You Guys!

I've written! More than one page! And I don't actively hate it!

It's fanfic (SVU, to be precise) and I'm not sure it's really going anywhere, but I'm hoping it'll be a cute little fluffy oneshot when I'm done with it. When I first wrote a story entitled "A Day With the Cole Brothers" I originally intended to make it the first in a small series of stories with Casey, Olivia, and the two Novak nieces (whom I completely made up). I wrote one more and then promptly ran out of ideas.

It wasn't that I didn't have any ideas. It was that all my ideas were very similar to stories I'd already written. Which was lame and so I didn't write them. Well, while I was sitting there at work this week, not really thinking about much of anything unrelated to work, I got a little idea for a new oneshot for the series.

It's really dry so far, but 1) it's not done, and 2) it's the first draft. My first drafts  are always really dry. But I'm cautiously optimistic about this one. I'm actually looking forward to working on it and getting back into the groove again.

And who knows? Maybe I'll post the finished product here!

Writer's Block Is Evil But Not Unconquerable

So. Writer's block. It's a real thing, a real aggravating, maddening thing, and I've written about it a lot. Because it's real and aggravating and maddening, and when you're in the middle of it, writing about it is pretty much the only thing you can do. If you can even get it out. Yes, my friends, it is indeed possible to have writer's block when writing a blog post about writer's block.

Welcome to my life for the last few months.

But lately I've found myself thinking about writing. And not the "I really should be writing"-guilty thoughts, but the "I want to set aside time and write today"-proactive thoughts. And today, I set aside some time and I wrote.

Since the first part of The Witch of November is so messed up, I decided that I'm just going to start over. Not completely, mind you; just until the point where I haven't messed with it a whole bunch of times. You can read what I came up with if you click the jump.

(Disclaimer: the following was written in about 45 minutes and has not been edited. Tomorrow morning, it will be less tempting to gag at it and just delete the whole thing. Breaking out of writer's block requires baby steps, people.)

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The Trouble With Mainlining and Writing at the Same Time

I mentioned in my previous post that I had an idea for a pre-series Supernatural fanfic, one which I hoped would kickstart my creativity again so I could get back to work on The Witch of November. And I also mentioned that this idea came about because I'd been mainlining Supernatural for the better part of a month.

Well, there's been a little unanticipated problem with that: it seems I have been watching too much Supernatural for the idea as I had it to take off. Want to know why? Because Adult Boys have been talking at me for the last month or so, and that's making it difficult for me to find the proper voices for Wee Boys.

Now, don't get me wrong ... I tend to mainline while I'm doing fic. Mainlining is what helps me get the characters right (or as right as I can make them) in the first place. The issue is I've had various seasons of Supernatural on my television for over a month now, and very few of those episodes include flashbacks. Wee Sam and Wee Dean are, apparently, easier to find for me when I haven't been listening to Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles for a month straight.

But this doesn't mean I'm giving up on the fic. Oh no. It just means I have to set it within the series' timeline and make it a casefile fic instead.

Best I can figure, I should set it somewhere in the early part of season three. For story purposes, I need it set at the start of a school year. Season one starts in October/November of 2005, which is too late. The boys are occupied with Zombie Angela in late August/early September in season two. There is a small time jump, though, in season three between "Sin City" and "Bedtime Stories" that could work in my favor.

See? Really wasn't kidding with that "geek" thing.

My Name Is Danielle, and I Have Writer's Block

It's high time that I admit it: I have writer's block.

Like, for real and for serious. This isn't the "Oh, pooh, I'm bored with this story" kind of writer's block. This is the actual "Everything I write sucks and is so stupid omg I hate it all" kind of writer's block.

It's the kind of writer's block where you spend all day struggling to squeeze out a page and a half (web-formatted) and then the next morning delete everything you wrote because it sucks out loud. Which, as you can imagine, is more than a little frustrating.

Okay, it's a lot frustrating. It's tear-your-hair-out, gnashing-of-teeth, rending-of-garments frustrating.

Nothing comes out the way I want and even my tried and true method of the Rewrite Project hasn't managed to help. (I tried, honest, I did! But I got three pages into it and stopped ... because it sucked. See above re: "it's so stupid and I hate it all.")

So where do I go from here? Clearly, just throwing in the towel is not an option. But neither is sitting here writing and deleting and writing and deleting until the end of time. The last time I had a block like this, I broke through it by trying fic for a new fandom. Unfortunately, that is not an option this time, as none of my new shows have fic potential. (I typically need to be overly obsessed with a show in order to attempt fic for it, and I'm not at the omgsquee-supergeek point with any of the newer shows I've been watching.)

I do have a last-ditch effort up my sleeve, though: a vague idea for a new pre-series Supernatural fanfic. Y'see, at the beginning of last month, I attended a fan convention (I wasn't kidding when I said that I'm a nerd) and have since been mainlining the show. Since I've pretty much been eating, sleeping, and breathing Supernatural, the wheels in my head have been turning.

