Movies I Always Quote From:
1) Finding Nemo:
"Look, something shiny! Let's follow it over the trench!"
"What's wrong, grumpy gills?"
"Gather!"
"That's where I would play."
"It's wicked dahk down there."
"Ess-CAH-pay!"
2) Clueless:
"That's totally harsh, Tai."
"I totally paused."
"We can totally party with the Haiti-ans."
[breaking off in mid-thought] "--ooh, I wonder if they have that in my size."
"Do you know what you're talking about?" "Why, do I sound like I do?"
"As IF!"
3) Heathers:
"What's your damage, Heather??"
4) Half-Baked:
"Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you... you're cool... and fuck you."
"What, man-- you go to pot college?"
5) Night on Earth:
"I'm sorry I sound calm. I assure you, I'm hysterical."
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Listify Life: Week 11
My Favorite Places to Waste Time on the Internet:
1) Rapping about writing on the message boards at Absolute Write.
2) Playing name games on the message boards at Baby Names.
3) Taking quizzes at Sporcle.
4) Browsing eye-popping art at Deviant Art.
5) YouTube. Duh.
1) Rapping about writing on the message boards at Absolute Write.
2) Playing name games on the message boards at Baby Names.
3) Taking quizzes at Sporcle.
4) Browsing eye-popping art at Deviant Art.
5) YouTube. Duh.
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Goals and Thoughts for June
New month!
I'm shooting for another 60 hours of Butt In Chair (BIC) time, and hoping that will bring me to the mid-point of the book by the end of the month. One wrinkle is that because we didn't have any snow days this year, The Son is out of school on June 17. I didn't sign him up for any camps that first week he's out of school, and am hoping/planning to spend a lot of time at the pond and other fun, summery outings that promise to eat up many hours of the day. And then toward the end of the month we'll be on Cape Cod, where I'll be lucky to get an hour a day of BIC time. Taking all this into account, I'm going to take advantage of his remaining school days and try to get 40 hours by the 17th.
I feel like I should say something about my pace. If you do the math on the stats I've given, you'll see that I'm averaging less than 500 words an hour, which is horrifyingly slow. That number is slightly misleading, since my BIC time includes hours spent making scene outlines, researching, and doing light editing. But even taking that into account, my pace is sluggish. I'm (mostly) okay with it, for two reasons:
1) I feel like I'm doing two drafts in one. With both Eleven Names and The Owl Bearer, my first draft was verrrrryyy rough-- "the crap draft", as I affectionately refer to it. I was so overwhelmed by writing a WHOLE NOVEL, I just wanted to get the story down to "The End" and not worry about anything else until later. This meant that I wound up doing 3-4 drafts of each book, which as I've documented on this blog is a grueling process, yo.
I don't think approaching it that way was necessarily the wrong choice for the writer I was at the time... but I'm not the same writer now. I'm not so overwhelmed by writing a novel. And I'd like to avoid ever having to do such extensive revisions again.
To that end, I'm taking the time to get the words right, rather than rushing to splash the story onto the page. I'm paying attention to tone and flow. I'm not skipping over the hard parts. When I get stuck, I'm going back to a previous chapter and doing a little line editing until the solution comes to me.
I hope that being this methodical (and slow) will actually save me time later, when I only have to do 1-2 revisions rather than 3-5.
2) It's slow, but it doesn't feel like a slog. I'm having a blast writing this thing! "Write the book you'd want to read" seems like "duh" advice, because what kind of weirdo writes a book they wouldn't want to read?? But I'm seeing now how that advice needs to be applied on a micro (scene) level rather than just considered on a macro level.
Earlier this year, I read 2K to 10K by Rachel Aaron-- ironically, in the hopes it would make me a faster writer-- and in it she said something that kind of blew my mind: Writing is not supposed to be a struggle, and if it is, that's a sign something is wrong.
I know. Let that sink in.
I've known so many writers (myself included) who say they like having written far more than they actually like writing, and who complain about the horrors of the creative process, that it just seemed like the Way of Things. It's never really occurred to me how fucked it actually is. To be honest, I've always unkindly suspected that the few who were like, "What are you talking about? Writing is fun! Wheeee!" were stupid people writing very simple books.
But Aaron frames it like this: You became a writer because you love stories and love telling stories. Telling your own story to yourself (which is what a first draft is) should be the best thing ever. To quote the book: So why aren't you enjoying this fundamentally enjoyable thing?
Earlier in the book, she talks about storybuilding: creating characters, building worlds, and coming up with scenes. She says that this process should be enormously fun, and that if it's not, this probably isn't a book you should write. I completely agree, and have always delighted in the storybuilding stage of writing. It wasn't that much of a leap from that to her point about first drafts: if you aren't enjoying it, there's something wrong with the story-- not with you.
Sometimes our writer-minds create scenes we've decided are necessary to the plot, but our reader-minds have no desire to read them. Sometimes the plot veers off course and we keep slogging forward on the overgrown path because we loathe the idea of backtracking the last 5/20/100 pages and starting over. Sometimes we forget that if we're bored by what we're writing, it's probably boring.
