What a useless day.

I think I may have added 100 new words to the WIP... mostly through revision. *headdesk* Out of all of the revisions and the three new scenes I wanted to get down tonight... 100 words. Maybe.

Self-doubt: I has it.

I posted the first chapter of my psychothriller WIP for criting the night before last. It's gotten a few bites so far, but I'm hoping for a few more before the thread dies off. I've been given some useful insight; less tell, more show, less, err, "padded up fluff" (that one hurt a little). And then there are some chunks that make absolutely no sense to me...

One thing that's really bothering me, though, is having been told that I need to cut out more description. I have always thought that, if anything, I write tightly. But apparently not. I am very tough on my own writing (or so I thought)... I edit constantly, always looking to improve and tighten the prose. And one of my pet peeves is excessive description- "the blue car rumbled over the slightly steep hill, crushing fragile white daisies under the worn tread of its tires as it went".

So I'm left looking at the opening scene of my WIP and feeling a little lost. I loved that scene. Hell, I still do! It wouldn't win any prizes, no, I don't expect any of my writing would... but I loved it. I thought it was tight and powerful, just enough to suck the reader in. And reading it again, I still feel that way- but it's hard not to wonder exactly what's wrong with my eyes, as others seem to find so much fault in it.

Blah. Crits usually don't bother me... I can take and apply suggestions and information and go back to writing. But this is putting a bit of hesitation in me. I've been very excited about the progression of the story (really looking forward to writing one of the climatic moments, as it's a strong one for my MC, who is a little bumbling most of the time) over the past few days, and now there's a big WHY BOTHER?! sign blinking in my brain.

Someone smack me. :(

More outlining and innate fear of crits!

I am a useless, completely unproductive goober. I've spent something like the last two days... including breaks at work... working on outlines and notes. And outlines. And pages of notes. Longhand. When I have a perfectly good Horace (er, a Neo) sitting in my bag all the time, just begging to be used (Horace might interject that he would prefer to be left the hell alone, thank you and get the fuck out, snarlcough).

Brainstorming, outlining, connecting the dots... it's one of my favorite parts of the process. Never mind that I got an awful lot of previously unwieldy detail work pounded out, or that it's brilliant (clearly I haven't read back over my notes yet), or that I even sketched out a new character*. It's all coincidental. The last two days have been about self-indulgence, and that bothers me a little. Even productive self-indulgence feels a little shameful.

*A character with a bee allergy. A character who is an angry, twitching little man most of the time but an angry, twitching, terrified man during the summer. I love neurotics. They are so much fun to write, and it gives the rest of the cast someone to make fun of other than me!

I figured out how I want to catch the guy, though... I'm not wholly in love with it, but I threw the thing to the mercy of the comment box on AW and got a great post with a very useful factoid about incinerators. That information helps a lot, and while the solution still doesn't thrill me, I have an idea with which to add to it that does. I'm going to write it and let it fester a while.

To wrap up the night, I posted the first little section- just under 1000 words- of this particular project in the SYW section of AW. Now I'll sit with my legs crossed to keep in the pee of fear. Or maybeprobably I'll take an Ambien and go to bed. But I'm sure there will be fear pee in the morning. Maybe they won't see it!

Minor (and major) changes to the WIP...

The only thing that hasn't really changed is the avoidance thing. :P

I think I've decided to tweak my ending a little... much as I was looking forward to decimating the happy there at the end, I think I'll let that particular guilt-ridden love interest live and kill the other. The one discovers the identity of the murderer and drags his feet while trying to deal with the reality of ousting the closest thing to a father figure he's ever had... and in the interim, the murderer abducts the MC's son. I thought I might off him due to almost-getting-girlfriend's-son-killed guilt combined with the guilt of having to bring the hammer down on the murderer*... but now I'm thinking the police chief rather deserves it more.

The police chief, after all, has been heading a sub-par investigation concerning the disappearances of the boys... after all, to a certain point in the MS he has proof that they are actually dead, only missing, and the publicity of the thing is drawing donations and publicity for the little town. May have to drag the mayor in on that one. While he is doing that, two more boys are abducted and killed and a third narrowly escapes. I think I'll have fun writing that final scene... sometime after he discovers that being dead is the best thing they have going for them; they were tortured for days, maimed and beaten, before they were finally killed. There is video footage of that due to the murderer's personal psychosis.

