Updates and Snippets

Before I start, just a quick scheduling thing: I'm going to be on vacation next week, soaking up the last dying rays of summer (depressing, isn't it?), far away from my computer. I'll be back to posting and visiting the last week of August.

As I mentioned last week, I'm taking a non-fiction class on writing personal essays, so I'm a little bit swamped with making mistakes muddling through working on my assignments right now. I'm also still trying to get things done on my WIP (the fiction sort), so I decided that for today's post, I'd tag myself in a cool blog hop and talking about what I'm working on!

Hmm, what's that? I can't tag myself in a blog hop? Oh well. Too late now!

1. Fiction: Despite some people's doubts, I really am still working on my novel. I have proof, too. Very heavy, large, and intimidating proof:

It's the big textbook-looking one, set next to a normal book for comparison purposes (which yes, is on my To Be Read list). And just so you can get the full effect, here's a cropped side view (and no, I don't have abnormally giant hands. It really is that big):

I felt the need to show you these pictures, you see, to validate the rather extreme feelings of intimidation and dread that strike me whenever I open this damn tome and start reading. It's a tad bit overwhelming. Unfortunately, it's also necessary, because I have no freaking idea what I'm doing with my South American lifetime yet, and I need as much information as I can get.

I, erm, haven't gotten very far yet. Ahem. I might still be skimming through the Introduction. In my defense, it's 26 pages long.


2. Non-Fiction: This is actually going surprisingly well. I'm afraid to post about it, because I am ludicrously (and yet, for a writer, typically) superstitious about talking about potential success. It's all very Jewish Shtetl Evil Eye-ish of me, but I worry that if I say things are good, they will suddenly take a turn for the very much worse.

I'm going to get over that, though, and say that my hope that writing personal essays would come naturally to me is so far turning out to be true. This is really early to be saying it (cough Evil Eye cough), since I have yet to move past the rough draft stage of anything, but thus far the stories are pouring out of me quickly and easily. I've twice written an entire rough draft of a 2,000-ish word essay (yup, still having brevity problems) in a couple of hours. A couple of hours. Which is NOT NORMAL for me.

This is in stark contrast to my pace when I'm writing fiction. I'm sure that's at least partially because I plot and research and character-develop everything to death in my novels, which I don't have to do for non-fiction. That is a pleasure.

(And no, pantsers, that doesn't mean I'm suddenly joining your team.)

I can't post any snippets from those rough drafts yet, because of many, many reasons, but I can post a little snippety thing I wrote for my homework this week. The assignment was to write an "Apology Epistle", based on this gorgeous little piece, beginning with the words "I'm sorry." It was supposed to be about 250 words, and guess what???  Mine clocks in at 257. Score one point for brevity!!!

Here it is. Feedback is welcome, but be very gentle, please - this is definitely a rough draft.

I’m sorry I didn't go out with you that night. I can imagine so clearly how it would have been: the snow sparkling in starlight, the brilliant white hiding the gray, the yellow, the black: the true character of the city, which we all saw bared for the first time that night, still cloaked in darkness and flecks of light. Walking home through the naked streets, laughing past the shadows in the corners, their menace unnoticed and ignored. The air like knives on our wine-protected skin, their blades unfelt until. Until. Then the figures like more shadows coalescing into a gang of teenagers, staining the white sparkling night, demanding with clumsy gestures our wallets, our money, our phones. Refusal, laughter; their faces so young and so foolish; our minds still shielded in warmth and soaked in booze; then the dark sinking chasm of the gun. 

I imagine that I would have stopped you. I would have taken your arm, looked in your eyes, and the question hovering on your lips would have fallen, unvoiced, to the filthy snow. Then we would have lost wallets, money, phones; gained bruises and cuts and yes, the gash under Ethan’s eye; but we would have walked away uncaring because we would also have your life.

Instead, I stayed home, and worked on the play I was writing for you and with you and because of you, and slept with innocence through the terrible night and awoke to a gray dawn, still unaware, still thinking I had nothing to be sorry for. 

