Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 118
January 27, 2017
Book Brain and the Budget
I got my draft done last night. Now I need to fix it. I’ve already thought of some adjustments that need to be made to the ending, and I’m sure that a lot of words will need to be made prettier.
It’s funny how much better I slept last night after getting to the end. It’s like my brain couldn’t really rest until the story was done.
Ideas are already starting to swirl for other projects that are getting impatient for attention.
One thing I’ve noticed is that being so intently focused on a book is good for my budget, and not just because writing a book means having a book to sell, which means I make money. When I have a bad case of book brain and don’t want to do anything else, I’m not doing stuff like going out to eat, going to movies, or doing recreational shopping. When I need to shop for necessities, I feel like it’s an intrusion on my writing time, so I make a list and then have a very focused shopping trip in which I go straight to the things on my list, get them, then get out of the store. There’s no wandering around and browsing or being tempted by things that aren’t on my list.
So, I guess I should stay intently focused on books more often. That is kind of the goal for this year, to get more books out there, which means more writing. I have long-term goals and plans that require some short-term sacrifices.
And now off to fix the book. And make a quick grocery run, just for the items on my list.
It’s funny how much better I slept last night after getting to the end. It’s like my brain couldn’t really rest until the story was done.
Ideas are already starting to swirl for other projects that are getting impatient for attention.
One thing I’ve noticed is that being so intently focused on a book is good for my budget, and not just because writing a book means having a book to sell, which means I make money. When I have a bad case of book brain and don’t want to do anything else, I’m not doing stuff like going out to eat, going to movies, or doing recreational shopping. When I need to shop for necessities, I feel like it’s an intrusion on my writing time, so I make a list and then have a very focused shopping trip in which I go straight to the things on my list, get them, then get out of the store. There’s no wandering around and browsing or being tempted by things that aren’t on my list.
So, I guess I should stay intently focused on books more often. That is kind of the goal for this year, to get more books out there, which means more writing. I have long-term goals and plans that require some short-term sacrifices.
And now off to fix the book. And make a quick grocery run, just for the items on my list.
January 26, 2017
Finish the Draft Day
Today is finish the draft day. I had a school visit on Tuesday morning, and although it didn’t cut into my actual work time, those things are a massive energy drain, so I got a lot less done that day, and I spent much of that time on research and plotting. I’d been going back and forth between ideas for how to get my characters out of the fix they were in, and at about 4 a.m. on Tuesday I woke up with an idea. Normally, those 4 a.m. “brilliant” ideas that solve everything in the book end up being utterly ridiculous when I wake up and think about them, but this one still made sense and was somewhat viable once I did some research. I needed a better mental image of the location in that time period, and fortunately there are some libraries and museums who have put their historical map collections online. So, that was Tuesday’s work, backtracking to get that set up.
I finally managed to move forward and get my characters out of their immediate jam yesterday, but then I had to get ready for children’s choir. I had something I learned from the workshop a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to try, but it took some preparation.
Today, though, I have no reason to leave the house, nothing on my calendar or to-do list other than writing, and I’m very close to the end of the story. That will leave me a few days for revision/editing and a couple of days for proofreading. I don’t have a lot of rewriting to do, since I’ve been doing it all along. The only thing I know I need to fix is adding a character to an earlier scene to set up his existence. Otherwise, it’s fixing words, adding description and emotion, etc. I can do this! And to help, yesterday I found a bag of dark chocolate Dove hearts that I must have bought last year in the Valentine’s candy clearance sale. They’re just past their sell-by date, so I need to use them quickly, right? They’ll make good writing fuel.
The school visit was interesting, even if it was draining. It was my “neighborhood” middle school — it’s actually in the adjacent town, but it’s where my kids would go if I had kids. The kids were really engaged and asked great questions about books and writing. A couple of girls lingered afterward to ask more in-depth questions. It turns out they’re already writing novels and posting fan fiction on Wattpad. Those kids are the reason I like doing these events. I was those girls at that age, though without the Internet to share my work with others, and it would have been a really big deal for me to get to talk to an actual author when I was that age.
Now, off to go turn tea and chocolate into a steampunk fantasy novel.
I finally managed to move forward and get my characters out of their immediate jam yesterday, but then I had to get ready for children’s choir. I had something I learned from the workshop a couple of weeks ago that I wanted to try, but it took some preparation.
Today, though, I have no reason to leave the house, nothing on my calendar or to-do list other than writing, and I’m very close to the end of the story. That will leave me a few days for revision/editing and a couple of days for proofreading. I don’t have a lot of rewriting to do, since I’ve been doing it all along. The only thing I know I need to fix is adding a character to an earlier scene to set up his existence. Otherwise, it’s fixing words, adding description and emotion, etc. I can do this! And to help, yesterday I found a bag of dark chocolate Dove hearts that I must have bought last year in the Valentine’s candy clearance sale. They’re just past their sell-by date, so I need to use them quickly, right? They’ll make good writing fuel.
