Balticon Whirlwind Tour

AKA: How not to do a con as an introvert (or maybe just as me)

I made it to Balitcon this year despite having a full family life, however I went about it all wrong. Somehow, I think I should have…well...I'm getting ahead of myself. First. Let’s start by stating that I am an introvert. This is not news to me. I have known it my whole life, but after reading TheIntrovert Advantage, I know a lot more about what makes me tick. Also within the last week I was diagnosed with moderate to severe anxiety. I am still digesting that one, but it explains a lot. Anyway, that all aside, I have been thinking about Balticon all month and whether I should attend or not and whether I should enter some art in the art show or not. I decided I wasn’t ready for the art show and was not likely to get any return on it. Also, I didn’t want to drive up there to drop off and pick up my art. I live within 2 hrs of Balticon, so I thought I would just drive in to attend. If I had to stay overnight, I wouldn’t have gone at all. In the end I decided to just attend on Saturday and get as much out of it as I could. My goals were to meet people and start learning my way around the social customs of approaching and talking to an actual, live Editor/Agent.

            Saturday morning, I left home with enough time to encounter traffic, get lost or wait through a long registration line, but not all three. As the 2 hr drive progressed and I took a wrong turn in construction zone and then waited in accident traffic I became increasingly agitated. By the time I registered and walked into the program 10 min late, I was feeling pretty frantic. Then I bounced from panel to panel, without giving myself time to do anything else. The only time I talked to people was when they approached me. Even worse, I cut conversations short so that I could go to another panel. Sigh. This was especially stupid in retrospect when I found that most of the panels I had chosen had nothing new to offer me. I have been studying the business of writing long enough to know the basics, like don’t be a jerk, etc. I am officially giving myself permission to stop going to those kinds of panels and choose something totally new and outside my realm of experience. One incident that has me laughing at myself in a sad sort of way happened right after a Multi-creative program, one of the more interesting panels I attended. I was waiting for a pizza at the café and one of the panelists walked by and saw me. I had asked a few questions during the program and so he wanted to follow up. He, PatrickSaffiddo, was very nice and offered to send some helpful info after the con. I almost asked if he wanted to talk and have some of the too large pizza that I had bought with the intention of sharing, but I got in the way of myself and didn’t offer. As I circled the hotel with my pizza, I saw him two more times, but it was even more awkward to offer each time. I laughed because it was like the universe was trying to help me along in this goal of meeting people, but I just couldn’t get in gear. I think he thought I was laughing at him at one point, but I hope not. Sorry Patrick!

            Towards my other goal of meeting and talking to editors, more for practice than as a serious endeavor to get a book contract, also ended in a similar failure. I had attended a few panels by editors about their books/companies. I marked out who they were so later I could talk to them. However, by 3pm, the time designated to socializing, I was literally too worn out to do anything. I ended up grabbing a bookmark and running away from an artist’s table because I couldn’t remember what I had wanted to talk to her about. I tried to sit calmly outside and regain some energy, but it didn’t work. Later, I wound up sitting on a lobby couch next to a writer who I had questions/comments for based on a program we had both attended. It probably would have lead into an easy conversation, but I was just too exhausted to make the attempt. Then an editor walked by headed to the bar, where I could have offered to buy him a drink and picked his brain about writery stuff. I just sat there in a stupor, trying to decide if I should push through to the 5:30 panel I wanted to attend or just drive home. I went home. I was almost too tired to drive home. (Apologies to the guy I cut off in an unexpected lane merge).

            So, what did I really get out of Balticon? Well, I learned how an anxious introvert should not do a con.

1.      Do not drive in the morning of. Arrive the day before and get a room.

2.      Do not attempt to scope out and then meet editors in one day. Scope them out on day one. Research them. If you see them later, when you are peppy, talk to them. They are people too. :)

3.      Do not put so much pressure on yourself to get it all done according to schedule.

4.      Do not attend to back to back panels. Even if you feel at a loss for something to do, just go to every other panel. Relax and let things happen naturally.

5.      Go back to your room for a nap or to relax. Don’t worry if you miss out on something because if you don’t rest, you aren’t “there” for it anyway.

So my resolution for future cons is to do it the right way. Stay at the hotel and commit fully to the con. I was trying to balance between family time at night and enjoying the con, but in the end I just stressed myself into exhaustion. No more of that. 

