NaNoEdMo wrap-up.

Well, I got to the fifty hour mark of editing in March about an hour ago, which is cutting it close. I’m tired of editing, pleased with what I accomplished, and a little disappointed at just how much more there is to do – sigh. I guess that’s the way it always goes.

I got approximately six lessons on the ‘How to Revise your Novel’ course finished – I was in the middle of lesson 8 at the start of the month, and now I’m in progress on fourteen. I learned a lot and did some great work with my book in those lessons, too.

I got some great revision done on ‘The Storm Mirror,’ polishing a charming first draft into what could, I think, be a really great finished story!

I also got some good revision done on ‘The Scroll’, especially the first sample chapter. Unfortunately, I found out yesterday that there was no space for me in the CSSF Novel workshop, as the class is being kept very small this summer. Oh, well. I still think I want to revisit ‘The Scroll’ for Camp Nano in August.

Aside from these three, a lot of my editing hours were spent on old fanfic projects, some of which I’ve already tackled in NaNoEdMo of previous years, but I’ve learned a lot more about what makes good writing since then, and polishing these stories up to post them on fanfiction.net is good practice in editing for other stories, if nothing else. Also, when I just had to get some editing in on a crazy day, (and trying to do 50 hours of editing in a month makes most days crazy,) sometimes I wanted to be able to work on something I wasn’t too emotionally invested in anymore, and just fire up the MS word grammar checker on the bus home and see what it thought about my sentence style.

Next stop – the Frenzy! It’s always a little crazy to switch from marathon editing to wildly passionate script writing on April the first.

Nanoedmo update – week 2

Well, it looks like the NaNoEdMo forums are back up, and hours logging should be online soon. As for myself, I’ve been plowing along pretty well, counting my time for the Holly Lisle course work and any other editing that I’ve done. I’m up at 23 hours now, which is pretty good for day 14.

One trick that has really helped has been my calendar. For March, I decided to do something a little bit different to keep track of EdMo stuff – I write an E on teh calendar whenever the hours tracker ‘ticks over’ to a new hour, and try to mark at least one E every day. Sometimes that isn’t a full hour per day – I had some odd minutes heading into Comicon weekend that I used up, because I didn’t take a netbook with me on the bus to Toronto and didn’t have that much time to edit after I got home.

But it’s been great to see multiple Es on some days, including the first weekend, and Wednesday a week ago, when I went to the Monastery.

Aside from the Holly Lisle stuff, I’ve been working on chapter 1 of The Scroll, on a revision of The Storm Mirror, and some of my old Roswell fanfics, which I just wanted to polish up a little before posting on fanfiction.net — that makes them ideal for when I don’t want to work on editing anything that I feel might be high pressure.

Are there any other EdMo’s out there among my followers? How’s it going? If not, what’s been keeping you busy in March?

Insecure Writer’s support group – Writing in the Monastery

(Note, when I first posted this last night, I completely forgot that I’d meant to tie it into IWSG – so I’m making edits on Thursday morning

I have entered the monastery – and I came out on the other side to leave this post for you all. There’s no blogging from inside the Holly Lisle Monastery. (Which isn’t a real Monastery, just a state of mind for doing a particularly intense exercise in Lesson ten of the ‘How to Revise your Novel’ course.)

It was an interesting and cool experience. I dawdled a bit this evening – first, because you’re not supposed to listen to any music with words inside the Monastery, I spent time going through my itunes and coming up with an iPhone playlist of instrumental tracks – covering Bach cello by Yo-Yo Ma, Mozart piano sonatas, Serenity and Simpsons movie soundtracks, John Sheard and Natalie McMaster. Holly suggested just keeping ‘Classical Gas’ on single-track repeat, but I knew that sticking with any one song would drive me crazy.

Then I did a bit of review – going over my scene cards and every exercise that I’d done in the course so far, not trying to memorize anything so much as refresh my subconscious memory of anything that might be useful. That took about three quarters of an hour, and I put it all away and ventured into the Monastery at five minutes to eight, with my list of promises, my Alphasmart and a power cable for it, and the netbook a few feet away with the instructions and the Monastery progress thread on the Holly Lisle forums set up just in case – and a project tracker to count my Monastery time for NaNoEdMo.

And I started to write out scene sentences. And paragraphs, because I didn’t always get them down to single sentences, but I think I did a pretty good job of including the five elements of a good scene in most of them.

Preparing to enter the Monastery as a Writer Monk

I haven’t posted that much about the Holly Lisle How to Revise your Novel course here lately, but I’ve been continuing to work away at it, a little every week. I’m getting very excited about it now – I started lesson nine, the last stage in figuring out what’s good and what’s missing in the current draft, yesterday evening at quarter after eight. I had finished the last exercise by the time I got to work at quarter after eight in the morning today!

I’ve now read through the worksheets for lesson ten up to the point where she says to not read ahead further until I’ve finished an exercise. Lesson ten is about making your plan for major surgery on the book, now that triage is done.

And wow, what an incredible, exciting, scary, intimidating exercise it is!

