Origin of Alex Novel

Every month my friend writes a letter to her son (and now to her new daughter, also). She tells him what he's been doing, how he's growing and changing and how she feels about him. A sentence from one of these letter gave me the entire idea for my 3-book Alex story. Here it is:

I've become such a baby junkie that I can't even leave you alone anymore, because what if a goblin snatches you away when I am not looking?!

Yes. Three books from that. Ideas are everywhere, people.

Day Late and a Dollar Short: Babylon 5

Seems like all of us here at Eventyr are running around frantically and *gasp* not writing.

D:

I'm supposed to be working on a short scifi piece and a graphic novel script, but between personal and professional commitments, those haven't been happening.

However, I have been rewatching a lot of Babylon 5, so here, have a fanvid:

Mad Busy

Work and other commitments are keeping me busy, so I'm just thowing together a short, random post for you.

1. Slang dictionary.

mad--(adj.) really

ashy--(adj.) dry; I need lotion! My hands are mad ashy!

brick-- (adj.) cold; Miss, it's mad brick in here!

brollick--(adj.) strong; George is the smart one and Lennie is mad brollick.

2. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost recreate Star Wars.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Writing Religiously: Co-Authorship

For the past few months a friend and I have been collaborating on a novella. I’m not sure what the best way to co-write a work of fiction is, but because the story is his brain-child I’m letting him have the final say on all edits.

I find the process enjoyable as we brainstorm character scenarios together, but challenging as I relinquish style-choices over to him.

This is an ongoing project and I’m sure I’ll be blogging about more faucets of co-authoring in the future, but for now I highly suggest authors find someone to collaborate with on a project. It doesn’t have to be long, a short story will work (are you reading this April?). If nothing else, I’m learning more about my own style as a writer in the process.

How I Learned... #7: To Loathe Writing Short Stories

Dear Internet: I have a confession to make.

I hate writing short stories. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I'm not all that fond of reading them either, to be honest, but it's the writing of them that drives me daft.

God knows I've tried, and managed it from time to time. I've even sold a few; I've got a short piece called "Under a Lady's Skirts" coming out in September 2011 from Aoife's Kiss. But they are the exception that proves the rule, which is that the first draft of any short story I attempt to write will inevitably be five or six thousand words over what the magazine is wiling to accept. Granted, I do believe that editing is good for the soul... but I've mortified my spirit by chopping down so many pieces that were striving to become novellas, I might has well have sackcloth under my skin.

I started a science-fiction piece called "Deep Places" over a year ago. It's not allowed to be any longer than seven thousand words. And I'm finding it insanely difficult. I've done four drafts so far; none of them have gotten beyond four thousand words—not because I've run out of story, but because the relatively simple, straight-forward plot I thought I'd had suddenly mushroomed into something quite different, something exciting and complicated. And now I can't get past four thousand words because I'm terrified this thing is going to explode into another vast work that I'm going to have to take a blowtorch to. It's gut-wrenching. Oh, I could just let it bubble and brew and become another novella or novel, but then I'd have another WIP on my harddrive—and still no short story!

The problem, at first glance, is merely the length. I've been doing this writing thing for almost fifteen years now, and brevity is something I've never been able to learn. I've never been able to write a complete beginning-middle-end piece coming in anywhere under the eight-thousand-word mark that is usually the ceiling for professional publishing venues.

A second reason, probably more likely, is the simple fact that I lack the ability to formulate a proper plot on its own, without taking all the characters into account. For me, the plot is not something external to the characters it affects; it is internal—it wells up from the characters. They bring their perils and their enemies with them.

There is no plot without characters. There is no understanding of a plot without a thorough understanding of the characters—their lives, their motives, their pasts and dreams. For the writer that I am, there can be no story at all unless I and the reader knows the characters intimately.

And that's damned hard to do in eight thousand words or less.

(Comic from http://giavasan.diludovico.it/archivio/2009/04/16/short-story/)

Forget the Pants, I'm Wearing a Skirt

Note: This post is a little rambley, because I didn’t get to edit it enough and wrote it while sleep deprived at my meat puppet job.

It’s high time I’ve talked about the novel I’m writing. Basic facts: It’s a YA fantasy about a girl named Alex who finds a door to a different world. It’s been in my head in some form or another for 3 years.

I officially started writing it last August, got 15000 words in, and then had to start over because the tone was completely off. I’m 15000 words in again to my 2nd 1st draft and I realized that I’m going to have to rewrite most of it because Alex's motivation is all wrong.

