We're to that stage of pre-nano countdown where I'm not thinking in weeks any more, now I'm thinking in days. And I'm getting itchy to start writing. This is when I start plotting, and making notes for myself that I will utterly forget about long before Nano gets here. 

Today's particular waste of time...

Wordle is a fun way to look at something you've already written, and examine how you use language. Not that I have any clue what to make of that. 
Anyway, if you click on the picture up there it'll take you to the website, where you can do your own smash of word-art. This one is from Strange Travels, Book 1: Black Watch which was my NaNo novel for 2012. Book 2: White Dawn will be this years nano novel. Horray for picking up abandoned projects, right? 

<cue deranged laughter> It'll be fine. 

I mentioned yesterday, over at The Art of Procrastination that I spent my weekend wading through the slush-pile. And it's totes not all I did this weekend, mid-edits and two chapters from the end of a book, but it was a large part of it. 

I try not to be insulting about the slush pile, in public anyway. I fail, pretty frequently, but that's another matter entirely. The fact of the matter is we've all been there, and it's a learning process. There are a lot of things I think most of us learn with experience, as we collect that folder of rejections and see what works and what doesn't. Still, I'm pretty sure we'd all like to skip a bit of that. So. Just for you, I've got a pithy ridiculous list of tips (because it's me, I don't know what else you expected).

1. Follow the bloody instructions!
Literally nothing as a reader is as annoying as having to wade through extra stuff you're not going to accept anyway. I know it seems cold, but if I've asked for something in a specific format it's for a reason and I don't have the time or the impetus to decide if you're special enough to be exempt from that. Nobody likes to be ignored, so don't set yourself up for failure by ignoring an editor's requests.

2. Nobody cares.
This one's a little cold too, but it's the truth. Unless you're submitting to a religious publication, I don't want to know about your relationship with whatever your deity of choice is. Unless I'm asking you for an anthology of poetry I don't want to know every place you've been published in the last six years. Unless it's immediately, inherently relevant to the thing you're sending me I don't care. If your cover letter rambles I'll probably skim it at best, and be less inclined to give your submission the kind of attention you'd like me to give it. 

3. Nobody's story is good enough to survive not having an ending.
I've touched on this before, but it bears repeating. A lot. We've gotten some clever, wonderful stories we'd have been happy to publish, until they took a short sharp turn to the left and went off the cliff. Look at your plot, and imagine you're telling your best friend this thing that happened to you in the coffee shop down the block. How many times would they hit you if you walked off where your story ends? Then for the love of all things fluffy, fix it before you send it out.

4. Develop a relationship.
There isn't a publisher out there who doesn't have a twitter account, and a facebook, and... ours included. Hunt them down. With an account with your name on it, because I sure remember that stuff, and I'm sure other people do too. Especially independent or small press publishers. Reply to their tweets, create a relationship, even if it's based around pithy Star Wars one-liners. Find out if they have a mailing list you can be put on. Make yourself a real entity, a person who could possibly be depended upon for content. It's a foot in the door that will cost you minimal effort and no money.

5. Look at the date.
Up there, in the corner, that you wrote when you finished your final draft? How long ago was it? If you haven't changed, demonstrably, as a fledgling writer in the last two years we're gonna have to talk. If you finished that story four years ago and you're still sending it out with that date on it we really have to talk. Unless your Steven King...No, scratch that. Even Steven King changes as the years go by. If it's more than two years old give it another draft before you send it and change the bloody date on the thing.

6. Shotguns are good for hunting, not submissions.
We got a submission for The Golden Fleece. To the wrong email address. I stared at it for a good two minutes, utterly poleaxed. Not only did you not bother to actually read our guidelines, you didn't even look at them. Your sending me a story when you don't know what you're sending it to. You don't know who you're sending it to. In what wacky parallel universe do you live where crap like that works? Do you offer short-term vacation visa's, because I'd like to go visit somewhere my stuff could be published because I scatter-shot all over someone's inbox. 

