I've found over the past few years that I need defined, measurable goals to keep myself focused. National Novel Writing Month, which I completed back in November 2009, was a boon for me, productivity-wise, because it kept me on task. In order to make the 50,000-word goal by the end of November, you need to write approximately 1,667 words every day. It was an ambitious goal, but I found that it was a doable one. I could mark my progress daily, figure out whether I was on target, and adjust my work time and output if I was not.
In 2010 I wrote a novel, which I spent a good chunk of 2011 revising. Unfortunately, in 2011 life got in the way, and my output of new material was...well, crappy. I got a new job, which altered my work hours. (I had previously been writing mostly in the mornings, before I had to go to work at 10:30. Now, I have to be in the office by 7:30. Somehow, getting up at 7 and writing for two hours is a lot less daunting than getting up at 4 and writing for two hours.) I also had to travel for work a lot more, especially during the summer. Plus, there was a lot of other stuff going on in my personal life that took my time and emotional energy, some of it good, some of it...not. I had thought things would calm down after the New Year and I'd be able to write more, but so far I've been lacking.
I think I need to set a goal for myself again.
So I'm thinking about doing my own mini-NaNo, in which I set my own personal goal of 50,000 words in a month. One of my Facebook friends pointed out that 50,000 may be too ambitious a goal. He may be right. I completed NaNo without a problem in November 2009. But in November 2009, I was single with a job that required no traveling. Here in February 2012, I have to live with the fact that the office may send me away at very short notice--and frankly, I don't get much done while traveling.
Plus, I'm no longer single; I'm now involved with a guy who lives three hours away. The distance is not terrible (especially considering that, once upon a time, I kinda/sorta dated a guy who lived in the United Kingdom!), but it does mean that some thought and planning and coordination are required before I see him--not to mention the travel time there and back, if I go there. Plus, once I'm there, I'm not really thinking about my fictional world; the real one is so much more engaging, at that point. (And writing is a very, very solitary activity for me, and I have difficulty forcing so much as a sentence of fiction out with other people around.)
Frankly, I want to see him whenever I can. I dig him. Things are pretty much cupcakes with a side of ice cream right now. So yeah, it's definitely a time suck that I didn't have two and a half years ago. But it's a time suck I want, and it's non-negotiable. Writing may be good for my mental health, but so is he.
So yeah...50,000 words was doable back in November 2009, but in February 2012 it may be a strain. That said, I need to find a way to fit writing into my life now, without sacrificing the things that are important to me. I need to set a goal for myself that is both ambitious enough to feel like an accomplishment, yet realistic enough to be completed without killing myself.
The aforementioned Facebook friend suggested three pages a day. Since word counts are something that my damned left brain (which I keep trying to get rid of), I'm thinking maybe 25,000 words in the next 30 days. Total of 834 words a day. Doable, right? And also something I may be able to progress into future months.
And if I make it, I'm totally buying myself something nice next month.
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Letting Go
So I haven't written in awhile, and since I'm planning to go out this will probably be a short one.
I spent my morning working on my novel. I'm in that sort of "final revision/editing" stage where I'm not doing much actual substance change, but merely cleaning up typos and tweaking words here and there. After over a year of writing, I'm almost ready to start sending it out the door.
And this is overwhelming to me. As a writer, I am bombarded with tales of how difficult it's going to be, how many rejections I'm going to get, how long a haul this will be. Yet this novel is something precious and special...to me. These characters live in my head. I've spent over a year with them now. I know them better than I know most of my friends. If I were sane, I'd pick another dream, something easier, something less likely to crush me, something not nearly impossible to achieve.
Yet, as much as I hate hearing these messages of negativity and pessimism over and over again, I understand why they're out there. Editors and agents get tons of submissions every day, and there are people out there who think they can throw a few words on paper and voila, it's a novel! Writing fiction, like everything else, is a skill, one that takes time and practice to develop. I've been writing fiction since I was six or seven years old. I honestly don't know if I'm any good now. I believe I can put words together, make them clear and concise. I believe I can write without an overwhelming number of typos or editorial mistakes. After spending five years as an editor, I would have been in big trouble if I couldn't. But as to whether I can bring a story together and have it be interesting, entertaining, and coherent...I still doubt myself some days.
I have worked hard on this book. I have written and rewritten and reviewed and workshopped and revised and then revised again. I tried to make this book the best that it could be, the best I could make it. Whether anyone else will recognize that, I don't know. I hope so.
But now, there are only two paths left for my fledgling novel: out the door, or back into the bowels of my computer where it will remain forever. And if I choose to leave it on my hard drive...well, then my dream really will be impossible.
I spent my morning working on my novel. I'm in that sort of "final revision/editing" stage where I'm not doing much actual substance change, but merely cleaning up typos and tweaking words here and there. After over a year of writing, I'm almost ready to start sending it out the door.
And this is overwhelming to me. As a writer, I am bombarded with tales of how difficult it's going to be, how many rejections I'm going to get, how long a haul this will be. Yet this novel is something precious and special...to me. These characters live in my head. I've spent over a year with them now. I know them better than I know most of my friends. If I were sane, I'd pick another dream, something easier, something less likely to crush me, something not nearly impossible to achieve.
Yet, as much as I hate hearing these messages of negativity and pessimism over and over again, I understand why they're out there. Editors and agents get tons of submissions every day, and there are people out there who think they can throw a few words on paper and voila, it's a novel! Writing fiction, like everything else, is a skill, one that takes time and practice to develop. I've been writing fiction since I was six or seven years old. I honestly don't know if I'm any good now. I believe I can put words together, make them clear and concise. I believe I can write without an overwhelming number of typos or editorial mistakes. After spending five years as an editor, I would have been in big trouble if I couldn't. But as to whether I can bring a story together and have it be interesting, entertaining, and coherent...I still doubt myself some days.
I have worked hard on this book. I have written and rewritten and reviewed and workshopped and revised and then revised again. I tried to make this book the best that it could be, the best I could make it. Whether anyone else will recognize that, I don't know. I hope so.
But now, there are only two paths left for my fledgling novel: out the door, or back into the bowels of my computer where it will remain forever. And if I choose to leave it on my hard drive...well, then my dream really will be impossible.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Characters
There's not much writing advice that I put much stock in, but one piece of advice that I do is this one: know your characters.
I recently read a book that I loved. One of the revelations the book had to offer was that the two main characters had been engaged in a sexual relationship -- even though they were adopted brother and sister. Once I turned off my immediate "ick!" reaction (there's something about two people who were raised together -- even if they aren't biologically related -- having sex that immediately stirs that reaction), I realized it made sense for the two characters, and that it also made sense, given the character's personalities and the first-person narration, that it wouldn't have been revealed earlier in the series. (This was book two of a three-book series.) Reading the comments on the author's blog regarding that relationship, I realized something: she (the author) didn't seem entirely comfortable with it, either, or at least hadn't been when the story started to go in that direction. But she took it there because that's what those characters would do, and because it made sense within the story -- knowing full well that it could make people uncomfortable.
It worked well. At the end of the story, I was still rooting for those characters, still hoping for everything to work out for them.
I've discovered that most of the authors I really, really admire can tell you just about everything about their characters, often right down to what breakfast cereals they prefer and what kinds of pajamas they would wear. It's not a "genre fiction versus literary fiction" thing, either: contrary to the conceptualization that genre characters are not as well developed as literary fiction characters, I've found genre fiction pieces where the characters are incredibly complex and well-developed. I've also found literary pieces where the characters seem flat and cliched. (And vice versa, of course.) To me, fiction -- whether high-action and plot-heavy, or subtler and more contemplative -- is driven by its characters. I'll often give stories with lackluster plots a chance if they have engaging characters. Likewise, I'll give up on fiction that has interesting stories if the characters aren't interesting. Good characters are often more memorable than the particular twists and turns of the plot. If we're talking series fiction, strong characters are essential: if I care about what happens to the characters, I'll come back for more.
A lot of writing how-to guides that I've seen suggest things like creating character dossiers or answering pointed questions about your characters. (If your character was a tree, what type of tree would he/she be?) For better or worse, I started writing long before I realized how-to guides were even an option (most seven year olds don't spend a lot of time in the self-help section). At any rate, I'm too set in my ways, writing-wise, to follow such guides. Maybe they work for some people. They tend to make me feel like an idiot. Whatever. Not like I'm in any sort of position to offer writing advice to anyone.
For me, the getting to know my characters comes from the act of writing the story. When I started my current work in progress, I had one scene: a young woman wakes up next to a dead man; she knows she killed him, because this has happened before, but she doesn't know why. At the time, I didn't know why. I also didn't know what triggered the blackouts she went into when this occurred. Hell, I didn't even know her name. Some of these questions were answered very easily, but some of them took 300 pages of writing to figure out.
I've been hanging out with Dale (which is my protagonist's name, but not her real one) for a year now. I can tell you what breakfast cereal she prefers (Cheerios) and what she wears to bed (t-shirts, often with retro cartoon characters on them, paired with sweats in the winter or boxers in the summer). She reads a lot of children's books and fantasy, light and escapist. She watches a lot of old movies, and listens to a lot of old music. She picked out her current alias -- Dale Highland -- because the last movie she had seen was Flash Gordon, and the last book she had read was Outlander. She doesn't believe in using aliases like "Jane Doe" or "Jennifer Smith," because she thinks they're too obvious. She hates wearing makeup, but she'll do it because she often has to change what she looks like. She's not evil or crazy, but she thinks she might be.
I'm close. It kind of hit me last night. I'm working on cleaning up the climactic scene, and then there's one more scene I want to go back and do some major tweaks on -- mostly adding some stuff, because it wasn't quite as sensory as I wanted it to be. (In other words, it needed more heat.) Then a final read-through of the whole thing for consistency and continuity. And then...and then I'm going to take a deep breath and start submitting.
