Mini-Excerpt

The tunnels empty into a cave. I run, shards of glittering volcanic rock shivering and shattering around me, lacerating my face and hands. A torch is pressed into my hands, an urgent whispered “go” in my ear, arms enfold me quick and fierce, then release in a swirl of fire-lit blonde hair rushing into shadow. The ground tilts and I stumble, hands pierced by black razor shards as I catch myself. The torch rolls away and I clamor to my feet, grabbing the torch and running I know not where. The torch in my hand feels gritty-slick. I can find no hint of direction, no distant light of escape. Blood stings my eyes and I’m racing blind as deafening cracks warn the ceiling caving in. I trip, the torch flies and all is plunged into rumbling abyss. I pull myself to my feet, search frantically for direction as ceiling shards shatter all around, a cold sliver pierces through my skull and all is brilliant searing frigid light.

On admitting I'm not a ballerina

April's Camp Nanowrimo starts next week, and I'm beginning to geek out about it, already dreaming of chocolate chai lattes and airship pirates and the degradation of the temporal structure.

Meanwhile, I've finished and submitted my Amtrak Writer's Residency application, and have been dutifully managing my "significant social media contacts." I tweet now. I tumbl. I'm also working on a fiction piece for Ploughshares, though the process feels overly forced. I ride the steampunk novel like a wave, but this literary piece is a road-side root canal.

For instance: yesterday, I spent the great majority of my day writing a paragraph or two of uninspired literary goo, erasing it, and starting over. I finally relented and started working on the steampunk novel instead. Three pages later, I reluctantly surfaced because I had to leave work. I see no purpose in needless suffering in the writer's process. Writers are like dancers. Some are ballerinas. Some jump, jive, and wail. Give me Sing, Sing, Sing over Swan Lake any day.

So, maybe no Ploughshares.

If you'll excuse me, I have to find my sleeping bag and Coleman lantern...

Start

It's hard. Starting. Taking first steps, or even a leap of faith, it's hard. Surrendering to a desire that contradicts every rational impulse, acknowledging that persistent whisper you've tried to muffle for years. Your whole life? There are no guarantees, no safety net. No regular paychecks. Just...the desire.

I've ignored it, locked it away somewhere, an oubliette of the mind. Except I could hear it, whispering, singing. Mournful songs of abandonment. And I longed to release it, but reason forbids. Reason always forbids, with terms of penury, and inadequacy, and frustration. Visions of a terminally blank page, a cursor blinking in accusation. And a familiar voice warning me that artists, writers, musicians, unless they are lucky or brilliant, never make a living for themselves.

I'm not particularly lucky; neither am I brilliant. The stone-forged practical side chose to examine literature rather than create it. What better way to remain close to your first love than to teach it? Write about it? Immerse yourself in pools of others' creation? Become an acolyte of words.

But no. Enraptured as I was by the words of others, always I longed for my own expression. I feared that my words would be insufficient, lacking brilliance. And fear has clogged my veins for years. Fear of failure. Always, always, that fear. And reason. It's...not very logical, living by your art. Not safe at all.

Except I don't belong out there, among people with the talent for efficiency. I am not detail-oriented, task-driven, a team-player.

I belong here, infused with words, hijacked by stories.

But I need a deadline. One that I can't change or ignore. Otherwise, I allow fear and insecurity to dominate, frustration to choke me, despair to stay my hand. I surrender.

I've decided. A submission before May, a story written and perfected. A step, a leap of faith. To live by words.

Hyperfocus

I took some time off from writing over the holidays, as the pressure of an enormous story without end got too intense. I also needed some time to work through a rather nasty bout of jealousy, as some of my friends and family have been published and I'm still trapped in this enormous fictional world. Every time I sat down to write, I would feel this barb of jealousy work itself in deeper, and all my desire to write would drown in the pity puddle. I had to work through that before I could even consider getting back into my novel. And then I heard a little (though irritated) voice tell me to Quit Bitching about it and let it go.

(snarl) Fine.

So now, after the holidays and Spring Break-like Pity Kegger, I dropped the jealousy. And I've injected myself back into that fictional world.

But not the novel. Not just yet.

