Posted by nightphoenix on May 18, 2012 in
Novels,
Output,
Process So I’ve been struggling for…sheesh, years probably…trying to come up with a system to keep myself productive when it comes to writing. I will sometimes have entire weeks and occasionally months in which I get very little to nothing done, and that’s time I can’t get back. Well, I think I’ve come up with a solution, and it’s so ridiculously simple that I’m kicking myself.
The only way my brain is able to treat writing like a day job is if I actually “go to work” every day…meaning I get in my car, drive to my “workplace”, do work, and then go home when “time” is up. It’s not like I’ve never thought of doing my writing elsewhere; I’ve written in fast food places, coffee shops, bookstores, libraries. But I think in my mind I was still treating these excursions as get-aways or mini-vacations instead of a job, so it wasn’t something that I would think of doing every day. And the problem with choosing a restaurant or coffee shop as a writing office is that you’re morally (and sometimes actually) obligated to purchase something every couple of hours. That gets expensive real fast.
The other issue is hours. I’m free from 8 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon. Unfortunately, most places don’t open until 9 or 10, sometimes even 11. Technically I’d have more hours to work if I stayed home and started working at 8…but if I stay home, I often don’t get anything done at all. It’s a lot like abstinence-only sex education: looks great in theory, but in practice, I’d be better off trying a “less effective” method that actually works.
Last week I began experimenting with “going to work” at the library. I even give myself an official lunch break and everything. So far this has been working so well that I’m really, really annoyed at myself for not trying this before. If I work for 3 or 4 hours, with a break between, I can average about 2,000 words. (Mind, this is on days when the writing is actually a bit slow and difficult…I could probably do more on days when I can merrily plug along.) I’ve gone from hopefully being able to finish the rough draft of Promises, Like Tears by November to thinking I might be able to finish the draft by the end of next week. (This is my current goal, since my son’s last day of school is next Friday and after that my productivity will drop dramatically.)
My other nod to being more productive is on days when I just simply cannot work on the current story, I’m making myself outline other stuff in the queue. I have finished a fairly detailed outline for Dog Prince and Free (formerly Voiceless), and am working onputting Windwaker together. I’m discovering that a lot of my stories are much less “put together” on paper than they are in my head, but hey, that’s part of the fun…right?
Still agent hunting. Got another request for a partial, which was encouraging although they ultimately passed. I seem to vacillate between really hopeful and downright discouraged. Last night I finally broke down and did a little research on how to query the publishing houses themselves. Most don’t take un-agented stuff but I was surprised to discover that a few do, especially in the sci-fi/fantasy genre. However, that process is a lot slower: most houses require an exclusive look (which means you can’t send the manuscript to anyone else while they have it), and they can take anywhere from a few months to a year to make a decision. I’ve decided that if I haven’t found an agent for Seven Shades by the time I’ve finished This Chosen Fate, I’m going to dump Hands on the editor circuit and start hawking This Chosen Fate to the agents.
I’m going to try and do NaNoWriMo this year and hopefully finish This Chosen Fate, since it’s already started and I have a very good idea of where it’s going. It will be nice to have another finished story under my belt that isn’t part of a series.
Tags: agents and editors, business of writing, Shades, This Chosen Fate, Windwaker
Posted by nightphoenix on Apr 17, 2012 in
Process Whenever I listen to Writing Excuses and they talk about making magic systems and worlds from mundane ideas…my brain interprets this as a challenge. So when they said in passing, “you could totally make a city or a world or a magic system centered around book-binding”…well, I bit.
My first inclination was to approach this from a D&D perspective, because magic in that world is cast through words and spell books. One could easily make “bookbinding” a literal thing, where you are actually magically binding a force or spell into a book.
In a completely unrelated conversation, when something I was about to say just vanished from my head (don’tcha hate that??)…I wondered aloud where all those thoughts go. Maybe there is an Aether of Lost Thoughts, where all Lost Thoughts go when they disappear from your head. Maybe this Aether is “hungry”, and at times will actually steal thoughts away before you can think them?
