Month: August 2013

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Catching Up

I had a lot of things to clear off my desk this month, and for the most part, I think I succeeded.  First round edits on Lord Regret’s Price are back to Tera, plus I have a new submission in the pipeline.  I got back into the Plantation story, and now Molly’s waiting on me to write the next scene again.  I’ve started the PNR.  I’m sooo excited about it I’m not going to say much about it yet.  I don’t want to jinx anything.

School activities are picking up.  Since Princess is a freshman this year, band activity has been insane.  Practice every single morning before school, one late afternoon after school, and late Thursday nights.  Sept and Oct are crazy with trips and performances, all of which she wants us to go to if possible, of course.  (Plus they play at every single home football game.)  Now Middle got accepted on the yearbook team, and Littlest is going to try out for honors choir.  They’re both going to play volleyball.  CRAZY times ahead.

Plus Coyote Con is in the works!  I meant to have things turned around sooner so we could do some advertising, but it just didn’t happen this year.  I got busy writing and didn’t come up for air.  However, the first email went out tonight and you can register if you didn’t get the email but are interested in joining a panel.  The rough schedule is ready and I’m letting people sign up now, so don’t delay!

September is my birthday month too – I’ll be ten years old as a writer.  I guess I should plan some cool giveaways to celebrate, huh?  More to come.

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Revising a Fast Draft

In reference to Usable Fast Draft one important thing I learned after Raelyn Barclay’s astute beta read:  I used “that” nearly 1K times.

*headdesk*

They were completely invisible to me.  But once I started looking for that, it was everywhere.  Sometimes I could delete the word entirely.  Other times, I reworded the sentence better.  Other times, I of course just left it because it improved readability.  I don’t know if Raelyn believed me or not, but “that” is usually one of those throwaway words that I have to add in edits sometimes at my editor’s recommendation.  I tend to leave certain freebie words out, like off of.  That bugs me.  I just say off.  Sometimes I leave that out too.

But not in The Billionaire Submissive, evidently!

So no matter how great and clean you think that fast draft is after the first-pass edits, it’s definitely worth a second set of eyes to help you see through all the wonderful trees and find those insidious creepers silently obscuring the view.

A weekend of revisions and The Billionaire Submissive is off my desk to Tera.  Just in time for edits on Lord Regret’s Price to land!  I’m also back to work on the Plantation with Molly as well as more worldbuilding and plotting my new PNR.  It’s going to be a busy end of the year!

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Too Scary for Glasses

This weekend, I finally had the opportunity to go see The Conjuring with Princess.  It’s the first time we’ve done a “mother-daughter date” — though she adamantly said it wasn’t a date — just the two of us and we had SO much fun!  I laughed until I almost hurt myself watching this movie with her.

I’ve already said many times that I adore watching horror movies on Netflix.  Cheesy ones, supernatural ones, serial killers, whatever.  I love horror movies.  I don’t get to watch them very often unless I’m alone, because That Man can’t stand them (he about messed his pants when the creepy voice said “Get out” in The Amityville Horror).  If it’s even loosely based on something real – like demons – he can’t do it at all.  But then Princess came along, and as she’s gotten older, that’s “our” thing to do together.  She’s been dying to see The Conjuring on the big screen, and I’m relieved we actually made it before it left the theater.

She’s almost fifteen–going on twenty one, if you know what I mean–and was so sure this movie wouldn’t scare her.  I mean, the same child refused to even use the bathroom in our finished basement for years because she had a dream about zombies attacking through the basement after watching an episode of Walking Dead with me.  Two years ago she was convinced she had a “stalker” aka Edward the Vampire type ghost that made the chair move in her room and made breathing noises on her iPod recordings (of course those noises could NOT have been her or the dog she slept with every night *rolls eyes).

Anyway, we’re sitting down for the movie and I made her put her glasses on.  She hates to wear them unless she has to for school and I hardly ever see her wear them at home.  We weren’t ten minutes into the movie and she took them off and tried to get me to put them in my purse.  I refused.  “You HAVE to be able to see!”

