Graphic by Peg Ihinger
And it’s another open-mike day! Talk among yourselves, ask questions, update everyone on what’s going on in your life or with your WIP.
I’m fleshing out maps and background timelines for my two possible WIPs (still haven’t decided on which to do yet, but I’m leaning toward the complicated non-sequel).
And the Facebook page hack still hasn’t been solved…
I have finally capitulated and acknowledged I’m writing a series which happens to have two side novels instead of two novels and this one book on the side (the offending, actually I’m a series one).
Sadly, I’m also kinda writing it all in a lump since I write out of order and the events in each affect each other heavily.
Thousands of words but no finished book yet.
I think someone hacked your facebook
Going back and filling in all the diplomatic sessions. I was right that if I actually got some names and characterizations for the diplomats, I could find more interest in the topic; and it’s helping the too-compressed pacing.
I also wrote a scene that would go near the end, where the most troublesome of the diplomats talks about her fears for the future. Not sure it goes in; it kind of ends with a fizzle at the moment. Does give me a little more sympathy for her, though, and that’s probably enough reason to have written it.
I need to get off my duff and resubmit book 1. Though I also have to go back and rewrite the space scenes, as during the process of writing book 2 I reluctantly decided the humans don’t have antigravity. Fortunately book 1’s space scenes are minimal. Ugh, except for the taking of the protagonist’s ship. I now know that swarm ships don’t grapple the victim, they fire pods at it instead, because the target ship may be rotating and grappling a rotating ship is not a great idea, especially if you want to capture the crew. Okay, heavy rewrite there. It’ll be better for it, I hope. (My husband keeps saying, does this story need accurate gravity? But I think it does.)
I’m starting a key climactic scene where the MC sits down with her bio mother to ask some of the questions that have been nagging at her (mainly “Who is my father?” and “Why did you give me up for adoption as a baby?”). I know how I want the central parts of the conversation to go, so now it’s time to figure out the little stuff that fills in the cracks.
Those can be fun. I just had the heroine fishing around for knowledge of where she can sell her handiwork, and letting slip something, which inspired them to warn her of the pitfalls, and also slithered in some infodumping. . . but it got done.
It’s out, it escaped!
Sylvie’s Escape, available at Amazon and many other fine online venues!
Dear Wrede,
I started to follow you Last summeri, but I management to have time for your previous posti.
I read Dragons and genderbias. You say: What a shokki for a teenager to understand that their parents have once been rowdy teenagers themselves… like my on and everyone elses parents.
Do you mean that Cimorene becomes Boeing when she is alone with Daystar and gets olevan?
Auri said: “Do you mean that Cimorene becomes Boeing when she is alone with Daystar and gets older?”
No, I meant that even interesting parents present themselves differently to their children than they do to anyone else. Sometimes it happens because the kids are so used to their Mom or Dad doing something that they think all parents do that, and they are quite startled when they realize that everyone else thinks their parents are cool. More often, it’s because for some reason the parents got into the habit of doing a particular cool thing when their kids weren’t around. So the kids never realized that the parents ever did it. Like watching “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”–I know quite a few parents and grandparents who have been terribly amused by their children/grandchildren discovering that movie and then finding out with great horror that their parents used to go to midnight showings in costume and know all the songs by heart.
Older
How do you manage to write even on days when you don’t feel like it?
I know you’re not supposed to wait for motivation since it’s fickle, but I have trouble being consistent in practice. I would have time but especially after work my brain often feels so drained I feel as creative as a brick.
Are there any tips for getting started daily to get at least some sort of consistent progress? Or for finding creativity on the days when even watching Netflix feels like it would require too much brainpower?
Just from someone also too drained at night, I found the key was getting lots of my material easily readable on my phone with an easy app for me to write a bit here and there as inspired, which is where my thousands of words this year came from.
I’m not even using a writing app. I’m writing in a private discord server and then plugging stuff into my desktop big scrivener picture on weekends, then exporting it back to put on my phone to keep going.
Even if I just write a few minutes on the go, I can beat the totally fried window.
When I had a day job, I wrote on my breaks and over my lunch hour. Those are pre-set time slots that happened every day, so it was just a matter of repurposing the time to do something I really wanted to do. Nowadays, I use my phone to capture ideas when I’m in the waiting room at the dentist or on the bus or waiting for friends to show up to walk or have lunch at a restaurant. Phones make it much easier to use tiny scraps of time to capture sentences. And there’s always “go to bed half an hour earlier when you’re fried and wake up half an hour earlier and write.”