After that, I probably won't talk about this project much anymore, unless there's news. I don't want to jinx anything.
I've heard that writing for publication is not for the faint of heart. I'm trying not to be.
I recently read a book that I loved. One of the revelations the book had to offer was that the two main characters had been engaged in a sexual relationship -- even though they were adopted brother and sister. Once I turned off my immediate "ick!" reaction (there's something about two people who were raised together -- even if they aren't biologically related -- having sex that immediately stirs that reaction), I realized it made sense for the two characters, and that it also made sense, given the character's personalities and the first-person narration, that it wouldn't have been revealed earlier in the series. (This was book two of a three-book series.) Reading the comments on the author's blog regarding that relationship, I realized something: she (the author) didn't seem entirely comfortable with it, either, or at least hadn't been when the story started to go in that direction. But she took it there because that's what those characters would do, and because it made sense within the story -- knowing full well that it could make people uncomfortable.
It worked well. At the end of the story, I was still rooting for those characters, still hoping for everything to work out for them.
I've discovered that most of the authors I really, really admire can tell you just about everything about their characters, often right down to what breakfast cereals they prefer and what kinds of pajamas they would wear. It's not a "genre fiction versus literary fiction" thing, either: contrary to the conceptualization that genre characters are not as well developed as literary fiction characters, I've found genre fiction pieces where the characters are incredibly complex and well-developed. I've also found literary pieces where the characters seem flat and cliched. (And vice versa, of course.) To me, fiction -- whether high-action and plot-heavy, or subtler and more contemplative -- is driven by its characters. I'll often give stories with lackluster plots a chance if they have engaging characters. Likewise, I'll give up on fiction that has interesting stories if the characters aren't interesting. Good characters are often more memorable than the particular twists and turns of the plot. If we're talking series fiction, strong characters are essential: if I care about what happens to the characters, I'll come back for more.
A lot of writing how-to guides that I've seen suggest things like creating character dossiers or answering pointed questions about your characters. (If your character was a tree, what type of tree would he/she be?) For better or worse, I started writing long before I realized how-to guides were even an option (most seven year olds don't spend a lot of time in the self-help section). At any rate, I'm too set in my ways, writing-wise, to follow such guides. Maybe they work for some people. They tend to make me feel like an idiot. Whatever. Not like I'm in any sort of position to offer writing advice to anyone.
For me, the getting to know my characters comes from the act of writing the story. When I started my current work in progress, I had one scene: a young woman wakes up next to a dead man; she knows she killed him, because this has happened before, but she doesn't know why. At the time, I didn't know why. I also didn't know what triggered the blackouts she went into when this occurred. Hell, I didn't even know her name. Some of these questions were answered very easily, but some of them took 300 pages of writing to figure out.
I've been hanging out with Dale (which is my protagonist's name, but not her real one) for a year now. I can tell you what breakfast cereal she prefers (Cheerios) and what she wears to bed (t-shirts, often with retro cartoon characters on them, paired with sweats in the winter or boxers in the summer). She reads a lot of children's books and fantasy, light and escapist. She watches a lot of old movies, and listens to a lot of old music. She picked out her current alias -- Dale Highland -- because the last movie she had seen was Flash Gordon, and the last book she had read was Outlander. She doesn't believe in using aliases like "Jane Doe" or "Jennifer Smith," because she thinks they're too obvious. She hates wearing makeup, but she'll do it because she often has to change what she looks like. She's not evil or crazy, but she thinks she might be.
I'm close. It kind of hit me last night. I'm working on cleaning up the climactic scene, and then there's one more scene I want to go back and do some major tweaks on -- mostly adding some stuff, because it wasn't quite as sensory as I wanted it to be. (In other words, it needed more heat.) Then a final read-through of the whole thing for consistency and continuity. And then...and then I'm going to take a deep breath and start submitting.
After that, I probably won't talk about this project much anymore, unless there's news. I don't want to jinx anything.
I've heard that writing for publication is not for the faint of heart. I'm trying not to be.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
April: A Month in Review
Holy shit, it's May! How the heck did that happen? Just a second ago, I was happily proclaiming that it was April, and now...May! Time flies when you're having fun, or something like that. Though in actuality, I'd like time to stand still for awhile, or save time in a bottle, as the Jim Croce song says. But that is neither here nor there, and not something I want to talk about on this blog--or at least, not in a month-in-review post.
Anyway...the best thing about April, other than warmer weather, was all the BOOKS! Not just quantity, but quality. I read so many books that often, at the end of the month, they all seem to blend together and I can't think of what books I'd like to talk about. This month, not so much.
Nightshade by Michelle Rowen was absolutely wonderful. It focused on Jill, an aimless office temp, who is caught in a Mexican standoff of sorts and injected with a formula that makes her blood posionous to vampires...and yet irresistible. Afterward, she is kidnapped by Declan, a half-vampire/half-human hybrid who suppresses his "evil" vampire side (i.e. his emotions) with a serum, and is horribly scarred from his years of battling vampires.
This year, I've been reading fewer and fewer urban fantasies, eschewing them in favor of romance. I read so many of them in 2009 and 2010 that I started to feel a sense of "been there, done that," that maybe I had already experienced everything that could be explored in urban fantasy. This book reminded me of why I fell in love with the genre in the first place. Jill is swept up into this world she knows nothing about (vampires' existences are secret to the general population), and her kidnappers--Declan's employer/foster father--frequently take advange of her ignorance to manipulate and use her. But as the book progresses, we get to see that Declan's as much a victim as she is, which sets up an interesting parallel between them. Much as I enjoyed Jill's character, it was Declan I really fell lin love with. He grew a lot as a character in this book; his beliefs and worldview are shaken to the very core. It doesn't hurt that tortured heroes are very, very sexy!
Nightshade has everything I love in fiction: a heroine who remains strong and determined in spite of everything that happens to her, a hero who grows and evolves just as much as she does, and a plot that kept me on my toes. I can't wait until the sequel, Nightshade, is released in July.
The other book I want to highlight for April, Where She Went by Gayle Forman, is also from a genre I have backed away from: young adult. Now, my reasons for backing away from YA are a lot different than my reasons for backing away from urban fantasy. With urban fantasy, I still love it, but I just felt like I wanted to read some different stuff for awhile. With YA, I made a conscious decision to stop reading it as much. It had started to depress me; I was tired of reading about heroines who were 16 years old. Don't grown-up women in fiction have adventures, too, I wondered. It was that wondering that brought me to urban fantasy in the first place.
But I never gave up YA completely. There were always books that stuck out, books that lingered in my memory long after I read them. Forman's If I Stay was one of them. The protagonist, Mia, is involved in a horrible car accident that kills her family and leaves her comatose. Told primarily through flashbacks of Mia's life, Mia must make a decision: to stay and live, or go.
Where She Went picks up three years after If I Stay, and is told from the perspective of Mia's high school boyfriend, Adam. No one dies here, but in its own way Where She Went is just as harrowing as its predecesor. It's a fantastic book, and it answered all the lingering questions I had after If I Stay and then some. It was one of those cases where, although a sequel might not have been necessary, it certainly added to the story.
And in writing-related news, I hit a bit of a wall with my revisions, as I already talked about. It's not surprising, really. First of all, I've been hanging out with these characters for almost a year now; my brain needs a break! Second, I just got...overwhelmed, I think. Revising over 300 pages of prose is not an easy task, and I started to feel like it would never be done. Plus, I've discovered that it's much harder to discipline myself to write in the evening than it is to write in the morning--especially when that "writing" is actually "revision," which isn't as much fun to me. I am considering--though I haven't decided yet--whether I should just start getting up earlier in the morning (say, 4:00 or 4:30) and writing in the morning. Problem is, I'm not a morning person, and getting up at 5:45 or 6:00 is hard enough! I'm not sure my brain would be awake enough to even write in English, at that point.
Other option is just trying to up the self-discipline. Set aside a time, turn off the ringer on my phone, unplug my internet cable, and just go at it. Unfortunately, self-discipline has never really been my thing. So we'll see.
The good news is, I think I've gone over the hump on revision. I sent someone in my writing workshop (which, unfortunately, I won't be attending this term--I switched to another day) the complete draft of my story. As I did, I wrote an e-mail saying, "These are the big things that I need to change." As I went through it, I realized it wasn't as bad as I thought. There are four important scenes that need to be either rewritten or added to, two for content and two for excitement. The rest is just minor tweaking based on what I did in those scenes. Four scenes. That's all. I can do it! (Where's Tony Little when you need him?)
And that, my friends, was April. I resolve, in May, to blog more frequently. We'll see how that goes.
Anyway...the best thing about April, other than warmer weather, was all the BOOKS! Not just quantity, but quality. I read so many books that often, at the end of the month, they all seem to blend together and I can't think of what books I'd like to talk about. This month, not so much.
This year, I've been reading fewer and fewer urban fantasies, eschewing them in favor of romance. I read so many of them in 2009 and 2010 that I started to feel a sense of "been there, done that," that maybe I had already experienced everything that could be explored in urban fantasy. This book reminded me of why I fell in love with the genre in the first place. Jill is swept up into this world she knows nothing about (vampires' existences are secret to the general population), and her kidnappers--Declan's employer/foster father--frequently take advange of her ignorance to manipulate and use her. But as the book progresses, we get to see that Declan's as much a victim as she is, which sets up an interesting parallel between them. Much as I enjoyed Jill's character, it was Declan I really fell lin love with. He grew a lot as a character in this book; his beliefs and worldview are shaken to the very core. It doesn't hurt that tortured heroes are very, very sexy!
