A month?!

I can't believe it's been a month since I last posted! It only feels like a week. Guess that's a sign I'm getting old...

I've been busy. Lots of knitting and reading, but I also lost a week when I was laid out by a nasty head cold, and I've been getting out of the city to do some bird hunting with Idiot#1 on Saturdays. Sundays means knit class, so I've been spending a chunk of time prepping for that too. Maybe if I can get my life in order I'll post some pix... but that's a big maybe.

Work has been busy too. Usually is in September and October, but I'm already starting to see the slow down that's fairly standard for November & December.

Which is a good thing, because I've also started outlining a new novel for NaNoWriMo. Pretty excited about it. Don't know exactly what genre you'd call it—maybe you guys can help me? Characters are older teens, but it's not exactly a coming-of-age story, so maybe not typically classed YA. The main character is a regular teen, but the opening chapter is the beginning of the apocalypse and the people he falls in with are time travelers—a bit of a sci-fi element, yeah. Current world, current time. No fantasy beings, just people who seem normal but are actually time travelers. A bunch of teens trying to get from point A to point B in time, because they're being chased by other time travelers that want them dead. Fighting, yes. Killing, yes. End of the world, happening around them.

Any ideas?

More Scrivener Love

I love organizing. And making lists. And being neurotic like that in general. Some people don't take the organizational approach to writing, and that works great for them. For me, organizing background information is one of my favourite parts of the process. It's also a great way to procrastinate if I'm dreading a section, or if I'm just not feeling the writing mojo.

Scrivener is an incredible tool for the kind of organization I love. And of course, its creators have videos for all this kind of stuff if you need a tutorial, but if you want to see some more Scrivener action, I've got the goods.

In the MS I'm currently working on the world has magic. A few different types, with different classes and levels. My characters don't delve too deep into this stuff in the first book, but it'll come into play in book two onwards. So I needed a way to organize the types of spells and what my characters know about them. I'm just going to jump right in and show you how that's going…

Creating a new folder (see the Folder+ button in the bottom left?) and calling it Grimoire.

Just for fun, giving it a Red Book icon. As you can see in my binder (left side
of the screen shot) I love all the different icons to choose from!

Laying out how I want each "page" of my grimoire to look.
I really went to town on the formatting.
You can blame my graphic design instincts.

Moving that layout to the Template Sheets folder makes it a template.
Renaming it something appropriate, like Grimoire Page.

Creating a new text page in the Grimoire folder, from Grimoire Page template.

Referencing the spell (highlighted) from the MS text (on the left split screen) and filling in
the details in the Grimoire Page (on the right split screen).

Because I want to organize the Grimoire by the three classes of magic, I create three
subfolders under the Grimoire, changing their names and icons.

Dragging and dropping different spells under the correct class of magic, and adjusting
the page order so the lower level spells come first.

And that, ladies and gents, is how I'm going to keep track of the different types of magic in Deyl's world, the different spells, and what she knows or has seen about them. Whenever I'm unsure, I can just flip open the grimoire and find the answers I need. With the split screen view turned on, I can even reference them next to the text I'm working on. It's pretty sweet.

If you're a Scrivener user—or thinking about becoming one—I hope this helped!   :D 

Bye for now,
S.

Character File: Alicia Bowmyn

Yesterday evening I puttered around on a Manga-Avatar site, building sketches of all my characters from I Had To Fall. As a graphic designer, I like visual things. I thought it would be most excellent if I could draw out my characters and always have them as references, helping to make them more real when I'm writing about them. (By the way, if you're thinking, "you're a graphic designer, just illustrate them yourself!" then you should know that I'm not a graphic artist, but designer. I'm a strictly stick-figure kinda illustrator.)

So I avatar'd all my characters. Then I thought, wouldn't it be cool to do a blog post tomorrow as a character study, and show off one of the new avatars, along with a description?

Things just snowballed from there.

I didn't post this morning because I thought, hey, instead of just slapping the avatar image in with a description, what if I made like a faux case-study sort of thing? That would be cool. But for that I needed some of my design software, which I don't have at home. So I packed up my lunch an hour early and headed into the office, where I promptly started designing a folder to build the character content into.

