Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 16

The Deception of Revision

Our weather finally dived into the deep end to prepare for winter. That’s now only a few weeks off and hard to believe. The leaves never changed colors. Some simply dried out and fell off.

On “Write Like a Pulp Writer,” I’m digging into the time management lesson learned. That’s becoming a fairly big topic because no one quite talks about it. If you’re reading a standard time management book, they talk about your work career and accomplishing those goals. Your personal life is this thing on the side that’s there and has nothing to do with the goals (along with sleep).

The writing ones talk about squeezing time in around the day job. Neither talk about how these are going to impact each other, or what you can do to offset that. That might be a book on its own.

And here’s a realization for you about revision:

New technology offers the promise of making less work for us. Which is a lie. It makes more work. When I was in the Army, we printed PowerPoint slides and copied them onto transparencies. That was the technology available. If the presenter had a change to one of the slides, he simply corrected it verbally at the meeting.

Enter technology to show presentations with a computer. Now people revise their slides twenty or thirty times, tweak one more word five minutes before the meeting.

The computer makes writing easy. No doubt about it. Perfect tool to cycle while working on the first draft. But it also makes it easy to do what I see people do with PowerPoint. Revise, revise, revise…because you can. They don’t think that the ease of the tool is making them do more work.

 Something to think about: What if you could only do one draft?

Next Project

Yoga Sunday morning. I’ve started doing yoga on the weekends since I shifted working out to the early morning. Keeps the pattern for the entire week. I’m using Yoga with Adrienne on YouTube, which is gentle yoga. Some of what I’ve run into are more of a ninja yoga and I want to focus more on the gentle stretching and balance, not going from plank to dog and back.

I end up thinking—it seems like all night—what I want to do next. The story will be with the continuity editor for about two weeks. I don’t want to start a new Dice book until I see those edits, since they may impact what I do in the next book. Plus the editor is creating a story bible for me. Win-win!

A project to fit in with the two weeks?

I’m warming up to that, though I don’t want to do short stories. I’m still a little burned out on short stories. So I come up with several ideas, all of which I can do:

Write Like a Pulp Writer: Lessons From Writing a Story a Week for a Year.A book on cycling itself, since that doesn’t exist. I’m thinking this might be a craft series that focuses on one small piece of writing as it relates to pantsers. Most books on craft are far too generic and broad.Tech Talk for Writers, a proposed series on software like Word, Excel, Evernote. The programs are designed so you can jump on them and use them right away. Most people never get past that, and there are so many things you can do to shortcut your writing by employing the next level up. 

I decided on the first one. This was on my project list that I started at the beginning of the year, though I’d forgotten it was there!

First round was on getting ideas and on beginnings. Plus, I did a cover. Not final. I have a series title for the top that I haven’t decided on.

Superhero Portal is Done!

This is a huge win for me because I hit my deadline, and was actually a day early. I might have been a little earlier, but ChessieCon wiped me out last week. 

So I spent most of the week tying up loose ends on the story because my creative side needs all those resolved to make the climax work. It also made me realize I hadn’t done my diligence about the final scenes in the climax. A common problem for pantsers is racing through the end and not doing enough with it, which is what happened. I could taste the ending and it showed as being too thin.

I knew Saturday I would do the push and have it done, just like I did, week in, week out during the Great Challenge. I woke up knowing what I needed to do.

So now it’s off for a continuity edit.

What’s next? Good question.

Stuff Your Stocking With Free Books!

The one we can’t forget to give gifts to is ourselves. Easy to forget in the rush of Christmas shopping for the rest of the family. So reward yourself for all that Christmas shopping with a free speculative fiction book from the Tales of the Future Book Giveaway

This one is science fiction focused.  You’ll find a lot of space opera, some fantasy, and even a few Christmas stories to get you in the mood. 

It runs from November 27-December 31. 

Convention Zombie

Convention Zombie

I wake up and it’s really cold inside. I have my temperature set to 70 degrees. The temperature outside is sucking out the warmth, so I bump the gauge up a few degrees. Check outside: 36. Wind chill: 25. Yow!

No farmer’s market Saturday. I debate about going to breakfast. But I enjoy that and the people there. So I bundle up, curse at the wind, and drive on over. I’m 15 minutes later than usual because I was doing early morning yoga. No one is there.

After that, I zoom through the grocery store, feel like I need to take out a loan to buy food.  Too expensive!  Prices have gone up for me between $20 and $40.

After the late night on Friday, I’m tired, and I stay tired through Sunday.  Because I’m so tired, I opt to run Pro Writing Aid on the story.  That’s about where my mental power is. I’m impressed at what it finds that Word and Grammarly didn’t.  I’m surprised to discover that I’m using two British variations of words.  I add those to my autocorrect since I’m likely to use them again. 

