Writing Mania

So, for the past three days or so, I've woken up knowing exactly what the characters need to do next.

Not like a vague, this is where we're going sort of direction, but a literal the exact words I need to type are scrolling across my brain and I'd better get to a keyboard and get them out before I lose them.

I've always written my best first thing in the morning, sneaking down when no one else is awake, putting on the kettle and just going for an hour (stopping to make tea when the whistle blows, of course), but this goes beyond that. I feel like I have moved into this hyperspace where the story will just come to me, and I write until I'm forced to stop (by either work or the need for sleep) and the instant I can get back to it again, there it is, waking me up an hour earlier than is reasonable and demanding I write.

My mother is the sort to self-diagnose all her children with whatever she's last seen on Dr. Oz, but when she told me I was bipolar, I looked into a bit. (Let me preface all this by saying that if I am, it is BEYOND mild and not unmanageable, and probably well within the range of "normal" swings anyways.) It's easy to find patterns of highs and lows in my life, but the human mind has always been susceptible to seeing what it expects to see. Still, as I'm a little older now and can watch for these things in myself, I wonder if I'm not starting a bit of a mania. I was certainly depressed enough these past few months, but anyways. We'll see what yields.

Regardless, I am SUPER excited to have the writing moving along so nicely!

Writing Goals: Week 2.5

Ok, back before I realized what a stupid idea it was to try and talk about CURRENT PROGRESS before it happened, I wrote this post for week three. You can have it now, and I'll work up a better post for my actual progress report for week 3, which is going much better than anticipated. Week 2 had me really, really down.

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TERRIBLE week this week - too much work. Kids came back to school, bad weather and illness in the staff meant I was working way, way overtime, and lost the groove of what was going on in Asylum. We'll get back to it, but it's going to be a struggle, I think. Wish us luck.

Writing Goals for 2014: Week 2.5

 -Keeping my blog post scheduled up at least a week in advance, so I'm not stressing deadlines: Still working with the re-vamp of the schedule, so I guess Mini-goal: Figure out what posting schedule I want to go with and get its page up.

-Writing at least once a day, as is suggested by so many successful authors: Not happening lately. I'm really not happy about this. But it is the first week of school, and everything is crazy, so maybe once I actually settle into a routine?

-ACTUALLY FINISH A COMPLETE STORY so that I can flex my editing muscles a bit: ASYLUM HAS GROUND TO A HALT! I need to figure out how to get back on track with this!

However, on the editing note, it's apparently time to start editing my NaNo, so I guess if Asylum keeps confounding me, I can work on that. I dread the idea of touching that horrid thing again, but I did make a legally binding promise on a silly website, so I suppose I must. :P

-Research employment opportunities in the writing field (so vague, I know) since I'm tired of my soul sucking service industry job: Might have a lead on this, one of my employees suggested I look into working for the local newspaper - any feedback on that, anyone? HR is also a possibility, apparently - I hate that I feel like I don't know anything about the grown up world and grown up jobs! I'm 27, damnit, when will I finally feel qualified to be an adult?

Aaaand that's my writing week. Anyone else able to chime in with something more positive? I could use some success stories right now.

Opinion Time: To post, or not to post

One of my characters is deeply disturbed.

DEEPLY disturbed.

Like, takes it out on small children, 5 flavors of crazy disturbed.

Also not human.

The question is: do I share the crap that rolls through her head with the world? I wrote a scene with her and her brother earlier, and it's still got me shaken up. I'm disturbed that something like that lives inside me. But it's part of the world, part of their story, and just plain who they are. However, it's not at all relevant to what they're doing. She's a side character, with no place to go and no major plot point to affect. She just happened to want to share with a pretty graphic sex scene.

So, to post or not to post? I'd intended on posting some more mature stuff in here as I go on, to see what does and doesn't hit the filters, but this stuff is pretty bad. Nothing too terribly descriptive (at least as far as the disturbing stuff goes - the sex is as graphic as any other sex I write) but just... I dunno. It's bad enough even I'm not sure I want to claim, and for those of you that know me, that's pretty bad.

So what would you do, if you have a psychotic violent killer in your head, talking to you about the stuff they would do if their brother wasn't there to keep them in check?

Excuse me, have you seen my serpent?

So, I find myself in an interesting situation: I don't know what my character is thinking.

