Fear and Dying Cats

Sometimes it's better not to rush. I am slowly, if not painfully so, discovering this. I have set many a goal to finally finish editing my novel but every time I come up short. Part of me thinks its fear, laziness, but another believes its my brain telling me something isn't quite finished. I know that sounds silly, like the people that wait for the muse to hit them. (Wait... This is exactly that... Whatever.) but through the process I have realized certain aspects I had been missing and thus have slowly begun to flesh out my story even more.

To a point it's finished. I've written it, there is a beginning, middle, and end but at the same time it's not submission ready. Technically that is up to my personal opinion. For all I know it is. It may have just needed some polishing and a great many cuts (I have the tendency of being wordy...) and have been ready for agents eyes. Sadly I am a perfectionist and won't settle for less. And yet my standards may be too high. I expect my manuscript to be at the caliber of the greats yet who ever said they were great when they were published? (Oh, publishing houses.) but setting such a high bar also sets me up for failure and the fear of failing. I have a nasty habit of letting that fear dictate my choices and actions. It keeps me from succeeding in the fear that it will be shit. ("We are our own worst critic."-everyone, ever)

There in lies my major problem: thinking it is worthless. In my mind I see my manuscript and having any self confidence in my writing, in the vein of the tone deaf people on American Idol. They swagger in and stand before the judges adamant that they are the next big thing. If only they could win on confidence alone. Then they open their mouths and the sounds of dying cats dragging their limp bodies across a chalk board emit from their chords. The judges cringe and America shifts nervously in their seats. When these people are told they don't have what it takes they are heart broken because obviously someone, or maybe themselves, have been told they have the voice of Mariah Carey. They believe it and when their "dream" comes crashing down around them it is devastation. That is my fear.

So I am left to decipher if it is the fear I have that weighs me down or that there is still more to discover within my story. Dear god, let it be the latter.

Tell me about yourself

It's amazing how sometimes a fictional character can take on a life of its own. For instance I have been busily editing my first novel and I have come to a point in the story where I seem to have shifted into a wrong gear. No matter where I begin this particular chapter or put on the page it sounds wrong. And I refuse to let myself get bothered by it so I tried another approach.

The iPhone is a handy little tool. Truly. I especially love the notepad app because there is no bells and whistles it is exactly what it says. It's a notepad. Now while I was waiting to be picked up outside Von's I began to have a conversation with one of my characters. I asked her what she had been up to. It was through this series of questioning that I discovered that my recount of her portion in my tale was completely wrong. She was in fact in some place entirely different at the time of the chapter I'm having difficulty recounting. So with a few tweaks in the previous chapters I am absolutely certain it will smooth out my ride and ill shift into the proper gear.

So now I am jazzed to start fresh tomorrow with the knowledge I have gathered. This line of questioning has also inspired me to do the same to my other characters but instead of trying to figure out "what happened" during the gap of time she was gone I instead will have them tell me about themselves.

I know this isn't that original of an idea. I was told to do this exercise in my acting classes and in various "how to" novel writing books. This will be the first time I've ever actually utilized this tool. Now I wish that I had in the past. It was because of this line of questioning that the character became more vivid in my thoughts. Granted she is based off of a real life person but in the context of the story and the events that transpire in it she has become her own self.

P.S.
I found this website to be amazingly helpful. It has a VERY thorough character questionnaire. I found myself pretending to be a journalist as I asked the questions.

