Contest!!!

So I am having a contest to name my newest novel! The name I choose will simply be a working name  and may not be the ultimate title, but right now all I have is "zombie book" which, as I mentioned in my earlier post, is annoying the beejeesus out of Aaron so I need another name. Without the word zombie in it.

Anyway, this is the premise:

Rachel Oxford is a young FBI agent in the year 2018. She is given an assignment which, if she can solve it before the new director of the FBI is appointed, will result in her getting a coveted promotion. The case involves the director of a Residual Human Research Facility in Washington State, who was killed, apparently by the RH's (residual humans or "zombies" for the layperson who doesn't want to be PC). However, upon closer examination, it appears that a human did the killing, and simply framed the RH. Now this apparently cut and dry case is much bigger and Rachel must sort through eight possible suspects, and face her own violent childhood, to get to the bottom of this murder.

Please place comments with your suggestions. I will be making the final decision one week from today (the 7th of June) and the winner will get many accolades from me as well as a special blog post announcing the winning name. BRAINSTORM AWAY!!!!!

Character Surveys or questionnaires

So many writers do "character surveys" of their main characters to get to know them better and really make them come to live. These surveys for those of you who are not familiar, ask a variety of question such as "What is their favorite color?" or "Do they have a birth mark?" or "What do they consider their greatest weakness to be?"

I have always hated these. I have tried to do them on a number of occasions, but I hated the experience and I never felt like knowing my character's favorite color really made them come to life. Some of the questions I could answer based on what I have planned out of my plot, for example, if my character just wants to make a lot of money so she won't turn out like her white trash mother who she is embarrassed by, then a question like "What is their greatest fear?" could make sense. I could answer that based on relevant information from the book. Someone who simply read my book could figure out that answer.

But the majority of the questions are completely irrelevant to the story I am writing and what my character had for breakfast doesn't seem to "round them out" at all. I am simply making up something, probably the first cereal that comes to mind, since what they had for breakfast simply doesn't tell me much about their character, at least for most people it doesn't. Of course, if someone has a butler preparing him eggs Benedict at six AM then that is relevant, but for your Average Joe, it is probably more indicative of what was in the cupboard or fridge when they got hungry.

HOWEVER, I am going to qualify this by saying that I have never been great at character development. Plots have always been my strong point and I take a plot and run with it. My characters go through harrowing adventures but their actual character seems a little soft or flat. Maybe this is because I am totally an introvert, and would spend my life in a cabin in the mountains by myself if I could. But whatever the reason, I am well aware that this is something I need to improve on in my writing. Twice now I have gotten rejections from agents regarding Finding Innisburg that said "Your premise is intriguing, but I didn't connect with the narrative as strongly as I had hoped." In my interpretation, this is agent-speak for "You have a good plot idea but your characters kind of suck."

So as I go into my yet-unnamed "zombie" novel (I put "zombie" in quotes because Aaron has informed me that I do not understand the concept of zombies, having not watched enough zombie movies, and thus my zombies are not TRUE zombies and I will piss off zombie lovers such as himself if I call them this. However, for lack of a better term, they shall remain "zombies" until further notice.), I want to develop my characters better and thus I have issued myself a challenge:

COMPLETE A FULL CHARACTER SURVEY FOR EACH OF MY EIGHT SUSPECTS AND MY MAIN PROTAGONIST

This will be like pulling teeth for me, but many, many writers who are much more experienced than I am swear by this method and I cannot discredit it without giving it a real, fair try. So I will answer every question no matter how unrelated to the story it is, and see if I "get to know" my characters any more. Wish me luck. I'll need it.

Also, I am interested in knowing if you writers out there use these, and if so, how effective they are for you. FEEDBACK TIME! :-)

Collecting things

I cannot for the life of me find the article now, but a few days back I was puttering around online and I found an article which was a step by step process of writing a novel. The writer of the article said that the first step was collecting ideas. She (I'm pretty sure it was a woman!) said that many writers were collectors as kids, never throwing things away and always wondering when something that they had might come in handy. She said that as adults, this translated into collecting ideas and inspiration for out books.

