Jenn's World

I've been too busy to blog, but I've been thinking about it. Alas, too busy. Working on a revision of God's Play. Trying to finish Skin Farm. Outlining a new book in my head. No rest for the weary.

DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I think finishing the first revision/second draft of one's novel is cause for excessive exclamation marks.

I'll be going over some of the trouble spots with a fine tooth comb for the rest of the week. Then my beta readers will be getting a little Godsplay Christmas present in your inbox...

STATS:

543 pages
133,500 words by the "every page = 250 words" measurement
12o,500 words by MS word count
Some 570,070 characters (making...about 4.7 letters per word)
Plus some 117,210 spaces
13,157 lines
and 3,674 paragraphs.

And to think I almost spent the night playing World of Warcraft :)

Yay! My alma mater won the PAC 10! The Rose Bowl awaits! Yay!

Strange, how I can sometimes care about such strange things. Why should it matter which group of slump-shouldered men bangs the other ones into oblivion? I don't know any of them, so I have no personal stake in the game, yet I must cheer... I developed a taste for winning at debate tournaments, and somehow that competitive spirit can transfer to strange things.


Of course, I probably should have done this post during NaNoWriMo, but who says you can't use the advice throughout the year?

The write or die app by the appropriately named Dr. Wicked will do annoying things to you if you stop writing and don't fulfill your word count modes. I haven't tried it, but I love their slogan-- "putting the prod back in productivity."

Inkwell offers humorous advisory twitters helping NaNoWriMo writers pad their word counts from famous authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephanie Meyer and Anne Frank. ("Avoid distractions! When I wrote my book, I locked myself in the attic & refused to let any1 in.")

Finally, the NaNoWriMo site asks the proverbial question: "I wrote a Novel, Now What?" You can find the answers here.

It includes snippets of advice from people about revising, including a Scott Westerfield quote that compares meaningful evisceration of a novel vs. the shallow easy changes, which he calls "rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenburg."

I had no clue that "Water for Elephants" was a NaNoWriMo book! Wow! You can bet the revision/research took longer than a month, though...

My car's been working smoothly since I got it fixed and the demons were exorcised from my laptop. All it took was a little sprinkling of holy water. Huzzah!

What have I been up to? Where does the time go?

Well, writing has been slow of late. I started re-reading the book from the beginning and was disappointed at how much better the beginning is than the middle/end. It feels fresher, more vibrant. Understandable, since I spent so long perfecting it--this must be my 3001st draft of Rachell running down the hillside. The earlier versions are so different its funny/amazing. I figured out that I need to bring the villains out a little more front and center--hard to do, since really the book is almost three separate sections in one, and each time the villain is different (oddly like Mercedes Lackey's early work tended to be--except darker and different in tone, theme, etc.). The main thing I think is I need to tune up the description in the later chapters. Dave's workshop encouraged me to slow down and add more description, but the further I got away from the workshop/the more pressed for words I was, the more bare things became. So I'm trying to overwrite and cut out later.

I find that I actually write better description when I'm zonked out because my mind goes strange, non-cliche places. So I edit during the day and write/describe at night.

But I think I'm going to have to go over it all AGAIN before I send it out to beta readers. So tack on another month's delay, alas. I love you for volunteering!

If there's anything to read, that is. I was shopping for swimsuits online--I'm having a big birthday bash to celebrate my 26th since I haven't been able to really celebrate my 24th or 25th (damn newspaper)--and I somehow managed to contract a nasty virus that's effectively killed my laptop. I don't know how--I didn't download anything, to my knowledge. Anyway, it won't let me open anything except for a window offering me anti-virus software. Ahh, modern day mafia tactics. Extortion in the digital age. Can't you see some nerd with bug-eye glasses bullying me for "protection" money?

Well, of course I said a few obscene words that were, shall we say, 'very descriptive'. I've been saving my novel to a flash drive so hopefully that's all right, but things like the word count comparisons, lists of repairs and possibly some scenes I wrote separately could be utterly lost. Including the end of the novel. Grumble.

I'm not too worried. Even if they can't drive away the malware, they can probably retrieve the word data. Maybe I'll take the opportunity to replace my laptop with one that works better.

Other than that, I've been job searching. I might get a job running a flight simulator for a star trek space center thing here in Utah. It looks fun. I get to work with kids and computers. Unfortunately, it would mean a half hour commute and waking up early on days I had flights.

At least, after all the trouble I went through, I found my new swimsuit for my big pool party. The link is here. Though I almost bought this one or this one. Who'd ever think I'd have to order a size large? Asian sizing for you, I suppose. Anyway, it's free shipping today at this site so if you want to order anything, do it today! I love the wedding dresses--I wonder how my family would react if I showed up to my wedding in fire engine red.

