This post's purpose is to collect my common tags in one place, so readers (and I!) can easily access entries on several subjects.

Poll #1484453 Hot Romance!!!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 45

Oracne needs to write a "hot romance" story. Which of these settings appeals?

This is my first choice of sub-genre.

You should do another poll for characters!

My random comment is

Philadelphia's transit strike is over, so later this week I plan to be back to early-morning gym sessions. I didn't go first thing this morning; I'm actually a little stiff from Saturday, still, and am not sure if it's better to go work that out or give it a little more time.

I also plan to get back to writing this week. Last week I deliberately took off from the novel, letting it stew around in my backbrain, and instead wrote some upcoming guest blogs and emails about review copies and the like. Yesterday, I brought my notebook to Tuscany (a coffee shop, not the place in Italy, alas!) and focused on what needs to happen in the last 20-25K of my first draft. I probably haven't thought of everything - I never do - but it's enough for going on with. I don't want to waste too much time meandering around figuring things out, now I'm so close to the end. I have quite enough plot items going on already!

If not for the miracle drug ibuprofren, I doubt I could have made myself go back to the gym this morning to lift weights.

I'm still sore from my Saturday afternoon post-writing visit, where I carried around a little notebook and kept track of where I set the benches on the machines, how much I lifted, and how many repetitions. But I woke up early this morning, and decided I would just get it over with. The notes from Saturday helped a lot. I imagine it will help even more once I get started with the personal trainer sessions.

One thing about this gym business - it is like writing, in that it is very satisfying to have exercised, even if the process itself was difficult in the moment. Also, I can space out a bit while exercising, which sometimes happens when I'm writing.

I have also learned from writing that it's best if I have as few barriers as possible to getting it done. For example, I now have a bag beneath my desk with several days' worth of gym clothes, so I won't have the excuse of leaving them at home - the stuff is with me, so I might as well use it. Since the gym is close to my workplace, I don't have the excuse of having to travel a long way, and I can't go home first and then become entrenched there.

I will do this.

And hopefully, soon I will stop blathering about it so much.

The hardest part of re-reading my own work is stopping myself every time I want to make a tiny edit. That isn't the point right now. The point is to pick up on the various plot buttons I dropped in and forgot about, and figure out how to sew them on in the last third of the novel, and pre-figure them in the bits I already wrote. Or some similar metaphor that makes sense.

Gym Orientation is today at lunchtime.

If you have any questions you think I should include in my short fiction FAQ, or suggestions, or the like, I'm collecting them today. I want to do a page for my website compiling the information so far. Here's the post. I also attempted to use an MP3 widget to provide links to my Inspirations playlist, or at least a version of it, since some of the songs I used aren't available for sale. The one I tried is pretty awkward. I'd appreciate suggestions of others that might work better.

I wrote both at lunch and after work yesterday, and ended with a total of 1700 words, all part of a sex scene...which may be a tad too long, I won't know until I'm done writing it. It doesn't feel too long. But if this weren't an erotic novel, it would definitely be too long...and I'd be showing more of Sylvie's investigations and less of her fabulous clocked silk stockings. Sad but true.

I went home and watched the British tv adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Hogfather, which I got a while back with a gift certificate. For some reason, I thought it was two hours long, but actually it was just over three. Towards the end, I was wondering why I was so tired, but I didn't turn around to look at the clock, and was shocked when the story ended at it was 11:30 pm. It was a really good production, and I was absorbed by it, desperate to know what would happen next, even though I'd read the book and knew exactly how the story came out. The actors' performances made the difference, perhaps. I have a weakness for British actors (she understates profoundly). Ian Richardson was the voice of Death, and I really loved how he did it. How does one speak in all capitals? It sounded like he did it, however you do that. Marc Warren (he was in Hustle and The Revengers Tragedy and guested on Dr. Who) was also really riveting and scary as Mister Teatime with a weird high-pitched voice and a movie-mobster accent. Definitely worth seeing.

