Why I Write Longhand

All right.  It's no secret here on the blog that I love to write longhand when I'm working on a novel.  I've pretty much alternated project-to-project with how I write it, whether it's straight into the computer or longhand first.

I've discovered time and again that I do prefer writing longhand first.  Here's why.

1) Writing longhand helps me to focus on story over word count.  I can estimate a word count, but that's only an average count.  Some pages might come out with far fewer words, depending on how much dialogue is there.  (I'm a classic under-writer and have to add in scenery so I have more than just floating heads.)

2) No internet.  Internet=evil.  Internet use is counter to productivity.  If you write longhand you're not on the computer.  Far fewer distractions.

3) Ease of editing.  Okay, now I know what you're thinking.  How easy can editing be when you're writing on paper and it's hard to erase?  You don't edit when you're actually writing it.  The quick edits come when you're typing it into the computer.  So often as I'm transcribing I find that the saids which are so easy to write out when you're on a roll aren't necessary.  Also, you get to really see just how conversations are working as you type it out fresh rather than looking at what's already typed in a future edit and wondering how the scene is working.

4) Portability.  I can take my notebook and iPod pretty much anywhere I want.  Yes, I do have the project binder sitting on my lap so I can reference maps and calendars and all the rest that I need, but the notebook is so much lighter than an actual computer.

Experience and Practice

It's no secret here on the blog that I've written a fair number of books and stories that have all gone into the drawer of practice.

It's all practice and experience.  Sure, I could read craft books but they put me to sleep.  (Great cure for insomnia.)

That's just not how I learn.  I learn from practice, from seeing examples in living color (read: television and movies), and from doing.

I've written three fantasy novels, one steampunk/fantasy hybrid short story (which I later tried to transform into a novel. Still want to make it work), two romance novels, two romance short stories (one of which I transformed into a novel), and done world-building on another fantasy and on a contemporary adventure novel.  I've the beginnings of three or four other short stories on my hard drive.  Not to mention all the poems.

What's the point of confessing all this?  To say this: For the first time in my short writing life (two years I've been going at this in earnest), I feel like I'm finally getting a handle on how I work as a writer and what's going to help me make a book as strong as possible.

When I set out to world-build and plot my latest WiP (and the second and third books in the trilogy), I knew where I needed to improve off my last attempts at writing a novel.  Every word I've written has given me experience.  Every word has shown me a glimpse of what works and what doesn't.  Every word helped me to develop that eye and intuition for character and plot which are, in my opinion, so necessary for good writing and revising.

It may take 10,000 hours to become a master at something, but perhaps it only takes one 90,000 word novel to flip the switch on a lightbulb in the writer's mind.

How I Came Into Writing

I've been reminiscing lately on how I got started on this whole crazy journey.  The start of my writing life is a little nebulous in my memory.  (A fact which would shock my family.  I'm known as the one with a mind like a steel trap.)

Basically, though, this is what I remember:

In ninth grade I was obsessed with a certain boy band.  No, I won't say which.  That would date me.  I think at around the same time the movie, "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmaron" came out and, well, I've always been into horses.  (I used to have one but we had to put him down last year.)  Somehow I got the idea in my head to write a screenplay for an animated movie about horses.  And since the member of said boy band with whom I was most obsessed was also into horses my brain had the casting down to a tee.

I started working on the idea, trying to learn how to write a screenplay, and coveting screen writing software that would automatically format the script properly.  (You know, character names in all caps, action tags, to be used sparingly, in brackets, one minute of screen time per page, etcetera.)  Boy was that software going to be expensive.  And at the time, I of course didn't have a credit card.  (Oh, to return to that time.)

Somewhere along the way between ninth grade and my junior year of high school (in Utah, middle school is 7th, 8th and 9th, while high school is 10th, 11th, 12th), the idea got abandoned.  I'm sure somewhere in all the boxes of books and miscellanea at my mom's house I still have my basic notes that I took on the idea.  (Casting alongside notes on who should do the music, since it was going to be classic Disney, singing characters and all.)