The basic idea (which is pretty much all I've come up with so far) is this: John is on a hunt in some fictional Massachusetts town, and the middle school that Sam starts at is haunted. The boys--Sam, especially--are fairly new at the hunting thing, but Dean recognizes the signs and tries getting a hold of John, but he can't. So he and Sam have to deal with it on their own (with help from Bobby via phone calls, of course.)

Yeah, the reason John's incommunicado is because John is ridiculously hard for me. But so is writing in general right now, so, y'know. Sue me.

Anyway, my plan is to try to start this at some point this weekend. Here's hoping that this 1) works out at all, and 2) gets my creative juices flowing again!

On Gripping and Searching For Talent

I'll admit it: I'm totally gripping here.

I'm trying for a voice I'm not sure I can achieve, and even if I can achieve it once, I'm not sure I can maintain it over the length of a novel. The closest I've ever come to the voice I'm trying for was in a Supernatural fanfic entitled "Corpse Fire," but even that had its moments of adult voice mixed in with the kid voice.

I'm okay with doing the whole thing in that kind of mixture. (Because, really, I kinda like the way that story turned out.) And it would be easier for me, since adult voice is closer to my style anyway.

But my problem is I need a hook. I need something to draw the reader in, I need someplace to start. In the original fanfic version of "The Witch of November," I opened with Allie standing at the fence after Charlie had thrown the Frisbee over it. Since that opening scene was meant to be a teaser--sort of a prologue--I tried to expand it for Chapter One in the novel version. Now I'm wondering if that was a mistake.

I've been reading some of my old stuff over the last couple of days, trying to see where I'm going wrong. I'm not sure I've discovered it yet. I'm not sure I've found my voice. But I have to believe that I will, if only because this feeling of being stuck stinks and the thought of never getting over the hump is terrifying.

And Another Batch of Concrit

Okay, one more time. I think I may have gotten myself a little more on track here, but, as we all know, I tend to think it's brilliant the day I write it and then hate it the following day.

So. This is the new opening to Chapter One. It takes us to the same point where I left off in the previous post, but I think this is a lot less exposition-y and a lot more character-y. Also, keep in mind that I've written this over the course of like, 45 minutes and have not gone back and made things pretty. I'm looking for a general idea, here, because there's no sense in making things pretty if I'm not keeping it.

Previous offering still stands: virtual cookies and my undying gratitude!

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Concrit Please!

And here we go again. Admittedly, this plea for concrit is a touch more important than the previous one. The prologue is meant to reel the reader in, give them just enough background to make them interested but not enough that you give away the entire story. Below, however, is the first page or so (Works page ... I have no idea how many book pages it is) of my first chapter. And this is where I'm having the most trouble.

As I've mentioned before, I'm having issues getting the tone right. The characters here are eleven, and my normal style is more along the lines of what you saw in the prologue. However, the proper, reserved tone that works well for adults in 1877 does not work as well for children in the present day. So I'm trying to adapt a little, make the tone a little more conversational and a little less proper.

What I've come up with so far is below the jump. Please, please give me concrit. I don't have much to offer in the way of rewards, but the offer of virtual cookies and my undying gratitude still stands.  (Also, I realize that Charlie comes across as really annoying here ... he doesn't stay that way. But we're in Allie's head and she's annoyed with him, so ... yeah).

Attention! Concrit Welcome!

(I attempted to do this as a Note on Facebook, however Facebook's paragraph formatting leaves a lot to be desired. Actually, there is a distinct lack of paragraph formatting (at least a lack of paragraph formatting that I can make work ... I try Shift+Enter and I get a line break, not a paragraph break), leading to a giant block of text that makes my eyes swim. So I'm doing it here because Blogger will allow formatting like a normal website. *pets Blogger*)

Anywho, I am about to do something I hardly ever do: offer up my prologue for concrit. Basically, I've been having issues with tone and voice for a long while now, so long that I feel like I can't properly judge the quality of my own writing anymore. (I am indeed my harshest critic ... I tend to think it all sucks. ;)) So! If anyone could read this and offer some concrit, you will get virtual cookies and my undying gratitude.

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Writing Exercise #10

Something a little different this time. Two things:

1) This is a stand-alone vignette, not part of any larger universe. I believe this is the first exercise I've done that is neither fanfic nor somehow connected to The Witch of November.

2) It's in first person, and I very rarely write in first person.

As is typical of the exercises, this was written in like, fifteen minutes.

Prompt: airport
Fandom: original

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The little girl pressed her face against the cab window, watching the city buildings pass by in a blur. “Look, Mama!” she cried, pointing as the cab slowed to a stop at a red light. “I see the airplanes.”

