Are you Afraid?

It's blog chain time and this time Kat brought us a question perfect for Halloween:

What are the primary fears that drive your characters? Do they battle aliens or gangsters or monsters? Or do they battle unreconciled issues in their lives? Which do you prefer writing about? What do you fear?

Okay, so fear. I think most writers would admit to having some pretty big fears, because it kind of goes hand in hand with that whole overactive imagination thing. It does not, in my case at least, take a lot to get that imagination going either. A horror movie will do it - actually I just can't sit through horror movies anymore - I literally shake and cower during the suspenseful parts, cover my eyes entirely during the gory sections, and for days afterward have trouble walking into dark rooms. Or a news article about a dry drowning can make me even more neurotic than ever about letting my son anywhere near a swimming pool.

Now with my own fears, I use my worrying almost as a neurotic type of shield - like it will keep all the bad things that I imagine away. Or I try to find actual physical ways to make life safer - whether that consists of making sure the doors are locked at night (Actually this is my husband's job, but sometimes if I hear a funny noise outside I'll ask him, "did you make sure you locked the doors?" Sometimes, if I'm feeling especially nervous I'll put in a request for him to double check. For the record, he does not seem to appreciate this.) or putting some padded foam onto a sharp counter corner in the kitchen (I actually just did this today - my son kept banging his head on it, and I didn't want it to get to the point where he banged it so hard he needed stitches or lost an eye. Yes, I know. I really am neurotic.)

However, my characters are not so lucky. There are no locked doors or safe foam corners for them. As soon as I know what my characters fear most, then I know exactly what will happen to them.

Fear of fire? Grab some matches.

Arachnophobia? Bring on the mutant spiders. A

fraid you'll turn into your mother? Then it's time for some Freaky Friday action.

Whether the fears are internal or external I want to be constantly nudging my characters towards the edge of the cliff, until there's nowhere to go but down... and then I found out how they deal with falling.

So, what do you fear? What do your characters fear? And do you push your characters towards their fears too?

And for more blog chain fun you can find Rebecca's post before mine and Amanda's directly after.

WIP Wednesday and Blog Chain

Happy Wednesday... I guess. It's a gray day today here in Knoxville, with steady rain coming down, and no end in sight. And while I like the occasional rainy day - it's always a good excuse to curl up with a good book and a cup of tea - we have had so many of them lately that honestly I am a little sick of it.

Maybe though my anti-rain bad mood is just me being disappointed that I didn't meet my goal of finishing my rewrites this past weekend. The problem is that I kept hitting walls that I hadn't anticipated, so instead of having a plan of how to get over or around them, I ended up just sitting, staring at the computer screen (or sometimes a Bejeweled Blitz game) and wondering what I should do next.

I am slowly figuring things out, and eventually moving past the walls, but it is definitely a process, and one that can be very discouraging at times. I guess it is all part of the journey though... and that is my kind of lame segue into our current blog chain topic brought to us by Sandra.

What kind of journeys do your characters make? What effects do they have on the characters and the plot? Also, if you wish, please tell us about one of your personal journeys and how it changed you.

As several other blog chainers before me have mentioned, the most important journey that a character makes is their internal one. The question of how my main character changes or tranforms by the end of the story is second only to what that character wants. However, it can also be helpful to show rather than just tell about this journey by the character going on an actual physical journey - whether that means having them hop on a transcontinental flight or a simply take a trip to the mailbox at the end of the driveway.

In my first (now trunked) novel, a contemporary romance, the main character, after having her heart broken, decides to bicycle back to her hometown of Buffalo, NY from her current location in Miami. After spending several days on the road, mostly getting lost and frustrated she comes to a realization - that she is lost in more ways than one. Here is a small excerpt of her making that realization:

Now on day five, after ending the previous day having actually lost a mile, Stella tried to once again to remind herself why she was here. Wherever here was… she was once again foggy on that point. The rational that it was something Old Stella wouldn’t have done now seemed preposterous. It had taken Stella five days to realize that there were in fact many things that Old Stella didn’t do, that any sane person wouldn’t - for good reason - ever want to do. Stella was beginning to suspect that bicycling from Miami to Buffalo might be one of those things. With this thought, Stella stopped peddling.

She was on a completely deserted road. Lost is what she was in every way possible. She wasn’t doing this to prove something, this was now clear. What she was doing was running like a chicken with her head cut off. Or like someone uncertain of where she belonged anymore. The truth was she didn’t want to go home. This bicycling thing wasn’t flying solo - it was stalling. It was when she got home, and had to decide what to do next that Stella would have to test her wings for real. Maybe the stationary bicycle in her living room hadn’t been taking her anywhere, but for all intents and purposes, this one wasn’t either. Decision made Stella wheeled her bicycle around and started peddling back in the direction she had come from. For the first time in days she felt like she might be going in the right direction.