The tool finds quite a bit that I do need to clean up, so I work my way through on and off between panels and a little Sunday morning.  I optimistically think that I’ll be able to jump back into fleshing out the climax Sunday afternoon after the last panel.  But alas, convention zombie wins.  Not even a nap helps!

The panels were a lot of fun.  I had ones on:

Do Series Go on For Too Long? We were all over the place on this one, with books and TV shows.  I’m reading J.D. Robb, which is around 50 books—and they’re still good.  But I’ve read other series where the author made a change at some point and the series lost what I liked about it.  Usually, it’s around book 7.  Problematic when the publisher wants more books in the series with this character and you’re getting burned out on it.

Genre Mixing: An interesting one of blending two genres.  The key for this is to know which genre shelf your book will be on and make sure that one is in charge.  I’ve seen a lot of writers add a little of this one, a little or that one, and maybe that one and end up having no genre at all.  Some may also not mash together well.  I don’t think thriller and romance can be blended effectively.  Very hard getting the pacing requirement of a thriller.  Kind of hard to develop a relationship when you’re running for your life.  The other was Horror-Romance.  Doesn’t mean someone hasn’t tried.  Doesn’t mean it worked either.  I also noted that a lot of Science Fiction Romances don’t work.  Most of them don’t understand science fiction.  They just plop a romance on an alien world, add aliens, and done, leaving a vaguely unsatisfying story.

Why Aren’t They Writing Like They Used To:  This one started with aspects of stories that are trending now that hadn’t in the past.  For instance, I was disappointed with a lot of books while I was growing up because there weren’t a lot of girls or women in them.  I wanted just something for me and was so ecstatic to see MZB’s Sword and Sorceress series.  I also noted that I wasn’t always as happy with having women in the action roles.  Women are built differently, a fact very obvious when I was in the military.  When you factor that in, it’s hard to write action scenes.  You have to think a lot about how to do them in a way realistically to what the woman character can do.  In Urban Fantasy, a lot of characters got super strength, super healing, or the part about being different like that got a hand-wavy thing like it didn’t matter.  In one thriller (written by a woman), the woman main character fell downstairs and out of the action scene while the sidekick did the fight.  Yeah, right.

It was a lot of fun!  Though I hope I’m not as much of a zombie on Monday!

First Day at Chesscon

Since the con was virtual, I didn’t have my drive to Maryland to stay at the hotel. Glad I didn’t either. We’re pretty cold here. Sunny and clear outside and the wind gusts bringing it below freezing. Since my first session on Zoom isn’t until 3:00, I get a lot of cycling in.

I’m doing a full cycle of the story. It’s a lot of cleanup of little things mostly. I took up what I got out of the editing book (plowed through that pretty quickly, though I’m going to review one section more extensively).

I started with spell checks because I didn’t want the errors distracting me during the cycling.

Ran Word spell check. Word’s pretty good at catching certain types of errors.Ran Grammarly, skipping over all the false positives (anything with hyphens). But it’s really good at finding comma problems and other types of errors.Ran PerfectIt, which is a copy editor’s tool. It matches the story against the Chicago Style Manual. One of the things it does is note if you have a word hyphenated in some places and not in others. In one case, in context, some shouldn’t be hyphenated and others should be. That made me think about how to say the former differently. It also has a tool to remove the two spaces after the period.

I also picked up ProWriting Aid (lifetime subscription is on sale for half off, which is a really good deal). That’s the remaining tool on this list because it catches still another level of errors. Fixing typos is always a tedious part of the process of writing, so anything that helps I’ll take it.

Then I went to the beginning of the story and started reading through it. I found some repetitions, not too many. Added dialogue about something that needed to be mentioned. Discovered that I’d not completed the loop on a character action.

Cycling through also made me realize that I need at least a couple of passes over my climax. Getting towards the ending is always a rough spot for me. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and suddenly I want to run for it. So I always have to make sure everything is cleaned up pretty good.

I zoomed through almost twenty chapters in a few hours (and it doesn’t take long because I’ve been making cycling passes throughout the writing process).

Then off for the first con session: Welcome to ChessieCon. One of the things we discussed was con attendance. Chessie lost a lot of people because they weren’t able to do this in person. The crowd is older and doesn’t like Zoom. There’s been a decline of new attendees to ChessieCon, and also Balticon. Those are both literary cons. So they’ve been trying to figure out how to draw new people.

One of my complaints—which kept me away—was politics. We get smacked with politics every single day, all of it nasty and angry. Washington, DC is even worse. So when I go to a con, I want to escape into the wonder of science fiction and fantasy. On my first time as a con panelist, I landed on two panels that went very political and angry. One panelist said to me, “You’re not saying anything.” My response was, “When you get back on topic, I will.” A friend who went to Capclave reported some of the same problems.