One of the issues I had post Nanowrimo was that, even after the 50,000 word goal had been reached, the story was still disjointed, disembodied, a complete and overwhelming mystery. I still couldn't see it, couldn't feel it, couldn't live in it. I would get in and immediately begin to hyperventilate because I had no idea what this world was really like. I had glimpses, I had some genre-specific environmental tropes that could guide me, but instead of seeing the world and the events and recording them, I was attempting to imagine them in situ, making everything up as I went along. Fun, but also overwhelming when considering an entire plot/theme arch.

Solution: start small. In this case, a short story. I picked one of the lesser characters and figured out his history. I'm working on this right now, actually, letting the character monologue, then going back and imagining my way through the events to draw out details. Still haven't decided if the story will be first or third person, but right now, that doesn't matter. It's all about his story at this point. Not only do I focus on one event and one character, but I limit my focus to one location, which for me is important, as this location demonstrates one variation of the Steampunk world. I only have to think about this one place, this one type of Steampunk, and the events occurring therein. SO much easier than worrying about a huge plot arch. But it fits into the novel and enriches the story as a whole. It also helps me develop the character. And I've already found a way of incorporating one of the themes from the novel.

Besides, a short story is easier to finish and submit for publication than a novel. Not to mention that it gets my name out there as a foundation for the publication of the complete novel.

Let's see how hyperfocus works.

Kill My Darlings?

The first time I read the phrase "kill your darlings" was while reading Stephen King's book On Writing. It seems simple and reasonable. But after NaNo, I've started the task of trimming the overgrown garden, and now I'm struggling with what to keep, and what to prune away.

For instance, the story didn't go the direction I initially planned, but my manifesto didn't allow for second guessing and since I was writing pretty much by the seat of my pants, I simply wrote what made sense at the time. And I got some good ideas out of it, but my one book is quickly growing and dividing. I've lost the whole sense of the story and have started considering plot lines that frankly annoy me in order to make the pieces fit.

The other option is to rewrite it all as I had initially intended, killing most of what I've written. Not a nice thought. At all. Amalgamating the two isn't possible without resorting to annoying plot lines.

I've decided to give it a rest for a while, just to let the story simmer in my mind over the holidays and pick up again in 2014. Maybe a bit of distance will lend perspective. Or I'll have a sudden "Aha" moment and kill half my characters with a bomb, i.e. The Stand.

And it may be that I took on more of a story than I can properly manage right now. Too many threads to weave, too much to take into account. I did the same thing with my graduate thesis. Overplanned, tried to stuff too much into a relatively small space.

I have what I submitted to NaNo this year, in case I have to do an emergency resuscitation. And just in case, I might tie the dead darlings' shoe laces together in case of zombie novel apocalypse.

The After-NaNo Manifesto

Last night, after the glow of happiness dimmed, I realized that I suddenly had a huge NaNo-shaped hole in my heart. I don't have The Big Deadline to work toward, to dream about. I couldn't let it roll around on my tongue like a marble - something hard and tangible. And now...well, now what?

So I looked over my NaNo manifesto. It helped me through many a moment of WTF Am I Going To Do Now, and motivated me. Especially that "I'm going to finish this MF-er" part.

Only...that's the issue now, isn't it? I haven't finished it. I wrote the 50,000 words, but the book is nowhere near done. So I realized at 5am this morning when I finally began to drift off to sleep, that the NaNo-shaped hole has transmogrified into a Novel-shaped hole that can, indeed, be filled.

So, leaving off where I did with the NaNo Manifesto, I have some new rules for my After-NaNo Manifesto.

1. I will finish this story. The story, not just a word count. It's rude as hell to create leave a creature mostly skeletal and minimally fleshed and soulless. Those kinds of creatures have a nasty tendency to haunt and terrorize. Or fester and rot and stink to high hell and kill you that way. So I will finish this story.
   
2. I will attempt to write on this story every day, but will be lenient with my soul if I should miss a few days, especially during holidays.
   
3. I will set word-count goals and celebrate when I make them. Perhaps not 50,000 words per month, though. I'm not writing the Narnia series, here.
   
4. I will maintain the fun. I will work on sections that I want to work on, rather than trying to plow through chronologically.
   

So that's it for now. I'm sure I'll devise more rules as I go, but these are the biggies. 