Also somewhere in here I was doing a lot of reading.  Fantasy mostly.  We're talking my first exposure to Tolkien (junior year); J.K. Rowling, Tamora Pierce, and David Eddings dominated.  I know that thought crossed my mind, "I could do this.  I could write a fantasy novel."

I launched into the world-building.  My parents had years before bought a large encyclopedia set and it sat on our shelves.  I took to thumbing through it for maps and pulling random place names for locations in my fantasy world.  This was after I'd hit on the inspiration for my entire plot, the meaning of a name given to one of the principal female characters in the saga.

By senior year I was writing the story.  My English teacher that year, Sly, was kind enough to offer me feedback on my chapters as I went.  I spent down time in every class revising those first few chapters.  My folder filled with the hard copies of those chapters and my special writing pen were never far from hand anywhere I went in my day.  (Nor were the notebooks I wrote in at the time, even when I went to work that summer after graduation.)

Eight years later, after abandoning the novel on two different occasions (and some encouraging words from Jasper Fforde), I launched into a start-from-scratch world-building frenzy and rewrite of the first book in the series.  I finished it after five or so months and the monkey left my back.

I have since shelved the book but I still think about it and the characters almost constantly.  I know it can be saved, I'm just not there yet.

Making Your Outline Work For You Part 3

We made it!  The last step of the process!  This one is time-consuming but by far the most fun of them all.

All those post-it flags and notes in the margin?  They're coming off.

First, the easy ones.  Whatever colors you've designated for things to move elsewhere (4 out of 6 categories) are the ones you'll go through first.  Go one color at a time and start cutting and pasting.  This is where your margin notes will come in handy.  You should have noted along the way where to move something to.  Mine read something like, "Use this scene for such and such bit of mythology, character history, whatever."

As you address each of these changes, remove the post-it.  This pass-through will leave you with just two colors and two categories to address: Scenes/chapters to reconsider (which I've marked in mine with orange) and things hinted at or foreshadowed that need to be developed further.

These two are the meatiest of your categories and the ones the hardest and most time-consuming to address.  But your outline will work for you, not the other way around, with this method.  This outline will help you to close up plot holes, deepen characters, adequately foreshadow events, etc.

The easier of these two categories is the foreshadowing/developing further one.  For each of your post-its in this category, go back through your margin notes.  These notes will indicate places where it will flow naturally to put in a sentence, a short scene, anything that might help foreshadow without giving away or places where a small bit of backstory can be seeded to explain something you've indicated.

Don't remove the post-it until you've fully addressed it.  This includes scenes that need to occur after the post-it, further on in the narrative.  Once you feel that you've added everything that needs to be in order to smooth out the plot bump, you can remove that post-it.

Now we're only left with one color.  Scenes and chapters to reconsider.  You may find that many of these are no longer something that needs to be addressed and the post-it can be removed.  (Many of mine ended up being deleted as I went through the other five categories of changes.)  But this category also includes the scenes that you noted in the margins to add but don't get addressed by the other five pass-throughs.

In the end, you'll end up with a stronger story and a post-it free outline.  (At this point, for future revisions, I would suggest you create a clean outline to work off.  This one you've just finished with is vastly different from the manuscript as it currently stands.)

Making Your Outline Work For You Part 2

Everyone set with their outlines all post-it noted and looking like there's a lot of work ahead?  *crickets chirp*

Right then.  Well, we're going to go ahead and press on to the next step.  I recommend your favorite comfort food because this is going to sting, possibly a lot.  It's like picking off a scab.  You know it's going to hurt but you do it anyway.  And then it hurts and you cry.  But it scabs over again.

Your first part is to knock out the easy stuff.  Pull up your latest draft, the one that's most current and that you'll work off of for this revision.  For me, so I don't lose anything that maybe will find its way back in later, I copy the entire manuscript to a new file and save it with a later draft number.  This way I have a history of the story progress and if there's something that's absolutely worth putting back in later, I can access it rather than try to recreate it from memory.

