Ransom Noble's Blog, page 12

Need a Break

And sometimes it is good to allow that. There’s a lot going on outside my writing life, and sometimes the writing goals are the ones that need to give. It’s been 41 days of my 1500 words per day writing goal. The last three in a row I haven’t made it. However, my work-in-progress is at 64k words. It’s nearly done, and I promised myself to sketch out the remaining scenes today. Should push me over 65k, and I can live with that.

Preschool begins today. Different activities for my daughter also begin this week. I traveled over the holiday weekend, and we had fun.

But I also remember it is 58 more days (including today) until NaNoWriMo begins. And I want to write another novel in that time, probably at the same pace I wrote this one. Even if I get it to the point I have drafted Book 2, Book 3 will be in decent shape for rewrites. My outline for Book 3 is stronger than Book 2′s was before writing. I think I can give myself a few days – at least until after the weekend – until I start the next book.

I Need More Fences in this Blog

Fences, you ask? I’ll get to it.Next week, preschool begins. It will be September, and it’s also a new session for my daughter’s activities. I’m looking forward to a new routine, though it always takes a little bit to figure out how to get everywhere at the right time.

I know a few moms who changed the sleep schedule so kids get up earlier, but my kids slept in the past two days and I’m enjoying that. In my house, sleeping in is defined as me staying in bed until 7 am.

Last night, I spent an hour catching up on social media, changing a few passwords, and adding a picture where it needed an update. The picture was the tricky part, because for some reason there aren’t that many pictures of me that I want to share. Most of them are old. Many of them have only my daughter. And it’s very rare these days for someone to take just my picture. It’s always with one or both of the kids.

My project is going well with 1500 words a day. Have 54,743 words and expect to spend less than two more weeks on Book 2 before moving to Book 3. The trick will be to find the writing time with the new schedule.

If I can wear my daughter out enough to nap, I could get some good writing time in. If I can focus, I can also get some editing time in when the kids go to bed. If I can find some quiet time, I can blog and catch up on social media, too. There are a lot of ‘if’s involved, but I think it’s worth doing, and I’ll find the time somewhere.

I even find time to read, because that’s the best way to get my brain to relax to sleep. I want to curse the authors who keep me awake past bedtime to finish one more chapter as much as I hope my readers feel the same about my work someday. At least if I read, I’m much less likely to be remembering new thoughts for the work-in-progress an hour after the lights are out, tapping them into Evernote in my phone.

But back to the pictures. I think I put too much thought into pictures. What should I use to describe editing? Writing? Some other activity? Do I put something else in as visual interest?

Visual interest reminds me of art class in high school. My teacher always had us trying new things, even though our artistic vision might differ. Once, a friend had a painting of a snowman, with skaters on a lake, and a few trees dotted around. The teacher said she needed a fence. It was supposed to draw the eye around the painting. After that, whenever we finished anything – we always joked that you needed a fence in it. I thought of that last night when I read about adding images to posts in Google+. It’s just something to draw in the eyes when you’re trying to get them to read your text.

So here’s my fence:

Fence around Flamingos at Sacramento Zoo

Habits and Goals

This is Day 29 of my challenge to write 1500 words a day

until I finish books 2 and 3 of my trilogy. I’ve failed to meet the goal three

times. I’ve exceeded it a few times, too, which leaves me with a goal of 43.5k

words by the end of today. I’m sitting at 44,884. (I began before the first day with 894. Right on target!)

I often read about goals and habits. Writing has become a

habit for me. A habit I have cultivated deliberately. It takes 28 days to form

a new habit. I’m still not sure what it takes to break an old habit.

Habits are something you get accustomed to doing. It isn’t

about whether the action is good or bad – it is simply what you do in a given

situation. So the habit becomes sitting in a chair and letting the words pour

out onto the paper. I’m practicing to do this every day. It isn’t about good

words or bad words. I know I can edit it later.

Editing is another skill I am cultivating. It is far from a

habit, but I’m progressing.

