Category: Writing

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When Killing Everyone, Remember to Stay Happy

Please excuse this poor excuse for a post.  Not all of writing is pretty happy shiny.

So, the book I’m writing involves a series of increasingly grim tales of an apocalypse that nearly wipes out humanity.  Things are getting depressing.  I usually have troubles when I’m in the thick of writing something hard, like character deaths.

And every single chapter is a character death.  Oh no, not just one… dozens.  Hundreds.  Cumulatively, ultimately, billions.  :/  I’m killing the world here.  And it’s taking it out of me.  I am actually getting sick because of it, or maybe it’s just compounding an already terrible feeling.  That’s probably it.  When I get sick I feel terrible; I’m experiencing a perfect storm of feeling like poop.

All-day headache, awesome.  Crushing feeling of depression (I am not depressed, that is not a phrase to brandy about lightly).  Sore throat.  The blehgs.  Usually it lasts a day.  Today was day three, and the headache was new.

I’d forgotten about this aspect of writing.  My last novel didn’t have any death in it.  It was rather upbeat.  I loved writing it.

This is the first major work I’ve written where I can’t wait to be done.  I am actually looking forward to the process of finding an agent or publisher for it (the part I usually dread).  Normally, the writing is a joy.  This is some strange monster of joy and sorrow and anguish.  My best yet.  I can’t wait for it to be over.

Because I know I’ll be able to sell it.

I just have to get the damn thing written first.

Last week I set out to do a segment that ended on an upnote, a ray of sunshine in a dark, dark world.  However, it made more sense for the narrative to take such a devastating turn that it worked out brilliantly, but has left me exhausted.

I won’t harp on about it.  I guess, if you’re going to be writing something dark, prepare yourself.  I should have know this would happen.  It’s happened before.  …Not like this though.  I’ll get through it, and I think the work will be better for it.

Such death, so apocalypse.  Wow.  Many depress.  Wow.

A remedy: this video (NSFW, in that, it’s hilarious, but you might not want your boss seeing this over your shoulder).

Chin up.  Stiff upper lip.  All that wot wot.

Heidi out.

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My Experiment Without Sleep

Well, my no sleep experiment was a success.  I’m bummed I couldn’t go longer, but really glad I held out as long as I did.  Long enough to get sick, physically sick from staying up so long.

I made it 48 hours.  Two full nights.

It’s not really that long.  I feel like a bit of a wimp.

7AM Saturday to 7AM Monday.

By the end of it, I was destroyed.  In every sense of the word.  I’m not being melodramatic either.  I know it *sounds* melodramatic.  But damn, I was a wreck.  Falling asleep if I stayed still, and just as bad when I went for a walk to try and stave off the inevitable.

I woke up after a five hour sleep (nap) and got up to get some food.  I made breakfast.  And then I saw the (victory) pie that I had bought in the last hour of my walk this morning.  I’d completely forgotten about it until I saw it.  I cast aside my other (inferior) breakfast and ate some of that sweet sweet pie.

I was able to keep notes.  It was pretty difficult near the end there.  At about 5AM I hit a wall, a wall that twisted my stomach into knots and made my eyes start to do stupid things.

It was fun.  It was educational.  And there’s no way in hell I think things would go as I had thought they would (in my book) before I did this exercise.  I’ll have to write some changes with this knew knowledge.

And in the end, that’s what I wanted.  To better understand what happens when we go without sleep.

We go insane.  We become shambling simulacrums, mindless automatons.

Or at least, I do.

Thanks for reading.

Heidi exhaustedly out.

P.S.: Thank you Minecraft and Sons of Anarchy for helping keep me occupied while I tried this madness.  Both are good.

(I started a new world in Minecraft, one in which I vowed never to make a bed and sleep in.  It was hard.  It was fun.  I think my stained glass windows ended up looking a bit like eyes, bloodshot and wide, a subconscious act on my part.)