Editing Continued - The Wrap up

Since I started this project of editing my book 5 months ago, I've gone through three definite stages of learning with editing. I can look at my book as 4 separate parts. Part 1: mild editing and a large learning curve. Part 2: More vivid writing, but still needs a lot of work on the scenes and connectivity of the story line. Part 3: All knowledge to date incorporated to date, but somewhat disconnected from the remaining book because I have changed some of the story line. Part 4: Pristine, untouched, original draft.

            Just thinking about those stages makes my head hurt. In a way, my book was better before I started than it is in its current state. I will compare it to moving into a house, because that is something that happens in my life quite often. When you move in, there are these lovely empty clean rooms, just like the clean empty outline of my story, AKA the first draft. Then the movers come and shove boxes and furniture everywhere. There isn’t enough room for everything and you begin to despair at the mountain of work ahead of you. Then you start opening boxes and unpacking them and rearranging furniture. There is stuff everywhere. Books piled by the wall because you can’t get to the shelf where they are going to go. Piles of wrapping paper. Boxes flattened and tossed out (text that is no longer useful to your story). Dishes piled in the living room because the box was put in the wrong room and it was too heavy to move so you had to unpack it, but got distracted by the search for the Tivo wireless antennae, which had to be found right now because the cable guy was due any minute and the antennae was essential for installation. And suddenly its night time and you have to go to bed because you are dead tired, but the sheets for the bed haven’t been found yet, so you just keep unpacking boxes like an automaton. Finally after an exhaustive night’s sleep where you frantically unpacked boxes in your dreams because you were looking for the baby, which some stupid pot smoking mover packed away neatly under all the china, you wake to reality, which is not much better. Don’t you feel a little frantic just reading about this?

There is a point of despair in every move, and I feel like I will never get through. Nothing is going to fit. I am going to be tripping over boxes for ever and I will always feel jittery because I live in a maze of boxes and paper. That is how I feel about my editing process right now. It’s such a mess and at this point, my book is worse than it was in the first draft, in the same way the empty house was cleaner than the half unpacked state. At least the first draft was a coherent story without characters popping up unexpectedly and other characters attitudes randomly changing.

            But, I kept chipping away at the boxes of stuff and eventually the house comes together. So it will be with this manuscript. Right now it is in an ugly stage, but it can only get better. I will have to finish out this round of edits and then go back to the beginning and apply the knowledge I acquired later to those first chapters. In a way, my book is a living and changing thing that will grow as I learn more. I also won’t be the same person I was when I started this process, not only because the process itself will have changed me, but already 5 month have passed and trust me, life went on around my editing project. I have been angry, scared, sad, happy, and all of the other emotions that constitute life, but also can change a person. So, the me that began will never be the same me that finishes a project that requires this much time.

            So, that all said, what will I do differently next time? I will story map first. I think I am kind of doing it backwards now, but don’t really want to change midstream since I am afraid something will get forgotten or undone if I change the process now. Right now I am going to keep unpacking one box at a time even if they are in the wrong rooms.

If you are editing a project, good luck and keep at it!

Editing Continued – Writing a scene

Despite all the other wonderful discoveries I had been making about my characters, I still struggled with scenes. I couldn’t really identify which was a scene, an incident leading up to a scene or just an event in the story. I was operating along the definition that a scene caused a bend in the story line, but I found that wasn’t always true. Sometimes a scene prevented a bend in the story line, like when a character chose not to take a particular action even though it was what they wanted. That kind of scene can happen entirely inside one character’s head, if need be. So what really defines a scene? I don’t know. I still don’t, but I will eventually learn I think.

            However, I did find this really great article about writing a scene.  By examining this and following the basic three part pattern defined here, a scene/sequel has the following three-part pattern:

scene (goal, conflict, disaster) and sequel (reaction, dilemma, decision), I was suddenly able to see where I was going wrong. It was so enlightening. What I thought were small incidents suddenly became much more important and needed to be filled out. Places where I had glossed over the reactions of each character stuck out and begged to be fixed. Moving forward, I started writing this three part pattern out for each character in a scene. This helped me look at their actions and fix those obvious places where the characters were acting wrong or worse, not reacting at all. You’ve seen this on TV, where a bomb goes off and the guy in the background doesn’t even flinch. When that kind of thing happens in a book, it just makes the writing feel dead. This is all in line with Kurt Vonnegut’s advice that “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” I had heard that line before, but it had never really come home to me until now. I knew generally what each of my characters wanted, but by being more specific in each scene, I could more precisely fix their reactions. It felt like my story was growing up. In places where I have completed this task, the story has gone from a nebulous blobby thing to all sharp spikes and beautiful angles. Well, that is how it feels in my mind anyway. Time will tell if I actually managed to get that feeling to the paper.

