I’m moving over to aliciathewriter.com.
As I take the first steps to becoming a professional–a real, dedicated professional–I figured I’d do the same with my blog.
See you over there!
I’m uneasy (and grumpy!) because I have NO IDEA what I’m doing now.
I have nearly 50,000 words written in my book. I have 4 scenes left to write. Once those are done, I’ll be in the mysterious frontier of editing a novel.
Which is strange to say, since I used to be an editor myself. But that was nonfiction, textbook-y stuff. Editing a novel, and editing my own work, is an entirely different ordeal.
I’m proud of myself for nearly finishing my book. But, let’s face it, this first draft is not awesome. It needs a lot of work, but I don’t know where or how.
Jacob gave me a pep talk, which was helpful. He’s amazing with computers, but said that some days, his brain’s not 100%, so it’s difficult to solve problems. When he works through those days anyway, he’s much better off when he’s back at 100%, but when he takes a break instead, he’s that much farther behind when he’s back at 100%. The work you do when you don’t feel like working matters.
It helped.
So I’m going to keep going, keep working. I figure this is one of those gates that prevent the 80% of the population that wants to write a book from actually writing one. Getting started was hard. Writing 50,000 words was harder. This unknown, this anxious will-I-really-be-able-to-turn-this-into-something-readable feeling is even harder. But it’ll make me that much stronger, that much of a better writer.
And I suspect even seasoned writers feel this way. I’ve been working on my Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Writing–and many authors seem to describe this agony, this awkward stage of writing. At least, I hope that’s what they’re talking about.
Any advice? What do you do when you have no idea what you’re doing? When you get to the end of the first draft and it’s not exactly sunshine and rainbows?
Okay, so Cowboys & Aliens was actually good. I expected it to be barely watchable. I mean, aliens in a western? It’s ridiculous.
Except it’s not really about Aliens. Or cowboys. It’s about people. Individuals. People changing. People becoming better, living up to the greatness within them. It just happens to take place in the West and Aliens just happen to be a catalyst.
Okay, that’s oversimplifying it a bit. You can’t ever take a story fully out of its context. But the heart of the story, what makes it good, is that it’s about people.
The characters were also fantastic.
Things to learn from Cowboys & Aliens to apply to my writing:
But I can see where the title got people in the theaters who otherwise wouldn’t have gone for either a western or a deeper story like this one.I got a Kindle Touch for my birthday!! (Thanks, Mom and Dad!)
LOVE it. I read a lot more. Partially because I can check out a lot of books from the library without actually having to GO (which is kind of hard right now with 3 small kids). And I don’t rake up all these fees for my inevitable late returns.
Features:
Drawbacks:
Despite the drawbacks, overall the Kindle is fabulous. If you like to read a lot. I’d say most people aren’t really going to benefit from having a device solely devoted to reading ebooks, because most people don’t read much anyway. But for those of us who consume books, the Kindle is fantastic.
Surfing the internet is great, but in my current pregnancy moodiness, I found Pinterest and blog-hopping becoming more and more depressing, since I can’t actually DO any of the amazing ideas I was finding.
So I took a break from those. At the same time, I came across a scripture that I love: “Do not spend…your labor on that which cannot satisfy.” Yeah. For me, right now, the internet is NOT satisfying.
So, of course, I turned to reading. Since I’m immensely lazy (and just plain immense at 33 weeks pregnant), I don’t make it out to the library much anymore. So I turn to free books for my Kindle app.
After reading a post by Shannon Hale on her upcoming Austen-ish book, I read Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen. Hilarious. The narrator is my favorite character in it.
Then I turned to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Yes, I do imagine Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law as I read it, since I saw the movies first. There’s a ton of interesting comparisons between the two.
Sherlock Holmes is, in a lot of ways, an easy read. Simple story, same narrative structure almost every time, and interesting. But I kept tripping up on words and phrases I, not being from that time period, just didn’t understand.
And I LOVE the instant dictionary in the Kindle App. Highlight a word and the app will look it up for you. If that doesn’t give you anything, there’s a link to Wikipedia that usually does. I wouldn’t bother looking up half the words I did if I had to do it manually. LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this feature.
The only drawback is that you can’t look up phrases. Which is a bummer, because there’s occasional lines of French in Sherlock Holmes that I never looked up. *See comment on immense laziness above.
I am very close to getting a Kindle myself, since I’ve been spending more and more time reading on my Kindle app and less time reading physical books. And since more books are available free through OverDrive at the library.
Normally, I wait until April to do my taxes, but since I have a baby due then, I’m getting them out of the way now.
Did you know you can deduct the cost of your contact lens solution? Put it on Schedule A, under the medical section. If you didn’t keep receipts last year, start saving them now for your 2012 taxes!
Here’s a link to allowable and non-allowable medical deductions, arranged by how likely my family is to use them. You can get the same list direct from the IRS here.
