Category: writing

This is going to be my writing blog, even though I’ve populated it with a few other rants and raves on other topics — articles I liked and things like that.

Right now, I’m working on a novel tentatively titled Stoneflower. They say if you cannot describe your novel in twenty-five words or less, you’re off track and don’t have something marketable. As an exercise, I did it, but I’m not going to post it here, because it gives away the ending. It is fairly old-fashioned Good v. Evil and is in part an answer to a lot of the writers that are so popular today who say that Everything Was Wonderful Before All the Damned Patriarchs Came Through.¹

The first draft should be done sometime around the end of October, first of November.

I’ll also be talking some about the marketing of At the Foot of the Throne, a fantasy novel I wrote last year, for which I am still trying to find a home. I’m waiting another month on the publisher where it is now, then I have to go through the whole pain in the ass of slogging it around again. I’m doing this without looking for an agent. Sometimes I think I’m being smart, other times, wondering if I am being lazy. Real Live Professional Writers seem so mixed in their advice on whether or not to try to find an agent early in one’s career. Steven King says you shouldn’t try to get one until you’re making enough to steal from, others say that you haven’t a hope in hell of marketing your stuff to anywhere good or getting a decent contract unless you do have an agent. Me? I’m just some goofy dreamer whining about her production schedule and word count. How could I have enough information to have an accurate opinion?

Anyway, Hi. It’s me…

Stoneflower Progress

33,015 / 120,000 (27.5%)

¹Yes, I’ve read a lot of MZB in my time, why do you ask?

Your = possessive. i.e. Your car, your boat, your rotten grammar.

You’re = a contraction for “you are”. i.e. Your rotten grammar makes you look like you’re an idiot.

This is not aimed at the casual blogger. This is for people in professional fucking journals who, at least in theory, have fucking editors to catch shit like that.

You writers out there really oughta¹ figure this stuff out, too, ya know. In theory, your tools are your words and you’re making yourself look like an idiot if you cannot employ your tools to your advantage to show you’re a professional.

Just sayin’.

¹Yes, yes, yes, I’m aware when I write, I use colloquial terms. You’ll also note that I’m specifically doing so as a technique to mimic folksy speech on purpose. I am perfectly capable of writing formally when necessary. It is more often necessary in the course of my own work to create a rapport with my audience. This generally requires a certain rhythm to my “voice” best expressed by my native accent and speech patterns. If you think it is not a specifically-chosen technique, you’re sadly fooling yourself about the thought a writer puts into her craft!

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

— Theodore Roosevelt (I encourage you to click on the link and read the whole speech).

I prefer to be a professional as opposed to an artiste when it comes to writing.

Thing is, it seems that a certain level of artistic temperament bubbles out anyway.

I find the first draft phase of a novel exhausting mentally, and that carries over into other things. When I wrote my last novel, that’s really all I did — write. It was terrible for my health, and I gained about 20 lbs in the process. I cannot afford that, so this time around I’m being a lot stricter with myself about exercise and eating habits.

And I’m still fucking worn out.

I find that I’m becoming impatient with a Special Sort of art critic. No, not the professional. Not the person who has an art¹ and diligently practices it. I genuinely believe that critique and analysis is a part of the process. It’s important to good art.

It’s the person who sneers at something not being good enough (without the bother and work of actual critical analysis) and does not go regularly to his art². It frustrates me, even though it has little enough to do with me in the end. But I often feel indignant, especially when I’m tired and want to sleep, but I need to finish a scene to keep up with my production schedule, and I’m wishing for coffee, but don’t dare because I want to sleep enough to be able to get through the next day.

I’m not special in this. There are millions of people every day who go to a project because they love it, they believe in it. They put calluses on their fingers from guitar strings, knowing they’re never going to be “richnfamous”. They write fanfic they can never publish because they love a world someone created. They dance even though they’re not skinny enough that people are going to want to see them perform. They make their fucking lunchboxes works of art, because the creative drive is that strong in a human.

This isn’t a fluffybunny thing. Bleeding into lambswool in toe shoes ain’t fluffy, and neither is slugging back the espresso and writing after the kids go to sleep. It ain’t fluffy to stay up all night filming a scene and trying to keep your actors from getting hypothermia, and it ain’t fluffy to court hypothermia to be in the scene!

I think of that and then find sneering and eyerolling really, really pathetic.

¹For myself, I don’t believe that art is something that has a narrow definition or that you have to be a painter, writer or musician to count as an artist. A cook can be an artist. I can think of someone on this filter that most certainly makes excellent art out of food — especially cake! Knitting is a wonderful marriage of art and craft. I talk about my mother a lot, who makes the act of living an art, surrounding herself with pretty, creative and graceful things.

² I’m sorry to say I know someone who is excellent at critical analysis, but uses it as a bludgeon to beat work down rather than a growth-promoting thing. I find it painful and sad to watch his waste of life.

I feel like I’ve been beaten with a stick.

I was getting behind on my novel and wrote about 2200 words yesterday. I know, it doesn’t sound like much, but if you have a full-time job, that’s rough.

I think people who do NaNoWriMo are insane (that’s about 1600 words a day every day for a month).

Doing 1000 words a day works best for me. It’s enough to give it some heft for the writing session, but not so much that I’m going nuts.

