Where is the edge?
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.
It was a long weekend. It was also an excellent, inspiring weekend. I imagine it will take a number of weeks before I even get through all the notes I took there, although I already have plans to implement some of what I learned into Shades right away. (Note to self- I must find some index cards.)
I did get the program done in time, by the way, and it turned out quite nice. Being me, I noticed one or two little mistakes I made…transparency inconsistencies, spacing a little off in places…but I doubt anyone else would see them. Of course, by the end of Friday, I was asking myself why we bother to place people in rooms beforehand at all, as the schedule of the day never actually matched what was in the program. Ah, well. I think everyone managed to get where they needed to go.
Part of me actually does not want to rehash the whole conference blow by blow, because I’d feel the urge to make a clever, witty narrative of the event and I’m too tired to do that. I met some great people this time around (not that I didn’t last year), and was actually able to have some lengthy chats with them. Denise Little and Debra Dixon were especially great…just all around fun gals to hang around with. I had my editor appointment with Denise, and she gave me some names of people to target and good advice. Katherine Sands was there again (I remembered her from last year); another great gal. I also got to see Susan Hubbard for a few minutes (she writes some of the best vampire books I’ve ever read), and I talked bad literature and bad movies with a gal my own age for about an hour on Friday night.
One of the things that I’ve taken away from this weekend is the urge to really start making use of this blog. You may notice that I’ve added a blogroll and a whole bunch of links. I tried to stick to writing and fantasy related sites, but one or two political ones may have crept in there. (By the way, if you read this and you have a blog, shoot me an email and I’ll go check it out.) One of the perks of reading and writing mostly YA is that most of the current authors are hip with the times and keep blogs, or at least have an online presence of some sort.
I want to start posting something in here every day. I’m also quite sure I’ve said that at least four or five times before, on various online blogs I’ve kept, and it just never happens. The problem is, I don’t necessarily have something to say every single day, and I’m the type of person where if I don’t feel I have something useful to contribute to a conversation, I keep my mouth shut. Given that tendency, what I may do is give myself a topic for every day of the week. That way, if I can’t think of anything else, I can at least post a song, or movie quote, or something. No issues, though! I do not want this to turn into a political blog. There are enough of those out there already, and I really don’t like talking about hot topics. I also have a hard time making myself stop once I do start thinking about them, which distracts me from things I’d rather be thinking about, like my stories.
So, look for that.
What else. The Goal, Motivation, Conflict workshop that Debra Dixon gave has really inspired me to go back through Shades and make sure every scene is pulling its weight. The most encouraging thing I took away from that talk was that I do GMC with all my characters pretty instinctively. I’m a character-driven writer. When I start to write a story, or when I go to turn a conceit or dream into a viable story, I usually start with one, maybe two characters. I ask myself what they want within the context of the conceit, and give them a bare bones reason why they want it. Then I make up another character who wants something that puts him or her in direct conflict with the first characters. Then I mentally plop those characters into the conceit and happily watch them create problems for themselves. Backstory arises from plot and motivation problems that come up (as in, I need this character to do something, therefore I must give them a damn good reason to do it). If I make the characters vivid enough, the plot writes itself. For instance, three or four years ago I had this vague milieu for a story and one really, really strong character, and decided to sit myself down and construct a basic plot. Two hours later the first initial outline of Shades was done. Two days later I had four chapters written. (Can you guess who that character was? *shakes a fist at a certain copper-haired Cowl*)
Instincts being what they may, I can already see how going though this process consciously will help me on initial plotting, and on rewrites. And I now have a much better grasp on Mask of Eldarmarch (that was the story I chose to work on during the workshop itself). It was interesting trying to work out goals and motivation for a character that I have to essentially treat as two different people in the story itself. But the split between Dustin and the Piper is the emotional crux of the story; they really do have different goals at the beginning, and are very different men. Only towards the end do those goals start to align…and once they merge, the mask becomes the symbol of that united purpose (instead of the symbol of living a lie). I’m not sure I would have ever been able to pin that down in such plain terms, had I not done that workshop.
Today, I’m going to get some writing done on Shades. Haven’t been able to do that for most of January. I’m also wallowing through a slow spot, which doesn’t help. My goal (!) is to have the first book of Shades finished by the end of March. It took me about two months to get halfway, so I’m figuring another two to complete it. At worst, mid or late April. I may need that extra month to polish. My bigger goal is to have the whole trilogy finished by the end of the year. As I’m hoping the later chapters won’t need as much work as the earlier chapters did, I think that goal is doable. But as always, we’ll see.