* That said, the whole family is a bit screwed up. So it wouldn't be entirely out of place. But I like the idea of there being a bit of hope left at the end of the thing beyond my MC and her son.

Huh. Happy endings- who knew?!

I've also gone back and expanded a little on the McDermont boy's plight in two separate scenes. It's still just enough to let you know where his mind is and not exactly what's happening to him physically... I'm not sure if I have his age nailed, though. That's going to take some thought later, but now I'm going to leave it and push through to the next thing.

It's all a lot of crap writing right now, and that's the hardest thing for me to get through... my self-editor's hat has actually grown into my scalp at this point and it's nearly impossible to stop tweaking this and changing that.

Stagnant, but alive!

One more time, that pesky real life thinger gets in the way. :P I've gotten engaged, for one thing (and if I'd stop mucking around the internet and write something half-decent, it might help to pay for the wedding, but what can you do?)... and the move has been shuffled around a couple of times.

Beyond a recent interest in contemporary fiction (chick lit flavor)*, not much has been going on.

* You may have noticed that that sort of fluff is just about the furthest one can get from my personal style... but when your teddy bear speaks to you, there's nothing to be done but listen and obey. By the way, I'll love the guy who added the crack to Ambien until the day I die, and yes, officer, you may see my prescription slip.

I manage to find these little pockets of inactivity from time to time, but I always miss it until I make it around again. It comes out in funny ways... I don't sleep as well (even with the Ambien), seams stop coming up flush, I get a little bitey (imagine that). When I'm writing, and even when I'm writing badly, the edges smooth out on their own. I guess it's cheaper than crack.

Oh, fantastic.

There I was, trucking along quite well- going back over a previous scene and tweaking, as I always do before settling into the "real" work for the night (fresh progress)... and POW! Blue screen of death. Thanks very much, Geraldine. Lucky if I don't turn you in for an old-fashioned typewriter.

So! I guess Writer4 doesn't actually have a streamlined auto-save option (or I haven't found it yet). There seems to be a setting for saving at set intervals, but it creates a new backup file each time... figure doing that every three minutes for an hour plus each night.

Color me ass-pained.

Whoohoo!

I finally made some real progress with a scene I've been struggling with quite a bit! It's a few sentences from being complete, but they are still milling around upstairs and have no interest in coming down for a nip or a chomp at 1AM. And it really begs a strong close, so I'll let it sit.

I should appreciate these hurdles, but there are times when I've flailed against them for a while and damnit, I just run out of creative ways to curse the text pointer. ;) Nights like these I'd prefer to cut, print, and kill the pig... or the extraneous character, in this case, with apologies to Krusty.

I've been flopping around on AW a little the past few days, critting here and there... I don't write well when my back is stiff. Whining we got. Productivity? Not so much. But critiquing/editing is another part of the craft that I really enjoy. It cheers me up every time, and not just because I'm inherently evil. (But it helps.)

There is something really refreshing about cutting out the brown spots of a story. Especially a really good one- there are always some gems available on AW, although some other forums leave me wanting to drop the red pen and go for the writer's squishy bits. It's not always flawed writing that brings up my foam... more often than not it's writers who don't really believe that their writing is anything less than something exquisite to be savored- when in reality I was clawing the residue off my tongue five pages ago. Worse, the effort that goes into a dedicated crit... the consideration, thought, and time that I would have spent on my WIP otherwise is not well appreciated by that sort. For four paragraphs of assistance I get a bland, "Thanks. Now what about THIS..."

Should have just given 'em the tongue goop bit, yeah?

Too... many... projects!

I've been in and out of town for the past several days... juggling family functions and other events. There's been a bit of a lapse in the old blog. Not to worry! I'm incapable of shutting my yap for any length of time. ;)

I'm having trouble with focus right now... part of the problem is that there are so many projects waiting to be seen to. They are from a couple of different genres and are, at the moment, jostling for position and causing a lack of dedication to my current WIP.

There is a lonely CRIME-related project:

* Current WIP (psychothriller)

We have the horror-slanted:

* Demonic schoolhouse story (this one's at full volume)
* Zombiemutant story (which has as many holes as steady points)

And the horse-related YA:

* GTKJ (the one with the miniature donkey)
* Sneaky rehab (involving sisters and an injury)

I know there are others, but they've slipped my mind. Good!

No, I don't give them working titles... it encourages the little bastards.

