I think I wrote maybe a handful of words yesterday, hence the non-progress. The story is very slow to form, and I've been rather tired lately and having difficulty concentrating. I might try revising my Inca myth story rather than work on this story, for I still have no clue what it's about.

For those who don't normally follow the blog of the slushmaster, he's posted an entry on the process of fishing my story out of the slush (and it was rather unusual process for him this time from what I gather). It's had me thinking a bit about derivation, imitation, and influence as well as the idea of readers wanting the "familiar" or things similar to their favorite authors (when I worked at the bookstore, we had lists of "if you like this author, you'll probably like this one" to help out the customers.). What we read obviously influences us whether we're conscious of it or not, and hell, weren't the greats of the Canon influenced by the works that came before them? I mean, would there have been a Ulysses without The Odyssey? And how many authors pillage the Bible for material? Seeings how I'm always worried about originality in my work, I'm always wondering where the line is between inspiration and imitation. Any thoughts?

Finished up the rewrite of "The Hearts of Men" today and employed my new editing technique, and found it very useful for finding typos and making final changes, so I think I'll add that to my checklist of stuff to do prior to submittal. I'm a little too high-strung right now to work on anything so I think I'll treat myself to some Age of Empires 2 for the rest of the day.

And big congrats to aliettedb, who just sold a story to Realms of Fantasy!

I'm used to folks finding the fact that I write to be rather quaint; the only person non-writer person I know who really doesn't seem to feel this way is my mother, who will never miss an opportunity to brag to friends and relatives that I'm a writer. I had a rather interesting moment at my daughter's school today. She has the day off due to academic assessment, which is what we were there for (it was supposed to take 30 minutes but instead lasted an hour). I'd brought along the latest issue of Paradox, since I have one story left to read and I was hoping to get it read while waiting for her to do her assessment. Before she was to go in, we sat at a table in the hallway, waiting for her time to roll around, and one of her classmates came over and sat with us. I had my nose buried in my magazine. Dana was talking to her friend then suddenly she turned to me and asked, "Is that the magazine your story's in?"

"No. That was the last issue."

"Oh." But she then turned to her friend and said, "Guess what. My mom writes stories and they get put in magazines like that one."

And her friend looked at me all wide-eyed and he said, "That's so cool!" It's such a rare thing for anyone to look at a writer like he would his/her favorite basketball or football star or actor/actress. I'd never felt prouder of being a writer than at that moment.

As you're all aware, I've been bitching and moaning about the catalyst of my novel for weeks now, wondering whether or not I could actually get it in within the first 30 pages or not (the answer I came to was no), but I'd also starting to wonder what the heck my catalyst was. In the previous draft, it was quite obvious what it was, and that event took place about 120 pages into the manuscript. But since that draft, I've done a whole bunch of brainstorming on character motivations and made a decision of bringing a new character into play that was only talked about in the previous draft, and I gave him more hands-on involvement in the plot. And by doing so, I think I actually changed the catalyst to something else. The same things still happen, but there's a more sinister reason behind it this time around. But I'd been writing the new draft as if the catalyst hadn't changed (meaning that one character, despite knowing what was really going on, continued to act as if his motivations were the same as in the first draft when in fact he's supposed to be acting on someone else's behalf ,for a greater purpose that will become evident to the protag later in the book). And I think this was my big problem: I didn't adapt the narrative time-line to the new catalyst, which in fact means that I need to make chapter 2 chapter 1, and move chapter 1 to chapter 2, and watch my antagonist see his plans for seeing his son take the throne crushed by this new catalyst, and so spur him to more drastic measures. His disbelief in the catalyst just isn't sufficient this time around since there's no way now that he wouldn't believe it. Which means rewriting the first 2 chapters again and a bit of chapter 3, and in fact I think I can make the new catalyst happen within the first 30-35 pages. And it feels like a relief to have figured this out.

I converted my old draft of MSR to published-book format. I actually started out doing this little exercise for a good reason (I've been following the pitch lessons over at Pubrants and I've been trying to figure out exactly how many manuscript pages equates to 30-50 pages of a typical paperback, since the pitch lessons say that the story catalyst should happen within that range in a book, and I think mine might happen a little later than 50 pages). But now I'm just fascinated by how cool it looks. I converted what I have of my rewrite into it as well, to see where I stand page-wise (17 pages at the moment, though when comparing page to page, I think the format I have is closer to trade paperback size rather than mass market. My second draft: 408 pages, which is indeed steep for a TPB). Anyway, I wasted a good deal of time oogling at this today and also decided that it might actually be a good format for proofing my novel when I get it done, for just a casual perusal of the first 6 pages in this format uncovered quite a few typos that I undoubtedly would have missed by trying to read in manuscript format.

