I got up about eighteen thousand, then I might as well have gone twenty thousand words, because . . . that’s how I roll.

So I edited.  I knew Chapter Ten was about twelve hundred words, so not a problem, I’d burn through it.  What I had forgotten was that Chapter Eleven, the last chapter, was almost two thousand words–hey, though, these things happen.  Besides, I’d done the same thing the night before, so why get serious?

As it was, the last two chapters had been well written, so editing was not a chore.  I did one, then the other, then saved, then sighed . . . and commended myself for a job well done.  For Replacements is the first ready-to-publish story I’d done in over a year.  There’s been a lot of writing, but almost no publishing.  Once I have a cover, Replacements is going up to the big Kindle Store in the Internet, and maybe this strange little tale will get noticed–

I say strange little tale because it is.  There’s sex and some BDSM, but not so much that it’s going to trip the erotica wires.  There’s romance, but not that kind of romance.  There’s drama galore, but if I had to pin this sucker down, I’d say it’s science fiction, because it deals with things that one normally wouldn’t find in real life.

This is something I find myself doing:  I write in genres that actually contain so many other elements.  I’m a child of the New Wave of Science Fiction, and that could get out there in terms of what one might read.  (Check out “Riders of the Purple Wage” by Philip Jose Farmer is you want a great example.)  There might be robots, and murder, and sex, and they might all be together in the same story:  that’s what I used to read, and that’s what I tend to write.

The door is closed on Replacements.  It is, as they say, what it is, and I own it.  That’s one thing I do with my stories:  if I finish them, they’re mine.  If I don’t finish them, then they were never meant to see the light of day.  I’ve had that happen a few times, but only once in the last two years.

The story is ready, the song is over.  All I need is a cover–

Seems like the story of my life of late.

Spring Into Power

Yes, it is 1 April, and there will be no jokes, no pranks, no misdirection.  I’m not going to tell you I found a contract in my inbox this morning, offering a six-figure advance for one of my novels, ’cause it’s just too damn good not to publish . . . no, there’s none of that.  If anything, I stay away from those kind of pranks, ’cause what do they get you?  Nothing.

Does Cassie sound grumpy?  Probably a bit.  While Friday was something of a pain in the ass, the rest of the weekend was, for the most part, nice.  Weather was great, there were some interesting things to do, The Doctor was new, and I did a lot of writing and reading.  I’m doing a beta read on a story, and the writing . . . lots of editing, a few things I’m doing on the side for a friend, and I set up a Scrivener file for articles I develop.

Oh, and there was editing.  Busy, busy, was I not?

I went through at least three chapters in Replacements over the weekend, getting them clean, getting them better.  I found few errors, but in one chapter I wasn’t happy with the way things sounded.  The structure was clumsy, the words didn’t sound like they should come from my character’s thoughts; it’s not how she’d speak.  So a bit of rewriting was necessary, because if I want the story to sound right, then I gotta make it right.  It’s not like the character is gonna jump out of the computer and redo her own imaginary dialog, is she?

Last night saw the start of a new chapter, however.  In the original story, I went from events in Chapter Five to establishing that things were pretty much hunky dory in Chapter Six, even though it was established that one of the characters was a bit freaked out by her actions in Chapter Five.  After I finished the story I looked at it and said, “Naw, that doesn’t seem right,” and began wondering if there should be something else, something that shows the development of the characters from the actions that occurred at the end of Chapter Five, and how they seemed to have fallen into their roles at the start of Chapter Six.

I’d created a new Chapter Six, and began writing that last night.  One thousand twenty-six words later I finished, established that one of my character had did her research and decided that she’d fallen into something that the other character wanted, and now had–and she was stuck with the aftermath.  Given that, she figured out that if she needed to establish some kind of equilibrium in this relationship, she’d need to set her own ground rules, and thus . . .

I started wondering, after I’d finished my writing for the evening, if I needed to separate the scenes in the new Chapter Six, and create a new Chapter Seven.  Because, the way I lay things out, it makes sense.  And with Scrivener, all things are possible.

Why, it’s as simple as pinning a card to a corkboard and writing, “Chapter Seven” upon it.

Looks like I have some extra work tonight.

Building Towards Excitation

Yesterday was busy; today is likely to be a bit of a madhouse.  Yesterday was taxes and medication, along with a little work that I didn’t want to do, but more or less was pushed into doing; today is going to be getting my car tested and shopping with other people.  The only thing that makes today a little bearable is that Doctor Who starts tonight, giving me something else to watch for the next seven weeks.

Oh, there’ll be writing as well.  What else?

I’ve the clock on me this morning, because I’d like to finished this post in another twenty-eight minutes so I can put my vehicle through some emissions testing.  So much fun, because you feel as if you have less and less of you own time due to these other obligations.  You have so many things throughout the day you wonder if you’ll get to the things you want, to be able to engage in the things that are important to you.

I do my best.

I’ve finished the edit on Chapter Three of Replacements, and things are going smoothly.  Last night was a real good edit, because I was seeing things that shouldn’t have been there, and a couple of clumsy passages that made me cringe a little on the inside.  How the hell did I write that and think it was good?  Well, it was a first draft of things that were written for another site, and at best I gave those chapters a good looking over before posting them online.

Its wasn’t a disaster, however.  I’t wasn’t as if I was embarrassed by what I’d written:  it’s that these days I know how to look at something and know it doesn’t look right.  When other writers say, “Get good at your editing skills,” they know of what they speak, because there is so much more going on in these phases than I’d ever imaged before getting serious about my writing.  There were many times in the past when I believed my first drafts were so good that I didn’t need no stinkin’ editing–how wrong is that?    If anything, I can look at something I wrote five, six, ten years ago, and know it’s a bit defective, and that it needs a good rub down.  (You know, a polish?  What were you thinking?  Naughty people.)

Tonight I’ll polish up Chapter Four, then tomorrow I’ll get into writing a new chapter?  What’s that, you say?  New chapter?  Yep.  Figured the story needed it, and I have an interesting idea that I want to put in that shows the developing relationship between my two main characters.  Shouldn’t be more than a couple of thousand words, then I can let it sit, I can do something else for a while, then go back and give it a major edit.

Mean and clean:  that’s how I like my chapters.

At this rate I’ll finish the edit next weekend.  Do I edit something else?  You know, there are a couple of stories that need a good edit, and I should get into them if I’m serious about getting stuff published this year.

Only if it’s ready to go is it ready to go.

Seven thirty to seven fifty-two:

Looks like I can check off blogging for the day.