#amwriting

I'm still working for Inkitt, though they are making some changes that may lead to my not being able to do that anymore. Hopefully at worst that's six months away, though. At best they'll alter course just enough that it doesn't come to pass. I really like this job and the way it is now, it fits really well for me and for my family.

It's been interesting, doing my own writing these days. I wonder if people in MFA programs and who write for TV have a similar experience...when you're in an environment where a lot of what and how you write is assigned. Because now when I approach my own writing, I'm not really sure how to go about it. The lessons I'm learning writing for Galatea are interfering (possibly in a good way in the end) with my own natural inclinations, and that means that I find myself staring at my screen, unsure of how to move forward, a lot of the time.

One reason I started making time for my own writing again, after the first few months of writing for Galatea, was that I wanted to be able to have more freedom with it. Galatea has a specific format. Each episode has to be between 1600-1900 words, for instance. This often creates a situation where I just don't get to include the details I want to include. So I went into my own story promising myself to wax on as long as I wanted and...I can't. I mean, I do probably add more detail than I would in a Galatea story, but not much. Because now it feels like it's slowing the story down.

Even before I took the Galatea job I entered a phase of my writing in which I started reading books on plotting and other writing topics, and watching talks, and my husband even got me a subscription to Masterclass, which I loved and no longer have any time for (keep meaning to pick it back up though). So I've really been loading my brain with a lot of rules about how to approach a story. I've gone from being a pantser (for decades!) to a dedicated plotter. And I feel like the current result (I don't think it's in any way permanent) is that my writing is in this awkward growth spurt where I no longer have a strong sense of character or of what I really want to see happen. I'm trying to think of all the rules and structures and such that I've read about and that have resonated with me.

Finding a balance is hard. My short novel, Wild Wild Witch, is a really good example of me privileging structure over character. I think it's a fun story but I'm also pretty sure that the characters, while likeable, aren't especially well-developed. In my new WiP, The Tower of Doors, I've tasked myself with continuing to use everything I've learned, but to also really digging into the characters. And... I'm finding it hard. Characters (mine anyway) that are well-developed tend to want to go off script. And I'm not comfortable with that right now. And yet, I think characters are what's most important to me, especially if you include setting as a character.

Anyway, if you want to support my writing in a really substantial way, you can FOR FREE, by going to Inkitt and reading The River and the Roses. I have a tentative plan with my supervisor at Galatea that if I get enough reads (measured by people clicking on "next chapter"), they'll develop River on the app. Which would mean royalties, y'all. It would be really, really exciting.

I also always appreciate honest reviews.

What's new for you?
Have you ever felt like you were in an awkward growing phase of your writing?
What do you think is most important (if you had to choose), character or structure?

Draft 1 Done!!! Yay!!!

After several months of dragging and not writing and all that jazz, I have finished the first draft of the sequel to The City Darkens. I have some revisions to do already, and I haven't yet heard back from my beta reader, of course. But a first draft is a first draft, so, Huzzah!

The title looks like it's going to be The City Smolders. One thing I did which was a bit of a gamble is the narrator is a new character, not Myadar. I really like Ginna, though, and it's been a bit of a wild ride with her, as I mentioned in a previous post, as she's the kind of character to take the reigns and go her own way.

Another fun and challenging aspect has been the dialect I've given Ginna. I've taken bits and pieces of English dialects so it resembles many but represents none. My main task has been to be consistent, which hasn't always been easy. One of the goals of the revision process is going to be to make sure the dialect is consistent.

I'll be interest to see the response of my beta reader (and I may see if another person who beta'ed The City Darkens wants to take a crack at this one too) to the book in general and the ending in particular. I won't say more about it than that for now. :)

There Comes a Prophet, by David Litwack

I have mixed feelings about this novel. On the one hand, I enjoyed the writing stylistically. This novel was published by a small publisher, though, so one can expect it to be edited and free from errors. There were some errors, however, though not enough to bother me, and I can be picky. On the other hand, much about it was disappointing.

::SPOILERS::

Plot Summary: A thousand years ago the Temple of Light took over, banning everything that would remind people of the time before (our time, plus perhaps some more advances in technology). The people live as they did in the olden days (I purposefully use a vague term here; the descriptions were lacking) with people who work as weavers and shoemakers. In order to enforce their power and the rejection of what they call the Darkness, the Temple periodically takes a youth and gives them a "teaching;" which amounts to psychological torture lasting several weeks. When the youth's spirit is broken, they return them to their village to be an example to the rest. Which actually sounds a lot harsher and scarier put like that that it actually was in the novel, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Anyway, the three main characters, Orah, Thomas, and Nathaniel, are all around the age of teaching, and Thomas gets chosen. When he returns he's in bad shape, so when Orah gets chosen next, Nathaniel decides to go after her.