Many Mini Revelations

So I've done it. I purchased the URL of my pen name and thus have begun a whole other journey. Sure, I'm putting the cart before the horse in some aspect but I wanted to have some blogs written by the time I start to query. The main idea being that if I have some examples of my writing online then they would be available if someone should google my name. I doubt it but you never know. The whole process has been interesting. I asked my partner/boyfriend/thing if it was odd that I made my own website and he thought I was rather ridiculous for doing it. I'm weird he told me. Which is true. I am a bit strange but there is a method to the madness. After many failed plans I have finally concluded that this must be my moment. I want to start out 2013 with a bang and focus on my writing. I have set a date of the 26th to be completed with my round of edits. Unlike in the past the process hasn't gotten me down. In an odd turn of events it's made me realize how capable I am of doing that which is expected of me. And even in some instances have walked away from my spout of editing feeling invigorated. Let's hope that continues this weekend.This weekend I intend to finish the main plot line of my novel. It has two that run parallel through the entire thing and tie everything up in a nice little bow. While reworking scenes and adding in/taking out characters I've developed a more coherent subplot that plays well into the main story. So, I figured it would be fair to dedicate time to each individual story instead of hopping back and forth as I have been. At two points in novel my characters had the same exact scene just hours later and in a different locations. The crux of my problem due to the fact that I had spent one week revising one chapter (to perfection, I may add) and the following on the following chapter which in fact has no real tie to the previous. (Who's on first?) The past couple weeks I have had this phrase recycling in my thoughts: You make sacrifices now to reap the benefits later. It's basically a reworded, reap what you sew or anything reaping adjacent. I never really understood that until recently. I guess some part of myself thought that the computer would just magically make the necessary revisions. Obviously that isn't going to happen so I'm rather glad that my brain has caught onto that fact. But i have to confess it is difficult when it feels like your inner critic and your partner/friend/thing seem to be best buds and grew up together. His words tend to feed this second sense of self and it keeps me down and wanting to hide away from my work.

Wake Me Up When September Starts

A new month is quickly approaching and is the end of the year and the end of my coincidental age/year correlation. I have been 26 for the vast majority of 2012. If you didn't gather 2 x 6 = 12. Anyway... I have this weird superstition with numbers. I tend to play these little games where I see if I can divide or mulitply something to equal 12. Most of the time it works, oddly enough. But I always see 12 as a sign of good fortune. For example when I was 13 I thought I had appendicitus. I went to the hospital and even spent a night there. But... the number I was handed in the ER was 12. I told my mom then and there that I was fine. Yet that didn't stop her worrying and spending a fortune for me to stay overnight and have nothing happen except the fact that I was poked and prodded for hours by amateurs that were insistent that I have an IV. Ugh... but I digress. My Birthday is november 4th. On that day I promised myself that i would have an agent. I intend to keep that or else I shall parish. This is the year that I make my career and life happen. I must. So with the approach of a new month, and my birthday drawing closer, I have decided to spend every day in the month of September working on one chapter of my book. I will devote the evening, after I get off work, to pouring over it and make certain that it is up to par. I know I can do it. I have found in the past, since the book I intend to finish-finish was done as such, that I work better under 30 day deadlines. I finished this novel during NaNoWrimo. I suppose it only seems fitting that I would finish it in a similar fashion. Instead of meeting a certain number of words per day I will instead work on chapters. Luckily my novel is only 33 chapters and tend to be rather short. So it isn't going to be overwhelming. I think that has been the crux of my problem. I just find the overall task of editing a novel length work of fiction daunting. I become frightened and scurry into the shadows avoiding it at all cost. I think it also doesn't help that I am turning a critical eye on to my art. But if I intend to make a career out of what i love to do (which is making up stories) then I must forge on.I have faith in myself. I know I can do this. I must do this. I will do this.

It's been awhile...