A short rant and an incidental review.

Tonight, as I trolled the Stephen King forums, I saw a post lamenting SK's one-liner on Richard Laymon's The Woods Are Dark. The timing was interesting because I just read that particular book last week. It took me about forty-five minutes. I could not put it down.

The posters in this particular thread hated the book for the most part... not surprising if you've read it. It's an easy book to hate. No, the surprising part came towards the end of the thread... where a poster said, "After reading (the OP)'s take on Richard Laymon, I have no desire to read his books."

Did you try to read some sarcasm into that? You did, didn't you!? I certainly did. My mind rejects the thought that a person might actually dismiss not just a single title but every book the author put out in his lifetime... based on the opinion of one person on the internet...

(Cue creaking noises from the old gray matter.)

Now, if my mom told me not to- wait, no, that won't work, my mom hates horror... if my hypothetical horror-loving mother pooh-poohed a book, I might not bother with it. On the other hand, I might rush out and buy a copy purely because I might want to see the train wreck with my own eyes. And that's my mom.

It's one thing to stay away from a book or author because they aren't really your style... but when your style is clearly horror (King: master of), to cross an author off of your list because someone else didn't like one of his books? It has to have something going for it, doesn't it? It got a review from SK, didn't it? You don't have a review from SK, do you?

I did not hate The Woods Are Dark... it isn't a startlingly in-depth masterpiece, no. It's a sick, twisted, dark and capering little thing. Within the first couple of chapters, it had set rusty hooks into me. Parts of it disgusted, astonished and amazed me by turn. I immediately sent it off with my boyfriend to read. It is the quintessential train wreck, complete with corpses hanging from the windows and survivors screwing in the aisles, still waiting for the final hammer to fall. "Surprise, DEATH! Aaand... move on."

On another note, I finally made a little headway with the WIP... not as much as I would have liked, but I'm pleased with the quality (for now).

Grinding to a halt...

I haven't gotten much done lately. It seems like there's been a lot going on... and you know what that means; there hasn't been. I suppose it's a good problem to have, this thinking too much versus thinking too little.

My mind is flopping around with the rubbery consistency of over-cooked eggs. Excitable over-cooked eggs. We're beginning to need a traffic light up there. See? I got nothin'.

I did get a chance to run a few details by a psychologist today, though! He thinks that the psychological aspect will add to my readership quite a bit when/if I get to that point. He's about to start a book himself, it turns out.

Hard-to-write scenes.

I struggled today with the first of many hard-to-write scenes in this WIP. In this case I was trying to portray a child's utter terror at swimming slowly out of a drugged haze, and following his thoughts beginning with having no reason to believe that he isn't in his bed through to realizing that he is (alone?) in a strange, dark place... tied to a cheap chair.

There is some fun pant-wetting and a daddy issue that surfaces nearly the first thing... I love the scene for what it is, but it's a hard thing to write. Not only due to the gravity of the scene- who wants to fluff off something this serious and tragic?- but also to the squick factor. No one likes to see children face mortal terror. Unfortunately it's crucial to the progression of the story.

I am not a child-eater myself. Even my zombies prefer lean meat to fatty children. Can't have a fat zombie, can't runshamble fast enough.

The AlphaSmart 2000 is working beautifully. I'm in love! I discovered pretty early on (thank goodness) that removing the batteries dumps the work... oops. I only lost a little ground. I'd thought that removing the batteries between breaks would keep co-workers out of it. I suppose I'll have to get a lock. I also picked up a PS2 cord for it at Walmart for $15, so I did much better than the ~$20 +shipping that I would have paid on eBay.

Aah! So excited!

My AlphaSmart 2000 has arrived!

It's an older model (I assume, as it does not actually have a model- not the Neo or Dana) 2000... but I'm already in love with it. The screen is bright and clear, and there is no lag time between keys being stuck and words hitting the screen. It's also extremely lightweight. It has a couple of sticky places where tape has been pulled off, but those will come off... and oddly enough, a large gold and black "H" sticker on the back.

As such, I shall call him Horace.

The missing character bios have been partially regurgitated... it isn't as enjoyable the second time around. I'm changing a few things, tweaking character ages here and there. My old people were too young. I realized that the older woman I'd cast as my villain's wife was around my mother's age, which was not old enough... so she (and her husband) are ten years older now and more true to themselves.

I've also added a couple of goldfish as minor characters.