The easy stuff is everything that you put a slash through two steps ago, the second step of the detailed outlining process.  (Which I talk about in this post.)  If there's something in the scene that you're deleting that you've marked to be moved elsewhere, I suggest you either leave that in the document file itself or you can create a separate file for those tidbits so that when you get to the next step of the process you have handy access to them.

After you've done that, you'll need to move on to the next part.  This is where you start brainstorming the sutures you'll use to put your poor baby together.

Go post-it by post-it and look at what needs to be done.  If it's something you need to develop further, meaning it's an event or some such that you've hinted at or foreshadowed or that came up unexpectedly when you were pantsing it, this is where you start looking for places you can do just that.

For each post-it go back through the scenes the preceded it or follow it, depending on where it needs to move or if it's something to set up or address later, and note where you could put some sort of scene or revise a scene to help accomplish that goal.

In the end of this step you'll have pages that could look like this.

Or something like this.  You'll have notes all over your margins on some pages.  Some pages you might have nothing.  It all depends on how strong the individual scenes and chapters are.  Because the book is only as strong as its weakest scene or chapter or character.


That's enough for today.  This post is getting long and this step can take a day or two.  Come back on Thursday (after a WiP Wednesday with my updates on how well this process is working for me.)

Making Your Outline Work For You Part 1

Outlining?  Me?

Yes.  And I'm here to tell you how to make your outline work for you.  I've blogged before about the outlines that I do.  (I plan to continue this process through many many books.  It's extremely helpful, especially this next step.)

As a refresher, the first two posts are here and here.

Now, after I've created my lovely outline, in a process that takes a while, feels like rolling Sisyphus' rock, and makes you want to tear out your hair, and proceeded to tear it to pieces, I have a nice messy slate to work off.

This is the next step in the process:

Post-it Flags will be your friends in this step of the process.  Here I have 6 colors to match the 6 highlighter colors from step 2.

These and your pen will become invaluable from here on.  They're your best tools, aside from your imagination, at this point.

You can see in the photograph that there are a ton of post-its sticking out the side of my outline.  I'll explain.

First off, you're going to want to set aside a good hour or more for this part.  You're not just sticking these flags on willy-nilly.  There's a method to the madness.

Next, I recommend a good television program or movie playing in the background so that when your eyes are swimming in colored post-its you can avert them and allow them to re-calibrate.

All settled on the couch?  Great.  Here's where you dig in and really make this baby start working for you.  You're now going to go page by page and put a little post-it beside every highlighter mark you've made in the outline.  Does your page have four different colors marked on it?  Great.  One flag of each color.  You may have to continually reference your little color key you've inserted in the front of your outline, but you'll get there eventually.  You'll start to notice that certain colors appear more than others.  This will show you where you might have a weakness or writer's tic.



In the end, you'll end up with the right edge looking something like this, only more colorful.  (At the point in this process I took the photos, I'd already gone through many of the parts I'll discuss tomorrow and Thursday.)

Now that's over, it's time to move on to the next part of this.  Which I'll post about tomorrow since this is already going on long enough.

WiP Wednesday 2/24

Revisions are going slowly.  But I've launched into them wholeheartedly and am feeling a bit overwhelmed.

There are 3 chapters that I have to add in to the book.  I'm partway through one of them.  There may end up being need for a prologue just to help set up some of the subplots that got lost when I took a hacksaw to the manuscript.

And my two main male characters need to be renamed.  Yeah, not an easy task.  My top picks are Halston, Kyler, Loran, Lian, Gage, Declan, Dashiell, and Macrae.

None of them are meshing well with my characters.  But they can't continue with their current first initials.  They just can't.

And that's all I'm saying about the manuscript for now.  Sorry I missed Tantalus Tuesday this month.  I'll hopefully be back next month with an even more exciting teaser than the ones I've posted before.

Stay tuned this afternoon when I reveal which of my statements was the truth and which were bald-faced lies.  (Or half-truths.)

Writing Goals

You know that feeling of being watched?  You can tell someone's got it out for you.  That's the universe staring at you.  The universe tends to have it out for you.  She likes to interfere with your best-laid plans and your well-intentioned goals.