Soulless Cover Reveal!

I'm still avoiding research freewriting up a storm these days, so in the meantime, I am delighted and excited to turn my little blog over to a VIE (Very Important Event) today: it's cover reveal week for Crystal Collier's book Soulless, which is the second book in her trilogy! YAY CRYSTAL! Without further ado...

Have you met the Soulless and Passionate? In the world of 1770 where supernatural beings mix with humanity, Alexia is playing a deadly game.

SOULLESS, Book 2 in the Maiden of Time trilogy

Alexia manipulated time to save the man of her dreams, and lost her best friend to red-eyed wraiths. Still grieving, she struggles to reconcile her loss with what was gained: her impending marriage. But when her wedding is destroyed by the Soulless—who then steal the only protection her people have—she's forced to unleash her true power.

And risk losing everything.

What people are saying about this series: 

"With a completely unique plot that keeps you guessing and interested, it brings you close to the characters, sympathizing with them and understanding their trials and tribulations." --SC, Amazon reviewer

"It's clean, classy and supernaturally packed with suspense, longing, intrigue and magic." --Jill Jennings, TX

"SWOON." --Sherlyn, Mermaid with a Book Reviewer

Crystal Collier is a young adult author who pens dark fantasy, historical, and romance hybrids. She can be found practicing her brother-induced ninja skills while teaching children or madly typing about fantastic and impossible creatures. She has lived from coast to coast and now calls Florida home with her creative husband, three littles, and "friend" (a.k.a. the zombie locked in her closet). Secretly, she dreams of world domination and a bottomless supply of cheese. You can find her on her blog and Facebook, or follow her on Twitter.

COMING October 13, 2014

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Freewriting as Fuel

I'm back! Back home, that is, and very much plugged back in. Thank you all for the well-wishes - I did have a great anniversary, a lovely vacation, and a wonderful birthday. To my great happiness, my birthday was exactly what I wanted: a delicious breakfast, then a fantastic, grueling four-hour hike, a hot shower, and an amazing and enormous dinner (with wine, of course). Call me crazy, but I love the feeling of happy, exhausted accomplishment when I finish a long hike, with a delicious feast as a well-deserved reward. And besides, with a view like this at the top of the mountain, I'd hike it any day, feast or not:

That picture doesn't even do it justice, because I got way too much of the top of the mountain in the foreground, and not enough of the view beyond it! It's a 360 degree view, which I also couldn't capture, of the Green Mountains and the Mad River Valley, and on a clear day, you can even see across Lake Champlain to the Adirondacks. It's gorgeous.

At any rate, I'm back at my job and at my desk, and still using the impetus from the movie to propel me into some work. The more I freewrite, the more I'm inspired to keep going, so I'm going to use that fuel to help me churn out as much as I can while I have time today. It does feel great to be writing, even if I have to give myself little do-nothing breaks for additional motivation - that vacation mentality is a little hard to shake.

So, while I kick my butt back into gear, I thought I'd post a little bit of what I wrote a couple of weeks ago. I did say I might do that, after all, and I like to keep my promises...even if I'm the only one who remembers them. And yes, it's maybe possible that I didn't have time to come up with a longer blog post. Maybe.

This little snippet is from the Tibetan lifetime (since that's what the movie was about, and what I was in the middle of researching when I stopped to watch it), and as always, it's barely been reread, much less edited. When I wrote it, I was thinking of this being the very beginning of the Tibetan section... but we'll see.

It was winter, thick and heavy, like the snows that blanketed the peaks and hid all of the passes. It was no time for a journey.

Tashi slid his fingers – brown and leathered and rough, like the rest of him – over the parchment. He couldn’t read the blocks of black ink, spidery and strange, but he knew what they said; he had gotten a lama to tell him the story the parchment held, and he’d memorized it, fast, a flash of lightning seared into his mind. There was nothing to be gained from it anymore; he should throw it into the fire and let it bake his tsampa for him, let it cook the dough along with the tea for his breakfast, but for some reason he held onto it anyway, and kept touching it, as if it had more to tell him.

