Category Archives: Writing

My Flock

25 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in Pets, Reviews, Television, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

My dad’s dog is here visiting for a week. I’m sure I’ve posted pictures of him before, but he’s just about the size of Zelda, if a bit heavier, golden and fluffy. He’s a mix of poodle and something else, maybe cocker spaniel? I should remember, but I don’t.

At any rate, three dogs underfoot and on the bed is somehow qualitatively different than two dogs. Instead of having a couple of dogs, I have a flock of dogs. And they are a flock, not a pack, because they are all fluffy. It’s a little collection of fluff balls. Alone, none of them are too, too fluffy — well, B pushes the line. But put them together and suddenly, it’s a serious fluff experience. I would love to get a really good picture of the three of them, but I can never quite get all of them to be cute at the same moment, unless I’m in the kitchen, in which case I don’t have a camera around.

And I am babbling in order to avoid the reality that it’s already past noon and I have written exactly one sentence this morning. I should try to write a second one, because maybe it would lead to a third and then a fourth. I haven’t broken my writing streak yet — I have written every day of 2016 — but the past two days were not good writing days. I’m annoyed at myself, because I can see how I’m being resistant, even sort of understand why, and yet… knowing my reasons doesn’t help me overcome the sensation of wanting to do anything, anything other than write.

I’ve even watched a lot of television. I started watching Person of Interest because of a clip online about the dog, Bear. I am fairly sure I got hooked mostly because I wanted a distraction and it fit the bill, but I’m definitely hooked now. Sometimes it crosses the line into hokey-ness and melodrama and I definitely need to exercise my willing suspension of disbelief, sometimes to a fairly extreme level, but it is, unexpectedly, a show with incredibly fun, powerful female characters.

Ugh, and I just got totally sucked into an Internet rabbit hole of reading about the characters because I wanted to link to my favorite one. But the links I found were all so spoiler-ific that I will not do that to you! I’m also feeling a little bummed that I spoiled myself. Apparently my favorite character (Shaw) misses most of Season 4, because the actress was out on maternity leave. Ironically, the actress also played a character I loved in the television show Life and also disappeared from that show to have a baby. I guess it’s nice that she likes kids! And sort of funny, given the seriously tough, kickass characters she plays. I’d love to see her playing the same type of character pregnant. That would be… huh, you know I bet someone has written the fanfic of that. Okay, I’m not going to fall down that rabbit hole, but I am going to stop letting myself be distracted and go stare at my own story world for a while. But Person of Interest — quite fun if you can suspend your disbelief and don’t mind lots and lots and lots of guns.

Grace update

22 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Grace, Tassamara

≈ 11 Comments

So I am not quite, but very close, to having written as far as I ever have in A Gift of Grace. In other words, I’ve gotten past where I left off in the first version, almost to where I left off in the second version, and past where I left off in the third version. I’m calling that good news. Except I keep thinking I should be done and then discovering that I’m nowhere close.

I suspect that the editing of this one is going to be more challenging than I want it to be, too, because after so many versions, I don’t always remember what’s still in and what’s out. I am definitely going to need good beta readers who are willing to call me out on my screw-ups. That there are screw-ups is basically guaranteed.

And that said… I told my dad on Friday that I was pretty sure Grace is the best thing I’ve ever written. Obviously, I’m not done yet, so I could still screw it up. Equally obviously, my opinion isn’t really worth all that much. I know these characters really well now. Whether a reader who hasn’t lived through all the versions will feel like she or he knows them equally well is still totally up in the air. I won’t know that for a while. I might not ever know that if it turns out to be like The Wedding Guests in terms of getting very few reviews. It might be a total mystery to me forever. But that’s okay. Sort of.

I did realize that one of my ongoing problems, apart from the truly crazy over-abundance of characters, has been time and the passing thereof. I wanted this book to be like Ghosts in terms of taking place over months and having a romance that was a slow and plausible real build. People don’t fall in love in two days. They fall in infatuation and love is what happens over the course of time. Akira and Zane have, to me, real love. They met, were attracted, flirted, started bonding, slept together, kept bonding, spent a lot of time together, enjoyed one another’s company, liked one another for their differences, faced danger together, and live happily ever after. Grace and Noah might end this book at closer to attracted, flirted, started bonding… because 45,000 words into it, Noah has spent a single night in Tassamara. In book time, he met Grace yesterday. That is not love. We might be closer to a Happy For Now ending than a Happy Ever After ending. (And that said, I suspect that this is a problem of all romantic suspense. I’ve not really started examining timelines for my favorite books, but I suspect that ten days from first meeting to together & in love is pretty typical for novels, even if it is a terrible idea for real life.)

