Summer, summer, summer

Summer is my season.

I do miss Orion, but I do best when it’s hot outside.

I’m from the desert, and I thrive on the heat (I think I was a lizard in a past life.) More importantly, I have TIME. Fewer obligations, fewer concerns, fewer things fighting Jack and Lilah for brain space. Everything feels a little slower, softer, brighter. And good things happen.

Finally—FINALLY—it’s on its way.

I’ve already got one of the darkest tans I’ve had in my life—my body is thirsty for sunlight and warmth! This summer I’ll be house-sitting for one professor, editing a manuscript for another. I’m so so so excited to have access to my professor’s kitchen and have total control over what I out into my body! Already that’ll keep me more active, more engaged in the community, and more involved in writing every single day than I was last semester. Intellectual work tends to give me ideas and motivation for imaginative work. Plus, my novel is meant to have a theme of communicating with nature throughout, so keeping half of my brain in Environmental Studies will be good for the project. :) I’ll also be living with a friend, and I think we’ll be able to find a good rhythm together and help each other out.

So, this summer will be my summer. It’ll be my novel’s summer. Last summer I wrote 5 whole chapters from scratch, and this summer will be even better. I know even more clearly what I want my story to be about, where I want it to go. I know how important my story is to me. I’ve learned how to write a little better. I have all the tools I need.

The other night I hit the prologue again, took out and rearranged some things, and I feel a lot better about it now. Unfortunately, I had to stop earlier than I wanted to. It’s the week before finals, and I have so many things to do it makes me want to cry. But then again, some people recommend stopping while you’re still on a roll so that, the next time you write, you’ll be overflowing with words and the need to speak. We’ll see.

But regardless, as soon as all my papers and presentations are done on the 16th, as soon as I’m caught up on sleep and moved out and moved back in, it’s just going to be me and In Between.

I can’t wait.

Until then, to Power Point. The sooner I finish my class obligations, the sooner I can return to my heart’s obligation. In between, maybe my dreams will take me to where my brain really wants to be.

In between… In Between.

Novel Counseling

Every writer should have a wise friend who’s willing to listen to them whine about plot, characters, and syntax and then slap some sense into them.

I get antsy in writing when I don’t know what happens next, because there are too many possibilities and I don’t know how to pick. Or, that’s how I explain it anyway, but I don’t think that’s accurate. I think the problem is really that I have a feeling like there’s ONE RIGHT OUTCOME, and I just haven’t figured it out yet. That’s not true. That’s how I write myself into a little corner time and time again. There are infinite choices, and and there are many right choices I could make. There’s no one thing I have to pick or not pick.

She also recommended that, when blocked or in need of a warm up, one should free-write on setting and movement. (She’s a big fan of setting as a character and has some pretty deep things to say about that.)

Imma try that and we’ll see where this goes.

Prologue Troubles

My novel and I are going through a rough spot. Again.

(We still love each other, I promise, so it’s okay if we fight sometimes.)

I feel like I’m having a love affair with my novel, and I’m cheating on my studies every time I even think about it. I can’t figure out how to do both at the same time right now and, unfortunately, school is teh one I’m paying through the nose for and so that’s the one I’ve got to focus on when push comes to shove.

I carved out some time yesterday to check out a local coffee shop I’d never been to and have a nice long heart-to-heart with In Between. It was…semi productive. The coffee shop was nice, which is a good start. They had drinks with names like “Writer’s Block” (coffee + hot chocolate—yum), and overall it was a nice, quiet environment condusive to writing. (Though I wish they’d served in real cups rather than paper ones—I hate throwaway containers.) I think it helped to drink something caffeinated while I worked. That’s definitely what got me through the writing last summer: tea and tea and more tea and ooh now let’s try this flavor and more tea… I drank like 3 cups a night. It also helped to change locations for once, especially because I didn’t have internet access, which kept me from goofing off so much. :) For the first time since NOVEMBER I actually had time and energy to look at my poor, neglected novel.

