Updates (Six Month Hiatus Explained)

Well, it's been six months since I was last here. Sorry about that. Here's a few quick updates, then I'll make a second update about what I actually came here to write.

Health: I learned recently that I do not have carpal tunnel, but that I actually have cubital tunnel, which is somewhat similar, but uses the ulnar nerve and runs through the elbow instead. I'm on anti-inflammatories and some light therapy, but I think the thing that really helped it was just knowing the cause and the things to avoid. But more importantly, the pain I've been feeling is not a result of cubital tunnel syndrome, but is in fact a "more serious issue" we're currently trying to determine. I go in on Wednesday for blood tests to determine whether or not I have RA, which is the most likely result.

Zenith: Has a new intro that I rather like, but other than that, has been sitting ignored for a few months. I really need to go through and do final edits, but I just can't seem to find the motivation lately (we'll get to that in a minute).

Inevitable aka the TimeWIP: If you only follow me here, you don't know about the TimeWIP yet. It is my current project, which involves time traveling Historians. Yep, I gave time travel to one of the most boring professions and denied it to everyone else. Basically, the Collective Historical Society has unlocked the key to time travel and they've found a way to limit access to it. Historians are sent back in time to witness important events and collect facts (and occasionally artifacts) on these events. The MC, James, is told when he's 12 that he'll become a Historian, because in the future he's already one and the CHS needs to make sure this happens. There's more to it after that, but that's where I am at the moment. I really enjoy writing about time travel.

NaNoWriMo '11: I will be participating again this year, partially because I want to get back into the habit of writing everyday, partially because I want to challenge myself with something I'm not very good at (realistic fiction), and partially because Casye needs a writing buddy. Originally I thought about using the TimeWIP, but I had already written pieces of it, so that would be cheating. Instead I'm going to write about a bunch of friends from college who get split up after graduation, which will highlight different kinds of LDRs and LDFs.

Draft 3, here I come!

November 2009, I sat down at my computer thinking "Okay, I can do this: I can write a novel." As the months wore on, I started to question the validity of that statement. Could I really write a full novel? I knew I could start one, I'd done that dozens of times before, but could I actually finish one? Most days, I wasn't so sure, but I kept at it anyway. Then in February 2010, I did it: I finished...the first draft.

Then a few months later, the second. In July, I sent out copies of my manuscript to a few willing participants who had promised me feedback. One of them responded with notes on the entire novel, another on the first twelve chapters, still another on the first chapter (though, to be fair, this was all she had received).

And now, in November of 2010, a little over a year after I first began this project, I am beginning work on the third draft of Zenith.

I once compared rewriting to surgery:

For years I have heard authors toss around this phrase, that all writing is rewriting. I want to tell them they've got it backwards, that all rewriting is writing. You have a fully formed first draft and suddenly, you are starting from scratch. There is no such thing as a minor edit at this point, this is not plastic surgery. This is orthopedics, the breaking and reforming and placement of bones, the bare skeleton of what you wish to create. This is heart surgery and brain surgery, this is fixing the insides of a story so that it can live and breathe and speak on its own someday. You recreate the story, instead of making it look better. You rewrite it. Re-write. Write again. You essentially write a second novel, by fixing up that first draft. 

 I stand by everything I said then and I am happy to say that my patient is out of the woods and stable these days. No more trauma surgery, no more heart or brain surgery. I now get to move on to the less threatening issues. I can focus on the lacerations and bruises, make sure everything is okay and stable. I get to comb my novel for inconsistencies, make sure my characters and my story get across well enough, and destroy all evidence of typos and grammar faux-pas. This is plastic surgery, the surface reformations and beautification stage. I hope it comes out pretty enough, in the end.

Writing, Like Maths

Secret Agent Casye says maybe it will be a comfortable black hole. Oh God, I hope that's true.

So when you're coming up against a deadline and you know it's impossible at some point you're going to want to say "forget it, I'll just copy-paste the whole damn thing and leave it alone." Actually, you'll want this at many points. And that's nice, but then what's the point of edits at all? You know there are all kinds of mistakes throughout the novel and you could probably even pick out the chapters that need the most work and hope the others are clean, but they won't be, not completely. That copy-paste thing, though, there's something to be said about that.

When working with a very complex equation in maths you can stare at it until your eyes bleed, but the answer won't come to you by looking at the whole problem, you have to break it down into smaller, workable parts. Use the order of operations, PEMDAS, and figure out the parenthesis first, then the exponents and so on and so forth until finally, you have a small equation that you can answer easily. In mechanics you do the same thing when approaching a new machine that you don't understand: you pick a small part and understand that, then work your way into the part connected to it, until you understand the rest.