7. Know your market.
This should fit under that first tick up there, about reading the instructions, but apparently it's a separate thing. I don't understand people sometimes. It should be self-explanatory. Not "This journal is for unpaid dental assistants who like Anime. Gee, maybe they'd like my story about an old man coming to terms with his eventual slide into uselessness in the nursing home." Maybe they would, but probably not. If it's a publication for children your story needs to feature children--this is a strict rule, because small ones are less plastic with that whole suspension of disbelief thing. My seven year old still has to constantly check with me to make sure things are fiction--and for the teen market there's a little more play, but not much. There's not a teenager alive who thinks 40 year old dudes are cool. Unless they're Johnny Depp...and I'm not sure he's even still in his 40's so clearly he's a special case. 

8. Don't be a d-bag.
Yeah, this is another of those self-explanatory ones. Here's the thing. In a book, you can get away with having a truly despicable main or point of view character. Maybe. If you're really good. You can sort of...Stockholm Syndrome us into liking them for other reasons. I'm not saying it's a thing to aim for, because its damn hard to pull off, but it can happen. For a short story market you've got like 2 pages, tops, and arguably like 2 sentences to hook the reader. There's not time to convince me Jack is a really great guy to spite the fact he talks about women like Ian Flemming's more misogynistic cousin (I say this with the full understanding I'm judging Mr Flemming entirely by the existence of a character named Pussy Galore and not having ever read a Bond novel).

9. No, you can't have any more!
Do. Not. EVER. Ask. For. Critique. Ever. Ever ever ever. Like seriously, even if by some small miracle they've offered it before. You aren't Oliver, shuffling up to the table for another bowl. Or you certainly don't want to be. Aside from being seriously unprofessional, I promise with a small press they'll remember, and be seriously unlikely to consider future submissions you send them.

10. "We're drift compatible!"
Everybody tells you to find a crit group. I know. I know. But here's the thing. A crit group, or a couple of friends you're comfortable making a little circle with--even if it's a triangle--will do more for your writing than nearly anything, except possibly a decade of time and a published mentor. Not only are you likely to start learning the things you do wrong--and stop doing them--I promise learning to edit other people's work and give constructive critique will make your work immeasurably better. There are tricks for this, but that's a discussion for another day. The short version is find people you respect as creators, who understand what you need out of this relationship and are marginally willing to give it to you.

Alright, that's all I have for wisdom to impart, mes enfants. I bid you, go and create. Vite vite. 

Because it's time for a Year of Creative Pursuits update. 

So, what did I manage this month? Well, the publishing business is still big, and we did a video for our Kickstarter. I'm counting that. My acting skills are such I really should.

I'm also very nearly done with The Case of the Armadillo--two chapters left, and then edits and it'll be on the editors desk, ready for the real world. At some point I may have to talk about how different it is writing short children's books, from the long drawn-out variety.

Next months I've got a major editing deadline looming, not counting all the other secondary publishing deadlines and the continued push for the kickstarter and and and. 

Alright. Time to breathe. It'll happen. I know it will. 

The new idea that happened today just needs to go away.

I'm trying to do better at blogging every week, and I'm  counting this one because flip it, it's still Friday so it's still the same week I was supposed to do this in. 

It's been one of those weeks where I'm spending a lot of time trolling Tumblr, reading fanfic and writing it too because I feel like sticking my head in the sand and generally speaking my imagination is the go to place to do that. Tumblr has a...reputation for social justice and real world issues, but this is the kind of week where I pretty much just skip right on past that. Not because I don't generally agree, or don't care. Because I care too much and it tends to make me a person I don't particularly like and I don't care to subject other people to without cause. 

There's been a lot of news about fandom lately, between the sort of general run-around about Supernatural and Sherlock series 3, and that always jars me because I still exist in a head-space where the internet is it's own little corner, it's own section of society that still doesn't like to talk to the rest of them. Which is probably a function of my age more than anything else. 