The school visit was interesting, even if it was draining. It was my “neighborhood” middle school — it’s actually in the adjacent town, but it’s where my kids would go if I had kids. The kids were really engaged and asked great questions about books and writing. A couple of girls lingered afterward to ask more in-depth questions. It turns out they’re already writing novels and posting fan fiction on Wattpad. Those kids are the reason I like doing these events. I was those girls at that age, though without the Internet to share my work with others, and it would have been a really big deal for me to get to talk to an actual author when I was that age.
Now, off to go turn tea and chocolate into a steampunk fantasy novel.
January 25, 2017
First-Person POV
Continuing my writing post series on point of view, I’m going to dig into first person POV today.
First person POV is when the narrator is a character in the story, so the parts where the narrator talks about him/herself are in first person — “I did this, this happened to me, we went there,” etc.
Usually, the narrator is also the protagonist or the main character, but not always. Dr. Watson is the first-person narrator of the Sherlock Holmes stories, reporting on the adventures of Holmes, the main character. You may also find first-person narrators in framing stories, something fairly common in 19th century novels — the narrator relates a story told to him by someone, and once the story gets started, he’s no longer a participant. An example of this is Wuthering Heights. Sometimes the narrative ends up getting rather nested, as in Frankenstein, in which the book is a series of letters relating stories told to the narrator by someone he encounters, and within those stories is yet another first-person narrative.
The story may be straightforward narrative — a story the narrator just happens to be telling to some undefined audience — or there may be some purpose or particular audience. The story might be the narrator’s testimony, it might be a series of journal entries (as in Bridget Jones’s Diary), or it might be letters. In the case of letters, there might be two first-person narrators who each tell their side of the story as the letters go back and forth.
One strength of first-person narration is that it showcases the narrator’s voice, which can give the book a very strong voice. This is a big reason this POV was popular for the chick lit genre, with its breezy and very contemporary voice, and why we often see it in young adult fiction. Or that voice can very firmly ground the story in a particular time, place, and culture, as in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. I find as an author that a book written in first person tends to flow more quickly. It’s almost like channeling the character and just letting her talk. On the other hand, you do have to be careful to stay in character and not let your author voice seep through. Anything said needs to be something the character would say, and stated the way the character would say it.
One challenge with first person that can be either a strength or weakness is that it can be rather limiting, since your narrator has to be present for every story event you want to dramatize. If your narrator isn’t present to either witness or participate in the event, you have to resort to having someone else tell the narrator about the event, which is less interesting for readers. That means you have to choose your narrator carefully. This character needs to be someone who is likely to witness and participate in the major story events. Once you’ve committed to a narrator, you’re limited in what events you can show.
But this can also be a strength, and is a reason this POV is popular for mysteries. If readers can only see and know things the narrator sleuth sees and knows, they get to be on the same page and solve the mystery with the narrator. There’s no opportunity for the reader to watch the villain at work, run across evidence the sleuth doesn’t know about, or hear conversations among suspects when the sleuth’s back is turned. This doesn’t mean that the narrator necessarily puts all the pieces together. You can have the narrator note but not interpret something, and clever readers may be able to do the math that the character isn’t inclined to do, so they figure out what’s going on before it occurs to the narrator.
Perhaps the most unique aspect of first-person narration is the fact that the narrator is aware that he or she is telling a story. That means the narrator is choosing what to tell and how to tell it. This is another factor in choosing your narrator wisely. If you want to write a steamy story and your heroine is the sort of person who has to spell the word “s-e-x” and blushes furiously when doing so, she’s not going to make a believable first-person narrator because that character wouldn’t tell anyone about the intimate details of her life. You have to stay in character with what the narrator character would be willing to share, what she’d think about, and what she’d share about her thoughts.
This makes first-person narration probably the best way to tell an unreliable narrator story. With third-person narration, in which the reader is eavesdropping on the characters, who are unaware that they’re in a story, it’s difficult to pull off a big twist about who a viewpoint character is and what their true motives are while still playing fair with the reader. With first-person narration, the character might be lying or withholding information. Your narrator might not share that he’s a secret agent whose real agenda is messing up the operation until he’s ready to reveal himself if he knows he’s telling the story. If you’re just eavesdropping in his brain, you’d think he’d be thinking about his mission and making plans. If you want your viewpoint character to keep secrets from the reader, first-person narration is the way to do it.
On the other hand, there is some loss of suspense with first person, since if the character is telling the story, that implies that the character survived the events and is looking back on them (unless, I suppose, you make it clear that the character is narrating from the afterlife but don’t make it clear when the character died). I have read at least one book in which the first-person narrator died—the story cut off abruptly right before the character headed off to the final confrontation, and then was picked up by someone else who talked about finding the journal that recorded the previous events, then told what he’d learned of the fate of the person who wrote it. I don’t know how many times you’d get away with that gimmick, though.
There are probably more limits to writing first-person narrative than you find with third-person, but those limits can be used to your advantage. Next, I’ll talk about third-person narrative.
First person POV is when the narrator is a character in the story, so the parts where the narrator talks about him/herself are in first person — “I did this, this happened to me, we went there,” etc.
Usually, the narrator is also the protagonist or the main character, but not always. Dr. Watson is the first-person narrator of the Sherlock Holmes stories, reporting on the adventures of Holmes, the main character. You may also find first-person narrators in framing stories, something fairly common in 19th century novels — the narrator relates a story told to him by someone, and once the story gets started, he’s no longer a participant. An example of this is Wuthering Heights. Sometimes the narrative ends up getting rather nested, as in Frankenstein, in which the book is a series of letters relating stories told to the narrator by someone he encounters, and within those stories is yet another first-person narrative.