I blogged about my favorite Westerns over at the pro blog, and otherwise...I got nothin'. Didn't write last night. Did (sorely needed) laundry instead. Feel in a rut. Have to confirm I got Friday off, then start making myself enthusiastic about spending it writing.

Maybe I'll make some notes today. Sometimes that helps, when I feel either stuck or just immobile on a story.

This weekend I was having a really hard time writing, and feeling overwhelmed by it. I think the solution is to unplug this weekend and hopefully on Friday or Monday if I can get one of those off from the day job. Then I can just write. It often helps to have an uninterrupted stretch of time, especially several days in a row, because then I can build up momentum. It also helps not to have other things tugging at your attention, which I won't quite manage this time, but I'll do my best to ignore things.

I'm about halfway through the draft of The Duke and the Pirate Queen. Sometimes I think it's not bad at all, sometimes I think it's a mess and have no idea what I'm doing.

If someone invented a writer confidence pill, they would make a mint, if only writers had any money to buy the things. (I'm assuming the really, really bad writers wouldn't buy such a pill, because they would already think they're brilliant and don't have to do anything to get better.)

No writing today, as I digest yesterday's excellent critique from slithytove, mroctober, pointoforigin, and filomancer. Am pondering how I can incorporate various suggestions, if those suggestions would work for the sort of novel this is, and how much better I aspire to make it, and if "better" in my opinion will make it more or less popular with readers (a thing I try to prevent myself from worrying about, as useless approval-seeking, and yet I do), and whether I should consult my editor about one or two plot ideas that are different from the synopsis they bought, or if I should just stop worrying about all that and go to Readercon this weekend, and let my backbrain make all the decisions, as it usually does. The subconscious has been giving me floods of anxiety dreams the last three days, or maybe it's four. I would like that to stop now, please.

It was a lovely break, if tiring, to go and play with Mademoiselle and The Maw after I got back from workshop.

Travel to Readercon is sorted, and I'm pretty much packed. Thank goodness I accomplished something. Still need to pack for RWA, because I leave for that two days after I return from Readercon, and will probably need to sleep or something in those two days.

Understatement: I was very glad to see filomancer yesterday.

My wordcounts on Friday and Saturday were 1530 and 1576, quite respectable, though I have done better in similar situations.

Dinner out tonight with feklar and barbarienne, then dinner out tomorrow with non-LJ people, then a haircut on Wednesday.

Revisions continue, and I continue to check things off on my revision letter for The Moonlight Mistress.

I have rediscovered something else: available time to write does not directly translate into wordcount.

If I'm writing dialogue or description, but most especially dialogue, the words pile up faster. Word acquisition slows when I'm making subtle changes, or changes in many places.

I think there are a couple of reasons for subtle changes being slower. One is that I spend time scrolling or searching around in the document for the things I need to change. The other is that each change requires time to think, and if the changes aren't related to one another, each one requires a little thinking time of its own.

If I'm just adding in a scene, I can start at the beginning and proceed to the end, or an end; also, I've usually thought about what I'm going to do in that scene before I sit down, so it's just drafting, or if I'm really lucky, transcribing.

Why do I ponder these questions? Well, I feel better about my writing if I feel in control of it. It's not something one can control in every aspect, but knowing how I work, and that my methods have been successful in the past, is reassuring. Understanding my process makes me feel more in control of my process.

Justine Larbalestier talks about finishing writing projects.

"My immediate response is that no book is ever "well and truly done." They could all be made better. Every single one of them, yes, even Pride and Prejudice. There is not point at which "you shouldn't tamper with a story anymore."

Problem is that if we all took that attitude we'd all be working on the same book our entire lives and it'd only find its way into print when we carked it. Not very satisfactory. So, yes, at some point you have to let your story go. It may not be a forever letting go. It may just be letting go to send out to agents and/or editors. If it does sell it will be return to you and you'll be rewriting it again. I know some writers who continue to revise books after they've been published.

However, as a writer who's had several books under contract, deadlines are my signal to stop."

