I jumped with both feet, so to speak.
Space Bones has been submitted to a pro market, Rusalka (poem) as well.
Now, I wait.
Oh, right, I hate wait.
Meanwhile, time to see what my workshop class thinks of the first three chapters of Casimir Hypogean.
No wait, there is too much. Let me sum up…
So far my workshop class this term is going far better though I’ve discovered sort of alarmingly that I really don’t like workshopping other people’s work (selfish as that sounds). It often devolves to arguing semantics, which is fun for a while, but week after week? Also, there was one story turned in by a published author that I didn’t actually do a critique response on because I found the writing and story impossibly boring. Not bad, just completely uninteresting in pretty much all ways. I couldn’t think of a nice way to say this, so I didn’t say anything.
And I just finished up my Clarion West application and sent it in. I formatted the two stories I wanted to send and realized that in the different font they were pages longer than they had been. So I had to choose between the two. I finally settled on Space Bones since I think the character interaction and dialogue is probably sharper than in Delilah. Also, the plot is more ambiguous and less biblically inevitable (as one friend put it). So there’s that. This is going to be the longest month ever, isn’t it? I’m not sure I dig the whole submitting thing.
So, to sum up:
I hate wait. Also, Nobu, finish the damn novel.
That’s all.
It is technically the start of year 2 in the 10 year 10 novel plan.
I won’t say I’ve failed so far. While 2008 didn’t entirely go as planned, I did manage to get more writing done than ever before in my life. On various projects I’ve written over 150k words this year counting editing and rewrites. I hope to double that this year.
2009 will hopefully look like this:
I’ve submitted the first three chapters of Casimir Hypogean and Bladebearer to the writing workshop at Norwescon. This will be my first non college work-shopping experience.
I’ve edited and polished my two submissions for Clarion West and have only to format and send them in. If I get in, awesome. If not, at least I tried.
I’m going to finish the rough draft of Chwedl, edit it, and prepare a synopsis and query for it. This will officially be my first of the 10. Actually selling the novel or getting an agent is out of my hands, but my goal is to begin the process and not give up until I get there (which might take years, I accept that).
I’m going to finish Casimir Hypogean this year, at least the rough draft.
I’m going to write 5 more short stories.
I’m going to find homes for the 6 short stories I already have that I think are marketable.
I’m going to finish and polish A Prince Called Courage and set the novella aside until I can find a market for it.
These are my goals for 2009. Perhaps ambitious, but I don’t feel they are unreasonable.
Happy New Year!
Heh, wordpress looks strange again. Grr.
Anyway, I survived first term of graduate school. It was underwhelming. Hopefully next term will go better.
I’ve decided to attend a couple of cons (specifically geared towards spec fic/writing/etc…). The deadline for the workshops for the first con I’m going to is the 14th of this month, so I’d better get my ass in gear. I think I’ll send them Bladebearer because it’s a complex little story and has some weird problems I could use perspective on. You can send two pieces, so I’m tempted to send in the first 3 chapters of Casimir Hypogean. I still hate that novel, but maybe feedback on it would somehow make the path clearer. Or at least give me a few better ideas of what is going so wrong with the whole thing. I’d have to write up a synopsis, however, which could prove problematic since I’ve never written one. It’d be a learning experience. Well, we’ll see how far I get this week. Otherwise I’ll send Monsters as my second piece.
The second con is World Con, which is in Montreal this year. I’ve always wanted to go to Montreal, and I think Chwedl will be in at least polished draft form by then and (cross fingers?) ready for agent hunting, so it’ll give me something to really peddle around at the con. Plus the panels should be informative and I’ll get to vote for the Hugo winners. Which means my summer will be full of reading the nominated books, never a bad thing.
I’m also, this month, polishing Space Bones and Delilah for my application to Clarion West. I’m terrified I won’t get in and I’m terrified I will. It’s like a perfect lose lose situation. But really, I want to go. I think it would be fantastic and horrifying and awesome all at once. Besides, then I could stalk EBear in person (note, this is a joke, unless you consider reading someone’s lj stalking…). I’m just jealous that she has a cat. Seriously. Stupid renting with no pets rule. Moving on… I think that the two aforementioned stories have the best shot of showing how I write. They’re also now the most polished of my spec lit pieces and Delilah is still one of my favorite things I’ve written ever. It might be a risk considering the very Christian overtones and the linear inevitability of the plot, but I hope that the characters and stylistic tones will override that and punish the reader with its awesomeness. Seriously, I like that story. And Space Bones has grown on me. I wrote it mostly for the title at first, but after about four drafts I finally feel a connection to what is going on in the story and to the characters. Hopefully this will all translate into the Clarion peeps thinking I’m whatever they’re looking for.
