Category: The Writing

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MayNoWriMo: Final Outline

Whew, I finally finished typing in all my notes!  The outline ended at 100 sections, 14,820 words.  I have two things I thought of that should be researched — but neither are a big deal and I can add those details after the fact if needed.

Each section has its own page in the outline, a header that details POV, location, etc. and then whatever notes I felt I should make.  For example, this is part of the opening section:

Title:  Arcana
Day:  pre-1
Scene:  001
POV Character:  Lilias (Lily)
Additional Characters:  assassin
Location:  Nocturna Castle, Great Hall
Approximate Time:  Midnight

Notes:
Someone tries to kill Lily as she makes her nightly walk from the library through the Great Hall. [more details]

Then for each section, I have a line in the “Daysheet” spreadsheet so I can quickly see where I am in the midst of days/scenes.  Here’s a short snippet of Arcana’s daysheet, color coded by POV so I can make sure I have a good balance.  e.g. I don’t want 100 pages to go by without a certain POV showing up.

Day Scene POV Total POVs for Character Scene Title
Pre-1 1 L 1 Midnight Assassination
1 2 L 2 Hysterics
1 3 N 1 In Search of a Book
1 4 L 3 Surging Magic
1 5 V 1 Sisterly Spat
1 6 L 4 Boring Country Dance
1 7 A 1 Taunting the Raven
1 8 N 2 The Sleeping Guardian

 

I didn’t include as much detail in this spreadsheet as I did for the Maya story.  I don’t expect to “salvage” as much of Arcana’s first draft, so I don’t need to track revised second draft section vs. brand new section.  Everything is going to be brand new, although I will gain a little in the morning by using some revised sections I started a year ago and then abandoned.

I won’t post the whole character sheet online, but this is a sampling of the information I have for each character, in particular, Nevarre, the hero.

Personality and Background

Greatest Strength:  Honor.  Once his word is given, he keeps it, even if the holder of his oath proves less than trustworthy.

Greatest Weakness:  Once his oath is given, he continues the path, even when it’s apparent the path is wrong and dishonorable.  He’s been led into dishonor in the past because he refused to back down from his oath.

Personal History

As a powerful young mage, he was squired with Hugh of Grimsgate along with several others. Hugh was a hard man with shaky political motivations that changed on a dime, but by the time Nevarre was old enough to understand his master had questionable loyalties, he’d already given his own oaths. Hugh fled to Palestine, taking his knights with him. Their families left behind were punished for their crimes and Hugh told them they could never go home or suffer the same fates. Nevarre was devastated.

Dishonored through his leader but sworn to loyalty, Nevarre can do nothing but fight in the Crusades as directed, holding to his word. Events worsened in Palestine. Lured by promises of gold, Hugh joined a secret sect of the Hashshashin (assassins) specializing in magic (dedicated to Anubis) and plotted to take his knights with him.

To join the Hashshashin was to die. Literally. Hugh betrayed his own Knights, took them into a battle where they were slaughtered to the man. In a bloody ceremony of death, they were raised to kill. They gained power from killing, bringing souls to Anubis.

Nevarre didn’t mind killing the guilty or to enforce justice.  If Saladin were assassinated, the Crusades would be over, or so he believed.  If other enemies to the Church were eliminated, lives would be saved.  He was already dead, after all, and could do some small good for his people.  However, the assassinations against Saladin failed with vicious retaliation.  Hugh abandoned them and secretly returned to England.

 

Un-dead and trapped in Palestine, Nevarre went mad for a time.  He killed his way out of a prison and roamed the land until he came to the Temple of Amun in Karnak.  Their Archmagnus claimed he called Nevarre to join the Magi.

 

In Karnak, Nevarre learned of Great of Magic, the Egyptian Goddess protecting the Sun.  Humans failed him, forced him into dishonor, yet he hoped that service to the Goddess would truly give him a higher purpose.  He has nothing left.  No honor (even broke his oaths to the Hashshashin), no country, only his magic and the dreams of the snake goddess.  It is She who sustains his life, now.

 

He has served Her and the Magi for hundreds of years.  To fail is to die.  Part of his oath is to put Great of Magic above all, especially other women, so he remains celibate.  His heart beats, his body lives, but his soul holds a great debt against it.  To fail Her–or love another–is to surrender his soul.

 

Obviously those above paragraphs are *all* backstory and won’t be directly in the story.  However, these details are crucial to who this character is, and the torments through which I should put him in the story.  All  major and secondary characters got a character sheet, most between 4-6 pages long.  I have one more minor secondary character I want to do some work on — I think she’ll provide the comic relief.  Hopefully I’ll flesh her out while drafting and then polish her afterwards.

 

Well, my wrists are killing me and Dark & Early will come very, very early tomorrow.  Let MayNoWriMo begin!