Holly calls this part ‘The Monastery’, and you’re supposed to leave everything behind except your awareness, deep down, of what kind of book you want your writing to become, a cheat sheet of her big promises that every writer is making to his or her readers, and something to scribble on. (Since I hate using pens, I’m going to venture into the Monastery with an Alphasmart instead of pen and paper.)

No copy of my manuscript. None of the notes or exercises that I’ve spent the past three months working on. No discussion with other writers, or complaining on my blog. Ideally, no television, talking to family, or surfing the web for anything.

And in the monastery, I will write out a new synopsis for my book, one sentence per scene, that will fix all of the problems I’ve spotted with the old draft and bring out all the hidden potential that I see in it.

“You do not speak about writing. You do not read about writing. You become writing, and you simply write.”

I don’t think I’m quite ready to face the monastery yet, but I’m looking forward to it!

National Novel Editing Month preparation

It’s only a few days until the arrival of March, and as I have for many years now, I’m going to join in the NaNoEdMo challenge – completing fifty hours of editing work within March. It’s not a very popular event, but I find that taking this time as winter turns into spring to concentrate on the tough work of revision and rewriting is one of my favorite markers on the year-long writer’s calendar.

So, as February winds to its close, I’m putting together a list of editing tasks that I can work out my fifty hours of self-imposed hard labor on. It helps to have a reasonable variety, so that if I get blocked on one project or simply sick of it, I can switch to another one.

Here’s some of what I’ve got lined up:

• Rewriting the sample chapters of ‘The Scroll’ to send in to Kij at the CSSF – I want to have this ready to go by March 9th, before I head off to the HobbyStar Toronto March Comiccon.
• ‘How to Revise your Novel’ coursework and exercises on “Won’t somebody think of the Children.” I’ve nearly finished the triage phase of HTRYN, and so the ‘Major Surgery’ lessons are coming up just in time for Edmo!
• First rewrite of ‘The Storm Mirror’ – I liked a lot of things about the first draft, but it was very rambly, coming in at over 8000 words, and I think that a lot of them can be cut.
• Third draft of ‘Father Ismay,’ which I’ve been procrastinating on all month. Maybe that was just my subconscious telling me that it was a NaNoEdMo job.

• Doing quick cleanup on some fanfic so that it’s fit to be posted up on fanfiction.net (which isn’t a terribly high bar. )
• Doing a critique for critters.org, and possibly other feedback for other writers. Good critiquer karma is definitely a part of Edmo!
• Possibly rewrites of ‘Shuttle Fidelity’ or ‘Project Fast Track’.

Do you have anything particular planned for March? If you’ve got editing work to be done, I do recommend checking out the NaNoEdMo home page. The forums are a bit ghostly and spammy at the moment. I need to try to generate a little good chatter over there. Editors don’t always have time to gabble at each other online, though.

Holly Lisle update – the conflict ‘versus’.

Well, I haven’t been updating about it in a while because it feels like such a hard slog, but I’m making some progress with the Holly Lisle ‘How to Revise your Novel’ course. I’m on lesson five now, and – well, parts of it are fun, and all of it’s been informative.

Lesson one was the first big inventory of the novel, marking out lots of different things in pen on the hardcopy and filling out worksheets of what works and what doesn’t.

Lesson two had us learning about promises, and counting details to see how important we were promising certain characters and items were.

Lesson three involved a lot of filling out index cards for each scene, and trying to identify protagonists and antagonists, settings, conflict, and twists.

I haven’t said anything about lesson four, and it didn’t take me too long to get through it. That lesson was about plots, subplots, and the broken sequences that aren’t really plots in your first draft.

Lesson five is focusing on conflict, and it’s starting with the core conflict of the entire book. I wanted to share what I’ve got so far with you guys. I’m not sure if the last part – my ‘versus’ sentence, is a bit too long and unwieldy… of course, I’m not sure if any of you know the HTRYN course, but I’m curious about what you may think as outsiders.

What matters about my story.

It’s about two young parents who come to realize that they’re not going to be able to get their daughter ready for her all life by themselves. They need their community to support them, and the community is apathetic, more interested in the present than the future. They have to find a way to inspire the entire ship with their vision, while Ginny is messing with them because she wants to keep on being the pampered princess.

It’s Tom and Melanie versus the selfish parts of their community.

It’s the two parents-to-be, passionate to teach and prepare their child but unprepared themselves, versus the people in the ship’s community who insist on things always being done the way they always have been, who aren’t going to sacrifice their privileges for the sake of the mission, the future, or the children.

 

IWSG Follow-up: Why my First-person Narrative has to be deleted.

Okay, well, since so many people asked about it, I’m going to do as Elizabeth suggested and devote a short blog post to talking about first-person narrative in “Won’t somebody think of the Children” and why I’m leaning towards rewriting the entire book in third person point of view.