Someone on Tumblr linked an article--which I'll do as well here in a second--about Sherlock and it's slightly crazy fans. If she'd have just linked the title I probably wouldn't have followed that particular white-rabbit. Very few things have the ability to actually annoy me like articles on the internet about things I care about. 

"The proper way for cultural mythmaking to progress, it is implied, is for privileged men to recreate the works of privileged men from previous generations whilst everyone else listens quietly. That’s how it’s always been done. That’s how it should be done in the future, whatever Tumblr  says."
--Laurie Penny, Sherlock and the Adventure of the Overzealous Fanbase.

I highly suggest you click on the linky and go read, she's got some really good points, some that I don't necessarily agree with, but that's neither here nor there. I have this...internal twist when it comes to fandom, and I've never really explained it because I can't, it doesn't always make sense to me. But I feel like trying today, so I'm sorry but buckle up and I'll try not to make it too bumpy.

When you talk about fandom, whether it's the movies you like or the fanfiction you read or...anything, there's a certain ownership implied there. Sometimes it's quiet and a little ashamed, sometimes it's that false-bravado twenty year old's excel at that's shouting from the rooftops because I'm awesome and anything I love is awesome too and the rest of you can just go hang. Either way it's yours. And I love that. I'd give nearly anything to write the kind of stories people get that emotionally involved in.

The problem is that it's yours and sometimes you forget that it's someone else's too. This happens more in Doctor Who than nearly anywhere else I've seen in fandom. People have that one Doctor they love above all the rest, or that one companion they just can't stand. Sometimes, if you offer a dissenting opinion to that you'll open yourself up for an earful about all the ways you are wrong wrong wrong. You can't possibly be a Doctor Who fan if you only watch Ten, if you stopped because you don't like Matt Smith, if you --insert ridiculous attempt to impress my fandom ownership/head-cannon onto you here.

Fandom's full of problems, because it's full of people and for better or worse that's something human beings are good at. And that's not even broaching whether Moffat's a woman-hating arse, or Misha Collins' is a wank of epic proportions, or any of that. 

Laurie Penny makes some good points, about men in their ivory towers wanting fiction to stay on their terms, wanting their creative vision left alone (that's an over-simplification, I know) but I'm going to make a contrary one, because I get a little tired of feeling like every single conversation about a show or book's creation is whopping me over the head with King Solomon metaphors, complete with evil executives in striped ties wielding giant swords cackling 'Let's cut it in half and see which one of them really loves it.' 

Nearly every show or book I like, there are problems. Not enough diversity, not enough female characters that might actually live to the end of the episode with some inherent value to the plot, not enough guts to go the full monty--figuratively speaking--with whatever idea they're broaching the side of, etc. But that's what it feels like to me. That's part of why I write and read fan-fiction, because there's something I need that's almost there but it's not. I absolutely have every right to that, to my feelings and my desires and whatever else I'm wrapping into that package. What I don't have a right to do is tell somebody else what to do with their creative vision, not like that, not ever. Not with other fanfic writers, or people who write original content, or draw cartoons, or role play, or code video games, or make origami frogs to hop across their kitchen table. 

If I want somebody to respect my right to creativity, I have to respect theirs too. No matter how stringently I think those two people are secretly in love with each other. 

That was seriously long and I'm going to go back to hiding in my corner again until next week. Oh, and possibly post pictures of the mine-craft scarf I finally finished (YAY)

I looked up today and realized it was time for me to write my week three pep-talk for Nano. Which (a) makes for a lovely thought when I've already spent more time on Nano tasks than actually writing today and (b) fills me with a sort of low-grade panic about the fact it's already freaking time to be talking about week three. 

Anyway, as tempting as it was for me to just regurgitate a pep-talk I've done previously for this weeks pep, I didn't do that. Instead I found one I wrote two years ago I'm going to regurgitate on here. It seemed fitting.

Happy week three, I'm sure we're all over-doing the panic. (O.o)



Week Three:

According to the Nano-calendar I downloaded before November, tomorrow is ‘River in Egypt day: 6000 words behind isn’t THAT much’.

