Excuses, excuses

Hitting the wall early this nano. Got 500 words this morning, but tonight... brain refuses to work. I cannot see ahead right now, and it's driving me crazy. And I ran out of orange juice for my sore throat. And I'm cold. And I have "Rest in Peace" from Once More With Feeling stuck in my head now.

So, I resort to pictures to, um, er... inspire me?

Perhaps I'm going about this the wrong way

Still suffering inability to get the right voice down on paper. I'm currently writing in omniscient, which is a great surprise as that's not a pov I ever use. I like to get in someone's head and stay there. I can't get in these characters' heads. So, in this novel, so far, I'm mostly observing and pointing thing out as narrator. I keep trying to pull in tighter, and each time, I pull back, so from that aspect, it is a weird combo of povs as I experiment.

I keep getting the feeling it should be in first. I may even try a section like that, see how it reads.

And the other big problem is my lack of setting. I've been very careful to try and keep this as low-key fantasy as possible, mostly urban, and not much of that. And I think that might be exactly backwards. I'm coming to the conclusion that this story needs to embrace the fantasy aspects, head-on. That I can actually tell the story I want better for the fantastical and the contrast it allows, than for trying to steer clear of it. Hm.

How not to tell a story

Interesting. Nano proceeds, and I'm finding it quick and easy to get my word counts this year. However, the writing sucks. The story's events are exactly what I want, in fact, I've had some interesting surprises as I go along, all good. But I am not telling the story the way I want to. The voice is wrong, the pov might even be wrong. This actually fascinates me, how wrong everything's coming out. Not wrong, exactly, just not what I want. This will be the first time in the nanos I've done where very little will be kept from this first draft.

And oddly, that doesn't bother me at all. I think with this story and subject, I need to experiment a bit. I think I need to get the whole thing out before I can figure out the proper way to tell it. And I like that. I like that a lot. This time doesn't feel wasted at all. It feels like necessary discovery and learning time. It also frees me up during nano itself. The past few years I've stressed over the words, editing and chopping as I went. It made nano very hard, but it also gave me fairly clean drafts.

This time, I'm not worried over how any of it reads, and don't really care how lousy the sentences are. I just want to see where the characters take me so I can learn what makes this story so different in the actual telling. Why the straight-forward approach that worked on my other novels fails here. The sense that some important discovery about my own writing lies ahead makes me write faster and quibble less. It's quite cool and rather exciting. And oh-so-different from my normal writing experience.

Oh bother

Last day before nano... and I'm seriously considering changing my novel. Gah! "Why don't you do me a favor and shoot me." My novels keep getting tougher and tougher, in subject matter and in depth. Now, this is a good thing, we're supposed to take on more. How else do we grow as writers without reaching farther? But I have doubts about whether anyone will want to read this one except me.

Oh crud

Nano starts in five days.

Oddly, the score to Waterworld has been great outlining music for this novel. I say odd because that's not a score I would have picked as appropriate just off the shelf.

Am having trouble with setting for this book. I cannot get a handle on it. Okay, that's not exactly true. The POW camp is very clear in my mind, as is this one particular street in the city (not sure why that exact street or what I'll use it for, but I can see it!). It's the later action... it has no locale yet. Very unusual, as the locations are part of the foundation of a story for me.

Dang. Read the top of this entry and realized again how little time remains before I actually have to start cranking out words. Lots of 'em.

Eenie Meenie Miney, Moe?

Okay, read all notes on both potential nano novels, still vacillating, but now swinging back to POW. Had the right piece of the puzzle fall in my lap today. Watching/listening to a commentary on the 1948 film "Act of Violence" (excellent movie, btw), and the commentator began discussing identity, how it related to the two main characters, the noir genre, and the director. Takes something that simple sometimes, but I realized that's what a big part of POW is about: identity. I just couldn't label it until today, but now that I have, the novel just became much clearer in my mind. This pleases me greatly.

I've started compiling lists of names for it. It's stupid, but lack of the right names can be one of those annoying things that can really stall a project. And during nano is not the time to stall over something dumb. I'm not talking the main characters -- they're all already named. I'm talking the extras and secondary characters. But calling characters Jack 1, Jack 2, Jack 3 just doesn't cut it. Hence the name lists made up in advance. Need a character name? Just open the file, scan until something jumps out at me. Done. And in a fantasy novel, the flavor and sound of the names is important. Average novel potential name list for me needs 50-100 names in it. I won't use even half that, but I've got to have the selection at hand. Even that many's sometimes not enough, and I'll have to fish around elsewhere to supplement the list. Place names too... usually need a lengthy list of place names to choose from.