... how have you been, you blog of mine? Yeah, we had a moment awhile ago. It was brief but exciting. I had such high hopes but... they were childrens fantasies. But I am back. I have had a xanga site for going on eleven years. That's pretty fricken amazing. Most people get bored with that site after maybe a year but I have been putting away on it for some time. So it basically gets all of my attention. This blog here... well it was a fling. But I feel my xanga and I have gotten... distant. We don't seem to mesh as well as we once had. I'm beginning to search outside of the relationship. So thus I return to you. I made a promise to myself that once I finished with the third Sookie Stackhouse book I would return to working on my novel The Love Immortal. It has been some time since I have worked on it. I had, again, such high hopes and even marked a day on my calendar of when I would get an agent. Sadly that day has drawn dangerously close and I have refused to even look at my manuscript for fear of returning to the wicked headspace of my inner critic. My self esteem is shot to hell. There isn't anything I really like about myself to begin with so anything I might produce doesn't reach to my expectations of what is standard. So thus my novel was one of the corpses left behind because I'm afraid of failing. And by living in that fear I am in fact failing... It's this wonderful ironic cycle I put myself in. It is almost as if I can never say I failed if I never try in the first place. But if my dream is to be a published writer then... well I have failed, haven't I? My want to return to my novel began with a camping trip. It was my friends birthday gift from her boyfriend. He had planned this elaboorate weekend. Well it wasn't as exciting as I had imagined but at some moment in the weekend we were all sitting aorund the camp fire and my friend asked about my novel. All i need is a tiny tug and the rocks that hold back the damn of my creativity gives way and everythign comes pouring out. I told her, her boyfriend, and my own about my novel. The two gents stayed silent but her enthusiasm for it ignited that desire to be published. But it was a tiny flame and barely got my pot of creativity boiling. It wasn't until I returned to the sookie stackhouse books that the process began to boil. I was reading through the rest of the first novel and was astounded that it had ever been printed. It is a mess in terms of thought and how it was written. Don't get me wrong, I adored it. The story is fantastic. But so much of it feels undone. It feels as if Charlaine Harris sits down and slams out a story without any real regard for plot or an overall story arch. It was while I was reading, thinking these very thoughts, that it occured to me that I am good at what I do. I'm not amazing and could use quite a bit of polishing but I know that I can at least do better than her. (I'm not saying she is terrible.) Well, I finished the third book and partially true to my word I pulled out the bankers box with all of my notes on my novel. I will begin to peruse them and put them into a binder so that everything makes sense and I have a full grasp of what all is taking place externally and internally in the story. I will be publishd, I promise you.

It begins with an idea...

It's been exactly 2 months and 15 days since I finished my very first novel length of fiction. I met the requirement for NaNoWriMo and finished on the due date with the appropriate amount of words, although upon the finish line I didn't yet have a finished book. So after I put in my final numbers and got my groovy certificate of completion I vowed to finish it. Six days later I wrapped up the story of "The Love Immortal." I was so proud of myself that I started to cry, which is lame I know, but I am very suspect to emotional moments. Upon completion I realized that I could write a novel and that all these years at my failed attempts was because of a lack of motivation and competition. I was worried about making sure to get this idea in or that concept, never allowing myself to actually just write for the sake of writing.

I didn't believe it when I read on the NaNoWriMo website that "the story will work itself out." At times I had NO IDEA where the story was going or appeared that I ever would. Yet it was in those moments that I brought excitement to my tale. If I didn't even know where we were going on this ride how was my character going to? It was through that lack of planning that I brought out a story that kept me on my toes, even when I was reading the finished piece for the first time.

Since then I have wanted to get to editing. I want to get it somewhere near a "finished" state so that I could begin submitting it to agents to get it published. (I'll be damned if I don't get one of my books out in the world.) But every time I sat down to work on it my brain hesitated. At first I thought I was just being lazy or allowing myself to fear actually finishing something; but being an "artist" I realized that it was my mind's way of pushing me to work on the next story. Don't worry about this one just yet.

You see, when I finished "Love Immortal" I nowhere near finished the story as a whole. I brought the main plot to a tidy close but left a hole for the thread of story to continue forward.

When I thought about it I realized that I could probably wrap it up in four books, then that way when I sat down to edit and do some rewrites I would have a firmer grasp on the strory. Not to mention that it gives me a leg up on trying to sell it.

According to Writer's Digest agents and publishers are interested in a book that can be a part of a series; even better they want a finished series. And truly that is my main goal.

Thus I have decided that I am doing my own personal WriMo during four speperate months. The first being March 1st. I even downloaded an iPhone app that could keep me on track to finish the next book in the series. Then two months later I would do the next and so on... I haven't thought out the true logistics of it but I will finish four novel length works of fiction this year, or die trying.

I go into it with a shadow of an idea that may or may not have a real bearing on the plot, who knows. I like this lack of planning and I'm sure I'll write about it in future blogs.

I want to finish my protagonists story but more than anything I want him to work for me. I want to whore him out to the publishing world so that maybe, just maybe, he can help me make my mark on the world. And the characters that run around in my head can potentially make someones else life a misery, I mean joy.