The story may be straightforward narrative — a story the narrator just happens to be telling to some undefined audience — or there may be some purpose or particular audience. The story might be the narrator’s testimony, it might be a series of journal entries (as in Bridget Jones’s Diary), or it might be letters. In the case of letters, there might be two first-person narrators who each tell their side of the story as the letters go back and forth.
One strength of first-person narration is that it showcases the narrator’s voice, which can give the book a very strong voice. This is a big reason this POV was popular for the chick lit genre, with its breezy and very contemporary voice, and why we often see it in young adult fiction. Or that voice can very firmly ground the story in a particular time, place, and culture, as in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. I find as an author that a book written in first person tends to flow more quickly. It’s almost like channeling the character and just letting her talk. On the other hand, you do have to be careful to stay in character and not let your author voice seep through. Anything said needs to be something the character would say, and stated the way the character would say it.
One challenge with first person that can be either a strength or weakness is that it can be rather limiting, since your narrator has to be present for every story event you want to dramatize. If your narrator isn’t present to either witness or participate in the event, you have to resort to having someone else tell the narrator about the event, which is less interesting for readers. That means you have to choose your narrator carefully. This character needs to be someone who is likely to witness and participate in the major story events. Once you’ve committed to a narrator, you’re limited in what events you can show.
But this can also be a strength, and is a reason this POV is popular for mysteries. If readers can only see and know things the narrator sleuth sees and knows, they get to be on the same page and solve the mystery with the narrator. There’s no opportunity for the reader to watch the villain at work, run across evidence the sleuth doesn’t know about, or hear conversations among suspects when the sleuth’s back is turned. This doesn’t mean that the narrator necessarily puts all the pieces together. You can have the narrator note but not interpret something, and clever readers may be able to do the math that the character isn’t inclined to do, so they figure out what’s going on before it occurs to the narrator.
Perhaps the most unique aspect of first-person narration is the fact that the narrator is aware that he or she is telling a story. That means the narrator is choosing what to tell and how to tell it. This is another factor in choosing your narrator wisely. If you want to write a steamy story and your heroine is the sort of person who has to spell the word “s-e-x” and blushes furiously when doing so, she’s not going to make a believable first-person narrator because that character wouldn’t tell anyone about the intimate details of her life. You have to stay in character with what the narrator character would be willing to share, what she’d think about, and what she’d share about her thoughts.
This makes first-person narration probably the best way to tell an unreliable narrator story. With third-person narration, in which the reader is eavesdropping on the characters, who are unaware that they’re in a story, it’s difficult to pull off a big twist about who a viewpoint character is and what their true motives are while still playing fair with the reader. With first-person narration, the character might be lying or withholding information. Your narrator might not share that he’s a secret agent whose real agenda is messing up the operation until he’s ready to reveal himself if he knows he’s telling the story. If you’re just eavesdropping in his brain, you’d think he’d be thinking about his mission and making plans. If you want your viewpoint character to keep secrets from the reader, first-person narration is the way to do it.
On the other hand, there is some loss of suspense with first person, since if the character is telling the story, that implies that the character survived the events and is looking back on them (unless, I suppose, you make it clear that the character is narrating from the afterlife but don’t make it clear when the character died). I have read at least one book in which the first-person narrator died—the story cut off abruptly right before the character headed off to the final confrontation, and then was picked up by someone else who talked about finding the journal that recorded the previous events, then told what he’d learned of the fate of the person who wrote it. I don’t know how many times you’d get away with that gimmick, though.
There are probably more limits to writing first-person narrative than you find with third-person, but those limits can be used to your advantage. Next, I’ll talk about third-person narrative.
January 23, 2017
Closing in on the End
I have a new stove! It actually came early. The delivery was set for sometime between 2 and 6, but I got a call at around 11:45 asking if I’d be there if they came in 45 minutes. I had to scramble to get things ready, but I was fine with that, and it was all set up and they were gone by 1, so my afternoon went uninterrupted. I cooked dinner on it that night, and I baked something for breakfast on Saturday, then used both the stove top and oven for Sunday dinner. According to my oven thermometer, it seems to be running a bit cool, and the “oven on” light clicks off before it’s heated to the proper temperature. After years of an oven that was much hotter than the temperature on the knob indicated, it’s going to take some trial and error to get used to this one. I may use it for a few weeks before I do anything to recalibrate the knob.
And now I have about a week to finish this book. I may have about two days of writing to get my rough draft done, depending on how much gets done (I’m having to go back and adjust a few things to get where I need to be), and then there will be a frenzy of revision. I imagine I won’t have much of a weekend next weekend. I’ll be holed up with the computer, doing a marathon of editing.
Then I may allow myself a day or two to breathe and get my life back in order, and then I’ll get to work on fixing that proposal I’ve been working on. After that, the plan is to develop an Enchanted Universe novella — a shorter piece set in the Enchanted, Inc. universe but about one of the secondary characters, like that free short story, but a bit longer. I have several ideas, but I haven’t narrowed down whose story will get told this time.
