Category: 13 Treasures Britain (Page 3 of 4)

The Rough Draft Is Done!

February 2, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Finished my Thirteen Treasures of Britain rough draft the other day. Whew!

Now comes the long march of revisions. I might just totally, utterly, and completely revamp my entire story. So that should be fun.

What’s weird is that I used to outline my stories in the past — lots of note cards, lots of outlines, etc. — and I found it made the process of actually writing to be a bit of a slog. I found that my inspiration kinda died if I did too much outlining and planning ahead of time.

So with Thirteen Treasures of Britain, I totally wrote by the seat of my pants (“pantsers” as they say in NaNo-realm). It was fun to write (until the end, where I had no idea how to finish the story in a non-lame way), but now I’m afraid what I have is a hodgepodge mess of a story that ends in a boring, predictable way. My endings always suck. But this one was particularly sucky because I didn’t have a plan going in.

Does this mean I really need to be a “planner”? Do I have to do a full outline beforehand? Do I need all kinds of character profiles and maps and background-y stuff?

It’s looking more and more like I do. And yet, I’m afraid that I’ll plan everything out and then be completely uninspired when I sit down to write. It’s happened to me before. Will it happen again?

Interestingly, when I was in college learning about screenwriting, it was pretty much hammered into our brains that we had to write treatments (basically, outlines in story-form), beat sheets, and scene summaries. And I never found these kinds of pre-writing tools to be soul-deadening or inspiration-crushing.

My plan for revising The Thirteen Treasures of Britain will include the following:

  • Rereading my rough draft and marking up sections (basic categories: keep it, toss it, needs work)
  • Creating a “BORG outline” (trademark: James Scott Bell in Plot & Structure) for a new version of the story
  • Seeing where I can combine material from my rough draft with my new story outline
  • Writing a second draft (using the new outline)

For now, I’m letting the draft settle and I’m working on pre-writing for an entirely different story (tentatively titled The Red Tower). I will return to the Thirteen Treasures of Britain rough draft in a week and go from there.

I’m kinda excited. Revision is one of my favorite parts of writing.

So where is my finished rough draft?

January 10, 2015 / / 2 Comments

Yeah… not done yet. New deadline! January 13. (This is the nice part about being my own publisher…)

But…

I’m probably not gonna make that January 13 deadline either. It’s a busy time for me at work: Midterms. So that means I might have to reschedule this new deadline…

I am apparently the worst at meeting deadlines. The worst part of all is that I don’t feel like I’ve been goofing off (she said as she wrote this not-her-novel blog post). I’ve been doing work for my “real” job, taking care of my family, doing as much limited house cleaning as I can sneak in, eating. There haven’t been a lot of random Lord of the Rings marathons (okay, maybe one…), or binge watching Orange Is the New Black (which is what I was doing last year in January when we had an epic amount of snow/freeze days at my school) (I have been binge watching Comic Book Men, but that’s usually when I’m feeding my infant or playing with her on the floor, so it’s not like that’s interfering with my writing time).

I suppose I need to have more realistic goals. I have to face the fact that I’m not gonna be Johnny and Sean and write a zillion words this year. My original publishing plan for 2015 was to release three full-length novels plus a few short stories. I’m fearing this will not happen. I hate taking it slow; I want to get my stuff out there! But maybe the more realistic goal is to go at the pace my life allows. And my life right now does involve taking care of and raising a human being, so that’s kinda important.

2015: The year I try to live with more realistic goals.

New rough draft deadline: January 20

The Value of Side Projects

December 31, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I’m stealing a lot of my ideas in this post from Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work!

About two weeks ago, I organized a bunch of my old notebooks and stumbled upon an early one from my teenage years. Inside were many maps and names for a fantasy world I called “Kell.” I was surprised at how many of the place names and character names from this old notebook stirred ideas in my head. I’ve been mulling over an idea for a fantasy series set in an original world (i.e.: not a mash-up of mythology and folk lore, as The Thirteen Treasures of Britain is currently constituted). Basic set up is a young woman awakens to find herself in a room, which she discovers is in a high tower with only one window and no doors (think: Rapunzel). She has no memory of how she got there or who she is. This was all I had: the girl in the high tower (yes, I am aware of the Philip K. Dick-ish book title…).

What I really needed was a world for my character and her tower to exist in. Cue my old notebook. I started imagining all the ways to meld my story idea with my imaginary world of Kell. But then I stopped. Wasn’t I supposed to be writing The Thirteen Treasures of Britain and working toward my January 4 deadline? This girl in the tower idea was a distraction, right?

But then I remembered the words of Austin Kleon: “I think it’s a good idea to have a lot of projects going at once so you can bounce between them. When you get sick of one project, move over to another, and when you’re sick of that one, move back to the project you left. Practice productive procrastination” (Steal Like an Artist, p. 65).

