Impending Failure

This is me.
Or at least this is the look I have in my eye as I face my impending NaNoWriMo failure. I've participated several times and always managed to meet the goal by the end of the month, but November 2013 has been my undoing. Too many days off from school for my son, too many other pulls on my time, so I will not reach 50,000 words by the end of the weekend. I'm at close to 40,000 and planned on it being about 60,000 by its conclusion.
Never fear, I am like the steady tortoise and will finish this manuscript mostly because it's pretty good already and I don't like to leave things undone for my characters. I've really enjoyed the research I've done for this book and have learned a lot about costume jewelry, the parts of a bar set up, and how to use ricotta cheese in ice cream.
It's good to fail every now and again. It teaches you perspective. And my perspective at this point is I'd rather be 10,000 words behind on a manuscript than be an angry-looking tortoise covered in some sticky brown substance. No wonder she looks outraged.

Let the Writing Begin!

So it's November third and I'm deep into my NaNoWriMo story. November is National Novel Writing Month and there's an online community devoted to encouraging writers to complete a 50,000 word first draft in one month. Now this timeline is problematic for me because of the holidays that fall in November (Veteran's Day, Thanksgiving, Daylight Savings time, etc.) which means my writing time is somewhat reduced. However, I have always met my word count every time I've participated even though my books tend to run about 20,000 words beyond the requirement.
How do I do this? There are all sorts of guides and tips out there for an aspiring NaNo writer, so I won't go into those. I usually have plenty of ideas for stories floating around in my mind, so once I've set on 'the one', I start a notebook and write out my backstory, plan scenes, and write questions out that I'll need to answer as the book progresses. That starts a month before I begin writing. I also do research on the internet and with the help of the Worthington Public Library system (vote yes on Issue 53 Tuesday!).
This time around, my idea was sparked by a submission call from a publisher. Of course, this doesn't mean I'm going to end up with a book I want to submit to anyone, or if I'd even submit it to this company, but I've been enjoying writing 'on spec' for the first time.
Anticipation builds and sometimes I can't resist making note of some runs of dialogue. It's a relief when November first arrives and I can begin. So far I'm at over 5,000 words and I'm happy with where things are going and how my characters are taking shape.
I'll post more later about the story, but first I'm going to list a few of the research topics I've explored and see if anyone can guess what I'm writing about.
1. Top Chef Canada auditions on YouTube
2. Hattie Carnegie costume jewelry
3. knives
4. Daytimers

Sunshine On My Brain

Maybe because it finally feels like spring and the sunshine and warmer temperatures are mellowing my brain, or maybe because I wrote over 50,000 words on a new book last month for Camp NaNo, I haven’t paid attention to making a blog post in far too long. Let's blame it on all the plants emerging in my garden and distracting me terribly.

First off, the writing is going very, very well. I am so pleased with the SFR story I’m finishing up now, all the little connections and threads I needed are coming together at the end and that’s a great feeling. And I went through another story (one I wrote last November for NaNo)  and revised it in the last two weeks. This one I’m going to pitch to an editor at Lori Foster’s Reader and Author Get Together in June, so it’s very nice to have most of the heavy lifting done on it already. It’s a contemporary set in Ohio, the heroine is a small town school bus driver employed for the summer to drive around some movie actors on a location shoot in her home county. And our hero is one of those actors who decides he doesn’t want to be famous. So far, my favorite scenes to write were one at a garage sale, and another of a seduction in below zero weather in a drafty bedroom.

Still waiting to hear about the pitch I made three weeks ago. I kept myself busy and haven’t thought about it much other than wanting to know what the editor thought so I can enter it into our Central Ohio Fiction Writer's contest; Ignite the Flame. I might just enter my contemporary instead and not worry about it. I just want to find a publisher for my SFRs, I have written four and I’d love to find a home for them so I can get them out there.