But first, I must finish the book. Off to work …
And now I have about a week to finish this book. I may have about two days of writing to get my rough draft done, depending on how much gets done (I’m having to go back and adjust a few things to get where I need to be), and then there will be a frenzy of revision. I imagine I won’t have much of a weekend next weekend. I’ll be holed up with the computer, doing a marathon of editing.
Then I may allow myself a day or two to breathe and get my life back in order, and then I’ll get to work on fixing that proposal I’ve been working on. After that, the plan is to develop an Enchanted Universe novella — a shorter piece set in the Enchanted, Inc. universe but about one of the secondary characters, like that free short story, but a bit longer. I have several ideas, but I haven’t narrowed down whose story will get told this time.
But first, I must finish the book. Off to work …
January 20, 2017
New Stove Day
My new stove is coming this afternoon, so that means I have to totally clean my house (at least the downstairs) before then because I’m one of those people. I still say that what I need is a maid service that does nothing more than set appointments saying they’re coming, and that will make me clean the house in preparation for the appointment, so I no longer need the maid service.
I will admit that a monthly deep cleaning service is on my wish list when I make enough money to support it. I sometimes even remind myself of that as motivation when I have a “but I don’t wanna write” day. I figure that would force me to keep clutter in check, as it can’t get too bad in one month, and I’d tidy up before the maid came. The maid could take care of the stuff I seldom get around to doing or don’t think about doing, and then I’d enjoy it being clean so much that I might be motivated to keep it that way, like when I stay in a hotel. When I do a massive clean on my own, I enjoy it and can keep it that way for a while, but then I have a lazy day and slip, and it’s all downhill from there, so I need the combination of a good clean baseline and a regular reset. I suspect there will be a cleaning and organizing frenzy when this book is done (though I say that with every book because one symptom of being near the end of a draft is a sudden urge to clean and organize my house, which passes as soon as the book is done).
Anyway, most of what I need to do is make sure there’s a clear path to the kitchen, which will require some furniture adjusting. Then I will need to tidy, just because I want to. And I need to get all my pans out of the old stove’s storage drawer.
Meanwhile, I did manage to throw some monkey wrenches into my characters’ plans. Maybe not a complete reversal, but they’re having to improvise. This is actually making them look even more clever, which is fun, and I’m showing them working as a team. I have about 15,000 words to go to reach my rough target word count, and I don’t think this one will require massive rewrites, since I’ve been fixing things as I go. I’ll just need to do a good clean up and polish pass.
Now, off to fix my kitchen!
I will admit that a monthly deep cleaning service is on my wish list when I make enough money to support it. I sometimes even remind myself of that as motivation when I have a “but I don’t wanna write” day. I figure that would force me to keep clutter in check, as it can’t get too bad in one month, and I’d tidy up before the maid came. The maid could take care of the stuff I seldom get around to doing or don’t think about doing, and then I’d enjoy it being clean so much that I might be motivated to keep it that way, like when I stay in a hotel. When I do a massive clean on my own, I enjoy it and can keep it that way for a while, but then I have a lazy day and slip, and it’s all downhill from there, so I need the combination of a good clean baseline and a regular reset. I suspect there will be a cleaning and organizing frenzy when this book is done (though I say that with every book because one symptom of being near the end of a draft is a sudden urge to clean and organize my house, which passes as soon as the book is done).
Anyway, most of what I need to do is make sure there’s a clear path to the kitchen, which will require some furniture adjusting. Then I will need to tidy, just because I want to. And I need to get all my pans out of the old stove’s storage drawer.
Meanwhile, I did manage to throw some monkey wrenches into my characters’ plans. Maybe not a complete reversal, but they’re having to improvise. This is actually making them look even more clever, which is fun, and I’m showing them working as a team. I have about 15,000 words to go to reach my rough target word count, and I don’t think this one will require massive rewrites, since I’ve been fixing things as I go. I’ll just need to do a good clean up and polish pass.
Now, off to fix my kitchen!
January 19, 2017
The Curse of Clever Characters
I’m starting to see why it’s so tempting for authors to create characters who are Too Stupid to Live: It’s so much easier to write that way. If it’s totally in character for your people to just blunder into things or rush rashly into things, then it’s easier to get them into trouble. If your characters are really clever and thinking several steps ahead, considering possible consequences, planning their actions, and generally having common sense, they’re less likely to be able to get into the kind of trouble that makes for an interesting plot. There’s not much fun in a story that has a character see what the bad guy is up to, research it, come up with a plan that has several backups, and then execute that plan perfectly to achieve victory.
That means that if the characters are smart, the writer has to work a lot harder to make things interesting. There have to be unexpected snags the characters couldn’t have anticipated — events they weren’t aware of, betrayal by other characters, mechanical failure, badly timed weather events. This is the rare place when you can get away with using coincidence. The general rule is that you can only use coincidence to make things worse for your characters, never to make things easier. So you can use the coincidence of weather hitting at the worst possible time, the rare guard who shows up early for his shift change, a traffic accident that blocks the road and impedes the getaway, etc. Even the smartest person can’t plan for absolutely everything.