But I’m not letting that realization bother me. This book is very definitely not what I thought it was going to be, not what I wanted it to be. It doesn’t match the outline that I wrote for it (in 2013!) at all, with the sole exception of having a hero who hears ghosts and thinks he’s crazy. I’m not even sure that the title works anymore. But all of that is okay, too. Onward!

A new month

01 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Writing

≈ 4 Comments

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I wrote every day during the month of January. Thirty-one days in a row, some words on Grace every single one of them. I want to take a moment to pat myself on the back and say, “good job, self, good job,” but instead, my brain demands to know how in the world I have not finished writing this book yet. Not yet 7AM, still dark, and I have already spent twenty minutes or so beating myself up.

It’s not like I’m trying to write the great American novel or anything deep and literary. I’m not worrying about symbolism or all those poetic terms I can’t remember the names of. It’s just a fun romantic ghost story. I’m not even obsessed with editing perfection! I let sentences end in prepositions. I use fragments and run-ons! I even, horror of horrors, put multiple exclamation points on the same page yesterday!! (They belong there, though. Or at least I was pretty sure yesterday that they belonged there. I might change my mind this morning.)

I suspect my big mistake of several years ago was in starting to read about writing. I wanted to improve. That was part of my million word goal, to get better and better and at the end of writing a million words, decide whether or not I wanted to try to write for a living. But I think the more I learned about writing — not grammar and punctuation, of course, but about telling a story and building characters and creating a good plot, the harder it got for me to write. All that reading is where my story-telling went wrong.

Many years ago, I had a co-worker who would remind us that it wasn’t brain surgery, “it” being whatever work thing had us stressed out. The point wasn’t that our work was easy in comparison (although it was, obviously), but that no lives depended on what we were doing. I should make that one of my imaginary inspirational posters and remind myself of it steadily. No lives depend on me getting the story right.

The worst part is, of course, that it’s actually a whole lot easier to write fast and to not revise. I constantly have to go back and version check while I’m writing — have I said this in this version? Is this how this works this time around? It’s taken me so long that I forget what I wrote and even more, I forget what changes I’ve made.

But enough whining. February goal: to write every day, to write a lot every day, to finish this book and start the next one. A friend read A Lonely Magic last night and was messaging me until late in the night. She wants the sequel and I’d really like to write it — for her, for me, for the other people who cared. I also was asked last week about an audio version of Ghosts, so I want to create that. I also want to finish Grace, do my taxes, go to yoga three times a week, paint my bathroom, walk the dogs every day, eat healthily, and win the lottery. The only one of those things that’s impossible is the last. (I never buy lottery tickets. Too cheap!)

Apparently February 1 is the new New Year’s for me. Filled with resolutions and resolve! But onward and upward, right?

Writing Joy

16 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in Grace, Heather, Tassamara, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

Last night, I was trying to sleep but actually lying awake, staring at the ceiling, wishing I hadn’t drunk coffee in the afternoon, when a scene began to scroll before my eyes. Like watching a movie or having a dream, the characters were so vivid, so real, and their conversation so charming. I sat up, turned on the light, pulled my Chromebook over, and scribbled down rough notes about the dialog I’d just imagined. And then I turned the lights off and tried to go to sleep again.

This morning, I was in the shower, washing my hair, when the same characters popped back into my head and started flirting again. I could see them at Maggie’s diner. I could hear the conversation they were having. And I knew exactly what happened next. I barely dried myself off before I was at the computer, typing madly, trying not to drip on the keyboard.

Such a fun, fun, fun feeling. And such a pity that the words and the characters and the scenes are NOT from the book I am working on. ARGH!