In her book, Aaron relates how she began tracking her word count output as a first step to trying to increase it. One thing she discovered is that she had much higher word counts on days she was working on "candy bar" scenes. For those unfamiliar with the term, a candy bar scene is a scene you are dying to write. A scene that's been in your head since you first got the idea for the book. A scene you write all the other stuff just to get to. She realized that she had to get that excited about every scene, and if she couldn't, the scene had to go.
So that's one of things I've been focusing on this time around: trying to get psyched about the awesome in every scene, and giving my reader-mind more of a say in how the story unfolds. So far, it's working: I'm enjoying telling myself this story, and giving myself permission to trash a scene if it's boring me.
I'm shooting for another 60 hours of Butt In Chair (BIC) time, and hoping that will bring me to the mid-point of the book by the end of the month. One wrinkle is that because we didn't have any snow days this year, The Son is out of school on June 17. I didn't sign him up for any camps that first week he's out of school, and am hoping/planning to spend a lot of time at the pond and other fun, summery outings that promise to eat up many hours of the day. And then toward the end of the month we'll be on Cape Cod, where I'll be lucky to get an hour a day of BIC time. Taking all this into account, I'm going to take advantage of his remaining school days and try to get 40 hours by the 17th.
I feel like I should say something about my pace. If you do the math on the stats I've given, you'll see that I'm averaging less than 500 words an hour, which is horrifyingly slow. That number is slightly misleading, since my BIC time includes hours spent making scene outlines, researching, and doing light editing. But even taking that into account, my pace is sluggish. I'm (mostly) okay with it, for two reasons:
1) I feel like I'm doing two drafts in one. With both Eleven Names and The Owl Bearer, my first draft was verrrrryyy rough-- "the crap draft", as I affectionately refer to it. I was so overwhelmed by writing a WHOLE NOVEL, I just wanted to get the story down to "The End" and not worry about anything else until later. This meant that I wound up doing 3-4 drafts of each book, which as I've documented on this blog is a grueling process, yo.
I don't think approaching it that way was necessarily the wrong choice for the writer I was at the time... but I'm not the same writer now. I'm not so overwhelmed by writing a novel. And I'd like to avoid ever having to do such extensive revisions again.
To that end, I'm taking the time to get the words right, rather than rushing to splash the story onto the page. I'm paying attention to tone and flow. I'm not skipping over the hard parts. When I get stuck, I'm going back to a previous chapter and doing a little line editing until the solution comes to me.
I hope that being this methodical (and slow) will actually save me time later, when I only have to do 1-2 revisions rather than 3-5.
2) It's slow, but it doesn't feel like a slog. I'm having a blast writing this thing! "Write the book you'd want to read" seems like "duh" advice, because what kind of weirdo writes a book they wouldn't want to read?? But I'm seeing now how that advice needs to be applied on a micro (scene) level rather than just considered on a macro level.
Earlier this year, I read 2K to 10K by Rachel Aaron-- ironically, in the hopes it would make me a faster writer-- and in it she said something that kind of blew my mind: Writing is not supposed to be a struggle, and if it is, that's a sign something is wrong.
I know. Let that sink in.
I've known so many writers (myself included) who say they like having written far more than they actually like writing, and who complain about the horrors of the creative process, that it just seemed like the Way of Things. It's never really occurred to me how fucked it actually is. To be honest, I've always unkindly suspected that the few who were like, "What are you talking about? Writing is fun! Wheeee!" were stupid people writing very simple books.
But Aaron frames it like this: You became a writer because you love stories and love telling stories. Telling your own story to yourself (which is what a first draft is) should be the best thing ever. To quote the book: So why aren't you enjoying this fundamentally enjoyable thing?
Earlier in the book, she talks about storybuilding: creating characters, building worlds, and coming up with scenes. She says that this process should be enormously fun, and that if it's not, this probably isn't a book you should write. I completely agree, and have always delighted in the storybuilding stage of writing. It wasn't that much of a leap from that to her point about first drafts: if you aren't enjoying it, there's something wrong with the story-- not with you.
Sometimes our writer-minds create scenes we've decided are necessary to the plot, but our reader-minds have no desire to read them. Sometimes the plot veers off course and we keep slogging forward on the overgrown path because we loathe the idea of backtracking the last 5/20/100 pages and starting over. Sometimes we forget that if we're bored by what we're writing, it's probably boring.
In her book, Aaron relates how she began tracking her word count output as a first step to trying to increase it. One thing she discovered is that she had much higher word counts on days she was working on "candy bar" scenes. For those unfamiliar with the term, a candy bar scene is a scene you are dying to write. A scene that's been in your head since you first got the idea for the book. A scene you write all the other stuff just to get to. She realized that she had to get that excited about every scene, and if she couldn't, the scene had to go.
So that's one of things I've been focusing on this time around: trying to get psyched about the awesome in every scene, and giving my reader-mind more of a say in how the story unfolds. So far, it's working: I'm enjoying telling myself this story, and giving myself permission to trash a scene if it's boring me.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
May Wrap-Up
The stats for May:
*60 hours of Butt In Chair time
*7 chapters completed
*Act I completed
*24,827 words total
I'm particularly happy with the word count, because for the first time EVER I'm not running long!