Dawn crept through the cracks in the tent, blue and sheer with frost. It was cold, bone cold, with storms chasing the clear sky into darkness: no time for a journey, and yet here he was, embarking on one anyway.

He wouldn’t have done it for anyone else. Tashi stirred the hearth, blowing on it gently, until it caught and the embers blossomed into flame. No other soul could have called him back; not Diki, long-dead anyway, taken from his side by a wasting sickness ten years after they married; not his brothers (he refused to dignify them with their names, even in the silence of his mind) or their pale, weak daughters, or – he added quickly, before memory could settle too deeply into him – anyone else. Only Dorje, his son, could force him to go home.

Snapshots From My Brain

I'm doing something I rarely do on this blog: I'm sitting down to post with zero idea of what I want to write about today. I usually have some framework in mind, or at least a theme, but this morning... not so much.

Excited yet???

Me too!!!

So, I think what I'll do is brainstorm right here. You know, just freewrite, like flipping through my brain's current photo album, and see what comes out. It'll be a little experiment. And I'll do it in list form, because lists make me feel happy and safe. So, without further ado...

• NaNoWriMo. I'm not so much doing it as I am finding new and creative ways to work around doing it. You see, I thought at first that I might leap headlong into the fray of NaNo, throwing caution to the wind, and - gasp - write without a plot or an outline or anything but a vague sort of idea-thingy-dingy. You'll be shocked to learn that this lasted about ten minutes, before I looked in dumb dismay at my computer screen, and said (maybe out loud. I'm not telling), "I have no idea what the f*&$ I'm trying to write about." Yes, I confirmed once and for all that I am not a pantser, because no matter how hard I try, my brain just doesn't work that way. I can't write without at least a brief sketch of a road map, it turns out, and I can't make that map without knowing my characters.
• Not worry! I haven't stopped trying; I've just changed tactics. I may not be able to write a 50,000 word novel in a month, but I might be able to write 50,000 words of character analysis, free-writing, and outlines in a month. That's what I'm doing now. Perhaps some people might call that "cheating"; I call it "changing the goals so I don't get ridiculously frustrated and unnecessarily upset with myself and actually manage to get something done."
• Guess what? It's working! I don't have anything close to 50,000 words, and I might not hit that target (thank you, life, people, day job, and so on), but I am churning out my brainstorming quite a bit faster than usual. And since I LOVE brainstorming so, so, so much, anything I can do to speed the damn process up is a big fat WIN in my book.
• For those following this new book of mine, Sam's name is now Taylor. I took a brief and entirely unscientific poll, and people seem to have much fewer immediate gender associations about "Taylor". So that's what I'm going with. 
• Taylor is, yes, still very keen on getting me to tell their damn story (I'm going with 'they' instead of 'he' or 'she' on the excellent advice of Mr. M.L. Swift. Thanks, Mike!) Thanks in large part to all of your great advice, I'm now enjoying it rather than wondering if I've truly lost my marbles. 
• I'm also working on a few new sections/lifetimes, involving an old man in ancient Tibet, and a nomad in pre-Columbus South America. The amount of research I'm going to have to do for this thing is starting to get a bit alarming. 
• No, I haven't forgotten about Cloudland. Editing is truly done. I've queried a few agents and am now waiting, quite calmly and patiently, to hear back on this first round of queries. I do not, of course, refresh my inbox 75,000 times per minute, nor do I do anything foolish like jump out of my skin every time I have a new email notification. Of course not. Ha, ha, ha.... UGH. As a side note, how the hell do people stay sane doing this????? 
• I also entered Cloudland into some contests. Some results are encouraging, but far from finished. I'll keep quiet about that for now, but will hopefully have news.... later. Things are brewing.