The good news (maybe?) is that these characters are clearly in the sequel to the book that I am writing. There’s no way I can reach their story until I make it through Grace’s story, because until Grace and Noah have their happy ending, Noah’s brother will not be visiting Tassamara. And he can not be happy-go-lucky flirting with a random girl in Maggie’s Bistro until he gets there. So back to Grace I go. But oh, inspiration is so delightful.

I don’t know when I’ll get to write this book and I don’t know what its name is and everything about it might change dramatically between now and then, but: Heather Allen is on the run, carrying with her a secret of life-shattering proportions.

Someday I will get to tell her story!

Uprooted by Naomi Novik

10 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by in Books, Grace, Personal, Reviews

≈ 12 Comments

First of all, switching computers and operating systems and browsers and absolutely everything — I even have only one trackpad button now, instead of two — is really disorienting. But I love my new little computer. The battery life is incredible and the keyboard is clicketty perfection. Okay, not quite perfection — I keep getting a 1 when I try to get an !, but apart from that, it works really well and feels great.

Writing-wise it’s sort of interesting — the screen is so small that I can really only see a few lines at a time as I write. It makes it hard to assess the flow, but it also feels like I’m starting to write faster, because I’m not spending all my time being critical of the words I’ve already written. They disappear so fast that I don’t have the chance to stare at them gloomily.

However, my writing got horribly negatively affected this week when the library delivered Naomi Novik’s Uprooted to my Overdrive shelf. I was on the waiting list and it was finally my turn. I’m feeling slightly guilty right now that I haven’t returned it so that the next person on the waiting list can have her chance, but I haven’t yet, because I keep wanting to just drop into that world again for a little visit. I loved it so much. I’ve read other books by Novik — I think I read maybe the first three books of her very long Tremaire series? I enjoyed them but not enough to keep going when I reached the end of the series that had been written when I first started. I hate trying to remember what happened in a series that I haven’t read for a year so I often let series go. But this book was nothing like those books.

It’s a fairy tale mix of… oh, Robin McKinley and Patrick Rothfuss and Suzanne Collins and … someone grim and bloody and someone magical and stubborn. Maybe it is its own thing entirely? After I fell in love with it, I listened to the Sword & Laser podcast about it and then read a Slate review of it. One of the things that both of those sources pointed out was that it’s almost a trilogy in one book: a coming-of-age tale with a fantastic heroine where for the first third, she’s learning in a classic Beauty and the Beast scenario, and in the second third, she’s off to the city in a Mercedes Lackey/Patrick Rothfuss watch-out-for-the-evil-peers story, and in the last third, she is engaged in epic battles to save her home, ala people that I don’t read because I’m not so much an epic battle sort of reader. (And wasn’t THAT quite the run-on sentence.) The Slate review criticized that, suggesting that it would have been better as three books, but I totally disagreed — this is an all-things-in-one, breakneck speed, completely engrossing read. For me, it was perfect.

Well, pretty close to perfect. On a second read, I started to quibble with some things. (What happened to the wolves? Where did they come from and why were they never seen again? Why didn’t the obnoxious girl get transformed into a toad? Seriously, on what planet is tilting her headpiece a year’s worth of humiliation for someone that bitchy? Also holy cow, there are a lot of dead people by the end — I’m not sure I’ve ever loved a book that was quite so bloody.) BUT! None of those things remotely occurred to me on my first read and really mostly I just loved it to death. So much so that as soon as I finished, I went back to the beginning and started again and since then, I’ve been dipping in and out of it at regular opportunities. And worst of all, my night-time and morning day-dreaming — the moments when I’m half-awake and story is unfolding before my eyes, words drifting into my imagination — all those moments are being stolen by Novik’s world. *sigh*

I should really return this book to the library right now and try to forget all about it. Noah needs to finish his confrontation with Lucas and Akira needs to get back from her honeymoon. But you, on the other hand, you, dear reader, should promptly put your name on your library’s hold list. I’ve added the book to my Amazon wishlist and someday after I make it through the holidays, after I finish writing a couple books of my own, I’m going to be buying my own copy of Uprooted so that I can read it until the pixels wear out. (Thank God they never do!)

And oh, bah, I was actually going to write the story of my Christmas tree, but I’m out of time. Oh, well. I have a Christmas tree. It feels magical. It’s not really decorated yet, but I feel a decided glow of happiness when I think about it that matches the glow of its lights.

