Words of Power

Pushing deadlines

2010-03-01T06:19:10Z

Although HTRYN Lesson 14 has arrived, I haven't yet finished assignment 13, so there will be a hiatus in my progress reports for a while. In the meantime...

]]> I finally got around to writing another short story. This one is for an anthology titled "Scheherazade's Facade", and is set in the world I am developing for my Dreamwalkers novel. I outlined it during the Christmas break, but what with HTRYN and my promotion at work, I had put off working on it. I did make a half-hearted attempt at the beginning of January, but only managed about 600 words before getting sidetracked by other stuff :(

This week I realised that if I let the February 28 submission deadline pass without sending anything in, I'd really regret it. Besides, there was that little red icon nagging me every time I started OmniFocus...

So on Saturday morning I knuckled down to work. I skipped over the scene I'd been struggling with, and started into the story at the point where everything starts going pear-shaped for the protagonist. I can't say the words exactly flew from my fingers, but by lunchtime on Sunday I had a 4500-word draft that I liked.

After that it was just a matter of polishing it, writing a cover letter and pushing the big scary 'Send' button. There was no time to submit this one for critique, so I'm less confident of this one knocking the editor's socks off. But at least I did it.

Deadlines. Motivation in a bottle.

HTRYN Week 12

2010-02-20T16:44:56Z

Week 12 is about deciding which major characters to keep and which to either remove or merge into stronger characters. Fortunately I went through this process when I did the first round of rewrites, which means I have a chance to catch up a bit on last week's assignment.

So, I've just spent the day building a new card index outline for the first half of the book. Unfortunately that's the easy part; plotting the second half is going to be the real challenge!

]]> The good news is that, apart from filling in characters lists on cards that I haven't written yet, assignment 12 is done. A quick skim through the assignment 6 worksheets, and I realised that I just needed to shuffle my skraylings a little...

At the moment I have two skrayling envoys, one of whose role in the original story was to be the murder victim. Now there's no murder, he has no purpose except to be this silent figure who only speaks through his aide and interpreter. So, sadly, he has to go - his aide can be promoted to ambassador with little or no loss to the story.

I'm not going to discard the old guy, however. Whilst going through my notes, I realised that the skraylings in London are currently a nameless, faceless mob of aliens - not good! So the former ambassador is going to be recast as the leader of this community; an important character with whom the humans must deal at some point.

Waste not, want not!

Spring makeover

2010-02-14T19:16:26Z

To celebrate the publication of my first short story, I've given my website a facelift with a new "The Raven in the Tower"-inspired colour scheme and banner image.

]]> I've also changed the main website over to using the same Movable Type installation as my blog, instead of the primitive CMS I wrote myself. This means some minor changes in layout, but it makes the site much easier to manage. It also means that the whole site is now searchable, not just the blog.

Enjoy!

HTRYN Week 11

2010-02-08T09:04:01Z

I can tell that this week's lesson is going to take me a long time, because it's about reworking plots and subplots, and that's where I'm having the most problems...

]]> The first part of the assignment seemed fairly easy: working out how many scene cards we need for each plot and subplot in order to produce a balanced story. Notice I said seemed?

First off, most of my scene cards list more than one plot/subplot/notplot, so how do you do the maths for that? Then I realised that what I had identified as subplots were in many cases either facets of a single big plot, or character arcs that are subservient to the actual "plot". So, I redid assignment 4 and came up with a more manageable structure of one plot and two subplots.

Doing the maths, I need another 37 scenes in order for the book to be a decent length. So, now comes the hard part - thinking up what actually happens!

I think I have finally hit an assignment I will struggle to complete in a week...

HTRYN Week 10

2010-01-31T16:57:59Z

The first half of the Lesson 10 assignment was a weird one for me. We had to write a line-per-scene synopsis of our story from memory, from beginning to end - which is pretty tricky when you don't have an ending actually written! I did the exercise, of course, but I'm not sure how useful the end result will be. My Muse is not terribly good at the clever scheming, preferring melodrama to intrigue, so anything that comes out of free-writing has to be taken with a pinch of salt.

There's also the problem for me that, by focusing only on the scenes that appear in the book, it's difficult for me to rethink what the villains are doing behind the scenes and how that might impact on the story.

OTOH the second half was very satisfying - playing with coloured index cards is something that both me and my Muse enjoy!