Hey... that wasn't so bad! I guess I can write without an outline, as long as what I'm writing - is an outline! 

Thoughts from the Reject Pile: Tips on Brainstorming

I know I've written about this topic before, but the last time, I wrote about it in retrospect, remembering how it had worked for Cloudland, with that lovely rosy tint of memory coloring my thoughts (ok, fine, it was more like the sludgy brown film of frustration, but whatever.) Now that I'm freshly enmeshed in brainstorming my new idea, I find that I have some new ideas to offer.

To be entirely honest, I found that out because I kept cutting sections about brainstorming out of other posts. Once I had collected a bunch of rejected paragraphs, I decided I could shmush them all together into a brand spanking new post. And here we are - the reject pile!!! Isn't that exciting??

So what I realized is that brainstorming takes a very specific shape for me. Yes, sometimes I do write out ideas, and explore them, via a sort of stream-of-consciousness conversation with myself. But more often than not, I just write.

I know this seems self-evident, since, y'know, I'm a writer, but that's how I brainstorm best: by writing. Not by freewriting, although that's the catalyst, but by actually writing out scenes.

When I'm brainstorming, ideas often occur to me as fragments of prose or dialogue. So, when I'm developing each, I write out a brief scene-let that's built around that fragment. I then end up with lots of little bits of writing, which I call "freewriting". Right now, I have at least two or two bits for each of my ideas of lives for my two souls. Then once I have a fragment of a scene written out, I can see how the idea works, and where my characters want to take it. More often than not, these fragments don't end up in the finished manuscript, but sometimes they do. The first chapter of Cloudland came directly from one of my freewrites.

So, how does this actually work?

Well, I know I want one of the stories in this new book to involve a love affair between a Greek god and a mortal. When I was first brainstorming that idea, I was trying to work out a bunch of different things: which god, what kind of affair, how they meet, who they are, etc. I settled on Apollo as the god, and then I had a flash of an idea, a fragment of prose, really, about how they might first meet. It appeared in my brain as "The first time Apollo saw him... The second time Apollo saw him..." and so on, with each "time" being a new paragraph briefly detailing each sighting, following a rising arc of action that begins with the first sighting and ends with Apollo actually meeting this person. I then thought of the myth that Apollo, as the god of the sun, rides a chariot that pulls the sun across the sky, and decided to use that: the sightings happen when Apollo is in his chariot, making the sun rise.

(Yes, I know that it was actually Helios who pulled the sun, and that it was only later that this became associated with Apollo, but this is all part of the glorious freedom of artistic license.) 

So, I wrote that flash of an idea out. I have no idea if this will end up in the finished book, but it helped me figure out some things about Apollo and this unnamed to-be lover of his - for example, that at the time of the first sighting too many of Apollo's lovers have suddenly died or been transformed (thank you, Greek mythology), and, heartbroken, he's committed himself to celibacy; that this new to-be lover has been determined to seduce Apollo since childhood, and may actually have orchestrated all of these sightings, setting up a nice little conflict very early on; and so on.

Since I swore to myself that I would never, EVER share any of these brainstorming bits in this blog, because they consist of unfinished, unedited, weird writing that is for my eyes only, I naturally decided to post a little bit of this example here today! Hooray for self-humiliation!!

Remember, this is TOTALLY UNFINISHED. It might really, really suck. Here's that first paragraph, anyway:

The first time Apollo saw him, it was in a curving glance of golden light: his limbs bending up the long grass, each fine thread of muscle and sinew coiling with life; his hair black and wind-blown in the first drawn breaths of dawn. Swift and easy he raced up the shadowed slope, chasing after the flickering white tails of his herd. The god stilled his hand on the chariot and the horses reared back in plumes of flame, and the sun settled its burning arms low on the rim of the world, and so the day began with wildfire and black smoke instead of the rushing stream of rose Apollo had intended. 

And that, my friends, is what I call brainstorming.