What's On Your Mind About Your Writing?

What's on my mind is how to get back into this. Into the game, full strength.

I put months of the hardest work of my life into finishing this manuscript. I've worked overtime doing hard manual labor, at top speed with no option to slow down because what mattered was getting it done not putting in my hours (in other words I've done organic farming), and finishing this book was almost worse. I didn't think I could get that physically exhausted doing mental labor. I did it because the book mattered so much to me, because it's the best thing I've ever made. Then I sent it in to my publisher, made the deadline and GUYS THE EDITOR HASN'T READ IT YET AND THAT WAS IN MARCH. I mean granted, after two months of them not reading it I gave them permission to not read it and I took it back to start editing it again. They're not exactly a big house. But grah.

And now here I am. Rewriting the first chapters. Only, simultaneously, the... sort of commune-type place?... where I live is folding, with big emotional meetings and stuff, and we don't know yet whether we'll have to move or not. So that's great for morale. Also for really building up a head of steam on a big project, you know? Nothing like real-life chaos to help you write.

Also first scenes are so hard, guys.

Well. Thanks for listening/not listening (this being the type of thread where you can quite appropriately do either. I'm out. Maybe I can make this happen.

Working on a 20-pager, and I have a few thoughts on that.
One that I already knew: I am terrible at matching outlines to word counts. I had a perfect outline, except that every 500 words allotted in the outline was more like 700 words once written.
One that I didn't know: I've been working under the idea for the past 10 years that a single-spaced page is about 1000 words and a double-spaced page is about 500 words. This may be true for fairly paragraph-dense pieces, but once you add paragraph breaks for dialogue, that jumps down to 300 words double-spaced.

All told, this means that an outline that was intended to encompass 10,000 words is actually for about 14,000 words, and I actually only have enough space to write about 6,000 words. (And it's for a grade, so I can't really play that off.)

So I've decided that 1. I'm saving the outline so that I can expand on this once I'm done with the part that's due. 2. I've cut one character that was intended to be fairly major and merged his role with another character that was intended to be fairly minor but introduced earlier.

I lowered my font one point. Printed a page and I can read it just fine with or without my glasses. I also changed font family. I was using Times New Roman and read on createspace forum that TNR was a hallmark of the self-published writer. To I switched to Dante.

WIP1 - The Historical. The 8th draft. I finally completed the picnic scene on part two and am nearing the end of Part Four: Stranger Within the Gate. Thought up a better title for part six - The Beloved Stranger. I swiped it and the former title from two of Grace Livingston Hill's books, because both fit the plot lines to a T.

Apparently summer heatwaves make me even less productive than usual. It's so damn hot, my brain just feels like it's been slowly turning into soup for several days now.

Do I write strong female characters? I don't think I write strong female characters. My book is filled with flat, powerless women. My book is basically the same barely interesting melodramatic scene told over and over again from different viewpoints. My book has no tension in it. I'm not using my writing time effectively enough. I'm allowing myself to get too distracted by things that are distracting. I am an unmotivated puddle of sludge. That was an insult to unmotivated puddles of sludge.

auzerais:

I guess most of my female characters are strong.

Not because they are big and muscular, or because they have a nasty temper, but...because they are principled.

And once the bad guys try to push them around or take advantage of them, they not only push back, but they push back in intelligent and unexpected ways.

But a character can be strong in other ways as well, whether quietly or behind-the-scenes.

Some of my characters do good things without asking for attention, or sacrifice themselves behind-the-scenes, so that the person who is the recipient of the good deed, usually never finds out about it.

There are many ways to make your character strong.

Hmmm, I wonder how you happened to pick your handle "auzerais". Sounds french, but I have not used french in a while except when ordering fries, so I am not sure. In any case, it sounds beautiful if pronounced with a french accent.

I finished my Sunweaver trilogy today! (Or at least the first draft of the final book).

It was an 8,000 word sprint to the end (that usually happens to me when I get toward the end). I know I have some work to do during revision, but it's exciting to have it done. Now I can say I've finished writing two epic fantasy series. That's nothing to sneeze at.

The question now is what I want to write next. I have so many ideas. I'll probably take a little time off, but you never know.

rwm4768 said:

I finished my Sunweaver trilogy today! (Or at least the first draft of the final book).

It was an 8,000 word sprint to the end (that usually happens to me when I get toward the end). I know I have some work to do during revision, but it's exciting to have it done. Now I can say I've finished writing two epic fantasy series. That's nothing to sneeze at.

Click to expand...

Congratulations!

I FINALLY got around to submitting a short story to a SFWA-eligible market. I really want that membership cred. It's a personal thing. Disappointed, though, in that the response time is three months.

I wrote the first four tentative pages of a MG fantasy yesterday. Here's to finishing, and having fun in the process!

