FINNtastic

So far, the first draft is shaping up to be something fun and unexpected.  I got Holly a job (hooray!) and I jumped into one male prospects’s head and got to see Holly through his eyes.  I also got to mix in a gold-digging mother, and an ex-boyfriend who leaves the door to their past relationship wide open.

Oh, and did I mention the wedding?  There’s going to be a wedding!

Not Holly’s, relax.  That would mean the novel was over, and it’s far from that, to be sure.

In other news, research is starting to kick into gear.  I’ve scheduled some time to observe some pros at work, and I’m reaching out to see if I can get a few other people to talk to me about their experiences.  Hopefully, this will translate into a cool little scene between my heroine and her potential men!  But keep your fingers crossed!

I’ve also dediced that I should be in NaNoWriMo mode for April and May.  Impossible, say you?  Perhaps.  My schedule has been altered somewhat, having reclaimed blogging duties over at Girl With a Puck.  You’d think blogging about something you love (hockey, the Ducks) would be a cinch, right?  No.  While it’s a joy to do, it’s also a lot of work.  I’m planning on revamping the site for next season (provided I can hang on and actually blog through next season), and my way of doing things involves reading all the MSM stuff out there, analyzing the boxscore/stat sheets, and coming up with something that wasn’t said or trying to present it in a way that it hadn’t already been tried.  The whole process has become quite foreign to me now that I’ve taken a year-long absence from the blogosphere, and it feels a lot like going back to the gym for the first time after having let yourself go for a while.  Flexing those blogging muscles means there’s some kind of price to pay (a bit of soreness, and a time of adjustment) to get back into blogging-shape.

Still, I hope to be able to juggle everything and still get my first completed draft done by July 1st.  That is my goal, and I am sticking to it!

If I’m to complete EVA’s Book in a Year challenge, I better!

It’s been about one week since my pledge to write a page per day was made.  Guess what?  Epic fail.  I wrote nearly 2,000 words at a local cafe with my friend Alison over the weekend, and that proved to be as fruitful as I could get over the weekend.  Of course, it’s been another busy weekend, and a nearly-as-busy week!  But hopefully, I’ll be able to get some work done later on this week when I have an entire day off from work!

Oh, and by the by, I’ve written a draft of chapter one.  Tomorrow, I’ll loosely edit, then proceed to chapter two.

That is how I plan to get through this.  Cross your fingers!

–C.

Didn’t I tell you that I’m not very good at blogging consistently?  I didn’t?  Oh.  Well, now you know.

Actually, I’ve never been a consistent blogger, diarist, or any such thing.  It’s translated into my writing.  I’ve never been a consistent writer.  You know those people that can sit down and pound out whole chunks of scenes, entire chapters, or whatever works for them for a solid couple of hours every single night?

Yeah, I’m not one of those.

I’m a deadline girl.  Give me a deadline, I’ll give you progress!  No deadline?  No work done.  Inconsistent writing then leads to inconsistent characterizations and mixed up details because I completely forgot that on page 5, I gave someone green eyes, not the brown eyes they suddenly have on page 87.  Hm.  Problem.

The unspecified “they” say that you should make it a habit, a point, a goal to write every day.  Even one page at a time.  In fact, I believe international best-seller Liza Palmer promotes this method as well.  The incomparable Nora Roberts also has a daily writing regimen according to her website:

Now, after 160 books and countless bestsellers, she writes eight hours a day — every day.

Wow.  Nora always puts me in a awe-struck stupor.  But that’s beside the point.

The point is: I must write.  Daily.  If I expect to be productive, I really ought to commit to writing every day.  Taking the advice of Ms. Palmer, I should probably just commit to writing a page a day.  Little by little, it will get done.  If I could survive the madness of NaNoWriMo, I should be able to do this!  And, like I did when I did NaNo, if I skip a day or two, I face the terrible punishment of having to “make up” the word count!

*Exhale*

Or, I can try what my writing friend Alison tried, and work on cranking out the Fast Draft — an insane goal of writing 20 pages a day for 14 days!

*Terror stricken*

Um… Or I can try the one page a day thing.  Yeah, that sounds more do-able.

Wish me well and tell me what YOUR writing goals are!

–C.

