The problem with time travel stories is this: what’s to stop a character after the story is “over” from going back to undo the entire thing and thus negating the entire sequence of events? Since the life of the main character has been presented in anything but chronological sequence, what constitutes an “ending”?
It was a thorny problem, and one I’ve been struggling with. But as it turns out, I left myself an opening way back on day two of NaNoWriMo. I had a somewhat sinister character that was sent back in time to cause havoc and later had her “die” (read: I forgot about her, and when I remembered her, I just had the other characters remark that they hadn’t heard from her in a while, and therefore she must be dead).
Now she gets to the be one who shoots the female lead character and the reason time travel is stopped, all in one fell swoop. It makes more sense in my head than it does written down here for those of you who haven’t read the story. Which is, you know…everyone.
My goal to finish this story was “before the end of January,” and that is looming next Monday. But I think I can do it. I wrote 78,000 words in 30 days. I can write 10,000 in a week. And if not, I can just travel back in time and…wait. I think I’m getting too close to the story.
After this one is over, I have three short stories I’d like to finish and another new one I want to write in its entirety. Two of the four are werewolf stories (not sexy werewolves), another is a comical first-contact story told from the viewpoint of the aliens, and the new one is set in the same universe as my urban fantasy novels Perdition’s Flames and Death Scene, excerpts of which are available at the top of the page, if you so desire. The short will tell the story of how Nick, the main character, came to realize he had magical powers. I can’t wait to start it, which means I have to hunker down and get Killing Time done.
But right now, I’m off to my regular Tuesday night critique session with the other Fountain Pen members.
Project working title:Killing Time New words: 1,938 Current total words: 81,555 Goal: 100,000
Reason for stopping: Lunch was over.
Notes:
As I said above, I finally found how to “get out gracefully.” This is, after all, a story about time travel. How do you exit that gracefully, and make sure the story is over when it’s over?
Made copious notes on how to fill out this rediscovered character and make her be the fall guy (gal?) that is the catalyst for the climax of the story.
This story engaged me from the first paragraph all the way through to the last. It sucked me in, and I found myself wanting to read more.
I liked the main character, the automaton Mattie, but from the get-go, I either disliked or was ambivalent toward most of the other characters with the exception of Niobe and the soul-smoker.
"Killing Time" by ..stina.. used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licenseTonight I wrote another 628 words on Killing Time, bringing my grand total to 79,617 words. It’s not a lot of progress in the scheme of how much I was making per day during November, but it’s not bad considering.1
I think I have everything set up, now, for the next several “climactic” scenes, each taking place from a different POV or in a different time frame. Did I mention that Killing Time is a time-travel story set simultaneously in the present; multiple, parallel pasts; and the distant future? Well, it is. And keeping track of all that may prove to be too much for me, but we’ll see if I can pull all the threads together and make the ending a little less unsatisfying. That was one of the big complaints of the people who read it when it was a 12,000-word novelette. Too much exposition (for a 12,000 word story, probably 6,000 of that was exposition. <cringe> Exposition about how time travel works. <double cringe> Yeah. I know. I promise that ratio is much better, now. And the ending was anticlimactic. That was partly by design, and I’m keeping some of that, but adding more detail to clarify why it’s designed that way. Hopefully, my alpha readers will get it.
At least no one died in this scene. That’s a nice change. (No, really, that’s not facetious. I have a truly staggering body count in this one.)
There are between four and eight more scenes left to write, depending on how I feel when I start writing them. I have a lot of loose threads. If each scene is between 2500 and 5500 words long, I’ll crack 100,000 for sure.
Um, yeah. A chapter should be around 2500.
Well, we’ll see. :)
[Note: I’m experimenting with using a photo from Flickr that is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, but I’m not 100% sure exactly how to do that other than what I did, so I apologize heartily if I got it wrong and I will fix it if someone lets me know.]
I have a bad respiratory infection, causing me to cough like mad, and the medicine is making me a little loopy.
Last night on Second Life at our regular Monday night meeting, The Quillians (the SF & Fantasy writing group I belong to) were discussing writing goals for 2011.
