Wrapping Up October – CoronaLife Day 229

October 29, 2020 By Leave a Comment

The last week of October is always hectic and stressful for me. Several family celebrations plus Halloween makes for an unhappy introvert. And this year all the political turmoil added to the pandemic strain piles on the anxiety.

So I haven’t been very productive this week. Just have been exhausted and scattered. Which isn’t to say that I have done nothing. I have been thinking about my Veritas re-write, and as snatches of scenes or paragraphs I want to insert come to me, I have written them down. It’s fits and starts, but it’s progress. I hope to get those words into the computer before the week is out.

Those of you who have followed this blog for a while will know that we have had a rather adventurous time trying to keep guppies alive in our small 5-gallon fish tank. We’ve been through 8 fish. The last one died right before the lockdown in March, and our tank has been empty since.

We’ve begun “cycling” our tank again to get the ammonia and nitrate levels to zero before adding fish. It’s a slow process and currently leaving me scratching my head, but we seem to be getting there in spite of ourselves. Once we get the water right, we’ll get new fish, and hopefully keep them alive for a decent amount of time. Of course, the way coronavirus cases are rising in our neck of the woods, we will probably be ready for new fish right when we get closed down again!

So I have written a paltry few hundred words on my novel, and have been watching bacteria grow. Exciting times. But the end of October is always like this for me. I know come November I will be able to take a deep breath and feel some weight come off my shoulders.

I am not crazy enough to do NaNoWriMo this year. I do not have the headspace or emotional bandwidth for it. But I do want to try and at least get into a rhythm, dedicate some time each day to writing. We shall see.

Are you doing NaNo? If so, good luck!

Have a happy and safe Halloween, everyone!

Rebuilding the Story – CoronaLife Day 208

October 8, 2020 By Leave a Comment

With me, my daughter, and my husband all fighting for bandwidth on a DSL line all day, we were running into problems. So we finally broke down and got cable internet. Hopefully the increased bandwidth will erase the problems we’ve been having. We are also keeping the DSL as backup in case our cable goes down, which it seems to do with regularity in our neighborhood. I think I may just stay on the DSL and let them have the cable—the DSL is sufficient for what I need.

I’ve been chipping away at Veritas again this week. I am into the part of the story where serious rebuilding will happen, as the new seeds I planted in the opening bear fruit. So while the general direction of the plot won’t change, how we get there most definitely will. I am trying, among other things, to make my protagonist more active, driving the story more than being pulled along by events. It’s difficult because she is literally trapped in her mind for a significant portion of this section, so having her more active is a bit head-scratching. But I have some ideas to play with.

I know very well that even with all the work I am doing on this editing pass, I will need to do at least one more. Whenever you go in and work on a nearly-complete manuscript and copy, paste, delete, insert, there are going to be continuity issues. So I need to do that, and I need to make sure that all the new stuff hangs together with all the old stuff and that it all makes sense. So still a long way to go, but I am confident I will get there in the end.

Also, I got my ballot in the mail this week, so I am doing a shout-out to everyone to make sure you vote, whether by mail or in person, depending on your state’s procedures. Your vote is your constitutional right and the foundation of our country, so make it count. If you don’t know how or where to vote in your area, call your County Clerk or Board of Elections office, and they will tell you where to go. Make a plan to vote and let your voice be heard!

Beginning…Again – CoronaLife Day 201

October 1, 2020 By Leave a Comment

I’ve mentioned my on-again, off-again work on my YA sci-fi Veritas. When last I mentioned it, I was using Lisa Cron’s Story Genius and her Scene Cards to try to organize my thoughts, deepen the story, and not lose track of the emotional through line. This has been a struggle for me, but I felt I was finally starting to see something.

This week, even though I have not finished the Scene Cards for the whole book, I went in to massage the first 10 scenes, which I had done the cards for. I needed to see how the changes I pondered felt in situ, and see how it changed the flow and tone of the story. This amounts to the first 10,000 words of the story, but I think I need to really get this right before I can go much farther.

I like what I see. While that actual changes to the scenes are relatively minor—added lines here, deleted lines there—the story feels different. By more fully understanding Cron’s third rail—the misbelief that has driven my protagonist for so long—I was able to refocus the scenes and drive the story in a whole new way.

