Category: writing life

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Goodbye, 2010

  By personal & miscellaneous, publishing, Third Person Press, writer development, writing life, writing log

Yes, it’s been a while. The end of 2010 flew past without even giving me a chance to properly say goodbye here. But it’s not too late.  I’m pretty sure I had made some writing goals for 2010…(digs around a bit and comes up with a dusty list)…yep, here they are:

Short-term:
1. Plan more structured writing time, if not daily then most days. Most of
the time I do a lot of procrastinating before I actually get down to
writing, and I know that’s a bad habit.

Result: I did get into a better writing schedule for at least part of the year.  I can’t give myself full marks for this one, but I made some progress.

2. Log my writing time for at least a month, so that I have an idea of how
much time I actually spend on writing.

Result: I kept these logs for a while, and decided that I did not spend nearly enough time actually writing, and too much time on writing-related-but-not-really-writing things.  However, I didn’t *fix* that problem as well as I might have.

Medium-term:
1. By the end of January, finish the last pass of the novel edit that is
almost done, and get it to my first reader.

Result: Completed this goal, but it was in July, not January.

2. By the end of February, finish the two (or three?) short stories I have
underway.

Result: Sadly, I can’t remember precisely what stories I was talking about here, so I don’t know if I did it or not.  I’m thinking not.

3. Get some more stories back into submission.

Result: Again, I did make some subs, but did not complete this goal as fully as I would have liked.

Long-term:
1. By the end of the year, complete the novel I started this past NaNoWriMo
and get it submitted.

Result: Did not do this, but wrote the second half of this story during NaNoWriMo 2010.

2. Complete the second anthology Third Person Press is working on, with a
projected release date of October 1st, 2010.

Result: Full marks for this one.  We completed the anthology and released it on schedule.

I’ve already made some decisions on writing goals for 2011, but I haven’t put them into short, medium, and long-term form.  I’m going to think about that some more and include the new goals in my next post.

Aside from actual goals, I also had three short stories published in 2010 and got a third novel into submission, did some great school visits, gave some classes and readings in Second Life, and, I think, grew as a writer and editor.  So all in all I’d have to say it was a good writing year.

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Ask a Librarian

  By current projects, writer development, writing life

The other day I discovered a very cool program offered by the Halifax Public Library system–Ask A Librarian. You can email the research librarians there and ask a basic question. Within a day or two they will try to get back to you with an answer, links to further information, or suggestions for where you should start research for a more in-depth or complex question.

I thought this was a great idea, and I discovered the service precisely because I had a question. I wanted to know if there was a library in Halifax during the time period in which my novel is set (1901). Although I am writing alternate history and don’t have to have all the facts right, I like to be able to integrate some factually correct details along with things I’ve…er…tweaked. So I emailed them on the spot.

The next day I had my answer! A very nice email arrived to tell me that there was indeed a Citizen’s Free Library in Halifax in 1901, housed on the second floor of the City Hall building on Duke Street. The librarian told me the names of the Head Librarian and Assistant Librarian, and sent me a link to the actual catalogue, which I could read online.

I think that’s a fabulous service. I was telling my son and daughter about it and my son said, “Wow, are they Super Librarians?”

Maybe so. :)

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The Waiting Game

  By current projects, publishing, writing life

old typewriter keysRome wasn’t built in a day.

Good things come to those who wait.

A watched pot never boils.

These are the things we tell ourselves as we wait for our manuscripts to be read, evaluated, and (we hope) accepted by editors and publishers. One of my novel manuscripts has made another jump up the ladder, an email today informs me.

{happy dance, happy dance, happy dance}

Okay, back to the waiting game. I’ll try to put it out of my mind again for another little while.

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The Chain Story

  By current projects, publishing, reading, writer development, writing life

A while back, I wrote here about The Chain Story Project, Michael A. Stackpole’s ongoing online anthology. Today my own story in the chain, “The Longest Distance,” went live.

You can reach it from the main project page at http://chainstory.stormwolf.com, or since you’re already here, from the link in the right-hand sidebar. :)

It’s been an interesting process and fun to participate. It helped me finish a ten-year-old story, and creating the “cover” artwork was cool. And much, much easier (and faster!) than writing the story itself!

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Vacation Notes

  By current projects, personal & miscellaneous, Third Person Press, writing life

As some of you may know, I’ve been on vacation all the past week. I brought along lots of things to keep me busy in case the Muse had an opportunity to visit, but the chances of that happening were severely curtailed when my laptop screen died the night before we left home. I brought it along anyway–since there was some work for Airborne that had to get done, vacation or no–and a small external monitor allowed me to use it. However, after consulting with my resident computer expert (hubby), we decided that probably it would be expedient for me to shop for a new laptop. With some trepidation, I did so, with the result that I’m typing this now on a new HP ProBook. I’ve spent quite a few hours copying and moving things from the old machine to the new one, and I think I’m pretty much there. It’s a nice fast machine with a pretty sweet keyboard, so I think I’m going to like it, although I wasn’t really ready to part with my old one.

