Problem: Recognized (I Think)

I know I've said this many, many times (more times than I want to count, really), but I think I've figured out part of my problem with my voice in The Witch of November: I feel like I'm being too verbose.

When I read through the first chapter, I get this, "Get on with it" reaction. Which, clearly, is not the reaction I want. I feel like it's too much exposition and not enough action, even though the exposition is kind of necessary.

Like before with my needless drama issue, I now have to figure out how to provide enough exposition so that my eventual readers will have some clue as to what's going on, but not enough to bog down the whole chapter.

Wish me luck.

Writing Exercise #7

Legit, I wrote this in like, ten minutes. I have absolutely no idea where it came from.

Prompt: motorcycle
Fandom: Law & Order: SVU
Character(s): Olivia Benson, Casey Novak

-----

“You’ve been on the back of a motorcycle?” Olivia Benson asked, raising her eyebrows at Casey Novak.

“I think I’m offended that you look so shocked,” Casey snickered as she poured more wine into her glass. She motioned to top off Olivia’s glass, but the detective shook her head, indicating that she’d had enough for the moment.

“It’s not that I’m shocked--” Casey raised a single eyebrow at the detective, who smiled sheepishly. “All right, it’s that I’m shocked. When were you on the back of a motorcycle?”

“Right when Charlie first started getting sick,” she answered. When Olivia winced, Casey waved a dismissive hand. “No, this is actually a fun memory. Looking back in it, I suppose I should have realized something was going on, but at the time, it just seemed like he was being impulsive.”

“What’d he do?”

“He’d had his eye on a motorcycle for a couple of months, but I’d always managed to talk him out of buying it. One day, he came by my apartment, rang the buzzer, and told me to come outside. When I got downstairs, he was sitting on it; he’d bought it right before he came to see me. He told me to hop on, so I did. I mean, all we did was drive around the block a couple of times, but yes, I have been on the back of a motorcycle. So there.”

Olivia smiled. “Did you like it?”

“Not particularly,” Casey laughed. “It was fun that once, but he drove a little fast for my tastes. Maybe it would have been different if I’d been driving--you know me, always like to be in control--but I didn’t know how. Still don’t, actually.”

“Eh, you’re not missing much.”

Casey’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “You know how to drive a motorcycle?”

Olivia gave the ADA a wide grin, snatched the bottle of wine from Casey’s desk, and topped off her glass. “Why, Counselor, I think I’m offended that you look so shocked.”

Writing Exercise #6

I took a write-break for a couple of weeks, partly due to the holidays and holiday prep but mostly because I just wasn't feeling the writing thing. I'm still not, to be honest, but I know I need to get back into it. Because the weeks will turn into months, and I have too much work still to do to allow the break to stretch into a lull.

So I now present the return of the writing exercises. I started this prompt two other times, in different fandoms, before settling on original characters. And I think this is the first exercise where I didn't use the word itself in the vignette:

Prompt: driven
Fandom: original characters (The Witch of November)
Character(s): Lillian Blackstone

-----

Damn it, it didn’t work. Again.

Lillian Blackstone had no idea why the ritual wasn’t working. Lillian knew it worked all the time for Millie. She’d been there right in Millie’s parlor when the other woman performed the ritual and talked to her Caleb. After learning of the trouble Lillian was having, Millie had even tried to contact Josiah for her, but she couldn’t find him, either.

Odd, that. Why was Caleb so readily available and Josiah was nowhere to be found? It didn’t seem fair, not at all. Poor Millie didn’t have any answers to give, but then Lillian didn’t expect her to. The other woman wasn’t an expert, after all. She’d only been doing this a couple of years herself.

The two of them had an appointment in two days in Portland with Constance, the medium who taught Millie how to contact Caleb. Hopefully she’d be able to find Josiah, and if not, she should at least be able to point Lillian towards someone who could.

Failing that, Lillian would just have to start researching on her own.

Millie had more than once warned against that course of action because the forces they were using could be unpredictable. Clearly the way around that was to invite the other woman to study with her, and they could research together. Millie had been expressing interest lately in trying to see what other events she could make happen. After all, a circle of candles was all it took to talk to her dead husband. Who knew what else they could do with some candles and herbs and incantations?

And as for Lillian, all she wanted was to know that her husband was okay. Was that too much to ask?

Clearly, the answer was yes.

Lillian sighed and blew out the candles, tears welling in her eyes. “Oh, Josiah,” she murmured, “where are you?”

Writing Exercise #5

Why is it that I see nice, sweet prompts and turn them into something darky and angsty? And yet, when I see a dark, angsty prompt, I turn it into something sweet?

Yeah, I know I'm weird. You don't have to tell me.

We're jumping into Harper's Island for this week's exercise. Fair warning: this little vignette spoils the end. Do not click the jump if you haven't seen the whole thing and think you might want to someday.

Maybe ...

My write goal for this weekend was to spend at least one uninterrupted hour on The Witch of November. To ensure that I would have no distractions whatsoever, I unplugged the router. That's right, no Twitter or Facebook to capture my attention!

So I took the laptop into my room, put Vertical Horizon's Burning the Days album on the CD player, and started Chapter One over again. Yes, I've written and rewritten Chapter One about seven zillion times (give or take), but this time, I think I might actually be happy with it.

I don't quite know what the difference is except for that I think I loosened up a little. I wasn't as focused on making it all sound perfect; I just wrote. I kind of took an example from the writing exercises and just went with it. 

And this is some of what I came up with:

Allie Sullivan knew the second the Frisbee left Charlie Davis’s hand that she was in for a very long day. With one hand shielding her eyes from the late-June sunshine, she watched the neon yellow disc slice through the humid sea air like a hot knife through butter.

It soared high above her head and finally disappeared from view after clearing the tall wrought-iron fence surrounding the property all the way across the barely-two-lane side street. Allie spun on her heels and fixed Charlie with an exasperated glare.

“Oops!” The boy’s best I’m-so-cute-and-innocent smile brightened his face.

Allie heaved a sigh and rolled her eyes heavenward. Charlie hadn’t even managed to last ten minutes before doing something obnoxious and aggravating. She shouldn’t have been surprised, though; Obnoxious and Aggravating should have been the kid’s middle name.

