Free-for-All month!

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen!  Since I can’t decide on one project to focus on and the muse is complaining, I’ve decided to do a free-for-all.  Whatever I feel like working on (besides the chapbook – that has to be done), I will work on.  As long as it’s a current unfinished project.  So basically Alpha Female and Pirouette are in the running.  Today I rewrote the first scene of Pirouette and got 606 words I didn’t hate.  That is progress.  😀

I’m not sure if this will work, and what the result will be, but I’ve got to get whatever I can get out of my muse.  Because that’s better than taking a month off, which I considered, but dang.  With just over 14k for the entire year so far, I didn’t want to do that.

But why torture myself?  If I want to work on Pirouette, then good.  Alpha Female?  Fine.  Something else?  Sure, as long as it’s unfinished (I highly doubt that, but gotta give myself room to move here).  It’s an experiment.  We’ll see how it goes.

The running tally:

Pirouette – 1 day, 606 words
Alpha Female – 0 days, 0 words

I’m crazy, I know.

God help me…

Been trying to get into some kind of rhythm and groove after my surgery.  Well, it hasn’t really happened.  Sure, I’ve written stuff.  I’ve spent a lot of time brainstorming and figuring out things.  But I’ve been feeling off kilter. I think part of it was my forced time off writing and part of it is my grandfather’s death.  He was my last living grandparent, 97 years old. His funeral was last week.  I’ve cried only once, but I’ve felt his absence.  I wrote a blog about him on the Turtleduck Press blog.  http://www.turtleduckpress.com . Scroll down a bit.  It’s called “Honoring My Grandfather.”

I have my 2nd chapbook, Without Wings, releasing April 1st.  So this month for me will be getting everything finalized.  We’re down to less than 30 days!

Alpha Female has continued to be my problem child.  I had to cut 5k because, as usual, it wasn’t working.  Started poking at it again tonight, and that didn’t go very well.  I’m thinking of setting it aside and working on it here and there. I’ve only got 5 parts to finish and the draft will be done.

Annnnnd I started the Pirouette revision.  Just 210 words, but hey – gotta start somewhere!  It’s daunting, knowing that this is the last revision (so I’m telling myself) and I’ve got to nail it.  So I’ve been putting it off.  Well, I decided today that I’m going to work on it.  Sentence by sentence if need be.  A lot of it is fine.  It just needs to be tweaked and cleaned up.  There are some things I’m changing too, but nothing major.

It feels good and it feels scary.

Lastly, I got clobbered by a plot bunny recently.  It’s a psychological horror, which I hear has no market, so I’m in no hurry to write it, but dang.  It speaks to the twisted, kinda crazy side of me and it’s drawing me in.  Relentlessly.  It’s about a girl who has erotomania – that is, she believes that someone is in love with her, a famous person, and he’s not.  It’s all a delusion.  And this is a real condition.  And it’s fascinating because, well…imagine what someone in love would go through for the one he or she loves…when the love is reciprocated.  Now imagine that intensity but without it being reciprocated but the girl believing that it is.  Can you imagine some crazy things?  Yeah.  That’s what I’m talking about.  It’s tentatively called Eros in Chains.  Another one to add to the pile.

So….this is going to be an interesting month.  I’m hoping to finish Alpha Female but who knows if that’s going to happen.  I need….something, and I’m not even sure what it is.  Just feel so lost right now.  Hopefully, I’ll find my way again.

Epiphany.

Today I was ready to throw in the towel on Alpha Female — not for good, but for awhile.  I’ve been working on it for about 7 months, pretty much straight through with no real breaks except the week of my surgery.  I was just tired, and the last two days have been rough for me production-wise.  But I’m not a quitter and I realized: I want to finish this.  Sure, I could put it off or wallow in being stuck, but the fact remains: the novella won’t write itself.  The farther I go from it, the harder it will be to get back into and on track.

I realized this because I considered switching back to either Flamebound or Pirouette.  Flamebound especially — when I read over the HTRYN lesson I was currently working on (naturally, I couldn’t have yanno, finished it up) I felt like I was reading Greek.  I read a few of my notes on some changes and again, I’m like, whaaaat?!  And it seemed impossible at this time, so I decided to wait a bit longer.  With Pirouette, this is more of a planned wait because the plan is to come back to it refreshed and I’m almost there, but not quite. Sooooo that left Alpha Female.

And after my recent discoveries, I’m actually excited about it again.  Sure, I’m not sure what rabbit I’m going to pull out of my arse this time (moar questions, how I love thee!) but hey, slow progress is better than none.  One sentence at a time if I have to.  I’m doing this.  I won’t accept anything less.