And then I thought, what if you could pluck these lost thoughts out of said Aether, and say, bind them into books?
But somehow you’d have to do this without actually thinking the thoughts, because…well, it’s not a Lost Thought anymore if someone thinks it, is it? Plus, maybe Lost Thoughts are also those thoughts that people push away because they’re too disturbing or awful or messed up to contemplate…like what you’d really like to do to that annoying relative or what sort of damage that really sharp knife could cause…stuff that kind of half passes through your head just before you mentally slap yourself. Those could be pretty dark. Spending too much time letting those kinds of Lost Thoughts pass through your head could drive you insane.
So perhaps the purpose of book binding is to get those thoughts out of the Aether without harming anyone in the process.
Then I liked the idea of drawing out Lost Thoughts with music. Perhaps there could be two classes of book-binding magical practitioners: Minders and Binders. Minders would be the ones trained to “listen” to the Aether, locate troublesome thoughts, and draw them out. Binders would be in charge of setting down onto paper what the Minders draw out. At first I thought about making a sort of music language, but that got too complicated. I think perhaps what the Binders would be doing is drawing, maybe something like Celtic knot work, complex patterns, fractals, etc. And because every Minder and every Binder is different, the music used to call and the drawings used to capture any given Thought will be wildly different, even if the Thoughts themselves were similar.
This gives the added advantage of these books not being “readable”, in the traditional sense. Random Villain X isn’t going to be able to come along and read a whole bunch of dark, dangerous thoughts out of these books…at least not easily.
Unless Random Villain X is a Minder. I imagine some Minders would eventually figure out not only how to draw out Lost Thoughts, but how to channel them into spells. And perhaps Binders can do other things…like transcribing a speech onto paper in such a way that the speaker and audience would both forget what they’ve just said and heard. Or changing memories by writing them down.
Perhaps a rivalry has built up between Minders and Binders over the years, despite the fact that they need each other in order to keep the Aether safe. That could be a starting background conflict for a story.
I have several story snippets that could be combined with this to make a story…but that’s a process that could take some time.
Tags: brainstorming, ideas, musings
Posted by nightphoenix on Mar 23, 2012 in
Output,
Process When I first started the Visions bestiary, I basically scoured my D&D Monster Manual and online sources, looking for interesting mythological creatures, and dumped them in more or less as they were. I had always planned to go through and “tweak” the critters, making them unique to the world…and I did that with some of them.
But not all. So I went through, looked at the terrain each creature inhabited, and looked at which race lived there. I figured that, in a lot of cases, the name a certain race gave to a certain animal that lived in their home territory would be the name that stuck. In all other cases, the common language used by all the races would give the name. Vision’s “trade language” is Arader (the weasel/otter race), because the Arader are natural exploders and traders, and it was they who made the initial contact with various places, animals, and people.
(Their language is English, stripped as much as possible of words borrowed from other languages. Because any given word in any given tongue is, at its core, a description of what it represents. We call a rat a rat because the word “rat”…or rather the word “rat” evolved from, represented a gnawing sound and that’s what rats do. Native Americans have descriptive sounding names because they’ve been translated from their own tongue to English.)
I had already decided what culture and language each race would borrow from, way back when I was naming the lakes and mountains and cities. So for each creature, I looked up what it most closely resembled in the language of the race who would have named it. For example, the Feya’s tongue sounds a lot like French, so creatures in their homeland would have very French sounding names. (I discovered, in this process, that the Feya are excessively fond of seafood. Who knew? 
Then I started “wearing the edges” off the names, paring them down in ways I imagined common use and exposure to different tongues would do. Sometimes I would end up rearranging the word so that it spelled the way I was instinctively pronouncing it. (For example: “yabbyervotzk”. Which is “jabberwock”, transliterated into Russian. I was mentally pronouncing it “yabber-ya-votzk” until I noticed the spelling, and decided I liked my pronunciation better. So now it’s “yabberyvotzk”). Sometimes I’d end up abandoning the native word and going with the familiar name. I didn’t want to fall into the fantasy “calling a rabbit a ‘shmearp’ simply because that sounds cooler than plain ‘rabbit’” trap. This process will continue as I work on the game.
