Posts (page 2)

My progress on A.C. and Phoenix has been slower than I would like it to be.  Granted, a lot of that was the physical problems that literally slowed me down and forced me to bed.  Without a laptop, doing any kind of writing was particularly hard.  With my iron levels as low as they were, it isn't any surprise that all I wanted to do was sleep.  So, I'm not kicking myself at being so far behind on either book, but I am disappointed in general.  I was hoping to be finalizing v6 of A.C. by now and getting it off the beta readers.  Instead, I'm still floundering my way through v4/5.  And I had hoped to be working on v3 revisions of Phoenix by now, but I don't even have a rough draft done.  Like I said, it couldn't be helped—being sick for 8 months took a lot of wind out of my sails, so to speak.

So the first thing I've done to help myself out is to readjust my goals for the two books for this year.  I'd like to just get the v4/5 version done for A.C.  And a rough draft for Phoenix would be nice, though I suspect that might be pushing it a bit.  I may have to be content with just getting the building draft done plus a whole lot of world building.

Which brings up a point quite briefly: just because you're writing in the same world doesn't mean no more world building.  In this case I need a whole bunch of different locations developed and I'm in a different time period than A.C.  So, yea, a lot more world building on my end.  The good news is that most of the basics are pretty set: magic, the gods, and so on, giving me a ready foundation for what I need to do for the other book.

Anyway, the second thing I'm doing to help get me going is to sign up for some challenges through my writing group.  Now, admittedly, I do this every time they hold a challenge, but I decided to join into this one a bit differently than in the past: I've focused my challenge choices so they apply to these two novels, especially A.C.  Now I do have a critique challenge in there, but the other two are novel revisions and world building specifically.  Neither has a high goal at the moment, but I will push them higher if I can.  I won't know if I can until I'm close to completing the ones I have: revise 7 chapters in 8 weeks and do 24k in world building.  I had to resist adding other goals that could derail me by giving me too much to do—I need to keep my focus on the two novels at hand and what I need to finish for them.

The one down side is that I've cut my weekly word count goal for Phoenix itself, the reason being that I need the world building before I can go too much further into developing the book itself.  That's part of what the building draft is all about: pulling together the information you need for descriptions and whatnot and putting all of it in the where it's needed.  When you get to the rough draft stage later, it's just a matter of working the details in that you need where you need them and spreading them out a bit.

Trust me, it works, for me anyway.

My weekly and daily goals are now adjusted a little to make the challenge goals the priority.  I'm actually not too worried about the world building stuff.  Between the two books, if I can't come up with 24k, then I'm just being lazy. REALLY lazy.  But the revisions do worry me.  I'm in the last 11 chapters, yes, but I'm also in the chapters that are going to require the most change.  Some are going to see drastic cuts.  Others are just plain going to have to be rewritten.  I suspect in the end I'll have 8 or 9 chapters instead of 11, but the chapter a week thing just may not happen with the amount of work that needs to be done to get there.  But I guess that's kind of what challenges are all about:  you reach for something you're not quite sure you can make and hope you actually do get there.  If they were all easy, it wouldn't be a challenge, right?

One of the things I've been neglecting as I work on Assassin's is the world building.  I put a lot of thought and effort into world building early in the novel's creation (or, actually, it's fourth incarnation), but I ended up burning out on it and stopping for a very long time.  Really, not the best thing to do since I need the world building.  Most authors seem quite capable of remembering things from one chapter to the next, but my combined ADHD and anemia make memory a serious issue for me.  It's so bad, I like to say i have a 5 minute memory lifespan...literally.

I need the world building, and I need it on paper where I can double check in case I forget and can't easily find it in previous chapters (Alden actually has 5 separate binders for world building), so  ignoring it as long as I have isn't a good thing.  I have characters and things towards the end of the book that I haven't taken the time to think about or get to know, and that not only means inconsistencies in the writing, but it also means it will be harder to weed out the clichés and the images that have been seen before.  The best reworking of certain ideas for my world has come when I've written something down and let it percolate a bit before I am set on it.  Waiting so late in the novel's development means there's less of a chance of the unique taking root, and that can be a real problem.  For example, one of my races is dangerously close to a gaming race, and having the time to think about what I've put down in their cultural profile gives me an opportunity to redevelop them a bit and take them further from that comparison.

