writing

exploratory noveling

It makes me very sad that the NaNoWriMo word count widgets aren’t working yet. So when I say, “I have 17,507 words!” that doesn’t get translated into a pretty little progress bar.

I Googled and I found one! Not the fancypants official ones, but still a visual interpretation of numbers and that makes me inexplicably happy:

17507 / 50000 words. 35% done!

I’m much further ahead than I’d expected to be. I might try to hit 25k sometime over the weekend if I’m feeling particularly motivated. It’s going well but I’m not sure what I think of it yet. But my characters are putting up with a fair amount of pushing them around, and they have a destination that I likely won’t reach for another 10k, and I have a general idea of what might happen after that.

I have more of an outline this year than usual, mostly because I’m structuring it on classic Hero’s Journey framework, so it has a general sort of shape to it. It’s building toward something, there’s all the fun traveling bits and stuff to encounter around the way.

It is sort of a fairy tale mashup, with my main characters taken from fairy tales and pushed far beyond their happy ever afters. So far I’ve pulled from Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Six Swans. I’m likely using Bluebeard at some point.

It’s almost as though I have a map this year, only it’s written in fading ink and has bits missing, and I keep wandering toward those bits that say hic sunt dracones. Still exploratory, still not sure what I might find, but I have a decent idea of where I’m headed.

Unless of course I get attacked by pirates or something. Which has been known to happen.

By erin, ago

it’s that time again

nano_09_red_participant_120x240.pngI think this is the first year that NaNoWriMo has pretty much snuck up on me. It’s October 28th, you say? Seriously?

It likely doesn’t help that we’ve had a lousy rainy sort of October around here, so it hasn’t felt as festive as usual. I have had my Pumpkinfest beer at the Salem Beer Works several times, though, so that’s something.

But anyway, October has flown in rainy (occasionally snowy) quickness and now it is very nearly November, and November is National Novel Writing Month.

For those of you unfamiliar with the phenomenon, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. You can read all about the wonderment that is NaNo on their website.

This is my seventh NaNoWriMo. I’m really not sure how that happened. I’ve won every year except my first try, and I blame that on not really knowing what I was getting in to and being overly invested. I went in with a story I’d been trying to write for almost a year, I got annoyed when it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be, and I gave up around 15k. The second try I went in with no expectations and reached the mythical 50k mark fairly easily.

The novel that was just revised and sent back to agents started life as a NaNovel in ’06. The current version bares a very slim resemblance to that 50k, it’s been revised many, many times since then. (I actually cheated a bit and continued in ’07, so I had 100k to work from. Bad me.) One of my major characters doesn’t even appear in the NaNo drafts.

Which is why I find it kind of baffling that people think NaNoWriMo is about starting & finishing a novel that is “done” on November 30th. It’s not, in my opinion. It’s about writing a draft of a novel. Writing it in a condensed period of time with a deadline that makes it easier to shut up the inner editor and just write write write.

And then you can see what you have and start revising it into something resembling a novel.

For me, NaNoWriMo is about exploring and discovering. I’ve never started a NaNovel with more than a handful of characters and a vague plot concept. And that’s the way I like it, because it allows for possibilities. Anything can happen! It’s an adventure! You don’t even have to leave your house, all you have to do is type. A lot. But you have to type a lot to find things. There are things that you find at the 30k level that you won’t find at 10k. It’s like creative excavation. The deeper you go, the more interesting artifacts you find.

I still haven’t dusted off NaNovel ’08. I love it, but it needs a lot of work. It didn’t really find its plot until the 40k mark, so there’s a lot to polish. But I have a lot of story there to work with that only took me 30 days to get down on the page. And it’ll get there.

For NaNovel ’09 I haven’t had much time to plan. Not that I ever do a whole lot of planning. But I have a handful of characters and a vague concept, so once I stock up on red wine and chocolate I should be all good.

By erin, ago

the end is in sight

I’m in revisionland again, in case the radio silence hadn’t made that terrible obvious.

I would like to take a moment to say that I have fabulous beta readers. They found the elusive things that were missing instantly, because they are brilliant. Everyone needs extra pairs of eyes to look at things from different angles, and I have three pairs of great ones.

And even better, I knew as soon as they pointed out the weak spots what I needed to do to fix them.

So I’ve been fixing. Added two new sections which I finished writing today, and now I have to tackle a few changes through the rest of it and then it will be shiny and polished and novel-shaped again.

And of course, there will be another round of index card ordering on the studio floor. I’m sure Bucket will enjoy that.

But the end is in sight. And beyond that, November is looming in a NaNoWriMo shaped cloud of loomy thing. I should have at least a few days to get armed & ready. Hopefully.

By erin, ago

color-coded

I am so close to the end of revisionland I could throw rocks at whatever land it is that lies beyond revisionland from here.