…

Except that I forgot what a mess I’d left it in. :(

Mostly I deleted things, which actually is productive because it keeps me from being sentimental and clinging to sub-par prose/ideas. Does leave gaping holes, though… Right now I’m trying to figure out how to get from this kinda cute and childish scene about a monster under the house to “and then her dad got sick and died and she stopped believing in magic.” I thought about just leaving it at the monster scene and jumping into the story from there, but my gut’s telling me I need to put in all of the fmily information NOW and just get it done. Don’t want to bog the story down later with 80 million flashbacks.

Other major questions I need to figure out:

-Chapter 4: What does Red do or say to convince Leona Lilah that she should help him and share her magic with him?
-Chapter 7: What do the werewolves actually want?? Are they going to wage war on humans or duende, and is that actually what they want when Lilah first shows up?
-WHAT HAPPENS AT ANY POINT AFTER THAT? How do I get to the forest fire???

I’m still stuck at only 1/2 an outline…

I have faith that everything will resolve itself sooner or later. But I also feel the pressure of time slipping away from me. I’m not going to be one of those people who talks about wanting to write a novel all their lives but never does it. I KNOW this story is worth telling, and even if it wasn’t I know I need to finish it to keep myself from going completely bonkers. So, I gotta gotta gotta get to work… D:

Names, names, names

It’s been bothering me lately that Leona’s name is so obviously derrived from mine. I mean, that’s the point I guess. She’s always very purposefully been an author proxy; she’s meant to be the mousy, overly self-critical, quiet parts of me, the version of me who feels small and powerless. (And then, of course, throughout the story she finds her inner strength and grows a pair of lady balls, etc., etc.) But does it have to be so in your face with the name? I’m thinking of this book that I read not too long ago in which one of the major characters shares a last name with the author, which I found kind of weird.

It’s also oddly similar to her dad’s name, Arie, which in Hebrew also means lion.

So, I’m seriously considering Lilah instead. It means “languishing, lovelorn, seductive; night beauty.”

I dunno about the whole “seductive” bit, but the rest sounds great. The story does a lot of play between night and day, as Jack switches between human and non-human from sunrise to sunset, so I like the relation to the night. And she IS languishing and lovelorn for much of the story, until she realizes she doesn’t need the guy anymore.

Not 100% sure yet, but that change is likely to happen.

I’ve considering tweaking Jack’s name too, just because Jack is such a common name and is stereotypically used for brawny manly men, but I think Imma leave it because I named him for my dog. :) I don’t care who else has already used that name, darn it.

Rewriting and Growth

I’m so glad I decided to start this blog for my novel, because it’s very interesting to be able to look back and see what my thinking process was earlier on, the assumptions I made. I feel like I can hear myself growing up, slowly slowly, at each stage of the process too, the same way my novel is slowly slowly growing up.

Also interesting: the way I cycle through periods of NOVEL MANIA and novel…phobia? Times when I’m afraid to touch it because I can’t be as perfect as I want to be. Of course, I always have school, work, LIFE to deal with, and that’s part of it too. But honestly, those are the excuses. If you want to be a good writer, you find ways to make time for yourself to write every day no matter what.

So, I’m trying to re-outline again.

During my intensive writing this past summer, I really saw the value in having a strong outline. Some people can write well off the top of their heads, just winging it. They feel constrained by a plan. They like to let the plot develop as it happens. And then there are writers like me. If let the story unfold by itself as it happens…I get gobbledygook and unicorns and werewolves chasing sharks with spoons. BAD THINGS HAPPEN. I feel much more comfortable when I have a plan, a structure, a goal. I can wander around within that and uncover new details and twists that I hand’t thought of before, but I need to know where I’n going first, at least a bit. That’s how I get my best writing. So this time I think it will help me very much to put in the effort to put together a complete draft, which I’ve never really done.