This isn't for the usual reason of stubbornness or lack of knowledge on his part. Rather, I simply cannot reach him.

I think he is in someone else's head.

Finishing my first book

The first "book" of The Asylum is coming to a close.

It's been an interesting journey, and I've learned a whole lot along the way. This is the first book I've ever written all the way through to the finish, though of course the story is no where near over. But my partner and I both know this is the end of book one, we can just tell. There's a big plot point looming on the horizon that'll change everything, and open everything up for books upon books to come.

It's kinda funny, we've know this was coming for weeks, but the closer we get to it in the writing, the longer its seeming to take to actually get there. Like an event horizon of a black hole. I don't think the characters want us to write it. :P I can't say I blame them, it's going to be pretty intense.

Looking back on it all, it's been an odd adventure.

I'm still kind of in shell shock about it all, but once I've decompressed a bit and had some time, I'll share more complete thoughts on the matter, and maybe talk about the editing process a bit as well (once I've given myself the required "just walk away for a while" stage)

Killing your Darlings

I had started this post nearly a month ago, and had forgotten about it. It's a link to a wonderful post about Whitman's phrase "Kill all your Darlings". I can't recall exactly what I meant to say about it, but I do know it's worth the read.

Just wanted to share this for later about killing your darlings

Re-Writes

Ack. I just started trying to edit my main story for beta-readers.

It sucks.

Going back over 500 pages of writing ago, I don't even feel like I remember this story anymore. This is the first major editing I've ever done, and it's daunting. It also doesn't help that I'm trying to write out what was one of the corner stones of my character, because it really needs doing. He wasn't meant to be a long lasting character, and he can't stand as he is now.

But it's a really big re-write.

I wish I had something inspirational to say here, some great pep talk for anyone else going through this, but it's after midnight, and I've been editing for over four hours. I'm tired, my eyes hurt, and it seems hopeless.

But I guess the inspirational part will come when I finish, and can post the completed draft. So hang in there, kids, this story will have a happy ending, I promise. :)

Happy Writing,

-R

How to achieve your goals: Write it Down!

Welcome to 2014!

I always feel a little silly celebrating the new year two months after it's passed for me (I prefer an older style of yearly reckoning, ending my year with October) but it is a changing of the calendar, and a chance for some clean slate action.

I like to use all the resolution energy floating around to help propel some changes in my life, set some goals and try to lay the ground work for good habits. This includes my writing habits, so I thought I'd share.

Writing Goals for 2014:

Double space

No NaNo update for today, as this falls under my Thanksgiving break days. But I do have a little tidbit about writing for you all.

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I didn't even know this was a thing, but apparently there's a long standing misconception about putting two spaces after ending a sentence. This long debate <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html">has been resolved </a> if you're curious.

Amusingly enough, I use the double space to create a period when typing on my phone, but that's different. :P

She said What?! Getting to know your characters

My girlfriend and I were IMing the other day, and she shared this wonderful little gem of an idea. I find the concept extremely helpful for jumping back and forth between characters (like we tend to do) and for building up new characters you're not so sure of - or just for fun!

The idea is to take a sentence/concept, and "translate it" into how your character would express it. The examples she gave me when like this:

On Writing: Keeping track of time

One of the author's I follow posted this today, and I've sort of fallen in love with idea of "pantsing". I am a definite pantser, because my characters demand it out of me. However, some planning is absolutely necessary when you write several stories in the same world in the same day, so to keep things straight, Cait and I tend to use timelines, like this:

What if I run out of things to say?

This thought just struck me last night, as I was driving home from a long day of Christmas shopping. What happens when - not if- I run out of things to say? There is only so much that can be said about writing, and even less that can be said about it by me.

And yet, I've been writing, and talking about writing, for years.

I knew less about writing when I first started talking about it, and it didn't stop me then.

NaNoWriMo: Day 10

A little bit of confusion in my note taking here. I'll see if I can't clear this up when I sit down to crunch the numbers (and I swear, I will! ...someday. December is very busy for me.) With any luck, I'll get to it before this post actually goes live, but I somehow doubt it, at the rate this month is going.

I first started my NaNo is one big file, called Awakening.

Then I wrote my first scene out of chronology.