Like the goal of being done with Oracles Promise before this Saturday.

Not. going. to. happen.

The universe has it out for me.  She threw a killer cold my way and I've been lucky to get from my bed to the couch.  Forget trying to pound out the words that I need to finish before Saturday.  New goal= finish by Christmas.  I'll be lucky if I do, but it at least takes some pressure off.

How to know when it's time to change

How do you know when it's time to change MCs?

1- You would rather write the book about a different character
2- To make the book saleable you have to cut the characters that you feel are better and more alive than your MC so you can focus on the MC
3- You just can't stand your MC anymore, you don't fell she's a viable character, etc.
4- Your tired of trying to sound like a 10 year old when you don't know how to make a 10 year old sound believable.

Can you tell what I'm having issues with?

Character Bios

Julie Dao asked me in the comments to last week's WiP Wednesday about my character bios.  I thought I'd take some time to go over those a little more in-depth than I did in the comments.

My biggest resource for questions to ask about my characters is Noah Lukeman's The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life.  The first two chapters of his book cover dozens of questions to ask.  Chapter 1 is all about the external.  What do they sound like?  How about cheekbones?  Wais size?  All sorts of stuff like that.

Chapter 2 focuses on the internal.  He covers topics like conversational focus, sub-conscious programs, religion, spirituality, etc.

For any given character I go through most, if not all, of these questions.  Until I lose steam.  Which is why I can only do a couple of character bios at a time.  I make it a goal to at least cover the physical description questions and the stuff about tone of voice, accent, etc.

Take, for example, my bio for Derek, the MC from Lodestar.  I've got 4 or 5 pages on him.  I answer most of the questions found in Lukeman's book.  But then for side characters such as Grady or Evans, I only have a page covering the basics of background and physical description.

Since in Lodestar ethnic background is important I make sure I note that for each character, regardless of how in-depth their bio may or may not be.

I hope that this helps answer Julie's question a bit better.  I'll probably do another post on bios sometime, too.  We'll just have to see how it goes.

Tortoise vs. Hare

Two examples:

1- Season 3 of the Fox television show, Bones.  I love this show.  It's now in its fifth season and has a promise of season 6.  (Which I'm sad to say I hope is its final season.)  Season 3 was the ill-fated Writer's Strike season.  Thus, the pacing was off quite a bit.  The finale episode climax was pressed into a single episode instead of the hoped-for arc of 2-3 episodes.  Thus many fans felt completely justified in being angry over the outcome of the hunt for a serial killer and his apprentice.  (Think Sith Lords, here, and you'll be on track.  Heck, they even used that reference in an earlier season 3 episode when discussing this killer.)  The pacing was off because of the strike.

2- The season finale of the Sci Fi Channel original series, Warehouse 13.  There was a huge reveal in the final moments that came completely out of the blue.  The pacing and integration of the character whom the reveal was about was completely off.  In any work, when you throw a monkey wrench in the works like this, where a character you thought was good is really in cahoots with the villain, you need your viewers (and for us, readers) to be able to go back on the season (or chapters) and go, "Oh, I can totally see it."  But this won't happen if you rush it or if your character isn't involved at all.  Your character must be either the hare, the tortoise, or the ref at the race's finish line, but can't be the random bug that might buzz the hare's or tortoise's head once in a while.

Pacing eludes me.  (Or should that be evades?)  I'm constantly struggling with it.  I have a tendency to rush through everything because I just want to get the words out on the page.  In 12th grade, the first time around on Oracles Promise (though it was titled Sabrina back then, I think) I had this problem.  My 12th grade English teacher was kind enough to take time from his busy schedule to read through my work.  A repeated comment I received from him was to elaborate on a scene.  So I would.  And often that scene would triple in page count.  Often, after elaborating on the scenes that he had suggested, my chapter would have doubled in length.

But pacing would still be a problem for me.

So I soldier on, and keep track of where I want to add more details.  Really I need to add more scene to my dialogue sections.  Again with the pacing.