I also loved this quote, because it matches what I do:

"I stop working on a manuscript when

a) it's due, or
b) I can't stand it anymore."

She also talks about degrees of being finished.

I've started tracking total wordcount on The Moonlight Mistress at the end of each revision session. (Tracking how many words I subtracted, and how many I added? There lies madness.)

So far, no matter how long I work, I seem to average about 500 words per session. Is that how many changes I can make before my brain gives out? Because rather than count, as I do when drafting, I'm just working until I run out of writing-brain functionality. (By which I mean, I can poke and poke at the sentences, and suddenly nothing is happening, it's like pushing paperclips back and forth across a desk.) (Which I just realized still doesn't explain what I mean. Oh, well.)

I am curious to see if this 500-words-per-session thing holds true on the weekend, as well. I am betting not. On the weekends, I start writing first thing in the morning, when I am perky and excited to get to work. When drafting, I get more wordcount, more easily, on the weekend. During the week, I write after a full day at the dayjob, so I'm already a bit tired. I wonder if I've just trained myself to 500 words? Because that used to be my minimum per weeknight before I could stop, at least until I sold The Duchess and had to bump up to 1000 per weeknight so I could make the deadline.

*ponders*

I did more revising last night. I spent a week or so after receiving the revision letter just thinking, more in the back of my mind than in the front. I made some notes on my ideas, scribbled a little on a printout of the novel, and thought more. I finally opened up the file on Saturday, and worked on it again last night.

I need to add some scenes, particularly with the villain and relating to his evil plots, but before that I'm making the more subtle changes, the ones that alter the way characters and their relationships are. So, in the original version, two characters had been childhood friends and, in their teenage years, lovers. In order to point up that one character worries about his sexuality (he's bi), I decided that his friend had been much less emotionally involved in their teenage affair than he had been, and that they both knew it, but didn't ever talk about it. At the same time, the friend is charismatic and physically demonstrative, so that's now an added small pain, a constant reminder that his physicality is often casual.

Also, I'm trimming down the numbers of the background soldier characters and giving them a tad more personality, not so much that the reader really has to keep track of them, but enough so she can if she wants to. And I'm giving them a bit more toughness overall, more trash talk, more reason for the characters with alternate sexualities to feel nervous.

I still have to decide some details about the evil scientist plot, but that's coming together, as well.

[whine] Writing is hard! [/whine]

I opened up my laptop last night, for my first fiction writing session in over a month. I didn't get far. I read over the story-in-progress and made some minor changes, then got to the end and just stared at it, and stared, and stared some more. After sleeping on it, I think I'm going to hack back the last thousand words or so and go in a different direction, since the current direction is not singing to me. I thought I had a handle on what I wanted, but I don't. So I'll try something new, because I do still want to write a story about these two characters.

I poked at a synopsis for a werewolf novel, and found I didn't have as much thought out as I'd thought I did. I'm still debating if I want to combine current pair of characters with new werewolf characters (for example, a Russian guy), so I need to make that decision before I can write a synopsis. This morning, I considered using the Russian character in a standalone story instead. Still thinking on it.

Also, having troubles with the page number field in my word processing program, and the sound card is completely dead now. Perhaps I should invest in a new laptop? This one is several years old, and was not top of the line when I bought it. I'm pretty conservative on technology, usually.

I am still extremely mentally tired and somewhat discombobulated after whizzing through writing two novels in quick succession, more so than I'd thought at first. The days off were a very good thing. I found myself listening to my friends conversing as if I'd never heard such a thing before, as if I'd been on a desert island for months.

Which I almost have been. The description I finally arrived at for my state of mind, full of mixed metaphors, is that I've been inside my head for months and months, staring only at the spot directly in front of me, and usually only seeing the inside of my skull. Now, I've fallen out onto the sidewalk and there are people walking by! Events! Other books and new ideas! It's a little overwhelming.

