Oh boy - two weeks since last post

And I haven't written a word. Okay, that's not entirely true, but it wasn't on my own stories. That will be remedied tonight.

This is just so pretty, I must share: the cover for the Combat! fanfiction zine I've been working on editing/formatting. If you're not a Combat! fan, it won't mean much, but I love it. Okay, Brockmeyer's missing, but I won't hold that against the cover's creator... LOL!

Interesting writerly stuff

P.O.V. - read all about it...

How other writers write novels - link salad

Sometimes it's useful to read how other writers work, sometimes it's not. Mostly it gives confidence to people who haven't finished a book yet -- look, ma, someone else has the same problems, the same stress, the same insecurities, I guess I can do this. But for anyone interested, Elizabeth Bear has kindly gathered links to several different responses to the "how do YOU write a novel" question running around right now...

http://matociquala.livejournal.com/891599.html
http://matociquala.livejournal.com/889579.html

Remakes

So, after recently reading about a potential remake of "A Walk in the Sun" is in the works, all I want to do is watch the original again. Hollywood and their stupid remakes. I'm sure when I'm a silver-haired old lady, I'll be reading about the remake of "Star Wars" that's in the works.

I need more tea

Should be working on last revision of novel, but haven't quite brought myself to that point. Maybe because I know that once I do, I'll be in it up to my neck, and there'll be no room for other things. And I have other things I need to do first. Projects with deadlines that won't wait.

It's funny, cuz I've had a very productive couple of months; the productivity has just been in other arenas.

Read a young adult novel recently called "Premonitions" by Jude Watson. It's a lesson in vividness and brevity, and I enjoyed it immensely. I got into her writing many years ago when she was writing the Jedi Apprentice books. Yes, I was in my 30's reading young adult Star Wars books. Yes, I bought the entire series as they came out. I visited the bookstore frequently, waiting specifically for the next book to hit the shelf so I could snap it up. I bought not one but two copies, and gifted my best friend with the second set, because we both love SW that much, and she had also fallen in love with Jude Watson's writing. You couldn't pry those books out of my collection, I love them too much. The first one she wrote, "The Dark Rival," is still my favorite. It was bloody brilliant, and I was an instant fan.

So, browsing around online, I found some non-SW books she'd written and bought "Premonitions." Ah, what an enjoyable book. Very similar to the SW books, in that she doesn't wimp out on the difficult topics. She dives right in and makes her characters deal. It's one of the things that grabbed me in the SW books. I've been proofing a lot of fanfiction recently for a print version of a zine, and if I see one more overwritten, prepositional phrase-loaded, participial phrase-loaded, dangling modifier (oh God, this one is killing me, kiiiiiiiiiillling me!), and adverb-loaded sentence, I'm gonna scream. And yes, I read examples that shoved all those things into one single sentence. You'd think the page would bend out of shape from all that word weight. This novel was the biggest breath of fresh air after drowning in prose that simply doesn't work. Short, concise, direct. There's much to be said for reading (and learning from) good young adult novels.

And I'm back and writing already...

I reminded myself of how important music is to my writing moods/productivity.

Had to turn out a vignette that I've been procrastinating on. Had tried working on it over lunch, but turned out only a few bland sentences. Looked at the CDs I have downstairs right now, and picked "Memoirs of a Geisha" by John Williams. I wrote my last fanfic story to it, and since I was working with those characters again...

And it was the perfect mood. Again. (Which is still the oddest thing to me -- how this score works for writing Combat! fiction... but writing is all about mood, and it's got that in spades.) And I got my 450 word piece done, beta-ed, and submitted, all with "Memoirs" playing in the background.

And a three-day weekend lies ahead!

September already

Ah, it's been a lovely vacation. But, alas, it's over. It's back to writing. I received one of the critiques on my novel today and so decided today is the day I go back to work on it. I'll spend September doing the final draft, which will leave October free to plan for this year's nano.

That's the plan anyway.