Category Archives: Shadows

NovPad, Shadows

Shadows Progress

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This post is mostly going to be about Shadows, but I don’t have a Shadows-y picture to put up there, so I went with one of the images the amazing Darek Zabrocki sent me when he was working on the cover for Lost and Found. This image came pretty near the end of the process so, as you can see, it’s quite a bit like the end result — just with a fewer details. Still, one thing this version has that the end one doesn’t is that little bird in the tree. I love that bird. The cover works better without it, but I don’t mind telling you I was sad to see it go.

So, I’m working on Shadows. What will be the final draft until I have either an agent or an editor to help me apply the final layer of polish. It’s going very well. I started writing this draft longhand in February and finished it in June (I think). I did a workshop in early spring that meant I had to send stuff in for critique, so I broke my rule about letting my work rest a few months before revising for the first few chapters, but once the workshop was over, I shoved those critiques back into a drawer to mellow along with the rest of the draft. That was a good choice. Feedback I’d thought was frivolous or just plain wrong looks very sound and insightful once you give it a few months distance. Also, the story which I’d had personal issues with, is stronger than I’d remembered.

So, yay!

I’m revising as I transcribe from my notebooks onto my computers. It’s been interesting. I think years of NaNoWriMo combined with my natural inclination toward wordiness have taught me some bad habits — or maybe it’s just that the draft I’m transcribing was a fresh draft. A second first draft, as I like to call it, so I can expect some… badness. Still I laughed as I revised “…drew a smile on her lips.” to “She smiled”. Then I opened up a new Word document to track some of the best/worst examples of my wordy-ass (and just plain awkward) writing. Allow me to share 🙂

drew a smile on her lips –> she smiled
for having not been paying attention –> for not paying attention
The liquor seemed to have done more than loosen his tongue, it had given it wings -> The liquor hadn’t just loosened his tongue, it had given it wings. -> The liquor had given his tongue wings.
The smile that filled her face –> Colby’s smile
He paused, looking around him –> he paused, looking around
as he began to clear a spot –> he cleared a spot
I’m hoping the THING would be able to help make… –> I hope the THING will make…

There are several other examples already but I can’t share them without context or risk of spoilers. As much as some of these make me roll my eyes at myself a little bit, I’m actually really excited by my ability to notice them in my own work and revise them out. That feels like growth to me. Progress. And in this case, progress is good.

Right now I’m estimating that this book is going to finish up about 65k words. That’s a little shorter than I wanted, but it’s still a decent word count for a YA fantasy novel, and best of all, the plot is much stronger in this version than any of its predecessors.

I’m currently at 10,737 words transcribed and revised. Whoot!

As for NovPad… I’m um. Behind. A lot behind. My poem for day four turned into a short story. I’m hoping to make some progress toward catching up today, but I’d planned that yesterday too and it didn’t happen. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Goals, Guest Blogger, NaNoWriMo, NovPad, Personal, Pictures, Shadows

Paint and Music and Love. Oh my!

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Today is my anniversary. Another year spent married to this guy. This is Jo. Jo rocks. We’ve been together for just over ten years now, married for seven of them. I love him more today than I did a decade ago and if I were to imagine my life without him it would be a dismal thing indeed.

He’s got his game face on in this picture — we were in the lab and he was pouring things into test tubes for me to photograph. He’s cool like that.

*Insert some sort of clever segue here between anniversaries and music*

Today I’ve got a guest blog over at Beth Cato’s blog. It’s all about music and stories. Check it out 🙂 Once you’ve read my blog post poke around Beth’s site a bit more. I’m the third guest blogger she’s had there recently talking about music. Also, she’s just kinda awesome.

*Insert one more clever segue*

I’m working on a collaborative project with Jennythe_reader. We hooked up via 2xCreative (which I’ve mentioned before here). We’re actually doing a couple projects together. For the first, I sent her a poem I’d written and she is writing it out all pretty-like and then embellishing the paper. I don’t think my description does it justice, but you can hear her talk about it a little bit here. Anyway, I kind of wanted to do something more. Partly because my time investment was pretty small this month (I already had the poem written and only had to send it to her) and also partly because I wanted to do something different. Whenever I work on a collaborative project I provide words in some form or another. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, but Jenny, well, Jenny is a fabric artist. It just so happens that I paint fabric. How could we not do something that combined those talents?

I dug out my fabric painting stuff from where it was tucked into a corner of the basement and painted three pieces. I will be popping these into the mail to Jenny this week and I’ll keep you updated about what she creates with them. I can’t wait to see!

 

In other, writing-related news, though I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year, I am doing the November Poem-a-Day challenge. My theme is going to be ‘Classic Horror’ with a focus (I hope) on ghosts.

