Welcome to the Hell of Editing

Today's Mood Puppy is a Mood Astra! Astra is Kyrie's first daughter. :) All fresh and happy and ready for adventure, she was just like me when I finished my second novel last month (YAY). I looked forward to finally starting the editing process on both books.

Astra, at least, is still happy. I, in comparison, took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

Though editing has been a trial at times, it has taught me a lot and I have come to enjoy the tightening and polishing. I felt excited about applying those new skills to East of the Sun. What changed?

One, I started writing that first book in 2010. It is two days from clicking over into 2014, and to say that I'm a far better writer now is pretty safe. So part of my initial Edit-Shock comes from realizing how MUCH work I'm going to be doing to bring the first parts of EotS into line with what I can do now.

Two, in realizing how far the writing has to go, I'm seeing all sorts of places that are going to require significant plot changes, and that makes me very, very happy that I bought Aeon Timeline at the end of NaNoWriMo because I think I'm going to need it to keep track of who does what when, where, and why.

There's a lot of pure terror in me right now, looking at these two books. I love the story, I love my characters, I can see so many ways to make both of them better. It's just going to be...hard. Very hard. Harder, in fact, than writing the books in the first place because everything needs to get so much tighter.

So I have done two things to motivate myself, because they always say that the best tools for finishing things are a deadline and accountability!

First, literary agent and author Donald Maass is giving a hands-on seminar in the DFW area for aspiring novelists the first week in May. I got in, and now I MUST get the books in a state which will not completely embarrass me! In order for me to benefit most from this seminar, the books need to be as good as they possibly can be, so that the feedback I get will really help me. I want to start submitting these to agents by the end of 2014.

Second, I decided that I would write about editing EotS here, in the blog, chapter by chapter. I will feel disgusted with myself if I don't see progress in those blog entries, and it will also serve as a record of how I've improved my writing because I'll be utilizing everything I've learned in the last four years. And I think I can do it in general terms, without giving out any spoilers!

So here we go. First, my logline: This is a story about a girl whose family sells her to a bear. And about everything that follows from it...

I went through my first two chapters of EotS and realized that they were probably actually three chapters, first off. The two were long already (my chapters tend to run 5k words average in rough--these were 5.5K and 6.5K) and I saw that there were other scenes I needed to put in.

Reasons for those other scenes? My first chapter needs to start off with action and I hadn't given one of my mains enough time in the spotlight. I'd also kept her more passive and she was not that kind of character! In addition, I needed less overall description and more of the action showing the dire situation the family is in, to build tension.

Along with that dire situation I realized that I was missing an opportunity to introduce the main villain via a violent encounter instead of with passive hints. Instead of merely showing the aftermath as I had before, I wrote the violent scene in. In the process I discovered some surprising things about the relationship between the two oldest brothers...things I'll be able to use later.

So, more active scenes, stepping up the tension, the main characters strive actively to keep the family alive and hopefully gain our sympathy, while some others...well, you'll find out in time. But I decided that things still weren't bad enough, and that I was being too easy on my characters--I had this tendency, and have tried to squash it. So I decided to poison the last possible easy food source, traumatizing one of my main characters in the process, and also killed off an innocent minor character.

Now things are really bad. One life lost, another dying, everyone's hungry, one desperate family member has attacked another, and a monster is loose on the mountain. Awesome! On to chapter 2.

Writing Analysis

Good morning, blog readers! Our Mood Kyrie today is actually a Mood Baxter. Bax is a pup from Kyrie's second litter. He is growing into a very handsome young fellow! This photo was taken when he was about a year old.

As usual, I have been working hard at NaNoWriMo this month. Also as usual, I am behind. I spent the first three days of November covered in puppies out east (well, they don't evaluate themselves, you know?) and the fourth day under the knife, having surgery. Negative fun. Luckily, after the first couple days or so I was well enough to type while propped up in bed!

I have noticed something interesting about NaNoWriMo. Though I can happily peruse any book on writing I want to in the days leading up to it, once NaNo is here I can not bear to pick up a book on writing! I have also found that I don't read much fiction during NaNo UNLESS it is completely outside of the genre I am currently working in. For example, I'm working very hard on my mythic fantasy West of the Moon right now, and I am reading either non-fiction or mysteries (re-reading some of my favorite Agatha Christie books from my childhood). I find that I have no urge to read fantasy or even SF right now.

