Nicole R. Murphy's Blog, page 15

A view inside my current state of mind

Yeah, you probably really don't want to read this. However, I think it's important to put on the record some of the (utterly) ridiculous things that can go through an author's mind when, it would seem, everything should be honky dory cause they have achieved the dream.

It's been two months since I turned in Rogue Gadda (book three). In that time, I had some editorial feedback and made the small number of adjustments requested. Now, I'm just waiting for the copyedits.

Next week, Power Unbound (book two) goes to print, ready to be delivered to the bookstores just before Christmas (even though it's a January book – trying to deliver books in the first week of January when the publisher is shut for holidays has in the past proven problematic and so it's done like this now). It's two months away, which didn't seem long for the first book. But when the first book was released, I was editing Power Unbound and writing Rogue Gadda and so I didn't have time to sit and think about it being two months away.

In the meantime, Secret Ones is out there in the world. The feedback to me on it has dried up – no more reviews, no more "oh my god I loved your book"s from family and friends because they've all read it. It's kinda in this strange limbo place – I guess things are still happening, but I don't know.

So the Dream of Asarlai trilogy is, to all intents and purposes, done and apart from a couple of weeks of copyediting, there's really nothing more I can do for these books. That's sad, and a bit scary. Oh of course, there's marketing and publicity to do, but that's really not as big a deal as actually writing them. All the marketing in the world won't sell a crap product. Not without tens of millions of dollars :)

Amidst all this is the overseas sales of the trilogy. HC have the world rights and I don't doubt for one moment they're working on selling them. However, my silly little brain has convinced itself that all that should be happening around now, and that I should hear any moment now, and so every time the phone rings my heart skips and I'm constantly checking emails.

Then there's the writing I'm doing at the moment, and I'm wondering if I made the right decision to work on Battle for Odana first. There's so much writing happening, it's taking longer than I thought. My plan was to have it ready for submission by the end of the year. Instead, I'll be lucky if it's ready for the Beta readers by then.

Maybe I'd be better off focussing right now on the sequel for Dream of Asarlai, because it could be the easier to sell. Except if the trilogy tanks, it won't sell at all.

The result of all this – I am slowly, but surely, going mad. I'm so much in my head, and there's so little there that's certain, that I've become grouchy and whingy and bitey and all the other not-good-ways-to-treat-the-people-you-love stuff.

Nor can I at the moment see a way out of this predicament - so much of it is caused by things that are out of my control and realities of the publishing industry. All I can do is keep ploughing ahead, try to be nicer to those around me and hope that they'll forgive me when the madness clears and I feel on a direct course again.

So, there you have it – my head at the moment. Not pretty is it?

You should try being in here :)

Novel coming along swimmingly

I just wrote one of those fabulous scenes where everything you've done comes together. You've been writing, and you're doing all this cool (make that cruel) stuff to your characters and you're sure of your character's motivations but you're not sure if it actually means something.

Then you realise that thing the character did – it's going to be the act by which they cause their own downfall and throw everything into disarray.

It's moments like this I bless my subconscious – I might not know exactly what's going on, but it's all being knit together behind the scenes and I just have to trust and let the words keep flowing.

It's been a good week for the novel, even though I've had to get rid of huge chunks of text that I previously wrote. Finally, the core of it all is becoming clear and with it, scene after scene is pouring out. Today so far – 5800 words, and it feels like there will be more to come after a bit of thinking time.

It's ended up very different to the original novel, and it's taken me a while to accept that. I thought it was going to be a simple matter of entwining another couple of POVs through the book I already had, fleshing out that story and that world. However, it's become more complex, very different, and things have occurred that I didn't expect.

So now I've accepted that I'm writing a new draft, not editing or changing and old one. It's made the world of difference to my attitude and freed my brain up – another reason it's all coming along so well.

I'm so happy with how it is at the moment. I think this is a really interesting (and entertaining) story I'm telling. I can't wait for it to be ready for people to read.

