Archive for the ‘writing’ Tag
Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: real life, writers life, writing
Leave a comment One of my critique partners is moving away. To Tampa. Next weekend. Well, actually I think she and the dog are boarding the plane on May 1st, but it’s close enough.
We’re having our last In Real Life (IRL) meeting on Good Friday. Somehow it’s appropriate. Endings and beginnings.
She’s beginning her new life with her old husband (they’ve been separated since January) and can’t wait to see him again.
And now the Moxie Quartet (our informal name for our critique group) is down to two. But life goes on and there is Skype.
It makes me think of Ecclesiastes, as interpreted by The Byrds. They called it Turn Turn Turn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odj2kNn3_v0&NR=1
Best Cat Food Commercial Ever
Have you seen the new Fancy Feast commercial?
The one with the gorgeous persian kitten (not a no-nose persian, mind you, but a short-nose persian). Fluffy, white, and adorable, purchased by a man to impress a woman.
The kitten that could be a clone of the woman’s beloved childhood cat (seen in the first 5-10 seconds of the commercial).
The kitten wearing the collar with the gigantic heart-shaped tag (well, gigantic for a two-month old kitten) engraved, “Will You Marry Us?”
Yes, it was cheesy and played on cliche and stereotypes. Yes, it was emotionally manipulative. Yes, it made me bawl — not sniffle, not cry, but soak-two-tissues bawl.
In 30 seconds. With no dialog. That’s storytelling.
Best. Cat food commercial. Ever.
Pseudo-MFA in Genre Fiction writing?
I have been tasked to come up with a curriculum for aspiring novelists, sort of an ersatz MFA program in genre fiction, that can be delivered via online classes.
To me, such a curriculum would break into three parts: the writing, the business and the marketing.
Yes, business and marketing are different aspects, because business is query letters, synopses and deadlines while marketing is websites, blogs, Amazon/B&N/Facebook author pages, Twitter & connecting all of the above.
But what order does stuff come in? Characterization before plotting? Or basic grammar, because writing it properly in the first place is easier than editing later?
If anyone reading this has any thoughts on the subject, I would be delighted to hear them.
Thanks,
Val
A Seriously Eventful Week
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: coping beans, real life, writing
Leave a comment This week the mystery readers/writers group had a minor emergency–they didn’t have enough people attend the last two meetings to have an election.
Out of approximately 50 paying members, maybe five or six turn up on any given month. They’re considering some significant changes to meeting venue and date to reverse the problem. I hope it works, because I miss seeing the interesting (in a good way!) people who love mystery literature.
Then the writing conference board had a meeting and Mayhem In The Grove won’t be in the Centre on the Grove this year. We just can’t afford it without charging attendees too much (you would not believe, for example, how much they want for a gallon of coffee).
We also had to withdraw from the agreement Michael Hauge, the screenwriting guru who was going to teach the master class. It hurts (he’s a marvelous teacher), but the money just didn’t work.
And then a critique partner called to say she’d not be attending this weekend’s meeting because her husband just received a fabulous job offer in Tampa, Florida. She’s not moving immediately, but probably will be joining him within a year.
To put that in perspective, we live in Boise, Idaho. It’s not commuting distance for anything but electrons. I’m trying not to sulk. Or pout.
Oh, and a U.S. representative was shot outside a supermarket yesterday. A federal judge and a nine-year-old girl were killed in the incident.
When you start shooting children at supermarkets over politics, rhetoric has taken a turn for the psychotic. I don’t care if you’re a liberal democrat, a fascist, or anything in between.
Mom warned me there would be weeks like this. She was right.
Why I Write Speculative Fiction
Once upon a time, Val decided to write a romance novel. Seven months later, she had a manuscript with a beginning, middle and end that was long enough to be a Silhouette Desire. It was about a director of a commercial research lab and one of the researchers. There was a patent for a new form of bacterial gene splicing in the plot.
That was my first try at a sexy contemporary romance novel. It has been shoved into deep storage. No, it will never come out. Trust me, this is a good thing.