Pacing makes everything believable or unbelievable.  It's, in my opinion, the critical factor in any work.  Second only to characterization.  If you rush through, your readers aren't going to fall in love with your characters like you have.  If you go too slow, they're going to put down the book before ever reading the wonderful twists and turns that the climax will provide.

The moral here, though, is that your readers are smart and they're going to know if you've rushed something or if you're lingering too long on someting else.

Hitchhikers

On Monday, I drove down to my alma mater to take an office skills test. (Oh, the drudgery.) On the way down there, I saw two men hitchhiking. Now, being a single female, I’m never inclined to pick up hitchhikers. One of these hitchhikers was thumbing it right where the freeway onramp merges with the freeway. On the side of the freeway! The other was on the side of the road as it turned into a freeway onramp. The first wasn’t getting picked up. I doubt he would get much business where the cars are supposed to be going along at freeway speeds. (Though no driver in the area has yet to pick up on the concept of freeway onramp.)

Driving along down the map of our novels, there will be hitchhikers. We must decide whether to pick them up. Often, it will be a short journey if we do. No more than a couple of blocks. But sometimes there’s that hitchhiker that refuses to go away, the one you fear will turn out to be a mass murderer.

How to decide whether to pick them up or not?

It’s a tough call. Sometimes they’re there with their thumbs out at the end of the freeway onramp as we’re zooming along at top speeds writing, enjoying ourselves, and liking where the story is going.

Other times they’re there before we even take off on our writing for the day or week or whenever it is we’re sitting down to right. These are the ones that are easy to pick up and integrate into the story as they’re needed.
So far, I haven’t had any character hitch a ride for longer than a couple of blocks. (Equivalent to a handful of pages.) These are the sorts of hitchhikers that are liable to being cut from the end result of the manuscript. It’s the ones with potential to fulfill all the nightmares instilled via urban legends that will take over the book and make it more than it already is.

Related in the blogosphere:

Don't Dis the Map Part 1 @ The Innocent Flower
Don't Dis the Map Part 2 @ The Innocent Flower
Don't Dis the Map Part 3 @ The Innocent Flower
Letting your characters tell their story

Striking a balance

Achieving my daily word count is becoming a burden. It's taking over my life, leaving no time to do anything else.

I'm chained to my writing pen.

How is this about finding balance, you ask?

It's about balance because I am going to talk about it that way, that's why.

So, balance. A definition: Well, there are several. But here's the one that really matters. (It's #9 in the noun definition of balance.)

Mental and emotional steadiness.

Oxymoronic in relation to writing a novel, right? I mean, a novel is all about tugging at those heartstrings and pulling your readers through a bit of an emotional roller coaster. Or maybe it's more like switching from the roller coaster the carousel to the bumper cars and back again.

Anyways. I need to find balance.

Balance can be achieved in many ways. One of them is not a 2,000 words per day minimum pace in writing. Because that takes too many hours in the day.

I'm trying to keep this from sounding like I'm complaining. But I think it's going to come out a little bit that I'm whining.

Writing that many words a day takes time. Sometimes several hours. Usually I type up what I wrote that day and go to bed because it's taken me that long.

Blogging and platforming are taking another chunk of time. But none of it is balanced. Eventually I'm not going to have all the time in the world to write and blog. There will be other things I have to do, like go to work. (Fingers crossed.) Balance will be key in maintaining my sanity in the long process and throughout the remainder of my life.

My first two steps toward achieving balance are these:

1- I am no longer holding myself to a minimum word count or rigid schedule. Remember those authorial goals and the fial pictures? (I know it's misspelled. That's the whole point.) Yeah, no more of those. Rigid goals and deadlines are out the window.

2- Saturday goals updates (corollary to #1) are going away. As are Sunday's Author's Bookshelf posts. They both put too much pressure on me in the week and I thus don't work toward balance or enjoy the processes I'm going through.

Blogging will now be as follows: Tuesday and Thursday will be my usual thought-provoking posts that I began this blog with. Once per month Tuesday will be replaced by Tantalus Tuesday. WiP Wednesday will be there as a motivator for me to actually write during the week and make progress. Fiction Friday will likely be implemented beginning this Friday. Those posts at least for a time I can write up and have scheduled far in advance. But do keep in mind that this is subject to change at any time and for any random reason.

