Cat Hellisen's Blog, page 36

Writing is…

Nerine Dorman has tagged me with a Writing is…? meme.

And my answer is going to be the most boring ever, so let's keep it shortish, yeah?

Writing is…

a job.

It's one I'm kinda okay at, and it's certainly more fun than working in an office.

Like all jobs it has ups (moments of flow, reading is 'work') and downs (subbing, subbing, subbing). The highs are fucking fantastic – that moment when you just hit a sweet spot in a story and everything is shooting out like literary jism (that metaphor, it is bad. It is SO BAD, that I have to leave it there, because omg yeah. Wow. Bad.)

And the lows are pretty sucktastic. No-one likes being told their work is crap. So yeah, that blows. And rewrites can be a bitch. But they can also be more fun than actually getting the first draft down.

But despite the lows, it's not a job I'm giving up any time soon, because hey, I can play my music as loud as I want and no one can complain (dude, I have Patrick Wolf on repeat, someone would have killed me in an office by now), I can work in my pyjamas, I can spend a whole day reading and not feel guilty, I get to call my holidays and excursions "research" and yeah, I make shit up and get to play a glorified kind of Barbie and Ken with the imaginary people on my computer (oh wait, no, that's Sims, carry on.)

Basically, writing is my job, and my job rocks.

So if you want to do a "Writing is…?" post, link me to it in the comments so I can see what writing means to you.

                                      

icicle feet

It is wintery and I am cold. Unfortunately, the moment the sun is down my internal clock says GO TO SLEEP. It is 7 pm and I am ready to hibernate. Luckily I have this cold beer to see me through till at least oh…7:30 pm.

I'm busy rewriting a book, which is a strange exercise in KILL ALL POVs and try make another character more sympathetic and human (I am failing hard here, hahaha oh well).Also, my agent hinted at …wait no,my agent said please please let's have some romance for the MC and I was all BUT THERE IS, and then I realised that only I could see it. Hah.

No-one tell Suzie that it's staying a Doomed and Tragic romance, mmkay?

Okay enough waffle. Have a snippet instead.



We can feel the hate emanating from Alice's bulk. We have destroyed him, torn him in two, and he wants us to pay.

"Who?" says another voice, calm and emotionless as the icicles that form under eaves. The owl floats down, lands before us, and changes. A woman in white, she is the sky-ward soul of Idalis. She is sharp and small and thin and distant as her other half is vast and round and overbearing.

"Ida," Sariken says. "I suppose you too want me to destroy them."

She looks at us. "I should."

"And?"

She raises one shoulder, drops it. "I find myself not caring." She turns on her toes like a dancer, all grace and speed. She reminds us of us. "I want one thing only; for Alice and myself to become what we were, to be reunited."

Sariken shakes his head. "We would need the Amnio for that. I think we all know that is not an option."

"Fine," she says. She smiles with only one side of her face, while the other stays blank, as if it is not even listening to the conversation. "Then do what you want with them. I know Talim, he would not have time for a broken vessel."

"I am not my brother," Sariken says. "I think at least, they should live."

"You're an idiot, Sariken – you would let them live, knowing what they can unleash?" Alice says. He moves towards Ida, and their hands touch and for a moment it is almost as if they are one again.

"True." Sariken folds his hands behind his back and stares down at the ruins about his feet. We, who do not feel fear, feel something close to it.

                                      

You never were a genius

You call it outlining, I call it first drafting.

Some people like to have an organised outline that follows a neat path through scenes that are All There For A Reason. And that's fine, but it's not how I work, and that's okay too. Everyone has to have their own madness. So this post is for the people who feel like maybe they're doing it wrong.

You're not.

My first drafts are prose vomit, idea diarrhoea. They are all the filth and beauty and wrong turns and right turns and stupidity and genius that's in my head, hammered out as fast as I can. First drafts are where I take chances, make leaps of logic and time, trust my subconscious, my story, my characters. If I don't pour it all out as quickly as possible and let myself make godawful mistakes, then I have nothing to fix. When I start getting scared of writing (and more honestly, scared of failure, of people pointing and laughing and asking me what is this shit?) then I have a little mantra that I like to repeat.

Let it be hypocritical. Let the words lie to me, contradict themselves. Let the story tell me one thing and do another.

I say this to myself, and I feel the calm descending. Because it's okay. First drafts are like people, they have hidden agendas and they lie and they don't always make sense. And that's where the strength comes from. The beauty. The art.

And yes, this means that when I have that first draft done and dusted, I have a mess of revisions to go through, but you know what?

Every revision takes something I thought was broken and makes it better. Every revision surprises me with some hidden twist in the thread of the story that wouldn't have been there in the first place if I was so scared of writing rubbish that I never took the chance to slam it down.

Write dirty

Revise hard.

(I feel a sex comparison coming up but because I am technically an adult I shall refrain)

(Or possibly not)

                                      

A Child's Reader

It's pretty fascinating watching my eight-year-old daughter really discover books. She's always enjoyed stories and reading but recently something has just clicked in her brain.

