Category Archives: A Lonely Magic

Wrapping it up and putting a bow on top

28 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in A Lonely Magic

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Holy cow, the edits on A Lonely Magic have been immense. I wish I knew whether they’d made the book better. At this point, I am so close to it that I definitely can’t see the forest for the trees–the trees that are made of words like “looked” and “seemed” and “eyes narrowed” and “nodded” and “sighed.”

I have to turn it over to the editor tonight (or possibly tomorrow–I told him I’d send it on April 29th, so he’s not expecting it until then and I know he’s been in the middle of a big project himself.) If I had more time, I would definitely use it. More edits and more edits and more edits! But maybe it’s better this way. I can let go of it for a while and let other people look at it and work on it.

I’m in an interesting mental space about it, though. With Ghosts, I felt like I’d written a nice little story. Sure, it could be better, but it was the best I could do at the time, and good enough to share with the people I thought would have fun reading it. I figured my family and friends would buy it out of loyalty (probably not ever read it, though!), and my dozen or so Eureka fanfiction friends would read it out of interest and that would be it. With Thought, I felt a lot more pressure, but my life was also a complete mess and I felt obligated to finish it somewhere within the range of time that I’d said it would be done. I let go of it feeling satisfied that I’d done the best I could do in the circumstances and that it was a fair value to a reader at the price. With Time, I might very well have stuck the manuscript onto a hard drive and in a drawer somewhere were it not for my lovely beta readers. If people hadn’t liked it, I wouldn’t have kept working on it.

With ALM–well, technically, I’m done. I could publish it within a couple of weeks pretty easily if I felt so inclined. But I might not. I might keep revising. I might add more scenes. I might delete scenes. I might move characters around. For the first time, I’m not thinking “good enough” and “the best I can do” are sufficient. I feel like I’ve imagined a world which could be so much fun to play in for such a long time that I really, really want it to be as amazing on the page as it is in my head. Good enough isn’t, I want it to be great. And if it’s not, then I think I want to keep trying to make it better. I might have to become a better writer first, though, and that’s sort of easier said than done.

Meanwhile, though, I should get back to it. I’ve got one chapter half-finished with minor rewrites, one that needs major, major work and two more that I think are close to done. That’s a lot to do today!

Happy Monday

21 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in A Lonely Magic, Anxiety, Personal

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I was walking the dogs this morning–on a rather beautiful, slightly cool, very green April day–when I realized that my mind was telling me stories again, specifically a conversation between Fen and Javier which is going to make Ch25 so much better. Yay!

For the past few weeks, my brain has been caught on a hamster wheel of college plotting and planning and financial calculations and frustration. In the daydream-y moments when I’m usually lost in my story-world, I’ve been stuck in a not very pleasant set of realities. Most days I still worked on the book, but it’s been slow and painful, the words dragging and dull. Yesterday, though, we paid the deposit for New College of Florida and filled out the financial aid paperwork and stuck the forms in the mail, and now my brain appears to have jumped off that unpleasant hamster wheel and moved back to Syl Var. Whee!

This week, I’m going to finish the revisions, one way or another. Next Monday, the book goes off to the editor. Next Tuesday, I start writing the next one. This month has been a rough spell, but that thought makes me happy!

Moving between worlds

22 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by in A Lonely Magic, Short Stories, Writing

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So I spent the week in Tassamara. And it was lovely.

But, having finished my subscription bonus short story and sent it out to subscribers and then spent a couple hours obsessively checking my email to be sure at least a couple of them liked it enough to tell me so (YES! they did! YAY!), I was so ready to get back to A Lonely Magic.

Point One: Sia Mara and Tassamara? What was I thinking? Two names that are so close are almost sure to be confusing. But… sigh… the name is too solidly in my head now. I don’t think I can change it. Ah, well.

