Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 134

Adulting?

The taxes are done. I just need to double check everything before I file. The good news is that I'm not only getting a refund, but the refund is big enough to pay this year's first quarterly installment and still get some back. The bad news is that this is because I made less money this year and had more business expenses -- not drastically so, but enough to drop me into a different bracket.

Meanwhile, I'm closing in on the current round of rewrites. I won't say that I should finish it today because I only have about 30 pages. That would guarantee that I'd run up against another roadblock, and I already know that part of those 30 pages are the part that most needs to be worked on. But the end is in sight.

I already celebrated a little on both the taxes and the book with a slightly splurgy Target run this morning. I got a household item that was somewhat needed, though I went with the option that was upgrading from what I have. I found a Star Wars nightshirt on the clearance rack, and how could I resist? Now I have something to sleep in for my convention travel this summer. And there was another splurge on something that probably counts as a toy but that I think will be useful if I manage it properly.

There I'm not sure if I'm being an adult or a child about it. It's not a huge expense but is beyond the level of "just throw it in the shopping cart," and I went through a lot of mental gymnastics to justify it, making pro/con lists, deciding it still fit under Christmas money that I haven't really spent, considering that maybe it counted as a book finishing reward or a tax refund purchase. Never mind that I have money to cover it anyway. So on the adult side, I suppose it's mature to consider a purchase like this as an extra outside the regular budget and to think rather than being totally impulsive. On the child side, there's this weird sense that my own money isn't really my own money and I have to get permission to spend it. At any rate, I have a Christmas present/tax refund toy that I'm not going to let myself play with until after I finish the book -- well, this round, anyway.

More Ripples

I felt like I didn't get much done yesterday, but I did get the business side of my taxes done (the hard part), and I did a lot of thinking about what happens next in the book. I'm dealing with a ripple effect, where the changes in the last scene should have a big impact on what happens next, but I'm not sure yet what that will be. There's a transition scene, and I'm going back and forth on whether it even needs to be there. If it's there, then I think more needs to happen. But then the more that happens there, the less of a surprise it will be when something else happens later. I'm waffling between suspense and surprise.

If I go with suspense, then it's all about knowing something is likely to happen but not being sure what that will be or exactly when it will come. I'll need to drop more advance hints that something is planned, and then the characters will have to take more action to try to figure it out and maybe prevent it.

If I go with surprise, then I'll need to cut some scenes, but then we aren't actually getting the reaction to the previous events.

Every time I think I'm sure about what I should do, I think of something that will be affected if I do it.

So I guess I'll finish my taxes while my subconscious chews on it.

Meanwhile, I'll try to stop giving in to distractions like shopping around for a relatively cheap tablet that I can travel with instead of taking my laptop. I don't know why that became a priority yesterday, but it did. It may be my brain's usual trick of getting me out of the way so it can work.

The Summer Schedule

I think I only wrote one entirely new scene yesterday. Then I revised a scene that I thought would require a lot of rewriting but that only required cutting a paragraph or two, writing a new paragraph or two, and changing some pronouns. Today I suspect will be another round of new writing, since the last scene I changed will have some major ripple effects on the next few scenes.

And I suspect I'm going to have to go through and change the chapter breaks and headers throughout the book because I've added and subtracted events.

Someday, I'll finish this book.

Meanwhile, I've been making travel arrangements for some of my summer events. I'll be racking up a lot of Hilton points in May and June. I'd learned that my events at Comicpalooza in Houston were starting earlier than I anticipated, so I had to adjust my travel plans. Rather than adding a night at the convention center hotel, since it's not quite that much earlier, I found a less expensive hotel on the way into the city, so I can make the road trip the day before, then have less than an hour of driving (in extreme traffic, much less if it's not bad) to get to the convention center on the day of the convention. That was a compromise between another convention hotel night and leaving at five in the morning. I've never done a big comic convention with celebrity guests and all that before, so this is an experiment. At the very least, I'll have been in the same building with the entire cast of Aliens, which is one of my all-time favorite movies. I'll just be doing the literary panels, though, so I doubt I'll run into them. Though there is a green room that I presume I'll have access to as a guest, so you never know. Actually, there's a lot I still don't know about this convention. They're not big on the communicating thing. I only found out about the earlier than expected panel I've apparently been assigned to when the moderator reached out to the panelists.

