Egads!

So there's this book. That I really really want. Like superwant, and have been wanting for oh.......6 months? Something like that. And so it gets published next Friday, August 3.

Super, right?

Wrong.

It gets published in the UK August 3. I get to wait until spring-ish next year.

So, off to ebay I merrily trot.

And what do I find there? A signed ARC (advanced reader copy)! Signed! Cooooool!

So I bid.

(Keep in mind that the US-UK exchange rate at the moment is a bit over 2 dollars to the pound, so..it sucks).

Then someone outbids me.

So I bid again.

And now I'm trying to debate how much I want a signed first edition by an author I love for a book I really really want.

Also, shipping has to be taken into account. I've already talked to the seller, and it's going to be 12.56 (pounds) to ship. That works out to $25. Yikes.

I'm in the process of transferring $120 (59.18 pounds) from my bank account to my paypal account in case I need that much, but $120 is 2.5 weeks of personal expense money for me. As in, 2.5 weeks that I have to make do with what food is in my apartment and hope no one hits me up for money.

*sigh*

I do so so want it, though.

As Expected

I are NOT NOT happy.

So I got my lease, we all knew this.

I also had to call the local electric company and the gas company so that I would have both when I moved in. Fair enough. I'm not huge on talking to people on the phone, but that's life.

So I call PGW (Philadelphia Gas Works). I DO realize what I did wrong there; I neglected to remember that my social security card has my middle name on it and so a conflict came up. Ergo, Kate has to go into the city to do it in person, with lease, two forms of ID, and social security card.

Kate is annoyed now, but she already knows what she did wrong. So she calls PECO (Philadelphia Electric Company) to get electricity and do it right this time around. THIS time, I have my social security card out beside me as I'm on the phone, so I give the right name.

And with THIS one, there's ALSO a conflict, so I have to go in to do THAT one in person, too!

I thought I was finished with this in-and-out-of-the-city crap. And now I have to go sit around at PGW and PECO to show them my two forms of ID, one of which will be my green card (so I'm bound to get funny looks), and HOPEFULLY, MAYBE, when I get home tomorrow, I will have things set up for my apartment.

But at this point, I'm not getting my hopes up.

Good things?

Well, I think I've given up on scriptfrenzy, mostly because I can't summon up the requisite enthusiasm. Ah well. Next year, maybe (if it happens).


But I signed a lease on an apartment, so I have somewhere to live as of July 7. Scary. My own place. (Yeah, the parents are paying the bills. But it's still my place).

And I'm getting another feeler on a job, this time for working on a campaign. Awesome.

This only guarantees that every other aspect of my life is about to go crumbling into a zillion pieces.

You watch.

(Oh, and I don't think I'm going to rewrite the novel-from-hell. Probably).

A Month (nearly)

Well, it's been nearly a month since I finished the novel-from-hell, and I have been gloriously not doing anything since. (I might/might not finish Scriptfrenzy, I'm 10,000 words in so far).

I've decided that this afternoon I'm giving it a read-through. Huzzah.

That means tomorrow I'll decide to rewrite it. You watch.

Scriptfrenzy!

Now, I thought that I'd talked myself out of doing scriptfrenzy. I'm a book-writer, not a screenwriter, and I've no desire to be anything but. Besides, I've gathered that it's even more of a difficult biz to break into, and seems like I've already got my work cut out for me enough with the regular writing.

Then somehow, I find myself doing it.

I'm trying to not be too surprised about it.

The screenplay I'm writing is an idea that I'd had and put down in my little notebook o' plots, but it seemed too cliche to ever be worth seriously committing time to it. So I've decided that there's no harm in writing a screenplay that will never see the light of day about it. Better than scrounging one of my good plots on it.

Of course, it was going to start as a lighthearted romantic comedy. Mostly because I imagined that they'd be the easiest thing to write about and the plot vaguely fit the bill.

But this is me. Of course it's already got a conspiracy and a totalitarian government. Again, I'm trying not to be too surprised. They're things that tend to creep into my stuff, whether or not I intend it too.

The good news is that it's only 20,000 words, and I'm already 3,000 in. I'm guessing that I'll be finished by the end of the week, around Friday or so. Then I can get back to writing (or more accurately, avoiding writing) the sequel for the novel-from-hell.

On the personal front, still no job. Still no apartment. Another thing to try not to be too surprised abot.

Another one bites the dust

As of five minutes ago, I finished the umpteenth draft of the novel-from-hell. The end is largely the same as the last draft, but that's okay, because I liked the ending from the last one. It was the middle that was screwy.