She compromised.  Every time one of the scary ghosts popped up, she buried her face on my shoulder (she’s almost a foot taller than me now) and had me watch it for her.  “What’s happening?”

“Look and see for yourself!”

“I can’t!  I’m scared of the witch’s face!”

So if you go by “too scary for glasses”, The Conjuring was a huge success.  In all honesty, I think it’s probably the scariest movie I’ve seen.  It didn’t need a bunch of gore or TSTL teenagers boinking in the car while the crazy killer approaches.  All it really needed was a believable background story and a creepy doll.  I loved the whole set up.  And man, I loved Lorraine’s outfits (this one in particular).  Not the normal “seventies” clothes I think of.

Now I really want to write some horror.  *coughs*  *looks at our Plantation files with Molly*  *gets to work*

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Scrivener Update

I’ve blogged before about my struggle on switching over to Scrivener.  I’ve always loved the idea of what I could do, but I was having a seemingly hard time embracing the reality.  Every project I started in Scrivener stalled and I wasn’t sure if it was the project…or Scrivener itself.

I finally drafted Lord Regret’s Price wholly in Scrivener.  It was a very slow project, taking me months longer than I wanted to finish.  But I don’t think it was wholly Scrivener’s fault.  I didn’t skip around with the plot but wrote mostly linearly all the way through.  I had the whole thing fairly well plotted out, using folders Act 1, Act 2, etc. to split things out and high-level scene notes for where I wanted to go.  I even used color-coded index cards to mark expected POV shifts.  It was great for holding all the research and worldbuilding notes in one place.

Drafting was very slow, though I think it was mostly a mental thing I just had to work through.  I would have had the same issue in Word.

I also drafted The Billionaire Submissive wholly in Scrivener – and it went lightning fast.  This time I didn’t have a plot at all and I did skip around a little.  I didn’t use any color coding, synopsis notes, or character/research notes.  But Scrivener makes skipping around VERY easy.  I could see my files at a glance and shift them around into a new order if I wanted.  Renaming them to agree with a new order (I named them 001, 002, etc.) was also very easy.  In this kind of writing, Scrivener definitely shines.

What I still haven’t been able to really get the hang of, though, is EDITING in Scrivener.  I can reread the previous scene easily, but I don’t get the overall “feel” of the piece as easily as when it’s a single Word file.  I think I probably need to use a different view if I’m trying to edit inside Scrivener, rather than a file by file view via the outline.  I’ll play with that next time.

For now, I use the compile feature to build the .doc file, and then I use Word to actually do the read through and edits.  Of course that means if I’m not completely done, I have to flip over to Scrivener, locate the individual file, and make the change there.  So editing is definitely much easier to do in one pass rather than daily.  Again, I’m sure there’s a view inside Scrivener that will create a seamless single “file” that would make this a lot easier.  I just need to play around with it.

In my free time.

Snort.

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Usable Fast Draft

Or how I wrote a 76K book that doesn’t need a ton of revision in 33 days.  In fact, I fully expect to submit this book by the end of this month, maybe sooner.

These notes are for me as much as anyone else – I love posts about writers’ various processes.  One thing I’ve learned over the years is that no book works exactly the same as any other.  Even though I’ve been at this writing gig for ten years this September, I’m constantly surprised.  My writing process changes from book to book depending on what I need and how I’m growing.

Please note, too, that I had a dismal few months of writing this year and so I was totally due for a breakout writing period.  I’m sure that helped create the perfect storm that hit me in July and let me write The Billionaire Submissive so quickly.

I broke all my personal rules for writing/plotting this story.

