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“Next time don’t come down stairs until you’ve rubbed the bitch out of your eyes.”
I love that line so much. I don’t really know why, but it’s tickles me. That’s Michael greeting his ever-pleasant older sister at way too early in the morning. In all fairness, she was being a bitch.
Applying the edits I made to the manuscript starts tonight. I’m thinking it’ll take me a week or a week and a half to finish. I’m still up in the air about the opening lines.
“And that’s what can happen when you feed a dog Poprocks. Amazing, isn’t it, Diane?”
“It certainly is, Rick. I hope little Billy’s wounds heal soon. We at News Channel Seven wish you a speedy recovery, Billy.”
It’s completely irrelevant to the rest of the plot but it’s what Michael’s sitting in front of the TV watching. He makes some comments on it, like wondering when Poprocks became breaking news, but it’s not the context I’m worried about more so than what people’s reactions would be as a first introduction to my story is a newscast about a dog eating Poprocks. Again, betas will help immensely.
So I’m finagling on my laptop last night and I’m trying to create those little ‘alt’ symbols, like the spades and hearts and things like that, for bullets over on Bites. On laptops, you can’t use the number bar for that so you have to enable the number pad. Well, the thing worked fine on Wednesday night but last night it decided to give me a wet willy. At first it wouldn’t turn on and then it did and now it won’t go off. Do you have any idea how hard it is to type when you constantly have to hold down the Fn key in order to not get L311! type? And I type something like 100 words a minute. Yeah, I’m down to a crawl with that.
There doesn’t seem to be anything stuck; it just appears that the little censor thing on the board underneath has farted out. I wanted to pop off another button to do some comparing so I went for the Caps Lock . . . and broke that one. It still works just fine, there just isn’t an actual button. Thankfully my dad has a spare keyboard that he can install to replace this one (damn Fn key) and even if he doesn’t, I’m just going to go buy a wireless keyboard, sit my laptop on the tray it has and type in my lap. Better for my wrists anyway.
But now my groove is off. I’m using my desktop now but that’s not where I do my writing. That’s done on the laptop in my room but my mojo’s been trampled by Fn. WTF? My comfort zone bubble’s been popped! I’ll find out Sunday if my dad has the spare keyboard and if not, I’m going over to Staples and getting something cheap to replace it. A laptop kayboard runs about $100 and needs to get shipped. I’m twitchy as it is that I’ve lost a day editing and it’s just not right doing it on this computer. *twitch* Gah! Must fix . . .
On the plus side, everything that I’ve made thus far that’s been gluten free hasn’t been an epic fail. I’ve made (or my mom has, for only a couple things) turkey chili, fried chicken, pizza, white cake with cream cheese frosting and baked apple streusel. The pizza I just made tonight and was shockingly good for gluten free dough. Although it does hang a little limp and I just absolutely refuse to use a knife and fork on pizza (never ever ever ever ever) so I ended up making a mess but it was good. The cake kicks ass. I’m actually quite excited.
And the thing is, and this is both good and bad, I feel better. Crap.
You know you have them. If you’re a writer, no matter how much you love to write, there are just certain aspects of it that have you procrastinating until it’s 4 am. Don’t lie.
For me, one of them is naming my characters, namely surnames. I hate it. Absolutely despise is with the passion from the fiery pits of Hell. I never know how to work my MCs’ (or any characters’) full name into the story and not have it sound contrived. Even when it’s a viable means of saying it so the reader knows what it is it still sounds like I’m forcing it. I can’t stand it. Are last names necessary in fiction? Will it kill the readers to never know my characters’ last names?
The other one is titling. I hate giving anything a title even more than I hate giving my characters last names. I yearn for the day when titling is out of my hands and into those of the publishers. They know what they’re doing and can come up with some pretty good stuff. Me, I just gimp around usually with the first thing that pops into my head and hope for the best. But attachment, pretty much never. Up until my junior year of college I never titled anything until my creative writing professor said I had to. With hindsight I know I don’t have to but I didn’t know any better then. But it’s not like I can query a novel called Untitled. Agents like to see you can at least come up with something.
So what about you? What aspects of writing can you just not stand?
And OMG help me hatch my eggs! They’ll die if you don’t! You don’t want that to happen, do you? Caled needs family!
Not quite regularly scheduled posting but pretty close. I’m still pretty afraid of shopping areas with it being the weekend after Christmas and all but I’m thinking tomorrow on the bit of research I need for the post. Or I’m sure the Barnes and Noble website could help me out but I’m more concerned with what’s on the shelf.
Anyway, yesterday I completed the first draft of Earth Shatterer, my NaNo-written novel. I had even less to finish than I thought and it came in at just over 55,000 words. It’s a little scant when it comes to editing wiggle room but my idea for this story was much more concise, not to mention it was my second book. And if you’re thinking, “well why didn’t you just finish it in November,” to that I say bite me. An extra 5,000 words and I would have been in a straight jacket.
Since Diamond Crier was my first, I did a lot of experimenting with my writing, spent four and a half chapters alone finding the voice and the rest of the book figuring out where it was going to go. Well, not that so much but allowing it to blossom far beyond what the original intention was. With 83,000 words on that one, I have a lot hacking to do and a bigger deal in trying to figure out what goes and what stays.
Earth Shatterer was much more concise. It was pretty fatless from the beginning, the action came as it was needed and the plot propelled itself forward. I got lucky with this one. I don’t have much whittling to do. That’s not to say I won’t have a lot of editing to do but at least I won’t have to hack down to about 55,000 from 83,000 words. That’s a mighty hack.