I’m a big fan of first person point of view. On the other hand, I’m starting to realize that at times my reliance on that writing style doesn’t really serve the story that I’m telling, and that’s the basic decision that I’ve come to with Tom Sandinez serving as narrator of his book. It’s a call that’s more intuitive than deductive at this point, but the most obvious reasons have to do with the next point I made last post, that I need to do more showing as opposed to telling.

If I let Tom tell the story in first person, that’s exactly what he does a lot of the time. He tells the reader what happened yesterday or last week, and he skips over some of the best parts. Now, if I really wanted to, I could probably show a lot of what I need to show and still stick with Tom as the first-person narrator. But I’m still not convinced that that would be the best way to write this story, and I’d be fighting Tom’s inclination to gossip and summarize the whole time. So, I want to try switching things up – telling most of the story from close to his head, (and maybe jumping away to some of the other major characters for a scene when I need to,) but not letting his voice take over.

So, that seems to cover it. I hope that what I typed makes sense, and feel free to post more questions in the comments if you’re so inclined.

And Alex – killing off a favorite character with no warning because you’re not sure how else to end a book is indeed cruel. It also fits in with a great and glorious Nanowrimo tradition.

Insecure Writer’s Support Group – Holly Lisle revision course

Well, it’s the first Wednesday in January, so this is the first yearly meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. At this point, a lot of my writer’s insecurities center around the Holly Lisle ‘How to Revise your Novel’ and scene cards.

Revision courses can be enough to make any novice writer feel insecure, I think. You’re learning a new philosophy about what ingredients go into a great book, and the homework exercises are applying tests to your beloved novel manuscript and forcing you to admit all of the different ways that it’s broken. As I’ve gone through the first few lessons with “Won’t somebody think of the Children,” I’ve found out that:

• The first person narration absolutely has to go, which means that I’m going to have to rewrite the entire book just to get it into some kind of third person, and proofread it very carefully to make sure that I didn’t accidentally leave an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ in the wrong place.
• On a related note, I’m very guilty of telling instead of showing.
• There’s a lot of passages that I honestly don’t care about when I’m reading them myself.
• My characters personalities are often all over the place, or simply invisible.
• There’s conversations where two people tell each other things that they already know simply to explain them to the reader.
• I’ve got scenes that end with whimpers instead of twists or hooks.
• Important characters are left to be introduced near the end of the book, even though they could add to the first act.
• In act one, I don’t establish why my characters really want the goal that they’re fighting for.
• A main character dying at the end comes literally out of the black night of space.
• I’m putting too much detail into introducing minor characters, and too little for more important supporting characters.
• I’ve got scenes with no conflict, scenes with no clearly established setting, and scenes that are missing a clearly established antagonist that need one.

Of course, the obvious come-back response is that finding all of this stuff really will help me rock the revision and write a much better draft of the book. I do try to focus on that. But it can be hard to stick to the lessons and avoid procrastinating when it feels like all I’m finding is problems. That’s why it’s important to celebrate all the cool moments that I’ve come across too, the passages that make me smile when I think “I wrote that!”

Holly Lisle Revision update – lesson two

So, I’ve fallen a little behind on my Holly Lisle course, because of trying to keep up with some other stuff going on, but I think I’m nearly finished with my week two lesson. Week two is all about Promises:

1. The seven big promises that all fiction writers are making by giving their work to readers. (I like #6: ‘If I put something in the story, I will put it there for a reason.’)
2. The specific promises that you intended to make and keep when you set out to write this book.
3. All of the promises that you didn’t realize you were making by writing three paragraphs about something cool that occurred to you while you were writing your first draft – probably during Nanowrimo. Unfortunately, they also look like foreshadowing about something that’s never going to happen.

A lot of the worksheets for this week had to do with #3, the ‘Unplanned promises’ – which could turn into something that would make your book a lot better, if you find a way to deliver on those promises. There’s also some work on the planned promises of your major characters, which I’m feeling a little iffy, including the question “Why should your reader care about this character?”

But I finished those ‘character refocus’ sheets, and I think that I’m almost done going through the book looking for unplanned promises for characters. I’ve only reached the half-way point by pages, but you only look at a character’s first scene, and the new character introductions have been coming less frequently once I’m out of the third act.

I’m not quite sure where this course is going to take me, but I’m learning new things already.

Revising with Holly Lisle update, Lesson One

So, the first read-through of “Children” is going pretty well. I’m up to page 78 out of 123, and hoping to finish the Despair worksheet tomorrow night at Starbucks Runnymede in Toronto!

This is the biggest part of the first lesson, mostly because it involves the full manuscript read-through. The idea is that you look for five different things as you read:

1. Ideas that didn’t work well or fell apart as you were writing them.
2. Characters that work for the book, or don’t.
3. Elements of the setting that work well, or poorly.
4. Places where you find yourself skimming as you read.
5. Places where the story is working and you enjoy it as you read.

So for each of those spots, I write down a little code in hot pink pen in the margin of the page, and make a note in my excel spreadsheet. The code indicates that it’s worksheet 1B, with another letter a through e for each of those five cases, and a numeric suffix to indicate the spreadsheet line.