The Great Gates of Kiev

First off I have to say:  the WordPress make over is a bit strange, slipping into some Art Deco style black and white craziness that, for some, has been a bit off-putting.  But I am used to the strange and unusual, so I’m not nearly as bothered by this as some.  I’ve been in the software trade for some time, so change is both expected and dreaded.  In the end, I’ve had worse things happen, so move along.

Now that Welcome to the Fishbowl is something of a reality, I’ve started the task of bringing it together.  The world is so-so there–and by that I mean I have a majority of the basics down, it’s the little things that remain that will bring things into sharp clarity.  Yesterday I show the hospital wing from the main hall of my school, and after the post went up I spent some more time putting things together.  By the afternoon I’d arrived at the following conclusions:  one, because I was moving my story from a universe that wasn’t really of my making (yes, these things happen), and into my own private universe, there were things that were never in the building that I was now needing to add–like, say, an office for the head of school security, and a place from which to monitor everything.  And two . . . this damn place is huge.

Let us gander upon what I have so far.  As you can see, I’ve maybe half the second floor in place, and I’ve started putting in the library, which is going to be beyond that wall in the back of the building.  From the doors in the lower right hand corner, to the wall all the way towards the top, the building is one hundred and sixty meters long.  If you don’t do metric, that’s about five hundred and twenty-five feet.  To put that into some kind of perspective, I could fit this building inside Indiana’s own Lucas Oil Stadium, which is about two hundred and seventy meters long by my careful Google Map measuring.  Except my Great Hall will never seat sixty thousand people, nor require a tax on food so millionaire owners can keep the lights on.  It’s a world all unto itself.

My characters are developing as well.  The story has a huge cast, though maybe a half-dozen of them will get any sort of face time.  Still, when I think about the characters that do have a spoken part, and who end up becoming important to the main characters–I’m looking at over a dozen.  Easy.

Where do I get names?  Scrivener has a name generator that allows you to randomly generate first and last names based upon gender, nationality, and even letters of the alphabet, so when you need the name of a German woman whose last name starts with an E, no problems.  Then once you see something you like, move the name to your short list and copy it off for later use.

Or do as I did this morning.  I needed the names of three people who are part of the Foundation, and whom play a part in the story.  In the process of setting up their cards in Scrivener, I came up with Mr. Mayhew, Ms. Rutherford, and Mr. Gabriel.  If you know me, you know where those names came from.

The gates of the story are ahead, and I’m approaching slowly.  Won’t be long before I enter the city proper.

Or the school for that matter.

Infinite Space

The weekend is a good time to get creative, and it’s also a good time to think about what you’re going to do for future projects.  As I wrote yesterday, I’ve begun the process of getting my story for Camp NaNo going.  I’ve a title, a Scrivener project in place, and I’ve got some characters set up.  Yes, I have other things to do, but I also have two weeks to get my kernel of a story planted, watered, and sprouting.

I’ve done more with less, trust me.

As I pointed out to a few people I’m into the world building phase.  The good news is that I have a lot of the world already built.  The bad news is I have a lot of the world to build.  Reason?  I originally built much of the story within the framework of another world, and now I have to reverse engineer everything so it fits inside another world.  Does that make sense?  It does to me.

One of the things I use within my story are maps and floor plans.  I’ve always used maps to figure out where things should be within the framework of a story.  When I wrote Couples Dance I knew where the main house was located, and I used Google Maps to see how I’d get from one place in my world to another.  With Her Demonic Majesty I had drawings of what Chicago might have looked like had city plans been allowed to progress, and in my world that’s exactly what happened.

And in The Foundation Chronicles, I’ve a pretty big school to design.  Actually, it’s designed for the most part.  There are things to put into place, but I have buildings up, and names assigned to buildings and places.  Now all I have to do is write the story.

Though there’s something else here as well . . .

I may have mentioned that I have designed buildings that I use in my stories because I like to have a visual reference for what my characters are seeing.  This was actually forced upon me, more or less, by someone I know, because when I’d start talking about these buildings that these characters were visiting, she was like, “I can’t really see it.  Can you draw it out?”  Most of the time I’d say, “No,” but I have a hard time saying no to this person . . .

