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Today I've had a great writing day. A Great Writing Day!
Yesterday I took the first chapter of my YA steampunk WIP, A Flight of Thieves, and I took several crits from friends, and I took all the thinking I've been doing about it while I recovered from the lurgy over this past week. I put them in a bag and shook them all together for a minute. Then I sat down and dedicated the entire day to rewriting that big and slightly flabby opening chapter into two smaller (and tighter and faster, I hope) chapters. Last night I sent them off to my critters and went to bed a happy man.
This morning I was still excited about Flight. And that's always a good thing. But better was to come.
At lunchtime I had one of those moments of sudden inspiration. It grew from a single line in Chapter 2, something not-quite-but-almost throwaway that meant something small when I first wrote it but suddenly shone a light of potential into my eyes. I sat back and pondered it for a few minutes, and liked what started surfacing in my brain. So I dived into research and spent the whole afternoon brainstorming.
The story just got bigger. It got a lot bigger, in the sense that it got a whole lot deeper for the heroine.
This morning I was excited about Flight. This evening I'm head over heels in love with it.
I love my job!
:)
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My friend Donna Ballman, author of The Writer's Guide to the Courtroom, launched her new site today.
Donna is a top Florida Attorney and an inspiring teacher, and no writer's bookshelf should be without this Guide.
"Everything you need to inspire your writing, help your characters navigate the legal system, and get your story right. When your fiction... calls for a character to sue someone or be sued and survive the ordeal, this book should be number one on your docket."
Read all about this superb resource here.
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That flu that was lifting last week? It didn't.
Not all the way, anyway, and after three days clear-ish it came back and stomped me again. Oh, goodie.
Life isn't all doom and gloom, though. Not by a long chalk. Elvis the puppy continues to delight us and Jake has grown into his alpha dog role with coolness in abundance. Between bouts of lurgy I completed Quarter Square's transformation from adult UF to YA, and after a quiet weekend I feel confident enough today to say the plague has finally gone. Yes, you bastard flu, you heard me. You're history!
And then this morning a most excellent thing happened, but I can't tell you about it yet. Sorry.
/coy
:) |
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Our new puppy came home to us this weekend. He's a Dogue de Bordeaux, 8 weeks old and already 8 kilos, and Saturday was his first night away from his mummy and daddy, sister and five brothers. Poor little thing howled all night.
Sunday, despite us all being dead on our feet after his Saturday night performance, we loved and comforted him. Sunday night he let us sleep all the way through from midnight until 6am. And, although he's still weeing in the house, he already knows that poos have to happen outside.
Jacob, our 7-year-old German Shepherd, is being an absolute star! He could have made a difficult weekend much, much worse, if he'd acted up jealous. But he didn't. He still has the loveliest nature of any dog I've ever known and I'm so proud of him.
Puppy pictures!
( below the cut ) |
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Still struggling to get all the way over the flu, I started Cherie Priest's Boneshaker at bedtime last night, read four chapters, then forced myself to put it down and turn off the light. Otherwise, I suspected, I would be awake all night.
You know when a story promises all kinds of awesome from the first pages? This is one of them. |
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Flu hit me last Wednesday night and is still stamping me into the ground. This is my second whack of it in three months and I'm not impressed, especially as it's going to look as if my family have wheeled out a partially reanimated corpse for my birthday celebrations tomorrow.
Still, it gave me the chance to make a small hole in the tbr pile on my bedside table.
First, I jumped into Sergei Lukyanenko's urban fantasy The Last Watch, which I've been looking forward to reading for months. The flu might have made me harder to please than normal, but I really didn't enjoy it much.
I loved his Night Watch trilogy. That is, I loved The Night Watch and The Twilight Watch and was prepared to forgive the slightly disappointing middle book The Day Watch because the trilogy as a whole was a satisfying read.
But The Last Watch feels as if he is going through the motions. He - and we - know his world so well that there seems to be nothing new to discover, so he's just used it as a backdrop for a thriller. Grump.
Ian Rankin's The Complaints was next. I read it over the weekend and finished at two o'clock this morning. I was a fan all through his Rebus years and wondered how he would cope when that series ended, but I needn't have worried. The Complaints is excellent: a stonking storyline with good characterisation and thoroughly enjoyable dialogue.
Rankin is pretty much the only crime writer I read nowadays. As far as I'm concerned, his crown is still in place. |
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I don't listen to music while I'm writing. I need silence for that. But I like each WIP to have its own soundtrack, for planning and thinking and dreaming.