So, to sum up: Links! Blog goals. Writing goals. Here’s to productiveness.
I have heavily updated the Writing Projects page. It now has all the ideas that have cropped up in the last few months, plus some more choice music. Go check it out.
“To All My Democratic Friends:
Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2010, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere . Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wish.
To My Conservative Friends:
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”
Okay, everyone, my writing email has been getting spam. Since I don’t give out that email to any site I sign up for, I must assume that the culprit came from here. I have deleted the 3 users that I do not know, since they have not made any comments or introduced themselves to me. If one of you is reading this, and you are a real person, and you want back in: please, please, please introduce yourself in an email or something, and I can re-create your user. I’m not trying to be nasty, but I really don’t like spam.
Well, Shades isn’t going to be done by January. Maybe if I had like a month on a deserted island with food, my computer and a power plug…but even then, it’d be rushed. I don’t want to rush just to get it done; it’s a good story and I want to do it justice. I’ve paid for an agent appointment anyway, because I think it will be good practice, and I’ll get to ask questions. I started making a list of agents I will want to target once I get done…even going as far as picking out some to pitch Mask of Eldarmarch, Dragon Singer, and even Briar Rose to (if nobody is interested in Shades at first).
I decided a while ago that I’m going to need an agent if I want to make a career of writing. One: more and more of the big publishers are no longer accepting un-agented stuff. Two, and possibly more important for me: I am absolutely terrible with legalese. I don’t want to screw up with a first contract and have it come back to bite me later…I’d rather just leave it in the hands of someone whose job is to handle that stuff. But I’ve realized that I’ll need to be particularly selective in my choice of agent, because I have such a broad range of projects I’d like to do. I did some research and discovered that most agents who handle YA and MG (middle grade) fantasy do not handle adult books and don’t know the adult market, and likewise, agents who handle adult fantasy don’t want YA. My first few novels definitely fall somewhere between YA and MG, but my Tindaari epic, for example, was always going to be an adult fantasy. Will I have to get a different agent for that one?
Also, I did not find a single agent that I thought I could pitch multiple ideas to and have them be interested in all of them. Obviously I have more looking to do, and there were a few that I could probably pitch most of my ideas to. But for example, some want gritty urban fantasy, but no regular fantasy…or more specifically, they want fantasy but no vampires (Briar Rose?), or fantasy but no sci-fi (134340?). I mean once you’re in, I guess an agent will represent anything if it’s good enough, but still, I don’t want to get stuck having to find a different agent every two or three books.
Shades is going to be a hard story to sell anyway, for three reasons. It’s YA, it’s long, and it’s my debut. Most publishers won’t take a chance on a super long YA novel from an unknown. Right now I’m probably in the neighborhood of 200,000 words. I can pare that down, and I will, but not in half. Certainly not down to the 80,000 mark (which is about the max for YA, typically). At that point, I’d be sacrificing story for length, and I refuse to do that. I’ll hang onto it and finish Mask of Eldarmarch and sell that first, if I have to. If it was an adult fantasy I could probably get away with long…but I think the voice is too young, and the people that will really be interested in it will be mostly teenaged girls.
But long YA debuts are not unheard of. Stephanie Meyer was relatively unknown, and Twilight came in at 118,501 words. Christopher Paolini was a complete unknown, and Eragon has 157,220 words (though he self-published it first…it existed for a whole year before a major publisher discovered it). Both fantasy, like Shades…even in YA, if it’s fantasy, it can be a little longer than average. I’ve actually revised my word count goal based on these two books…first I will shoot for 150,000 (comparable to Eragon), and if I can manage that, I can shoot for 118,000 (comparable to Twilight). That way, when I pitch it, I can point to the bestseller and be like, hey, this other book was long too, but it did well because it had a great story, etc. I think Shades has a good shot of succeeding on its own merit…as long as I can somehow prevent a prospective agent from having apoplexy over a 150,000 word manuscript.