As I have worked at my writing the last year or two I have started making a note of habits and tendencies like the above. This is valuable, I think, because like weight loss--and you think I jest, but I have found weight loss to be almost completely about this--writing is about figuring out what your best habits are and working within them, and figuring out what your worst habits are and attempting to avoid them as much as possible. Given that I say this when my diet and exercise regimen has gone completely to blazes thanks to the surgery (no exercise allowed yet, and I am going BONKERS) and the stress of being behind during NaNo (I devour great amounts of comfort food when I am under stress, and the most I can do is try to mitigate the damage).

So this brings me to the second part of this post, which is that during October I had picked up Rachel Aaron's short "How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day" and decided to make a run at doing some of the things she mentions in there.

There are three things that Rachel talks about as the key features in how she began to put out vast quantities of verbiage. Put very succinctly, these are:

1. discover the features of your most productive writing time;

2. write the scenes you are in love with; and

3. spend five to thirty minutes before you write making a detailed outline of the scene(s) you'll be working on. In other words, know what you'll be writing before you write it.

Now, every writer is different and many things that work for some are disastrous for others, but I set out to try Rachel's advice because I was curious. I am pretty right-brained at times, and I love statistics. So what could be more interesting than charting my writing productivity? I followed Rachel's suggestion and set up a spreadsheet. There were spaces to note the times when I started and stopped writing, my total words and average words per hour, whether I had been interrupted and by what (thus letting me know how disruptive those interruptions had been), and I also put in a few other spaces--where I had been writing, music or no, whether I had been prepared (i.e. did I know what I would be writing in detail before I jumped in) and which project and scene I had been working on.

After a couple weeks of tracking, the results have been eye-opening.

First, she was completely right that when I was working on a scene that I loved or that I was looking forward to for a long time--the "gravy scenes" to use my own term--I was a MUCH faster writer. There is a scene in West of the Moon that I envisioned all the way back at the start of East of the Sun. It sprung into my head and I loved it instantly. I couldn't wait to write it. But at that time I was stubbornly sticking to "write the book in order" more or less, so I put it off. Well, this week, I FINALLY came to it. And, using Rachel's other tools (like writing during my most productive time of day) I broke a new speed record for myself: over 2,000 words an hour. Wow!

Also, I found that point three did help me. Especially if I was headed for a scene where I didn't quite know where I was going yet, if I wrote some detailed notes in my longhand journal about what things I wanted in the scene before I sat down to write it, I never stalled. I still wrote slower because I was feeling my way, but I always could look at my notes and know what came next. And the outlining didn't seem to make my writing stale; instead, it freed me up to relax, and I came up with some new material while writing one of these scenes that delighted me. So even if you outline, there is still room for your characters to surprise you!

But the most interesting discovery came from my spreadsheet. I am a diehard Morning Person. I wake up perky, alert, and bouncy in the morning. I would have bet money that writing in the morning would be my most productive time. BUT NO. The spreadsheet showed me that I was actually balky, hesitant and distracted when I tried to write in the morning! I don't think there was ever a morning point where I broke 750 words an hour. But in the early afternoon my focus improved, and that carried through all the way until I started to get fatigued--around 8 or 9 pm. So my peak writing time is actually between 12 p.m. and 8 or 9 p.m.

I would NEVER have guessed this without the spreadsheet. Once I realized it, I put it to the test. I worked on my novel only during my key times all of this week, and, even though I've returned to work this week, I've done between 2,000 and 3,200 words per day every single day. I'm within around 3K words of catching up completely now, and we've only just passed the midpoint. In fact, I've decided I won't be happy with just 50K words this year--I'm aiming to end significantly higher, and to be within range of completing West of the Moon entirely by the end of this month.

