Note to Self #1: Do not take an entire Unisom tablet unless you are prepared to be comatose for 13 hours.
Note to Self #2: Do not fritter away The Son's school time with the rationalization that you'll get your words after he goes to bed. Writing in the 7:30-9:00 time period sucks: the phone rings incessantly, The Husband bangs cabinet doors in the kitchen, The Son comes out of bed to impart vital information (such as, "When I shake my hair, it sounds like sand."), and you wind up feeling persecuted and grumpy. Why do you forget this so easily?
Note to Self #3: Don't go overboard buying books for your birthday. It's not a good sign that you've already bought one and your birthday is still three weeks away. Remember the stack of partially-read books you need to return to and finish.
ANYway...
Last day of the month! Let's check in with the goals I set on May 8 and see how I did:
1) write 500 words a day on TOB, continuing to move the story forward --DONE. I didn't miss a day! I've written 12,000 words in the past 3 weeks.
2) finish phase outline for Part 2 --DONE.
3) complete at least 5 more exercises from TFiF --Not done. I did one of them, and then just never got around to doing more.
4) blog here every day, even if just a few lines to report progress --DONE.
Not too shabby, all in all.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
5/30
Got my 500 words, which puts me at 15,000 for Part 2 so far.
I just took a sleeping pill, in a Hail Mary attempt to unfuck my sleeping patterns. I have been sleeping for shit lately, I'm becoming dependent on coffee, and I'm sometimes more snappish with The Son than the situation calls for. The 2:00am hailstorm that sounded like an ocean's worth of broken glass and marbles being dumped on the house didn't help. I plan to be asleep in less than an hour!
I just took a sleeping pill, in a Hail Mary attempt to unfuck my sleeping patterns. I have been sleeping for shit lately, I'm becoming dependent on coffee, and I'm sometimes more snappish with The Son than the situation calls for. The 2:00am hailstorm that sounded like an ocean's worth of broken glass and marbles being dumped on the house didn't help. I plan to be asleep in less than an hour!
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
5/29 Report
500 words: done. We're at the cusp of a Big Reveal. Willa thinks she understands how outmatched her people are compared to their opponent, but what she learns in this scene will make her realize she hasn't even scratched the surface of their power.
Monday, May 28, 2012
We Are Building a Religion
500 words, which I just finished at 10:45pm because I spent half the day mooning over this woman's uh-frickin-MAZING illustrations. Check out the Tarot deck! And the book covers she's done! *swoon*
I wound up over there because I was looking for mythic/fairy tale images to inspire me to do a little retroactive worldbuilding for TOB. The isolated culture to which my heroine belongs is a mostly rationalist one: they don't have any gods, and the closest thing they have to a Holy Book is an encyclopedia of pre-plague knowledge (which is not really a book at all, but a bioengineered ROM device that reproduces asexually) (my novel is weird, okay?). They're living in small, agriculturally-based villages, for the most part at a Middle Ages level of technology-- except for the few pieces of ancient technology they've retained (such as the asexually-reproducing ROM device mentioned above), which look more and more like magic as the decades and centuries pass.
They have stories about the early days of their people, which happened after the encyclopedia ends (the ROM devices can be neither added to nor subtracted from) and for which there is no one official story or set of records. These stories are part history, part tall tale, part fairy tale, and are told to small children at bedtime and around bonfires at village festivals. They are just beginning their metamorphosis from myths that no one really takes literally, to the basis of a belief system.
I sort of knew the skeleton of all that, but I didn't work it out in even that much detail, because I didn't think it was going to be relevant to the story I'm telling.
Turns out it is.
I'm not going to go nuts with it (so I say now; building religions is like my favorite thing ever, except maybe building educational systems), but I do think I need to sketch out a few of these myths, create a few characters that are about to become gods, and work out the meanings of some symbols in order to add this layer to the story.