Powerpoint index cards

2010-01-30T13:35:48Z

I expect someone has already thought of this, but it's not often I dream about writing so I thought I'd post my idea...

]]> I was dreaming about some software for writers that allowed you to import a picture and add a short caption on top of the image, then play them in sequence like a story book. When I woke up and thought it through, I realised "Powerpoint (or Keynote or OpenOffice) could do that!"

It then occurred to me that a presentation program would actually make a good cheap'n'cheerful substitute for index card programs like Scrivener or SuperNotecard. Admittedly these specialist programs have a lot of extra features, and I wouldn't give up Scrivener for anything, but for someone who can't afford extra software, OpenOffice Impress would be really useful.

You can quickly and easily type your scene descriptions into Outline mode, then play them back in Slideshow mode to decide if they tell a coherent story. And you can use Slide Sorter mode to rearrange the outline just as easily as in index card software.

Of course it's easy to get distracted by the extra features, like the ability to add image, fancy backgrounds and special effects - but that's true of most software.

Still, it's worth a try - I might give it a whirl myself when I have to revise my outline...

HTRYN Week 9

2010-01-25T07:52:53Z

Another short assignment this week - and some surprise news!

]]> The news is that our set reading between now and Lesson 12 is A Game of Thrones by George R R Martin. A great choice, since Lesson 12 is about strengthening your characters, and Martin's characters are nothing if not strong.

The spooky part is, I bought this book back in October, though I didn't get around to reading it until recently because of Real Life getting in the way. However I'm now about a third of the way through - and loving it!

Lesson 9 was an introduction to Manuscript Surgery, and the assignment was to identify the vital elements of the story so that we don't inadvertently cut out the "healthy" bits. The only bit I had trouble with was the "What do you want your reader to take away from the book when he or she finishes it?" sheet. The demo example makes it clear that Holly approaches it in terms of specific issues and conclusions that she wants the reader to share in - and personally I'm a bit uncomfortable with that. I don't feel qualified to tell the reader what to think, only to describe the human condition as I see it and let them draw their own conclusions. For me, writing is about entertainment first and foremost - if the reader takes anything else away, that's a bonus.

Hence, when it comes to social and political issues I try to avoid anything that resembles a soapbox. It is inevitable, if I am writing from the heart, that my own attitudes and opinions will colour my work. The Raven in the Tower is largely about bigotry, and of course I hope that the reader will share my feelings that this is A Bad Thing, but I did not set out to write a book on that theme.

I appreciate that the writer needs to know what mood she wants the reader to take away - should he feel uplifted by the characters' triumph over adversity, or resigned to the arbitrary whims of fate, for example. That is something that the writer has to have control over, or the impact of the book will be diluted. But that is very different from what was presented in this lesson.

HTRYN Week 8

2010-01-24T12:41:52Z

A nice easy assignment this week - just the antidote to Week 7!

]]> Week 8 wraps up the two months of manuscript triage with a series of short exercises. I found the theme exercises relatively easy, but then I got to the steps where we have to write a negative-but-objective reader review and a one-line editor's rejection comment. Trouble is, my manuscript isn't complete, so if I took the exercise literally, that's what I would criticise my manuscript for - which isn't terribly helpful to me, because the problem is glaringly obvious!

So, I left the exercise to stew a bit and eventually decided to do them as if I had written my planned ending. I was then able to focus on the flaws in the rest of it - and it was really useful. I suddenly realised that I have a formerly vital secondary character whose raison d'etre has been totally removed by the change in plot, as well as ongoing worries about the balance between talky scenes and action ones.

By the time I finish these revisions, the book is going to be very different! But much better. Oh yes...

HTRYN Week 7

2010-01-17T12:17:32Z

I thought this week's assignment was going to be so quick and easy. Triage your World-building - surely I wouldn't have that much to do, right? I mean, I've done so much research and taken such pains to drip-feed it into the narrative.

How very, very wrong I was.

A three-page worksheet for every location (think stage set) in my story, complete with entrances and exits, props, scenery, and the cultural details revealed there. And I have 60 of the damned things! Thankfully they're not too heavy on the description, but they are full of tidbits of information about the social attitudes of the Elizabethans, mating habits of skraylings, and much more. By the time I was halfway through my manuscript, I had lost the will to live. Srsly.