Christmas tree

Chromebook progress

05 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by in Boring, Randomness, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

The abuse of the last couple days of NaNo — hours banging away on the computer to get those last 12,000 words — was a little too much for my laptop’s keyboard. The 8 key had already been sticking, but the i key and the n key stopped working regularly. Argh. Trying to write and having every sentence turn into “tryng to wrte” is disconcerting.

I’m hard on my keyboards, I’ve discovered. Back in the day when I used Apple machines most of the time for work I didn’t have problems, but when I quit my job and switched to cheap Windows PCs, I started needing a new keyboard every year or so. And not because I spilled stuff on them, just because steady typing takes its toll.

This one, though, left me with a dilemma. I’d promised myself that when it bit the dust, I would go back to a Mac, figuring that the quality was worth the investment. A computer that didn’t need a new keyboard every year and that had some operating system stability (don’t get me started on Windows — I hated 8 but my problems with 10 never ended) would be a bargain in the long run. Not to mention the time I’d save by not fighting with it all the time. But I’d hoped to at least finish a book on it first. Maybe two! In other words, I needed it to last long enough for me to earn some money on it before I could make that decision and yet, there it was — it’s tough to earn money from writing when your I and your N are only optional.

Enter… drum roll…. a Chromebook. It’s the other anti-Windows option. I have no idea (yet) whether it will suit me long-term, but when I started looking, I managed to find a deal on Amazon that basically cost me $122 with free same-day delivery. It’s a working keyboard, software that I can use to write on, and for the investment, all I need is for it to last for a few months. And it is so, so, so cute.

Unfortunately, it does have typical Google interface problems. They are so remarkably bad at design. The people there may be incredible coders, but even reading the instructions doesn’t help me figure out how to do things that ought to be obvious. Example: opening up a hangout so I can chat with a friend. It took me probably ten minutes to figure out that I needed to go to the Chrome Web store and download an extension. The things that looked like links on the search results page just didn’t work at all. And figuring out how to use the trackpad is going to take me forever. I may need to put a cheat sheet next to me while I work to remind myself to use three fingers for… well, something or other. I remember reading in the instructions that I could do something by swiping with three fingers but I no longer remember what the something was (proof of the need for a cheat sheet.)

But every time I get impatient, I will remind myself: working keyboard, ability to keep writing without going insane, I key and N key and 8 key… and for basically the price of a single CostCo grocery run. I have to admit, too, it really makes me want to head off to Starbucks and write at a coffee shop, just because it’s so usably light. I could seriously tuck this machine into my purse and not even notice that I was carrying it around, but it still has a usable keyboard. I can also put my iPad in my purse, of course, but writing on that keyboard doesn’t work at all for me.

Anyway, enough rambling about my new device. I’m going to have to experiment with google docs and see if I can set it up to be functional for me without a huge learning curve, and I don’t think this is going to be a complete replacement for a computer — for one thing, I don’t know how I’d create an ebook using only Chrome-capatible software — but first things first. Until I finish writing Grace, I really don’t have to worry about creating an ebook, so time to get started with the writing! Thanks for the good wishes on my last post — I didn’t answer comments because I’ve been very computer frustrated with everything taking longer than usual, but I appreciate them!

Jigsaw puzzles

02 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Grace, NaNo, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

Re-reading all the words I wrote in November to pick out the good bits and sadly, there are so many ideas, and — less sadly — so many good bits, but they do not fit together at all, at all. I think I called it a jigsaw puzzle once — it is more like one of those three-dimensional puzzles where all the pieces have the exact same shape. I say “one of” — I don’t actually know that such a puzzle exists, but if it did, this conglomeration of words would resemble it.

Conglomeration is maybe not the word I want. But it’s not collection and it’s not cacophony and whatever it is, it starts with a C.

I don’t want Grace to be a story that gets stuck in a drawer, I really don’t. But yesterday I just bailed. I read the Parasol Protectorate all day long, finishing Book 5 this morning at about 11. So yeah, five books in 24 hours, not exactly the most productive use of my time. She deserved a better editor, in my opinion, although she did some fine retro-fitting to plug up her world-building inconsistencies. But I bet she got some letters of complaint before she did. Is that my problem, I wonder? Am I worried about people complaining? I don’t feel like it should be — so far, with a few rare exceptions, I’m my own harshest critic.

