Archive for the ‘plotting’ Tag
That Face When…
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: editing, plotting, writing, writing life
Leave a comment You realize you need to completely replot your novel, because you’re at 40,000 words and have run out of things to do…and it’s supposed to be an 80,000-word book.
Every day for the past, oh, month or so, I have opened up my work in progress, the story of Beta Tanaka and Danae Childress’s courtship, and stared at it for an hour or so. Adding a sentence here, taking one out there. And I haven’t substantially changed the total number of words.
This week, I had an epiphany. I’ve told all the story I had. What I really need to do is expand the story, which is going to require expanding the plot, which is going to affect the character arcs and the relationship arc.
So I might as well just come out and say it—I need to replot the danged book. Luckily I’ve had a couple of ideas already that not only expand the external plot, but also both protagonists’ character arcs. They also make the relationship issues (and resolution of those issues) more realistic and satisfying. Well, satisfying to me at least.
So, for those of you waiting on Beta Test/Beta’s Test/Testing Beta (or whatever the final title turns out to be), I’m sorry, it’s gong to be a while longer.
But I think it’s going to be a much better book.
Thanks for your patience,
Val
News from the Word Mine
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: plot turns, plotting, WIP, writing, writing life
Comments (4) House purchase accomplished. Furniture purchase accomplished. Now I am back to the word mine, hard at work on about four projects.
First Working Title: Finding the Briar Rose
Set in the Human Diaspora universe. The story of Dane and Aurora Avondale’s courtship; he wakes her up from a century of cryosleep. He’s kidnapped by Saurians (friendly-ish aliens who evolved from their version of dinosaurs). He prevents the kidnappers from killing her after she nearly fights them off.
It is a Sleeping Beauty trope, but it’s Sleeping Beauty done properly. She wakes up with this guy kissing her and punches him, as one does in the real world. Eventually, Aurora kills the evil fairy in dragon form Saurian queen to free Dane, then takes over as regent for the late queen’s offspring that he saved when they were eggs. Hey, the kids didn’t do anything wrong.
I’m having trouble with the middle bit, where they discover they have far more in common than not, and the irritation turns to attraction. Apparently stubborn people live in my subconscious.
Second Working Title: Beta Testing
Set in the Dozen Worlds universe. The story of how Beta Tanaka and Danae Childress re-establish contact with Earth while overcoming their own relationship problems (he’s a customer-relations ninja for the Hauptmann Group, flitting around the Dozen Worlds fixing things; she’s a stay-at-home Zonan art expert–which makes for a really long-distance relationship). Oh, and did I mention alien cephalopoids (evil squids) might be coming to kill them all? Still fighting with this story, so the plot’s a bit murky yet.
Third Working Title: A Married Woman
Set in Regency England. Michael and Elizabeth, Lord and Lady Danbury, are coming up on their tenth anniversary…he was “blackmailed” into a marriage of convenience by her seedy father right before he leaves to be a field surgeon on the Peninsula. They discover she wasn’t quite 12 (who makes 12 the age of consent?!?—England until 1875! Gah!) at the ceremony.
A lot of living has happened since that wedding—both his older brothers died four years ago and he’s now heir to the big title—and he’s fallen in love with her, but she’s not so sure about trying the vows again. I never planned to write even one historical, but this is the second set of characters that refuse to get out of my head, so I’m writing it. FYI, Michael shows up at the end of A Ruined Woman as the physician for the duel.
Fourth Working Title: Temptation of Tetsuo or The Hitsugaya Harridan
Set in the Dozen Worlds universe. If you’ve read The Nobinata Gambit, you know a bit about Tetsuo Nobinata and Yuki Hitsugaya. This is their courtship—alpha male imperial warlord and alpha female survivor of sexual violence. And I’m still plotting it so that’s about all I know right now, but I do know that her strength and resilience is one of the things he finds highly attractive.
I also know Tetsuo is a great fighter but not so smooth with the ladies, and his awkwardness, and to some extent vulnerability, is something she finds attractive about him.