The same idea of breaking down a problem into workable parts can be applied to writing as well. I prefer to type out everything again by hand, to effectively rewrite the novel, but when there's no time for that, copy-pasting will have to do. So instead of copy-pasting the entire novel and trying to comb through for mistakes, I copy a small portion, just a few paragraphs at a time, and work through those. That way I don't get overwhelmed by the bigness of everything and get too distracted from the finer details. I tend to miss things when I have too much to look at, so I limit the scope a little by zooming in on a particular set of words and fix them up, then move on to the next part attached to it. Copy-pasting saves me time, but I still manage to work through it all.

With that, I'm off to finish up my 4th chapter of the day. Hopefully I can still manage to pull off seven. Luckily, I have the day off tomorrow.

Tip #1: Break down the problem into something you can work with.

Just Because You Have a Deadline, Doesn't Mean You Can Make It

So here's the thing, deadlines only work when you stick to them. You cannot make a deadline if you want until the last minute because having a deadline doesn't magically make your work done. I knew this in November, but I can't seem to actually apply it to my life now. I have 15 chapters done, out of 41, which means I have 26 to go...in 4 days (including the rest of today). I basically need to write 7 chapters a day and today so far I've written 2. It's 6:30 at night and I have written 2 chapters, that's not a great sign. Tuesday I work in the morning and Wednesday my siblings return from Colorado, about the same time my aunt comes to visit from Georgia. This deadline is not possible and Secret Agent Casye is totally going to throw me in a black hole. That doesn't sound very pleasant at all.

Second Chances as a Science

It's summer for me now and honestly I have no idea what to do with myself. I don't miss classes or a hundred papers a week (well, maybe just ten), but I do need the structure and schedule that came along with school. My sleep schedule is screwed up--which is really bad, considering I'm an insomniac (I'm on hour 30 of no sleep right now!)--and so is my writing. I have 18 days left and I'm really not much further than I was a week ago, it's sad and scary. This whole writing thing was a lot easier in November.

The thing with edits is that you have a chance to make things better than they first were before anyone else sees them. It's your chance to polish up your novel and get rid of all the things you wouldn't want to get out into the world. At this point, if you're like me, you might discover that your story doesn't make as much sense as it should in the order it was written in, so you'll start moving things around. This can be good, this can be great! Or this could be a bad idea.

Sometimes, after you've rearranged things in all these new ways you look back at it and realize you only made it worse. Maybe what needed to be moved wasn't a chapter, but a scene, a paragraph, a sentence. Chapters can be broken down into smaller units and exchanged, they don't always have to move in giant blocks. I thought I had done so well with my new order of chapters, til I realized that Rob could talk with his mother about Risty, but it would make sense to wait until he knew Risty better. The part I had pushed behind this section hinged on a paragraph, not a chapter, and I shouldn't have moved everything to accommodate that small section.

Edits are for second chances, but also for experimentation. Edits are chemistry, essentially. You take different elements of the novel and combine them in new or unexpected ways, just to see what will happen. Sometimes you'll be granted with something fantastically superior to your original, sometimes it will blow up in your face. Your second chance experiments can make your novel better, but every now and again, you realize that what you started with is what was best, after all. My beginning outranks what I currently have, but I'm going to continue experimenting and hopefully find something that works. (Before my friend Casye throws me in a black hole like she's threatened if I don't meet my deadline).

EDIT: I lied, it really was better the new way. Or is it? I don't really know!

The New Order

This morning I emailed off my last paper for my summer course, which means I am now free to spend any time outside of work editing my novel. That's...a little scary, honestly, but it's okay. I had a migraine earlier, but once the excedrin kicked in I thought I might go read and I decided "No, I'm going to try to do some edits. If it doesn't work, I'll go read some Fitzgerald, but I at least need to try." Because that's my thing, I don't always try, I put it off, because "don't feel like it," or some other crap excuse. Today I tried--and turns out, I actually was able to do something with this MS.

When I am writing and especially when I am editing, I sometimes look at what I've written and think "Wow. I wrote this? Seriously, I did? This is actually really good." I might even realize deeper meanings in the prose that I hadn't consciously placed there originally, but is just so gosh-darned good. I amaze myself, sometimes.

Other times I look at the page and wonder how I even managed to get this far. I should have stopped ages ago, because obviously, I suck. I really suck. And I make really stupid mistakes, like using the wrong name for a character or have a seriously huge error in continuity or something like that.