Nightshade has everything I love in fiction: a heroine who remains strong and determined in spite of everything that happens to her, a hero who grows and evolves just as much as she does, and a plot that kept me on my toes. I can't wait until the sequel, Nightshade, is released in July.
But I never gave up YA completely. There were always books that stuck out, books that lingered in my memory long after I read them. Forman's If I Stay was one of them. The protagonist, Mia, is involved in a horrible car accident that kills her family and leaves her comatose. Told primarily through flashbacks of Mia's life, Mia must make a decision: to stay and live, or go.
Where She Went picks up three years after If I Stay, and is told from the perspective of Mia's high school boyfriend, Adam. No one dies here, but in its own way Where She Went is just as harrowing as its predecesor. It's a fantastic book, and it answered all the lingering questions I had after If I Stay and then some. It was one of those cases where, although a sequel might not have been necessary, it certainly added to the story.
And in writing-related news, I hit a bit of a wall with my revisions, as I already talked about. It's not surprising, really. First of all, I've been hanging out with these characters for almost a year now; my brain needs a break! Second, I just got...overwhelmed, I think. Revising over 300 pages of prose is not an easy task, and I started to feel like it would never be done. Plus, I've discovered that it's much harder to discipline myself to write in the evening than it is to write in the morning--especially when that "writing" is actually "revision," which isn't as much fun to me. I am considering--though I haven't decided yet--whether I should just start getting up earlier in the morning (say, 4:00 or 4:30) and writing in the morning. Problem is, I'm not a morning person, and getting up at 5:45 or 6:00 is hard enough! I'm not sure my brain would be awake enough to even write in English, at that point.
Other option is just trying to up the self-discipline. Set aside a time, turn off the ringer on my phone, unplug my internet cable, and just go at it. Unfortunately, self-discipline has never really been my thing. So we'll see.
The good news is, I think I've gone over the hump on revision. I sent someone in my writing workshop (which, unfortunately, I won't be attending this term--I switched to another day) the complete draft of my story. As I did, I wrote an e-mail saying, "These are the big things that I need to change." As I went through it, I realized it wasn't as bad as I thought. There are four important scenes that need to be either rewritten or added to, two for content and two for excitement. The rest is just minor tweaking based on what I did in those scenes. Four scenes. That's all. I can do it! (Where's Tony Little when you need him?)
And that, my friends, was April. I resolve, in May, to blog more frequently. We'll see how that goes.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Bitching and moaning about revision (what else?)
As I have mentioned before--several times--the revision fairy is not kind to me.
I love first drafting. It's free and spontaneous and fun. Revision is like pulling teeth.
I am approximately 1/4th of the way through my first round of revisions of my novel. My goal is to start submitting it to agents/publishers by June. I am...not even close. My new work schedule has been hard to adjust to; it was easier, for me, writing between 7 and 9 am than it is writing between 7 and 9 pm. There are a lot of changes to be made. A few of them are minor things, but a few of them actually change the story somewhat (primarily, the relationship dynamic between the hero and heroine). I'm moving stuff around, so I have to remember to take it out of the story later.
But what's really frustrating about this is that I don't feel anywhere close to FINISHING. I don't even feel like I'm making any progress. Back when I finished the first draft on December 31, I had a complete novel. It may not have been perfect, but it was a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. What I have now feels more like...Swiss cheese.
I think I need a new plan of attack. The hitting things up in order worked for awhile, but it's not helping anymore. So I'm going to send the latest draft to my Kindle, read it again, and figure out the "big things" I need to change. I'll hit those scenes first. Then I'll go back through again and make little tweaks: continuity errors, repetitiveness, etc. The frustrating thing right now is that I know where I want to go (kind of), but I feel like I'm not getting there.
I also, probably, need to rotate my revision with some new first drafting. I had always intended to do that, but haven't managed to sustain it thus far. It's hard for me because I suck at multi-tasking. When my mind is on one project, it's hard to switch over to another. I think it's the same type of limitation that makes it difficult for me to write stories out of order, no matter how much that intense climax scene is poking at my brain when I'm only 20 pages in. I'm right-brain dominant, but my left brain is kind of a pest and won't leave me alone unless I do all that silly creative stuff HER way. But I think breaking up the monotony with some new characters and new worlds will help; I have spent almost a year nonstop with my current crop of homocidal (but loveable) freaks! I've had some ideas bouncing around in my head recently, so maybe a little bit of writing just for writing's sake will help me out.
Last week, one of my favorite writers, Carolyn Crane, posted a blog entry with writer Layla Messner about having a preference for first drafting or revisions. Layla, like me, was in the first drafting camp, while Carolyn strongly prefers revisions. She says that she imagines there's a "hidden perfect story" within the first draft, which she's getting closer and closer to finding.
I think that's my problem right now: I feel farther away from an end point than I did when I finished the first draft! Maybe because "the end" of revisions is a lot harder to define than the end of a first draft.
To top it off, my back is killing me at the moment. Not the kind of debilitating pain that prevents me from moving, but the kind of annoying pain that just makes things difficult. The last time I strained my back like this was last August, when I made the mistake of trying to carry a shoulder back with a computer and a weekend's worth of clothes with me while walking to work (a 25-minute walk). But I can't figure out what caused it this time...though I'm sure sitting in yoga-like positions on desk chairs (a bad habit I developed in high school and never managed to break) probably doesn't help. So yeah, it's just annoying and making me a bit irritable. Painkillers and I don't get along very well, either. Rather than killing pain, anything opiate-based tends to make me look and feel like I'm auditioning for a role in a remake of The Exorcist. No fun.
So for now...I will go re-read my manuscript, again, and I'll figure out how to approach my revisions, again. And hoepfully by Monday I'll be feeling better, mentally and physically.
I love first drafting. It's free and spontaneous and fun. Revision is like pulling teeth.
I am approximately 1/4th of the way through my first round of revisions of my novel. My goal is to start submitting it to agents/publishers by June. I am...not even close. My new work schedule has been hard to adjust to; it was easier, for me, writing between 7 and 9 am than it is writing between 7 and 9 pm. There are a lot of changes to be made. A few of them are minor things, but a few of them actually change the story somewhat (primarily, the relationship dynamic between the hero and heroine). I'm moving stuff around, so I have to remember to take it out of the story later.
But what's really frustrating about this is that I don't feel anywhere close to FINISHING. I don't even feel like I'm making any progress. Back when I finished the first draft on December 31, I had a complete novel. It may not have been perfect, but it was a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. What I have now feels more like...Swiss cheese.
I think I need a new plan of attack. The hitting things up in order worked for awhile, but it's not helping anymore. So I'm going to send the latest draft to my Kindle, read it again, and figure out the "big things" I need to change. I'll hit those scenes first. Then I'll go back through again and make little tweaks: continuity errors, repetitiveness, etc. The frustrating thing right now is that I know where I want to go (kind of), but I feel like I'm not getting there.
I also, probably, need to rotate my revision with some new first drafting. I had always intended to do that, but haven't managed to sustain it thus far. It's hard for me because I suck at multi-tasking. When my mind is on one project, it's hard to switch over to another. I think it's the same type of limitation that makes it difficult for me to write stories out of order, no matter how much that intense climax scene is poking at my brain when I'm only 20 pages in. I'm right-brain dominant, but my left brain is kind of a pest and won't leave me alone unless I do all that silly creative stuff HER way. But I think breaking up the monotony with some new characters and new worlds will help; I have spent almost a year nonstop with my current crop of homocidal (but loveable) freaks! I've had some ideas bouncing around in my head recently, so maybe a little bit of writing just for writing's sake will help me out.
Last week, one of my favorite writers, Carolyn Crane, posted a blog entry with writer Layla Messner about having a preference for first drafting or revisions. Layla, like me, was in the first drafting camp, while Carolyn strongly prefers revisions. She says that she imagines there's a "hidden perfect story" within the first draft, which she's getting closer and closer to finding.
I think that's my problem right now: I feel farther away from an end point than I did when I finished the first draft! Maybe because "the end" of revisions is a lot harder to define than the end of a first draft.
To top it off, my back is killing me at the moment. Not the kind of debilitating pain that prevents me from moving, but the kind of annoying pain that just makes things difficult. The last time I strained my back like this was last August, when I made the mistake of trying to carry a shoulder back with a computer and a weekend's worth of clothes with me while walking to work (a 25-minute walk). But I can't figure out what caused it this time...though I'm sure sitting in yoga-like positions on desk chairs (a bad habit I developed in high school and never managed to break) probably doesn't help. So yeah, it's just annoying and making me a bit irritable. Painkillers and I don't get along very well, either. Rather than killing pain, anything opiate-based tends to make me look and feel like I'm auditioning for a role in a remake of The Exorcist. No fun.
So for now...I will go re-read my manuscript, again, and I'll figure out how to approach my revisions, again. And hoepfully by Monday I'll be feeling better, mentally and physically.
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Fake it 'til you make it.
Just a quick entry, because I'm tired, but I wanted to share. Lookee what I got for the conference I'm going to this weekend:
My new business card! Behold the prettiness.
(On a slightly unrelated note: I covered up the right portion of the card with my thumb, because I really don't want my address and phone number going out over the entire internet. But now I can't stop staring at my thumb. Is it really that ugly? My nails are pretty ragged and bitten at the moment, and God knows it's been months since I had a manicure, but sheesh! Also, why do I have those weird little divots in my nail? I suspect the chronic nail biting and the freaky-ass nail texture are interrelated.)