My hope is that in limiting myself to four days of blogging and eliminating the rigid goals and deadlines I can begin to balance my life and find enjoyment in writing and blogging again.

But if I disappear for a while, either from blogging, responding to comments, or commenting on y'all's blogs, it's because I'm losing my sanity and am perhaps locked away in the looney bin.

Semi-related in the blogosphere:
Ultimate irony @ Cake Wrecks
Balance @ my cozy book nook

The Writing Process Then vs. Now

I thought I would take some time today to discuss my writing process. I'll begin with a compare/contrast of the way I wrote when I first started out 6+ years ago and my writing process today.

Then: Sit down to write, knock out a few sentences or paragraphs, stop when "stuck" or bored.

Now: Sit down to write, know I have a minimum goal of 2,000 words to reach, break when I feel stuck, but come back to it an hour later with new inspiration.

Then: Write thinking it's the best ever.

Now: Write knowing it's utter crap but will get revised later.

Then: Longhand first, in a fancy journal purchased at Barnes and Noble.

Now: Longhand first, in a fancy journal purchased at Barnes and Noble.

Then: Derivative.

Now: Maybe not so entirely derivative after all.

Then: Hobby.

Now: Passion.


As you can see, not much has changed in my writing process as far as the physicality of it, but so much has changed in my mentality. Really and honestly, in high school I was so excited about Sunstone but it was for all the wrong reasons. Now I'm excited about it because I can see where I've grown but I can also see my weaknesses. I know where to find resources to help me strengthen those weak spots when it comes to revision, too.

And of course the most important one of all is that it's more deeply ingrained in my psyche to write now than it was through high school and most of college.

My first draft is never truly my first draft. Let me explain. When I write in my fancy-schmancy journal purchased from Barnes & Noble (weird, I know) it's my first draft. I'll cross some things out as I go along, sometimes as much as 1/2-3/4 of a page, but generally what is written is what's in my head. (Except for those glorious moments where a character takes over their story and you hear their voice for the first time.)

But the first draft anyone might ever see in printed form is not my first draft. It's the second draft. For whatever reason, my mind likes to revise as I transcribe my longhand version to the computer. Usually it's a matter of tweaking the word order in a sentence so it actually makes sense as opposed to the jumbled mess on paper that resulted from not knowing where the sentence would end when I began it. (Long sentence to explain that, huh?)

My senior year in high school I got to chapter 5, titled "Logan" (now currently chapter 6), and completely stalled. It took me months, most of the summer in fact, to finish his chapter. When I finished, I moved on to a completely new fancy-schmancy journal just to get past the mental associations I had with the one Logan's chapter was written in.

To show how much my process has improved, and how much my mentality has changed, I'll just say this: In the five days I've spent writing so far this month, I've written a prologue and 3 chapters. That's a far faster pace than I ever wrote before. Granted, it's probably because I'm really just re-writing from scratch what had been written previously, but it still feels like such a huge leap in my ability as a writer. I'm trying not to care about the quality of this first (second) draft because I know I'll spend loads of time revising in the coming months and years. Which is a vast leap over the chasm that separates my writing abilities from then and now.

This is a very long, rambling post, but what I'm trying to explore here is that I really have improved as a storyteller. I abandoned this series of novels once because it felt too much a conglomeration of books I'd read in the past. But then I struck gold and came up with a brilliant idea to fix the most prominent of these sorts of derivations. The rest, I'm seeing, are just my use of genre devices that are interpreted in various ways by a lot of different fantasy authors. Is this derivative? Maybe, but it's less so than I was originally thinking.

What do you find works best for you in your writing process? How have you improved now vs. then?

Letting your characters tell their story

OK, caveat here. In case you missed it in the comments section for Tuesday's post, I sliced my hand open on a tuna fish can on Tuesday. This means comments and blog posts will be shortened as typing doesn't always go so well. So bear with me. The stitches have to be in for two weeks and it hurts like the dickens if I move my thumb and index finger too much. (Also will account for typos and misspellings should they occur.)