She's reading a book a day. After almost every one she comes to me with her eyes shining, saying "This one was so exciting it was all about ADVENTURES!" or "Was this your favourite book when you were a child?" or "Do you have more books like this?" or "That one was SO SCARY!" all with this manic grin.

I'm also running out of books to give her. (yay a shopping trip is in order!} but so far, she's read all my Famous Fives, White Fang, The Graveyard Book, A bunch of DWJ for younger readers (I tried her on the Chrestomanci books and she found them too scary? What? I dunno…), Dogsbody, A bunch of children's books about King Arthur and a bunch of Adventure books.

The pile has dwindled. I've dug out my Wizard of Earthsea and The Sword in the Stone and some PG Wodehouse, but most of my books that are not adult books are very much for older teens.

So, on payday I'm going shopping.

*grin*

It's going to be such a nostalgia trip for me. What are some of your favourite kid's books that you'd recommend I keep an eye open for? We'd love to hear from you.

                                      

Writing in tongues.

My brain is so scrambled at the moment. I've been trying to write #Lud in American English, so that if it sells, copy edits will only be 2/3 as painful.

Except.

There's always got to be an except.

When I'm writing in the BOOK, I forget and write everything in regular English, then get my little squiggly red line of doom (I've set to USA English) and I have to go back and change it immediately. (I'm anal like that.) Then, when I am typing emails to local peeps, I put a bloody zed in everything and have to go back and change it to proper spelling.

I think my head is going to asplode.

Also, I can't switch from round to around, it just feels so unnatural. Also, my U's keep creeping in.

I may be fighting a losing battle here.

This extremely dull post brought to you by the letter Zed.

                                      

There is only one answer to the question.

Beer?

Yes, please.

The Slave and I have started on the grand adventure of home-brewing.

We've just bottled our first batch (a kit beer, but I can see this turning into an expensive and crazy note-keeping hobby – if anyone asks why we bother with science and maths at school, just tell them it's so we can make beer one day) and I keep staring at the bottles, waiting for time to pass.

(Problem? What problem?)

Anyway, I have decided that in order to be able to easily sanitise all my equipment, I will need a bigger house and kitchen. *ahem* Just saying. It's also very difficult to keep stuff sanitised when you have two sprogs going IS THE BEER READY? and three cats trying to stick their noses in everything while pretending to not be interested.

Damn, beer, why you not ready?

                                      

Things that can happen in a year.

It was around this time last year that my agent, the wonderful Suzie Townsend, sold my first book to Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Back then it was still called Sea Rose Red, and the ending was an entirely different beast. After some intense revisions with my editor, it's a far better and stronger book, with a new title: When the Sea is Rising Red.

It's so weird to think back a year ago and how little I knew about publishing then (I know marginally more now) and what it would be like working with an editor (surprising, frustrating, exciting, and ultimately amazing). It's even weirder to think that by this time next year my book will be a real thing, with a cover, and pages, and inked-in words.

Basically I just want to say happy birthday, little book. You've come a long way.

                                      

From birth to death in a few paragraphs

just a little backstory, lost in the middle of a novel.



I'm not a collection of rolled-together memories. I am real. Everything I have is my own.

This is the difference between me and Lud.

I grew up without a father, the gap filled instead by a selection of uncles brown white black yellow. They came in all shapes and sizes, and some of them were kind to me and some of them were not. Most pretended that I did not exist. Some gave me gifts because they understood that my mother loved me, and that I was the key to her affections.

The school I went to was a government institution, all of us uniformed in blue and gray with regulation hair bands and baby doll black shoes for the girls and practical lace ups for the boys. Cheap white shirts, and expensive ties that doubled as head bands after school. We were pirates and gangsters and cops and robbers.

I say we, but I really mean them. The others called me names that I never told my mother, and I spent break time hiding out in the school library, where it was guaranteed the others would never venture unless forced to my some extreme need to research a project. Miss Figgins even made me a library monitor, which gave me a better reason to be there than simply hiding.

My mother had bought me most of a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica dated circa 1970, and alone in my room, this was the other facet of my beleaguered education. She said she wanted me to get a real smart job, like maybe even work in a government department because then you never got fired and your pension was sweet and there were housing benefits and all kinds of things.

I grew up thinking my mother was a waitress, which was not entirely accurate.

Oh, she waited tables. That much at least was the truth. She worked in a club owned by my Uncle Fat, and she served drinks and she sat at the tables with the men and flirted with them and made them spend their money and they always bought her cigarettes and beer.

She was not a whore, and despite what the others said, I am not a whore's child.

I asked my mother about my father, often, and there was little she would tell me, just that he was very handsome.

And sometimes, that he was terrible and cruel.

So at least I know where I get that from.

There was so much that I wanted to know that she would never tell me, that I could never figure out the least hurtful way to ask. Was he Korean? Malawian? German? I'd had uncles of all kinds before. I could accept any nationality as my ancestry. I was lighter than my mother, who was lighter than hers. My eyes were gray in the right light, but murky and dull in every other. My hair was Asian-heavy and black, so there was one clue. But still never enough.

