IWSG: The Goal Achieving Edition (#20)

Insecure Writers' Support Group (IWSG) is a really awesome meme that you should be doing along with the rest of us writers. Unless you truly are happy with your writing and don't feel the need to vent about your insecurities because they don't exist for you. But, really.... Don't they?  
IWSG is hosted by Captain Ninja Alex at his blog, Alex J. Cavanaugh.

That's right. I made a New Year's Resolution back in January and I just reached it! I set out to write 93,500 words of fiction for the year and reached 93,692 just last Saturday. I know it's not a lot of written words for the average writer who probably writes twice that in any given year, but it is a lot for me.

It honestly wasn't that hard to achieve, which is why I set it. I knew if I just wrote a few hundred words a day, I would make it, so that's what I did. I couldn't write every single solitary day, but most of the time I wrote more than just a few hundred words, so skipping some days was easy to do.

I also am finally writing a new original story that doesn't make me lose sleep at night. I find most of my manuscripts give me insomnia and make my life miserable for some reason, but my current work-in-progress is not provoking anxiety in me. All I can say is "YAY!" to that because this has been a problem for over a year now. I'm just so thrilled to be writing something I don't have to freak out over and can hope to actually finish and publish. (God-willing, right?)

It's nice to have some writing victories for a change! Onwards to 2016 and that '1 million words' lifetime word count! Are any of you finally conquering some of your writing demons for a change?

Happy 4th of July & Checking-in with Goals

Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

Besides acknowledging my country's day of declared independence, I figured it was also a great opportunity for me to check-in with myself to see how I'm doing on my New Year's writing resolution/goals. Now that the year is officially HALF over (that was fast!), I need to see how I'm doing on this front.

So far, I have written 55,287 words since January 1st, 2015. For me, and I stress the word "me," this is pretty amazing. I've never written so many words within the first six months of any year, so that is an accomplishment. My goal is to reach a minimum of 93,000 words by the end of the year, so I can see that I'm already slightly more than half-way to that goal at the half-way point of the year, so I'm on-track to meet it.

Although, I admit I've been slacking off on my writing as of late. June was a horrendous month for me and I was sick with strep throat. I'm still trying to completely get over that, but I think I can get some writing done now. Hopefully, I can at least do that for the remainder of the week and I'll just have to see how next week shapes up.

Perhaps I'll check in with myself again at the 3/4-mark of the year. I suppose there's nothing like checking in on yourself to motivate you to keep up with your yearly goals.


How is everyone else doing with their yearly writing goals?
 

New Year's Resolution

This award is so perfect for me! I didn't make this, but I decided to bestow it upon myself, nonetheless. I am definitely the type of writer inclined to be slow. So, with a new year and the tradition to start a new path that is better than the old one from last year, I've decided to set an intention to write everyday.

I realized that if I were to write at least 300 words a day for the entire year, I would have over 100,000 words completed by the end of the year. That's not hard! That's so doable, so this is what I'm intending to do for the year of 2015. 100,000 words written is great for one year, especially for a slowpoke like me. Maybe I'll be able to make this award not apply to me anymore.

The most important trick to making this work is to set a low word count that is so easy to meet everyday, there's no excuse not to do it. Like brushing your teeth twice a day, which takes so little time and reaps huge benefits compared to never doing it. Also, write any sort of fiction, even if it's just free-writing or fanfiction. It all counts toward your overall word count goal for the year, and you can worry about writing a best seller later. Most of what we write as fiction authors never sees the light of day, anyway, so just write!

Happy New Year to everyone! 

Any New Year's Resolutions for you writers out there?

Camp NaNoWriMo 2014!

Anyone else participating in Camp NaNoWriMo this July, besides me?

All I know is that November is always a bad month for me because I'm too busy and stressed out due to the holidays, and my creative flow is usually completely nonexistent at the very end of the year each year. July is much better for me for the lack of family holiday stress and a better creative flow!

Camp NaNoWriMo is actually more lenient than the annual event held every November, in that you can set your word count goal as low as 10,000 or as high as 1,000,000 words. All you're trying to do is meet whatever word count you want to meet, instead of the 50,000 words you have to meet in order to win in November. More reasons for me to like this July event better. It will be running between July 1st through July 31st, so it starts exactly a week from today!

