Welcome to the blog!

You have, perhaps by luck, fate, scribblings on the back of a business card, or the arcane power of Google, happened across the writer’s blog of the Nightphoenix. Welcome! Feel free to look around the site, but do try not to step on the M&Ms.

If you wish to read the more detailed entries about specific projects I’m working on, you can click anywhere it says “register”, and follow the directions. Or, if you’ve one of my business cards in hand, you can simply use the visiting_writer login. The Blog Security page at the top has more details about this. Don’t worry, I won’t come knocking at your door.

Well, if I’m never a *famous* writer, I’ll settle for this…

NORRINGTON: “You are without doubt the worst pirate I’ve ever heard of.”

JACK SPARROW: “But you have heard of me.”

 
Jack Sparrow is one of those characters that makes me want to be a writer.

Tags: movies, quotes

Dismantle. Repair.

In light of the things I’ve been working on, I think today’s song will have to be Dismantle. Repair. by Anberlin. If the first book of Shades is to have a theme song, this is probably it. Raphel has a definite propensity to cut Saeli to ribbons, turn around, and put her back together again. It’s even a play on words, in a sense: Dis-Mantle.

one last glance from a taxi cab
images scar my mind
for weeks have felt like years
since your full attention was all mine
the night was young and so were we
talked about life, God, death, and your family
didn’t want any promises,
just my undivided honesty, and you said

hands, like secrets, are the hardest thing to keep from you
lines and phrases, like knives, your words can cut me through
dismantle me down
repair
you dismantle me
you dismantle me

Tags: music, Shades

Progress today

Last Friday I used the last of my Barnes & Noble gift card money (you know, the cards that my New Years thief didn’t steal because thieves apparently don’t read…), and bought myself a book entitled: First Draft in 30 Days, by Karen S. Wiesner. I initially picked up the book because the title intrigued me. “30 days? Yeah, right. Maybe if you don’t have a life.”

Well, the book is actually a very comprehensive system for outlining a story before you start writing it. This is something I could use. I immediately saw how one could combine the system with the principles of GMC that I learned at the conference, and do most of the legwork beforehand. Well, there’s a section for outlining a manuscript that’s already in progress, so I’ve spend most of today working the first book of Shades into an outline form. The reason for this is that I’ve reached a point in the rewrite where I feel like I’m running the story into the ground trying to get from point A to point B. I need to reestablish the whole picture in my head.

I’ve really been concentrating on turning what was the first section of the story into a complete book…determining the logical order of escalating stakes, figuring out where the downtime is, where the black moment is, where the resolution is. The good news is, there really aren’t any gaping holes…maybe little minor potholes. I haven’t even had to change the order of any scenes…I’ve just had to occasionally clarify what’s going on. There are a few places where I’m going to tweak little things, and make character motivation more clear, but other than that, outlining has been relatively easy.

Which proves that I have a pretty intuitive grasp of story arc, and I can apparently do GMC without knowing what the heck that is. Good for me! Now with my half a stick and my highly evolved brain *pokes self in the eye with the stick* ouch, I shall make fi-yah! Oh wait, wrong movie. Now I have the tools to do these things deliberately, without it taking several years per story. *cough*

The goal is still to finish the first book of Shades by the end of March. Mid-March, if I must.

I did a little agent research tonight…looking up some of the names I was given at the conference and adding them to my list of possibilities. Added another blog to the blogroll as well…an agent named Jennifer Jackson.

Tags: books, business of writing, revisions, Shades

Love Like Winter

Since the hubby and I were talking about a specific vampire villain of Briar Rose today, I thought I would post this song by AFI. It’s almost eerily good as a vampire song.

warn your warmth to turn away,
here it’s December,
everyday

it’s in the blood
it’s in the blood
I met my love before I was born
he wanted love,
I taste of blood.
he bit my lip and drank my war,
from years before

Tags: Briar Rose, music, vampires, villains

The writer’s library, thus far

Thought I’d share the list of writing books that I own, and personally found very helpful. (Obviously, if I hadn’t found them helpful, I wouldn’t own them…)

Stein on Writing – Sol Stein

A standard. Anyone who wants to write good fiction should read this book at least once. Better yet, attack it with sticky tabs and a highlighter.

Writing the Breakout Novel - Donald Maass

Same as above. Really, if you were going to buy just two writing books, this one and the one above are probably your best bet.

Spunk and Bite – Arthur Plotnik

Remember Strunk and White, and their little book full of rules for style? This book shows you how to bend those rules.

Dynamic Characters: How to Create Personalities That Keep Readers Captivated- Nancy Kress

This was actually my first writing book. It was a required text for the only creative writing course I ever took (and subsequently had to drop, because I couldn’t keep up with that and two art classes in the same semester). It’s a good solid guide to how to build character, come up with backstory, etc…I didn’t find it particularly useful at the time, because character is the one thing that I’m naturally good at.

Bullies, Bastards, and Bitches: How to Write the Bad Guys of Fiction – Jessica Morrell

I saw the title of this and just had to open it. I loved it immediately, because I like my characters to be, for the most part, a little bit on the edgy side. She covers everything from villains, sociopaths, and monsters to dark heroes, anti-heroes and even unreliable narrators.

Writing Great Books for Young Adults – Regina Brooks

Good solid book if you write YA fiction. I’d really like to find a book that deals specifically with YA fantasy fiction, but this was a good place to start.

