I ran a contest through 99Designs.com and it was awesome. I would definitely recommend it for other authors. I love this new cover, and I am excited to be working with the designer for books 2 & 3.
Category: 13 Treasures Britain (Page 2 of 4)
I just re-read my post about being pregnant and wow, does it sound whiny. I won’t lie: things were not good in the first trimester. Sickness, extreme exhaustion, lots to do at my teaching job.
But reading that post now. Eeeeesh. I sound like a whiny whiner who whines.
My work habits have improved since then. Part of that is due to being off for the summer (yay! teacher-life!), but a larger part of my improved work habit is an awesome little book called Life Long Writing Habit by Chris Fox.
Fox’s 5,000 Words Per Hour was a revelation for me when I read it in November 2015. My word counts jumped from 500 words per hour to closer to 1,500 within the span of just a few weeks. If I hadn’t gotten so down in the dumps during the first trimester, I would probably be closer to 2,000 words per hour by now. I cannot recommend Fox’s book enough. His book is the only one I’ve read that has real, actionable steps that can be taken to improve one’s writing speed. I’ve read other books about writing more words per hour, but most of them just offer advice like, “write using an outline” or “don’t worry about typos.” This kind of advice is not helpful for the more experienced writer.
Fox’s book, on the other hand, was immediately helpful, and it will continue to be helpful as I move through my writing career. I am not a novice writer; I didn’t decide to *just* start writing. I’ve studied screenwriting in college, lived in L.A. and tried to get a job in television, took screenwriting courses, wrote articles about classic movies for different online publications, and taught English classes (nothing will hone editing/revision skills like helping teenagers improve their writing). I’ve been writing for a long time. Fox’s book is one of the few that hasn’t repeated a bunch of stuff I already learned in college; it offered me something new, and as of right now, it’s working. It was the kick in the pants I needed to get my writing speed up to “Moderately Prolific Indie Writer” levels (now I just need to level-up to “Insanely Prolific Indie Writer”).
Just a few weeks ago, I decided I needed another kick in the pants. Being in the doldrums earlier this year — and finding my revision process on Thirteen Treasures utterly stalled — I decided to pick up another one of Fox’s books. Lifelong Writing Habit didn’t come as highly touted as 5,000 Words Per Hour; it seemed to be the forgotten middle child in Fox’s “Write Faster, Write Smarter” series. However, it also seemed to be a motivational book, and I needed motivation.
True to its title, in just a couple of weeks, I have developed a ridiculously better writing habit. Whereas (since summer started) I couldn’t drag myself out of bed until almost 7:30, I am now getting up regularly at 6:00 a.m. and starting my day with writing. I used to avoid working on Thirteen Treasure revisions (for fear of failure, of course), but now I know that unless I get to work, my goals for the future won’t be realized. I now have much more concrete (and written down) goals for where I want my life and career to be. And I’m excited about writing again.
This is all thanks to Fox’s book.
Regarding my current revision adventures, I am currently in the trenches. I’m in the middle of the book, revising chapters that are messy, sometimes corny, and utterly mediocre compared to the chapters I’ve already revised. Deep revision like this is comparable to one of those snowball-rolling-down-a-hill things you see in cartoons (or Willow). One small change to a character’s motivation in chapter 2 is now having huge ramifications in chapter 7, and the new character backstory I invented in chapter 4 must be incorporated into the character’s reactions in chapter 9. The chapters I thought wouldn’t take as much time to revise are proving to be just as time-consuming as the utterly horrific chapters I’ve spent weeks revising.
I’ll be honest: At times, this revision process has made me feel like a failure. I had a publication date goal of June 22nd, but that date has come and gone, and I’m still revising the manuscript (let’s not even talk about proofreading yet, please).
My new goal is November for publication. Even though I’m moving my date back, it should be more effective in the long run. This gives me time to do what I originally intended to do: write books 2 & 3 before book 1 comes out. Being able to release all three books within a 6-month span should help with visibility and marketing efforts.
Lifelong Writing Habit has definitely improved my outlook in this regard. No matter what my publication dates are, I know that each day I get my work done, I get one day closer to my goals. This cannot be stated enough, my fellow writers: Everyday you work, you get one step closer. Days spent writing are never wasted days, even if it’s taking you longer than you hoped.