If anyone is participating and you'd like to "friend" me on the website, feel free to click here and add me. If you want me to "friend" you, then let me know how to get to your profile page so I can add you to my friends.

Hope to see you there!

What I Write

I never blog about my actual stories, so I figured I should fix that, even if for a mere blog post. Since it's taking me so dang long to finish writing my current novel, I'll just use my little corner of the cyberspace universe to chat about what sort of writer I am and what I've been writing since last August.

Does this make writing seem really cool, or what? Tell everyone you know that this is what you do for a living!!

So, what do I write, since I'm a writer? 

I write stories that appeal to me and hope they are going to appeal to other people with the same interest in fiction that I have. It means I hope I'm in my target audience. 

I have a few, maybe more, unfinished manuscripts lying around on my laptop's hard drive that I feel have become the stepping stones for the stories I write today. That's just a nice way of saying they suck, but if I hadn't written them, or partially written them, I wouldn't have the skills to write what I can write these days. 

I might be approaching forty--as I leer at it--but don't be fooled. I am not much of an adult and probably still think too much like a teenager or college student. I usually read Young Adult fiction, thus I usually write Young Adult fiction. Anything that dramatizes fantasy or paranormal elements floats my boat. Just as long as the fiction isn't stuck in the overly realistic mundane world, I'm happy. I like to escape when I read! 

My current work-in-progress is a Young Adult vampire novel. I know, that sounds like the stupidest kind of novel to write in this day and age. As if this genre hasn't already been beaten to death thousands of times over. Despite this, vampire lore and the fascination humans have with these paranormal creatures lives on, my friend. If a real life vampire were to approach you tomorrow on your way to work, would you simply tell him, "I'm so sick of your kind. Just go sparkle somewhere where I can't see you...!" I think not. 

And, why not? Perhaps you know intrinsically that vampires can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways. You would probably bombard the poor fellow with a slew of questions about what makes him a vampire and how he lives from day to day, and whether or not you happen to be his next meal. They are basically creatures who prey on humans for their blood, sometimes even turning humans into more of their kind. That's all that is needed to create a fictional vampire. Beyond that, the possibilities are endless..... 

My WIP (work-in-progress) is about aristocratic vampires, enslaved humans and the Roman Empire all wrapped up in an alternate history of the 19th century. Yep, that about sums it up. Any questions?

Which Story to Write?

I don't know if very many other authors or would-be authors, like myself, have this problem as I do. Do you find yourself in this scenario?

You think of a great idea for a story that seems unique and you get excited about it, telling others about the idea and they agree it is something they'd love to read one day. So, you start writing it and you don't get very far with your first draft before you realize your brain just won't conjure up the creativity needed for you to keep going.

You bang your head against the wall to see if that will jog the creative juices, but it is of no avail. You cannot, for the life of you, get this story off the ground. You have no choice but to put it away and think of something else entirely to write next.

My current writing project seems to be fine, so I don't think this is an issue for me right now, but this has been how my year as a writer has gone until recently. I started out writing a Young Adult high fantasy about winged people until I realized the story was boring me to tears and sounded as flat as a plank. Then, I started a sci-fi apocalyptic story about cyborgs and destructive robots only to not be able to think of what to actually write. Then, a zombie apocalypse novella that somehow got away from me and I don't even know how that happened.

I was starting to think something was seriously wrong with me because I couldn't finish anything. I still might have this problem, but I can say that I feel my current YA vampire historical novel is a project I can at least finish in the first draft stage. I have the motivation to do it and am truly loving to write the characters. Finally, although it's likely it won't be finished until next year. So, I will have spent one full year not getting a first draft finished. 

I shake my head at myself, but I wonder how unusual is this for authors. Does this happen to anyone else? I really don't see authors admitting this, so it makes me feel like it's just me who has ever gone through this. I hope I'm not the only author who struggles with picking the right story to focus on and has to sift through quite a few to land on the right one. Surely, the norm is not to come up with the perfect idea out of the blue and just sit and write the story until it is done. That would be a little too perfect for this imperfect world, right?

Do you ever struggle to find the right story to focus on? 

