90 posts tagged “writing”
first draft of the new book done. bigger than I expected.
That is 476 pages of pure I-dunno-what. I never really know until I've done a third or fourth draft. It is, however, the *real* reason I've been away from Vox. Sure, I've been putting in several hours a day doing home remodeling. Yeah, work has been hell, but pretty much every stray minute of my day for the last four weeks has gone into write this. I'm a little tired.
Oh, and those of you in my neighborhood, you can click on my Alter Ego link to check out some excerpts from this current project.
I try not to take things personally, or imagine that a specific month is out to get me. Because that would be crazy.
Still, I'm having a hard time not holding a grudge against April.
There's the flooded basement, which seems to be squarely under April's provenance. April showers and all that.
This is the time of year when work requires me to actually work for large portions of the day.
There are the two rejections just this week from agents who had partials of my manuscript. Most infuriating was the agent who asked for an exclusive, which meant I had to stop querying, stop sending stuff out, and wait for things to trickle in so I could give it to him exclusively. My reward: a form rejection three weeks later. Thanks, dude. You're a fucking prince.
Add those rejections to the previous three rejections of the manuscript and I feel distinctly hinky.
Then there's the small press that wants to publish my first novel. The very small press. Who offered me a $1500 advance. The small press that doesn't have a professional editor or a distribution system. Sure, the money would be nice, but I don't think I'd get much benefit from publishing with them. Plus, I feel like that would be a sign that I've quit. That I'm settling.
So, April, nothing personal, but isn't it time for you to leave?
Usually I save randomness for Friday, but I feel pretty darned random today.
It's fucking cold out there. It was 4 degrees when I woke up. (Toasty warm inside, though, courtesy of my programmable thermostat.)
The woman who had the octuplets, I can't quite decide which rude euphemism I want to use: clown car or Stargate...
I spent two hours looking at Google Earth yesterday, because I want to be 100% sure that the scene in my book that involves a drive from Oklahoma City, over the Canadian, and into a corn field, actually works logistically, leaving enough time and actually ending up in a corn field, instead of say...an industrial park. Two hours seems like a lot of time to make sure that somebody from that part of the world won't be able to call me out on a factual error, but it's a lot less trouble than driving down to visit that particular corn field again. I feel obliged to do this, however, after that workshop in which one of my classmates had written a play that took place in the passenger train station in Liberal, Kansas. Uh, no. There isn't one. Hasn't been one in decades.
Today, I'm reading fairy tales, trying to decide if I want to add more fairy tale elements to the book. What do you all think? What's your favorite fairy tale and why?
I dreamt that I was so fat, I couldn't leave the house. I was one of those enormous, tragic people who end up going to the hospital on of a flatbed wrecker, after the wall of their bedroom has been torn out and the police have used a crane to move them. It was weird, scary, and no doubt a product of my recent dietary habits.
The seventh New Me is pregnant. I predict she doesn't come back after maternity leave, in which case, the Church of the Valet will be hiring an eighth New Me. Also, John's wife is pregnant. According to the Fabulous E., John seems really excited, but that's probably just because he views a baby as a whole new chance to accessorize, and he does love to accessorize.
When the Fabulous E. asked after John's wife, wanting to know how she was feeling physically, John replied, "She's getting used to the idea."
No, not just that general category of weird things writers do, like watch you too closely because they're clearly trying to figure out how to transcribe your behavior into a character sketch that will be incorporated into a character you'd never want your behavior ascribed to. And not weird stuff like spending 42 minutes engaged in a deeply personal and hurtful internal debate about whether it's okay to use that semi-colon. Not that other weird thing that involves an eccentric hat and a fake foreign accent. I apologize for that on behalf of writers everywhere. We just can't help ourselves sometimes. Which is why we do that weird thing with our trash cans on trash day. Sorry. It's a compulsion.