Here are the events I'm currently planning to do (yeah, I need to update the web site):
The weekend after next (22-24) I'll be a panelist at WhoFest DFW in Irving, TX
May 12-15 I'll be at the Nebula Awards conference in Chicago. There will be a booksigning open to the public on the evening of the 13th
June 17-19 I'll be at Comicpalooza in Houston
I'm planning to go to ArmadilloCon in Austin in July, but I haven't heard anything from them inviting me to be a participant (and if I don't, then I won't be going)
I'll be at MidAmericon2 (The World Science Fiction Convention) in Kansas City August 17-21
and I'll be at FenCon in Irving Sept. 23-25

That's what I know of now. I did say I was planning to dedicate this year to my career, and getting out there and meeting fans or potential fans is a big part of that. Somehow, I'll have to try to work in some writing, as well.

Ripple Effects

I just thought I'd smoothed out the seams between the rewritten scene and the existing book. Yesterday I found myself writing two new scenes and never even made it to the existing book. It seems that changing one thing had a ripple effect and required other things to change. Plus, I came up with a new idea and decided to add some additional action and fun to the sequence. I could have just smoothed over those edges and jumped back to the existing stuff, but it's more interesting this way.

And then last night I came up with something I need to adjust in what I wrote yesterday.

Goodness knows what will happen today. I didn't plan any of yesterday's stuff before I sat down to write.

I probably could have done more yesterday, but I was distracted by noticing that my outdoor thermometer reading on my weather station was dropping drastically. It went down nearly ten degrees in less than half an hour, the skies started getting darker, and the wind was howling. That generally means that something bad is about to happen. So I got back online to see what was happening. It turned out that there was a very nasty hail storm northeast of me. I barely got a spattering of rain, but there was softball-sized hail utterly pulverizing cars and houses about 30 miles to the northeast. My weather radio did go off with a warning not long after I decided to check on what was going on.

Now I need to buckle down and get some work done. I have to finish my taxes (the hard part, the business accounting, is mostly done) and finish this book. After this week, I can get back to stuff like the Once Upon Stilettos commentary.

Already Behind

I feel like I'm already behind today because I had a yoga class, then the yoga class had a Starbucks (or as we say at church, St. Arbucks) fellowship, then there was grocery shopping. Whew.

But I made it past the latest tricky part in fixing the book over the weekend, and now I can move forward to the next tricky part. I've even done most of the smoothing out of the seams. I just need to do the transition out of it and re-break the chapters.

Meanwhile, I had my first rehearsal with the harp ensemble at church yesterday. I managed to keep up with them pretty well, considering I was sight reading and have been playing the instrument for three weeks. I'm going to need to learn more music theory to figure out chords and accompaniment, but right now I'm doing well to pick out the melody line at tempo. In the lesson book I'm working through, I'm at the part where you start to play harmony and counterpoint with the left hand, and that's really tricky for someone who doesn't play piano. Supposedly, doing this kind of learning that requires making new pathways and connections in the brain and in the brain/body connection is good for staving off dementia.

I hope to have the book done and some of the other business stuff taken care of this week. Then I'll really catch up on life while letting the book rest and brainstorming something else, and then one more round of editing/proofing before I send to the copyeditor.

Avoiding Distractions (sort of)

I still didn't do as much as I wanted yesterday, so I have to be really good today. Really. No distractions. No zoning out. No coming up with random things that need to be done. I just need to get through this scene and out the other side, and it should be easier from there.

I swear, by the time this book is done, I'll have spent about 50 percent of the time I worked on it writing two of the scenes. At least they're major turning point scenes. It would be really frustrating if I kept getting stuck on minor exposition scenes.

When I'm faced with a distraction, I've come up with a new mantra: At the end of the day, next week, next month, next year, at the end of my life, how will I wish I'd spent this hour? Will I wish I'd worked on this book and finished it earlier so I could have written more books, or will I be glad I got caught up in a Facebook doom loop, obsessively checking to see if anyone posted anything new in the last 30 seconds?