I finally figured out what had my subsconscious up in arms. The moon, of all things!

I wrote a scene so that the moon was still full nine days apart. Okay, yeah, that was an error, but couldn't my subconscious have just pointed that out to me rather than let me writhe for days in agony, wondering what was wrong? That was the unsolvable error? That was the reaosn for my writer's block? The freaking moon?

Today was a good day. Until my computer shredded everything I had worked on. I finally hammered the emotional scene into a shape I liked but...BAM! It's gone. And I can't remember a bloody thing I did. I heard a strange whirring sound and tried to save but it died a moment before the little blue bar crossed the screen. Curse you, little blue bar!

I don't know why auto-save failed. But I'm almost ready to chuck this laptop out of my window. It's impossible for me to remember to save things myself when I'm drowning so deeply in Rachell's world.

I'm trying to look at it as an opportunity to create a new and better revision, but it's hard not to be discouraged. I worked so hard.

Writing Prompt (no number, because it's not an official one): Write a flash-fiction (or longer, whatever) horror story involving a frustrated writer and a supposedly "innocent" computer.

Oh well. Time to relax and cuddle up with some episodes of House. I've been having the most delicious dreams about Hugh Laurie.

(Though sometimes I wish Cuddy would just kick him in the groin, just for the sake of strong women everywhere.)

I don't usually get writer's block. I call it "writer's hesitation." I'm reluctant to write because I know something is wrong, and I'm afraid, by writing, I'll just make it worse.

John Brown calls this a gift because we knowing we need to stop, think and fix is better than progressing in ignorance. Usually I agree with him. Usually I can figure out what if I look at something closely enough. But this sense of wrongness has been growing for weeks and I can't figure it out. It's ssssooooooooooooooooo frustrating.

I thought my revisions would be done by now. But I'm 80,000 words in and stuck. I'm struggling with writing this emotional, painful scene. I'm struggling with trying to add dialogue tags that aren't melodramatic. I'm struggling to add new descriptions, new metaphors that I haven't used already. How do authors come up with new imagery book after book? How many sunsets and forests and river scenes can you write without them being repetitive, both intra-textually and inter-textually.

I'm struggling with the fact that I hate the book's ending, but I don't know how to make it better. ARGH!!! A little voice in my head says I need to have faith in myself and I'm just cranky because it's not my "original vision" which would have been 500,000 words, probably.

I'm struggling with the fact that my gut says I should cut out one of the main characters. But I really don't want to do it. I tell myself, I'll leave her in...at least until I get some beta readers to look at my book. Then we'll see.

But you know it's really bad when I start doing laundry. Doing laundry and cleaning my room to instead of writing? Talk about your pigs-ice-skating-in-hell scenarios.

It's probably a little bit my own life too. I need some new stimulation--read a new book, do something new, see something new. Maybe I just need to take a week off and think really hard about where I want this to go. And I'm still a little pissed at a girl who insulted me for wearing baggy jeans. I thought I was above the high school mentality, but there's something about the little, flippant "heh" that really pisses me off.

Meanwhile, I had an awesome dream for a Y.A. book called "My Own Personal Prince Charming." The concept's been done to death, but maybe I'll work on that next. The basic premise is a prince drops out of the sky in modern L.A. on top of a modern teenage girl who despises him for his boorishness and poor dental hygiene. After fighting off a bunch of bad guys, she learns that the boy next door is much better than some screwed-up fairy tale tall-dark-and-handsome. Though of course that doesn't stop her from saving his world.

Oddly enough, in my dream, it was the other way around. A princess from our time had to come to the magic fairy tale kingdom to keep it from collapsing, and when the prince learned about VCRs... he went happy-nuts. But the "princess" was patronizing him the whole time, accepting the living situation because she needed to escape from some mafia peoples.

Sometimes, I have the coolest dreams.

Chopped off 3,500 words today off the first third of Godsplay. Yay!

Only comes to 11 pages? Math bad. Grrr. Of course, yesterday I got confused after I realized that pp 23-25, for example, count as three pages (23, 24, 25), so I'm still sorting the system out.

157 pages and counting. Name a synonym for Dragon. Anyone? Anyone? And I'm struggling not to capitalize the words Dragon and Dragonrider, even if it's not proper English.

Hell, who cares, as long as I'm consistent. It's my world, thus I decide when to bend the rules of grammar. MWAHAHAHAHA.

Some beautiful pictures of same-sex couples kissing outside the temple in Salt Lake here. Any expression of love is a thing of beauty, and should be respected. I wish I could better understand my church's view of homosexuality. I think, in this case, I will always be out of step with Mormon culture. I can't say I feel too sorry about that.