Charlie Obnoxious and Aggravating Davis, she thought. Had a nice ring to it.

A mischievous glint lit the boy’s bright blue eyes, and any doubt Allie had as to exactly why her friend had whipped the Frisbee so hard disappeared. “I am so not going over there to get that,” she informed him.

Charlie raised a single eyebrow at her. He didn’t move, didn’t say a word, and Allie realized that he was simply waiting for to give in and head over to retrieve the Frisbee anyway. Well! Two could play the stubborn game, and she crossed her arms over her chest and returned his calm stare to prove it.

The two of them deadlocked, staring at each other, neither willing to let the other win. For quite possibly the first time in all of their eleven years, it was Charlie who relented, though he did so in typical Charlie fashion.

“You’re such a baby,” he snickered, playfully rolling his eyes at Allie. Then he brushed past her as he started across the street.

No, it's not perfect. But it's more "me" than what I had before, and I think I like it.

Writing Exercise #4

First exercise using original characters! This is a mentioned but never written vignette between Allie and Charlie from The Witch of November:

Prompt: shadows
Fandom: original characters (The Witch of November)
Character(s): Allie Sullivan, Charlie Davis

-----

“Do we really have to?” Allie Sullivan asked as Charlie Davis turned his bike down Lancaster Road. She knew she was whining, but she didn’t care.

“You don’t have to do anything,” Charlie returned over his shoulder, the implication of course being that she could always go home if she was just going to sulk.

As they pulled their bikes into the vacant lot where Charlie had decided they needed to play this summer, Allie glanced at the old, abandoned house across the street. She hated that house. Feared it, really, and for good reason: everyone in the town of November, Maine said that house was haunted.

Charlie thought all the stories about the house being haunted were lame, though, and constantly told Allie that she was being kind of a wimp. As a matter of fact, this sudden insistence of his that they needed to play across from the old house was his way of getting his best friend to face her fears.

The kids hopped off their bikes and unceremoniously dumped them in the sand. As Charlie looked for rocks he could use to mark the bases for their game of Wiffle ball, Allie fearfully raised her eyes to the house.

And then she saw it. A dark shadow filled the old master bedroom window. The shadow, though small, was person-shaped, and whoever it was appeared to be staring right down at her and Charlie. She tried to call out to Charlie but her voice came out in a small, uncertain whisper.

“Charlie!” she managed to croak a moment later. “Charlie, look at the window!”

“What window?” Charlie asked distractedly.

“The bedroom window.” She glanced over at Charlie to try to capture his attention. By the time she looked back at the house, the figure had vanished.

“I don’t see anything,” Charlie said, rolling his eyes. “You’re imagining things.”

Allie opened her mouth to argue that there was something there, but she knew it would have been pointless. Besides, it didn’t matter what Charlie thought anymore. She now had unequivocal proof that the old Blackstone house was haunted: she’d just seen the ghost.

Writing Exercise #3

These exercises have been both helpful and minorly frustrating.

Helpful, because they do get the juices flowing. It's liberating to just write and not worry about it. Not agonize over "Does this sound good?" and "How can I punch this up?" and "Will I be able to sell this eventually?" They're what I like most about writing: the creation. Taking one word and creating a little vignette out of it.

But they've also been frustrating because they are just flowing. They're coming and they're coming easy, which makes the difficulties I'm still having with The Witch of November all the more aggravating. Don't get me wrong, I think it's getting better, but it's not 100% perfect, and for a perfectionist? Yeah, you can imagine the irritation, heh.

Anywho. Jumping into the SVU-verse for tonight's exercise:

Prompt: warmth
Fandom: Law & Order: SVU (set in the early part of season 5)
Character(s): Casey Novak, Olivia Benson

-----

A deep shiver ran down Casey Novak’s spine. She didn’t think she’d ever feel warm again.

It was all too much. She hadn’t asked for this, and she certainly didn’t want it. Didn’t want to spend her days in a living nightmare, down in the trenches, chasing after the depraved human beings that made up this new world in which she found herself.

She poured a generous amount of whiskey from a newly purchased bottle into her coffee mug. She didn’t like whiskey very much and certainly didn’t like to drink her hard liquor straight, but she needed something to calm her shivering limbs and the dull ache in her head.

“Forgive me if I’m being forward,” said a soft voice from her office door, “but you don’t seem like the drowning-your-sorrows type.”

Casey looked up to find Olivia Benson standing just outside the open door, a gentle and friendly smile on her face. “I’m not,” she admitted.

“That’s a very dangerous habit to start, Counselor.” The detective crossed the threshold and eased down onto the leather sofa underneath Casey’s office window. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

As a matter of fact, she didn’t. Baring her soul was not something that Casey did easily, and she and Olivia had barely been working together three weeks. Plus the detectives hadn’t exactly been the friendliest to her, and Olivia especially had had moments of downright hostility. But as she met the detective’s eyes, the words tumbled from her mouth, unbidden: “I can’t do this.”

Olivia raised a single eyebrow, waiting for the young attorney to continue.

“I … I’m sure you heard, I came here from White Collar.”

The detective’s eyes reflected a sudden understanding. “Kind of a culture shock, huh?”

That? Was putting it mildly. “I mean, the worst quality in people I’m used to seeing is greed. The worst I saw in terms of crime scenes? Horrible, inefficient filing systems. This …” She indicated an open file folder on her desk, lurid photos from a rape kit done on a nine-year-old staring up at her. “This is a whole new level of … I don’t even know.”

For a long moment, Olivia didn’t say a word, seeming to consider her response, trying to decide what was best for the situation. In the end, she stood and grasped Casey’s jacket off the coat hook. “Come on,” she said, tossing the jacket to the ADA.

“Where are we going?” Casey asked, her brow furrowing in confusion and just a touch of apprehension.

“We’re going to get some coffee,” the detective answered, that gentle smile returning to her face, “and we’re going to talk. It’ll be a lot more productive than losing yourself in a bottle of whiskey alone in your office.”

Though Casey was unsure about opening up even more to the detective, she had to admit that Olivia had a reasonable point. So she shrugged on her jacket and followed Olivia out of her office.

