What, are you an actress?

So I spent a couple of hours yesterday dissecting my outline for North to the Klondike, with most of my focus on what I call the "internal story," i.e. the part of the story that deals with character development and what the character's motivations are. I laid out index cards for each scene and made sure that there were both internal and external things happening and now I feel much better about the book. Today I've been rewriting some of the scenes that I had written earlier and I think I have a better chance of seeing this book through to completion.

At the same time that I was reworking my book, I was making notes on some universal elements of story writing, at least my story writing, mostly with regard to the internal elements as related to the external. And the end result is that I really want to write a book on writing, or at least on my take with writing. Of course having never been published, I don't exactly posses the qualifications to write such a book, but I'm thinking of writing it anyway and then when it's finished, putting it on here in pieces. What do you think?

In addition, (see how many good things can come from taking a step back and planning instead of just foraging ahead?) I think I can use the notes I made yesterday to rework my old novel "Runaway Train" which I sort of gave up on after I realized the story has absolutely no backbone. But I think I can use my new method, which I am hereby dubbing "The Anna Method" to fill in the blanks in my story.

In a less writing related topic, it looks like I'm going to get into school this summer to begin my prerequisites for nursing school (assuming that I don't get an agent, find a publisher and get a million dollar advance between now and then) so I have exactly 33 days more of leisurely unemployment. I'm still hoping to finish North to the Klondike and maybe have a reworked outline for Runaway Train by then.

I also sent off my first snail mail queries today. Up until now, I've just been querying via email to the agents that accept email queries, but 94 queries later and I'm beginning to run out. So I mailed off four queries today to agents that do not accept email queries. I was at the post office sending them and the man behind the counter looked at what I was mailing and said, "What, are you an actress?" I'll admit, it felt good to say, "No, I'm a writer." But at the same time, I wanted to point at the addresses and say "LITERARY AGENT. Not TALENT AGENT." But oh well. I sent out nine more email queries last night and still no replies at all today. So far I've had responses from about 25% of my total queries so I still have a ways to go. Of course for many agents, no response just means no, so I might never hear from some of them.

Beginning the Editing Process

So first off, I apoligize for the delay in posting.  I have been quite busy lately with work and various Christmas activities.

I really began to get into the editing process for Runaway Train tonight.  I wanted to start last week but I didn't really know where to begin so I went to Barnes and Noble and flipped through a few books on editing to get a feel for what I needed to work on, and then kind of played around with a few different things to get a feel for what I liked.  One book said that writing initially is about the plot, about what is actually happening in the story, and editing is about the subtext, about bringing out the unspoken ideas that are the undercurrent of the novel.  So I've been delving into my character's motivations, what they really want and how what one of them wants, colides with what the other wants.  It's been a little bit difficult for me since it is a post-apocalyptic novel so for all practical purposes, there are only two characters and no real antagonist.  But I've come to realize that each of the characters is the antagonist for the other, since they both ultimatly want the same thing, but the way one of them gets there clashes with the way the other one does.

So after trying a few things to figure out where I need to add to my story, I finally wrote out a sort of outline for the subplot of my novel, which is a romance story, about the path that each character takes to figure out that he or she is in love.  In a nutshell, the female main character, Katy Jo, has to find herself before she can fall in love with Joshua, the male main character.  She has to find out what she wants in a man, and adjust her ideas of what a perfect man really is.  Joshua, on the other hand, knows he is in love with Katy Jo almost right off the bat but the more he tries to become the man she wants, the farther he gets from being himself.

So now that I've mapped out the subplot, I'm going to integrate that into my originally outline and figure out which main plot scenes can support subplot themes as well.  Once that is done, I'll go back through my novel and rewrite/add scenes as necessary to incorporate all of the different areas.  Hopefully that will all be done by the end of January although I'm starting to think that might have been a bit ambitious.  But we'll see.

Also, thank you all for reading my Christmas story.  The first few copies went out to my family today, so we'll see how they like it.

Finishing up one project, and starting on another

Well I finished my last read-through of "Christmas at the Holiday Inn" to find the last minute little mistakes this morning.  Then I went over to Kinkos and got it printed up and put it into covers for my family for Christmas.  I'll be posting it here probably on Wednesday.  I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out, considering I had my first idea for it less than two weeks ago.

Now that that is finished, I start the somewhat daunting task of editing "Runaway Train."  The first problem is that the novel is only 40,000 words right now and I'd like it to end up at more like 60,000 words.  There's a lot I CAN add, but I'm interested in finding the best places to add some words.  I need to work on figuring out what the theme is and structure the book towards that end.  I know what the story is, but right now there are several underlying themes and I want to narrow that down to one main theme and work towards that with the book.  The start is a little slow so I want to fix that and get into the meat of the story right away.  Back story can be worked in later.  And of course there is spelling and grammar and punctuation to fix as well. 

I'm hoping to get it sent out to beta readers by the end of January so I've got my work cut out for me.  And, again, let me know if you'd like to be a beta reader for me.

NaNo and other writing projects update!