All the original Manifesto rules still apply. ;)

Goal Attained

All over Well...the numbers game is over. I finished the 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo tonight, copied and pasted like mad to get the words from WriteWay into Word, went through a mad spellcheck, then validated it.

And...laughed like mad. Because I got the word count in a month. Because I'm not finished, just beginning, the whole thing is sketchy, skeletal, nearly soulless. It's a shell. And ALL over the place. But the goal was met. The first goal.

So now what? No deadline, but still so much left to do. I'm afraid, now, that the whole thing is going to get swept aside, that it'll remain...part of a story. Just another stump.

I need another manifesto. The after-NaNo Manifesto.

Let me get right on that tomorrow...

Nearly There

Word Count: 36,266

I might actually "win" NaNoWriMo this year. After three attempts, I might actually write a 50,000 novel in a month. OK, let's be more realistic for the situation. I might write 50,000 words of a novel that is going to stretch much further than that.

But here's something else that has bothered me for a while. Once November is over, and the rush done, and I have another however many words to go until this story is finished, am I going to stick with the momentum, or will I "take a break" and never get back to it?

Maybe tonight's not the time to be thinking about this. Tonight, I'll think about finishing before Thanksgiving.

Cultural/Racial Diversity in Characters

The gaps are closing, the characters materializing before my eyes, and I'm beginning to realize how flimsy some of them are. I've also realized how much my protag depends upon her male companion, which is NOT my intention, so that much change. And I've realized that my whole character list is white. I mean, I haven't written in anyone who isn't, well, white. And I need to change that. I did change that. One of my favorite characters is now Indian.

Deal is, I've written a world where the slave trade didn't materialize and cultures were encouraged to continue unhindered (except for human sacrifice), based roughly on the best parts of the Roman empire. People of color are there and in abundance, but I just haven't created that part of the narrative world yet. Granted, I'm just trying to get protag and company from one scene of action to the next, and I know that I can add details later, but what bothers me is that the crux of the novel is, once again, in the hands of white people (one of which is the one who causes all the snafu in the first place), and that's not really what I want. In a world where an empire crosses multiple cultural and racial boundaries through trade, etc., the purely European white majority wouldn't exist as heavily as it does in many of the books of this kind that I've read.

So, that's something to consider as I push toward that 50,000 word goal.

You know, I still don't know how this story is going to end.

Word Count: 31,111

Triple Espresso Shot Mocha

That's what I ordered this evening when my friends and I went to our favorite local coffee shop for some Bananagrams, Phase 10, and hot beverages. This was after a lovely sushi lunch.

WHY did I need that much caffeine? Because I had to catch up. It was Day 15, the official halfway point, and I hadn't hit the 25k word count yet. But I wasn't stressin' because I knew I needed girl time as much as I needed typing time. And because I've been nearly faithful to my NaNoWriMo Manifesto, I'm not bashing my head against the computer screen. I'm having FUN! I'm regularly reapplying duct tape to the mouth of my inner editor and just plain enjoying the process of getting my little story out of my head and onto the screen.

I've even stopped stressing about potential plot changes. This time a week ago I was doing plot diagrams in my head while wondering why sleep eluded me. I think I've changed a few minor plot elements because they just felt right.

I've jumped over major plot points because I'm not "there" yet. I've written scenes based entirely on the music playing on Pandora at the moment. I've toyed with the idea of adding a dragon to the mix.

And a few minutes ago, I saw, for my first time ever, the balance of words written tip over the number yet to write. I'm more than halfway done.

Triple Espresso Shot Mocha aside, though, I'm freakin' exhausted. I'm going to check FeederWatch Cam and then go to bed.

OK, so I lied...

Due to an insane case of insomnia exacerbated by one of the trees in front of my apartment falling over from the severe wind, I ended up sleeping all day yesterday, and a rather large part of today. SO I haven't been writing. So my vow of never taking another day off zizzled in 24 hours. Alas.