Anyway, that means I get peace from it for a full month while I try to forget it ever existed. I will put my energy into
a) finding an apartment
b) finding a job
c) writing a paper
d) starting on the other two projects I've got lined up.

The other two projects that I have are of a much more comedic nature than the one I just finished. I don't know if I'm much good at comedy, but it'll be something different. The goal is to at least start writing one of them over the next month, though if I do script frenzy, perhaps that will be my June project.

In any case, at the beginning of July, I'll start editing the novel-from-hell. Goal is to have it edited by the end of the summer, or by September at the latest. (Going to depend on my work schedule, when I get a job). That means by the fall, I should be ready to submit it to agents. *gulp*

End of an Era

After two years, Miss Snark is hanging up her blog and drifting away into retirement. She will be missed. I know that I learned so much from her, and wouldn't be where I am today without her. I'm not published, but I'm not quite as clueless as I once was.

The bad news is that she's going.

The good news is that the blog's staying up, so generations hence can learn from her snarky wisdom.

Miss Snark

You will be missed.
Thank you for everything.

Slow Progress

Seems like a long time since I've been around here. Finishing school, moving home, pretending to find a job, and all the rest.

But I have been doing some writing, and the novel-from-hell is all the way up to 60k words. (The fact that my schedule says I should hit 80k today is another matter entirely). For this whole week, I've really been in a writing mood, and have been consistently putting out at least 5k a day, which is good output for me. Yesterday, we were futzing around with trying to get wireless on my laptop (a success, I might add), and by the time that got sorted out, I was too emotionally exhausted to do any writing. Any new task tends, in my family, to be rather emotionally involved, even something as fairly straightforward as connecting a laptop to a wireless network. Today, I was wondering about whether I was going to get my phone interview for a job I really want, and that made me too tense to be able to write. As I now know the interview will be tomorrow, that means I'll be tense for most of tomorrow, thus giving me the excuse to not write tomorrow. I need to find somewhere to live in the city if I'm going to work there (the 1.5 hour commute really gets to me), I need to actually GET a job, and there's the fiddly matter of having to entirely re-write a paper for one of my classes because my professor rejected it as "not relevant". Boo sucks to him.

This gets to the point that I'm trying to make. I'm so good at coming up with reasons not to write when I'm not in a kickass-writing mood, which is most of the time. It's a bad habit of mine, and one that I really need to overcome. After I write this blog post, the goal is to sit down and punch out at least another 5k. I think I can more or less scrap the idea of finishing the damn thing this weekend, but we'll see where I'm at on Sunday before we make any decision on that.

Also, I'm thinking about doing scriptfrenzy. It's not anything like I've ever done before, but I think it might be fun. Still not decided on that, though, or whether I'm going to shoot off to one of the other two projects that are sitting on my laptop, waiting for my attention. But number one priority is finishing the novel-from-hell, and then writing the paper. (The worst thing about the paper is that it has no set due date, in my prof's words, "Just sometime before you graduate"). But I do need to write it, because that Incomplete on my transcript sucks.

But, off to write. Damn.

Fingernails

I have to admit that this is a fairly "random" type of post, but I thought it needed to be said, because I just really noticed it for the first time today.

When I was younger (most of the way through my teens), I loved the fact that I could grow really long nails completely naturally. Where other girls had to go and get fake nails, I could just grow mine out, and quickly, too. The fact that I rarely had cause to paint them is another story entirely. This period of my life was also largely before I was introduced to the joys of the computer. It was, after all, only three years ago (maybe four) that I learned how to email people. I wish I was kidding, but I can clearly remember demanding that my mother teach me how to send email.

Anyway, then junior/senior year at high school happened. In between my junior and senior year of high school, I went to a pre-college summer program. Because they thought it would be a good idea, my parents shelled out the bucks to get me a laptop (the same laptop that I'm typing this up on, as a matter of fact). That was probably when I started using a computer for more than about five minutes a day, and the usage slowly increased up from there, to the point where I can easily spend quite a few hours sitting in front of it a day.

Typing is perfectly possible if you have long nails, just mighty uncomfortable, I've found. In that respect, it's kind of like playing a guitar (which I did, briefly, possess the ability to do). You can do it, but it's a hell of a lot easier to do it with short nails.

Why did I just come to terms with this?