So this is why you find me blogging now--it's not noon yet, so I haven't hit my super-productive time. Way to rationalize a blog update, huh? I hope that y'all will head over to Rachel Aaron's blog to check out her system. I've linked to it above. She also sells a short e-book of that title, with that blog entry expanded, where she goes into more detail into her writing methods. Check it out! And thanks, Rachel, for giving me some new tools to improve on and explore my writing. :)

Darkwriting

Since I'm playing catch-up with the blog this week (posts I meant to do weeks ago), I decided that the mood Kyrie for this one would be a retro-Mood Kyrie! This is a picture of Kyrie as a little pup with me on the very first day we got her. :)

Fast-forward to a day around four weeks ago when I bent over to get a frisbee for Kyrie's daughter Blazie. Unfortunately, Blazie was trotting back toward me at the time, and we ran into each other. More specifically, Blazie's rock-hard forehead rammed me in the temple. By that evening we knew that I'd suffered a mild concussion.

It's taken me these four weeks to recover fully. During the first three I was unable to look at TV's, computer screens, or my iPhone without pain. I couldn't go to the grocery store without having panic attacks (complex visual things are very bad when you're concussed). I was unable to read books, and even audiobooks (which some concussed people have no problem with) made me hurt for the first week or so. When I was able to go back to my job, I had to turn out most lights in my department and spend a lot of time sitting quietly in the near-dark between batches of work.

Needless to say, this was not only boring, but extremely frustrating! I had a new story in progress that I was excited about, and I couldn't work on it. I had been trying to establish a routine for upcoming NaNaWriMo in November--now scrapped for who knew how many weeks. Out of annoyance I set my computer screen brightness to zero and typed without heeding spelling or spacing errors. Thus the title of this post. After, I went back and fixed things (once I could look at a computer screen without wincing). Here is what I wrote:

"I walk around at work with my eyes squinted shut--AND sunglasses on, because even with my eyes almost closed, the light feels too bright. I think I have the tiniest bit of understanding now of what a blind person feels like. I find myself counting the steps to the corner by the time clock so I can walk the whole thing with my eyes completely closed. I get very annoyed when people leave things on the floor out in the aisles for me to stumble over. At home, the fridge light is so bright to me that I close my eyes and concentrate on the feel of the glass in my fingers to try to judge when the cold water is almost to the top.

The biggest spur to creativity is to be told that you can NOT exercise it. I itch to work on projects I began just before this happened. My new short story cries to be finished. I tried to do this to it, writing it with the monitor black, and got a few sentences, but it's not the same. I'm a visual person. I like to commune with my words as I write them.

Ideas pour into my brain with no outlet. I tried to make myself work on my drawing today, but it was too much. The more I push, the longer my recovery time, I'm told.

I forced myself to get back to work in my second week, but can't do more than three or four hours before I go home, exhausted (or having panic attacks from too much visual stimulation).

I can not wait until this is over. I am terribly glad that it WILL be over, that this is temporary. How would it feel to lose my sight permanently? The thought terrifies me.

I am making these notes because I know that some day I'll use this in a story or a book. Future me: never underestimate the amount of frustration an active, creative person feels when they simply can not do what they are used to. Never take for granted the ability to act upon your desires with no (physical) limitations."

Pics from WorldCon 2013

Just a few photos from WorldCon 2013, as promised. Above, the Alamo at night. Below, the Con-Tail (what my badge looked like--though Helsinki lost the bid for 2015 to Spokane, WA). Note that the most enthusiastic Con-goers had built triangular constructs (con-structs?) of over thirty badges in three rows. I am a noob.

Below, George R.R. Martin and Games of Thrones' Rory McCann do a ninja-signing added for limited numbers at the last minute. HBO was nice enough to import Rory from Scotland for the Con. He is just as tall and imposing in person as he is when playing The Hound on-screen--an impression somewhat mitigated when he attempted to drink the bottle of GoT "Take the Black Stout" I gave him to sign, and again when he showed up in the snazziest kilt ever to the Hugo awards ceremonies. Bottom line: this photo is of two Really Cool Guys. ;)

Below, a couple of shots of beer, pun-intended. Way too much of that at WorldCon, by the way--though I did manage to avoid the ghost-pepper-vodka cocktails. First, the row of Game-of-Thrones-licensed stouts and pale ales at the Brotherhood Without Banners Private party. Behind, you can see "Bros" frenziedly opening large bottles to pour and serve everyone. Ommegang brewing sent two cases of beer just for the party!