In writing news, Airborne is done to the point that we’ve ordered the proof and it has been shipped, so if there are no problems with the proof when we get it, we’ll be ready to order copies. Whew! I feel a bit nervous calling it “done” until I’ve seen that proof, but it does feel like we’re almost there.

Two other writing notes–I’ve realized that one of the characters in the novel I’m writing requires a change of gender (not as part of the story; I mean I have to go back and rewrite him as a woman). And I’ll have more writing news come Monday. Stay tuned!

*Photo: Cavendish Beach, from peionline.com. Yes, I’m on Prince Edward Island. :)

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Dante & Virgil Encounter the Shapeshifters

  By just for fun, personal & miscellaneous, writing life

Continuing the exploration of Famous Paintings with SF titles, we discover:

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Dante & Virgil Encounter the Shapeshifters

In a little-known side adventure, the Italian poet Dante encounters three savage beasts deep in a forest. Dante then meets the ancient poet Virgil, who offers to be his guide through Purgatory and Hell. The beasts then reveal themselves to be aliens from the planet Zorg, who try to talk Dante out of this whole silly journey through Hell business, inviting him instead to come back to their mothership and join in the fun of buzzing primitive planets. Not trusting the aliens, eventually the poets ditch the shapeshifters by distracting them with raw meat and continue on their way.

(Okay, it’s actually just titled Dante & Virgil and was painted in 1859, but I think my story is better.)

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I Write Like…

  By just for fun, personal & miscellaneous, writer development, writing life

I saw some Facebook friends referencing this lately, so of course I had to try it: http://iwl.me/

Basically, you plug in an excerpt of your writing, it’s analyzed, and you get a result comparing your writing to that of a famous author. Sounds like fun!

So I plugged in the first excerpt (the instructions were to use at least a few paragraphs, so I went one better and pasted in about ten pages). The result? I write like…Dan Brown!

Hmmmm.

Okay, so I don’t think he’s the worst writer ever, and he has certainly made his writing work for him, from a fame and fortune point of view. Not such a bad thing. But…but…really?

So I chose another story (you can see where this is going, can’t you?) and plugged in ten pages of that. This time I was channeling David Foster Wallace, whom I am sorry to say I had to look up on Wikipedia. Okay, “one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years” is pretty cool, but he wrote postmodern literature and hysterical realism (which I also had to look up) and ultimately committed suicide? Doesn’t really sound like me…

The next six attempts had me writing like H.P Lovecraft, Kurt Vonnegut, William Gibson, and Mark Twain, and a repeat each of Brown and Wallace. Now I was addicted. Another excerpt. Chuck Palahniuk. My two YA novel excerpts got Wallace again, then James Joyce.

James Joyce?

Okay, at this point I was trying to decide what it all meant. I didn’t keep trying in order to get a writer I liked–I mean, I already had some great genre writers in the list. Did it mean that the program is just wonky, or that I have my own unique style, which I alter slightly to fit the piece I’m writing? I liked that idea. But still…one more time.

I write like
Douglas Adams

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Oh, yeah. I’ll take it. :)

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L.C. Smith No. 3

  By personal & miscellaneous, writing life

Here’s the find I pulled out of the attic of my grandparents’ house yesterday. It’s an L.C. Smith model No.3, and it’s in half-decent shape. I haven’t had a chance yet to check it over for manufacturing dates or anything like that, as there’s a layer of grime that has to come off first. I have a feeling that I’ll be visiting this website a fair bit in the next little while. From a quick survey around the Internet, I’m guessing it was manufactured between 1900-1910, but I’m not sure at this point. The L.C. Smith company later merged to become the “Smith” in Smith-Corona.

All the keys are intact, and as you can see, the ribbon is still strangely bright. The platen is somewhat dried out and cracked, but it might soften up with some care and judiciously-applied products.

Mechanically, all the keys strike, but the carriage doesn’t advance. I don’t know if I can fix that or not. My goal is actually just to clean it up as much as possible, not to actually use it for typing, so that’s not a big issue. Some of the lacquer is not in great shape, which I understand is difficult to fix, but we’ll see what happens. It obviously saw a good deal of use in its day, as the paint is visibly worn on the spacebar where the right thumb would strike.

The three-horse Smith decal is in excellent shape, with the motto “Writing in Sight” clearly readable. This motto refers to the “visible” style of early 20th century machines~as you can see from the picture, the body of the machine is open and you can see all the working parts inside.

I’ll post more pics of the cleanup process as it goes along. I expect it will take a lot of patience, but I’m excited to get started!