Last week, I was thinking about the ecology of Avatar (Cameron’s version, not Airbender), and remembering how I admired the overall sense of unity that existed on that world. (Except the Na’vi, but that’s a whole different gripe…) Because what I needed for Amphiptere’s Vision was a particular trait or evolutionary connection. Partially to unify the world and partially to help fix the “shmearp” problem. What’s unique about this world?
First thing that came to mind was dragons. Well duh, most fantasy worlds have dragons, usually of the Western, winged variety. But no one ever seems to think about how unlikely such an animal is, evolutionarily speaking. A six-limbed reptile, where two of those limbs basically grow out of its back as wings? On worlds where most other creatures sport the typical two legs, two arms symmetry? Dragons in fantasy literature are like the Na’vi of Avatar. I look at the rest of the ecosystem and wonder: how in the hell did this aberration evolve, and why hasn’t anyone else noticed how weird it is?
(Dragons created by some kind of separate, magical or supernatural process, of course, are a different matter. But this is rarely explicitly the case).
So, one unique feature of the Visions world is the existence of creatures that evolved with two legs, two arms, and two wings, arranged just so. And I remembered that dragons weren’t the only six limbed creature I’d dumped into my bestiary. I had griffins. Hippogriffs. Chimeras. A four-armed ape/yeti creature. A four-winged bird, originally stolen from D&D, I think. Two of my races have wings that sprout from the back.
I Googled “dragon skeleton”, and found something interesting. About half of the depictions showed the dragon having essentially two separate sets of shoulder blades: one set for the forearms, one set a little higher up for the wings. But the other half used a sort of combination scapula, one that could accommodate both arms and wings. I liked that one better. What if every single creature in the world (except insects and octopi and the like) had such a bone inside them? What if they all had six limbs?
I modeled a combination scapula with clay so I could really get a sense of how this thing would work. Interestingly enough, I found that if I flipped the scapula upside down, I had something that could support a four-armed creature like my ape-yeti, where the lower set of arms appears to poke out of the ribcage. If I included this special shoulder blade in every creature, I would have my uniting factor…and the creativity could come from deciding how those six limbs would manifest.
I’ve also been taking each creature and picking several different animals to use as models…because then I can say with confidence that my shmearp is not just a rabbit, but rabbit + wasp, with a little squirrel thrown in (to use a made-up example). And variety makes it easier to incorporate two extra limbs. Eventually I’ll organize these drawings and notes into a D&D-like Monster Manual, although I plan to lay it out like a field guide. Maybe Spiderwick style.
Tags: Amphiptere's Vision, brainstorming, ideas
Posted by nightphoenix on Mar 23, 2012 in
Novels,
Output,
Process,
Short Stories Let’s see.
I’ve been putting the finishing touches on a short story written from Brendan’s point of view. It takes place during the span of time when Saeli is missing from Aschamon, just before she makes her reappearance. I’m planning to enter it in the Writer’s Digest contest, as well as one other (that isn’t picky about simultaneous submissions). If it places, I’m hoping it will generate interest in Hands, Like Secrets.
My other big project this last week was overhauling the bestiary of Amphitere’s Vision. I’ll talk about that in a separate post.
I have also decided to change the format of the game from computer-based to table-top. Because getting a computer game concept into the right hands is next to impossible for someone like me. If you want to create a game, you essentially have to work for a game company. There really isn’t a clear avenue of gatekeepers for ideas from outside the industry. However, if I go table-top, I will essentially be able to self-publish the concept and rules. I don’t have to worry about the look of the finished product, or about handing stuff over to a company or a programmer. I don’t have to invent every single little rule and quest and NPC and outcome for every single scenario that could possibly happen in the world, because I can leave most of that in the hands of the individual GMs who run campaigns. I think the move makes sense. And later, if someone wants to pick it up and make a computer game out of it…hey, I won’t complain
I will have to reacquaint myself with GURPS (Generic Universal Role Playing System) in order to set up the dice rolling and gameplay rules. GURPS is the most straightforward and flexible system that I’m aware of (D&D is a mess and copyrighted besides, and I don’t want to have to invent a system from scratch).