In fact, some of what's been holding up any work on Randi Kayde is the world building.  I have an entire new concept for it to work out and just haven't wanted to tackle it.  Loving the concept of a book doesn't necessarily motivate you to work on the much needed background material.  Besides, I have my hands more than full with the novels I'm currently working on.  Once I need a break from Alden, then I'll probably revisit Randi.

Since I've got little going on for the editing job at the moment, I'm taking my unexpected "free" time to work on the missing world building for the end of A.C..  Getting it done now will provide me a little time to do some rethinking for when I work on v6—which is a revision brought on largely by changes in my world building.  Mind you, there are other things that need to be worked out in v6, but a large part of the reason to revise again is the world building.  I'm just not able to stop where I am and go back in a draft and make changes based on a new idea I just had.  Which I think is a good thing—waiting until I've finished the current revision gives me a chance to think through and develop the changes a bit.

So, while I'll still be working on actual A.C. chapter revisions, the main goal this week is to get through the rest of my world building list.  I've already had a character's new profile force a change in a battle scene in the chapter I'm currently revising.  This is the one thing I have to admit I enjoy about world building.  Other authors get to know their characters and locations while actually writing them; I discover my characters and locations when profiling them.  My characters rarely, if ever, surprise me in the story; but they frequently surprise me as I work on their profiles.  I find that very cool.

I've actually made enough little bits of progress when trying to get myself in a place to work on world building (seriously, when I'm working on world building is when I am most easily distracted in my writing) to make a decent dent in what was left of my list.  I now have less than a dozen things left to profile, and most of that is characters (which are the most fun to profile).  Since we're heading into the weekend, and Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are the days set aside for my own writing anyway, I should get these all done fairly quickly.

Then I get to start again for Phoenix.  The good news there is that some of the building will have already been done since Phoenix takes place in the same world as A.C.  And I'll take whatever breaks I can get.

I've been doing so much editing work lately, even when I get the chance to work on my own stuff, that I'm feeling the lack of writing in a bad way.  So today we work on Phoenix 1.  I'm not quite ready for the building draft, which is the next stage of its development, but I can skip around so what I'm missing is no big deal.  Right now I'm pulling all my world building notes out of the notes draft and creating my world building list.  Once I have that done, it's on to actual writing—scenes, dialogue, action, pov, all of it.  This is the stage just before the rough draft, and there's still story development going on, but this is when the excitement really begins.  No more (or very little) exposition, narrative, and summary.  The rough draft will expand upon this draft, intertwine the descriptions, and so on, but this is where it all starts.

It's exciting!

It's been crazy since I last posted here.  Since the 20th of last month I've:

» Checked the edits on 3 novels for Lilley Press
» Checked 4 various versions of the ebooks about to be released
» Gone through 18 slush manuscripts, and read beginning to end at least 6 of them
» wrote up revision notes for yet another novel
» edited a novella (round 1!)
» had 2 doctor appointments, one which was canceled but only after we arrived
» revised a chapter and a half of A.C.
» revised a section of Stolen Priest
» posted 8 crits to my crit group (and am working on at least 2 more today)
» started some world building profiles
» did the Admin stuff for the writers group, including removing inactive members, updating forums, and writing the newsletter
» held an editor meeting for Lilley Press
» hired a new editor
» scored 3 or 4 editor tests (well, 6-8 since it's a 2 part testing process)
» spent an entire day at Carmax trying to get a "new" car (we ultimately prevailed but weren't home until after 11 PM)
» reviewed and made fixes to a website
» spent a day and a half trying to find out if one child will actually get to go to high school
» registered 2 kids for high school
» took the husband to the airport--will be picking him up on Tuesday
» helped find errors in a pdf file when InDesign tried to eat the imported manuscript
» did school related shopping
» celebrated a kid turning 16 with cake and a movie
» had an "I will have to quit if it's not fixed" crises at work--dealt with, I think
» pulled my Metawriting from an ezine after huge editor/author issues--and the edits of the last article took 2 days as well
» revised the 3 handbooks and style sheet for Lilley
» fought and won against one sucky Canon printer
» been to the farmer's market and 2 other grocery stores at least twice each (we know where to shop for what for the best prices)
» helped the husband with his resume
» added an authors page to the Lilley site

All that and some sleep in there, off time because of stormy weather, and family time.