What we have here is the hospital of the Main Hall for my school in The Foundation Chronicles.  It’s a big part of an even bigger building, and as there are three main floors to this place, it’s taken some time getting things in place.  My two main characters end up going here after they arrive at the school, and it’s here that they not only meet someone who’ll be a part of their lives for many years to come, but it’s where one character learns some rather unusual news–

Actually, they learn a few things in this area.  There’s even a joke that comes out of the story where one of the beds is named for one of the main characters.

I have stairs and a lift to the floor above.  I have bathrooms.  I have a place for patients to sit and eat if they can.  I have beds for quick examinations, and beds for overnight–and longer–stays.  I have the doctor’s officer, storage, and . . . the waiting room where one of my characters gets the news, and they have a bit of a freak-out moment.  Oh, get me a fainting couch!

Then again, if you look hard, you’ll see I already have one . . .

 

The Fountain of Salmacis

After all the fun and frivolity of yesterday, I’m back to the grindstone this morning.  It’s not really as much of a grind as you may think:  I’ve been up about seventy-five minutes by this time (the clock on the computer says 7:12 AM), I’ve had a cup of coffee, and I’m almost forty minutes into listening to a concert by Genesis from 1976.  It’s a normal morning for me, more or less.  At least I’m getting some sleep these days.

This was going to be a very different post today, because as I was powering up the computer something struck my mind, a sliver of memory that had been hanging around for a few days.  When people say, “Where do you get your ideas?” the answer is they just come to me.  My blog posts are like that.  A few times it seems as if all I’m doing is detailing things that happen day to day, and there are times, weeks even, when I do just that.

But every morning I have to come up with something.  Now, you might say, “You don’t have to come up with something,” and that’s true.  I don’t have to do anything.  I don’t have to write the blog every day.  I could just take a day off and–I don’t know?  Shop for hand bags?  Shave my legs?  Strike out on a massive road trip to find every Facebook friend who I want to share a dinner, a cuddle, and a warm bed with?  (Actually, that last could make for a great story, and I have some ideas where I’d start.)

The idea that hit me first thing is different from the words you’re seeing on your screen right now.  I’m not going to throw that idea away, because it’s a good idea, and it’s very possible when I’m sitting down tomorrow morning in my local Panara (which you can see to your right–unless you’re reading this upside down, in which case it’s to your left), and I only have one hour to crank out my post, I’ll write it up.  Yes, that is very possible.

Instead I have a project to start.  Camp NaNo is getting closer, and I can smell the stale air in the cabin now.  I know we’ll need to air this sucker out, and with the nice weather of late, I’m hoping it stays cool enough to get some warm summer breezes through the windows and make this place smell like a field in the early summer morning.

It’s time to get into Scrivener and get a project started.  It’s time to do up the character sketches, which I’ve got in my mind but not on note cards.  I was up late speaking about the story with . . . let us say a collaborator, who will probably do her damnedest to keep me honest and not to stray from the straight and narrow of the story.  While she won’t be helping me write this story, you can bet I’ll feel her behind me, because she certainly helped develop it in such a way that I can get it out of my head.

I need a title.  I’ll have a title.  And then . . . well, we know where then is going.

At least I do.

Land of Confusion

Put another tick in the “completed” column.  Fantasies in Harmonie pulled into First Draft City, found a good hotel, and decided to shack up for a while, ’cause the diner across the street has damn good coffee.

It was a good afternoon of writing, and since I said I was gonna finish that story, I was for sure gonna finish the sucker.  Two thousand, six hundred words later I was finished, and it was a good thing.  Not because it was finished, but because my mindset had changed drastically over the last week, and where I had been pretty down on both myself and the story, as I wrote the final chapter I returned to the conclusion that while the story might not be down and dirty, smoking hot dirty porn, it was pretty good fantasy erotica, and I could give myself a pat on the back for completing another story.

‘Cause if you don’t know, completing a story is pretty much as important–if not more–than starting one.  And if you’re gonna start one, you better finish it, love.

Fantasies in Harmonie is not only finished, but I’ve got it out to a couple of beta readers already.  Yes, Cassie is quick on this one, because it’s a pretty clean story–you know what I mean–and after a couple of edits and a cover, I can work the world of smut with this beauty.  Maybe it’s not as good as a story about programming the girl next door to be your perfect sex slave, but it’ll be good.