I am dealing with this in several ways. On my days off, I wrote, and I only wrote things I wanted to write, things that I enjoyed. I tried (with little success) to not feel guilty that I didn't write all weekend. I cleaned out a closet. I played with a baby. I ate pie. I did a little housecleaning. I watched the rest of series one of Life, which I loved and would totally read the fanfic for if someone would tell me where the good stuff is, if there is any, yes that is a hint.

cookie_chef asked for some examples of the edits I've been making. This is what they look like.

Original:
Men stood and read the papers under streetlights and in the street itself, blocking wagons whose drivers cursed. Some men cheered, and some shouted angrily. Singing and pipe smoke billowed from the open door of a beer garden; rats skittered in the garbage in the alley next door.

Edited:
Men stood and read the papers under streetlights and in the street itself, arguing vociferously, blocking wagons whose drivers cursed. Singing and pipe smoke, drunken cheers and angry shouts billowed from the open door of a beer garden.
[Rats seemed out of place; she wouldn't be peering that closely into the alley, given how she feels. Folded a boring sentence into other sentences, created some parallel structure.]

Original:
"Run!" he said, so she grabbed her bag and did so, hearing the sounds of a scuffle behind her through the pounding in her ears.

Edited:
"Run!" he said, so she grabbed her bag and did so, hearing a scuffle behind her through her heart's pounding.
[Cut dependent clauses; still a bit confusing, but better]

Should probably be: ...grabbed her bag, her heart pounding, hearing the scuffling behind her.

Original:
"There aren't so many places that will hire a woman as a chemist," Lucilla said, sharply. "Perhaps you haven't noticed."

Edited:
"There aren't so many places that will hire a woman chemist," Lucilla said, sharply. "Perhaps you haven't noticed, France being full of them. Or no, I'm sorry--those women are cooks, aren't they?"
[added more anger, to more realistically provoke other person to shut up]

I'm not progressing as fast as I'd like on these revisions. Last night, though, I went a couple of pages with no changes at all, and it struck me that I was for most the part doing line editing, and that was what took so long, pondering how to clean and sharpen each sentence.

It isn't the time for that now; especially since my revision letter might have me cut scenes. I want the manuscript I turn in to be clean, of course, but I have to back off a bit if I want to be done. I still need to have time to physically enter the changes in the computer file and write the new scenes I've decided I need.

This wasn't an issue last time; I simply wrote until my brain was empty, printed, and sealed it into the courier envelope so I couldn't touch it again.

1000 words last night, mostly getting people from one place to another, as well as a few minor edits I'd thought of and couldn't get out of my head.

Like how I broke glass in one scene and forgot to mention it in another, or didn't say use the word revetment when it would have been cool, niggling details that niggled so much I couldn't start a new scene until they were fixed. You know, in case I got hit by a bus before I could fix them.

Having extra caffeine in the afternoon meant I got through three chapters last night, but couldn't get to sleep. I won't be doing that again.

If I were not me, and I saw myself making these tiny edits, I would probably want to smack me. Except for the one where I had a continuity error that appeared in my revisions--person is doing one thing in one paragraph, and in the next we're told he's been sent elsewhere. I fixed that, you betcha.

I cut words. Maybe a thousand or so, I didn't count exactly; they were talky-not-showy words I would have cut later, so I might as well cut them now.

Then I made changes relating to the Law of Conservation of Characters (I don't know if that's a real law with a name, but it ought to be) so that instead of a younger brother and a sister and her husband and his brother who is the important one, the brother-in-law is now the younger brother. And the rest are neighbors or something, they might end up gone, I don't care at this point. It is hot outside and humid and I am tired and feeling pressured.

I also made some other changes, copy-editing types, so the brother-in-law would be the brother all the way through.

Then I made a list of new scenes that my critiquers had suggested or inspired; there are other changes they suggested I really liked, but those can wait until the draft is done, I think. I still need to write a better scene list for the last third of the book.

I've also been asked to do some outlines for something else, an experimental something which I can't talk about now, but for me, a lot depends on when they'd want actual manuscripts, because I don't want to work on more than one novel at a time. I'd have to start after I turn in the werewolves.