The problem I have with the novel is that it was lackluster. There's only one part that really held my attention, and that was in the first third when Orah is taken and Nathaniel goes to save her. That was compelling. Otherwise, this novel really illustrates the need for authors to put their characters in dire situations that seem impossible to escape. Most of the time in this novel, that was not the case. Thomas's teaching, while certainly a sucky experience, was hard for me to really imagine as soul-crushing. They have him in a solitary cell. It's dark. Occasionally they show him images of  nuclear weapons going off, so he learns what the Darkness was all about. Yes, this is a nasty experience, especially for a nice kid who's been raised in a small village where the worst thing that happened was probably a bad winter. But not having experienced solitary confinement myself, I have little understanding of what it does to your mind. Perhaps if the author had gone further in his descriptions... I don't know. You're repeated reassured that no physical harm will come to the character. You know that the period of teaching will end and he'll get to go home. It's just not dire enough.

Even when the characters went to find the Keep, and it looked like the clever arch bishop might be tracking them, they handily get rid of the tracker. No tension there anymore. They find the Keep and spend a leisurely summer looking up things like mathematics. Not exactly nail-biting stuff. Litwack hinted that Thomas might betray his friends, and in the end he sort of does, but only by denying he wanted to go to the Keep with them. I thought he was going to do something far more drastic, like call the vicars. Then it would have been fascinating to see him struggle with what he'd done and all that. So things just never reach any sort of a real peak. It seemed to me that the novel was a platform for the author's views, which many novels are. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, but that's kind of *all* this novel was, in my experience.

As for the characters, they were not developed enough. Each of the main characters only had two or three qualities that defined them, and most of the time the author just told you what they were without going into detail. Nathaniel's a dreamer. He used to dream about knights. He's brave. Orah's the planner. She's also a leader. Thomas used to be the sweet musician, then after his teaching he's the scared sweet musician. He likes food and is good at climbing. Any secondary characters get next to no detail at all. To be fully developed and interesting, characters need a lot more going on. I was really interested when the author started to describe Orah's life as a weaver. I wish there had been a lot more of that. It might have made me care about her more. But more than that, none of them seemed to have real dreams. Nathaniel wants to... explore the mountain pass? That's his big dream? Be a knight, I guess. Although that's implied more than shown. Orah wants...? Nathaniel, eventually, I guess. But not much else. Why does she even care about the Keep? Is it because she got chosen for a teaching and wants to bring the Temple down out of... revenge?

No--such an emotion is too dark and extreme for the characters in this book. They are just nice kids who stumble onto a puzzle and walk a really long time, then get exposed to some education that opens their minds to possibilities. It's not enough to warrant the revolution they decide to bring on. It just isn't. Nobody ever went to war because they thought the populace needed to know that a thousand years ago people were capable of star travel. People become revolutionaries when their children are starving to death.*

So as much as I'd like to rate this novel higher because I appreciate stylistically good writing, I just can't. I hope in his future writing David Litwack raises the stakes and pushes the limits of how far he'll take his characters. It doesn't have to be as brutal as The Hunger Games, but make me believe they're really in danger! :)

__________
*Or when the British overtax them and restrict their "right" to take land from Native Americans. But that was sort of an anomaly, as revolutions go.

Wrangling Fictional Characters

I've begun to write the sequel to The City Darkens, and I won't say very much about that specifically, since it is one my rules never to talk about a story before it's finished. But what I will say is that I decided to go with a different narrator than Myadar. Ginna has lived most of her life in the Undergrunnsby--I felt like Myadar's story really only showed one perspective on the city, and that I needed to have the next story flip that and look at it from a completely different angle. So this has presented two unexpected challenges.

First, Ginna has a distinct voice, which is great, in a distinct dialect, which I can hear clearly in my head most of the time. At first, I had a real struggle because Ginna kept insisting on switching tenses and telling her story sometimes in present tense and sometimes in past tense. Eventually I figured out how to handle this: she'd tell the events of the story in past tense, and anything she considered to be a constant truth she'd tell in present tense. Now the only trouble I'm having is with some of her to-be verbs, which I can't seem to find a consistent way of conjugating. I'm going to have to study up on existing dialects. The nice thing about creating your own fantasy world is that you can take liberties when you invent a dialect. You're not required to represent how real people talk in a certain region of the real world. But you do have to be consistent.

