writing

7 Comments Posted on General, Novels, Writing

The professional author

I have been doing a lot of research into this business of getting my book out there. I have the online channels covered for ebook distribution, but another aspect is the physical book. Bookstores aren’t dead yet, and I think it’s short-sighted to write them off. I’ve looked up a few bookstores in Montréal and even contacted one for details on their consignment policy.

business card address labels

With this in mind, I ordered business cards so that when I leave my book for bookstores to consider, I have a professional way of letting them get in touch with me with their decision. Granted, the book is number one, and I will put my sweat and tears into it to make it the absolute best it can be. I also want to present myself as a pleasant professional who would be a pleasure to work with. The cover of my book isn’t the only thing being judged, and I don’t want to walk in looking disheveled and scatterbrained, making them wonder if I’ll be able to deliver orders on time or be unreliable in getting back to their messages or phone calls.

I’m selling myself as much as I’m selling my book, and first impressions are quite important.

Leave a comment Posted on Climbing Yggdrasil, Goals, Novels, Project: Destiny, Writing

Destiny-oriented goals

I managed to not write a single word for Destiny last week. Granted, I covered lots of ground on Yggdrasil and wrapped up my second draft. This is perhaps the danger of running two projects at once: one may get casually tossed aside so that the other can make a huge leap forward. Since Yggdrasil is now on standby until I get a new proof to attack, this week’s goals are much simpler:

goals 2014-07-21

Lots of work on Destiny to make up for having tossed it aside last week. I cannot afford to lose any momentum here, I need to keep moving forward and get this story to some sort of suitable ending. I can’t start this thing over anymore, unless it’s to revise a first draft. I’ve got a good head start, and I’m ready to build on it.

Leave a comment Posted on Fantasy, Novels, Project: Destiny, Writing

Dead week

destiny words 2014-07-18

It’s not looking very good, is it? What that line of zeroes doesn’t tell you is that I’ve been hard at work on finishing my second draft of Climbing Yggdrasil and that I’ve had a cold the past few days and have been going to bed ridiculously early, so no writing. Project Destiny will pick up and move forward at full force once Yggdrasil’s draft is finished and sent off for printing. Next week’s numbers should be much more inspiring!

There’s always a chance I finish the Yggdrasil chapters early and have time this weekend to bring those numbers up a bit.

Leave a comment Posted on Climbing Yggdrasil, Editing, Novels, Project: Destiny, Writing

The power of goals

Setting concrete goals for my writing this weekend has already helped me get off my ass. I feel this desire to one-up myself, to do better than what I said I would do. The only thing I haven’t touched so far is blog prep, because I feel like I have a lot of time left and I want to focus more on advancing my books. Yet here I am posting my second extra blog post of the week because I’m excited about goals.

goals progress

I’m especially pleased because it’s only Saturday, I haven’t even got to the extra days of this long weekend. I’m going to keep going and smash my original goals to pieces, then set more for the next arbitrary time period. Soon I’ll be setting word-count goals for Destiny (more on that later).

Now to go spend more time agonizing about Yggdrasil’s blurb. Folks, blurbs are difficult.

Leave a comment Posted on 100 words, Prose poetry, Writing

100 words: Summer

Scent of suntan lotion in the air, with a buzz of excitement as people wander about, heading nowhere. Any excuse is good enough to be out. You feel the warmth on your body and wonder if this is what a plant feels like, your skin seems to sing with delight in it. Your smile is easier, you breathe deep all the smells of summer. A kiss of wind carries some heat away. Before too long, it’s time to go back inside, and you carry with you the tingle of sun on skin, a precious souvenir that fades all too quickly.

2 Comments Posted on General, Writing

The difference between talking and writing

Well, one’s talking, and one’s writing, right?

I feel like I have two internal voices: the one that gives words to my mouth, and the other that gives them to my pen (or keyboard). My speech voice has gotten all tangled up in recent years as I immerse myself more and more in the French language. Nowadays, I spend roughly 35 hours a week speaking almost exclusively French, and when I switch over to English I find remnants of that in my speech. The word “bien” is especially sticky, and it has no English equivalent in certain contexts. I also sometimes get mental blocks where I can’t think up the English word for something. “I’m going to have some toast with… wait… dammit… what’s the word for ‘confiture’?”

This used to upset me at first. I’ve been speaking English all my life, why should that get pushed out for French? I don’t actually think either of them has had to make room for the other, and I have enough bilingual people around me that if I automatically say something in French or English because it’s more efficient that way, they understand. Often it’s subject-related: I speak French at work, so if I talk about work it’s easier for me to do so in French. Sometimes it’s random, or not even proper French. The two languages have slightly different grammar structures, and I’ve been known to say something entirely in English, but using the French structure instead.

When I am writing, this is almost never an issue. The writing voice remains clear on what is English and rejects the rest. I never falter or spend time searching for an English word that I’ve temporarily forgotten because the French equivalent comes to mind. Perhaps it’s so easy to separate the languages because I don’t do any creative writing in French. I’ve done some for a university course, but they were very short pieces riddled with grammar issues. I simply haven’t done enough reading to have the vocabulary necessary to try any serious creative writing en français, never mind the fact that there are literary verb tenses I won’t touch. The ones I know already are complicated enough.