As for my own personal journeys, I think that just like in fiction the most memorable ones are those that help us learn or understand something new about ourselves.

On some trips you learn that if you are going in July to stay with a friend who lives in North Carolina you should really make sure they have air conditioning (and in this case, I also found out that you should also be prepared for less than clean living conditions when you already know ahead of time that this person had been on the Jenny Jones show in a segment entitled: "My Roommate Is A Slob.")

On other trips you learn about your own resiliency when you end up in an unknown city having to seek out a ear, nose, and throat specialist for a horrible earache, and your bare minimum health insurance doesn't cover it.

And finally there are simple day trips, like when my husband and I drove from LA up to Santa Barbara and I found out that while it may look cool to be driving in a Jeep with the top down, in reality you mostly are just hot and windblown, while on the next day you end up with some pretty funky sunburn lines.

So what journeys have you made lately - whether it's a character's journey or your own?

And to follow this full chain, check out Rebecca before me and Amanda after.

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If you want to participate in WIP Wednesday, simply post your own WIP Wednesday entry on your blog and leave a link to it in the comments below. Or if you don't have a blog, feel free to report your progress directly into the comments box.For more detailed information concerning what all this nonsense is about please consult the original Work in Progress Wednesday posting.

Work in Progress Wednesday

Well it is once again WIP Weds. and I am still doing rewrites. So far I have written about 6,000 new words, while I have cut around 4,000 old words. I still have some big cuts coming ahead though, so it will be interesting to see where my final word count ends up.

As you may have noticed that is a fairly large amount of new words, and in helping them find their way to the page I made use of my new SUPER SECRET WEAPON!





Behold.

Bejeweled Blitz courtesy of Facebook.

Okay, it's actually not terribly secret, nor is it really weapon-like at all. In fact, some might even consider it more of a black pit of procrastination. To those people though I would say... okay, yeah you have a point.

Yes, there have been times when before jumping into the Word document that is the current version of my MS, when I might play one, two, or (gulp) twenty-five "warm-up" games of Bejeweled Blitz. You know, just something to transition me from the checking email and blogs part of my computer time to the getting down to serious work part.

However, once I have gotten through those one, two, or (gulp) twenty-five games of Bejeweled I dive into my MS and start writing... aaannddd then after a solid two or three minutes of writing there is usually a pause of some sort where I consider which words need to come next. Now some might take these time to stare into space, spin in your chair, or consider the state of your cuticles and while in the past I have done all these things - now I have found something even better. During this time I flip back to the ever so conveniently still open Bejeweled Blitz tab and play one more game (really it is just one this time... okay, sometimes two).

But - and this is an important but - while I play my brain is working on that next sentence and flipping through the various possibilities until I come up with the perfect thing. Then I flip back to Word, type that in, and if it doesn't immediately lead to something else I flip back to Bejeweled to ponder my next sentence.

There are two reasons that is the perfect game for this type of "multitasking".

One: Each game is only a minute long. It is long enough to give your brain a chance to work on your story, but not so long that you get sucked into the game and forget about the story altogether.

Two: It's kind of a mindless game, or it is the way I play it, which is to say, with a minimum of strategy. I'm not looking for the big plays or thinking ten moves ahead - I just make the matches as my eyes spot them. And I swear every time in this game that I've gotten a really high score it is when I am on the phone, or not really thinking about the game at all (although I am usually kind of a middle person on the scoreboard and my highest score to date was only around 113,000.).

Okay, that's my WIP Weds. Hopefully next week I will have finished my rewrites - that is the plan at least. How about you? How is your WIP coming along? And do you ever play games or have something else to get your mind going when you get stuck?

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If you want to participate in WIP Wednesday, simply post your own WIP Wednesday entry on your blog and leave a link to it in the comments below. Or if you don't have a blog, feel free to report your progress directly into the comments box.

For more detailed information concerning what all this nonsense is about please consult the original Work in Progress Wednesday posting.

Feel free to also make use of the lovely little WIP Wednesday logo as well!

Work in Progress Wednesday

It's a little late in the day for WIP in progress Wednesday (my clock currently reads quarter to 9), but it is still Wednesday, so I'm squeezing this blog post in anyway.

Last week I wrote about how during my various rounds of rewrites and revisions I never differentiated between the two words, until finally during this current round, I came to see a very drastic difference between the two.

I had some really excellent comments regarding how other people defined their own rewrites/revisions/edits and wanted to share a few of them here.

K.M. Weiland: I definitely differentiate between revising and rewriting. Revising is routine; rewriting is radical!

Jennifer Shirk: It's like taking a chunk out of a cake that tastes funny and putting in a different layer. They you do the REVISIONS which is the frosting that keeps it all together so you never see the rewrites and it looks all pretty.