Taking time to think

Today's post comes from the realm of 'just cause you've got a contract doesn't mean you know everything'. I have Jodi Cleghorn to thank for this. She posted a blog yesterday which she'd written a while ago but put up again as an aid for people getting set for Nanowrimo. In the blog, called Thinking as Writing, Jodi talked about the importance of time to think in the writing process.

Now, as my last blog post stated, I've been wandering around wondering why it was so hard for me to write this novel. I mean, books two and three of the Dream of Asarlai trilogy ran out of me. Jodi's blog made me realise – during the writing of those two books, I was also working at the supermarket and that menial job was giving me the much needed thinking time. I know it did – I often had insight while throwing cardboard boxes into the compactor or stacking tins on shelves or throwing frozen peas into the freezer.

Now, I'd set myself up to write five days a week, five days in a row. Get up in the morning, write for at least three hours, every day. In the afternoon I'd faff around, read mostly. When I'd go to bed, I'd try to think about what I was going to work on the next day and sometimes it would come and sometimes it didn't and when it did, it wasn't always sticking well.

What I wasn't doing was giving my brain enough time to work through what needed to come next. I write really quickly and the story gets on the page really quickly, so I need time to realise the ramifications of that and work out what to do next.

That's what I've done today. I've done the housework. I went to the gym and then I went shopping. I told my brain at the beginning of it all – all righty, brain, we need to work out the Kaimi situation. And now I'm just letting it mosie along. It will tell me when the answer's there. I'm not going to read, or watch any drama on tv – nothing that could add information. I'll just play some video games, watch some gameshows and let me brain do its thing.

After all, it's never let me down before :)

Thinking about first books

It's strange, the impression you get of things. I've been feeling like I'm having to pull teeth to get this novel to start flowing, and that I've not been achieving a lot. Then I look at the wordcount, and realise that in three weeks, I've written around 45,000 words. That's not too bad.

Battle for Odana is a more complex work than the Dream of Asarlai trilogy – it has more point-of-view characters, the world is completely fictional, the concept of the feminine-only power of odana is complicated, there's more storylines. I'm finding it challenging, and that I think is a good thing. I need to keep testing myself as a writer in order to improve.

I'm doing a lot more re-writing at the moment than I thought I would but that makes sense – adding characters, deepening the world means more changes to the plot at first. I'm hoping that the later plot won't need as much changing and I'll be doing more just adding in the bits that are missing from the other characters POV (although I know the end will change too).

I'm thinking about the fact I'm taking a single book and turning it into a duology – particularly, I'm thinking about the pacing required to do that. This is the first time I've written a first book in a continuing storyline – while Dream of Asarlai had an overarching plot that continued from book to book, the majority of the action was self-contained within each volume. I did beginning, middle and ending for each book. Here, I need to write something that is the beginning and middle of a story but not the ending and do it in such a way that's it's both a convincing read itself and will encourage people to get the second half of the story.

So I'm thinking I need to read a few first books in trilogies/duologies, and just the first book. It's not something I normally do – I hate having to wait to finish a story, so while I'll buy books as they come out I'll generally not read until I have the entire trilogy there to continue with. However, I currently have several first books on my TBR shelf, so this is a great time for me to decide to read first books and try to teach myself what works in a first book and what doesn't.

How about for you? When you're reading a first book, what are your expectations? I'd love to know.

Launch – The Heir of the Night

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Some more of what I’ve been reading

Since I last posted about my reading in early July, I've read another twenty-four books. I'm up to 63 in total for the year (three of which are re-reads, so don't count for the annual total). In May, I posted that I was reading so well I thought I'd get well into the 60s and maybe even past 70.  Now, who knows – 100 perhaps?

There's only been one book that I haven't finished. It was an urban fantasy and after about ten pages, I couldn't go on. The world-building just wasn't good enough to my mind – things were happening already just to make the story easier. I put it down and moved on.

