To Dream In Deep Water “cover”
August 29th, 2010
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Hellfire Heroes update
August 26th, 2010
I started writing the first incarnation of Banshee (now To Dream In Deep Water) in NaNoWriMo ‘09. Back then the book was a stand-alone novel. After that, it grew in my head into the overly-ambitious concoction of ideas Hellfire Heroes is. Needless to say, I am very excited for it.
I died out in NaNo ‘09 with just barely over 25K words, and a horribly timed bout of insomnia, which drained me of the energies I needed to actually finish the damn thing. It was sad, but I’d like to think (read: lie to myself) that it wasn’t entirely my fault my first NaNo failed.
On to the point. I haven’t actually written much of anything since I died out of NaNoWriMo last year. Yeah, it’s that bad. The why is a combination of two things: 1) world-builder’s/outliner’s disease. 2) going back and forth between main projects. You might have noticed most of my previous posts about projects jump between talking about work on Summeryear, The Odehren Fables, various graphic novels, and the Hellfire Heroes series. I wasn’t juggling all those at once, I just couldn’t (wouldn’t) make up my mind.
There is, thankfully a cure.
I’ve given myself the chance to think about it, and it comes down to this. I want Hellfire Heroes to be my break-in to the business. It’s what I want to write for my career (as well as I can judge that at this age, at least). It’s dark young adult; horror prodding at the line of fantasy with a very long shoe; sarcastic and somewhat sadistic humour; and chock full of excuses to pull out my criminal psychology text books and pretend I’m working on research while I’m really just having a giddy old time.
So…that means I need to actually finish the thing.
Here goes.
Cheers!
Summeryear Graphic Novel
December 15th, 2009
I’m young. I’m still learning about myself and my creative impulses. So, I’m going to try something.
I’ve always loved the idea of comics and graphic novels, although I never read any at all until recently. It’s a brilliant mesh between written storytelling and visual art. I want to be a writer and I want to be an artist. I figure I’ll try doing both at once and see how it goes.
I expect this to be an enormous project — much bigger than the novel, maybe. But hell, I can’t learn without trying, so here goes. First order of business is writing out the script. I’ll update again once I’ve finished that.
The plan is doing the whole graphic novel in my own digital painted style. Nothing cartoony if I can help it. A daunting project, but if I can pull it off I might find a life calling.
Cheers. (EDIT: Doing this with a new story called Pastel Sun instead)
Nearly NaNoWriMo!
October 26th, 2009
It’s almost November – almost time for my very first NaNo. I’ll do my best to post an update every day with my word count and maybe a general feeling on how well I think the writing went that day. I don’t want to make too many promises, ’cause needless to say I really don’t know how well I’ll do on this. Keeping a positive attitude, and looking forward to it – that’s all I can do for now.
I have enough of Banshee planned out to keep me going through most of November. These last few days before then will be reserved for finishing up the chapter-by-chapter outline. I’m happy with what I have planned so far, both for the story itself and how much preparation I’ve managed to get done.
I hope to get Suntamer finished this week – but I’ve learned well enough not to claim it actually will be. Needless to say the Banshee outline is priority. I’ll probably post again when the outline’s ready to go and if I finish a painting, but aside from those instances I don’t think I’ll have need or time to before November first.
Until then, cheers.
Outlining vs. Organic Writing
September 5th, 2009
I outlined Summeryear to no end.
It was a little over a month between the first idea and me actually sitting down to write the first page of the rough draft. I would write out extensive dot jot notes in the beginning, then think up scenes on sticky notes and rearrange them until they vaguely resembled something like a story. Then, used those notes to write in- depth chapter summaries. After that I’d make charts about each chapter, organizing what each scene would do for the story and how the characters would evolve.
I don’t think all that was necessary. But hey, I like being organized. The way I understand it, after some brainstorming most outliners write up paragraph summaries of their chapters before they feel ready to start writing. That’s probably enough for me as well, but I really liked the outlining bit. So I dragged it on for a while.
On the downside of that, I used up a lot of time before I had really started working. I was having a great time organizing everything, sure. But I could have started writing a couple weeks earlier. Then there’s the fact that I had decided my outline was mostly worthless after writing a dozen or so chapters. So I started over, and that time I outlined significantly less.
I liked that story a heck of a lot more than the outlined one. I still used most of the concepts I had come up with while outlining, just used everything a little differently. What did I learn that works best for myself? Outline to a general feel, but take the time to get to know your characters before you do anything else. I have a character profile* that I fill out with every new major character, some questions that help me analyze their personality and make them more concrete for myself. It’s very useful questionnaire, asking me to think about everything to do with my characters down to the last detail.