If I'm really, really good, maybe I'll finally get around to watching the new Star Wars DVD I got this week. Yeah, I saw the movie three times in the theater, but still …

And now we have a trailer for Rogue One, the story behind how the Rebels got the Death Star plans in the first place. It looks like so much fun, and I suppose that will work to tide us over until the next main Star Wars movie. It should be interesting to see another slice of that universe and what was going on behind the scenes.

But first, I have so much work I need (and kind of want) to do.

Building My Cocoon

I'm going to have to be good today because I somehow wasted yesterday. I did get stuff done, but I didn't get around to the writing work or all the business work I needed to do. It was one of those non-focusing days. This probably means that Saturday will be a working day because I've got a lot of stuff to take care of, and getting a few things off my plate will make me feel better all around for the rest of the stuff I need to do. Also, spring allergies are in full force, which may have a lot to do with it. An industrious spider built a couple of huge webs on my patio, and they were soon totally covered in pollen. They looked all fuzzy.

I did figure out what version of the replacement scene I needed to go with. Now I'm working on what should happen in it. I was imagining it as I fell asleep last night, so perhaps yesterday's lack of focus was my brain's way of getting me out of the way so it could work.

Oddly, some of the lack of focus came from a bit of news about yet another honor for Rebel Mechanics from the library world. It's very cool, but it's also rather frustrating to hear news like that from my editor and to see my publisher tweeting about it when I know just how interested they really were in that book and in turning it into a series. My reaction was a weird combination of "Ha! So there!" and dejection, especially when I started hearing from angry librarians who aren't happy that they got kids excited about this book and now won't be getting a sequel, though I'm assuring them that there will be a sequel. They'll just have to buy it from a different source, though I think there are some libraries that have issues with stocking independently published books.

I suppose more proof of the fact that my brain was working on something was that I was having a noise-averse day. I didn't have to do children's choir (yay!!!), but there was a children's worship service, and I generally go just to be a presence (and to get a good parking space near the choir room), but I had to sneak out and go sit in the fellowship hall until dinner because the music they were playing was so loud and I couldn't handle the noise. Choir practice didn't bother me so much because we were all singing together, but I came home and needed silence.

So I will be building a cocoon for the next few days until I get at least one source of stress taken care of.

Hitting the Hard Parts: The New Idea

You can thank my new hobby for inspiring the next series of writing posts. I'm learning to play the harp, and it may be the first entirely new thing I've tried to take on in ages. I can read music and play other instruments, but the harp is physically unlike anything I've done before, which leads to some frustration. Each new piece of music I have to learn starts with a great deal of fumbling, and I have a moment when I sincerely believe that this is beyond me and I will not be able to do this. Then yesterday I was playing a piece of music that I'd learned and was doing it fluidly and at tempo, and I remembered that this was the piece that almost made me give up because it was utterly impossible. Meanwhile, I've been struggling with a difficult part of the book I've been working on, made worse by a new idea that's distracting me. I realized that this is all really the same issue. In any endeavor as challenging as writing a book (or learning an instrument), you're going to hit a hard part. How you deal with that will determine whether you succeed in the long term.

But saying "just keep going" isn't a big help, no matter true it is. So, over the next few weeks (in posts every other Wednesday) I'll address some different kinds of hard parts and how to work through them. For the most part, I'm assuming a beginning writer who has not completed a novel and who is not under any kind of contract or on a deadline imposed by anyone else. Some of the same tricks and techniques also apply to more experienced authors because almost every book has a hard part, but the circumstances may be different. Contracts and deadlines may affect the timeline and process, but on the other hand, an experienced writer may have a better sense of when something should be abandoned. I generally recommend that a first-time author actually finish their first book, even if it's no good, unless you get into it and absolutely realize that it was a terrible idea. The act of finishing a book is important, and you don't want to get into the habit of starting a lot of things that you quit when it becomes difficult (I speak from experience).

I'll start with the easiest and best kind of hard part that has little to do with the project you're working on: the shiny new idea. The fun thing about creativity is that it breeds more creativity. The more you write, the more ideas you'll have. This is great, but it can sometimes be inconvenient because those exciting new ideas will strike you while you're working on something else, and that makes it more difficult to finish your original project. It's very common for new writers to have multiple projects that have been started and then abandoned when a shiny new idea that seems even better strikes. Even if you don't abandon your current project to play with the new idea, that new idea can be so distracting that you're unable to concentrate on the current project, and its quality suffers.