So I'd been getting a bit discouraged lately by my novel, not because it's bad, because I don't think it's that bad, not because my word count is low, which it isn't, but because I'm not sure I have enough story left.  Although 50,000 words is the requirement for NaNoWriMo, it is a bit low for an acutal novel, and I was hoping that I would have enough story to fill out 80,000 or more words.  As it stands, I think this book will end up around 60,000.  So I was a little disappointed that I wasn't going to be able to write a book of the length that I wanted, but I was doing some research online today and it looks like mystery novels, which mine could be considered, usually fall more in the range of 60,000 to 80,000, which is much more attainable to me at this point.  So I feel a little better, and I also know that there are parts of my novel which could be fleshed out a bit, although I hate doing that.  I prefer the action to the detail and tend to jump from action to action in my writing.  Mostly because that is the way I like to read; I hate reading boring filler scenes.  If something exciting isn't happening, I usually get bored.

So right now I am at 35,195 words, with plans to add a few thousand more before the day is over.  My characters escaped from jail and are now trying to figure out the next step in their plans.  I still have almost half the month left, so at the rate I'm going, I'll be done in time to spend the rest of the month outlining my next book, which I think will be a sequal to Runaway Train, which I need to finish editing and begin submitting to agents.

So my current projects or soon-to-be projects are:

1. Runaway Train.  Possibly young adult survival adventure romance which stands at 40,277 words and needs some more editing and adding before it is ready to submit to agents.

2. Finding Innisburg.  Currently at 35,195 words, needs to be finished, edited and submitted to agents.                                                                                                                                                                       
 3. As yet unnamed short story.  Probably will be an Old West rendition of Much Ado about Nothing, with no comic spoofiness to it and delving deeply into the characters of the original Shakespeare.

4. As yet unnamed sequals to Runaway Train.  Before I started, I planned a whole trilogy so I have rough outlines for two more books.

5. Unnamed screenplay.  Probably about a girl who embezzles a bunch of money from her work with no forethought and runs away to Guatemala just because she felt impulsive.  Will be writing that for Script Frenzy in April.

So that's what I'll be working on for probably another year or so.  Hows your life?

Short Stories

So when I was a kid I always always wanted to be a writer. I loved writing short stories and hated writing anything longer than that. From before I could even write, I would dictate stories to my mom (usually about a girl named Rose who incidentally had the exact same things happen to her as happened to me, only with way cooler outcomes. Like instead of simply stubbing her toe falling off the swing, she would break her arm. Etc.) Then when I was about nineteen I suddenly had an urge to write a real novel, "The Great American Novel" in fact, so I sat down with my laptop and no outline whatsoever and wrote the first few chapters of what would later become Runaway Train. (Sort of. My computer crashed and I lost those first few chapters and then later started over and rewrote them with a few details changed). Then I discovered NaNo and wrote my first NaNo novel in 2008 which was pretty much a load of crap with a horribly Mary Sue main character and no conflict whatsoever. Then I rewrote Runaway Train as I mentioned above in June of this year and now I'm going into NaNo prepared for a third novel.

So all in all, it's been several years since I've written anything other than journal and blog entries, novels, and an occasional poem. I used to really enjoy short stories because they can be so intense, so real. Also, one technique I used to use all the time when I was a kid, which I would still love to really pull off successfully, is to write a short story with no names. Only a couple of characters, maybe as few as two, and not name any of them. I did it a couple of times as a teenager with varying degrees of success.

So anyway, I've had a couple of novel ideas that would probably either need to be a short story, or would need some serious subplots to really pull off as a novel, so I was thinking about trying my hand at some short stories after NaNo. By that point, I'll have two hopefully halfway decent novels, which I will be revising, editing and hopefully querying some agents about, so getting some short stories under my belt might be good. Also, I've heard that having some published work is useful when querying agents which I hope to be doing by next summer or so, and I currently have none (well, except for a poem which I published in the Highlights for Children's reader section when I was 12).

So I found a few short story contests with no entry fees that have deadlines in the late winter, early spring, so I think I'm going to write a few short stories after NaNo. Wish me luck!

Biding my time til November...

So I was re-checking out the book that Chris Baty (founder of NaNoWriMo and God to all insane novelists) wrote called "No Plot, No Problem, and I remembered all the pitfalls that over planning can cause in the noveling process. I began to get worried that I had already overplanned for my NaNo novel (I am a very paranoid novelist) and there is still a lot of time left before November. I knew that if I didn't find another project for myself to work on until then, that I would very likely over plan.

So I decided to go back and begin the editing process on the book I wrote in June/July of this year. It's called Runaway Train and it's a sort of post-apocalyptic romance story. I hadn't looked at it at all since I wrote it and so I was a bit nervous to open it up and see if there was anything salvagable among it. The first three pages or so were total BS and I cut them immediatly, and even after that the beginning is going to need a bit of work to keep it from dragging, but over all it was suprisingly well written. I found myself getting pulled into the story almost as if I hadn't written it, and laughing at a few funny things that I had forgotten I had written. It is refreshing to work on a new project, and I'm excited both for Runaway Train and the NaNo novel which is currently called Finding Innisburg. It seems I do have some writing talent after all and I'm stoked to edit Runaway Train and make the whole thing as great as some of it is already.

So that is my project between now and November.

Also, I officially got Halloween night off of work so that I can begin noveling right at midnight. Although there is a good chance I'll have to work in the morning at like 9 or some other unholy hour. Somewhere behind my eyes my brain is contemplating pulling an all-nighter to novel, attempting to pull ahead of the pack by a few thousand right off the bat, but at 22 I'm not as young as I once was, so we'll see.