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Method Writing Experiment: Preparing for 100 Hours Without Sleep

As you may remember, I have been known to engage in something I’ve decided to call “Method Writing”.

If you’re unfamiliar with Method Acting, basically it’s a technique employed by actors to put themselves in the psychological state of the character they’re portraying, to convey a more realistic sense of that character.

Robert DeNiro drove a cab on twelve hour shifts for a month before filming Taxi Driver.

Daniel Day Lewis has gone to extreme lengths to get inside the minds of his characters, spending months learning new skills and getting into their heads.

You get the idea.  Doing things in real life that your character would do.  Living as they would.  Amassing their experiences, so you have the emotions and memories of those experiences to draw on for your performance.

Writers are portraying characters as well.  We have to portray them all.  Every single entity in a book is characterized by a single individual.  Just take a moment on that.  Every single entity in a book is characterized by a single individual.

Good writers will have a cast of stock characters that they can draw from to make things easier.  You change details, mannerisms, speech patterns; the surface stuff that makes us different from one another can be changed as easily as a costume, and is about as effective at characterizing someone.

But the core of characters, the very heart of what makes someone tick, how many of those do we know?  How many people do we understand, really understand in their heart of hearts?  A good writer will have a few.  Enough to get by.  Great writers have more.

Thus, the more people we can understand, inside and out, and truly know, the more effective we can characterize the plethora of people needed to populate our work.

And Method Writing is one of the ways to do that.  You try new experiences, go to new places, learn the things that your character will know, so you understand them better.  Do you think I’d’ve guessed that a good Projectionist in a new building would have a roll of micropore tape in their pocket?  No.

So: getting into the mindset of a character is key to portraying them realistically.

And yes, having similar experiences to that character helps us draw on genuine emotions and thus aids in achieving a level of realism that will translate into a more rich and lifelike individual.

Of course, we are writers; our job is to imagine these things.  But we cannot work in a bubble.  We’re always using our own experiences, the people we know, the things we do, to insert realism into our work.

I’m currently writing a book which requires me to know a lot about sleep.  And insomnia.

I’m already having to invent dozens of people.  I can’t really go be a paramedic, or a sound mixer for Skrillex, or an artist working in Paris.  But I can understand what it would be like for them to be sleep deprived.

My next experiment is to remain awake for 100 hours.

During this time, I will periodically measure five things:

My blood pressure and heart rate.

My mental acuity, using simple math and reading comprehension tests.

My ability to see and sort colours.

My reaction time.

I’ve been taking readings on all these leading up to my experiment, so I have a baseline.

I have excellent blood pressure.  🙂

I see colours pretty darn well.  (Seems by biggest weakness is in the blue area of the spectrum.)

My reaction time is pretty constant.

My math skills are pretty good (always been quick to do basic math in my head, except, for some reason, the eight times-tables, which is apparently the blue of single digits).

My reading comprehension is good (the test itself had errors in it).

So I have a benchmark, because I want to have actual data points to compare to when I’m doing these things on no sleep.  I’ll try to do them every twelve hours.

What do I hope to gain by staying awake for 100 hours?  A better understanding of what my characters would be going through.  I could fake it.  I could probably write a good approximation.  But having lived it will bring an air of authenticity to the work that I will feel much better about.

Understanding people is key to writing realistic characters.  

I’m not going to enjoy doing it, but I will enjoy having done it.

Sometimes I can’t experience what my characters are going through.  But these rare times when I can, I feel an obligation to at least try.

Thanks for reading.

Heidi out.  

P.S.: (I will report back in one week, when I’m just at the tail end of my 100 hours.  I apologize in advance if it is riddled with insanity and/or is generally a mess.  I will of course do a followup with a more articulate account of how it went.)

P.P.S.: It’s different from Gonzo Journalism, or Gonzo Writing, in that I’m not inserting myself into the narrative.  It is a technique which serves only to help me understand and bring realism to characters in a story.