But really, I suspect it’s the jigsaw puzzle problem. When I started, I was writing three stories at once: a romance between Grace and Noah; a mystery about stock options, anonymous threats, and bodyguards; and the story of the ghosts. When I started over again from the beginning, back in the summer, I jettisoned everything except the romance, but now I’m back to trying to write the romance and the ghost story and feeling like the mystery was the glue that tied the two together. So, option one: keep writing, even though I’m lost and spinning in circles. Option two: back to the beginning and start revising, see where I can go if I fix all the things that are already bothering me. Option three: write something else for a while.

Option four: go back to bed and wallow in depressed, gray, miserable gloominess.

I’m thinking option one. I may not be getting anywhere, but as I learned from my re-reading of all my not-getting-anywhere-of-November, there were at least some good ideas. And I did discover — especially in the last few days of November — that when I simply force myself to write, whether I know where I’m going, whether the words are any good or not, things start churning around. I wrote a lot of words in two days. I didn’t much enjoy them. But I don’t think they’re bad words. I’m probably not going to use a lot of them, maybe not any, but pushing to create them was… well, it felt like exercise. Not necessarily fun, but healthier at the end, healthier when I was in the middle of it, and even if it’s not forward movement, at least it was movement.

Three o’clock and I haven’t had lunch, so I think I shall go hunt down some food. But after lunch, it’s time to start writing again. Today will be Day 1 of a fresh writing chain which is, someday, I am really quite hopeful — or maybe just thinking positive — going to end with a book.

Taxiing

30 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by in Grace, NaNo

≈ 3 Comments

Why, oh, why, do we use the word “taxi” to describe an airplane’s free motion along the ground? Apparently they’re traveling on land known as a “taxiway,” but why should that be called that? Maybe to differentiate it from the runway? But who chose taxi?

Also, double i is a really intrinsically weird letter construction in the English language. I wonder how many words there are that use a double i? I’m guessing not many because offhand, I can’t think of another. Ah, but Hawaii and skiing, of course, and all of skiing’s forms. Plus Shanghaiing and shiitake and alibiing. But not a lot of others. (Technically 50-some others, if you include all the ones on the word game cheat list that I just looked at, but a bunch of them are pretty dubious — Hawaiian plant names and words with no definition online, etc.)

If I had discovered the answer to the question about taxi, I’d stuff this blog post with keywords so that other people could find the answer more easily, because I’ve wasted a scary amount of time trying to discover the etymology of that phrase, but alas, I didn’t find the answer, so there’s no point.

But today is the last day of NaNo.

Achievement One: Write a blog post every day. Unlocked as soon as I hit Publish on this one.
Achievement Two: Write a 50,000 word novel entirely within the month of November. Nope. Achievement not unlocked. Maybe next year.
Achievement Three: Write 50,000 words within the month of November. I have ten hours and approximately 4500 words to go.

That’s an average of 450 words per hour. Phrased that way, it still seems possible. And since these words count, I may as well continue babbling here for a little bit longer. Overdrive — in the interests of making it impossible for me to success with Achievement #3 — very kindly auto-checked out the complete Parasol Protectorate by Gail Carriger to my iPad this morning. I’ve had to hide the iPad in the other room to discourage myself from distractions but I did read at breakfast and lunch. I read another series by her — The Finishing School series — last week, also mostly courtesy of Overdrive. It’s encouraging in some weird way to see that she has become a better writer as she’s written more books. I don’t know why exactly, except that sometimes I think I’ve gotten a lot worse, but maybe it’s just hard to see your own growth in progress? And maybe it’s just a satisfying affirmation that yes, authors grow and learn and develop, and if I’m not as good as I want to be today, that doesn’t mean I won’t be later.

Also, although perhaps less optimistically, it reminds me that I’m a good editor and I’m a good editor on my own books, too. The reason I’m saying this is that there are clunky sections in the first book of the Parasol Protectorate series — repetitions, infodumps — stuff that pretty minor edits could have fixed and it’s satisfying to me to know that I would have caught them and fixed them. It reminds me that even if this first draft that I’m working on is the worst thing ever, ever, ever, I am entirely capable of fixing it in rewrites. I wish I could remember that a little more easily. I should be more confident when I’m writing about my own skills as an editor, because that would probably let me relax a little more while I’m writing. Hmm, another useful insight.