Cobalt Jade said:

I FINALLY got around to submitting a short story to a SFWA-eligible market. I really want that membership cred. It's a personal thing. Disappointed, though, in that the response time is three months.

Click to expand...

I know how you feel. It's an admirable goal that takes a lot of patience. I'm still not there.

I got a way early start on editing the historical. Finished the fourth part and the third interlude. Going to dive into Part Five: Raiders of the Wilderness shortly after breakfast. First I'm going try to fix something that's bugging me. I had a total of 65 chapters--I thought. So I added one and I still have 65 chapters. I slipped count somewhere, obviously, but where...

I officially have my cover art for Empire of Chains. You can see it in my avatar and right here.

Edit: Had to remove due to image size. It's still there in my avatar. Full size version here:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/ryanwmuellerauthor/photos/?tab=album&album_id=1180134165424837


I also have everything ready for publication on June 30th. *must resist urge to fiddle around with the manuscript*

Cindyt said:

I got a way early start on editing the historical. Finished the fourth part and the third interlude. Going to dive into Part Five: Raiders of the Wilderness shortly after breakfast. First I'm going try to fix something that's bugging me. I had a total of 65 chapters--I thought. So I added one and I still have 65 chapters.

I slipped count somewhere, obviously, but where...

Click to expand...

Or maybe your computer ate one. Yes, I'm joking, but it actually happened to me once.

Full disclosure: I'm not as obsessed with the Bechdel Test as I was coming across. Unfortunately my problem is the 50% of the time I make things out to be a bigger deal than they are because I get ahead of myself and I don't trust my own abilities to cross certain bridges when I come to them.

49% of the time there are actual people giving me a hard time over what they perceive to be a career-destroying problem in a story.

When I write a story with a female lead, I naturally worry whether or not I'm portraying a character that will please some of the people some of the time. But the 49% seem more concerned with whether I'm going to please all of the people all of the time.

So the problem came when I started writing a "traditional" fairy tale. I realized my princess wasn't very active in the story I was planning and I started to worry about the pitchforks and torches. That's where the 1% of my problem comes in. No one knows I exist and I'm not worth the time and effort that goes into a proper crucifixion.

Now that I'm happy with what I have I can stop worrying about what everyone may or may not think.

Cindyt said:

I had a total of 65 chapters--I thought. So I added one and I still have 65 chapters.

I slipped count somewhere, obviously, but where...

Click to expand...

Do you use Scrivener? I've accidentally moused a chapter under another one before...

Right now what's on my mind is that I'm not doing enough writing - want to finish this novel already so I can move on to the next step!

Why must the process of doing the second draft be so hard? I spent a damn week on chapter 15 before bulling through it then did just 1 day of work on the next chapter before saying its done. Now to chapter 17 -- which looks to need as much work as the 15th! I'm guessing that most of the issue lies in my computer (the keys on the keyboard are falling off, and the touchpad no longer works like it should now) while the some of the rest just lies in me; I'm not sure where the remaining 25% lies in. So far, I've fixed the issue on the main character not knowing anything about the disease that was experienced before the plague, and how he wasn't able to save his pets by putting them in stasis, and how the plague's been noticed as reeking havoc in the galaxies that are located in the Universe's middle-western sector, but I've yet to tackle the starting symptoms of the characters stress from being forced to stay indoors because of what's going on and pinpoint a date to when chapters 15 and 16 take place. Some work will still need to be done with them chapters, but I think they're good.... for now, that is.

It took 8 drafts for me to finish the story, because I kept adding this and that. Fortunately, I deleted a bunch or I'd have about 300,000 word count. I'm exaggerating. A bit. I had to dup 10-year-old Al's POV, ditto the prince and his henchmen. Just about killed me. But I can edit those scenes into the next historical.

I editing about 5 or 6 chapters Thursday and have 11 more and the epilogue to finish draft 8.

Got 972 words on a secondary project that has been haunting me - of course I also lost several hours of sleep due to the haunting! Oh the life of a writer...

After a major revision, I've decided my original pov was all wrong and now 20k into the new pov I've realized I was right. I also have ditched the second pov I was using.

How does anyone write short stories without them ballooning out into at least a novelette at risk of crossing into novella territory?

My mind just isn't suited for short-form fiction, it seems.

Wondering why I can't get any interest in "Hellvetica," a story about a possessed font that causes the death of anyone who reads it...

Reservoir Angel:

One good way to keep a short story from turning into a novella...is to kill off a few of the major characters!

In the preface of his novel "Puddin Head Wilson", Mark Twain mentions that he faced a related issue, and that he ended up tossing characters into a well.

But the well soon got so full of characters, that some other characters started noticing, and got suspicious...and that caused yet another problem!