P.P.P.S.: I’ve been reading up on sleep and sleep deprivation a lot.  I’m not going into this blind.  It is the last step in my understanding, not the first.

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What Makes Agents Stop Reading (SiWC), and We Have a Winner!

First off, congrats to Phillipa, the winner of my first ever book giveaway!

Thanks to everyone who entered.  I will be doing another one soon, and you’ll have another chance to win then, by commenting here, on Reddit, and my Facebook page.  🙂

And now, more notes from SiWC!  This time I’ll be taking a look at their wonderful “Surrey International Writers’ Conference IDOL”.  Basically, it’s four people skilled in the art of rejecting authors, and one person who reads.  What do they read?

Everyone is invited to submit the first page- ONLY the first page- of their manuscript.  It’s blind and it’s stark and brutal and beautiful; the words have to do the work, there’s no preamble, no explanation, no baggage of any kind to go along with them.

Here are the rules: if one of the four judges raise their hand, the reader keeps reading.  But if a second judge raises their hand, the reading stops, and the judges explain why they stopped it.

If they get to the end with one or zero hands raised, they also talk about it.

It’s absolutely fabulous.  Riveting.  There were some amazing first pages mixed in with the mediocre and the just plain bad.

To give you some context, the judges were:

Michelle Johnson, founding agent of Inklings Lit.

Nephele Tempest, an agent at The Knight Agency.

Patricia Ocampo, an agent at Transatlantic.

Bree Ogden, agent with D4OE Lit.

And the reader was the illustrious Jack Whyte, author of such novels as The Camulod Chronicles, The Knights Templar Trilogy, and The Bravehearts Chronicle, and owner of one of the most magnificent voices I’ve had the pleasure of hearing.  I would have listened to him read a phone book.  But instead, he kept me captivated with stories of every kind, his sonorous Scottish accent lulling me into that wonderful state of “I’m listening, please, never stop.”

So that’s our setup.  Four amazing women in the industry waiting to blind judge the first words, sentences, and, if the writer was lucky, the first paragraphs of as many first pages as they could get through.

Here’s why they stopped readings, peppered with reasons why Jack Whyte made it to the end of a page without the hammer coming down.

Please note- the first pages spanned every genre and tone, and going into the specifics of what they contained would not add to this; the reasons for stopping reading are universal.  I hope my notes are enough to give you an overall sense of why agents put work down in the first few sentences.  And as usual, this is a mix of the agents’ words and my own interpretations and additions.

x= complete stop, 1/2= one hand up, but made it to the end, and ✓= no hands raised.

x  too much happening- what is going on, we the reader cannot make heads or tales.

x  too boring, there’s no hook.

x  who is talking?  And why do we care about them?  (Not identifying your narrator or having a clear main character was a much-repeated reason to get the agents to stop the reading).

✓  pacing was great, and there was a good balance between setting and character.

✓  the voice was clear and captivating, there was an excellent balance of setting, character, all aspects; drew us in.

x  too much description, going nowhere.

x  there’s more to a story than beautiful imagery.  Wonderful writing, but flowery descriptions are not what draws people into the beginning of a story.

x  to local- super specific small town setting was a turnoff (so we need to set our stories in Anytown, USA?  Dang.).

1/2  (one hand raised, this first page barely squeaked past)  not much happening, nothing at stake, no conflict.  No reason to put it down, but also no reason to keep going either.

x  too much exposition- thinking about thinking, telling not showing, no action, the age of the narrator is inconsistent (the voice was inconsistent, giving the reader mixed impressions of the narrator), what is the conflict, and there were 2 typos ._.

x  cliché and lame, plus the implausibility of a 14 year old being in handcuffs, AND being able to pick them.

1/2  we’re lost; it’s interesting, but *what* is going on.  Confusing your reader is not the same as hooking them.

x  waking up (don’t start your story with your character waking up.)  (Seriously, don’t.)

