Well –

I got to preview Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel, and the first lesson is pretty good! I dug out the original copy of Freedom that I got bound in that offer Lulu.com gave back during NaNo 2005 to use for my revision. That book has given me more fits than any other one I’ve written, so I figured it’s a good test run as to whether this class is any good.

If you want to be in the first class in January 2010, just go to the link above and sign up to be on the announcement list for when enrollment starts.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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/

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.

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?