[December 19th] Ready, Set, Edit

Somehow, I will always consider editors and writers in editing stages to be this in real life. I mean, not evil and mindless in their rage, but at constant war with mistakes in manuscripts.

I've had Crimson Anatomy [previously known as Crimson Cacophony] out to beta readers and I've received some feedback, which suggests that a lot has to be changed, both big and small. I thought that readers had to be informed about certain physical transitions, which now I realize I overdid and will have to tone down, if I'd like to avoid any annoyance on the part of the reader.

I was aware at the time that some aspects in the novel would need to be fixed, but I also knew that my perspective on the novel has shrunk to what was on the pages and not how it could be altered to support the ideas expressed on the pages. What this feedback has managed to show me is that everything has to have its purpose to be written about, within a scene, then within a sub-plot, then within the work as a single, whole work of art. Now I know these things in theory, but I learn best by doing something a thousand times wrong, which has happened here. 

Now I'm ready to tackle this beast, again. I'll write a synopsis of the new draft, hopefully the final one in terms of big changes and then read the manuscript to make notes and then I shall invoke the Red Pen's power: 

"On manuscript's pages white

no error shall escape my sight.

Flee, for tis not how I write.

Succumb to Red Pen's viscous bite"*

* - Any similarities between this little rhyme and anything that or may not be a pop-culture icon are purely coincidental.

[November 24th] On Writing Longhand and the Importance of Words

I’ve not spoken about writing in a long time, because I consider the craft of writing as a rather personal experience. My main understanding is that every story is different and every writer is unique in his/her thoughts, inspirations and techniques are strictly individual. From where I’m standing, I’d rather not dish out advise. There are plenty of websites, which provide you with countless posts on the technical aspects of writing. Magical Words serves advice like a petite French restaurant; compact portions sculpted to beauty. Chuck Wendig overtakes the table as an Italian seven course meal, calorie rich and dripping sauce.

In that metaphor, what am I? I’m just a story in the kitchen and I’m fine to be one. Recently, I had to switch from writing on the keyboard to writing longhand, because my day job demands me typing. The implications are two-fold. First, my fingers are already tired from hitting away at the keys and second, my brain associates this time of writing as a chore*. Writing as an act and a process, sitting down and typing words, grew to be tedious and my ideas, no matter how bright and shiny and witty suffered, when it came to give them shape. 

Write or Die is an excellent software, if your brain has already swollen with the pregnancy of a story, which your fingers desperately want to deliver, but not when your story has its own umbilical cord tied around its neck. I needed c-section and writing longhand functioned as such**. Yes, now everything is a thousand times slower. Yes, I have to actually make more time to write the same amount of words I crank out for an hour. But. The big But. I place the right words, I add texture to my story I can’t do when facing the white screen or race with my fingers, because everyone types faster than they write. Sometimes it’s all about the physical presence of the notebook that helps me get my idea out. 

I’m feeling a bit guilty that I’m choosing impracticality over efficiency, which doesn’t make sense. It’s irrational. This sense of guilt is stupid, because it implies that you’re racing against something or someone. Is writing a race? Well, kinda. It’s a race against death. Everything is racing with death. Everything knows that it’ll lose a race with the big, underlined and bolded THE END; it’s more of a matter of how much gets done. This brings me down to the devil: quantity and boy do we know about quantity. Word counts, word meters and the month of the word count tracking NaNoWriMo***. 

Quantity is a fixation. In “Booklife” Jeff VanderMeer pins this quest for wordcount as a goal that is hollow, pardon, I’m paraphrasing from memory. VanderMeer spends some time to the importance of the right words and his points are excellent. While I understand how setting a goal, which has to do with getting a set number of words down, helps track progress, this is a ‘surface’ progress. First drafts become our arenas to suck and fail, but I feel as though advice to allow yourself to fail during first drafts is misinterpreted as ‘suck, but just get it out, doesn’t matter how much you do suck’. In my mind, this conspiracy theory emerges, where this predominant attitude about sucking has joined this fetish for metric measurements in a craft, which is not meant to welcome math****. 

The right words matter even in a first draft, because later on, during revisions, you’ll find that you have a solid first draft that needs little modifications on a linguistic level. That the prose actually helps you find the right direction for the story and relatively ease your journey in the land of Edits. Sometimes you can suck too much to know how to fix a story. And all the time you saved dashing through your first draft [and more] will go into your editing. 

