Argh. Ahoy. I finished the revisions on Strigara to make it a first draft instead of a rough draft. I’m going to give myself a day, then go back to Weasel Boy. And, not so incidentally, the last-batch revisions on Redemption Alley I’m faced with.
I would much rather have a glut of work than be knocking about with nothing to do. But when I finish this sort of rough-draft revision, my brain feels like it’s been scrubbed out and wrung dry. I have to lay on the floor a bit and stare at the ceiling, drooling, until the sponge soaks up enough water to fill out its accustomed outlines again.
You know, when I started this writing thing, I had no idea about revisions. It’s just as well, or I might have done something desperately stupid just to avoid it. It’s not that I don’t like revisions, it’s just that…Jeez. On an 80K book, you will probably write five times that in revisions, between tweaks, false starts, other bridging, fixing structural issues, emailing your editor–you get the idea. Argh.
All of which leads me to: I’m within spitting distance of 70K for the YA on my pass between rough draft and first draft. (Definitions: the rough draft is the very first corpus of the book, the draft NOBODY SEES because it is messy and unfinished. Prettify and fix it up after a short break and you have a First Draft, which will be savaged by your beta and editors. *headdeak*)
The book will end up between 70-80 (closer to 80) and the only bad thing about this part of the process is obsessively reworking pretty much every freaking sentence. Which (can’t you tell?) I’m kind of avoiding for about ten minutes while I write this.
No, I will not write space opera just yet. Quit asking. I know you’ve got plans for me, but the stuff that’s under deadline is the stuff we have to do first.
Jesus. Quit crying. STOP IT. Don’t look at me like that.
Okay. All right. Fine. ONE HOUR of space opera a night. That’s my final say on it.
Don’t hug me, Muse. I’m going to work your a$$ off for this.
Does it make me unfaithful if I usually work on two books at once?
And the next random thing: Indian cricket in cheerleader cover-up. I understand conservatism–really I do–but why is it always directed against women’s clothing/behavior? All these societies who systematically, economically and otherwise, repress one-half their population–and then make that half something that needs to be mutilated or repressed even further to guard the culture’s “virtue”.
That being said, the idea of cheerleaders at a cricket match kind of makes me put my head to the side with an RCA dog “What? Huh?” look. Do the cheerleaders take tea with the teams or the fans?
And because my brain is wired weird, I went straight from Indian cricket to Bollywood this morning.
I took some bellydance a while back, and I’m here to tell you a lot of those moves I’m seeing are HARD. (I know it’s not belly or Eastern or even Egyptian-style dance, but it looks similar to me and makes the same muscles hurt when I try to block it out.) DAMN. That’s some serious dedication and effort right there.
If you haven’t guessed, I love me some Bollywood. (God bless Youtube, where I can get a quick fix without having to go looking for an Indian grocery, where I can buy ghee and random DVDs that might or might not work in my player.) My favorite, though is a Shahrukh Khan flick titled Asoka, a very highly fictionalized account of an emperor who converted to Buddhism. Here’s a little bit of goodness from that film–incidentally, this is one of the Prince’s favorites. He loves dancing around the room to this, and will beg me to rewind it all afternoon so he can hear it again. (The guys on stilts are a particular favorite.)
Now is the time for me to mention I think Shahrukh Khan is totally hawt, right? Anyway, love me some Bollywood and I especially dig sharing. Enjoy this last one, also from Asoka, it’s got subtitles.
Catchy, ennit?
Now it’s back to revising. I’m halfway through Strigara now, and should have a workable first draft (not the rough draft) by the end of the week if I take it easy, less if I push it.
I did give the talk on writing a series–it turned into more than I thought it would, and I think I totally blew it by getting off-topic. But the audience was asking questions, so I chose to go in the direction prompted by their questions rather than stick like glue to the subject. I’m pretty sure it was a total bomb.
*sigh*
Anyway, off I go. The house is quiet and I’ll get an hour of work in before everyone wakes up. Sounds good. Happy Monday, all.
I think my body’s fighting off another bug. You know that flu feeling you get when you’re just coming down with something? Not sick enough to take to your bed, or even sick enough to take a decongestant. Just blargh, run-down, body aching, head caught in a vise not squeezing very hard but still there and stuffed with cotton to boot.
