November 2009 - Annie Bellet

Archive for November, 2009

Mind: Blown

Went to Orycon this weekend, spent too much money on art (damn you awesome artists at conventions, why do you tempt me?), and attended some panels where I learned some things, had other things I already knew drilled deeper into my head, and generally had a decent time. The insomnia issue meant I had a very short energy buffer for dealing with people, but I adjusted (and spent Friday night sitting in a hotel room playing Magic the Gathering).

Also had lunch with an author/friend who was very reassuring even if yet another story of 10+ years of toil= overnight success is somewhat daunting. But after 10 months of trying to be a working writer, I suppose I shouldn’t complain yet.

Came home to yet another ‘nice’ rejection and felt like tearing my hair out and giving it all up for the ghost, but decided to haunt the internets instead. On a suggestion from aforementioned writer friend, I signed up for Dean Welsey Smith’s novel workshop in Feb. I Hopefully that’ll get me on a good path to selling this thing. As prep I decided to read all of his blog last night. Mind blown. Seriously. There is some fairly tough to hear information contained in his posts, and I’m not sure all of it would work for me, but there are things I think I should give a shot.

What especially called to me was the publishing as numbers game. I agree wholeheartedly that writing is practice, and rewriting/editing isn’t really practice, though I do think some things can benefit from a pass or two. But the only way to get better that I’ve found is to write new things taking what I’m learned worked or didn’t work from the stuff that came before. I also was floored by the whole goals side of things on Dean’s blog. I like the idea of having a sort of shoot for the moon longer term goal and then shorter term goals entirely within your power. I started this blog to record my journey to write ten novels in ten years, but really, wouldn’t it be cooler to publish ten novels in ten years? According to Dean, that means I should write 3 novels a year.

At first, that number looks crazy daunting. But really, is it? At the pace I write novels, I can get 100k word novel done in about 2 months. Then take a month off to let my readers weigh in and have a month to revise/clean up. Send it out, rinse, repeat. Really, not that bad. And I could use the month off between edits and writing to work on short stories. I aim to have 30 shorts making the rounds by next year, I’ve got 10 now, with two more that will be sent out in about a week as soon as I take another pass at them to catch the last (hopefully) typos and such.

So that’s where I am. Going to revise Chwedl this month, write a couple new stories, get something in for 1st quarter WotF, and get started on this new novel. Hello December.

Rinse, Repeat

Writing is a whole lot of doing the same sort of thing over and over and hoping for different results. It’s a lot of starting over, trying something slightly different (or radically different). Over and over.

Just got another rejection with more nice comments saying how the editor enjoyed the story but it wasn’t right and they hope I’ll submit something else and wished me luck placing this story somewhere else. Which is nice to hear, and I’ll definitely submit something else to them, but man, I’d really like “we loved this story, here’s your check”. I’ve had quite a few “nice” rejections now. They in fact far outbalance the form letters (and my one “mean” rejection). I know, objectively, that this is good. My writing is improving, people like it, it’s only a matter of time, etc… But inside, it still hurts. What am I missing? What can I do to push past this “good but not good enough” point? Keep writing. Try something else. Rinse, repeat.

In other news, I accidently started another novel. These things happen, I guess. One minute I’m laying awake at 3am wishing this month long bout of insomnia would go the hell away and the next I’ve got a teenage girl’s voice talking to me about how she doesn’t want to join the military and quoting Sun Tzu and *bam* suddenly there’s shapeshifters and an alternate realm and all sorts of plot-filled worldbuilding goodness pouring into my head. Next thing I know it’s two hours later and I have three strong main characters, an adversary, and a rough sketch of the world that is slowly getting populated. Don’t have an outline yet, still working on the characters and worldbuilding, but this novel is going to be a tiny bit epic I think. The scenes already in my head are pretty grusome and horrific, with a few that are painfully tender. I hadn’t intended to start another novel until Jan at the earliest, and the next one was supposed to be another project (which is already outlined, damnit!), but hey, I’m hardly going to argue with the muse.

I figure once I’ve got the world set up and a decent working outline, this novel won’t take more than a couple months to write (though the start will be slow because I have to take lots of time in December to edit my other novel). That’s the benefit of being able to churn out 3-5k words a day once I’m in a groove I guess. Hopefully someday if (when?) I’m a working writer that ability will stand me in good stead. For now I’ll just keep developing good habits I guess.

Full of Fail

So between real life fun like car accidents, new car shopping, and illness (mmm colds are so much fun, really), I’ve gotten just about nothing done writing-wise. I think I’m going to just write November off as a lost month, though I suppose two short stories isn’t the worst outcome. I’m working on another one, but the science part of it is tripping me up. I’m not a hard sci/fi writer, but this story really wants to be a hard sci/fi story. I solved one problem, theoretically, now I have to figure out how to solve one other sciencey issue and then maybe I can write the damn story.

