Writerly Wackiness

A month and a half after I started the damn thing, and the de-crapified second draft of my novel-prequel-ish short story (now titled Demon Dreams) is finally done. The wee beastie beefed up to 6,700 words in the second draft. That's what a hearty diet of more detail and description will do for one's fictional figure. Now I just need to give the beastie a final go over, and then it's into the critiquing pile while I start something else. 

I'll be doing The Never-Ending Odyssey (aka TNEO) again this summer, so it's that weird time of year where I have to wait several months after finishing a story to get critiques on it.  (Well, I'll probably throw the story at my lovely local group, the Awesome Ladies of Awesomeness, for our next meeting, but I'll wait until I have the TNEO crits as well before making any major revisions.)  Being forced to wait is probably a good thing for me.  Even though I take forever to write stories sometimes (or maybe because I take forever to write them), I tend toward impatience, wanting to get them out the door in speedy fashion as soon as they're done. So it's probably healthy for me to have to sit on a few of them for a spell and see how they age. 

And speaking of TNEO, I get to take on the roll of moderator this year, which I'm sure will keep me super busy on top of all the critiquing and writing to be done for it.  But I'm looking forward to it.

Urgh. I did so well cranking out the first draft of this short story, but then the Procrastination Fairy came along and waved her wand at me before I could get started on the second draft. I've taken a hit out on the stupid fairy so I can get some second draftage done this weekend.

I fear for my lack of a title on this story.  My experience with titles has generally been this: if a title doesn't pop into my head while writing the first draft, I end up having a hell of a time coming up with one that doesn't suck big hairy balls of suck.

On the positive side of writing-related things, I did an hour writing exercise a few hours ago and cranked out a 1K draft of a flash piece. I'm not sure if it's something I'll polish up for submission, though, as I'm not sure where I'd send it.  Is there an appropriate publication for an unabashedly liberal-leaning flash piece about a gay Jewish superhero who saves the day only to be accused of being an illegal alien because he's from another planet?

In theory, I should have had more writing time last week.  In actuality, I didn't make a lick of progress on the short story I had started the week before.  But today?  Oh, today was surprisingly lovely for a Monday.  For what felt like the first time in ages, I sat down and just cranked out first draftage for three solid uninterrupted hours.  About 1,400 words in all, which is pretty damn good for slow-going me.  It's all crappy first draftage, yes, but I think (hope) it's going to clean up nicely.  When the story's done, that is.  I usually get a good sense early on about how long a story is going to be, and I think this one's going to push the 6K mark, at least.

In other and unrelated news: shiny new Apple trackpad!  I'm quite loving this thing.  It doesn't make my hand all crampy and achy like a mouse would do after a day at the computer.

The novel revisions have been slow-going lately, but you know what?  That's ok.  I'm not going to beat myself up about being slow right now.  I've got a lot of stuff going on, so the fact that I'm writing every day at any pace is the important thing.  You hear that little miss internal critic? I hereby give myself permission to be slow and you're just going to have to deal with it.  Neener neener neener!

On the publication (or lack thereof) front...

Unfortunately, the magazine that accepted my post-apocalyptic zombie story last year appears to be a little on the dead side.  Duotrope's declared them so some time back (website not updated in some time, no reply to their inquiries...the usual).  I waited it out a bit longer, wanting to give the benefit of the doubt, but it's been over a year with no sign of any future issues surfacing.  I never received any kind of contract, so I finally sent an email officially withdrawing my story from the publication (on the off-chance there's ever any further activity there). The perils of trying a new publication, alas.  [And editing this entry to add: I heard back from the submissions editor who had accepted my story, and she confirmed that things aren't moving forward at this point and that I should try the story elsewhere.]  I've since sent the story off shambling in search of a new home, so here's hoping. 

And on the My Big Fat Epic Fantasy Novel front...

