Everything in Waves

I'M BACK!

I'm sorry for my prolonged absence from the blog, this summer has been full of fun stuff and a lot of changes!  Because of this all my writing, not just the blog, has suffered.

Everything I do seems to happen in waves and there is very little that I do 100% of the time.  It seems like I'll be in a mood for one particular thing and that will occupy me for a few weeks or months and then that ebbs away and another desire replaces it.  For a while I'll be obsessed about catching up on all the hot TV shows, sometimes its a video game.  Maybe I get bored easily, maybe I have so many interests and so little time I try to make time for everything.  Whatever the reason, I don't seem to stick with something consistently after I start it.  The good thing is after a good break I'll miss whatever I put aside and I'll pick it back up.

It seems that, for me, for now, writing has fallen into this bucket.

The only hobby I have that I seem to do more consistently than everything else is reading.

I started to feel the writing itch again about a week ago.  I started to miss my characters and my world, but where I left off was slightly de-motivating to me.  I started to think it over and I realized that maybe my outline was less than stellar.  I have a pretty bare bones outline and I was doing a lot of the writing from the seat of my pants which made it harder for me to get down to it in my limited writing time.

I have a four page outline for my full length novel.  When I wrote it up I thought that was pretty impressive, until I read an article with an author who said her outlines are usually 20 pages or so.  I couldn't help but be shocked, 20 pages!  Yikes!  

I guess my outline wasn't nearly as good as it needs to be.

Now everyone is different, every writer writes differently but I found I was relying pretty heavily on an outline that didn't have enough information to be useful.

Ok, so how do I fix that?

Over the weekend I got an idea that would help expand my world, give more depth to my characters and help sculpt the future of my novel.  A prequel short story!

Yesterday I sat down an did a story board session for my prequel and got all the big plot points for the story. 

This will be my experiment.  I will see if this beefier outline helps me in the short story.  If it does I will go back and work up my existing outline for my novel and see if that helps.  

So I'm getting back into it.  Time to bring on the next wave :-)

And the winner is...

Not me...   oops, I guess that's kind of a spoiler.

A few blogs back I told you guys about a writing contest I entered hosted by NPR.

It's called 3 Minute Fiction and the guidelines are simple, write something that is 600 words or less, something someone can read in less than 3 minutes.

The theme for this round is to write a story where a character find something they have no intention of returning.

Over the last few weeks they have been posting a few online and tonight they announced the winner.  As I mentioned before I was not it, nor was I among their list of favs.

I'm ok with this.  I know that there will be hundreds of rejection letters in my future and while I didn't actually get a letter telling me no, I was not among the posted list.  The important thing I put myself out there and gave it a whirl.  It gave me a great idea for a book and I got to do something that I was really proud of.

Congrats to the winner, and to all those that were posted on the website and read on the radio.  If any of you are interested in reading any of the stories you can find them here.

So without further ado, here is my story.  I hope you like it.



The Key

     I leaned over to spit more blood into the dirt at my feet. I couldn't lean too far with my hands tied together at the wrist and looped over a hook protruding from the stone wall above me. I lifted my head again to look at my captor with the most bored look I could muster. The small stone cavern we stood in tilted wildly then righted itself making my stomach churn in response. I must have taken one too many blows to the head.

     “Tell me where it is.” my captor snarled, “You're a smart girl. You know this only ends one way. Give me the key and I'll let you walk out of here unharmed.”

     I raised an eyebrow and looked down at myself. My cargo pants were torn in places and exposing gashes and bruises. My once white tank top was gray now from the dirt with a nice red stripe down the front from the blood coming out of my mouth or my head, I couldn't tell anymore. The normally blond hair that hung down in front of my face was also caked with mud and dried blood.

      “You're right,” I muttered around a swollen lip, “a quick shower and I'll be as fresh as a daisy.” I laughed a little then, I couldn't help it. The whole situation was suddenly funny. I shifted my feet, the hook above me was high enough that I had to stand on my tip toes to support my weight.

     I spent years scavenging through old libraries and exploring caves to find the very door on the opposite side of the small cavern. Once I had found it, I spent another few years trying to find a way to open it. As luck would have it, I found directions to the key's location on an unrelated cave exploration written in some old clay tablets. I could barely contain my excitement. If I had known it was going to land me in this predicament I would have thought this through a little better.