The second unexpected challenge is that Ginna is such a strong personality right from the get-go. I feel like she's just using me to get her story out. (Stephen King attributed an idea to Native Americans--I don't think he was specific about the tribe and I don't remember where I read this--that stories stalk the writer until the writer is ready to tell them, or some such. It's like that.) Actually, a few times it's been like she slapped me upside the head and said, "Hey! What kind of ninny do you think I am? I'm doing this instead." And sometimes I don't really like what she does, but there's no way around it. She's going to do things that way, because that's who she is. For one thing she can be incredibly and remorselessly violent. Not all of the time, but basically she's got a lot of rage from some of the experiences she's been through. I've written before about violence, and how ambivalent I am about representing it in fiction. I look at George R. R. Martin's stories, which granted I've only experienced through the show, Game of Thrones, and I think he goes too far. Don't get me wrong, I'm addicted to the show. But I really could do without some of the images it has put in my head, and it disturbs me when people come to the defense of its violence with reasons like, "It's historically accurate." Westeros doesn't exist, people. It never did. There can be no historical accuracy there. And if you're referring to a depiction of medieval England, let me tell you that the ways in which GoT is historically inaccurate far outweigh the ways in which is may be accurate--for instance, there's no Catholic Church, and you really can't talk about the history of England without including the Catholic Church.

Not exactly a Catholic priest.

Okay, end history-nerd side rant.

Anyway, the point I was actually trying to get to is that since I've begun dealing with Ginna, it's caused me to wonder if GRRM might actually not have really planned to be quite so brutal when he started writing. Maybe his characters slapped him upside the head and said, "HEY. WE ARE JUST THAT EVIL." Or something. Then again, one of the people I watch GoT with claims that when GRRM was a kid, he had pet turtles, and used to write stories about the turtles torturing each other and plotting to murder each other. So quite possibly he's just that much of a sadist. Who knows?

I'm actually not complaining about Ginna's domination over the story. It's quite wonderful when characters take over and the story grows from them. I'm a pantser, though. I can see how if you had a whole outline written, characters slapping you upside the head and demanding that the story go in a direction you never intended might become a problem. You'd get quite lost without your map.

Have you ever experienced a character running loose from your control? What was that like for you? Did you enjoy it, or were they a royal pain in the ass? How did that story turn out?

First Draft Finito!

Yes, folks, I have just finished the first draft of The Plane and the Parade, the third book in the Veronica Barry series (unless you count Veronica in Paris, which is book "zero" and takes place about 13 years before The River and the Roses). I'm doing a first read-through and then I'll be sending The Plane and the Parade to my most wonderful beta-reader, Kathryn. And while she's slogging through that, I'll be working on a cover. Although I have been searching through images, and so far I haven't found any parade ones I'm particularly taken with.

It's always so wonderful to finish the first draft. The revisions are much less fun. Yes, yes, I know they are a necessary evil, and I'm going to do my best to nail every typo and fill every plot hole. I'm just not going to particularly enjoy it.

I've been giving a lot of thought to what to write next, and I just finished reading a GLBT fantasy novel that I'll be reviewing here soon that I absolutely loved, and it made me want to write a GLBT fantasy novel. Or maybe just a fantasy novel, with or without GLBT characters. I've got a fantasy world I spend month building many many years ago that I'd love to actually set a novel in.

Trouble is, I'm really not sure what my characters or story would be like. I have odds and ends in terms of ideas, but nothing that hangs together. I know I like an old-fashioned quest, of course.

But then there's the whole idea I had about trying my hand at writing a romance, and I'm really not sure I'd want to combine the two. QUEST + ROMANCE = CHEESY. Not always, of course, but it just seems like if the point is to find the MacGuffin before the world ends or whatever, then splitting your attention to moon over some hottie is a little bit counterproductive. And I do realize the hottie can be the MacGuffin, but then it just really becomes a book about a character who is obsessed with someone else and needs to develop a stronger sense of self. Although I suppose the Myadar serial I've been working on has some elements of this--in her case it's a child, not a hottie, though. I like writing female main characters, though, and if I'm going to write a romance, I don't want my mc to be so smitten with the love interest that they pursue them like a MacGuffin. And as for a scenario where the mc of my fantasy novel dutifully pursues the (non-character) MacGuffin and falls in love with some other character who is somehow tangentially involved, while I have no problem with this sort of story, it's not really a romance. It's a fantasy story with an element of romance. And so it doesn't satisfy the "I should try writing a romance" urge.

No, I have a couple of specific needs when it comes to my mc, and these vary by genre. For one thing, if I do write a fantasy novel, I want my mc to be powerful. I often write mcs that are fairly ordinary or at least inexperienced, and as such, apt to get their butts whipped. It would be nice, for a change, to have an mc who does the butt-whipping. If I write a romance, I suppose my mc could still be a butt-whipper, (ahem--this is straying into unintended territory--keep your minds out of the gutter, people) but it's really not so essential.

