Saturday, September 14
Whoa. Long time no post.
My excuse for this is I'm back at school and working hard. Eighteen hours of class and sixteen hours of work a week, plus 70 hours of community service to get done before I graduate. Also, my car has a flat and my contact lense cracked open in my eye and I have a list of things that *must* be done that's about as long as my arm.
Also, I'm lazy.
But I will try and get back in the habit of doing this. The whole reason I started blogging was because I'd never been good at keeping a journal, and I wanted to be, damn it. I am *not* giving up. (Yet.)
The only major news (aside from back-to-school) is that the Novel is finally finished. Because I was a readmit I had to show up early to register and so ended up hanging around with nothing to do for about four days before school started. I determined that I was going to finish revising the damned thing before I started school. Ended up with a bad back, a painful wrist, and a near-permanent headache: but I *did* it. 298 printed pages. Incidentally, "laser printer" is now at the *top* of the when-I-have-money list. It took my poor Inkjet seven hours and two computer crashes.
I mailed it to DAW books and have been trying not to bite my fingernails off ever since, or at least to do so quietly and in private.
I gave myself a week or two to recuperate and have so been working on the *second* novel since Sunday. The current count is at 6900. Not bad. Not good either, but not bad. I've located a really nifty program called Z-Write which does a really good job with chapters, abortive drafts, glossaries, and all the assorted clutter I collect when I write. Nice to have it all in a single document.
I'm going to describe Saturday's proceedings, since I may well want to reference them later:
1) Dug out my background materials. This was two abortive drafts (I collect abortive story drafts. I just can't seem to help it), seven minor character sketches, several scribbled notebook pages worth of background, and six or seven index cards of scenes I'd scribbled down, generally when I was working on the first novel.
2) Sat and looked at them for a while.
3) Organized my scribbling notebook. This is what's referred to, in the writing business, as "cat-vacuuming".
4) Picked up my scribbling notebook and brainstormed, primarily on the villains, who weren't making it into the scene stuff as much as I'd like. Decided on a setting for their "base", which showed up in the last scenes, and then outlined their operations and the sort of people I was looking at, then outlining, from this, the character of the head of the organization. Then I brainstormed on what had happened to my characters in the year between this and the last book, and listed some potential subplots.
5) By this point I had some good ideas for scenes, so I wrote those on index cards. Then I tossed in some events I hadn't really scened but knew were going to happen, and wrote them down, too.
6) Organized the index cards into a timeline. This was harder than it looked. The novel is primarily straightforward (unlike the last one, which lived and breathed flashbacks), at least, for the moment, but I had to struggle to figure out where and when things happened. I still have two "floating" scenes that could happen at any point, but at least I don't have ten any more.
7) Pegged the timeline of cards up on a corkboard. Looked at it for a bit, settling the major holes between one set of happenings and another into my head. No miracle solutions occurred, so I let them vegetate in there.
8) Went to dinner.
The point of all this business with cards is to overcome my major writing problem (well, one of them), which is plotting. I don't plot. I converse. If I had my way every book would be one never-ending conversation, with maybe a few events tossed in here and there, in a sketchy way, to keep the characters in with something to talk about. However, never-ending conversations don't really *work* as stories, so I've had to learn to plot. The way I did it last time through was to write a lot of really bad stuff in an effort to bridge the spaces between cool conversations, which is why I spent a year on bad drafts and another year on revisions. It wasn't so much that I wrote a novel. It was more like an archeological expedition. I'm hoping that, by plotting the story out beforehand, I can minimize the amount of stuff I end up throwing out.
(Stats for the last novel:
Finished length: 81,000 words (computer count)
Abortive drafts and cut scenes: roughly 254,000 words.
See?
And, yes, I'm a packrat. I save everything I write, even if it's something I'm cutting. So sue me.)
So far it's working. I'd thought up a scene or two by the time I'd finished dinner, and having the board right out there helps: I tend to peg a card or two up every few days, shift things around, note down ideas that come to me as I'm writing, generally meddle. It's nice, and it's working a lot better than outlining, which didn't work well for me at all.
And now it's time to change my pants. I'm on the pig crew, mornings, and we were doing castrations today. Guys are now free to cross their legs and cringe. Just don't do it while you're actually castrating the pigs - I can testify, from watching a male co-worker this morning, that it's a bloody awkward position to work from.