With that out of the way, it means I got–let me check the big clock . . . a little more than nineteen days before Camp NaNo is in session.  Which means I need do to research.  It means I need to build my world.

I means I need a title.

That’s the thing that’s bugging me right now.  Not that I need to spec out the school, or the teachers, or the students, or the curriculum, or . . . well, any number of things.  No, the thing that bothers me now is that I don’t have a title.  I have an idea and the bare bones of a plot, but I don’t have a title, and just like Harlan, I’m strange about starting without a title.  I did that with Kuntilanak, because I really had no idea what to call it before I got all original and named it after a creature in the story.  Since then I always have a title so I don’t have to go and rename the Scrivener file once I’m about ten thousand words into this thing.

However!  Part of the story takes place aboard a 747-400, and while doing one of those magical things called a “Google Search”, I found the Seat Guru site.  While my plane will be a charter flight, I have an idea of what a current 747-400 looks like, and I can–what’s that word again?  Oh, yeah:  Imagine.  I can imagine what the inside of my place will look like.

If I get too crazy I may just model my plane in 3D–

I’ve done worse.

Deep in the Motherlode

There are a number of things happening today, not the least of which is finally getting to this blog post.  I was going to start writing about eight; it’s now ten-thirty, and I have only myself to blame.  Part of it is due to looking at bad book covers.  Part of is due to being pulled away by every shiny thing that happens to cross my path.  Part of it is that it’s sticky outside today, and I feel it in my writing space.

But I’m here now.  All Hail the Great One!

When I crawled out of bed today I had Fantasies in Harmonie on my mind, because my life is pretty much like that.  No one else in bed with me, so wake up with my story.  Last night I finished all the sexy encounters that happened in the aftermath of one big event, so all that is left is to have the girls say goodbye and close it out, just as a story should.

While putting the story together in Scrivener I set up the chapters and gave each a little tag, as I always do.  For my last part, Part Four, where I am now, I had two chapters:  one of goodbyes, and one of followups.  And while getting up today, I thought about the writing I had ahead of me and went, “I don’t need that last chapter.  It’s going to take away from the story and and end up becoming superfluous.”

Which means the last chapter is dead.  Something I was going to do in the old last chapter gets done in the new last chapter, and that’s that.  End of story, write “The End”, move onto the next project, my Fantasies are over.  Sit on my twenty thousand words of erotica, it it later, and submit it to the big smut stand on the Internet.

Speaking of what’s next . . .

I’m off to camp again:  Camp NaNo July, that is.  I’ve already sent out my notices about who I want in my cabin, and I’m getting stuff ready for smores for those moments at night when we’re not writing.  It’s going to be fun, I tell ya–fun!

Then again, I have to come up with something to write in the next few weeks, don’t I?

I’ve a few ideas that I could do, all of which sound like–here it comes, I’m going to say it . . . novels.  I have lots of ideas that could be turned into novels, but if I write a novel now, does that mean I’ll be able to write another novel come November and the Big Party?  I even had another one pop up this morning and I need to get it written down before my mind completely spaces away.

I also have one particular story I could do that would make this a great Camp NaNo.  I’ve even been nudged in that direction by someone who knows me well, and knows the sort of stuff I write.  They even had a couple of words of inspiration for me:  ”Two witches”.

Hot lesbian witches . . . wait, sorry:  I’m not Charlie Sheen.

I need to get this erotica behind me today.  Then I can get my witch’s hat on and start thinking right.

 

Moonage Daydream

The weather has cooled and isn’t as muggy as it was yesterday.  I know that sounds a ridiculous thing to say, given the way weather has lost it’s mind of late–though it’s not something I haven’t seen coming for a while.  But that’s a discussion for another time.  Right now it’s cool outside, and it’s going to say this way for a few days.  Cloudy, cool, rainy.

Perfect weather for writing.

I’m well into novelette territory now with Fantasies in Harmonie.  After watching Iron Man 2 with my daughter last night, I hit the Scrivener bricks about ten PM and wrote for an hour.  A thousand words later I found a good point to leave off until today, stared at the final word count, and proclaimed myself the worst smut writer in the world.