Yeah. Like that.
My Friday post is up at Fangs, Fur, Fey; it’s titled That’s Great. Now, Do It Again. It is a reprint of a post I did last June. Sorry about that, but the subject has come back up again and I think it’s useful. Above all, I didn’t want to retype the damn thing.
You’ve been continuously mugged and beaten and robbed blind for the past seven years straight, and as you lay there on the cold, hard economic ground, bleeding and gasping and wondering what the hell happened to your vacation time and your health care plan and your mortgage payment, your attackers scoff and leer and toss a couple of bloodstained nickels on your pulverized face and mutter, here sucker, have some bus fare, and then they cackle and stomp away with all your loot and dignity and hope, back to the White House from whence they came.
What, too harsh? Not really. It’s a lovely feeling, made even more sweetly ironic by the fact that Congress will likely soon shove through another $108 billion in war funds like a giant gallstone through our collective fiscal urethra. Right there, that’s about 500 bucks for each and every adult human in America, baristas and Baptists and NASCAR fans alike.
Do you see? Your “economic stimulus” check is meaningless, an empty gesture, a trifling crumb of recompense after robbing you blind via insane gas prices, infrastructure meltdowns, massive failed wars that aren’t really wars. Thanks for the bogus check, Dubya, now where can I buy a sliver of our missing national dignity? (Mark Morford)
Yeah. I really can’t add much more to that. Except that later on in the article, he links to a study that shows meditation can strengthen empathy. Make you kinder.
Boy, do I ever need that today. I’m feeling like Nix, our third cat–the one who looks like a ferret and is jumpy as a…erm, big jumpy thing. (I almost said coke fiend, but decided that would be Too Much. Oops…) Anyway, I feel like every inch of my skin is too aching and sensitive today, like I’m skittering and jumping from one shadow to the next, trying to find one big enough to hide me from.
Anyway–on the reading front, I read Scott Westerfeld’s Pretties and Specials yesterday too. The series was great. A little deus ex machina-y (what the Selkie and I call magic dingus-y) at the end of Specials, but no complaints. It was great, well-structured, and nicely done. Bravo. Usually when I blaze through a book or two that fast I’m not looking under the hood and tinkering with the engine, which means I’m not being pulled out of the story. I did find some of the luck stuff–like the main character just happening to land inside an anthropological experiment–a bit heavy-handed, but what are you going to do? It’s YA, and short YA at that. All in all, it was a fantastic little series, and just what I needed.
Last but not least, my Mother’s Day present arrived. I’ve taken to buying my own and enthusing over them so nobody has to buy me soap on a rope or a tie or anything, you know. Everyone’s happier that way. This year the kids got me a Garbo box set. I’ve always wanted Queen Christina on DVD. Now I can satisfy my longing for sultry Swedes who just want to be aloooooooone. What an awesome gift.
Heh. Not too many complaints, despite the post title. Oh well, it’s nice to be pleasantly surprised. Also: I scored this at Powell’s last time I went. What a great title, eh? I’m hoping it will live up to it. Even if it doesn’t, the premise is awesome and should provide me with grist for the mental mill.
But first, work today. And a nap. Definitely feeling like a nap.
I almost forgot: Saturday (tomorrow) I will be at Cover to Cover Books from 5-7PM for the monthly Writer’s Mixer. I’ll be presenting on the topic of continuity and character development in a multiple-book series. In case you want to, you know, come by and beat me up or anything.
Since I’m deep into Weasel Boy and still on that same flat diet (just slide a pizza under the door, thanks, I’ll stagger around to eating it when I’m about to starve and go right back to the work) I’m just going to bullet a few things out for weekend digestion and head back to the salt mines. (Mixed metaphors, anyone?)
* On May 3, I’m going to be the featured speaker at the monthly Writer’s Mixer at Cover to Cover Books. I’ll be talking about how to keep character consistency and continuity over a multiple-book series. I’ll have a whiteboard, so I’ll be at least halfway coherent, and there will be snacks.
