I know it’s been a while since I did a writing post on my blog or LJ, but I’ve been having some difficulties there related to health issues that made me less inclined to keep up with things. However, that didn’t stop me from progressing, so here I am, finally updating NaNo.

I went back and read my posts (as sparse as they were on the topic) and realized that any reasonable person would assume the life block surged up and swallowed me again. That is far from the case. (more…)

Slowly but surely, I’m gaining on where I should be. If I’d somehow managed an additional 10k today, I’d be all caught up. But still, I managed just under 3,300, with my current total being 10,533.

It’s out of context, so the nuances might not come across, and remember that this is raw first draft, but I liked this exchange amid disaster and wanted to share. (more…)

NaNo started out uniquely this year. Each previous time, I have jumped in feet first and set my target for 5k or 10k for the first couple of days to build up a cushion for when I start to slow down as I always seem to.

This year, I was at World Fantasy in San Jose at midnight on the 1st, and driving back from the Bay Area on the day of the 1st, beyond usual post-con exhaustion. Not only that, but I brought my sister back with me to get some intensive programming time. Then it was my son’s first play of the year, and both sets of grandparents came to see the incredible (unbiased, really, I swear) performance. None of this translated into more than a tiny bit of NaNo productivity.

So, I have finally reached the point where I can focus on my NaNo, and am coming in about 8 days behind. This is clearly not optimum, but I’m not giving up either on the story or on getting my 50k. To accomplish this, though, I need to be focused and driven. I need to use my writing time appropriately, and get those words out on the page.

The universe seems to have other plans . (more…)

I’m heading out to the World Fantasy convention down in San Jose, California in…less than an hour…but I thought I’d drop a note about NaNo since it starts while I’m down there.

This year is the first in a long while that I decided to do NaNo several months ahead of time. Normally, I say I’m not going to do it then jump in at the last moment, praising Lazette Gifford left and right for convincing me to keep a couple of outlines on hand.

Oddly, it’s also the year where I may be the least prepared since my first NaNo in 2003 when I wrote Shafter. I had a number of possible projects, all in various stages of preparation, but have chosen to do none of them.

I took a good look at what has happened since I fell sick about two years ago, and realized I’d abandoned a novel. I started Karth’s Story for the March Madness challenge on Forward Motion, and never touched it again. Now if the story no longer appealed to me, if I didn’t ever think about Karth and his unknown daughter, if visions of the not-quite-alive forest didn’t tease, I’d say the flaw was in the story.

However, it bugs me that I didn’t finish the novel. I’m enough of a goal-oriented perfectionist to want to finish everything I write, so that could have been the cause. But there’s a big difference between the few short stories and novels that remain unfinished because I can hardly recall their story lines, and being haunted.

So I’ve decided to accept that Karth’s Story, along with the rest of me, fell victim to a Life Block. Not a writer’s block where the fault lies in the tale or the telling of same, but a life block where something external, uncontrollable, act of Godish, happened to prevent this tale from coming to life. When I got over the life block, instead of looking back at the abandoned bones of a novel discarded, I surged forward on to new vistas in the forms of Coma Wedding and Molly, leaving Karth a faint ghost to haunt me.

No more. I am scrapping the less than 10k I managed to squeeze out of my overloaded, heavily medicated brain, and starting anew. As of November 1st, Karth’s Story gets another shot at the limelight, another chance to draw you into a world where an adventurer’s retirement is really denial of troubles left unsolved…mysteries that have a habit of growing ever more complex once out of sight. Whether I reach the end in 50k, finish all 85k or so expected for the first draft, or just get a solid start, this time Karth will not be abandoned on the very doorstep of his greatest adventure yet.

Not too surprising considering my last post, today I put those lovely words on the page: The End.

Coma Wedding is the first novel I have completed since my NaNo almost two years ago on November 30th of 2007. If you’ve been following for a bit, you’ll possibly remember that a medical mystery knocked me silly all of last year and so this is a major win .

That said, this story is not what I’d consider my normal fare, though elements of it do cross over with other stories. I thought From the Sea was hard to classify (originally Selkie), but Coma Wedding takes it a step further.

This is a romance with no on-screen sex–heck, no sex at all, though a honeymoon has certain implications . It is a time travel story with no explanation of the event beyond the fates, and the characters don’t believe in time travel despite having to admit it happened in this one unique case. Yes, there’s a ghost. No, he doesn’t haunt, he doesn’t scare little children, and he isn’t trapped there until some great wrong is undone. He hangs around because something is unfinished, true, but he’s so unghostlike that both he and the others often forget his lack of corporeal form until his chill reminds them.

And most importantly, it ends just after the honeymoon…when the Laura gets an offer to return to the industry she loves–in other words, a job.

I haven’t reread it yet. It could be the most horrible, mixed-up story ever, but I really don’t think so. The characters caught me and wouldn’t let go. They dragged me through the chaos of their tale, refusing to settle into any known pattern and refusing to compromise even on something as simple as length. I thought 80k-90k was reasonable…they thought differently.

