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It’s been a while since I’ve been on here. I was reminded of that on Tuesday, but this was the first time I’ve been able to get back on. Some of that has been pure procrastination, some of it was pure ire (I wrote a brilliant blog post and then my new system deleted it. My fault, but still annoying), and some of it was out of a need to decompress. Now, I’m back, I’m relaxed and I’m more certain than ever of what I want to do with my life.
Now that may make it sound like I was waffling a bit over my chosen path and I can assure you, that I wasn’t considering leaving writing. I hadn’t even gone to the point of wondering if I could make a living out of it. Those, in my mind, were foregone conclusions. One day, I will be good enough and I will begin making a living off of it. The thing that was starting to halt me was the first part of that sentence.
One Day
It’s a tiny phrase to have caused the amount of damage it was. I had started thinking of One Day as being far away, too far for me to worry about. In the meantime, I certainly had other goals. I began a critique group (Called the best name ever… A Bitch of Writers), I started showing my work to others, I’ve been learning how to edit (Painstakingly slow, it seems), and I had to get ready for my trip to SIWC (Surrey International Writers Conference).
The critique group has been so helpful. It’s really shown me the areas that I obviously need more work on. Mostly, these come down to description issues. I’m great at tension, but I have to really work to make any characters imaginable. Learning to edit has been really difficult, mainly because I realized that my teaching of this in school was not what I would consider adequate. As a student, my idea of editing was to write a rough draft, clear up a few of the spelling mistakes, and maybe a word choice before handing it in. Editing a novel, I’ve found, is just a wee bit more intense than that.
It was the trip to Surrey that really changed me though. This year I took my writing (and ask me in person sometime about the “life-changing-field-trip-with-Zuko”) hoping for the same glee I received last year when CC Humphrey’s reviewed my work (Mr. Humphrey’s, if you ever find yourself reading this, ask me about my first chapter now! It’s awesome now that it’s written). Instead I found the classes containing a lot of the information that I learned last year and felt myself ahead of the game.
Nervously so, of course. One Day doesn’t leave room for me to be suddenly understanding what the instructors are teaching. In fact, thinking myself ahead of the game felt downright wrong. The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I handed Wendy Roberts my work this year was horrible. When she asked if this was my first book, my heart sank. Still, I continued on bravely, simply answering “Yes” instead of the Is it that obvious comment that I was thinking to myself.
Imagine my shock when she told me that my work was much better than most first books she’s seen. She then asked me point blank if I was querying. I was stunned and when I said, no, she told me to get on with it. Ivan Coyote reinforced the knowledge later that day when I heard her tell a story about an old student of hers who wasn’t published and was terrified of being rejected. She had to tell her, “I know this is going to hurt, but you’re already not published.”
I decided that day that perhaps One Day had come. Still, I was stunned when I spoke with my Brian Hades (of Edge Publishing) for my pitch appointment, and he nodded, asking for a partial. Once again, it was reinforced at lunch, when I spoke with Donald Maass (Of Donald Maass Literary Agency) and he took my name and told me that he would tell one of his agents to keep an eye out for a partial from me. Serendipity, Coincidence, Whatever you want to call it, I was hit with it this conference.
It floored me when I realized just how much these two words, One Day, had been holding me back. Now, just as before, I know what I want to do but for the first time, I think I see a light at the end the of the tunnel. I need to finish crafting a synopsis and a query (any good suggestions for books on How To would be appreciated) and then I’ll begin the next stage of my journey. I think, I may finally be ready for that next step.
What about you? What did you learn about yourself in the last year?
Posted in Blogs on October 28th, 2011 by B.A. Matthews | | 3 Comments »
Today, while listening to Writing Excuses podcast on style editing, I realized that I tend to remove too much of my voice during the editing process. I took the advice to heart that I was going to want to leave everything in and that I was going to have to be super hard with myself to come out with anything good. Realizing that this was what I tended to do my writing made me stop for a moment though. I know I need a few classes in editing properly, but until I can take those classes, this was excessively useful. It reminds me that my style is what will get readers to stick with me and that by trying to remove my voice from my writing, all I’m really doing is a disservice to myself. By doing that, all I’m telling others and even worse, proving to myself are those dark fears that my style isn’t good enough. Telling myself “I am…” is the fastest way to make it so. Therefore I’m going to stop that immediately, and instead work on a plan to counteract the flaw.