Insecure Writers' Support Group (#9)

Insecure Writer's Support Group (IWSG) is a really awesome meme that you should be doing along with the rest of us writers. Unless you truly are happy with your writing and don't feel the need to vent about your insecurities because they don't exist for you. But, really.... Don't they?  
IWSG is hosted by Captain Ninja Alex at his blog, Alex J. Cavanaugh.

As some readers of my blog may already be aware, I've had problems crashing and burning when it comes to my writing in the recent past. It has not been pretty nor fun. I had gotten to the point where writing was so painful, I began to really dislike it and prefer doing anything else besides. And I want to do this for a living!

I had to do some realizing about why this was happening to me, since it hadn't ever happened before. So, I let this issue percolate in the back of my mind for a while, as I tend to do when trying to do damage control in my life (when am I ever NOT doing damage control?!).

I found a book on how to become more prolific (The 7 Secrets of the Prolific: [...] by Hillary Rettig) and the section on perfectionism really stuck out for me. I definitely needed to get over my perfectionism issues and just let myself write crap when composing my first drafts. Why I wasn't doing this, I'm not sure. I just didn't want to make mistakes, period. But, I realize now that it's okay to make them when first writing a draft, and even afterwards. I think I made an important breakthrough there.

But, that was hardly all I needed to do. I still felt very stuck and very unhappy when writing. Just my perfectionism alone wasn't all that was stifling me, clearly. I thought more and more about what made me love writing back when I was doing it for fun. And, something I had heard J.K. Rowling say in an interview once about why her Harry Potter books are so popular popped into my mind and wouldn't leave: she said, according to thousands of fan letters, it had to have been the characters she created that made her books endearing.

I thought about all that I had been writing since I wanted to write with the intention of publishing. It wasn't that I hated what I had been writing. It was that I wasn't writing characters that I could fall in love with anymore. That was the difference. It all occurred to me after figuring out that I used to write characters that made me love to write about them, and I had somehow, without realizing, stopped doing it.

When I love any book I read, truly love it, it's always, always, always because there's at least one if not more than one character in the book that I liked a lot, or even loved. That's it. That's why I read and that's also why I write. I'm a character-person above everything else.

I decided to zero-in on my newest characters in my current work-in-progress to ensure they were making me find them endearing. With a little effort on my part, I've been writing better characters, at least as far as I'm concerned, and really loving to write again! 

In the end, I don't even care if my characters don't enchant anybody else. Maybe everyone else will find them boring--who knows? For now, they need to be right for me and make me happy. All I've been wanting is to love writing again and I had to rediscover what it was that made me love it in the first place. Now, if I could only make myself remember this in the long run......

 

My Post-It Notes Novel

As a writer, over time, I've only gotten weirder. I've gotten to the point where I can't finish any draft I start and have now resorted to writing my novels on Post-It Notes just so I can have the story organized and out of my head.

I discovered this idea from reading Roz Morris' novel, Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books and How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish with Confidence. I have to say, so far it's actually working! I'm about half-way finished writing up all the different scenes and snippets I want to include in my first draft. Half-way! That is so big for me. It's odd, but I really feel like I'm writing the manuscript already, even though I'm not literally doing that, yet. But, composing a cohesive, viable story is half the battle.

What I love most about this little tactic is that I can add and remove scenes so incredibly easily. I'm figuring out what works and what doesn't long before any prose is being typed up in "stone" on that computer. I realize I have a huge dislike, or dread for trying to find something I wrote within a sea of literally thousands of words in order to axe it, add to it or move it around. Of course, this has to be done during every author's editing phase, but at least I can do some of that axing, adding and moving before those scenes ever gets lost in that abyss known as a Word document.

Life made easier! That's progress for me. I've been in a horrible writing slump lately and this is really helping me to move past it. I never thought I'd actually be writing an entire novel on Post-It Notes, but now I can see myself doing this with every story I write from now on.


Have you ever tried anything off-beat or bizarre in order to get out of a writing slump?

Insecure Writers Support Group (#8)

Insecure Writer's Support Group (IWSG) is a really awesome meme that you should be doing along with the rest of us writers. Unless you truly are happy with your writing and don't feel the need to vent about your insecurities because they don't exist for you. But, really.... Don't they?  
IWSG is hosted by Captain Ninja Alex at his blog, Alex J. Cavanaugh.