Given the fact I’m falling rather depressingly behind on my personal goal, I thought that was fitting. How are the rest of you doing? Did you figure out I was lying about week two getting better as it went? I’ve been crossing my fingers all week that I was right, at least for a few of you.


The thing with week three is…It’s just broken. I’ve never had the same week three two years in a row. Some years it’s an easy glide, and I hit 50k ridiculously early and then finish the book by the end of the week and get to work on something else. One year I found out I was pregnant and didn’t write another word until the 25th. One year I wound up in the hospital at the end of it. This year I’m driving halfway across the country and probably not touching my computer again until the 27th when I get back…


Week three can be the quicksand that waits innocently under that patch of flowers. Just when you think you’re over the hump of week two…WHAM. Or gurgle…whichever seems more appropriate to you. It sucks your feet down and makes you wonder things like ‘but where’s all this going?’ and the dreaded ‘and why would anyone care?’

Questioning the validity of your writing or not, whatever you do, don’t stop! This isn’t the kind of quicksand that slows down when you stop moving. It only sucks you down faster. Write. Even if it’s pages and pages of ‘oh dear great spotted thing in the sky I don’t know what to write.’ Even if it hurts and you know it’s horrible and clearly there is something WRONG with you. Just keep doing it.

Comfort yourself with sunny thoughts of the tropical haven full of six-toed cats and palm trees you’ll get when you sell this monstrous thing (even if you’ve no intention of ever letting it see the light of day again) and keep writing. 


Remember, you can sleep in December. 

Jules


 

I promise It's about writing.

Today is the 29th of October and that means it's Nano time in less than two days. Less than two days!!! I'll wait until you're done panicking, take your time. 

We've had our regional kick off party, and my first 'write-in' of the year where I didn't write more than the title of a project I'm decently sure isn't going to be my nano-novel--more on my inability to get over the hump and pick a freaking plot later--and I've had 387 people asked me about outlining. 

Alright, so that might sort of be an exaggeration. 

There are all sorts of schools of thought about outlining, especially with Nano. Some people are 'pantsers' who sit down on Nov 1st with a vague idea and a blank document and just...go. If that's you, I salute you and your craziness and wish you all the best of luck. I've tried that route before, and I wind up with fifty-thousand words of 'middle' where freaking nothing happens and I hate everyone. 

I'm a plotter. And not in the sense that I have ideas and an outline that vaguely points me in the right direction--if you're the sort of person who gets committed to things once you write them down, that might be the way to go for you--but in the sense that I know exactly what's going to happen in every single scene, complete with snatches of dialogue and maps and genealogical research for my main characters. And I have all that with the complete understanding that at some point the plot will go off in a strange, sideways direction and none of it will apply. It's fine, it doesn't need to end the way I think it's going to end, I just have to have one written down or I don't get past the middle. 

But here's the pitfall with that. I don't always finish the book in November. Sometimes I don't finish the book until the next November. And I promise you no matter how much sense you think your outline notes make, a year down the line they're alien hieroglyphics written by a drunken college student. And that's assuming they made sense in the first place. 

Case in point. Years ago I started a contemporary romance--not my normal genre but it's taken me ten years to get anywhere near actually picking a genre so whatevs--that I intended to pick away at bit by bit in the off season. Back when I was still trying to make myself write actual books outside of Nano events. And it's cute, what I have of it, and once in a while moved by nostalgia or whatever I go back and start reading it again, thinking I'm going to finish the story. I wrote it in Scrivener which oh so helpfully printed out all my outline notes at the chapter heads, when I moved it to Word. And every time I do this, I get to this--

Chapter 27, Scene 1--Lionel Richie's Greatest Hits


I stare at that for ten minutes trying to figure out what in the seven hells I meant. Every. Single. Time. Was that supposed to be on the radio? Does a character discover a sudden fascination with Lionel Richie? I know myself, and I had some spectacular brain-lightening idea that I was absolutely positive I'd never forget so I didn't need to write more of it down than that. It was so brilliant the entire concept of Lionel Richie would forever be linked to it in my brain. 