1/2  good description but confusing- who is the protagonist, who is the narrator; beautiful, but what is the story?  Sometimes it’s useful to flip the first chapter, putting the end at the beginning, to draw the reader into the story (the setup comes after drawing them in).  Telling not showing…

1/2  all backstory and repetitive writing.  Varying sentence structure was great and switching up what the sentence is about (switching between character, description etc).  Cliché opening line was a turnoff.

x  descriptions galore, choppy, unrealistic depiction of emotion, unrealistic reactions.

x   waking up (don’t start your story with your character waking up) (seriously, don’t).

x  word usage- “lovers” and other sex specific words (this was an agent preference).  Trying to be clever- the writer getting in the way of the tone (see my previous post on how the author intrudes on the story).  The description doesn’t match the tone and content; huge disconnect between content and the voice.

x  a lot of telling, no showing

x  description of how someone travelled- who cares, and now we’re in another location.  We don’t need to know what airline they flew.  Rule of thumb for backstory: a little at the beginning, some in the middle, none at the end.

1/2  saying the same thing in several ways, get on with it.  Beautiful sentences, but telling not showing.  Whose story is it.

1/2  great voice but too many adjectives, cliché and poor word choice.

SO!  That is the list of commentary I took down as the judges meted out their sentences on those authors lucky enough to have their first pages drawn for the reading (it was random, and no, mine was not one of the lucky to be eviscerated evaluated, which is a shame, because none of the others started off the way mine did, and it would have been lovely to hear what they thought!).

Hope others find this helpful.  I surely did, and it I was glad to have had the opportunity to hear this raw and unfiltered look into what gets an agent hooked enough to want more.

Several of those writers whose work made it to the end were asked to approach the agents afterwards.  One of them was Russel, a young man whose story of a jester on stage absolutely captivated the room.  When Jack Whyte looked up at his audience and found us spellbound, and we realized there was no more to the story, there was an audible reaction from the crowd.  We wanted more.  And so did two of the agents.  I went up to Russel afterwards and offered my congratulations; he hadn’t finished the manuscript, but he had talent enough to hold a room full of his peers.

What an opportunity!  This is one event at SiWC that I will attend every time.

Cheers.

Heidi out.

P.S. It’s the last day of Aaron’s (well funded) Kickstarter campaign for a superior Spirograph!  Check it out and join the fun!

MATHEMATICAL!

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SiWC Post 1: Power Editing with Robert Dugoni, and a Book Giveaway!

This past weekend was mega busy, and oh so fun.  I volunteered at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference, and worked my butt off for them.  In exchange, I got to pseudo-attend the conference.

I went to a masterclass, panels, and talks, and met some amazing people.  I’m going to do several posts on SiWC, because trying to fit it all in to a single post would be madness.  Just like trying to fit a whole year’s worth of writerly-networking and craft-discussion into a single weekend.

So!  Before I give out my notes from the Power Editing Masterclass, do go check out Robert Dugoni.  He was an excellent speaker, and in addition to giving me some things to think about, he managed to sell me on checking out his books.  (You can also have your chance to check out his books, courtesy of me!  Check out my note at the end of this post about winning his book!)

Onwards!

Please note that this is a mix of Robert Dugoni’s talk and my own opinions.  I made bare-bones notes, enough to trigger thought processes in my own mind, so what you’re about to read is a mishmash of his teachings and my experiences.  It ended up being more about story structure than editing, but it’s all relevant.

Also note that these are notes from a masterclass– this is not day 1 writing.  I’m not going to explain some of these terms.  You can look them up!  🙂  It’s still pretty approachable.

My brain had a little trouble right off the get go.  He mentioned that he’d done 14 drafts of one of his novels.  FOURTEEN DRAFTS.  This was one of those wonderful (read: terrifying) moments when I wondered “Am I doing it wrong?”