I’ve changed the title of one of my stories. “Empty Eyes” is now “Dog Prince”. The sorcerers of that world have tamed these giant desert jackals, which they use both as horses and as guard dogs. The rest of the world, that hates and fears magic anyway, thus disparagingly calls anyone who can use magic a “dog”, after the jackals the sorcerers ride. Since Arav was heir to the throne before getting disowned, and then joins the sorcerers and discovers that he can use magic himself…kind of makes him a dog prince. I’ve also decided this is an adult story as opposed to a YA. Only because of tone and mood, not content! 
The other major change I’ve made to the queue has to do with Windwaker. I’m…removing the main character and replacing him with a girl. Because I think there aren’t enough stories where a girl goes on a sword and wits adventure by herself. And I mean one that doesn’t end with her meeting a prince and falling in love. I want to write an adventure where a young woman takes the Hero’s Journey, not as an accessory or “helper” to a man but on her own, and becomes the Windwaker herself…not just a prince’s bride.
This is something that I struggle with as a writer. As much as I don’t want to insert an “agenda” into my stories, the more I learn from blogs and online people about privilege and minorities and other viewpoints…the less I can ignore them in my writing. Yes, I originally wanted to write Windwaker about a male, but I cannot help but realize that if I do so, I will be unconsciously reinforcing the stereotype that only boys can have adventures. And I don’t want to do that. So I will write the same story, only about a girl. Because if authors write stories about boys who have adventures that aren’t about falling in love, then they should do the same for girls. Otherwise, girls may take away the subconscious message that the greatest adventure their gender is capable of is love and marriage…and it makes the girls who find swords more fascinating than boys feel like there’s something wrong with them.
Another example of this interplay of privilege and writing is that most of the relationships in my stories tend to be heterosexual. It’s what I know. But I cannot in good conscience deny the fact that gay people exist, and I feel that ignoring them in my writing is really not much better than ignoring them in real life. So in stories where they fit, I deliberately insert gay characters or have characters deal with homosexual people, not because it’s “politically correct” or to promote a positive or negative view of homosexuality…but because homosexual people are first and foremost people, and writing is about people. I don’t get to write stories with no gay people just because I’m straight, in the same way that I don’t get to write stories with no men in them just because I’m a woman, or no people of color just because I’m white. I have to make myself write such characters because I know I don’t do it naturally…and I don’t think the fact that certain thinking doesn’t come natural to me is an excuse to not do it. Not all of my readers will share my gender, race, or orientation, and I don’t think it’s fair to pretend, intentionally or not, that they and their struggles don’t exist or aren’t worth talking about.
So, Meghan Iris McKenna was born this last weekend. She’s a drummer from a religious town and a family that doesn’t think drums are a “proper” instrument for a girl to play, and that women have no business in leadership of any kind. I’m shelving the character Quintin for now, but he’ll probably show up in a different story that calls for an introverted geek. I rather like him.
Tags: business of writing, editing and revisions, Windwaker
Posted by nightphoenix on Dec 22, 2011 in
Novels,
Output,
Process I just looked at the date of the last post I made here, and I’m fairly embarrassed. I’d love to say I’ve been wonderfully busy and productive and just haven’t had the time to update… Read more…
Tags: business of writing, editing and revisions, GMC, goals, Saeli, Shades, the real world
Posted by Mistress of Feathers on Sep 17, 2011 in
Novels,
Process I am about to rewrite the knife battle between Avalgo and Othau, which is, in a sense, the climactic moment of my characters’ stay on Dheu.