So this might seem a bit odd, given my recent post whining about self-doubt, but it's all kind of related. On the one hand, I wonder if I'm being arrogant, tooting my own horn when there isn't anything to toot about. I used to hate people who would talk about their writing as if they were already on the New York Times bestseller list. I, meanwhile, kept hidden in a corner somewhere, afraid people wouldn't take me seriously when I told them I wanted to be a writer. (It was a legitimate fear: they often didn't.) I was afraid people would tell me I wasn't good enough.
I'm still afraid, and I still worry that I look arrogant. Maybe I do. But I'm trying not to care. After all, if I don't believe in myself, who will? And even if I don't really have the confidence I want to have, I'll just fake it for awhile until I do.
Now...let's hope I can take that feigned confidence and use it to actually talk to people I might want to give my business card to at this conference. But that, my friends, is a completely different story.
My new business card! Behold the prettiness.
(On a slightly unrelated note: I covered up the right portion of the card with my thumb, because I really don't want my address and phone number going out over the entire internet. But now I can't stop staring at my thumb. Is it really that ugly? My nails are pretty ragged and bitten at the moment, and God knows it's been months since I had a manicure, but sheesh! Also, why do I have those weird little divots in my nail? I suspect the chronic nail biting and the freaky-ass nail texture are interrelated.)
So this might seem a bit odd, given my recent post whining about self-doubt, but it's all kind of related. On the one hand, I wonder if I'm being arrogant, tooting my own horn when there isn't anything to toot about. I used to hate people who would talk about their writing as if they were already on the New York Times bestseller list. I, meanwhile, kept hidden in a corner somewhere, afraid people wouldn't take me seriously when I told them I wanted to be a writer. (It was a legitimate fear: they often didn't.) I was afraid people would tell me I wasn't good enough.
I'm still afraid, and I still worry that I look arrogant. Maybe I do. But I'm trying not to care. After all, if I don't believe in myself, who will? And even if I don't really have the confidence I want to have, I'll just fake it for awhile until I do.
Now...let's hope I can take that feigned confidence and use it to actually talk to people I might want to give my business card to at this conference. But that, my friends, is a completely different story.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Revision Angst
Now, three months into the revision process, I feel like I'm going nowhere.
I'm trying to go through the story in order, hoping it'll feel less overwhelming that way. I'm on page 64...of 309.
Yeah. So much for that.
There are some reasons for my slowness, besides just the general ickiness of the revision process for me. Between traveling and Sex Week, February was kind of a wash for me. And I just started a new job (at the beginning of last week, actually), which meant that for several weeks before that, my mornings--which I had normally been spending on writing stuff--had been spent doing fun stuff like getting those damn dental appointments out of the way. (On a side note: getting crowns--not fun!) My new job requires me to get in by 7:30. The good news is that I'm usually out by 4:00. The bad news is that I have to be awake, showered, dressed, and out the door by the time I was previously stumbling out of bed. Daylight Savings Time also hit this week, which means that I was actually getting up two hours earlier than I was used to. The rapid schedule change gave me an on-and-off headache that lasted up until yesterday. As such, I spent most of my non-work hours last week...well, sleeping. I haven't reoriented myself to write at night yet.
I know. Excuses excuses.
But I need to try to look on the bright side. The two complete read-throughs I've received so far have really helped me see where I need to go and what I need to do. I think I have a good sense of the characters and the direction of the story now. And the stuff I've revised and workshopped thus far has been getting really good feedback, so I think I'm going in the right direction.
Still, it's hard not to feel overwhelmed, knowing I'm only a fifth of the way into the book and that the scenes that are likely to be hardest to revise are yet in front of me.
About a year and a half ago, I decided to stop treating my fiction writing as a hobby and start treating it like a career. After years of writing, reading, and, more recently,
That said, it's hard to channel the Pollyannish optimism I need when, three months into my revisions, I feel like I'm getting nowhere. The worst of it is that I haven't even gotten to the hard part of the process! Forget revision, which is a pain in the ass for me, but still very much within my own personal control. Soon enough, I'll be sending this poor little novel that I've worked so hard on out into the world. I'll be writing query letters and synopses and flooding the post office with self-addressed, stamped envelopes. And I know what'll come after that: rejection. I got plenty of them even when I was treating writing as more of a hobby than a career. What I will likely get in the future will make the angst I felt then look like a day at Disney World in comparison.
I'm not being pessimistic. I'm trying to be realistic, to brace myself for the inevitable. Sure, I'd love to be one of those authors who gets multi-million dollar, multi-book deals on their first sales, but I'm a nobody from nowhere, and I don't have that kind of luck.
You see, this can-do, fuck-it-all attitude of mine is a relatively new thing for me. Most of my life, my attitude has been more like, "When the going gets tough, give up." I'd like to think the new worldview is a sign of maturity and personal growth. Of course, it also hasn't been tested much yet, and old habits die hard.
I believe I can do this. It will take time. It will also take patience and a thick skin--neither of which are personal strengths.
I believe I can do this. But I have to keep going. So tonight, having whined myself out, I'll go to bed at a reasonable hour, wake up all refreshed, and go to work in the morning. Then, when I come home, I'll put in a couple of hours of revising time before dinner.
I believe I can do this. I just can't let my doubts get in the way anymore.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Anatomy of a Sex Scene, Part 1: The Setup
Last week, I posted an article for CC2K's Sex Week arguing that romance novels are often used for the same type of sexual release in women that pornography is used for in men. In preparation for that article--and honestly, also because it was fun--I read a lot of romances. Seriously. Take a look at the books I've read since January 1; I'd say about 75% of them are romances--as in, they may have other factors (paranormal, usually, because this is me), but they're primarily romance. Of the rest, almost all of them have some kind of romantic subplot. Hell, I think the only book I've read in the past few months that didn't have a sex scene was Clockwork Angel, and that's only because it's YA!
So it makes sense that I've been thinking a lot about sex scenes, both as a reader and as a writer.
Within the romance world, sex scenes come in all shapes and sizes (whoa, bad pun). You have the Jane Austen-esque novels that don't show anything at all. (Did anyone even kiss in a Jane Austen novel? Much as I love Jane Austen, there's some definite sexual repression going on there.) You have the Nicholas Sparks-type novels where you might get a sex scene or two, but they're...tasteful. Discreet. Imagine the written equivalent of a PG-13 movie. It's enough that you know what's going on, but not enough to really be enticing. Then there are sex scenes that are quite graphic and descriptive. The level of descriptiveness can definitely vary a lot. I've been going a bit off the beaten path with my book selections these last few months, so I've read some sex scenes that have definitely pushed my own personal boundaries. But I've also realized that the boundaries between romance and erotica are becoming murkier all the time.
If we're sticking to non-erotica romance, and you wanted to rank, on a scale of 1-10, the hotness factor of sex scenes...J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood series would be a 10. (And, just for the sake of honesty: yes, I am jonesing at the moment. Lover Unleashed, the ninth book in the series, will be released at the end of March. I'm psyched about this one, because for the first time in the series, it's the female character we've been following for several books, not the male.)
I love BDB. It would be so easy to dismiss these books as a guilty pleasure, because they're romances about vampire warriors and the women who love them, but the truth is Ward does her work extremely well. She's created this incredibly complex world with incredibly vivid characters. Whereas other paranormal romance series may only be loosely related to one another, BDB has an ongoing, overarching plot. Although the "main couple" is the focus of the book, side characters and plots are always integral to the story, especially as the series has developed and the world has grown.
Ward's sex scenes are incredibly hot. Yet they're all incredibly different, always an outgrowth of the characters being featured and their relationship. For example (spoilers ahead):
--In Lover Eternal, Rhage fears he'll never be able to really "give" himself to Mary because whenever he gets close to her, the beast that lurks within him awakens. (He's afraid he'll shape-shift into the beast and eat her. I'm sure there's something deeply Freudian about that.) So ultimately, Mary proposes he has himself chained to a bed so that she can see if she's able to take him without the beast appearing. Their relationship has been, up to this point, very loving and tender. Mary seems fairly inexperienced, and Rhage is quite protective of her. It's not surprising that she's kind of freaked out when she sees him chained to the bed (versus thinking it's kinda cool and kinky), but that she tries to tough through it...or that, when Rhage realizes how nervous she is, he kisses her and performs oral sex on her until she has orgasmed and is more comfortable.
On the other hand...
--In Lover Unbound, Vishous is definitely into S&M, as a dominant who very much gets off on control. In life, he's smart, cunning, and ruthless. When Jane enters his world, she's one of the few people who is able, and willing, to go toe-to-toe with him. When Vishous takes Jane back to his apartment and allows her to take him--becoming, for once, the submissive partner, it's an incredible moment. Yes, having Vishous bound and gagged is very kinky, but the important thing is that he's giving her control--something he had always clung to, prided himself in. He's giving himself to her. And though Jane's a little overwhelmed by his Dungeons R' Us setup at first, she quickly finds herself getting into the action.
End spoilers.
So there you go. Both of these involve someone being tied up. But they both evoke different reactions from the characters. (Afterwards, Mary indicates she doesn't want to repeat the experience, whereas Vishious and Jane are later shown much enjoying their games of dominance and submission.) And both scenes make perfect sense in the context of these books, and these relationships.
I could probably go through and describe sex scenes from each of the eight books, just from memory. They're all very different--who knew you could have sex so many different ways? But sex scenes in fiction aren't just about positions or fetishes. Instead, they're about characters and feelings--which is why I argued that romance novels are often more effective as sexual releases for women than porn. It's harder, if not impossible, for us to separate the sex from the feelings, and from that particular relationship, whatever it may be.