Specifically, I'm talking the weird things that writers do on the internet. Here's the latest:
Many agents suggest that writers with professional websites (as opposed to whatever this is), look more attractive to agents and publishers, because they appear to have a grasp on using the internet for networking and marketing. As a result, lots of writers create websites and blogs and whatnot, in hopes that someday an agent or publisher is going to Google them and find their website. (The next part of this fantasy goes like this: "Gosh, what a great website. I was on the fence, but I am definitely going to offer this writer a multi-book contract.")
I never bothered, because...well, because I was the literary equivalent of a cave-dwelling ascetic hermit. I didn't publish. I just wrote. Mostly as a form of self-punishment. Then, two years ago, I decided to try to get published. Two painful years of rejections later, I've got a handful of short story publications and a few more coming out in spring. So, at long last, as I contemplate beginning another round of queries for a novel, I have done that weird thing.
I got a website. Under my own name. To talk about...my writing. To post links to my publications. To generally stick my ass out there, in hopes that some agent or publisher will Google me and think, "Gosh, what a great website." (Why is it that agents and publishers talk like Eddie Haskell in my head? I don't know.) So I've put up my little bio, a page with links to my publications, some pictures of my cats (OF COURSE), and I've started a blog.
Here's the dilemma: when you start a new blog, how sad and embarrassing is it when you don't have any comments on your blog? So then how to create traffic to a blog I've just started? On my writing board, I figure I'll ask some people there to go over and take a look, make some comments. I've debated whether to call upon my hoodies on Vox to make a similar sacrificial effort. That is, the folks who are in my neighborhood, who actually know who I am in real life, because I don't want to have a "leak" effect, where the two blogs are confuzzled, thereby destroying the comfort of relative anonymity I have as Redzilla. What do you think?
I don't get bored. Unfortunately. Something will always snap me back from the brink of boredom, whether I want it to or not. Push me too close to boredom and I'll think of something to amuse myself. I'll get a hobby, start a project, pull a prank, start an insurrection. Something.
Here I am in Brain Tumor Hall. Too cheap to take a day of vacation. There's nobody around. There's nothing that needs to be done. Nothing to do with everyone gone.
I'm supposed to be waiting until this weekend to tackle revisions on the my current writing project. Where does this leave me? What will I do to pull myself away from the boredom?
I'll start a new writing project.
Fine, I'm lying. I already started the new project. I'm already a thousand words into it and I'm trying to put on the brakes. I have enough projects. I have other things I should focus on. Also this project is monstrous. Hideous. Unlovable. Have you ever had a story idea that was so horrific you shocked yourself? Where you gagged a little and your finger hovered there, trying to decide between Delete and Save?
I clicked Save. Help.
Normally, this is a time of year when thinking about the publishing industry makes me happy. After all, Xmas is coming soon, when I usually receive at least one and sometimes several gift cards to buy books. Add to that the fact that the nominations for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award had been made public. Then there's quiet time coming, with all the students gone away and campus deserted. Time to write.
Alas, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has rained on my parade. They have officially put their acquisitions on hiatus. This means they are not acquiring any new books. When you're a writer and one of the big publishing houses says, "We're not buying any new books," well, that's not a very shiny feeling.
No surprise, the blogosphere is chock full of writers in full-blown Chicken Little mode right. The sky is falling, they're hunkering down, oh god oh god oh god noone will ever want to buy their book.
Everybody needs to take a chill pill.
Yes, the economy is in the tank and that makes things bad for publishers, too. Yes, the credit crunch means that heavily leveraged companies aren't able to access as much as they normally could. Yes, there are probably going to be fewer books published in the next two years. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt isn't absolutely representative of the publishing industry either. They leveraged heavily to buy Harcourt and they are billions of dollars in debt, so they may be more representative of all types of companies who made reckless business decisions that are now coming home to roost.
The big three auto-makers in the US are in far worse straights, but that doesn't mean engineering students who have dreams of growing up to design cars should change their majors to agricultural engineering. We're still going to make cars. It's just that things are going to be tight for a while, and they may be different after this dark cloud lifts.