I keep running into this in the Rebels books because my main characters are so smart and logical. Verity doesn’t rush into things rashly. She does her research and thinks things through, trying to account for all contingencies. That means my first attempts at her carrying out a plan tend to be boring because her plans work. I have to go back and break her plans in ways that don’t make her look dumb.
And I’ve run into that yet again, only this time it’s both her and Henry, so we have two smart people, one of whom has extensive experience in pulling off elaborate plans and then getting away. Anything they come up with should work — and that’s a real problem for me. I have to come up with things they didn’t account for to force them to improvise. I have to be even smarter than my characters. It helps there that I can know things they don’t. I can make someone betray them, derail a train, cause an accident. But I still seem to always have the “the plan works” draft that has to be scrapped for the “unexpected things make everything more difficult” draft. At least this time around, I figured out what was happening only three pages in, and I removed the situation that made things too easy. That back door mysteriously vanished, like it never existed. No trace remains in the story.
I would say that I should give myself a break and write a dumb character, but I think I’d find that annoying for other reasons.
That means that if the characters are smart, the writer has to work a lot harder to make things interesting. There have to be unexpected snags the characters couldn’t have anticipated — events they weren’t aware of, betrayal by other characters, mechanical failure, badly timed weather events. This is the rare place when you can get away with using coincidence. The general rule is that you can only use coincidence to make things worse for your characters, never to make things easier. So you can use the coincidence of weather hitting at the worst possible time, the rare guard who shows up early for his shift change, a traffic accident that blocks the road and impedes the getaway, etc. Even the smartest person can’t plan for absolutely everything.
I keep running into this in the Rebels books because my main characters are so smart and logical. Verity doesn’t rush into things rashly. She does her research and thinks things through, trying to account for all contingencies. That means my first attempts at her carrying out a plan tend to be boring because her plans work. I have to go back and break her plans in ways that don’t make her look dumb.
And I’ve run into that yet again, only this time it’s both her and Henry, so we have two smart people, one of whom has extensive experience in pulling off elaborate plans and then getting away. Anything they come up with should work — and that’s a real problem for me. I have to come up with things they didn’t account for to force them to improvise. I have to be even smarter than my characters. It helps there that I can know things they don’t. I can make someone betray them, derail a train, cause an accident. But I still seem to always have the “the plan works” draft that has to be scrapped for the “unexpected things make everything more difficult” draft. At least this time around, I figured out what was happening only three pages in, and I removed the situation that made things too easy. That back door mysteriously vanished, like it never existed. No trace remains in the story.
I would say that I should give myself a break and write a dumb character, but I think I’d find that annoying for other reasons.
January 18, 2017
Shopping from the Sofa
I did something new for me yesterday: I bought a stove while sitting on my sofa. My old stove worked, in the sense that it got hot and cooked food, but it had been perhaps a wee bit overzealous about that. The oven was heating up nearly 50 degrees hotter than the dial indicated, and the “burner on” indicator light for the stove would come on randomly, first if you shut the oven door or otherwise bumped the stove fairly hard, later if you set something on the stove. Yesterday, after I cooked breakfast, the light wouldn’t go off when I turned off the burner, and it stayed on even when the burner was cold. Worse, it was making a weird whining sound that unnerved me so much that I flipped the breaker (unplugging would have required pulling it all the way out). Since the stove is original to the house and more than 30 years old, I figured that it wouldn’t be worth it to try to get it repaired, and it looks old and worn enough that it would have been a factor in selling the house, so I figured I might as well get a new one. I was grumbling about spending the time to go shopping while I researched stoves on the Home Depot site, when it occurred to me that all that happens when I go to the store is that the store associate goes online and orders it (usually after I’ve spent about half an hour trying to find someone to help me). There’s no real difference in ordering it myself online. I had it narrowed down to two stoves that were basically the current version of what I have now and had decided to go with the slightly more expensive one that had the better customer reviews (93 percent said they’d recommend it, vs. 85 percent of the other one), and the more expensive one was above the threshold for free delivery, which made it ultimately less expensive. But when I clicked to put it in my cart, the price came up at $100 less than was marked. It was an online only unadvertised special. I ended up getting the more expensive one with the cord kit for installation, delivery, haul-away, and tax for less than the base price of the “cheaper” version. And it was a deal I couldn’t have had if I’d gone to the store.
It’s going to be delivered Friday. I can survive that long without the stove because I have an electric teakettle for boiling water, I’m having dinner at church tonight anyway, and I made a vat of nacho soup on Monday, so I have leftovers to nuke. Between the electric kettle, the toaster oven, and the microwave, I’m good to go, though I will confess to getting a few baking urges, just because I know I can’t bake. I imagine I’ll be making either muffins or scones for Saturday breakfast, just to play with my new toy.
Now I will have replaced all my kitchen appliances, and they’ll all be white instead of the ugly bisque color that came with the house.
It is possible that I have some kind of plain, white issue going on. My walls are plain white (except for one wall of wallpaper in the dining room). My sheets are plain white, as are my towels. My dishes are plain white. And now my appliances are, as well.