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MayNoWriMo: final prep

I ended up editing all of my character sheets again yesterday, as well as creating a new one for the secondary character I mentioned.  I also revised the setting sheet for the castle to give it more character and detailed its long, impressive history.  I clarified the conflict between the two major groups of magic practioners.  I tracked all the new little themes and details all the way through the outline in multiple passes, making notes by hand on the pages.

Today, I will sit with the outline and daysheet open, and then make the final pass.  I’ll transcribe all my notes into the main file, and sync it with the daysheet to reflect any new scenes I decided to add.  I’m sure to break 100 sections for this story. The outline is sitting at 12,327 words right now (including the section heading on each page detailing POV, setting, etc).  I bet it’ll break 15K by the time I add all the notes I’ve made this week.

After that, the only thing left to do is print everything out and update my binder, and try to hit the sack early tonight.

I’m setting the goal of finishing this revision by June 30th.  I know that’s probably at least 100K in two months, but my production always goes down in the summer.  I need to get this story done and then sit back and relax through July and August, working at my leisure on worldbuilding the new sci-fi stories and polishing Arcana, getting it ready for submission.  I did finish Return to Shanhasson for NaNoWriMo by Christmas (I think 104K), so this should be doable — if a bit insane.

Yes, I started sleeping in my wrist splints again and have a nice stash of Caribou Coffee.

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Arcana Revision Hell: Preparation

Dig a little deeper in the Well, boys
Dig a little deeper in the Well.
If you want a good cool drink of water
You gotta dig a little deeper in the Well.

One thing I remember really struggling with as a beginning writer was “deepening” a story.  What did that mean, exactly?  I had a story in my head.  It was “the” story.  I didn’t know how to change it.  If I changed it, then it was a NEW story, wasn’t it?  If the character wanted to be different, wouldn’t he/she have shown up in my head that way?

I’ve been deepening Arcana and its characters today.  Gregar has been bellowing that song above in my ear all night.  Deeper, dig deeper, ask why, make this WORSE.  In many ways it’s like the tip of the iceberg.  What I know or see is so little compared to the details that lie beneath the surface.  I don’t necessarily need all those details on page, but knowing them adds a whole different dimension to this story.

I have to say, I have NEVER been so prepared to start a story.  The scary thing:  I’m not quite finished with these preparations yet, either.  I modified 5 character sheets tonight and realized I need to create a new one or I’ll end up with another cardboard secondary character.  (Yes, I was originally going to kill this character, how’d you know?  Now this character is sticking around indefinitely for me to torture.)  I’ve got a map of my castle drawn, but I’ve decided it needs a history.  This castle should have its own personality on page, very much a “character.”  This story could not be set anywhere else, and I need to reflect that down to the finest detail.

The character sheets are incredible.  They really are.  Why did I forget I had this template thingie?  It combines every little thing I’ve picked up over the years that help me get to the heart of my characters.  I’m not talking favorite colors and eye color here (although if there’s something important in physical description, I do have a spot for that) — I’m talking greatest fear, darkest secret, why the hero and heroine should NOT be together, etc.  I have paragraphs or more backstory for each character.  I have meticulous historical dates where needed.

It’s crazy.  Why isn’t this story written yet?  Oh, yeah, I covered that whole fear aspect already.

And even though I have a NINETY-SEVEN-PAGE OUTLINE (boggles), I’ve already gone through with pencil once and added details, then started another pass with a few new angles I thought of.  I’ve added a few scenes — bringing the list up to around 100 scenes.  It should be a nice meaty book when I’m done.  I’m going to make a third pass through the outline with character sheets in hand to make sure I cover scenes where the characters’ fears and secrets should come out or affect the emotions.  Heck, I might even make a fourth pass just for EMOTION. 

Then I’ll type up everything, print out fresh copies, and be ready to go on May 1st.

The biggest changes so far have been making things worse.  More people die or pay some cost to achieve what they want.  The cast is a little bigger — and the overall themes are more complex than I originally envisioned, which are all good.  I have something more to say than I originally thought.  The general theme is balance vs. chaos and how the various characters all reflect different degrees — but there’s another new subtle layer underneath that just came to me today.  I definitely want to spend some time ensuring that shadowing exists in the outline.

More importantly, though, I eliminated some of the “fluff” elements.  This is a flaw of mine.  When I originally thought “Regency Fantasy” with a little “Romance,” I let a few standard tropes creep into the story, especially the ending.  Tonight, I axed every single one.  My heroine is going to be a bit subversive.  Her sister is excessively subversive, but she will pay a steep price for that independence.  I’ve done my research to the best of my ability, so I understand the consequences.  I think.  :wink:

 

There is a “Regency Romance” buried beneath the magic and fantasy, but it’s not going to end with a wedding, baby, and title, if you know what I mean.