I wound up over there because I was looking for mythic/fairy tale images to inspire me to do a little retroactive worldbuilding for TOB. The isolated culture to which my heroine belongs is a mostly rationalist one: they don't have any gods, and the closest thing they have to a Holy Book is an encyclopedia of pre-plague knowledge (which is not really a book at all, but a bioengineered ROM device that reproduces asexually) (my novel is weird, okay?). They're living in small, agriculturally-based villages, for the most part at a Middle Ages level of technology-- except for the few pieces of ancient technology they've retained (such as the asexually-reproducing ROM device mentioned above), which look more and more like magic as the decades and centuries pass.
They have stories about the early days of their people, which happened after the encyclopedia ends (the ROM devices can be neither added to nor subtracted from) and for which there is no one official story or set of records. These stories are part history, part tall tale, part fairy tale, and are told to small children at bedtime and around bonfires at village festivals. They are just beginning their metamorphosis from myths that no one really takes literally, to the basis of a belief system.
I sort of knew the skeleton of all that, but I didn't work it out in even that much detail, because I didn't think it was going to be relevant to the story I'm telling.
Turns out it is.
I'm not going to go nuts with it (so I say now; building religions is like my favorite thing ever, except maybe building educational systems), but I do think I need to sketch out a few of these myths, create a few characters that are about to become gods, and work out the meanings of some symbols in order to add this layer to the story.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Ready for Summer
The next few days are the last of my tutoring gigs for a while: this is finals week at the boarding school my evening gig kid attends, and my two remaining SAT kids have the test this Saturday. I'm not likely to get any more work until mid-July, at least. I'm looking forward to getting a lot of writing done in June and July.
500 words today. I've reached a little hole in the plot: at this moment, my heroine has to screw up in a really embarrassing way in front of a lot of witnesses, and completely due to a flaw in her own character. I know this. I just don't know what she does.
500 words today. I've reached a little hole in the plot: at this moment, my heroine has to screw up in a really embarrassing way in front of a lot of witnesses, and completely due to a flaw in her own character. I know this. I just don't know what she does.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Like a Movie
500 words on TOB today, of which 400 were random notes to myself about things to change in what I've written so far or things to add to my plan for what's yet to come. I read this blog post about Fantasy author
Rachel Aaron's process for storybuilding (following a link from this post on writing 10,000 words a day)(holy shit), and found it was very similar to the process I used with The Owl Bearer-- with one intriguing addition. Aaron says she avoids writing unnecessary and boring scenes by thinking through her whole plot, watching it unfold scene by scene like a movie in her mind. She said it helps her see the story with her "reader" self, and that she finds that some scenes her writer self thought were necessary to the plot are boring to the reader self.
Now, I've certainly thought about TOB as if it were a movie. I've "watched" chunks of it at a time, like skipping around chapters on a DVD, but I've never watched it all the way through from beginning to end. I "watched" it in my mind from the beginning to the scene I'm working on now, and saw a lot to tweak; thus, the 400 words of notes to myself. It was a really valuable exercise, and I'm planning to try to think through more of the story-- the scenes I've planned but not yet written-- tomorrow. I'm feeling excited to finish this draft now, so I can get busy sculpting it into what I see in my head!
Rachel Aaron's process for storybuilding (following a link from this post on writing 10,000 words a day)(holy shit), and found it was very similar to the process I used with The Owl Bearer-- with one intriguing addition. Aaron says she avoids writing unnecessary and boring scenes by thinking through her whole plot, watching it unfold scene by scene like a movie in her mind. She said it helps her see the story with her "reader" self, and that she finds that some scenes her writer self thought were necessary to the plot are boring to the reader self.
Now, I've certainly thought about TOB as if it were a movie. I've "watched" chunks of it at a time, like skipping around chapters on a DVD, but I've never watched it all the way through from beginning to end. I "watched" it in my mind from the beginning to the scene I'm working on now, and saw a lot to tweak; thus, the 400 words of notes to myself. It was a really valuable exercise, and I'm planning to try to think through more of the story-- the scenes I've planned but not yet written-- tomorrow. I'm feeling excited to finish this draft now, so I can get busy sculpting it into what I see in my head!
Friday, May 25, 2012
Welcome to the Newest Member of the Geek Tribe
500 words done, but in more important news, The Son watched Star Wars (Episode Four, DUH) for the first time tonight, and now has a dude-crush on R2D2.
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