What do you do when crafting first drafts? Do you stop to think or go where the hands take you? 

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*I’d like to take the opportunity to distance away from my brain as we never have seen eye to eye on a various subjects. 

** I disturbed myself with this metaphor, so I will stop with it. 

*** Dudes, I’m far from criticizing NaNo for anything else. I still believe in its key value, to tech persistence and consistency when writing. 

**** I hate math, so there you go.

[August 9th] Final Stage Revisions Entered

The title of this piece is "Imagine" & I'm imagining finishing something properly.

As anticlamtic as the blog has been, I for one can say that I have been doing work on “Crimson Cacophony”. I’ve finished with the preliminary reading, assembled all the plot lines in a chart and am able to throw in notes in the table as to what I have to fix in order to connect each chapter with the next.

I can’t honestly say that this feels entirely organic, in the sense that I have to answer questions that I have left in my own writing, like how the hell is my character feeling confident in her abilities, when each and every success she achieves has someone else’s involvement as foundation. The whole novel is a careful balancing act between the depression she feels knowing that she is marionette with very promiscuous strings and the delusional hope that she can obtain the power [magical or otherwise] of the imaginary super ego she has created for herself.

I can’t say that this in particular is plot as the struggle is internal and represents the themes of identity and control, which I’m fascinated with for this particular project. Nevertheless, this constant swinging motion from one state to the next should go uninterrupted throughout the duration of the whole novel, while everything else happens.

On another note, I’m not entirely happy at how I’ve rushed the last third of the novel. If you read my manuscript you will see three distinct phases. “I’m so in love with this project” which runs its course in the first ten to thirteen chapters, where everything is written to the fullest and a balance between show and tell has been achieved. Then comes “Eh, I’m kinda not interested, plus this is the middle and I have no clue what happens” with chapters that are okayish, but mumble events, glossing over the details. AND then it all crashes and burns with “Can I get this over with” with chapters as intelligible as monkey dribble on banana peels.

So far I’ve passed seven chapters. So that leaves 29 more to go and 30 K more to add to the flesh and bones that I leave in my ending. Suddenly, I’m not very optimistic that an end of August deadlines is possible.

Ready, Set, Write... and Edit on the multiple projects I have in mind

Guess the witch!

NaNoWriMo is over and so is the celebratory weekend filled with doing nothing. My wrists had to rest a bit and I also have family return home for the weekend, so there. I have perfect excuses to justify not-writing. All of which end now.

I've jotted down ideas for my 1920s inspired mythological story called "Rabbit Heart". It's a story especially written for an anthology called 20Spec: Speculative Stories of the Roaring Twenties. It's a secret so far, but it has a very famous witch from mythology appear. I've also planned this one to fit in the "Lungs" concept of Florence and the Machine inspired shorts. I have to keep it under 5000 words, which will mean that I will use some dream logic to weave in all the elements I've envisioned.

In the spare time... Okay, that was a lie. My main focus will always be revising "Crimson Cacophony", a novel neglected when NaNo came. I kind of dread it, because it will involve retyping it from the journal I wrote it in. Several months of journal pages. But then again, if it was not for the journal I would not have finished it at all.

So what are you working on?

Notes to Myself for When I start a First Draft

It's basically how I keep my journal, but without pictures. Picture is by Eilyn.

I'm currently revising my novel "Crimson Cacophony" [the closest I've come to editing anything longer than 10, 000 words] and I think that if I was a stranger and tried to read the manuscript for the first time, I'd shoot myself with a hunting riffle à la Supernatural. It is a complete mess of a thing and I do mean the actual manuscript, the thing that you read.

Here are the two most important things I'd not to myself and give to you as advice.

1) If you plan on keeping your world-building [especially if that world-building involves, say, a magic system based on the theory that matter vibrates and that it's the frequencies of objects that cause change in the physical world] non-electronically, make sure you use one and the same notebook, journal or whatever for the notes. In my universe, I've gone as far to create a complicated regional and hierarchical society based on talent, skill and the nature of the magic in a person. Magic is way more complicated than that. I involve a bit of linguistics in all of that AND I have no clue where half the stuff I noted down in, so keep all the eggs in one basket. Just this once.