This really struck me as a brilliant thought. I was absolutely a collector as a kid and in some ways I still am. Much to the chagrin of my mother, I never wanted to throw anything away, be it a scrap of paper I scribbled in in second grade, or a little bolt that I might need some day. I have improved on that, but I still collect ideas, just as she said.

I have a space in the coffee table in our living room where I am constantly stashing things, mostly papers, that I don't want to throw away. Well, Aaron finally got fed up with it and made me clean it out and organize it yesterday. As I sorted through all sorts of stuff (which by the way were in layers like an archaeological dig, it was kind of cool...like a slice of my life over the past few months) I came across dozens of little scraps of paper, receipts, pieces torn off of larger paper pieces, note cards, anything that you can write on. These had ideas for future stories, quotes that caught my eye, thoughts about my current story, phrases of speech that I found especially exquisite. I always just jot them down on whatever is handy, during movies, while at work (I have probably hundreds written on Blockbuster receipt paper while I worked there). Anyway, the experience reminded me of the article about collecting and showed me that, yes, I am absolutely still a collector. Just a collector of thoughts and experiences.

I would like to end with a couple of quotes about writing that have been an inspiration to me since I was a young girl. I saw both of these quotes in book about writing and had them written in Sharpie on the inside of my "writing notebook" which I kept while I was in middle school and early high school before I had a computer.

"Inspiration only knocks. Some writers expect it to knock down the door and drag them out of bed."

This second one I'm not sure if I have the details write so you can correct me if I'm wrong:

"No experience, good or bad, is lost on a writer who can put it to use." That one especially has gotten me through some hard times in my life as it is very true. A writer who experiences only pleasant experiences will not be able to write as effectively about the difficult ones.

Shiny New Idea

I don't know who said it first, but it's the idea that while you're working on one book, suddenly you get a "shiny new idea" for another one and it consumes your mind while you try to put it off. Well, I'm 22,000 words into North to the Klondike and it just happened last night.

A couple of days ago I had kind of a thought and I jotted down the words "sci-fi mystery" in my idea book. I've never written a sci-fi book before and I love a good mystery story so I thought they could be combined effectively. And then last night, just as I was on the brink of sleep, it hit me. A zombie murder mystery. But these are not your regular, run of the mill zombies. In fact, they don't like being called zombie because of all the negative conotations that the word has. They prefer "residual humans," or RH's for short. After the great virus outbreak in 2048, the RH's were quarantined in Residual Human Relocation Enclosures around the United States where they are put to work during their short, one year second life spans.

But after a scientist studying the RH's is murdered, it is up to FBI agent Rachel Whiteford to come to the Residual Human Relocation Enclosure in southeast Washington State to find out what is going on.

So now I'm doing a little research on the science of zombies just to quench my thirst for a little while and then I'll get back to work on North to the Klondike. What do you think of the idea? Would you read the book?

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.

Partial and update on new novel

So I have been getting a little discouraged lately since I've been sending out 3 to 5 queries a day and have had nothing but rejections for a couple of weeks. But today I got another request for a partial. So now I have partials out with two agents.

I did get one personalized rejection today too which is both good and bad. He said that he thought the book was too short. I know that it's short but a lot of thrillers are kind of short or at least I thought so (It's currently at 51,000 words) so I don't know. But no one else has mentioned it so maybe it'll be ok.

North to the Klondike is having problems. I'm on 15,000 words into it and just not motivated to work on it. Also I'm almost halfway through the story already which is a big issue. I'm not good at adding things into books later so I'm not sure what to do. I'm going to try reoutlining with index cards before I get any further to make sure I'm not missing some scenes that should be added in.

Just some random stuff...

Aaron and I got a couch. From IKEA. Prior to this, we just had a big oversized arm chair and an office chair. We never got to sit next to each other so finally we caved and bought a cheap couch. It's not the most comfortable thing in the world but it works and it's not bad.

My book is coming along ok. I'm at about 13,000 words I think but I'm slowly plugging along. My main worry is that I'm going to finish the story way too soon. I need to hit at least 50,000 words.

I sent out a bunch more queries for Finding Innisburg yesterday and today and promptly got a bunch more rejection letters. Still haven't heard back from the agent that has my patial yet so I guess that's good. There is hope yet.