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. :)

Blurb Writing Hell

Yep, that's where I am. I got some feedback on the blurb I wrote for The City Darkens (along the lines of it sucking) so now I'm trying without a ton of success to rewrite it. I'm really lucky, though, because a bunch of people are helping me (for free!) on AbsoluteWrite. I am genuinely grateful for this. I've realized, though, just how very, very bad I am at writing blurbs. (I've also realized how truly obscure dieselpunk is to the vast majority of people out there, even other writers on AW, but that's not the point of this blog post.)

I never really thought I was great at writing blurbs, you know, but now I have a sense for how truly terrible I am at it. For one thing, I usually only read the first two sentences of a blurb on a novel I'm thinking of reading. I do this not because I'm impatient (well... maybe that too) but because I hate when blurbs have spoilers in them. And they almost always do. And basically a lot of the advice I've been getting from the folks at AW is leading me to do some of that with my TCD blurb. This so goes against my tastes. But let's face it, writing, "This is a really great novel. Trust me. You'll like it. You don't want me to give anything away why, right? Just trust me." Isn't going to work. So I'm biting the bullet and writing a new blurb that says a lot more about the story than the original blurb did.

In my latest attempt, I went and looked at the blurb for Kushiel's Dart, since it was one of the books that I thought of when I was coming up with my ideas for TCD (Cynthia Voigt's Jackaroo was another, as were a couple of Marion Zimmer Bradley novels). I followed the Kushiel blurb line by line, trying to come up with what the equivalent would be for TCD. That was interesting, and some of the AW peeps say they like this latest version the best. Now, of course, I'm going to rework it, both to incorporate the newest feedback but also to change it enough that it's not so close to the Kushiel blurb.

This process is frustrating and tiring and may be interfering with my regular writing energies. In any case, I haven't worked on the WiP in a couple of days. I haven't wanted to, which is disappointing because for a while there I was chugging right along. Today, though, I did think of something that was missing in the story, so with luck, I'll find the energy for it again tomorrow. 

When you read blurbs, do you like there to be a lot of information about the story, or do you avoid finding out a lot, like I do?

What qualities do the best blurbs have?

My current "shoulds" of writing

My cbt therapist (or should that be cb therapist?) Shiva, would probably tell me to rephrase this, but there are several things I "should" be doing for my writing right now.*

First of all, there's the sequel to The River and the Roses, which has been through one round of revisions, and probably could stand to undergo about nine rounds more. If I gave it some serious time and energy, I could probably get it up to par for April, and publish it. I even have most of what I need to create the cover. I've been meaning to do this for about six months, with the intention of dropping the price for River to $0.99 once the sequel is out. Why have I not done it yet? Well, aside from the whole pregnancy/bed rest/newborn baby distraction, revisions are... well, work. And often annoying, painful work at that. I read a quote on twitter the other day, I forget from which famous author, saying something about how revisions or rewrites are more pleasant than producing the first draft because you don't have the dread of not finishing the novel hanging over you. I can relate to that, but for me, revisions are way more difficult to get into. Still, and Shiva would approve of this phrase, it would be satisfying to get that item done.

Then there's marketing. I stopped actively marketing my books nearly a year ago, I think, or at least nine months ago. I'm still on twitter and I update my facebook page from time to time, most often to notify you all that I've got a new blog post, actually, but as for directly sending out messages on twitter suggesting that people check out my book, no. Michael R. Hicks, one of those lucky and driven self-pubbed authors who is living the dream (he quit his day job last April, I think it was--I admire him so much!) suggests that the "tipping point" for twitter as a marketing platform is to have 1000+ followers. At the moment I have about 845. I use my twitter account to recommend news articles and just talk about things I'm doing or am interested in. And also let people know when I've posted something new on either this blog or the recipe blog. I don't advertise the family blog because it's much more personal and I figure if you're really that interested in me you'll check it out off this page. And probably most people aren't that interested in me! Anyway, I don't have a problem with people posting on twitter to advertise their books (in fact I try to retweet them when it's clear to me what they are about). Although some people will spam the feed for like, ten minutes, and it makes me wonder whether they've ever read an article about twitter etiquette. So my point is, though, I haven't been doing that. Why not? I feel like until I've got something new to offer, I don't want to risk losing followers because I'm self-promoting for the sake of self-promoting. Probably not sound business reasoning, but there it is. Maybe this week I'll send out a couple of links to my books.