Well, about two weeks ago, I was about to cut my nails when I remembered how much I enjoyed having long nails, even if I did nothing with them, and so I wanted to see if I could still grow them out. Five minutes ago, right before starting this post, I cut them. It's just so much easier to type, so much quicker, and my fingers slip so much less easily off the keys than fingernails. I'm a fast typist, and having fingernails slip off keys is a very real event for me.

So maybe it's unfeminine to have nails that are incredibly short. I'm not a very girly-girl anyway, I don't wear make-up, dresses, or skirts, and I don't paint my nails. Of course, there are things that long nails are good for: untying knots, changing the time on my watch, and the like.

Ah, well. C'est la vie. Can't have everything.

Extraneous this or THAT

So, over at fictionscribe, I offered up my first 200 words to be sliced and diced as they rightly deserved to be. I was amazed at the...tameness of the comments. Yes, I got rightly lambasted for my overuse of "THAT" and the fact THAT my second character's name remained unknown for the 200 words, and yes I've been writing the damn thing for years, but I express my surprise. As I had known more or less when it was going to be posted up there, I got into the habit of (even while at home over Easter) checking the blog as frequently as I could to see if she had posted and commented on it yet. As it turned out, no such luck until Monday, which was more or less what I had expected anyway. Still, it is always a pleasant surprise when you think you are throwing something to the wolves and instead of it being ripped to shreds, comes back with just a hole ripped in the knee of its faded jeans.

Anyway, as soon as I read the comments for the excerpt, I did as suggested, and went to my current version of the novel from hell, did a find and replace for the word "THAT", and came up with a staggering 305 "THAT"'s. I know some of them are probably useful - the word does exist for a reason, but 305/12,711 = (according to my calculator) 0.239 = 2.39%! Nearly 2.5% of my story is THAT. And THAT has given me something else to torture myself over. Not only do I have to WRITE the damned thing, I have to worry about my tragic overuse of a certain word. More than THAT, I have to worry about having another THAT word THAT takes up another 2.5%, or another, or another, to perpetuity. And THAT, ladies and gents, is why I have been working on this wreck of a novel for nearly 6 years. Yes, we must be coming up on the 6th within the next couple of months. Perhaps I should burn an old copy of it to celebrate (or hell, the new copy, for all the good it's doing sitting open on my computer right now...stop trying to make me feel guilty, damn it!)

In spite of the very good advice given to me in reducing my THAT's (and yes, it IS something THAT I will take notice of, in the editing stage), for the sake of my sanity, and it's fragile enough as it is, I'm just going to tuck it away in the back of my head and only bring it out when the novel from hell is back in an editing stage. Theoretically, THAT will happen around a month after the hell known as university concludes for the semester. Then I will spend the summer torturing myself with it, and have something to send out when I should be going to class next fall.

I recall THAT, when writing my hook for the last Miss Snark Crapometer, I noticed my extraneous use of THAT. I suspect it is a problem many people face without even knowing they do it (agree with me here for my sanity). However, in Russian (yep, I'm a dork learning Russian), you have to use the word THAT, you can't omit it as you can in English in many instances. So maybe it's just THAT has become such a filler word and we need to prune down on its use.

I just copied and posted this into MSWord and had it capitalize all my uses of the word THAT and it made me laugh to see how many of them there were.

Writing Advice - Characters

First, a disclaimer. I'm not published, so take anything I say with a heavy helping of salt. In the same vein, though, what works for one person doesn't always work for another, so even if I were published and famous (haha), the things I said were good wouldn't necessarily be good for everyone. I'm hesitant enough to post this anyway, because I feel it does sound a tad pretentious for someone that's simply a wannabe to tell others how they should be doing it.

But enough of that.

Characters, for me, tend to make or break a story. I can't care about a story if I can't care about the characters in it.

Characters aren't made, they just exist. I know that sounds bad, because you're going to say that they're fictional and so someone has to make them up. Yes, to a point. I have my main characters, Nicholas, Stephen, and the rest. But I didn't sit down and say "this is what they're like". Let me tell you what I DID do, way back when, to the extent that I can remember.

I didn't start out by saying Nicholas was going to be good/bad, kind/cruel, or any of it. I started with, I wanted him to be poor, a father with strong political opinions, and working for the government, and I think that's about the extent that I started with.

