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Author Erica Ridley's blog: Erica Writes Romance
Sorry I've been MIA all week, but I just hit THE END on Touched this morning! w00t! Yayayayayayay!!!
Also, it's been one year this week since I first brainstormed the wacky tooth fairy story over on Miss Snark's blog that turned into 400 pages now known as Hi-Jinxed two title changes, four character tweaks, and a major plot change later. (full story here)
2007 rocked---here's to 2008!!!
I have the (pleasure? horror?) of being snowed in 1,000+ miles away from home, as I flew north this weekend to visit family for the holidays. Internet is sketchy because there's no wifi (what kind of Neanderthal house is this?!) but I'm scrambling like crazy to finish Touched.
Two things about that: Realism vs Procrastination.
As you may know, I'm a long-standing advocate of setting specific, quantifiable, realistic, attainable goals and holding yourself accountable to them.
I did not make my (internally-motivated) goal of finishing Touched by Thanksgiving. In fact, I'm in danger of seeing Christmas before my agent sees the manuscript.
Why? I think it was my old nemesis "realistic". Finishing by Thanksgiving (an arbitrary deadline, to be sure) may have been theoretically possible, but possible != realistic.
And so... and so, once the deadline came and went--and, granted, Life reared its hectic head in the form of germs and cross-country plane trips and omnipresent client work and so on--once making the deadline was an impossibility because the date had already passed, so too went a big chunk of my drive.
I mean, partly I was rewriting because I love to write and I love this story, and partly I was rewriting because if I want my agent to lay eyes on it, then (duh) I have to send it to her, but also partly I was revising because I'm self-competitive by nature. Ain't never seen a goal I didn't want to meet or beat. I work for what I want, and in general I tend to succeed. But when I woke up Thanksgiving morning with the new goal of making it out of bed without coughing my lungs onto the floor, well... it was all too easy for justifiable delay to slip into that insidious beast Procrastination.
Now, as mentioned, I'm scrambling to finish, despite being snowed in a house with more family members than beds and a single non-wifi Internet connection. Because it's almost time for that end-of-year standby, New Years Resolutions, and I am determined to begin my super-secret new project on January 1. I will start it then.
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Question:
Is it possible to churn out bad fan fic of your own WIP?
Answer:
Apparently, yes.
Yesterday, I was struggling with a scene. Not that I was actively not writing it, exactly. Just that I kept writing 2-3,000 words of it and then having to throw it away because it sucks.
Not sucks like the prose is clunky or the dialogue is stilted or there's too many adverbs and adjectives. The scene is tense, funny, hawt.
Too bad it makes no frigging sense.
Version 1: Heroine follows hero to his bedchamber, waits by the open door while his valet helps him from one outfit to another, then goes inside when hero calls to her and excises the other bodies from the room, exhorting them to shut the door behind them.
The problem? Uh, hello, Regency house party. Broad daylight. Servants everywhere. WTF is she doing with him in his bed chamber, watching him undress and redress, then agreeing to spend some quality time with him alone once he kicks the servants out? Stupid, stupid, stupid. All three of us. (Hero, Heroine, Erica.)
Delete button.
Version 2: No bedchamber. Too dangerous/stupid/fanfic-y. Hero sweeps heroine into a room off the main thoroughfare, conveniently stocked with sofas and just as conveniently devoid of houseguests and servantkind. He does what any other anti-marriage Regency buck would do: promptly starts to get nekkid.
Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrt! (That's the sound of a screeching halt.) Although the partial nudity was ostensibly motivated by something other than the desire to get into the heroine's skirts (checking out a wound) it's still him with his shirt off and her right there staring at his bare chest, if a bit nervously. (As well she should.)
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I got back about an hour ago, and since then have been catching up on email, so I'm not any further than I was when I left for lunch. I'll have to break again here soon for day job antics followed by supper plans, but I hope to report in with a complete scene before the day is through!
...but got most of a scene done! I had hoped for the whole thing by noon but you can't have it all. I hope to finish up when I get back, and if possible start another. Hope you're off being productive!
So far, it's been an hour and I've written a whole 150 words. Grrr. If the phone would just stop ringing... Off to try and double the word count before another client catastrophe ensues!
Hopefully I will make many many blog posts today as I check in with progress.
I was up at 7:30am, and so far have revised 1 scene (all that was left to revise from recent crits) and now have nothing else (story-wise) to prevent me from moving forward with the WIP.
Check back with me in a couple hours, and lay me a fish-slap upside the head if I'm not reporting in with another scene written!
Okay, okay, I'm not really a Tairen Soul. It would be wicked cool if I was, though!