There may be times when abandoning what you're working on in favor of the new idea is the right thing to do -- when it's exactly what an editor has said she's looking for or the hot thing in the market that you need to jump on right away -- but most of the time, that new idea only seems better because you aren't actually trying to turn it into a book. It's just an idea, almost like the teaser trailer for a potential story.

What do you do when a shiny new idea strikes you at an inconvenient time? Take a moment to do a brain dump. Write down everything you currently know about that idea. That serves three purposes. One is to preserve the idea so you can work on it later. It also helps get it out of your head so you can better concentrate on what you're working on. And it may show you that the idea isn't either as good as you thought or as developed as you thought. What seems like a full story when you're playing with it in your head may give you little more than a few paragraphs when you write it all down. If you stopped your current project to try to write the new story, you might get a chapter or two into it before you got struck by yet another new idea, and you'd end up with those files and files of uncompleted stories. You may still get new details about the new idea popping up from time to time. Keep a notebook handy and jot down what you think of before getting back to work.

I find that it also helps to have some kind of sensory trigger that gets me into the mindspace for a project. It can be an image, a piece of music, or even a scent. After I've indulged myself in writing down thoughts on the new idea, I can use this to get back into the current project so I can finish what I'm working on.

The shiny new idea frequently coincides with other kinds of hard parts, so I'll address coping mechanisms for those in the coming weeks.

Problem Scenes

I've run up against a snag in the rewrites. There's a pretty pivotal scene that's just not working for me. It leads to a turning point in the story and is what kicks off the middle part of the book. But there's really not a lot of conflict or tension, no excitement. It's just a bunch of events. I finally realized yesterday that this isn't a scene I can fix. What I need is a new scene.

So I brainstormed possibilities for a new scene that can serve the same purpose, and I think I have it narrowed down to two. One is possibly less colorful and exciting but more believable, and I think I can give it some interpersonal conflict. There might even be a way to throw in some danger. But it also comes dangerously close to repeating a scene from the first book. Similar things happen, but there's a different purpose, different people are there, and there's a different outcome. I could even use that, I suppose, and have the characters aware that this scene is eerily familiar.

The other possibility is a lot more colorful and would be a major sequence in the book, but I'm not entirely sure it makes a lot of sense. Would people really do something like this? It would be a lot of effort for what they want to accomplish.

So I'm torn between a more realistic scene that might be a little boring and a more colorful scene that wouldn't be very realistic.

I've been able to visualize it both ways. I may need to make a pro/con list. I may even need to try writing it both ways and see which one works for me.

It's this kind of thing that makes writers develop homicidal levels of rage when people complain about having to pay more than 99 cents for an e-book. So many hours sweating over stuff like this to make the book the best possible experience for the reader, and there are people who whine about having to pay more than they do for a fast-food soda or cup of coffee for the product.

Back to the Drawing Board

I had a grand epiphany Friday afternoon about what the underlying trouble with my book was. I was lacking a strong story goal. There's a big-picture goal for the series, but there was never really a moment when the main character said "this is what I want to do now" for this book. And that explained why it was all somewhat lacking in conflict. If there's nothing specific that the characters are trying to do, it's hard to stop them from doing it. Then once I figured out what the goal was (it was already there, just not focused on), I realized that part of the problem is that this goal was being easily achieved all along, so the big, climactic scene in which they achieve their goal is rather anticlimactic.

That means more rewrites, though not of the whole book. There are just a few key scenes that will have to drastically change. They can partially achieve what they're trying to do in those scenes while still failing at this goal, and that will make it more tense when they absolutely have to succeed and have no history of having made it happen before.

There was a moment of whining and moaning when I realized I needed to go back to the start, but then I got over it because there's been something nagging at me about this book not being quite right, and it feels good to have figured it out.

Meanwhile, I've thought of a few new details for that new story idea. I think that's a big part of my motivation for getting my head down and finishing this book so I can write the next one and then write this new one. Well, I said this was going to be a year of focusing on my career.

And the harp, because I have to have some fun (and I'm making good progress).