So as I hit the end of my blogging every day month, what have I learned? I have learned that I’m probably not going to blog every day. I never check my traffic, but I bet my traffic has gone lower and lower this month as I’ve bored more people with blog posts that say nothing. I’m not even sure that I’d bother to read my own blog if it weren’t, you know, my own. But I’ve also found it really useful to blog every day as a way of beginning my writing process and also forcing myself to relax about what I write. My normal process, even with a blog post, includes a lot of revision and tweaking, but this month, there’s just no time for that. I bet it’s not even that noticeable to anyone who’s managed to keep reading. But it’s relaxing for me.

And I just drifted off to google analytics — a terrible way to spend my now less than ten hours — and yep, I’m dramatically right. The little blue line plummets at the beginning of November. That’s okay, though — it’s a nice reminder that I should blog for what I get out of it myself and not to take up other people’s time. If I worried too much about my audience I would probably stop blogging entirely, because time is a precious resource for all of us and not one that should be wasted. But I can waste my own time, because I’m getting self-analysis, writing discoveries, encouragement and experience out of it. Words, words, and more words! They count for something for me, even when they’re not useful for anyone else. (Technically, of course, all reading is good because spending your time interpreting symbols is good for our brains and keeps us mentally agile, but there are a lot of worthwhile things to read in the world — my blog does not aspire to be one of them. Not that a blog could aspire, but you know what I mean.)

Almost 1000 words on this blog post, which puts me at under 4K left to go in my nine hours and forty-five minutes. Do I have anything else to say about my blogging discoveries in the month of November? I don’t think I posted any recipes, which might just mean I wasn’t a very creative cook this month. But book reviews were obviously my fallback position — when I have nothing else to write about, there are always books. I wish that worked in real life, but it so seldom does. Never once have I survived a stilted conversation with a stranger by discovering that we both liked to read the same things. But maybe I should try more often, since I don’t think I often try the “Read anything good lately?” line. (I don’t actually wander around talking to strangers all that often, anyway.) Writing, reading, cooking, dogs — if I ever try to do the blogging every day for a month thing again, I will have to make sure to take an interesting vacation during the month!

Anyway, I’m going to get back to my attempt to produce words that will eventually go into A Gift of Grace. Tomorrow I’m going to have the fun organizational job of reading everything I’ve written in the past ten days and pulling out all the coherent bits to see how they fit together or how they can be fit together. But today I’m just going to try to write some more of those coherent bits. With any luck, Noah can get on with his confrontation with Lucas and I can get through this section and into a more fun section with Akira. More fun because Akira is always fun to write, I think, and it’s been a while since I’ve been with her.

Tomorrow — if I manage to get all the words done today — I am going to reward myself with a box of these chocolates from CostCo. I shouldn’t, because I seriously don’t need the sugar — it makes all my joints go wonky — but they are oh-so-good and I need the motivation. Yay, chocolate.

Desire and determination

29 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Boring, NaNo

≈ 4 Comments

From Judy in the comments: “Motivation is shit when you think about it. It’s fleeting, inconsistent, and unreliable. Commitment. That’s what it takes. Make the decision to better yourself every single day. Don’t rely on motivation, rely on your desire and determination to not stay where you are.” Runningmandz

Yesterday was a 3000 word count day. All the words were terrible. Some of them were a rant about how much I was hating writing and how much I was hating the book I was working on. Some of them were a feeble attempt to write a different book, which, it turned out, I Hated just as much as the real one. (I have no idea why my fingers randomly capitalized hated in that previous sentence, but I’m leaving it even though it’s wrong because it amuses me. Yes, my hate yesterday was worth of capital letters.) But I really tried to keep my fingers moving. As of today, I need to write 11,500 words in the next two days. I am willing to accept absolutely any words as an element of this goal, no matter how bad they are, despite the fact that realistically, that’s kind of stupid.