This month, my writing insecurity might be a bit unusual. I really don't know what to make of this one. My current manuscript is sort of forcing me to write it in an uncomfortable manner. 

I know--how can a manuscript make you do anything? It sounds preposterous, but my current WIP just won't let me actually plan it out before I write it. My usual way of writing is to mostly plan the entire story, sometimes as I go, but I "pants" very little of my stories. But, this one. This one. Will not formulate in my head before I sit my butt down to write it. I can only say that this is terrifying!

I'm not a "pantser" so this is really new and very strange territory for me and I can't understand why this story is behaving this way. It's like it's a jumbled mess of raw materials strewn about all over the place that is expecting me to just stick everything together at the last minute into an organized structure. I don't even know. It's all abstract. It's an abstract story in my head that has no shape or form, but it's there somehow. I don't even know how to explain this.....

Anyway, are there any pantsers out there who can give me some advice? I'm so freaked out that I'm going to end up staring at a blank page with absolutely nothing coming to mind. I mean, how can I write when I have no idea what to write beforehand? 


How do you usually write your fiction? Have you ever tried a method opposite to your usual and learned to be comfortable with it?

  

This Post is Dedicated to...Nobody

 

This is sort of an op-ed piece I decided to write today. I've had this subject on my mind, lately, and being an avid reader, how could I not? I see it so often....

 

Have you ever wondered why authors write those little one-line dedications at the very beginning of their novels? You may very well BE one of those authors dedicating a line to someone you deem special enough to have made writing your entire novel worthwhile.

I don't have anything against authors who like to do this. After all, show me an author who doesn't do this in their books. It'll be hard to find one. But, I personally can't understand why practically every author perpetuates this practice. It seems rather pointless to me. 

Consider that an "Acknowledgments" page gets included in just about every book along with this dedicatory page and I am really left scratching my head. Why bother to write some sentimental line to your dog or your mom when you've just spend a page-and-a-half thanking everybody under the sun you've ever known plus the kitchen sink? It's completely redundant. 

I know--it's a tradition and one that's been around for centuries. I looked it up, although I can't seem to find out why this tradition started. It just seemed to have popped up one day and never looked back.

I promise I won't judge you for keeping this redundacy alive, although you could avoid it by just not writing an Acknowledgments page. You know, pick one and not both! But, even if you insist on doing both, I won't hold it against you. I'm cool with people doing what they feel they have to do and one sentence is hardly anything to lose sleep over. 

But, I don't think I'll be joining this long-standing bandwagon. I feel the need to go against the grain and leave this little one-liner out of my future published novels. Acknowledgments will be plenty, since I see that page as being essential. What book can be made without tons of help from tons of people? But, why should any one person or animal or cosmic phenomenon get the sole dedication for any book I write?

So, what's your take on author dedications? I'm really curious as to what other people, especially authors, actually think of them. I'll admit, I laugh at the funny ones. If it's funny, I might just think it's worthwhile, after all. 

  

Matching Music

Today's post is just something to post in the interim of waiting for the next IWSG post for June. I'm starting to like that meme......

Since I struggle for what to blog about I figured I'd post videos of songs that I like to associate with my current work in progress, which I'm calling Rise of Iron. It's an apocalyptic (NOT post-apocalyptic) Young Adult sci-fi with a fantasy-ish element to it.

It takes place in Los Angeles, California in the heart of the city. I don't normally like urban areas, but L.A. has always been special to me for some reason (it's the nearest one to me). Big cities are so full of people, they tend to take on a life all their own, don't they? The streaming cars on the highways can be likened to the blood coursing through our veins, keeping us alive. It's like big cities are very large, living organisms, so my story takes this a bit literally. *wink*

Anyway, here are some tunes I like to listen to as I write it! 

 

    

How Weird Are My Ideas?

A thought popped into my head (dangerous, I know) because I've been thinking about where great ideas come from. Many TED-type people will tell you different things, but it all comes down to chaos coalescing into something that actually makes sense in the end.