Whether this story will find a home, I cannot say. Of all my outlier novels, I think this is the furthest out. On the other hand, because it has a (mostly) contemporary setting, because it’s about "normal people" despite the strange things that happen to them, it may have an easier time finding a place. After all, the mainstream market tends to be rather egalitarian, even if science fiction and fantasy aren’t as welcome. Good thing then, I guess, that the time travel isn’t explained .

And stats:
New Words: 0 words
80 scenes
80 complete – 100% of the novel
0 Scenes remain
0 Remaining word count
107039 Estimated length – with an average of 1338 words per scene.
107039 Current Total

Okay, I know it’s been a while since I gave a real update for Coma Wedding. But a Pretty Bauble was the higher priority project and I’m lousy at updating. But here’s the thing. Coma Wedding is rolling along merrily. At the end of last week, I took some time to update the outline so it’s now in pretty much final form (open to change of course as it always is) and now have a reasonable belief that the final length will be around 110k. It’s an interesting length, but within limits of the type of book (so crossover it ends up being mainstream ).

This has been an odd book from the start. First it comes and grabs me when I wasn’t writing anything, then I started NaNo without finishing the outline (and it was in lousy shape for the part I needed then), and when I reached the end of NaNo, I was dead. So I stopped entirely and blamed the book. But it wasn’t the book, it was me. So now here I am racing along at frequent 1500 or better writing mornings, something generally unheard of.

I like this book. I like the characters, I like the tangles, and I even like the fact that it’s a paranormal, time travel, romance, coming of age novel about finding yourself.

So, the big news in my rambling is that the outline is complete, I’m on target for finishing by March 15th, and maybe even early. I have 7 scenes to go and am completing a scene a day pretty consistently.

And it even has a real title. The title is just as strange as the book, so who knows…it might stick: Once Upon a Coma.

And stats:
New Words: 1488 words
80 scenes
73 complete – 91% of the novel
7 Scenes remain
9457 Remaining word count
108084 Estimated length – with an average of 1351 words per scene.
98627 Current Total

It’s been a while since anyone has seen this title cross my posts, but I thought a short, fun fantasy might be just the ticket before I tackle another big one.

I went back to reread my early posts about But a Pretty Bauble, and they make me tremble for what’s to come.  That said, at least this time I can feel the shape of the novel, the weight of it pressing against my hands.

So far I have edited the first four chapters.  The main characters have all been introduced, the main conflict and major secondary conflict have floated across the page…umm, make that two secondary conflicts…and I’m certainly not hating it.  I think this is a novel I’ll require outside feedback on before I can tell if it works or not.  We’ll see.  I may be able to see major issues as I get further in.

At one-seventh of the way, though, I’m tweaking, clarifying, and cleaning up some truly horrendous NaNo prose, but seeing no major changes at all.  Oh, and I am faithfully murdering sentence-level darlings that still resonate, but just don’t work with what surrounds them.

Whatever happens, I think it’ll be a fun excursion from my normally more complicated texts.

And stats:
Edited Today: 4,644 words
4 Chapters complete – 14% of the novel
46 Chapters remain
64,714 Remaining word count
10,878 Current Total
76,253 Predicted Total
 

I have a confession to make.

I have been hiding from this blog. Not that you might have noticed because my postings have always been rather spotty ever since I started it, but those are the facts.

Thanks to a surgical complication, I spent most of 2008 seriously ill and dosed on half a dozen medications including high-level narcotics for pain. This ended with a total hysterectomy last September (once they finally figured out what was going on with me. I’m so irradiated I probably glow in the dark ).

Why is this relevant?

Since the surgery and freedom from constant severe pain, I’ve been muzzy headed. Now I tried my darnedest to accept, having been sick for a year, that it might take up to that long before I was back to normal, but it hasn’t been fun. On the other hand, my levels of frustration and upset at this fact were just as vague even though the implications were to eliminate the ability to multitask and reduce me to almost no spontaneous creative energy. I’ve been "drifting" through everything, unable to remember consistently, and unable to get stressed and worried about it even as unnatural as that may seem.

This is why I’ve been ducking my "writing" blog. It’s not writer’s block, exactly. It’s more like writer’s haze. But either way, it has been worth more than my energy to talk about what’s going on here. Among other things, though I drag my characters through horror, they always come out of it. I believe in happy endings…or at least ones with the possibility of being better. So I couldn’t talk about this until I had something hopeful to say.

And here it is: hormones actually affect the ability to think. And not, as my dear friend Val said, only in a negative way despite the trend of teenagers and thought.

I’m only on day two of having a brain, so I can’t be totally conclusive, but here’s my pattern, and it certainly seems pattern-like.

After the surgery, I was put on a hormone patch (hormone replacement therapy is automatic for surgical menopause because your body isn’t ready for the transition).

That level was too low, shown by hot flashes and the need for too much sleep, so they upped the dose.