I’ll have to be efficient the rest of the week to fit in the writing plus the tidying I’ll need to do to be able to clear a path for the delivery. Some furniture may have to be shifted, and I’ll have to rearrange some things in the kitchen to make it easier for them to work. Plus, I’m the kind of person who cleans like I’m having a party whenever anyone, even a repairman, is coming over, and my house currently looks like I’ve been frantically writing a book.
It’s going to be delivered Friday. I can survive that long without the stove because I have an electric teakettle for boiling water, I’m having dinner at church tonight anyway, and I made a vat of nacho soup on Monday, so I have leftovers to nuke. Between the electric kettle, the toaster oven, and the microwave, I’m good to go, though I will confess to getting a few baking urges, just because I know I can’t bake. I imagine I’ll be making either muffins or scones for Saturday breakfast, just to play with my new toy.
Now I will have replaced all my kitchen appliances, and they’ll all be white instead of the ugly bisque color that came with the house.
It is possible that I have some kind of plain, white issue going on. My walls are plain white (except for one wall of wallpaper in the dining room). My sheets are plain white, as are my towels. My dishes are plain white. And now my appliances are, as well.
I’ll have to be efficient the rest of the week to fit in the writing plus the tidying I’ll need to do to be able to clear a path for the delivery. Some furniture may have to be shifted, and I’ll have to rearrange some things in the kitchen to make it easier for them to work. Plus, I’m the kind of person who cleans like I’m having a party whenever anyone, even a repairman, is coming over, and my house currently looks like I’ve been frantically writing a book.
January 17, 2017
Book Report: Thoughts on Fantasy
I might actually meet my deadline. I think I can finish the first draft this week, and that then gives me about a week for polishing. I’m heading into the big final confrontation stuff, so it tends to go more quickly, unless I have to stop and think.
I haven’t done a book report in ages. I guess I went through a bit of a “blah” reading phase. But I recently read one I want to talk about, The Queen of Blood by Sarah Beth Durst. It’s the kind of fantasy novel I’ve been looking for. I’m not sure I’d call it “light” because some pretty dark stuff happens, but it has a sense of optimism to it and the protagonists are honorable, relatable people, so it’s not too depressing. The worldbuilding is astonishing. The society and the physical structure of the world are unlike anything I’ve seen before. This is definitely not your standard-issue quasi-medieval fantasy world.
For one thing, the people live in trees! There are whole villages formed among the branches of giant trees. However, the forest isn’t entirely safe because there’s a delicate balance between the people and the spirits of the world. The spirits want to kill people, but people have managed to keep them in check and get their service at times. The story is about what happens when that balance goes off and how it may take a new approach to achieve a different kind of balance. Saying much more about the story would give away too much.
Between this and Uprooted, it makes you look at the woods in a totally different way.
I’ve also been doing some non-fiction reading. It took me ages to get through it since I was fitting it in around fiction reading and writing, but I read The Fellowship, by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, which is about the group of writers around Oxford that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The book gets into the history and lives of Lewis, Tolkien, and the other main members of the Inklings, weaving their individual stories together in the ways their lives intersected and delving into their individual faiths and the influence of life and faith on their writing. It was fascinating stuff, if a bit dense at times.
In a way, it made me wish for a group of friends like that, people to get together with and talk about writing and myth and faith. But then the thought of reading my work in progress out loud to people is rather terrifying, and getting together a couple of times a week would be overkill to me. I wouldn’t have time to get any writing done.
Reading about their influences and their philosophies on fantasy was interesting because it echoes a lot of the way I look at it, as a way of exploring ideas and creating places where amazing things can happen.
I’m not sure I’d recommend this book to anyone who wasn’t really, really interested in the topic, though.
I haven’t done a book report in ages. I guess I went through a bit of a “blah” reading phase. But I recently read one I want to talk about, The Queen of Blood by Sarah Beth Durst. It’s the kind of fantasy novel I’ve been looking for. I’m not sure I’d call it “light” because some pretty dark stuff happens, but it has a sense of optimism to it and the protagonists are honorable, relatable people, so it’s not too depressing. The worldbuilding is astonishing. The society and the physical structure of the world are unlike anything I’ve seen before. This is definitely not your standard-issue quasi-medieval fantasy world.
For one thing, the people live in trees! There are whole villages formed among the branches of giant trees. However, the forest isn’t entirely safe because there’s a delicate balance between the people and the spirits of the world. The spirits want to kill people, but people have managed to keep them in check and get their service at times. The story is about what happens when that balance goes off and how it may take a new approach to achieve a different kind of balance. Saying much more about the story would give away too much.
Between this and Uprooted, it makes you look at the woods in a totally different way.
I’ve also been doing some non-fiction reading. It took me ages to get through it since I was fitting it in around fiction reading and writing, but I read The Fellowship, by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, which is about the group of writers around Oxford that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The book gets into the history and lives of Lewis, Tolkien, and the other main members of the Inklings, weaving their individual stories together in the ways their lives intersected and delving into their individual faiths and the influence of life and faith on their writing. It was fascinating stuff, if a bit dense at times.
In a way, it made me wish for a group of friends like that, people to get together with and talk about writing and myth and faith. But then the thought of reading my work in progress out loud to people is rather terrifying, and getting together a couple of times a week would be overkill to me. I wouldn’t have time to get any writing done.