His PERSONALITY, wasn't something that I intentionally created. I just started writing stories about him. I still have most of them here on my laptop. They're not very good stories, but they helped to make him a character. He's a father, and he wants to be a good one. To be a good father, he feels that he needs to be able to feed and clothe his children. When he cannot do this well, enough, it makes him extremely frustrated. It makes him angry at the government that is denying him the money that he feels he is entitled to. What do people do when they're angry about a situation, or with a group of people? They want to change the situation, using whatever means possible. For Nicholas, this ultimately means going against the government.

You can't GIVE your characters a personality. Or rather, you can, but don't expect them to be believable or likeable or for them to be any more than cardboard cut-outs. They'll be patchwork quilts of the things that you wanted to make them. And what's worse, as you write more and more, it will become painfully obvious that they're NOT what you intended them to be. Because as you gain talent as a writer, these things just start to come naturally. So you'll be saying "Princess Fairydust is vain but self-confident" and what your story will show is that Princess Fairydust is actually neither vain nor self-confident, and then you lose your readers.

My characters all live in my head. Every last one of them, major and minor, the ones from the last rewrite and the ones that dropped out several rewrites ago. They're all still there, because they're all real people to me. I could imagine walking down the hall of my dorm and running into them. I wouldn't necessarily WANT to, but they're just as real to me as flesh-and-blood people are to me.

I don't just think about my characters when I'm writing. I think about them all the time. I could be in the store picking up some soup and suddenly think about something Nicholas or Stephen might say. Their lives are NOT restricted to the story that I write. They exist outside of it. They are bigger than the story.

The story exists because of them, they don't exist because of the story.

Major characters don't ever exist because of a story. A story exists because of the major characters. That's something else that you don't seem to get. Characters come first, a plot follows naturally after you've got characters. That's why I have about 20 short stories on my computer, none of which are even very relevant now, but all of which helped to create the personality of my characters. Once they're real people, certain plots just become self-evident and you couldn't force a plot on them any more than you could radically alter the direction of my life just by telling me so.

And yes, you might say there is a difference because I write with characters in "the real world" and if you're a fantasy writer. I say, that doesn't matter a whit. They still need to be real. I wrote a fantasy for Nano. I don't think that it's particularly good, but I still did it the same way that I started writing the novel-from-hell. I picked my main characters, gave them a sentence-long biography, and then started writing short stories about them.

Put characters in situations and find ways to get them out of them. That's how you "build their personality". Sure, other writers might have a better way of doing it. But what I do know is that just "giving" your characters qualities, is NOT going to work. It just isn't. It's not going to give you characters that anyone can relate to, that anyone can believe in.

The Idea, But...

Last November, during which I was a proud participant of NaNoWriMo, I started and aborted a story that was my first endeavor into the realm of literary fiction. I don't consider myself technically a good enough writer nor even truly a good enough storyteller to pull off something that is a lot less action-y than the stuff that I usually write. Yet, it was my one chance to put aside the wretched novel-from-hell and give something else a shot. So I made a lot of plans and I came up with a basic structure for it.

It flopped, miserably, about 10,000 words in. I could tell that it was boring...it wasn't going anywhere, and it wasn't even prettily not going anywhere. It was just lying there like a great lump on the ground and growling at me whenever I looked at it. All in all, it and I just weren't getting along. So I got my mop and mopped it up, tossed it in a folder of its own and hid it in the list of my writing failures, titled under My Document as "Graveyard".

There it has happily sat until last night, when I pulled out. Not the story itself, but the notes and the Excel spreadsheet I made for it.

Do you know the expression "the word's on the tip of my tongue"? Well, this is exactly the same thing. I feel like I'm just inches away from some epitome that will give me insight on how to write it, and how to write it so that its reincarnation is less like the growling lump. On my walk to the library this evening, I was even juggling some first lines in my mind. I feel like I've almost got it, but just like the frustration you feel when you can't think of that word, I feel the same about this concept, which I...just...can't...quite...get.

Seven Types of Ambiguity, by Elliot Perlman

Only about ten minutes ago, I finished this book, with tears in my eyes.


The basic plot to the book is simple. A guy named Simon, who is obsessively in love with his ex-girlfriend from University, Anna, stops by her son's school one day after school and takes him home. It seems crazy, and Simon accepts that it's an irrational act, but he does it anyway. He can't even explain why he does. The boy, Sam, is returned only a few hours later, not at all worse for the wear.

What makes this book such an intriguing read is the way its laid out. There are seven parts, each written from the first-person perspective of one of the characters involved in the plot. The interweaving of the characters is amazing...it is in this that it feels a little too overdone. Everyone is too connected to everyone else. But it does do a lot to add drama and tension as each part advances the plot of the story. One of the parts is just dialog. About sixty pages of just dialog.