Luckily, I think the prologue and the first two chapters are mostly fine. There are even parts of chapters 3 and 4 that I think I’ll be able to use, but they’ll mostly be rewritten. So, it’s not a COMPLETELY new draft. I like the broad strokes of the begining I have laid out right now (though, of course, the individual words could use some fine tuning and then some…)

The main changes I made so far in the first “act” of the story are the dynamics between Red, Jack, and Leona. In the previous version (because, let’s face it: NaNo this year was no very productive. I didn’t get a new draft, I just added onto the older draft from the summer) I had this weird dynamic where you were supposed to trust Jack then be suspicious of him then trust him again… And Red was creep but Leona was supposed to trust him and not trust Jack and then he really was creepy all along… It was just too much character movement all the time, and it didn’t feel real. The question I always come back to with Leona always seems to be, “Just how stupid is this girl supposed to be?” And she’s supposed to be me, isn’t she?

In this version I’m trying a couple of different things. 1) Jack does not ask Red to help. Red comes to them, and after much debate they grudgingly agree they need him and they have no other choice. 2) Jack is much easier to trust, until a moment at the very end. (Which should hopefully be okay/reasonable for a while because it turns out to save Leona’s life.) 3) Red isn’t trying to convince Leona to go to the duende village—he knows she would be killed, and therefore would no longer be useful to him. He wants to keep her to himself. The point isn’t to make him likeable or trustable but to make him pitiable. Leona doesn’t trust him, but she feels bad for him and that’s what makes her help him, which leads to her kidnapping. 4) Red is not an exile. He lost his magic because he went back and forth between the human world and the magic world too much (drinking blood!), and the exposure ruined him. He’s part of the community…but an outlier because he’s weak without magic, therefore codependent and vulnerable. He’s a leper. He also used to be Jack’s trade partner because it allowed both of them to satisfy their addictions…until they had “personal conflicts.” Until Leona shows up, they’d been ignoring each other. Then they need each other again…

That takes me to the end of the first of the 3 major sections. There’s nothing there I didn’t already have the framework for. All I did was jiggle the puzzle pieces around so they fit together better. Now I’m in mostly unexplored territory. I’m trying not to be afraid of that great big question mark. It’s not a challenge—it’s an opportunity to play. This is my story, after all, and it can be anything I want it to be. At any moment it’s up to me to choose to change ANYTHING. So, this is my chance to try out ideas.

Here goes nothing!

Other things I learned in Guatemala

Mora in Spanish means blackberry. Kinda fitting.

Wordle

Another fun toy kind of like Autosummar on MS Word:

Wordle

I’ve had drafts of the first chapter and prologue (which has shifted between one or two seperate chapters throughout the drafts) all organized because I thought I might use it for class. (I didn’t.) So I though it might be fun to do Wordles for each draft and see how the focus changed.

1. Spring 2009

This draft was really a sloppy script from back in the day when I intended to make the story an animated movie first. (Check out the very unfinished video in the archives.) What’s interesting is that Leona’s mom’s name was Aria at that point.

2. December 2009

I only wrote 2 pages on this draft, but it was the first time I tried to seriously write it as a story as opposed to any other weird medium. This was the first draft of the Imaginative Little Girl thread.

3. November 2010

The infamous NaNo round 1 draft. Oh my… (Mom’s name changed again: now it’s Mahalah, and the DAD’S name is Arie.)

4. Summer 2011

Mom’s name is Madhavi in this draft. Also, check out how many similies I freaking use: like is rather large in this one. (Trees is also pretty big.)

5. NaNo 2011

Most current verseion.

“Leona like dog.”

That about sums it up, doesn’t it.

And last but not least, let’s look at the entire current version of the story (the last Wordle was only the first two chapters.)

In Between in a nutshell

This tells me I need to edit for the word “just.”

White Flag

Yeah, I wrote a whopping 500 words for the entire 4 day Thanks Giving break.

Fuck.

I don’t think NaNo is gonna happen, because I’ve got 2 days left and still only 37K. But I’m not giving up on the story. It just has to wait a bit until I have less schoolwork to deal with.