I smiled at my five-year-old daughter, Sophie, and ruffled her dark curls. “I see them, too. And you know what?”

“What?”

“In just a couple of hours, we’ll be sitting on one of those airplanes.”

“And then we’ll be flying with the birds!”

“Exactly. And then, after we fly with the birds for three hours, where will we be?”

“With Mickey Mouse!”

I laughed and even caught the hardened city cab driver smiling to himself at little Sophie’s excitement.

With one watchful eye still on my daughter, I faced forward in the seat and mentally ran through the pre-vacation checklist. Did I plug in the timers? Turn off the computer? Lock the doors? Remember to use up of all the perishables in my fridge?

Check, check, check, and check. Not that I could do anything about it now. The airport loomed large in front of us, and in just a few minutes, Sophie and I would be lugging suitcases--a huge thirty-incher for me and a tiny pink Dora the Explorer one for her--through the corridors and going through security.

Then we’d be flying with the birds for my daughter’s first trip to Disney World.

Cautious Optimism

I know, I know, I've been neglecting this blog. Truthfully, I've been neglecting writing lately, which meant I had no real content for the blog. Since no one likes to read "Yeah, nothing's really changed, but I'm here just to babble" posts, I just ... haven't posted.

The reasons for the neglect are numerous and all sound like bad excuses. At the beginning of the year, I had a really stressful couple of months, which left no energy or even real interest for writing. Then when things calmed down in my personal life, I found myself writer's-blocked. Nothing came out the way I envisioned, I didn't like the sound of anything I wrote, the whole shebang.

So I took a break. Breaks not of my own choosing are frustrating, to be sure, but sitting there hating everything I wrote was even more so. The hardest part of any break is getting back into the swing of things, but I knew that if I didn't, I never would.

I like writing, so the thought of not being able to make myself sit there and do it made me sad. So tonight I kicked my own behind, put my headphones on, and tried to work on my epiphany. I'd written the new prologue a couple of times already, but it never sounded ... right. And I can't really explain what "right" is; I just knew that what I had wasn't it.

Tonight? I'm cautiously optimistic that I got it right. Cautiously because I tend to like the things I write the day I write them but then I look at it more objectively the next day and see all the problems. We'll see if I still like it tomorrow, but I like it a lot tonight. The tone, the voice, a nice balance of exposition in the prose and in dialogue ... I kinda think I nailed it.

On Epiphanies

It is said that something cannot be created out of nothing, but that is precisely what writing is. It's taking a little idea, an inkling of a notion, and weaving it into a story.

Because of the aspect of creating this whole freakin' universe out of a tiny, "Hey, wouldn't this make a great story ..." thought, you don't always get things right the first time. Sometimes the things that don't work become apparent in the first draft and you can fix it then, but sometimes they don't become apparent until well into the editing process.

Part of the problem of discovering way too late that something didn't quite work is that you wind up becoming attached to what you've already written. Even if you absolutely hate what you've written, you don't want to lose it. Whether it's just a natural unwillingness to admit you were wrong or it's an unwillingness to admit that you spent all kinds of time on something that ultimately didn't work, I'm not sure. All I know is that realizing you have to delete what you've written and rework things? Can actually be painful.

But then there are those times when inspiration hits out of the clear blue sky. When you're sitting there, doing something completely off-topic and not thinking at all about your story, and you suddenly think, "Oh my God! I know how to fix it!"

I call those moments my little writing epiphanies.

My latest writing epiphany? Expanding my prologue.

I mentioned before that in reading over my first chapter, I realized that it was way too exposition-y. I wasn't sure how to go about fixing that, aside from spreading out the exposition over a couple of chapters. And then while I was watching TV, it hit me: expand the prologue.

This little epiphany of mine means changing some things. My prologue had been a letter from the ghost to her husband (written back when the ghost was alive, natch), and I had about four or five more letters scattered throughout the novel that detail the woman's slide into the dark arts.

Without setting up the conceit of the letter in the prologue, I have to remove the other letters. I figure I can rewrite the letters as scenes or scenelets, much like how I rewrote the prologue.

I'm hoping that putting more of the exposition in the prologue will relieve some of it from chapter one. *crossing fingers*

Writing Exercise #9

Since I watched Harper's Island this weekend, we're jumping back into that universe for this week's exercise. Honestly, I'm debating polishing this up a little bit and publishing it as a ficlet! It wound up being double the size of the other exercises (though still shorter than my typical one-shot stories, hence "ficlet"). Oops!

As before, the following vignette spoils the end. Click the jump at your own risk. Also, I am aware that this reads as a little disjointed. It's intentional.

On Rewrite Projects, and Why They Help

I've mentioned before that when I get stuck/frustrated, I sometimes work on a rewrite project to help get the creative juices flowing again. I don't believe I've ever actually sat down and explained the rewrite projects, though, so here goes:

It's pretty much what it sounds like: I take a story I've written previously and completely rewrite it, from beginning to end. The pieces I choose are usually years old and have problems that I didn't see when I was writing it the first time.