Noah Lukeman's book The Plot Thickens is essentially all about characters.


Not plot, characters.


That seems odd...to a novice like me.


Then I had the realization that what he was saying was that our characters should be so real to us that they'll take over their own story. And they'll appeal to our readers all the more for it and the plot will be richer for it.


Of course, we do have to wrangle them sometimes and keep them on the more complex plot we've outlined or determined for them. But sometimes they surprise you and give you the best laugh of the whole writing process by taking over the story and their own actions.


Example. The following is an excerpt from my novella currently titled "A Rose By Any Other Name." It's the story of a young woman, in her mid- to late-twenties who gets published and decides to publish under a pseudonym. She is able to create an entire new identity for her author self. This excerpt is a scene wherein she is meeting with another author with her same editor. Her editor had to leave town suddenly and asks my MC to meet with this other author in order to help him decode the mysterious symbols she uses in the MS she sends back to this new author. They're having lunch and the characters both took over from me and I laughed harder in this scene than in any other. Without further ado:


Emilia headed off to the Hard Rock Café on the other end of Times Square. Jeremiah was standing in the entry waiting. He was surprised to see Emilia walk up.

“Miss Parker,” he said. “I was not expecting to see you here.”

“Please, call me Cara. Gloria called. An emergency has taken her out of town. She asked me to meet with you today instead and answer any questions you may have.”

“Oh, I see. Well, her loss is my gain.” The hostess led them to a table in the middle of the dining area. They looked at their menus for a time before their server came to take their order.

“I will have a garden burger, no cheese, with pickle, onion, tomato, lettuce, ketchup and mustard, and a water, please,” Jeremiah said when asked for his order.

“And for you, hon?” their server asked.

“Bacon cheeseburger with cheddar, no pickle, no mayo, a virgin pina colada, and a water. Oh, can I get a side of mayo and an empty condiment dish?”

“Sure, hon.” Their server took their menus and left.


Don't ask me why it made me laugh so hard, but it did. And this was truly one of those small moments where my characters took charge of their own decisions. And I personally feel that, while this is really only the first draft of this novella, this moment is one which enriches my characters and story more than any moment I could have planned.

OK, hand hurting so I'm going to stop now.

My Own Personal Hades, or Outlining

Now begins the part of this process that is making me depressed and making my brain hurt. I'm outlining. Hopefully I'll get through the entire Sunstone outline, all 3 or 4 books (whichever I decide upon though 3 is appealing more at the moment), but it's unlikely. I just need to get through the outline for book 1 by the end of the day Friday.

Here's where I've put myself into depression mode: I'm outlining in detail what I've already written, scene by scene (sort of) and I really get it affirmed to me more and more that I need to just basically cut 6 of the 9 or 10 chapters I've written so far. I really should just start over from scratch on Saturday when I kick into 2,000 words a day mode, but I can't do it. I want to get this book written, no matter how crappy and horrible it is, and starting over makes me feel like I won't get it done in the month of August like I've allotted. (I've been working on this for 7 or 8 years now and I'd like to feel some sort of sense of accomplishment.)

Meantime, I sit here outlining, still not really knowing where my plot is going. I'm outlining it in this way:

Chapter
.....Scene
........Events
........Characters
.....Scene
........Events
........Characters


Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Scene by scene, chapter by chapter. It's going to get really rough when I get into the portions I haven't written yet.

Reading all of The Plot Thickens really drives home that I do need to start in a different spot and get rid of 80,000 words (maybe that's an exaggeration). But there are so many characters I love in those first six chapters and there are so many little things that I think I meant to be important, little subplots that will be crucial in later volumes, etc., that I'm struggling right not to figure out where they'll fit in should I eliminate all that pretext, that isn't really pretext but important plot setup that should be covered.

Now to go and make sense of al my Sunstone notes that I've garnered over the years and try to nail down the rest of my plot and finish the outline. New deadline for outlining: TODAY.