This. This is how my brain works. I’m a bouncer. I bounce from idea to idea, exploring, going off on tangents, getting obsessed for several days in a row over one idea, one project, and I work like heck, forgetting to eat or to sleep, until that project is done, and then it’s back to the main project, and working on the main project, until slowly that gets done, but all the while, side projects bounce in and out.

This realization was freedom. I could knock off and spend two hours with my old notebooks and create backstory for my “Red Tower” world (which is what I’m calling the tower where my heroine is stuck), and strangely enough, this knocking about in my side project, has inspired more ideas for The Thirteen Treasures of Britain. The two projects are feeding off of each other and nourishing each other. Suddenly, what felt like a distraction was the very lifeblood for writing.

I’m really starting to realize that the most important thing is to always be working. If I keep working, if I keep creating, then I’ll be on the right track. It’s when I stop creating that things start to die.

Merry Christmas! And a few changes…

December 27, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I hold to the old ways of celebrating the twelve days of Christmas. So happy Feast of St. John!

I’m on Christmas break (two whole weeks off from work!), so it’s been a good time for getting writing done. Unfortunately, I’m not where I wanted to be at this point in my novel, but I’m still making headway.

I am getting into the third act of my novel (I trained as a screenwriter, so my lingo is still very much screenwriter-ish), and it’s looking like the story will be shorter than I originally planned. At least in the rough draft stage. It’s possible that when I write the second draft it will get longer again, but for now, I’m looking at a 75,000 word rough draft instead of an 80,000 word one.

This is a bit of a relief, since I’ve been struggling to reach my word count goals each day. Maybe there’s just not enough plot/conflict/urgency in my story (which I’m hoping to fix in the second draft). I’ve also given myself an extended deadline. I’m off from work until January 5, so my new deadline is January 4. This means I’ve got to write about 22,000 words in the next week. This is still ambitious (my average words per day usually hovers around 1,100), but it’s doable.

I’m getting to the point in the rough draft where I can see how much editing needs to be done and I want to skip ahead to the editing/revision phase. It’s hard to focus on writing this crappy rough draft when I’m so desperately itching to focus on writing the much-better second draft. At this point, I just need to Get It Done, but it’s proving a hard task.

I will now rub my NaNoWriMo “Inspiration” sticker for some inspiration. Also, St. John the Evangelist and Apostle (whose feast we celebrate today) is one of the patron saints of authors and booksellers. Maybe his intercession will also help me.

Reaching Half-Way and Other Thoughts

December 20, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I am officially past the half-way point of 13 Treasures of Britain.

I’ve also gone through and eliminated about six chapters that I planned on writing on the back end of the book. Basically, I tightened up the story. I really feel like once the book hits its second turning point (roughly Chapter 17 at this point), it should be going at a faster pace (like a roller coaster heading downhill). So I’ve shortened things down from 32 chapters to 26 chapters. This means, from Chapter 17 to Chapter 26 (i.e.: the end), the story is flying.

I eliminated a lot of chapters in my outline where the description was something lame like, “Merlin fights monsters.” Those nothing-burgers were nixed. I really had no idea what was supposed to happen in those chapters, so there was no point keeping them around.  I’ve found that by shortening my outline and cutting to the chase, I’ve made the second half of the book a lot stronger.

General writing rule #48: Cut through your story with a giant scythe and watch as the story instantly flows better. Cutting to only the scenes you *want* to write almost always makes the story tighter (even if that means cutting out what seemed like necessary information).

Closing in on 40,000 words…

December 6, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I am getting close to the half-way point for my rough draft of 13 Treasures of Britain. I should reach 40,000 words this weekend.

I’m freaking out a little bit that my deadline is December 30 and I’m still not half-way done, but I am also strangely confident.

On the other hand… I have a sinking feeling that I’m suffering from a “main character problem.” To be specific, I’m afraid that I have a flat main character whom the audience won’t care about. My challenge is to find a way to get the audience to care about my Merlin character. Is the “save the cat” thing played out, or do writers still do that?

In a lot of ways, I’ve imagined my version of Merlin to be like a mixture of the Peter Capaldi and Christopher Eccleston versions of Doctor Who. But the first half of the book is mostly Merlin-collecting-things and doing crazy stuff (think: the first half of a Doctor Who episode, where the Doctor travels to another planet and encounters some treacherous situation). In a typical episode of Doctor Who, the emotional stuff usually builds in the second half, particularly when we find out there’s more to the adventure than the Doctor originally thought.

My problem is that I’m not writing an episode of television; I’m writing a novel. So for 40,000 words (100+ pages), the emotional stuff hasn’t come into play yet. It will happen in the second half of the book, but will the audience lose interest before that?

I can already foresee a ton of editing and revision once I’m finished with the rough draft. Which is actually exciting. I’m a weird person in that I LIKE revising. I’ve just got to keep the “inner editor” at bay for a few weeks more while I finish the rough draft.

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