Yesterday I sat down and wrote 237 words on my Godred story. I know it is not much, just a drop in the bucket, but they were pretty good words, so I am pleased.

Sometimes John and I feel like we are not being as productive as we could be, but I had to give John his props for staying up late on Wednesday to finish some grading. It is a long work day for him, then he came home and graded. He turned the tables on me and complimented me for my blog-writing and said I should try writing for a magazine. I don't know why it touched me the way it did that he said that--it's not like he never compliments me *g*--but it made me feel energized to write, somehow. The little grey cells have really been jumping since then, so I am sitting down to put more words on the page before I lose them.

Ciao!

Just a quick post to say that I've been working on my Godred story. Sometimes I feel like Sisyphus, pushing the same old boulder up the hill, but then sometimes, like today, I feel like I'm actually getting somewhere. It is still not completely right, but I am satisfied enough with it (for now) that I don't foresee myself going back and starting over (again) any time soon.

I have been working on the intro for so long that I can't think of what comes next. I don't think I've worked that out yet. *pokes characters back into brain* "Into the stewpot with you, my lovelies, and don't come out until you know what you are supposed to do next!"

Is that my que?

I'm still here, too. I've been sneaking a peek to see if anything new has been going on, but sadly I have zip to post. I guess it's the guilt factor that's got me hiding.

I've been distracted and not writing. And I don't like it. Work has gotten crazy and there doesn't seem to be enough time in the day to get everything done. I have gone days and days without doing anything for myself.

But I've got 4 days before I have to sit behind a desk (someone else's) again. Maybe I can make some magic...Keep your fingers crossed.

Most of my writing over the last few days has been of the whiny journal variety, so I won't get into it here. I have put a little work into my other blogs today, and I wrote just the *tiniest* amount on my Cinderella story yesterday, but I thought I should at least check in over here to say that I'm still breathing.

Wow, that was lame, but I seem to be good at lame recently.

I'm adding the blog of the Knight Agency to Kee's blogroll below. Romance seems to be big on their list.

I was just reading an article by Elizabeth Bear on revising her novels over at Storytellers Unplugged, and I thought you might appreciate this part, Kee:

"This is the part where it stops being about art or inspiration or even a Puritan work ethic, and becomes about nothing more than sheer bloodymindedness."

She's asking for a post, is she? Well, let's give'r a post.

I have been slacking. But only in my writing, well not really. In writing, I'm a little stuck. Outside of that, I have been busting my butt. Like in getting the little buggers new bedroom set up. Like in working my arms down to nubs cause I'm the only one around that knows how to wield a paint brush or a screwdriver.

So I's tired. And can't think. After one day of being too tired to keep up with the review, I couldn't take it and sat down to at least get something on paper. I wanted to try to do the synopsis.

Which might only be a little less painful than that mammogram. Which I get tomorrow so I really don't know how painful it is, but ya know.

I get the concept of the synopsis, and why it's important, but really. Who thought this stuff up. It's like death to the life of the story. Cause I can't go into all the cool character stuff that I worked so hard on to make it FEEL right. From what I've read, the synopsis is like a book report. As in "What happens in this story to make me want to read it?". Great. Plot stuff. Which is fine. I got plot. I got so much plot, my plot runneth over.

And if I write this synopsis, then the agent's gonna be able to tell if my story falls apart before I say "THE END." Got it. Understand it. Hate it.

Cause why? Cause whiles I tries to get the plot out, I keep getting sidetracked with all the other cool stuff that I just can't hack away. SO I write a little, go back try to hack out the unneeded. Write. Hack. Re-Write. Throw it away. Start over. Hack. And finally end up at stuck.

Then read the blog where someone's looking for a post.

Well, Kee? I thought we might get an update soon... No pressure, though.

I survived my 2 classes with Hannah in tow this morning, so I might actually have the energy to work on Godred some more. I was thinking about it while I was not sleeping last night, so maybe there is something there to actually work on.

It seems that my brain wasn't fully in gear when I cranked out the last bit of Godred. I finally hit on all the things I wanted to *happen* in the opening scene, but I wrote it in 3rd person, and it came out totally flat. *wah!*

So today I sat down and rewrote it in 1st person, and it is finally getting closer to being *right*. To me, at least. I didn't take the time to count words, but I had 84 lines, handwritten.

I have to do some homework for class tomorrow, so I can't push onward for now, but tomorrow after class--look out!

I started the day with a little bookkeeping. I flipped through my two notebooks, one full-sized and one half-sized, and counted up my word-count for last week.