The best thing will probably be the snacks, given my shyness. But I’m going to give it the old college try.
They have a potent aura of trustworthiness, fairness, decency. They are f—ing generals, for chrissakes, and hence we like to think of them as straight-talking, no-BS working men whose word is solid and whose authority unquestionable and therefore no wimp-assed monkey-faced president or scabrous Defense secretary could make them say something they didn’t actually believe.
Wrong. Oh, how horribly wrong.
So I ask again, did it work? Was America duped? Well, yes and no. There’s little doubt that this insidious, sustained PR attack — and make no mistake, it was/is an attack on the American people; such calculated “psychological operations” aimed at U.S. citizens are actually very illegal, though it’s enormously difficult to prove so in court — swayed millions of Americans, gave fuel to the preemptive attack argument, inflamed (and still inflames) the warmongering right, scammed the media, fanned the pro-war fires for years before the public recoil finally kicked in.
But oh, kick in it did. This is the fascinating thing. Even all those high-ranking military experts lying like well-decorated dogs in one of the most impressive, appalling PR campaigns in American history could not keep Bush from collapsing, could not prevent Americans from learning the real facts of the failed war and toxic presidency — eventually. (Mark Morford
* I have given up on reviewing Cassie Edwards’s Savage Wrongs. I offered to take one for the Bitchery and review it, but I just…I can’t. I’m sorry, I’ve tried several times. I just Cannot. Do. It.
So, if you live in the continental US and would like to give it a go, email me at lili at lilithsaintcrow dot com, first come first served, and you can have the damn thing. I just can’t. I’m sorry. *hangs head*
* Can I just say that Caitlin and Angela are AWESOME PEOPLE?
* A quick note: by the end of the day, between the punishing wordcount and the homeschooling and the getting the kids fed and into bed, I just want to drool as I play World of Warcraft. Dude, a human warlock in Teldrassil is ridiculously overpowered (even more so in Auberdine) and that plus-five-percent rep gain? AWESOME! Although, having a mace specialization as a race and not being able to train for maces because of being a warlock? BOGUS. I just…I guess I just like maces, especially with the regen stuff usually on them interacting with Demon Skin etc.
I am now officially, if I never was before, a geek. (Yeah. Like I wasn’t before I realized I was talking with a kid half my age about a video game and acquitting myself rawther well. Gah.)
* This morning the Teen’s Ipod-alarm woke him up with Billy Joel’s My Life. He’s taken it as a sort of anthem lately. And he tells me my music is “cool.”
I have hooked someone twenty years younger than me on Billy Joel.
I feel old now. Or maybe “mature”. Yeah. That’s the way to put it.
No, really. It is. And I’m not the only one who finds this news utterly delightful. I mean, come on. Of course the Earth is singing as she twirls through space, like a four-year-old in the backyard with a Goodwill prom dress and a magic wand. Twirling in circles, and singing that tuneless sort of song kids half-hum when they’re having a helluva good time, completely absorbed in what they’re doing.
As the Selkie might say, “That kid has magic.” By which she means, a lucky child whose parents understand that sometimes kids just need to goof off and hum.
But maybe the Earth is humming like an adult in the kitchen, fully absorbed in the making of something. Or at the laptop, or just messing around with a piano. Have you ever done that? Not played the piano, mind you, but just listened to the sounds it makes when you plonk it, humming while you do so?
I think Gaia wants us to sing back.
That was always one of my favorite Sesame Street songs. I don’t know about the “sing just about the happy stuff”, but the “don’t worry if it’s not good enough for anyone to hear”?
Oh, yeah, I believe in that. I really think that’s part of the point of writing. Or creating anything. (You knew this would come around to writing, didn’t you?)
One of the best things that ever happened to me was reading The Artist’s Way–the part where Julia Cameron says to give yourself permission to create bad art. To me, that was incredibly freeing. Permission to write the worst dreck in the world, as long as I wrote and kept writing. As long as I was happy, and doing what I was made to do.
Heady stuff. Because before there is discipline and doing this professionally, there was just me trying to get up the courage to write without feeling like I was a failure every time I set pen to paper. Trying not to remember everyone who ever told me I was worthless and that I couldn’t create anything worth looking at. Even, yes, my mother’s voice saying, “You’re so smart, why didn’t you do this right the first time around?”