Is it any wonder I haven't been around lately?  I am working on A.C. as best I can during all this.  With the release date coming and more subs coming in, it's been very busy at the job.  I've hired editors to help with that, and may possibly be hiring one more just because I think we'd be REALLY lucky to have her.

Today is sort of a catch all day.  I'm doing crits and updates all over the place.  We'll see if I actually finish any revisions or manage to get back to any of my ignored writing.  It'll be an all nighter, so there's a chance, but I'm also likely to be so tired I won't make any sense.

So, at the beginning of this month, I said my writing was stalled.  Turns out it was a lot more than a stall and a lot more serious than we realized.  I ended up having an emergency, minor surgery about a week ago.  It wasn't really a big deal, but it did need to be done, and I've felt immensely better since.  My energy levels are rising, my concentration is better, and, most importantly, the physical issues that were interfering with my life and my writing seem to have been taken care of.  The problem now is getting back into the routine of things after being out of it for so long.

Getting back into my editing job hasn't been so hard.  I suspect it goes back to being responsible to someone else and on an external deadline.  Being behind by about 2 weeks has also eaten into the time I have to do my own writing.  I usually reserve Fridays for my own work, but with the amount of work that needs to get done and soon, I've dropped that until I'm caught up.  As for during the week, I spend the mornings working and the afternoons resting because I'm still recovering and want to make sure I get healthy as soon as possible.  I want to work on my own stuff, I'm just too tired to.

I have done some tinkering with A.C., but not much.  A.C. is my first priority, though, so hopefully as I get stronger, I'll get back into it and move along as well as I was before all this health stuff interfered.  It's just nice to know the "stall" wasn't me being lazy, that there was a solution.  The constant drag is gone.  Now all I need to do is start building up some of those reserves I lost over the past few months.

It's scary how your physical state can have such a devastating affect on your writing.

There's been a lot going on—mostly health issues, but a few other things a well—and now A.C. and Phoenix are stalled.  Hopefully not for much longer, but I'm having a lot of trouble getting back with it.  It's like I didn't fall off the cart but got tossed off instead, and no one noticed I was missing so the cart kept going.

And this is going to be another place where I have problems if I ever become pro: how do you write when you're sick and stressed, and how do you get yourself back on track when you can barely get out of bed?

Don't get me wrong: I needed the week off I just took.  I wasn't getting enough sleep.  I could barely sit up most of the time.  I'd not only not make coherent sense if I even tried to write or revise, I wouldn't be doing my body any favors either.  When you're that sick, you take the break and just accept it.

But when you're done being that sick, you've got to get back on your feet, and I'm not doing so well at that.  I am picking at A.C. revisions, yes, and most of that needs to be done off the comp (I revise by hand; revising by comp doesn't work for me), but picking is the operative word here.  I'm definitely not doing as much as I should be.  I can't even seem to convince myself to do the world building I really, really need to get done for both novels.

I am managing to get back on track with my editing work, but my own writing?  I just can't seem to find the motivation to get with it.  And it's driving me crazy that my own motivation, or lack thereof, is what could be my downfall as a writer.

We've got more upheaval coming this month, but, somehow, I've got to find a way to work through it.  Any suggestions?

Phoenix Rising has been sent off to a writing buddy for a plot check.  The notes draft isn't quite done—it needs some actual notes—but the story itself is.  Politics play a big part in this novel and I needed someone who likes that kind of thing to make sure they work. Last thing I want is to get to the point where I'm posting it for crits with my writers workshop and find out that the politics really don't work so the whole thing has to be stripped back to a point where I can fix them—probably back to the outline.  I would have sent it off at the narrative draft stage, but there isn't really enough in that stage to see this kind of thing.  It can help with general plotting, help makes sure the subplots are fairly woven in, stuff like that, but it's not so great at something like this because there's just not enough of it to see how well it works.