Cinderella story: 173 new words, 77 words of notes
the story known as "Vale": 87 keepable words, 141 rough-draft words
Godred: 398 keepable (woo!) words

For a total of 876 words. Not too bad, considering I also proofread a 27-page article (not double-spaced) last week. I had realized, of course, that I was putting words on the page, but not how many.

Onward and upward!

Whew! I just worked through a particularly rough spot. After I got into it, I really wasn't sure how to make it work, but I made myself sit down and do it. And now I think it's FANTASTIC. (Can you tell how excited I am?)



So from 61 to 69 is basically all new. That's a lot of work. I'm up to 66.5, too.



And I couldn't have done it without the "PRAISE ME"s I got from you and Westxgirl. She even said she can't wait to read it. Well, do you think I'm about to turn down a new set of eyes, and potential "PRAISE ME"? Hell no.



So's I got's to finish it.

Kee and I were talking on the phone, and of course the topic turned to writing, as it almost always eventually does. *g* Anyhoo, we were talking about writing characters who are outside our personal experience. Of course it must be possible, or we wouldn’t have half the literature we do. But I think the question boils down to whether it is possible to write a *believable* character outside our personal experience.

This question has been poking me in the brain since our phone conversation, now quite some time ago, so while Hannah is off at a play date and before I have to put the last touches on proofreading job #4, I thought maybe I would try to work on it.

On the one hand, there’s the piece of advice “Write what you know.” But I think writers can use this advice to limit themselves: “Oh! I’ve never done X, Y, or Z, so I can’t write about them.” I’ve never been a dwarf or a dragon, but that’s never stopped me from writing about them. *hee!* How many statuesque, naturally perfectly blond/red-headed/auburn, perfect-skinned women do you personally know, yet how many show up in romance novels? Do you think every romance writer looks like that? I find that doubtful, or they’d all be underwear models.

BUT, if I were going to write about a specific job—like a policeman or a nurse, I sure would do my homework first. Those kinds of details you get right or wrong, and policemen and nurses (and others) reading my work would certainly notice any glaring errors. I can imagine myself as a beautiful blonde, and I don’t need any special knowledge to do it, but if I try to imagine myself as a beautiful blonde nurse, it’s a whole different story. So that’s one kind of “writing what you don’t know”.

What about writing about someone from a different culture—gangbangers or Japanese or what have you? Even within a “culture” there is no one single way for members to behave. But if you portray someone as being a non-typical member of the society, I think you have to point that out. And you can only do that by knowing about the culture they don’t “match” with, if that makes sense. I have never been in a gang, so I would feel weird writing about someone who was, but if I felt it was really necessary to one of my stories, I would figure out a way to do it: watch movies about gangs or read about them in books or newspaper articles, something.

I think where you start having problems is when you try to get around the problem by writing stereotypes. A stereotype is a very flat kind of representation of a person; I know that I want to write real people, so I have to always be careful not to use the “shorthand” of stereotype, unless I want to subvert it (which is my favorite writing game). Don’t tell me someone is “trailer trash”. I know lots of lovely people (including my mother!) who live in trailers; look beyond that to what makes that person tick. If your character is tacky and a total beeyotch, have her do some bitchy stuff where we (the readers) can see it and make up our own minds. Of course the author is steering the reader to think a certain way, but let the character speak for herself. And if she happens to be like Britney Spears without all the money and with more of an attitude problem, then so be it.

Ok, now I am getting into bossy mode. Sorry about that.

While I was doing the dishes, another thought occurred to me on this topic. I think it can be hard for writers to *allow* themselves to write about stuff outside their own personal experience. This kind of goes back to the “Write what you know” thing, but I think it is also painful in a way to stretch yourself like that. Maybe it would be uncomfortable for me to put myself in the place of a rapist murderer (1) long enough to write about one, but each person has to decide for himself or herself. Ok, maybe that is an extreme example, but still, it is going to be hard to write about a person who is unlike yourself if you are not willing or able to pretend to not be yourself. If that makes sense. It’s kind of nice to imagine yourself as attractive and admirable, but maybe not so nice to imagine yourself as Hannibal Lector. Obviously you are *not* Hannibal Lector any more than you *are* Naomi Campbell just by writing about one of them, but you do have to be able to relate to them, get inside their heads in some way to be able to write them convincingly, I think.