The two books, I know, will be two different editing experiences but I’m looking forward to it (although I’m plotting my procrastination now). The new year will begin the editing process and I think I’ll edit the two before I start on something new or the next book in the sequence. For one I don’t want first drafts piling up with no editing done. I would like to find an agent sometime this century. And two, I don’t see a point in starting the second book to either series before I have everything put together and organized in the first. Since I write without looking back, I’d almost be writing the sequel blind and I’m really trying to keep my sanity intact, especially while I’m editing. Plus it’ll give me a chance to catch up on my fun writing. I miss my fun writing.
On a completely unrelated note, I have custom fields! Fun! Now I just need to figure out how to use them.
I pulled this off of an older Yapping About YA post and thought it was pretty neat. There are supposed to be ten examples but I really don’t think I’ve written enough to have that many. Essentially all you’re supposed to do is list the ten things that are constant throughout all your novels, whether they’re actual sequential novels or not. It links back to signatures that each author may have and this is a good way to point them out.
How do you know you’re reading a Donna Sirianni novel?
1. Nostrils are mentioned (I have no idea why).
2. There’s snark.
3. The character is beat upon in some fashion (mentally or physically, they won’t walk away unscathed).
4. There’s a non-prominent relationship sort of forming (I’m not into the full-blown stuff, not yet anyway).
5. There’s always help from at least one adult but the MCs bear the brunt of the weight.
That’s pretty much all I can think of at the moment. I’m sure I’ll come across more when I start editing. I haven’t looked at DC since September so I’m sure I’m forgetting something. So what about you? What are the similarities running across your novels?
If you haven’t heard that the publishing world is imploding with the rest of the economy, then I think you’ve been living under a rock. Or just not into publishing, one or the other. It’s not as news-making as the Big Three wanting a bailout in order to escape insolvency but if you’re a writer, it’s certainly big enough.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt halted adult novel acquisitions last month, or so it was grossly rumored (per the HMH spokesperson) as I read on Agent Kristin’s blog. She’s been reporting on this stuff for the past month or so. If you don’t know what that means, it’s really quite simple. No touchy. HMH will no touchy your work. They ain’t buying nothing. Apparently the children’s department is still acquiring and the spokesman did say the news was taken too far, that they were still acquiring but under a tighter pen, but it’s still daunting news.
Well, Publisher’s Weekly has more news out that people in the publishing biz are dropping like flies, all at HMH and their divisions. They’re consolidating their departments in order to save money. Good for them, bad for the rest of us. For writers it means getting an even smaller chance to get published with an HMH imprint and for readers, it means, in a year or so, less by the way of HMH publications to read. The catalogue is shrinking.
We are in dire straits and no one is being left untouched (unless you’re one of the Big Three and get to fly around in your Lear Jets asking for billions in taxpayer money bailout). Our chances of publication have just slimmed that much more. A random blog I read (hell if I could remember which one now, blasted sieve of a memory) had a post that highlighted reasons it’s great to be a writer in a recession (mainly very little monetary output and maximum creative input) and that’s not to be taken lightly. There’s never a bad time to be a writer (in theory) but when the pickers get picky, you just have to up your game.
Not that you were slacking off before and not that this is an excuse or anything because you’ve always done this, but now is the time to strive to write even better than you did before. The competition’s huge and there are fewer medals to win. You have to be better in order to get that coveted spot. You might have thought you were good before. Now it’s time to supercede that. You don’t have a choice.
These are not good signs but we don’t have any choice but to work with them.
NaNo Update–I’m roughly 4,000 words behind. You know, it’s bad enough when I hit lulls in my work that I have to trudge through. It’s even worse when I’m on a word and time deadline. So I’m hoping I can crank out about 7,000 words over the rest of the weekend so I can at least somewhat catch up. I’m thanking the Thanksgiving god that I only have a two and a half day work week this week. But it does make me feel a little better that out of the people on my buddy list on NaNo, I still have the highest word count. That’s not going to write anything for me but at least I’m not alone.
I’d say maybe this time last year, I would have considered myself pretty ageist. I don’t know where the thought came from but for whatever reason, I felt that because I was older, I knew more than the teenagers still in high school. Stupid, I know, but I thought it. What could they possibly know that I don’t? I’m older. I’ve experienced more. I’ve traveled more. I’m more worldly and wiser. Little peons.
Thankfully I’ve grown and humbled. I came to realize that I didn’t give them enough credit. Not nearly enough. When it comes to writing, there are kids still high school school that are further along in their careers than I am now. There are kids that know as much as I do about the publishing world, if not more. Hell, what I’ve learned I’ve just acquired within the past year. Then again my focus has been scattered for many years prior to that.
My point it, if you can smell the asses of birds, it’s time to give your neck a rest. No, teens don’t know everything. But neither do I. I’ve learned a lot about writing YA straight from teens, teens that are in the same writing position as me and teens that are in positions I hope to be in some day. Am I jealous? I won’t lie. A little bit but I don’t have time to dwell because I have my own work to do. So I hope nothing but good comes of their work and their careers and set back to work getting mine to that place. A year ago I probably would have thought ‘what they hell did they do that I didn’t?’ Instead now I think ‘good for them.’ Then again, it helps to spin what you can into a positive. I’m only human, after all. It doesn’t always work but wishing ill on someone, or harping on their success, will get you nowhere but even more steps back.
It’s when I see comments from high school students like Agent Kristin’s intern about the publishing industry that make me realize how wrong I was before. What she knows now, at sixteen or seventeen or eighteen, I just found out at twenty-four and twenty-five. Pieces of it anyway. Maybe I’d be closer to my goal if I had known that information at that age and if I’d been as steadfast about achieving it then as I am now.