I have to keep reminding myself of this. If I keep working, the book will get finished. And it will get finished when it gets finished; looking back at past deadlines and sighing is not a productive habit. If I want to achieve my goals, I must look forward. I must keep doing the work that needs to be done, even if it’s not perfect.
I think perfectionism can hinder us not only in the actual words we write, but also in the habits we try to form: i.e., “If I’m not writing my 2,000 words an hour, then I am a failure.” This is false; it is a failure mindset. Better to say, “I wrote 700 words today. I want to get to 2,000, but 700 words today is more than I had yesterday.” Let’s call it the “Keep on keepin’ on” mindset. If we, as creative artists, can just keep on keepin’ on, we will achieve our goals.
Good news: I’m pregnant. Due in October.
Bad news: I feel nauseated ALL THE TIME. The term “morning sickness” is very misleading. Very misleading indeed. I feel the worst in the evenings, actually. But mornings, afternoons, evenings — they all suck. Just constant stomach churning. It’s like being seasick 24/7, but without a way to get off the boat.
This has slowed my editing of Thirteen Treasures down considerably. It’s also completely stalled my attempts to write the rough draft of book 2 in the series, Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess.
I’m still working towards my deadlines, but they loom over me like horrible specters now, instead of like the bright beacons they were before. Before, my deadlines were finish lines I couldn’t wait to cross. I was sprinting and feeling the rush of oncoming victory. But now, I feel mostly dread. If I’m not feeling sick with nausea, I’m falling asleep because being pregnant makes one INCREDIBLY, INSANELY TIRED. And then on top of the physical issues, I’m sick with worry that I won’t finish the books on time.
If this post sounds like I’m whining, I am. I’m whining. A lot.
I listen to self-publishing podcasts, read blogs by indie writers, keep up on the latest strategies for marketing. But nowhere in the vast self-pub world do I see much information about how to get the job done when one is pregnant and also has a toddler at home. I’m beginning to suspect there’s not much out there for pregnant, self-publishing moms because pregnant, self-publishing moms are rarer than yetis.
And yes, my hormones are out-of-whack. Explains my dour mood, doesn’t it?
Anyway, I’ll do my best to keep chugging along.
Onward to Midsummer!
I’m in the midst of revising my second draft of The Thirteen Treasures of Britain.
Confession time: I’m not going to pay a professional editor. The reason I’m not is because I can’t afford it. Perhaps in time, once I’m selling oodles of books a day, then I can hire a professional copy editor. For now, I must rely upon my own skills.
(Side Note: I’m a high school English teacher during the day — and have been for five years — so I spend most of my time offering revision and editing suggestions to student-writers. I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on critiquing other peoples’ writing. Hopefully, I can transfer this skill to my own writing.)
But even if I were paying a professional copy writer, I’d still do a lot of revision myself. Copy editors are going to help with cleaning up the prose and the continuity of the text, but they can’t help with the structure or characterization. Of course, a structural/developmental editor may help with those things, but that kind of editor is even more expensive than a copy editor, and I think at this point in my writing life, I know what needs to be done structurally to make a story work. I’ve had a lot of training in screenwriting, and my teachers hammered structure, characterization, and dialogue into me with repeated force.
Maybe I will hire a copy editor for this book, who knows. The more I think about it, the more I think I could scrounge up $500 for one. But if I can’t manage that amount, then I’ll just make sure to go over my manuscript with incredible attention to detail. It can be done; it just takes a lot of patience.
Right now I’m in the “quick read-through” phase of the revision process: I set the manuscript aside for a couple of weeks, then I pick it up and read it on my kindle just as I would any book. While I read, I make super-quick notes in a separate notebook. I use symbols instead of writing anything lengthy because the symbols are quicker to write down and don’t interfere with the quick read-through process. (N.B.: I stole this idea from James Scott Bell in his excellent book Plot & Structure).
