Process Examination #15: In Which I Finally Hack My Brain (Or a Portion of It, Anyway)

There's more going on here than just looking back at the mess of Act One and realizing why it's 40K long and mostly pretty dry stuff (that would be the logic stranglehold). Now I'm trying to figure out why I can't seem to drag myself on with the novel. I think I pieced together some of it last night.

I fear letting a first draft of a novel be really, really rough. I can't let myself write full-on crap just to get to the end and have a complete story unit to look at, analyze, and perfect into an actual novel. Not at 100K words a pop, at least. With short fiction, this isn't a problem. Take PPR: the original draft of that story was 8K words, and I kept only 2K of them in the revised story, which ended up being 29K total (yes, I finished it Monday night; now to let it alone for a couple of weeks before I tackle the next round of revisions). That's 25% of the original story that stayed, and it comprises only 7% of the current draft. Translate those percentages into the 100K words of a novel's first draft, and yikes! That's a lot of words that get cut and take a while to create in the first place. It doesn't sit right with me to be so wasteful and inefficient with something I have so little time for in as it is.

But I looked closer at the comparison to PPR. Those original 8K were quite rough indeed, in the sense that my big reveal at the end was 2-3 pages of infodump that would have been much more satisfying revealed in the course of the story with my MC getting enough pieces of the puzzle to put some of it together herself. Also, the central conflict needed a good deal of work to make sense beyond my initial sketch. And the two characters in conflict were neither of them likeable, though they were interesting. While it was fun to write that way and part of me wants to see if I can tweak those 8K into a different interpretation than the one I went with, I overhauled the story into something with a good arc, with good character tension each step of the way, with a logical though not transparent plot and narrative flow, and with a complicated ending that didn't make things overly nice and tidy like I'm beginning to hate in some books. For some reason, just because it's a novel, I'm expecting the first draft of THUMB to deliver all of that already. I'm not giving myself permission to fail in order to see how to succeed with this story because that means risking a lot of words and time in creating those words.

How to fix this? I've started this a little. The past 2K of THUMB that I have dragged kicking and screaming out of my fingertips are definitely not going to stay in their present form. It's pretty much all infodumping on my gee-whiz tech in the story, but I wrote it because it provided a chance to get my MC showing her stuff, it led to some fun dialog and character action, and I know I'm going to end up keeping snippets in some fashion because at some point, I'm going to need a "Here's Where I Geek on Future Tech" scene. Today, I'm hoping to grit my teeth and summarize a bunch of activity as my characters get the ship ready to roll so I can finally write the fun piece that officially kicks off the conflict of Act 2. Hopefully I will keep giving myself permission to write outlines and sketches and distillations to keep me moving along.

I think part of the problem has been in trying to hit a word count goal in the first draft of a novel. It keeps me tied into the concept of "this is a lot of words, and I may lose a lot of them." Short fiction has shown me that my first drafts are very exploratory and take as much or as little as they need. And I find it very interesting that THUMB gummed up right around the 35K mark. I think I lasted to about 45K in SoZ before I came up against this wall. That time I forced myself through it, not thinking about the story or what the block could be telling me, and I got thoroughly off-track. There may be a very good reason that my first novel, HD, is told in three parts of about 30-35K a piece over the course of thirty or so years and many critiquers have complained that each part feels like it's trying to be a novel on its own and not part of a whole. A draft beyond 35-45K is outside of my natural comfort zone, apparently. And a draft that actually gets the novel out of Act 1 is problematic, as well, it seems.

I would find this more fascinating and helpful were it not for the fact that it took one complete but very broken novel (100K words) and three aborted attempts at novels (135K words) and myriad pieces of short fiction (hmmm, maybe a total of 100 or 150K?) spread out over five and half years (actually, seven if you count the very first 10K I wrote in HD before I considered myself serious about this writing thing). I don't like taking this long to figure something out, especially if it's about myself (though I have taken longer, and will likely take longer still in the future), and especially if not knowing the piece of information delays events that will get me closer to the dream of writing full-time.

Ah, well. I'm just going to have to get over that, aren't I? At least I did figure it out. Isn't that why I'm doing this series of posts anyway?

Revision Slog

Ugh. So the last two major additions I did for Ghost Story/Pinewood Fog have been very heavy on exposition. But one of those chunks is actually a good bit of storyshowing for some of my characters, so I might not be as bad off as it feels. We'll see what happens when I start typing things in.