I'm halfway through my friend C. L. Wilson's series (because only 2 of 4 have hit the shelves) and firmly in love with the hero's right hand man Bel. (If you also love him, back off. He's mine.)
I finally got around to updating my Books Read in 2007 list on the right. I think. It's been so long since my last update, I'm sure I missed some of them.
But I couldn't miss hanging out with C. L. Wilson in person this weekend at the TARA holiday party! Here's the Tairen queen and myself:
I had a blast hanging out with all my TARA sisters and brothers. You can read more about our party shenanigans over at Karen Lingefelt's blog, or about our gift exchange over at Vicki Lane's blog.
YOUR TURN: What did you do this weekend? Are you gearing up for the holiday season or do you wish it would pass you by? If you exchange presents this time of year, how are you doing on your list?
I'd like to chat about stories and subjectivity. I was reminded of a few things recently when a friend of mine went through some tough times:
Published != Easy
This is for all you aspiring authors out there. Published does not equal easy. Don't forget that. Just because Debut Debbie just scored $150,000 for her regency alien time travel secret baby western doesn't mean she has it made. It means she'll have $150k more than you--but only if she turns in her book on time, addresses her revision letters to the editor's satisfaction, and so on.
Editors != Yes-men
Don't assume that once you get that contract, the editor will love every word you put to paper. Maybe she will! I have some friends whose editors rarely give big picture changes and limit the majority of their comments to the occasional line edit. I have other friends whose manuscripts come back with more red than white. Neither of those things is good or bad--the editor is there to ensure the publishing house publishes a salable book. They're in the business of making money.
Editor != Friend
What I mean by this is, it's your editor's job to be your editor, but it is not her job to be your friend. She is first and foremost an employee of a publishing house, and to that end, she possesses a personality of her own. Maybe she has a calm, empathetic, thoughtful personality. Maybe she does not. Whether you get a light edit or a change-every-word edit has nothing to do with how much the editor likes you or the story. But how she presents her comments has everything to do with her personality and the manner in which she does her job.
If authors turn in a story to a contest or an agent and it comes back with the words "This sucks" or "You suck" and nothing else, we have no idea where we or the story went wrong. The editor's job is articulating her concerns in such a manner that the author is able to address them.
Compliments and insults are just gravy. Neither is required, but be prepared to get them.
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Please share your opinions!
We all can (probably) agree that there’s such a thing as a story being ruined by gross inaccuracies due to poor research. But it there such a thing as too much accuracy?
I’ve been thinking about this ever since I read Brenda Coulter’s post on Regency titles over at Romancing the blog. It’s a pretty interesting comment trail, too. At least one blog reader remarked that readers of historical fiction know and love history, so historical accuracy in fiction should be obligatory. At least one other blog reader remarked that she could give a fig less about historical accuracy; she just read to be entertained.
Where do you fall on those lines?
I don’t want my Regency miss saying “Hello” to the hero, or the young pup dancing attendance on her to lose his dukedom to his bastard brother on the turn of a card. The reader reading purely for entertainment probably has no idea why these two things rub me the wrong way when I come across them.
Then again, I don’t want my Medieval laird hero to suffer rotting teeth or the Sassenach heroine to go unbathed for long periods during the winter regardless of how accurate that may or may not be. I want them clean, I want them bathed, I want their clothes smelling halfway decent, their food unspoiled, and all their teeth nice and healthy. (Crooked is fine.)
But that’s just me, and historical is a sticky wicket anyway since obviously that period of time is over.
What about other genres? Uncoply cops, unnursely nurses, ridiculously precocious three-year-olds who take care of themselves for chapters at a time and spout college-level vocabulary? Does that stuff roll off your back, or does it make you want to scream?
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So, the other day I was sucked into the siren song of one of my Google Home Page links:
How To Make an Ambigram on WikiHow.
I'd first learned about ambigrams when reading Angels & Demons by Dan Brown. (The DaVinci Code is still on my TBR pile. So sue me, I saw the movie first. *g)
Anyhoodles, an ambigram (for those who don't know) is an image that reads the same even upside down (NOT mirror image, although it may *also* be palindromic), ie:
Naturally, thanks to the cursed WikiHow article, I had to try my hand at creating my own ambigram. (I first did this by hand on Post-Its, and then tried to recreate it digitally for upload purposes.)
Et voila, my name becomes:
Now that I've got that under my belt, all I need is a ruthless cabal of albino Vatican assassins and I'll be on my way to take over the world!!! Muahahahahahahahahaaa
YOUR TURN: Don't lie, you know you've procrastinated something lately. Was it as fun as making ambigrams? Spill! What's the best way you've procrastinated recently? Sure, it wasn't productive. But as long as it was entertaining, I wanna know!