I had a writing class once were I started explaining this. “If you need permission,” I said, “you’ve got it. You’ve got a working writer’s permission to write however badly you want. It’s not important for the first million words. That’s why they call it practice–”
I turned back to the room and two women were crying. Turns out they had really just needed to hear some variant of it’s okay to try this, to be bad at this. So much of our culture is bound up in the idea of teachers or authority figures giving us “permission”.
We ended up writing out certificates that stated so-and-so was a Writer, goddammit (the “goddammit” was my personal hiccup, uttered mentally every time), and had the right to write. It was silly, right? Nobody should need anyone’s signature to attempt to write, or to create. (I’m not saying everyone needs someone’s permission or even my permission, so don’t get all het up about that red herring.)
What I’m saying is, if you need to hear from someone that it’s okay to do this, and it’s okay to screw up and make mistakes while doing this, consider it said. Consider it heard. For what it’s worth, I am telling you this: you have permission to write the worst dreck in the world, sing off-key, dance without being Baryshnikov, knit without worrying about dropped stitches. The world is messy and wonderful, and how do we ever expect to learn how to write better, dance better, sing better, knit better without practice? And practice means making mistakes. It means f!cking up and going back and figuring it out and messing around with the joy of making something. That’s the important part. The finished work is important too, of course it is–but don’t let the fact that you’re going to make mistakes stop you from trying. Please don’t do that. Make all the mistakes you need to.
Each mistake is a chance for joy. Each dropped stitch could be a fork in the road, one that can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Each clumsy word will strengthen you, each comma you go back and remove will cheer you, each time you stumble while dancing you can consider it an invitation to a new movement, maybe one that’s never been done before.
Earth has been singing for a billion years or so. You think she didn’t have a few dropped notes? And still, look at what she made.
Weasel Boy is going well. 4k yesterday, and a lot of it usable. There will be dead weight in the rough draft, sure, but I want it well underway by the time I go back to the YA.
This is in many respects my favorite part of working, the creative burst that precedes a lot of revision. I had been having dark, dismal thoughts that the creative burst was in my past, that I couldn’t get up that head of steam anymore, etc., etc., shake that Internal Censor until s/he howls. But I’ve discovered that wasn’t the case. I was just resting, the ground kind of fallow and my usual speed slowed to a crawl. The creative life is somewhat of a bicycle ride, because one has to balance carefully and watch for danger and look at the bloody scenery. When one has to juggle on top of riding the cycle, speed necessarily slows–and this ain’t no Tour de France, it’s okay to sniff some roses and kiss some pretty boys along the way.
Or girls. Or tentacled monsters, if one prefers Cthulu.
On the book front, I’ve finished Wages of Destruction. It was a fun read, very dense, and I don’t understand half of what I should about statistics etc. but the author made it reasonably clear in context. I haven’t read any other studies of the German economy during the interwar and WWII period, so I’ll have to take the cover blurbs’ word that this is a revolutionary study. It did inform several other books I’ve read in odd ways–like Alan Clark’s Barbarossa and Beevor’s great study of Stalingrad. Now I’m hoping Tooze looks at the Russian economy in the same period. I’d read that book.
So…what I’m reading now: The Guns of August, Ivan’s War (thanks to all the Readers who suggested those) and, to leaven everything, The Beasts of Tarzan. I like Burroughs, actually. It’s pulp, but it’s reasonably good pulp and I know what I’m getting with every mighty-thewed chapter. Srsly, I haven’t read this many thews since the Iliad.
I have this regrettable fondness for Tarzan, mostly because of Travis Fimmel. I wish the WB would release that series on DVD. Hey. Quit laughing. I loved that show. It was awesome.
I am tossing around the idea of a historical Watcher series. It would mean a lot of research, but it would probably be fun. Of course, since I’m booked for the next couple of years it’s going to take a while and might never come to fruition…but it’s nice to think about these things, you know.