I knew some writers (myself not among them) wrote many drafts.  But FOURTEEN!  I tend to write one novel, re-write certain sections of it, and edit the crap out of it.  But I also outline beforehand… People that write a lot of drafts tend to be pantsers (they write by the seat of their pants, without much outlining).  If you plan it out, you know where it’s going, and thus don’t need to rewrite the darn thing so many times.

Once I got over that little factoid, I got right into:

Where the author intrudes on the story.

1) Opinion

Inserting your opinion into the work will bring the reader out of it.  Your opinion can come in the form of narrative judgement or even in the opinions of your characters.  This is difficult, because characters need to have opinions; convincing the reader that it makes sense in the context of the character is imperative if they’re to believe that it’s not yours.

2) Info Dumps

Insert information into conversations, naturally, so it’s not just unrelated information.  Sure it’s great to do your research, but you’ve got to get it into the story in a way that doesn’t jar the reader out and scream “LOOK AT ALL THE RESEARCH I DID”.

3) Biographies

No one introduces themselves and gives their life story.  Give characters information over time, naturally.  And don’t give information on characters that don’t matter or that we’ll never see again.

4) Flashbacks

Flashbacks are tricky.  Chronology works well to help story structure, and when you mess with it, things are bound to get ugly.

Basically, get your info across through your dialogue.

Appeal to core motivations: fear, love, wrath, envy, lust, greed- if it’s a deadly sin, you can use it.  People will identify with your character motivation if it’s universal.

High stakes: make the story personal to your character.

At the climax (the failure of the quest, followed by the triumph), remind the reader: what is at stake?

What is the physical journey?

What is their motivation?

What is the public stake?

What happens in the world, for other people, as a result of the quest?

What is the personal stake?

What happens to our character, personally, as a result of the quest?

But I’m way ahead of myself.  Let’s talk about

The Beginning.  

Do 5 things in the beginning.

1) Set the tone.

The reader should get a good feel for how the rest of the book is going to go.  What kind of story are you telling?  Is it funny?  Grave?  Who is telling it?  Let them know what they’re in for within the first few pages.

2) Introduce the protagonist.

Who’s quest is this?  Who are we rooting for?  We need to know this right off the bat.

3) Create empathy for your characters.

We want to identify with characters.  As writers, we need to give our audience reasons to like our protagonist, to want to go on a journey with them.

4) Hook the reader.

Get ’em invested.  You need to communicate that this story is worth their time, and you do that by hooking them with the most exciting, most pertinent part of the story.  Why are you telling this particular one?  Why should the reader care?  Get them interested.

5) The first sentence poses a question, and early on, a story worthy quest is set up.

The following five questions can be used to describe any story.

Who?

What?

Where?

But when…

What stands in the way of their goal?

Let’s try it out.

Alan Grant is a palaeontologist who is invited to Isla Neblar to vet a new dinosaur theme park.  But when the attractions break free from their enclosures, he must help the others on the island traverse the facility and escape from the once extinct predators.

Who? Alan Grant. What is he?  A palaeontologist.  “But when”? Got it.  And of course, the dinosaurs are in the way of his escape.  Easy!  You can boil down any movie or book into these five points and get the basics of the story across.  It’s what makes or breaks elevator pitches as well.

We are at the end of the first page of my notes.  Good job!  Have a silly picture to give your noodle a break.

Ok, let’s get back to it.

1) Senses: appeal to them all to set the scene.  Put your reader there.

2) Goal: ever present.  Each scene is about realizing the goal, or about revealing character.

3) Obstacles: Escalating.  Each one reveals a new character trait; don’t show your character overcoming the same kind of obstacle over and over, challenge them in different ways each time.

4) Conflict.  Always conflict.

5) The final words of a chapter raise a question to keep the story moving, keep the pages turning.

On to The Middle.

The middle= the crossing of the threshold —> the climax.

Here is where we find out

1) Whose story is it?

2) What’s the through line of your characters?