I'm on Pinterest, now, too. Please feel free to follow me. I even have a board devoted to books, although they are books I want to remember to check out, so it seems weird to post my own books there. Maybe I'll create a new board for my books and stuff related to them. I do have a decopunk board where I collected a bunch of stuff to help me world build my current story. So I suppose when (if) it's done and I've published it, I could pin it to that board and it wouldn't be weird.

Speaking of the current novel, it is teetering on the edge of that going-to-be-abandoned cliff because I haven't been working on it regularly and I'll lose so much steam I'll never get it back at this rate. And that would be a shame, I think, because I have some interesting ideas for it. So what would be good there is to set up some sort of schedule or something... and bribe myself with some reward for achieving a word goal too, I think. My attempts to create NaNos outside of the official NaNoWriMo have failed thus far. It's silly, it shouldn't (there's that word again) make a difference whether I'm looking at the official site's graph for the word count or a ticker I created myself, but for some reason, it does. So the trick may be to abandon the large goal of a NaNo and make smaller goals. Shorter term, too. And small rewards as a result. Hm... must give some thought to what rewards would motivate me.

Any suggestions? Must be cheap. We are broke-ish.

How about you, do you have any writing "shoulds" or other projects that need your attention? How do you get yourself on task?

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* By the way, if you have ever struggled with depression or anxiety, I strongly recommend going through cbt. Changed my life, no exaggeration.

It's Monday, Time to Get Back to Work!

There's a new post on my pregnancy blog here.

I took the weekend off from my routine, and enjoyed the lake, which was lovely. But now it's Monday, and I'm committed to getting these revisions done, if not completely today, by Wednesday. After that, I'm not sure what I'll work on. I'll be sending the revised ms of Fire to Mary Baader Kaley in the hopes that she'll beta it. And anyone else who's interested, really. Please let me know in the comments if you'd like to beta. But for my writing time every day, I haven't decided whether to focus on Veronica book 3, or work on universe building for this other idea. I'll probably start with that, actually, and see if it goes anywhere.

Have you ever done any universe/world building? Do you have any tricks or techniques you really like? One fellow writer, Will, once referred to a program he uses that draws maps... I'll have to see if I can dig that up. Although I see this story as involving planets and space travel rather than being tied to one world, so I think a world map may offer more detail than I need. I wonder if there are universe map building programs out there?

Establishing a Routine

So of course I shot myself in the foot yesterday by bragging on twitter that I'd finally gotten this elusive writing (and exercising) routine down. I could blame Jeff for staying up until 1am, at which time I woke up to find he wasn't in bed, and have not been able to go back to sleep since (he's snoozing away as I type). But truthfully, I'm up because I'm stressing over what will probably turn out to be a totally innocuous pregnancy symptom. I wish I could just get it checked right now, and then I'd be able to sleep. It's almost 4:30am, there is no way I'll be getting up at 7:30 to go swimming and then writing... unless I never manage to get to sleep at all, then I suppose I'll be up. But I think the first thing I'm going to do once it's a reasonable hour for such things is try to see my doctor. So tomorrow does not look good for the writing routine.

And to be precise I'm not writing so much as revising, and it's taking me a lot longer to do than I expected. Has that ever happened to you? You think you'll get the rest of it done tomorrow--meanwhile, four days later you still have a hundred pages to go? That's where I am. And it's just the first round of revisions. By the way, anyone want to beta this ms? I've gotten one person to do it, which was helpful, but I think I'd like someone else to do a complete read through as well as post it on the WSE forum chapter by chapter.