The list of allowable deductions includes surprising things like:
The IRS’s policy is to tax you the proper amount, NOT over-tax you. Take all the allowable deductions you can! Our family had more than $9,000 in medical expenses last year to deduct. How about you?
I created this great preschool schedule, but being pregnant slowed that way down. We have done a few fun learning activities, though:
Cornstarch and water
Lots of painting on our new easel:
Playing in the sandbox I made:
I painted our kitchen island with chalkboard paint:
And learning how to use hammers and pliers:
Okay. This week I didn’t even come close to my ROW80 goal of 1,000 words/day. I probably got 2,000 words over the course of the entire week.
The problem? I am having a writing identity crisis. I finished up Act I of my novel. Exciting, right? But it’s the first draft and I can see just how flawed it is. It doesn’t flow, it doesn’t work the way I envisioned, it is not some spectacular work of art.
It’s silly to hope for perfection the first time around, of course, but this is more than that. I’m doubting my ability to write a novel. No, not doubting: I KNOW I don’t have the ability–yet. I still have a lot to learn about how to write. And that’s okay, so long as I don’t give up.
Completing the first act is the farthest I’ve ever gone in writing a novel. And I’m definitely not going to stop now, no matter how self-conscious and nervous I am about it all. I’m determined to get back on track with my 1,000 words and to not let a temporary identity crisis hold me back from the writing that I love.
Writers: any tips on how to make a plot flow? That’s where I’m stuck. How do you keep the audience’s interest? How do you make one scene intensely exciting, followed by a less exciting–but no less interesting–scene?
I suspect these questions are so fundamental that I’m revealing just how ignorant I am. Like my 3-year-old asking, “What letter does C start with?” reveals that he doesn’t understand the concept of words vs. letters and what it means for a sound to begin a word.
My ROW80 challenge is to write 1,000 words a day.
Thursday 10/13: Wrote 1019 words by 6:20 am… then kept writing to finish up the scene by 6:54 with 1435 words. Exciting!
Friday 10/14: 107 words. Yeah, I’m not missing a digit. Only got 1/10 of my goal in today. But I’m okay with that. Not so okay if it happens frequently.
Saturday 10/15: 1013 words by 6:58 am. Last scene of the first act! Exciting.
Week total: 5320 words. Nearly finished with the first act of my novel. Success.
Monday 10/17: 1037 words, but not on my novel–on a different story. Also wrote out an outline for that story. I only wrote something along the lines of 100 words on my novel. I’m stuck on a tough scene.
Tuesday 10/18: 1138, surprisingly. By 7:15 am. The scene is just as tough, mostly because my outline for it is so vague and ill-defined. So I skipped the uncertain part and am writing out the battle sequence. Once I got started, the writing went pretty quickly.
I was wrong. Not completely wrong, but wrong enough. I expected Juliet: a Novel to be sappy, half-hearted, and predictible. Being pregnant, my sappy meter isn’t working 100%, but I suspect I would have enjoyed the book even were hormones not rushing through my system. And it was most definitely not half-hearted.
As for predictability, I could see from the first time he appeared who Romeo was going to be, and that certain characters in the opening would make a reappearance. But the way they appeared definitely surprised me.
And the ending! I was surprised at all the turns there. I love being surprised in books. It doesn’t happen much.
Paralleling the modern and ancient stories, which enhanced the meaning and importance of both. It would have been a weak story indeed if only the modern story was told.
New revelations at the end. They work because they’re hinted to–but left unsolved–through the rest of the story. Some authors try to insert new revelations at the end, but give us no foundation, no hint whatsoever of their existence. That’s cheating. Fortier did not cheat, for the most part.
The historical parts are believable. Historically accurate or not, they are believable.
Some parts were slow, some felt unnecessary. Like the fountain scene.
Keeping us on tenterhooks for so long about Romeo. I saw through that one immediately, so dragging out the revelation was neither interesting nor exciting.
Umberto’s story at the end was supposed to be exciting and interesting, but it slowed down the momentum, and so undermined itself.
The cover. I was half embarrassed to check the book out at the library, emblazoned with a giant red rose and looking, for all the world, like a romance novel (that half-respectable kind that still talks about steamy relationships even though it doesn’t have pictures of male models on the front cover). Not only is the rose irrelevant to the story, but it’s not a romance novel and most definitely not steamy.
This is a nitpicky thing, but the standard disclaimer on the copyright page–”not based on real places or people”–is a bit of a lie. Oh, there’s enough vagueness in the actual phrasing of the sentence to justify it, but when the author mentions (in the afterword) this character, who is a real person living today, running this hotel, which is a real hotel in Siena, that kind of undermines the whole “not based on real places or people” thing.
I don’t trust my pregnancy hormones enough to really recommend, but I did enjoy this book. A light, enjoyable read.
Alicia Brown the Writer 