I’ve also begun transcribing and revising Shadows. Right now I’m only working on the revision part (the first couple chapters were already transcribed), and I’m 4,785 words in. I’d love to use a word count meter of some sort here, but that’s tricky when you don’t know how many words you’re going to end up with LOL I think my last estimate was about 70k but at this point, it’s all a big question mark.

Finally, did I mention that it’s my anniversary? Happy Halloween everyone and Jo, I love you.

Just Stuff, Niteblade, Shadows

Recharging

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I feel like I need to recharge.

That’s the short version.

I don’t really want to go into the long version, not because it’s private or anything, but because, well, it’s long and requires the use of phrases I usually disdain. Phrases like ‘spiritual batteries’ and ‘technological burnout’.

The point is, I’m going offline for a while. My plan is to unplug for ten days starting on Tuesday. That means I won’t be checking or answering email (my own or Niteblade’s) or social networking sites. I won’t be playing World of Warcraft, or checking Niteblade submissions (though the slush readers may).

I’m going to unplug. Spend some time with my family. Visit a beach. Take some photographs. Maybe write, maybe not.

I’ll be back around the middle of August with new energy and a fresh outlook. I’ll be ready to roll up my sleeves for the Niteblade September issue as well as our upcoming special edition. To polish up my new sekkrit projekt, move forward on the story I’m writing with Danica and layout my zombie poetry collection. Maybe, maybe I’ll even be ready to start transcribing Shadows and doing it’s final revision before seeking representation for it. Maybe. But I’ve plenty of schoolwork to keep me busy if Shadows needs to mellow a bit longer 😉

Before I go I’m trying to get an empty inbox on at least one of my accounts — wish me luck. I really and truly need it.

Oh, and try to miss me. At least a little bit.

Shadows

Oh My Freaking God!

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I’m re-writing Shadows. Again. Not finishing the new fresh draft I started last spring, but starting all over again with a blank piece of paper. Again.

This will be at least the third fresh start on this novel and I’m not even going to think about how many revisions it’s gone through.

I’m taking a writing workshop and the feedback I received on the opening chapter was great — so great that I know this is the right thing to do. I know starting over will make this a better story and, perhaps more importantly, me a better writer, but it’s exactly the opposite of what I want to do. In fact, when I concluded yesterday that I was going to have to start all over part of me wanted to scream. Loudly.

That same part would like to stick Shadows in a drawer, leave it there and move on to a different story. I’ve learned a lot working on it (I should have, how many years has it been now?). That much is evident in the first draft I have of Twixt which is much stronger than the first draft of Shadows was. So even if I didn’t re-write Shadows the time spent on it would not have been wasted.

Sounds completely reasonable and logical, doesn’t it? Unfortunately for the part of me that wants to walk away from Shadows, the story won’t let me. I’ve tried. I’ve tried and tried and everytime I turn my back on it this story claws at my brain until I go back. I guess it’s a story I have to tell, and it’s one I won’t be satisfied with until it’s as good as I can make it. So here I am, starting all over. Again.

Wish me luck.

Goals, Pictures, Shadows

Strawberry Creek Retreat

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So, I just got back from a writing retreat at the Strawberry Creek Lodge. It was an interesting expirience, one I’m still processing. I’m not sure what the take home message is yet. I think it will either be ‘I need to ease up on myself a bit’ or else ‘I am not really a retreat person’. It might even be a combination of those two things.

This picture? I took it while I was there, as well as all the other pictures included in this post. The retreat was good for pictures, it was also good for birds. I love watching birds, listening to birds, photographing them, and I got to do all those things on the retreat as well. The pictures didn’t turn out so well for the most part, but like I told a friend what I expirience trumps what I capture on film. So yes, the birds were good.

The writing? Less good.

Well, perhaps that’s not fair. It wasn’t what I’d wanted though.

The retreat ran from Wednesday afternoon through to Sunday afternoon. That gave me three full days and two half days of writing. There is no television, no internet, no distractions. I thought this would be the perfect chance to pen the new first draft of SHADOWS. My plan was 5k words on the two half days and 10k words on each of the three full days. That’s a lot of writing but, I told myself, I know the story so it’s not like I will get blocked or anything. I’m mostly transcribing from my brain more than writing in any sort of creative way…

Um. Yeah. It’s funny the lies I can convince myself are true.

So I arrived at the cabin, all ready to go. Sure I was going to get the first 40,000 words on this draft done and then be able to finish writing the story in no time when I got home. I’m hoping for about 90,000 words on this draft, so in essence I was hoping to get half of it done while I was writing. Oh yes! A few days of intense writing and I’d be good to go!

