I’m still alive!

I know, it’s been a while, but I have a good excuse. See, in among all the excitement of the last post from mid-November, I also found out I was pregnant. Now there are some women who are great at being pregnant. I am not one of those. Between three bouts of colds/flu and several months of morning sickness, I am simply glad that I was able to hold my place in life, meaning the house is still standing, no one starved and no irreparable damage was done. Now that I am starting to have good days again, it is amazing to me how many dreams and ambitions have returned. I hope that I can always remember how it feels to be in bad health and be thankful for the good days even if I don’t get anything accomplished. Anyway, I won’t give you any more details about the last three months because I am SOoooo tired of being sick, talking about being sick and thinking about sick.

            Even though I’ve have been mostly out of commission and BooBear has decided that naps are not her thing anymore, I have managed a get few things done. I am taking a figure drawing class with Lisa Semerad at the Torpedo Factory. It is a great class and I’m learning quite a bit, but I wish I could take a day time class. By 7pm, I am usually settling in for the night and it’s tough to keep up the interest after a long day with the toddler. I also have created a few crafty things, including 2 bracelets, earrings, necklace charm, and plaque and name cards for the sister-in-law’s wedding. I also edited 1.5 chapters of the novel. When I write it out like that, it doesn’t seem like much, but when I start to feel like that I have to remind myself that I also grew about 5 months worth of new human being. The due date is July 9 but I am hoping for a 7-6-13 birthday just because the numbers are cool. Oh yeah, I’ve been working more on my ice dragon. Here is the comparison. Lisa (from the art class I’m taking) suggested a darker background behind the dragon and it looks fantastic!

            Now that I have come back to life, so to speak, I have a lot of things I want to do, but I am going to prioritize a few. 1) Keep editing the novel. 2) Write a pitch for the upcoming Nano contest and hope I win their little lotto so I can get some free professional critiques. 3) Paint some picture matts for friends. 4) Prepare for the new baby and possible move. There are several other projects that I would like to work on, but they are pretty ambitious and maybe not the best focus, but… since I’m enthusiastic about them, I might not wait for a more prudent time. 1) Create a tree on the wall in Sabrina’s room for family photos. (Reason for not starting: we might move.) 2) Put some effort in a comic/blog and get it off the ground. (Reason against: should focus on the other stuff). 3) Paint pretty designs on Boo Bear’s furniture. (Reason against: Need someone to add another coat of paint before I can do decorative painting because I am supposed to stay away from paint fumes. 

Procrastination and its purpose

So I spend a lot of time not working while at my computer supposedly editing. There are too many breaks for tea and cookies and words with friends. In the month of August, where I had set a goal of editing a chapter a day for about 30 chapters, I have edited three. Many days I do something else instead of edit.

Yesterday, while doing a search and destroy for all the bad grammar habits I have, I stopped constantly to do something else. Then I realized something. My despair and self criticism would build up to a peak and I would want to quit because I was convinced I sucked and that I would never be a writer and that it would be embarrassing for anyone to read this drivel! At this point I would take an internet or words with friends break and then come back to my editing in a few minutes. So even though I am procrastinating for a majority of my allotted editing time, I am also moving forward. If I didn't take these little breaks for perspective, I would probably give up. So in reality facebook and words with friends is preserving my writing aspirations while making me the slowest editor on the planet.

So happy writing and happy procrastination!

Editing – The final decision

So, after months of editing and rewriting I have decided to stop trying to salvage this version of the book. It was a hard decision to make and really took the last two months where I stepped away from the project to come to peace with it. Now that I’ve decided, I feel good about the choice.

            How did I just decide to throw away 6-8 months of work and start again? Well, it started when I just couldn’t keep editing the last quarter of my book. There was such a divide between the tone of the writing and the way the story had developed in my head. It was like try to paint over black wall paint. No matter how I changed things, the original tone of the book would show through. I also rewrote the first chapter for a writing workshop that I didn’t end up attending, but the first chapter was so much better as it was rewritten that I can’t go back to the original version. The tone is dark and fits the book. The characters are more real and instead of just going through the motions required by the plot, they are alive and feel the difficulty of their situation. I can’t wait to bring this through the whole book. So, yes, I am going to rewrite from scratch because I think the story and characters are worth it.

            And no, I don’t regret the time I've already spent on this project or the look at it as a waste of time. It was invaluable as a learning tool. Everything I have done on this book has been a huge step into making me into a better writer. First, it was the first book I ever finished and that is a huge accomplishment and still amazes me. I can look back at this book and still have that sense of wonder and accomplishment that I finished a book. Next, it forced me to take a critical look at my writing abilities and ask myself how I could improve. Taking the time to seek out ways to improve and learn was so important. This book has always been a “Throw Away” book (meaning I wasn’t emotionally attached to the idea and so wasn’t afraid of screwing it up). This idea gave me the freedom to learn without self criticism. Now, I think I’ve learned and am ready to move on and try again. Of course, the years I have spent with these characters and their story has changed my feelings towards the story and is no longer a throw away book, but I think I have grown enough as a writer to not be terrified at the thought of trying to write a good book. I am sure that terror will return sometime in the future, but right now I am excited to begin again. 

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 – 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?