Draft!

Ahhhhh, sigh. The bliss of finishing something. It may be first draft, but it's still done and ready for editing. Some plot points and characters don't quite follow smoothly yet, as I wrote it out of order, but it's all there, all 10,000 words.

And now! Now, that it's out of my brain, I can start some serious nano thinking. Once again... too many projects and none of them screaming for attention. They're all exciting, I want them all done, but that extra 'write-me-now' spark is proving elusive. Leaning now, not towards the P.O.W. novel, but a YA book that was supposed to be last year's nano book, only Variance booted it aside. Gonna take a couple nights, review the notes on each book, see which one grabs me.

Dances with Fish

Wild... I was looking for this short story I have started, and as I was hunting through the files, I found one with a rather complex little SF short story outlined within. Characters, the world, everything. And I had no memory of it at all. I vaguely remember a couple things in there, but the bulk of it is brand new to me now. Wonder if that will make it easier or harder to write?

Not an auspicious beginning

Okay, so on my birthday, I wished for one thing. That my muse come back from whatever extended holiday he's been enjoying and work with me, damn it. In turn, I promised focus and industrious work on whatever he gave me.

So, big (BIG!) note to self: 'Dear Deb -- when making such promises about writing, do not -- repeat, do not start off your first writing night by watching any movie where Aldo Ray goes shirtless. It renders your brain (and most of the rest of you) to mush, from which it takes hours to recover. And little to no writing will get done, and you will just get pointlessly angry. Reading. Reading's the ticket. Thanks.'

Discipline? What's that?

Discipline looks a lot better when someone else is wearing the uniform.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I should be working on that novel. But I'm not. I'm working on the other novel. I'm unpacking boxes (got about 8 taken care of). I'm finishing off the contact paper in the last cupboard of the kitchen. I'm watching "L.A. Confidential" and wondering how I'd recast it if I'd been making it in the 50's. I'm cooking twice-baked potatoes for the gang. I'm sorting crud that's not mine in the garage. Oh yeah. And I'm working on the other novel. Because I can't get my brain into DTD mode. Need to watch "Where the Sidewalk Ends." Doesn't matter what mood I'm in. This is business. This is work. This is discipline.

Which I don't seem to have today. Sigh.

Getting back in the game

It helps to spend an hour figuring out your finances for the rest of the year, and realizing you will be worse than flat broke.

So. It will help, even a little bit, to start earning money for my writing again. So, I did a quickie look-see of my short stories and found all except one in need of serious rewrites. Cruised Ralan to see who takes reprints, found one that may be a nice fit, and sent it right off.

Tonight, I will do a serious evaluation of the various drafts of stories and see which ones are actually worthy of being sent out. My current goal is to work on shorts through the end of this weekend, complete and send out as many as possible. After that... it's on to the big stuff. DTD. No excuse not to finish the final draft and get it out the door.

And this means nano's out this year. The last thing I need to do right now is start a new novel, when I've got three completed and just in need of revisions. When those are revised and out the door, then I can both finish Variance and start the new one. Not until then.

And that's also the end of my fanfic run... I was just revving up on MM too, but I can't spend time on it any more. Not right now. Maybe after I get some more stuff out the door, I can slip in a few hours a week on it.

Crowd scenes

My conscious brain is a very visual thing, and it can hang onto a lot at once when I'm seeing a story unfold in my eye. It's like Cinemascope. Except you can't write in Cinemascope. You can write broadly or narrowly, but you only have sentences chained together to form your vision. Each sentence feels like a spotlight, even when you're writing broadly, and you have to point the spotlight correctly or the scene goes astray.

I've got eleven major characters with speaking roles crammed in one room with forty other extras and a band. It's the scene that sets up the entire rest of the story, and everybody has to be kept straight. If I had to think about what I want to accomplish in this scene, try to plan it out, use my conscious visual brain, I'd go nuts. This is where I rely on the subconscious's in-the-can version playing in my head. Which, yes, is different from what my conscious brain sees. My conscious brain sees the sets and the cameramen and actors and lights and marks on the floor. It wants to shout orders and play director. The subconscious shows me the 'finished' product. It already has the camera angles, the focus, and I trust it to be what the story needs.

And, of course, there's always the blessing of re-writes, which are usually not so much re-envisioning the scene, but refining how I describe what the subconscious shows me. It's odd to me sometimes how much the physical act of writing a story has little to do with the words. That probably makes little sense, even to other writers, but it's how I work.