So poor Natasha is going to have to fight Delia with a magic she doesn’t know and doesn’t understand, and she’s going to have to kill Delia, somehow, even though Delia has a witch on her side.  Obviously, Delia has to die.  There’s no other option there.  Going to think on that one.

But other than that, it’s been a pretty good day.  About 780 new words on Alpha Female after ripping the scene apart.  I’m moving the stuff I ripped out closer to the climax.  Will have more impact that way.

Stay tuned.

So what have I been doing?

Yeesh, that’s a really good question.  The short version: banging my head against the wall.  And hating everything.  And jumping when my Inner Slave Driver says so. 

Lemme  explain.  Awhile ago, I got horribly, mercilessly, wacked-out-crazy stuck on Alpha Female.  It was so bad that I’d open up the file and I’d go numb.  Nothing would happen.  I’d feel uncomfortable and slightly panicky.  And then it would get so intolerable that I would have to close the file.

Imagine about a week of doing this, and then spending all my time away from the computer obcessing about it.  How to fix it.  What went wrong.  Alternate ideas.  Throwing lots of stuff on the wall.  Seeing what stuck.  Soul searching.  Wondering if  I really need to finish this draft now.  That’s important, yanno.

So at the end of that hellish week, I finally — after brainstorming until my eyeballs damn near started bleeding — came up with something.  The current direction?  Wrong.  The current ending?  Wrong.  It all needed to go from where  I started rewriting it last.  Ugh.  That really friggin hurt, but I saved the file under different name, just in case it was The Crazies and not a Brillant Idea like I thought.

Soooo I start in on the new direction and it’s flowing for a day or two.  I’m on friggin fire.  I can’t type fast enough.  It’s going, it’s going, and then..it went.  Just…nothing.  I went to start the next scene last night and ended up with this mess:

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” Derek asked as we walked quite a distance away from the Circle and through a copse of trees. The sunlight sent diffused light through the canopy of leaves, and I hugged myself, suddenly cold. The smell of saltwater reminded me of the time that Luke and I spent at the beach, and my heart clenched tight.

“No, I’m not,” I admitted. “But I have to do this.”

“It’s just down this path.” A dirt path lead to complete darkness. Disconcerted, I followed him, wondering how far into the darkness Luke was. I realized that I should have had my daggers. Some kind of protection. Who was to say that Derek wouldn’t just..kill me? They didn’t exactly owe me anything. Although, I was still the Alpha Female, and it had to count for something, right?

I tried to think positively.

I’m positive that I’m going to die.

 I shook my head. This wasn’t going to work.

“Natasha?” Derek asked. “Are you okay?”

I blinked. “Wha – yes, I’m fine. Just a little worried.”

“I can imagine.” Derek stopped at a short nondescript building made of brick. It seemed to completely fill the area, but maybe it was my imagination. Luke was in there. Right now. I wasn’t sure if that scared me more or gave me comfort.

The sound of chains banging against each other broke into my thoughts. Derek was trying to unlock the chains.

Not even going to go into why this sucks, just that it does, okay?

So what’s going on?  Well, my best guess?  Some things have been weighing on my mind, and as usual, I’m putting too much pressure on myself (what else is new?).  I would like to finish this draft of Alpha Female by the end of the year.  What might be the reality is that I don’t, and that’s okay.  But I have goals!  Well, sometimes goals aren’t everything.

I’m not giving up on it, but I am going to lighten the load a bit on myself.  It’s been difficult and I know I need to work through these things, but I have been working on Alpha Female since August.  Three rewrites plus countless other scene rewrites.  This has been one of the toughest books I’ve ever written.  Why?  I don’t know.  I can’t say it was because I had a deadline, because that was shot to hell halfway through.  It’s almost as if the book is fighting me.  Why?  I love Natasha and Luke, I love the Pirouette world, I love the story.  So why am I so effed up about it?

I don’t know.  That’s a bit of a mystery.  But it’s really pissing me off.

I’ve also been thinking about Pirouette and where to go with it once I start the revision.  Out of the gate, I’ll need to revise the first two scenes.  That’s been simmering in the back of my head for awhile.  And a new project — well, an old one that’s screaming for my attention — is Darkweaver.  I have Ideas, baby, but can’t work on it.  I need to finish Alpha Female and Pirouette before I can even start think about writing it.  Because I could get involved in that for a year and meanwhile, Alpha Female and Pirouette suffer.  Can’t do that.

And, lastly, is poetry chapbook #2, Without Wings.  I have a preliminary file started with the poems in a possible order.  They still need editing and the order needs to be studied.  It’s due to the Turtleduck peeps on Feb. 1st.  So that’s in the plan as well.