My second try at a sexy contemporary romance novel involved a secret method of decompiling executable files to tease a virus out of custom database software running oil production in a secular Middle East country. Sigh. Where did that come from? The heroine was supposed to be a stripper, for god’s sake. Into the drawer. No whining, get in there.
Okay, I thought, I would try a fantasy novel. High fantasy, perhaps even epic fantasy. Pseudo-Medieval, people who used to traffic with elves but hadn’t seen one in a generation or two…um, yeah. Within 50 pages it morphed on me. Big time.
“Elf” was suddenly an acronym for Engineered Life Form, “fey” meant Fully Engineered Human, elven magic was nanotech control systems, and they were colonists on a planet orbiting a blue-white star. But there was a love story. Welllll, alrighty then. I gave up on fantasy before page 100 and I still haven’t finished that story.
How about a paranormal? Yes, a ghost story, set in Seattle, about a software developer who has a new kind of project management tool that fully integrates…dammit.
Plus there’s the issue of the ghosts–do dead people get to have a point of view? My gut feeling is no, because it makes the ghost phenomena less creepy if the reader knows it’s just So-and-So trying to help.
It took me three tries, but I finished that one before shoving it into a dark corner.
At that point, I gave up and wrote the story that would eventually become Blade’s Edge, my first published book. The first draft was completed in five months.
Interestingly, it’s the only book I’ve ever written in order, from beginning to end–probably because I wrote the love story first, and then went back and added all the different points of view for the political story.
And that’s why I write the kind of fiction I do…because I can’t, apparently, write anything else. Even when I try. And believe me, I tried.
Now that I’ve admitted that, I have this idea for an urban fantasy about the sorceress who guards the Rocky Mountain power node under Yellowstone Lake. I think I can make this work, because I have to treat the magic like physics.
If you define magic as direct manipulation of energy, then it has to obey laws of physics that can be described mathematically. And if mages are those humans who have the ability to directly manipulate energy (anyone who can flip a light switch can indirectly manipulate energy), well, there’s your premise, all neatly tied up with a bow and E=mc^2. I can do that.
But first I have to get a few current projects finished. Club Bebop is tapping me on the shoulder again, whispering that it has lots of stories to tell me….
What is it with all the cancer in the last week or so?
Last week I had my now-yearly dermatologist checkup–I’m boring, if you recall. Grin. The next day I found out my friend Robin Lee Hatcher was diagnosed with breast cancer on the day before Thanksgiving (I was diagnosed with breast almost-cancer, DCIS, on the day before Thanksgiving last year).
Robin found it early and has a very good prognosis, but still, the timing coincidence is a little creepy.
Colleen Lindsay, who I started following on Twitter when she was a literary agent, is currently in the adventure of chemotherapy. She left agenting at the end of summer this year, but her tweets are so fabulously entertaining that I couldn’t stop following her.
Tonight, she said her chemo docs probably wouldn’t approve of her sharing apple pie with her cat. I’m not sure her vet would approve, either, but if Colleen and Stinkyboy (the cat) are okay with it, it works for me.
Now I have to split my thoughts, prayers and general good vibes between Colleen and Robin. Kick its [bleep], ladies.
And we lost Elizabeth Edwards on Tuesday. Sad and annoying; a life well lived, but…too short.
I’m healthy as a horse these days, at least according to all the new doctors I’ve collected over the last year and a half. So now the rest of the world needs to catch up.
In the world of writing, I didn’t get to 50,000 words for National Novel Writing Month, but I did get to 20,000 words. And I plotted a sequel cyberpunk romance novella. And I think I have the beginning of a third, which would mean all three could be packaged together as an anthology if anyone else likes them as much as I do.
Now, back to the manuscript critique on which I’m supposed to be working.
Nano, Nano, Nano
In a fit of optimism, I signed up for National Novel Writing Month this year. I’m not normally much of a joiner, but the organizers in my area, Megan and Sam, are such nice people and so enthusiastic…they swayed me.
And I was going to start small. Normally, the goal of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for insiders) is to complete a 50,000-word first draft in 30 days. The key words are “first draft” which gives the writer permission to have a lot of crappy writing in it. Crap can be fixed. Blank pages, well, not so much.
My goal is to complete a 30,000-word novella.