As they walked down the hall, Olivia slipped her arm around Casey’s shoulders and squeezed, then let her go. In that moment, the shivering stopped, and in the next, Casey believed that the warmth she needed could come from something as simple as having a cup of coffee with a new friend

Writing Exercise #2

A timely little exercise tonight. Happy Halloween, everyone!

Prompt: coma
Fandom: Supernatural
Character(s): Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester

Set pre-series; Dean is twelve, Sam is eight.

-----

Sam Winchester watched with a half-amused, half-exasperated expression as his older brother Dean tore into their trick-or-treat bags with a fervor most kids reserved for Christmas morning. “Dude, we made a killing tonight,” Dean exclaimed as he began separating the candy bars--his favorite--from the rest of the individually-wrapped pieces of hard candy and little packets of candy corn.

“Whatever,” Sam muttered as he began pulling off the accents to his costume. Dean had dressed him up as a shadow wraith, which turned out to be a super-lame idea because everyone thought, due to Sam’s all-black outfit, that he was going as a ninja. For his part, Dean had gone out as a werewolf. Everyone knew immediately what he was.

“We’re not doing this next year, Dean,” Sam argued, yanking off his black hoodie, revealing the black T-shirt underneath.

“What are you talking about?” Dean asked, looking up at his little brother in surprise.

“I mean I’m done with the dressing up and knocking on doors.”

“But … Sam.” Dean gestured at the piles of candy surrounding him as if he couldn’t understand why someone would willingly pass up this opportunity. “The whole point of tonight is to get ourselves enough free candy to put ourselves into a sugar coma for the next week.”

“But it’s dumb, and I hate it.”

Dean blinked hard. Next year he would be thirteen, too old to go out trick-or-treating on his own. He’d been counting on being able to use the excuse of having to take Sam around for the next couple of years, at least. He opened his mouth to argue but he could tell just from the look on his little brother’s face that he meant business.

So instead he tossed a Milky Way, Sam’s favorite, to his brother. “We’ll talk about it next year. Right now? It’s candy-coma time.”

Sam held his determined expression for just a moment before tearing into the Milky Way, plopping down next his brother, and eagerly digging in.

Writing Exercise #1

In order to help get my creative juices flowing a little bit, I've decided to do some writing exercises using one-word prompts, which I'm getting here and here. The rules, as I've set them up for myself, are as follows:

-Fanfic and original characters are both fair game
-No agonizing over it. This includes: no worrying about word count, no editing the hell out of it, no fiddling with it.

Basically, the idea is just to write whatever pops into my head and post it. I'm hoping this will help me get back in touch with my style and normal voice.

Anywho. Here is the result of the first exercise, using a prompt given to me via Facebook:

Prompt: windows
Fandom: Supernatural
Character(s): Sam Winchester

Set during Season 1, Episode 5: “Bloody Mary”

-----

It was said that mirrors were the windows into the soul, that mirrors provided the one true reflection of yourself. As a matter of fact, Sam had told Dean something similar just a few hours ago. It had to be true, though, because Sam hated what he saw in the mirror.

The figure staring back at him was something other than human. A freak who got dreams that told the future. A scared little boy who had ignored those dreams, refused to believe them. Refused to believe that Jessica would meet the same fate as his mother. Tried to convince himself that the nightmares were stress-related.

But deep down, he knew the truth, and he’d let her die. All because he’d been too afraid to lose control, too afraid to admit that the life he’d fled was catching up with him. He’d done nothing to stop it, nothing to warn her. And he’d left her alone.

Out of all his transgressions, leaving her alone was the one for which he’d never forgive himself.

Never.

Mirrors were definitely the windows into the soul. The one thing that never lied, that always showed you the truth.

Sam was ready. He shifted the crowbar in his hand, and began to chant: “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary …” He paused just a moment before uttering the final, “Bloody Mary.”

Writer's Block ... Of a Sort

I think it's time to admit that I have writer's block.

Well, sort of. I've mentioned before that I've only had one real case of writer's block where I just could not write a single thing, and that the block lasted close to two years. I'm not at that point right now. Where I am right now is a kind of burnout.

I've written and rewritten and reworded my first chapter so many times that I've honestly lost count. Nothing's coming out the way I want. It's not bad, per se, just ... not what I want.

I can't keep writing it over and over to make it come out the way I want. Especially since I don't exactly know what it is that I want. I just know that what I have now isn't it.

What do I usually do in cases like this is work on something else. Something new, maybe, just to spend time on something different in an effort to get the creative juices flowing again. I don't have any new plot ideas at the moment, so I'm embarking on a rewrite project.

Here's hoping that by the time I'm done with the rewrite, things will flow better in my main project.

Self-Deprecating Notes

Since I am still massively unhappy with the voice in The Witch of November, I'm trying something I should have tried many months ago: I'm starting over. Not completely, mind you, (again, I have not lost complete control of my faculties) but enough that I'm not trying to simply reword what I have to make it sound better. I'm actually rewriting the damn thing line by line, much the way I do for a second draft.

A good chunk of my problem right now is getting back to the heart of my style. In trying to find that perfect voice I had in my head but could never make work on paper, I must have reworded things a hundred times. And the more I reworded it, trying to make it sound "cute" or "punchy" or "witty," the less it sounded like ... me.

I recognized that a while back but I didn't stop fiddling and now it doesn't sound like me at all. It's okay, I guess. Some parts are a little clunky, and some parts are a little trying-too-hard; those kinds of fixes are easy once you recognize them. But the problem I have with it now is I don't see me in the writing at all.

It was in trying to fix the mess I've made of my first few chapters that I came to realize a few things:

1) There is such a thing as using too many fragments. I tend to use fragments for emphasis or to give the writing a more conversational tone. However, using too many fragments one after another or in conjunction with each other makes the writing read choppy and look sloppy. Oops!

2) I'm not remarkably witty. Or consistently funny. In trying to make the writing wittier than I actually am, it winds up smacking of trying way too hard. It's better when I just let the humor come when I feel it should rather than trying to inject some kind of droll remark in every line.