]]> I don't know if it was even necessary. But I feel I have to follow this course as closely as possible, at least on this run-through. It's learning a new recipe; the first time you really ought to follow it to the letter, to find out what the cook thought it ought to taste like. Afterwards you can experiment all you like, but on that first batch, you trust your instructor.

Lesson 8 had better be easier...

HTRYN Week 6

2010-01-10T20:50:48Z

Fell a bit behind on the course this week - my first week back at work was pretty exhausting, since I had a new member of staff to supervise as well as the usual challenge of getting back into the flow after a long break.

This assignment we've been looking at characters in a bit more detail, and since my book is rather well-populated, it was rather a time-consuming task. It took me 14 worksheets (4-5 characters per worksheet) to list the whole lot!

]]> One aspect of the exercise that I found particularly difficult was "What do I feel about this character/what do I need to feel?"

TBH, I really don't feel much either way about my minor characters. They are there to move the story forward and make it feel like a detailed, well-populated world, not to tug at the reader's heartstrings. It seems that this is one of the respects in which I totally differ from the course creator, which is no doubt connected to the fact she is a (former) nurse whilst I am a computer programmer. As in real life, I truly love the few people who are important to me - everyone else I only care about in a vague, "I'd rather they were happy than not" kind of way.

I think that's OK, as long as I don't try and force my writing into someone else's mould. If I were trying to write romance, it might be a problem, but let's face it - most SF&F fans just want some really kewl stuff to feed their imaginations, and if the main characters are a bit more three-dimensional than average, that's icing on the cake.

They say you should write the sort of books you want to read. And what I like to read is intelligent entertainment - something that's well-written without being overly "literary", but with a fun, page-turning plot and, yes, that dash of "we're not in Kansas any more" weirdness that we SF&F fans crave.

Bite me.

This is getting ridiculous

2010-01-01T06:02:28Z

This is the fourth (FOURTH!) year I have resolved to finish my work in progress. How can that be? I know it took Susanna Clarke a decade to write "Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell", but that was a whopping great quarter-million-words-plus breezeblock of a novel. Mine is somewhat less than half that, so I should be able to finish it in under five years, right?

Right.

No, really, I mean it this time.

New short story

2009-12-29T10:23:27Z

Since I'm on holiday and have plenty of writing time, I'm filling in the days between HTRYN assignments by planning a new short story. I don't want to say too much about it at this early stage, but I will let slip that it's a fantasy set in my invented world of Tyrrhanaea during an era with a roughly 17th century feel to it, and features a theatre company :)

HTRYN Week 5

2009-12-28T18:43:36Z

This week's lesson was about conflict - writing down the conflict for each scene, and making notes where there's no conflict or the wrong sort of conflict. This got me brainstorming ways to rework the wayward subplots into the main plot better and resulted in some extensive notes on ideas for new scenes. I don't know if they'll make the final cut, but I like the way things are going...

Tangled Bank delayed

2009-12-25T09:34:22Z

I discovered yesterday that the ebook version of The Tangled Bank has been delayed until Darwin Day (12 February), owing to problems in getting the formats sorted out in time for the planned December release.

On the plus side, we still get paid on time, and the Table of Contents has been posted on the website. I confess that the only name I recognise is Brian Stableford, but I feel inordinately pleased to have my work published alongside that of a famous British SF author!

HTRYN Week 4

2009-12-24T07:53:02Z

This week's assignment looked fairly quick and easy - identify your plots and subplots, note on each scene card which plot(s) are covered, and then read the cards in order to look for gaps and inconsistencies. So I did all that - only to discover after a couple of days that I had erred in step one...

]]> Thing is, in addition to plots and subplots, there's a category called "notplots", which is any subplot not directly connected to either the main plot or the protagonist. Trouble is, I have several of those, most of which I am very attached to - which is why I had categorised them as subplots, when I should have been honest with myself and noted them down as notplots.

It's not even as though "notplot" means that a storyline has to be killed. The lesson is explicit in pointing out that we are just making notes at this stage, and decisions must wait until we have all the information we need; sometimes notplots can be salvaged.

I needed this breakthrough though, in order to get this revision done, because this is one of the main issues that's been bugging me this year. I've changed the main plot of my book, and my subplot no longer fits into it so neatly. Hopefully I will be able to get to grips with this problem over the coming weeks and have a coherent novel at the end of it!