The original fight was in my first draft of the whole trilogy (back before it was a trilogy), and it was one of those awesome, completely unplanned moments. The way the events had been progressing, I always assumed Raphel was going to be the one to take down Othau. He certainly wanted to. So I had this Raphel vs. Othau moment in my head literally right up until the moment Othau and Avalgo pulled knives on each other, and Raphel was occupied elsewhere. And I said, “Um, okay, apparently these two aren’t going anywhere until they have it out”. And it’s sort of appropriate that the fight should be between the two characters who are actually from Dheu…it highlights the fact that my four main characters are interlopers on a conflict that’s much bigger and much older than they are.
The theme of the fight is essentially the age-old question: Can an end justify the means taken to achieve it? If you have to become a monster to save the world, is it worth it?
And this is a theme that forms the backbone of the entire trilogy. Raphel’s goal is to save Verre from a war that is destroying both the Mantles and the Cowls…but he has to kill two gods in order to do it. Obviously he thinks it’s worth it. Of course, he’s got a major lifelong grudge against one of these gods, and the other god is actively trying to wipe out his people…so he’s not exactly the most unbiased judge of such things. Same with Mora and Kaladan. Only Saeli really has a shot at truly deciding whether the end is worth the cost. Right now, she’s on Raphel’s side…but the more time she spends around Naeth, the more she’s going to realize exactly what it would mean to kill a god.
Will she save her world? Or will she save her soul? Of course, her stake in this is all tangled up in her relationship with Raphel, and the choices he makes. Her tragedy is that she will be forced to destroy Raphel while believing in her heart that he wasn’t completely wrong. Ultimately she chooses principle over saving the world, but her circumstances will allow her to do the latter by sticking to the former. Lucky Saeli. Why am I playing it like this? Why am I giving Saeli an out?
Because I don’t know the answer to the question.
Othau believes that securing a future generation of Dheuans is worth the cost of derailing two girls’ lives. Avalgo disagrees, arguing that what good does it do to become monsters in order to survive? Each of them has a point, and I honestly do not know what I would choose, were I put in that position. On one hand, kidnapping, rape, and forced childbirth are monstrous things to inflict on anyone. On the other hand, not acting to save an entire world when you *could*, is also monstrous. It’s an unsettling place for me, not being able to decide within my own mind what a character “ought” to do. All I have to work with is what I know the character would do.
It means I can’t really resolve this fight between Othau and Avalgo. It means that Saeli can’t fully resolve it, even after Raphel betrays her so badly that she MUST stand against him. It means I have to kill off my main villain without knowing, for certain, that he deserved it.
But ultimately, I think maybe it’s a question that needs to be left up to the reader to decide. Each character will choose where they stand, and the reader gets to decide if they made the right decision or not.
Tags: GMC, musings, Shades
Posted by nightphoenix on Sep 17, 2011 in
Novels,
Output,
Process Seriously.
Here’s the situation. Saeli, Raphel, Mora, and Kaladan are on a world that is, due to a series of unfortunate events involving three jealous goddesses, one naive god, and a very angry angelic…well, doomed. Said goddesses created an extremely infectious disease that eventually rendered every single female on the planet unable to bear children. The last generation has reached their mid-50s or so, and they’ve essentially lost hope.
Enter Saeli and Mora, two young women of childbearing age who, due to their not being born on Dheu, are immune to this disease. You can see how this might interest certain parties. The two women get kidnapped, and are currently trapped in a cave surrounded by twenty or so men who are so desperate to not be the last generation that they’re willing to rape female strangers and force them to live out their lives on Dheu bearing children.
Saeli and Mora are both trained in the art of using their qi to do all sorts of extraordinary things, like fire and ice and wind and teleportation spells. None of the men who have captured them have any such power. (Although half of them are what they call “spirit walkers”. They can essentially thrust their spirits out of their bodies and travel about the “spirit realm”, where they receive guidance from the angelics who live there. This is, of course, of no practical use whatsoever against someone who can lob a fireball at them).