Revised almost 70 pages today. Woohoo! I wouldn't have, but my internet connection was down so I didn't have much else to do.

Of course, I didn't cut as much as I should have. I think I'm leaving in a lot of description because I like the long, elegant sentences, even if they are repetitive. Words are teh win!

For Dragonlance fans, the Lost Chronicles are like slipping into a nice, fuzzy bathrobe. It feels wonderful to meet up with old friends and relive the stories and characters of my childhood. Sure, it robs some of the fun out of it because you know Tanis isn't going to die (spoiler alert? Oops). But I still enjoyed it a lot. Nice, light reading, as delicious as your favorite dessert.

Though if you don't have the benefit of Dragonlance-ish nostalgia, they might not be for you. For me, childhood memories are like rosy glasses. They make things look wonderful, even if they really aren't (or are they? With distorted judgment, how can you tell?)

I stumbled across an entry in my livejournal mentioning I'd gotten up to page 77 in my novel. I wonder where those pages went because I started from scratch.

To close out the week, I'm going to actually have a blog post that doesn't involve revision in any way shape or form except that I put the final touched on my still way-too-long prologue and am more or less putting it aside. No wonder it took me five years to write that thing!

Would you be turned off by a long prologue if the writing is good? How long is too long? How much connection should it have to the ensuing story.

Re-reading my last draft, I'm disappointed at bits that seemed to get "lost" somewhere in between drafts. I swear I had elegant paragraphs of character description that somehow just vanished. Were they all in my head in the first place or did I trim them because I was concerned about length? Sigh.

The book I'm reading on Revision was published in 1989 and it's funny to read about the author advocating for the use of computers. Honestly, I'm amazed if anyone still handwrites novels. I couldn't read my own writing if I tried. Go them, I'm not denegrating styles, but wow, it'd be so hard to organize and deal with it.

Though without an attempt to hand write my novel, I'd never have invented a "Sa'hana." I was trying to handwrite a novel because I wanted to force myself to stop revising. I have this tendancy to look back and finetune when I'm afraid of moving forward, and I figured with handwriting I wouldn't dink around the whole time. So I wrote in the morning and at night while I worked on a job searching other days and decided to start out my novel with a bang--Rachell's Sa'hana. But the scene felt really overdramatic/unbelievable, even for a society used to magic, and so when I wanted to start writing it again, I shifted the scene to the grandfather. Who wouldn't have existed without the handwritten copy either when I realized that someone needed to be involved in the Sa'hana--a character who looked down on Rachell for her half-blood status but loved her anyway. I don't know if the handwriting had anything to do with it or not, but there it is.

Wish I could find that damn notebook. Not only does it have the first draft, but it also has my maps, lists of the character's ages, a historical timeline, a short glossary, and the twenty-seven runes sketched out with their meanings, along with six or seven bindings. Since I misplaced the books two moves ago, I've had to make up new names (I wonder what Cien's name was in the draft?) but I'd like to have the runes at least, rather than having to come up with them all over again.

That was more about revision than I meant to write about. What I meant to write about is: will computers replace writers, GASP!!!

Writer Beware blog did an interesting entry on a guy who's the "most published author" on Amazon with over 100,000 titles (not books) available. How does he do it? Apparently he hires a bunch of computer programmers to data search on a specific topic and put it together in a POD book. To quote the blogger, Victoria Strauss:

"Ah, but what's creative? Not romance novels, apparently. Per the New York Times article linked in above, Parker 'is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. "I’ve already set it up," he said. "There are only so many body parts."' (A reductive statement that, no doubt, will infuriate romance writers everywhere.) What's next? Computer-generated SF novels with stock aliens? Algorithm-created crime dramas with hard-boiled dialog swiped from the movies? Robo-poetry to populate a hundred Poetry.coms?"

Okay, so I don't think HAL will replace fiction writers, but in some ways, movie writers in particular seem to have only artificial intelligence. How many scrapped-up remakes and hero's journey clones have you seen and thought "a computer could do that." Or my kid, a dog, can of soup, etc.

I wouldn't worry. There will always be a place for human intuition and creativity. Computers are more a threat to readership than writership. After all, how many of us will bother reading the next Ernest Hemingway where there are blogs to search and porn to download? Even a devoted bookworm like myself might prefer hopping into a virtual reality capsule.

I swear, I'll stop talking about revision next week!

June 18, 2009 -- 2:37 p.m.

I like Lee Ann's term for revising to plant clues and things. "Rearranging the mantle." That's a good one.

Anyway, the next step of revision I do is I retype just about everything. I open a new document side-by-side with my old one, or in another window, read a few pages, and then type up what happened. Often, I use the same words, but often I discover there's something even better.