There is one somewhat graphic sex scene in my WIP. On my scale of hotness (a 1, just for the sake of argument, being Nicholas Sparks), it would probably be about a 6 or a 7. But as I'm going through my revisions, I'm not quite happy with it. It's tender and soft and kind of poignant...but that doesn't make sense in the context of these characters. These are two people who were crazily attracted to one another on first sight...but also hated one another. Their dynamic is hard and contentious and lustful--even moreso now that I'm doing revisions. Two people who don't like each other much (or like each other more than they'd want to admit) and don't trust each other might have sex. But they wouldn't have soft, sweet, "lovemaking" kind of sex. No! It'll be hard and rough. It might even be a bit violent. And it'll also be crazy hot. 6 or 7? I've got to crank that up to about an 8.5 or more!
But, as I said, it's all about the relationship. The type of sex fictional characters have should be, as in real life, an outgrowth of who these characters are. For my two, it makes sense for them to have hard, violent sex. In another story, with other characters, that might not work.
So it makes sense that I've been thinking a lot about sex scenes, both as a reader and as a writer.
Within the romance world, sex scenes come in all shapes and sizes (whoa, bad pun). You have the Jane Austen-esque novels that don't show anything at all. (Did anyone even kiss in a Jane Austen novel? Much as I love Jane Austen, there's some definite sexual repression going on there.) You have the Nicholas Sparks-type novels where you might get a sex scene or two, but they're...tasteful. Discreet. Imagine the written equivalent of a PG-13 movie. It's enough that you know what's going on, but not enough to really be enticing. Then there are sex scenes that are quite graphic and descriptive. The level of descriptiveness can definitely vary a lot. I've been going a bit off the beaten path with my book selections these last few months, so I've read some sex scenes that have definitely pushed my own personal boundaries. But I've also realized that the boundaries between romance and erotica are becoming murkier all the time.
I love BDB. It would be so easy to dismiss these books as a guilty pleasure, because they're romances about vampire warriors and the women who love them, but the truth is Ward does her work extremely well. She's created this incredibly complex world with incredibly vivid characters. Whereas other paranormal romance series may only be loosely related to one another, BDB has an ongoing, overarching plot. Although the "main couple" is the focus of the book, side characters and plots are always integral to the story, especially as the series has developed and the world has grown.
Ward's sex scenes are incredibly hot. Yet they're all incredibly different, always an outgrowth of the characters being featured and their relationship. For example (spoilers ahead):
--In Lover Eternal, Rhage fears he'll never be able to really "give" himself to Mary because whenever he gets close to her, the beast that lurks within him awakens. (He's afraid he'll shape-shift into the beast and eat her. I'm sure there's something deeply Freudian about that.) So ultimately, Mary proposes he has himself chained to a bed so that she can see if she's able to take him without the beast appearing. Their relationship has been, up to this point, very loving and tender. Mary seems fairly inexperienced, and Rhage is quite protective of her. It's not surprising that she's kind of freaked out when she sees him chained to the bed (versus thinking it's kinda cool and kinky), but that she tries to tough through it...or that, when Rhage realizes how nervous she is, he kisses her and performs oral sex on her until she has orgasmed and is more comfortable.
On the other hand...
--In Lover Unbound, Vishous is definitely into S&M, as a dominant who very much gets off on control. In life, he's smart, cunning, and ruthless. When Jane enters his world, she's one of the few people who is able, and willing, to go toe-to-toe with him. When Vishous takes Jane back to his apartment and allows her to take him--becoming, for once, the submissive partner, it's an incredible moment. Yes, having Vishous bound and gagged is very kinky, but the important thing is that he's giving her control--something he had always clung to, prided himself in. He's giving himself to her. And though Jane's a little overwhelmed by his Dungeons R' Us setup at first, she quickly finds herself getting into the action.
End spoilers.
So there you go. Both of these involve someone being tied up. But they both evoke different reactions from the characters. (Afterwards, Mary indicates she doesn't want to repeat the experience, whereas Vishious and Jane are later shown much enjoying their games of dominance and submission.) And both scenes make perfect sense in the context of these books, and these relationships.
I could probably go through and describe sex scenes from each of the eight books, just from memory. They're all very different--who knew you could have sex so many different ways? But sex scenes in fiction aren't just about positions or fetishes. Instead, they're about characters and feelings--which is why I argued that romance novels are often more effective as sexual releases for women than porn. It's harder, if not impossible, for us to separate the sex from the feelings, and from that particular relationship, whatever it may be.
There is one somewhat graphic sex scene in my WIP. On my scale of hotness (a 1, just for the sake of argument, being Nicholas Sparks), it would probably be about a 6 or a 7. But as I'm going through my revisions, I'm not quite happy with it. It's tender and soft and kind of poignant...but that doesn't make sense in the context of these characters. These are two people who were crazily attracted to one another on first sight...but also hated one another. Their dynamic is hard and contentious and lustful--even moreso now that I'm doing revisions. Two people who don't like each other much (or like each other more than they'd want to admit) and don't trust each other might have sex. But they wouldn't have soft, sweet, "lovemaking" kind of sex. No! It'll be hard and rough. It might even be a bit violent. And it'll also be crazy hot. 6 or 7? I've got to crank that up to about an 8.5 or more!
But, as I said, it's all about the relationship. The type of sex fictional characters have should be, as in real life, an outgrowth of who these characters are. For my two, it makes sense for them to have hard, violent sex. In another story, with other characters, that might not work.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Likeable Characters
I'm having a bit of a dilemma with my novel. I want my protagonist to be a likeable, sympathetic heroine. But she does bad things. In her case, she kills people. She can't control it; she goes into trance-like states that she can't remember afterwards. And she usually kills "bad" people, people who are either physically hurting her or someone else.
Of my two beta readers, one of them likes the heroine and one of them does not. When I've read bits and pieces of it in my writing workshop, I've received similarly mixed reactions--though, judging by the reactions I've received on excerpts I've read more recently, I've softened her edges enough to win over most of my classmates.
The beta reader who does like her says she understands that the character is remorseful for her actions, that she genuinely seems troubled by the things she's done. The beta reader who doesn't says that she's not remorseful enough, that she doesn't do enough "good" things to balance it out, and that she doesn't believe that the protagonist is genuine in her interactions with other characters. (Which is true, in part: this is a woman who has lived under various false identities for 10 years, so there's always a delicate balance of truth/lies in how she presents herself to people.) She also has a problem, in general, with killing, her perspective being that killing is always immoral, so she inherently has more trouble sympathizing with a character who kills.
My male lead, I think, is even more problematic. He does some pretty f***ed up things in the book, things that I can neither sympathize nor agree with. Yet I still want him to be likeable, as well--mostly, anyway.
So that brings us to three questions:
For me, I can root for characters who do bad things. One of my favorite romantic leads is Edward Rochester from Jane Eyre. He's controlling and domineering. He's cold and condescending toward everyone but Jane. He has a young ward who may or may not be his daughter, and he barely acknowledges her. And when he falls in love with Jane, he proposes to her--despite the fact that he's already married. Oh, and, he locks his mentally ill wife in an attic. Lemmie say that again, just for effect: he locks his wife in an attic. Then when Jane discovers his betrayal--on their wedding day, no less--Rochester tells her to just disregard the wife; they'll run away together and Jane will become his mistress. Really, Rochester, WTF?
Yet every time I read the book, I root for his and Jane's happily ever after. He loves her, and she loves him. His wife was crazy, and he was coerced into that marriage. But he didn't treat his wife--or Jane--very well. I can't excuse it, but I can forgive it.
Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights...well, I won't talk about him much, because I just gave a friend (and one of my blog followers) the book as a Christmas/birthday present, and I'd hate to spoil it for her. Even the much-lauded Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice--lest we forget that the slight that kept him and Elizabeth apart most of the book was that he said she wasn't hot enough for him!
One of my favorite contemporary fiction authors is Jeaniene Frost. In her Night Huntress series, the heroine, Cat, hunts vampires, believing that they are evil. Bones, the hero, is a vampire--and a bounty hunter. When they meet, she tries to kill him, and he kidnaps her and chains her up in a cave, beating her up to try and get information out of her. There's lots of blood and death in these books. Yet I root for them, and their relationship, anyway. Why? Because I feel that, in spite of the things they've done, they're ultimately on the side of "good" overall. They try to do what's right, and they don't always succeed. And that's okay with me.
I tend to revel in ethical gray area. One of the things I've been thinking about, as I write this story, is whether there is any such thing as good and evil. Morality is a human construct, and what we deem "good" and "bad" has changed significantly over the years, as well as the way we punish illegal or immoral behavior.
So what causes a character to be likeable or unlikeable? Likeability is a very personal thing. I can tolerate characters who do a lot of bad things, especially if they do them for the right reasons. Rochester keeps his wife in an attic, but only because he feels she's a danger to herself and others (mental hospitals being a lot less prevalent in the early 19th century). He asks Jane to run away with him and become his mistress, but only because he loved her so much that he couldn't bear to lose her.
Darcy, meanwhile, almost lost me during my first reading of Pride and Prejudice with his crack about Elizabeth's appearance. I hated him almost as much as Elizabeth did--probably more! On the surface, his transgression is much more minor than Rochester's: making a snide remark about a woman he's barely looked at, when he had no knowledge that she could hear him. He was cranky, and he disliked parties. But his comments were mean and hurtful, and I had trouble looking past them.
I'm considering abandoning one book series I've been following partially because I'm having more and more trouble liking the main character. She's very moral and upstanding, so that's not the problem. But she loves to throw sarcastic barbs at people, comments that cross the line from funny to just plain mean. She hurts people's feelings, and I don't like that. Is she unsympathetic? No. But she's unlikeable, at least for me.
Murder most foul--no problem there. Meanness, on the other hand...you're on my shit list. I think my priorities are skewed.