I’m beginning to equate writing this novel with giving birth - painful, but hopefully worth it in the end.  The storyline is growing more and more complex.  More characters are popping up and I find myself pointing at them, shouting, “ARE YOU NECESSARY!?”

The men are running circles in my head, my heroine is playing hide and seek with me, and her mother went from sweet and nosy to meddling!  In an effort to take a break from the not-as-loose-as-I-planned outlining I’ve been doing, I went ahead and tried to write the first chapter, just to get a feel on the characters.

I need a break from trying to interrogate the men: “Why did you come back?  Why are you here?  What is your role in this madness?  How are you going to get to the heroine?”

And my working title is bizarre.  I had no title to begin with, and I normally have some kind of title in mind.  This time around, all I came up with is “Holly to the rescue”.

Pretty soon, I think I’m going to be the one in need of rescuing.  Yay, plotting!

I did not follow through on my intent to interrogate my novel’s heroine using a character chart.  Instead, as a direct result of my increased dedication to read my RWA loop emails, I had my eyes opened to a new world of plotting!  I’ve said it before: I’m not a plotter; I’m a pantser.  This approach has clearly taken me on a windabout path to nowhere, as I sit here without a completed manuscript (and several incomplete ones in a dead file on my laptop).

But I’ve recently learned of different software programs that help organize one’s thoughts - some going so far as to storyboard your scenes for you!  Amazed, I began to research some of the ones mentioned, and looked into One Note, a Microsoft Office program that a few others seemed to have had luck with.  Since I write on a Mac, but work on a PC at my job, I was able to fiddle around with the One Note program to get an idea of what one could do with it.  Then, I went home and took a look at my Office for Mac software, and randomly clicked on the “Notebook” feature in my Project Gallery.  What do you know?  It looked like a notebook, and had tabs I could add to, and everything!

Still buoyed by my morning brainstorm with the group, I began organizing my thoughts and notes into different tabs - Outline/Synopsis (which, I’ve stated I’m terrible at doing), Ideas (for the little bits that strike me, or thoughts that come to me), Scenes (for those moments that simply pop into your head like a quick snapshot, even though you’re not quite at the point in the story), Research (to list all the things I’ve got to look into later on), and Characters (where I put all those pictures of the celebrities that have features similar to my characters!).

WOW!  Let me tell you, it became an incredibly productive day in my makeshift office (ahem, dining table).  For a girl that never outlines, I found that my outlining was less of an outline and more of a general, informal way to tell the whole story — except, without the details, without the scenes.  The few scenes that popped into my head while I was working my way through the outline went into the Scenes tab.  Then, when I discovered that I had questions about something I had just written, I found that I could write a subsection (like a bulletpoint) under the paragraph I’d just written — and I had the ability to hide/show that point.  I found this helpful because I’d be writing along in the outline, realize something, write a quick sub-bulletpoint as a note-to-self, and could hide that note so I don’t interrupt the flow of the outline itself!  It was quite a discovery!

Not to mention the fact that you could place tiny colored checkboxes next to each paragraph so it resembles a to-do list, along with exclamation points and arrows to indicate priority levels!  There was even a big green question mark, which I put next to ideas I was unsure of.

I thought I might lose the day to lounging about my place again, but thankfully no!  The creative juices started flowing, and with the jumpstart from this morning, it became difficult to stop.  But now my shoulders are aching, my back feels cramped, and my dog has been so neglected that she gave up trying to capture my attention, and instead zonked out early on my couch.

Hopefully, tomorrow will be just as productive — but with a little more time to play with Duchess.

This morning, I attended East Valley Authors‘ monthly meeting.  We broke into small groups and brainstormed together bits and pieces of our stories.  It was an enjoyable couple of hours that was followed up by a critique group.  Like other groups I’ve been part of, everyone came from different walks of life and held interests as varied as Urban Fantasy to Women’s Fiction.

Time and time again, someone would chip in their thoughts or a tip, and I’d scribble it down for future reference. It was a creative few hours that was interrupted by text messages from my cousin, informing me that my sweet little dog Duchess was misbehaving.  A lot.

Apparently, she peed on my bed. 

This, after she had been already let out for her morning potty break!  But you know, I realized that her behavior can be inspiration for a misbehaving canine in my own work!  Ideas were everywhere… even springing up from my text messages.  Of course, I came home and attempted to give her a “talking to” (as my parents might say), and I’m quite certain she didn’t get the gist of my wild, accusing pointing at the wet circle on my bed since she spent the whole of my weak lecture looking at me as if I’d lost my mind.  When I paused for a breath, she flopped over on the floor and exposed her belly as if to say, “Play with me!”

