The day I posted about my UberCrucialRevelation(s) was the day I got back to working on the rough draft of Winter's World in earnest. As the hours ticked by, I watched the wordcount on my WIP tick over the 7,000 mark. Then 8,000. Then 9,000. (!!) I ended up writing approximately 2,500 words that day! Could you see me flying, high in the clouds, with Peter and Wendy and the Lost Boys at my side?

Yesterday was a return to the DayJob and I think I was even a little grateful for this forced respite from writing. My brain felt bruised from all the thinking involved the previous day. And so I wrote again, later, and nudged myself over the 10,000 word mark. *executes floppy cartwheel*

The thing is, I can't stand some of what I wrote yesterday, which felt like a shame after writing some terribly tense scenes the day before, scenes that will have to go under the scalpel for fine-tuning at a later date but are currently some of my favourites. Did I doubt myself? Yes. Was that silly? Probably.

Did I later ponder what I didn't like about the scene and realize that it was totally fixable once it was time for the second draft?

Yes!

There are so many hurdles involved in a rough draft, let alone taking a book through all the necessary stages, and it's so bloody easy to psyche yourself out. Maybe not at the first hurdle, or even the second, but when you feel the third one tremble as you clamber over it, doubt swims to the surface of your taxed mind.

Story time.

I was such a clutz in middle school that, when I found out we were going to try hurdles as part of our track-and-field unit in P.E., I panicked, ESPECIALLY once they were set up on the grass. How could they possibly expect us to get over all of those without stopping at each one to assess the height, gauge the approach, yada yada? I mean, I was tall, with relatively long legs, but graceful? Nuh-uh.

Those hurdles? I made it through without knocking a single one (or myself) down. A couple of them quivered but THEY ALL STAYED UP, and I got to the end and felt so satisfied that I hadn't psyched myself out of giving it my best go. If I had spent the whole run just waiting for one to fall down, there probably would have been dominoes. I'm just sayin' ...

Anyway, when you're working on that first draft, there will be hurdles, and sometimes (in my case, most of the time) you have to psyche yourself UP, not OUT, and go for it! You will make it through and you will type 'The End' and you will take a deep breath and you will put it away and wait for the next trial, when the hurdles will be a little higher, a little steeper, the course a little more intricate.

That, for me, is writing, and I'm damn well going to conquer those hurdles! Who's with me?

Okay, so - this book I've been writing? The murder mystery set in an alternate version of Victorian London? The one that has gone through countless reincarnations over the past, oh, six years? (I'm not kidding. It's coming up on seven.) The one that I keep stoppingstartingstoppingstarting?

The main bugbear that's been holding me back for the last few months - ever since I decided to change the setting to Victorian London - was needing to figure out the past-and-present politics.

The $%*@#&! bugbear that's been holding me back for the last few years has been the details of the night of the murder(s). Who did what and why? I've mostly known the who but rarely been able to settle on the motivations. Cold feet? Nah. The fact that there is murder involved and I need to have the motivations solid before I can comfortably go ahead with this story? Um, yeah!

Over the past 48 hours-before-12:08-last-night, thanks to a groundbreaking suggestion from the MumPilot and my stubborn refusal to leave my desk (except to go to Starbucks and work there) until things had been sorted through (okay, and thanks to a few Digimon cards), I FIGURED IT OUT! I figured it ALL out!!!

*flops on desk, mentally exhausted*

More details later, if anyone's interested: right now, I need to write!! And make coffee! And, yanno, eat.

Yesterday was delightfully productive in terms of writing output, especially when I stopped stressing over the scene I was trying to write and skipped to the end of said scene, leaving enough stubs to work with in the next draft while not leaving so many that I felt like the scene was more threads than fabric. I talked to the MumPilot about the scene last night and I think she hit on exactly the problem: this scene was so intense, with so many emotions and feelings, physical and emotional, swirling around my MC that I, too, got caught up in it, to the point where my head was nearly as crowded as Gina's! Not good. So, as aforementioned, I wrote the end of the scene instead and, before I knew it (and I mean that literally - I typed the end of a sentence and went to write more and then realized ... duhn duhn duhn ...), I was at the end of the chapter! Chapter two done - yays! I wrote nearly 1,200 words (!!). And I broke the 5,000 word milestone (!!!!!).