The Great Gatsby. Gatsby is a bootlegger with ties to organized crime. Yet he only got involved with that life to win the affection of Daisy, the woman he had loved and lost to a richer man. Meanwhile, shallow, superficial Daisy is really guilty of nothing more than toying with him a bit and choosing to stay with her husband. (The accident at the end was, indeed, an accident, and Gatsby plays more of a role in covering her involvement up than Daisy does.) Yet Gatsby is, to me, both likeable and sympathetic, the tragic hero of the story--and for my money, Daisy Buchanan is one the most unsympathetic, unlikeable characters in fiction. Their transgressions are roughly equal; perhaps Gatsby's are even greater. But Daisy, throughout the story, is insipid and selfish, toying with Gatsby because she doesn't want to leave the old money status her husband provides (this despite the fact that she knows he's cheating on her). Gatsby only became involved with bootlegging and the mob because he wanted the money to win Daisy--a futile effort, since it wasn't the right kind of money.
When my 12th grade AP English class covered Crime and Punishment back in high school, I couldn't even finish the damn thing. Although senioritis was partially to blame, I'm sure, part of it was that I despised the lead character, Raskolnikov. Within the first 50 pages of the book, he kills a pawnbroker and another woman (her niece, as I recall) just to prove he can. He thinks he's better and higher than other people, therefore he was entitled to do such things. I was done with Raskolnikov right there, and I still haven't gone back.
On another note: funny how most of the characters I've talked about are men. I wonder--and I'm probably opening Pandora's box by saying this--whether we're more willing to forgive transgressions when they're committed by male characters than female ones. Back to the Night Huntress series: I remember Jeaniene Frost saying in an interview that the character that she most often hears criticized in the series is Justina, Cat's mother. Justina believes that vampires are evil and encourages Cat to kill them--despite the fact that Cat is half vampire herself. Poor Cat starts the series with a massive inferority complex because of this treatment, knowing that her mother thinks she's "half evil" and that she must constantly prove herself to her mother by hunting vamps. Unlike Cat and Bones, Justina has never killed anyone. She's a good, law-abiding person by most standards. Are her acts really any worse than Bones's?
I, personally, like Justina. There were extenuating circumstances fueling her belief that vampires are evil, and she softens and evolves throughout the series. Plus, anyone with gumption enough to stand up to a vampire like Bones and basically tell him to go to hell--despite the fact that she's only human, and Bones could crush her like a bug--is pretty awesome in my book!
Of my two beta readers, one of them likes the heroine and one of them does not. When I've read bits and pieces of it in my writing workshop, I've received similarly mixed reactions--though, judging by the reactions I've received on excerpts I've read more recently, I've softened her edges enough to win over most of my classmates.
The beta reader who does like her says she understands that the character is remorseful for her actions, that she genuinely seems troubled by the things she's done. The beta reader who doesn't says that she's not remorseful enough, that she doesn't do enough "good" things to balance it out, and that she doesn't believe that the protagonist is genuine in her interactions with other characters. (Which is true, in part: this is a woman who has lived under various false identities for 10 years, so there's always a delicate balance of truth/lies in how she presents herself to people.) She also has a problem, in general, with killing, her perspective being that killing is always immoral, so she inherently has more trouble sympathizing with a character who kills.
My male lead, I think, is even more problematic. He does some pretty f***ed up things in the book, things that I can neither sympathize nor agree with. Yet I still want him to be likeable, as well--mostly, anyway.
So that brings us to three questions:
- What makes a sympathetic protagonist?
- Must a protagonist be sympathetic to be likeable?
- Can a character do things we disagree with and yet still be likeable?
 |
| Orson Welles, from the 1944 version of Jane Eyre. My favorite Rochester. |
Yet every time I read the book, I root for his and Jane's happily ever after. He loves her, and she loves him. His wife was crazy, and he was coerced into that marriage. But he didn't treat his wife--or Jane--very well. I can't excuse it, but I can forgive it.
Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights...well, I won't talk about him much, because I just gave a friend (and one of my blog followers) the book as a Christmas/birthday present, and I'd hate to spoil it for her. Even the much-lauded Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice--lest we forget that the slight that kept him and Elizabeth apart most of the book was that he said she wasn't hot enough for him!
One of my favorite contemporary fiction authors is Jeaniene Frost. In her Night Huntress series, the heroine, Cat, hunts vampires, believing that they are evil. Bones, the hero, is a vampire--and a bounty hunter. When they meet, she tries to kill him, and he kidnaps her and chains her up in a cave, beating her up to try and get information out of her. There's lots of blood and death in these books. Yet I root for them, and their relationship, anyway. Why? Because I feel that, in spite of the things they've done, they're ultimately on the side of "good" overall. They try to do what's right, and they don't always succeed. And that's okay with me.
I tend to revel in ethical gray area. One of the things I've been thinking about, as I write this story, is whether there is any such thing as good and evil. Morality is a human construct, and what we deem "good" and "bad" has changed significantly over the years, as well as the way we punish illegal or immoral behavior.
So what causes a character to be likeable or unlikeable? Likeability is a very personal thing. I can tolerate characters who do a lot of bad things, especially if they do them for the right reasons. Rochester keeps his wife in an attic, but only because he feels she's a danger to herself and others (mental hospitals being a lot less prevalent in the early 19th century). He asks Jane to run away with him and become his mistress, but only because he loved her so much that he couldn't bear to lose her.
Darcy, meanwhile, almost lost me during my first reading of Pride and Prejudice with his crack about Elizabeth's appearance. I hated him almost as much as Elizabeth did--probably more! On the surface, his transgression is much more minor than Rochester's: making a snide remark about a woman he's barely looked at, when he had no knowledge that she could hear him. He was cranky, and he disliked parties. But his comments were mean and hurtful, and I had trouble looking past them.
I'm considering abandoning one book series I've been following partially because I'm having more and more trouble liking the main character. She's very moral and upstanding, so that's not the problem. But she loves to throw sarcastic barbs at people, comments that cross the line from funny to just plain mean. She hurts people's feelings, and I don't like that. Is she unsympathetic? No. But she's unlikeable, at least for me.
Murder most foul--no problem there. Meanness, on the other hand...you're on my shit list. I think my priorities are skewed.
When my 12th grade AP English class covered Crime and Punishment back in high school, I couldn't even finish the damn thing. Although senioritis was partially to blame, I'm sure, part of it was that I despised the lead character, Raskolnikov. Within the first 50 pages of the book, he kills a pawnbroker and another woman (her niece, as I recall) just to prove he can. He thinks he's better and higher than other people, therefore he was entitled to do such things. I was done with Raskolnikov right there, and I still haven't gone back.
On another note: funny how most of the characters I've talked about are men. I wonder--and I'm probably opening Pandora's box by saying this--whether we're more willing to forgive transgressions when they're committed by male characters than female ones. Back to the Night Huntress series: I remember Jeaniene Frost saying in an interview that the character that she most often hears criticized in the series is Justina, Cat's mother. Justina believes that vampires are evil and encourages Cat to kill them--despite the fact that Cat is half vampire herself. Poor Cat starts the series with a massive inferority complex because of this treatment, knowing that her mother thinks she's "half evil" and that she must constantly prove herself to her mother by hunting vamps. Unlike Cat and Bones, Justina has never killed anyone. She's a good, law-abiding person by most standards. Are her acts really any worse than Bones's?
I, personally, like Justina. There were extenuating circumstances fueling her belief that vampires are evil, and she softens and evolves throughout the series. Plus, anyone with gumption enough to stand up to a vampire like Bones and basically tell him to go to hell--despite the fact that she's only human, and Bones could crush her like a bug--is pretty awesome in my book!
Friday, January 14, 2011
Critique
I know of writers who refuse to let anyone else read their work. They feel that other people can't truly understand their work well enough to give a valid critique. Plus, some worry that someone else might steal their ideas. To which I would probably reply: dude, you're not that good. I suspect most creative writers have too much pride to steal someone else's work. It would be like admitting defeat: I'm not good enough, so I'm going to take someone else's work. Plus, believing someone will steal your work means that you're going in with the assumption that your work is good enough to steal. (Why would someone steal bad work?) I think that's kind of a dangerous assumption, and leads to the kinds of writers who will dismiss critiques outhand without even listening to them.
I, on the other hand, firmly believe in critiques. Why? Because it's my intention to publish my work for an audience. The people who critique my work act as a test audience for me, and before I submit my work to agents/editors, I want to know that it's as strong as it can be.
But I really, truly wish that someone would set up some rules for critiques. Because I've heard good ones, and I've heard bad ones--and the distinction has nothing to do with the content of the critique.
And so, if I were the Master of the Universe (like He-Man!)
Beth's Rules for Good Critiques
- Start out with what you liked, and preferably why. Nobody likes having their work ripped apart. When you put so much thought and effort into something, it's disheartening to hear, "It sucks." I'm no exception. But a spoonful of sugar really does help the medicine go down. Tell the writer the things you liked first. Ease him/her into the criticism. Writer X may be more likely to take it if he/she doesn't feel like he/she's been massacred. And if you can, articulate why you liked a certain thing. That's not always possible, but it helps a writer to know what he/she did well.
- If you can't say something nice, maybe you shouldn't say anything. This isn't always possible; I've been in classes/groups where you've been required to give critiques. And at times, I've really had to scrape the bottom of the barrell for something nice to say. (I haven't quite resorted to, "You've got pretty font and good quality paper," yet, but I've gotten pretty close.) Sometimes--and I know I'm probably betraying my writer bretheren by saying this--something just sucks. It may not have redeeming value. But remember that a) what is good, and what sucks, is a matter of personal preference, and b) no matter how much you think something sucked, the writer still worked hard on it. I've kept my mouth shut in my current writers' workshop more than once. At times, I've piggybacked off of others' nicer critiques to offer my own more negative assessment. I won't be dishonest, but sometimes what might come out of my mouth would be too harsh to be useful, anyway.