Ideally, these goals should stretch us as writers, but not be so bold as to be impossible. I mean, that’s the definition of a good goal, right? It’s all well and good to say “I’ll write four complete novels in 2011,” but it’s quite another thing to find the time—and the ideas—to do it.
I’ve taken a seminar on goal-setting. They stressed the importance for goals being SMART. That’s Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. Well, the Measurable and Timely are already taken care of: Measurable = a finished project and Timely = by the end of 2011.
So I’m left with Specific, Attainable, and Realistic.
Specific is also pretty easy to do in writing. Specific for me will be either a novel, novella, novelette, short story, or flash. So that’s another one out of the way, and I’m left with Attainable and Realistic, which sort of go together.
For the last five years, I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo. The first two years, I crashed and burned because I didn’t have an idea what I was writing before I started. I foolishly thought I could just pound out 50,000 words in 30 days with no preparation. With no idea of a plot, characters, or setting.
Yeah. Right.
The last three years, I won1 by completing 50,000 words in 30 days. All three times, I intimately knew my characters, setting, and where I wanted the plot to go. The rules say you don’t start writing the story until November 1: you can do as much preparation as you want before that.
This is where Attainable and Realistic come in. I know that I can write 50,000 words in 30 days. I know that, in fact, I can write 78,000 words in 30 days if I’m really motivated, because that’s how far I got in November of 2010.
But it really burns me out. I haven’t written but about 1000 words since November 30th. So being able to do a thing for a short while and being able to do it every day for a year are vastly different things. At 2,500 words/day, I could, conceivably, write 912,500 words before the end of 2011, but that would drive me clinically insane, I think.
So, that being said, here are what I believe are Attainable, Realistic goals:
Finish my 2010 NaNoWriMo SF novel Killing Time by the end of January.
Edit/rewrite Killing Time before the end of June.
Finish my urban fantasy novel Perdition’s Flames by the end of June.
Edit/rewrite Perdition’s Flames before the end of December.
Write 15,000 words of new short fiction by June 30, 2011
Submit at least one piece of short fiction for publication.
Submit ~8000 words to Viable Paradise by June 15.
Critique regularly for the Quillians, Lawrenceville SF & Fantasy Writing Group, and The Fountain Pen. (This is a gimme, since I already mostly do this, but I could do better.)
Regularly submit for critique for all three groups.
When put down in writing, this doesn’t seem like a lot. But as of this entry, Killing Time is at 78,989 words and needs to be about 100,000. Perdition’s Flames is at 35,538 words, will probably be right at 50,000 or 60,000 when “finished,” and then must be edited to flesh it out to be about 100,000 words. And 15,000 words of new fiction in half of the year is kind of a group goal that we were challenged to take on by Sherry, one of the members of the Quillians. I have a good number of short stories that are either unfinished or need editing to be ready to submit. And one new short that’s clamoring to be written set in the same universe as my urban fantasy novels.
The two “submit” goals are the ones that are my “stretch.” I’ve never submitted anything to be published because I’ve never felt anything was “ready.” And so that’s where all the critiquing comes in. The only way I can know if I’m getting better is for people to tell me that the story is ready. Or not.
Three of the last four goals aren’t time-constrained because they’re not independent goals. They rely on the input of other people and the completion of other items, so it’s impossible for me to say “Submit a story for publication by March 1″ because I might not have anything ready by then. The Viable Paradise one is constrained because there is a deadline for submission. For those that don’t know, Viable Paradise is a week-long, residential writers workshop held on (in?) Martha’s Vineyard in the fall of each year. As a side goal, I’d like to read something by each of this year’s instructors, as well. Just to get to know their work.
So, anyway, those are my writing goals for 2011. They’re subject to change as situations change, but I hope that I will add to them rather than dropping any of them.
[Note: As an added comment: I first posted this using a Mac-based blog client called Blogo. It pretty much screwed the format, and will not be used again. Thank goodness for trial versions. I hope none of you saw the first version and were appalled.]
You don’t actually win anything other than the satisfaction of having accomplished the seemingly impossible.
Well, after quite a bit of hard work and a lot of cursing and name-calling (I definitely implied that the parents of the designers of WordPress, several widgets, and a number of plugins I’m using, as well as those of the designers of the theme I eventually decided I like were never married..and may have also suggested that they indulge in unsavory sexual acts best left undiscussed), I have finally gotten my newly minted website up and operational.