What’s the point in writing a lot of bad words? Except the point is something to do with motivation, with setting a goal and achieving it. Even if all the words are terrible words, if I’ve written fifty thousand of them in a month, I will have accomplished something. Admittedly, not the something that it would have been good to accomplish, namely finishing the first draft of A Gift of Grace. Even if it was 20,000 words, it would be better to have a solid first draft at the end of the month then a ton of unusable words. But persistence, commitment, desire and determination — as long as I keep opening up that damn file every day, I will get there in the end. Seriously, yesterday was close to giving up again, though. I have thousands of words that are basically just trying to find the next scene and no understanding of why it’s being so difficult. I feel like it should be straightforward — Noah’s got a job and is working until Akira gets back, what’s complicated about that? — but it feels super murky middle.

I suspect my real issue is that I want a lot of time to pass in the book, months ideally, and that is never my strong suit. The best I’ve ever done with that — oh, ha, the ONLY time I’ve ever done that — is “six weeks later” as the starting of the seduction scene in A Gift of Ghosts. That is literally the only time I’ve ever made significant time pass in a story. Well. Huh. Perhaps I’ve just realized why I’m spinning my wheels. That’s a useful accomplishment, go, blog post writing. But all my other books take place in literally days. In fact, I think I can go back to a blog post I was writing in the midst of Ghosts where I discuss my exact inability to make time pass. It has a name, narrative something-or-other, and apparently I still haven’t mastered the skill.

Moving on, at dinner last night, I took a break and read — well, skimmed, really — a classic Josephine Tey novel, Brat Farrar. What I wanted to read was a Ngaio Marsh mystery, having recently been reminded of those books. But unfortunately, the ebook versions that exist of Ngaio Marsh are ridiculously expensive. I hope her heirs are at least the people making the profits of those books, but I suspect it’s just a publisher. There’s a whole ocean of books that would be nice to have as ebooks — Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie, old Dick Francis, Elswyth Thane, Elsie Lee… — but the publisher wouldn’t have the ebook rights in the contract, since the books predate computers, giving them no motivation to make electronic editions without new contracts.

And as a business opportunity for an outsider, it’s probably risky. You’d need a good lawyer, the original contracts, clear owners of the copyrights, all for sales that might wind up being trivial. When I think about that way, it’s more obvious why Ngaio Marsh’s ebooks should be $9 each. But still, I wasn’t willing to pay. Instead, I found the Project Gutenberg library and Josephine Tey and read Brat Farrar for free. It was very soothing. The world in the book is peaceful — well, despite having a psycho murderer in it — but serene and friendly and warm. Darkness is there, all around, with tragic deaths and past wars and death duty taxes, but the sun still shines golden on the hills and riding a horse can be a sublime experience. It didn’t make me less discouraged with my own book, but it did remind me that I can relax and take my time and have some scenes that are just there to be pleasant. I don’t know what kind of crazy standard I’m trying to write to, but I think for today being reminded to take my time is a good thing.

And these words are feeling very incoherent, not to mention rambling, but that’s okay. Given that I need to write 6000 words today — a number that makes me roll my eyes — a few rambling words to begin with are probably good for me. The real issue with that ridiculous word count goal is that I’m bringing R back to his ride to school. For me, it’s a great deal. Instead of a five hour drive to bring him all the way to Sarasota, it’s a two hour drive. Hours of time saved, excellent. But on a day when I aspire to write thousands upon thousands of words, and even more hope that at least a few of them will be good and usable words, chopping out a couple hours in the middle of the day is sort of unfortunate. Of course, that’s the whole deal with NaNo in November, anyway. Losing a couple days to cooking a big dinner is not so efficient, although if I wasn’t the cook, having the holidays would probably be really nice to increase my word count. I bet a lot of writers with full-time jobs pack their Black Fridays with words, words, and more words.

Anyway, the real issue with losing time to the drive is not so much the drive, but the coming home to an empty house. It’s so nice to have R here. I still wind up spending a lot of my time cloistered away at my computer, but when I wander out to the kitchen, I enjoy the company and the conversation. I suspect that when I return to the empty house, I will have to go through a period of being sad before I can settle my head back into Tassamara.