  • I still don’t have a picture of either the hero or heroine (usually I create a character cast) though I hunted down a picture of Lilly’s red stilettos at the very beginning (and pray to God they end up on the cover).
  • I never jotted a single note about their background.  I do not have a profile or even a few words ANYWHERE about them.  Boom, they showed up as they are.  Hello, so nice to meet you Lilly and Donovan!
  • I wrote the blurb first (so I had a very strong premise).
  • I did no advance plotting.  I started writing scene 001 with no outline, no plan, nothing.
  • I didn’t even jot down ideas for future scenes until I paused around scene 017 (the end of the first night where Lilly and Donovan were fully together on page from that point forward).
  • I skipped ahead and wrote the ending scenes of the book at that point (030-032).
  • I created scene layouts for what I wanted to happen in between – just a few lines – starting at scene 020-024.  Basically the last 1/3-1/2 of the book.  Those 4 scenes morphed into 18 scenes!
  • I never had a playlist for this book.  I finally added one song around scene 020e/020f but it totally led me in the wrong direction and I had to rewrite the scene 3 times before I finally got it right.  Those are the only two scenes I struggled with/had to rewrite before I was happy with them.
  • I didn’t write any of this Dark and Early, but rather Dark and Late, staying up until midnight or even 2 AM several times.  (I have to get up at 6 AM for work, but the story wouldn’t let me rest.)

Typical Fast Draft rules I broke

  • I reread daily, almost constantly in every free minute I had, if I wasn’t writing new words.  I used Scrivener’s compile and dropped the file into Dropbox each night.  Then during the day if I was stuck waiting to pick up Princess from band camp or driving around in the car or watching some boring TV show with That Man before he went to bed, I was reading my book, start to finish, over and over and over.  I’ve read it 3 times at least since I finished it too.  It just keeps sucking me in.  I’d say all in all I’ve probably read the whole thing 10 times already.
  • I made revisions as I went.  When I read, I made mental notes of things I wanted to fix and that was my chore for later that evening before I could go to bed.
  • As I reread at night on the computer, I would do line edits too, so each time I reread, the story was markedly stronger and cleaner every single day.
  • I rewrote the trouble scene over and over until I was happy with it (I didn’t skip it).  I didn’t let it stall me though – I’d already skipped ahead and written the end by that point, so I knew I could get there.  I just had to work through that problem scene.

Overall, I think these were a few of the key components that fed the perfect storm and helped me finish so quickly.

  • I had a strong premise from the very beginning that tickled my fancy, intrigued me, and made me smile/giggle every time I thought about it.
  • Writing hard and fast kept me in the zone constantly.
  • Rereading and editing as I went made the story constantly better, which helped keep me in the zone and kept the words coming fast and furious.
  • I wanted to know what was going to happen as much as the reader hopefully will.  No plot meant everything was a surprise and delight as it unfolded, although I already had the ending written fairly quickly.  (That pesky middle had lots of surprises.)
  • Because it’s a separate book from my other series, I was free of expectation.  I had zero expectation for this book.  It’s new, fresh.  I didn’t have to reread anything to remember some quirk about a character I mentioned 2 or 3 books ago.  I didn’t have to worry about disappointing anyone (other than my family who’d be shocked at the language and content in this book!) because the world, story, and characters are completely brand new.

I wish I could deliberately set up every book like this, but alas, I know that will never happen.  Some books need to marinate in my brain for long periods of time.  Some parts will fly and others crawl.  I think it’s important, too, to get it out of our heads that A). fast-draft books must be crap because they were written so quickly aka carelessly or B). that slow books are better and more intellectual or C). if I struggle to write the scene/book then it must be bad or wrong somehow.

I’ve written crap slowly.  I’ve written crap quickly.  It’s still crap.  I’ve plotted and written a 40 page outline with 3 spreadsheets and then threw the whole thing out, so a slow/intellectual approach isn’t necessary “best” either.  And I’ve been assured by my most trusted readers that even though I personally struggled with many scenes in Lord Regret’s Price and it seemed like it took forever for me to write it, that it doesn’t read like it was a painful slog.  (It’s been accepted but I haven’t seen my editor’s revisions yet.  Hopefully Tera agrees it wasn’t a slog or she wouldn’t have accepted it!)