One thing that's really helped me in this revision is a concerted effort to think about what the scene is in its draft form, what I want it to be in its finished form, and then jot down notes on how I think I can get it there. Then dive into the revisions for that scene. And when I think about where I want the scene to be, I'm getting very theme and character focused. This is all to the good.

This hasn't been an easy revision, but I definitely don't feel lost like I have during other revisions. I feel like I've really grown as a writer here. Of course, applying these concepts to something bigger than 10K might prove a stumbling point. We'll see when I start going over SoZ's +80K. That ought to be fun.

When Sciences Collide...

I'm having fun with the revisions to Ghost Story, which I think I may be renaming to Pinewood Fog (maybe). It involves taking basic physics and chemistry, which I recently reviewed while trying to nail down the magic specifics for Velorin, and melding it into a very broad and probably misunderstood concept of neurology. Add in a smattering of philosophy, and we have the first scene of the story. I have no idea if it works. In a perfect world, I would be a recognized expert in chemistry, physics, neurology, and philosophy and would know if I was talking out of my ass. In an ideal world, I would be able to send the scene to such experts and have them tell me if I'm talking out of my ass. In the real world, I have to submit this story (after more reviews and one or two beta-reads) and hope I don't get heckled too badly by fans (assuming it gets pubbed).

Regardless, I'm having fun with it, and I like the ways I've used the science and philosophy. It does serve to remind me, though, that reading more non-fiction would be a good idea.

A Happy Accident and an Unfortunate Reality

Last night, I printed out the story I had submitted a couple of times late last year. I thought I had printed the final version I sent out. I ripped into it, merrily cutting and revising per my thoughts on the feedback it received from one editor. As I got to the last line, something buzzed in my brain, asking me where a particular exchange was that I thought I had put into the story. I went through and looked for it, but couldn't find it. I did a mental shrug and assumed it had been in an earlier draft.

Then, today, I was printing out two other stories that I want to revise and kick out the door when I noticed a later draft of the story I worked on yesterday. Opened it up and, sure enough, there was the half-remembered dialog. I quickly read through the draft, making sure there was no other major changes that I needed. There weren't. Looking back at the draft I worked with yesterday and the one I found today, I like the earlier draft better. Much better. In fact, the stuff I added in to that later draft just clunked horribly and raised more questions than it answered.

After one last look through of the story with the revisions I made yesterday, I'll send that sucker out and feel much better about its quality.

While it was nice to have a mistake turn out to be a blessing in disguise, I wasn't so lucky earlier this week with regard to Carson's Learning, that novelette that made me more than a little nuts last year. It's been nine months since I looked at this thing, and boy-oh-boy did the distance do me good.

CL is absolute and utter crap. I'm embarrassed that I sent it out in the state it's in. Don't get me wrong, the nuts and bolts of the words aren't too bad, and the overall story is still there and good. But I've thrown eveything but the kitchen sink at my protagonist in less than 15,000 words, and I have next to no transitions to speak of. Between those two flaws, I have created a protagonist that seems disconnected from everything I shoved at him, heartless in the face of his backstory, and overall rather inconsistent. Also, I have jerked the reader around continuously by having them ask one story question in one scene, only to force them to ask another in the next scene.

Bad, bad, Kellie.

I went back to the basics with this story, getting to the heart of the conflict, looking at turning points, etc. I've got all of the elements of that sort mapped out in a clear way, but now that I'm crystal on who my protagonist is, what he wants, who my antagonist is, and how what that character wants drives the tension, I'm looking at a rough outline that in no way resembles the story as it stands now. In fact, I have an outline of turning points that I simply can't translate into an actual plot at the moment. I keep hoping that my subconcious or my muse will mull over the problem and spit out the answer any midnight now. But nothing yet. If anything, I'm getting more excited about the novel that I want to write with these characters later on in the timeline than I am about revising CL. Sigh.

That's the state of my writing today. Hopefully by the end of next week, I'll have revised all of the other short pieces and identified the markets where I can submit them. Then I'll be ready to get back into Shadow of Zehth, knowing that I've done all I can to bring in money with my writing at the moment.

Always the Main Character, Never the Secondary

In trying to get back into a regular writing schedule for SoZ, I've been digging my way into the heart of the conflict of the story and re-assessing the arcs and act structures of the book. And somewhere in all of this I'm trying to assimilate some sort of writing process so I don't have to entirely reinvent the wheel the next book around--I mean, if I start out knowing that the basic shape has to be round, surely I won't get mired in this again, right?