By the time I was supposed to start work I'd decided it would be best to make the character study like a sort of police report / case file, complete with the Hunter's emblem at the top and a hand-written-in report on what the Hunter's might know about the character. Plus maybe they'd found a scrap of paper (like an excerpt from a book about said character...?) to put in the case file too.

So I spent my lunch hour finishing everything up. It's not my best work (this isn't really my kind of design anyway) but with a little more tweaking I think I'll be happy. So without further ado, here's the character study for Alicia:

So, thoughts anyone? Improvements I could make? Because I'm going to do these studies for all the characters, plus some studies on each race specifically. I have to kill time on my lunch break anyway, right?

Hahaha...

S.

Characters are people too.

I really, really love character development. I've written a solid outline (sitting at 22K words, still needs a bit of tweaking) and now I've moved on to some world-building and character development. For me, this works best because I know how the story goes, I know who does what and why, and I'm starting to have a good feel for what these people—characters—are really like.

But it's not quite a complete picture. Not yet.

To really flesh out my characters I use photos and character sketches. I try to cram as much detail into those sketches as possible: nicknames, meanings, relationships, dates, physical descriptions, strengths, weaknesses, internal and external conflicts, history, special abilities, distinguishing marks and personal items, habits, likes, dislikes, etc. I usually pull a photo off the web of someone who looks similar and use Photoshop to make a few quick and dirty changes to the appearance, where it doesn't mesh with what I have in mind for that character.

***fyi, the Mac program Scrivener is AWESOME for this kind of stuff. Go download the free trial right now. I'm not kidding.***

I like to start with a character's history. In life, I always find that the best way to understand a person is to understand their history, their background, where they come from. It can tell you so much about why they do what they do, or think the way they think. Once I have a history in place, other details fall in line. A unique twitch, habit or scar resulting from something in their past. A personal trinket or token they carry around from someone or some time in their life story. What drives him or her? What secrets is he or she keeping?

At the end of the day, I've got more than a name paired with a personality. I've got a person.

Because characters are people too!

State of the Writing

Well, so far today I've managed to get another 1500 words down on the page. It's not much, but then I don't really think word count matters in the outlining stage. Just MHO.

What really matters is that I've gone from a very loose, random, unstructured outline with too few characters, enormous plot holes and bad clichés to a full 31-chapter outline that has a smooth, start-to-finish plot, incorporating a variety of characters and their sub-stories, and only a few not-so-bad clichés. Excellent.

This evening I'm going to go back through the outline and clean it up, add notes and synopses, and update my character grid to match. Tomorrow, with the updated grid, I should be able to see the big picture and tweak the outline, hopefully until I'm happy with it and I can call the first draft done.

So next week, I'll be world-building. With my first novel, I HAD TO FALL, I started the writing without any real world building done, only loose character and location sketches, and just a lot less detail. This time I'm going about it differently. I'm hoping that, within a week or two, I'll be ready to start writing!

By the way, with this MS I'm really using Scrivener for the first time. Anyone got any neat tips and tricks for working with the program?

Just a quick note

Super busy the past couple of days, at work and just... life in general. I've still managed to get some more outlining and storming-of-the-brain done on my WIP, but that's been about all. There simply isn't enough time in the day!

My boss came back today after being gone for three weeks on holiday. With a small staff in a small office, that kind of absence takes it toll on the rest of us, so I'm damn glad she's back. This should mean I can start, sometime in the next month, to work a normal eight-hour day again! Very exciting. Think of the possibilities. I might actually get to sleep again.

Anyway, I gotta cut out early. Lots to do... and miles to go before I sleep!

Back at it!

Started writing my next novel today. I don't have a working title to share with you lovely folks yet, but soon. I promise.

So, what did I decide to write? I'd been unsure about what to do next (see previous posts where I bemoaned this indecision) when Lisa Desrochers blogged about just such a dilemma. And I decided that, although I'd like to go back and work on the sequel to my first novel, to instead write something new, and in turn that I should write the fantasy novel (which turns out, might also be YA) that I really want to write. Fantasy might not be the cool thing these days, but who knows. Maybe this story will go somewhere. What really matters is that the story, the characters, have already become real in my head. I WANT to tell their story.