Then all was forgiven.  (sigh)  Sometimes, I’m simply too easy and my love is simply too big.

Now, she’s curled up on my couch as I type this and continue researching some of the angles that surfaced from this morning’s brainstorm session.  She’ll get her rest, and I’ll get some work done — I hope.

I spend a lot of time (sometimes too much time) reading more about the craft of writing than actually writing.  I’m always tempted to try the various techniques that other authors swear by.  Not every trick works for every author, and I’ve come to realize a few things about my own process.

1. I am NOT an outliner; I am a pantser.
2. Storyboarding on index cards seems tedious, despite the fact that it would probably be helpful.
3. I cannot write a scene or chapter out of order.  I have to start at the beginning, go through to the end, and attempt to curb the detours as much as possible.  The detours I do allow, I have to accept that I may need to sacrifice the scene later.

Today, I attempted to get to know my characters a little better.  I started to create a character chart, trying to get to nitty gritty of each character based on answering a series of questions.  I chose to use the detailed model provided by Charlotte Dillon, but there are a several other character charts available all over the internet.  In the process, I managed to only write down the basic info for my cast of six!  Still, I found the exercise helpful and I’ll look to continue the interview process with my characters over the weekend.

Yesterday, the trick I tried was searching through pictures of the Young & Beautiful in Hollywood.  I managed to find every character rather easily, except my heroine!  I figured her out today, and it turns out she’s a bit of a Hollywood blend.  I didn’t expect this exercise to be as inspiring as it was, but I was pleasantly surprised by it’s productiveness.

Maybe other tricks will come to my attention as I get closer to attempting to PLOT before I PANTS it!

You haven’t heard from me because I’m dying. Of a cold and a fever and the inability to draw breath in both nostrils simultaneously. I toss and turn all night. I may have kicked my dog in the process. I was only half-conscious in my illness-hell. Every sneeze threatens to send my head bobbling off.

Being sick unleashes the dramatist in me. Wish my immune system luck in fighting back. I will re-emerge into the world of the living (and writing) soon. I hope.

You’ve gotta start somewhere, right?  For me, that’s one half page.

I am quite proud of my half-pager.  I know, in time, the monster that is my MS will grow, lengthen, get ugly (uglier?), and give me a couple of gems to work with later.  But for now, I feel like I should just be happy that I’ve got that half page out.  After all, it means I’ve started!  I’m on my way!  Publication, I’m coming for you!  (Okay, in another year or two, maybe.  If I manage to crank ‘er out and get ‘er polished.)

And now, I’ve begun.  It feels really good, albeit a little rough. (This I say as I inspect the lock holding my Inner Editor in a cage where she is banished from my brain until I get this first draft out.)  Now, I’ve just got to keep it going.

I’ve spent most of this month plotting and very little time writing.  I feel quite anxious when I consider the actual writing bit of it.  Probably because I’m terribly worried that this attempt will end up like all my other attempts — as a casualty of my fickle tastes.  And I’ll once again face an unfinished MS sitting on my harddrive, taunting me with its very existence.

But I can’t bear to delete it.  One day, I might actually re-work it into something beautiful.

Yesterday, I was supposed to go home and write.  But my sorority sister Van called to ask what I was up to.  How easy it was to say, “Nothing much.  I’m headed over to Borders to hunt down Liza Palmer’s Conversations with the Fat Girl.  Want to come?”!  In two shakes, I was off to browse the shelves.  They didn’t have her novel in stock, so I walked away emptyhanded, though I attempted to pursuade Van into buying two Noras.  (She didn’t take the bait.)  Then, we had dinner at the home of my “second family” and I stayed to watch Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.

By the time I got home, of course I was too tired to actually write.  I was rather disappointed with myself as I climbed under the covers.  And, judging by the sulky behavior of my dog Duchess, she was disappointed in me too.

Tonight, despite a scheduled meeting at 8pm, I will write something.  Anything.

A sentence, for God’s sake!  I need to start somewhere or my novel will never get written.

And, I will stop making excuses to not write.  They really do get tiresome.