On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells – Leigh Michaels

This book covers a lot of ground, and although it deals primarily with romance novels and the romance genre, a lot of the principles are things that carry over into general fiction writing. Most of my stories have a love story in them somewhere, even if they don’t fit specifically within the romance genre guidelines.

Tags: books, business of writing

Art!

It’s Thursday! Here’s a drawing I did a while ago of my main characters from Shades.

 
And, perhaps a couple of maps. It’s funny, I actually didn’t draw these until the first draft of the story was almost done, when I finally needed to know exactly where things were.
 

 
Here’s the world as a whole. You can see Aschera and Chisge in the upper center area. The village where Raphel was born is almost due west of Aschera, on the other side of the Midplains. The red area is the cursed Midplains, top-left pointing stripes represent Mantle territory, top-right pointing stripes are Cowl territory, and crosshatching is disputed territory. (You may notice that there is quite a bit of disputed territory, and that the Cowls have much less undisputed territory than the Mantles. The Mantles are winning the war when the story opens). Iadnah and Lanschport are both southern Cowl cities. Iadnah is nominally under Mantle control, while Lanschport is purely Cowl. Lanschport has a rather unsavory reputation even among Cowls, which is probably why the Mantles don’t want it (people on Verre have odd superstitions about the ocean); both Geris and Teja hail from that city. The battle of Iadnah plays an important role in all three of my major Cowls’ pasts: Mora lost her husband, infant daughter, and father; Kaladan lost his faith in the Mantle cause and turned Cowl; and I haven’t yet decided how Raphel was involved (but I have decided that he needs to be).
 

 
Here is Aschamon. A great deal of the action in the first and third books takes place on Aschamon’s campus, so I needed to know exactly where each building was in relation to the others.

It sits on a hill in the western quadrant of Aschera (Aschera I have not mapped yet. Not sure if I need to). The Temple and the main sorarc tower are the hub of the school, both physically and spiritually. The small triangular buildings are the dormitories: one for the youngest (gray) students, three for the various ages of Mantle students, and one for the cleric students. Saeli lives in a Mantle dormitory, even though she is not a Mantle; she and Cara got special permission to be roommates, and since Cara is a Mantle, the school allowed it.

Tags: artwork, Kaladan, maps, Mora, Raphel, Saeli, Shades

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for fiction

I figured this would be a good place to start Writer Wisdom Wednesdays.

Eight rules for writing fiction:

- Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), 9-10.

The only one I truly disagree with is 8. I’m not really worried about nuclear apocalypse or cockroaches eating my books. If the reader gets to a certain point where they feel they could finish the story themselves, they’re going to put the book down. That’s what I do. It’s not an adventure when someone gives away the ending. There’s a difference between a reader having a complete grasp of what’s going on, and the reader knowing exactly how things are going to end…and that difference is nothing less than the difference between good storytelling and bad storytelling.

Tags: wisdom

TV Tuesdays, Movie Mondays, and other word play

Too campy?

As you might have read from my last post, in the interest of posting something in here every day, I’m thinking of giving myself a theme to work with for each day of the week. TV and movies are easy topics: they’re not entirely unrelated to writing and they’re everywhere. At most, you could expect a review from me; at the very least, a memorable quote.

Book reviews I think I’ll do on Fridays (Fiction Fridays? Still trying to be all clever and stuff). Saturdays and Sundays could be song lyric days, as I’m usually pretty busy and wouldn’t have time to post much else. Wednesday could be Writer Wisdom day. That leaves Thursday. Hmm. The only thing left is art…Artsy Thursdays? I really should get some of my wand photos up here, and other story related artwork.

So, in the interest of TV Tuesdays, here’s a quote from a show that I really like, despite the genre.

MICHAEL: “If I surrender now, I lose everyone I love.”
PRIEST: “But do you lose your soul in the process?”
MICHAEL: “Well, we all have our crosses to bear.”

That pretty much sums up the kind of guy Michael Scofield is in Prison Break. This scene occurs somewhere in the second season, after he’s broken his brother out of prison and is on the run. Michael has just stolen a GPS that he couldn’t afford, and is having a crisis of conscience about it. He goes into a confessional booth to have a conversation with a priest about everything he’s done up to this point to save his brother. Ultimately he is the type of person who would sacrifice his own soul to save someone else.

Prison Break is one of those shows that looks like it’s going to just be all grit and violence (and there is that), but underneath it has these great characters and a really strong story. It’s unusual, as prison stories go, in that all the characters except one are actually guilty of the crimes that put them there, even the main protagonist. The worst villains in the show have enough backstory and complexity to make them into sympathetic characters, which I really like. Even T-Bag, who is about as bad as you can get…you do kind of end up feeling sorry for the guy.

I initially started watching the show simply to see Wentworth Miller in action, because the moment I laid eyes on that actor, I said, “Holy crap, if that guy had hair, he’d look exactly like Raphel.” I mean, he can even glare the way I had imagined. Now I like the show for its own sake, and I really respect Miller as an actor.

Tags: ideas, prison break, shows

So much for no politics…

But I saw this last night and it made me very, very happy. Remember those Westboro, “God Hates -X-” nutcases that go around picketing soldier funerals? This is the best counterprotest I’ve ever seen.

When you compare statements like “God Hates Fags” and “Where’s Waldo?”, yeah, there really isn’t much meaning to either, and I think that was the point. It’s really an ingenious protest, IMO.

Here’s the article itself.

Tags: humor, snark, the real world