Stretched Out Before the Future

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about writers, its that we’re a stubborn, yet fearful, bunch.  We’ll get into a project and stick to it until the bitter end–and then, when the end is in sight, refuse to let go of the creature we’ve spawned.

Over the last year I’ve noticed that there are two things that seem to scare writers the most:  research and editing.  Research has always been a friend, and editing is slowly becoming a welcomed roommate.  But why do these fill our hearts with fear?

Editing is something that seems to get the better of us each time.  I read it a little today, when someone asked, “When do I know my novel is perfect?”  One might as well say, “When can I let my children go out into the world?”  For some people that answer is always, “Never,” and they hang onto their rugrats like they were bars of platinum–at least until they realize that they’re thirty-five and spend entirely too much time on the “Kawaii Crossplay” website, and maybe it’s time to throw their ass into the street.
Perfection is a will-o’-the-wisp:  you’ll never find it because it doesn’t exist.  Or, better yet, for my science fiction writer friends, it’s like getting to 1c, the speed of light.  You can get close, closer, closest; you can get to .999999c; you can push those engines all you want for decades, but you’ll never hit 1.0c.  Not gonna happen, at least not in this universe.

You can edit and rewrite and re-edit your story all you want, but in your own eyes, that sucker will never hit the level of perfection you’ve set for yourself.  You’ll drive yourself nuts trying to get it to where you’re finally convinced you can publish it–right after this last polish–

I look at editing like I look at action scenes:  I try to keep it as short as possible.  Try to get the story where you want it during the first draft, get rid of the typos in the first edit, clean up the story, plot holes and all, in the second, and go over it again to make sure you have things right.  Let someone else look at it, then edit again where needed.  After that, get it out to a house for a look-see, or start formatting it for self-publication.

It’s time to put it in the street.

Then there’s research . . . oh, my.  This seems to scare writers more than editing.  (If a sampling of a few ebooks is any indication, there are a lot of scared writers out there, ba-da-boom!)  I love research, because this is where you learn stuff.  Even if you think you know everything there is to know about a subject you’re going to weave a story around, you’ll find something new that’s gonna surprise you.  I had this happen when I was writing Her Demonic Majesty, and the bit of information I discovered when I was about seven chapters into the book helped change an important scene for me, and developed how the MagicPunk City of Chicago should feel.  What I found was completely unknown to me, but not anymore, since I have that information bookmarked in the Scrivener project.

Take all the time you want for research–up to a point, that is, because if you stretch research out for too long, you’re still looking for that level of perfection you’ll never find.  That final bit of data is keeping you from the real thing you’re suppose to do, and that’s write.

Wouldn’t want to be accused of shirking your duties now, would you?

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 . . .

The Words From Hell

Consistency.  If there’s one thing you need in writing, it’s consistency.  Loose it and you may find your characters stripping off all their clothes, swimming out to a sinking ship, and filling their pockets with items once they arrive.  Or you’ll make pancakes for breakfast, give food to all seated, and when daddy shows up some time later, he sits and begins eating off a plate that appeared before him.

The one thing I learned so many years ago when I started reading in the 1960′s, and had reinforced in the 1970′s, is you have to keep your rules consistent.  This is especially true in science fiction, where you are creating new universes, and if your notes aren’t straight, you’ll find yourself crashing your spaceship into a planet that wasn’t suppose to be in your way.  Or, as David Gerrold–the World’s Oldest Redshirt–once stated, if you set up your rules so that no one can use their left hand, you can’t have the hero win in the last chapter by using their left hand.  It’s not only bad writing, it’s lazy.

Yesterday I’m on a editing burn.  I wanted to get through at least two chapters, and three if it where possible, because I’m in Part Two of Her Demonic Majesty, and if I were to finish the last two chapters today, then all that would remain of formatting is Part Three, and by next weekend I could get my Table of Contents in order, kick back, and get ready to meat grinder the story.

So I’m going through the story, looking for strange characters and misspellings, and correcting things that need correcting, and I discover one of my characters saying the word “hell”, and I realize it isn’t the only character who is suppose to say that word . . .

Allow me to explain.

Her Demonic Majesty takes place in an alternate universe difference from ours.  The main character, Jeannette, finds herself in this universe, and as she learns about the world, she begins picking up on all the little things that set it apart from her home.