Lets define that, shall we?  I don’t mean “worse” as in I can’t write.  I can.  I write good, as some might say.  What I mean by “worse” is that this story is double the size of other stories I’ve seen, like The Boss, My Slut or Daddy’s Horny Step Daughter.  Then again, I’m not writing those stories:  I’m writing mine.

As one person told me, it’s gonna be a real story, not just get off sex.  Though there’s nothing wrong with that.

What’s strange for me is my sleeping patterns these days.  When I go to bed I’m usually thinking of some story that I want to write, and when I wake up I find myself going over a scene from the current work in progress–usually as I lay there gathering my strength and wits.

That happened this morning.  I started coming awake in the dim light of this cloudy, gray morning, and here I have something bouncing around my head concerning one of my characters.  Now, I don’t know if it’s something that would fit her for this current story, but it’s damn sure something that could work for her in another story.  Yes, I think that way:  I’m always figuring in another story angle for characters even when I’m working on their current story.  (About the only one I haven’t done that with is Couples Dance because, damn . . .)

The images that assault me during that time–oh, my.  It’s an interesting time, since I have these ideas and scenes and feelings that enrapture me while I lay there, eyes half-closed, taking it all in.  Sometimes I feel like this is the best time for me to get my ideas in order, because things are coming at me fast and furiously, and I’ve had some of my best scenes hit me during the waking hours.

They can also be a little overwhelming at times, because my mind is wide open, and just about anything can happen during these moments.  These things wash over me and I lay there and take it in and take it apart.  I see what works and what doesn’t.  I think about what I want to keep and use and what I want to discard–

Sometimes I even get a story idea.

If only my day was this productive.

Wild is the Wind

For a moment I wondered if my computer was coming up this morning.  You start having these fears when your machine is looking at its seventh birthday, and all your friends have gone through three or four machines by this time.  If I’m lucky I’ll hang on this sucker for another year, then maybe get that super-tablet that I’ve had my eye on for years.

But I’m here, I’m up, and I have plans for the day.  Writing, of course:  I need to get back into my story, and there’s something special I want to work on as well.  What is it?  I’m not telling, at least not yet.  Give it a day or two, but you’ll see it.  Maybe you’ll even like it.

Speaking of the story . . . yeah, over the ten thousand mark.  That’s me, Ms. Wordy Smut.  It should just be sex and sex and sex, and kept it short and simple, but no:  I gotta tell a story.  Well, people liked my other long smut, so maybe I can get people to like this smutty smut, too.  They might even want to give me a couple a bucks in the process.

I have a guy watching me because writing and swaying back and forth as I listen to David Bowie Live From the BBC, from back in 2000.  Hope you enjoy the show, sucker, because maybe it gets better.  Enjoy your yogurt and quit staring a hole in me, ‘kay?  People, I swear.

I think I’ve finally reached some sort of point with Fantasies in Harmonie, where I feel like I have to write this now.  I go through the strangest feelings about my works at time, and this has been one of them.  Maybe it’s the writing late at night, maybe it’s finally using Scrivener in full screen mode–which I highly recommend–maybe it’s I’m finally kicking through this depression I’ve been in for the last month.  Whatever it has been, when I’m writing I love writing.  The distractions are becoming fewer, and I’m really getting into the scenes I’m creating.  It could be due to the story finally taking off, so I crank through another ten thousand words, get to the end, and get a cover while I’m editing this sucker.  Push it out, put it up, have it ready for the end of July so people can have a little excitement as they flow into fall.  I aims to please.

There remains what comes next.  It’s always about what comes next these days.  Get into the wind and go with it, and don’t stop flying just because you found a place where you can relax for a bit and enjoy the sights.  Somewhere down the jet stream you’re going to find something new and exciting, so finish up your thing and get wild with the wind, because if you’re good, if you’re right, you can keep flying the wind forever.  Or at least until you get too old to fly.

Then what do you do?

Screw it.  You keep flying.  And tell the stories of when you touch down.

 

Onward to the Lost Planet

Yesterday I wasn’t in the mood to write.  Yes, I know:  it always seems as if I’m in the mood to write, but that’s not always true.  Yesterday was one of those days when the words were stuck in the back of my mind, and the urge to get them out on a page was ranking somewhere below scrubbing the sleep from my eyes.