     My laughter only seemed to raise Jayce's ire. He stalked over to me looking like an animal about to strike. “WHERE IS IT?” he screamed in my face.

     I looked at him for a few silent moments while he stood there panting. His breath blowing the snarled strands of hair out of my face.

     I wiggled my fingers furiously to show him I had nothing. “It's only for the worthy, you don't qualify.”

He hit me just below the ribs, hard. I made a move to block the punch but my bound hands kept me from doing so. His fist landed in my side with a resounding thud. Again all I could do was laugh. He moved to hit me again but this time I was ready. I grabbed on to the hook and jumped. I lifted my feet up to kick him square in the chin. He went flying back to land against the opposite wall, out cold.

     I jumped up again to release my hands and quickly freed myself. I dug a small silver object out of a zippered pocket on the inside of my waistband and held it to my lips. Oh the things I endure for my craft. I smiled at my personal joke and walked to the door.

     I held the key to the door. “Please.” I said

     A rumbling could be heard then the door opened slightly. I pushed it open the rest of the way and walked through.

Busy Bees

With my birthday, Mother's Day, a Brad Paisley concert, catching Grease up in Manchester, and 3 birthday parties in two weekends my days have been pretty full.  Add to that a Game of Thrones book club all the season finales happening right now and it does not leave much time for writing.

Things have been slow but I continue to make progress.  I think I have mapped out that dialogue sequence that was giving me such a hard time a while back and I am much happier with the scene.

I know I missed last week's blog but I was determined to write something this week and say Hi.

I would also like to thank all the members of the United States Military, both past and present, for sacrificing their lives and their time away from their own families to defend our freedoms.  We can sometimes forget that this holiday means more than time away from work, the unofficial start of summer and backyard barbecues.  It means honoring those who have giving everything so we can have something!

Happy Memorial Day!

  

I'm sorry, How many words?

One of the most terrifying thoughts for me was not knowing if I would be able to write enough to fill an entire book.  The prospect of writing 85,000 words for a book sounded crazy!

That's so many, I thought to myself!  How on earth could I fill that much.  I only have a few scenes in my head.

Well thanks to my outline I have a rough idea as to where I want this story to go and I know about how far down the road I am on my story map.  I came to the realization recently that I might actually have to start cutting stuff from my book to speed it up and get to the good stuff, cut to the chase, make with the interesting.  It was pretty satisfying to know that from what I am looking at right now I can write that many words.  The trick, however, is not in the writing of the words, the trick is in actually telling the story, and telling it in a way that doesn't bore people to tears.

A friend of my recently came across a writing competition held by NPR.  They are currently in the 11th round, so I'm assuming this is a regular thing over there for them.

It's called 3 Minute Fiction.  They take submissions from wannabe writers, but there's a catch.  This has to be something that can be read in 3 minutes or less.  So for writers that translates to 600 words or less.

That sounds like quite a bit, but just to give you a frame of reference as of this word right here, I have written 276 words, that almost half of my allotment to tell an entire short story!

Yeah, it was going to be challenging for me.  I was getting used to filling a story out, making sure I could reach 85,000 words or more.  600 words is a drop in the bucket by comparison.  Most writers would consider this a warm up.

So I thought on it for a whole day.  I put out mental flyers hoping someone would pick it up and step off my mental bus and tell me a quick but entertaining story.

I was in luck.  One spunky gal answered my call!  So I had my idea.  Now I have to tell it in less than a page and half of double spaced text in Word....

I did what I always do.  I decided I was just going to write.  I'll thin it out later.  It would be easier to do that then try to compromise my story by worrying about the length as I went.

After I wrote it all out I thought it was pretty good, now it was time to check the word count.  I use OpenOffice and lucky for me they put that option right up in your face in the tools menu.  It's probably my second most used tool.  Right behind spell check.

I opened the counter and I saw the number and I was shocked.  In a quick 45 minutes I had written almost 700 words.  And I felt like I was going light at that.

I knew that anything over 600 words would be disqualified so I had to reign it in with a few words to spare.  You know, just in case.

So I started going through my story again, line by line, sentence be sentence.  I was getting rid of any words or descriptions that were not absolutely necessary to the telling of my story.  It probably took me almost as long to edit the doc as it did to write it.