Once I had my ideas set, I loved to let my fingers work out the story in their own time. The first rough draft I wrote with the outline wasn’t very fun to write. I had to follow my guidelines too closely for it to be fun. I love being organized, but that didn’t really work for writing.
Could have just been a fluke, of course. But next time? I think I’ll try to outline as little as possible, see how it goes. Rusalka’s outline won’t get very detailed. A paragraph per chapter. Maybe I won’t even bother for the next one. We’ll see when it comes to that.
I was very, very certain that I’d be an outliner, and didn’t even think I could work better organically. Beginning writers would do well to try both methods, and a few variations in between; not just assume they already know what they’re doing.
* As incredibly useful as the questionnaire is, I don’t want to post it here. I copied it off a website sometime back when I was just starting to write at about nine years old, so I have no idea where it came from. I might try to find the source sometime, because it is very good, but just in case whoever wrote it wouldn’t like it posted without a credit, I’ll leave it out for now.
Novels Update
August 29th, 2009
Now, I don’t intend to be updating this as often as I am right now. I just don’t like the look of this place so empty. Eventually I’m hoping for a post two or three times a week on average, we’ll see if it goes any different.
Onto the topic.
I’m working on two novels right now. That statement makes me prouder than anything else true that I have to say. Saying that I’ve finished the rough draft and an edit on one of them doesn’t even compare, because that doesn’t imply whether or not I’m still working. But I am, I’m working very hard. This is all new to me, and I’m sure with practice I’ll be working with substantially more efficiency and skill someday; but I am working hard.
I’m going to give it another week for Summeryear beta readers to get back to me. Likely on September 7th, then, I’ll start compiling my notes and spend another couple weeks editing.
That edit will put Rusalka* on hold, because to get the entire edit finished within a couple of weeks it’ll probably need my full attention. Until the 7th, I’m working on outlining and brainstorming for Rusalka. Occasionally thinking about what I can do for Summeryear without all the notes together, but mostly leaving that at peace for now.
Rusalka exists in a very fun state of outlining right now. I’m getting more and more into the story myself and it’s evolving at a solid pace. Until I start writing it out, however, there still isn’t really much to say about it specifically. Once I start, I’ll update regularly with word counts and comments on how it’s all coming along. I’ll do that here and on my Twitter.
*Czech-English translation: undine. English-NonfolkloreobsessedEnglish translation: water spirit.
Introduction to Summeryear
August 27th, 2009
Summeryear is a story that came to me in one ecstatic moment some time around the beginning of February 2009. My then-boyfriend was describing a worldwide, year-long, see-everything-”real”, hostels-only trip he was considering. The phrase that came to me then was ‘Summeryear – chase the season’ and my characters sprung out fully-formed, albeit a little shallow at the time. I imagined teenagers who resolved to travel across the globe after high school, following the summer season throughout their destinations. Before they graduated, however, they would instead push themselves into a world of anarchy by their own impatience to leave and their loathing for the lack of culture they found in North America.
The next day I began to outline my story. It took about a month of plotting and planning before I started writing, and then I ended up restarting the project almost entirely from scratch because of a substantial plot change early on. Two months had passed before I started the rough draft of Summeryear that I ended up keeping. That rough draft has become a first draft after an intensive edit, and now sits comfortably in the hands of two remaining beta readers out of five that I had sent it to.
The first readers – all beloved friends – who have responded already with notes and comments have been incredibly helpful. It’s a goal of mine to have a final draft finished and ready by Halloween so that I can begin sending it out to publishers and agents, or consider less conventional options (Podiobook, self-publishing, etc). Regardless of when or if I ever get published, I want to do this story justice.
I tend to be hard on myself after a writing session, thinking that it wasn’t great (but as the wonderful Mur Lafferty* always says – you are allowed to suck) and that I’ll end up redoing most of it in an edit somewhere along the line. Even through what I perceived were the sloppiest bits of writing I had ever pounded out in text, I was irreparably and irrevocably in love with these characters and their story.
And that is, as far as I’m concerned, the most important part of writing – loving it. That I do, so I will write for all my life. And that starts here, with Summeryear.
* Mur is a fantastic writer and podcaster, check her out: http://www.murverse.com/ and the I Should Be Writing podcast: http://isbw.murlafferty.com/