Though, I inadvertently determined a few character traits by scouring Pinterest steampunk related boards. My protag is going to have an incredibly sarcastic perspective of the Continent's rapture with all things steampunk (and the fact that less than a quarter of what passes as steampunk does anything whatsoever). Everybody but EVERYBODY is going to be an "Adventurer" or "Adventuress" or "inventor" or "explorer" as stated on their calling cards. With only a paltry few who have the guts and genius to survive any real adventure, invent anything worthwhile, or explore any place beyond their general neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, back in my Protag's home citadel, it's not a trend, but a kind of junker's way of life. And she really is an adventuress, really does encounter danger where "run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint" is pretty damn good advice. So when she encounters the "stylish" and rather risque steampunk clothing in the Continental stores, she's baffled and amused. The only "adventure" the wearer of these gowns would encounter is a torn stocking or scuffed boots.

Am I picking on steampunk a little? Yeah. I have to. It's in my blood to blast what I love. Mainly, I lampoon the viral trend that sweeps the Continent even though they have no idea where it came from and don't know what to do with it in reality. But for those who live that life by necessity, the trend is silly, superficial, and sometimes rather crass. And useless.

SO while I haven't physically added to my word count, I have found some ingredients that will add richness and will, in time, help the word count to soar.

At least, that's what I'm telling myself.

Week Two...

That's IT! No more "I'll catch up" days. No more. I hate looking at my "at this rate you'll be finished by" date sometime in early December. NO! To quote Paramore "I REFUSE, I REFUSE, I REFUSE!" It shall be done in November.

Now that I've stopped flopping around about my plot, I can just write. Which is great, except sometimes I have the mental capacity to write in the quasi-Victorian style, and sometimes I don't. And I've also managed to write myself into quite a corner. I might have to leave this section alone for a bit as I fill in bits of crucial "when did THAT happen" narration. And it's all pretty skeletal as well, with hardly any introspection and little to no real character development.

Eh, I'll figure the rest of that out later. Right now, let's just figure out how exactly to get from point C to point J.

Tomorrow. After I sleep a little.

Word Count: 18,861

Sacrifice Word Count for Much Needed Socialization

OK, so I took a few days off on the novel because I needed human interaction and I really needed to get out of the house. So the word count has suffered. I can catch up quickly enough.

And since I slept for a couple of hours earlier this evening, I should be able to stay up all night again, clacking away.

Total count so far: 16,787. We'll see how that's changed tomorrow morning.

Fire Bad. Tree Pretty.

I apologize for the blatant Buffy quote, but that's about how I feel at the moment. Over the last couple of days, I've chugged out nearly 4 thousand words on my Nano novel, and my brain won't let me rest. For instance:

Tonight I wrote and wrote and wrote. Brain decided it was through with thinking and I shambled off to bed drunk zombie style. I floated in that blobby world between sleep and wake for maybe an hour.

Then, an idea hit me. An idea so mind-blowingly perfect for my story that I couldn't risk the sandman whisking it away or having it dribble out of my ear as I slept. So I got up, drunken zombie walked to my computer, and started clacking away again. That was at about 11pm Thursday. 4 hours later, here I am, in the wee morning hours AGAIN, having squeezed nearly all the juice from my cranial spaces, leaving just enough to write this post. I'm dangerously close to "Fire bad. Tree Pretty" once more.

Maybe I'll get two hours out of this sleep attempt this time.

It's only Day 8. Save me from this madness!!

How do you write your characters?

I'm several good scenes and most of a prologue into my NaNo novel, and I've discovered something about my characters.

Most of them are pretty skeletal right now.

I have an overall idea of who I want then to be, but since my real goal at the moment is to get the plot out before I talk myself into changing something major, I've pretty much glossed over the characters, dropping little hints now and then, but not really fleshing them out.

Last year, when I was prepping for NaNoWriMo, I did all this character analysis (part of the writing program I use, so why not?) in order to really understand my characters. And while that was helpful, I spent an inordinate amount of time fretting about demonstrating these little character ticks while I was working on laying out the plot. If I had months and months to do this kind of edit-as-you-go writing, I'd have been ok. But my word count was deplorable simply because I couldn't get things out.

So this year, I'm letting the characters kind of exist for the most part until I get the plot out, and then I'll start adding in those endearing or annoying or nauseating traits when I have to start plumping up the word count.