I also managed to order my swag for the above mentioned RAGT. If you are attending, expect a magnet from me, and I’ll have some cover post cards to sign, stress balls, AND bags of Brach’s hard candies. Getting ready for this event has been hit or miss for me. I have no idea what to expect, so I’m kind of muddling through all the pre-planning. Although I have been getting great advice from a writer friend, Allyson Young http://www.allysonyoung.com/Home.html , who has attended before. This will be my first ‘appearance’ as Lynn Rae, author. It’s a little daunting. I have a not so secret fear that no one will have even heard of my book, let alone read it. Ah well, if that’s so, I’ll just mingle and fake it.

Here We Go Again

Isn't that a great picture? I took it last fall on my way to Chichen Itza.  Those are ceramic wall plaques on the most fantastic orange wall. I loved the contrasting colors and repetition.  It reminds me of all the colorful bits and pieces you need when readying something for a submission to a publisher.  Writing the story is one thing, making it fit for an editor to read is quite another.

Look at that, it’s been a  week since I posted.  There’s a reason for that; I’ve been hard at work on my new MS for the April Camp NaNo and revising another manuscript in the hopes of being able to submit it.  I had a pitch with an editor yesterday and she asked to see the whole thing so hopefully all those hours of editing, re-writing, blank stares, sore back, and despair are worth it. And if she isn’t interested, I do understand.  My book isn’t easy to categorize.  It’s a small town sci-fi romance with no space battles or aliens.  My heroine works as a trash recycler. It’s not dystopian or shiny perfect future. People on my world work and get dirty and don’t have many places to shop because the settlement exists to grow food and ship it away to more populated worlds. Definitely not something I could pitch as fitting very neatly into one of their lines. But I’m grateful she’ll at least take a look at it.

So I spent my writing time today doing a massive re-write of the ending (always the most difficult part for me to write), running that spell check AGAIN, and fixing everything on my knock list. Once I did that, I did a little happy dance around the room, drank a cup of tea, and returned to the computer to write up the dreaded synopsis.  Once I completed that, I started in on this blog post because I am done done done until I hit send tomorrow morning.  Or heck, maybe I’ll send it out tonight with a glad heart and return to my current WIP with a clear conscience.  And speaking of quirky Sci-Fi, the story I am writing now takes place on a world made of peat moss, animal-like trees, and a special epiphyte that makes the human brain VERY happy. I love it there and can’t wait to return to it.

From the Caribbean to Deep Space

So that’s a picture of a fan palm.  At least I think it’s a fan palm.  I took that picture last fall on a trip in the Caribbean because I love palms of all sorts. But this palm inspired a biological plot twist in my April Camp NaNoWriMo novel.  For those confused by the acronym, NaNoWriMo refers to National Novel Writing Month which is November.  But for those of us insane enough to want a novel in a month more than once a year, there are mini-celebrations in April and July.  I wrote a pretty decent novel last November that just needs some polishing so I decided to take the plunge again this month.

Because I’ve been doing so much ‘business’ over the last few months (editing, promoting, blogging, etc.), I was starved for something purely creative.  As the germs of my work in progress started to grow in my head and I began to make notes in a composition book which is what I do for every novel I’ve written.  I outline the story, make character studies, and diagram scenes in there.  Sometimes I’ll even write dialogue longhand to get a feel for the characters.  My last contemporary/paranormal buzzed to a halt because both of my main characters were just too, well, repressed, so I decided to indulge myself with a sci-fi effort.

When I write sci-fi, I am able to let go of so much that realism that I think is important when you write contemporary.  With sci-fi I can make up names and places and plants and devices to my heart’s content.  Plus I don’t have to abide by current societal norms.  Just an example of how wild my imagination can get; I am creating a world filled with symbiotic trees that have all sorts of epiphytes living on them.  Intrepid scientists have recently discovered that one of these epiphytes produces a compound that does something magical to human blood chemistry (one guess what that is) and now the race is on for people looking to get rich quick.  It’s sort of like the California gold rush except on a soggy planet very far away.

And this fan palm was the inspiration for the organism that hosts the epiphyte in question.  The waving of the fronds is an important part of the life cycle of the epiphyte.  The sad thing is that I have written pages of notes about the biology of these creatures and I know that hardly any of it will appear in the book.  But it’s my world and it’s safe in my imagination.