However, that gives me a new goal — to finish Grace before he comes home again for Christmas. It would be so extraordinarily nice to have a final draft of this book completed. At this point, having spent over a year working on it, it’s almost impossible to imagine. It’s the book from hell. It will never end, it will never make sense, I will always have dozens of paragraphs (good paragraphs) that simply don’t fit in anywhere at all… how’s that for pessimistic? Yesterday, when I was trying to get the new version of ALM finalized, I wound up organizing some files and I found some great scenes from Grace that I wrote a while ago. Truly, great scenes. Unfortunately, completely USELESS because I went in a different direction when I wrote and they no longer make sense, but they were very well-written. *sigh*

Okay, time to stop whining. There are two more days left in November and I have the desire and the determination to use them wisely. Waiting for meaning to spring full-blown into my imagination hasn’t been working, so instead I’ll be pouring out the words as fast as my fingers can move and hoping that eventually all my babble will start cohering into something meaningful. Or fun, anyway.

I believe this post gets the Boring tag. Someday soon I will be updating Goodreads with all the books that I’ve read in November — a list that includes the entire Finishing School series by Gail Carriger, the entire Paladin’s Legacy series by Elizabeth Moon, and alas, some other library books that I already don’t remember. Drat. Yeah, Overdrive was both a good and a bad discovery for me. But if I don’t reach 50,000 words (not that I’m giving up — I’ve got 38 hours left!), I sure will have read a lot of books — at least 15 in November, not counting the ones that I didn’t write down, so probably closer to 20. Maybe I should have called it National Novel Reading Month instead of Writing Month? That would have worked better for me.

Gah, I should not have wasted the past twenty minutes on Goodreads. No time for reviewing books! On to writing. And still thinking positive — I can do this, really I can! Desire and determination, that’s all we need, right?

Edited to add: I went looking for the narrative something-or-other post and it’s called narrative summary. My post was nothing special, except for the link to Patricia Wrede’s site where she usefully explains different aspects of the technique. It’s worth a read.

Three more days

28 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in NaNo

≈ 4 Comments

Approximately 15,000 more words.

Likelihood of success: low.

But not zero! I’ve had three very low word count days in a row, so maybe they can be followed by three very high word count days. It’s a goal, anyway. Yesterday I really intended to write, but I spent the morning working on formatting A Lonely Magic for print and in the afternoon, I was seriously tired. Not because formatting is so difficult, although it is a job for a perfectionist, but because Thanksgiving really does take a lot. It’s not the cooking that’s the problem, although my gravy took an awful lot of stirring, but when you’re feeding eleven people in a house where usually a big meal involves three people, there are a host of other chores. Like moving furniture around, setting up tables, dragging chairs in from the garage, getting the step stool out about a hundred dozen times to retrieve the good china from the top shelves, and then the serving dishes, and then the trivets, and then the search for the serving platters… I even ironed the tablecloths because they really, really needed it. When I think, oh, it’s just cooking a turkey, sure, that’s no big deal, but in fact, there’s a lot of movement and carrying involved with setting up a big meal.

So yesterday I was tired and today, to be honest, I’m still tired. I would happily have another day of zoning, maybe even some television watching. But instead I am going to write, because I think I could still finish NaNo. Not the real thing, of course, but the 50,000 words of one form or another.

In other blog post news… nope, got nothing. I posted the new cover of ALM yesterday and couldn’t figure out a way to ask if people saw Fen’s face without, you know, actually asking and making it obvious, so I am left to wonder how many people missed it. But I feel like ALM and everything around it needs to become for me a thing that I can love so much that no one else’s reaction matters.

That’s an aspirational position, of course — I’m a hard-core people pleaser, so I want other people to love the things I love — but it’s good for me. It’s… hmm, I can feel myself wandering into one of those deep psychological self-analysis moments, tied to middle school and moving a lot, managing friendships, and so on, but I’m going to resist the temptation because it’s not getting the writing done that I want to get done. If I’m not writing Grace, I should be setting up Christmas lights while a super-tall person is available to help me with them. Well, a super-tall person and also a handy spotter for roof-climbing purposes. I don’t mind going on the roof, but I like to know that someone’s there to call 911 should I fall and break my neck. Or really any bones. Doesn’t have to be the neck.

Right, back to Grace. Many words to be written today, so off I go to write them. If you’re a fellow NaNo’er, also not finished, good luck today. Write lots!