Today I crossed the 15,000-word mark, which I should have done on Monday if I were on track. Now, if I was trying to do the full 50K, I should have hit 25K on Monday. Oy! That’s a lot of words.
Anyway, that’s where almost all of my writing has been going for the last couple of weeks. I need to catch up to my goal word count, so I might not have another post ready until after Thanksgiving.
Just in case, I wish anyone reading this a happy holiday with many things to be thankful for.
Only 14,952 words to go!
The Quest for Coping Beans continues
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: coping beans, real life, writing
Comments (1) So I’ve gotten back the coping beans from worrying about the car, although I still have the nervous tic (I glance at the temp gauge every five seconds while driving, just in case).
My local RWA chapter has its elections this weekend; I’m giving up webmaster. I’ve been doing it for two years, and I’ve sucked at it for the last several months, so it’s time. Yes, the burning smell is me.
My term of office as president of Popular Fiction Association of Idaho, Inc. (which puts on the only yearly genre fiction writing conference in Boise) ends at the end of February. The lovely and talented Amberly Smith has been unanimously consented in as the next president already. More coping beans will be freed up by that.
By the way, Amberly’s debut novel, Rinse and Repeat, will be coming out in January from Dreamspinner Press, just in time for her to finish her bachelor’s degree in Communication. I’ve read parts of this book and I think it’s delightful: Groundhog Day meets Quantum Leap.
More coping beans returned: The single intersection I must pass through between home and work has been under construction for 10 months, but they painted the lines and took away the orange cones today. This should cut my commuting time in half.
Now all I have to do is cut back work hours to 40 per week, wean Spooky Man from needing me to pick up something from the store every bleeping day, and get all the furry children cycled through their immunizations by Christmas.
NanoWriMo: 5 days in, only 1,000 words. I am sooooo behind.
Who would have thought cancer treatment would have been the easiest part of the year?
Saga of the Subaru
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: coping beans, real life, writing
Leave a comment Huzzah! I have new head gaskets. Yes, plural. I have a ’98 Subaru Outback that has a 2.5L “Boxer” engine. The boxer engine is flat, with opposing cylinders, two to the east and two to the west as you’re looking under the hood. That means it has two heads. And that, my friends, means it requires two head gaskets. It’s a lovely engine when it works properly.
However, if one ever needs to replace the head gasket, say, because of the well-documented Boxer 2.5L phase I engine internal head gasket leak (Google Subaru head gasket and you’ll find out exactly what I’m talking about), it’s double the fun.
But wait, there’s more, as if that already wasn’t more than any sane human being would want to know about my car.
After three and a half days and >$2,000 paid, the car wouldn’t start at the garage. I had to go back into the office, stifle my hysterical giggling (I laugh when I’m stressed, it’s one of my mutant talents) and explain to the service writer that the car wouldn’t start.
It turned out to be a loose screw and took maybe fifteen minutes to find and fix. Well, specifically, it was the bolt holding the main block ground wire.
If the ground wire doesn’t have a good connection to the block, the starter can’t get spark to the coil and the engine will sit there waiting until maybe you taser its metallic behind.
After the bolt was fixed, Subie and I went to the store, got a latte, waited in the construction zone traffic and went home, all without the temperature gauge even considering doing anything warmish.
So. At last I’ve recovered the “worrying about the car” coping beans and I can get back to Open Mike Night at the Bebop and figure out what happens to Glitch and Travertine.
Rejection for Finding the Briar Rose
Samhain finally rejected my futuristic take on Sleeping Beauty. I say finally, because I submitted it for the Hot Fairy Tales anthology at the end of January–and all of the stories for that were chosen by February 15th. Anthology editor Laurie Rausch forwarded the manuscript to my editor, Lindsey Faber (who has been super busy this spring and summer). And Lindsey e-mailed this weekend that she’s going to pass.
Well, good. That means I have time to work up the other two fairy-tale-in-space novellas for my own anthology. Why yes, I do have an evil plan; I thought you knew.
In the meantime, I need to get cracking on the redemption of Talyn Penthes, who finds herself outcast, a Unique in a world of clones. Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to try to kill your identical twin.