Not to say I'm not recognizing some of the character traits already. Some are just...cardboard at the moment, or paper dolls. They serve a purpose, perhaps demonstrate some of their ultimate selves in tiny glimmers.

So, how do you write your characters? Do you plan them out first? Let them write themselves? Maybe a little of both?

NaNo Update

Going well. Lots of words. Manifesto is helping immensely. Don't care about spelling. And I think I've changed narrators three times. owell. I'm enjoying the hell outta this. 

Day 4 - nearly 8000 words and I haven't started writing today.

It's not pretty. It's not completely fleshed out. It's skeletal and the dialog is kinda...cardboard. But I can work on that all later. When the words are out. When the ideas are out.

Last night, I was trying to go to sleep after midnight, and I had a flash of conversation for the story, and I had to get up and scribble it down before I forgot it. I've lost many a glorious passage through swearing I would remember it overnight. Not this time. I wrote it down as fast as I could, because the words were materializing before my hands could scrawl them on the page.

I had forgotten how amazing this feels. Here we go with a few more hours of writing, a few more hours of dissolving into this little world in process, a story that refuses to stay on track, but seems to work nonetheless.

Raise your oversized mugs of straight espresso, folks! I need a battlecry!

My NaNo Manifesto

I tried to sleep tonight. I really did.

But then I started thinking about little details for my NaNo novel and suddenly I couldn't shut down. So I left my nice warm bed and came out to the living room to start clacking away at this year's story.

But not before making some rules for this year.

1. If I decide at one point that I want to shift from 3rd to 1st person, I will not waste time revising what I've already written.

2. If I have a "what's the damn word" moment (which happens a lot with Fibro fog and pain meds), I will find a close approximation and go from there. No scouring the thesaurus for "just the right word."

3. I will NOT let my failed previous attempts discourage me.

4. I will NOT make this a deep, thought-provoking exploration. It's gonna be action. It's gonna be fun. It's gonna be apocalyptic steampunk fun with little consideration of the exact hows and whys. It's going to have some blatant references to Doctor Who. Because I want it to.

5. I'm going to enjoy the hell out of this story. I'm going to throw some twists and flips and WTFs in.

6. I'm going to finish this MF-er.

So, there are a few of my rules for NaNoWriMo 2013.

Now that I've written more than my daily allotment of the story and set up my rules, I think I'll go ahead and sleep. Yes, indeed.

Yes, People, Yes.

Last week, before my back surgery, I was fearing the worst about NaNoWriMo - that I wouldn't be able to do much in the first couple of weeks because of altered mental states due to medicine and not being able to sit up much. I was, honestly, dreading this whole recovery process. While I love to read, it loses much of its luxury when it's the only thing I can do. I don't do well with cabin fever, either.

Turns out, it's not an issue. The medicines that I'm taking don't alter my mental state more than make me rather sleepy and perhaps a bit more likely to write what first enters my mind rather than what gets filtered through the fine muslin of my perpetual mental editor. Add to this the capacity to sit for a couple of hours at a time at least three times a day, and November is shaping up to be pretty damn productive. I have no work obligations, and no where to go except for walks to build up my endurance.

I also have a great story idea this year that promises to give me plenty of imaginative romping room. I'm exploring some steampunk/apocalypse punk ideas within a framework of time manipulation.

As such, I've been playing around with my writing music list. I've recently been introduced to Armin Van Buuren, a Trance DJ, whose music provides me with just the kind of ambiance that I need to push my story forward. I started listening to trance when I was a graphic artist, when I needed something to engage my mind while I played around visually. I love the repetitive nature with few lyrics. Lyrics, I've noticed, snatch my attention too much, causing me to listen too closely to what they words are, to analyze rather than create. I've also found that classical music takes too much of my attention as well. Trance just let's me bob on the surface and play.

So I'm likely to be listening to a lot of Armin Van Buuren next month.

My husband just asked me why I wait until November to focus on my story - why I don't just start now. I've asked myself that, periodically, when I have an idea that I can't wait to flesh out, but have to settle for sketching in the meantime. I'm getting antsy to start writing on this baby. But for me, NaNoWriMo gives me the competition that I like to have, and the deadline. I can set myself deadlines all I want, but I suck at keeping them. Even when I tell my friends I'll have something done, I just...don't hold to it. But NaNo is a set time, a set date, and if I don't make the deadline, I feel rotten.