Happy Tuesday, all. And now, back to the salt mines–and I’m cooking Fifteen-Bean Soup and rye bread today. Let’s hope it works out as well as some of the writing is…
I’m at 62K with the YA, two more scenes and I’ll have a rough-rough draft. Then I’m going to stick that in a drawer and work on the Weasel Boy story for a while. (Don’t ask. Really. Just don’t.) After a week or two I’ll drag the YA out again, kicking and screaming, and give it a polish. Then the betas will get it, then the editor.
I used to think the hard part was finishing a rough draft. It is tremenjously exhausting, mostly because when you get a few scenes from the end it becomes The Book That Will Not Die. Then there’s the exhaustion of revisions, when it becomes The Book That Will Not Die NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES YOU STABBITY STABBITY IT!!! Both are bone-crunching work.
But hey, I would rather have those problems than a host of others I could name. I do really love this job. *beams* If only because I have writing buddies like the Selkie who send me things like this.
Warning: the other stuff Amateur Transplants does is SO NOT SAFE FOR WORK, and if you’re easily offended you’d better not listen to other stuff. You’ve been warned.
Anyway, off I go to finish This Damn Book. It will die today, dammit, even if I have to chain myself to the chair. Once I finish stabbing it I’ll close the laptop and go for a walk.
Sounds like a plan, Stan. Have a great weekend, one and all…
Everyone here knows I’m a big Mark Morford fan (despite his run-on sentences and his sometimes simplistic shot at a cheap laugh.) Should it come as any surprise that I’m advocating a RUN DON’T WALK over to read his Free Tibet? Hell, free America!?
Thanks to Dubya’s disastrous economics, we now have the largest deficit in history, coupled to the widest gap ever between ultra-rich and the poor, with the largest swath of the middle-class no longer really in the middle and now more like hovering just above oh my God how will we make the mortgage payment this month I hope nothing goes wrong with the Civic and please please please no one get sick.
Wait, check that: Bush’s economics haven’t failed at all. They’ve worked spectacularly well, and exactly as designed: The rich got richer and, well, f— everyone else. (Mark Morford)
Note: Mark’s not saying we shouldn’t care about Tibet, so if you’re going to comment with that red herring, don’t bother. You’ve been warned.
And don’t you just love how the Olympic torch relay is now something heavily guarded that the public has to be barred from? It’s looking more and more like the torch run is a magical ritual designed to accentuate, celebrate, and metaphysically mark the ownership of the earth by a few corporations, and the public–that is, you and I–aren’t welcome.
And the Olympics used to be such a proud thing; they used to Mean Something. Now it’s advertising and jackboots.
In other news, the YA is galloping for the finish line. Yesterday was rough–a bit of polish on the 3k and a half choked up the night before at roughly 12-4AM. Sometimes the Muse won’t let me lay down and rest. That’s something writing every day does–it gives the Muse the idea that you take this thing seriously, that you can always be found at the laptop at a particular time, and encourages her to take the bubbling, boiling story, slap a coat of paint on it, and force it through the filter masquerading as a poor writer’s head in huge chunks. The trouble is, sometimes she chooses to do this in the middle of the night as well as during regular business hours. I can only think she’s working in a different time zone. Or she’s a sadist.
Both are equally likely.
I do a lot of tongue-in-cheek about “the Muse”, mostly because I agree with Stephen King. I don’t really think any writer knows exactly where stories come from. (As King said in IT, My friend, you may as well ask me “Who cut the cheese?” and be done with it.) They come when they come, and they grow like Topsy, and I might as well call it the Muse. Anthropomorphizing makes it easier to deal with the fact that I often feel like my creative output isn’t strictly mine, that it just comes through me.
Today comes another big push to get the story out. It’s in rough chunks, but a long-cherished maxim of mine is: get the story out first, worry about the pretty sparkles and polish afterward. Lots of new writers get so caught up in polishing an unfinished manuscript (usually their first) that it becomes a timesuck in and of itself, and that should be avoided like the plague, preciousssss. Get the damn thing done first. Then worry about surgery to make it prettier. You’ve got to have a whole corpse to work on, so to speak.
Heh. Gruesome.
