Tag: Process Notes

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Some Ideas About Ideas

So I’ve been thinking about where ideas come from lately, because I keep seeing this idea floating around that explaining where they come from is somehow secretive and difficult to do. I didn’t get that, the hesitation thing, because I’d always thought the ideas were kind of simple to explain even if no-one was asking me to do so. Then I got interviewed for the first time and realised how hard it is to come up simple, easy answers off the cuff, and there’s petty good odds that if I had been asked the idea question (which, thankfully, I wasn’t) I would have resorted to some kind of “writers hate that question” rhetoric on the basis that it’d stall for time while I thought up a decent answer. So, as an in-case-of-emergency measure, I figured I’d work out an answer before I needed it. And my explanation goes a little like this: Imagine an equilateral triangle. Put “confluence” at one

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Two Things Worth Reading

1) A Hundredth Name, Chris Green (Abyss and Apex; Subscription Required to Access Archives) Click the link, you know you want too. No? Okay, let me convince you then. You should go read Chris Green’s story at Abyss and Apex because the man is freakin’ talented and understands things like brevity and leaving empty spaces for the story to breathe. I’ve critted Chris a bunch of times and it’s a bloody hard thing to do, because he crams more story into two thousand words than there should actually be allowed and he fits the damn things together so tight that pulling one segment out causes the whole damn thing to unravel in your hands. You should read his story because he’s one of the few people I know who manages to give the impression of being genuinely, fearlessly interested in everything and somehow manages to filter that down into his fiction, even though his bailiwick seems to be horror rather than any

Works in Progress

Doin’ Stuff

Yesterday I shaved off the scraggly neck-beard I’ve been sporting since Conjecture, cracked my knuckles, and proceeded to write like a furious writerly-thing until I hit the 30k mark on the Black Candy draft. Then I discovered – joy of joys – that I’d written myself up to the point where the narrative reconnected with the middle of the novella-length draft/outline I’d written last year, allowing me to cut/paste/edit the next 10,000 words without too much difficulty. Net result: ‘Tis a horrid, splotchy, unreadable mess, this draft of mine, but it is halfway done and actually feels halfway done in terms of narrative. Which is something of an evolution for me, because the last time I hit this point in a novel draft I was still trying to figure out exactly where the story was going. Maybe I will get the hang of this novel-writing thing one of these days. Of course, being a horrid over-achiever, I then wandered off

Works in Progress

Claw Update.

Went away after the last post, wrote 898 words, then realised I was done. The net for Draft One is 20,799 word, and there is a part of me that’s still kind of shocked that I’ve written something that long. I don’t do long that often, and I can still remember two years ago when writing the 10k novella for my AHWA Mentorship was a long, drawn-out battle to get words on the page; when I look back and realise that this has all been done in less than a fortnight, it freaks me out. I can safely say without looking at it that this is one of the most god-awful draft I’ve ever written, full of random asides and irrelevant scenes that aren’t going to make any sense to anyone who isn’t me. Which is okay, really, because I’m slowly starting to figure out that this is going to be the process I end up using for novellas (or,

Works in Progress

Claw Update

Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 6315 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period:1,673 Deadline: April 30th Last night made for an awesome burst of writing – finished chapter three, worked out some more things that were bugging me about the first two chapters*, and promptly took the daylight hours of Sunday off in the name of cleaning, playing a few hours of D&D, and preparing to go back to work tomorrow. Fortunately the part of me that’s damn happy about doing a minimum of 2000 words a day for the last four days albeit not all on this project) is making noises about how it’d be nice to keep that going. *to whit: when writing a hard-bitten character, or at least when writing this particular protagonist, having them start off in the dark trying to work out what’s happening is the wrong choice. Having an investigator start with an idea of whats going on, then subverting it in a way

Works in Progress

The Jams? I have kicked them. Yes, finally.

There has been actual progress on the Claw draft over the last twenty-four hours, alongside more mundane acts of not-sucking such as finishing short stories (two!) and doing the washing up. Hell, I even walked over to the local Indian take-away to pick up dinner in the interests of getting some exercise. Claw Draft Projected Total: 25000 Total Words to Date: 2893 Words Done in Prior 24-hour Period: 1,432 (not to shabby, considering this mostly came together around 8 PM last night and I’ve done other stuff today) Deadline: April 30th Reasons to Squee*: Chapter one is done, after a good nine or ten weeks of being unable to figure out who to move from the set-up I wanted to the story I wanted. Plus the fix makes for a logical reason to keep the possessed Russian Blue feline in the narrative for all ten chapters. Reasons to Wail: Still got nine chapters to go, and I seem to have

Works in Progress

The stories, they are not working today

I’m spending a lot of time with old stories this week, and I’ve noticed that towards the end of last year I’d broken out this alarming tendency towards using framing stories. I’m not sure why I did that – as a general rule I’m not a fan – but I think I’d talked myself into believing that they were merely examples of discontinuous or contrasting narrative rather than a frame. I’ve cut the opening and final scenes of the last two stories I’ve opened and felt pretty good about it both times. That said, the bulking up of the story that remains is proving a frustrating thing. This isn’t unexpected – I’m so rusty at the writing thing that I practically creak when I sit down at the keyboard – but it is frustrating and it’s proving difficult to force myself to stay in the chair and keep working. Discipline is an easy thing when you’re in practice, but there’s

Works in Progress

Because this is all my brain is up for today…

The good thing about trying to hit a deadline and being behind: you start to figure out ways to fix stories and ideas that are broken, potentially unsaleable and not on deadline. Yesterday I took an hour away from the books to write up a plan of what I could do to transform all my second-person-present-tense-vaguely-cyberpunk vignettes into a solid-ish mosiac novella. I just spent the last half-hour writing notes about the way to expand and fix the problems on the zombie novella I wrote as part of the AHWA mentorship in 2007. It’s all distraction to draw me away from the work that really needs doing, but at least the notes will be waiting for me once I get the thesis draft down.

Works in Progress

The theory of relativity as it applies to writing

The difference between a good days work and a bad days work can depend entirely on how close you are to meeting a deadline. Or, in other words, 1500 words of thesis draftage today. A month ago this would have been cause for celebration; today it is met with the soul-crushing knowledge  that I haven’t yet done enough to earn myself a few hours sleep 🙂

Works in Progress

On diving well and failing to swim

So Chris Lynch has posted a more-or-less up-to-date bibliography of things achieved by our Clarion South class since the 2007 workshop. He’s put this together, along with some thoughts, because the two of us are scheduled to go have a chat with the current crop of Clarion South participants about what it’s like to finish the workshop and go back to the real world. I have to admit that my first response to Chris’s bibliography was a panicked that can’t be right, but it is. The only thing he’s missed is the 100 word story I had in Brimstone Press’s Black Box e-anthology, although I start to feel a little better when I factor in the three forthcoming stories that don’t appear on Chris’s summary. Even taking into account the kind of low-key achievements that occurred around the publications, it seems like so little for two years of work once it’s listed like that, and its started me thinking about the

Works in Progress

Claw

The problem with writing a thesis is that it’s just no fun to talk about. The novella, on the other hand, creates the kinds of problems that I find interesting . And thus there is nattering on about it on the blog. The nifty thing about getting back to this story is that I’ve had the first scene in my head for a long while now – Miriam Aster holding a gun to a cat’s head, threatening it for information on the sly while the owner is off in the kitchen making some tea. The details around that image have shifted a bit since I first came up with it – originally she’d gone there looking for the cat, forcing her to bluff her way past the owner, but now seeing the cat is a by-product of showing up to talk to someone else. On the whole it’s lots of fun – both because Aster is the kind of character who