            So I still don’t have a good feel for what a scene is, but I am getting closer. In those cases where I had written the same card out 2-3 times to put them in each character’s story track, I felt those were obvious places for a scene. If the incident/event was important enough to affect each character’s journey track, then it is probably some part of a scene. Since I have had all these revelations and am only about 2/3 of the way through my first serious editing attempt, I may have a few more revelations before I am finished. Who knows? Next and probably last post in this editing series will be…well, we’ll see.

Solar Lanterns

New crafty project - Solar lanterns from mustard jars and solar yard lights. 

Editing Continued – Story Mapping

In the previously mentioned workshop, I also learn more about plotting and building up suspense to scenes. I think I knew enough about this from all the books I have devoured over the years and of course, TV shows and movies that I instinctively got the basics right, but referring back to the house building metaphor, it was like a house being built by a competent carpenter with no experience. Everything will more or less function as it is supposed to. The roof will keep the rain out. The walls will keep critters out and the door will let people in. However, there will also be a lot of things to overlook and other things to shake your head at. That was my story. Now, I had intended to proceed with editing the whole thing with the current methods before I went back and mapped the story to fix all this stuff, but then I hit that chapter. The crossroads chapter. I was stuck. I felt like I could just keep going and accept that it was an ugly chapter, but I couldn’t go forward knowing it was there like a big hole in the floor of my house to be tipped toed around each time I walked through. I decided to start at the beginning and do some story mapping. Maybe that would help.

            Wow! What an amazing exercise! At first it felt like I was just rewriting the same events I already summarized -  who did what when – like a post-writing outline only on index cards. I was supposed to be looking for scenes and at incidents leading up to scenes. This is how you build tension. It wasn’t really working. Most events went unlabeled/categorized until I had a stack of events with no meaning. Then I started assigning these events to my three main characters. This lead to me ask why the event was important to that character. Sometimes I would write out 2-3 cards for the same event and put one in each characters pile because it was important to each of them for a different reason. Soon I had journey tracks, or at least that is what I call them. Each character has their own journey to make independent of the main story line and this is what I found myself defining and again, Wow!

Have you ever had those moments when you find you have done something that is completely amazing and you are generally shocked that you were able to do that? I have, but usually in art work not writing. (Don’t worry, I won’t get a big head thinking I am brilliant or anything. I’m too insecure for that. Even now, I am afraid to tell you all that I had a moment of brilliance for fear that you will find out someday that what I think is brilliant is just mediocre. Yeah, that’s the way things work inside my head. Sad, I know. Sorry.) Anyway, I had been writing with my attention focused on my POV character, but unconsciously I had written great journey tracks for my two other characters. For example, one of them wants to be the hero so desperately, but is never in the right place at the right time. I called that the ‘not quite the hero’ track. Another character has been a pawn her whole life and just wants to stand on her own, but every time she tries, she is knocked down. She starts to depend on all these crutches to get her independence, but someday, not in this book, she will have let go of those crutches and stand completely on her own. These journey tracks were not consciously planned and are that much amazing because of it.

So when I arrived at the crossroads chapter, I had a much better idea of what was to happen because I knew my characters better…where they were coming from…what they wanted. So I had to change the tone of the whole chapter from discussion to an actual argument. Well, this didn’t make rewriting/editing the chapter any easier since I hate arguing and hate it when my characters argue, but at least I had a goal in mind.

But I found that even though I had accomplished quite a bit with the story mapping, I had completely set aside the idea of scenes and incidents. That discovery process was almost as much fun as the journey tracks, but enough for today. Until next blog…

Editing Continued – the next revelation

I left you last with the question of how I made my writing come alive. Well, to be fair, I should let future readers judge if it is actually alive or just pretending. But, to me it’s more lively. Anyway, around that time, I attended my first writer’s workshop. It was a real grown up affair with tea and coffee and bowls of pistachios for nibbling and best of all – did not include a toddler. Call me horrible if you want, but for four days, I talked to adults all day long! So without regard to the quality of the workshop, I was in heaven before I even walked in the door. The door incidentally, led to the Vander Zee Gallery. Double heaven. In moments when my brain was tired, it could just wander away through the mysterious gateways of the art. My favorite place? The Birch trees with blue leaves by a river. I think that the river was off the edge of the canvas, but I knew it was there since I dabbled my feet in the water.