I did a tad bit of writing yesterday, certainly not enough to justify updating the word count, but I wrapped up chapter 1 and started on chapter 2. I'm also contemplating making my protag a year or two older, for I do think her voice isn't quite as young as it's supposed to be, and really there's no reason she can't be a year or two older (this would also allow me to trim more off the front end, since then she wouldn't have to go through the naming ceremony and such, and information about her own experience can come in when her brother sees the soothsayer about his adult name.). I'm not sure I'm going to work on it today; it's nice out and we're probably going to go for a walk rather than hang around the house.

Hope everyone's having a good weekend!

I have synopsis, though it's kind of cruddy right now and just sort of ends with a whimper (I'm really unsure how to write up what I envision the last chapter being like without reiterating stuff that's already been said, so I decided to not talk about it). I am quite pleased with some character renovations I made and now that I've given my protag things to accomplish along the way, she feels much more motivated and forceful about getting her way. Right now it's 7 1/2 pages, which is much improved over the original 15 pages, but I'd still like to get it down to 6 pages if I can (5 would be ideal, but I'm not going to push it yet). I shall go over it again tomorrow morning and see what tweaking I can do, see if I left anything out, then send it off to a couple of friends for their opinions on the plot changes before I get too far into the actual rewrite.

Off to bed now though. I feel very accomplished.

No work on the rewrite yesterday, but I did spend a couple hours brainstorming my villain and his motivations, and boy, I'm actually starting to see potential for redemption in him (well, not "all is forgiven" redemption, for he does far too many horrible things to be granted that, but I can definitely see him getting to the end and saying "enough if enough" and might even try to resist helping the big bad on who's behalf he's been doing a lot of these horrible things). I'll do a bit more today then maybe do some writing, or get back to reading my friend's novel (probably the latter, since I think it's coming due soon and I don't want to be scrambling to get it done).

So I spent some time this weekend working on brainstorming character motivations for all my novel's major players and seeing how I can intertwine it all. Today I messed around with plot synopsis, going from very basic, query-type ones (while not worrying about it being a query-type one, since that's the kiss of death to trying to create something coherent) up to a one-page one (if it's four lines over 1 page, does that still count as a 1-page synopsis?). Tomorrow's plan is to expand it into a 3-5 pager. I'm feeling close to be done with the brainstorming part of this process and will probably move into the rewriting segment soon, though I'll likely go through and mark the parts I want to keep from the previous draft and write up notes of what specifically I want to change about them and what new stuff I need to add. I know, I'm stalling on getting to the actual rewriting. I usually do; I initially find rewriting intimidating, but that goes away almost immediately once I actually start and then I thoroughly enjoy myself. Truthfully, rewriting is my favorite part of writing.

Right now though I'm watching playoff hockey while Jeff sleeps on the couch.

Yesterday's writing resulted in about 3 different versions of a tag-line for my novel, none of which are right yet, but I feel like I'm on the right track, just mostly a matter of rearranging things into a coherent sentence (it seems incredibly long too, about 70 words for a single sentence, which makes me wonder if I'm trying to cram too much into the sentence). I do have an article from SFWA to look at to help me, so I'm confident I can whip this into shape.

In other news, for the first time I've had a copy-editor fact-checking a story of mine prior to publication and I'm really glad the mag does this because in fact she found a few errors in my Nahuatl in the story, all of which thankfully appear to be transcription errors on my part. This of course makes me wonder how many other errors I've made in my other stories that were never caught because no one's ever taken the time to fact check it (and if I misspell a difficult word the first time I use it, I will misspell every time after because I refer back to that first spelling, not the reference book). I'm very pleased that GUD takes its fiction serious enough to make sure they're putting out a quality product, and while initially I felt sort of foolish for making such dumb mistakes, I feel its much better to catch them at this point in the process rather than having them pointed out by a reader after publication. This has also made me resolve to keep a research file on every story I write, so that I can fact-check myself later before sending out (use those history major skills like I would in college). Given that the story in question is a pretty old story, the first one I wrote in my One World series, I have practically no memory of which sources I pulled my information out of and so I had to go back and look in all my sources and figure things out. I had the same problem when I was going back through the recent rewrite I did of "The Place That Makes You Happiest." I grabbed a Nahuatl phrase from one of my Codex Florentine books and put it in the story about a month and a half ago, but when I went back and reread it the other day and came to that word, I had no idea what it was and even after scouring the book I thought I took it from, I couldn't find it again. Frustrating, to say the least, and of course then I had to cut the word completely because I didn't even know what it meant in order to make it coherent with context. I think taking the time to record my sources for myself while I'm working will save me a bundle of headaches later on.