The first obvious question: how did a couple of magically inclined characters get captured by a bunch of non-magically inclined characters in the first place? Read more…
Tags: brainstorming, magic, Mora, Saeli, Shades, worldbuilding
Posted by nightphoenix on Jul 22, 2011 in
Novels,
Output,
Process Recently I’ve been trying to come up with a way to organize which projects I work on, and how much time I spend working. The problem with me, I’ve found, is that when I try to concentrate solely on one project at a time, I inevitably work myself into a bind that I can’t get out of. Not wanting to “break my focus”, however, I don’t allow myself to work on anything else…and thus, nothing gets worked on. Plainly this is, ah, not a good system for me. The other problem I have is allowing myself to get completely derailed, spending a month or two enthusiastically pouring energy into Amphitere’s Vision or one of my minor story ideas when I really, really wanted to be working on Shades. Also, there are days when I get bitten by the art bug, and need to work on something visual. So…what seems to work best for me is having a variety of projects to work on at a time, but only certain ones.
I’ve come up with the idea of organizing every project, including the artistic ones unconnected with my writing and my wands, into what I’ll call “cycles”. Every cycle includes at least one series novel (like Shades or Briar Rose), one stand-alone novel, various shorter writing projects, bits of Amphitere’s Vision, and art projects. It gives me options, but confines those options enough so that I actually make progress on things.
What’s also helped is finally sitting down and deciding exactly what still needs to be done for Amphiptere’s Vision, which was kind of a huge, sprawling mess. The project folder is a jumbled mess of Excel spreadsheets, Notepad notes, and drawings of characters, dragons, and maps in various stages of completion. I asked myself: “If I was going to hand a folder to, oh say a game producer, what all would I need to include so that they would understand the vision of the game? What might they want to see?” and made a list. So now I have, like, actual goals to work towards.
Each “cycle” is supposed to take 1-2 years to complete, though I think that will vary. The way I broke things down, I already have 12 cycles planned. *cough* Yeah, I have a lot of projects. Although the last two or three are just Tindaari (I know I’ll be filling those up). I ran some numbers, and calculated that if I wrote 400 words a day, I could write a 96,000 word novel in a year’s time. Double that to 800 words a day, and I could write two novels in a year’s time. That’s not bad. 400 words doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but I’ve been surprised how often it’s difficult to manage even that much in a day. (Ever try writing with Inspector Gadget, Rugrats, or Pixar playing in the background? Meh.) That will get better after school starts, I think, and I have some hours to myself.
One of my biggest problems in productivity is guilt. Much of the time I feel like I’m not making enough progress. Of if I am making progress, I feel like it’s coming at the expense of doing the laundry, or making sure my son isn’t just sitting around all day watching TV. I know guilt motivates some people, but it paralyzes me. I get even more disinclined to work, and thus feel more guilt, and so on. The 400 words a day is really helping with that, because it’s such an easy goal to meet and yet I know it will still get me somewhere. And when I write more I can pat myself on the back even more. 
So that’s where I am, and why I haven’t been updating much.
Tags: goals, the real world
Posted by nightphoenix on Jun 18, 2011 in
Input,
Life,
Novels,
Output,
Process It’s been a while. And actually, I haven’t been writing for a few weeks either. Most of you who know me in RL already know, but for those who don’t…
Back on Memorial Day, we had to take our five-year-old son to the emergency room. He’d been tired for a couple of days, and then his mouth got really dry. When we took him in, he was so weak and tottery that he could barely walk himself to the bathroom. They tested him in the ER and determined that he had Type 1 diabetes and was suffering from diabetic ketoacidosis, and immediately admitted him. Ketoacidosis is what happens when your body cannot use the sugar in your blood for fuel, and starts breaking down its own tissues instead. Read more…
Posted by nightphoenix on May 27, 2011 in
Books,
Input,
Process I just finished the Winds of the Forelands series by David B. Coe, and as fantasy epics go, it was pretty good. It’s rare that I pick up a series at random and have it be unique enough to hold my interest. Although it had many of the classic tropes of epics, they were combined and re-imagined in such ways that I couldn’t sit there and say “Ah, so it’s this kind of magic system”, etc. Read more…
Tags: authors, books, brainstorming, goals
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