Point Two: Oh, it is so much fun to be back with the Sia Mara. SO fun! I’ve spent the afternoon reading reviews and comments, collecting them for the editing document that I create for every book. It’s a list of changes that I know I need to make and items that I want to check. My usual editing process is to work my way down it before sending the file out to some beta reviewers and creating a second editing list. So this is maybe my alpha editing list? Anyway, I’m reading all the reviews in order to collate all the suggestions people made along the way and make sure that I’ve at least considered them, whether or not I made the change, and it’s been so fun. The number of times people wrote “What a twist!” or “OMG, didn’t see that one coming” pleases me greatly. Sia Mara is just really, really entertaining to me.

Ah, which brings us to the point of this post: if you’re interested in being a beta reader for the next draft–it’ll be at least a week from now, because there’s a lot I want to add–please leave a comment. I know some of you have read the first draft while it’s been happening, so I understand if you don’t want to look at the second version, plus I have every intention of posting more revisions to wattpad, which is much easier if you don’t actually like looking for places to criticize. But if you do like to be critical and would like to read the closer to final draft, please do let me know!

This book is getting a real editor. I’ve hired him already, even sent him some money, but he’s not available until the end of April, so I’ve got about a month to make it as perfect as I can on my own. I’m excited to see how the more-perfect-than-my-own-level-of-perfect process goes.

Competition

04 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in A Lonely Magic, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

My favorite lines from the most recent chapter of my current WIP:

    1) Maybe he was like a Doctor Who alien, a creepy monster zipped inside a human-being suit.
    2) Seriously, her brain would dump crazy-sauce all over her psyche when someone got too close to her on the El and it was going to let aliens slide?
    3) Someone should have given Gaelith better lessons in not being an alien.
    4) “I’m a legal adult in all fifty states. I take care of myself. A couple days in paradise, awesome, rad to the tenth, rocks the big one.” Fen couldn’t keep her hands still and her voice was rising with each additional adjective, so she stopped herself and took a deep breath. In a quieter voice, she said, “But I want to know when I’m going home.”
    5) Aliens.
    Damn them.
    They were so very, very nice.

Writing today was awful. Gah. Words squeezed out like that very last bit of toothpaste when you know you should have bought a new tube three days ago but you just didn’t get around to it, and the honest truth is that there’s nothing left in there but you still want to brush your teeth.

End of the day, though, I am amused.

Feel free to vote for your favorite in the comments! I love them all, but then, I know what goes in between them.

Being mean or not

26 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by in A Lonely Magic, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

So…I’ve been grinding out word after word of Akira and Zane’s honeymoon and mostly hating it. It’s not that the words aren’t good, they’re fine. But I hate it anyway.

Today, I couldn’t do it. Could NOT do it. So I decided to just let my fingers fly, write anything, whatever the words were that the fingers typed, that was fine, even if they were the same words over and over again. Write, write, write, damn you.

And I discovered — I am entirely resistant to writing about Akira and Zane because it means being mean to them. I have a plot. A good plot. It involves them being UNHAPPY. I don’t want them to be unhappy. I don’t want that to happen. And my fingers–they don’t want to write that.

When I let them go, they started writing an entirely new story instead. A girl named Fen. Busy fighting off a murderer, not very effectively. A much, much darker story than I anticipated, a girl who’s far more bitter than I knew and a sense of OMG, FUN! that was totally unexpected. There’s a character–meant to die in this scene, meant to convey through his death that this is a darker book–well, he declined to die. And he’s horrible. Truly horrible. And also Spike, from Buffy. Yeah, he’s a psychopath. Yeah, he mildly regrets having to kill you. But we all gotta do what we all gotta do and the heroine’s death, it’s just what he’s gotta do.

He lived. And I wrote happily.

Fen is by far my darkest character. I don’t know how far I’ll get with her. She understands depression and death and suicidal ideation and cutting and being alone in a way that I’ve never even tried to reach with my other characters. And I believe–oh, I so believe–that there is sunshine in her future. I want to write her and that feels really, really good.

Might take me a while to finish Akira’s carefully-plotted horror story. But that’s okay. Telling my fingers to do what they would gave me more joy today than any writing I’ve done in weeks, so that’s the new plan. I’ll be mean to Akira someday. But meanwhile, Fen? She doesn’t even understand mean. She thinks that’s what life is all about. I love her.