Hey, didn't we just elect a president who ran on the idea of change? Why are we so scared? Change could well be a good thing for the publishing industry, which has increasingly condensed itself into fewer, larger companies. The end result of that has been a tendency toward publishing and pushing the concept of "The Blockbuster," which tends to be a book equally loved and loathed.
This is the publishing industry that has set a precedent of paying six-figure advances for unvetted memoirs that blow up in their faces. That need to find a blockbuster often means that huge sums are paid for books that the publisher believes will sell big, and then more money is put into that book to make sure it sells big, but there are no guarantees. There is no next Harry Potter or DaVinci Code. There are just books, some good, some not as good, and readers make or break a vaunted "blockbuster." (Either because they truly love the book or they fall victim to the hype.)
This is also the publishing industry that has often preferred concept over quality, rejected good storytelling and promoted premise. If you think that's just the free market at work--the publishers produce what people want--think about how hard it can to be find a book you really want. It's that the publishers control the supply side in such a way that consumers simply have to choose from what's available, with little power to affect what's available.
If the big publishing houses fall apart, that doesn't mean publishing will stop. Books won't go away. It just means that smaller publishing houses will rise from the ashes, and that may be a good thing for all of us, readers and writers.
Hey, go buy a book, why don't you?
Apparently it's going around, but today I'm officially declaring my hatred for overseas customer service call centers. I work for a BIG university, so although I pay the bills for my department, the checks and everything else get issued out of a separate office. Naturally, they make mistakes sometimes, and then I have to sort them out.
Today, that involved a call to Amazon.com. Normally, I like Amazon. I love books and they sell a lot of them and they give free shipping. That said, I think it's going to be a loooooong time before I buy anything from Amazon again. When things go smoothly, they're great. When things don't go smoothly, you can spend four months tearing out your hair trying to get someone on the phone who can help you solve the error. On the phone, because if you try to sort it out by email, you get three dozen form emails that never address your problem. Right, Jaypo?
Look, I speak fairly standard English. I can turn off the Okie idioms. I speak slowly and clearly. Those are the positives in helping me deal with non-native English speakers over the phone. On the downside: I'm mostly deaf in one ear and can't hear very well out of the other. Also, as you know, I have diminishing patience for people who can't think on their feet.
So the last hour has been trying. That is, I was trying. The little girl on the other end, "Jesse," was not trying. It wasn't her problem really that my accounting department had mailed the check to the Amazon's corporate credit card address. She was perfectly content to keep mumbling the key phrases that appear on her screen, without any consideration for whether they were actually going to get me closer to solving my problem.
I came to Vox today planning to pitch NaNoBuyMo. National Novel Buying Month. (Yeah, I made it up. So what?)
The book industry is flagging. Stores are going under, publishers are closing imprints, buyers are getting cold feet, agents are getting nervous. Sure, it's selfish of me, encouraging people to buy books to prop up an industry I'm trying to succeed in, but it's not like I'm encouraging people to do something harmful. I'm not a tobacco executive trying to get you to smoke. Reading's good for you.
After my experience this morning, though, I'm going to make my encouragement more specific. Go to a local bookstore and buy a book. If you know someone who's trying to sell a novel (you do), go a step further: buy a first novel by somebody you never heard of. (Easy to check on the author bio flap. Susie Smutzenheimer lives in Idaho with her 9 cats. This is her first novel.) That's how the more modest writing careers are made--people buying one book at a time.
I wish you well with any customer service dealings you may have today and I hope you enjoy your book.
As many of you are already aware, November is National Novel Writing Month. (NaNoWriMo or just NaNo.) So, as we hit the midway point of October, people all around me are gearing up to get ready to write 50,000 words in November. I've never participated in NaNo, because frankly, every month feels like novel-writing month to me. I don't always produce 50K words in a month, but I certainly did in August.
On the surface, I like the idea of NaNo. Its stated goal is the triumph of "enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft." Painstaking craft is good, but half the battle of writing a novel is getting words on the page. I've known would-be writers who spend years polishing the first couple chapters of their planned novel, because they never seem to be able to move on and write the rest of it. That's sad. I'm a big believer in writing everything, no matter how bad, and fixing it later.