It’s all about where I am in the journey at that moment.  Lord Regret was teaching me some things I wasn’t prepared for.  That road was dark at times, slow and lonely, but I still had to make that trek.  I can see it now in how easily Lilly and Donovan pulled off their story.  I couldn’t have written it if I hadn’t been in that dark place with Sig.  I couldn’t have written Sig’s story if I hadn’t already been whipped by Lady Blackmyre in Her Grace’s Stable.

And now that Lilly has beaten some sense into me, I think I’m fully prepared to face Mama C and Mal too.

But I’m not done with Lilly yet either.  Just last night she was whispering a very naughty idea to me for what the next book in her world should be.

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First Draft and First Pass are DONE

It’s been a long week at the Evil Day Job, so when my boss offered to let me shut down a little early yesterday, I closed the work laptop off at 3:30 and opened my personal laptop.  I knew I was close to finishing The Billionaire Submissive — I only had 3 sketched out scenes to go.  In the end, I managed to combine two of them into one for double duty, smoothed out the connection (since I already had the ending written), wrote the epilogue, and YAY SNOOPY DANCE!!!

The first draft was done!  75K.

But then I was reading over it later last night and realized I had one scene penciled in (017B) that never got completed.  Boo.  I was working on it last night rather late, because Princess was going to be out late at a pool party.  I went to bed near midnight when she texted me that she was safely installed at her friend’s house for the night and went to bed.  I hadn’t finished the scene yet, and I didn’t have that killer last line I like to try and do for each scene or chapter, that little hook to keep pulling you along, but I was too tired to stay up.

Unfortunately, within an hour I was up again with the most brutal, wretched headache I’ve ever had.  Ironically, while lying there waiting for the spasm in the back of my head/neck area to stop, I got the hook/line I needed.  Since I couldn’t get comfortable anyway, I got up and sat on my heating pad for awhile and typed out the last few lines of that scene. 

[The headache is hard to describe but it’s definitely muscular, though not a typical muscle spasm.  It’s more the back of my head than my neck.  I didn’t pull anything and I don’t think anything’s out.  It just suddenly got tight and then went from bad to worse.  Very probably stress related and long hours on the story this week after hours didn’t help any.  And don’t suggest chiropractors because just the thought makes me want to throw up.  I can’t bear the cracking sounds and electric shock gives me the heebie-jeebies too.]

The heating pad didn’t help.  In fact, it made it worse.  I swear I could feel the blood pounding in my head.  So I tried an ice pack and eventually dozed off with ice on my neck.  I don’t know what time it was when I woke up and went back to bed, but I was stupid foggy enough I forgot to plug my phone in on the bedside table (something I do every night).

The headache is better this morning but the tendons and muscles on the back of my skull are sore and tender today.  My head still feels like a hollowed out egg shell.  So unfortunately, we cancelled the trip to the fair.  I just couldn’t face walking around in heat, trying to hold my head up.

I’ve sat here on my heating pad today and completed the first read through.  I’ve removed all the [notes], smoothed sentences, connected scenes, etc. and made myself cry.  *grins*  Always a good sign.

With the new scene from last night, the book is just under 76K.

Interested beta readers can drop me an email (joelysueburkhart AT gmail DOT com) if you’d like a first look before I do the final editing pass and send it to my editor.

Snippet:  These are the few lines I added last night to that missing scene while waiting on the headache to abate.

Donovan opened the back door of the Jag but she took one look at the leather seats and grabbed the dog’s collar before he could jump into the car.  “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

I can’t wait until she can grab and control me like that.  Donovan had to drag his gaze away with a brutal shake.  Idiot.  Jealous of a dog.  “Of course it’s a good idea. We’ll have a very very good time.”

She heard the thickness in his voice and her lips twitched.  “Are you sure?  Maybe I should just stay here and get to work on your design for the windows.”

“Don’t you dare tease me like that, Miss Harrison.”

“All right, Mr. Morgan.  But Hank rides in the front with me between my knees.”

Donovan muttered, “Lucky dog.”