I’ll try to surface about once a week and think of something interesting to type, but…yeah. Those are pretty much the rest of my year if I can keep from getting distracted again. Wish me luck. And let me know if you come up with better titles, because I struggle with them.
The Real Estate Transaction
I warned you this house purchase was going to occupy my attention this month, didn’t I? Well, we’ve secured all the necessary documents (one of them three times), acquired a VA appraisal, inspected a house, a well, and a septic system, and we’re on track for loan approval by Friday and closing next week.
If everything goes according to plan, this time next Tuesday I will be signing several inches of documents in McCall, Idaho (a somewhat touristy mountain town that hugs the south end of Payette Lake and abuts Ponderosa State Park). That’s not where the house is located, but it is where the title company has an office.
Then I will begin the process of moving Spooky Man to his beloved mountains and cleaning old, unnecessary stuff out of the city house without a retired spouse underfoot. There’s also a lot of mountain driving in my future, but it will give me plenty of time to work out plot and character issues.
I’m a bit frustrated with my current work in progress (WIP), because I don’t have a character arc for the heroine. And I’m being distracted by the house thing, so I don’t have enough brain left over to dig into her problems. Luckily, after next week the distraction should be over.
Then, Miz Danae, you and I need to have a heart-to-heart talk that I’m not sure either of us is really going to enjoy. Fair warning my dear, I’m going to push you so far out of your comfort zone you might never fit back in it. Sincerely, Your Author.
Thanks,
Val
So we bought a cabin
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: plotting, real life, writing life
Leave a comment Just after I got the manuscript uploaded for the paperback copy of Strike Force Cyber Warriors, Spooky Man and I made an offer on a house in the mountains, a couple of hours north of the city. He will be living there most of the time while I stay in the valley for my job and commute on the weekends.
It’s a nice house, bigger than our place in the city, and with no questionable neighbors within fifteen feet of either side. Also, it has been eating all of my attention for the last week and a half, and will probably continue to do so until the keys are handed over at the end of this month.
I’m still working on Finding the Briar Rose, but slowly. I’m also working on the story of “Testing Beta” (my working title), the third story in the Dozen Worlds series. And some other stories that are percolating, just…slowly at the moment.
And pricing things like washer/dryer sets. Great googly moogly, they’ve gotten expensive! On the other hand, my current in-town washer is olive green and almost as old as I am, so it’s pretty obvious I don’t have much experience with large appliance shopping. Wish me luck.
I’m also having a birthday this month, which is always nice and a good reason to list the things for which one is grateful—my health, my family (Spooky Man and the furbabies in the innermost circle), my friends, my work, both in the day job and in my writer cave…there’s a lot to be grateful for. It’s going to be a happy birthday this year.
And in the meantime, I need to split up Beta and Danae, so I can bring them back together to defend their piece of space against whatever made Earth cut them off so long ago. Bwah-hah-hah-hah-hah.
Writing, writing, writing
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: business, conference, master class, plotting, publishing, workshops, writers conference, writing
Leave a comment Progress report: In two weeks, I have a net gain of three thousand words (which includes rewrites, expansions, and cutting material that is now redundant or no longer part of the story at all). I’m getting there, slowly but surely. I have to get it done by the end of October, because…
I’ve also started plotting work on my “NaNo” book; the story I will be working on in November, as part of National Novel Writing Month (fondly known as NaNoWriMo, or NaNo for the truly lazy). This is going to be something completely different: a historical romance about a duke who isn’t quite a duke and a ruined baron’s daughter who isn’t really ruined.
I never thought I would try to write a historical romance, but the characters popped into my head and wouldn’t go away, so here we are, LOL.
One other thing —
For writers who publish independently: I attended a workshop called the Indie Unconference October 12-13. It was mostly about marketing, but there were also discussions about the latest developments in wide vs. Kindle Unlimited (Amazon exclusive), and the best way to do print-on-demand now that Createspace is no more (may it rest in peace).