For instance, my most recent rewrite was on a Supernatural story I wrote in 2007 called "Child's Play." It's a pre-series story about a young Sam and Dean meeting the ghost of a little girl who's haunting the motel at which John left them during his hunt. Over the course of the rewrite, I tightened up the language and also changed two things: how little Lucy was killed in the first place, and why neither Sam nor Dean told anyone on staff at the motel about the kidnapped child staying in one of their rooms.

I changed Lucy's manner of death because, in all honesty, it was too hard to prove and thus seemed too convenient that John and Dean caught onto it relatively quickly. I originally had the kidnapper drugging her food and overdosing her by mistake. Since a five-year-old (for that's how old Lucy was) wouldn't understand much other than "This tastes funny and makes me sleepy," it was just really convenient that she not only described it like that but also that John made the leap from funny-tasting food to drugging food to overdose as quickly as he did.

The whole thing with Sam and Dean not telling anyone in charge about Lucy was something I never thought of at all during the initial drafts. Because, well, I knew that Lucy was a ghost. It wouldn't have mattered what Sam or Dean told anyone because Lucy had been dead for eleven years. But when I was doing the rewrite, I realized that I at least needed to acknowledge the thought process of people who don't yet know that she's a ghost. So I had Sam offer to go tell someone and Lucy beg him not to, and I had Dean on his way to tell someone when John came back and the two of them figured out that Lucy was a ghost. So the intent was there, at least, even if neither of them managed to follow through.

The rewrite project I want to do now is on a Charmed story I wrote back in 2004 called "With a Vengeance." The basic premise of the story, that a demon/bad person/whatever wants to turn the Charmed Ones by using Prue's guilt over Andy's death as a way in, has a lot of potential, but the execution of it was ... not so good. There are too many things I spelled out way too much and too many things I didn't spell out enough. There are bits that are clunky and bits that are melodramatic and bits that are rather good. Basically, I want to even it out, and I think the distance from the piece will help a lot with that.

Now, as to why these little projects help with the current one. There's a lot less pressure on the rewrites, because the story's already done. It was posted in various places many moons ago. I only update my own personal files/archive with the rewrite information, so mostly they're for my eyes only. Because there's less pressure, the words usually wind up flowing nice and easy. And when the words flow, it loosens you up. Makes you realize that yeah, maybe you can do this after all.

Then, when the rewrite is finished, you have gained not only a little bit of distance from the project on which you were stuck/burnt out, but also a little more confidence in your talent and abilities. You're closer to and more in tune with your own style.

In a way, it's kind of a palate cleanser, a chance to clear out the cobwebs so you can return to your current project bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready for anything.

Writing Exercise #8

I don't mind telling you that I'm incredibly frustrated. Nothing's coming out the way I want it to, and I'm beginning to wonder if I need to do a rewrite project just to take a step back for a week or two.

(I also may be working on a post to explain the rewrite projects and why they help.)

Of course, that is a discussion for a different post. The point of this one is to share the results of the eighth writing exercise. More original characters!

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

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“Do you want to see it again?” Charlie Davis excitedly asked his best friend. He held out his hand, palm up, under her chin.

Her nose wrinkling, Allie Sullivan backed away slightly from Charlie’s outstretched palm. “No.” She’d already seen it. Three times. How the heck many times did he expect her to look at it?

A pout turned down the corners of Charlie’s mouth for a fraction of a second. Then he covered, rolling his eyes at her before returning his attention to the object in his open palm. “Whatever. Your loss.”

“It’s a penny!” Allie cried in exasperation. Really, if you've see one penny, you’ve seen them all.

“It’s an ancient penny,” Charlie corrected her.

“It’s not ancient.”

“It’s from 1909, Allie. It’s older than our grandparents. That makes it ancient.”

Allie sighed. This happened every single time that Charlie found a new coin for his collection. For a couple of days, he’d stare at it and then put it in his pocket only to take it out and stare at it again. Then he’d drop the coin into the tin with the rest of them and then forget about the whole collection until he found another coin. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And since all his coins were found money--coins he found in the street or got back in change--most of them weren’t even worth much more than face value! Allie didn’t understand his fascination with the stupid things in the slightest.

Charlie, sensing Allie’s disdain, took her hand and dropped the penny into it. “Think about it like this. That little penny has been held in human hands for over a hundred years. It’s seen the sinking of the Titanic and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It was minted sixty years before anyone ever set foot on the moon. This one little piece of metal has survived it all.”

A smile curled onto Allie’s lips despite herself. All right, maybe she could understand Charlie’s fascination with the old coins. If she thought about it, they were like mini history lessons that fit into the palm of her hand.