Below that, you can see my autographed bottle of Take the Black Stout. Rory signed across the tree, George on the lower right side. Certainly the coolest empty beer bottle we have owned!

At the BWB party, George's wife Parris supervises The Great Beering:

Finally, the awesome little pins devised by our friend (and GRRM-minion) Raya Golden for the Brotherhood Without Banners party--sold to benefit the BWB. A stylized representation of the House of Black and White insignia, also featured on this year's BWB t-shirt.

Thanks for reading, all, and I hope you enjoyed the photos! Sorry I didn't get more--will try to be better next time. :)

WorldCon 2013 - San Antonio

This past weekend my husband and I attended the 2013 WorldCon in San Antonio. We got back about two hours ago, but the whole thing has been affecting enough that I wanted to sit down and write about my experience.

First off, I've never before attended a WorldCon, and this is only my second Sci-Fi Con (the first being AggieCon earlier this year). I don't know why I haven't before. It's probably a combination of two things.

First, I work for a miniatures company. Being so involved with games cons (Gen Con, ReaperCon, Origins, etc.), most of the time Sci-fi cons or fan cons were off my radar. I just looked at them with a quizzical head-tilt and wondered "what do they do there?"

Second, ridiculous as it sounds, there was some fear of just not fitting in with the people who attended. If I allow myself to actually think about it for a full second, that is a goddamn silly thing to think for a woman who grew up watching Dr. Who and Star Trek and who started reading Anne McCaffrey and Piers Anthony at age 8 or 9.

I can blame my newfound Con involvement almost entirely on Parris McBride (and I suspect I am not the only one who can say that!). Parris LOVES fandom and conventions. She met her now-husband George R.R. Martin at the Cons, long before Game of Thrones. Parris was always asking me (and then Zak, my husband) if we were going to attend AggieCon or WorldCon. AggieCon is always in Texas, but WorldCon moves to a different city worldwide every year. This year the city was San Antonio.

At first I was skeptical. And that's an understatement. I have a busy life. I have to partition my spare time carefully. And, as I said, there were doubts number one and two sitting there in my head. But AggieCon would be short, and pretty inexpensive to attend. And George was the Guest of Honor. Sure, I'll go!

Long story short, Zak and I had such a great time that we ended up texting our dog-sitter and begging him to watch the dogs for an extra day so we could stay longer than we'd planned!

So, suddenly WorldCon was on the table. And to my surprise, it was my husband suggesting that we go!

I think almost anyone who's written science fiction or fantasy has at one point dreamed of the Hugo awards. There are others--the Nebula, the World Fantasy Awards--but the Hugo was the first. Many of my idols, the authors who I most adored as a kid (C.J. Cherryh, for one) were Hugo-award-winners. If we went to WorldCon we could vote for the Hugos! Wow! That sold me. Getting to vote was really cool.

Second, George and Parris were going, and their minion Raya who has become a good friend. George was nominated for a Hugo for The Battle of Blackwater episode from Games of Thrones on HBO. So between them (though we knew that George would be incredibly busy) and many of my Viable Paradise instructors who were attending, at least I knew some people.

And there were panels and seminars about all sorts of writing stuff. Lovely! I would have things to do.

Well...turns out I wasn't quite prepared for how MUCH I had to do!

Every morning I would haul myself out of bed (sometimes after having put myself into bed at a gawdawful early hour and after several-too-many Shiner Bocks), stagger downstairs, stuff breakfast/brunch into myself and then take off for three to five HOURS of panel discussions. Then we would meet people for dinner. Or we would go out by ourselves, just Zak and I, and have fun realizing which of our favorite authors were at the next table!