Reading about their influences and their philosophies on fantasy was interesting because it echoes a lot of the way I look at it, as a way of exploring ideas and creating places where amazing things can happen.
I’m not sure I’d recommend this book to anyone who wasn’t really, really interested in the topic, though.
January 16, 2017
Back to Writer Mode
After spending a couple of days playing musician, I’m back to writer mode, and I don’t get a holiday today because I have a deadline.
It was a good weekend, though a bit tiring. I’m not used to having to get up early and get across town — into the real city — first thing in the morning and then sit in meetings all day to then drive home in evening rush hour, being around people that whole time. They’re nice people and fun people and I’m doing stuff I love, but it’s still crowded and noisy and active. In the sessions on dealing with preschoolers, there’s a lot of physical activity because we have to do the stuff we’re going to have to teach. Then there are sightreading sessions where it’s kind of challenging reading music I’ve never seen before and I feel self conscious about not being a truly trained professional musician when I’m surrounded by professionals. One interesting thing I got out of the weekend was a good voice lesson. On Saturday, I had a slot where I’d gone to the session that interested me on Friday (they do the same schedule both days, so you can do multiple things) and there wasn’t anything else that really applied, and someone I sat with at lunch suggested I go to the session on youth choir just because the instructor was so good. It was on developing musicianship, and that’s a weakness of mine, as I never really learned music theory. He was talking about how to teach music theory for choir members, but I was picking up how I could go about learning music theory. I enjoyed hearing him speak so much, and I had reached information overload about preschool stuff, so I stayed for his last session, on developing the individual voice. His premise was that it’s not a great idea to tell a whole choir they should be doing something, technique-wise. The ones who are doing it wrong don’t think they’re doing it wrong, so most of them won’t correct it, and it tends to be the ones who are doing it right who are worried about doing it right and will try to correct it (and probably overcorrect), which means they’ll end up doing it wrong. The result of telling the whole choir to make a correction is generally the whole choir ending up being wrong. He said directors should listen and pay attention to what each person is doing and make individual corrections. There were only four people in this session, since it was the end of the workshop, so he demonstrated on us, having us all sing something, and then giving individual corrections. I turned out to have been the overcorrector in the group. It was obvious that I’d taken a very common group instruction, since it addresses a problem that’s very likely, and overdone it to the point I was wrong. Now I have to work on fixing that bad habit, and I know to ignore it when the choir director tells everyone to do a particular thing.
Then last night we had some nasty storms. I was watching PBS when the neighborhood tornado sirens went off, my weather radio went off, and PBS dropped audio to play a weather warning, so I switched over to a local station showing the radar. When I saw that the storm track included my specific neighborhood, I put on my “real” shoes and started preparing my safe space, putting a towel in the bathtub to lie on and getting the old featherbed ready to pull over me. I lucked out because just before the questionable part of the storm got to my area, the squall line caught up to it and the tornado risk dropped. We had gusty winds and a lot of rain, but no tornado. It was just rather unnerving having those sirens going for about half an hour. We got enough rain to test the repairs on my house, and I can’t detect any dampness, so now I get to fight with the HOA about getting the interior repaired and doing some mold remediation.
But first, I have a book to finish, and it’s going to be a close call to meet the deadline, so work, work, work.
It was a good weekend, though a bit tiring. I’m not used to having to get up early and get across town — into the real city — first thing in the morning and then sit in meetings all day to then drive home in evening rush hour, being around people that whole time. They’re nice people and fun people and I’m doing stuff I love, but it’s still crowded and noisy and active. In the sessions on dealing with preschoolers, there’s a lot of physical activity because we have to do the stuff we’re going to have to teach. Then there are sightreading sessions where it’s kind of challenging reading music I’ve never seen before and I feel self conscious about not being a truly trained professional musician when I’m surrounded by professionals. One interesting thing I got out of the weekend was a good voice lesson. On Saturday, I had a slot where I’d gone to the session that interested me on Friday (they do the same schedule both days, so you can do multiple things) and there wasn’t anything else that really applied, and someone I sat with at lunch suggested I go to the session on youth choir just because the instructor was so good. It was on developing musicianship, and that’s a weakness of mine, as I never really learned music theory. He was talking about how to teach music theory for choir members, but I was picking up how I could go about learning music theory. I enjoyed hearing him speak so much, and I had reached information overload about preschool stuff, so I stayed for his last session, on developing the individual voice. His premise was that it’s not a great idea to tell a whole choir they should be doing something, technique-wise. The ones who are doing it wrong don’t think they’re doing it wrong, so most of them won’t correct it, and it tends to be the ones who are doing it right who are worried about doing it right and will try to correct it (and probably overcorrect), which means they’ll end up doing it wrong. The result of telling the whole choir to make a correction is generally the whole choir ending up being wrong. He said directors should listen and pay attention to what each person is doing and make individual corrections. There were only four people in this session, since it was the end of the workshop, so he demonstrated on us, having us all sing something, and then giving individual corrections. I turned out to have been the overcorrector in the group. It was obvious that I’d taken a very common group instruction, since it addresses a problem that’s very likely, and overdone it to the point I was wrong. Now I have to work on fixing that bad habit, and I know to ignore it when the choir director tells everyone to do a particular thing.
