Kate Genet's Blog, page 10

See the Writer at Work (It's Like Watching Paint Dry)

Filed under: Writing Journal

It Ain’t Always Pretty, To Get This Close…To Your Characters

I’ve been sitting in the same position so long my arse has gone to sleep. I’m playing the music through my headphones so loud my ears are going to hurt when I’ve finished.

But the music helps. It blocks out the world, the room I’m sitting in. The other people in the house know I’m just going to look blankly at them in they come in and try to talk to me. It’s a clear message I’m writing. It also makes me feel alive. Loud music – strong emotion.

It’s a strong emotion day. This is an intense scene I’ve been writing today. I’ll be exhausted when I’ve finished. Emotionally spent. I’ll drag myself out into the sunshine and lie down on the grass, staring up at the sky and feeling the real world seep slowly back into my bones.

Do other writers get this involved in the lives and character’s emotions? I don’t know and it wouldn’t make any difference if I did. Today I’m working on a short story – it doesn’t have a title yet; I’m just thinking of it as Michaela and Trisha’s story. That says it all, just for now.

Michaela and Trisha. I know these two characters – women – so well now, I can practically put on their lives and emotions like a second skin.

So when I’ve spent the last three days writing about them going through a really difficult time, I feel it almost like my own pain. It’s not my pain – my own life is just fine and dandy, but theirs isn’t right at the moment, and writing it is turning into one intense experience.

I can see them in my mind as I write. I can see them looking at each other as though I’m a peeping tom behind the window, or I can look at Trisha from Michaela’s eyes or at Michaela through Trisha’s. I can see what they see, and I feel what they feel because that’s the only way I can find out what it is, what is going on in the story, what actions and reactions are appropriate.

There’s not a hell of a lot of distance going on in this writer/character relationship. Is it always like this? Pretty much, yes. I move in and out of my characters’ heads, their environments, their bodies, as needed to know what is going on. I can watch them as if on a movie screen in my mind, or I can climb right inside and be part of that movie playing in 3D and technicolour and surround sound inside my head.

So today is hard. Because Michaela and Trisha – I’ve become awfully fond of them. They’ve become sufficiently well developed as characters that I can put them in any given situation and watch them act perfectly in, well in character. And because I like them so much, I’ve been feeling it all right along with them.

Damn but they better hurry up and make up. A writer crying over her own characters is just not a pretty thing.

Filed under: Writing Journal

It Ain't Always Pretty, To Get This Close…To Your Characters

I've been sitting in the same position so long my arse has gone to sleep. I'm playing the music through my headphones so loud my ears are going to hurt when I've finished.

But the music helps. It blocks out the world, the room I'm sitting in. The other people in the house know I'm just going to look blankly at them in they come in and try to talk to me. It's a clear message I'm writing. It also makes me feel alive. Loud music – strong emotion.

It's a strong emotion day. This is an intense scene I've been writing today. I'll be exhausted when I've finished. Emotionally spent. I'll drag myself out into the sunshine and lie down on the grass, staring up at the sky and feeling the real world seep slowly back into my bones.

Do other writers get this involved in the lives and character's emotions? I don't know and it wouldn't make any difference if I did. Today I'm working on a short story – it doesn't have a title yet; I'm just thinking of it as Michaela and Trisha's story. That says it all, just for now.

Michaela and Trisha. I know these two characters – women – so well now, I can practically put on their lives and emotions like a second skin.

So when I've spent the last three days writing about them going through a really difficult time, I feel it almost like my own pain. It's not my pain – my own life is just fine and dandy, but theirs isn't right at the moment, and writing it is turning into one intense experience.

I can see them in my mind as I write. I can see them looking at each other as though I'm a peeping tom behind the window, or I can look at Trisha from Michaela's eyes or at Michaela through Trisha's. I can see what they see, and I feel what they feel because that's the only way I can find out what it is, what is going on in the story, what actions and reactions are appropriate.

There's not a hell of a lot of distance going on in this writer/character relationship. Is it always like this? Pretty much, yes. I move in and out of my characters' heads, their environments, their bodies, as needed to know what is going on. I can watch them as if on a movie screen in my mind, or I can climb right inside and be part of that movie playing in 3D and technicolour and surround sound inside my head.

So today is hard. Because Michaela and Trisha – I've become awfully fond of them. They've become sufficiently well developed as characters that I can put them in any given situation and watch them act perfectly in, well in character. And because I like them so much, I've been feeling it all right along with them.