The symbols I use are as follows (again, heavily borrowed from Bell’s book):
Checkmark: Dragging
Star: Sentence-level revision needed (in other words, the prose is wonky or I need to work on paragraphing)
Circle: Need to add material
X: Cuts (either because I’m over-explaining, something’s not working, or I’m telling and not showing)
?: Plot hole/inconsistency
That’s it. I don’t write lengthy notes while I’m doing the quick read-through. The idea is to get an overall sense of the story. One of the reasons for this is that sometimes when I’m doing a read-through, I see a “flaw” and immediately start revising. Then I get lost in the rabbit hole of “tinkering” which is not really revision but just endless shifting of commas and clauses. The quick read-through and symbol system help me avoid getting sucked into this trap.
The other reason for the quick read-through is because I don’t believe a fundamentally flawed book can be fixed in revision. Not to be too gross, but trying to fix a fundamentally flawed book is like trying to polish a turd. Better to just flush that thing and move on.
If the quick read-through reveals that my story isn’t working — that on a structural level, something is off — then I need to start over. Dean Wesley Smith calls this the “redraft.”
When I wrote the first draft of Thirteen Treasures, I didn’t like it. It had some good moments, but overall, I found it to be fatally flawed. So I put it in a drawer and started over. My second draft for Thirteen Treasures is a completely new story. I’ve kept most of the main characters and a few of the settings, but the structure is new, the themes are new, and the overall energy and tone are new. I’m in the midst of the quick read-through now, and I can already say that I enjoy this new story so much better than the old one. It would’ve been a waste of my time to try and fix the problems of the first draft. With this second “redraft,” I’ve got something inherently solid that I know I can work with to make better.
It’s a bit daunting to do a “redraft” because it feels like the time spent with the previous draft was all just wasted time. But honestly, writing a new draft is a lot more fun than struggling to edit something that is fundamentally not good. Sometimes we as writers need to exhale some garbage and clear our creative heads before we can get to writing the good stuff. My first draft of Thirteen Treasures was the stuff I needed to exhale. The second draft was the story I really wanted to write. The quick read-through that I’m in the midst of now has shown me that this second draft is revision-worthy.
After the quick read-through, I’ll move on to Phase 2 of the revision process. More on that later…
If you asked ten-year-old me to rank her favorite fantasy series, I would definitely have put the Chronicles of Narnia at the top. But a very close second would have been the Prydain Chronicles. Not as well-known or iconic as the Narnia series, the Prydain series nevertheless felt as exciting, magical, and original as Narnia, especially for me, a kid who obsessed over knights, dragons, magic, and all things fantasy. The names, the mythology, the magic, the creatures — the Welsh-ness of Prydain made it feel different, a little bit stranger and therefore more wondrous than the typical English-y fantasy. I would later discover just how much Arthurian legend originated in the Welsh tradition, but as a kid, the weird names and Welsh flavor of the Prydain Chronicles made them seem exotic compared to the fantasy and medieval legends I normally read.
Of course, the real beauty of the Prydain Chronicles is in the story and characters. I LOVED Eilonwy and Taran. I LOVED Fluedder Flam. I LOVED the relationship between Taran and Coll, and wonderful Dalben, and yes, even (sometimes annoying) Gurgi. Each of the five books had a unique story that introduced unique and amazing characters. And the villains were creepy and truly dangerous. This was a world in which bad things can and do happen, in which characters can and do die. It was a fantasy world filled with menace and evil in a way the Narnia stories (and even The Hobbit) never were. I must have read and re-read the series at least half a dozen times when I was younger. And I’ve reread them since, as an adult, and still find them to be charming. This, to me, is the mark of a great storyteller.
Looking back on the series now, I’m most fascinated by book 4, Taran Wanderer. As a kid, it wasn’t my favorite. It didn’t have a strong, scary villain. Its quest wasn’t magical enough. It was just Taran going around learning crafts and meeting with ordinary people, trying to find his heritage. Where were the battles? Where was the epic struggle between good and evil? And yet, as an adult, I realize now how bold it was to make the fourth book in this action-adventure fantasy series into a somber, quiet quest for identity and maturity. Now, when I reread the books, I get so much out of Taran Wanderer. It’s a story that continues to resonate.