I met up with a couple of my Viable Paradise classmates, Sean and Jake (thanks for the awesome dinner invite, Jake! We had a blast!). I was able to touch base and at least say hello to almost all of my VP instructors who were there, and a couple of them (Teresa Nielsen-Hayden and SFWA President Steven Gould) were generous with their time. BIG thanks to Steven and Laura Mixon for a few moments of their time today before they left Steven's signing. Our talk was inspirational, and it left me fired up to continue to improve my writing. :)

The Hugo awards were terribly fun and it was even more fantastic to see friends and instructors win!! My instructor Elizabeth Bear won for her SF Squeecast podcast, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden for his excellent editing, and John Scalzi won the coveted Hugo for Best Novel (YAY Scalzi! Zak and I both voted for you!). :) Plus, George won for Blackwater!! A phenomenal night, so much fun.

I walked away from this WorldCon with:

A very long chain of colorful ribbons attached to my badge (they call it "con-beard" but I am calling it "con-tail", as in pony-tail, because I am female, dammit)

Many new friends in the Brotherhood Without Banners fan club for George R.R. Martin. We wore many of their ribbons, a couple of their t-shirts, and the awesome pins designed by Raya Golden! We have also made some fantastic new friends. Thank you all so much for welcoming Zak and I into your circle!

A bottle of Ommegang brewing's Game-of-Thrones-licensed "Take the Black Stout" which I got to drink at the private Brotherhood party and then have both George and actor Rory McCann (who plays the Hound in the HBO series) autograph the next day;

SIXTEEN PAGES of notes from my panel discussions

Renewed acquaintance with many of my VP instructors

Did I mention "new friends"? Not only the BWB peeps but we met some wonderful people at the dinner Jake Kerr invited us to. :)

A big respect for what it takes to organize a big international event. Organizing ReaperCon is a cakewalk compared to this.

A flood of inspiration and ideas on things to improve in my own writing;

And finally, last but not least, a husband who says that *maybe* we can get ourselves to WorldCon 2014...in London!!!

Pics or it didn't happen? Of course! Check back tomorrow...

The Learning Curve

Pensive Mood Kyrie says, "I suppose you're wondering why I've called you all here today..."

(Okay, not really. Really Mood Kyrie was saying, "You're not thinking of taking my bone, are you?")

Being in a thoughtful mood this evening, and having promised a new blog entry, and having been remiss in my bloggerly duties (I know, not a real word, but "bloggerly" is pretty awesome even so), I am here now to talk about the learning curve of writing.

This isn't about the four million words of crap you supposedly have to write. (Or was it one million? I've lost count. And anyway I always assumed that, like swing dancing, I would take four times as long to learn the same steps as everyone else.) Rather it is about how you work so hard, you're getting good feedback, you think you've gotten better, you're starting to feel encouraged...

And then you read something else and realize you're not even partway up the mountain--you're barely in the foothills.

In the last year I've been learning a lot. I realized that I would have no idea how to set about editing my novel, for one thing. So I wrote a bunch of short stories and tried to figure out how a short story actually works. Harder than it seems, by the way, as I am the sort of reader who hasn't really sought out short stories. I am much more fond of novels. And my writing resembles noveling. Which is fine until you realize that you're writing a short story, not a novel.

But I digress.

The point is that I think I have finally figured out how a short story actually works, and in attempting to edit my own hopelessly sprawling short fiction I managed to learn enough about self-editing to feel that I wouldn't make a total hash of the rewrite/editing of my novel. I honestly can say I would have had no idea about how to even begin to edit _East of the Sun_ if I hadn't spent the last year or so battling with short fiction.

I've read some writers who say that short stories really have nothing much in common with novels and that trying to write one to learn more about the other isn't the best use of your time. I would have to disagree. All stories, of whatever length, are about story, after all. For a wordy, rambling writer like me, learning to create a credible story in under eight thousand (the last one was only FIVE thousand! I almost swooned...) words is a very valuable lesson in how to trim the dross off of your fiction.

So. I have successfully slimmed my stories. I have gotten some very encouraging rejections from Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and even Tor.com. I am starting to feel like I might just write something very soon that someone might want to buy.

Then I went to the bookstore this past weekend and picked up Elizabeth George's _Write Away_. It's less a how-to and more an exploration of her own writing process. I find that stuff fascinating and have always loved George's mysteries--like my other fav P.D. James, she's a master of the literary mystery. Her characterizations and prose are deep and fluid enough to drown in.