- Explain why you didn't like things, if you can. "This sucks," is as useless as a critique as, "This is awesome." Why does it suck? What's wrong with it? Where are the areas of weakness? Why didn't you like it? This will help the writer determine what can be improved and whether it's a valid critique.
- Be nice. Back to, "This sucks." Even if it weren't completely useless, it's also unnecessarily mean and hurtful. When you critique something that doesn't work for you, don't be a jerk. (It goes back to rule #2).
- Critique the work that is, not the work that could be. I have a very bad habit, as a reader: I tend to insert myself into the place of the protagonist (or the main female character) and imagine how things should play out in my head. But that's not my decision, in the end, and I know that. You are not the author. Don't try to rewrite the author's story for him/her. I love reading fantasy and sci-fi, but I'm not much into straight romance. If I was critiquing someone who wrote straight romance, I wouldn't say, "I think this would be better with aliens." In a way, you have to take your personal preferences out. Consider whether you didn't like something because it's not your normal genre, or because it simply didn't read well.
As a writer, there should be a few rules for accepting critiques, too.
- When you're on the receiving end of the critiques, listen to them. Let me explain: critiques of your work will not be right all the time. You will not take every criticism and change your work based on it. (Since many could be contradictory, you'd be in trouble if you tried.) But don't get up on your high horse and say, "Well, they just don't appreciate my style/my vision/what I'm doing/etc." Maybe they don't. But maybe you don't have an accurate view of the strengths/failings of your work, either. Those people have taken the time to read your work, engage with it, and think about it. The least you can do is listen to them and consider their perspective.
- Don't go into a critique group/writing workshop/etc. with the expectation of universal acclaim. Writing is a very self-serving pursuit, I'll admit it. Most of us have got some egos on us. I'm no exception. And I love the times when I read something and I get nothing but praise. It's an awesome feeling. But the next week, I could read something that will be torn to pieces and come out feeling bloody and raw (and believe me, I have). It's the name of the game, and I've got to take it all for what it is. Your writing is not The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread. You've come into that critique group/writing workshop/etc. of your own free will, and the goal of that situation is to get critiques. Those people are trying to help you make your writing the best it can be. They are not there to tell you how wonderful and great you are. If that's what you want, read it to your mother, your spouse, your adoring 4-year-old child/grandchild, and maybe your dog--the people in your life who think your shit doesn't stink. If you want to publish it, on the other hand, learn to take your lumps--because editors, in all likelihood, won't be as gentle as your critique group.
- Be gracious. You will run into idiots. People will critique your work whose very existence offends you. Maybe their critiques are completely off-target. Maybe they strike you as being a total moron. Maybe they ran your story through an online translator, and accidentally read it in Pig Latin. It doesn't matter. Again, these are people who took the time to read and engage with your work. Just because they didn't like it, or just because you think they're wrong, doesn't mean you should get all snooty and condescending (a personal pet peeve) or tell them to go f-themselves (which I could tolerate better than snootiness, honestly).
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Inner Angry Monster does revisions
It's revision time, again.
I'm channeling my inner angry monster. It hates my work. It thinks I suck. It picks me apart. But lucky for me, my angry monster and I have an understanding: it can be as critical as it wants to be, and it doesn't hurt my feelings. Something about it actually being a part of my psyche seems to shelter me from the feelings of worthlessness that usually accompany a harsh critique.
So we've talked, and I've agreed to let the angry monster take over the keyboard temporarily, to give me an honest assessment of what he (she?) thinks of my manuscript thus far. (He/she has read about 40% of it, thus far.)
Introducing: my inner angry monster!
I'm channeling my inner angry monster. It hates my work. It thinks I suck. It picks me apart. But lucky for me, my angry monster and I have an understanding: it can be as critical as it wants to be, and it doesn't hurt my feelings. Something about it actually being a part of my psyche seems to shelter me from the feelings of worthlessness that usually accompany a harsh critique.
So we've talked, and I've agreed to let the angry monster take over the keyboard temporarily, to give me an honest assessment of what he (she?) thinks of my manuscript thus far. (He/she has read about 40% of it, thus far.)
Introducing: my inner angry monster!
***
Hi. I'm Beth's inner angry monster. You can call me Growl. (Yes, I am male. Isn't that obvious by looking at me? She can be such a moron sometimes!)
But really, this is for Beth, so she can get an honest assessment of what I think of the first 40% of her novel. Because someone needs to kick her off her high horse and tell her when things suck. Not sure why she wanted me to blog to do it, considering her only two followers are, at the moment, also the other ones reading the manuscript. But whatever. I guess she's just pretending they won't read this. Yeah, whatever. Pay no attention to that monster behind the curtain. *Snort*
Okay, Beth, here it is. You talk too much. And by talk I mean write. (But you talk too much, too.) Your prose is repetitive, and sometimes you say things that are already obvious from what's going on in the scene. Tone down the inner monologue. You're not Woody Allen! Often, we know what your protagonist is thinking by what she does/how she reacts. You don't have to explain it ad nauseum. We're not stupid. Same thing with the other characters.
What's the deal with your heroine and hero? I mean, they seem to go from zero to 60 pretty quickly, if you know what I mean. I think you need more sex and/or violence in those early scenes between them. Not that they need to have sex right away. (Not that I'd ever object to sex...especially hot monster sex...yummy!) And they don't need to kill each other. But do they hate each other, or are they attracted to one another? Maybe it's both. (And yes, I'm benefitting from my unfortunate insights into your brain...ugh.) So show it. I want to smell the sex and blood. Whoohoo!
(Monsters are hedonists, by the way. Or at least I am. Just thought you should know, for the record.)
You've got some consistency problems. How long did your heroine live in New York? How many super-secret special necklaces does she have, exactly? Is her former best friend dead or not? Really, Beth, this is just careless. Don't you know your own story?
Chapter 1 starts a few weeks after the prologue, but the story doesn't actually start until six months, and several scenes, later. I think you should cut out those in-between scenes and just get to the meat. Mmmm, meat.
Ummm...Growl?...Beth here. Is there anything you did like?
Why should I tell you that?
Because it's generally accepted within a critique that you'll tell the author both what you liked and what you didn't.
Ugh, fine. I liked your opening scene. That's awesome. There's lots of blood. And your heroine feels bad about what's happened, so it's not like she's a complete monster. I am, so I wouldn't mind if she were, but I don't think that's what you were going for.
And when you do show sexual tension between hero and heroine, it's awesome. I should want them to bang all the time. You have it when they first meet, and you have it later on, at the bar and afterwards, but not so much in between.
I like your violent scenes. Violence = fun!
And I like that your heroine has a nice rack.
It's a novel. How would you know she has a nice rack?
Because she has a nice rack in my head! Plus, you said it in the story.
Oh...uh...thank you?
You're welcome. That's just how I roll.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Who do we write for?
I remember one man in particular, an older guy who participated in a class I was in about two years ago. He was writing historical fiction. He seemed to believe that adjectives and adverbs were a substitute for nouns and verbs, and that pages upon pages of scenery description should precede every action. His work was tedious, heavy-handed, and difficult to read/understand.
This was almost universally commented upon by the class. "Cut back on the adjectives/adverbs," we told him. "Description is not a substitute for character or plot." He was very resistant to our feedback. (Naturally, he was also the kind of guy who would eviscerate other people's work without a second thought.) Finally, he said to us, "Well, I don't think I'm going to change anything. This is my style and I like it like that."
Which, given that this guy was a jerk and had blatantly disregarded everyone's critiques of his work--while scornfully cutting others to pieces--I said, with no small amount of disdain, "Well, then, if you don't want to revise your work based on other people's feedback, why are you even in this class?"
The guy, as I said, was a jerk. He was snobbish and condescending, and he took the class because he wanted everyone to fawn all over him. But the argument itself brings up an interesting question: who do we write for, ourselves or the audience?
Everyone who writes does so, first and foremost, for themselves. I mean, we wouldn't do it if we didn't like it. And if that's the extent of it, and you have no further interst than keeping your writing stored away in your sock drawer, than good for you. But my belief is that, for people who want to be published, you have to take what other people think and react into consideration.
A few years ago, I interviewed Charlie Kaufman. I love his work. Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, both of which he wrote, were awesome. He had just finished his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. He told me then that he hadn't screened the film with focus groups, believing that movies become more cliched and generic when they're subjected to more voices. Except, of all of Kaufman's work, I enjoyed Synedoche the least. I kept waiting for something to happen, and it didn't. I kept waiting for it to make sense, but it didn't. I felt like that kid who pointed out that the Emperor was, indeed, naked.
That said, other people aren't always right, either. I wrote a story once where there was a very violent scene at the beginning. I describe it in fairly graphic detail. When I read the story in a workshop, several people in the class advised me to take it out or tone it down. I didn't. The story is about a woman whose brother is a serial killer, and an act she watches him commit when she is a child haunts her for years; even after he is arrested, she believes that maybe she could have stopped him if only she had told someone what happened. To tone it down would be negating the point. The incident ravages her character. It stayed.
I think there's a happy medium here. You, as the author, know what story you're trying to tell. But at the same time, I think we get a myopic view of our own work. It's hard to see the inherent flaws and problems with our own stuff, because we're just too close to it. I know what I wanted to say. I like to use other people's feedback to judge how far I really am from that goal.