I wish I were Neil Gaiman sometimes. It seems so easy for him, how he seems to be able to pop out good material on a constant basis. Yes, yes, yes, I know. A) He’s talented. B) He went through that most rigorous of writing boot camps — working as a professional journalist. No artiste temperament allowed. Put out good copy or don’t eat.

At some point, what it really boils down to is, “Just tell the fucking story. Your hindbrain will take care of all that stuff literature professors get orgasmic about.”

We don’t learn to write fiction in school. We learn what it takes to make a story, yes. We learn what makes a story rich and thick and good. What we don’t learn is the process of putting all that good stuff into our story gumbo, and I think part of it is because in the throes of the process, it’s not entirely a conscious thing. I’ve never heard of a writer admitting to consciously saying/thinking, “Okay, I am going to make these sharks eating away at the huge swordfish a metaphor for my struggles to tell a good story and my fears of losing my abilities.” I have heard, however, writers saying that their best stuff is when they’re so focused on the story they’re telling that the keyboard/computer/typewriter fades away and all they’re conscious of is being there in the story.

In At the Foot of the Throne, the novel I wrote last spring, there’s this recurring theme that I did not put in consciously. I needed a scene where the main character did something astonishingly foolhardy to protect the life of her King (and lover) because he had no heirs — something for the good of the kingdom.

What happened was an encounter with a wild boar.

Throughout the novel, and I did not think consciously about this, the antagonist king is described as being “like a boar with a toothache” or some such wild pig comparative when someone comments on his anger or aggression.

I didn’t consciously choose the metaphor. What I did was trust my subconscious to come up with all that and stuck to telling the story.

Now I am not claiming to be a great writer of fiction by any means. I’m not at all. At best, I am just learning to be competent. What I’ve really got to learn are editing skills — cutting away the unnecessary stuff and keeping the structure strong.

I put my palm pilot and keyboard to good use today and went over to Border’s to write for a bit.   Got nearly 2,000 words done, too!  Not bad for a morning’s work.

I don’t really like lugging my computer around, but find that writing on something that folds up to fit in my purse is really, really nice!

I have the added bonus of not being connected to the ‘net on it, so I am not tempted to do any web surfing or stuff like that.

I was wondering if the people around would be too much of a distraction from actually writing, but it turned out not to be so.  In fact, the people watching was considerably less of a temptation to let my mind go off task than using a computer connected to the ‘net is!  I did chat briefly with some people who were fascinated by the Palm and the little keyboard, but it wasn’t enough to throw me off my groove.

I’m using Quickoffice on my Palm, which syncs okay with my word processor.  Formatting isn’t ideal, but I’m writing a novel and in a novel formatting isn’t fancier than anything you’re likely to be able to do on a typewriter, anyway.   I really wish I’d had something like this as a teenager.  It would have kept me out of the basement when my hands cramped up too much from writing longhand out in the woods.  There was a rock and a log that would have made the perfect desk!  A laptop isn’t really someone you’re okay with taking out into the woods with you, but this?  Perfect.

I sent At the Foot of the Throne to Baen.

I got an automatic email saying it would take nine to twelve months to get back to me and I oughta go write another novel.

Okee dokee…

But if I don’t hear from ’em by the time Stoneflower is ready to submit, I’m querying another publisher. Just sayin’.

I’m actually working on two separate book projects. I’m writing one book and marketing another. After reading Miss Snark, Holly Lisle’s writing blog and PBW’s writing blog, I think I have a clearer idea of how to write a query. I have decided, however, to look for an agent instead of trying to get That Damned Book published myself because I hate selling with a deep and bitter passion. I’ll do it long enough to get myself an agent, but am happy to pay someone else for that part of the job if I can swing it.

I’m leaving At the Foot of the Throne up for another week, but then I need to take it down so it can be sold. Read it if you want. If not. that’s cool. I do ask that you do NOT pass this copy around. You may forward the link if you like, but after it’s down, please let it stay down. Thanks!

I don’t know what I was thinking when I had planned to start Stoneflower while still in the early phases of recovering from surgery. I suppose the story about Margaret Mitchell writing Gone With the Wind while laid up with a broken ankle caught my imagination. I don’t think Mrs. Marsh was on the “good drugs” during her writing phase. Just sayin’. I like to write and have a nice glass of something, but morphine doesn’t do it for me for the writing of good prose.

However, I did nibble at it. I have some 30-50K of notes from years past, and did sit my ass down right before my surgery and notecard the book. I do it slightly differently than the way Lisle recommends. I’ll decide how many scenes each character gets, write their names at the top of the card, then shuffle the stack and start brainstorming. Later, I go back and put them in the order I think will work. After that, I open a new document, set it up with title and all that, then do a bulleted list of each scene. When I finish a scene, I delete it from the bottom of my list.

I know some writers outline in detail, but that’s never worked too well for me. Writing with no plot at all, but a vague idea of the end never really worked, either. This is a happy medium that I like a lot.

Because I want to balance having a life with writing more than I did when I wrote At the Foot of the Throne, I’m having a weekly quota of 5,000 words instead of 7,000. I dove too deep into the last novel, and I don’t think it did my personal life any real good. Certainly it didn’t help me focus on my day job. Right now, I still need the day job. Here’s to the day when I don’t any more!