A goal is something different. Something mindful. Something

you choose to do. Goals are set with the intention to create something, bring

something into your existence, accomplish something. I read about SMART goals,

and it always reminds me of Michelle Tuesday talking about how “more” is a

horrible goal word. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic,

Timely.

SMART goals are where many of us fail in our resolutions. We

say we want to write more, to lose weight, to do something vague but impressive

sounding. If you want to write my current goal in a SMART way: I will write

1500 words a day, every day, from July 24 to October 31.

This nets me 150,000 words on one project: the two sequels for The Next Jane.

This goal isn’t impossible for me, because I had been writing at least 750

words a day, and I know in times of NaNo I can write a lot more than that. I

can measure this, and I have a time frame that I want to do it. Keeping that pace for 100 days, though, is a bit exhausting.

If that were my only goal, I’d finish it every day. However,

my time limits me to only certain times of day to write.

I’ve seen people write that the only thing you get good at doing with your 750 words a day (from the Morning Pages) is writing 750 words. I know that pushing myself to double that is pushing, but I’m gaining coherence through projects by getting them out in a short period of time. It might be my habit to sit down and write 750 words at a time. But if I plan around that, I create short bursts of story. They coincide with my outline. Later, I wave them together.

Some habits can be put into line with goals to create progress. What are you doing to reach your goals?

New Writer’s Group

It’s always exciting to find a new one, and this week I managed to attend. I always start out a little aflutter because there are so many ways it can go. What do I take to read? What do I wear? [Yes, I tend to be silly that way.]

But however many groups you’ve been to before, they’re always a little different. I’ve tried to form a few online, to varied degrees of success. I’ve spent time in groups in person in three different cities, and each of them had a personality of their own. I’ve made friends and sparked debates and learned something from every group I’ve attended.

I try to think about what I want out of a group, and what I’m willing to give to them, before I go. While I’d love to trade novels, I haven’t yet been part of a group that was able to listen to an entire novel – I’ve traded those with some writer friends online with good results.

The group Monday does an exercise to warm up, and then they share. I’m not sure it’s a long enough meeting for all of that, but it’s a new group, new people together, and I’m interested to see how it evolves. And it seems they might switch off to do different exercises. It’s almost enough to make me run out and go research different things in that vein.

However, I’m being good and focusing on my WIP. Current word count is 24,181 (97 pages). There are 85 more writing days until NaNo.

What I did decide to take to the writing group next time is information about goals. We talked about writing goals, mentioned NaNoWriMo, and current projects. More than one expressed they wanted to be able to do NaNo successfully (50k words in 30 days). My first NaNo in 2007 was just over 50k, but I didn’t finish the project. Since then, I’ve been working to stay focused and actually finish a project during the month, which I did last year (76k words). I’ve also been writing 155 days in a row today, at least 750 words each day.

And I might take the opportunity to blog about how to do all of that, next week.

I’m most excited about this group being an outlet to discuss writing, the mechanics or the exercises or the WIPs from the members. They’re nice.

What do you look for in a writer’s group? What would you want if you were in a new one from (almost) the very beginning? Do you think ahead of time about what you will take from and what you will give to the group? What would you not want from a writer’s group?

Forward Progress

The goal is 1500 words a day to get 150,000 words between two novels before November 1st. It’s also to get a first pass through the rough draft of book one.

 

So far, I have gone through the first chapter of the first book. It’s more cohesive and has notes in a few places to add, subtract, whatever. I’ve read through the second chapter, and I think I’ve figured out where to start to get to where I want to be.

 

The second book passed 12,000 words last night. Only one day I did not reach the 1500 words, and if I had stopped exactly at the goal I’d be at 10,500 words. It’s only been a week, but I’m starting to feel the momentum carry me further. It’s easier and easier to open the work-in-progress and jump in with my characters.

 

One of my hardest parts about staying focused through the end of the editing is the ‘ooh, shiny!’ factor. I want to write something else. Right now I’m thinking about machines. I have a couple ideas about how that could go (and yes, I do write them down), but I’m making myself wait for that until November. That will be my NaNoWriMo treat – to be able to start on something completely new. Then I’ll be able to finish the editing during December.

