Novel Roulette

I don't presume to know how many other novelists out there are like me and constantly playing roulette with their projects.

I figure I've got seven fiction novels that I've created detailed worlds for and written large portions of their plots. Seven. And I am not the most productive wordsmith in the world by a long shot. So I end up focusing on maybe two of these projects at a time, only one if I'm either extremely inspired or if I'm being perversely focused, but usually two so I can world build for one (which is fun and relaxing) when I'm stuck in actually writing the other one.

For example, here's how the past five months of my writing life have gone:

October: got wicked excited about plotting Grave of the Goddess and decided to write that while waiting for NaNoWriMo to start. Pretty much focused exclusively on this world even while nominally working on some kind of plot and characters for my planned NaNo, Solemn Vow. Also spent a ton if time in the NaNo forums soaking up all things writing.

November: ditched the chick lit idea immediately to write Grave of the Goddess for NaNo. Worked only on this all month. Wildly successful except for one week where I got bogged down by a slow part of the plot and the presence of relatives.

December: relative crash and burn. Set everything aside for several weeks. Wrote nothing, not even journal entries. I still can't decide if I did this to recover from NaNo or if the bad effects of unemployment were starting to gnaw at my creativity.

January: slow slow slow. Set Grave aside entirely. Instead, spent all my creative time invested in rereading and thinking about how to restructure A Hunter's Fire, and also creating ridiculously detailed history for my Stormwatch series.

February: got a freaking job! Also completely lucked out as the job has copious amounts of free time where no one cares if I'm reading or writing my own stuff. I've finally come back to Grave of the Goddess, just as enthused as November. But Face the Flames and Stormwatch are at my fingertips too.

I don't know if there's something wrong with me that I operate like this - with a writing backup, waiting to see where the ball lands today. But that's how it seems to be.

Progress or Lack Thereof

On Tuesday, my favorite author of all time, George R. R. Martin, released the fifth book in his fantasy series. (This would be the book A Dance With Dragons in the series A Song of Ice and Fire for those unacquainted with his work - and if you are, get thee to a library right away and get a copy of Game of Thrones.) I spent the majority of the day (I requested a vacation day from work) with a group of my closest friends reading said book. We drove to Burlington, MA to see GRRM and get him to sign our books. It was an exhausting and utterly inspiring day.

Reading George's books always puts me in the frame of mind to want to write and write and write. I say he's my favorite author of all time - not only because I enjoy the story he's created, but because he is a fantastic writer. He has a wonderful sense of words and character voices and he knows how to make a huge emotional impact on his readers without clobbering them over the head every other chapter. And he's unapologetic about his process. It took him almost six years to finish this book. And I don't begrudge him a single one of those days. How long have I been nominally working on Face the Flames now? Ten years? More? People in my life are forever urging me to finish. Telling me to just go on and find a publisher. Become famous. Retire young.

What do they know.

Writing is ridiculous. Taking it from a logical viewpoint, I don't understand why any of us chooses to do it. Taking it from my own viewpoint (often far from logical, I admit), I can't understand how any of us can ever stop. Or choose not to. Or quit.

Inspiration picture for Ariana, a very troublesome character indeed.

My current plan is to work on this book and ONLY this book until I'm done. I wanted to finish by year's end. We will see how far I get. I'm fixing things still. I can't just keep going without doing it because the biggest fix is a character that has always bothered me. She's one of my six point of view characters and the only one that I feel little emotional connection with. I've never known who she is, barely even who I wanted her to be. She's based on all of the female friends I've ever had - in parts caring, petty, jealous, gorgeous, and projecting an awesome self-confidence that she never feels in her heart. And up until now I've not been able to stitch all of those pieces into a coherent person.

Another inspiration picture for Ariana.

But George has inspired me. He finished his behemoth. (Kong, he called it.) And it's brilliant. More than worth the wait. So I'm going to be like him. Close my ears to my friends and family (I love you all and I appreciate the support, but sometimes it's all too much), and just write it the way I need to write.

Perhaps then it will be brilliant.

There can only be one.

I've been so frustrated with my writing lately. Too many projects with not enough focus = not enough writing. Every time I open a word document I just stare at it with this horrible exhausted feeling.

So. I'm going to set aside everything else and just work on Face the Flames. Until it's done. That's right. DONE. All 36 chapters of it. That means no super book for awhile. No Mortal Coils. No Wings of Destiny. No nothing except this, my first and most personal universe.

Bring it!

We, soldiers of a different sort -

“We, Soldiers of a different sort,
We, wasters of ink and page,
We, warriors of words,
Masters of melancholy,
Harlots of the pen,
We bleed these volumes,
and expect only absolution.”
- Jarvis Black

Writing has been going... and going. I made an executive decision to get virtual TTT sessions going. TTT, for those not in the know, is a writing group that a few of us began back when I was a junior. The acronym stands for Triumvirate of Tea and Toast as we were originally a threesome who would get together in my kitchen, drink tea, and make extravagant toasts to our own greatness. Really it was a chance for us to get together and commiserate, read, and edit each other's work. Often it devolved into the sharing of internet memes and occasionally insane giggling fits induced by too many pixie stix. (I bought a ginormous package of them for NaNo that year, and they carried through for much of the year.)

The year after its inception, TTT gained some distinction. We assigned T-words to describe our different writing styles (Terror, Tragedy, and Tra La La - guess which one is mine?). We created ourselves a banner that hung proudly in my room and living room for two years, and which caused some grief when I left Worcester and had to leave it with the other two original members.

(Preserved forever in photographic form. Our Ts are all supposed to correspond to their meaning.)

This past year, we incorporated another person (unfortunately he's still T-less, but we did say he could be the floating tea pot above my head on the poster). And last semester all four of us blazed our way through National Novel Writing Month together because we are awesome like that. So it was a little sad this year with our newest member and me both moving away from Worcester. Terror and Tra La La will fortunately be living together for their final undergraduate year. But due to this minor diaspora, we decreed that having virtual TTT sessions was a must.

I've decided to commit myself to getting through the final edits for Wings of Destiny, my 2008 NaNo of paranormal romance genre proportions. Via virtual TTT this means getting an edit from my fellow writers for a chapter each week. This also means that I have to personally edit a chapter a week. Good kick in my butt, I'd say. I'm excited about this because I think it's going to be a lot like what William Tapply's Writing the Novel and Advanced Fiction Writing classes were (minus his awesome read-aloud of our work).

So I've got that going.

Face the Flames is still forging ahead. Slowly but surely. Chapter 8 is gonna be done in the next few weeks. And then there's only one more chapter in part one! Part Two is gonna be a hellacious ride, so I'm itching to get to it. Plus Terror and Tra La La make special guest appearances beginning in chapter 9. Whee.

And then there's the short story I signed up to write for Fantasy Big Bang.


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I'm writing a prequel to Creatures of the Wind, a novel of mine that is almost as old as Face the Flames. Yow. More about that as I write it.

That's where things stand in my writing world. Now if I could just get a job...

(No real reason for this other than my thinking that every writer should have a cat. This is Callie, my grandparents' calico. She's a sweetheart and absolutely loves to walk across my keyboard whenever I'm typing. ... of course, I have a quote for this.)

"A catless writer is almost inconcievable. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys."
- Barbara Holland