Last week I did the facepalm/headdesk thing as I realized that I've become a much more visual thinker and learner than I was in the past (or maybe I've always been so visual, I just never realized it and/or managed to play to that strength without a fuss), and that nothing in my writing process was as visual as I needed it to be. So I got the great idea of putting together a timeline that I could then printout and keep on very large posterboard on the wall by my writing desk. Excellent. Issue addressed.

Only I didn't have a timeline.

So back to the drawing board I went, trying to piece together a timeline. That's when I realized that four-act structures are great, but they're only for the protagonist's story/arc. And here I am with a protagonist for the overall Velorin series, a (different) protagonist for the initial trilogy, and yet another protagonist or two in the nebulous two to three books beyond the initial trilogy. Now, I have arcs and broad outlines for most if not all of these folks (and I'm including "Book 5 or 6: Think Final Fantasy X but with more science fiction and less fantasy, but they're trying to get back to the fantasy" as a broad outline and arc), but what about all of the other characters running around in these stories?

For my own sanity, I stuck with the POV characters from the first book (which are, incidentally, the POV characters from the next two books as well, excluding those who die in the course of the first book, of course). At first, I tried to weave what all the characters were doing in and around my protag's four-act structure. Then I did another facepalm and got to the heart of the "everyone's the star in their own show" saying. I was never going to believably write from a POV of a non-protag unless I got into their stories as if they were the protagonists. Said another way, I went back to each of my POV characters and looked at their stories as if I were going to write their stories for the book. I gave them all their own four-act structures. I'm going to give them all their own conflict boxes, too, I think.

Writing up all of those four-act structures made a few things clear to me: Ayren is definitely the antagonist, she has the most compelling view with which to tell this story as effectively (and efficiently) as possible, considering both the story itself and its salability. For example, I could write the first bit of the Velorin saga from Rayn's point of view, but then I would have to squish the first two books into one and shift my antagonist from Arzakel to Corla. Oh, and that act of squishing the first two books into one would make for either a very hefty first book (on the order of 150 to 200k) or a very superficial book on the order of 100k. Losing Arzakel as the antagonist in Book One also destroys the connection with the overall series antagonist, thus giving Loria's POV nothing to push against until I can re-introduce the series' antagonist much later in that two-into-one squish in Rayn's story. So Ayren is the protagonist, and I now can stop feeling guilty for giving her POV more time in the book than Rayn's. That fixes a lot of problems right there.

Also, looking at those four-acts for the antag and his "goons" made me solidify their backstory much better. In fact, the backstory is so much clearer, that I'm going to write snippets of it as standalone stories that will help me keep focus on character voices and conflicts. Because once the story is written, the image in my mind is solidified in a different way. It has concrete connections to something outside of my mind, and not just in a nebulous, I wrote my notes out or mapped them kind of way. But in an actual "I have translated my mental image into a complete story" kind of way. That really cements things for me, because once the story is complete, I can remember it as a movie, not just random images.

But I do have enough from all of these four-act structures to piece together a timeline and put that sucker up in lights next to my writing desk. I've got a few other things to put up there, too (such, I dunno, how 'bout the map, one of the most visual things I've had for this book since the beginning). Maybe by the end of the month I'll have put myself back on track for writing SoZ again. I really hope so.

The Wonders of the Dollar Store

It's amazing where you can find inspiration. I went into a local dollar store just to see about picking up some posterboard for mapping out SoZ in purty colors. I decided to wander around a bit and see if I could find anything else that might help me visualize my story better. I didn't find much for SoZ, but I did find something so intriguing that I'll have to set aside time to write a different story in the near future.

I was browsing the knick knack section when I saw it. In among some other colorfully painted Victorian hat stands (with attached hats, of course), I found one that was entirely painted in silver. I saw it, and my first thought, I kid you not, was, "Victorians...in...SPAAAAAAACE!!!!" And then I thought, "Damn, now I have to write that."

Short Fiction Will Save My Sanity

Recently, there's been buzz about the role of short stories in launching a writing career. I must admit, the idea of making a name for myself with quicker-to-complete short fiction was why I started writing shorter pieces. I didn't latch onto this idea because it was something the pros were telling me to do. Instead it was something that I observed in watching the genre trends at conventions, in the new deals, on blogs, etc. It just seemed to me about this time a year or so ago that short fiction often established oneself in the genre and thus helped one's opus rise above the slush. Plus, it was very desirable to have a few completed pieces that I could sub to maintain some sense of accomplishment and control as I slogged through a novel.

Then I tried to juggle moving with a toddler, a very intense period at the DDJ, moving in with my mother, and buying a house. Short fiction became a path to sanity.