I’ve also been thinking about the title of the book. “Shades” is an okay one, but it was really more of a working title in my head because I had to call it something. I had several permutations going, having to do with black and white, and shades, and gray, but none of them really seemed right. But one day last week I was scanning back through my first draft chapters (which are all titled based on a phrase from within the chapter), and I happened upon Chapter 24: Like softly breaking glass. And I thought to myself, “You know, that’s a nice poetic line. That could almost be the name of the whole book.” Especially since the essence of the story is not the abstract notion of good verses evil (though the story does cover that, obviously)…it’s about Saeli’s tragic relationship with Raphel. “Like softly breaking glass” conveys that in a way that’s interesting, and eye-catching, and poetic. (Not to mention glass seems to be a common prop in the story).
So, Shades may become Like Softly Breaking Glass when it’s done.
In other news, I have not been able to write at all this week, due to holiday preparations. However, my gingerbread cookies were a success both at our small group and at MOPS today, and I think I have everything bought that needs to be bought. I have some things to finish making, and things to wrap, and probably things to bag, and cards to sign…and the hubby and I’s anniversary is this Sunday, which will be a pleasant reprieve, but still. *sigh* Yeah, I’m beginning to understand why people dread Christmas.
I’ve had one or two users register in the last few weeks that I have no clue who they are. Don’t get me wrong; that’s perfectly okay!
If I know you in real life or from elsewhere in cyberspace, please, please let me know somehow. Either in an email, or private message, or add something to your bio…something. And if I don’t know you, that’s great, but I’d still like to hear from you. Make a comment on one of my posts, if you don’t want to contact me directly. I’m not much of a commenter on the blogs I read, so I really, really, really don’t want to delete someone who reads and is just quiet. But in the interest of protecting my ideas, I do need to hear from everyone on here at least once.
You can tack a howdy-doo onto this post, if you want.
Remember how I was all like, I’m going to finish the rough draft this week? I don’t think I realized how close to mid-September it was already. So no, it’s not going to get done this week. I have to get the conference booklet done first…it is more imminently due than anything else. Then, only then, will I concentrate on rough draft and upcoming short story.
That is all.
I think I could get the first draft done this week if I really, really worked on it. Literally, if I wrote for 2 hours every day…and more importantly, didn’t spend that time going back through what I’ve already written…I could get there. As always, however, whether that will actually happen shall be dictated by circumstance and the cooperation of a certain three year old.
Then the cutting process will begin. I know of two whole scenes I can nix without even thinking about it, and numerous other bits and pieces. I’m sure I’ll find more once I actually re-read, especially in the first section. The angelic subplot can get cut…I started it on Dheu and then never had the space to take it anywhere. It just kind of fizzles out. The Keeper subplot can probably be streamlined, since it took me three quarters of the story to finally figure out where I was going with it. Let’s see, what else. A lot of Saeli’s interaction with Cara and Brendan at the beginning can be steamlined, if not cut altogether. Naeth isn’t as big a player as I thought he was going to be, so he probably actually has enough screen time…I just need to focus it a little better. I think, like Brendan, he doesn’t actually have to BE on screen to be vitally important.
Interestingly, the process of closing this story is providing more and more material for a sequel. Please Login or Register to view this.
Wow, I just totally went on a sequel tangent. *sigh* I have a lot of work to do before January, and the next two months are going to be ridiculous. I’ve agreed to design the conference booklet for the SCWG this year…which is, btw, really cool, and I’m flattered that I was asked. That has to be done by mid-September. I have to polish off the first draft of Shades so I can start editing it. I want to enter a short story in the SCWG writing contest for the conference…which means I have to write, edit, and polish a 2000 word story by Oct. 15th. (Short stories are not my forte. I have a hard time thinking small enough). I need to finish editing my short story for the Writer’s Digest contest before Nov. 2nd. We have friends coming to visit the weekend of Oct. 17th, and my Hanson concert is the 24th. That’s two weekends shot. Oh, yeah, and my birthday is in there somewhere. (Did I mention I have to have Shades done…DONE, as in: cut, edited, copyedited, polished…by January, if I want to have a complete manuscript at the conference??)
I’m sure I’m even forgetting something in this list.
Which reminds me…it’s bedtime, and I have laundry to do tomorrow.
…is anyone having any trouble with pictures and things loading on the site? I can’t promise everything here will always be entirely dial-up friendly, but we have the lowest end of broadband and things seem to load on my end pretty quickly. I hope that’s the norm.
Mariah Dennison, fantasy writer and artist. I have finished the first book in a trilogy, and am currently working on the second.
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