Lady Glamis: A rewrite to me means opening up a blank document and starting over. That's what I've done with my novel Monarch. I've been rewriting it for months now, and I'm almost done.

Elana Johnson: There is such a HUGE difference between revisions and rewriting. I call revisions edits and rewrites revisions, though. Because when I revise, I'm doing all that chopping, moving and rebuilding you talk about. Just different words. :)

What I think these comments highlight is not only how differently we all approach the writing process, but the many different ways that we can define it as well. I also have to mention that while I was writing last week's post I knew there was another word for rewrites/revisions that I couldn't think of, and it wasn't until I was reading my comments that I realized that word was "edits". It was definitely a hand-meets-forehead moment.

So, onto this week. I've actually made a lot of progress with what I've defined as my reWRITES. I even had one of those moments when the writing was just flowing and everything inside of me was like, "Yes, this is what I'm meant to be doing." Of course, that was Friday night and everything I've written since then has been like pulling teeth, but still that one moment almost makes the rest of it worthwhile.

Another thing that I've tried to keep in mind while doing my reWRITES are some general guiding principles or ideas that I want to use a criteria to judge what needs to go out and what needs to be put in instead. I boiled this down to three basic ideas that I wrote down and have been referring back to, constantly asking myself if I am sticking to them.


1. Simplify.

This one mostly refers to my overly convoluted plot, which towards the end grew so complicated that I could barely understand everything that was happening and how it all tied together.

2. Lighten and Go with the Quirk

This is more of a note on tone. Overall, my MS uses a lot of humor, but there were some very dark and weighty moments. While some of those moments are staying, others are being stripped away - especially where things got a little too dark and depressing.

3. It's the Character's, Stupid!

This kind of ties back into number one, when I became so wrapped up in the plot, I ended up losing some of my most important characters - so while I am at work unraveling bits of plot, I am also gently reminding myself where to keep the focus instead.


Anyway, those are three pretty broad statements, but so far they are helping to keep me on track. Has anyone else tried to use something like this to keep yourself focused on what your want your story to be - whether it be with a first draft or the (as I am calling my current draft) 500th one?

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If you want to participate in WIP Wednesday, simply post your own WIP Wednesday entry on your blog and leave a link to it in the comments below. Or if you don't have a blog, feel free to report your progress directly into the comments box.

For more detailed information concerning what all this nonsense is about please consult the original Work in Progress Wednesday posting.

Feel free to also make use of the lovely little WIP Wednesday logo as well!

Work in Progress Wednesday

Wow, it has been over a month since my last official WIP Wednesday posting. And it feels even longer than that.

When I last posted a WIP Wednesday progress wwaaayyy back in August, I had plans for finishing off revisions and beginning work on a brand new shiny and exciting WIP.

Except that didn't happen.

Instead I am once again elbow deep in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

Up to this point when talking about revisions and rewrites I have used the two words interchangeably. However, as I have begun to make the latest changes to BTDATDBS I have been very carefully referring to them as reWRITES - and suddenly the difference is very clear to me.

Now other writers may see this another way, and this is strictly my own way of looking at things, but here is what I see as the difference between reWRITES and reVISIONS.

REVISIONS. This is something that is done with red pen in hand (well technically you can use any color ink... but why would you?) where you cross out little bits, maybe write in other little bits, and just generally make a lot of squiggly lines indicating the need to split a paragraph or correct a misspelled word. In a word, revisions are nit-picky.

REWRITES. This, on the other hand, is something that is done with a power saw, and a take no prisoners attitude. It's big, bold, and sometimes even bloody. No part of your manuscript is safe - from characters to plot points to location - anything can be torn to shreds at any moment. Of course, it's not only about destruction - because then you have to go back and fill in the now gaping holes. Depending on the level of devastation - you may end up doing a lot of rebuilding.

After having recently been given some excellent suggestions on how to make my manuscript stronger, it is in reWRITES of this type that I currently find myself. These will actually be the biggest rewrites I have undertaken on this MS. Prior to this, I'd say I did about two rewrites - although much more minor ones - and they were after getting feedback from my first beta readers. Since then there have been many many many many many - just uncountable really - round of revisions. Revisions, for me, are kind of like that - one round just blends into another. And after I finish these reWRITES, there will be another round of reVISIONS - acting as a clean up crew of sorts.

So, that's where I'm currently at. What about you? How are your works in progress? And do you differentiate between reWRITES and reVISIONS (your definitions don't have to be the same as mine) when you are working on your MS?

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If you want to participate in WIP Wednesday, simply post your own WIP Wednesday entry on your blog and leave a link to it in the comments below. Or if you don't have a blog, feel free to report your progress directly into the comments box.

For more detailed information concerning what all this nonsense is about please consult the original Work in Progress Wednesday posting.

Feel free to also make use of the lovely little WIP Wednesday logo as well!