3) How are they to achieve their goal?

4) Who helps them achieve it?

5) Who hinders them?

Which brings us to

The End.  

You must fulfil the promise, the promise you made the reader at the beginning (a story worthy quest, a character they want to follow).

The end must be completely inevitable, but unexpected.

The end must be satisfying.

The end has one more big obstacle.

Let’s talk about twists:

A twist is either an escalation, or a revelation. A twist is inevitable, yet unexpected.

There can be a twist of:

Character (like in the Wizard of Oz, the twist with ‘the wizard’)

Awareness (like in Planet of the Apes, when he realizes where he is)

Complexity (like in The Game, how everything was much more complex than anyone in the story or the audience realized)

Cleverness (like basically all of Sherlock)

Danger- the peril isn’t what we/they thought it was, it’s much, much worse, or different.

In the end, no new forces may be introduced, and no new characters.

When you’ve got all that (you did get all that, right?), then:

Go through scene by scene.  Ask yourself, do you need it?  Does it a) move the story forward or b) reveal character?

Raise a question with the first sentence of every scene.  We spend so much time on our first sentence, our first page; make every start of a scene that important.

If it can be presumed, it can be cut.  You don’t need a whole ton of description for mundane things.  He picked up the cup of water and took a sip.  No!  He took a sip of water.  There’s tons of actions that just don’t matter- cut them.

Readers’ emotions mirror the characters’ emotions.  If the protagonist cares, the reader will care.

Describing clothes: let details be revealed in motion.  Movement/action= active.

Her hair was red, her eyes were green.  No no no!  

Her red curls bounced behind her as she ran into the room; her green eyes darted from the gun on the floor to the knife in Robert’s hand.

And now one of those points that gets made that blows your mind (at least, it blew my mind, particularly because it has effected me and I didn’t realize it):

Secondary characters can be more interesting because main characters are too much like us.  My first novel’s protagonist IS too much like me.  And who did I pick to follow for the second book in that series?  A much more intriguing secondary character.

My notebook has a word that stretches the entire width of the page after that note…

DDDDDAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

Looking at character development: just one step up the ladder is enough.

1) The character cares only about themself.

2) The character cares about 1 other.

3) The character cares about a group.

4) The character cares about a community.

5) The character cares about all.

You can have character growth that doesn’t involve them becoming a saint.  Just one step up in this little hierarchy is enough to show development.

You did it!  You got to the end!  That’s it for that class.  It’s all over the place, I know… Hope you found it useful.  I sure did.

Or if you were more like

then I thank you for stopping by nonetheless.  Sorry for the technical post; I hope other writers find it helpful!

And now dear readers, I offer you a chance to win a book!  The first book in Robert Dugoni’s David Sloane series, The Jury Master, could be yours!  Just leave a comment below, or head to Reddit and comment in this thread in /r/books.  If you do both, I will count you in for two entries!  I will draw one person at random in one week (on Wednesday, November 6th), and I will contact you for your details.  And then you will have the first book in this thrilling series!

I will congratulate the winner in next week’s post.  And if you don’t win this time, I’m planning on doing more of these, so you’ll have more chances with other great books.  🙂

Next up: Surrey International Writers’ Conference Idol: Crushing Hopes and Dreams in front of Hundreds of People for Fun and Profit!  (j/k it was actually really useful, interesting, and fun!).

Thanks for reading.

Heidi out.

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Prisoners

I just got home from seeing a screening of Prisoners.

Holy smokes, I was not expecting that.  It had me on the edge of my seat for almost the whole film.  My chest is tight, my heart hurts from living in my throat for the past almost 3 hours.

The performances are excellent, the soundtrack is so unsettling, and the visual storytelling here is just top notch.  Oh, but the best thing, the very best thing, is the script.