I’m looking ahead at workshops and WoTF submissions. I have a novella planned that is supposed to be my first quarter submission, but if I don’t get it written in the next couple weeks, I’ll have to do something else, since I need a week or two break between writing and editing things.

The bad news is that with the car stuff, I might not be applying to any of the big three workshops this year. We had to clean out our funds to replace the car about a year sooner than we were planning to (it was a very old car, so we were going to replace it, but not for a year when our savings had been built up for it). So the money that was getting put away for the workshops has been used on a car. That’s life though, sometimes it doesn’t go according to plan.

I might sign up for one of Dean Wesley Smith’s weekend workshops instead. They’d be easy enough to get to and I’ve heard good things about them. Mostly I’m looking around for ways to really take my writing to the next level. I’m getting plenty of “positive” rejections, which tells me that while my writing is good, something might be missing. I want to figure out how to push past the “good but no thanks” stage and get to the “here’s your check” stage. I know it’s not a perfect science and that even famous writers get rejections, but I want to get at least my first sale someday. I need a little push, I think. Something.

For now I’ve been reading books on fiction editing and selling a novel. Gearing up to revise my novel and get my submission package ready to go to my chosen agents. I’ve got a top 5 list put together, so hopefully by January I’ll be ready to go on that. First though comes the hard part, the actual revising of something that is many thousands of words long. I’ll just tackle it the same way I wrote it; one page at a time. One page at a time.

Boring but Short Update #2

It’s nearly the end of the first week, and due to the depression and resulting insomnia (I’ve been averaging about 8 hours of sleep a week for the last month, fun eh?), I’ve been way down on productive things.

However, I still managed to get a second story written, this one also over 4k words (5160 actually). Oh well, hopefully in the editing process I’ll cut some of that out. 5k seems to be my natural first draft for stories length I guess. Well, except the occasional 7k one, but that’s definitely the exception so far, thank god.

The bright side is that I feel both of these stories will be submittable after editing. They’re both a little weird, and one needs some propping up of the plot elements, but nothing that an editing pass or three won’t solve. So we’ll see. Next up I might tackle the novella I’ve been meaning to do since Worldcon, or maybe the story about the Rusalka. Or the one about magic chalk.

So NaShoWriMo isn’t much of a success so far in terms of getting lots produced, but two stories a week wouldn’t be the worst pace ever (as Oso keeps reminding me, heh). I’m just so used to novel writing lately that getting two things done in a week seems really slow to me. But novel writing is a totally different beast than composing a fresh new world on the fly constantly, so I guess there’s that. I’ll keep plugging away. Maybe I can get three done this next week, now that I have some momentum going. *grin*

Boring but Short Update #1

I finished my first NaShoWriMo story. It clocks in at about 5500 words, which, once again, is longer than 4000. Oh well, one of these days I will write another story under 4000 words. I think (hope?) I’ll end up cutting a couple hundred from this story once I get around to editing it (December is apparently editing month, January is submission month. Weee). For anyone on OWW it’s now up there. I figured for the kick-off story, I’d post it for fun (and comments?). I don’t think I’ll be posting any of the future stories there until they’ve seen one edit at least (I didn’t even give this one a read over).

So it begins. Day 3 and I’ve completed one story. Time to decide today what’s next. I’m thinking something short and on the sillier side, because I really don’t want to have to process information right now. Insomnia is kicking my ass. But hey, time to write! Now, to spend a few hours building the next story in my head. This one will have less research attached, damnit. I’m going to make it up whole cloth so I don’t have to spend nine hours reading about flora and fauna and names and rivers and yeah… I just love research too much. Grr.

One story down, at least 11 more to go.

NaShoWriMo in Peril?

Well, I think I can safely say that day one of my crazy story plan was a bust. I have two paragraphs written on a story. I first conceived of this plan over a month ago, before I finished my novel even. I figured it would be a good way to keep my writing production up while I’m taking a break from novel writing.

What I didn’t count on was a major depressive episode (I suffer from clinical/unipolar depression) which has meant, among other things, that I’m not sleeping. For the last three weeks I’ve been getting an average of 1-2 hours of sleep a night, with some 24-36 hour periods without any sleep at all in there. Some nights I take sleeping meds to get 4-5 hours of sleep in, but they zombify me the day after and leave me mentally and physically useless, so I try to limit how often I use them. This, sadly, effects my ability to write. The less sleep I get, the harder it is to focus on things or retain anything in my brain.

It’s very frustrating, because I know that as a writer I’m fully capable of completing this challenge. I have notes galore on stories I’d like to write, and my novel writing output is generally 2-5k words a day. But with my brain addled from lack of sleep (plus the other fun side-effects of depression), I’m finding it very hard to run at full capacity on this.

I’m not giving up, however. I might just revise the goal down to 12-20 stories. I think with effort and focus and hopefully my antidepressants kicking in soon (they take a couple weeks to really start working, alas), that I can still manage to get a lot done. So, back to work. Since I’m not sleeping, I might as well be writing. Slowly.