I've not finished Dracula yet, although I'm not going to give up on it. I think I need a couple of days in which to sink into it and finish it as it's not the easy read of say most urban fantasy or romance, which has been a lot of what I've been reading.

I read my first BFF in quite a while in August – Russell Kirkpatrick's Husk trilogy. I was finding it hard going, until Tansy Rayner Roberts posted that she was having to remember to let herself sink into BFF in order to read it properly. Once I did that, the trilogy screamed along and I finished all three books in a week.

Favourite books since July 12 (when I last posted)

* Madigan Mine by Kirstin McDermott – absolutely loved this book, beautifully written, enticing, thought-provoking

* Scent of Shadows by Vicki Pettersson – book three of the Signs of the Zodiac. I love how Vicki is ramping up the tension not just within a book but within the series – really well done

* Death Most Definite by Trent Jamieson – a really original take on urban fantasy and I loved the anti-heroness of the protagonist, Stephen.

* Stardust by Neil Gaiman – picked up one of the signed copies from Kinokuniya and devoured it, just love how I could hear Gaiman's voice in my mind as I read it and also from the point of view of adaptations, working out how and why they changed things for the movie

* Bleed by Peter M Ball – sequel to Horn and another fantastic read, thankfully not as squicky as the first one

* Kitty's House of Horrors by Carrie Vaughn – grabbed this in Melbourne when I met Carrie and really enjoyed it, was able to get into the story and the characters even though not the first book of the series and the tension build really nicely

* Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond – read as research for Battle for Odana and gave me a lot of food for thought.

Spirit Day

Originally posted by neo_prodigy at Spirit Day 


It’s been decided. On October 20th, 2010, we will wear purple in honor of the 6 gay boys who committed suicide in recent weeks/months due to homophobic abuse in their homes at at their schools. Purple represents Spirit on the LGBTQ flag and that’s exactly what we’d like all of you to have with you: spirit. Please know that times will get better and that you will meet people who will love you and respect you for who you are, no matter your sexuality. Please wear purple on October 20th. Tell your friends, family, co-workers, neighbors and schools.

RIP Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh (top)
RIP Justin Aaberg, Raymond Chase (middle)
RIP Asher Brown and Billy Lucas. (bottom)

REBLOG to spread a message of love, unity and peace.

Canberra Short Film Festival

Last night I went with a sister to the Canberra Short Film Festival (CSFF). It’s held annually at the Dendy cinemas (my favourite) and it was a great thing to do.

The way it works is thus – there are four categories (we went to the National Open category, the others are school, youth and Canberra and region) which are initially pruned by a panel of judges. The movies are then shown in one session (we saw twelve) and that final list is then judged to get the winners. There’s also an audience vote, and after each film we had to score it out of ten for the viewer’s choice award.

I wasn’t sure what the standard would be like – the only shorts I’ve really seen (apart from Academy award winners/nominees) were at cons and some of them left a lot to be desired in terms of production. However, every single one of the entries was fabulous and some had a production list at the end akin to some television dramas.

I decided the film-makers might not be professional, but they were amateur in the way small press like Twelfth Planet Press and Ticonderoga are amateur – within small budgets and time and resource limitations, they create exciting and interesting work with production values akin to big publishers.

 

My favourite was The Adjustable Cosmos, directed by Adam Duncan and written by Adam Browne. It was the only specki film and was terrific fun. Set in the fifteen century, the Emperor of Prussia is asked by the Pope to lead an army to Constantinople. The stars don’t support the venture so the Emperor, the Cardinal and the Astrologer travel to the roof of the heavens to change the stars. It was steampunk, the animation was clean and clear and fresh and some of the imagery just lovely (the belt around Saturn was made up of trees of lanterns and when they passed Jupiter, eels jumped in an out of the gas in a wonderful dance).