While my buddy checks it, I'll be adding notes and starting some character profiles and the like.  I'll also be continuing with A.C. revisions.  The current chapter has gone slower than the previous few, but it also was written out of order and about...7? years ago—and hasn't been touched since being written.  It was originally going to be, get this, chapter 10.  I should finish it by the end of this upcoming week.

Regardless, it's been a wonderfully productive weekend so far.  Tomorrow (erm, later today), I'll work on notes for the notes draft and probably chapter 4 of NPB.  I need 13k/week to make my word count goal for the year.  With a little pushing, I think I can actually make it this week.  We'll see about next week.

Both in life and with my writing.  Life right now is a bunch of annoying, but necessary doctor appointments.  Taking care of a recurring female related problem and finally getting back on my heart medication.  Just can't love being winded all the time.  Kids are out of school, though youngest will be going to summer school in June.  Husband is working.  Things aren't better than they were before, but they aren't worse, so this is good.

I'm on ch. 23 of Assassin's Choice and almost 34k in on Phoenix Rising.  Plus I picked up my Novel Plot Building book again and just started chapter 4.  I'm actually sailing through A.C. at the moment.  I'm still behind but managing a chapter a week (both v4 and v5 revisions), sometimes going into a second chapter.  It looks like I'll finish 2 months after my self-imposed deadline, than I'll need to make the v6 revisions I have planned.  Most of those shouldn't be too hard though—the big ones involve some character/race changes, but even they aren't that big.  I expect the book to go out to beta readers by the end of the year.  I'll take a break and early next year start thinking about the query letter, outline, and synopsis.  NOT looking forward to that, actually.  :P

The night owl schedule is definitely a big part of the productivity.  When I do finally get out of bed, I'm usually quite ready to get to work rather than needing time to wake up and figure out my day.  At night, I use my most creative part of my cycle to make progress in my revisions, which seems to be really helpful in keeping me going despite being at the most difficult part of the novel.

I've given up on shorts for the time being, maybe permanently.  Shorts are a hard length for me, the market hunting frustrating and exhausting, and the pay not worth the time put into the process.  Granted, I don't write to make a living...yet, but, at the same time, I'm not writing to put more money into trying to get published than I get out of it.  I have a few credits, some of them in some pretty decent zines.  For now, I'm content on that front and just want to focus on the books, which I'm more comfortable with anyway.  It may be awhile before I get published again, but I'm okay with that.

I've actually had an amazing amount of personal stuff get in the way of my usual activities, some of it health related, some of it family related, and a whole lot of it disruptive.  Things appear to be settling now, for the most part, and I've made a few changes to make my days easier for me.  Not sure they will get me on this blog more than usual, but they are already helping with the writing aspect of things.  Now we just need the weather to be cooperative...which is not likely to happen consistently any time soon.  We need the water, don't get me wrong, so the rain is welcome.  The tornadoes and lightning, however, really aren't as necessary as they seem to think they are.  ;)

Of course, the biggest concern has been my health.  I had to go back on my iron to combat anemia, and finally gave in and went to the doctor when the last 2 weeks proved to be far more difficult than they should have been.  He's put me on medication as a stop gap measure (which is already working) and is having testing done to see what we can do to keep the issue under control in the future.  A lot of this has to do with my weight, and a lot of it has to do with my age.  I was taking tiny steps towards a healthier me when the newest wrinkle showed up.  With the temporary measures already having a dramatic affect for the better, I'm already trying to get back into some of the habits that were helping me before.  I may hold off on exercise for a bit, though, just to allow things to stabilize before I go adding something back into the mix.

One of the biggest changes I've made is to my schedule.  I'm not sure why, but months after leaving my substitute teaching job, I was still on the working girl schedule: up early, awake all day, to bed around midnight.  For most people, this works...except maybe the midnight thing.  For ME, this is a nightmare.  I hate mornings (I like to say I'm allergic to them) and have always done better with a night time schedule--meaning to bed at 3 AM (or later) and up at 10 or 11 AM.  I don't even start to feel creative energy until 1 AM or later, so being in bed at midnight robs me of my most creative time.  After talking with the husband about this, it was agreed that I should try to go back to my own schedule, with a small change: I still have to get up to get the kids off to school.  I just go back to bed once they are on their buses and sleep until 11 or noon.  The old work schedule rears its ugly head still, so the shift over is proving a bit more difficult than I thought it would be, but, as I said earlier, the positive results are already being seen.  I've been working A LOT faster on A.C. than I was before starting to switch over.  Nothing beats working within your own creative cycle.