Today, I rewarded myself by getting lost in the sweet romance and poetry of The Juliet Club (Suzanne Harper) and crying happy, sad, and bittersweet tears over the second issue of the Archie-marries-Veronica saga.

I now feel refreshed and recharged and ready to tackle the next chapter, which first means setting down on paper (aka a legal pad) some backstory-intertwined-with-present-story juiciness, involving disgruntled politicians and nobles, a torn king, and a princess with mysterious motivations. I'll let you know how it goes. In the meantime, how is your WIP doing? What do you need to do to propel yourself on to the next chapter/scene/moment?

I had hoped to get a schwack of writing done yesterday but I was totally wiped out, and when I did sit down to get some words down on the page, I remembered a MAJOR research-plot snarl that had to be worked out ASAP. In working out this alternate history, you see, I had pinpointed the spot where English history diverges, but I had failed to work out the spot where Scotland's history diverges as well, in spite of the fact that it plays a big role in the backstory and also in the present!! The more I researched last night, the more frustrated I got - I couldn't find a place where I could reasonably make history diverge without spending weeks establishing the "real" history first in my mind and then further weeks coming up with the alternate history.

Finally, I decided to see if I would fare any better with Ireland, and after a bit of searching came up with a rather fortuitous spot that's at the EXACT same point (coincidence? fate?) where my AU-England history splits off. I'm not 100 percent sure yet that it will work, but I think it will, and now I can stop pulling a Dobby and banging my head on my desk and get back to work, which brings me to one more point: prioritising.

Karen Mahoney's recent post about putting writing first was eyeopening for me, one of those cases where I've heard the content before but never in a way that clicks quite as well, that thrills me to bits and inspires me to say, "Yes, YES! That's what I'll do." Not only am I bumping writing up the priority list (I'll go into more details later, for those who are interested in other people's writing processes) but I'm getting more organized in other areas of my life as well, and I think they will feed each other (but mainly, I think, the organization will fuel the writing).

Have you read Karen's post? Well, what are you waiting for? :-)

ETA: Whoops - forgot to say that I broke the 4,000 word mark last night ... with 300 words' worth of stubs! i.e. A says something snotty to C; G snaps at A to cut it out; BLAH BLAH BLAH; they arrive at Stonehenge. Writing out a scene this way within the draft itself has helped me before when I feel stalled, because I then go on to take each stub individually and flesh it out into prose. (And if I'm really stuck, I just leave the stub and move onto the next one. I can tackle it in the next draft!) Anyways, that's my writing goal for today - flesh out those stubby-bits!

Yup, two posts in one day. I guess I was just in the moooooooood ... (if you've seen the British sitcom As Time Goes By and remember the chattering secretary Mrs. Flack, you can picture the tone I used there!).

I wanted to link to this wonderful post of Darcy Pattison's, about tips for teen writers:

http://www.darcypattison.com/writing-life/teens/

If you know any young kids or teenagers who enjoy writing, definitely point them in the direction of that post, or print it out and pass it on to them, because it's awesome and practical, too. A couple of things that occurred to me as reminders I would have appreciated as a fledging writer:

Ask questions! If someone uses a word that you think you know but aren't really sure, ask them why they used that word and what it means in the context. If someone shows up wearing a knitted scarf or crocheted gloves, ask if they made them or where they come from and what they're made of. If someone just came back from working at an orphanage for six months in Thailand, find out if they still keep in touch with the kids. You never know what could add just the right colour to your story.

Have fun! Writing is often hard work, especially when it's done for publication purposes, but never let yourself forget that it can also be fun. Do word finds, write a wacky haiku, doodle on the page with coloured pencils. There is so much joy in writing and we don't always remember that.