An example: I read Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News in college, and I just could not get into it. The main character wasn’t abhorrent, but I never connected with him. He didn’t seem able to have strong emotions at all, and I couldn’t *imagine* him in a way that I found satisfactory. (I seem to have lost my copy, so I haven’t been able to go back and see if he affects me differently these days.) I don’t think I would ever try to write a character like him; there has to be something in it for me, too, as the writer.

I know that I often suffer from “staircase wit”, where I think of a witty retort on the way to the car. But don’t think I don’t like to imagine myself as the person who gets in the witty retort as a parting shot. The thing about fiction is that characters aren’t *exactly* like real people; if they were, we wouldn’t need them, we’d just go back to people-watching in the park or at the mall. In most fiction (especially commercial fiction, I will go out on a limb and say), the characters have to have a little more going for them than the average person on the street--they manage to get in the parting shot--or they have to find themselves into a situation that is more dramatic than real life. No one buys a “memoir” about someone who gets married, holds a job, has kids, retires, builds birdhouses, and dies; look at that section of the bookstore: “My Life with no Legs”, “How I Pulled Myself out of the Gutter”, “The Prison Years” (all made up by me, except there was a book by a paraplegic that I saw in a bookstore in Sweden). My point is, readers don’t want “normal” characters, they want characters who are “normal-plus.” So we writers have to imagine those kinds of characters, even though we aren’t those kinds of people.

(1) I had this horrible dream in college where I was some kind of monster—raping and murdering—and I was going to write a story about it, but it was too upsetting for me, and once I got past the point of getting upset thinking about it, I couldn’t call up how it felt to be stuck in the dream anymore, and I wasn’t willing to push it. Without that feeling, the story would have been lifeless, so it never got written. Now I can’t remember all the details that made it so vivid the first time.

Okay, remember how I have been feeling so good that I am working on RANSOM everyday. Well, I looked over the notes of how far I get each day. In 14 days I have only gotten to page 61.

Ugh......

In my brain, I know it's progress (61 pages I didn't have re-worked 14 days ago, yadda, yadda, yadda). But it's also screaming...61 PAGES..IS THAT ALL YOU CAN GIVE ME, DIRTBAG? (It's kinda in a hardass, drill sergeant voice.)

Granted, there has been a lot of new stuff added (I'm up to 65.5 k words) and a lot of stuff taken out. So...lots of work. But here's the thing. The beginning is the part that has had the most work already. And now it's taken 14 days just to read 61 pages into it. How long's it gonna take to work through the rest that hasn't had near as much work?

I shudder to think.

Can you tell I could use some "PRAISE ME"?

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
- Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.
- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard, 1813 - 1855

You must have long range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short range failures.
- Charles C. Noble

Excuso al of the typos. Me thinks faster than me cans types.

I'm at it.

Read, read, read. Write, write, write.

Everyday.

Even if it's just a teensy weensy two pages of reading. I tell myself that it's two more pages than the day before. It seems to be working. Because there was one day after I started my disciplined schedule that I skipped. I know, horror of all horrors. But actually it kinda was. There was sooooo much guilt involved. Then I worked extra hard the next couple of days just to make up for it. That's when it hit me that even just a little was better than nothing at all.

I think all the outside reading I have done since really picked up Ransom the last editing go-round has helped. It's not so much pulling teeth and hashing it out over every sentence. I think it might actually be starting to come a little easier. (Knock on as much wood as you can find.) But I think I read somewhere that it takes a person a million or so words before he's any good at writing-like 4 or 5 books worth.

Well I think I have probably put in that me in Ransom alone. It is definitely not the story it started out to be, but it is more saleable. And really isn't that why I am doing this in the first place. Not the money part, so much as the selling it part. I am writing to get something published. For the world to stand up and shout, 'You Rock!'

Could happen.

But not if I spend all night posting this.

So I finished 2 of 3 proofreading jobs, for about 13-1/2 hours of work. I started on #3 today and am almost halfway through. I'll still have to go back and address some stuff I marked for looking up, but it is going much more quickly.

Then I have a proofreading/editing job for a different professor. I don't know how long that will take, but it is kind of long (at first glance), so we'll see.

I wrote about 2 paragraphs on my Godred story. *insert world's tiniest "woo!" here* I don't know what to think about writing at the moment, so I will pretend it doesn't exist unless whacked over the head with it, at least until my proofing jobs are done.

Have you checked out Miss Snark today? You won't believe it. I saw the post late last night about 20 minutes after it was posted and I actually teared up. Then I knocked out 4 more pages when I was really too tired to do much more than sleep.

I just can't believe it.