3) I have a bad habit of explaining things forty-seven ways from Sunday. I started writing first drafts this way because I had the opposite tendency at first: I'd just write whatever popped into my head and by the time revisions rolled around, I'd reach sections where I had absolutely no idea what I meant. So now I explain everything, mainly so when I get back to that section in edits, I'll have some idea what I'm talking about. The result is exposition in the narrative, the dialogue, and in the inner monologue. Which is a lot of freakin' exposition. Oy.

4) I tend to be very all or nothing. My characters are eleven, so I have it in my head that the narrative has to be in kid-voice. I'm a long way from eleven, so kid-voice is hard to maintain over the course of a novel. As a matter of fact, the only time in recent memory that I completed a project in kid-voice was a 13,500-word Supernatural fic called "Corpse Fire" (oddly, one of my favorites, if it's cool to have favorites of your own work.) My usual style is a tad more adult. Why it can't be okay in my head for me to write the narrative in my normal style and leave the kid-voice for the dialogue, I can't tell you.

5) I tend to write a lot in the passive voice. You know, the "The floor was littered with debris" construction rather than "Debris littered the floor." Or "He was sitting on the sofa" instead of "He sat on the sofa." Again, oops!

Also, I start sentences with "But" and "And" a lot. And while that's okay sometimes (see what I did there, did ya?), it's totally not cool all the time.

Survey Time ... Again.

Hey look! Have another survey that I found here, mostly because I'm still stuck on the voice in The Witch of November and I'm about ready to delete the whole thing and just start over.

(Okay, not really. I have not lost complete control of my faculties. Frustration typically leads me to hyperbole. ;))

On Fanfic, and Why It's Harder Than You Think

Writing fanfiction is one of those little hobbies that people are kind of embarrassed to admit to having. I have to admit that I'm sometimes a little sheepish when people find out that I spent time writing the further adventures of the characters from, say, Charmed or Supernatural. And we're talking a lot of time here, people, not just a few hours.

But you know what I'm going to do right now? Link you to my ff.net profile. Though it's nowhere near everything I've done, that archive goes back to 2001. (If you feel the need to go poking through the stories, please be kind about the older stuff!)

And you know why I'm going to do that? Because I'm tired of being embarrassed by it. Yes, I understand why some people would consider writing fanfiction somehow less than creating something from scratch, using brand-new characters and places. But writing fanfiction is a lot harder than you think.

I jumped on the fanfic train for realsies way back in the day with Sports Night. I am the first to admit that my stories were kind of terrible. Very simplistic, not a lot of punch with the language and verbage, and I totally injected myself and my friends into them. (Yes, I wrote Mary Sues! For shame!)

But you know what fanfic is good for? Practice. You get to figure out how to create and pace a short story without having to worry about characters and setting. You don't have to create the whole world the characters are in, because it's already been done for you.

Ah, and there's the rub: these characters that you're writing? You have to be true to them. These are characters that millions of people know and love/hate/tolerate. While it's true that some fanfic writers will write anything and some fanfic readers will read anything, the good fanfic writers are the ones who can write the characters in such a way that it reads like the characters you see on TV.

And that can be freakin' hard. There are certain characters who come very easily to me. Prue Halliwell from Charmed, for example, comes so ridiculously easy that it's kind of frightening. I start writing her and it all just flows, which makes everything else fall into place.

Other characters that come super-easy, though not as easy as Prue? Casey Novak (SVU) and Abby Mills (Harper's Island). Sam Winchester (Supernatural), to an extent. He's easier for me than Dean.

But there are some characters who just don't come easily at all, and every single thing they do or say is a struggle. John Winchester from Supernatural is the hardest fanfic character I've ever written. We didn't see him enough for me to get a clear enough read on him to write him properly, and the opinions within the fandom are so widespread that there's no clear fan consensus on him either.

And then there's Phoebe Halliwell from Charmed, whom I don't like writing simply because I don't like her. It's hard to put aside my own feelings on the character in order to write her favorably, even though I know I have to. I mean, I can't make her be a twit just because I don't like her (no matter how much I may want to, hee).

So why are people so embarrassed to admit they write fanfiction? After all, those tie-in books you see all the time? Published fanfic, my friends. Licensed fanfic, sure, but fanfic nonetheless. The only difference is those authors are being paid and the writers on the internet are not.

Part of it, I think, is the view that fanfic is not "real" writing. Which I completely disagree with ... any writing is real writing. If any of y'all have a blog? Congratulations, you're a writer. Sometimes plotbunnies for fics come from a line or a moment or a scene in the source material, but all fanfic is a product of the fic author's imagination. It's taking a certain direction that the show never did, it's delving into the characters' heads/backstories/relationships/what have you in a way the show never told us, it's creating an adventure for the characters that we never saw. Why should a fic be considered something less just because the fic author is using characters already in play?

And the other part of it is very few people want to admit that they spend their free time writing stories about characters on a TV show. But hey, every writer has to start somewhere, and if it helps you to start out in a world that's already created for you, go for it! You'll never know what will give you the bright idea for your novel until you start writing.

As I said before, The Witch of November started out as a fanfic. And now it's a (granted, nowhere-near-completed) novel with a word count of 84,382.

So yeah, I'm a fanfic writer, and I'm rather proud of it.

And Another One!

Since any actual content I could write in this blog right now would be more "Edits revising blah blah blah editscakes," I'm going to do another survey! Really, though, these things are good at giving me things to talk about.

Hey Look, a Survey!

This meme has been making the rounds on LiveJournal but I figured it was a perfect post for this blog. 29 questions, all about writing? Hell yes!

Because I Felt Like Sharing

As an aspiring writer, I have a need for feedback that borders on the pathological. However, because of that "aspiring" qualifier in my previous sentence, I am terrified of offering up something still in progress for feedback.

On the one hand, it would be nice to know if I'm on the right track. On the other, it needs so much work and I don't want people seeing it and yeesh.

Yeah, you can see the dilemma.

But I'm bored and antsy tonight. So against my better judgement, I'm offering up this little snippet. Have at it, kids:

Eventually the Witch broke eye contact with Allie and stepped back, appraising the two kids with one withering glance. “You children want easy answers. Well, I’m not about to just hand them to you on a silver platter. You think you’re so intelligent? Figure it out on your own.”

