A wild ride

Lots going on here: sons just finished out marching band season (did pretty well!), got two paying non-fiction venues, was asked to contribute to a non-fiction anthology. Way behind on the Think Sideways class. Two novels to crit. And the holidays are coming. So what do I do?

NaNo. (well, unofficially)

Yeah, I know, taking on too much again. But I got this idea for a world that I had to explore, and this is a good time for it.

This is more a seat of the pants thing than anything else, but it’s going well. Off to a slow start from migraines brought on by too much weekend, but today is looking very good indeed.

 

Interesting tool

Ever wonder what a place actually looks like? You can use Google Earth, but that’s not updated all that often.

I found a site called Weather Bonk that collects live webcams of various places. This one is of a California freeway, for example, but they have ones of all sorts of places, from beaches to residential neighborhoods. And the webcams are updated fairly frequently.

 

Last chance for Think Sideways class

Holly Lisle hasn’t announced it yet (I got a note from her affiliate manager), but she’s closing the How to Think Sideways novel-writing class to new members on October 9th, so she can work on some other projects. She plans to open the class to new members twice a year; the next time will be sometime in 2010.

So if you’ve been thinking about taking the class this is the time to join.

Right now, I’m on lesson 14 (yeah, I’m behind, but it’s okay, since you just pay for the lessons and they’re available for as long as you like), and wow. That’s all I can say about it.

It sort of goes like this: you ever write, going along great, and something weird pops up? That’s your subconscious putting a hint of something about your story that – if you want – might make your story REALLY good. Holly shows you how to use that.

(which of course means I’m now going back through all my stories to put this into practice!)

So go at least take a look.

 

Stuck (in retrospect)

While I don’t want to jinx this, I have been stuck, now I am less so.

The problem? Not letting the character be who she is.

She’s a rough woman, a gangsta’s moll, a drifter who cheerfully “cut a few people” to get out of a rioting city. Yet I had her acting nice to a girl who pissed her way off.

I couldn’t figure out why my story stuck in mud until I backed up and really looked at the scene.

(got that tip from lesson 13 of the Think Sideways class, btw)

 

Now this is a good idea

The power of TK

For example, you’re writing along and hit a note that isn’t important to the plot or anything that is a detail that does need to be added in. Instead of stopping to figure it out, or research it, you write something like “He jumped into the [TK make/model of car] and slammed the door shut.” The ‘TK’ is a somewhat statistically improbable letter combination, so you can, in draft, just do a find for TK and work your way through in a later draft fixing little things.

Read more over at http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/

 

Hmm.

I read that last post again, and I still don’t like my story sentence, as it doesn’t quite capture what I’m going after. My MC is penniless because her life savings was stolen, for one thing.

But the story’s going pretty well. I tend to worldbuild on the fly, and since this location is an actual place (Los Angeles) I’m spending a lot of time poring over maps of the LA Basin, making sure as to where a road crosses the river, things like that.

Anyone out there writing? How’s that going? Seems awfully quiet here.

 

A new WIP

Got the girl married off, things have settled a bit, and I’ve finally figured this story from the Think Sideways class well enough to go to lesson 9, and begin writing.

Heh.

I thought I knew how to write scenes, but I’m writing a lot better just from this one lesson than I ever did.  The lesson is forcing me to really LOOK at the scene, figure it out in its entirety, put in the detail, and make it MATTER, before I go to the next one.  For someone like me who normally breezes through 2k a day without breaking a sweat it’s a bit slow, but I find that the scenes are much better ones. I can definitely see progress here.

This story is sort of untitled, in the sense that the working title wouldn’t make much sense if you weren’t reading the story, and is a bit silly to boot, so I’ll just leave it Untitled for now. It’s a post-apocalyptic story in the sense that a lot of stuff happened and things are more or less stable, but it’s a whole different world than we’re used to.

Here’s the Sentence:

A penniless drifter in a drowned Los Angeles, intrigued first by a charming yachtsman and later by the secrets he holds, is enticed into a web of lies that extends beyond Earth.

We’ll see how it goes.

What are you working on these days?

 

It’s been a while

How’s everyone doing?

Since April, my sons have started high school band (they integrate the 8th graders in at the end of the year), my daughter has graduated high school, and the house is all in a flurry because she’s getting married next month.

It’s bittersweet to be losing a daughter (yet gaining a son, so to speak), but they seem to love each other, and she’s continuing with her education. So I’m pleased about it.

I’ve been working on the garden (which has really perked up this year), taking care of home and rabbits, driving kids places, and working on the Think Sideways class. I’m a bit behind, but learning A LOT.

Each class builds on the one before it, so it’s a bit difficult to explain, but the homework for this lesson is to split your planned story into scenes then write a one-sentence blurb for each scene. For example, the Council of Elrond in Lord of the Rings could be summed up this way:

The Council of Elrond meets, and after much controversy, appoints Frodo and eight others to go to Mount Doom and destroy the Ring.

As you can imagine, this homework is taking me a while to do. But it’s a great way to get a handle on the book before you write it. I had an idea of where I wanted the story to start then realized that I really needed to start the story a few scenes earlier. Also, doing this has shown me where I need to do research (anyone know how to sail?) and where the logic holes in my plot are. All this before I spend weeks writing this thing.

So I’m very happy about the class.

What have you been up to? Anything good going on the rest of us need to know about?

 

Write what you know? Or not?

There has been a huge discussion over on LiveJournal about race and cultural appropriation, and one thing I’ve noticed is people saying, “Well, if I just wrote about [what they are], then it would be boring!”

Which made me laugh, because none of the things they put in the brackets sounded boring at all … unless they wrote mainstream, which puts me to sleep.

Seems to me that writing about what you know about, with a bit of tweaking to make it not exactly you, might be just what you need.

Take Tobias Buckell, for example. He grew up in the Caribbean. If he had said, “I can’t write about what I know, that would be boring!” then his whole damn freaking awesome series wouldn’t have come about.

Now I know what you’re thinking: the Caribbean is WAY cooler than, say, Hoboken or Seattle or Dallas. But no, it isn’t. Because if you honestly write what those places and people are like, someone from somewhere else is going to find that interesting.

And Tobias didn’t just write about Caribbean people. He wrote about Caribbean people in SPACE, with aliens and immortals and interstellar wars and blowing shit up.

If he had written it mainstream … well you see where I’m going here.

(apologies to mainstream writers … it’s just not my thing)

I say this as I prepare a story set in the Los Angeles basin. Just so happens it’s in the future. Most of the LA basin is underwater due to global warming, gangs run the place, and our heroine is wheedled into working for a guy obsessed with finding his way off Earth.

But it’s LA, I grew up around there, and I’ve driven that damn basin so many times I could practically do it blindfolded. That doesn’t mean someone might not be interested in what it might be like, a hundred or so years from now. Especially if it involves blowing things up.

So the adage to write what you know still seems right on.

 

Think Sideways course update

I just started lesson five on the How to Think Sideways class (lesson six is up but I’ve been slow). This lesson … mind-blowing. If you can imagine tapping into your subconscious for all the things that motivate you, then putting THAT into your writing on a conscious level … it’s incredible.

I have two great ideas for stories from lesson 4, but I’m going with the SF one (any surprise?) because I can do a better job on this without a ton of research — I’ll need some (know someone who curses in Chinese?) but it’s set in Los Angeles and that’s a place I already know.

Click the box at the top of the sidebar on the right there for more information on the course, or you’re welcome to ask about it. I’ve gotten my money’s worth already and I still have the rest of the year to go.