Are my ideas for novels bad, great or just plain bizarre? I wanted to blog about some ideas I haven't even touched yet, so none of these have anything to do with my current novel. That idea is, actually, rather mundane in my opinion. But, even a great idea is worthless if executed poorly, and some bland ideas are done so well in content, they become best sellers. So, I'm not worried about that.

Here are a few ideas for novels I've been batting around in my head, as of late: 


1. Teen girl saves a man's life and turns him into a cyborg so he can destroy all the evil robots causing the apocalypse. 

Is this odd, or what? I like this idea, so don't get me wrong. I like all these ideas, but this is pretty funny in that either it is terrible or awesome. This is a story with the characters salvaged from a YA urban fantasy I was writing last year, but abandoned. I love the characters too much to just leave them in my head.

The robots are the element iron in living form. They are anything that was man-made metal turned into living metal creatures that destroy everything because they are not able to sustain an animate state without going mad. The protagonist has her personal reasons for wanting to get rid of all the robots and the man-turned-cyborg is the only hope she and humanity have that they can be destroyed because he's at least half "bad guy." But, controllable, unlike the bad guy robots.

I also love this play on Frankenstein and a potential blend with Pygmalion, which is kind of the opposite of Frankenstein. Not to mention the mental state of this cyborg guy and his brain fusing with living metal inclined towards madness. The Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde trope could factor in, as well. This is what makes writing fun!  




2. Cinderella + Hamlet.  

Yep, you read that right. The world's most recognized "happily-ever-after" story coupled with the world's most notorious "everyone-dies-at-the-end" tragedy. How in the world is this story going to end, right? I honestly don't know at this point and I'm kind of excited to find out. 

I realize that in order to make this work, you have to have the Cinderella/Opheila character as the protagonist, otherwise the Hamlet character will take over the story to the point it won't be a blend of Cinderella and Hamlet. With her at the helm, it could work. It's like Cinderella is in love with a mad prince who has to revenge-kill his evil uncle for assassinating his late father, the former king. Is the Prince more interesting now, or what? And all the deaths that occur? How will she live happily ever after? Will she live at all? 

I wanted to use a character I created in an Adult sci-fi novel I was writing last year and have him be the Hamlet character, because, again I like him too much to let him rot in my head. He's kind of insane, so he could play this role, only he'd be younger and look different. I was a Shakespeare student in college, so I could actually do this.... probably. Maybe. (Pray for me!)

 
3. The most beautiful female in the world is cursed with instantly killing every man who lays eyes on her.

This is an idea for an original fairy tale that I'm not so sure about writing anymore, but I've had the premise in mind for well over a decade. Maybe it's just so dramatic and tragic. What a lonely girl. I also like the theme that beauty can be a curse and not always a blessing. In this case, a curse when in excess. I don't have a plot worked out, or at least not a viable one, so I have no idea what I would do with this character and what she would need to accomplish, story goal-wise. But, maybe this one has some potential if I were to put my mind to it. 


Are my ideas weird? What story ideas do you have that seem far-fetched? Anything insane or just totally amazing?

        

Review: Wired for Story by Lisa Cron (Part 3)

Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence
by Lisa Cron

Genre: Nonfiction/Fiction Writing Skills

Publication Date: July 10, 2012

Source: paperback purchase

| Amazon | |Barnes &Noble |

Imagine knowing what the brain craves from every tale it encounters, what fuels the success of any great story, and what keeps readers transfixed. Wired for Story reveals these cognitive secrets—and it’s a game-changer for anyone who has ever set pen to paper.

The vast majority of writing advice focuses on “writing well” as if it were the same as telling a great story. This is exactly where many aspiring writers fail—they strive for beautiful metaphors, authentic dialogue, and interesting characters, losing sight of the one thing that every engaging story must do: ignite the brain’s hardwired desire to learn what happens next. When writers tap into the evolutionary purpose of story and electrify our curiosity, it triggers a delicious dopamine rush that tells us to pay attention. Without it, even the most perfect prose won’t hold anyone’s interest.

Backed by recent breakthroughs in neuroscience as well as examples from novels, screenplays, and short stories, Wired for Story offers a revolutionary look at story as the brain experiences it. Each chapter zeroes in on an aspect of the brain, its corresponding revelation about story, and the way to apply it to your storytelling right now.