But, it's edits, these moments are supposed to happen, right? (Oh God, I hope that's right.) I'm supposed to realize that I actually can make something out of what I've got so far and see the potential in my own work; realize that I have talent and build up my self-esteem to get me through to the end. I'm also supposed to find all those really stupid mistakes so that I can fix them—that's what editing is all about, really. I'm supposed to take something that pretty much sucks, but has potential, and turn that piece of coal into a shiny new diamond, ready to be cut and placed on a ring that I can later use to propose a marriage between myself and an agent.

So, bad news: The entire first half of my novel needs some serious work and the second half has a lot of errors with names and places.
Good news: I think I figured out how to fix it all, by rearranging some of the chapters in the first half. What was once chapter 1 is now chapter 4, and the prologue is gone completely (for now?). What was once chapter 15 is now chapter 5, and the end of chapter 4 will have to be rewritten to reflect the changes. Well, a lot of things will have to be rewritten to reflect these changes. All writing is rewriting, after all.

Writing is Inescapable

There are some jobs where you go to the office, clock in, do your work, clock out, and leave. Writing is not one of those jobs. Writing is who you are, every minute of the day, whether you're working on the story or not.

As I mentioned, I'm working on editing Zenith and I have until the end of June to do so, a date that is approaching far quicker than I'd like. After that last post I went to my day job as a receptionist, came home, and went into immediate care. I spent the next seven hours on a doctor's examining table, getting my blood drawn, being sent to the hospital, having a CT done, and waiting for results. Through that whole ordeal, between thoughts of "I bet it's appendicitis" and "ow ow ow OW" and "OH GOD I HATE NEEDLES" and just "uuggghh," there were thoughts like "I'll have to remember what a CT is like for when I'm writing about Ciera" or "Maybe the disease she can have is stomach cancer." I've had Ciera's story rattling around in my head for years, (where a teen is struggling with a terminal illness and doesn't tell her friend) so even when I was on the table, part of me treated the experience as research. It's a job you can't leave at the office, you can't leave at home.

That said I haven't gotten much done since the last entry here, because I spent such a long time in the hospital. I'm alive and I spent all of yesterday out of town away from my computer at a Memorial Day picnic. Tonight hopefully I can find some time to focus and get a few chapters knocked out before I have to turn my attention to homework.

Deadlines are great for me, ovarian cysts are not, even if they afford me chances to research a future project.

"All Writing is Rewriting"

For years I have heard authors toss around this phrase, that all writing is rewriting. I want to tell them they've got it backwards, that all rewriting is writing. You have a fully formed first draft and suddenly, you are starting from scratch. There is no such thing as a minor edit at this point, this is not plastic surgery. This is orthopedics, the breaking and reforming and placement of bones, the bare skeleton of what you wish to create. This is heart surgery and brain surgery, this is fixing the insides of a story so that it can live and breathe and speak on its own someday. You recreate the story, instead of making it look better. You rewrite it. Re-write. Write again. You essentially write a second novel, by fixing up that first draft.

So how can they say that all writing is rewriting? That first draft wasn't rewriting, there was nothing to repeat. But here's the thing, only the first draft is ever truly written, without being rewritten, and the first draft never makes it to publication. First drafts are monsters, hidden deep in our closets, that we hope will never be viewed by any eyes other than our own. True writing, the stuff that fills the pages of a book, that's rewriting. All real writing, all commendable writing, is rewriting. So all rewriting is writing and, to a point, all writing is rewriting, no matter how impossible that sounds. It's almost a paradox, yet we authors achieve it. Or we try to, in my case, at least.

So today I truly begin the process of writing something that I hope someday one other than myself will read. Or maybe two, or two hundred, or two thousand, who can be sure? Today I begin setting bones and sewing up hearts and stopping bleeds so that my creation can stand up straight and walk out of my door, to no longer have to hide in the shadows. Today I begin--officially--rewrites. I've got 33 days before my finished second draft is due if I want the hard copy that I won from NaNoWriMo. 33 days, 4 of which will be spent in the classroom, and 15 of which will be spent at work. But I wrote a novel, a full first draft, in 30, while going to school 5 days a week, working 3-4 days a week. So I can do this, I believe I can. I work best under a deadline.

And I'm going to try to post everyday again, to help me stay on track. I don't have to submit my daily word count to the NaNo site anymore, so I'm going to do it here. If I don't post, I know I didn't write, and then all of you know I didn't write. Hold me accountable, while I try to discover what Richard North Patterson meant when he first said that all writing is rewriting.