It also reminded me that there are different types of editing, and that until I’m better at editing I may want to take the time to do all three instead of slopping all of them together. It’s something worth thinking about, and something that I think will help my writing immensely as soon as I puzzle out how to do it properly. More on this when I give it a try on my next bit of writing to come out, I’m sure.
I found the time to go see Inception as well, earlier this week, and I must admit that I was impressed. And even though I also gave Sorcerer’s Apprentice a good review, please don’t think that means I give most movies a good review. In general, I’m actually pretty tough on my movies and movies only get a really good rating if they were exceptional. Let me say now, that Inception is.
It’s not just the CG (which is amazing) or the acting (which was emotionally charged), or even the way it left you feeling (incredible and active)… no, what really stood out for me here was the story told and the rules given. You can’t carry a movie on CG or good acting alone… there has to be an engaging story and the movie can’t break the disbelief, otherwise it has failed in its task.
As an example, while I enjoyed the movie “Avatar”, there were a few moments that pulled me away from the movie. Why send in ground troops for an aerial bombing? Why not blast the area from space? Why “Unobtainium” and is that strange metal related to “Atmospherium” of The-Lost-Skeleton-of-Cadavra fame? Why were the aliens humanoid in shape when almost every other native creature had at least 6 limbs (a throwback of genetics, perhaps)? On the other hand, character motivations were good, the acting was good, the new technology succeeded. To quote Howard Taylor (Schlock Mercenary and Writing Excuses podcast) “It was the best ‘Fern Gully’ remake, ever!”
It was good, but it left me with too many bad queries, questioning the science, the intelligence of the enemies or the intelligence of the writers (Open Rant – Unobtainium… I still can’t get over that. Come up with something different. “Garonomium” or “Skotepinium” perhaps. I don’t care if it sounds silly, so long as it’s not an obviously understandable word with the last letter or three taken off and “-ium” tacked on the end – End Rant). Now, following the common book saying that a gun seen in the first act must be used in the second, I’ll compare this to Inception.
The technology in Inception, while not described fully, was good. It had its own jargon, equipment and uses which were explained as they became pertinent to the story. And they did this smoke and mirrors well enough that you don’t even notice it being done. The story is solid and even with the “apprentice” character introductions to what you can do with the technology and the inevitable “working montage”, the story wouldn’t have been complete without it. The characters were intelligent and even the apprentice caught on quickly. I can’t think of an instance where anybody got caught by the same mistake twice. Even the character whose flaws were noticeable compensated for their arrival whenever he could.
The movie didn’t break disbelief fortunately; the scenes looked awesome and were done brilliantly and they were all stitched together seamlessly. The only scene that almost took me out for a moment was a single gunfight near the end of the movie where I thought it was unreasonable and added in simply to hype up the movie goers. Even in that instance, directly after the fight they explained why the scene had been necessary and discussed how they were to deal with the repercussions drawn up from it. I loved the chance The characters all stuck to their motivations and yet, I don’t think any of them were obviously cliché. They looked, acted and felt real because the scriptwriters took the time to make them so and the actors furthered this by truly getting into their roles. Even Leonardo DiCaprio gave a worthy performance!
If you were wondering whether to see this movie, I would suggest doing so. If you only see one movie this summer make it this one.
In other news, I ran into a friend of mine from the Nanowrimo group here in Calgary yesterday (Hey Kai!). I was quite embarrassed since I had convinced her to participate in Julno, and then had done so badly at it myself. I haven’t done an actual count yet, but I think my total in fiction words is sitting at 2 – 5K for the month. Now, I know this happens every year at this time and I had been hoping to break myself out of the rhythm. While I wasn’t able to succeed, this gentle nudge (perhaps more of a trip since she managed to get about 25K and she started on the 16th) from my friend reminded me that I do have control of this, and that while I may like to say “I get Writer’s Block from May to September”, it’s not true. I get a severe case of procrastination and don’t WANT to do anything during this time.