  

Here's Part 3 of my very long review of Wired for Story. Read both Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven't yet to make more sense of this part of the review.

My Review – Part 3

Those who are famous for writing often say writing means going deeper in order to dig out the real core of who you are and what message you're trying to get across. In Chapter 5 of Wired for Story, you'll discover just how you can dig up your protagonist's inner issue that drives his every thought, word and deed.

The truth is, everyone of us can only see and comprehend the world around us through our own eyes. We simply aren't privy to any telepathic abilities or technology that allow for reading other people's thoughts, thus we see the world through our own filter. That filter got that way from our personal life experiences and upbringing. We can only see it the way we believe it to be at any given time.

And, so does your protagonist. He will interpret everything that happens to himself and anyone else through his own messed up filter. If he experienced a life-altering moment in his past, then everything from that realization on will be tainted by that shift in his perspective. What you need to do as a writer is pinpoint the moment when that shift in his perspective caused his whole worldview to go off the rails. That's how you dig up his 'inner issue.' And, it's how you will write your entire narrative.

When you develop your protagonist's bio, make sure you pinpoint this moment in his life as well as the time when he first felt the desire to accomplish his story goal. These may end up being one and the same thing. I'll use an example found in the book: in It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey's worldview gets skewed when he watches his father get beat down by the town misanthrope, Mr. Potter. He then believes he'll become a failure if he stays in Bedford Falls, thus spurring him to want to leave town and become the success his father never could be. The story eventually leads him to realize just how wrong he was, both internally and externally.

Even if you never show the reader that scene in real time or a flash back, it should be referenced or implied so the reader understands what motivates the character and shapes the direction of the story. And, when you can zero in on this motivation and its cause, you can lead your character to huge emotional growth by the end of the story. If you know anything ahead of time about how your story will end, it should be what your protagonist will have learned by the end. Give him an “a-ha!” moment of realization, thus knocking his worldview back into alignment, again.

In Chapter 6, the next important thing we learn about telling a gripping story is the need to be specific. The cognitive secret here is that we don't think in the abstract. “We think in specific images,” says the author. What it means is that anything abstract or conceptual must be made specific in order for the reader to care.

But, why is this? Our brains are lazy and will only think about things that matter to us. So, you need to make the general more specific in order to hook the reader to the emotional appeal of your story. If I said, “A lot of people died years ago in a country far away,” how much interest and emotion does this conjure up in you? Not much, I'm supposing. But, if I said, “280,000 people died in Indonesia in one of the deadliest tsunami/earthquakes in recorded history on the day after Christmas in 2004,” your ears perk up. You might actually care about news like that.

In what ways do writers write in generalities?

1. The specific reason a character does something is often neither implied nor stated outright. Without knowing reasons behind actions, those actions tend to fall flat.
2. The specific thing a metaphor is meant to illuminate is often too vague. Metaphors should be instantly grasped by the reader, or they get missed.
3. The specific memory that a situation invokes in the protagonist is sometimes left to the reader's imagination and, ultimately, never processed.
4. The specific reaction a character has to a significant event can be totally left out, leaving the reader wondering if the character is capable of human feeling and emotion.
5. The specific possibilities that run through the protag's mind as he struggles to make sense of what's happening are often absent so the reader can't even infer what the options are.
6. The specific rationale behind a character's change of heart end up completely omitted, so as to leave the reader wondering how Doug went from being a total wad to giving everybody at the office gift certificates to Starbucks.

Writing a good story is all about making the reader care about the story and the characters. But, keep in mind, less is more. If you clog up the story with too many specific, unnecessary details, you will cause your reader's brain to tune out. We can only process so many things at a time. How the brain functions and what its limitations are will determine how effectively you've crafted your story. And, when those specifics have nothing to do with your protagonist and his inner issue or goal, they will be treated like generalities by the reader. Ignored.

That's it for this part. Now, I'm halfway finished with this super long book review! Tune in next week for Part 4.

Have you noticed you have trouble getting to the heart of your story? Do you see areas in your writing where you could be more specific about why your characters act the way they do?