No "real" writing has gotten done in days, but oh the muse is so terribly excited and demanding I drop everything and turn him loose. I've been brain-storming the character and plot problems for my novel with some of my writing group friends for the last couple of days, and now that I've shared the rest of the basic plot line of the story with them, I've been steered in the right direction and muse is screaming "That's f-ing awesome! This next draft is so going to rock!" My biggest issue was with my protag's motivations and her lack of being an active agent of the plot and its resolution and I kept putting off addressing her issues for the longest time because it was a big cloud hanging over me. But last night I spent an hour and half just writing up a couple paragraphs about her motivations, just thinking aloud about what she wants and what's important to her and trying to see how that relates to what the other main character wants, particularly over the entire storyline of both books, and now it's finally come together. I think the motivations were always there in my mind but I'd done other things wrong, blocking them from playing a part, or I made it impossible for her act or make a choice, or if she did make a choice, it turned out to be a non-choice. I gave my protag too much access to free-magic to solve all her problems with little consequence (big rule violation concerning magic and it's trade off values, which any decent fantasy novelist wouldn't have made, but I'm new at this and feeling my way around. At least I resisted my urge to try to query some agents about this book before now and so didn't ruin my chances with any of them). I also gave that same real consequence-free magic to another character and basically made it impossible for the antagonist to even have a fighting chance (not to mention that with this power, this other character should have just used it as soon as he was an adult and everything would have been over, happy happy joy joy! So now I snatch it back from him, ha! and make it much harder for my protag to use what she can, and now the antagonist has a fighting chance and she's the only one who can stop him. And the non-choice she originally made...gone, and she's going to have a much, much tougher one to make. Plus I get to keep around a character I really really hated killing off and he can cause grief and temptation for my protag in book two. And I get to bring in more gods! Hurray! After these sessions, I've come to the conclusion that I held back too much of the broader plot in this book, mistakenly thinking I needed to save it for book two, but in fact, if the protag knows some things about the broader plan of her beloved god, it gives her extra motivation to succeed and help out.

The muse is biting and clawing to get to writing, but I'll have to muzzle him for a little while, so I can write a query and see how my protag's motivations hold up. Then it will be off to another rewrite of the outline. Plus, it was recommended that I take a look at The Mists of Avalon, since I'm doing something similar in that I'm taking a myth (not a really well-known one, but the most well-known of that particular culture's mythology) and telling it from an alternate character's POV, so I bought that yesterday and plan to read it (this is the first time I've ever bought a novel with the intent of studying it in hopes of helping my own writing.).

And in other good news, the Zokutou word meter is back up and running again. Quite pleased to see that.

I've learned yet another valuable lesson today in writing, one that kept awake most of the night fretting and fussing about until I had the break-through this morning: one can't expect to get useful feedback from critiquers when one only lets them read half the story.

Well duh, right? But for some odd reason, I didn't think this logic applied to novels, and now I know better.

For last couple of months or so, I've been struggling with the feedback on my novel, exasperated that a good deal of the suggestions would take me completely away from where I wanted to go with characters and plot events. I was reluctant to express my frustration, but now I can because I realize that it's nobody's fault but my own. My private writing group is awesome, full of really great writers who are incredibly smart and astute folks well on their way to being professionals in the field, and they worked their asses off giving me feedback and offering heartfelt suggestions that had me banging my head on my desk. And why was that?

Because I gave them a map of Utah and said "Show me where I should go on my vacation," but didn't tell them I wanted to see arches more than anything in the world. So of course I get suggestions like "go skiing in Snowbird" or "the Salt Flats are really cool because you can see the curvature of the earth" or "Bryce Canyon is really beautiful in the summer." All very cool suggestions, but not really what I wanted to spend my holiday doing. One person did tell me "You should go to Arches National Park" because I'd told her before that I wanted to look at sandstone arches and so she knew that's where I would really want to go.