Lillian Blackstone sniffed and turned on her heels, preparing to walk (or float or whatever) out of the room. “You know what, lady? Nothing about this is easy!” Allie hollered, the anger dripping in her tone. Then she blinked, clearly surprised by her outburst.

The Black Widow paused in her tracks for a split second before whirling around and fixing a terrifying, furious glare on the girl. When she stepped forward again, Charlie inched closer to his best friend, fumbled for her hand, and grasped it tightly. “You forget your place, child,” Lillian grumbled, her low register sending a deep shudder down Charlie’s spine.

To his complete surprise, Allie held her ground. Though her hand trembled like crazy when she pushed her glasses back up on the bridge of her nose, she didn’t break eye contact with Lillian. “I forget my place? You’re just an angry, bitter old woman who died decades ago! You shouldn’t even be here right now! You’re the one who’s forgotten her place.”

Fury burned in the Witch’s eyes, her lower jaw jutting out, as she gritted her teeth and clenched her hands into fists. “In my day, children had respect for their elders.” That self-satisfied smirk curling back onto her lips, she raised her arm and held up her hand, palm out, in front of Allie. The girl dropped to her knees, crying out in agony and wrapping her arms around her stomach.

“Allie!” Charlie knelt down next to his best friend, trying to pry hands away from her stomach so he could see what was wrong. The Witch lowered her arm and Allie stopped whimpering, although she was quite clearly still in pain. “What did you do to her?!” Charlie cried, glaring up at the Witch.

“She’ll be fine,” Lillian replied in an off-handed tone. “Sometimes a little force is necessary to keep children in line.”

I kind of already don't like the rhyme in the last lines there, but I don't know how to reword it. I don't feel like a woman who died in the 1920s would say "okay." I could perhaps use "all right" but that somehow doesn't have the same dismissive connotation as a simple "fine." *shrug*

Taglines and Summaries

Editing is still going and going slowly. I wish I could say I was happier with the voice, but it remains my mortal enemy. (I also wish I could say the previous sentence was just me being overdramatic but it certainly doesn't feel like it right now, hee.)

I know I need to loosen up and just let the words flow but letting go is kind of hard. I keep feeling like it needs to be, you know, perfect, and anything less than perfect is insanely frustrating.

Anyway.

The purpose of this post is to have a little bit of fun. I realized earlier that if I ever get The Witch of November into a publishable state, I'm also going to need to create a tagline and a summary. At least for shopping it around (the very idea of which scares the crap out of me ... just saying.)

And it also occurred to me that although I've talked about it all before, I don't think I've ever actually come right out and said what it's about. So, consider yourselves in the know now!

First, the tagline. You know, that one sentence on the cover that's supposed to entice people to pick it up, turn it over, and read the summary on the back?

A small Maine fishing town harbors a dark legend.

Or something to that effect.

Now onto the summary.

Eleven-year-old Allie Sullivan is afraid of pretty much everything, especially the hulking abandoned house on Lancaster Road. Unfortunately for her, her best friend Charlie Davis has decided to make the house their hangout for the summer. He wants to search the old rooms for treasures left behind but she just wants to get the heck out before they meet up with the Black Widow, the ghost said to haunt the building.

Charlie is convinced that the town legend is simply that but when he falls into a coma after venturing into the master bedroom, Allie knows that the Black Widow is real and, for some reason, has set her sights on her friend. Now Allie has to face her fears in order to figure out the mystery surrounding the old house -- because attempting to save Charlie from the Black Widow's clutches is just the beginning.

Again, or something to that effect.

How does that sound? Does it make you want to read it? (Please say yes!)

Ah, I Like When Things Work

You know all that stuff I wrote about in my previous post? You know, how I had to cut one chapter into two and combine two other chapters into one and delete a whole bunch of extraneous stuff? It's done.

Because I had to delete most of Chapter Three, I wound up having to cut about 1700 words, which killed me. I managed to put about 450 of them back just in having to transition the beginning of Chapter Three into the beginning of Chapter Four and then going back and making sure it all worked. So the total word loss was 1250 and change, which was still pretty traumatic, not gonna lie.

I suppose it's my own fault, though, for writing up stuff I didn't need.

But even though losing all of those words was traumatic, I like the beginning few chapters so much better now that all the drama is gone! It flows together better, and I don't feel like I'm interrupting the actual storyline with pointless drama.

So. Score one for change.

Change is a Good Thing ... Sometimes.

Remember what I said before about change being necessary in the writing process? Yeah. It still stands.

I’ve thought of a workaround for my problem in the beginning of The Witch of November, namely the whole bunch of drama that ultimately goes nowhere. And that fix (at least I hope it’s a fix!) involved lots and lots of change.

Step One was to split Chapter Two into two separate chapters (because that shit was freakin’ long). So now instead of ghosts and 911 calls and ambulances and hospitals and doctors, it’s ghosts and 911 calls and ambulances. The hospitals and doctors come later, in the new Chapter Three.

Step Two was a complete rewrite. I decided to take out all indications that Charlie had been physically attacked. No bruises, no bumps, nothing. The kid is just unconscious. That step was both practical and creative: practical because it cuts out the whole “we have a person attacking kids in an abandoned house” line of thinking for the adults, thereby cutting the police investigation out of the story entirely, and creative because it’s more mysterious to have Charlie perfectly fine one minute and in some kind of ghost-spell-induced coma the next.

I also had Allie refrain from telling the paramedics that she’d seen the ghost standing over Charlie. The way I’d had the story originally, the adults figured Allie had seen Charlie being attacked and, in her trauma, confused the town legend with what she actually saw. This way, if she doesn’t tell them she saw anything, they have no reason to question her. Charlie could have fallen in the house, hit his head, or he could have just come down with some bizarre illness like on an episode of House for all they know.

And yes, Allie struggles with keeping information from the adults that could help her friend, but she’s old enough to know that a group of doctors and concerned parents are not exactly going to believe, “The ghost did it!” coming out of the mouth of a hysterical child.

Step Three is combining and rewriting my old Chapters Three and Four. Most of the old Chapter Three no longer applies, since that was when the detectives come to interview Allie. So that all has to just get deleted, which will severely cut into my word count (sadness!).