Between Sirens and sniffling, not a lot of progress lately, but what little progress I've made has been good progress.  At first the chapter 2 rewrite was laying some serious hurt on my brain.  It was an unfortunate case of conflicting critique comments knocking my internal compass off-kilter, with comments like "The characterization is great but the pacing is a bit too slow" followed by "I think you should slow things down and spend more time letting us get to know the characters."  But I managed to find my footing again, figure out what felt right to me, and get the rewrite off to a good start.

Good News: 3-day weekend combined with the office closing early on Friday meant lots of time to work on the novel.  More precisely, to work on the rewrite of the rewrite-to-date.

Bad News: My writing time kept ending with me, after feeling like I was getting so much accomplished, looking at the time and realizing, "Three hours of butt-in-chair and I've only gotten this far?  Seriously, brain?"

It may not have been as much accomplishment as I wanted, but I did at least 1) figure out how to restructure my first chapter to address some major issues, and 2) get the first scene rewritten.  Two more scenes to go.  And once that's done, the rest of the chapters won't need nearly the same amount of work before I can pick back up where I left off in chapter 15 and plow forward.

Took longer than it should have, but the crappy first draft of my hugely re-written short story is done. That's a relief. It was tough breaking through the "I'm a hack! I can't write!" self-doubt on this one, but I finally managed to dope up my internal editor long enough for me to finish.

And dude, what did I ever do without the internet? Need a hymn within the public domain with lyrics that in some way involve the words "soul" and "order" (as in ordering someone to do something) because it would work really well in your story? Consult the almighty Google, and it shall provide. And once you have the hymn, you can go on YouTube and listen to Mahalia Jackson sing the hell out of it while you finish writing the last scene.

Now for the fun part of tidying up the crappy first draft so that it can become a not-so-crappy second draft. And I mean fun in the non-sarcastic sense. I actually prefer the revision part of the process to the cranking out raw wordage part.

This week I started a major rewrite of a short story I wrote about three years ago.  It was the first story I had critiqued when I was at the Odyssey Workshop, and I got lots of great feedback and ideas for turning it into a stronger piece, but unlike everything else I wrote there, I never felt ready to tackle the rewrite until recently.  Most ideas I can just dive into with abandon, but there have been a few like this one that feel a bit more...special, I guess.  Or maybe fragile.  I'm not sure.

Whatever the right word is, these stories tend to set my expectations-for-myself bar even higher than usual--so high that, when I sit down to start the story, I have this petrified moment where I'm convinced that I have no idea how to write anymore.  There's this great idea and a few words on the screen, but there's also this growing dread that I can't write the story because, hell, I can't even start the story.

And then I get over it and start writing.

Something keeps me there and writing despite the strong suspicion that I'm a hopeless hack who should give up now.  While part of me is frozen in terror, waiting for the big bad writing monster to finish me off, another part of me--the part that will survive the horror movie that is a writing career--is desperately looking for what I like to think of as the "in" to the story.

A while ago (a longer while ago then I thought once I went searching for the entry) I made a post babbling about how much I agonize over the first few sentences of a new scene or chapter.  That agonizing stems from the same thing I'm looking for at the start of a new story: that elusive "in" that will let me into the story and let the wordage start flowing.  Until then, I'm only skirting around the edges of the story or scene.

With the short story I started working on this week, fear and high expectations were certainly part of my problem getting started, but another part of the problem was that I had trouble finding the right door to get inside.  There were so many possible ways to start.  With my POV character, a soldier, in the middle of battle?  After the battle with another soldier ragging him for crying?  Or with him going to see the unit's chaplain...which is where I ended up starting.  But even then, I couldn't quite get the door open.  What does my character focus on first?  On what the chaplain is saying to him?  What the chaplain is doing?  How he looks?  Where is the point of focus around which everything else will suddenly click?  So I started trying all the keys until one of them worked. 

And now I'm in the story.  Later, I may decide that renovations are necessary and I need to move the door that let me in.  Or I may just need to change the locks.  But I'm already inside, so that's ok.