The Underwater Cities panel was a lot of fun. We had a submariner and a science teacher with me. I watched Sea Hunt (reruns!), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (the more I learn to write, the more awful the series becomes), Primus (might have to see if that’s available anywhere), and SeaQuest DSV (the first season is best, though they were imitating Next Gen by adding a kid on a submarine). I also studied oceanography in college and very much enjoyed it. I have been pondering doing an underwater novel or series.

I think our foray below is likely to be tourism. Because that’s what’s happening with space now. People can pay $25,000 and go up into space.

After that, the Star Wars panel. It was at 10:30 PM and I’m afraid I was half asleep. It went in a different direction than I expected. I didn’t say it there, but I haven’t been as impressed with the more recent Star Wars entries. I think it’s a trend in Hollywood across the board where everything feels like low hanging fruit and the characterization isn’t always there for me (and may be the quality of the actors, too).

For example, I liked that we got a character like Rey. Yet, The Force Awakens felt like a Xerox copy of the very first Star Wars. I even watched one scene and correctly predicted what was going to happen. Movies should surprise you with unexpected directions. But this isn’t a thing specific to Star Wars. It’s a problem across the board in Hollywood.

Onward to more panels tomorrow!

The Nuclear Option

It’s been pretty dead all week.  People are already headed out to visit family and hunkering down for turkey preparations.  For Thanksgiving dinner, I visited family locally, the first time in two years.

Earlier in the week, I picked up a book called Be A Writing Machine, which is written by an indie writer who is also a pantser.  So no, ‘You gotta outline to write fast,” which is in a lot of books.  I should note he also has a pocket guide for pantsing and one on advanced editing for indie authors.

The book mentioned a “nuclear option” for writing, which means shutting everything out to write.  So I did that, because it required a real mental shift. 

Then instinct told me to write the next scenes out of order. And it helped me get over the hump I was struggling with. But I also did a few more things:

I’d been writing the story in Word. As I got further along in the story, I started having trouble getting a feel for where I was in the story. So, since I’d lost my original serial number for Scrivener (I was a beta tester for the first version), I bought version 3. Ported the story into it. Found yet more typos that Grammarly did catch. Yeah, I really need that editing book above. But once I separated the climax scenes into separate text files, it helped me mentally because I could see right there I really didn’t have that much to do (we’re talking 3K tops).I skipped one scene that was sticking me so I could write out of order. I normally don’t need to do this, but changing things up helps.

I still have to write that one scene, add the epilogue/Validation (always the very last thing I write).  But on Friday, it’ll be a full cycling pass, just make sure all the loose ends are tied up. And I’ll take a gander at that editing book and see if I can use anything before I ship this to the first phase of editing: Continunity.

Story completion is in sight.  Land Ho!

Story Regrouping

A bit of regrouping today.  Had some time to think about the problems I was having last night, especially with the inner critic.  Need to jettison thinking about the low point.  That’s mechanical…it’s one of those things someone who is outlining would try to plan for.  All I need to know is that the XXXX is about to hit the fan.

The story feels a little better today though…more fun.

I also popped in and checked the ChessieCon site to see if the panels were posted.  We’re only days away!  And yes they were.  I’m on eight panels total.  But there’s also a panel called Writing Without a Net, a panel for pantsers.  I suggested that one, but I didn’t make it onto the panel.  So tune in if you want to check it out.

ChessieCon This Weekend

I’ll be attending Chessiecon virtually this weekend. They just posted the panels. Attending this convention is free.

My panels:

Welcome to Chessiecon/First Chessiecon/Intro to S/FFUnderwater Cities: Is there merit to this idea?Star Wars: What Went Wrong and What Went Right?Do Series Go On Too Long?Why Aren’t They Writing Like They Used To?Genre Mixing (I’m the moderator, so if you have any questions you want me to ask, let me know in the comments)Your Universe, Your GodsHas Fantasy Lost Its Wonder? (also a moderator. Same deal as above)

Also worth tuning in for Thomas Hotlz’ presentations if you like science. He’s a Maryland university professor who gives good presentations.

Inner Critic at the Door

I spent this weekend working on the climax and wrestling with the inner critic.  Whom I let in without intending to.  I kept thinking that I had to do a low point, make sure I had enough for it…gave it the crack in the door it needed to waltz right in.   Of course, it’s like that commercial where a waitress falls and someone else asks, “Is there a doctor here?”  A woman rushes over, professing expertise because she watched a lot of TV.  Yeah, that’s inner critic.