Huzzah.
There are a lot of reasons it was time. LiveJournal is and will continue to be my first love as far as blogging is concerned, but as a writer who wants to be published, I need a home site where, eventually, my fanatically loyal minions readers can go for information about me as an author. LiveJournal…has a lot more of me than that on display. :)
Mostly, though, it’s because I eventually want to have a story in Mike Stackpole’s Chain Story, and one of the requirements is—you guessed it—a website on which to host the story itself.
I’ve been putting it off for several months. It just seemed overwhelming. Every time I looked at themes and tried to figure out WordPress, it seemed so arcane and I just didn’t want to expend the time. But this week at work, I’ve had some downtime (shhhh!) and so it gave me ample opportunity to play.
I’m going to beg everyone’s indulgence over the next couple of weeks as I iron out the kinks. I may double cross-post a time or two, or who knows what. This will be a learning experience for all of us. I’m going to try to post all my writing posts here on Writewright (catchy, no?) and everything else will be on either LiveJournal, Twitter, or Facebook, depending on the nature of it.
It’s a brave new world, and I just hope it doesn’t bite. :)
I’ve found it difficult to write, lately. I don’t know exactly why, except that maybe I have too many projects in progress at once. See if you agree.
I have a novel-in-progress that was my 2008 NaNoWriMo novel. It’s a high fantasy with lots of magic, five main characters, a quest, really evil bad guys, prophecy…and had been knocking around inside my skull for more than two decades when I finally decided it was time to do something about it. I wrote about 1/4 of what I envision taking place in the novel, and was still at 51,115 words. Now it’s hanging out there, mocking me, waiting for editing. It’s called The Third Prophesy.
And I have a novel-in-progress that is an urban fantasy similar to Jim Butcher‘s The Dresden Files books. So similar, in fact, that I worry that someone may think I stole the idea, but honestly, I started writing it before I’d read any of his books. It’s about some GBI agents that belong to a paranormal investigation group within the bureau and a tough-as-nails Atlanta PD detective who work to solve a string of bizarre murders in Atlanta. Committed with magic, of course. I’m about 38,000 words into this one, and have kind of reached a snag because I need to add a new character, but he needs to have been there since Chapter 2, and I’m in Chapter 9. Whoops. It’s called Perdition’s Flames.
And I have a novel-in-progress that is the second in the series I mention above. I did this one for NaNoWriMo 2009, because I had a fantastic idea and had to write it down. So I’m 53,122 words into that one, and am almost done. I’ll have to go back, of course, and flesh it out a bit. In this one, the investigators from the first book solve another, even weirder string of murders committed using magic. This one is called Death Scene.
And if that weren’t bad enough, I have ideas for the next two books in that series, but nothing concrete enough to start writing. Just a bunch of hand-written ideas in a notebook I keep with me constantly. One of them is tentatively called Lethal Allure, but I think that will change.
Let’s see, what else?
Ah, yes. I have three novelette- or novella-length stories on back burners, waiting for inspiration. Two are finished, and I’ve workshopped both of them…but my critiquers found them…lacking. The third is in a limbo state of being half written and half in my head. All three are hard science fiction.
I’m working on a hard science fiction story set on Mars. I’m revising an urban fantasy/dark fiction short story involving a vampire.
All in all, I think I have twelve short stories in various stages of completion. They range from pure horror to high fantasy, dark fiction, humorous sci-fi, urban fantasy, and a couple that don’t really fit any conventional genre. And they range in length from a 1200-word snippet to something along the lines of 7500 words.
And yet I can’t write. I sit down and the words…just don’t come. I can write this stuff all day, of course. :)
I think I need a kick in the pants. Maybe literal, but I’m hoping for figurative. :)
(c) 2008 Brandi Simms, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 GenericA couple of weeks ago, I was thinking over some of the details of an urban fantasy novel I’m tentatively calling Death Scene. It will be the second in my urban fantasy series set in Atlanta, only magic works.