I am so jealous of this script.  I want to give it a read and find out just how it managed to take me on this journey.  It had me in the palm of its hand and did things to me… things that films don’t do to me very often.  Like seriously, the intensity of emotion they managed to create; the craft level on every aspect of this film is stellar.  And like I said, the script-fu is just… damn.

I am a huge Hugh Jackman fan so I basically had to see this film, but it became apparent very early on that I was going to be in for way more than I bargained for.

I am having a hard time figuring out just exactly how to recommend this film; it’s not going to be for everyone.  Its pacing was brilliant, but it was slow (although it didn’t feel slow, if you know what I mean).  And if you have kids, god help you; I already feel sick to my stomach after seeing it, I don’t know how parents would survive this film.

 

Prisoners.

 

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“Luka and Iso”- Top 10% in The Nicholl Fellowship!

Hello wonderful blog readers!

I received an email from the Nicholl Fellowship today.

Every year, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences picks five writers and pay them, based on the strength of the script they submitted, to produce another feature length screenplay.

I didn’t make the cut for the Fellowship, but my script scored in the top ten percent!

7,251 entrants, and I’m in the top 10%?  Pretty awesome, but of course, disappointing not to advance.

Ah well, I’m hoping I can find someone out there as excited about the story of the first genetically engineered dragon as I am!  Perhaps this will help me along.  It will make a killer film.

Congratulations to everyone that is advancing.  I’m sure there are some amazing scripts, and how they’ll ever pick just five is completely beyond me!

In other news, I received my second ever royalty cheque!  Seems that A Quick Bite of Flesh is still selling.  Want some zombie flash fiction?  Then this book is forrr yoooouuuu!

I am waiting on an awesome agent for a new book I’d like to see in print.  Paranormal romance/urban fantasy here I come!  I’m well into the sequel already, and hitting short stories out of the park on a daily basis.

I’ll keep at it until- BWA HA HA YOU CAN’T STOP ME

Thanks for stopping by.

Oh what’s that?  This is my 100th post?

Hurrah!

Oh man, if I’ve been this into my small successes so far, when I get my first novel picked up I’m going to be happier than a kitten with a feather.  More excited than a porcupine with a banana.  You do know porcupines love bananas, right?

Anyway, thank you for stopping in and staying with me on this long, long journey to authordom.

Heidi out.

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I’m Still Here


Well, I’m still here.

I’m just keeping on keeping on.  Written another book.  Am having another go at finding an agent for “Luka and Iso”, the tale of the sentient genetically engineered dragon.  I really hope I can get that one represented; the time is right for the story, and it needs to be told.  All the fuforah about GMOs lately is wild.  There’s some great opportunity for marketing, and great potential for cross talk when stories about GMOs and advancements in genetics come up.

Glow in the dark monkeys, anyone?

Meanwhile, my new project is going over well with an army of anonymous beta readers.  It’s nice working with people I don’t know, and that don’t know me; they’re giving me good, honest feedback.  …And a lot of it is positive.  They already want the sequel!

But I’m sticking to my guns about not writing more than one book in a series until the first one gets published.

So I’m starting yet another one.  While I polish the new book, I’m outlining the next, which will be my fifth novel.  A fun sci-fi, inspired by a short story I wrote last year called “The First Gentlemen’s Galactic Scavenger Hunt”.

Short stories continue to be sent out, rejected, accepted.  The latest is in the upcoming “Zombies Gone Wild II”, for which the cover was just sent to me.  I think it’s hilarious.

So that’s me lately.  It’s been interesting trying to temper my least favourite part of the process (trying to find an agent) with my most favourite (writing); the new projects pull me along even as I drag my heels cold-emailing amazing agents who I would absolutely be ecstatic to work with.

Oh, and I’ve levelled up my procrastination skills.  Whenever I finish a major project, there’s a decompression that happens afterwards.  So far it’s been things like fill a sketch book or write a zillion short stories, and my latest: watch all of The Office.  Seriously, I’m almost done.  This has been the least productive of my come-downs, but man is it good.