That's basically what happened when I submitted my novel to the group for critique. See, somewhere along the way, I'd decided to cut the full story into two books, the first hopefully being a stand alone. I only have book one written at the moment and I was of course eager for feedback. One person knew where I was headed because she'd read the novelette it was based on, but the rest of them didn't, which I thought would be a good thing so I could get a reaction similar to what I would from normal readers. A good thing, right? In theory, except that we're not asking readers to offer us suggestions on improving our work, which we do ask of critiquers. I basically asked them to give me feedback without telling them where I wanted the actual larger story to end up, and so I shouldn't have been the least bit surprised when I came away frustrated because quite a bit of the feedback wouldn't take the story where I wanted it to go in book 2. It's only after much hair pulling and head banging and grumpiness that I've come to the conclusion that it was a mistake to ask them to critique the first book because in fact it's something more like LotR or His Dark Materials in format, not some on-going series of stories like Patricia Cornwell's Scarpetta novels. I should have written the whole damn thing then asked them to help me split it into two. My frustration was nobody's fault but my own, and it's a relief to finally realize this. I know some folks say you shouldn't write book two until you've sold book one, but I don't believe any writing is a waste of time, especially if it's going to help me along in my craft, which I think is the case here. It may mean that this novel will have to sit in the closet for a few years until the time's right and I have a professional name to help me sway editors to take it on, but I think I will be better off for having written it the right way.

Weekends seem so long these days, which is kind of funny because I can still remember times when the weekends arriving were a big deal because it meant no school (never no work, because I never had one of those Monday to Friday jobs like normal people), but now the weekend feels like a huge pothole in the middle of my feverish writing life. I've gotten to the point where I like writing so much that I don't really feel the need to take a break from it and so the weekend is just a couple of days where I'll won't get anything done and instead clean the house. I hate that. Maybe the time's come to add some writing time to the weekends, an hour or two a day, so I won't feel so derailed come Monday.

Anyway, I'm still working my way through the next draft of the outline, trying to make everything come together. I feel good about it at this point.

In the interest of avoiding actually working on rewriting the outline, I instead decided to pass the morning updating my writing expense database, which I haven't done at all this year. With my two Con memberships and having joined Pike Peak Writers, I'm already considerably "in the hole" this year as far as expenses go. The good thing is that last year I decided to buy a two year subscription to Locus and so won't have that expense this year, nor the renewal of my domain. I'm wondering though if I should put my LJ renewal in my expenses this year (I think it's debatable whether I can truly deduct it as an expense, since it's not %100 about writing, but at the same time is a very large part of my writing promotion.). It's interesting to note that thus far this year I've only sent out 1 snail mail sub. I was expecting filing the taxes this year to be a rather rigorous and hair-tearing experience, but in fact it wasn't all that bad (though I probably didn't make enough to actually have to claim my meager writing earnings, we decided it was better to be safe than sorry and cover our asses, so the IRS can't come back later and tell me I should have. After all, last year I made the most I've ever made on writing and even turned a profit after deducting my expenses.).

Anyway, the database is up-to-date now and I have no more excuses to not work on rewriting the outline. :)

Finished my preliminary 3rd draft outline, which came in at a whopping 27 pages single spaced (though a good portion of that can be attributed to me being excrutiatingly detailed with my new material, plus I outlined every section of the parts that I intended to keep. Most of that will be tossed out of the final outline.). Tomorrow's agenda is to work out the parts that I didn't have worked out the first time through and make some decisions about what I'm going to cut out of the first section (I've got my eye on shortening one scene in particular and possibly cutting an entire chapter and moving the pertinent information later. I'd like to get to the plot catalyst quicker than I do at present and cutting that chapter would bring it at least 30 pages sooner.). I'm feeling good about the changes I'm going to implement, for they keep my antagonist more to the forefront, keep him involved in events; in fact, now he has his hand in everything that goes wrong for my protag, causing almost all of it, with the exception of one thing, but even the guy responsible for that one is in my antagonist's pocket. The next draft will undoubtedly be longer, but I think it will also be better.

In sub news, finally got to the post office and mailed out "The Hearts of Men." I also heard from ASIM that my story passed the first reading, which is actually only the second time I've made it out of round one with them.

I don't have any cool April Fools pranks to spring on anyone so I'll just have to settle for pulling out my April Fools Snape avatar.

Well, I'd hoped to have "The Hearts of Men" ready to send out today and was feeling pretty good about it last night after one final go over, until I saw the word count. Somehow I added an extra 300 words to it (granted, I did a bit more explaining of some of the myth elements and ramped up the final fight scene, which I do suppose could amount to 300 words). I'm going to let it sit a while longer then look at it again, make sure I've cut everything that needs cutting then send it out later this week.