There was the whole Edwardian romance idea, but I am, shall we say, a perfectionist when it comes to research, and would probably drown in any effort to write a historical romance even of the shallowest kind. I've considered possibly creating a fantasy setting that somewhat emulates the Edwardian England of Jane Austen, thereby releasing myself from the need for accuracy of depiction, but then we stray back into FANTASY + ROMANCE = CHEESY again.

Welcome to the merry-go-round that is my mind when I try to tease out a new story. :P

How about you, do you ever find yourself going around in circles when you're trying to nail down a new story?

Writing again...

Well, it's been nearly a year! Finding out I was pregnant pretty much stopped my creative juices from flowing in the writing direction. I spent my time cooking and knitting, instead. But I am now finally starting to work on a story again. I'm happy about this, although I really didn't sweat the months on hiatus. I figure, as long as I'm not feeling stressed out because I'm blocked, I just have to go with my creative flow.

Of course, I've done some writing for the MA program I'm in online. It's for American History. That's been good, getting back into writing papers. There's something really satisfying about putting a paper together, like finishing a puzzle.

I have yet to actually start writing the story, although I think today may be the day for scene 1. We'll see; I'm not entirely sure the idea has matured enough. I've been using Pinterest to collect images for the idea I have. I discovered dieselpunk and decopunk recently and after watching Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film, Metropolis, I became inspired by the possibilities of a 1920s/scifi setting.

Actually, it all started when I was on Netflix in the middle of the night--I've discovered that the only way I can stay awake to feed the baby is to watch movies or tv shows--and I started watching Deep Space Nine from the beginning. And the first thing I realized, is that I am craving good sci fi. The second thing I realized is that I'm really intrigued by the space station as a setting. I can't say I was overly impressed with the writing of the shows--I can only hope they gain in depth as the series progresses--but the setting is really interesting. I like Quark's gambling hall, the promenade, the way that characters can come and go due to the daily docking and departure of ships.

One thing I haven't really hammered out yet, and I may need to give more thought before I jump into writing, is the tone I want for this story. I'd like to make it quirky, in the vein of dieselpunk stories such as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and make it a fun adventure, but I also just got finished reading The Hunger Games Trilogy, and I was blown away by how brutal Suzanne Collins is with her characters. It really made me realize how NOT brutal I am with mine. So... something to ponder.

How about you, how do you treat your characters? Do you like to just have fun with them, but keep it light? Or do you put them through the ringer?

name your baby--er--character

I am obsessed with names. Especially character names. Show me your query, and I will probably become fixated on a character name in it and raise some issue that no one has ever shown any concern over before. When selecting my own character names, I go through a whole process. It's actually a lot of fun for me. Here's what I do:

• Decide on a word or words that best describes the character. Recently, for instance, I needed to find a new name for a character who I would describe as hard, bitter, inflexible. 
• Go to a couple of my favorite name sites, such as this one or this one, and do meaning searches on the words I chose, and some synonyms. Now often, especially for negative attributes, this doesn't go very far (although Mary means "bitter"--did you know that?).
• Go to BabelFish and run the words through various language translations. I settled on "Felsen" for my inflexible character's last name. It means "rock" in German. I'm really hoping it means "rock" as in "stone" and not as in this. But in the end, it doesn't matter--it just has to mean "rock" to me. I don't expect anyone else to look up the meanings of all of my names. And since sometimes I tweak the spellings of them to suit my needs, it would probably be an exercise in frustration for anyone to try.
• Sometimes, if the above steps don't come through, I'll go on to search the names of gods and goddesses, mythological creatures, historical figures, etc., to find a name that resonates.

A few things to consider when naming a character:

• Make sure none of your characters' names are similar. This is a rookie mistake. A lot of people do it unconsciously--they like the sound of certain vowels and consonants in a name, and without realizing it, they use them over and over. Honestly, I think Tolkien did it with Arwen and Eowyn, among others. I bet he had all sorts of justifications for it in his world-building. In the end, it's still a lot harder than it needs to be to discuss who you think Aragorn should end up with.
• Look at their ethnicity and ancestry. If you are going to name a character Billy Gambini, have a reason. Even if only you know the reason. 
• Consider whether the name sounds like anything unfortunate. Unless you chose it to be funny. And trust me, folks, I've seen some unfortunate character names out there--this is the sort of thing I notice.
• Avoid choosing unusual names unless they fit with your genre. If you have a character named Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, they'd better be the headmaster of Hogwarts.
• Likewise, make sure the name is easy to pronounce, even if your character is an alien from a culture where they click their beaks when they speak. Please, for the love of Groosalugg, avoid apostrophes.

That's all I've got for now, although I suspect I'll think of five more points and come back to edit this post again later.

What process do you use to name your characters?