Sometimes I forget my brain is an easily-distracted hamster.


So, here's my advice on outlining: 

• Experiment, find the method that works best for you because everyone thinks and writes differently. 
• Give your self space to wiggle, if you think you'll get attached to whatever you write-down or you're generally still learning how you outline. 
• If you leave yourself a note, leave it like you're explaining it to a fourth-grader you've never met before.
• For the love of all things holy, if the story changes don't forget to change the outline too.
  

For some strange reason, every time I say the word 'plot' my brain thinks 'grave-site' Best I can tell this comes from me agonizing over the plot to my first novel at the same time my mother was calling me with information on the grave-site's she and my father had purchased and what their plans were.

That, or every October for the past ten years I've been agonizing over the plot I had but didn't like--or just flat didn't have--while everyone else I knew was agonizing over Halloween plans. 

So. It's October 2nd, Nano 2013 is officially off the ground (the website rolled over last night, and if you haven't looked yet you totally should, it's all shiny and sparkly still) and I'm thinking about plot creation, because no matter how many times I've done this I still freeze when someone doing their first Nano asks me where I come up with a plot from. 

The truth is I don't. Not actively, certainly not any more. Now I do things like try and sit down to write a short story and wind up plotting a ten book series. I watch a movie and think 'no, that shouldn't have happened, he/she/it/they should have done this' which you would think would lead to fanfic but rarely does with me for some reason. The plots just happen. All the time, certainly faster than I can manage to write them which leaves me scrambling, trying to get enough information down that I won't lose the thread. 

I fail. A lot (someday I'll tell you the story of 'Lionel Richie's Greatest Hits').

So it's nearing November and it's time to think novels. They seem big, don't they? No matter how many books I plot there's always a moment where I look at my outline and think 'I've got like half a plot here. Crap.' But that's the point of Nano, biting off more than you can chew and learning how to churn through it anyway. 

Which leads us here. Last week I was comparing plots and gritching about fictional people who wouldn't do what I wanted them to with a friend, and we realized something. Everything I write starts at a snowball moment. I think I remember a science show in the 80's calling it 'contact.' The point where everything happens. And more than that, it seems to be the way I see all stories. Maybe the snowball moment isn't the beginning. Maybe it's not even in the book. But to me, it's the point that means everything, and it's the point that directs where everything goes. 

This years advice, when it's time to plot that insane novelling (seriously, ten years and I still can't figure out if that should have two L's or not) adventure? Find a snowball and roll it down the hill. Give it a chance to surprise you.

And then come tell me about it, I love to hear about other people's creations.

So. It's a list, right? It's a short month that means strange paycheck schedules. Here in the Northern Hemisphere it's cold and wet/snowing/evil. Valentines. Maybe you have a severe phobia of Groundhogs and therefore hate February 2nd... (apparently for animals all phobias are grouped as Zoophobia, but I got that off the internets so take it with a grain of salt).

Personally, my biggest problem with February is the fact it's two months after Nano ends. Come December 1st my creative batteries are so broken I couldn't string five sensible words together, and then it's Christmas (I'm sure you can insert your winter holiday of choice here and they all cause the same thing) and I'm cooking/making/chicken-running. Then it's January 15th and I haven't taken the decorations down yet and just the thought of trying to write makes me want to burrow down for another epic six-season watch of Doctor Who.

And then, inevitably, there's this moment in the first week of February where all the stars align and I start writing again...and three weeks later I've crossed the 100k mark and I've forgotten how to talk to people who don't exist inside my head. I know, embarrassment of riches, blah blah blah. I could be all humble about how awesome it is to write that much, but I don't really see the point. I'm not pretending what I'm writing when I go that fast is better than a decently trained monkey with a type-writer.