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Numbers and Sand Castles

  By current projects, NaNoWriMo, personal & miscellaneous, writing life, writing log

If you follow this blog at all, you’ll probably have noticed how v e r y s l o w l y the “percentage complete” number on my progress bar for The Murder Prophet seems to change. I’ve been working on a complete edit of this novel since early in the year (maybe even late last year?) and although I keep thinking I’m approaching the end, it sometimes (often!) disappears out of sight over the horizon again.

This is because rewriting and editing are messy jobs. You might think first draft writing is messy–and you’d be correct about that. First draft writing is like starting with a big pile of wet sand and trying to build something out of it. But if you’re lucky, at least you keep building up. The sand castle grows, takes shape, forms and reforms and sprouts turrets and towers, gets a moat and a defensive wall and doors and windows and finally a flag on the top. It may still be rough around the edges and missing some bits and your hands are still covered with sand, but it’s standing and you can point to it and say I made that.

The rewriting and editing parts of the job are the really messy parts. You have to scrutinize your castle and evaluate its foundations. You may have to lift it to put a basement under it, and hope that all the jostling doesn’t cause it to come crashing down. Some of those turrets have to be torn off and rebuilt, or scrapped and replaced with gables or a hipped roof instead. The moat’s too wide or too shallow, the wall needs doors and a portcullis, and you may have put the wrong flag at the top. In the end, your castle will be bigger, stronger, and more defensible. But the remodeling job is huge.

This is one of the admitted problems you can run into with NaNoWriMo novels. Unless they’re well-planned (and many–or most–of mine are not, and this one was especially not), it’s very easy for the story to run away with the writer. Or maybe the writer’s brain runs away with the story. At any rate, if your building plans are sketchy or non-existent, you usually end up with a castle that needs more than the usual amount of renovation. Sometimes whole rooms are left out. Passages lead nowhere. It might even be on the wrong plot of land. And these are the problems that you don’t even know are there until you start exploring the place with a flashlight and a magnifying glass, taking notes about everything that is wrong. The exploring and note-taking take a long time, and the fixing usually even more.

Which is why it’s so difficult to predict how long such a rewrite/edit will actually take. In the case of this novel, I was down to the last sixty-odd pages of type-ins, when I realized that I had forgotten to address a rather major issue relating to the actual world/setting of the novel and the characters in it. I’m glad that I thought of it on my own instead of having one of my first readers hand it back to me with a note saying “but what about ?” However, it pushes that elusive end-of-the-project goal a little further out of reach again.

I’ll get there. The four thousand words that I’ve added so far have improved the novel immensely, and with luck I’ll continue to make it better. But I hesitate to change that “85%” complete to “90%” just yet.

Well, maybe I can make it “86%.” Just to feel like I’m making progress.

*The great sandcastle photo is by remoran

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Juggling Projects

  By current projects, NaNoWriMo, Third Person Press, writing life

Sometimes I have so many writing projects on the go that it’s hard to decide what to work on or settle in to one thing. I’m a good multi-tasker, but that only goes so far.

So sometimes it’s easier to just put it all aside and write a blog post. :)

Lately I’m working back and forth between Third Person Press‘s Airborne anthology, and doing type-ins for my scifi/fantasy/mystery/romance novel The Murder Prophet. Both projects are on deadlines (albeit to some extent self-imposed ones). Both are also coming along really well. I wonder if that makes it more difficult to choose between them? I expect if one were a horrible slog and the other was flowing merrily, I’d be much more inclined to work on the latter and let the former wallow in its own misery.

I’m very fond of The Murder Prophet. No one else, not even my trusted first readers, has seen it yet, so that feeling could change in the next few months. I hope not. It was tons of fun to write, I love the protagonist, and I’m adding a slick little subplot now at the eleventh hour that is making me smile. Its mixed-genre lineage might make it difficult to place, but that might also work in its favor for niche or quirky publishers. However, that’s a worry for another day; right now I just want to get it to a point I can call ‘finished’ so some folks can read it.

Work on Airborne is also progressing nicely. We’re finishing up line edits on the last few stories now, so that they can go out for author approval, and I’ve started typesetting those that are already done and approved. The typesetting this time around has been a breeze; after figuring out all the hard stuff while working on Undercurrents, it’s a much faster process now. Not that I don’t run into any problems at all, but I have a better idea how to solve them, at least. Also, we have an almost-finalized front and back cover, an ISBN and barcode, and someone very cool lined up to write an introduction, so we’re pretty pleased.

I guess that’s enough procrastinating for now; I’ve sent out one story for author approval so far this morning, so maybe I’ll do type-ins for a while and see how I feel after that. Juggle, juggle. Sometimes the writing life is all about keeping the balls in the air.

*Photo by abeall. And my to-do list is never blank like that. :)