"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing." Richard North Patterson

School Continues to Get in the Way

I miss writing fiction. All I have done lately is write paper after paper after paper, the last one keeping me up until 5:30 this morning. I only had a short one today but I am still finding myself short on time. This weekend hopefully I will be able to return to The Conqueror or the found piece, anything but papers. Although I do have one narrative due on Tuesday that I wouldn't mind writing as it's very creative and very personal (on my medical issues).

Anyway, the reason I stopped in quickly before bed (gosh it's already past 1 AM!), is that earlier tonight when I was thinking of songs for a playlist for The Conqueror, I decided which song would be absolutely perfect for the story. I generally try to have a playlist of songs that relate to the narrative, but there is always one that stands above the others and becomes the one song I associate with the piece I'm writing. For Zenith it was The Postal Service's "Such Great Heights," and for The Conqueror I think that song will be "All These Things That I Have Done" by The Killers.

Still working on the rest of the playlist, but I have about 6 songs at the moment. One of them I think is theme song for Matt & Karina, which makes me very happy. The song is "In My Arms" by Plumb and it's sad, but sweet.

Maybe once I manage to pare the playlist for Zenith down a tiny bit more, I'll post it here. Until then, I must sleep and write reports. Hope to be able to get writing & stop back in here soon.

The Conqueror, Chapter 10; The Unmarked Trail

Overall word count: 11,269
Words written today: 107

Oh look, I've made it to day two! That's good. However, I fear I may be far too exhausted to write much tonight. Actually, I know I am. I'm heading to bed early tonight. All of tomorrow is dedicated to writing and laundry.

I've found that there comes I time in every novel when suddenly you look around and realize you have absolutely no idea where to go anymore. You had a set of directions, or a map, but they only led you so far in your journey. The second page was missing, or an area was torn off by accident. Maybe you got lost, maybe you just hadn't planned this far, whatever the case, you're not sure where you're going. During Zenith this came somewhere around chapter 27, but it seems to be coming far sooner in The Conqueror, in chapter 10. I know what I'm doing for this chapter, and I know what I'm doing for the next one. After that? After that it's a loose array of random plot points and no clear pattern anywhere. The points I have are nonessential or free-floating and I'm not sure what to do with them. I have an end in mind, but no idea how to get there.

The Unmarked Trail is not all bad, though. Maybe you're not sure which road to take, but that just gives you the freedom to take any road. So when you reach this point, take chances, push your way through the brush and make your own way. If your only goal is to make it out of the forest, then you can go in any direction and still be okay.

This reminds me of a quote from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which I will leave you with:

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. Which road do I take? she asked.
Where do you want to go? was his response.
I don't know, Alice answered.
Then, said the cat, it doesn't matter.

The Conqueror, Chapter 9

Overall word count: 11162
Words written today: 625

Fridays are always hit or miss writing days for me, generally because I tend to write more late at night and I don't have that option on Fridays. I work at 6:30 on Saturday mornings, so a reasonable bedtime the night before is a must. Today I managed 625 words which is not fantastic, but far better than anything else this week. I went three days without writing a word, partially because of the crazy amount of schoolwork I had to complete (6 pages of papers just last night) and partially because I've been having a really rotten week. And by really rotten I mean "exceptionally exhausting" and "terribly trying" and other such alliterations. Getting back to writing, accomplishing something, felt good, like visiting and old friend or watching a favourite movie. (Which I also did tonight by introducing my best friend to Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium, but that's beside the point)

In those 625 words I finished the 9th chapter of The Conqueror and introduced one of my favourite characters, William. He's a bit crazy, usually drinking, and generally hilarious. He used to work in the palace, before the Overthrow, and now he works for the resistance. If you've read my novel Zenith, or heard me talk about it, you might be thinking that he's very similar to Fagan/Gramps, and in some ways he is, but in many others he's very different. Still, I think those two would get along rather well, especially over a good meal.

Meet the Lunatic

Hello everyone, chances are if you're here, you already know me, but if you don't, here's the basics. My name is Jez, I'm 20 years old, and I'm an as of yet unpublished writer. I've written all sorts of stories in different genres and lengths and I'm working on getting some of them published. On 19 February 2010, I finished my first complete novel, Zenith, clocking in at 55,940 words. It's a science fiction story set in the future when aspiring film director Rob needs to help his grandfather keep one of the last farms and hide an airplane in a time when air travel is illegal, all with the help of a young cyborg named Risty. This is also the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo in 2009, which I finished!

This blog is to replace my vastly outdated one and to keep track of my writing with updates on word counts, troubles, and celebrations. Hopefully there will be more celebrations than hardships.

And since you're probably wondering, the name of this blog comes from a quote in Cornelia Funke's Inkspell.