I am a long way from finished, and I will undoubtedly revisit these scenes again. This process is time-consuming for me, and sort of hurts my brain. But I feel it is reaping some rewards for me already, with more to come. I hope that this is like doing a large jigsaw puzzle—at first, and for a long time, it feels like a struggle to find pieces that fit. But as the number of pieces dwindle, they come together faster and faster, until in one burst of puzzling it all comes together.

I’m still at the beginning of the Vertias puzzle. If I get this right, though, and take my time going forward, the story should roll faster and faster on its own, and come together all at once as I near the end.

At least, that’s the dream.

What are you all working on? Are any of you at the beginning…again?

Routines and Revisions – CoronaLife Day 187

September 17, 2020 By Leave a Comment

This is my daughter’s second week of remote learning, and we are settling into a routine again. Unfortunately for me, every school-time routine means I don’t get enough sleep. No matter how hard I try, it is always later than I want it to be before I get to bed, and that alarm goes off awfully early in the morning.

However, a routine is helpful. My daughter is old enough now that she does not need constant help with her schoolwork. Unlike the spring remote learning, where we were all simply trying not to drown, her teacher is online live with her and the class for 4 straight hours (with small breaks in between lessons so the kids can move around, go to the bathroom, etc). Then a lunch break, then my daughter goes back up to her “art studio” to do her Specials work and anything she hasn’t finished in class.

Since she also makes her own breakfast and lunch, that leaves my day more open than it has been all summer. It’s still hard to concentrate, because my daughter pops down at every break to chat, but I can get some work done during the daylight hours (if I can stay awake!). As a result, I have been able to work some more on revising Veritas later in the afternoon and evenings.

As I said in a previous post, I have been using Lisa Cron’s Story Genius to revise, but I got hung up on what she calls the third rail—those competing desires that fuel the inner conflict of your protagonist. I wasn’t quite understanding it, or at least I could not clarify it enough to find one that felt “right” for Veritas, until I spoke to my friend Kathryn Craft, who is a wonderful developmental editor. She reframed the idea for me, coming at it from several other angles, and at last I “saw” what I needed.

I have spent the past week chipping away at the rest of Story Genius, laying the groundwork which will both support and propel the story. I feel like it’s finally coming together. This is a major revision of an already well-polished story, and what I am finding is that all the pieces I needed were already in the story—I just have to put them together in a different way. So, yay to my subconscious for knowing what needed to be in there, even while my conscious brain missed the point.

My plan from here on out, now that I think I grasp what I need to do, is to use Cron’s Story Cards concept to examine my existing scenes and align them with my new insights, and figure out if any more need to be added (or deleted). We shall see how it goes.

How are you settling into your fall routine? Is it much different from your summer one?

Moving Forward – CoronaLife Day 152

August 13, 2020 By Leave a Comment

So last week was a bad week. I felt so completely stuck in so many areas of my life, I was quite down about it. This week has been better because I had a plan and I actually followed it!

I have been avoiding returning to my YA sci-fi Veritas. I did a major rework of it last year, and managed to make it worse instead of better. So back to the drawing board, but I have been struggling with the lack of energy and motivation that comes with anxiety and prolonged stress.

I have sporadically reworked the opening chapters since January, ending up with about 14,500 words done. But then I ground to a halt, because I wasn’t quite sure where to go next. So I returned to the notes given to me by my trusty developmental editor Kathryn Craft, looking for clues as to how to move forward.

Kathryn did not let me down! She suggested I use Lisa Cron’s Story Genius book and Jennie Nash’s Inside Outline to zero in on motivation and connecting all the emotional/psychological beats that would make the story compelling. I was already familiar with Story Genius, having read it and used it for another story, and knew I would find it useful for this one. After I looked at the Inside Outline, I knew I couldn’t use it at this point. I am not an outliner, and just looking at it made the enthusiasm drain right out of me. But it will definitely be a tool I will use after I complete the new draft I am working on.

I didn’t want to set myself up for failure. So I decided to set a goal of doing one step in an exercise from Story Genius a day. If I wanted to do more, fine. But one was the goal. And I have been doing that. Walking through Story Genius, I am getting a handle on the inner conflict that drives my protagonist and the misbelief that must be resolved by the end of the story. I am getting more excited as I see thing more clearly. I finally feel like I am making progress.