So, I’m taking it easy.  Hopefully, I can get something going before the end of the year.  I hope.

Alpha Female is done.

I officially finished it Thursday, and it came in at 27k, just 2k over what I needed.  It is now with a trusted beta reader, who’ll give me the lowdown on what’s working and what’s not working, and I’ll have less than 2 weeks to do a revision plus a 5-page synopsis.

I must be crazy.

Actually, while I’m still actively trying to make that deadline, it’s not a huge thing.  I mainly wanted to see if I was capable of producing something on a deadline.  And I pretty much did, for the most part.  It’s going to depend on what my beta reader says, because I’ve lost all objectivity.  So, I gotta wait for that.

Pirouette is next up, particularly finishing the notecards and rewriting the first few scenes.  Beyond that, it’s just tearing through the manuscript much how I did with Alpha Female, except on a bigger scale.  I’m worried that I won’t nail it, and I simultaneously believe that I can.  Which will win out?  I has no clue.

The website is almost finished — at least the writing section, anyway.  That needs to be done before Life as a Moving Target launches on December 1st.  I have a few things planned for that so stay tuned.

Life as a Moving Target is almost ready to go on sale.  I have a second proof ordered and if it’s good, then it’ll go on sale with the other Turtleduck books on Dec. 1st.  It’s so exciting, seeing it in print, something I never thought would come true.  I’ve gotten some wonderful support and encouragement on it so far, and that’s so important as the subject is so personal to me.  All in all, I believe this is going to work out nicely.

It’s after midnight as I type this, but I still consider it Oct. 16th until I wake up in the morning.  It’s a weird quirk of mine.  So….today was not only Sweetest Day, but it was the 1-year anniversary of the day the family drama began, and my life, as I knew it, changed irrevocably.  The person who caused it still remains out of my life, although I still think about this person and what this person did almost daily.  It’s not enough to say that I’m hurt, or angry.  I’m livid.  Still a bit numb, even after all this time.  My world hasn’t quite gotten back on track and I’m still feeling pretty dark and empty inside.

I don’t even know what to say.  Except there are poems in this.  They’ve been whispering in my ears for months,waiting patiently for me to put them to paper.

In other news, I’m now in a cast because my foot doc feels that immobilization of the joint might do the trick.  I’ve never been in a cast before, so it’s been a real interesting — and frustrating — experience.  Exhausting, too.  I went downstairs to my office for the first time in 4 days and was terrified the entire trip up and down.  I did it twice today, and I feel more stable.  But dang, it’s tiring. Especially going up.

I hope this is it.

Also, I got hit with a doozy of a plotbunny.  I’m not even going to speak of it, because evey time I even think about it, it grows.  Halloween is perfect timing, but I’m standing firm on my no new projects decision for the rest of the year.  It’s going to have to wait, and so will my mini-Nano.  There’s always next year, right?

So that’s what’s happening here.  I’m so excited about everything.  I can hardly stand it. 🙂

Re-re-rewrite

Yeppers.  I was at about 18k on Alpha Female and it all fell apart.  I determined that the new direction I’d taken (which I believed was awesome at the time) was the wrong direction because it became a painful slog.  It didn’t feel right.  So, I decided to rewrite it from almost-scratch.  I have a few scenes I can salvage, but most of it is useless.

However, I believe that’s part of my process.  Write alot, get a feel for the story, then possibly rewrite/revise/whatever to bring the entire thing up to snuff.  Some might say that it’s horribly ineffecient, and a waste of time, but I say no.  Without that initial 18k, the story as it is becoming right now would not exist.  Ideas flow from ideas.  Maybe it wasn’t the right idea, but something triggered what came next.  If I were to take out the 18k completely out of the equation, I’d be back where I started without this better understanding of things.

The sucky part, though, is starting over.  I’m at just under 3k.  I’m now 3 weeks behind essentially, and will only have 1 month to revise versus two.  But, hey, if the story’s not right, why beat a dead horse?  Worse case, if I can’t make the deadline, I’ll submit it to their regular submissions or elsewhere.  Best case, I’ll be able to submit a story I’m proud of.  Either way I win because I’m learning how to write to a deadline.

That said, I was having major problems getting into the mindset, and problems getting the words down.  I kept writing and rewriting stuff, and deleting stuff……I know this is the right path because I feel good about it, but my muse just wasn’t on board.  Could be that on the whole I’m still feeling inadequate as a writer, and I keep telling myself otherwise….and music, which always helps, didn’t do a thing for me.  Nada.  And that never happens.

As for the Pirouette notecards, no new work for the past few days.  Not enough time, not enough energy.  I need to make the time though.  It’s important, too.