My least favourite was Kanowna, and not because I didn’t like it – I felt the story was too big for the fifteen minutes given to it. It was a poignant story of an Irish trooper in the West Australian goldfields who fathers a child with a Japanese prostitute and starts a chain of tragic events. I wanted more time to sink into these characters, to know and love them so their pain would mean more to me. At least double the time – not sure it’s feature length, but this was definitely too short.

Neon Skin did nothing for me because it didn’t really tell a story – it was a vignette, a moment in their lives. It was a moment that possibly was going to change them and their relationship, but we didn’t get to see that.

Apricot was the artiest of the movies – the photography was beautiful, although I thought it took a little too long to set up the premise. I loved the end.

Via Gori was the story of a Russian women and her child trying to escape the Russian bombings of Georgia on a bus full of Georgians. The film had a message that at the end of the day, we’re all victims of war regardless of what side we may appear to be on. However, it was unclear whether the filmmaker was trying to say that’s just a female thing or all people come to this realisation and it sort of ruined it all for me.

Suburbia was a strange one – we see a murderous rampage through a suburban neighbourhood through the eyes of one of the residents. I liked that we never saw the gunman, just the result of what was going on, but the main character didn’t work for me. It seemed he was the local good-guy who everyone knew and loved, which was why he seemed the only one to realise what was happening and do anything about it. But it didn’t make sense to me.

The Foal was just beautiful. The little girl in it acted her little heart out in a story where what was really happening only became clear at the end. Quite heartbreaking.

I could go on and on. There were some name actors in some of these productions – Leah Purcell, Don Hany, Linda Cropper, Jodi Gordon. Some made you think, some made you laugh, some made a tear come to your eye. All were interesting and unique.

A great night out. I’ll make sure I do it again next year.

 

Hates the Bagginses, I does.

Well, actually, no I don't. I quite like the Bagginses themselves. Bilbo's funny, Frodo's cute, although the Sackville-Bagginses – shudder.

However, I do hate my own personal Bagginses – drafting.

I remember a time when I loved drafting. It was all I wanted to do – dive into a story and scribble my little heart out. I could spend twenty of twenty-four hours writing, have the four hours sleep and get up for more. I could pour out story after story after story.

When I wrote the original drafts of the Dream of Asarlai trilogy in 2003, I got down 180,000 words in three months. Flow, I tell you. Flow.

Yet here I sit with Battle for Odana, a story that I like, with interesting ideas and great characters. A story that I find myself day-dreaming about at various times of the day or night. It should be a story pouring out of me.

Instead I find myself fighting just to get a couple of thousand words done and being so over it while doing it. It's not that the words aren't coming – I've written around 18,000 words in the past week and a half. But Lord, it's boring me!

In the two weeks before that, I was doing structural edits for Rogue Gadda (book three of the Dream). Now, this is a story that's seven years old. I've been working on it pretty consistently since November last year. If there's a story I should be bored with, this should be it.

And yet – I had a rocking time with the edits. I love being shown a problem and having to solve it. That sense of pressure really does something to my creativity. I've always worked better when there's a deadline, or expectations.

The problem with drafting is that even when you have set yourself a deadline, there still isn't the pressure there because you know that's not the end of the process. I'll have this book done by mid-October. I'll put it away for a couple of weeks and then I'll re-look at it and that's when it will start to get interesting. There will be problems and I will have to solve them in order to get the book presentable enough for people to read. Then when their reports come back there will be more problems that I'll have to solve, before it will be ready to be submitted to agents and editors.

That part of the process I love, and my impatience to get to that super-cool problem-solving part only makes the current unpleasantness even more – unpleasant.

All us writers have a part of the whole thing that we hate. A lot of writers talk about feeling like this at some point of the drafting process – hating the work, not wanting to do it, making their butt get in that seat and do the work cause that's the only option. I know I'm not alone.

But DAMN I hate those Bagginses!

Secret Ones – the trailer

For your viewing pleasure.

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