Who Am I?

This week on the blog chain we are getting all existential with a question brought to us by Michelle:

Do you choose WHAT you do because of WHO you are? Or is who you are determined by what you do?

Wow. BIG question. It's not quite: "what's the meaning of life", but it's pretty darn close.

So, I'm just going to jump right in and say straight out: I label myself by what I do. This means that even though I have been writing stories for as long as I've known how to put words on paper, I wouldn't say "I've been a writer my whole life." I mean, I've always had a passion for writing, but then again I've always had a passion for chocolate, but I wouldn't call myself a chocolatier either.

The thing is despite the notebooks that I've over the years filled with short stories and bits of novels - writing was very rarely my focus. In undergrad I planned on getting an English degree, but then the acting bug bit and suddenly I was working towards a BFA in theatre. Even though I loved the opportunities to write - even taking a playwriting class - the experience that I seized upon during those four years for my future goals was when I directed a one-act play my senior year. I was meant to direct, I decided, and not wanting to limit myself to the stage I headed off to California for film school.

Luckily, the MFA program at Chapman encouraged writer/directors, which meant that I had the chance to do not only do a lot of writing, but also see it come to life on screen. Even as I fell out of love with directing, I came to became more passionate than ever about my writing. I still wasn't a writer though. Why? Because over the next few years I intermittently worked on one full length screenplay and began a handful of half-baked novels.

So when did I actually become a writer? That is difficult to capture. Was it two years ago when I began writing the first novel that I would actually finish? Was it when I began to research how to send that novel out to agent's and had to tackle my first query letter? Was it when I received my first agent request or, even better, my first rejections? Or maybe it was the moment when I trunked that first book and started writing the second one?

Perhaps it is simply the accumulation of all those moments.

And is there a moment when I would stop being a writer? I think so, and that one is easier to pin-point - it's when I say to myself, "Enough with this writing crap. It's time to follow my real passion: chocolate!"

Okay, what about you: are you a believer in the motto "writers write" or do you think there is something more to the whole thing than merely action? And was there a moment when you first said to yourself, "I am a writer?"

For more thoughts on this topic make sure to check out Rebecca before me and Amanda who is up next!

Life In Progress

I had a plan. It was a good plan too. I returned from my semi-vacation (2 plus weeks staying at the parents house in Buffalo, NY) last week and I was ready to work. Okay, yes, the thousands of blog entries that I had missed and needed to catch up on reading did give me pause. And the latest massive rewrites (rewrites, not revisions, more about that in another post though) that I was looking at for Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea did make me feel like I was sometimes swimming against the tide.

Overall though my mood was upbeat. I was refreshed and ready to get some work done. I had even begun composing this weeks celebratory Work in Progress Wednesday post in my head - about how sometimes all we need to unplug once in a while, and we'll come out on the other side better and stronger and maybe even with whiter teeth than before (okay, this last one is probably only true if your time off included a trip to the dentist, which mine did not. Who the heck goes to the dentist while on vacation?).

The thing is I had a plan, and then...

Have you ever heard that joke about how if you want to make God laugh - tell him about your plans? It's a funny joke, although also kind of depressing. And it definitely doesn't go with the whole vision of God that I was brought up with Him (yes, He was definitely a He.) seeing us as beloved children or sometimes lost sheep. This God who laughs at our plans though is more of the type who looks down and sees us as all a bunch of schmucks. I'm not judging or saying either one is right or wrong. It's just an interesting contrast.

Anyway.

I had a plan, and then I got sick. Not a small case of the sniffles either. Although also not swine flu. No, it was more of a puke (sorry for the oversharing here. Is there a more discreet way to say puke? Would vomit or upchuck have worked better? I think they all give one a pretty graphic idea of what was happening.) until there's nothing left, and then go to the hospital and puke some more. Yeah, this sickness came with an express trip to the hospital. Where I was hooked to an IV. And put in the coldest room ever in the history of the world. I swear they were importing the air from Antarctica. They also gave me medicine that stopped the puking. And Sprite on ice with a bendy straw. The bendy straw was key.

That was Sunday. And since then I've been sleeping, taking care of a sickly toddler (although not sick with the same thing as me, OMG thank goodness), and praying to any type of God who will listen to please let me never ever ever ever ever again in my entire life have to throw up like that again.

So, there was no rah-rah yeah me celebratory Work in Progress Wednesday this week. But as this week continues to plod forward I will be working towards having progress to report next week and on once again catching up on all your great blogs (I miss all of you really I do! Sorry I haven't been commenting, but I have been reading).

In the meantime has anyone else had life get in the way of their plans? Or maybe you've been sick (my mom says it's going around... although I think she says this every time I get sick) too? Or if you have some actual work in progress Wednesday stuff to report I'd love to hear that too:)