Is it any wonder that the book I’m writing now is based on Welsh mythology? Is it any wonder that my imagination is steeped in the world of Gwydion and the Black Cauldron and the kingdom of Llyr? It’s funny to me that the Prydain Chronicles don’t seem very well-known, and yet when I mention them to fellow readers, I find so many people who also grew up reading about Taran and Fluedder and Eilonwy and Doli and Henwen and all the rest. Why the series is not more well-known is a mystery. It’s kind of unbelievable that we haven’t gotten a live-action movie franchise out of them (the less said about the animated Disney movie the better). But then, would we be able to trust a movie studio to do justice to the darker elements, to the themes of humility and sacrifice, to the subtleties of Taran’s journey from pig-keeper to high king? I’m not sure what a studio would do with a book like Taran Wanderer. Probably add a lot of unnecessary action sequences.
One of the things I’m most looking forward to as a parent, is the day I get to introduce my children to The Book of Three. Hopefully, it will stir their imagination as much as it did mine. Two decades after I first read the series, it still stirs my imagination.
I teach high school English, so of course, I give a lot of writing advice to my students. It’s my job, after all, to teach young people how to write. And for years, I’ve passed on the two “golden rules” of writing, the same essential words of wisdom that I learned from my own mentors: 1. All rough drafts suck, and 2.) Writing is rewriting.
And yet… When I think of some of my best writing — the stuff that soared and sang from my pen and felt true from the first word — much of it came fully formed on the first draft, with only a few minor touches and polishes coming afterward in the editing phase. If I’m totally honest with myself, my rough drafts didn’t suck at all. In fact, they were usually right on the mark. The only revision I really needed to do was clean up some prose, fix a few grammar issues, maybe add a line or two here or there, and cut out a few extraneous bits. But the works themselves — whether essay, poem, story, or article — were anything but sucky. And those times when the first draft truly was bad, even in revision, I couldn’t fix it all that much. There is one time — and only one time — when I remember revising an essay multiple times and making it really good.
So I’m not saying revision or editing are bad things. I have had to polish and do minor edits on most everything I’ve written. But the whole “first draft is crappy” thing? I’m kinda not buying it (at least not in my case). In my case, if the first draft is bad, it’s a sign I need to write a new draft, not try to revise the bad one. It’s a sign that something was off about that first try, and that the way to go is to give it ANOTHER try, not try to polish something that’s no good.
What’s got me thinking about all of this is my decision to start the Thirteen Treasures of Britain over from scratch. There were too many things in the first draft that I didn’t like, that didn’t work. Instead of trying to patch the first draft into a Frankenstein’s monster of a story, I decided to simply start over, to write the whole thing new from the beginning. Perhaps this IS a form of revision, but for me, it doesn’t feel like revision; it feels like a new start, a new story. And this story, this new creation, is already much better than the old one. Yes, I will still need to edit and polish, but this time, I won’t be working with a sucky draft. I’ll be working with a draft that soared and sang and felt true from the first word.
Realigning my thinking when it comes to drafts and revisions means that I’m not forcing myself to write everyday. I check in with my draft nearly everyday — reading bits here and there, adding or changing things as needed, keeping my enthusiasm and imagination charged — but I don’t feel required to plop down 250 words at the end of the night after the baby’s in bed and I’m tired from the day’s work. Because those 250 dead-eyed, zonked-out words are usually crap, and when I read them the next day, I end up deleting them all. What good are 250 words if they’re totally irredeemable?
So I don’t write everyday. I write when I feel fresh. When I have a good chunk of time to devote to thinking. When the story is clicking. And if the story isn’t clicking, if the effort feels strained, if I’m writing garbage, I stop. And I come back to it another day. I try a different chapter or a different type of writing. I don’t force things, because when I force things, I end up with a lot of splintered and broken things. And there’s no way for me to fix something once it’s splintered.
If this seems like I’m breaking the number one rule of writers (i.e.: write everyday), then yes, I’m breaking that rule. What can I say? I’m a rebel. I always have been, so why change now? I tried the conventional “write everyday,” “first drafts suck,” “don’t get it right, get it written,” and frankly, those conventional ways don’t work for me. And perhaps that’s the point of this post. When it comes to writing, there is no ONE way of doing anything.