Because my novels are often volumes in multi-book sagas, it's often hard to escape the sense that completing a scene or a chapter is barely nudging the story forward to its ultimate conclusion. Usually this isn't a problem for me. But when chaos becomes a matter of course and the ideas of stability and routine feel like brief sightings of land in a very turbulent, endless ocean, sitting down to a work-in-progress that launches a universe can make you feel like you've just been tossed out of the small boat you were on in the first place. Thus I purposefully set aside SoZ during all of October and most of November and focused on revising a few older short stories and on creating a novelette, Ghost Story (gotta get a better title there).

I didn't feel helpless when I sat down at the computer during the rare moments when I actually had the time. There wasn't an infinite story stretching before me. Everything I did had a concrete, definite end that was easily attainable even given the insanity of that time. It kept me from going crazy and growing to loathe a wonderful world like Velorin. It also had the unanticipated and painful (yet beneficial) side effect of giving me the distance I needed to see the structural flaws of SoZ and a way to fix them.

Here's my current dilemma. I'm again on the cusp of insanity with closing on the house, moving out of my mother's house and into our first house while still juggling the DDJ and a toddler (and things are heating back up again at the DDJ as it seems not much that should've been done since October actually was done). In trying to get back on track with SoZ, I've been doing some extra worldbuilding to actually solidify and organize everything I've learned about Velorin and the characters in the 80K I've already written. This is not an easy or quickly accomplished task. It's not helped that I really need good chunks of uninterrupted time to really sink my teeth into things and let them absorb me. I don't have those chunks of time. I get an hour at best to focus, and the end of that hour is usually when I'm just hitting my stride.

I'm getting mighty frustrated.

Hence, I'm turning once again to short fiction. It helps that any short fiction idea I get that is more than fleeting is much like a demon that must be exorcised as quickly as possible. In fact, my current short in the making is actually an attempt at fanfiction, of sorts. Through a very meandering path, I decided to mold an idea I had into a take on The Tempest, only in a near future setting with some fairly steep changes (in fact, it's a bit of an alternate reality, if you can apply the term to drastically tweaking a plot point of a classic work of fiction; in fact, I don't know if it can reasonably be called fanfiction because of that; oh, and I think I've messed with some of the characterization as set out in the canon). But it's a lot of fun, and I think the link up with the play actually serves to really deepen the theme and character arcs of the story. Or it could just make it extraordinarily shitty. Check in with me when I've finished the story. I may hate the idea and be cursing the Bard for being so damn good, but at least I won't be dangling onto the edge of sanity by my pinky, staring into the abyss that is the Velorin saga.

The Great Shadow of Zehth Plot Rethink

I've mentioned before that I'm an organic writer, and I've described a bit of what that's like. And although things sounded pretty darn up in that post, I'm going to chat about the dark side today. Before Lee Goldberg can say "You should've outlined," though, I'd like to point out that I was writing to an outline of a fashion. I knew where my acts ended and had a few highlights of what was going to happen along the way, along with a story arc, some character arcs, and even a friggin' series arc. Granted, it was all done in a rather chaotic brainstorm map (hey, it's how I think when it comes to fiction), and I didn't really refer to said outlining materials but once every other month or even less. The reason that I looked at the quasi-outline rarely can be described quite well with this post by Jennifer Crusie.

My last disclaimer is that I ignored the niggling concerns about silly things like a logical plot and smart characters because I thought Muse was trying to trick me into rewriting the first 20-30K words over and over again in an endless pursuit of perfection. I wasn't going to let her fool me, though. I was going to keep going and finish this draft, though I did nod to the concerns and duly note them along with my ideas for addressing them in my "to be revised" mindmap.

During the fallout from my writing computer meltdown, I started thinking a lot about change and shakeups and what made the most sense to deal with yet another unexpected kink in my already far from usual writing circumstances of late. At the time that all of that was bumbling around in my brain, I was working through Holly Lisle's Create a Language Clinic (and really pondering the statement she makes that "a language is the soul of its people), and I was listening to Loreena McKennitt's new album. A lot. Particularly "Caravanserai" and "Kecharitomene." Things clicked.

Basically, to continue the map metaphor, I realized that I was writing the equivalent of the "Look, kids! There's Big Ben! Parliament!" scene from National Lampoon's European Adventure.