Damn but they better hurry up and make up. A writer crying over her own characters is just not a pretty thing.

Filed under: Writing Journal

Think Spec Fiction and Romance Don't Mix?

Try your spec fiction with a delicious side serving of lesbian romance. Orange Moon and Remnant both discounted for the rest of March…

ORANGE MOON on Amazon, AmazonUK, Smashwords and Barnes&Noble

REMNANT on Amazon, AmazonUK, Smashwords and Barnes&Noble

 

Filed under: Writing Journal

Riding My Little Red Writer Wagon

You all will have noticed that my blog has had something of a make-over. I did the big changeroonie a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to make a fuss of it, tell you all about it and say hey lookie here, do ya like it?

But I spent a day making the banner, putting it all together, setting up the new widgets (which were the main reason for the change) and finally, on an in-drawn breath, clicking the button to go live with the new look, – and then I promptly forgot about it.

I told you all in the last post how I'm pretty much a no-frills gal. Well, I'm kinda single-minded as well. And the track this one-track mind is on at the moment is the express train toBookville.

My new novel is becoming all-consuming – when it comes to my work anyway. I'm really only good at having one project on the go, concentrating on one major, creative thing at a time. I wrote a poem last week, I changed the look of the blog the week before, but really, the only thing I've been doing otherwise is working on the new novel.

Which is coming along really well. See that cool little widget to the left? The one that shows the word count? I'm enjoying adjusting that and seeing how far and how fast I can get through the book each week. Although it's there mostly for my own amusement (I know, I'm very easily amused), I thought you might enjoy checking in every now and then and seeing how things are progressing.

Some things aren't progressing quite so well, however. Fat Pat and the Accidental Death of Maryanne is still languishing, waiting for me to dust it off, spruce it up, tie a ribbon in its hair and send it off into the wide old world with a nice shiny apple to eat.

Same story with another project I'm trying to fit into the schedule. You might be interested in this one too – Mike H, who wrote the hilarious Michaela and Trisha outtakes you can find in various places around this blog and I are collaborating to bring you a juicy little selection of stories showcasing the life and times of Michaela and Trisha – and Caro, can't forget her, we know how much you all love Caro too.

It's practically ready to rock and roll and hit the press. I just need to finish a short story I'm writing for it. A short story you might want to read actually, if you are a Michaela and Trisha fan, because it will slot very nicely between Sweet Charlotte and the next book I'm planning in their series. There won't be any mystery in the short story for the two girl sleuths, however. It's going to be a little more romantic than that.

I guess I'm going to have to start telling my little caboose wagon to start stopping at a few towns along the way. It's going to be three or so weeks until I have this novel obsession over and done with, and I don't want to wait that long to get these other two stories out to you. Will just have to see what I can do.

Filed under: Writing Journal

Learning to Spell Intimacy

I don't consider myself a poet, though I've written quite a stack of the stuff over the years.

Sometimes it just seems the best way to express the feelings that touch you the deepest. Anyway, felt like sharing:

Learning to Spell Intimacy

When we meet

we tease each other

with words dripping

and sliding,

tumbling to one another.

Plucking at those words

with nerve-raw fingers

we weave stories

which, naked,

we read to each other,

the punctuation an indrawn

breath, a pregnant,

poignant pause.

While tracing for each other

the outlines of our verbal

anatomy,

we find ourselves multi-syllabic

and breathless between

the lines.

Drifting in the velvet glow

of our wordy, willing

seduction,

we are trying on

each other's stories,

creating layers of meaning

and learning to spell

intimacy.

Filed under: Writing Journal

Valuing Your Creativity and Trusting Your Own Process. Uh Huh.

I visited a few really pretty blogs about writing today. They were all pastel  coloured and inspiring, upbeat and really 'c'mon now, you can do it!' They talked about creating space for your Important Work, valuing your creativity, and trusting in your own process. All really nice stuff.

What tickled my fancy too, was that all three I visited (following links from one to the other) talked about something that seemed to involve choosing a word that would sum up your goals/desires/focus for the coming year. One woman wrote in the comment section that she'd picked 'passion' for her word as it was something that would really challenge her. Cool. Another chose 'risk it all' or something like that, though that's a phrase rather than a word – I guess there are no hard and fast rules with this stuff. Someone else was going to 'write like a motherfucker', which made me laugh, especially as she had a coffee cup with this sentiment proclaimed in red on the side.

All pretty interesting. Even kinda amusing.