This, however, along with being a wonderful read, exposed to my poor beginning-writer brain exactly where in the foothills of writing I was. It was like plotting my course with a topographical map and compass, and then getting cell phone reception and glancing at the GPS and finding out that you might, perhaps, have taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

To be fair, not a wrong turn...just that you weren't as far along as you thought. There are always those wake-up calls where you realize that you have a lot to learn yet, and this is one of those.

On the one hand, I am ever so much better at the writing craft than I was two or three years ago. On the other hand, I am realizing that the learning curve for writing (like other forms of art that I have practiced) is two things.

First, it is actually a very gradual slope. A little epiphany here, a jump in logic there, a phrase that triggers a little light in the brain along a little farther there.

However, it is an INFINITE slope with many different trails. And no matter how far along you think you are in one moment, in the next you will turn around and read something that seems to expand the accordion of your brain (with accompanying wheezing and settling dust). I think that even seasoned authors must do that--they must read other authors and just have a moment of pause where they're like, "Well. THAT was well done." And maybe, for a second, they wish they'd written it.

At least, that's what I'm telling myself. I am also going back to re-read that damn book this weekend. And this time, like the student I am, I am taking notes.

Delving the Past

Since today's post is about the past, our Mood Kyrie is a photo of Kyrie at eight weeks. Heck of cute, no?

Today I was reminded why, in this age of technology and instantly-searchable documents, it is both exceedingly annoying and contemplatively useful to keep a journal that I actually WRITE in rather than type in.

I finished editing a short story last night (it's called Grim Thunder, for future reference), and it's about to start making the submission rounds. I needed a new project. One of my previous story ideas sat up in my head and said, "ME!"

Okay, sure, I can do that. Wait. Hmmm.

Almost all of my useful notes and scenes on that story are written in my journal.

Ummm. WHICH journal, ridiculous writerly self? You have filled FOUR of them in the last three years!

So today I went journal-delving, and managed to find a couple of key scenes that I needed to refresh me on where I was going with the story, though not the one I really wanted--yet! However, in the doing of it I found some interesting thoughts of mine from a couple years back and I thought that I would share them.

First was that even two years ago I knew that beginnings were my worst part of a story. I have a horrendous urge to start contemplative instead of with action, and if you don't know the character it seems to me that there's little to recommend a story that starts with their inner thoughts unless those thoughts are so traumatic or fascinating that you keep reading with a "WTF?" kind of attitude until the writer lets you figure it out. Or maybe you're C.J. Cherryh, in which case you can write a whole series full of convoluted yet somehow fascinating thoughts and yet I still keep reading (Foreigner, anyone?). But even then the first book started with action, so I guess that rule stands.

But, in the immortal words of Byron, I digress. I had in my journal a thought about why beginnings are so hard for me, and perhaps there's some truth in it. In my favorite genre, setting the scene is also necessarily setting the setting, and I grew up in the 80's when it seemed like all those lovely high fantasies started with meandering, thoughtful prologues that were really mental background paintings full of backstory. I guess in a movie it would be like that long panning shot at the beginning, or what Save the Cat calls the Opening Image.

But a long panning shot doesn't belong in a short story. It takes up too much room. So when I get my contemplative groove on I tend to founder in the surf instead of striking boldly off into the waves.

The good thing is, I've recognized this since, and I think I've managed to overcome this tendency. So writing such things in my journal does seem to work, eventually.

The second thing I read I found very interesting because it was directly related to Anne's First Rule, Don't Judge the Work. I jotted a thought that a writer reading their own reviews was poison. The reason was that in reading those critiques, it necessarily opened the door in the back of the writer's head and invited self-criticism. We spend so much time trying to lock up our Inner Editors, to just write and not to bog down in self-doubt. Even though the story being reviewed would have been published, I think that unless all the reviews were glowing (which would never happen to people in Real Life except to those people that we really do not like--channeling Anne LaMott, there...), it would still cause more harm than good.

So those are your thoughts for the day. Now it's back to delving through the other three journals, trying to find that pesky scene...

p.s. yes I know I could just rewrite it from memory. IF I remembered it. Unfortunately, I only remember it exists. Aye, there's the rub.