But I figured out how to kick myself out of the loop and actually write this great story that's been bumping around in my head. And I learned that, although I will always be an organic writer and will "feel" my way through a project, I can be a lot smarter about the kernels of the story I keep with me as I go. Particularly when a question starts to niggle away at me, I know what other questions to ask to put the original niggle in its proper frame of reference and more accurately decide if it's a delaying tactic or a valid critique.

That's the good news. And, yes, there is bad news.

The bad news is that I now have to go back to Ye Olde Beginning and start from word 1. See that word count over on the side bar? Yeah, the one that says +80K words in Shadow of Zehth? I have to go back through those 80,000 words, primarily writing new scenes from scratch and seeing where I can graft in some of those 80K words. This is a year and a half after I began draft creation for this book. It's not as bad as I had first thought when I figured out what I needed to do. In cobbling together a very high-level outline for the rethought plot, I figured out that a lot of the scenes will stay, though in altered form.

Still. Ouch.

In the wake of this massive plot (and character) rethink, I have been brutal with myself to make sure I can verbalize what the problem was and how I can prevent it for future novels. This is what I came up with.

As an organic writer, it is absolutely vital that I continually refer back to the meager amount of outlining, mapping, and arcing that I do before I write a scene. This is to keep fresh in my mind what the central conflict and character motivations are every step of the way to minimize wandering far off track or getting stuck in ruts and loops. Otherwise I go where the Muse tosses me, which may be interesting and fun but may not be the best thing for the whole of the novel. Also, this seems to be a good way for me to filter all of the backstory and subplots to distill the information that the reader needs each step of the way. It also gives me a better sense of control over the whole process, or, rather, the illusion of control, as I will be writing the novel from a birds-eye view vantage point instead of a character's view. I'll be better able to see the ruts and extreme tangential wanderings before I get too lost in them.

So that's my Joy of Writing story for the year. Hopefully next year's won't require a drastic revision of 80,000 words.

Too Tired

Got up at 3:30 this morning to catch my plane. Survived through some intense DDJ meetings and discussions on a grande peppermint mocha. Barely managed to keep my feet under me through the day. And then, silly me, I thought I'd try detail my SoZ plot rethink. I actually wrote quite a bit, then my brain fizzled out as I tried to wrap things up (which, actually links back to the problem I was having with the book in the first place, an irony that I will be happy to explore next Thursday).

So off to bed I go.

Upgraded

I have completed the oh-so-entertaining task of going through all 800 posts on this blog and labeling them with the new Blogger Beta tag function. The next item on my Blog Maintenance list is to figure out RSS feeds. I sense a headache looming for that one. But I will figure it out. Maybe even by the end of the year.

And I also updated the side bar with the actual wordcount for SoZ. In the insanity of the move, I completely forgot to log my last week of writing in the count. It wasn't a whole lot more, but it did push me past 80K. Go me! This weekend, if I don't manage to accomplish this tonight, I'm going to finish my entry for PBW's 2007 E-book challenge (see, I'm not late for the 2006 challenge, just way ahead of the game for next year's), do one last read-through of a short story and submit it to Fantasy & Science Fiction (they say they want more humor, hopefully this will fit the bill), and get back to Velorin. I stopped my progress on SoZ so I could do some backstory and alternate POV sketching for a particular plot thread. I hope to finish that this weekend as well so I can be writing new words in SoZ next week.

Still to be considered is the best way to keep working on my short fiction so I can always have something out for consideration in a mag. Maybe the perfect plan will strike this weekend as well, making next week an actual "normal" writing week.

Writing Again

I haven't established a regular schedule yet, but I am writing again. Still not working on SoZ yet, but I'm revising a short for submission and finishing another short. Feels good. I hope to get a better sense of what my "regular" schedule will be until we start moving in to the new house. Then I can put together a good structure and wordcount expectation. Hopefully I'll have that in place by next weekend.

Juggling

In the midst of juggling life stuff, I find myself also juggling writing stuff. I have an idea for a short story that I'd really like to get into and give me the soothing satisfaction of actually completing a project right about now. But I'm afraid that I'll get derailed in the middle of SoZ, which would be a very bad thing because if I get derailed in the middle, it's hard to get back on track.

So that's the dilemma. Write the short story and feel good about seeing a project through from start to finish in the middle of all the Real Life Stuff and risk an extensive delay in finishing SoZ. Or keep chugging on SoZ--which I'm enjoying, don't get me wrong--and every now and then feel a little off because I feel anchorless in my writing as well as my life. Hmmm....