Dig a little deeper in the Well.

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Arcana Revision Hell: The Plan

While reviewing my notes last night and this morning, I thought I’d made a dreadful mistake.

As I’ve mentioned, I have a huge binder full of notes.  The first draft was finished as a Fast Draft (ala Candy Havens) back in March, 2007, and ever since I’ve been overwhelmed at the prospect of revising it.  Literally, I’ve been unable to comprehend how I can possibly complete this project. 

While I’m glad I attempted a Fast Draft (and succeeded), the lesson I came away with is that draft is an OUTLINE, not a foundation on which I can build a story.  I can’t open that file and begin revisions — I have to start FRESH.  The first draft doesn’t contain all the story threads I decided to add later (when I realized I only had “half” a book), and the characters are two-dimensional, again, because I wrote the blasted thing so fast.

It’s a fantastic story premise, though, and well worth the work, if I can decide how to tackle it.

About a year ago, I bought Karen Wiesner’s First Draft in 30 Days because of its revision chapters.  I cut the first draft apart like she recommended, made notes for each section, did tons of worldbuilding and new character development.  All good work.  But when I started the revision, I quickly became overwhelmed again.  I was afraid.  I got it into my head that I’d never be a Regency writer — which is true.  I’m a FANTASY writer who wants to write a Regency-based fantasy.  I lost sight of that and allowed myself to skip off onto a new project.

My fear beat me a year ago.

So determined to conquer this fear, I reviewed everything and found many incredible notes.  I also found something sadly lacking.  While I had 3 spreadsheets outlining the scenes, I couldn’t find any DETAILS about those scenes.  Now a year later, how the heck am I supposed to remember what a section title of “Somedays….” means?

After building up my mental reserves to tackle this revision, I sat here this morning sick to my stomach.  Had I really been that stupid to spend so much time outlining and planning — only to never create any kind of outline?  Usually I create notecards for each scene and jot a few notes.  It doesn’t have to be formal — just enough to help me remember what that section title was supposed to mean.  Was I so afraid that I’d wasted all this time on “planning” and “research” only to subconsciously sabotage myself?

I went through all my secret drawers, looking for a baggie of notecards.  Nadda.  I decided to go through my laptop files one more time.   Maybe I’d done something different that I couldn’t remember.  After all, I was using FD30D documents.  Maybe…

With a huge sigh of relief, I found a document called “Capsule Outline” — a glorious 97 page outline, one page for every single section in my day sheet.  WHEW.  I was really sweating bullets here, people! 

So now this week I’ll read my outline, review each character’s biography (yes, I have that much detail!) and make sure they’re tightly tied to the premise, and make any revisions to my notes that I come up with.  Then hold onto your butts, because May 1st, I’ll start the second major re-VISION draft of Arcana (RHP).

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Storybuilding

If you heard any cursing this afternoon, I nagged begged That Man into putting up some corkboards for me in my office.  I bought some cool new animal print ones at Target the last time I picked up some Caribou Coffee, and I had a larger corkboard I bought months ago and he never put up.  The old one had itty bitty screws.  He only dropped them twice in the carpet.  The tiger print board is a little crooked, but it’s up, and I’m already putting them to use.

The vision is starting to come together, and it’s so big, I really needed a wall so I could see the connections.  These stories all started out as individual ideas, but with some give and take, and new inspiration, I think they’re all in the same connected world:  the science fiction Regency spoof, Seven Crows, and a really old untitled idea that keeps rearing its ugly head.  This time I think I finally found the right world and characters for it.

I’m still worldbuilding and figuring out the themes, main conflict, overall story arc, etc. so I don’t know what to “write” right now while I build this other world.  Oh, I have a story I could work on.  I’m just scared of it.

It’s the Fast Draft story from 2007.  I’ve done as much research for that story as the Maya one, if not more.  I’ve replotted it with three spreadsheets and have filled a three-inch binder with notes.  Yet I still haven’t been able to write it.  It’s going to be WORK.  Hard, gut-wrenching work.  Harder than Revision Xibalba.  Harder than anything I’ve done before. 

I know what needs to be done.  It’s just getting my mind in the right place to tackle the work.  It would be so much easier and more fun to tackle a bright shiny new idea…

But you know me.  I’ve never much cared for the easy path.

The first shitty draft of a short synopsis for the Maya story is done.  Copyedits on Dear Sir, I’m Yours are sent back to Angie.  Storybuilding is chugging along on a new world (or rather, galaxy).  So I guess all that remains is to drag out my binders and spreadsheets and come up with a plan for RHP.

Let RHP Revision Hell begin.

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The Care and Feeding of Your Artist

So I’ve been working really hard the last few months at getting my “morning pages” done as recommended by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way.  I do really good Monday – Thursday, but then not so good over the weekend.  But I am staying more “open” and alert, watching for inspiration no matter where it comes from.