Back to the work in progress,
Val
Quick update – still alive here, just busy writing
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: life, plotting, publishing, status report, writing
Leave a comment Just wanted to put up a quick note to mention that I’m still alive (although temporarily short a breast that was thinking about killing me again—I’ll tell you about it later).
I’m deep into the middle of the story of Tasha Ocasek’s half-brother Stephan, who—ten years after The Valmont Contingency—is busy saving the universe from an Ancient Horror (yes, that’s their official name) while trying not to fall for the intriguing Ekaterina Avondale. And failing, at least in the not-falling-for Kat department.
Kat was raised in a society of dragons. In this particular instance, “dragon” is the slang term for an alien species formally known as Saurians because they come from a parallel line of evolution where the “dinosaurs” became sentient rather than extinct. So they are part velociraptoroid, part parrotoid, and, like T-Rex, the girls are bigger and stronger than the boys.
So Kat scares the bejeebers out of most men, but Stephan is a little different from most men. His big problem is that she’s the result of a union between to major cartel families, and after the way his father died, he’s extremely allergic to cartel families.
It’s going to take both of them to destroy the group-mind insectoidal colony ship that uses carbon-based life forms to incubate its eggs and larvae. I know, right? It creeps me right out, so Stephan and Kat had better get it together and destroy these things for good, and they only have another 30,000-40,000 words to do it.
For anyone waiting impatiently for Talyn’s story, I’ll be doing the final edit on it just as soon as I get this first draft finished. My goal is to get it published by the end of the summer.
Back to the story now,
Val
So, I Wrote A Book in About Two Weeks
This is me sticking my head up, well, from writing most of a book in two weeks. I discovered something about myself this month. Several things, actually. This post is primarily for writers, so if you don’t care about the novelist’s process, check back in a few days for updated pet pictures.
In the meantime, here’s some stuff I learned:
1. If I can get characters and plot really nailed down, I can write forty thousand words in two weeks. Now, I’ve never written more than 25K words in a month before, so this was a revelation.
Unfortunately, it took me fourteen months to get to that point. Next step is to figure out how to speed up *that* process.
2. I have a hybrid plotting process. I start out by writing with no concrete plan, but maybe a vague idea of the major plot points. Then when I get 30-50 pages, I can’t go any farther without knowing what happens, which is when I start to plot in earnest.
Now, that first 30-50 pages isn’t necessarily all the first part of the book; it might be all the really pivotal scenes from beginning to end. Or it could be one or two of them.
The first kiss, the turning point where the hero(es) figure out the big conflict is inevitable and decide how to handle it, the closing scene–any or all of them could be in there. After that I have to figure out the holes and fill them.
For this last book, I ended up making a list of scenes, then color coding them: pink for the heroine’s character arc, blue for the hero’s character arc, green for the relationship arc, black for external plot, and yellow highlighting for scenes that hadn’t had a version written yet.
From June 1 to June 26, I added more than 43,000 words to this manuscript, cutting about two thousand (that I counted). The next step is to send it out to critique partners and beta readers and see if what I wrote actually makes sense.
And then I send it to my editor with fingers crossed, LOL.
When Instalust Isn’t Really Instalust
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: plotting, promo, Valmont Contingency, writing
Leave a comment I have seen a review of The Valmont Contingency accusing me of Instalust and lazy writing.
This is hilarious, because I have difficulty getting my characters to get to the lust portion of the program in the compressed time schedule I’m allowed by The Main Story Question. They’re always, “Yeah, but the zombies…!”
As a result, I made danged sure both Hero and Heroine had plenty (and I mean PLENTY) of motivation before they ever did anything about it.
Please note that the reviewer is absolutely entitled to her opinion, because it’s her opinion (could have been his opinion, but this particular reviewer was female). The book, as an artifact, has to sink or swim on its own merits. Period.
But this is my website/blog, so I’m going to explain things because I can. So there.
Garrick, Our Hero, has been primed by two years of Kardashian-level tabloid coverage of Tasha with wardrobe and makeup worthy of a Playboy shoot.