And sometimes, hearing feedback from other people can take you off in entirely new directions altogether. My just-finished novel draft actually started as a piece of flash fiction. When I brought it into the workshop to read, people bombarded me with questions about what the narrator acted the way she did and what was wrong with her. (In their defense, she kills a guy before the story even begins, so "What's wrong with her?" wasn't an unreasonable question.) At the time, I had no idea what was wrong with her, but my crazy brain started playing with it. The whole story started because I was trying to answer that one question. Crazy thing.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Revision
Today I finished the first draft of a novel I've been working on for about six months, tenatively titled Human Blood. (Macabre, right? Hehe...)
I love writing first drafts. Not that it can't be challenging in and of itself, but the first draft is like a roller coaster to me: fun and exciting, and you have no idea what's coming next. I don't generally know much about my story when I start a first draft. I'll have a few vague ideas, but no clue how I'm putting them together. Maybe I'll know the beginning. Maybe I'll know the ending. But I never have any idea how I'm getting there.
When I started Human Blood, I had only one scene and one character. There was blood and death, but I had no idea how it happened or what it had to do with my narrator. Originally, I had envisioned it as a short-short, a teasing little piece of flash fiction. Six months and 94,000 words later, I clearly can't call it that anymore!
That all changed when I took the piece to a writer's group that I participate in. After I read it, I was peppered with questions about who my narrator was, why she acted the way she did, whether she was crazy or not, whether she was possessed, etc. (I wasn't offended by these questions. My narrator's behavior was, shall I say, a little outside the mainstream.) At the time, I didn't have any answers to these questions. But my mind--being the weird and strange place that it is--started to chew them over. And I started to write.
So when I say that I had absolutely no idea where the story was going when I started, I'm not kidding. Writing the first draft has been a big, exciting adventure for me. You open up that MS Word file for the first time, and the possibilities are limitless. All avenues are open to you. The sky's the limit!
But if first drafting is a big, exciting adventure, revising is like solving a Rubix cube or a Soduku puzzle--neither of which I'm any good at! Six months ago I had no idea where the story was going. Now, I know exactly who these characters are and why they've acted the way they did. But I know the story has rough spots; I already have a sense of what some of them are, and I'm going to work on them. Others, I won't figure out until someone actually reads the story. But the possibilities are no longer endless. To make this story stronger, I have to work within the framework of what I've already created.
So maybe the Rubix cube and Soduku puzzle weren't the best metaphors. It's more like Jenga--that game where you attempt to remove individual blocks from a tower without knocking over the rest. It's one thing to copy edit and wordsmith. It's another to change entire scenes. If I change a scene on page 50, how is that going to affect how things play out on page 200? How can I do this without messing up the rest of the story? Jenga. Also, there's no one right way to do it. What doesn't work for one reader might be the best part of the story for another. Who's right? Who's wrong? What do I do to keep from strangling people? Revision, for me, is scary and frustrating and makes me want to pull my hair out.
But I know this is a necessary part of the process, and I know if I want to make that transition from "hobbyist" to "professional," it's something I must do. So I'll suck it up, and I'll do the best I can. And meanwhile, I may work on another first draft just to break some of the tension inherent to my revision process. I have another idea bouncing around in my head, and it's a little lighter and funnier than the one I've been working on.
Something tells me "light" and "funny" are exactly what I'm going to need while I'm revising.
I love writing first drafts. Not that it can't be challenging in and of itself, but the first draft is like a roller coaster to me: fun and exciting, and you have no idea what's coming next. I don't generally know much about my story when I start a first draft. I'll have a few vague ideas, but no clue how I'm putting them together. Maybe I'll know the beginning. Maybe I'll know the ending. But I never have any idea how I'm getting there.
When I started Human Blood, I had only one scene and one character. There was blood and death, but I had no idea how it happened or what it had to do with my narrator. Originally, I had envisioned it as a short-short, a teasing little piece of flash fiction. Six months and 94,000 words later, I clearly can't call it that anymore!
That all changed when I took the piece to a writer's group that I participate in. After I read it, I was peppered with questions about who my narrator was, why she acted the way she did, whether she was crazy or not, whether she was possessed, etc. (I wasn't offended by these questions. My narrator's behavior was, shall I say, a little outside the mainstream.) At the time, I didn't have any answers to these questions. But my mind--being the weird and strange place that it is--started to chew them over. And I started to write.
So when I say that I had absolutely no idea where the story was going when I started, I'm not kidding. Writing the first draft has been a big, exciting adventure for me. You open up that MS Word file for the first time, and the possibilities are limitless. All avenues are open to you. The sky's the limit!
But if first drafting is a big, exciting adventure, revising is like solving a Rubix cube or a Soduku puzzle--neither of which I'm any good at! Six months ago I had no idea where the story was going. Now, I know exactly who these characters are and why they've acted the way they did. But I know the story has rough spots; I already have a sense of what some of them are, and I'm going to work on them. Others, I won't figure out until someone actually reads the story. But the possibilities are no longer endless. To make this story stronger, I have to work within the framework of what I've already created.
So maybe the Rubix cube and Soduku puzzle weren't the best metaphors. It's more like Jenga--that game where you attempt to remove individual blocks from a tower without knocking over the rest. It's one thing to copy edit and wordsmith. It's another to change entire scenes. If I change a scene on page 50, how is that going to affect how things play out on page 200? How can I do this without messing up the rest of the story? Jenga. Also, there's no one right way to do it. What doesn't work for one reader might be the best part of the story for another. Who's right? Who's wrong? What do I do to keep from strangling people? Revision, for me, is scary and frustrating and makes me want to pull my hair out.
But I know this is a necessary part of the process, and I know if I want to make that transition from "hobbyist" to "professional," it's something I must do. So I'll suck it up, and I'll do the best I can. And meanwhile, I may work on another first draft just to break some of the tension inherent to my revision process. I have another idea bouncing around in my head, and it's a little lighter and funnier than the one I've been working on.
Something tells me "light" and "funny" are exactly what I'm going to need while I'm revising.
The Inagural Post: Why I Write and Why I Read
So I've decided to start a blog.
I have no idea why I'm doing it. I have no idea whether anyone will read it. Not for awhile, I suspect. Which is fine. Gives me a chance to get the lay of the land, so to speak.
There are two things I do pretty frequently, more often than anything else: writing and reading. I don't really have any other hobbies, so to speak. I like cooking, but I live alone and I'm a picky eater. I like dancing, but I hate crowds and I don't have a boyfriend. I used to like television and movies, but now I can't remember the last time I went to the theater and I can't even find my remote control half the time.
So that's what I do. I write. And I read. And that's that.
And this is fine with me. I have great friends, a good job, a nice (albeit quite messy, most of the time) apartment, and I love my life. Being a book girl is awesome.
My love of reading started very early. As a kid, I had a difficult time socially--that's just another way of saying I was a pariah--so books became my escape, and the characters became my friends. Anne Shirley. Meg Murray. These were the girls I related to growing up. As I got older, I moved on to Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. (Ah, yes, despite my cynical facade, I am a sap. I am a sucker for the romances.) More recently, I've been reading a lot of urban fantasy and paranormal romances. I love supernatural stuff. I've always been a big believer in a world full of possibilities.
As for writing...well, that one is simpler: I am a megalomaniac. The books you read don't always end the way you want them to. The books you write do. I get to create a world and its inhabitants. Then I get to control it. I am a god. HAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Seriously, though, I live half my life in my head making stuff up, anyway. I'm a regular Walter Mitty. I might as well use writing as an outlet for it.
At any rate, since I need a place to keep track of them anyway, here are my reading and writing-related resolutions for 2011:
I have no idea why I'm doing it. I have no idea whether anyone will read it. Not for awhile, I suspect. Which is fine. Gives me a chance to get the lay of the land, so to speak.
There are two things I do pretty frequently, more often than anything else: writing and reading. I don't really have any other hobbies, so to speak. I like cooking, but I live alone and I'm a picky eater. I like dancing, but I hate crowds and I don't have a boyfriend. I used to like television and movies, but now I can't remember the last time I went to the theater and I can't even find my remote control half the time.
So that's what I do. I write. And I read. And that's that.
And this is fine with me. I have great friends, a good job, a nice (albeit quite messy, most of the time) apartment, and I love my life. Being a book girl is awesome.
My love of reading started very early. As a kid, I had a difficult time socially--that's just another way of saying I was a pariah--so books became my escape, and the characters became my friends. Anne Shirley. Meg Murray. These were the girls I related to growing up. As I got older, I moved on to Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. (Ah, yes, despite my cynical facade, I am a sap. I am a sucker for the romances.) More recently, I've been reading a lot of urban fantasy and paranormal romances. I love supernatural stuff. I've always been a big believer in a world full of possibilities.
As for writing...well, that one is simpler: I am a megalomaniac. The books you read don't always end the way you want them to. The books you write do. I get to create a world and its inhabitants. Then I get to control it. I am a god. HAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Seriously, though, I live half my life in my head making stuff up, anyway. I'm a regular Walter Mitty. I might as well use writing as an outlet for it.
At any rate, since I need a place to keep track of them anyway, here are my reading and writing-related resolutions for 2011:
Reading Resolutions
1. Keep track of the books I read. I read a lot of books in 2010. Too bad I have absolutely no idea which books, or how many
2. Be more open to new genres and authors.
3. Along the same line, take more reading suggestions. As the Book Editor over at cc2konline.com, I really should try to be more open and diverse in my reading. (Of course, the advantage of having my own personal blog is that, on it, I can be as self-indulgent in my reading as I want!)
Writing Resolutions
1. Revise that manuscript of the first draft I just finished.
2. Join some critique groups.
3. Learn to take criticism better. (I've got a long way to go on this one.)
4. Start submitting to agents/publishers before the end of 2011.
5. Work on something else as I'm revising, so I don't want to tear my hair out.
Oh, boy. Something tells me it could be a long year...
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