On the need for backups...

I just lost all of the in-depth character profiles I'd done to date. Thanks, laptop. You're a gem.

Right after that happened, though, I saw a thread on AW about tools of writing... and someone mentioned having gotten an AlphaSmart 2000. I hadn't heard of them, and when I checked them out on eBay I found one used for $20. I have made it mine. Most of the writing that I do at work is longhand... which can be problematic if my hands are playing up that day. Laptops are forbidden at my workplace, but this should be allowed... it doesn't have enough memory to store massive blocks of text, but I can dump the work onto my PC/into yWriter4 each night.

Procrastination.

It feels like I spent all day thinking about the WIP... but without really coming to any new conclusions or writing anything down. Frustrating.

In other news, if you see movement over this way in the morning, it's safe to assume Ranch's refrigerate after opening note is a friendly suggestion rather than a rule.

Author Advocate Defense Fund

Sorry about the multiple postings, but I wanted to post a little about the Author Advocate Defense Fund.

I'll post Dawno's comments from AW. She has said it so much better than I can. You can also check out her blog for more information.

Dear fellow AW members,

On September 20, 2007 Barbara Bauer filed suit in New Jersey against a list of defendants, including several of our AW colleagues. Defending oneself against a lawsuit is expensive, and many of the author advocates being sued could use help to pay the many legal costs involved, which are adding up over these past 9 months.

I've set up a PayPal site where you can donate to help these writers with their legal fees. Any amount is welcome. Any fees assessed by PayPal will be covered, so your full donation goes to the legal defense fund. All funds will be disbursed directly to the defendant's attorneys in equal shares.

I hope you will click the link in my signature and donate today.

If you wish to put a similar link in your blog or on your website, please PM me with your email address and I'll send you the full HTML to put the donation button on your site.

You can also add a donation link to your signature, again, just PM me for the URL.

Thank you for your help!

Dawno

I give up with the friggin' link already! You'd think I had no HTML knowledge at all. You can donate via Dawno's blog (she has a functioning button), the AADF link, or you can just donate directly to authoradvocatedonations@gmail.com through Paypal.

Warm and fuzzies!

I argue with myself from time to time over the nuances of the process. Particularly because I spend such a large block of time on character development. The actual writing seems to fly by. It's the preparing to write that brings me to linger. I'm not one to use outlines, but I have to have most of the characters completely fleshed out and the dark corners of the plot illuminated before I start to write.

That's not to say that characters don't surprise me, or that I don't occasionally fall for the old vortex-hidden-by-rug move while everyone laughs... I enjoy the little surprises that writing brings when three-dimensional characters are involved. They will refuse to do what you want, sticking to their own agendas and changing your opinions of them... or refuse to die when that was the really fun part of the whole damn plot! (It's okay, Boppo the clown is in holding until he's ready to die properly. I'm playing a lot of The Wiggles for him, I heard that might sway him to my side.)

But no matter how long it takes, I really love my personal little process. I get little warm and fuzzies in the pit of my stomach, or occasionally my bowel depending on the time of day, when my characters begin to take on their own voices. It feels good to suss out the little details of their lives preceding the story, to be able to ask them questions and have them answer in ways that hadn't made it fully out of my subconscious until moment.

Exploring plot makes me feel the same way. There are trap doors at every corner for the first little while, and I don't mind that... the first step's a doozy and there's always a monster at the end of the drop, but we're generally on good terms. Sometimes there are secret doorways, rickety bridges across black spots in the plot. On the other side, things that might have seemed unrelated before fall into one another perfectly, explaining away the holes and traps. The monsters don't eat as well, but hungry monsters make more stories!

It's hard for me to decide that it's enough and start hacking away at that blank page.

Aaaand go!

Some stolid little creature inside me is already leaving pinch-marks over the time that this blog is going to take away from "real" writing. Another distraction? Another excuse? Really? You would think that she'd spend less time complaining and more time cleaning up in there. My small intestine is a real mess. Slob!

Nevertheless, I'm excited.

There will always be spill-over for me. Little bits of prose... squeals over progress... less-than-polite mumblings when a dismembered arm falls into the road and blocks my way. (It's a small path, lions and vicious pygmy goats on each side, you understand.)

This is the place for the spill. The over-share. The, "Oh my god, does she ever talk about anything but her stupid book." As boring as those things can be, I hope that someday, some of you will read along.