Anyway, back to the workshop. It was taught by David Hazard, who I had met a couple weeks before when he gave a free workshop to artists on writing Artist Statements. There were seven participants and I will tell you that I was intimidated right off. Most of the people were writing books about their life experiences or historical accounts of their amazing ancestors or real world military policy. What was I writing? A fantasy about kids going on a scavenger hunt. (Yeah, I know, when I put it like that, you don’t much want to read my book either.) But that is how I felt, like I wasn’t worthy to be there. So whenever we went around the room to talk about our projects, I would dumb it down and make it seem as insignificant as possible. I guess I was thinking that if they weren’t interested in my project, they wouldn’t look closer and then start to ask themselves why I was there. Of course, I soon realized I was being stupid. I paid a lot of money to be there to improve my writing. I was there for me, not what someone else might think. Now, before you get all up in arms about literary snobs, I would like to point out that this all went on inside my insecure little head and everyone in the workshop was kind, supportive and interested. So I forced myself to speak up and share and even confess my insecurities so that I could get the most out of the workshop. I won’t go into all the details nor do I wish to give away all of David’s tips and strategies for writing (you will just have to take his workshop yourself), but I learned two very important things.

First, to bring my writing alive, I had to bring it down into the body. That is advice directly from David. Instead of saying ‘she was scared’ you might say ‘her hair follicles tingled and her legs tensed, ready to run.’ I know that seems like ‘show, don’t tell,’ and I think it falls in that category, but it is much more focused and allows you to climb inside the POV character. After learning this, suddenly I could see where my writing lacked that luster to really make it shine and come alive. I don’t know if I am there yet, but it really made me see what I had written in a different way. So if you are reading my current draft, I believe you would be able to pick out the point where I had that revelation.

The second thing I learned is still a growing and changing thing, but in the end will help me create my elevator pitch and speaks to the theme of the story. We were doing an exercise where we were visualizing our target audience and trying to come up with descriptions of our book that would catch their interest. I was having a hard time with this because fantasy readers are a very diverse crowd of people and not all types of fantasy appeal to all fantasy readers. Again I felt like a little kid in the class, mumbling that I didn’t know the answer when the teacher called on me. The others had pretty specific target audiences: divorcees, children’s history teachers, but not me. So I laid it all out there and the group helped me come up with ideas. Not all of them were applicable, but there were a few that were spot on and one that really stuck out. “You can’t save someone who is addicted to power.” Suddenly that put a whole new view on personality on one of my characters. So as I write his actions and the reactions to those actions (which in the first draft just happened) there is purpose behind them.

So I discovered two very important things in the work shop that changed my editing process: how to bring my writing to life and the theme for my book. I also learned many other things that were applicable, but I thought I would wait until the next round of edits to incorporate them so I didn’t get over whelmed. I edited along smoothly until I hit a road block -  a crossroads chapter. It seemed so fake and vanilla and not realistic. I didn’t know what to do, but we’ll save that for the next post.

Editing continued – The beginning.

Continuing on the previous post, I have tried to edit Book I before, but I always get distracted by some other life event and never finish, so when I decided to make commitment to editing this whole book, the first thing I did was to make a check list of the chapters. This has helped in so many ways. First, I can’t really lose my place. Second, I get the satisfaction of checking another box at the completion of each chapter. Third, it breaks the vast project into manageable chunks. As someone said, “How do you each an elephant? One piece at a time.” And finally, it gives me a kind of progress bar where I could pat myself on the back when I need a little encouragement.

Now, I have been meaning to edit for a long time and some years ago, I even made a check list for each chapter. This checklist included both my own known failings in writing (such as the overuse of that) and advice from various sources, such as SFWA advice pages. Interestingly enough, I wrote the check list so long ago that I didn’t remember the meaning of some of the things on the list. So I set out to edit.

Step 1 – Speed read the chapter. Do not stop. Do not edit. Do not criticize. The idea was to get the whole chapter in my head as a complete unit before I started any editing. That was a hard thing to learn.