Thank goodness for the Self Control app, which I use to block out every distraction, but leave the rest of the useful internet free for research.

So, onwards I go.  Book after book, I’m going to just keep ’em coming, until I find an agent that’s into one of them.  And then we’ll really see what I can do.

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My book is coming true before my very eyes…

It is at once exciting and frustrating to see my sci-fi future coming to pass.  Exciting to see how things are progressing down the path I speculated they would- nice to know I can see into the future somewhat correctly sometimes.  Frustrating because, well, once all the things happen, my book isn’t going to be as topical.  I want it out in the wild soon, to stir the pot with all the questions that we’ll have to be asking once things get really serious.

And they are getting serious!  Check it: “Scientists want to bring 22 animals back from extinction.”  DE-Extinction.  I can’t wait!  I know I know, it’s going to be years, decades, before things start actually showing results.  But I’m still pretty excited.

As usual, relevant TED Talk.

And here’s the thread on Reddit about it (ignore all the “comment removed” posts; memes and jokes are simply not tolerated in the science subreddit).

So, I hope I can find someone to help me sell my book, and get it on the shelves, while its content is just starting to make it into the public awareness.  Also, it’d be pretty sweet to have current affairs to help me out in the publicity department…  🙂

Right!  Well, onwards.  I’m going to write a children’s short story tomorrow, one about dragons, for Spellbound.  And then, thinking of the next big project.  Something that’s started to just peek into my conscious thought is this desire to put my fantasy series on the big screen… and I have to resist for now.

…Because I’ve decided not to continue writing anything that could be a series until I sell it.  If I write the first book in a series, as I’ve done twice now, I will leave it be until I can actually publish it, and there’s an audience who wants more.

This is great, it’ll mean I can keep breaking new ground with new ideas and characters, and have the benefit of creating a huge body of work that I could continue at any time.  Once I “make it” I’ll have several series that I could choose to continue if there’s an audience for them.

I leave you with this picture, from another planet!  It absolutely blows my mind that we have something on another planet, and it’s sending us back pictures.

Thanks for reading.

Heidi out.

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Kells and Reasons for Rejection

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!  The Book Of Kells is free on iTunes today.  I don’t know a thing about it, but I will soon enough.  Enjoy!

And today, author Michael J. Sullivan posted some interesting insights from another author, Marion Zimmer Bradley, on Why Stories Get Rejected.  A good read, and something every new author needs to internalize.

I have it down pat by now.  Though I think this can be a problem; this insidious expectation of rejection has effected me in a way I didn’t anticipate.  I have four things that I’m really excited about right now: my novel got a full request at an agency I would love to work with, my screenplay is being considered for the Nicholl Fellowship, as well as a contest to get me into Pitchfest, and also a short story of mine has been shortlisted for an anthology I’m excited for.

This is a lot of excitement.

Usually it’s just a lot of little things, various stories out for various anthologies, and the trickle of rejections come in steady and constant.  No big deal (anymore).

So when I actually have things to be excited for, I realize how oppressed this expectation of rejection was making me.


Sometimes we need to step back to see things more clearly…

The danger of getting excited is that it makes the rejection just that much worse.  I’m finding this creeping into other aspects of my life; I’ve stopped getting excited for movies (movies that I would have gotten excited for in the past!) because of past let downs (not a rejection, but the same feelings are at play).

Last week was the most difficult I’ve found meditation.  My mind kept racing forward to the future, and I’d have to pull it back.  Sit.  Stay.  Not terrible, but it got me to realize just how much I’ve been not been letting myself get excited.

So I’m excited.  Even if none of these four amazing things happen, it feels good to have so much possibility laid out before me.  And even if a single one does happen?  Well damn.  Things are pretty swell.

 

Silly kitty.  My own is hiding under my blankets, scared of the wind.

Right!  So, hope all is well with you, dear reader.

Thanks for reading.

Heidi out.