Have I mentioned how much I like Armin Van Buuren's music? I'm listening to it now, and I'm just...yes. Yes, indeed.

SIX DAYS, MY FRIENDS! SIX DAYS AND THIS ADVENTURE WILL COME TO LIFE!

Damn, I can't wait.

Getting Ready for NaNoWriMo

Alright, ladies and gents. I know it's only halfway through October, but I've been gearing up for National Novel Writing Month since - like - May. Now it's only a couple of weeks away and I'm gettin' giddy. I've been batting around a story idea in my head and I'm newly armed with wisdoms gleaned from my past attempts. This year I'm pretty much a captive author so I will have little to do but write.

I haven't "won" a NaNoWriMo yet, and for a few good reasons. Last year I was dealing with the death of my mother and then a knee injury, so I just couldn't focus. The year before I was rudely interrupted by thesis revisions. But my biggest nemesis is myself: my tendency to edit as I go and second guess every inch of plot. Basically, I'm scared that my stories are too predictable, too Been There Done That. My love of storytelling loses all its warm glow and turns into a cudgel with which I beat my brains. Not to mention that, should I decide I need to go a different direction that requires some revision to the previous storyline, I feel I have to go back and fix what I've already written for the sake of continuity. Not exactly conducive to meeting word count goals.

This year I'm toying with time manipulation and post-apocalypse-punk. Not Mad Max. More in the steampunk vein, but including technology from a lot of different time periods from updated siege engines to bombers to mind-manipulation and time-manipulation tech.  To be honest, I'm just exploring all the different off-shoots of steampunk for kicks and giggles. Last year I tried very hard to write something serious and deep and significant. To hell with that. 

As a matter of fact, that's my motto for this year's Nano novel. What the hell, sounds like fun!

Some things write themselves

This may be my last post for a few weeks. I'm having spine surgery on Wednesday and will be highly medicated while lying down, sitting, or standing as the case may be as I recover. However, as I'm pretty much homebound for at least a month (I can't even get in a car for that long), I may be craving non-spouse human interaction and may also encounter some glorious moments of lucidity and will brave the pain to share them. Here's hoping.

Alright, back to the writing craft.

When I took a creative writing class in college, my instructor encouraged us to "write what we know." Every aspiring author has heard these words and has either taken them to heart or cast them whirling into the winds as they desire. I took them very seriously because I've found that life + poetic license = pretty good fiction. So far all of my stories have drawn deeply on actual events reinterpreted or bent to my will. For instance, I fixed my romantic naivete and ultimate dumb mistake in one story. But the events up to the end were almost entirely exact to what happened in real life, all the way down to the songs that played at the club. That story wrote itself. All I did was tweek it a little to salve my bruised ego.

Since then, I've continued to draw heavily from my life, even if it's just details and locations. The home in my YA novel is a variant of a house I lived in as a teenager, and the location itself is my childhood home. Some of the events are true as well. I'm even going to keep the name of the road. It's simply too appropriate.

Real personal events and details are like an umbilical cord. While the story develops, you feed it with emotions and rich details that sustain it even as you're creating something entirely unique and ultimately independent. It's also like letting a child run wild in home territory, exploring all the hidey-holes you'd forgotten. New eyes, new adventures, new revelations.

It can also be therapeutic. I've rewritten and explored some painful events in my life, and just the act of remolding them or imbuing some unifying perspective makes them easier to handle. Not to mention that you get to right some wrongs or recast yourself as the hero instead of the fool. Or vice-versa. Sometimes it's fun be wild in print. To explore the not-so-logical options, to slip the bonds of morality for a while. It keeps you from going insane.

So why is this important? To me at least? Think about that child running wild in a familiar place. You know all the details, all the potential hiding places, all the creaky boards and groaning hinges. You know the smell, the quality of light, the way the dust swirls in the slanting sun-beams. You know the place. The action might be new and hard to describe, but the locale is familiar and perhaps beloved. You can imagine it without effort and that can make writing about it almost automatic. And again, you can imbue the place and your writing with all those interlacing connotations swelling inside you. It can mean a scene or story that writes itself.

That can't be bad.