Not Standing Still

This has been an interesting time.

I've mentioned I've had a tough time on this project. I've got about 8-10 stabs at an opening scene. I tried different points in time, viewpoint characters, 1st person vs 3rd person, etc. and I hated all of them. In talking to people, I actually said that I hated all of them. They were poorly written; they didn't feel right; they were clumsy; and so on.

Uh, did I mention that I haven't attempted a full-scale writing project in a few years?

Yeah. I was saying this out loud to people (sometimes rather angrily). I'm thinking that the "out loud" part may have been important simply because of the subconscious implications. I haven't written a long-form project in years and with several attempts I've openly criticized the writing that was happening. And I wondered why things weren't improving.

I went from getting full scenes that weren't letter perfect on the first go, to writing start/stop scenes, then I'd end up with a paragraph or two before I'd say "This sucks!" Now? I haven't written a word of actual fiction. Sure, I've been researching like crazy, and have had a few mind opening twists that dramatically alter the story, but I have no words to show for it.

So, now I'm going to approach this quite differently. It may still be a while before I'm back to writing full speed, but I think I may be back on track.

**Edited to add: I went back through some of those false starts. They weren't near as bad as I thought. Sure, they're raw, a little too succinct, and there's some grammatical issue, but they are far from the piles of vomit I felt they were at the time.

Failure All Around

Still no work to speak of on my project. So that sucks. Yeah, there's a lot of problems going on at home (financial and employment issues, my mother was found comatose and rushed to the hospital, stuff like that), but I still should be able to get some writing done. I've also been taking Japanese classes at work - that's eating up some time (study and practice).

I have done a lot of research and prep work (kind of an outline). A while back, I decided to scrap the story I had and rebuild it. It's definitely a lot cleaner and more interesting. But there's a huge gaping hole right now: Why on earth would these two characters set out on the journey? There are several logical reasons for one or the other to do it, but not both - especially since they can't stand each other. I'm going to actually focus on this question and see what I come up with.

It could be that I fall back to an original idea... only one of them sets out on the journey. But crap goes wrong. Very wrong. Hmmm... I'm gonna make note of that and see if it's actually workable.

We'll I didn't have much to say this time. Not feeling the impetus to update since there's not much to actually say. But I haven't given up.

E-Books II

So here's Nathan Bransford's viewpoint on the e-book pricing question along with some math. It does shed some light on the issue, but it's still a very murky room. I'm using my iPad to expand on the books I read, not to replace them. I still get my copies of Jim Butcher, Tanya Huff, Simon R Green, Cassandra Clare (and a few others) in print. These are authors I've been reading for a while and I trust their work. I've been horribly burned on recommendations, "employee picks", and "If you liked A, you might enjoy B" deals. So I look for ways to reduce my investment. Electronic distribution was supposed to be one of those ways.

E-books

Why are they so expensive? I wanted to check out Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt series. The first book, "The Mediterranean Caper", was published in 1973. There was a paperback reprint done in 2004.

Amazon is selling the 2004 paperback at no discount for $9.99. The Kindle and iBook versions are also $9.99.

What the...?

I've noticed this trend lately for several books. I refused to buy the e-Book of the third Gail Carriger book because they wanted the same price as the physical book. I looked into "Shades of Milk and Honey" by Mary Robinette Kowal. The paperback Amazon price is $9.77, but they're charging $11.99 for the Kindle version? Not gonna happen.

I don't know what the publishers are doing, but I believe they're trying to keep the popularity of e-Books at a lower level. Why do I think this?

My response in these and other instances has been to by a used copy of the book. I really hate to do this. In doing this, the author receives nothing and the publisher receives nothing. So the only concept I can logically come up with is that they want to force people to buy hard copies of the books. Maybe they think that Kindle or iPad people have wads of cash just lying around... but if that's true, then I'm not one of them.

Once, I contacted an author and told them I'd bought a used copy of their out of print book and requested a PayPal address so I could send them what I would have paid for it. For something in print, that seems... creepy.

I'm not a person that has to read a book the day it comes out. I can wait a week and pick up a used copy for 30% the cover price. I'd rather keep things electronically, simply to cut down on the environment impact of yet another book.

Podcasts, II

I still listen to "I Should Be Writing"; it's excellent. But the focus has drifted. Previously, it was primarily about writing and lately it's been mostly concerned with authors. I totally understand that the two are significantly intertwined. :) And I also get that this podcast has been going on for over five years. There are only so many topics for shows focused solely on the craft of writing. But I'm starting to miss the writing focus.

To that end, I've now picked up the podcast "Writing Excuses." I'm starting with this season (#5). There were two episodes I checked out a while back and they just didn't grab me. One was some live event, and another was a more generic topic that was just a poor choice for me. The episodes are usually about 15 minutes, so I figured I'd give it another shot. I'm liking it so far.

The other two just don't exist anymore, which is sad ("Holly Lisle On Writing" and "The Secrets" by Mike Stackpole). I was hoping maybe one of them would reignite since last August, but no dice.

Anyone have other recommendations?