Hopefully Ill have better news in the future.

Progress?

Lately I’ve been well…..wangsting over my lack of publication.  Stupid, I know, right?  The Inner Slave Driver seems to feel that I’m not working fast enough.  18k so far on Alpha Female + 70 or so notecards done for Pirouette in one month?  That’s slow?  As Alisia would say, mercy me.

Okay, so I’m just a wee bit impatient.  I’m very competitive, and when I hear about writers being successful, I always feel a little sick inside.  The whole, well, why the hell aren’t you there yet? Huh? routine.  And I’d like to make it clear that I am happy for those lucky writers–I’m sure they worked hard for it — and feel no ill will against them.  However, it always shines the spotlight on what I haven’t done.  And that just blows.

And I’ve been working hard, not lollygagging around here.  I just feel so…..inadequate.  Like I should BE there by now.  But one thing I keep reading everywhere it that every writer’s journey is different.  Some get lucky.  Some actually have more time to devote to it, and thus progress faster than me.  Others struggle.  I think I’m in the middle.  I know I’ve improved alot over the last 6 or 7 years, and I struggle with tendonitis on occasion, which makes high wordcounts impossible.  My progress is more slow and steady.  I might be slower, but my wrists don’t die and maybe I won’t need to pull out the Dragon again. 

Furthermore, I have other things as well — full time job, chronic illness, a husband.  A family.  Relaxation (what’s that?) or reading time.  I’ve learned that even I need breaks occasionally.  Even I need to back off, which has been tough with Pirouette because my every instinct is screaming at me to get back to it, fix it, polish it, get it out the door, and I know that it needs time to gel more.  I’ve got a ton of ideas, and they’re all documented.  Notecards are in progress.  I’m constantly thinking about it.  But it needs time.  And that’s time I wish I could be querying it, but as I’ve said before, it’s not flippin’ ready yet.  And that’s the biggest bug in my butt here.  I can’t send out an inferior, crap manuscript.  Can’t do that.  So I gotta cool my heels and wait till I can make it better.  Sometimes I just wish I could work faster.  But it is what it is.

I’m still hoping to make my one HUGE goal of submitting something this year.  Will probably be Alpha Female, which is going okay, except that the story got away from me and may no longer fit with the antho I was looking to submit it to.  Oh well.  It’s one of my rules: I go where the story takes me, even if I outlined it a certain way or had a different idea in the beginning.  I can submit it elsewhere if need be, so this isn’t wasted time.  And I’m getting good practice on writing on a deadline. 

This whole go where the story takes me thing is how Hereafter went from comedy to friggin dark fantasy and how Survivor turned into a rich, complex story about several key characters versus the few I wanted to focus on.  It’s how Pirouette went from practically fanfic (and no, I’m not proud of it at all, but it did start the whole thing in motion…gulp..5 years ago) to its own world and own characters and its own plot and worldbuilding and such.  But if I hadn’t followed the story for the 11 months it took to write that critical first draft, Pirouette would not exist as it is today.  I’m positive about that one.  So, Alpha Female changed a bit.  I like the changes.  I think they are strengthening the story.  I’ll make a ruling after I’m done with the first draft whether or not I’m going to try to revise it to the antho specs, or just revise/polish it and send it elsewhere.

So I haven’t been sitting on my butt moaning my fate.  I’ve been productive.  I just need perspective, you know?  I need to believe, now more than ever, that I can succeed at this.  It’s been my dream since I was a little girl.  It’s what I am.  And I want so desparately to get my stuff out there, and maybe make a living doing it.  Just got to wait my turn.

Getting back on track, finally.

Had a few days I lost to a personal issue that made concentrating difficult, and writing just wasn’t in the cards.  Happily, things worked out okay and I’m getting back into the swing.  I rewrote the current scene, changing where it needed to be changed and weaving in some new stuff.  I need to backtrack and rewrite the previous scene.  Currently, it’s in two pieces and needs to be combined.  In a coherent manner.  Why am I doing this?  Well, the scene didn’t feel right, the emotions all fuzzy, and it was just wrong.  I usually just know when this happens.  Something feels off.  And I can’t move on if it’s like this.  Only reason why I went to the next scene was to bring up my wordcount for MayNoWriMo.  Normally, I’d fix it and move on, but I was 2 days behind.  I’m still hoping to get my 12k.

Soooooooo that needs doing.  But yay, I’m on the last 25k of the book.  109k rewritten/revised.  I have high hopes of finishing it this month, leaving June free to take off.  Possibly.  I don’t know yet, because momentum is important. 