Last but not least, I was feeling mighty low yesterday until I dosed myself with Kipling. Kim is just such a wonderful book, I’ve been reading it in slow fits and starts before going to sleep, but yesterday I got it out and swallowed the last three chapters, laughing out loud, crying sometimes, and very happy.
Couple of neat things: a Pub Rants post about why you need to pitch a complete manuscript and a Romancing the Blog bit about antiheroes. I do very much view Batman as an antihero, because he’s in it for revenge. Plus, he’s a vigilante–kind of a cheap and easy way to build an antihero, but it works if you don’t make him too romantic-squishy.
Now I’m thinking about heroes in antihero clothing. Wow. Possibilities.
In other news, I saw the end of the YA last night. Must be the spring rain, as the Selkie says. Damn Muse. She thinks if I have time to comment on Internet stuff that she’s obviously not working me hard enough.
Speaking of which, there’s still reverb going on about my Friday post at Fangs, Fur & Fey. Some people are still not reading 90% of the post–they’re just skimming until they get to one particular thing and then hanging all sorts of things on it. *sigh* Ah, teh interwebs.
Go ahead and get out the pitchforks. Because I don’t believe that just anyone who has an idea for a book that they’re going to write someday when they have time is a “writer”. There are people who like to call themselves writers for one reason or another, and I was posting about what separates them from the people I call writers–the ones who do the goddamn work. If you don’t agree, fine. The world is wide enough for both of us to call parts of it what we will. Who cares about the opinion of a barely-midlist hack anyway?
It is an unpopular thing, to state that one must have hard work and discipline to be a writer. And a lot of people are overlooking the fact that I said over and over again in the comment thread (because it was off the point of the post) that once you have built up your discipline you can “take a day off” and your busy little brain will continue to work on the story. That daily discipline will carry you and it DOES carry several professional writers, including a few who brought that up in the comments.
But that discipline absolutely needs to be reinforced and cared for just like muscle tone. Move it or lose it. It is fragile, and it is easy for it to succumb to timesuck.
In all the hubbub, I did not see anyone advocating another specific route that would do what I said writing every day does, to wit:
* You give yourself the clearest possible signal that this work is not going to go away, and that you are committed to it.
* You bolster the habit of just sitting down and putting your hands to the effing keyboard.
* You give yourself the opportunity to practice hard enough and long enough to start producing readable product.
* You give your writing a priority to match other priorities in your life.
So some people took issue and umbrage…but they didn’t bother to offer an alternative that would satisfy those things. If you have a Sooper-Sekrit System that will give you those benefits without writing every day, good for you.
Go do it. Don’t wait around to tell me how wrong I am, just go do it. You’ve got the jump on me, sweetheart. Use it.
There is no magic flexible bullet that will grant you writing success. If I told you there was, I’d be lying. But you know, it’s a lot easier to be successful the more professional and prepared you are, and that discipline is part of preparedness and professionalism. I would be irresponsible and untruthful if I didn’t say it.
You can hit the ball out of the park on a fluke, yes. But it’s a lot, lot easier if you’ve trained for it and showed up at the bloody park when the game’s on.
A lot of people like to pretend “writing” is some sort of super-classified Arte you have to Suffer and have the Magic Ingredients for, which are jealously guarded secrets only available to NYT Bestsellers. It does serve a lot of ego to act like this stuff is FM (F!cking Magic, for those of you not married to my mechanical-engineer husband. *grin*) Saying, plainly and clearly, what I believe about professionally writing strikes to the heart of that dynamic–I’m attempting to deobfuscate, with my Friday posts.
Writing, like any creative endeavor, ain’t simple and it ain’t easy, and there is no magic key–but hard work and persistence can prepare you for whatever magic there is to happen.
I don’t have a lot of use for most of the stuff Natalie Goldberg said (there was a lot of complicating the simple in there) but one thing she said did particularly stood out, for me. It was about sitting at her typewriter and looking out the window, and feeling a rush of Joy and Love For All Things. When she told her teacher this, thinking she had hit some sort of enlightenment, he simply said, “Quit stalling. Get back to work.” (I’m paraphrasing, she wrote it better.)
And on that note, dear Readers, I’m going back to work.