My excuse for this is I'm back at school and working hard. Eighteen hours of class and sixteen hours of work a week, plus 70 hours of community service to get done before I graduate. Also, my car has a flat and my contact lense cracked open in my eye and I have a list of things that *must* be done that's about as long as my arm.
Also, I'm lazy.
But I will try and get back in the habit of doing this. The whole reason I started blogging was because I'd never been good at keeping a journal, and I wanted to be, damn it. I am *not* giving up. (Yet.)
The only major news (aside from back-to-school) is that the Novel is finally finished. Because I was a readmit I had to show up early to register and so ended up hanging around with nothing to do for about four days before school started. I determined that I was going to finish revising the damned thing before I started school. Ended up with a bad back, a painful wrist, and a near-permanent headache: but I *did* it. 298 printed pages. Incidentally, "laser printer" is now at the *top* of the when-I-have-money list. It took my poor Inkjet seven hours and two computer crashes.
I mailed it to DAW books and have been trying not to bite my fingernails off ever since, or at least to do so quietly and in private.
I gave myself a week or two to recuperate and have so been working on the *second* novel since Sunday. The current count is at 6900. Not bad. Not good either, but not bad. I've located a really nifty program called Z-Write which does a really good job with chapters, abortive drafts, glossaries, and all the assorted clutter I collect when I write. Nice to have it all in a single document.
I'm going to describe Saturday's proceedings, since I may well want to reference them later:
1) Dug out my background materials. This was two abortive drafts (I collect abortive story drafts. I just can't seem to help it), seven minor character sketches, several scribbled notebook pages worth of background, and six or seven index cards of scenes I'd scribbled down, generally when I was working on the first novel.
2) Sat and looked at them for a while.
3) Organized my scribbling notebook. This is what's referred to, in the writing business, as "cat-vacuuming".
4) Picked up my scribbling notebook and brainstormed, primarily on the villains, who weren't making it into the scene stuff as much as I'd like. Decided on a setting for their "base", which showed up in the last scenes, and then outlined their operations and the sort of people I was looking at, then outlining, from this, the character of the head of the organization. Then I brainstormed on what had happened to my characters in the year between this and the last book, and listed some potential subplots.
5) By this point I had some good ideas for scenes, so I wrote those on index cards. Then I tossed in some events I hadn't really scened but knew were going to happen, and wrote them down, too.
6) Organized the index cards into a timeline. This was harder than it looked. The novel is primarily straightforward (unlike the last one, which lived and breathed flashbacks), at least, for the moment, but I had to struggle to figure out where and when things happened. I still have two "floating" scenes that could happen at any point, but at least I don't have ten any more.
7) Pegged the timeline of cards up on a corkboard. Looked at it for a bit, settling the major holes between one set of happenings and another into my head. No miracle solutions occurred, so I let them vegetate in there.
8) Went to dinner.
The point of all this business with cards is to overcome my major writing problem (well, one of them), which is plotting. I don't plot. I converse. If I had my way every book would be one never-ending conversation, with maybe a few events tossed in here and there, in a sketchy way, to keep the characters in with something to talk about. However, never-ending conversations don't really *work* as stories, so I've had to learn to plot. The way I did it last time through was to write a lot of really bad stuff in an effort to bridge the spaces between cool conversations, which is why I spent a year on bad drafts and another year on revisions. It wasn't so much that I wrote a novel. It was more like an archeological expedition. I'm hoping that, by plotting the story out beforehand, I can minimize the amount of stuff I end up throwing out.
(Stats for the last novel:
Finished length: 81,000 words (computer count)
Abortive drafts and cut scenes: roughly 254,000 words.
See?
And, yes, I'm a packrat. I save everything I write, even if it's something I'm cutting. So sue me.)
So far it's working. I'd thought up a scene or two by the time I'd finished dinner, and having the board right out there helps: I tend to peg a card or two up every few days, shift things around, note down ideas that come to me as I'm writing, generally meddle. It's nice, and it's working a lot better than outlining, which didn't work well for me at all.
And now it's time to change my pants. I'm on the pig crew, mornings, and we were doing castrations today. Guys are now free to cross their legs and cringe. Just don't do it while you're actually castrating the pigs - I can testify, from watching a male co-worker this morning, that it's a bloody awkward position to work from.
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