A Whole New Blog Check-in

I just switched over to the beta version of Blogger that will let folks "subscribe" to my blog and get email notification when I have new content. Also, there will finally be content tags so you can browse my blog by topic. I'm betting "Drew" will be a popular one. (This, of course, means I have to go through over three and a half years of posts and apply said tags. I'll probably do that over the course of a month unless I suddenly find a bunch of free time. Ha.)

The week finished up so well with the news about Mark's interview, the news about the DDJ looking for a tech writer (yes, I applied), and Drew adjusting very well to the new day care and being in such a great mood for me while working at home yesterday...it's just so hard to believe that the start of the week was well and truly awful.

As for the writing, I managed to get some done this week. I'm still stuck in the middle and not particularly enjoying it, but I keep trudging onward, knowing that things are going to get wicked cool in a bit. Also knowing that all sins can be fixed in the revision. I may need to start using some other story ideas as a carrot to get through this middle bit.

For the most part, though, I'm just damn happy to have survived this week. I have a feeling that the next few weeks are going to be like that. But I'll survive with a smile, so I guess that's all right.

Stuck in the Middle with Muse

Crazy things start to happen when I get into the middle of a book. I'll try to skip it and get to the end, or I'll get caught up in all the flaws of the previous material that I halt all progress, or I'll get mired in it.

For Human Dignity, I skipped the middle sections by, in essence, writing the beginnings and ends of three books--conveniently called "parts" in the novel. That is, I introduced the situation and characters and conflict, then I went right to climactic action and resolved it, with some dangly bits. End of Part One. Part Two began fifteen years later, so I had to re-introduce the situation and characters and conflict, then I went right to the climactic action and resolved it, with some dangly bits. End of Part Two. And so on. My most common critique of HD remarked on this feature, which was just my way of avoiding writing the middle of a book.

With The Masque, I had so totally re-envisioned the beginning of the book after I had written it that I didn't know how to keep writing without revising everything I had written, which I was going to do except I got pregnant. But I was stuck at the end of the beginning of the book for months, unable to really move forward because of all the flaws and my unimplemented ideas for fixing them. This was especially frustrating because I was unemployed for many of those months and had hoped to use that time to finish the draft or at least get damn near to finishing it.

Now, here I am in the middle of Shadow of Zehth, and I'm not skipping it or stuck, but I am mired in it. Every scene seems to stretch on longer than it should. Could be that's how my previous tendency to skip the middle is exerting itself this time. I don't know. The only thing I know is it's really making the middle seem even longer to get through. But I'm going to keep at it and see what things look like once I write my way through to the end. Maybe these scenes won't be overly long and drawn out, maybe they'll be the perfect pace and length once I can see the whole of the book, or even just the whole of the middle.

I wish I knew why middles gave me so much trouble. One of these days I'll put my mind to the dilemma and see what I can learn from it to grow as a writer and improve my process, but for right now, I'm stumped.

The Odd Sunday Check-in

Still not back to 100%. I've only been up for three hours today, and I'm ready for a nap after doing simple grocery shopping. I go back to work tomorrow, but I'm not sure I'm going to make it a full day. We'll see. Other than the energy levels, though, I feel fine. I've got several follow-up appointments this week and next, and the docs will give their Final Word on how I'm doing after the recent medical insanity. One of the follow-ups includes an ultrasound of my kidneys. Fun.

In non-health business, I've done a lot of reading and TV-watching this week. The books were OK, but nothing that really absorbed me and Did It for me. It'd be nice to read a really good book. I've got a hardback that I picked up that I've been shying away from even though I really like the first chapter. Sounds silly, but I was reluctant to heft such a tome this week. I'll probably get over it, though, as I really want to get into a good book and that one seems to be the most promising.

As for my writing, I did manage to get a good bit done this week. About 4K. And I should have the energy to write more today and tomorrow as well. I need 5K more by tomorrow night in order to be fully "caught up" to my minimum goals after the hospital stay, but I'm not going to push myself to make it. If I get there, I get there. If I don't, it's OK. Health has to come first at the moment.

So that's been my week. I wish I was a bit more healed, but I'm hoping that getting into the swing of my regular life will trigger the rest of the energy to return. Some times that's what it takes.

Yet Another Writing Plan

Last week I got frustrated with my writing. Frustrated in the sense that I knew I was good enough to be published right now, at this very moment, except that I didn't have a completed novel of publishable quality to get published. In the odd logic that permeates such frustrating moments (and keep in mind I was having a bad week at the DDJ and was irked that I couldn't spend the time on my writing that I wanted), I decided to go ahead and pitch the Velorin series to the Luna line without a finished first book. No, I didn't go right out and act on said piece of insanity. I let it stew. I discussed it with Mark. I considered all of the various problems that could arise if I did this--and it was very telling that my only option that would not land me in some sort of trouble was if the pitch was rejected.