As part of the story, one character has to convince another to leave Atlanta and go somewhere “nearby” that is still within reason for people to travel kind of on a whim, but has places remote enough that, say, a body will not be found for three years. You know, just for example. :)
And you don’t want to call up the forestry service and say things like, “So, I’m an author doing research. If I were to want to dispose of, let’s say, a body, where would it be least likely to be found for a few years? Hypothetically.”
Or maybe you do. I have no idea. I’ve never done anything like that. :)
Google Maps…is okay, but it’s limited in what it can show, so I started casting about for some tool to help me figure out where to set the scene.
I thought, “I could buy a really detailed map of Georgia.” So I searched on Google for “detailed map of Georgia.”
And what came up was Google Earth.
Now, I’ve resisted the siren song for a long time and just never found a good enough reason to want to install it. But, that day I thought I’d give it a chance.
Oh. My. God. :)
I’m completely hooked. Not only did I find some nice “wilderness” areas in Georgia (which gives me an idea where to concentrate my research, even if I have to go there), but now when I hear a place mentioned, rather than just looking it up in Wikipedia, I call up Google Earth.
I was listening to a podcast just now where one of the hosts was talking about his volunteer work several years ago on the island of Fogo in Cape Verde. I’ve never heard of Cape Verde, much less Fogo.
So I whipped out Google Earth and typed in “Cape Verde” and it zoomed into an archipelago off the coast of Senegal in west Africa. Fogo turns out to be a little volcanic island dotted with settlements and a couple of larger cities. And I can zoom in on those population centers and see how they’re laid out. Or I can click on YouTube videos or pictures people have uploaded that are tagged with GPS coordinates that put them in that area. It’s…just astounding.
I highly recommend Google Earth.
For writing, that is. Yes, as a tool for writing. Not wasting time zooming in on places you’ve never been and never expect to see with your own eyes.
(c) Anthea Brown (Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives 2.0 Generic License)A lot of people who write—whether or not they ever get published, or even try—do so because we have “no choice.” I said in a recent post that I write to get rid of the voices in my head. And while I meant that humorously and facetiously on at least one level, to a certain extent, it’s also true: stories and characters do have a tendency to knock on the inside of my skull from time to time.
But that’s not the whole story (<rimshot>). For me, at least.
See…I may be 44 years old—soon to be 45—but I still want very badly to open a wardrobe door and find myself in Narnia. No, literally. Those books…changed reading for me. I read dozens of books before The Chronicles of Narnia, but I never wanted to crawl into any of those, curl up, close the door, and stay forever.
To make an analogy with drugs that almost pains me to type: Narnia was like my first line of cocaine. I got an amazing high, and I never wanted to come down. But come down I did, and then it took more and more and more to give me that same feeling. Now I’m strung out on multi-book series like Xanth, Discworld, The Dresden Files, The Belgariad, The Malloreon, The Sword of Truth, and The Wheel of Time. All in some hope of recapturing that initial awestruck craving to go there that I had with Narnia.
I would give almost anything if I could wake up tomorrow in a world where it’s possible to go to Narnia.
Alas, this is reality. Damn it. And because it is unfortunately reality, the only way I’m ever going to get to visit Narnia afresh—or Oz, The Land, Phaze/Proton, Middle Earth, Prydain, Hed, Majipoor, Earthsea, Discworld, Ringworld, Green-sky, Landover, Pern…or yes, even Xanth—is to create something like them in my own head and then write down the stories in the hopes that it affects other people in the same way that Narnia or Green-sky affected me.
Hmm. To continue my drug analogy from above…that would make me a pusher. Maybe that’s not such a great analogy after all. Okay, ignore that part.
The point is that part of the reason I am driven to write—and to (I hope) improve my skills as I go—is to give back some of what other writers were able to do for me.
And even if no one ever reads them, they brought me joy in the making. And for a while, I got to visit Mr. Tumnus. As it were.
"Idea" (c) 2007 Daniele MarlenekUsed to be, I thought I only had one or two stories in me. That once I wrote them down, I’d be done, and could go back to mindlessly watching reality TV whilst eating Cheetos and drinking Coke Zero. Because, you know…that’s what you do. (Okay, that might not be what you (would) do, but I don’t drink alcohol, so Coke Zero’s about as strong as it’s going to get.)
I thought that eventually, the voices in my head (read: stories trying to get out, not schizophrenia; as yet the voices have never told me to kill anyone except my characters) would shut the hell up and leave me alone.