Earlier in the week while preparing for the funeral, we stopped by Payless Shoes to get new dress shoes for the monsters.  (Middle Monster is so hard on her shoes that her Easter ones are already scuffed up.)  They have the buy one, get one half price thing, and with three monsters…yeah.  I ended up looking.  I really needed black dress shoes, but I didn’t like any of them.

Then something caught my eye.  Black and red.  It was in the wrong area — in the casual shoes.  They were also a little big, but I pulled them out anyway and nearly squealed like a girl.  They were old-fashioned black “basketball shoes” with red ribbon laces.  I adore those ribbons!!  The shoes also had hearts and skulls on the sides.  *giggles*

Anyone who knows me is probably scratching their heads.  This is sooooo not my style.  But the artist in me was jumping up and down with a lollypop in her hand, demanding I get those shoes.  They’re perfect!  Black and red and hearts and skulls! 

Sometimes, we get in a rut.  We don’t want to look silly or immature.  But Julia says our inner artist is very much like a child.  It’s important to feed that child, to give her little presents just because.  I rarely ever do anything frivolous, especially for myself.  The shoes were cheap–hello, this was Payless!–but I still almost put them back.

I bought those silly shoes and I’ve worn them nonstop ever since.

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Maya Blurb Retake Retake

I think I’m really, really close.  Thank you to Rene for her question — I think this one is even stronger.

Called “Ruin” because he destroyed his entire civilization, the Gatekeeper is sworn to kill anyone who tampers with the Bloodgates – portals to the mystical realms of the Maya gods. When Dr. Jaid Merritt’s partial translation of a codex accidentally sends her father to Xibalba through one of these Gates and releases demons from the Maya hell, the “Un-Indiana Jones” is forced to face her fears and travel to Guatemala on her first dig in twenty years. To save her father, she must survive the Gatekeeper’s wrath and help Ruin reclaim — and relock — the Bloodgates before the bowels of Xibalba empty into our world.

Aside, Kait asked about whether I should be using “Mayan” or “Maya.”  According to my references, “Mayan is used to refer to the language; otherwise, the adjective or noun Maya is used.  Mesoamericans today speak many languages (not “dialects,” as they are often called erronenously), as did their Precolumbian predecessors.”  From An Illustrated Dictionary of The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya. 

If you’re interested, other research books I used for this project include:

  • Popol Vuh
  • The Ancient Maya
  • The Code of Kings
  • The Blood of Kings
  • Reading the Maya Glyphs
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Maya Blurb Retake

I hereby declare that May the Queen of Blurbs! 

Last night she patiently helped me tear and paste and scribble until we came up with a revised blurb for the Maya fantasy.  My beloved Sis also made a few important tweaks that I think help a lot — which Soleil also agreed with.  So it *does* take a village!

What do you think of this one?

Called “Ruin” because he destroyed his entire civilization, the Gatekeeper is sworn to kill anyone who tampers with the Bloodgates — portals to the mystical realms of the Maya gods.  When Dr. Jaid Merritt’s partial translation of a codex accidentally sends her father to Xibalba through one of these Gates and releases demons from the Maya hell, the “Un-Indiana Jones” is forced to face her fears and travel to Guatemala on her first dig in twenty years.  Together, Jaid and Ruin must reclaim – and relock – the Bloodgates before the bowels of Xibalba empty into our world.

A huge thank you to everyone who’s already commented.  Keep up the feedback – I greatly appreciate it!

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Preparation

I’m still working on the blurb for the Maya fantasy.  It’s kicking my ass.  I’ve shredded each sentence, tossed it out, started over a dozen times.  How can three sentences be this hard?  Bah. 

Since the coffee stash was low, we ran up to Target tonight and I restocked my Caribou Coffee Mahogany.  I looooove that stuff.  Bought all the bags on the shelf (only 4 left — I’m ashamed to say how long that might last me).  Middle Monster needed some new crayons for school, so I decided to browse the notebooks.

It’s sort of a fetish of mine.  I adore notebooks, paper, pens, pencils.  Nothing makes me see red faster than when the monsters get into my stash of supplies.  (I am seriously tempted to put them under lock and key.  Errr, the supplies, not the monsters.  Honest.)  Target had some gorgeous notebooks and matching folders.  Staring at them, I felt…

A twinge.  An itch in the back of my brain.  A tingle in my fingers. 

I needed those notebooks for a story.  Not sure which one yet, but the color and patterns really spoke to me.  One is mostly blue with some brown, and the other has brown, blue, and orange patterns all over it.  Not my normal color selection (hint, look around at all the black and red here on the blog) but when the Muse speaks, I listen.

*Gregar’s now laughing his arse off* 

*the smug bastard had better get over here and help me with my @#&%$* blurb!!*