So I put my frustration to better use and formulated a do-able schedule that would allow me to finish a draft of SoZ by the end of the year (with hopefully enough wiggle-room to accommodate the insanity of moving, whenever that should hit). It involves committing myself to at least 1000 words every time I sit down to write. This shouldn't be a problem in that I tend to write 1,200 to 1,500 words in every session. But to put the goals in writing, with the expected weekly goal of at least 3000 words (I get three nights to write each week) and the expected monthly goal of at least 12,000 words, should help me make steadier progress. I know where I'm going with the book, I have an outline of everything I've already written, I have a plan for getting where I want to be by the end of the year. I am going to stick with it.

Also on tap with the writing is to make a similar plan for getting my two short stories out in the world. Right now they're stalled because I'm unsure of the turnaround time at the magazines I'm shooting for and with the uncertainty of our move.... I just have to analyze my options and make a decision. As for my other writing ideas, I'm going to put them into a reward structure for meeting my 12,000 a month goal. Also, all writing business items (such as the blog), will be taken care of one night a week to prevent me from wasting my other writing time doing post in advance and such. By putting aside a specific time for that every week, I should limit the distractions and such that would prevent me from meeting 1K a session or even writing SoZ at all in a session.

And Now, Deep Thoughts...

When I started reading and writing stories for pleasure, I inherently focused on story. In fact, whenever I came up against a heavily used or relied upon trope (Merriam Webster is telling me that "cliche" works just fine, too), I'd get pretty annoyed. I read a lot of mysteries until late in high school when suddenly all I saw was a formula loosely connected with some story elements. How is that a fun way to spend my free time? I studied formulas day in and day out in school. Why would I want to read them? When I got serious about writing, it wasn't to trot out tropic themes and elements, it was to tell a story I wanted to share or read myself.

I've come up against tropes twice that I can think of. The first time was as a frequent visitor to the Melanie Rawn Bulletin Board. Someone decided to go off on the Exiles series because it wasn't really fantasy. His argument could be summed up in how the books didn't follow standard epic quest tropes. I thought that was a very odd argument to make. Why deride a book for not adhering to a formula? Wouldn't you want to judge the book on the merits of the story it told? But the argument must've stuck with me, because when I sat down to puzzle out Velorin, I looked to tropes. OK, I'm gonna need a map of my fantasy world, and a creation story replete with gods, and a journey by some average folk to save the world from destruction. As I got deeper into the story that wanted to be told, though, I turned each of those tropes into something different. (Well, maybe not the map; I consider that a functional part of the book, like page numbers; but wouldn't it be fun to find a way to turn that convention on its head? I feel another story brewing....)

The second time genre tropes hit me over the head was at my first writing conference. I was told (by an unpublished writer) that Human Dignity wasn't science fiction. It was a tech thriller or something. And I thought, "Um, but the majority of it takes place fifteen to thirty years in the future, and it has fictional science things such as nanotech and flying cars." I happened to get the opportunity to ask Teresa Nielsen Hayden if she thought my book was SF (she had read the same ten pages the unpubbed chick had as part of a workshop). I think she said something along the lines of "Don't worry about that, that's my job. Just write a good story."

That's the same basic line I was told at Forward Motion, and I'm very glad that I've had those experiences. Who really cares about genre boundaries and definitions so long as the story is compelling and well written? But apparently there are those who think otherwise, and enough of them to drive the marketing practices of categorization. I guess I'm lucky that I'm looking and listening and reading elsewhere.

Similar to what TNH said to me is this essay by Anna Genoese. The driving force behind that essay was a reaction to frustrations she heard from authors who want to publish their gay romance novels. She discussed market definitions and realities and the challenges of trying to create an audience, but in the end she said to write an amazing story and the publishers would go for it and figure out how to market it.

Recently I've found a couple of "movements" that work to challenge genre boundaries and definitions, and it's got me thinking more about how tropes fit into my writing.

Right around the beginning of the year, I happened upon the Interstitial Arts Foundation's call for submissions. Reading into the foundation's mission, I found this essay, and it got me thinking about Carson's Learning and the classifications of all my ideas in general. By the time I had finished my revisions of CL, I tried to figure out how to label it. I think I came up with something like "an erotic psychological thriller standalone installment of an epic military SF space opera." And yet it was none of those things, as well. I had a sense of that back in January, which is why I set about getting CL ready for this anthology. As I've looked deeper into the IAF and works they recommend as representative of the label "interstitial", it seems that they are more geared toward works that flit between literary and commercial classifications. And that didn't seem quite right for anything I've written or anything I want to write (with the possible exception of Human Dignity). I most certainly have a commercial voice. Still, I think CL would be great for their anthology.