It was to break up the week 2 blahs, and I'm not sorry I did it, but it really messed with my documentation of my NaNo. I started a second file, called excerpt, to try and keep track of things in the right order, with future scenes just tagged onto the bottom.

I soon got so many "later" scenes that I couldn't find where to write properly on my NaNo.

I also began to take RIDICULOUS amounts of notes, trying to keep track of what scene should go where, and what scenes needed to happen between my "current" scene and this rag tag collection of future scenes -

I am quickly realizing day 10 is where it really started to fall apart.

So I started another file, called Just Awakening, which was devoid of any notes, time stamps, or anything. It was just what I considered to be the actual story, in as best an order as I could piece together, so I could have something resembling an accurate word count.

Then I realized what I'd been posting as my daily word counts were wrong.

So I took Awakening, the very first one, and went back and tried to pull out the writings for just that day, and delete all the extra stuff and get a daily word count.

SOOOO (all of that to say just this)- this is what I have saved as "Day 10" in my collection of day by day files. I'm sure it contradicts with what I have for day 9, but I'm posting this anyways, unless I get things straightened out before the 10th (what are the odds of that happening? This blog is less than a month old and I'm sure you all know me well enough by now to be able to answer that.) So, happy reading, happy writing, and happy holidays, because why not?

-R

NaNoWriMo: Day 9

Saturdays are usually my day off in the week that I take for my own personal enjoyment. I sleep in, I go to belly dancing, we go out to eat and then I go to Stitch-n-Bitch Lex. That means I tend not to get home until pretty late, and I'm completely exhausted when I do.

The stage is now set for today's offering. Enjoy!

-R

How to stay on (multi)task

As I've mentioned, my writing partner (Caitlin) and I tend to work on multiple things at once when we write together. It makes sure we each have something to work on when we sit down to write together, for one, and we tend to get distracted and follow plot/character bunnies for two. Currently, we're running ...4? stories in the same world (same neighborhood, actually) and same time frame at once, and so the plot lines are a lovely tangle mess. To keep ourselves straight on what we've already written, we tend to take pretty extensive notes.

These are the notes from Haven, the story I wrote my NaNo to learn more about. The events of my NaNo take place two years before my real time Haven, so you'll see some familiar characters, and some new ones as well. There's also even a proper excerpt at the bottom, so real writing for "Day 8" Hooray!

The Experiment: Building a Buffer

This entry is a little less about blogger vs word press and a little more about using blogs for web serials 
making myself slow down sometimes
using blogs for web serials.

A vampire's resume

 Remember in my post about world building how I mentioned having tons of strange files, from maps to resumes?

I wasn't kidding.

I had one character, a minor background character in a minor background story SO INSISTENT about existing and being fleshed out that I literally could not write around her. She stood in the front of my head, arms spread wide, refusing to move until I sat down to write with her.

Unfortunately, her headspace is very different from mine, so much so that I couldn't get a good bead on her, until I tried to type out exactly what her application to Xavier's kiss would look like. I got with my writing buddy, had her hammer out a few questions the new kiss would likely ask, pulled up a resume writing tutorial, and got this little nugget.

Enjoy!

-R

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Worlds vs. Stories

I'm a world builder.

I get so involved in the building of my worlds, it often distracts me from the story itself and I don't get anything done. I'll have files upon files of notes, brainstormings, maps of the dance club everyone works at, character bios writing by the characters themselves (not always helpful), and resumes of vampires wanting to join a new kiss, but never actually get anywhere on the story I was asking myself all these questions for in the first place.

Not very conducive to finishing a story.

Funny thing though? I don't think I care too much. I am coming to the realization that I don't write for the story, so to speak. I write to know the world.

NaNoWriMo was great for making me actually sit down and tell a story, one complete story, without getting too lost in the side tangents. The funny part is that I sat down to write that particular story because it was the backstory of a girl who seemed to know EVERYONE in the stories I was working on before that. It seemed like a great way to go world digging, while actually getting something done.

50,000 words later, and I'm not even close to finishing the "story" I set out to write. I know now loosely what happens, how she meet most of the people involved, and more or less how to get from A to Z from where my NaNo started to where the inspiring stories are in "present" time. But I still don't have a finished story. And knowing me, I probably never will. I'm not interested in reading Rain's story beginning to end as a "finished" product. I was interested in it as a gold mine, and boy, did I hit the jack pot.