The most vivid soundtrack I ever had for any WIP was Jeffrey Luck Lucas's album What We Whisper while I was writing my noir paranormal romance Medium Rare last summer. It was a perfect match.
I've been struggling to find something suitable for A Flight of Thieves, which I started writing yesterday. Tried the very cool steampunk band Abney Park, but it's difficult to get past the fact that their music is just a bloody racket. As Flight is post-apocalyptic steampunk, I might return to my prog rock roots. Maybe something by Yes. Heart of the Sunrise. Hm.
Turn up the volume and close your eyes. Yes, it's ten minutes long. It's supposed to be. And, yes, it has a three minute intro. It's supposed to have that too. Just close your eyes and let it sink into you and think airship travel to faraway places and dashing pirates and clockwork robots and emergent intelligence and betrayal and battles and love...
What do you think? |
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I don't do NY resolutions, but find annual goal-setting works well for me. My desk is clear and I'm ready to rock, so here are my three main writing goals for this year:
1. Submitting and following-up. 2009 was a good writing year and I continued to build a body of work, but for one reason or another submissions were put on hold. This year my stuff is going out there and I won't hesitate to follow-up for responses and/or move on when industry professionals fail to communicate within a reasonable time. Nothing personal. They're busy people.
2. Write my two new WIPs and edit completed mss. I intend to complete post-apocalyptic steampunk A Flight of Thieves by summer, and will start submitting it while I draft the quest fantasy The Orphan Age that I'll plan while writing the steampunk.
3. Get published. Life is too short to wait around politely for busy people to notice me. Seriously, I'm good enough and professional enough and I know I will be published one day. But I'll be 53 next week and, with my body carrying the evidence of my adventures, I'm sensible to the fact that I might not be around in ten years time. I'd rather not be a posthumous discovery.
I outlined A Flight of Thieves last week and today I will write its opening pages. I love this story! Happy David!
:) |
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Steampunk Workshop
January 21-23, 2010 at Romance Divas
Featuring:
Zoe Archer
Meljean Brook
Gail Carriger
Sarah A. Hoyt
Katie MacAlister
Dru Pagliassotti
This workshop will take place at the Romance Diva Forum. All are welcome. To get access to the forum you will need to register. |
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Yes, that's the title of my steampunk YA.
I'm planning and outlining and aim to be writing by next week and I'm loving this story so much it's in my dreams!
Something strange and exciting occurred yesterday afternoon, when I realised that artificial intelligence is going to be important in this story and a whole exciting world of possibility opened before me.
You know when a story suddenly grows a lot bigger than you ever expected? That.
:)
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I believe this. There's a strong element of it couldn't be worse than last year, of course, in that Janette's and Bev's health crises were scary as hell. But that was then and this is now, and I believe this is going to be a good year.
I'm waiting on some things that I can't talk about yet. Exciting things and several of them, but we all know how things can come to nothing in the writing world, so while I'm quietly excited and looking forward to hearing back from people, I'm not going to say more about any of it until I have something real to tell you.
How's that for coy? Sorry. :)
An article of mine appears in Vision this month. That's the first happy thing of my writing year. More happiness to come. |
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If anyone is searching for something new to do this year, I recommend this free two-year course.
I did it three years ago. It's a wonderful course and I made several new friends who are now old friends. I'd already written a novel when I started the course, but found learning someone else's method opened new horizons for me.
You have to join the Forward Motion site to sign up for the course, but that's free too and it's one of the best writing sites I know.
The course is written and run by the site owner, Lazette Gifford, who is a multi-published author. She posts one lesson per week and you work through it. There's no pressure: no marking or scores. It's very much a get out what you put in thing.
Many people sign up then drop out without ever doing anything, and others drop out throughout the course as life gets in the way. Some aspects of Lazette's planning methods, for example, aren't for everyone, but that's no biggie. If a lesson doesn't work for you, skip it.
There's a private forum that only you and your course-mates can see, and you're encouraged to post snippets and comment on each other's work. It's a slow burner that might seem to go on forever in the planning stage, then suddenly you're looking back at several thousand words you've written and your novel is taking shape.
Year one is pretty much about planning, writing and editing the thing. Year two focuses on submitting and getting it out there.
I had a great time on mine and I'm about to start submitting the novel I wrote on the course.
Edit: In fact, I enjoyed it so much I've just signed up to do it again! :) |
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Happy Christmas, everyone! Have a wonderful day!
Love and peace to you all! xxx |
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Steampunk, to be precise. I've always loved reading sf, but never thought I'd write any! As if my self-imposed January deadline for finishing Quarter Square while recovering from the swine flu jab wasn't enough, I started dreaming this opening scene and thinking about the story all the time.