I shouldn’t be surprised. I saw it coming. Her reasons for her actions were very flimsy, and mostly based off of somebody else’s. I’d tried to think more deeply about it before, but didn’t have any easy answers so I let it drop.

All this rewriting doesn’t bum me out because these changes are for the better, and I can already see the story improving. It just makes much more sense.

At the same time, they show that I clearly need to do more planning than I’ve been doing. If I have to write the story over each time I have a narrative revelation this novel is going to take a while.

I’m not against planning. It just never seems to work out well. I think the reason I have a problem with it is that it's hard for me to think through a whole story if I’m not writing something of it. I mean, let’s say I want to think about a character's backstory and motivation. I’ll just arbitrarily make something up that doesn’t make sense or go with the story.

I think I may need to plan something, then do some draft scenes and see how they work.

So, back to the drawing board (literally). I’ve got to figure out a way to plot/plan some of this book before I keep writing, and not ignore the problems I come across. I see posterboard in my future.

This is a guy who knows how to plan.

I’m also going to take some time to dissect a book (my fav one) to figure out pacing. Word count means nothing to me. I'm going to try to answer these questions: What number of words/percentage of the book should be dedicated to the intro to the character/world/conflict? When do we start getting answers to our initial questions? When does the action pick up? When is the climax?

Obviously, these numbers are different for each book, but I want to have a ballpark, something I can work with.

What about you? Are you a pantser or a plotter? Do you use any fancy graphic organizers to plan?

A Day Late & A Dollar Short: Beastly things...

(Welcome to the first installment of "A Day Late & A Dollar Short," my intermittent series of random meeblings hastily flung-together several days past my weekly deadline.)

I'm in the middle of reading this recent blog post at The Hathor Legacy, when this paragraph caught my attention:

The Beast’s repellent form, initially a metaphor for old age as it related to arranged marriages between the audience (young women) and the rich men their parents chose for them, has been imposed on him, though not by time, but rather, as a way to gain wisdom. His only salvation will be the love of a woman who can see beyond his physical limitations– but he’s on a supernatural deadline, imposed by an enchanted flower that represents his own mortality and will take him with it if it dies. The Beast takes a man prisoner, because he is cruel, and when the man’s daughter comes and volunteers herself in his place, the Beast takes his chance to both free himself from his own beastliness, the ugliness of his fur and claws standing in for Gothel’s graying hair and wrinkles, and to save himself from what he considers an untimely death– and though, at the end of the movie, his castle and its inhabitants are restored to their former condition, one wonders how long the Beast had actually lived. After all, his servants had begun to refer to themselves as the names of the furniture and tools whose shape they occupied, his home had fallen into disrepair, and no one within the distance of one night’s horseback ride seemed to even be aware of any castle or prince in the area, even Belle, who one would assume would have read at least a few history books.

The rest of the article is very good (it's actually about step-mothers and how Disney borked them), but my brain wandered off in a different direction.

I've long had an unhealthy obsession interest in stories like The Phantom of the Opera and "Beauty and the Beast," any story that revolves around a physically different person falling in love with someone aesthetically acceptable. Basically, the bad boy falling for the girl is more to my tastes than the girl falling for the bad boy--probably because that's not normally how it works in real life.

There are "Beauty and the Beast" type stories in cultures all over the world, but one of the earliest, that I know of, is the story of Eros and Psyche, found in Greek mythology. C.S. Lewis wrote an amazing adaptation of the myth in his criminally-underrated novel, Til We Have Faces, which is actually written from the POV of Psyche's ugly half-sister. Lewis was revisionist before Maguire made it cool, yo.

I'm in danger of rambling forever, so I'll get to my point: I would like a story where the Beast-character actually is the villain--not just a misunderstood person with an ugly face, not just a spoiled brat, but an actual has-done-horrible-things villain. And who is, not necessarily redeemed, but who becomes a better person because of the Beauty-character being thrown into the mix. Not out of Beauty's love for the Beast, but out of Beast's love for Beauty, and... his own self-respect, maybe? I'm not saying this well. Argh, words, how do they work?

The best villains work because they are still human on some level; they have emotionally attachments and ethics of a kind and morals of a kind--you don't sympathize with them, but you don't hate them unequivocally.

So, if the Beast was a complete dick, and Beauty finally said, "Screw you and your talking furniture. I'm going back to my father until you become human ALL BY YOURSELF, because I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE!" and then the Beast actually wised up and DID all that, and Beauty said, "I'm impressed and I'll give you another chance, but you're still on probation" and Beast said, "I respect that..."

Yeah, that's pretty much the story I'm looking for.