 

And yes, I’ll also be deciding how to shop out the novel I just finished. Do you ever wonder how much you can do in a day? I do. Every day. And I keep pushing myself to do more.

Trilogy

When I was young and reading every spare moment, it seemed like everything in the speculative fiction section was a trilogy. Some of them became more than trilogies as the subsequent novels refused to wrap up the story.

I always wanted to be the one who had novels on the shelves like the ones I read. They were all in bookstores then as I browsed for something new to devour. The first trilogy I had planned was created while I was in high school. All the characters were named, pieces of the plot are still in my computer, and nothing ever came of it.

Yesterday I started Book 2 of a trilogy. It’s a real trilogy, I guess, in the way that it will be written. It will be edited, and as much as I can possibly manage, it will be professionally published.  On the bright side, if I average 1500 words a day, I can finish the rough drafts of both sequels by NaNoWriMo.

That would be good, because I already have a few ideas for November’s writing marathon. One hundred writing days to NaNo! (I haven’t written yet today.)

One of my friends told me that it was better to think in a series type capacity anyway, especially due to the amount of work it took to build these worlds in speculative fiction.

All I can say is I’m really excited about this adventure. I am finally writing a series.

In Translation

A language is more than just words. I can speak a few words in a few languages, but not enough to get by. Sometimes, it seems we share a language and still miss something in communication. Other days, I’m not sure I’m even fluent in my native language…

A friend of mine (from Sweden) said she was reading something British and she didn’t quite get it until she remembered it was British. After that, it was funny. She reminded me it wasn’t enough to read the words, but stories also can require a switch in mindset. Since my friend has lived in both Britain and America, it explains how she might identify it differently.

She also recommends translations of a few books from Swedish authors. Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell are the ones I’ve read so far, and both of them write intricately-plotted crime fiction. Many of the comments I’ve heard about it before and after I read it is that it takes 50-100 pages to get into the story, to be truly hooked. I felt that was accurate, though the second and third books by Larsson did not have the trouble because they followed after the setup of the first.

I know a couple people who don’t want to wait that long. I’ve heard of editors and agents who want to know by the first five pages, by the first paragraph.

What I really wonder is what that says about us, that we aren’t willing to give it a few pages. Does it say something if you read the last page first, if you skim through the book and then read it over in detail, or if you carefully devour everything on the page. Or is it something more about how short life is, that we want to jump into something that immediately takes us away.

Then it leads me to wonder if our work, translated, meets the same resistance when it travels over to someone else. If they need to switch to a part of the brain where they understand it, or if the translator doesn’t manage to change the ideas from what we intended to something that makes sense in that culture.

When I look at my work again, I start wondering about creating new languages. Y’know, because I’m always thinking about space adventures and aliens and I swear one day I’m going to finish that world I’ve created and the story that’s just beyond me at the moment. Those translations remind me that it isn’t just about figuring out the character’s mind, but also in making sure the reader sees it as well as I do.

Draft Finished?

Right. I know. I said I finished it. I felt good about finishing it.

So why is it that the little things I changed keep rummaging around in my head and whisper more little details to me? That’s not finished, that’s a work in progress.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. How do you know, definitively, that you are done? I’m struggling at the moment, but I will manage.

I’m moving on to the next draft, but I hope the susurrus moves to silence. After I fix that just. one. more. thing… After that, I also need to make that definite decision of what I’m doing next. I refuse to allow myself more than a week or two before making the next move. Only one manuscript will languish away in the drawer of death for five years. NO MORE!

Dedication

Today’s space is reserved for all the writers I know (and maybe some of them I don’t know) who ought to be out there, sharing their work, who are stopped by just one person: themselves.

Art of Science eBook!

Art of Science Kindle Book

Available in ebook form for your reading pleasure!

Art of Science Nook eBook

Art of Science Kobo eBook

iBooks link coming soon.

Book cover, final!

Sick day today, which I hate. However, I just heard the ebook went live and I had to share the news.