I’m hoping it’ll flow better now that the necessary-but-unnecessary drama is out of the story. It was necessary because of the way I’d set things up, but it wasn’t central to the premise. And because it wasn’t central, it had no real resolution: clearly the police were not going to find Charlie’s attacker since the attacker was a ghost. So why introduce a plot point you can’t resolve? Out it had to go.

So, yeah. I am cautiously optimistic that I’ll start liking it a lot better now.

More Frustration

For a couple of months now, I've been stuck on the first few chapters of The Witch of November, and I think I've finally figured out my problem: I feel like the story's getting bogged down with the drama.

Unfortunately the drama is kind of necessary. See, what happens is this: Charlie hides in the Witch's house to annoy Allie. By the time Allie finds him, he's unconscious and the Witch herself is standing over him. Allie then has to call for an ambulance because she can't wake Charlie up and it goes from there. I also have the police questioning Allie about what happened (because he'd been strangled) and then her parents questioning her as well.

I suppose I could take out the stuff with the police but I truly believe that the police would be involved. I figure Allie's 911 call would have alerted the police and they would certainly want to question a little girl if they found that a young boy had been beaten up and strangled and she was the only witness.

I also suppose I could change it so that Charlie isn't quite so hurt, thereby taking out the ambulance and police entirely, but Charlie's attack is Allie's big motivator. It's because she's trying to save Charlie that she gathers the courage to explore the Witch's house.

See, Allie is kind of a scaredy-cat. She's the kind of kid who slept with a nightlight until the fourth grade. She's that kid who hears the other kids say, "Hey, let's go to the climbing rock!" and thinks of all the broken bones they could get if they fell off the climbing rock. Allie would never go into a haunted building where her best friend had been attacked unless she had a really good reason. My reason right now: trying to find a way to bring Charlie out of his coma.

So where do I go from here? I'm not quite sure. I suppose I could think of something else that could get Allie to face her fears but really, the Charlie-in-the-hospital drama is kind of essential to the conceit of my story, here.

I think I'll try to trim down the calling-for-the-ambulance, getting-to-the-hospital chapter (it's by far my longest so I'm sure I can find ways to cut it) and then go from there.

Cross your fingers for me, please? Because I really don't feel like rewriting the whole first like, ten chapters of my novel.

Finding a Voice

I don't know what happened, I don't know what I did differently, but I think I've finally found the voice I want for The Witch of November.

I can't even really explain why it's different from what I'd written before. It's not as verbose and a little funnier than before. I also think I've managed a nice balance between the adult voice for the narrative and just a touch of kid voice to give the prose a punch.

Have a snippet:

“I’ll be right back,” she muttered, more to herself than to Charlie. All right. She could do this, right? It shouldn’t take more than a minute to find the ball and squeeze back through the fence and she could totally handle sixty little seconds. And besides, the longer she stood there thinking about it, the more nervous she’d be. A rescue mission like this needed to be done quickly and without thinking. Kind of like ripping off a Band-Aid.

But then again, she’d always been afraid to rip off the Band-Aid super-fast.

Rolling her eyes at herself, she gave Charlie a small wave and took off for the back yard. The next time Charlie fired the ball over the fence, he was going to have to be the one tromping into the Witch’s yard to get it back. Even if he called her a chicken on top of calling her a baby.

The plastic ball had rolled to a stop a couple inches shy of the wooden deck attached to the back of the house. Oh, Charlie so owes me an ice cream for this, Allie thought as she dashed forward and wrapped her hand around the ball. A real ice cream sundae from Sweet Indulgence, too, not one of those little treat things he usually got from the freezer at the 7-11.

“Hey, Allie!”

“I’m coming!” she hollered back. Cripes, that boy had no patience. She hadn’t even been gone a full minute yet! What more did he want from her? “Relax! Jeez.”

A flicker of movement in the dining room window stopped Allie dead in her tracks. Oh, holy crap, if that was even the Witch … that one little glimpse of her from the safety of the lot across the street had been more than enough, thank you very much.

It still needs work, of course, but it's reading more the way I want it to now. Which has turned my "There's no way in hell I can do this" into "I just mght be able to do this!"

Back to Basics

I used to take public transportation to and from college: two trains and a bus. Yes, that meant I spent a lot of my time not only riding trains and buses but also waiting for trains and buses. To pass the time, sometimes I'd do homework. A lot of times I would read, both school texts and books for pleasure. Other times, I would write.

Because I didn't have a laptop at the time, my process was writing on looseleaf paper snagged from my binders for class and then typing it up when I had enough written to make it worth it. My first draft would thus be handwritten and I would then edit it as I typed it all up.

Since getting a laptop, I've gotten away from the whole handwriting-it-all-out thing, simply because typing is so much easier! I type a lot faster than I handwrite, even taking into consideration the fact that my finger is pretty much glued to the Backspace key, so it just makes more sense to type everything.

Due to certain circumstances this past weekend (read: going out of town for a family wedding), I bought a notebook to write in on the long car ride since I didn't want to drag my laptop with me. And I discovered that there's something about handwriting in a notebook that I've ... missed, for lack of a better term.

I felt more connected--both to the piece and to my own style--when I was trying to recreate my first chapter from memory rather than just rewording what I'd already written. I'd missed that, seeing a blank sheet of paper and watching it fill up with ink and words.

I realize I'm not going to be able to handwrite my 82,000-word magnum opus in a little one-subject notebook but I can use what I've learned. How about instead of doing my normal line-by-line rewrite for my edits, I go back to basics a little bit and try to recreate the chapter? Maybe I should even push the content I've already written further down so I can't see it and just let the edits flow, only going back to check when I feel I need some direction.

Maybe I'll have an easier time finding my voice if I give myself a blank slate, so to speak.

Grammar Pet Peeves

I've previously posted these in my LiveJournal, but this is a good post for this blog as well.

It needs to be said here that I'm not a grammar nazi. I won't correct you unless you ask me to do so. There are plenty of things I screw up still (lay/lie, affects/effects, and frequently ending sentences in prepositions, to name but a few), but I do have some pet peeves. Most of these are written mistakes because I tend to see them all over the damn internet and then I get twitchy. Without further ado:

Pet Peeve One: Definitely.

