Oct
23

On the Edge of…Something.

Posted in craft, muse, nanowrimo, writing | 2 Comments
Mmmm…finally hit 10,000 words on Moonsong – but it’s been a slog. Should hit the same on ShadowWeaver shortly as well. Which doesn’t mean anything  – it’s just an arbitrary number, but I’d like them both past that point before NaNo starts. Sort of OCD of me, I guess, but there it is. And yet, when I’ve been writing the last few days, it feels like I’m skating the edge of where the real story is. (More on MoonSong than ShadowWeaver, truthfully). Like if I can just somehow get past this last little bit, the part that actually wants to be told will be sitting there, waiting for me. I wouldn’t call it a block, exactly. More like an expectancy of some sort. And to be honest, as wretched as some of the stuff that seems to come out when I’m writing is, I’ve discovered that it’s actually nowhere near… Read more
Oct
21

Team Effort

Posted in craft, writing | 1 Comment
It’s funny, but for all that writing is considered a solitary pursuit, the actual act of getting pubbed requires much more than a Team of One.  (At least for me).  I mean, sure – the writing belongs to me, the act of putting the words on the page, the sitting of my ass in the chair to actually do the work  – but there’s so much going on behind the scenes that it’s really unfair to claim all the glory for myself. (And I use the term glory *very* loosely – LOL – sometimes it’s nothing more than slamming my face into the keyboard.) But behind many writers is a coterie of people – the beta readers, for example, who are willing to run through your book again and again and again. This can be so important during editing, because after a while I know that I’ve looked at those… Read more
Oct
19

On Threesomes

Posted in craft, writing | 2 Comments
Ha. Not *that* kind of threesome, you pervs. 😉 No – I was thinking the other night about how difficult it can be to try to flip flop between writing multiple stories. I’d actually read part of the book there, Page after Page, some time last year. At the time I was in the middle of my procrastinator phase- I had just started writing and I couldn’t quite get my act together. One of those things where I was so tentative about actually getting the words down on the page.  Fear of success? Fear of failure?  (And maybe those are one and the same). So, yeah, I picked up a number of writing motivational books. Never finished any of them, because I already knew what my issue was – I just needed to suck it up and write the thing. The books were a sort of safety net – i.e. I couldn’t… Read more
Oct
16

Ergo, Ego, Eros

Posted in craft, ego, writing | 3 Comments
Writers, from what I can tell, seem to be a bit of a emotional bunch. One only has to be on a few mailing lists to see it – the brilliant moments of shared success when someone wins a contest or gets a call back from an agent, to the utterly gut-wrenching posts of despair that all one’s hard work is for naught – that no one will read it or buy it or like it.  And it’s not limited to just aspiring authors either – even the pubbed folks get rejected sometimes.  Even so, I think it’s a healthy sort of fear. One that might drive you to edit faster or write better, to attempt to become more than what you are. Jeffe and I were chatting about this the other day – why we as writers do what we do. There’s probably a certain amount of ego involved in… Read more
Oct
15

Ouch!

Posted in contests, writing | Leave a comment
So I got scores back for another contest last night (one which will remain nameless), and I have to say that if I’d this was the first contest I’d ever entered I’d be pretty devastated right about now. Out of a total of 40 points, I got a 25, a 24.5 and a *15*! Clearly this was a contest where the judges just didn’t get it. And by get, I mean  – sure, they thought the writing was fine, but the five to ten pages they got (which isn’t even an entire chapter, might I add) didn’t answer all their questions. Which kinda skeeves me – I mean, taking off points because I don’t show both characters’ full GMC in the first five pages seems a bit ridiculous to me. But sweet Jesus, some of the comments: 1) “She swears too much.”  (You know, I’ll concede on this one…I’ve been… Read more