Granted, it’s not actual writing yet. But I think once I get all this straight in my head, the manuscript words will come more easily. And even though I haven’t added words to my manuscript with these exercises, I have written 1,500 words of exercises. Which is something.

So I am finally moving forward with my writing, and it feels good.

What have you done lately to get yourself moving forward?

When a Story Refuses to Work

March 5, 2020 By 1 Comment

I’ve been working on my science fiction YA story Veritas for a long time. Maybe 5 years. Which isn’t as long as some people have worked on books, but it’s long for me. Finally, about a year ago I felt like I had gotten it to a good place, and sent it to my editor.

She and I both felt it was the best thing I had ever written, and after I fixed a few flaws she’d pointed out, I sent it around to agents.

No one wanted it.

I finally found one agent who loved the writing but was less enamored of the story as told. Gave me some feedback and said she would be happy to look at it if I revised it. I hemmed and hawed for a long while—I wasn’t a fan of some of the changes she wanted, and it took me a while to find a way forward. So I sliced and diced and added and pretty much rewrote the whole thing. It came out very different.

But was it actually any better?

I knew something wasn’t right, but I had worked on Veritas so long and hard that I had lost objectivity. So I sent it back to my editor, hoping the edits needed would become clear and not be too onerous.

The result was not good.

My feeling that something wasn’t right was correct. In fact, most of the story wasn’t correct. And before you think I am just accepting the editor’s notes at face value, I agree with what she’s saying. I’d just been too close to see it—but I knew it somewhere inside. I’d done a lot of work and gone backward. I had been left with a disaster wrapped in a catastrophe.

So now what? I think I finally figured out why I am struggling so much with the story. My protagonist’s goals aren’t clear enough. So I need to think about that. But I also need to think about whether I want to invest more time and emotion into this story.

If I do go forward (and I likely will, because I am nothing if not stubborn), I may go back to my original manuscript and start over from there with the new perspectives of the agent and this misfired rewrite. Just because version one was the best thing I had written to date doesn’t mean it couldn’t be improved. I’m not vain enough to think anything I write is perfect.

I will likely put Veritas aside for a bit, though. Let my subconscious chew on everything. I have a first draft of a manuscript I want to work on, so will probably jump to that and get that moving.

Have you ever had a story that was SO CLOSE but you just couldn’t get right? How did you overcome that?

Sick Days February 2020

February 13, 2020 By Leave a Comment

It’s funny how much we rely on routines to define time. Here it is Wednesday, and I feel like it’s the weekend. Why? Because my daughter is home sick from school for the third day in a row. She’s home, so my brain tells me it is still the weekend.

It’s hard to get work done when she’s home. Not so much because I am nursing her a lot—she’s old enough that she can take pretty good care of herself. But she needs little things, like water and food and sometimes just a cuddle because she feels awful. Things that individually do not take a long time, but add up. And the constant interruptions splinter the work flow and make it harder to complete a task efficiently.

I did still get some things done this week. This blog post, for one. And the weekly one I do over on The Author Chronicles. I also finished my last go-through of my YA sci-fi manuscript Veritas and sent it over to my editor. I went to a cyber-bullying presentation one evening at the school. I went food shopping. And I somehow managed to clean out the hall closet.

Still, it was hard with my daughter laying on the couch—especially when she was napping. I don’t know what it is, but when someone else is sleeping, I want to conk out. Maybe it’s a throwback to the old advice, “Sleep when the baby sleeps.” She’s not a baby anymore, but she still exhausts me.

Of course, I am tired, too. She had rough nights the past two nights, which means so did I. Helping her get changed 3 times in one night because she fever was breaking and she would wake up drenched in sweat. Cuddling with her at 4:30 in the morning because she was too congested to sleep. She is sleeping as I write this, and I hope she sleeps all night.

I hope I do, too—so I am heading up to try.

How about you? Do you get completely lost when your routines are messed up?