It is full of esoteric bits of wisdom, which just sound right and you take for granted. I don't know enough about psychology to say whether it's carefully researched (which I suspect it is) or if the author was just making it up, but the way it's presented really draws you in. It's written in a very simple style, lulling you into a complex weave of events with eloquently simple sentences.

The characters are people that you can feel for. You can identify with Simon's obsessive love, Anna's devastation at being in a completely broken marriage, and the rest of the cast trying to make it through whatever misfortune life has set on them. There aren't really any bad guys in this book, but I can't say they're all good guys either. They're...well, they're just people.

The ending is ambiguous, to some extent. The reader is left with the feeling that they know what happened, but hope and wish that they are mistaken. The ending that is hinted at is not one that anyone could want.

At 620-some pages, it's a bit of a hefty read, but it's such a wonderful style that I got through it in 3 days...and enjoyed every minute of it.

The Urge, Part 2

So my novel, the mortal gods (affectionately known as "the novel from hell"), isn't going so well. I get these spurts where I am just so sick of the damn thing, put it aside, and (almost) vow to never look at it again. Then it comes back with a vengeance whenever I have a new plot idea or a way that will just make it better. Better, in my mind, being entirely subjective. I finished writing the draft of it last November, and I've known it needed serious rewriting for a while, based on a stupid, stupid plot point halfway through. And, of course, this necessitates a COMPLETE rewrite. Bear in mind that this thing has already been fully written out (and subsequently scrapped) at least 4 times. This is the fifth run-through. Yeah, yeah, I know I'm procrastinating, and I know that the more times I rewrite, it's not actually getting me anywhere towards publishing. Fine, I'm aware of that, and I'm working on overcoming that. I think this one might be *gasp* the one, though (and I say that only being 5000 words in). It just feels better to me. Smoother.

I was sitting in my Russian Literature class today, and I honest-to-God was trying to pay attention. But then an idea hit me, and so now I've got 2 pages of looseleaf writing to type up because I couldn't stop myself from writing. Yeah, this is a very bad habit as I need to pass my classes, and to pass them, it would be great if I actually paid any attention in them, which I very much didn't today.

I don't even like writing by hand! Try typing up a 300k novel that you wrote all by hand and you'll feel the same way. The only upshot of doing that was that it has done wonders for my typing speed. But that's really not the point.

When the urge hits, it's like trying to stop a train. It's going to come, and do whatever it wants, no matter what I do. That's just life. So, now I'm off to go and type up these pages and maybe it'll give me the spur to get some more writing done tonight. I'm kinda in one of those writing moods right now...

The Urge

Well, I've been sleeping pretty badly lately, for a number of reasons. I tend to sleep too much one night and not enough another, and try to compensate for it all by pulling the occasional all-nighter. As you can imagine, this only works for so long before my body decides to just pack it in and call it quits. So far, I've avoided this happening. But I was just about to treat myself to a long, early night, sitting in bed, reading the stuff for tomorrow morning's class, when it happened.

I suddenly started thinking about when I was in the store today, and how I had a story idea while I was standing in line. I dismissed it out of hand - I wasn't in any position to write it while carrying a soda and bag of goldfish and came back home, and promptly put it out of mind.

Then it came back, and demanded my attention, right when I was about to go to sleep. I found myself reading the same paragraph in my textbook five times and getting no more out of it from one read to the next. All I could think about was the opening line to the story, sounding it out in my head and playing with it.

So the damned story got me out of bed and to the computer (which I had to turn on, mind you). I've written 1000 words in the past twenty minutes. Not bad. Of course, it's probably mostly crap, but stories tend to be like that on the first draft. Then there's the fact that I'm not a short story writer, and this particular story is nothing like the novel that has thus far consumed six years of my life.

But it's fun to write. And maybe it'll become a workable something at some point in the future.

But damn, I hate it when writing gets me out of bed when I'm tired because I literally can't do anything else except put the words down. Stupid story.

A Writer to Be?

I have been writing for a gazillion years.

No, really.

I have.

Don't believe me? Ah well.


Anyway, this ancient writer-of-tomes has recently relocated to here and from here, I will dwell on what the hell this whole writing business is (inasmuch as I know about it, which isn't much) and shall weep and shout with joy at my various writing failures and successes, as appropriate. But don't expect too much shouting with joy. I've still got to finish the book, after all.