I myself am slowly, slowly inching forward on Winter's World. There are still some issues with the research I need to work out before I get too far on this rough draft (mainly the British parliament system, past and present, and how I'll adapt it for the AU-England in my story), but there's still another chapter or so to write before it matters, so I'm encouraging myself to keep going and to stop worrying about the atomospheric details - those can come later! Right now, I'm making sure the basic content is there and MOVING ON. And I remind myself to have fun with this draft - maybe those quips in the narrative, those jokes in the dialogue aren't actually going to be that funny three or four drafts down the road, but right now, in this instant, they're totally worthy of making me laugh and snort and Move. On.

What makes writing fun for you?

The plot bunnies settled down after their crazed antics a few days ago. I'm getting itchy to move on to the actual drafting process, but there's a mass of bunnies/scenes near the beginning that still need to translate onto index cards before I can get going, and a thread or two I still want to weave in.

[Much of the climax and ending is still unplanned as well, but I think that, as long as I have the right stepping stones in place leading up to it, I can let it unfold organically once I get there and with the knowledge of what I've discovered during the drafting process, something I'm sure to do.]

Those beginning-bunnies have been kind of sleepy, but today they started to have energetic spurts between bouts of get-me-my-snoozy-pillow moments. I'm hoping to get the majority of this sorted out tonight! Yays!

I know some writers use the term 'plot bunny' to refer to an idea for a whole story, but I also use them to refer to ideas for scenes within a story. I've been trying this weekend to corral my plot bunnies into some semblance of a plot for Winter's World, and, while some settled cozily onto index cards, others have been, well, sleepy. Or hiding under rocks/vegetation/whathaveyou.

Um, until tonight. I had read a total of four pages of a Victorian mystery novel when the previously-comatose plot bunnies in my head started to act like this:


Wish me luck!

A lesson in how two characters will take different approaches in the same situation:

'A' asks for help figuring out a restaurant's dress code.
'B' spends fifteen minutes looking at reviews online.
'C' spends fifteen seconds calling the restaurant.
'B' and 'C' come to the same conclusion (business casual, shorts, jeans, anything goes).

Did this just happen in reality? Um, maybe ...

I just finished reading Sarah Dessen's latest novel, Along for the Ride, and I think it's definitely my favourite next to The Truth About Forever. As I was reading it, there were a couple of things mentioned that struck me as a writer as well as a human being:

"Failing sucks. But it's better than the alternative."
"Which is?"
"Not even trying."

- exchange between Eli and Auden

Maybe the truth was, it shouldn't be easy to be amazing. Then everything would be. It's the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth.

- Auden's narrative

Those things should be obvious but they aren't always, at least not to me. And now that I'm all inspired again, I'm going to spend some time with my legal pad and index cards, figuring out the plot of Winter's World. I'm determined to have it done by the end of the weekend! (With periodic breaks to, yanno, get some sunshine and watch Robin Hood and Doctor Who)

What are your weekend plans?

I don't think it hit me exactly how drastic this rewrite of Winter's World would be until I:

a) printed out the last draft I have
and b) looked at the revision checklist I made months ago

I'm about a third of the way through reading that old draft and (besides cringing at introduced threads I know I dropped or didn't follow through properly) I kept thinking, Won't use that ... no, that's not applicable ... hah! Not in a million years is THAT part going in. I did know and had already decided that this draft would need to be a complete, from-scratch rewrite, but this is like looking through a different window on the wreckage.

Rather than feeling overwhelmed, though, I felt inspired. The plot holes and character inconsistencies that I saw in that draft and noted on the revision checklist are either being worked out, snarl by snarl, on my legal pad/in my notebook/in Microsoft OneNote, or just don't matter anymore. Changing the setting from pseudo-medieval to nineteenth century England means that most of the epic questy stuff is kaput. This also means that one of the biggest and (so I thought) most exciting parts of the old draft has ceased to be, just the first of many slashes! However, I get a perverse kind of joy out of cutting plotlines/characters/etc. when needed, so all's good there.

I did have a few minutes of panic yesterday when all the snarls were ganging up on me, and I wondered if I'd made a mistake and if this book really is meant to be in a drawer, but almost as soon as I wondered that, I knew the answer was no.