The problems with this, as I’m sure you see even though I didn’t until I was right in the middle of everything, are many. One of the biggest ones I ran into right off the bat was that apparently some switch got flipped in my brain, and I suspect it came directly from the ‘I’m transcribing more than writing’ thought process. You see, pretty much everything I wrote while I was on retreat is remarkably dry and lacking any sort of personality or emotion. The current draft of Shadows (the one written pre-retreat) has loads and loads of personality, it needs to be re-drafted to fix plot problems and because if I just revised it to fix them I feel like the whole thing would begin to feel over-revised. Now, the draft I’m in the midst of has a stronger plot but lacks personality.

This is going to be a freaking nightmare to revise. I’m going to have to sort of try to merge the two drafts first and then revise. Wheee! Fun fun. In order to save my own sanity I am sorely tempted to start pulling descriptive passages from the pre-retreat draft and write them out in my new first draft. It will no longer be a ‘fresh’ draft if I do that, but it will have some flavor and since it seems that’s something I’ll end up doing in the first round of revision/merging, might be a timesaver. We’ll see, I guess.

Sadly, that problem wasn’t the biggest one I encountered on retreat. The biggest problem was my own brain.

As I write a novel I go through lots of stages, and I know I’m not alone. In fact, Jim Hines summed it up pretty much perfectly here. Usually while difficult it’s not impossible to work through those things, largely because they are spread out over time. However, I learned last weekend that if you compress the time you are taking to write the novel you also compress all the emotions that go with it. They don’t get weakened either, quite the contrary. By Friday night I was pretty sure I was wasting my time and money by going on retreat to write and by Saturday I was paralyzed. Certain I was a hack who didn’t have an original idea in her head and couldn’t write her way out of…well, take that cliche where ever you want. The point is, I was not writing. I was laying in my room staring at the ceiling, or calling home on the cell phone with the dying battery (no charger, whee!) just to hear Jo and Danica’s voice.

I relaxed my writing goals on Friday morning because I am writing this draft long hand and I didn’t want to cripple my hand. Plus, I was beginning to see the emotional price I was going to be paying for my ‘intensive writing’. Maybe I shouldn’t have, then I might have been able to push through the slump and start climbing back in love with the book, but maybe I also would have made myself feel even worse.

The end result is that I’m at about 20,000 words and I haven’t written a single word of fiction on that draft or anything else since I got home on Sunday. I’ve not even looked at it…though I have considered pros and cons of beginning the merge sooner rather than later. That has to count for something and I’ll take my victories where I can find them.

Despite how bad I made it sound, it wasn’t all bad, certainly. I met some new people, got some pretty nice photographs, ate a lot of fantastic food and had some wonderful non-writing expiriences. I listened to some great audio-stories (The Classic Tales Podcast) because though I made a point of not bringing any books with me in the midst of my writing paralysis I remembered I had some unlistened to ones on my ipod. I got 20,000 words done on my new first draft, and even if I think they are going to need a ridiculous amount of revision, those are 20,000 words I didn’t have before. So it wasn’t all bad and perhaps with this improved insight into myself future retreats would be better, but right now I’m left wondering if I’m really a retreat kind of person. I guess only time will tell…

Pictures, Shadows

1k Words for the Day: Jo’s Bike

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This is Jo’s bike. We store it in the same place as the lawnmower and when I moved it out of the way to get the mower the other day it got me thinking. Jo’s bike says a lot about him. A LOT. I don’t want to turn this blog into my ‘I talk all about Jo because he doesn’t even like privacy or anything’ place, but it did occur to me that my characters belongings (or one or two primary ones at least) are likely to say as much about them as this bike does about Jo. It’s one of those things that I’ve heard said (or implied) before and always just sort of nodded and smiled, but Jo’s bike really solidified it in my brain and made it real. I think I get it now. I’m looking forward to seeing how that understanding will play into the new first draft of Shadows I’ll be starting soon 🙂

Goals, Shadows

Strawberry Creek Retreat

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First of all, I sold another zombie poem the other day. It will be on Everyday Weirdness June 3rd Yay!

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you likely know I’ve been going through a bit of Con withdrawal. It’s sad but true. I missed the last World Fantasy convention and also World Horror in Brighton (and Neil Freaking Gaiman! Gah!) to apply to attend Clarion West (they said no). There is something incredibily rejuvenating about writers conventions to me, it’s something in the air (and seeing my friends doesn’t hurt either). I’ve been looking for cons closer to home and thus less costly in order to get a ‘fix’ but so far I’ve found nada. So I turned my gaze back to World Fantasy in Columbus.

I want to go. I want to go SO bad. It’s a World Fantasy convention, that puts it very high on my ‘want’ list all by itself, but when you add in the fact it’s in Columbus where my friend Amber lives (who I’ve not met in three dimensions yet) I really, really wanted to go.

I won’t be though. *sigh*

It’s disappointing, but I think it’s also the grown-up decision.