Combine that with his engineer-personality compulsion to “fix this” and her damsel-in-distress circumstances when they first meet in person, followed soon after by the realization that she has saved his life. “The poor bastard never had a chance” was how Spooky Man (my spousal unit) described it.
Tasha, Our Heroine, is in an extremely vulnerable state of mind when confronted by the first adult male in her life — ever — who actually seems to 1. see her as a human being, 2. care about her well-being (as opposed to her utility to him), 3. give credence to her intelligence, and, for the win, 4. need her help to stay alive.
Oh, and did I mention he’s three generations from a complete designer makeover to the family’s genes, so he’s pretty much physically perfect?
Like the panty-and-tank-top clad heroine who goes after the spooky noise in the slasher movie, my heroines have to have a lot of motivation to do something really dangerous, like fall in love.
Read the book with my list and see if I haven’t included all the necessary and proper motivation for “instalust.” (See, this is a subtle advertisement, because you have to buy the book to read it.)
And that’s all I’m going to say about that, LOL.
Writing What I Don’t Know
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: plotting, Stray thoughts, writing
Leave a comment Specifically, Japanese and Chinese traditional culture. I am working on a novel where the hero is from a space-faring culture based in East Asian cultural traditions and genetics, and the heroine is the equivalent of Japanese-American or Chinese-British. The more research I do, the more I find out exactly how much I don’t know about Japanese and Chinese culture.
I’m ethnically Irish, which means I have light hair, light skin, and round blue eyes. So, what do epicanthal folds feel like? Nobody who has them can tell me, because they don’t know what it feels like not to have them. At least I can figure out the hair — my mother had hair so vehemently straight it rejected poodle perms in about four weeks.
I’m culturally American, specifically Western American, which means I have one of the largest personal-space bubbles in the world. You get closer than four feet without a good reason and I’m going to be uncomfortable and backing away — just because of where I grew up.
Compare that to the Tokyo subway system, where they employ people to cram commuters into the trains with the personal space of, say, canned sardines. Shakiro (Our Hero) isn’t going to equate physical proximity with intimacy. Well, there goes that scene. He’s also part of the imperial security clan, which means researching the Samurai Bushido, the ninja/shinobi Oniwabanshu, and multiple schools of Chinese martial arts philosophy. Good stuff (Sun Tzu was fascinating), but still…that’s just the deep background of his world.
Because of my day jobs in technical writing and localization, I know that Japan has three different writing systems, one of which was co-opted from Chinese writing (kanji), one of which looks like Gregg shorthand (katakana), and one of which looks like a cursive version of Gregg shorthand (hiragana). And you read it from top to bottom, right to left. Yesterday, I had to look up the name of the Japanese short sword often used as a left-hand weapon by the Samurai class: wakizashi. Or at least that’s the Romaji for it (phonetic approximation using the Roman alphabet).
How would that shape someone’s brain? Does Shak trust written language at all? Would you?
It’s a good thing this is fiction, so I can make stuff up.
Need for Subconscious Speed
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: plot turns, plotting, writing
Leave a comment “Your job is done for now, so pat yourself on the back…then go write me a new book. ” This is how my editor ended her latest e-mail, the one accepting the copy edit changes and stets (which is copy editor-speak for “don’t make this change”) from me.
I’m working on it. Unfortunately, last night I was writing the scene where the hero and his father meet again for the first time in years, and dad started apologizing. Huh?
I realized that the reason Our Hero has been in the Republic (and not the Nipponese Empire, where he was born) is because he was passed over for a clan leadership position — by Dad. He went into self-exile to save face.
Which explains a lot, actually. You, in the basement — Muse — you couldn’t have sent this up three months ago? Whaddaya mean, you were working on the editorial changes for the last book? You’re supposed to be able to do both at the same time.
This little nugget changes motivations for half the plot. It makes perfect sense, but now I have to scrap most of the paltry 5,000-word first draft I have written. And I have to rework the synopsis/outline. Le sigh.
I need a faster subconscious.