At times even better than a thesaurus, I have a secret weapon on my laptop: the Trouble Words text file.
Every writer has their own personal crutch words and phrases. Some of them I can't help you with because my first drafts struggle with an overabundance of blinking and frowning and shrugging myself. (Although my advice for that one would be to have the characters interact with their environment rather than search for alternate body language tags.)
A few other words, however, could occasionally use some spicing-up. One of them in my Trouble Words text file is WALK.
I walk. You walk. They walk. (Come, conjugate with me!) But how are they walking? And can it be described without use of the dreaded Adverb Of Terror? Should it even be changed at all, or should I allow the character to walk in peace?
This is the WALK entry in my Trouble Words file:
WALK: absconded, accompany, across, advanced, amble, ambled, ambulated, approached, ascended, be, blend, bolted, boost, bounce, break, breeze, bumble, bushwhacked, cantered, careen, carry, change direction, charged, chase, chased, climbed, come, conduct, consort, continued on, cover, covered ground, crash, crawled, creep, crept, cross, crossed, cut, danced, darted, dashed, decamped, depart, descended, direct, dodder, dodged, drift, drifted, ease, edged, eluded, emerged, entered, escaped, evacuated, evaded, exit, fall, falter, fit, fled, flew, flinch, flitted, float, flounder, fly, follow, galloped, give, glide, glided along, go, groped, guide, hastened, haul, hauled off, head, hiked, hitch, hobbled, hurried, hurry, hurtled, inched, jogged, journey, jump, launched, leap, leave , led, limped, linger, listed, loped, lumbered, lunged, lurched, lurk, maneuver, marched, meandered, minced, mosey, moved, paced, padded, paraded, passed, patrolled, perambulated, plodded, plowed, pound, pranced, precede, proceeded, progress, propelled, prowled, pursued, pushed, pussyfooted, raced, rambled, ran, recoil, reel, ride, roamed, roll, roved, rush, rushed, sailed, sashay, sauntered, scaled, scampered, scooted, scrambled, scudded, scuffed, scuffled, scurried, scuttled, set out, settle, shadowed, shambled, shlep, shove, show, shrank, shuffled, sidestepped, sidled, skidded, skip, skipped, skulk, slide, slinked, slunk, slog, slouched, slow, sneaked, snuck, speed, sprinted, staggered, stalked, stamp, stamped, started, steal, steamroll, steered, stepped, stole, stomped, strayed, strode, strolled, strut, strutted, stumbled, swaggered, swerved, swing, swished, tiptoed, toddle, took flight, tore, totter, track, trailed, traipsed, tramp, tramped, trampled, travel, traversed, treaded, trekked, tripped, trod, trotted, trudged, tumble, turn, ushered, veered, venture, waddled, waded, wandered, wended, went on his way, withdrew, wobbled, work, yield
YOUR TURN: Confess! Do you have any Trouble Words of your own? How do you catch and correct overuse of crutch words and phrases in your own writing? Share your secret!
What do we do about mindsets that seem positive, but have an insidious debilitating effect?
Take me, for example. (I'm my favorite example because I know me best. Plus I don't have to worry about me suing me for libel.)
As you may or may not know, I recently went through a month-long writing drought. I wrote Touched, Scene 26 on November 3rd, and then not another word broke free from my brain for 30 straight days.
Why?
Besides wanting a good night's sleep, a few hours of uninterrupted time, my work/email caught up, a completed to-do list, my computer, an internet connection, a full stomach, a cup of coffee, the stars in alignment, and all that other fun stuff... I also wanted to feel like it was possible I could churn out something other than dreck.
Basic, right? We all want to write decent stuff. Why did I think I couldn't? Was I ridiculed? Given snide comments? Told to give up? No, nothing like that. The opposite, in fact. I was told by two CPs whose objective opinions I trust more than my own that they actually liked my WIP. Eagerly awaited the next scene. And so I froze.
I froze, and spiraled into a pit of self-defeating nitcritty hell. How would I write the next scene? Would it be as good as they were clearly expecting? Would I live up to my own bar? Would they see that my potential wasn't as great as they thought it was? Was my hook not hooky enough? My end-of-scene disaster too tame? The conflict too weak? The dialogue too rapid? My prose too clunky? The scene direction too stilted? The setting non-existent? Was I sure I wanted to write it in that POV? Starting at that point? With that particular arc?
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2,233 words of yet more talking heads. Fabulosity!
Hope you're off being productive...
After a month-long drought, I finally wrote a scene! 2,244 words of mostly talking heads, but hey. Progress! So exciting!
Off to see if I can eke out another...
Let's be friends!
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erica [at] ericaridley.com
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