The new dose seemed to resolve the two main issues and left me to recover from the surgery and illness (which I credited with the slowly reducing memory issues and creative haze).

But the patch proved incompatible with an active live style, the glue failing to hold up to perspiration :p.

So I requested a pill. They put me on a lower dose because pills don’t have as many levels and you want to be on the lowest effective dose.

Now, with my recovered brain, I can see that my ability to cognate reduced back to the early surgical recovery days. I couldn’t even program, my typing speed dropped because I couldn’t think of what to type, my vocabulary reduced, my ability to spell went out the window, and I couldn’t find the energy to care about typos. (Fun as I’m preparing to teach an intensive class, eh?)

So when the sample was starting to run out, in a rare flash of inspiration, I asked my doc if the hormones can affect thought. She didn’t know for sure, but was willing to give me a higher dose to see. This dose is higher even than I was on the patch.

And I just wrote over 1k in about an hour on Coma Wedding!

You might think this is nothing much considering that I managed NaNo before, but first of all that was on the higher level patch and second of all it was a real struggle with rare flashes of creativity.

So, for those of you on hormone therapy for whatever reason, if you’re experiencing writer’s haze, you might ask to try a higher level…or add more soy to your diet depending.

I know there will still be aspects that I’ll have to adjust to, but it is so much easier now that I don’t have to fight through dense fog to articulate a single word. I noticed the effect on my writing most dramatically, but it impacted everything from coding to having a face-to-face conversation. While life sure was interesting, it was the Chinese curse interesting :p.

Who knows…you might see more posts about what I’m doing now that I’m past this .

I know I owe you all a real post, and I apologize for dropping off the map after NaNo, but I plan to try harder. Still, I didn’t want to sit on these announcements, especially since the second, my class, starts on Monday.

A quick update (sadly very quick):

I did manage to start writing on Coma Wedding again in December to the tune of about 2,700 words. Since then my only writing has been non-fiction for classes, but between all the trips and planning for the holidays that happened last month, that’s not too bad actually. I hope to see things improve starting this month, and more specifically on Monday, but we’ll have to see.

First of all, as some of you know, I edit the review section and write a couple columns for Vision: A Resource for Writers. This is a wonderful online magazine that provides articles on markets, writing techniques, resources useful to writers, and interviews among other elements. It is also a market for beginning non-fiction writers, and pulls on a wide variety of experienced writers for articles and interviews. Most of the content focuses on fiction writing of any genre, but articles on non-fiction topics do appear and are welcome. If you haven’t checked it out before, please do. And if you have, you’ll be happy to hear the new issue has been posted.

www.lazette.net/vision

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The second item is primarily for fiction writers. I am teaching an online workshop on non-verbal communication: how to become conscious of its influence and how to use it in your writing. The course does require membership in Forward Motion (a wonderful writing community), but membership is free. This requirement is to preserve rights for any work you might complete during the class.

I give fair warning that my workshops are intensive, but the more work you put in, the more you get out of the workshops.

Please come and check it out at www.fmwriters.com. After you log in, click on the Learning Center 2009 link in the header and then go to the Workshops 2009 folder.

The workshop begins on January 5th and the class will run 6 weeks.

Hope to see you there.

Hmm, well, it’s interesting this…

I completed NaNo on 11/21, a bit late for some years, a bit early for the goal. That’s the good part.

The bad part is that I have stopped dead.

I’ve had some questions about this novel because in some ways it is very much a straight contemporary despite the odd paranormal elements. This would make my third completed contemporary novel…once I complete it…but my belief is that I want to do more fantastical SF or fantasy.

So why is it that these contemporary ideas grab hold and won’t let go? The answer must be that a part of me loves these stories. At least that’s the answer that I came to.

I thought about how I felt not when thinking about the story from a distance but when I’m writing, when I’m in the characters’ heads.

See, my SF and fantasy tends to be hard hitting. I tend to make my characters work for everything and cut the support out from under them at least once. In my contemporary stories, it’s more about the positive people parts. It’s about how people come together, what pulls them apart and what makes them hold on. All of my contemporaries are happy stories. They might have low points, but nothing like what I put the characters through in my speculative fiction.

So I’m thrilled (?) to discover the cause of my writing drop off is bronchitis. It has nothing at all to do with the story.

The ultimate answer is that both types of stories fill something within me. I like the sappy romantic stories as much as the traumatic, realign-my-world stories. This shouldn’t come as any surprise because I read that same spread for the different moods, nor should the pull of a sweet story have startled me considering I was coming off a rough year. That might even be why I couldn’t pull off writing Karth’s Story earlier this year because that one is a gut-wrencher on many levels.

I guess this post is more about psychology than writing, but there you have it. The good news is that I fully expect as soon as the elephant gets off my chest, words for Coma Wedding will start pouring out.

And stats:
67 scenes
37 complete – 55% of the novel
30 Scenes remain
39,242 Remaining word count
87,640 Estimated length – with an average of 1,308 words per scene.
48,398 Current Total