You see, instead of going to World Fantasy I’ll be spending a fraction of that money and going to the Strawberry Creek Writers Retreat instead. While I’m there I will be re-writing a first draft of Shadows (you read that right). I could go to World Fantasy, but let’s face it, it would be more of a party weekend than a professional one. If I go to Strawberry Creek I will make good progress on a novel I really love and maybe, just maybe, give me something to sell (whether to agents, editors or readers) at a future World Fantasy.

It’s the right thing to do, but it’s still disappointing.

Sometimes being a grown up sucks, eh?

NaNoWriMo, Poetry, See The Sky Again, Shadows

So…

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So, for the second year in a row I have stopped trying to write See the Sky Again as a NaNo novel. This time for different reasons.

Last year when I started writing See the Sky Again there were still a lot of blank spots in my mind. I knew the setting, one of the characters and the ending. That was pretty much it. When I stopped writing it as a NaNo novel it was because I thought I should fan away a bit more of the fog and solidify some plot points in my brain before I worked on the project in earnest. Then I got distracted with other projects and See the Sky Again got put on the back burner for a while.

Well, when I dusted it off to work on again I had a good idea of where it was going and how it was going to get there. Or, if not good, at least I had an idea, which was more than last year. Unfortunately, as I was writing on it for NaNo I just wasn’t feeling it. I love the story, and I’m excited to tell it, but I don’t think it’s destined to be written in this way. Which is too bad because I’d like to get the first draft done sometime soon LOL

However, like I said above, I’ve pushed it to the side again for a while (shorter term than last time I hope LOL). Now I’m working on the re-write of Shadows as my NaNoWriMo project.

<.<

>.>

What?

I couldn’t help it. Shadows won’t leave me alone. It’s always on the edges of my brain, demanding my attention. After the critiques I got from Jim C. Hines and Deena Fisher I had some really great ideas on how to improve it – trying to make it wait its turn until after I got the first draft of See the Sky Again done was, apparently, a very bad idea. I couldn’t focus on StSA because I really wanted to be re-writing Shadows.

Now that’s what I’m working on for NaNo (Note to any rules lawyers out there: I know that’s technically against the rules and um…I don’t care) and it’s going well. I’m enthusiastic about writing again and I really feel like the story is being filled out more this time. (One of my goals was to add more description and fill out the middle which I felt was lacking.) Yay! I’m hoping to complete the ‘new first draft’ via NaNoWriMo and then, just to be novel, NOT workshop it to death.

My nano word count is 6,652 so far, and I haven’t written yet today. Soon, I hope.

I’m also still working on the Poem-A-Day challenge and still loving it. Wheee! I’ve got 4 zombie poems (that I Love) and 2 more mainstream ones. I haven’t even looked at today’s prompt yet, but I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be sure and share at least one of the zombie pieces in my newsletter this month.

So far, November is being good to me. I hope you can say the same thing 🙂

Just Stuff, See The Sky Again, Shadows

What about second first drafts?

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The first draft of anything is crap. These are words I say over and over. I tell them to myself, I tell them to people on NaNoLJers, and I’m writing them here now. The idea of the first draft, for me, is just to get it down. Get it out of my brain and onto paper. Once I’ve done that I can revise it and make it better, but the first copy doesn’t have to be good.

But what about the second first draft?

I’ve decided to re-write SHADOWS, but so far I haven’t actually started that because I’ve paralyzed myself by over-thinking it and having too high of expectations. I have been unable to make my brain accept that this is going to be a first draft…because it’s not…it’s a rewrite, but it’s the first draft because I’m starting over, or should I? What about the parts of SHADOWS I really like? Maybe I should just really seriously revise it and add some chapters to the middle to deal with a couple issues I had with it. But if I do that, won’t it be choppy and over-revised?

See?

This is just a small sample of what my brain does to me.

I’m beginning to think that I should just walk away from SHADOWS for now and work on something else, at least until I can gain some perspective on it. Though, if I do that, won’t it just be there, in the corner of my mind, taunting me?

I think it might.

What do you do when it’s time for a big revision/rewirte? Start from scratch or save the bits of the original that you liked? Do you give yourself permission to write crap, or is it not -really- a first draft in your mind? Does your brain mess with you as much as mine does me? And what am I going to work on at my write-in tonight?

Maybe SEE THE SKY AGAIN. It’s the backstory for one of the characters in SHADOWS and one of my critique partners said, “NAME is one of my favorite characters from SHADOWS so I have high expectations for his backstory…” when this woman says she has high expectations she means it LOL And I don’t want to disappoint her or anyone, so I’m pseudo-paralyzed there too. I need to get over that one and just remember that the first draft of anything is crap.

The first draft of anything is crap. The first draft of anything is crap. I can do this! Hopefully if I chant this for the next couple hours it will re-penetrate my brain and I’ll be able to report back tonight that I’ve made some progress on SEE THE SKY AGAIN and I can focus on that while I figure out what to do with SHADOWS.

The first draft of anything is crap. The first draft…