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.

Brain on vacation

This actually doesn't bother me. It's been very nice not writing story, not thinking, not fretting for the past week. Just kicking back doing the other things life offers. Finishing a long story with a writing partner last week was very satisfying, have to bask in that for awhile before moving on. When my brain wants to work on serious stories again it will.

Perfection

Sometimes you read a story, and there's no words to describe how completely it satisfies. The story, the characters, the dialogue, the way the subplots cross and meet briefly, necessarily, but then go their own ways to their own conclusions, the sheer emotional impact, and the ending that makes you smile and cry all at once.

I read one of those tonight. It's a story I could never even conceive of, let alone write, and that's not a bad thing at all. On a story like this, I only ever want to be a reader.

And a saucer of milk please

Boy, nothing disrupts the writing routine (heck, routine in general) so quickly as a new kitten. Now mind you, I'm not in the market for another cat. I have plenty already, but on Friday, that didn't stop Grady from walking up and demanding a new home. And life has been topsy-turvy ever since. Because, of course, I took him in. What, I'm supposed to let an adorable kitten run loose in the neighborhood? With off-leash dogs and cars and raccoons and all else that would think a kitten is just a bite of lunch?

But I already have cats and dogs, so the weekend was spent acclimitizing everybody and breaking up minor spats. Elanor, the youngest of my indoor cats, warmed up first. She can't watch Grady playing soccer without wanting to get in on the game. Kit tolerates Grady, but with much hissing and swatting. Rosie, who is Elanor's mother, and was abandoned with her kittens in my backyard, is the most stand-offish. Brinja, my old dog, has renewed her resident household position as cat-defender, and has been trying to protect Grady from my younger dog's rough attempts to play. Maxie, thinks the new kitten is just grand, a perfect toy I brought home, just for him to stomp on and bowl over. Sigh.

And so, writing ground to a complete stop on Friday and Saturday. Yesterday, things started settling out, and when the whole gang crashed out for a siesta, I took advantage of the quiet to get 1000 words done. It was something anyway. Made me feel the weekend wasn't entirely a loss. I read a lot on Saturday, cuz it was easier to pick up and put down a book through the animal madness, then it was to attempt to stay grooved into writing.

August!

I know exactly what my problem is right now, as far as writing. It's a committment issue. Other than fanfic, I'm unable to commit to a specific project. Now, I have a deadline on one fanfic piece I'm working on, so I'm sort of using that as a lame excuse. "After Aug 15, I'll get going again..."

I think after seven months of being committed body and soul to one project (the last novel I did), I haven't been ready to jump that heavily into something else. It's been vacation time, and it's been wonderful, but it's time to get back to business. I reviewed my pending projects last night, and it's come down to writing draft 2 of my fantasy novel, or working on two novellas. There's three months between now and November, when I'll start a new novel. That's a nice chunk of edit time. If I can commit to something.

I'm leaning towards the novellas, mostly because they're shorter projects. They're just as immersive, but less writing required... and that leaves me open to do what I REALLY want to do before Nov. 1st -- complete the final draft of "DTD." I'm just not distant from it yet to go back to it, and I'm waiting on feedback from one of the beta readers. And I haven't figured out how to solve a couple problems in it. See? Excuses, excuses... I can't truly commit to it yet either, although it's never left my brain. It dwells there, in the background, biding its time.

And here it is August.

And on the left side of the railing...

I've known for a very long time that my strengths in writing are best suited to longer works: novellas and novels. And, oddly, I seem to be able to write decent flash fiction. But shorts... I struggle with them. Part of this is personal preference. I don't like reading short stories, so why should I think I would like writing them? I don't like them for the same reason I don't particularly like songs, but prefer opera, or symphonies, or a film score. I like my moods sustained. I want to go into something and stay there. I don't want to be amused for mere minutes when I could disappear into a world for hours.

That's not to say there aren't short stories that I enjoy, and I do read shorts regularly. And yet, when I look back at the stories from, say, F&SF magazine, the first two that pop to my mind are Kate Wilhelm's "Naming the Flowers" and Adam-Troy Castro's "The Funeral March of the Marionettes." Both are novellas, not shorts. Both awed me. Both rank among the best stories I've ever read. The other one that really stands out is "Death and Suffrage" by Dale Bailey, which was much shorter and just as fabulous, and any and every story written by M. Rikert. I would buy anything she wrote, sight unseen, because her stories are always that good. But those are about all that I remember by title and author. A handful out of.... fifteen years of diligently reading the magazine? That's not to say I didn't enjoy most of the stories I read. Because I did. F&SF consistently prints good stories. It's just that in the realm of the shorter stories, it's more difficult to find something truly inspiring.

So I write short stories infrequently, and most of them get read by maybe one person I trust, and then they get filed away in the "practice" folder. Because that's what 90% of my shorts feel like to me. Just practice sessions, experimenting with voices and tense and structure. They're useful for that. I have only three or four shorts that I really like and think would be worth working on. And the one I like best of all, I'm not ready to write. I know that. I'm missing something yet that would allow me to do it justice. And so it sits, just a title, the outline of the story, and a few experimental paragraphs, waiting.