Also “write regularly/write consistently” does not necessarily mean “write every day.” Writing every Saturday morning consistent, if that’s all you can truly manage. If you get interrupted a lot, turn off your phone and go to a coffee shop to write where nobody can find you. The real trick is consistency, which requires finding a time/place in which you can be consistent. One possibly-apocryphal guy hung a wax pencil and whiteboard in his shower…
The last two novels only got written because I put a paper notebook in my backpack and wrote a whole lot of scenes in it while on the bus/train or waiting somewhere. Then I’d transcribe the scenes later, which is something I can do even when fairly fried.
Thanks for the tips!
I write on my phone in bits of time. For a while I wrote in the mornings after I pressed ‘snooze’ on my alarm but before I got out of bed, though I’m too tired for that now (I just fall back asleep)
“I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at nine o’clock every morning.”
—William Faulkner
I’m halfway through a short story I was really pleased with, but it turns out space weather and Coronal Mass Ejections don’t work the way I need them to and the story may be dead in the water. (Well, or in the void between asteroids.) Darn it, science!
Can you turn it into gravitic vectors and superstring snarls, or some other technobabble?
(Can you make it more believable than what I just came up with??)
LOL, no, in this case the science part of the science fiction really does need to hold up. I’m trying to repurpose the CME to a different kind of threat; not sure it’s dangerous enough to be dramatically interesting, but it’s worth a try.
A while ago I asked about what natural novella-ists could do to write books – loved your answers, but I also found another. Write kids books! My natural length is just right for middle grade, and I’d been wanting to try that anyway 🙂
Great!
Trying to rewrite the query letter–really, write a new one–for Book 1. I have three sentences, having poked at it on and off all day yesterday. I just don’t know how to do this despite having read many, many how-tos. If I think about it too much I start feeling like the novel must be a failure because its structure is hard to capture.
It is possible to talk about the first big turning point in the story, when Kay decides to let the alien animal help find a missing child, in terms of what the stakes are for Kay. But it falsifies the scene quite remarkably, because for various reasons she’s not thinking about stakes at all; she decides on impulse. Only afterwards does she really appreciate how much trouble she’s gotten herself into; and things deteriorate rapidly from there.
There is some subtle mental manipulation going on (her “animal” is not an animal, and it has its own agenda), but she doesn’t find that out for another 10 chapters, so I really don’t want to say it.
Would the “falsified” stakes set a reader up to feel bait-and-switched by the real thing? Because if not, it’s perfectly okay to, er, gloss over things in a query to the point of let’s-not-call-it-lying. As long as the person who asks for the manuscript based on your query wouldn’t be disappointed to get your novel, you’re okay.
(There’s a great example query somewhere that talks about Luke Skywalker going to his mentor Ben Kenobi for help with the droids. Except that at that point in the story, Ben isn’t Luke’s mentor; they’ve never even met. But nobody who responded positively to that would be disappointed to get Star Wars.)
Your second paragraph there sounds like it captures the structure nicely.
A try at it (not in love with this version but it’s miles better than the last two):
Dear [Agent],
Kay Chatterjee is a senior zookeeper with a remarkable ability to work with animals, even alien ones. For her entire career she’s shunned the publicity that might lead people to ask how she does it.
Now a child has gone missing, and the prize of Kay’s latest exhibit, an alien “floating eye” she has named Tyree, wants to help find him. But if she accepts, there will be questions asked. How intelligent is Tyree? How is Kay communicating with it?
And one she should be asking herself: what does Tyree want in return?
When the human base on Tyree’s homeworld is suddenly overrun, Kay can no longer dodge these questions. The Terran military has plans for her. And so does Tyree.
Zookeeper is an 85,000-word science fiction novel with a streak of psychological horror.
I’m a research scientist with a background in genetics and
evolutionary biology. This novel was inspired in large part by evolutionary paradoxes among ants, such as the army ants which
lost the ability to tell nestmates from strangers during their invasion of the US, and now form a single colony over 200 kilometers across.
The novel is a complete story, but book 2 of a projected trilogy is in draft form.
Thank you for your consideration.
I’m no expert on query letters, not having sent one since 2013, but that looks good to me, and is true to the novel draft I read.
I hope it sells – it’s good.
Well, I’m interested!
Not having read this book, it sounds like you’ve struck a good balance between the immediate stakes/inciting incident and the fact that there’s a lot more going on than it seems at first.