This little mini-break felt all wrong.  It was 2 days, but it felt like 2 months.  I don’t like stopping when I’m going strong.  But trust me when I say that I wasn’t in a very good headspace.  So, recognizing that, I backed off.  Sometimes you need to, despite what your pain in the ass Inner Slave Driver might say.

But I’m only 1 day behind now, so we’re getting there.

On the Surrender front, I’ve got the major stuff figured out.  The part that’s killing me is the main characters’ names. Because the names of the characters are being used for Darkweaver (if you recall, the plot was split) and they work for that book better, I need to come up with new names.  And with names, it has to at least feel somewhat right.  Maybe not perfect, because a few names I’ve used I came up with on the fly, and they ended up working (whereas normally I’d give it some thought first) but they have to feel okay.  Original name was Wynd.  Well, Wynd was a vampire and now she’s Fae, so she needs a different name.  Although Wynd could work because of the whole nature thing, but I need Wynd for Darkweaver.  Decisions, decisions.  I’ve been looking at Irish names.  There are some beautiful names.  Siobhan is one of them, but the pronounciation is killing me (I pronounce it See-oh-ben and the correct pronunciation is Shee-vaughn.  Does not work for me).  Alas, I can’t do anything without the name.  With the male lead, same story.  Only one that’s staying the same is Ashe, the other main character.  And that I considered for a long time.  Thought about switching them: making my Fae Ashe and the other MC something else, but Ashe is Ashe.  She’s always been Ashe from day 1.  So it stays.

So that’s been bothering me a bit.  Luckily, this one is in perc’ing stage, so there’s no rush.

Two steps forward, two steps back.

Been working hard on Pirouette the Third. Problem is, I’ve started to overanalyze everything, so much that I’ve talked myself out of countless scenes, and today I almost killed a character.  Well, not literally killed — more like I almost removed her from the story altogether, totally convinced that she wasn’t needed and the sequel didn’t need her specifically as the protagonist.

WRONG.  I’ve also decided to STOP worrying.  Write now.  Worrying and analyzation are for revision.  I’m at 65k and the last 5k or so has been hard won.  I can’t see past this need to be perfect, and that has to stop because I’ll never be.  The story could be as close to perfect as possible, if I work hard enough on it.  But now is not the time to try.  I just need to get this 3rd draft done and then I can reassess everything.

Also, edits/rewrites during drafting are the kiss of death for me.  With a few exceptions (I can count them on one hand), I just can’t do it.  It derails me.  I can’t move forward.  Jumping around works occasionally, but I wanted to try to do this linear.  I think it will be less messy that way.

So….I decided to leave the character in and just tweak the dialogue to reflect what’s going on in this draft.  So many balls to keep in the air.  It’s crazy, but I do love it.  Just not when I hate it.

So this is me resolving to MOVE FORWARD.  Write now.  Worry later.

Slow progress.

I’ve been working like mad on Pirouette the Third.  Up to 63k.  I’ve written almost every day, and while my wordcounts aren’t astounding, I’m getting back into the rhythmn.  That’s what counts, right?

Family drama is stil ongoing, and it was screwing with my progress.  Still screwing with Broken.  I wrote and then rewrote the first scene, but it’s not done.  And frankly,I’m not sure when I’ll be working on it again.  I think I’m too close to it, and my muse seems totally about working on Pirouette the Third.  So into it that she threw me a couple of curveballs.  One of them spawned a true sequel idea.  Another one was relating to Alisia’s power and such.  But I don’t want to have to re-rewrite everything.  So I’m trying to decide what to go with and what to save for another book.  So far, I’m considering the new sequel idea, and discarding the power thing.  I did make a few tweaks to Alisia’s relationship with one of the major characters and the villain.  This I think will make it more powerful.  But, that’s it. 

Still feeling the perfectionism streak.  I know one author who has had her debut novel plus the sequel published recently, and another who’s debut novel is coming out later this year.  Other writer friends are doing the agent hunt.  And I’m still creeping along.  I feel like I should be done with Pirouette the Third but I promised myself I wouldn’t shop an inferior book.  I want it to be the very best, no matter how long it takes to get there.

The Flamebound revision is going slowly but well.  I’m on lesson 3 of 22.  The priority has been Pirouette the Third, but I might want to send it through the HTRYN process once it’s ready.  So I would like to have Flamebound finished by then.  I hope.

Also been having some issues with motivation.  It just isn’t there.  Normally, my competitive streak keeps me going, but I think the family drama sort of killed that.  Some days I just don’t feel up to it.  But, good news, I’ve committed to writing every day again even if it’s a few hundred words.

So the new year is starting not with a bang but with a whimper.  We’ll see.