One of her partners in crime, so to speak, is a demoness.  This demoness comes from another realm–an alternate universe, if you will.  The realm has another name, and because the realm has a certain notoriety  people of this new universe often use that name when cursing–

It should be noted that this realm isn’t named Hell.  Which means within this world you’d never hear people saying “What the hell?” or “The hell with it.”  Hell is an unknown name:  it’s not part of the lexicon.  If there is any character who would use the word, it’s Jeannette, because it is part of her lexicon.

But here I was, having someone in this new universe making a comment that has the word “hell” in it, and I’m scratching my head, because that goes against my rules for the world.

What can one do, you say?  You get to fixing.

I threw my story in Scrivener Mode and did a search for “hell”, and once I found it, I checked to see if Jeannette was speaking, or if someone else was.  And what do you know?  I’d screwed up:  I had characters from this new world using the word “hell”.  The one who was using it the most?  The demoness–the one person who wouldn’t use it, because . . . well, I think you know by now.

Keep in mind I’ve put this story through a couple of edits, and this is something that I missed each time.  I might have missed it this time, too, if I weren’t hyperfocused on getting the novel in pristine shape.  I caught it, and I know my other two rules have been adhered to, so I should be good as far as my rules are concerned.

If anything, I’m happy I didn’t say the hell with it.

See what I did there?

Coolness Factoring

There can be much joy in editing, though, as a writer, it’s one thing that we all seem to hate with white-hot passion.  For the longest time I avoided editing, thinking my first drafts were so good that I never needed to worry about editing.

While I will say that I seemed to get the story write on the first draft–you know, characters names are right, the plot flows as I want and doesn’t have huge holes in it–there are still a lot of errors popping up here and there.  Can’t be helped:  we are imperfect creatures creating imperfect creations.  Really, if I were producing tremendously fantastic stories that were nearly perfect, I’d stop driving sixty miles to work each day and live Neil Gaiman’s life.  Until then, I work at this writing craft until something come in the way of sales.

But I was struck by something interesting last night.  Shale I share it?  Am I writing here?

I was editing the last chapter of Part One for Her Demonic Majesty.  It’s a long chapter, a bit over fifty-eight hundred words, and it’s at the point in the story where I start turning up the drama a bit.  It’s a good chapter, it sets the mood for what’s to come, but . . . as I’m editing, I run into a few lines spoken by my lovely but dangerous succubus character, and there’s something about what she’s saying–

No, it more than that.  It’s how she’s saying the words that is making me feel a little strange.  As I’m setting up the format, what she’s saying just doesn’t feel right.  It doesn’t feel like here.  Someone is speaking, but when I imagine her in my mind, and she says those words, they sound like they’re coming from another person.

This is where you look at the line, think about what a character should be saying, and then have them speak the words.  It sounds easy, but it’s getting those words right that’s tricky.  So I looked at the lines, and imagined the sentences changing, rearranging, and I did  a little cut and paste here, added something there, and deleted a couple of things that didn’t fit my succubus.

When it was finished, the paragraph was far cleaner than before.  It hadn’t actually been reduced or expanded in size:  if I remember correctly, I believe it became one word longer after the edit.  The thing was . . . when it was finished, I was taken by how what she was saying now was far cooler than before.

Do I mean she ended up sounding like a character from a Tarantino movie?  Far from it.  Her words now seemed to flow from her effortlessly, as if this is how she would handle this particular emergency, how she would express her displeasure, and how she’d get the attention of the other two people in the room, and let them know that, right now, shit is deep and extraction is necessary.

I did this a few times last night, and while it is not my intention to try and create some “coolness factor” for each of my characters when they speak, the editing did prove one thing:

I can still be surprised by this craft.  And that’s a good thing.

Transformatting Station

As Replacements is no longer the work in progress, it became time to, shall we say, find a replacement.  What is a girl to do, then, when she needs a project?

She goes demonic.  And with majesty.

After weeks of getting Replacements ready, it was time to bring out the big story:  Her Demonic Majesty.  With a cover on the way, and Harper Voyager out of the way, I’m free to publish Demonic Majesty as I see fit.  As such, last night began the almost final leg of this novel, nearly two years in the making.

The editing is out of the way, but getting into Chapter One again, and what do I find?  A couple of typos.  Which pissed me off because I wonder:  did HV see those few errors and think, “What a tool.  The reject pile for her!”  One can never tell, because Harper Voyager will keep their secrets, and they gave me no pointers when they told me, “Next time, Chickiepoo.”