I will say this much for French, though: pronunciation is pretty standard, and that’s a blessing to anyone learning it as a second language. I have so much sympathy for anyone learning English as an adult and struggling with all its irregularities (see “The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité).

Leave a comment Posted on 100 words, Exercises, Prose poetry, Writing

100 words: Crimson

I used to belong to a community on LiveJournal whose only rule was that every post had to be exactly one hundred words. It was one of those fun constraints that forced me to say things differently, to reduce a very short piece to its most essential message, to cut words that did not add to the feeling in order to bring my count down. This blog is particularly lacking in creative writing; I write quite a bit about writing, but I’m hesitant to post excerpts from my big projects since they’re very much works in progress. What would be nice is to start a regular exercise, something like 100 words, that I would post here once a week or so.

Of course, I could just shut up and do it instead of making a big deal about it beforehand. Here’s a try:

Sometimes the words don’t come out right. You open your mouth and wish you could take back the stings and barbs your tongue spits out. You gush reassurances, but what’s said can’t be unheard, wounds become scars, reminders of monstrous utterances. Regret and shame fill you, you wish you could go back, tell yourself to stop, take a moment, reflect on your pain and anger, transform it into something less harmful. Make it into art, burning crimsons and angry oranges. Embrace it. Own it. Let it go. Breathe it out with a sigh of relief instead of a hateful hiss.

So I’m no good with poetry. I’m terrible with rhythm and breaking things up into nice lines and stanzas. I do like to play around with imagery and emotions, though. Prose poetry seems the way to go… 100 words of prose poetry.

Leave a comment Posted on Fantasy, Novels, Project: Destiny, Writing

Hacking through the wilderness

I deviated from my outline, making another chapter on the list obsolete. I tried to write it anyway, because I liked the neatness of my POV rotation: A B A C A D… etc. However, I found myself writing a chapter that didn’t have a direction, that I didn’t like writing, and that didn’t need to be there.

2014-04-18 16.18.27

So I decided to move on. “I make the rules,” is going to have to become a mantra of mine, because I seem to keep forgetting that as I write. Forcing out a chapter that will end up being crap isn’t worth losing momentum; better to set it aside and keep going. In the unlikely event that this chapter is worth salvaging in some future draft, it will be easier to do that once the bulk of the story is out.

I was essentially tying my own hands, thinking, “But… the plan! I have to work within the plan.” I’ve said from the beginning, the outline is meant to be ignored if a better idea comes along. I can work my way back to it, but I shouldn’t go hacking through the wilderness when there might be a more natural path that starts a little further out of the way. I would just get exhausted and make a mess for the sake of a straight line.

Leave a comment Posted on Fantasy, Novels, Project: Destiny, Writing

A change of scenery

I meant to post last weekend, then I felt bad for not having much of anything to say and for thinking of taking time away from my NaNo project. I am so far behind on my goal. I’m trying to berate myself just enough to light a fire under my ass, but also be realistic enough to accept that I may not get to 50k this time around. The main reason for this would be the switch from typing up my first draft to scribbling it down by hand. Typing is easier and quicker. I am infinitely more pleased with looking at nearly 70 pages of handwritten words, though.

I frequently have to remind myself to resist the temptation of spending time typing up what I’ve written so far in Scrivener. I want to save that step for when the first draft is complete, so I can give myself license to make edits as I go, to add in things that I meant to write the first time around but didn’t get to. I don’t want to do any editing at all until the first draft is done. I feel that’s a trap I’ve fallen into too many times; I get carried away with ideas I have for making the story better, and it never gets finished because I end up in an endless cycle of revising as I go. Even if I don’t meet my goal with Camp NaNo, I have to carry the lessons I learned from NaNo last autumn if I expect to get this all out.

Last week, I took a day to leave work early and set myself up in a café across the street from my apartment to write. I ordered a chai latte, streamed Songza over their free Wi-Fi, and wrote for nearly two hours. I responded to a few text messages from my husband, but other than that I didn’t touch my phone. When I began, I noticed people coming in and ordering and sitting down. By the end of it, I was so engrossed in writing that when I stopped, I wondered how the place had filled up without my noticing it. It felt good to set aside all the distractions and focus on getting the story out. I plan to make this a weekly thing, but I haven’t been back yet.

I liked being out in public and having fewer opportunities for distraction. No cats, no kitchen cupboard, no piles of DVDs/blu-rays/what-have-you. Sure, my phone could have offered up a number of diversions, but it’s surprisingly easy to ignore. I was there on a mission. Ideally, I would have written at least enough words to meet my NaNo goal for one day; I stopped just shy of 1,500. Handwriting really is so much slower for me. I’m glad I learned how nice it feels to put myself in a different setting and get to work, though.

As it’s looking more and more like I will be unable to meet the goal I set for myself, the thought I’m repeating is, “It’s okay if I don’t make 50,000 words as long as I write every day.” I am not writing everyday, though. Mostly, but there are days here and there that I skip. It seems like it’s a difficult line; I want to write often, to feel like I’m progressing in my story. I don’t want writing to feel arduous. I want it to stay fun. I want to give myself permission to read or listen to an audiobook or play a game if I don’t feel like writing any particular afternoon.

I shouldn’t ever forget that I’m the one who makes the rules here. I’ve got almost seventy pages more than I had at the beginning of the month. My book seems about a quarter full. These are positive things. I just need to keep going.