I probably read it through about 4 or 5 times before I felt satisfied.  My final draft had 594 words.  After that I realized what a great exercise this was.  It really made me look at each sentence and made me ensure that each word was being used as efficiently as possible.  I had a story to tell, I couldn't waste words on things were not vital to the story.

The competition closed last night.  So we'll see how I do.  The theme of this round was "Someone finds something that they have no intention of returning."

The winner gets signed copies of the guest judge's books and gets published in the Fall Edition of the Paris Review.

They are going to announce the winner in early June but before that they will be posting a few of their favorites on their webpage as well as reading a few aloud on their weekend radio show.

One of the rules states that this cannot be published anywhere before they announce a winner to the contest. So once they announce the winner and I am free to post I will do so here.  I want you all to be able to read a sample of what I have been learning all this time.  I figured if you're still hanging around you deserve an award for your loyalty!

I'm pretty proud of what I wrote.  It was a fun exercise and I plan to do round 12 when it's up.  Even if I don't win I got a pretty good prize out of doing this.  My new friend is fresh off the bus and told me a quick story for this contest, but she has a whole lot more to tell.  I decided her story is going to be a really fun one to write.  She's waiting for now, but I don't think she'll be waiting for long!

How I started to feel like a fictional PI

I have people living in my head.

If you didn't know any better you'd think I was certifiable.  Well, maybe I am, but not for hearing voices.

No, in my head I have people, living and talking to me.  All kinds of people.  Some of them are shy and I have to coax them out of hiding, others are very, very pushy and want to be heard whether I am ready to receive them or not.  These people are most annoying when I'm trying to work...

I have no idea where they came from, or how long they plan to stay with me.  Most of the time they just pop in like they got off a bus and they were looking specifically for me.  Once they have found me most of them want to give me as much information as they can in very short bursts.  Its like they have this story they need to tell and they need to do it RIGHT NOW!

This has happened to me so many times now I have taken to carrying a small notepad and pen in my purse.  I would whip it out anytime I would start getting frantic messages from any of my new (or sometimes older) friends.  Information is coming at me so fast I start to feel like a police officer trying to calm down a hysterical witness to a crime.

"Calm down, calm down, please.  Take a deep breath.  Now, tell me what happened."

It's at this point that I start to feel like a private investigator.  I've been hired by my clients to figure out all the people involved, gather all the facts, and tell the story.

I would always start with the very people who would come looking for my help.

I had to know everything about them.  What motivated them to come to me in the first place?  Why is this story so important to tell?  Is this person very forthcoming with the information I am looking for or do I have to interrogate them to get what I need?  After they would finish with their compulsive verbal diarrhea, I got to ask questions, lots of fun questions.

For me, at the beginning its a lot like having a phone conversation with someone.  I can hear their voice but I have no face to put with the sounds.  They usually give me a quick description of themselves but as is the case with most people, the best descriptions I get for these people come from the other people involved.  As time goes on, I start to get some pictures of the places in the story, the landscape, their homes, and finally the people.  Sometimes I'm quite surprised by how they turn out.  I had one picture in my head but when I finally see them, really get to see them, they may look completely different from what I envisioned.

Some of the people who come looking for me step right off the bus, push their way to the front of the line and demand to be heard.  These are usually the people with the most and best information.  Others will get off the bus and be content with hanging around the station until I get to them.  When this happens I usually have to pull information out of them like they were teeth.  Most often, I just explain to them that I understand that they are not ready to tell their story and I can wait for a little while but there is a statute of limitations and I will not wait forever.

I even had one case where a woman stepped off the bus dragging her brother and sister in tow.  She was very interested in telling her story, which then leads to the story of her brother and then sister.  I have heard their parts in her story, but they are as yet unwilling to share too much info about their own stories.  Fear not, I have ways of making them talk and they will come around.

So far, no one has left, they are all still with me.

To date, all of the very pushy people in my head have been women.  I don't know if that says something about them, or me...  Who knows, maybe both.

To keep track of the people living in my head I had to start keeping records.  I have a write ups on a handful of them.  Others have nothing more than a quick description.  Some go so far as to document what their favorite subject in school is and do they keep their house neat or are they messy.  Each of the questions in my file tells me a little bit about the people involved in my investigation.