But the editing is minimal; it’s the formatting that’s important.  What does one do to get a story ready?  Let me tell ya–

First I bring up the “Show Hidden Marks” in the document.  When you’re formatting for an ebook, you need to make certain there isn’t a space at the start of a paragraph.  This does strange things to your document once it becomes an ebook, and you only want strange in your stories.

I don’t have to worry about en and em hyphens, because I have Scrivener take care of that while writing.  En hyphens are found when you’re writing something like “New York-to-London-to-Paris,” and em hyphens are used when you’re separating clauses–like that.  Since I learn how to use character codes to put them in place in my story, I never worry about this part, I only double check to make sure something didn’t get messed up while writing.

I then check for three words that I don’t want to use.  First is the word, “So” at the beginning of dialog.  It’s never a good thing to have your characters saying, “So, you’re going to . . .” because it sounds a little awkward.  Then I check for “Suddenly”, and in, “Suddenly, the word appeared in a sentence!”  Whatever is appearing is appearing right that minute, so unless it’s creeping into view–which you’ll point out in your writing–don’t tell your readers it’s there suddenly.  Lastly, I look for “Very”, because very is a bad word.  Very is soft; very is weak, very–as was pointed out in Dead Poets Society–will not get you laid.  So be done with it, and use a word that is far, far better.

After that I need to set up my Table of Contents, but since Scrivener allows you to create .mobi fills for ereaders, I’m going to play with that and see if it builds one for me.  It’s not hard to do, just time consuming.  When that’s done, you set your title, set your last page, and then . . .

Then you upload and put it, as Freddie would say, in the lap of the gods.

If all goes well, I’ll have Her Demonic Majesty published by the end of May.  Maybe before, because with Memorial Day weekend then, too many people will be out and won’t be around to buy the book.  I wouldn’t want to deprive them of the joy of purchasing my first novel.

It’s coming.  No more tall.

It’s really happening, and soon.

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.

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.

Fast Lane to the Hinterland

There nothing like driving into Chicago at six-thirty in the morning with a cloudless sky above you, a lot of tall building before you, traffic filled with crazy people around you, and an old Japanese anime soundtrack blasting from your stereo.  It puts you in a certain frame of mine–unfortunately, for me, it was sort of the, “Why the hell am I doing this shit?” frame, and please don’t tell me it’s to pay the bills.

Still, there was a certain feeling while I was on the road.  I do love driving, if for no other reason that I can be alone with my thoughts, even if I’m accompanied by loud music.  When I used to make the weekly trek from and to The Undisclosed Location, I had two and a half hours to drive at 80 MPH, yell at drivers that wouldn’t get out of my way, and think out plot lines, scenes, and character development.

I thought a little about what I’m working on right now, which is editing and formatting Replacements so I can publish the work.  I’m getting this out of the way so when my covers arrive–that’s right, I was told I’m getting three covers for the low price of $200, and I can keep them or do some swapping, maybe using one of Smashwords and another on Amazon–I can then see about getting a cover for Replacements while I do a final edit and format on Her Demonic Majesty so I can get it online where it can take its place next to werewolf porn and a series about an eighteen year-old virgin who gets laid in about thirty stories–which means she must have regenerative abilities.

This morning I spoke with a friend about a story I’d submitted to a publishing house last May, and have heard nothing in return after they requested, and received, the full manuscript.  I’d mentioned that I’d sent two follow ups to the publishing house requesting an update on my novel, with none forthcoming from their end.  My friend’s comment was short and to the point:  ”Fuck ‘em, publish it yourself.”  This has pretty much been my attitude as well, since I’m getting antsy to find out what’s going on with that particular story.  If you want it, fine:  if you don’t want it, fine as well.  Just let me know, ‘kay?

This seems to be a common occurrence these days, where people send things out and sometimes never hear a thing back.  Or maybe it’s jut me:  maybe I’m stuck on this one with a lost in the aether and constantly waiting for it to return from the hinterlands.  Though I’m coming up on a year with it being out, so it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what I’m going to do with the story–

I’ll fix it up and I’ll publish it.

There’s no guaranty I’ll make any sales if I do this, but then there was no guaranty I’d make any sales by selling it, either.  Just as once I pay a couple of hundred scoots for a book cover there’s no guaranty I’ll get any sales from Her Demonic Majesty.  I do know this, however:

It will be out–and, with the right cover, it will be noticed.