The editing job has also gone through some changes.  Our acquisitions editor resigned for personal reasons that had nothing to do with her love for us.  She just didn't feel it was the right fit for her.  As a result, my position as senior editor is now merged with acquisitions, and I've had to do some shuffling around with my responsibilities to get everything to fit.  Fortunately, it's still quiet for us.  It may not stay that way once we have our August launch and release.  I'm looking forward to it, but we also still have a lot to do to get 3 of our 4 books ready on time (the 4th may or may not be ready, and we're okay with that).

In other news, my essay "When Tears Fall" has been reprinted in Voices of Autism, an autism anthology.  I am VERY excited about this antho.  It's already received at least one wonderful review:

The fifth entry in the Voices anthology project from the Healing Project, this work includes over 40 different stories and vignettes written by parents, teachers, and people with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) that showcase how families and caregivers measure perseverance, understanding, and success. Many of the selections stand out, including an author’s account of her autistic son, a seventh grader’s perspective on her two siblings with autism, a memoir by an adult with autism who relied on a tire advertisement to get through tough times, and an account of the challenges of dating an adult with Asperger’s. The book’s real strengths are the adult-penned passages, which will give readers a better sense of what autism truly is. Taken individually, the stories show glimpses of the impact that autism has on individuals and those they love. Taken collectively, they paint a rich landscape that many will find familiar. Highly recommended for public libraries and academic libraries with disability collections.

-- ­Corey Seeman, Kresge Business Administration Library, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor

I hope you will consider picking up a copy.  Autism is probably one of the least understood but most prevalent disabilities in the world today.  1 out of 166 people are diagnosed with autism, and it affects everyone in the autistic's life.  Probably the most frightening part of the disability is that those who have it look normal.  It's not like so many disabilities where you can tell there's something different just by the person's appearance.  When you combine this with the lack of knowledge about it, the result can be devastating for the family.  I've been a target of the blame game, of being told I should get another opinion because it's probably not autism, of having to fight for everything that my son is supposed to get by law.  The only thing that will help is education.  The essays and stories in this book come from our personal experiences as family members of autistics and from those with autism.  Nothing could inform better.

Between personal stress at home, work, weather, and a few other things, not much work has been done on my own writing recently (note previous entry).  However, I have finally reached the current halfway mark in Assassin's Choice in terms of chapter numbers.  I may be past that in actual word count because there's a huge chunk towards the end of the book that may get cut.  Phoenix Rising also got a nice, healthy word count addition this week--I now have a Friday buddy that I meet with to work on "alternate" projects.  Hopefully meeting with her every week will help keep me on track with it.

In publication news, two of my short stories are now available on AnthologyBuilder.com: "In the Blood" and "Intended".  One of them even received positive comments from the site editor.  I need to update the site to reflect that, I suppose.  ;)

There's little else to post about really.  I'm ruminating a new Meta and considering writing a new article on critiquing (yea, like we all ne4ed another one--but this one comes from something I realized about the crits I receive and how I react to them).  I'm still working on a short, and, yes, it's very odd for me to plod my way through a first draft of a short like this.  I just finished a S. L. Veihl book and have one other novel and an omnibus lined up for me to read.  For work, one manuscript has been returned to the author for round 2 edits, and the second manuscript is about done with round 1.

I did start trying out a new hard copy method for tracking my submissions.  It's going to take a bit to get all the old stuff in the columnar book...and I may end up having to do it all over again because I'm not so sure I like it.  I like the idea of a book and the information I'm trying to keep (in general), but the book is a bit...big.  I'm thinking of making my own template then having it copied and bound at Staples.  We'll see.

And...that's about it.  Told you it's been quiet.