And I like the idea of it – it all sounds pretty good, y'know – all this seriousness about creativity and writing and living. And all that. I like the idea and even spent maybe thirty seconds trying to think up my own word for the year.

But I couldn't think of anything.

I guess I'm just a no-frills kind of girl. The only times I've given head-space to all those concepts of being all lovey-dovey towards my own creativity and setting up my own space dedicated to my Important Work – were when I wasn't producing any of that bloody important work. I remember there was always an edge of desperation to that process-trusting and space-mining and passion-valuing.

The fact is, when I'm being productive with my writing, all that stuff just flies out the window. I don't even have a dedicated space for my writing. If it's cold I'll plonk down on the lazee-boy by the fire, and if it's not cold, I'll likely sit on my bed, headphones on, music playing and typing as fast as my fingers can work.

I never spare a thought for creativity when I'm being creative. I don't care where I do all that Important Work. I don't even think of it as Important Work. That capitalized emphasis just initimidates the shit out of me. My work is important to me – right up there with family and loved ones blah blah, but if I went around valuing it left right and centre, I'd end up scaring myself with all that pressure of doing something Important.

And I can't think of a word that's gonna sum up my year for me, that's going to provide stimulation and focus and motivation. I'm way too busy piling page after page full of words to single any one of them out to frame and put on my wall. I guess if you forced me to, I'd choose a phrase something like this:

Babe, doing it already.

Filed under: Writing Journal

The Dead Place – and My Good Place

I've been so busy the last couple of weeks working on the new novel that I've totally forgotten to keep you all up to date with a few other things that have been going on. Talk about one track mind! When I'm writing, that's all I really think about – the book in progress. I wish I could multi-task a lot better than I can; it would be terrific to work on the novel in the morning and a short story or something in the afternoon, but I can't work like that. The most I can manage is formatting work, a bit of blogging, and that's about it.

But the new book is coming along well. I'm 20k words into it now, after two weeks work, which means I'm about a quarter done. It feels like the story is going to be good – I won't know until it's done and I've read it over, but it feels like everything's falling into place. I was wishing yesterday that the act of writing didn't take so long. I've had a rummage around in the old noggin, and the story for this new book is more or less complete – it's all there, everything that's going to happen. I just have to write it down. And even though I've become a pretty speedy typist, that writing down bit and filling in the details doesn't seem like a job I can rush.

I know there are writers out there that can produce thousands of words a day. I'm happy with getting 2000-3000 down five or six days a week. Anything more and I just get too tired.

Why on earth am I grumbling? Everything is going swimmingly.

I was reading something, somewhere, earlier today, about what sort of books the people in that particular group enjoyed. The response was overwhelmingly ROMANCE. Oh dear. I've never been much of a reader of romance and I feel like I'm moving further and further away from being anything resembling a writer of it. But as we writers always say – gotta write what we gotta write. That's why it is so wonderful to me to think of you readers out there who have discovered my stories, given them a try and enjoyed them. It's terrific that the genre of lesbian fiction is now getting big enough that someone like me can squeeze a bit of supernatural horror in there too.

Taking a leap sideways from the subject of romance, and I'm astonished to find myself writing a book at the moment that has well, um err, a lot of sex in it. My only excuse is that's where the storyline has taken me! I'm finding it all very interesting, and the cast of characters are too. The secondary character I thought had headed for the hills is back, and she's not at all happy about being sidelined. I think she has stalker tendencies actually.

Anyway, oh yes, the whole point of this post – my short story THE DEAD PLACE has been published and is available at all the usual places, although it might not have gone through to B&N yet (I can't publish with Barnes & Noble except through Smashwords, I'm afraid as that requires being in the U.S).

The Dead Place was first published in The Venus Magazine last year, and I've been meaning ever since to make it available with the rest of my work. I've also (finally) uploaded SILENT LIGHT to Amazon, after waiting months for Kobo to update the pricing. I've also noticed that another of my short stories SILENCE isn't up on Amazon yet, so I'll spend a bit of time fixing that next week.

You all will remember that I was adapting the blog post FAT PAT AND THE ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF MARYANNE into a proper short story – well, that's done and sitting here waiting for me to give it a read-over to decide if it's good enough to show it's face outside the door. I'm thinking that once I, you know, spit in a hankie and wipe its face a bit, it will be presentable enough.

So, there you go. Consider yourselves all updated.

Filed under: Writing Journal

No Nancy Drew Here

I want to talk about my new novel, because I'm feeling pretty excited about it. It's going to be a bit difficult to, however, and not give away too much – the storyline, for instance. But I can't help myself anyway, I only hope you'll bear with me and not think me too awful a tease.

