Icon by Peg Kerr Ihinger
Once again it is open mike time! And back to school week, too. How has everyone’s end-of-summer been? What are you working on? What do you need or want to know?
Back to school open mike!
Icon by Peg Kerr Ihinger
Once again it is open mike time! And back to school week, too. How has everyone’s end-of-summer been? What are you working on? What do you need or want to know?
I’m now revising the final chapter of the novel that feels like it’s taking forever. After that, I have a fistful of fix-notes to deal with, and I really ought to do a copyedit/typo pass before kicking it out the door.
Normally I’d work on a short story or three as a break, but the “Plot is Hard” and “Cannot Find Endings” bugaboos are especially strong right now.
I have finished the WIP (and have a thousand or two words of the next one) and I’m tearing my hair out over summaries at various lengths. If I could tell this at short length I wouldn’t have written 84K words in the first place.
Two bits need a deep rewrite: kind of stalling on those. I did wordsmithing last night, got weirdly obsessive, stayed up too late: definitely not doing tricky editing this morning.
I’ve read the WIP, and it’s remarkably good. I didn’t inquire whether this was a first novel or not, but if so, it’s better than most of the first efforts I’ve seen published!
Color me impressed.
Awww. That’s sweet of you to say.
I have never published a novel but this is the fourth one I’ve written. Patricia tried to untangle my previous try at SF back on rec.arts.sf.composition, many years ago…. Or rather, she tried to tangle it, suggesting a complicated non-linear story technique that I couldn’t pull off (probably because it was only papering over deep structural issues).
If I get a nibble on this I may try a rewrite pass on the first of the two fantasies and see how it goes.
I’ve been hit with school stuff over the last couple of weeks, but I have read the latest portion and I like it a lot! I’ll get more specific feedback to you as soon as I can. 🙂
I’ve been back to school for two weeks already! Hopefully having homework to procrastinate will help me get some writing done this semester; I was hoping to write a ton over the summer, but didn’t actually follow through.
On the other hand, it’s been a long while since I set aside my WIP to rest; maybe I’ll go back through it and see if I have any startling revelations about how best to revise it. In that vein, if you have any tips for revising a WIP with plot problems, a magic system in need of a reboot, and characters with unclear motivations, I would love to know any wisdom you’ve picked up over the years! Revision is relatively fun for me, but it’s really easy to fall into useless tinkering that makes more problems than it solves.
Okay, I do have a question. When you’re writing a short intro for a query letter, how far into the plot do you normally go?
Query letters are more like blurb snippets than plot summaries, by all the advice I’ve seen.
@Mary — Of the few I’ve done, one had as little as a single paragraph about the plot, in a letter that was itself very brief. The query letter plot description can be especially short if you’re also submitting a synopsis. In another case, where a separate synopsis wasn’t needed, I spent eleven paragraphs on a pretty detailed outline of a novella. That letter was successful, as it happens.
It may be useful to see if the publisher’s or agents’ Web site gives any guidelines, of course.
My experience is limited — more prolific and successful writers may have better-grounded advice. 😉
Trying to revise a story to kick out the door before the end of the year. Alas, I am trying to work on it around job-hunting rather than a job, which is added stress.
Oof. Good luck!
Yes indeed! That’s not a combo I would ever welcome. Fingers crossed!!
Thank you!
(If anyone feels moved to buy one of my books either at Amazon or any of the other fine venues about the internet, or to review or rate a book of mine you’ve read, I’ll be grateful.)
Are there any you recommend for someone brand new to your work? I checked the Amazon link, and I’ve got to say, all those $1 options have this broke college student intrigued… 😉
I must warn you the short stories are the less-than-a-dollar ones, and that they are, in fact, cheaper in the collections if you get a bunch.
And then I can only observe that they range from battle of wits with a possible fae in “Never Comment On A Likeness” to pretty much pure adventure in “The Turtle of the Sea Of Sand.” So I’m not sure I could recommend one without knowing more.
Thank you!
I’m bogged down again in my WIP. I know what the next chapter needs to accomplish, I just don’t know how to actually do that. Specifically, I want the confrontation with the evil witches to go wrong such that my good guys end up having to work with the police, to set up a longer-term arc, but 1) I don’t actually know what the evil witches want and 2) at the moment the police have no reason to be present. Much brainstorming required. *Grumpy face.*
Ouch.
When outlining, I generally try making the exact opposite happen, but that works only because I’m outlining and don’t have a fixed path.
In actual drafts, there’s no help for it but brainstorming, long walks, and attempting to trick it.
Rowan, something that’s helped me in that kind of situation (not knowing what the evil witches want) is to get them on-stage talking about it. The resulting scene does NOT have to go in the story. Who would be in a good position to ask them juicy questions about their goals? Send them a vampire or a fairie trickster or something, and just get them talking. Or start an argument among them about their goals and write that.
Sympathies on how to get it to go where you want, though; I hardly ever can do that. It’s rather like the job I once had where I had to walk a Malamute daily. These animals can pull 1200 lbs. You are not walking them; they are walking you. If things got out of hand my strategy was to run round a tree and let the tree provide stopping power….
Oh, that’s genius! I do something like that with my protagonists sometimes (though it rarely leaves my head), but I wouldn’t have thought to do it on a villain!
Oh, goodness! My brother owns a Malamute/Husky mix and that dog, while being extremely cute, is also extremely difficult to play with! He’s so hyper that he doesn’t realize how insanely strong he is.
Thank you to both Marys. The Malamute analogy is all too accurate. I’ll block off a good chunk of writing time this weekend and see if I can make a breakthrough.
I guess this means the question is… what’s your tree?
What a question….
I think it’s Kay herself. I don’t generally know where I’m going, but the fact that it’s unequivocally a story about Kay gave me something to hang on to.
That’s why the next to last chapter was such an emotional roller-coaster to write. Is it still a story about Kay, after that?
Yes it is, absolutely. It’s about Kay confronting a wider universe, and figuring out how she and her ~family~ fit into it. (Not to mention how they fit into the human-inhuman and humane-inhumane spectra.)