It happens.  You get off somewhere in the ether, you find your mind wandering to other things, other stories, and the urge to write sort of vanishes.  With the things that have been happening to me the last couple of weeks I don’t find it all that unusual that getting back into my stories has been a bit difficult.

I sort of found myself putting around, therefore, and when I came time to get into Fantasies in Harmonie, it was a tough slog.  Write a little, then a distraction.  Write a little, then I’d see something shiny.  Write a little, then think of another story to work on.

On and on, into the night it went.

Here’s the thing, thought:  I kept writing.  Though I didn’t feel like writing, I kept at the story.  I’d do a paragraph, then something else for a few minutes, then back in to do two or three paragraphs.  Though there wasn’t any grand “Write Like a Madwoman for Hours” feel, it kept going–

Until I finally reached a point where I said, “It’s late, and this seems like a good place to stop the story.”  Once I checked out what I’d written for the night, the final word count was almost twelve hundred words.  As I told some people later, it wasn’t bad for someone who wasn’t in the mood to write.

I want to get back into the swing of writing like I mean it.  Sure, it sounds like I’m working hard, but the last year has seen me struggling through my writing.  A year of steady writing, and it seems like I have to kick myself in the butt to get it going.  I could point to several things happening in my life that make it that way, but a big part is that I’m wanting a lot, and I’m not getting there the way I want to get there.  I want it all, and I want it now.

I’m being impatient.

I’m looking for that lost planet, the one called Success, the one that says, “Okay, you can write, and you can even enjoy it, and you can spend the rest of your life doing it, and you won’t have to worry about editors and ISBNs and publication platforms.  We gotcha covered, chickie.”  And I get up in the morning and pull up my Scrivener files, and I drink my coffee and look over what it is I want to do for the day–

And I write.

That planet is out there; I just have to find the place.  It would help if my ship were ready to go–

Maybe I should write on up.

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?

The Foundations Upon the New

Lets get this out of the way right now:  Her Demonic Majesty is finished.  I received the finished edited manuscript yesterday afternoon, and I had it ported into Scrivener, and chapters updated, by five-thirty in the afternoon.  (Or as my friends in the rest of the world would say, 17:30.  Audrey and Cytheria would say that, too, just because.)  Today I write the dedication page and start getting the Table of Contents in place, and all that remains is the upload and publication.

So this part of my writing life is almost over.  Though, really, it’ll never be over,  because this will become my first published novel, and that’s something you sort of look at with a bit of nostalgia   ”Remember when you published Demonic Majesty back in ’13?”  ”Oh, yeah:  that thing was a bitch to finish.  Pass me some caviar. . .”  Just kidding:  I don’t care for caviar.  I’d probably be drinking some European beer instead.

I’ve already had someone ask when I’m going to have the book up on Kindle.  My reply was, “Soon”.  I want my accounts in order, I need to run it through the Smashwords meat grinder–there are still a few steps remaining, but it’s going to be soon.  Before the end of the month, I think.  If not next weekend, then maybe Memorial Day weekend.  But soon.

Which means, I’m already on to the next thing . . .

I’ve not started writing yet, but I’m doing a lot of thinking, and not a bit of world building.  I have my erotic cabin story to start setting up–yes, I’m still doing that–and I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this new world I’m creating, one with all the strange things that really happen in the world, but no one knows about.  Scoff and say it’s been done already, but I don’t care, it’s a world for a couple of my favorite characters, and I’m going there.

I began looking at the layout of the interior of Cape Ann, and under satellite it doesn’t look too bad, but when you switch over to a terrain map–geez, oh, is it rough!  It’s not a simple expanse of level ground; it’s rocky and hilly, and a perfect place for people with unusual skills to have built a place of higher learning.

Now I’m getting into the things I like, because making maps of places is something I dearly love, and once I begin getting ideas about how the Institute should appear, I’ll come up with some very interesting things.  At least I hope they’re interesting:  I’d hate to put a lot of work into this stuff, then have it ignored–

Ah, who cares?  It’s what I want to do.  World building is something every writer should do now and then, and have a blast throughout the creation.  And if you manage to root it a bit of reality, then it becomes an even greater world, because you’re interfacing the possible with the maybe-impossible, and it doesn’t get much better than that.

So much to do, so little time to get it done.  You’d swear I do this for a living.

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?