This new book is well started. I've written enough of it now (3500 words just today and the third finger on my left hand has gone numb on the tip) to know that I'm going to keep going with it, that, barring unseen catastrophe, it will end up a finished first draft in four or five week's time.

I'm working on an idea I had rather a long time ago – and indeed wrote about in this blog post and I'm totally thrilled at how it's coming together so far. I still contend (despite my pontificating on the left brain-right brain scientificamal facts, that there's something magical about writing.

I like my new main character. She's developing on the page in a most satisfying way. There's nothing Nancy Drew-like about this one, however; she's arrogant, opinionated and eccentric but I just can't help liking her anyway. Hopefully you're all going to feel the same way. I think you will, if I do my job properly. She's the sort of character who does things with such little regard for other people's opinions, that she's quite refreshing. She's also uninhibited, with little regard for convention. In other words, she's turning out to be a hell of a lot of fun.

I only realized a few of these things about her (her name is Fen Marshall, I can tell you that much at least) when I started writing, but she had grown on the page better than I'd even hoped. I sit down each morning to write knowing where and how I'm going to start, and having the outline in my mind of the day's scene or two, but that's all I know. The details fill themselves in. The details that not only move the story forward, but round out the characters – they fill themselves in. I honestly feel like I'm taking a back seat during all this. I'm just the one who supplies the commitment and the fingers that fly across the keyboard. The rest is that seductive muse of mine, whispering in my ear and onto the page.

During breaks (I wrote for three hours this morning with a break every hour) I sat outside thinking technical thoughts like 'I want to keep the pacing really slow with this one, I want the tension to become almost unbearable' and 'I wonder why we see her reflection so often?' (the answer came immediately, but I'm keeping that one to myself, dear reader). I mused upon the – surprising – fact that the character whom I thought would be the main secondary character, has in fact, exited stage left (although, stowing my coffee cup in the sink I realized we would meet her again, under some very shady circumstances) and the other character whom I thought would play very little part, has in fact stepped up to the plate and is calling quite a few shots. In other words, I sat there mostly bemused at what was going on in the pages I'd just written.

The story is starting to take on a life of its own.

I love it when it does that.

 

I'm typing two-fingered now. I've had enough for today. But I'm already looking forward to tomorrow's writing session.

Filed under: Writing Journal

When Revision Means Re-Envision

I've had an interesting morning.

This morning I took the twelve pages I wrote over the last two days on my new short story version of Fat Pat and the Accidental Death of Maryanne and threw them in the trash. Well, not literally in the trash, because they're still on my computer and still a saved file, but this morning I ignored them and started again with a brand new blank page.

I found myself wandering around yesterday dissatisfied with the way the story was going. I'd been writing it in third person and it wasn't working. I'd been stuffing too much information into the story and it wasn't working. Pat was turning into a good guy, a hard-done by guy and that wasn't working.

By the time I went to bed last night, I'd decided to start again with the story. I considered giving it up all together and going back to the novel I'm supposed to be working on, but that would have been giving up too soon. Instead I worked out a different way to tell the story, writing this time in first person and tackling it from a whole new (and hopefully more interesting) angle.

So that's what I did. When I sat down to work this morning, I didn't even open up the file with the old pages (all twelve of them!) in it. I simply cranked up a new page, set fingers to keyboard and started writing. It must have been the right decision because my daily goal of 2000 words, which usually takes around two hours to achieve, was completed this time in just a bit over an hour.

I still don't know if the story's going to work. I have other short stories sitting on my hard drive that I've abandoned because, for reasons I can't readily figure, they just don't 'work'. There's never a guarentee that a story will come together in a pleasing way, and I find this is doubly true for short stories. Short stories, especially considering their brevity, are hard work. Writing in such a compressed way is a real skill. To make a few pages say something interesting, surprising and true isn't easy. Hopefully it will be easier since old Fat Pat's story isn't going to be anything resembling literary fiction, but rather a pretty standard horror story. Then again, that's a form I'm not expecially experienced with so the whole thing is something of a challenge.

I'm going to keep going with it, however, even though there's a nasty little voice whispering in my ear telling me I'd be better off going back to my novel. Too bad though, that's one nasty little voice I'm not going to listen to. Maybe the story won't work out – but I'm not going to know for sure until it's done. Pushing yourself, extending yourself – well that's always a valuable process, no matter the end result.

Filed under: Writing Journal