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Archive for January, 2010

Snip, Snip, Snip

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

I finished the first draft of my short story for Nocturne Bites on Sunday night. That was the goal, and though I had to push to reach it, I did succeed. I also thought that I was 2000 words over maximum word count and I’m like, okay, there are lots of places I can get, including an overly long fight scene in chapter 2, but 2000 words? That’s like 14% of the story!

I wasn’t quite frantic, but I was concerned. Mentally, I ran through the story, trying to think of places where I could do some major trimming. And then I glanced down at my notes, saw I’d remembered the word count wrong and breathed a sigh of relief. It’s 10,000 to 15,000 words at just shy of 14,000, I’m okay. The really great thing? I can cut or add as much as I need without worrying about word count, not when I have this much room to maneuver. This ended up being a big yea!

Monday I did a read through of the story and made notes on things that jumped out at me as needing to be fixed. Normally when I write, I tend to reread and smooth before going forward, but this time I didn’t do much of that–I just wrote forward. That left me with some rough transitions that need fixing.

Lots of them.

Chapter one was pretty polished since that was part of the submission package, so all that was required was a little tweak to fix a logic flaw. Chapter two, though, is the one that needs the most work. And the most cutting. So what did I do? I added instead.

All right, some of what I put in was to smooth things out and make it all flow better, but I should have cut more than I added. I didn’t.

Today, I worked off hard copy and managed to cut 1500 words that needed to go. I don’t know why I could cut on paper and not on screen, but sometimes writers need to play head games with themselves.

Tags: writing
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Making Room For More

Monday, January 4th, 2010

I snuck in a reread of Eternal Nights this week. While I do reread my stories when they first come out (or when I get ARCs), it’s rare for me to reread an older book unless I need a specific bit of information from it. I had to scan through both EN and Ravyn’s Flight real quickly before writing The Troll Bridge for The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance because I wasn’t 100% sure of a couple of things, but it sure wasn’t a reread. I was looking for specific facts I needed to verify.

This week, though, I read almost everything. Probably because it has been such a long time since I last picked up this book. And as a thank you for this, Cam showed up and started talking. (Cam is Ravyn and Damon’s son. In EN, he’s around 2 years old, but when he arrived, he was all grown up.)

It isn’t a good time for another character to talk–my head is actually jam-packed right now as is the schedule I have in my head–but that didn’t stop him. He’s grown up now and in Special Forces like his father was.

This isn’t the first time Cam’s talked. He’s shown up a few other times and I always kind of had in the back of my mind that after I wrote the stories for Wyatt’s team, I’d do Cam’s story. Heaven knows my mom has been pushing me to write Cam. When I started EN, her first question was if the hero was Cam and she asked again when I told her about my time travel story (that hero is Troll Maglaya). I guess telling her I had an idea for Cam way back when was a mistake.

Anyway, Cam’s back. On Thursday morning, I had a nice scene in my head of a conversation between him and Damon. I’m really tempted to write it out real quick–it’s not a long scene–and post it on my website as an extra. The problem with that is that I’m on deadline for January 15th, and I don’t know if I can afford to fragment my attention like that. It’s hard for me to bounce around, and once I’m deep into a story, I like to stay there.

And on top of that, I have a few proposals I’d really like to work on after I finish my Nocturne Bites and turn it in. This is where my jam-packed head comes into play. I have so many characters from so many stories right now that it’s like standing room only. They’re not all talking at the same time, but it doesn’t take much to get them started. All I really need to do is think about them, and boom! They pipe up. Of course, if I wanted to write them, they wouldn’t be this helpful. They only do this to frustrate me, which is why I’m a proponent of torturing characters.