The question then becomes:  by whom?

Springing Ahead to the Unknown

Last night was Break Night.  I read up on Blender, I down loaded some content control software, and I chatted with people who needed chatting.  The last two days of work had been a pain in the ass, I’d finished Chapter Nine late Thursday night, and I needed a break.  So break I took.  Today, I get back into the novel.  Chapter Ten, Muse and Keith start having words, then shit, as they say, gets real.

Talia is so going to be disappointed.

Even though I shouldn’t, I’m already thinking ahead to the next story.  I’m guessing that at the rate I’m going I’ll finish up Suggestive Amusements in about thirty to forty-five days, and then it’s–what?  What’s next?  There is always a story right around the corner, no?  So what comes next?

That’s a good question.  Because, at the moment, nothing is sparking my interest.

I’ve been on a pretty good tear of late.  If I finish this new novel in March, that’s two novels written in five months.  Kolor Ijo was almost seventy thousand words, and I have no reason to doubt that Suggestive Amusements won’t clock in about sixty-five to seventy thousand words, either.  One hundred and forty thousand words in five months, with two stories edited in the between.  Not a bad output.  And if you pop the sixty or so thousand words of this blog from November through February on top of that, we’re talking a lot of words for the last few months.

Spring time is the time to get the self publishing thing going.  I need to come up with a cover, I need to get one of my stories fully edited and ready to go.  Just as we talk about writers who don’t do much writing, writers who don’t publish as much are just as bad.  You gotta get it out there, you gotta get people seeing your work.  I write for myself, but if I’m the only one reading anything, then I’m sort of losing track of part of why I’m writing.

This is the next part of the plan.  I’ve stated I’d like to publish four titles this year, and I need to get to that.  Otherwise–I’m not making progress.  I’m the shark that’s stopped moving forward, and it’s only a matter of time before I start going, “Glug, glug,” and sink to the bottom of the ocean to be consumed by hagfish.

I will start on Chapter Ten today, get my wordage in, then I need to start looking at things to help me get a cover together.  I would hope to make a cover that’s somewhat better than these gems, but who knows?  I could become the Gielgud of Bad Cover Art, which isn’t that bad of a goal if that’s what you set out to become.  I want something a little better, however, and I will guaranty that any cover I make will not have a dragon, a kilt, or anything relating to Scotland gracing the image; I’ll leave those to the other cover makers . . .

Once more I have a plan.

Now to make it work.

The Emptiness of False Dreams

The last couple of days I’ve been running on little sleep, but not really feeling it.  Well, not much, that is.  I felt it last night when I was writing.  Or, should I say, struggling to write.

I had stuff to do yesterday, then there was time spent trying to get a fire going in the outdoor pit–note to self:  you need an hour to get that sucker going–then, about eight PM, it was time to write.

Maybe it was the moon coming out of newness, or my hormones are freaking on me, or I’m just cold.  I don’t know.  But last night, I was really down.  I didn’t want to write.  I felt like I was spending this enormous amount of time cranking out words, then I’d do a check of my progress, and discover I’d written maybe two hundred words.

I had to look stuff up.  As prepared as I was, I’m still finding things to research, and for about twenty minutes I was looking for one damn acronym so I could use it for a line in a chapter.  I needed a date, and I couldn’t find the sucker.  I needed the name of a town . . . screw it.  This is what comes from working in the real world:  you have to use real things from time to time.  So not fair.

Then I got caught up in some social media drama.  Someone posted something that they did a, “Oh, is this real?” then when you say it is, the comeback is misquoting something you said weeks before, and that they aren’t going to debate anything with me, ’cause obviously I’m a bad person.  You keep thinkin’ that, love, and, just like last night, I’ll walk away because–wait, what’s that quote?

 

Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

Mark Twain.

 

Yeah, that one.

It seems like that quote has been coming to bear a lot of late.  Not just from “things”–whatever those things may be–but from people I know in the writing biz.  It seems as NaNoWriMo drags on, you begin to get a very good feel for those who are writing because they are serious about being writers, and those who are writing because they think it makes them writers.

I was telling someone the other night that in the run-up to NaNo, I received a bit of–shall we say, shit, about all the work I’d put into getting ready to write.  It seemed there was a palatable poo-pooing hanging in the air before me from people who were aghast that I was doing something like–research!  For a novel!  Oh, heavens above, where is the fainting couch?