But that turns out not to be the case at all. Au contraire, chers lecteurs!
That turns out to be the farthest thing possible from ‘the case.’
I recently wrote my 2010 Writing Goals in the form of a short story. I use “short” here in the sense of “not a novelette, novella, or novel.” Sucker came out to 7000 words. Or so.
First, I went into the Place I Keep All My Writing™ and looked over all the stories and fragments thereof.
Then, in the goals story, I wake up to find all my characters from all my other stories have come to life and are inhabiting my house, with the implication being that they aren’t going anywhere until I get rid of them by finishing (and submitting) their stories. Between the tentacled alien in the shower, Death (incarnate!) in the closet, three time machines, several vampires, some angels, a murderer, and a few assorted fantasy creatures (I banished the centaur and faun to the back yard; the hooves were wreaking havoc on my hardwood floors), it was rather a full house.
I have three novels knocking on the inside of my head wanting to come out. One of those is clearly the first of a trilogy, and it has been knocking for some 20 years. Or more. I think the first seeds of it appeared in a horribly Mary Sue story I wrote when I was eleven. Yes, eleven.
The other two are the first two in a Dresden Files-esque series.
In a “sanity break” at work, I was just going through the application where I jot down story notes and ideas as they occur to me during the day and discovered ideas for at least two more novels in that series (Get a load of me, talking about a novel series and I haven’t even finished one of them, yet!), and that didn’t even go back past November of 2009.
In the goals story, I identified no fewer than 14 short stories in some form of completion and the three aforementioned novels. Those short stories range from ~1200 words to whoppers of nearly 20,000. Which is a novella, not a short story. (Over the years, my “short” stories have developed pituitary problems.)
And the funny part is, I managed to miss a few. I totally lost three novellas each of which I had written a good bit of. (Diagram that Grammar Nazis!) Can’t find ’em. Gone. Zip. Whoosh. Into the æthyr. (That’s writer talk for “it ain’t nowhere.”)
I guess the good news is this:
I won’t run out of ideas any time in the next 70 or 80 millennia.
I am getting better as a writer; I can tell by looking over some of those early stories that…basically, I sucked as a writer.
I’m in no danger of becoming hooked on reality TV or Cheetos. (Coke Zero is already a lost cause.)
Unfortunately, the bad news is that
There are so many stories fighting to get out, I don’t have time to work on them all.
Any time I get the least bit bored or stuck with a story, I put it on ice and work on something else. Which is what got me into this situation in the first place.
But as far as real goals go, I made one. Or some. Depending on your viewpoint.
There are two writers workshops this year that sound like something I would really enjoy. One is called Taos Toolbox and the other is Viable Paradise. TT is two weeks in the desert in the summer; VP is one week on Martha’s Vineyard in the fall. I would be thrilled—THUH-RILLED—to be accepted to either one of them. Both have good instructors and involve a lot of intensive writing.
Toward that end, I’m working on the finished story that I think stands the best chance of getting me into one of them. The story was fully written and critiqued by my weekly writers group. I just never went back to it because in my mind, I was done with it. But after that goals story, I just couldn’t get the characters out of my head.
It’s a pure science fiction story with (what I hope is) an odd twist at the end. It involves time travel. I got it all edited and was done with the thing, then uploaded it to another writers group so they could critique it…and then read it again and noticed at least two plot holes large enough to drive Jupiter through. And at least three of its innermost moons. Without touching.
Unfortunately, said story is 11,500 words, and the limit for both TT and VP is 10,000. Hmmm. I smell editing in my near future.
I’ve already said a lot of this on both LiveJournal and FaceBook, but I thought it bore repeating. Because if I keep talking about it, I’m more likely to follow through.
Also, the deadline for the quarterly Writers and Illustrators of the Future contest is rapidly approaching (51 days, I believe), and that’s another potential submission destination for Killing Time (yes, the title blows goats).
So…I’m going to try to keep this more up-to-date as a “writing journal.” We’ll see how I do. :)
The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia
Last night on Second Life at our regular Monday night meeting, The Quillians (the SF & Fantasy writing group I belong to) were discussing writing goals for 2011.