Step 2 – Rewriting each chapter, trying to fill in the sparse description, changing the action from telling to showing and recontracting words. (In my desperation to meet my first Nanowrimo word count, I changed can’t to can not along with all the other contractions. Needless to say, it makes the resulting language awkward, but it did the job.)

Step 3 – Go through the checklist and rework the text according to the rules. This step takes as long as Step 2 even though it seems like it should go quickly. The really tedious part is searching for each of the words and evaluating them in the text. It was so tempting to quit sometimes and just check that word off. Especially the ones I didn’t know why they were there. Words ending in –ing for example. It took me a couple chapters to figure it out. Usually I would have a phrase such as ‘He was jumping’, but it should be written as ‘He jumped.’ Anyway, even though it was ridiculously tedious to search for every word, each time I found a place where I could improve my writing, it felt like a victory. I also tell myself that I would eventually be better at writing the first draft because of this tedious editing process. To date, I have found it to be true, at least in the case of my over use of ‘that.’ But, it doesn’t mean you have to eliminate every instance of a ‘bad’ word. Use your judgment. You are asking yourself if there is any better way to write this. If not, then fine, but you have to examine it to make sure you have done your best.

Step 4. Check the chapter off this progress list and do a little pookie pookie dance.

So, as I moved through the first quarter of my book, I found that despite my editing process my writing felt a little dead at times. That was pretty discouraging. Want to know how I cured it? Tune in next blog to find out. Happy editing for all the writers out there and if there are any non writers reading, never think that pure gold pours from brilliant minds onto the screen. I wish. No, it starts out like building a house. First you muck about in the dirt for a while before you pour a bunch of slop into a form that you hope hardens into some sort of foundation. Then the real work begins.

Facing my fear…editing.

So, I’ve written two and a half books. Considering I started about a dozen before I got around to finishing the first one, I’m pretty pleased with that number. The first book was what I call ‘a throw away book.’ By this I mean, it wasn’t any great story that I had been thinking about for years or my soul’s blood pouring out on the computer screen. No. In 2008, I decided to participate in Nanowrimo and wasn’t sure of my ability to complete it and therefore didn’t want to risk any of my precious novel beginnings on something that might go down in grammatical wreckage. Instead I pulled an idea from my document where I dump such things to keep the brain’s desktop clear for the current project. I had already lost a day of writing time before I decided to jump on the nanowrimo novel train, so didn’t have time to be picky. It was an immature story idea produced by an immature mind that spent too much time in night clubs and watching action flicks where everyone looked too cool to be real. Fortunately, I had grown up enough to recognize the flaw and made the story mature by immaturing the characters from hardened adventurers to kids scrabbling for survival at the edge of their society.

And I was off. I fought tooth and nail to get those 50K words in one month. When it was over, I felt such a sense of accomplishment. I could write book! I had written a book. Even better, I kept going and finished the last 10K to get to the end of the story after the race of nanowrimo was over. But it was a ‘throw away book,’ so I made two people read it and then put it away. Until the next year, when I wrote the first 75K of the sequel. I stalled out there, leaving the second book unfinished, but all the while plotting book three and the happily ever after of my characters. Nanowrimo, that merciless bitch, came again. And I thought, no, I am not going to write in this series anymore. I am going to write something new.

And I did. The first 10K of the book had nothing to do with the previous series, but then somehow, I couldn’t leave that world. This new book, 90K in the end, was a complete story with all the right stuff. Even my writing style had improved to the point where I could hope to sell a book to a real live person instead of guilting friends into reading my books. But how could I hope to sell a book that was the fourth in a series without the first three? I pulled out book one and it was awful. Ok, that is a little harsh. It was like walking into a house you are contemplating buying and being slapped in the face by bright pink carpet and royal sugar plum purple walls. When house shopping, you have to learn to look past the cosmetic and look at the bones of the house. So with my Book 1. If Book 4 were to ever have a chance, I would have to take a close look at my fixer upper. That is how I came to embark on this editing journey that has been my goal since Dec 2011 and actual work since Feb 2012. Book 1 of the series has good bones, but now was the time to bring in the sledge hammer and the paint buckets and give it a remodel.

Also, I have known for a long time that I would someday have to edit the novels I was writing. Oh, how I dreaded the editing process. So, in the end I decided what better way to learn this new skill than on my ‘throw away novel.’ No pressure. I mean, it was still a ‘throw away novel,’ wasn’t it?