Weekend Progress 7-MAR-11

I did what I set out to do, but not much more. :(

I made 11 index cards that cover the biggest, most essential scenes in the book (I used "Index Cards", an app for the iPad). Now, there's some flexibility with these as I'm not 100% sure they're the right ones. I've got two cards that feel like they're really just one scene, even though they each have a beginning, middle, and end. But the second cannot happen without the first and there's no time break between the two.

And the 11th card is the epilogue for the whole book, so I don't think that one counts.

I also got more of a handle on the primary antagonist. Problem is, I think I may have made him too understandable. I'm not a fan of explaining away the villain - I like my bad guys to be Bad. After some thought though, given his side of the story, I could understand why he's feeling what he does... His methods may have gone off the deep end a bit though.

So, more prep work accomplished, but no writing. Meh.

Story Backbone

I'm going to try something minor this weekend. Anybody remember the Five Act Structure? Babylon 5 used it a fair bit: Introduction, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Resolution.

These sections are not of uniform length. The Intro is very short, usually just the first chapter. Same with Resolution.

The Climax is more the turning point of the whole thing rather than the final battle. It's kind of the final girding of loins before heading into the last series of events that lead to the standoff. While "Falling Action" sounds like a boring part, it actually holds the last conflict and the immediate fall out, while Resolution is the short final wrap up of the whole story.

I'm bringing this up because I'm going to try and marry the concept of The Sentence to the Five Act Structure in order to identify the barest bones of my story. One sentence to cover each chapter based on the following structure:

Intro - 1 chapter
Rising Action - 3 chapters
Turning Point - 4 chapters
Fallout - 1 chapters
Resolution - 1 chapter

Obviously, this won't include development, side plots, or anything else. Turning Point and Fallout could be +/- 1 chapter, depending on what the secondary characters are up to.

I'll let you know how this turns out this weekend.

Forgotten Lore

So I wanted to share with you something I learned over a decade ago. And then completely forgot about.

Back when I worked on a continuous cycle, story-driven fantasy card game (CCG), one of my projects was to develop a style guide for the whole ball of wax: characters, story, architecture, geography, etc. I'd never done one before and was going to use other company style guides as a basis. I figured that if they were good enough for a $60 million a year property, they'd be fine for my piddly $5 million game. It just never occured to me to see if those guides acually were successful.

Then I took a week off and headed to LA for a break. I met up with a friend who worked at Warner Brothers. I got a tour of the office and saw something interesting in the Harry Potter area.

An entire wall was devoted to crazy stuff. It looked like a Bennigans or something. There were pictures of animals, swatches of cloth, logos of movies, just what seemed like random stuff spread out over the whole wall.

On closer examination, they had split the wall into four vertical sections - each of the four school houses. The stuff on the walls had no connection to the Harry Potter franchise at all. What they had done is pick things, colors, textures and so on that felt like each of the four houses. This entire wall was an inspirational style guide for the designers and artists! As I mentioned, this is an older tool I just hadn't known about at the time; it's called a mood board, but WB's was a whole wall.

Now since then, I learned that variations of this are a fairly common technique, but it was new to me. I took that approach and completely redesigned the Style Guides at my old company. Artists wrote to my boss (skipped me completely) mentioning that this Guide was incredibly useful. They wanted the other product lines to use something similar. So, score one for me.

After leaving that field, I'd forgotten all about this technique. But just yesterday it popped into my head. And I thought that I could dig this out of mothballs and apply the technique on the main characters in my book.

Pics of actors or anyone who looks like the character, hairstyles, favorite foods, clothing, eyes, and other sensory details. Just random little things that feel like they're tied to a given character.

So that's it. It's simple. It's very doable. It could be done in small stages, and it could be done on my iPad. I just don't want it to distract me from actually writing the story.

The World's in a Tizzy!

Truly.

Tons of stuff going on - but none of it is terribly interesting. I had the profound luck to catch serial versions of the flu/bronchitis with a trip to Disney World in the middle. October through January was one long bout of ugh. Then, February 1, I had surgery on my right wrist for DeQuervain's tendonitis. It's been a long recovery process and I'm really just able to start typing on a regular basis.

My post for today is short, but I wanted to mention the current state of my project.

I blew it up.

Yup. In the past when I heard this bit o' wisdom, I was a scoffer. "Scoff. Scoff," I would say. The advice goes something like this: "Keep yer durn mouth shut." I may be paraphrasing.

I have been guilty of getting just a little too excited about my various plots. Well, excited and insecure (it's not a good combo). So I'd reach out to several different people and lay out all my big plot points including the "OHMYGOD" twist and finale.

And that may very well be why I have eight separate first chapters and not much else to show.

I managed to make a little tweak to the outline in order to fix a logic problem. In the process, I just unraveled the whole thing and am starting from scratch. I'll be sharing progress, but no plot elements - not even The Sentence. I will say that everything on the poster is still intact.

The poster is a piece of art I designed and had commissioned to serve as inspiration. The tape wouldn't stay stuck to the wall, so it's been rolled up on a bookcase for 6 months. Kinda says it all, doesn't it?