Definitely. Not definately. It's one of those words that is spelled wrong so frequently that most people use the incorrect spelling thinking it's correct. However, there is no "A" in the word. Finite, infinite, definite. Definitely.

Pet Peeve Two: Lose/Loose

Lose = to misplace (verb)

Loose = not tight (adjective)

These words are NOT interchangeable! You cannot "loose" your keys. You cannot feel like you are "loosing" your mind. You "lose" those things.

If you're using the word as a verb, for the love of puppies and kittens, please use one "O."

Pet Peeve Three: Should Of/Would Of/Could Of

This one literally makes me go "Oh HELL no."

"I should of gone to the game last night" is very, very wrong because there is NO SUCH PHRASE as "should of." The phrase is "should have." The "have" is part of the tense of the verb (conditional tense) and it is needed for the sentence to make grammatical sense.

I understand where this one comes from (there I go ending sentences with prepositions!) I once had a kid ask for grammar checks in a story he'd written and he used "should of" in dialogue even though he wrote it correctly anywhere outside of dialogue. When I asked him why he did that, he said, "Well, it's dialogue."

That was when I realized he wanted it to read the way it sounds when people speak. And while I'm all for vernacular in dialogue because there's nothing worse than reading dialogue and thinking, "No one really talks like that," he should have contracted it to "should've." Dialogue or no, you need the "have." It's important. 

So it's "should have" or "should've." No exceptions!

Pet Peeve Four: Just Between You and I

Anything occurring "just between you and I" is WRONG. Anything that happens "just between you and me" is correct.

I know it's drilled into our heads in elementary school to not use "me," but there are instances where "me" is the correct word. That's, you know, why it exists as a word.

"Me" is proper in "just between you and me" because "between" is a preposition and needs an object, so you need to use the object form of the pronoun.

An easy way I was taught to spot the difference between using "I" and "me" is to take everyone else out of the picture:

Take the sentence "Bob and me went to the store." Would you say "Me went to the store?" No, so you'd use "I" there. (Grammatically, this is so because "Bob and I" is the subject of the sentence and the subject pronoun is needed.)

Now, "Jim went to the store with Bob and I." Would you say "Jim went to the store with I?" No. Use "me" there. (Again, with = preposition, which needs an object, so you need the object pronoun.)

I = subject. Me = object. Keep it straight, peeps!

Pet Peeve Five: Loath/Loathe

This is the one that makes me groan out loud. For freakin' real.

Loath = reluctant, unwilling (adjective)

Loathe = to despise, to detest (verb)

You are NOT "loathe" to tell her something that would hurt her feelings. You are "loath" to tell her something that would hurt her feelings.

This is one I'd seen in so many places that I actually had to go to dictionary.com to make sure I wasn't wrong! I think this mistake irritates me so much because no one really says "loath to" anymore unless they're being pretentious. But when you're being pretentious and you do it wrong, it just makes you look like you don't know what you're talking about (yep, another preposition ... go me, ha).

So there we go, my top five grammar pet peeves. I also have a list of Things Not to Do When Posting a Story Online, but that'll be a whole separate post, ha.

Writing Pride

Sometimes I'll be reading a book and I'll think, "I can totally do this!" And then other times I'll be reading a book and I'll think, "Oh, there is no way in HELL I can do this!"

I'm on the "no way in hell" end of the spectrum right now with regards to The Witch of November (although the edits have been going better since I stopped trying so dang hard), so I decided I needed to do this post now rather than later.

I've kept a lot of the fanfic I've written on hard copy. I tend to fall in and out of fandom (I'll go through, say, SVU phases and Sports Night phases and so on) so sometimes I feel like re-reading some of the stuff I've written. (Please tell me I'm not the only one who does this!) Most of the time, I read it very critically, all, "Holy crap, this is kinda horrible." Especially the older stuff. Sometimes, though, I have flashes of, "Hey, this actually might be kinda good!"

So, at the risk of sounding terribly conceited, I'm going to link to the couple of stories I've written that I actually like, if only to remind myself that I do have some semblance of talent lying around somewhere, hee.

-"Lost in Time", a Charmed story it took me three dang years to get out on paper.

-"Stalemate", an SVU story that is kind of AU (alternate universe) in that we were never given any info about Casey's family so I gave her one. It is probably the most dramatic story I've ever written and was therefore very challenging, but I do like the end result.

-"Hide and Seek", the most recent fanfic I've written. It's a Harper's Island fic through the eyes of the killer, so it spoils the end if you haven't seen the whole thing, but you have no idea how much fun it was to write. Which should worry me, I think, hee.

And just so this doesn't look like I'm shilling my old work (because I'm really not ... it's more for me to remember that I can do this and that it's not hopeless), here's a snippet from The Witch of November, a letter from my ghost to her husband, back when she was still alive (there are a few of these scattered throughout the story).

Accepting Change

Part of the exercise of writing something as large as a novel (current word count: 81,457) is being comfortable with change.

As a rule, I kind of dislike change. In my personal life, I mean. I like things the way they are because ... well, it's the way things are. You know what to expect (for the most part). Change brings the unknown. Change is the unknown.

But with writing, change is kind of necessary. Sometimes it's something as simple as the story taking a direction you weren't intending (like I said before, that stuff about the characters writing themselves is no joke). Sometimes it's accepting the fact that a story just wasn't meant to be written in the voice you were envisioning.

I had intended on making The Witch of November read as kind of conversational, like you're inside the kids' heads or that the kids are telling you the story. I've successfully managed that voice once or twice before, but that's not my usual style.

Out of all the edits I've done, I edited the diary entries and letters from the 1870s the least. I actually like and am pretty proud of those, and I think it's because I let the voice fit the writing rather than trying to make the writing fit the voice.

Part of the reason I think I found the conversational kid voice so hard is because I was trying to make it funnier than I am. Because I'm really not all that funny. (Well, not consistently ... I'm funny in fits and starts ;)). Trying to force humor is never a good thing, and trying to force a voice on a story that doesn't fit it isn't a good thing, either. Even worse, every time I wrote and rewrote the first chapter (I seriously lost count on what revision I'm on), it sounded less and less like ... me.

So you know what? Screw that voice. I've decided to just write the dang thing in my own style, and in all honesty, it flows a lot easier when I'm just being myself.