Long story short (har-de-har), I buckled down today and starting writing out the synopsis for the whole story. I got lots down, but I've already run into a bit of a dilemma: my main character doesn't speak (although she interacts with) to any other characters until like halfway through the story. That's gotta change.

I'm also missing some sort of key crisis or motivation. There's a tonne of internal conflict, but not enough external. Plus, I think this looks like a trilogy, and I'm not sure how much should go in book one, or where to split it. 

Tomorrow I'll go back and mess around with the synopsis, try to get Vera (the MC) talking sooner, and see if I can figure out what our external crisis is. Once I get those things covered the split should reveal itself naturally - I hope. With any luck, I'll have a good, solid synopsis done by tomorrow evening. Then next week I can start the chapter breaks and character grids...

And lastly, in other news, I joined Absolute Write the other day. Check me out right here!

Ideas

Wow, a week has slipped through my fingers since my last post! I finished the final, polished and shiny version of my urban fantasy, I HAD TO FALL, and decided to take a break from any real writing and just focus on fleshing out some new story ideas. I've got a lot of them rolling around in my head, so I've spent most of the last week sitting out in the backyard, vodka cooler in one hand and laptop in the other, soaking up the sun and pouring out notes on those different ideas. Hard life, eh?

And somehow—this is a bit of a mystery—I managed to catch a cold. I can feel it right now, that itchy feeling in the back of my throat, combined with the sniffles... in June! Well, if it means I have to miss a few days of work to recuperate * checks weather forecast of sunny skies and +25°C *  then so be it.

I'll be getting back into the writing tomorrow, but first I have to decide which of my ideas I want to push forward with. None of them are strictly urban fantasy, because I wanted to try something new. Of course, all these ideas have different pros and cons in my mind right now...

Adult fantasy. Different world, different species, not set on earth. Think Michelle Sagara. I really like this idea because the world is already pretty developed in my thoughts, and I like the idea of doing some more inventive and creative world-building. The problem: I can see that, in my head, the protagonist is a strong, silent woman with her own powers that slowly come to light. In this sense, she reminds me so much of Deyl Parker from my urban fantasy that I worry I'd get bored writing her.

YA dystopian. Or sort of dystopian. I loved DIVERGENT and have always been a huge fan of THE GIVER and NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. Just added the HUNGER GAMES to my "Good Reads" list. Thing is, I always wonder what happened to make these dystopian worlds the way they are. If you assume they're set in a future version of our world... what went wrong? War seems to be a common theme, but I find my mind wandering off on tangents imagining where humans screwed up to end up like this. So my YA dystopian idea actually happens during the apocalypse, the great cataclysmic event that results in a new world order. And the characters won't have miraculous teenage powers that save the world from changing. Instead they'll have to learn to change with it, to salvage what they can and move on. I really, really, really like this idea. Also, I see it from the protagonist male point of view, which is totally different from what I've written before. The problem: I can't see the world as well as I'd like. I can't decide if the characters are straight-up human, or if they've got a little extra juice. I can see what's happening, but I'm not sure of the stakes. Still, with a bit more brainstorming I think I could give this one a go.

YA romance. I like this idea because I already know the characters, I've already interviewed them in my thoughts. I want to write it from both the girl and the guy's point of view, which will again be different from anything I've tried, but I love the way that works in Desrocher's PERSONAL DEMONS. This idea isn't really paranormal, more of a sci-fi I think. There is definitely a bit of a time travel thing. The problem: I feel like writing in this genre might be beating a dead horse. After the whole TWILIGHT extravaganza it seems like everyone has written a YA romance. Maybe that's no big deal, but I have reservations about writing mine.

Adult sci-fi romance. Time travelers. What did I just say about beating a dead horse? Ha! But seriously, this idea doesn't seem as overdone, at least in my head. It's not anything super tech-savvy, just that the characters, pros and ants, move through time a lot more than regular ol' humans do. It's a bit of a war-time scenario, except that war is happening way in the future. I see the story from the male protagonist's viewpoint, which I'd really like to write. He's also something of a sidekick to the story's hero, which I find kind of intriguing, centering the story around someone other than the hero. The problem: Honestly, I'm just nervous about trying to write a sci-fi. Time travel is complicated. Michael J. Fox can tell you that much. I'm nervous about trying to keep all my time threads neatly sorted while overlapping them enough to add some complications to the character's lives.