By the end of December I hope to have the draft of Chwedl complete. Then comes the editing and pain, but I already see things I can do to help it along. This novel, to repeat myself, is nothing like Casimir Hypogean. It’s such a breeze to write and the language flows nicely instead of feeling forced and choppy as all hell. I wonder if I haven’t written the world of Casimir Hypogean too bleak, its characters too unsympathetic. After all, why should a reader care about chars who hardly care about themselves? It’s a strange dilemna. More reason probably for why I should edit up those first 3 chapters of the rewrite and send them off for critique. Maybe the novel is dead and I’m still pining for a ghost of a thing that shouldn’t be. It’s hard to tell such from my close perspective.
One of my classes got way behind due to teacher illness. This meant that week before this last one I had free time! In which I got to chapter 13 and just over 45,000 words in my novel draft.
Then said teacher decided to load us down with work to try to catch us up. Result of that? I’ve gotten no further in my draft, in fact, it’s been about 9 days since I did anything on it. I intend to remedy that this weekend and to make a push for 60,000 words before Tuesday. There are only two weeks of classes before finals and I have papers to write and a lot of extra translating to get done, so we’ll see if that last 40,000 is feasible in only a week and a bit (this novel will, however, be finished by the end of December no matter what that takes).
I also found out that one of my writing instructors next term is the author of “How to Make an American Quilt” which I think I read as a teenager. I know it was made into a movie, but I don’t remember if I saw the movie. Hopefully her workshop will be better run than the one I’m taking this term. No more poetry workshops for me, no sir, not at this college anyway.
So that’s where things stand. On the plus side, my Casimir Hypogean characters are chattering in the back of my mind again, though the scenes seem to be working their way back towards the beginning of the story. Hopefully by January they’ll be at the point I quit writing so I can pick up the threads and move it along. We’re only a few chapters away now with the current mutterings in my brain. Maybe I just needed to take a break and let the story get back to me. We’ll see.
I’ve written just over 19,000 words and have six chapters done.
This novel, for whatever reason, is proving hella easy to write. The characters are talking to me, the setting is coming together, the plot is all there.
I think this is due in part because compared to the setting and many-layered plot of Casimir Hypogean, Chwedl is a simple creature when it comes down to it. Instead of having to bring together a city-wide conspiracy and a hodgepodge group of misfits and criminals in a quasi-scientific setting that also has some magic with very subtle rules, I only have three main protagonists and bringing them together and figuring out the motivations is blissfully simple. There is no villain to build up and motivate, no betrayals to figure out how to realistically manufacture, no complex setting built from whole cloth.
Chwedl starts at point A and goes to point B. The villain, such as she is, isn’t really evil or much of a villain. She’s selfish, sure, and just kind of cruel in a way that is Other. The struggles are mostly between personalities. No gunfights, no highrise escapes, no twisted sex or weird drug addiction. Just good old Welsh-esque fairytale fun. (Okay, it is one of my stories, so there is of course blood, death, and some very implied sex). I don’t think anyone gets murdered in this story, however. That’s probably a first for me.
I’ve already added to and moved away from my original outline. I see outlines as being much like the Pirate Code. They’re more like guidelines really, not set in stone “this is how the story will unfold no matter what damnit” sort of things. I add and destroy and fix as needed, though I try to keep some version of an outline current so that if I have the rare brilliant idea about where the later story bits are going I can refer to it later.
Stay tuned for week 2 in which I’ll probably ramble about the challenges of the great swampy middle and writing a plausible romantic thread into a story.
I’m taking a 1credit course that involves just doing NaNo. Yes, I’m getting a graduate credit towards my MA degree for this. Ah, motivation.
There are many conflicting opinions about Nanowrimo. Some feel it is the only way they will ever get a novel done. Some think that it encourages bad writing and misleads people into thinking they’ve got something publishable at the end of the 30 days. Some feel even more strongly negative than that. Most, however, that I’ve run into feel it is a fun challenge. A way to turn off the inner editor and get to work.
I’m not sure what camp I’m in exactly. Would I do NaNo if it wasn’t on a dare (how I ended up doing it the first time) or for course credit? Maybe, but probably not. From my last experience, you get the first part of a very very rough draft, at best, out of the whole thing. This NaNo I’m trying to make it at least a full first draft by doubling the word requirements from 50k to 100k. 50k is just a really long novella to me.
I’ve got the first chapter. About 2200 words and counting now. I want 5k by the end of the weekend and then hopefully I can make Mon/Wed/Fri 8-10k word days because T/Th I have class.
Will I have a novel at the end? Sort of. I hope to have something I can work with as a rough draft. Will it be a pleasant read? Likely not, though I don’t engage in any of the random filler dares that people play with during NaNo a great deal it seems. I hope to have a few interesting characters and a somewhat coherent plot.
Anyway, I’ll update here as progress happens. And good luck to anyone else engaging in the insanity. Remember, it is supposed to be silly and fun.
I’m stuck on Casimir Hypogean. Not like before, either. Truly and fubar sort of stuck. I’m not enjoying the slog, I don’t like what I do manage to get done, and the whole project is sinking my mood.
I find that the most effective of epiphanies are usually the things that seem stupidly obvious in retrospect. Those head-slapping moments of “why the hell didn’t I think of that weeks ago?”