You may be reading this and think it rather odd.  In fact, I felt very self-conscious about it at first.  Then I started reading interviews and blogs from published authors and realized that a lot of them admitted to something very similar, if not exactly, what I was seeing.  Some did indeed have the same experience I did.

One of my favorite authors got the idea for her wildly popular book series because she had a dream of two people fighting.  She started to do her own investigation and things just started to fall into place.  So much so, that the fight she dreamed didn't even show up until book two!

These people may be fictional characters, but to me, in my head, they are very real.  I laugh and cry with them, I share their joy and their pain.  I feel their hurt, get frustrated over their choices and feel their regrets.  I cheer over their triumphs and feel pride in their accomplishments.  These characters are almost like children to me.  Though they feel to me like they are coming from somewhere out of the blue I know they came from me.  Every last one of them.

I only hope I am worthy of their choice and that I am capable of doing their stories justice.

Just a Spoonful of... Confidence

As many of you know I had a very uncertain start to writing.  I started my journey not really knowing where I'd end up or if I would even end up at all.

In the past, when I would get a little stuck I would begin to doubt myself and think, what am I doing?  There's no way I can write a book, this is just another example of why I can't.

I am pleased to announce that I have crossed a bridge of sorts.  I apparently have decided to start believing in myself and I didn't even realize I was doing it for a few days...

It happened last week.  I was working on some dialogue between my hero and my heroine and I was just not feeling it.  The chemistry wasn't right and I felt like I was jumping the gun on the outcome of the scene.  I needed to regroup and rethink the whole thing.

The last time this happened to me, it sent me into a tailspin I had a hard time coming out of.

This time, I realized this wasn't going the way I wanted and after a few seconds I thought, well I'll just fix it later and pushed through to finish up my 750 words.

That's it, that was my revelation and I completely missed it at the time.  I think that the fact that I missed it really tells me something too.  It wasn't a momentous enough of a thing at the time that I felt I needed to pat myself on the back.

No, it wasn't until about three days later I was actually laying in bed and rethinking my scene.  What was I trying to accomplish with this scene?  How did I want it to ultimately end up?  How was this moving my story forward?  Then, what I had thought to myself that night I was writing hit me like a bolt of lightning!

I realized that I thought the scene was no good and I didn't think to myself that I needed to quit because I was never going to become a writer.  No, I said, I'll just fix it later.

My subconscious had apparently worked out the fact that I was actually doing this and though it was rough, it wasn't half bad.

It's too bad it took my conscious mind a few days to catch up.  My subconscious, she's a sly one!  She does this to me all the time!

I think I'm done working on something and then a thought will pop into my head out of the blue and sometimes it's intense enough that I need to share it!  My husband is constantly giving me a hard time on my swift change in topics or my ability to be doing many things at once.

So I'm happy to say that writing a bad scene no longer sends me into an emotional tailspin that I have work extra hard to come out of.  Those 5 words really changed a lot for me and I had no idea at the time!

It's fun to feel my confidence growing.  Of course I only knew my confidence was growing because a scene came along that knocked me down a peg or two.

The difference this time is, I know I will work it out.  That's what editing is for!  I don't need to compare myself to anyone but me.  Just keep swimming and all that Jazz.

I'm going to make it to the end of this, even if it never gets published I will at least know that I was able to do something I set out to do.  And you know what, I feel pretty good about that!

Guest Blogger - Matt

First and foremost let me say this.  What happened today in Boston was horrific and may never really be truly understood.

I grieve for the victims of the bombings today at the Marathon's finish line, and I await the day the perpetrator of this heinous act is brought to justice.



Tonight I had an appointment that left little time for me to write a blog entry myself.  I asked my friend Matt, who was the subject of last week's post, to write up a little something to keep the momentum going.

So without further ado, I give you Matt.


Let me open with a clarification: I am not Jess. I’m her friend Matt. I’m three days younger, several dozen pounds heavier, and have no internal filter to speak of. You have my sincere apologies in advance.

Jess reached out to me this morning and asked if I’d mind throwing together a ‘Guest Blog’ for tonight, as her dance card was full up for the day, and she wasn’t going to be able to find the time to write her regularly scheduled blog. I took a look at my own brimming schedule for the day, then shrugged and said “The hell with it. Sure.”