Frustration Level: High

Writing is just like anything else: it looks easy until you try it.

I used to think the hardest part was getting the story out. Then I became entrenched in the world of edits.

I mentioned in my previous entry that I don't have a real process. I just write and think of my next steps as I go. I have run into problems doing that, namely when I get stuck, I can't jump ahead to another part in the story and then go back to where I was stuck. If, for example, I get stuck in Chapter Six, I can't jump ahead to Chapter Eight because I don't always know what Chapter Eight is going to be, you know?

So when I get stuck, I have to plow through it until I get unstuck, all the while thinking, "Oh, I can go back and fix it later."

You know what's harder than I realized? Fixing it later.

Part of my problem is I'm attempting a voice I've only written in once or twice before. I managed it in a Supernatural fanfic I wrote a couple years ago called "Corpse Fire" and I remember it being relatively effortless back then. Not so much now.

For some reason, the first draft of The Witch of November is ... not really verbose, but written in a more adult voice than I really want. And trying to change the voice I've already written is freakin' hard.

So, I want it to read roughly like this:

“I’ll be right back,” Allie muttered, more to herself than to Charlie. She could do this, right? Because really, it wouldn’t take more than a minute to find the ball and run back through the fence. She could totally handle sixty little seconds. Besides, the longer she stood there, the more nervous she’d be. This kind of rescue mission needed to be done quickly and without thinking. Kind of like ripping off a Band-Aid.

But paragraphs like that are kind of hard to come by.

Most of it is like this:
 
Of course, what should be was never what usually happened. Allie stared at the sheets of paper with a frown on her face for a few minutes. Nothing jumped out at her; the spells or rituals all seemed to have different ingredients and different methods. Some were what Allie thought of as white magic: candles, herbs, blessings. Others were classic examples of dark magic; nothing called for eye of newt or any other cliché ingredients, but most of them called for drops of blood, wilted flowers, and other things that called up images of Halloween and the macabre.
 
Which is ... okay, but it lacks both the punch and the humor I want. It also doesn't sound like an eleven-year-old.

(And people thought I was kidding when I said the first draft was terrible! Ha!)
 
So what do I do now? Try to figure out whatever I was doing when I wrote that first paragraph up there, hee.

Inspiration and Ideas

It's a question almost every author is asked at least once: "Where do you get your ideas?" And it's a loaded question, because there is no real answer. It's one of those things where you sit there and go, "You know, I don't even know!"

Inspiration is funny and fickle thing. I went through a period where I didn't get one little drop of inspiration at all ... for close to two years. It was terrible. And then after that, I went through a phase where I was getting inspiration from everything. Which was also kind of terrible because I can only write one thing at a time. Really, Inspiration, what gives?

Inspiration can come from anywhere. A song lyric (as with The Witch of November), road signs (I had an inkling of a story that never got off the ground about a dead end road that lived up to its name), conversations, funny things that happen throughout the day, plot points from TV shows and movies.

Now, I think of inspiration and ideas as two different things. Inspiration is the inkling of the idea. Inspiration is the glimmer of the plotline, the little moment of, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if ..." Turning the inspiration into an idea--something that you can possibly squeeze 50,000 words out of--is the hard part.

Okay, so your inspiration has evolved into an idea. Now what? Everyone is different. For me, I don't have a real process. I don't create flow charts, and I don't plan the story out from beginning to end. I just start writing and let the story flow. Yes, I've written myself into many a corner that way, but hey, I like a challenge.

Because sometimes the stories and the characters write themselves. I always thought people were kidding or being dramatic or whatever when they said that, but trust me, people, that shit is for real. For example, I wound up writing a small, barely-there romantic thread between my two protagonists in The Witch of November. They're eleven years old and thus in that "Boys/girls are icky but I think maybe I like like her/him" stage, so it's nothing too heavy-duty, but it's there.

I had no intention of writing any kind of romance at all between my two kids. It kind of just ... happened. And it ultimately wound up giving me the idea for my epilogue. Had I not let the story evolve in its own way, I wouldn't have my kickass ending!

Inspiration is all around. It's in the songs you hear and the movies you watch and in the funny thing that happened to your coworker on the way back from lunch. You just have to be open to it.

The Beginning

So. I've been working on a book.

Everyone who knows me knows this was a long time coming, but see, ideas that are meant to carry out over the length of a novel? Not my strong suit.

The idea came from, of all places, a line in a Gordon Lightfoot song. (Yes, I listen to Gordon Lightfoot. Stop looking at me like that.) The line, "And every man knew, as the captain did, too, 'twas the Witch of November come stealin'" in "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" jumped out at me. My knee-jerk reaction? "Oh hell yes, I've got to turn this into a Supernatural fanfic!"

Yes, I write fanfic as well. Don't judge.

My original intention was to write about a ghost ship kind of deal, taking the message of the line literally. In trying to come up with a feasible plotline, I came to discover that I know next to nothing (okay, absolutely nothing) about boats and about sailing. The amount of research I would have to do to have even a remote idea of what I was talking about was insane.

So the idea sat on my mental shelf for a while until something new came to me: what if November isn't a month but a place? And what if the witch isn't a name for heavy winds but an actual witch? And thus The Witch of November was born.

Of course there is no place in the United States named November. Well, there is a November Creek, Idaho (thanks, Mapquest!) but what I know about Idaho is pretty much equal to what I know about boats and sailing. I then decided that if other authors can make up places willy-nilly, well, dang it, so can I.

The Witch of November's first incarnation was that Supernatural fanfic (I said don't judge!). I wound up loving the characters and the town of November, Maine, and even my ghost/witch. The finished draft of the short story wound up being 44 pages long and consisting of 21,000-ish words. So I figured if I could get 44 pages out of it in a fanfic, I could take Sam and Dean (and obviously any Supernatural-inspired story elements) out, bring my original characters front and center, and expand on the idea. Oh, and change the ending, too, because a salt-and-burn would more than likely constitute copyright infringement.

After almost a year of work (not constantly ... a little here and a little there), the first draft is finished. The first draft? Is the easy part.

Keep checking back here for my squees when things work, whines when things don't, random observations about the story and the process in general, and the occasional snippet or two. I promise it'll be a good time.