Here's the opening line: Princess Victoria awoke to a snow-muffled New Year's Day and the Royal Yacht airship tethered above the palace lawn.
So last night I opened a new file and typed three pages of everything I've dreamed about this week. Airship pirates and clockwork robots and all. Maybe now it'll leave me alone for a while so I can finish up QS. |
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I had it yesterday afternoon. I'm immunosuppressed so we expected it to hit me hard, but by bedtime I was pleasantly surprised to be only drowsy and achey. This morning: ugh.
So I might be a bit quiet around here for a few days. See you when the fog clears. |
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Not an exhaustive list. Just a selective group that might look interesting/cool/quirky/worrying on a writer's website.
Here's mine:
lifeguard
sailor
intelligence gatherer
investigator
Want to share yours? |
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There's a lovely thread running on Litopia at the moment called Time for tea with Mrs Malaprop, in which people are sharing amusing malapropisms, mishearings and misunderstandings.
The most famous one in our family happened when we returned to the UK after some years living abroad, and spent the first few weeks on trains visiting family all around the country. Our kids were very young for all this travelling and excitement, but they were little stars and we were proud of them.
The final seven hour train ride from Liverpool to our new home in Plymouth turned out to be the most difficult. A hot day in an overcrowded carriage with little ventilation and we saw every other passenger wince when they noticed Jackie (8), Heather (4), and Beverley (2), squeezed into a seat on the other side of the table from us, surrounded by colouring books and various games. Again, though, they behaved wonderfully and no one had any reason to regret sitting in the same carriage.
After six hours or so, we pulled into the West Country town of Newton Abbot and the conductor announced the station name over his tannoy. "Newton Abbot. This is Newton Abbot."
Heather cocked her head quizzically and frowned, then her lovely little voice carried all through the quiet carriage when she piped up, "Naughty rabbit???"
All our fellow passengers chuckled, and several people said bye bye fondly to Heather with the words naughty rabbit when we left the train. She just beamed at them all and accepted their friendship.
To this day, eighteen years later, "naughty rabbit" gives us all a smile. And now she has her own home, and she and her partner Ian have their first pet: a rabbit called Nibbles, who is - you guessed it - sometimes rather naughty.
:) |
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They've showed all the Star Wars films on British TV for the past few Saturday afternoons. I didn't bother with the three pretenders, but made a date for the real ones. My favourite is the original Star Wars (yeah, okay, I'll concede the A New Hope) with The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi running close joint-second. Taken as a whole, I love these movies. If I had to be a character living in an eternal fictional loop? Han Solo.
Anyhow, this weekend we settled down by the fire with duvets and snacks and contented smiles to watch Return of the Jedi. And it was as lovely as it has always been, right up until the final scene.
Insert vehicle screeching to a juddering halt sound effect.
They've copy&pasted Hayden Christensen over Sebastion Shaw as Anakin's ghost!
They have, the bastards!
Why not go the whole hog and splice in Ewan McGregor for the youthful Obi-Wan Kenobi and a giggling tree frog for Yoda?
Okay. Since I started howling about this yesterday I've learned that I'm behind the times. Outrage Online occured for twelve minutes several months ago, while I had my head down working in blissful ignorance. Apparently they even covered it on South Park, with Spielberg and Lucas as evil bastards bent on destroying their artistic legacy.
But I only just found out. They changed a piece of our childhoods and no one warned me. It just jumped off the screen and hit me right in the face when my defence shield was lowered.
The bastards.
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Thank you for the virtual cookie, kind anonymous person. :) |
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Last week I met someone in person for the first time, although we've known each other online for several years. I noticed she seemed distracted at first and wasn't quite making eye contact with me while we talked, and after a couple of minutes she confessed to having had the wrong idea about me for ages.
She recalled a photo she saw three years ago, in which I wore the same glasses I had on while we spoke. I know the photo. I'd just bought those glasses actually. They have the Dolce & Gabbana logo on both arms in faint gold lettering, one of which had caught the sun in that photo. She said it looked as if I was wearing glasses decorated with diamante, and ever since then she has thought of me as camp and rather glamorous.
"But you know I'm married," I said. "I have kids."
"I assumed you had one of those interesting marriages," she replied.
This is what happens when your friends are creative writers. Sometimes they fill in the blanks for themselves.
Although she denied it, I think she was a bit disappointed, so I told her I would have been quite comfortable as a gay man if life had taken a different turn in my youth, and we agreed I would make a good bear.
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