2) If you plan to write the first draft on paper [in my case both my eyes need rest and the story usually flows better, when I write my first drafts by hand, otherwise I keep spotting mistakes in the draft], then make sure you write so that in the end, you can read. Tiniest of the littlest of the beadiest of letters [all swirled into an abbreviation of a word] DO NOT speed up the reading process. Also avoid abbreviations that you are not absolutely sure will make sense to you and never EVER, ever write with light blue pen. If you want to go blind, yes, sure why not, but don't do that to your vision or you will need telescope lenses for your glasses.

Tomorrow I'll blog about what lessons I have learned about writing from reading my first draft and those will be more content related.

Revision Cave: The Labirynth

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I have been busy catching up on major reading for the Comic Book Appreciation Month on my review blog “Temple Library Reviews” and I have been quite swallowed with Birds of Prey, which escalated from flat and not witty to enticing, witty and deep. Guess the author does make a difference and after Gail Simone took over everything went for the better, but I ignored everything else as I race with that series to the finish.

For instance I got lost on stage one as far as the Revision Cave goes and I say that this bad. I have read the early chapters and decided to discard them and start anew. I’ve started outlining chapter by chapter and things pop up that need to be researched and quite after they have been researched will I sit down to write the chapter. That is fine and dandy, but I am not sure on a few things.

Do I do this chapter by chapter? As in outline chapter, research aspects in chapter, note details and then add this to various arc schematics and then write it. This would mean to move at a slow pace, but would ensure that the story is perfectly tied. I sure hope that this strategy is good and I lean over to doing it this way, because with my scatterbrain tendencies I sense that the whole novel outline, research and then writing won’t contribute to much.

Research would need to be concise or perhaps I should cover more ground. I’m still working on this and good thing is that things shape up better than when I started this, so it’s good or maybe I am confusing myself again. Novel writing sure is tricky.

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I feel a bit evil and in the mood for weird as I approach a new short story project, so here is something equally evil and weird. I am a sucker for something pure and good as an idea and concept and then twisted into the opposite. This Poison Heart Care Bear is the perfect art and is the work of Bobby Chiu

To arms, this WIP has no chance...

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Yes, it is quite official. SMH has been shelved until the novel learns to behave and not turn into dozen things that I hadn’t intended on. As it cools I shall enter the revision cave as my friend and soon-to-be-published author Karen Mahoney refers to the process of revisions. I have decided to return to the first novel I have ever written in English: “Forged in Blood”.

Despite it being the only attempt at novel writing that’s been accomplished by my hands and by the rule of thumb, these attempts never reach a publication quality, I love the world, which has spawned seventy percent of any future series projects, I am contemplating, and I also love the story. I had some problems with it though.

The protagonist developed from the most incapable, reactive ugly duckling to a kick-ass black swan and she did so as a result of something that happened to her. Not so good, plus I am not into Ugly Betty type: nice, limited in ability, but with a big heart and moral compass, also an easy pick for a scheme. The novel itself starts as a sitcom, than goes into well tread waters in UF territory and then goes quite bizarre and macabre. I loved the last third and I want the whole novel to be like that, so here is what my muse did.

With regards to the trilogy end, my protagonist needs a total make-over and I need to make her the vicious ice queen Cerberus. But this is just step one in this whole Odyssey. I’m amidst a battle plan on what to do:

- After rereading the ‘brilliance’, I will note down all the world building aspects that are not consistent and then develop a file with details on the world. This will involve research topics and a lot of non-fiction reading.

- When the world is done, it’s time to map out the revisited plot and taking into account that the protagonist is not to be messed with. Characters bios are to be handled here with needed research on certain medical aspects.

- Get the newest Google Earth and start mapping out actual places in America, even if I am as far away from there as I possibly can be. That done, it’s time for a scene by scene breakdown and redoing.

Sweet, huh? I reckon I will be done never with it, but I gotta try.

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Another art inspiration for you guys. Since I am in the macabre mood with darkness spilling in the afternoon hours, I give you “Awakening” Part III by Becky Cloonan, who is talented and her art always speaks to the horror writer/fan persona inside of me. I find this to fit in to a point with the Cthulhu month Tor.com is having, tentacles and all.