I spent some time thinking about some different topics that might be interesting to ramble on about… Writing with Internet ADD… Novels vs Short Stories… The Catch-22 around Agent Desires and Publisher Desires…. But in the end, I decided to basically write a ‘Mirror Post’ to what Jess put up last week – Peer Reviews.

In my opinion, Peer Reviews are incredibly difficult to do properly, because it’s a two person process. Obviously, the person giving the review needs to do things a certain fashion, so that they’re providing good feedback without harping on the minuscule or otherwise tearing the piece to shreds, but just as importantly, the one receiving the feedback needs to have the correct mindset for it.

Last week, Jess hit on some of the emotions that go into letting someone else look at your work… it’s more or less stark, nail-biting, terror. Odds are you’ve worked your ass off writing something and have potentially spent hours on that one section once you start doing revisions. Additionally, there’s a good possibility that you’re completely convinced you might have written trite garbage that no one will ever want to read, and you should probably quit and go take up a different hobby where nobody will judge your work. So handing that piece of work to someone else takes no small amount of guts (and probably a solid shot of liquor or two to steel the nerves).

I had the ‘easier’ role of the two last week… I sent Jess about a half dozen pages from a section of my short story that, frankly, I hated. It was a necessary part of the story, but I just didn’t like what I’d done there (so much so that I’ve decided to shelve that work for a couple weeks and focus on another piece, for submission to a different Anthology. That’s how self-confident I am over what I’d written). Jess came back with some good pieces of feedback, and said that, overall, she didn’t think it was half bad… that definitely helped bolster my confidence a bit… perhaps I wasn’t writing COMPLETE Garbage… at least, there was a chance some of it could be redeemed.

This week, we changed roles a little bit… I reached out to Jess for a couple “What do you think about the formatting of this line…?” questions, and in turn, she sent me the first half of her Prologue to peek at.

At this point, it becomes very obvious to me that, while receiving criticism over your ‘baby’ is hard enough, they should, and probably do, teach college level courses on giving critiques. They’re incredibly hard for me, and I’ll tell you why…

I am the Grammar Police. Stick ‘em up.

If it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t know a ‘dangling participle’ from my own elbow, I’d probably be a good copy editor, as the QA side of my brain has trained me to catch every silly little formatting issue. Spelling errors, punctuation failures, sentences that seem out of order… but for the level of Peer Review we’re doing, I know that Jess doesn’t give a damn. She’s handing me a piece that hasn’t undergone revision, and will be looking through it all again long before submitting it to a publisher. She doesn’t need copy editing, she needs feedback. The other thing she doesn’t need is someone to look at a paragraph and say “You know, here’s how I’d have done it.” – I’m not writing her story, she is. How she wants to use a turn of phrase is up to her, and dictated by her style.

So I turn off the part of my brain that’s looking at the little things, and instead look at the big picture and try and get some feedback for her… I let her know that I think she’s got a good opener… here are a few excellent hooks that caught my attention, and would keep me flipping pages… I like how this piece here is written… and so on. I briefly mention that I noticed some technical flaws that I think a pass of revision will clear up, but don’t harp on them because I want to make sure she’s getting the positive feedback that she’s not off course. Her ship is on the right heading, she just needs to tighten the rigging as it were.

Now, earmuffs kiddies, this isn’t to say that feedback should be a big circle-jerk where it’s all rainbows and smiles. It just turns out she sent me a piece I felt was good. It would have been even harder for me if she gave me something that had real flaws in it, because I’d still need to give her solid feedback in terms of “I don’t understand this character’s motivations…” and “…why bother doing this when she could obviously just do this other thing with a fraction of the difficulty?”, but would need to do it in a constructive manner, that didn’t come across in a way that would depress her… because then I’m not only not helping her process, I’m harming it by sucking away her motivation.

Done correctly, Peer Review is an incredibly powerful tool if you’ve got the right people helping you out. You’ll be able to see things from a reader’s point of view… get a second opinion when you’re wavering on a particular formatting method or story idea… and can generally make sure you’re not heading down a dead branch. The caveat is just that you need to make sure you’ve got the right people helping you out, so you’re gaining, rather than losing, motivation every time you hand a piece out.