*60 hours of Butt In Chair time
*7 chapters completed
*Act I completed
*24,827 words total
I'm particularly happy with the word count, because for the first time EVER I'm not running long!
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
Listify Life: Week 10
Things I Splurge On/My Indulgences:
1) Books. No shocker there.
2) Fancy artisan cheeses and sausages. It's the Italian in me.
3) Moroccan Oil hair conditioner. It costs a fortune, but it smells so good!
4) Occasional pro housecleaning. There's no reason I can't just do it myself-- I'm not too busy and the house isn't too big-- but sometimes it's just really nice to have someone else do it for you.
5) Nail polish. Just drugstore stuff, but I already have hummina hummina bottles, and I don't need any more. At all.
1) Books. No shocker there.
2) Fancy artisan cheeses and sausages. It's the Italian in me.
3) Moroccan Oil hair conditioner. It costs a fortune, but it smells so good!
4) Occasional pro housecleaning. There's no reason I can't just do it myself-- I'm not too busy and the house isn't too big-- but sometimes it's just really nice to have someone else do it for you.
5) Nail polish. Just drugstore stuff, but I already have hummina hummina bottles, and I don't need any more. At all.
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
The Great Agent Hunt
(A tip o' the hat to Joely, who always calls it The Great Agent Hunt .)
I've been meaning to write a post about trying to get an agent for like six months. Here's the short version of the story:
I finished the book forever-amen in August. Between September and November I sent out 10 queries, including two that were requested via the #PitMad twitter pitch contest. The quick and dirty stats:
7 rejections, either form e-mails or silence after the no-response-means-no deadline.
1 non-response from someone who claims to respond to all queries.
1 rejection that seemed to be genuinely personalized and was encouraging.
1 request for more pages, followed by a rejection.
I wasn't crushed or anything-- I've read too many threads on Absolute Write to feel like 10 rejections is a lot, or even a cause for concern. Writers get a whole lot of no's for every yes. But it's still deflating when your fantasy that maybe this will wind up being the one part of the process that's effortless for you is dashed.
With all the craziness this winter, subbing The Owl Bearer was honestly the last thing on my mind. Then I got happily absorbed in Mender, and TOB kinda wound up suffering ex-boyfriend-book syndrome.
(I once read an interview with Amy Tan in which she said that having to tour to promote a novel you wrote a while ago while you're in the middle of writing a new novel is like being in a new relationship, madly in love, and being forced to dissect your relationship with your ex-boyfriend for hours every day.)
Anyway, long story short, I haven't sent out any queries for like six months and I've been starting to have the same cringing guilty-avoidant feeling about it that I do about any book I've neglected too long, so last night I sat down and banged out ten more e-queries. And I'm going to do #PitMad again in June. And then I'll send out ten more queries, and ten more, until I either land an agent or come to the end of the line for this particular book. But by then, Mender might done...
I've been meaning to write a post about trying to get an agent for like six months. Here's the short version of the story:
I finished the book forever-amen in August. Between September and November I sent out 10 queries, including two that were requested via the #PitMad twitter pitch contest. The quick and dirty stats:
7 rejections, either form e-mails or silence after the no-response-means-no deadline.
1 non-response from someone who claims to respond to all queries.
1 rejection that seemed to be genuinely personalized and was encouraging.
1 request for more pages, followed by a rejection.
I wasn't crushed or anything-- I've read too many threads on Absolute Write to feel like 10 rejections is a lot, or even a cause for concern. Writers get a whole lot of no's for every yes. But it's still deflating when your fantasy that maybe this will wind up being the one part of the process that's effortless for you is dashed.
With all the craziness this winter, subbing The Owl Bearer was honestly the last thing on my mind. Then I got happily absorbed in Mender, and TOB kinda wound up suffering ex-boyfriend-book syndrome.
(I once read an interview with Amy Tan in which she said that having to tour to promote a novel you wrote a while ago while you're in the middle of writing a new novel is like being in a new relationship, madly in love, and being forced to dissect your relationship with your ex-boyfriend for hours every day.)
Anyway, long story short, I haven't sent out any queries for like six months and I've been starting to have the same cringing guilty-avoidant feeling about it that I do about any book I've neglected too long, so last night I sat down and banged out ten more e-queries. And I'm going to do #PitMad again in June. And then I'll send out ten more queries, and ten more, until I either land an agent or come to the end of the line for this particular book. But by then, Mender might done...
Saturday, May 21, 2016
Numbers, Redux
Two-thirds through the month = time to check in again!
I'm at 45.5 hours out of 60 for the month of May.
I'm now 3/4 of the way through Chapter Six.
Currently sitting at 21,000 words. I'm thinking that's about 1/5 through the book.
I'm at 45.5 hours out of 60 for the month of May.
I'm now 3/4 of the way through Chapter Six.
Currently sitting at 21,000 words. I'm thinking that's about 1/5 through the book.
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