So bad had it become that a couple of people were insinuating–nay, insisting!–that if you had to plan things out in advance, you were some kind of formulaic hack, and damned if they’d go that route!  And that’s fine if you want to do that; far be it from me to say my way of writing is far better than yours.  And if you want to say your way of writing is far superior to my puny human efforts, Loki, that’s cool.  Though don’t expect me to give you mad props any time soon, because your mind is a bag of cats, and despite the hype you’re yappin’, I ain’t seeing the end result.

There seem to be a goodly number of people who, while some seem to be trying to walk the walk, they spend more time wiping up drama about their very comfortable walking shoes.  They go on an on about needing to sprint with people, when they could have been, you know, writing during the three hours they bitched about not having people around who can sprint.

Writing is hard, and last night it was very hard for me.  But, around eleven PM, something kicked in.  Something made the fingers fly.  Something made what I was writing make a hell of a lot more sense than it had before, and when it was all said and done, I made my NaNo Count, I made my Personal Daily Count, and I was about thirty-five words short of forty-four thousand.

You don’t own me, Novel:  your ass is mine.  So saith the Muse and Me.

Keep talking things up, and keep living those empty dreams.  I have other plans.  When you’re bitching about not getting in quality sprinting time, I’m struggling through my two thousand words, but I’m finishing that total before I head off to bed.  And just as a heads up:  a few of the folks who sort of turned their nose up at my prep work–they’ve crashed and burned their Air NaNo plane, and I’m still here.

And this story will be published.

You can count on that.

A Night at Ghost Beach

After fifteen days on the Crazy Train, my spreadsheet tells me I’m 83.6% complete, with 41,801 words banked.  My own stats tell me that, after looking at the average word count per chapter, I’m on pace for a 63,930 word story.

It’s a lot of numbers at the moment, but there’s a story in there.  You gotta trust me.

I knew, based upon what I was planing, that this weekend would be about the point where I’d cross the fifty thousand mark in the NaNo marathon.  When I look at last year’s stats, I cross that particular Rubicon on 14 November, when I finished the day with 51,061 words.  If I look at my numbers for the last ten days, there is a possibility I could end up at fifty thousand on Sunday night.  To do that I’ll need to probably have one three thousand word day–

If not, then I finish on Monday.  No big deal.  I can see the stadium off in the distance, so the race is almost over.

As for finishing the story?  That’s a bit trickier.

The chapter I’m working on today–and the chapter that follows–could get into some wordage.  A couple of the chapters that follow could be pretty short, and by that I mean maybe a thousand words, or so.  All that aside, I could still end up with a sixty-five thousand word story.  With a bit of editing, I could get that up to seventy, but lets get the story finished first.

For a while I’ve had this feeling that I’m not writing with the same speed and urgency as I did with last year’s NaNo.  Well, yes and no.  I had a bit of a heart-to-heart with The Muse last night–she’s still around, looking over my shoulder, rubbing my shoulders when necessary–and I’ve discovered the followed:  I’m not in a mad dash to simply throw words upon the page, but rather, I want to have it go out as a clean first draft, rather than a, “What the hell is this crap?” first draft.

My goal for NaNo was to get two thousand words a day behind me, and I’ve held to that.  There was one day when I just barely made that total, but numbers be met, and I’ll take what I wrote.  But as I told the Muse, this has also been one story where I’ve had to dive into the well and pull up research as I was writing, and unlike last year, that’s slowed me down.

Last year it was all about fantasy; this year it’s still about fantasy, but fantasy that exists in a real world wrapper, and there are names, there are weapons, there are streets, there are locations . . . hell, there’s even having to check what the stars are going to look like next year on a certain night on the other side of the world, and how one would eat pressed grilled bananas covered in sauce when your character are at the beach.

That’s where I was last night:  I have my characters waiting to see someone, they’re standing on a beach front in the city of Makassar, and I wanted to set a mood . . . so I’m looking at how the sky looked at the time, and I knew what they were going to eat, but I wasn’t certain how they’d eat it, or how it would be packaged–and therein is the need to run off and look things up.  Which I did.

So even among the writing, even with all the research, there’s work to be conducted, things to find.

And find them I do . . . that’s why I’m a writer.