A few months later, I caught wind of a group blog by a gaggle of writers called Deep Genre. They started their blog with a few definitions of what exactly (or inexactly) the term "deep genre" means. Reading through those entries, I put together my own definition of Deep Genre. Deep Genre is a work that doesn't take genre tropes for granted to tell a story, rather it examines those tropes and twists them into something the same but different. For example, a space opera that requires faster-than-light travel to get the characters around to fulfill the plot might turn out to be about the damages FTL does to the human body (there was a Star Trek: TNG episode that explored something similar in that it showed the "environmental" impact of warp travel; I'm also thinking of the CS Friedman book This Alien Shore as a work that twists the FTL trope). This can be dangerous because the work looks like standard genre fare for a decent amount of the time, but turns out not to be so standard by the end, thus potentially disappointing genre fans who want genre tropes to be genre tropes and not elements to be re-examined. The trick, as mentioned many, many times above, is to tell a compelling story.

To sum up: genre may have been a marketing ploy, it may have developed into a comfort zone, it may have a grab-bag of expected plot devices and characters, but genre is not absolute; it can be overcome, it can be re-defined. Readers will journey far and wide with you if you make it worth their while.

Back on the Horse Next Week

A series of errors prevented both Tuesday and Thursday posts. For the Tuesday fun, stay tuned for Monday's Drew Monster post. For the Thursday fun, send a bouquet of flowers to the DDJ. We're mired in some unknown circle of hell, and I find myself tearing out my hair. Now I understand how folks studying quantum mechanics must feel. I wonder if they mutter, "If I only had this variable, I'd have a universal theory of everything in nature."

As for the writing, I'm trying to piece together an outline for everything I've written in SoZ so I can do some revisions and get back on course for the rest of the novel. Live and learn: as I write novels, I will outline behind me. There's a lot more I can include on an outline as I finish each scene/novel.

All in all, another good week. Should be back on track for regular posting and writing next week.

Dr. Robida, I Presume

Pardon the silence. Keeping Mark sane this week during the countdown to his defense was a job in and of itself, and it didn't help that the DDJ elected to increase its insanity level this week. It also didn't help matters that my brain chose this week to dither on whether or not to revise Velorin before continuing on. And I got not a lot of good sleep. Crazy, crazy week.

But it's over and Mark passed his defense with flying colors. Lots of high praise got tossed around during the obligatory champagne and cake session afterward. Much use of the word "doctor" too, althought he's not officially Dr. Robida until Aug 12th, the official summer graduation date. Still, we're all callin him "Doc" for kicks. It's hard to believe that he's really done, that these six years are finished but for the getting of a "real" job. I'm so very happy for Mark and really proud of him. Now it's time for him to be the major breadwinner and let me live my life of writing bliss and luxury. Ha.

Now I can focus on the blog, my writing, and sorting out the DDJ better. Normal blogging should resume this week.

Moving Checklist

Or, rather, a non-specific general hoard of info that is related to hauling our butts to wherever it is we're going to be going next. That's what we're putting together this weekend. All in the hopes of helping us feel a little less like the world is spinning out of control underneath us. OK, so all in the hopes of making me feel like the world isn't spinning out of control, but Mark admits it'll help take the edge off of things for him too. If I weren't trying to juggle writing, a day job (and the seemingly unlimited permutations thereof depending on the job that Mark gets), and that whole motherhood thing, I think this bout of uncertainty would be easier to take. Or if I only had to juggle a job and motherhood. Or just writing and motherhood.

Wait. Since when did three things get to be too much for me to handle while dealing with the insanity of a move? I'm an Air Force brat, for cryin' out loud! Geez, I must be losing my touch.

Another good blogging week despite Drew's day of being sick and my general "I hate it when I can't plan to the end of the year" malaise. Also a decent writing week as I finished a draft of my first ever, real, honest-to-God short story, and I also made some good progress in Velorin and have a nice sketch of the next few chapters floating around in my notes.

So, good week overall, with the more and more frequent moving insanity. Next week's check-in will involve much celebration as by then Mark will be done with that whole PhD thing. Be sure to read that update for all the tales of jubilation.