Anyway, the point. When the writing binge happened in February this year, I let it go a little long in the tooth, and suddenly decided that for Camp Nano in April I could totally write an entire trilogy in one month. It wouldn't even be that hard, aim for about 60k a book and at the end of April I'd be at 180k with an entire trilogy drafted. Awesome, right?

I'll wait for the crazed, incredulous laughter to stop. You have a point.

We'll avoid the gory details. I did manage all of book one (It's around 75k) and all of book two (60k) and the first two chapters of book three. And some of that was good. Really good, like forget I'm supposed to be paying attention in the re-read good. I'm focusing on that, who cares if I lost the entire point of the plot arc somewhere in the middle of book two, I found it again. Sort of. 

And then it took me four months to finish book three. 

I'm sure about now you're wondering why I'm telling you this, because yay for me and all but what's this mean for you? I'm calling it an example. Most of us sit down to do something giant and we freak out. We crack the surface and go "Holy crap what was I THINKING!" And there was absolutely a lot of that. Several times over. Five months, three or four emergencies, two massive trips, and three books later I've come to a conclusion. It's over-simple and glaringly obvious. 

You'll never know what you can do, unless you try. Go forth my little Whistle-Pigs. Try.

And now I'm going to do those things in the reverse order (I'm strange, you'll probably get used to it)

I never wanted to be a writer. No, strike that.  I never wanted to be an author. The list of stories I started and never did anything with would take six years to go through. I always wrote, always imagined. To this day I put myself to sleep at night with some random story that's rattling around in my head. But that's all it was. A way to kill time when I didn't have anything else to entertain me. A way to escape.

I can tell you the exact moment that changed, but it's not when I started writing seriously.

High School Freshmen English was strange. Unlike all the middle school English classes we'd had, our new teacher expected something different out of us. We read books a lot of people say they didn't read until college (Inherit the Wind is still probably my favorite) and learned how to write an essay and understand a poem in iambic pentameter. And then she asked us to write. At least five pages, a real story with a beginning, middle, and end. If we wanted to make it fiction that was fine with her.

Most of the people in my class wrote about the big summer vacation they'd taken with their family when they were six, or last years karate championship, or how they felt when their child-hood dog died. None of that felt big enough for me, and she'd said we could write fiction. So I did, and it was more like ten pages instead of five, and by the end of that ten pages I'd been stranded in a snowbound car in winter all alone (I don't remember where my parents were) and rescued by a fireman I still saw every summer. When she talked to me about my paper she was horrified she'd never heard of this happening--it was a small town and secrets were hard to keep--and I stared at her blankly for a good minute of gushing before I managed a tentative 'you said fiction was alright'. And then somehow I was signed up for her Creative Writing class the next year.

I wasn't exactly a success at it. I didn't write poems that got published, or join the school newspaper. I didn't start attending poetry readings in the nearest city or shift all my life goals. Poetry meant something to me, and books meant something to me, and writing was fun. End of story.

Sometime I'll tell you about the moment I realized I could actually write a book.

So... About that new book. It's not mine, although their is one of those about three-quarters through the first draft that's kicking my butt today. It's The Cuckoos Calling by Robert Galbraith (who, if you happen to own internets and exist on social media you probably know is J K Rowling). I'm not far enough into it I can tell you what I think. It's brilliant so far, and I'm sure given it's her it'll be brilliant all the way through. And all of this despite, if A Casual Vacancy is anything to go by, how much I hate at least one of the characters. 

I'm not sure how I feel about her failed attempt at a pen name. Obviously I see the point. That sort of pressure's got to be spectacularly uncomfortable at the best of times. Like winning an Academy Award for your debut film. Where do you go after that? I can't help wondering certain things though. Did her publisher know? If they did and still didn't try and press the book more I can't imagine what they were thinking, and if they didn't they've got to be annoyed--as much as they can be once they've been handed a golden goose. 

I hope there are more books, and I hope they all turn out to be wonderful. I don't care what name she writes under, but I do sort of feel like I'd have rather found Robert Galbraith all on his own. Because privacy means something, even when it's unrealistic.