When I was nine years old, my mother sent me away. She put me on a minibus taxi that drove for eight hours, and I had a small box of fruit juice and packet of chips and a sandwich with lunch meat and mayonnaise. She asked the driver to make sure I got off at the right place, and she told the aunties to look after me, and they gave me pieces of fried dough and chicken when my food ran out, and the driver bought me a coke.

So I arrived at my grandmother's house sticky and sweaty and ill and I never wanted to taste the sweet-sick taste of coca cola again.

Grandmother lived in a worker's cottage on the edge of a dustbowl farm. There were a couple of other buildings made from concrete bricks and wooden slats and corrugated iron roofs. For the next year I went to school in a single classroom building and although I was more alone I felt less alone, because the children were friendlier, and less interested.

I ate maize porridge for a year, and only the topping changed. Sometimes it was sugar, sometimes it was tomato and onion and spinach. Once in a while it would be fatty cuts of meat. Grandmother didn't work – she was too old, and I discovered that my mother sent her money at the post office every week, and had for years. Now there was more money, to keep me fed and clothed, and to buy me text books and pencils. On Fridays I would skip school and walk with grandmother into town, to collect the money and buy what we needed: coffee and condensed milk for her, and sugar and tea and maize meal.

This was my life. My mother was trying to rebuild hers, and she wanted to take me back when she had a better world for me.

And it was good enough, because I was in the half-world of childhood, life was still beautiful. I hadn't yet realized how much the world would hurt me for not being what I wanted to be.

I was sent back. My mother was renting a two-bedroomed flat just outside of town. She had new furniture bought on credit, she had a new wardrobe. She was smarter and shinier. My new uncle was a German man called Frank, and he was okay. She wasn't working for Uncle Fat, but had instead got herself the near mythical position of a clerk in home affairs.

The world was getting better.

And then I grew up.

The moment I realized that life was never going to be perfect, never ever no matter how badly I wanted it to be, was the day my body decided to remind my brain that I was a girl, and I could no longer hide away in the asexual happiness of childhood.

I grew breasts, I bled. Instead of the perfect skinny body I'd once had, this flawless sylph I used to be, I was fat in all the wrong places, I hurt for the privilege of joining one side. A side I didn't even want to be on.

And then the world ended

So that's my life.

                                      

Yes

It's been a very long time, I had to go check what my last post was (a Lud excerpt, as it turns out, ha ha).

And basically that's what I've been doing. I went on holiday to Knysna with The Slave and the Spawn, then went to Afrika Burn and now I'm dithering about a little, poking sharp sticks at Lud and seeing what it does.

You ever get those headspaces where you seem to be constantly doing stuff, but have nothing to actually show for it? It's like fake productivity, and it's hella frustrating.

I've been revising.

I have a couple of key issues that I constantly need to work on when it comes to writing.

White room syndrome: I struggle with this so hard. It's a colossal effort for me to describe scene and place, and it's only after a number of drafts that the reader is given much of a mental picture. And believe me, it's a pain to get there.

I think maybe I need to approach this in a different way – perhaps do some setting exercises. I'll go page through Maass and see if he's got anything I can use, and maybe scour the web for some ideas/prompts.

This white room things extends to characters. A bigger pain than usual because of my tendency to write first person. How to build up a description of a character in first. Dunno about you, but I don't sit there during the day, my internal monologue ticking off my facial features and hair style, and the colour of my scintillating orbs. So, some work-arounds needed there.

Of course, I could use the alternate POV to get character description down, but I almost always have to be prodded into it by beta readers (they scream WTF DOES THIS PERSON LOOK LIKE? GIVE ME A HAIR COLOUR! ANYTHING PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF BABY BUDDHA!).

Pacing is a huge thing. I write short and fast and bare bones lean (my first draft for Lud clocked in at around 56k, I think). This leaves me with a fairly rushed story, with a lot of sub plots left so thin as to be transparently not there. It does, however, give me lots of room to deepen the things I find imporatant, to go back and build up layers and layers of characterization. So that's good.

What's you big writing weakness – and how do you work to overcome it?

                                      

chuggity boom boom

POW

yeah.

FLYING through this book and hopefully will come back from vaycay with tons more.

So, an excerpt:

I worked mechanical animal in Vale for a year, flipping ponyburgers at a cheap little place called the applebite, before I discovered that my brother George wasn't dead.

It happened like this.

It was a fryday, and we were serving a crowd of sinheads and screamers before they hit the clubs. Most of the scene is rivets and latex and verycherry fashion. The screamers were all on tabs so they were chill, drooling into their plates of fries and just generally being all zombified. But there's this one guy sitting at the counter and he looks nothing like the others. He's dusty and dirty and his hair is long but not cool. It's plaited back out of his face, and the skin at the edges of his face is grimy. He's scrubbed, but there's something about the black sprinkle of his pores that tells you he's never really going to get clean because whatever it is he's done, wherever he's been, it's just about been burnt right into him.

A traveling man. You hear about them, of course, and people say they've met one – at the clubs or just slumming about the city – but no-one really really believes. Why would you want to walk out into the storms that circle the city, just for the shot at walking into the next shit-hole?

He's wearing black gear, with a SolidRubber logo stamped into the shoulder, so I guess he's either really for real, or he's just got a fuckload of credit to be able to poseur that chill.