Then last night we had some nasty storms. I was watching PBS when the neighborhood tornado sirens went off, my weather radio went off, and PBS dropped audio to play a weather warning, so I switched over to a local station showing the radar. When I saw that the storm track included my specific neighborhood, I put on my “real” shoes and started preparing my safe space, putting a towel in the bathtub to lie on and getting the old featherbed ready to pull over me. I lucked out because just before the questionable part of the storm got to my area, the squall line caught up to it and the tornado risk dropped. We had gusty winds and a lot of rain, but no tornado. It was just rather unnerving having those sirens going for about half an hour. We got enough rain to test the repairs on my house, and I can’t detect any dampness, so now I get to fight with the HOA about getting the interior repaired and doing some mold remediation.
But first, I have a book to finish, and it’s going to be a close call to meet the deadline, so work, work, work.
January 12, 2017
Falling into Structure
Among writers and other people involved in the books biz, there’s often discussion about various plot structures and their merits or whether they should even be used at all. Some claim they hate the hero’s journey or the three-act structure, or Save the Cat, or whatever the current trend is. But the thing is, I suspect most of them come down to more or less the same thing, expressed in different ways, and if you’re doing it right, you’re probably going to fall into these structures, even if you didn’t plan it that way.
For instance, the last few days I’ve been writing the big midpoint part of the book — not the climax, but the big stuff that happens in the middle to lead up to the climax. If you’re thinking in terms of the hero’s journey, that would be the Ordeal section. I did plan that because I’ve found that the best way to avoid a sagging middle is to write a big action sequence in the middle of the book. It’s kind of the midterm exam for the characters — they’re being tested on what they’ve learned so far and realize that they aren’t quite ready for the final confrontation, so they have to regroup before we get to the big climax of the story.
Yesterday’s writing picked up from that and went into the aftermath, a quieter scene of waiting, characters who hadn’t spent much time together getting to have a conversation, and even a bit of romance. And then I realized that without having planned it that way, I was writing the Reward scene (aka Seizing the Sword). It’s the regrouping after the Ordeal, a time of letting the characters and the readers catch their breath, often a time of bonding or a love scene. It’s the emotional aftermath of what they’ve just gone through. I didn’t chart it out to happen that way. It was just what seemed logical to write next, and that’s why the pattern is the pattern. It’s what makes sense in storytelling to maintain the sense of tension and emotion.
Today’s writing should get to another big emotional moment, as it involves a big discovery about something I’ve been teasing for a while, and I don’t have anything I really need to do today, other than write (and maybe a walk to the post office), so I hope to get a lot done, since I’m out all day tomorrow and Saturday at Choristers Guild. There’s a specific session on dealing with “live wires” in young children, and I need all the help I can get with my choir. My gang of unruly boys seems to absolutely love being there — they race to be first and would happily come into the room as soon as I arrive to set up if I let them — but it seems to be more about getting to play together than about actually doing choir stuff. My reward for going to learn how to direct my kids is getting to participate in a few of the adult sessions to learn to be a better singer. The sightreading sessions, where everyone else in the room is a professional, mostly with music degrees, are daunting and challenging, but still a lot of fun, and I get to sing first soprano for a change.
For instance, the last few days I’ve been writing the big midpoint part of the book — not the climax, but the big stuff that happens in the middle to lead up to the climax. If you’re thinking in terms of the hero’s journey, that would be the Ordeal section. I did plan that because I’ve found that the best way to avoid a sagging middle is to write a big action sequence in the middle of the book. It’s kind of the midterm exam for the characters — they’re being tested on what they’ve learned so far and realize that they aren’t quite ready for the final confrontation, so they have to regroup before we get to the big climax of the story.
Yesterday’s writing picked up from that and went into the aftermath, a quieter scene of waiting, characters who hadn’t spent much time together getting to have a conversation, and even a bit of romance. And then I realized that without having planned it that way, I was writing the Reward scene (aka Seizing the Sword). It’s the regrouping after the Ordeal, a time of letting the characters and the readers catch their breath, often a time of bonding or a love scene. It’s the emotional aftermath of what they’ve just gone through. I didn’t chart it out to happen that way. It was just what seemed logical to write next, and that’s why the pattern is the pattern. It’s what makes sense in storytelling to maintain the sense of tension and emotion.
Today’s writing should get to another big emotional moment, as it involves a big discovery about something I’ve been teasing for a while, and I don’t have anything I really need to do today, other than write (and maybe a walk to the post office), so I hope to get a lot done, since I’m out all day tomorrow and Saturday at Choristers Guild. There’s a specific session on dealing with “live wires” in young children, and I need all the help I can get with my choir. My gang of unruly boys seems to absolutely love being there — they race to be first and would happily come into the room as soon as I arrive to set up if I let them — but it seems to be more about getting to play together than about actually doing choir stuff. My reward for going to learn how to direct my kids is getting to participate in a few of the adult sessions to learn to be a better singer. The sightreading sessions, where everyone else in the room is a professional, mostly with music degrees, are daunting and challenging, but still a lot of fun, and I get to sing first soprano for a change.