Sometimes I attack the snarls with a finetoothed comb. Sometimes I work them gently with a brush. And slowly, slowly, they're loosening.

This NaNoResFo I've embarked on has a dual purpose:

a) research the era
b) comb through the plot-and-world-building snarls

I'm feeling much more confident about (a), or at least I'm getting to the point where I feel like I'd be comfortable starting to actually write and do research as I go, but (b) is still rather tricky. The biggest snarl I've been gnawing at [eww!] is how exactly the MCs' elemental power works, which I really need to know to be able to figure out how they can learn to utilize it. The characters, obviously, won't and can't know everything I need to know, but I still have to figure it out.

My main character has an affinity with fire, so I finally decided that maybe I should go right to the source: physics. I found a couple of basic explanations of heat and temperature at Encarta and this page, and decided to delve more into the concept of kinetic energy.

Well, yanno, once I get that far, I have to run the whole gamut. I've spent the last hour or so watching videos on YouTube from an old science show called Eureka! [this one on kinetic energy is my fave so far] and they ROCK! My mind is buzzing with pieces of the puzzle wanting to click into place, but it's one of those cases where my mind will blow up if I try and type as fast as I'm thinking, so I'm going to sit down with a legal pad and piece together what I know so far.

During the course of this NaNoResFo, I also get to figure out more superficial-but-fun things, like what kind of car Gina has (I settled on this one). This might be superfluous to some people but, for someone who really needs visuals to encourage her to be visual in a story, it was a definite accomplishment!

Final note, and then I'll pick up that legal pad, I swear! The actress in the icon for this post (Eve Myles, better known as Gwen Cooper to those who watch Torchwood - which I have yet to - and Gwyneth in one memorable episode in the first season of Doctor Who - which I adore) is my current casting choice for Gina, the MC. I think she'll be sticking around for a while ...

As per an excellent suggestion by 2skippingstones, today marks the beginning of my own personal NaNoResMo (National Novel Research Month). I'm going to slice it in half, though, and make it two weeks. No fancy name for that, so I'll just refer to it as NaNoResMo. ^_^

The idea of NaNoResMo is to spend a relatively short period of time doing concentrated bouts of research for a project - in this case, a historical fantasy set in an alternate version of nineteenth century England. I've already watched various period films, so this time will be spent more with reference books and novels, books like The Last Days of Newgate [mysteries are apparently brilliant for absorbing atmospheric details] and The Jane Austen Handbook.

As of right now, this NaNoResMo is set to finish on September 4th. If anyone is interested in doing something similar, I'd love to hear how it goes!

ETA: NaNoResMo has been rechristened NaNoResFo (fortnight! how cool is that?)

Further to yesterday's post, it's time for me to spill the beans about this writing project I'm working on. I've written a few private posts about it that I'm now unlocking, and here they are in order:

http://britlitfantwin.livejournal.com/97164.html
http://britlitfantwin.livejournal.com/97367.html
http://britlitfantwin.livejournal.com/97683.html
http://britlitfantwin.livejournal.com/98209.html
http://britlitfantwin.livejournal.com/98557.html
http://britlitfantwin.livejournal.com/98633.html

I know you guys are busy, and so here's the Cliffsnotes version, just in case you're super-strapped for time today:

I've circled back to Good Night, Odile, which is now called Winter's World. The setting is shifting from pseudo-medieval to pseudo-Victorian-mixed-with-Georgian-and-Regency England. The murder mystery is taking centre stage.

Yes, I have worked on this project before, and it has gone through numerous rewrites, but something I was reading in Writing Mysteries illustrated an interesting point, in an essay by Robert Campbell. He says, "There's danger ... of making changes not because they are better but merely because they are different and I have developed a craving for something green." The changes I've made over time have been different, but the core story and, perhaps more importantly, the core of each character has remained constant, and those changes have also made the story better, closer every time to being the story I really want to write, a story I can be proud of. Every slice, dice, and toss sharpens the focus.

Okay. Time to stop waxing philosphical. Let's just say I'm totally psyched, and delighted to be sharing with you guys again!