So that's it for now. I actually have a few other idea snippets I want to get down on paper (digital paper, of course) before the end of the day, and maybe one of those ideas will the one I go with...

For now, any thoughts on these ideas? What do you think I should write next?

Mmmm... Spring!

I love spring. Honestly. Days like today are worth all the long, cold winter this country can throw at me. It was a balmy 10°C out there today, no wind and lots of sun. In September I'd have said it was cold, the windows would be closed and heat running. After a suffering through five months of winter... it's warm, windows open, heat off!

But enough of that weather stuff. I finished my comments and notes for I Had to Fall today, making it all the way from chapter fourteen to the end of the book. I've got a house full of people tomorrow, so I might not get a chance to work on the actual re-write, but I've still got Sunday. I love long weekends, too.

Oh, I also bought new lawn furniture today. It's all setup under the sunshade and ready to be used... for outdoor writing on a new macbook air... only 30 days! 

Happy Earth Day, by the way :)

Onward!

Made it through all my hard copy notes today.

According to my records, I printed that copy out on October 30th last year, let it sit for a couple months, and made the notes for changes during the last week of January. As I said yesterday, I've revised my editing process. One of the things that wasn't working for me was jumping back and forth between my new digital notes and that old hard copy. So today I finished converting my red-pen notes into digital comments.

Now, those red-pen notes were made almost three months ago. In that space of time I've gone ahead and finished the first draft of the second Deyl Parker book, To Rise Again. A lot has developed and changed in regards to characters, world, history, etc. Which means my next step is to review again, keeping all those new developments in mind, and make nice new little digital comments.

I really have no idea how long that will take. Tentatively, I'm hoping I'll be done by this weekend, though that might be a tad ambitious... we'll see.

Shifting Gears

Yeah, today did come together more smoothly than yesterday did. I finished re-writing chapters seven and eight, and got about halfway through chapter nine. I've still got some concerns, but so far the re-write is cleaning up a lot of the ugly writing and building a much more solid world around Deyl and her friends. And enemies. Stronger story, better writing. All good things.

And those concerns I've got? Basically, how will these changes affect the overall story. But I figure, once I've got all the major changes done I'll spend a few more days re-reading the whole thing just to tweak and polish the finished story. Yeah, it will all work out. I'm sure of it.

So I'll hope that my work schedule is a bit more under control this week, get in an extra day of writing on the long weekend, and really shift gears back into writing mode.

Also: super-excited to get my new Air next month. Do you know how old this iBook is? Well, it's an iBook for starters, so that tells you something. I need to update. Badly. If I go out and buy the Air on my birthday (which is the plan...) I'm officially on a 35 day countdown!!

And then there was a plan.

Worked for about eight hours today on world-building. As usual, Sundays are my best writing days. Nothing else going on, nothing but writing. And feeding the cat. Sometimes, I even remember to feed myself.

All in all, it went really well. I've got a much more solid history in place that provides the evolution for the technology, mega-cities, clothing, food, transportation, etc. in Deyl's world. It all seems to tie together quite neatly, and is based on the up-and-coming technology we have in place today. I tried to keep my question from yesterday in the back of my mind: what would it be like today, after 150 years of war?

I also put together my revision plan for book one, based on my notes from book two, the new world-building, and all the other little ideas that have been percolating through my brain while the book was on the shelf for the past five months.

Tomorrow: onward to the revisions!

Faster Than Expected...

Today I finished a quick, post-draft review of the second book in my Deyl Parker series. It went a hell of a lot faster than I had expected: four days.

When I say a quick review, I mean it. At this point I'm merely making notes on things in book two that might affect elements of book one. Where necessary I also made comments on the plot for book two, or fixed obvious spelling errors, but otherwise I went through it quickly, thinking mostly about book one.

So tomorrow I'm back, fully focused on I Had to Fall. I'm going to spend some time—a few days or a week—planning the changes I want to / need to make during the re-write, before diving in to make those changes. I also need to spend some more time on world building, the technology in particular. I mean, if a war between man and fae (just pretend, folks) were to break out today, and last for a hundred and fifty years, what kind of technology would we have at the end of it? What would we gain, what would we lose?