What makes me cringe about NaNo is this other quote from the website: "In 2007, we had over 100,000 participants. More than 15,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line....They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists."
It's a nice sentiment, but it's just not true. Writing 50K words in a month doesn't make you a novelist. Writing a novel makes you a novelist. A novel isn't just a lot of words. It's a story, with rounded characters and conflict and a narrative arc.
What I've seen year after year are people walking away from NaNo and walking into one of the miscellaneous writing groups I participate in, wanting us to help them edit their novel so they can sell it. These are painful moments, all the more painful because they're often funny. Not for those first-time writers, but for those of us who already know that it can take years to polish a first draft of a novel into something an agent might want to look at, who will then require half a dozen revisions to turn it into something a publisher might want to look at, who may or may not be willing to buy the book.
The other funny element is simply that so many of the participants don't seem to be participating in that other element of writing novels: NaNoBUYMo. Reading a lot of what's produced during NaNo, I can't help but suspect that it's written by people who don't actually read novels.
This happened to me on Monday night, when Spucko and I went for our usual writing night (equal parts writing and emotional support.) Sitting at a table next to me, with his back to me, was a young man working on an outline for his NaNo project. I could easily read it over his shoulder and it took a supreme act of will not to laugh out loud. That's how I know I'm not really a totally hateful person, because I didn't want to laugh, even though his idea and his writing were both laughable. Something about a mercenary with the last name Gunn, involved in some sort heroic firefight in Kirkuk. All written in the most lurid, pulpy 15-year old fanfiction prose. Cringe-worthy.
I had the overwhelming urge to reach around him, hit Ctrl+A, delete. I didn't, though, because no matter how bad his writing was, at least he was trying. I had to give him that.
Oh, and I promised an FSotD, so here it is:
I'd never had any trouble getting lucky before,
but let's just say, you can pick up women with a dog, with a cast, with a baby,
but not with the Creature from the Fugly Lagoon sitting ten feet away.
To perk me up on Friday, I'm borrowing the Funnest Sentence of the Day idea from Laurie. So, here's mine from the current work-in-progress.
She was blond and blue-eyed, wearing a white dress that showed some skin. Like an angel, if you believe in that sort of thing, or like a Playboy centerfold, which I happen to believe in.
I love this character. He's such a bastard.
I bitch enough about the part of writing that isn't fun: researching agents and magazines, querying and submitting, getting my hopes up and swallowing rejection.
Today, let me just mention the part of writing that's fun. I mean, really, laugh out loud fun.
It's when a story idea hits me like a bolt of lightning. I'm out walking and by the time I get home, the whole story is there: characters, plot, dialog, climax.
It's when I spend several hours a day feverishly writing everything I can think of to do with the story and the characters. Not just the important, dramatic stuff, but the mumbled conversation two characters have over breakfast when they barely know each other or what a character thinks about as he's pumping gas, watching a stray cat sniff around a trash dumpster.
It's when I spend the rest of the day thinking about the story. Sitting at the dining room table, having what amounts to a conversation with a character, in which I say, "Why would you do that? What were you thinking?" And getting answers. Having him lean back, light a cigarette, and say, "I'll get to that, but do you got something other than this faggy import beer?"
It's when I look forward to boring situations, because I spend that time thinking about the story. Or I miss out on interesting things because I'm far, far away. Halfway through a movie, I don't know anything about it, because I haven't been paying attention. I look up from my desk and Hubbicula is moving his lips, has been moving his lips for a long time, and then I realize, "Oh, he's talking to me. I wonder what about?" (sorry, honey, that's just how it is.)
Above all, it's fun when I've been doing all of this for months and then one night I sit down and realize, I really only have one scene left to write and I know what's going to happen in it.
So, pardon me if I'm giddy as a school girl, but the rough draft is done. Now begins the really fun part: editing!