The Goose’s Quill Top 10 Posts of 2019

December 26, 2019 By Leave a Comment

I always like to see what my readers responded to in the past year. I found a mixed bag this year, from writing-related posts, to personal celebrations, to the on-going drama of my daughter’s fish tank. In case you missed any, here are the 10 most popular posts of 2019:

10. A Successful, Grateful Book Launch for The Witch of Zal

9. A Muddy Revision Slog

8. Three Benefits of Reading to Older Children

7. Revision Difficulty? Maybe It’s Your Theme

6. The Fish Saga Continues: RIP Gem

5. Celebrating 50 Years!

4. Considering a Social Media Break

3. On Being a Low-Energy Person in a High-Energy World

2. Book Fair Magic: Casting a Reading Spell

And my number one post of 2019:

1. Speak Up: Democracy is Not a Spectator Sport

I hope you all enjoyed this look back at 2019! May your holiday season be happy and safe, and I will see you all back here in 2020!

Celebrating Your Milestones

August 15, 2019 By Leave a Comment

Writing a novel is a slog. It’s a marathon. It takes a great deal of perseverance and guts. It can feel like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without looking at the picture.

Because it’s such an arduous process, it’s a smart move to celebrate different milestones along the way. What you celebrate and how you celebrate, will be unique to you, and that’s fine, because it’s about motivating you to get to The End.

So, I finished Veritas a while ago. And I sent it around to agents. And got one who was interested, but wanted some edits done. After some soul searching, a lot of ice cream, and a chat with my friend Kathryn Craft, I saw a way forward with the edits that I could get behind.

My first step was reworking the main character’s POV. I chipped away at it and finally finished. But I still had 2 POVs to go, and I seemed unable to find the time I needed to dive into them.

The stars aligned this month. My daughter went to sleepaway camp and I was able to take off from my usual blogging duties thanks to fellow Author Chronicler J. Thomas Ross. So I threw myself into my work.

And I did it! All three POVs are finished. The breakdown went like this:
Jinx: original 30,200 words, new 38,700
Ace: original 39,900, new 30,400
Kit: original 9,700, new 4,100

It also dropped the total words from original 79,900 to now 73,300. That seems a touch short for YA scifi, but it’s very probable I will be adding things in as I go through the next few passes, so hopefully I will be closer to the golden 80,000 number by the time I am finished

As I mentioned above, I’m not finished with the rewrite. I need to go through it at least two more times for continuity and tone and see if I need to add in anything else to make the new version smooth.

While there is still more to do, I feel like the heavy lifting is done. So I am celebrating!

What are you celebrating today?

Revision Difficulty? Maybe it’s your theme

April 11, 2019 By Leave a Comment

I’ve been trying to revise Vertias for a long while now. I’m struggling with it, which is unusual for me. I normally love revision. So what’s the problem this time?

My first thought is perhaps I subconsciously don’t want to make the suggested revisions. This idea has merit, since none of us like to hear that our work is not quite up to par. However, I can see the value of most of the suggestions, and the changes I have already made have strengthened the story.

That should have been enough to get me excited, but it hasn’t. I still find myself procrastinating. Avoiding. Making excuses.

Truthfully, I’ve found it hard to get excited about anything writing related for a while. The burnout is real, and could also be why I’m struggling. But I don’t think it is—or at least isn’t the whole answer. Because when I get past the procrastination and into the work, it feels good.

Then I read K.M. Weiland’s post about plot and theme. And I got to thinking that perhaps in the almost 2 years since I first finished it, the theme had shifted. Now the plot and theme might not be working together seamlessly, and that’s why the revision is hard.

A lot has happened since I first wrote Veritas. Trump became president. My husband was away for nearly 10 months. The world has changed. I have changed. I am not who I was when I wrote that book…and maybe now I’m trying to say something different.

Every story has multiple themes, as evidenced by how many different ways readers interpret the same story’s meaning. The theme that I am working with now was in the original, but was a sub theme. Now it wants to take center stage.

If I let it, the revisions will be deeper and wider than expected. They will be more difficult. But maybe they will also finally be exciting again—a challenge to be conquered rather than a chore to be avoided.

Have you ever had a theme change in mid-stream? Or a life change that makes you see your book in a whole new way?

WP-Backgrounds Lite by InoPlugs Web Design and Juwelier Schönmann 1010 Wien