I didn’t think of it weeks ago. In fact, I’m not sure I thought of it at all. The solution stumbled upon me more or less by accident.
I don’t have a deadline with this novel. Just because it was the first novel rough draft I’ve ever written doesn’t mean it needs to be the first final product. There is nothing, as long as I don’t give up on it forever, preventing me from moving on and working on something I’ll enjoy. Clearly Casimir Hypogean needs to get back burnered. The ideas aren’t flowing like they could, the images just aren’t there. I don’t see any need to keep forcing myself.
I have other projects. It was one of these projects that cast the light on this path. I was sitting here at the keyboard, grinding out another couple hundred words that I would most likely just erase tomorrow, when images came to me in my despair. Out of the negative self-talk I love so much started to emerge a character I’d thought of over a year ago. Someone who also is full of negative feelings about himself, someone who leaves his life up to others because he just can’t trust his own decisions.
I quit out of the novel and opened a fresh page. A couple hours and 3444 words later, and I have two chapters of whatever this story is. I don’t think it will be novel length. I’m guessing it will be novella at best. I’m hoping for about 30k words, I think that will be enough to tell the story.
In some ways I’m in the infancy of my writing life. The writing I did in grade school and high school, it was the baby steps. I was fitting shapes into other shapes. Now I’m a toddler, learning to walk. Learning that there is a whole huge world outside myself and figuring out how to relate to it.
I get to be a child again. I don’t have to decide right now what works and what doesn’t. I’m a freshman in this world. I’m still in that stage where I can be anything. I’m reborn, remade.
In the desperate race to get something done so I can start the submission/publishing phase of life, I’ve been ignoring the gift that is this time of being an infant, of being unknown, unvetted. I don’t have to do one thing or the other.
I just have to write.
Seems stupidly obvious now, doesn’t it?
I’m accidentally taking a poetry class. This is both good and bad. Good because I like my poetry. Poetry is fairly easy to write (for me, maybe not for others) and I think I’m decent at it. The bad is because I haven’t written any poetry in over a year and because I’d sort of looked forward to writing prose. I think I might get around this by making one of the required poems an Epic Poem. Complete with alliteration and such. Oh yes.
I’m also taking a class where the sole purpose is to get a graduate writing credit by doing National Novel Writing Month. I’m aiming for 100k words, a proper novel instead of a novella.
I don’t know yet how much Grad school will eat my time and my brains, so I can’t promise much posting. I feel badly that I haven’t been posting here more, but somehow when I’m writing on other things the urge to blog dies away. I’ll try of think of some relevant topics to write about since I enjoy this blog and even get a few random readers from time to do (about 12 of you a day, far as I can tell.)
There’s an anecdotal story about Michelangelo’s David which goes something like the artist spent 15 months just staring at the marble before he ever cut into it.
I feel that way about this novel. An awful lot of staring is going on and not so much is happening with the cutting (writing). It’s the damn plot. I’ve constructed it in a way that for the next 4-5 chapters the whole rest of the book is set up. This is the climb towards the crest of the rollercoaster. And if I go off the track now, the whole thing will fail. I want to get this right. Which means I’ve been stabbing at the same couple paragraphs for the last week and a half.
To continue the stream of unrelated and piss-poor metaphors: this is probably the writing equivalent to opening the oven door every two minutes to check on the cookies. I know I need to stop obsessing and apply word to page. Let the whole thing sort itself out later. If I break it, I break it. That’s what editing is for, right?
The only problem is that once again I’m faced with the paralyzing fear that I’ll break this draft as badly as the first one and have to rewrite the novel in its entirety again. And again. I deeply respect and admire authors who are able to run through five or six or more completely different drafts of the same novel. I really do. I’m just not sure I have the fortitude to be one of them. We all have our own styles, our own ways of writing and working. I don’t think I’m a gazillion draft writer. Or maybe I am and I haven’t accepted my fate. Who knows?
I think I’m going to just try to press on. If the novel ends up broken in a way that small scene rewrites and repairs won’t solve I think I’ll be done with this book for a while. I’ll stick it in the proverbial drawer and move on to the next novel. Lessons learned. I can’t take another rewrite, this one is hard enough. Hopefully my future first drafts won’t be quite as broken as this one was. I have a feeling writing the thing on a bet in 19 days pretty much doomed me there.
I also think my next project will be fantasy. Probably the Welsh fairytale novel. It will require minimal research and have nothing to do with science. Making the world believable and constructing the pseudo-science is one of the things slowing my current novel project down a great deal. The next novel that requires research will definitely get better research done before I write it.
Of course, the next novel that will take lots of research will likely be my thesis project. I’m hoping I can do the War Witches idea as my thesis. That novel is slowly percolating and building in my mind and would be perfect for a MA thesis. Lots of research, lots of history, lots of texture, and plenty of Important Themes to explore.
All right. Back to hacking up the stone. Which really feels a lot like trying to gnaw the David out of titanium. With my teeth.
Tasty.