I haven't posted about much of anything lately, let alone writing. Partly it's because I haven't given you guys nearly enough credit. I worried that if I posted how my writing process was going, it would seem like I was treating it like a hobby. To the outside eye, I am, and everything I could say I'm filling my time with would sound like an excuse.

The fact is, I make no apologies for how I'm going about my writing right now. At the rate I'm going, I'll finish a book, oh, in a decade or so. But I am learning, and I am improving, and one of my goals for the next year or so is to reaffirm my dedication to writing and find a routine that works for me (I'm loving Becky Levine's!).

I want to talk about writing with you guys again. I want to brainstorm with you and share my ups and downs. For a while, it may seem like a meandering path, but it's a path, and I really hope you'll join me as I resume taking baby steps along the cobblestones.

Next post? Why there are books on my desk like Victorian London (Liza Picard), Writing Mysteries (edited by Sue Grafton), and The Jane Austen Handbook (Margaret C. Sullivan).

I watched Becoming Jane last night for research (and now I really want to watch it all the way through without stopping every three minutes to note something down! I adored that film) and ended up with two and a half pages of notes. I didn't write down things about clothing, because that's something I can easily figure out elsewhere, but things like certain attitudes of the time that were presented through dialogue ("Affection is desirable, money is absolutely indispensable"), how men and women interacted with each other in everyday situations, speech patterns ("Oblige me a walk along the river"), and so on. It felt very satisfying. Four more movies to go over the next five days!

As well as doing period research, I definitely need to spend some time over the next few days figuring out the plot. I think what I'll do is sketch out the major (and some minor) events, start to finish, without worrying about where they take place. Then I'll brainstorm potential settings and figure out from there which settings fit most organically with the plot itself. There will likely be some tweaking involved, and various minor scenes added so things make sense, but this feels like a more logical way to do things, and a less overwhelming way.

The final thing I noted down for myself to do (for now, anyways) is to write down a quick story arc for each character that figures into the story, ten in all. Only a few of those are major characters, but they're all important, and it will help me as I'm writing scenes to know what's going on in their heads, so that things will unfold more realistically. Something I may try, too, is more pointed questions. For example, what does Character E really think about Characters A, B, C, and D returning after being away for so long? What does Character F think about Character E?

Knock on wood, but this might actually be coming together.

I had no idea that figuring out which movies to watch for period-research would be so time-consuming. Ah, well. Better to spend a couple of hours narrowing it down now, right, rather than spend 10 or 20 extra hours watching largely inaccurate TV series and movies?

Yeah. That's what I'm telling myself.

Anyways, here's the process I went through, in case you're thinking of doing something similar for research:

1. Google "PERIOD movies", replacing the word 'period' with whatever era it is you're looking for. I started with Regency, because I plan to mix and match Regency and Victorian attitudes and customs (and clothes!) where it makes sense in my alternate version of 19th century London. This page was very useful to start me off:

Eras of Elegance: Regency Movies

2. Copy the list into a notepad/wordperfect/word document.

3. Start picking your way through each one, using the summaries and reviews at IMDB to figure out:

• the location it takes place in [I ruled out the various versions of War and Peace right off the bat, because they're set in Russia]
  
• the historical accuracy of the sets, the clothing, and the attitudes [although I adore the Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen version of Pride and Prejudice, I'm sticking to the Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth version for the sake of accuracy]
  
• the quality of the acting [if you're going to spend five, six, seven hours watching something, you're better off watching something you'll actually enjoy!]

That should weed out the majority of the choices. I find that, if you look through enough reviews, you'll find someone who comments on the historical accuracy or lack thereof.

I've just finished cross-checking my final list with the website for my favourite video store. As luck would have it, they have two thirds of my list in their catalogue! Woo hoo! And I happen to know that they have a 7 movies for 7 days deal that I've never had a reason to take advantage of. I may just start that NaNoReMo sooner than I anticipated ...