Today though I'm peeling down wallpaper and repainting Dana's room. Operation Gryffindor Room is underway! :)

Been quite busy the last couple of days and failed to find the time to post to the blog. Mostly I've been reading, critiquing, and working out the rewrite details for MSR, which are pretty significant. And yesterday was Dana's 9th birthday and we went to IHOP for dinner (she was intent on having the Who-cakes, which just looked nasty, but some kids just have iron stomachs). From us she got the boxed set of Spiderwick Chronicles (which I was finally able to find for a reasonable price on Amazon, which amounted to about $6 a book, which is half off the cover price) and from my mom she got a Harry Potter sheet and quilt set (my mom made the quilt herself from HP fabric she found on ebay, and it's really very nice. If I was a kid...oh, who am I kidding? I want a Harry Potter quilt too!:D). We're going to repaint and decorate Dana's room next week with Gryffindor colors and I bought a set of the movie posters to hang on the walls. It's time to change her room anyway. We'd decorated it with Winnie the Pooh when she was 2, with painted butterflies and bees on the walls and a wall paper boarder, but she's older now and her interests have changed (and thank god she's into Harry Potter because the alternative she was gunning for was to paint her room bright pink and decorate it with Barbie stuff. And the pink she was begging for would have burned out retinas with its brightness. But having gotten the sheet and quilt set from my mom, she's excited about the new plan and color scheme. I told her she could choose any of the house color schemes, except Hufflepuff--because I'm not going to paint any walls black--so she chose Gryffindor).

The plan for today is to do more reading and critiquing and continue work on the outline, if I have time. I'm quite behind on the reading over at LH and need to do at least 2 stories a day now in order to have everything done in time to vote.

I think today I will actually attempt to get a revision done on "The Hearts of Men" and get it turned in for the polish challenge. I looked at what I had done last night before bed and before I knew it I was working on it again and retyped a full page before Jeff asked if I was coming to bed or not. So I'm feeling a bit better about it than I was before and think at the very least I'd like to get a clean draft done for the challenge.

Thank you everyone who offered their thoughts and suggestions on the word count doubts I was having yesterday. They're much appreciated and I feel much better about it today.

I've outlined up to part 5 and now have to abandon the chapter by chapter approach I've been following so far and go for more broad strokes because I intend to completely butcher this last section of the book. The outline thus far has added two extra chapters, which has me growling (I'm supposed to be looking to cut, not add), and I don't imagine that the new last section will be any shorter than the original because, if anything, one of the complaints I've seen in early crits is that the climax comes on too quickly.

I'm probably stressing unnecessarily over this because I'm feeling that my cutting 30k is pretty paltry and now I'm actively adding on word count. I blame reading folks on Nathan Bransford's blog talking about how during revision they cut 50-100k on novels whose first drafts were of similar word count to my own and now I'm wondering if I haven't been merciless enough (though no I couldn't possibly imagine hacking a full 100k off this. Technically I would really like to cut another 10k off, but so far the new outline is throwing a monkey wrench in that plan.). I should stop thinking like this, at least for right now. I still have 3 crits coming to me by the seventeenth and I should see what they have to say before I grab a pair of scissor and a bottle of rum and butcher my manuscript while crying "why oh why must I do this?!"

Sigh.

Burrito time!!!!

More book buying frenzy. This one came rather unexpectedly, for I'd put it on order back in November and Amazon spent the following months trying to track down a copy for me. Then it appeared on my doorstep yesterday, so the emails must have gone astray. Anyway I am glad to have the book , which is Aztec, Mixtec and Zapotec Armies, another Osprey "Men-at-Arms" book, full of cool pictures (the Mixtec war garb is particularly interesting, as well as the surprising information that royal Mixtec women had the political power to be "Queen" and wage war accordingly. I of course want to find out more about this for that has potential story written all over it.). Another nice addition to the research library.

This is more of a curiosity than anything, but after running a quick spell check  on the outline yesterday, to add the accent marks into my characters names after transferring my text from yWriter into Word, I noticed it scored an 12th grade reading level on their little Flisch-Kincaid reading level. The novel itself only scores a 6.5 level, so I'm curious about what constitutes the difference. How do they measure this anyway? Not that I need to know; just curious.

In other news, I'm planning to buy Duran Duran concert tickets this morning. They're going to be here at the new Wells Fargo Theater at the Convention Center May 12th.

But in the meantime, back to the outline.

More outlining done and more interesting character twists. A character that just disappears halfway through the book has now turned traitor and I'm still debating whether she should be publicly garroted for it; I just might have to since the Méxica were known for strangling criminals with flower-garlands and yet no one dies by that method in the book. Things so far are coming together well and I'm actually excited about a third rewrite. I'm supposed to be editing a short story too, for the polish challenge at LH, but I haven't had the motivation to work on it so I'll probably end up submitting the unedited draft or maybe wait until I feel motivated about the rewrite.

But now it's time to make dinner and call it a night on the writing front.