Technically, I don’t have any more writing-writing left. But there is ordering and formatting and fun stuff like that between here and the point of done-done so it doesn’t feel finished yet.

It doesn’t feel finished in general, actually. There’s something missing that I can’t quite put my finger on. I’m hoping my team of fabulous beta readers will be able to help with that, and I’ll be able to give it another post-beta polish after they read it.

But for now it is index card time! I am sure most writers do this in outlining phases, but in my wacky, non-linear way I seem to have made a habit of writing out of order and worrying about how to put all the pieces together after the fact.

I’ve added and dropped enough sections from the previous draft that I have some serious reordering to do. So I made all new index cards.

index cards

They’re color-coded by type of chapter (circus tents proper got to be silver this time around, because metallic silver Sharpie is always good times) and then color-coded again by which characters are featured. These still need dates written on them, I have those broken down on a list (in approximate book order and again chronologically.)

Tomorrow I get to spread them all out on the floor and play the “no, this has to come before that” and “too much of this character in this area” and “Bucket, stop sitting on the index cards” game. It’s a good game, until kittens start eating the cards.

I am so ready to hand this off to the beta brigade, and distract myself with tarot kings and NaNoWriMo planning while I wait for feedback.

By erin, ago

deadlines & bribery

I am still, unsurprisingly, deep in the land of revisions. It’s nice here. It’s kind of dark and confusing but there are surprises and caffeinated beverages and shiny new plot points. I should send out postcards that say Greetings From Revisionland.

But as lovely as this tropical revisionland vacation has been, I would kind of like to start wrapping things up. I’ve got the bulk of things organized and most of the additions written, it’s now a matter of finishing a couple of sections that need to be reworked and making some minor changes for consistency.

And I’d wanted to be done by now. And I’m not.

So, as much as they make whooshing sounds when they go by, I am in need of a deadline. So I’ve set one. No, I am not telling you when it is. But my beta readers have been informed and given permission to harass me if I miss it, which I won’t because now I have people holding me accountable and waiting to read on a specific date.

Plus, I have given myself a bribe. I decided I needed something a bit more worthwhile than cookies or a sense of accomplishment, so I came up with this:

bpal creepy

This is a bottle of BPAL Creepy ’09. This is the scent of butterscotch-kissed, caramel-smothered red apples spiked with a blast of coconut rum. Those of you who have read previous versions of the novel know why this is such a perfect reward for finishing my revisions. Those of you who haven’t would probably not be surprised that there are caramel apples in a book about a circus. Unfortunately there is not a BPAL scent for chocolate mice.

I got it a few days ago and I haven’t so much as opened it for a sniff. It is sitting on my bookshelf (posing for photo with mini-jack-o’-lanterns from Pumpkin Hollow) and I am not allowed to open it or wear it until the revised manuscript is safely out with betas. So far my willpower has been impressive, though I’ve been a bit distracted by Boo (Eerie billows of spun sugar, fluttering white cotton, and sheets of cream).

So yeah. Greetings From Revisionland. Don’t really wish you were here because if you were I’d get even less work done.

By erin, ago

creative messes

While I’ve been in revisionland I’ve been silently bemoaning how messy my writing process is. I’m not sure what I expect would be better, or less messy, but it seems to tend toward chaotic. I have handwritten notes scrawled sideways on paper in two different colors of pen. I have snatches of dialogue scrawled in between. I have a Scrivener file open with bits of potential new scenes written in no particular order and odd bits highlighted so I know where I need changes. I have a hard copy of the current manuscript that I’ve started to mark up with purple gel pen.

It’s messy.

But when I was working on the bastet postcard (already sold!) yesterday, I realized my art process is just as messy, particularly toward the end stages.

This is a picture of my workbench, taken right after I finished:

creative mess

There are several things in this photo that I didn’t even end up using (the gold metallic worked better than the copper, for example) and yes that’s my hand covered in Mod Podge. There was an incident. I promise my camera hand was clean. Comparatively.

So I thought, looking at this mess, why should I expect my writing process to be different? Just because it’s words and not paint doesn’t mean the process is all that different, I make writing/painting analogies all the time. Of course my writing process is going to involve weird notes and seemingly disorganized bits and pieces. Clearly, I am the type of artist that needs to put paint I’m not going to use on the table and get my hands dirty.

I used to have this complex about working messy with my art. I thought all the paint should actually end up on the painting and not on the table, on me, occasionally on the cats. I got over that somewhere around the time I started splattering things. It’s difficult to splatter things and keep paint properly contained. But I liked the finished product, I liked the way it looked and it’s become something of a signature technique now.

Time to apply the same train of thought to writing, methinks. At least writing messily doesn’t involve as much cleanup.

By erin, ago