There are some other things that I have to write that are precursor to what I'll be writing in the novel, but will show up in the novel.

Time is slowly dripping away from me. I feel like the clocks in Dali's The Persistence of Memory.

Making names sound consistent and believable

Even in fantasy, names of people and places should sound consistent and believable. While this may come easy to someone like J.R.R. Tolkien who was a linguist and knew dozens of languages, to use mere mortals it's a far more daunting task.

In my contemporary fiction that I've written, the names have generally come easy. First names that is. If I ever needed a last name, I'd simply flip open to a random page of The Dictionary of Surnames, and scan for a name that appealed.

Fantasy becomes a much uglier beast. I have a spreadsheet on my computer to keep track of the significant name changes to either person or place. In one fell swoop, one day, I re-named several of the important side characters and every major location name for the country it all takes place in. Including the country's name!

My general strategy for coming up with names is to either get on baby naming websites and go through the database willy-nilly or to open baby name books to random pages and look for a name to jump out. On occasion I do go to fantasy name generator sites and look for names that way.

So what are your strategies?

Struggles with humor

I'm officially abandoning the attempts at humor that I've previously posted on this blog. (For examples look to the abysmally horrendous "Author's Friend: Bookstore Bargain" and "Once, I had a friend named Whiteboard.") I don't know why I struggle with humor so much, but I do. It's something I know I need to work on.

Growing up, I had to grow up. I always had more interaction with adults than with peers. I won't go into the painful details of why that is, but I'll just say that all the things you hear about kids doing each other and how cruel they are to each other are true.

My dad was diagnosed with cancer when I was 7. The ensuing years were a difficult period for my family, especially for me. I lashed out at my dad in ways that I can never forgive myself for. But I had to grow up and act older than my age for the most part. He was sick for a long time, with periods of remission that grew increasingly shorter, until he finally passed away cancer-free when I was 15. For 8 years I had more concerns on my plate than the average child of my age and that seriously impacted me. I'm not saying that this is the only reason that I struggle with humor, but the seriousness of my family life for all those years I do think had a part in this struggle.

I try to write humor but I know it doesn't come across well. It's not funny, I know that. I also know that what I find funny most people don't. My brain works in a really weird way. From now on, though, I'm going to no longer try to force the humor out of me because it simply isn't working.

Tales of a Blocked Writer

There are many things in life which can block a writer from their abilities to write. Some of these hamper the time in which an author actually has to sit down and write, whether just writing out developmental outlines or actual chapters. Others hamper the mental creativity required to generate a story of fiction, fantasy, or science fiction (and, yes, even non-fiction works). This anonymous writer suffers from the former. It all began five and a half years ago when I decided to embark on the journey known as university studies. As I began life as a college student, this grand dream of balancing schoolwork with writing with time left over for some semblance of a social life was strong. As time went on, however, that dream faded. Upper-division classes and then graduate work in a master's program slowly edged out all other pursuits. Not for lack of trying on the part of the author, however. I often sat down to try to develop a new novel, write other things besides poetry, but school would not hear of it. And so it was one day that this author began to fear I would never accomplish the lifelong goal of becoming a published novelist.

Once, I had a friend named Whiteboard

I haven't seen him in a while. Oh, he is around, I just have no space for him in my current living situation. I used to use him all the time to scribble outlines, notes, and random story ideas on, but now he sits on my floor. He's tucked away, more than halfway hidden by one of my two desks, and our relationship has suffered because of it.

He's being slowly replaced by my new friend, Notebook. Notebook is more convenient, there for me when I need him, and far less distant. He also has much more space in which to write and doodle as I go about my life as a graduate student. He's a better friend than Whiteboard was. The last time I truly saw Whiteboard he had to hide behind my door all the time, but Notebook can go in my purse, my schoolbag, but not my pocket. (He's a little too big for that one.)

Notebook will help my writing to improve by allowing me to draw inspiration from the real, tangible world around me. Whiteboard could help me do that in a limited way, but Notebook can and has seen much more of the world and so will be a better observer of nature than Whiteboard ever was.