The blessings of computers over typewriters is that we can go back and change things. While that's all well and good for minor changes, for major changes, I need to get my juices going and re-typing a draft helps me do that.

Right now, I'm remembering why it took so long for me to write the book in the first place. This prologue is the most difficult thing I've ever written. I was urged to slow it down and take all the time I need, but is anyone really going to put up with a 23 page prologue in the first book of a series? That's like 6,000 words before you get to the opening! There was a reason I shoved most of the scenes to flashbacks instead of trotting them out in real time.

That's the other thing about doing multiple drafts and saving them in multiple documents. If I don't like it, I can always go back to the version I had before. I probably will. Just because this prologue's better doesn't mean it's more salable.

On the plus side, I'm not going to hand a prologue in as my first set of pages/chapters to any agents/publishers anyway. So it really doesn't matter, right? If my editor wants me to slash it down, I give her the old version. Bulk it up? New.

If you haven't watched the Empires series, produced by PBS, it's up on hulu and I think it's well worth watching for any fantasy writers. I just finished watching the series on the Medici. Not only was it wonderfully produced (though I wished from time to time, that it would give more detail) but you can find a lot of political intrigue and conflict that can be fertile inspiration for your stories. For example, who'd have known that the works of Boticelli, Leornardo, Michaelangelo, etc. had so much political importance. I would like to write a story like Colleen McCullough's masters of Rome series set in the Italian Renassaince. However, I wonder, again, if it'd be salable? Especially since a lot of the main characters would, in this day and age, be registerred sex offenders for cavorting with their NAMBLA-age apprentices...

Michaelangelo in particular fascinates me. He was one of those crazy, difficult to work with geniuses who I empathize with myself since I too fall a little short in the social skills catagory from time to time.

And there's something about Renassaince paintings that I haven't seen matched. Compared to them, most other paintings look like they were formed out of cheap, colored plastic. I just love the art, the politics and the power of the mind unleashed in that age. So many interesting moments, from Da Vinci and Michaelangelo's fight over the block of marble that would become the statue of David to the birth of the Inquisition. I will write the story one day, I think, even if it molders in a basement closet. It's too powerful an age to ignore.

It makes you really understand Mussolini. Italy had the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, and yet it is nowhere near as prominent. You can understand where a mad dream to return to power could really take hold when your history so outshines your present. Nothing against present Italy, of course! I plan to visit there as soon as I scrape up the money. But it's hard to compete with such a fervent, powerful history.

Today, the stalling ends and the revision begins.

The first thing I'm going to do is make a chronological list of major things I know need changing. I don't know if other authors do this, but I make notes about my story about things I need to go back and change as I go along. The funny thing about writing is it never stops. Your ideas never stop developing. Your characters never stop evolving. And there's nothing like writing a novel to force you to find new facets of your story, world and characters.

That necessarily means going back and dropping 'hints' about what's going to happen. Or going back and reworking your magic system. Or just realizing that you need to repeat variations of the same imagery over and over to have a certain resonance.

So as I was writings, I made a two-page list of everything I wanted to change, from color's of a character's eyes to names to major plot holes that need solving. Of course, ideas don't occur in natural order, that's be too easy. So I think of something I need to fix in both the prologue and the middle of the story at the same time. And I don't want to go back and change things, because for all I know, by the end of the novel, I'll need to throw the entire scene out anyway, so why bother?

But that means I'm left with a list of semi-obtuse words like "bread baking" "spider feast" and "he burned his parents." Obviously, they only make sense to me at the moment. Hopefully they make sense to me--some of them are a little too cryptic shorthand, particularly the ones I came up with at 3 a.m. due to some messed up dream.

Anyway, so the first thing I'll do is organize the list so as I revise, I'll be able to check off changes as I make them.

Unfortunately, I'm sure there will be a second list I'll create after I revise the first time. Who was it that said "art is never finished, only abandoned?" Ah yes, Leonardo Di Vinci. Thank you, google.

Speaking of which, have you seen Microsoft's 'Bing' ads? They make me laugh because they make google sound so overly complicated and then they have almost the same screen, same system. I tried running a search with both engines and they all looked pretty much the same.

P.S. Gosh, I love Pandora. I have a Supreme Beings of Leisure station now and I love it for writing, along with my Enya station. One of my favorite bands, though hard to find anything by them. The problem is some times there's too much similarity. I tried an All-American Rejects Station and all the songs sounded exactly the same.

P.P.S. Hate to see Pub Rants' post that editors aren't looking for epic fantasy. If I get published, it'll be an example of how you don't have to chase the bandwagon as it rolls away without your manuscript, trying to jump aboard. Better to be the trend then follow it.