I'm playing around with the new opening scene of Winter's World and am discovering just how metaphorical ballet can be. Not just as far as the story of the ballet goes, but the dancing of it. I'm having a deliciously fine time recording (I was going to say "orchestrating", but that's not right) a verbal sparring match between Gina, her pas de deux partner, and various unimpressed high school students.

I haven't talked for a long time about Good Night, Odile on my blog. I haven't talked about it much at all. I laid it aside and pondered leaving it there for good. Recently, however, I realized that not only did I want to take a closer look at the character motivations and plot line, but the setting, too. The new version - and, I hope, the right version - takes place in an alternate version of Victorian England. It's been done before, true, but I'm fond of it, and I think there's still room for it. Besides, not everything will be as it was then. I did say an alternate version, after all.

I've already found some research gems:

• Victorian London (Liza Picard)
  
• What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew (Daniel Pool)
  
• NineteenTeen

Also, I've come up with a new title (Winter's World - a virtual brownie to whoever guesses the literary reference! it's not a direct quote) and a new way to begin the novel. The prologue I had before was, well, a typical prologue. The information in it was cool but not all needed. Some of it can be threaded in elsewhere. The rest can be in a deleted scene. *thinking optimistically* It also didn't set the right tone for the rest of the novel. I think I've found the right way to draw the reader into Gina's mind, as well as establish a connection between our world and a yet-to-be-discovered parallel world, and foreshadow future story events in a way that I'm totally psyched about. Let's just say I have some Youtube videos to watch, DeviantArt to browse, and library books to peruse.

I'm not ready to begin the rewrite, yet, because I need to immerse myself for a while in some period research, plot development, and character searching, but I get more excited about this with every passing minute. I think I'm going to take 2skippingstones's suggestion to do a form of research-NaNoWriMo (NaNoReMo?), very soon indeed.

(Also, because of the way I'm playing with the timeline and the way things developed - fashion and otherwise - this gives me an excuse to watch Regency-period movies! Jane Austen, here I come ...)

I realised yesterday that, sometimes, the days where you eke out 500 or 1000 words (adjust to whatever is your average output) are infinitely more satisfying than the once-in-a-while-days where you write two or three thousand words that just fly off your fingertips. I think it's kind of liking eating a chocolate chip cookie warm from the oven that you've just baked, rather than grabbed off the shelf of the grocery store. The grocery store cookies can be delicious, yes, but the work that goes into those homemade ones makes them just delectable!

But I think there's another reason, too. It's because of how rare those many-thousands-of-words days are. As writers, we know we can't and won't have those days all the time. It's just not possible. Days like that are encouraging for me, yes, but they don't make me nearly as sure of my chances of actually finishing a novel as the days when I sit down, work through the plot/character/dialogue/research issues swirling around my head, and get out a reasonable number of words, because I know that that is a process I can repeat on a regular basis and get a similar result.

Those days are my homemade chocolate chip cookie days.

Thank you for your lovely birthday wishes! I had such an awesome time reading them all, and am working my way through and responding to each one -- if I haven't done yours yet, I will soon, I promise! More on how I spent my birthday later but, right now, I wanted to show you the Wordle I created for my WIP:



Click on it and you might just glean a few clues about the plot.

p.s. Have any of you read Atonement? I adored the movie (and I think it got robbed at the Oscars), so Mum bought me the book for my birthday. I'm amazed at what a good writer Ian McEwan is! The way he can describe emotions and states of being so that you feel like you're right there ... wow. Talk about enviable.

Actually, let's start with the bad news: I heard back from the Claremont Review, and I was not a winner in their annual contest. The good news is that all entries are still considered for publication and, if that doesn't pan out, I've started compiling a list of other markets!

Bad news: I couldn't find my first-ever writing cheque.

Good news: I found it in a pile on my floor and deposited it a couple of days ago! I'm still not sure what to spend it on, though.

Bad news: I've been a bad blogger, letting the days drift by without a word.

Good news: I've been a good reviewer! Click here and scroll down to read my thoughts on Yael Naïm's self-titled CD. (Why, yes, that IS Carrie's book being reviewed right above it ... aren't I in good company?)