I did manage to come up with a plan to help me out which mainly involves me listening to podcasts designed to kick my butt, get me thinking and therefore writing again. Writing Excuses isn’t quite as good for this (since I’ve listened to every episode 2-3 times now… What can I say… I get very bored at work), so I pulled out the big guns. An old episode of Tee Morris’s Podcast “The Survival Guide to Writing Fantasy”, aptly named, “Easy Distrac- – Oh hey, A Butterfly!”. While the podcast is now over, I really enjoyed it and he’s been kind enough to leave up the audio files. This episode details how what I’m doing is definitely procrastination. And while Writing Excuses gets me eager to write, Tee’s way of slapping you in the face and reminding you that if you want to write for a living then you have to consider it a business is exactly what I need right now. Offhand (since I’m being distracted anyway), Tee Morris has the sexiest male voice ever. Give him a listen on Chasing the Bard, a podcast novel by Philippa Ballantine and I promise, if you like sexy voices, you’ll swoon (if you like the ladies, listen for Phillipa herself… Gods that woman’s voice could make me “curious”.)
Oh, I also heard the best quote ever today. “Disneyland is like falling in love, someone’s taking your hand and you go on this enchanting evening and you look into his eyes and its all romantic and nice. Six Flags is like being repeatedly fucked hard over and over again until you just leave shaking and exhausted, but ultimately better for having that experience.” Thank you Alex Day… I think you may have just made mine.
Posted in Blogs on July 29th, 2010 by B.A. Matthews | | 7 Comments »
Sorry for the very few posts this week. Some killer flu bug knocked me out, although I think it may have just been a continuation of whatever knocked me out last week as well. Regardless, the last five days my schedule has been nothing but sleeping for nearly forteen hours out of every day, working eight and a half hours, and about an hour of travel time. Most days, after four hours of being awake, I felt as if I’d been awake for a full twenty-four hours and wanted nothing more than to sleep again. So, one again, this is a ferfent apology for lack of posts. Next week will be much better (I assume) as today (for the first time in a week) I finally woke up before the alarm went off! Such a little thing to make me so happy, but there you have it. Now, on to more interesting matters!
No matter how ill I am I always listen to Writing Excuses and this week, as usual, was a doozy. Their topic was major overhauls to broken stories and, having done this once before, I found it really informative. A little over a year ago, I had to do a major overhaul on the Memories Written in Moonlight. I had found out that when I wrote it, the brilliant story I had in my head hadn’t translated at all to what was actually on the page. Due mainly to all the writing I’d been doing and all of the insight I’d gotten by listening to Writing Excuses, I was able to tell what I’d messed up and how I could fix it. Realizing that I’d ignored everything in favour of the relationship between the main characters, I decided finally to craft a new plot for the characters, giving them more freedom to advance as characters, defining them better as individuals and placing them in situations that placed them in much more conflict between each other and their surroundings. That story has been turning out much better in the rewrite, and will be worth the point of just editing, and not entirely rewriting it.
Howard Taylor (the webcomic artist of Schlock Mercenary)from Writing Excuses also made a comment that I think I’ll take to heart and really try to apply in my writing. He suggested a book to us because, as he put it, “It had stand up and cheer moments that were not the epically heroic, lone warrior against a million demons… but moments … that were triumphs of character, moments of courage in the face of small pettiness…” And I think that writers, especially new writers, like myself, really need to remember that sometimes it’s not the regular hero moments that we as readers will cheer for. After all, we see those successes every day in the movies and in the books we read. However, those character moments when your favourite character stands up to a bully and tells him to screw off… you really identify with the character at that moment. It’s that moment of identification that will make readers continue to be sympathetic with your hero long after the moment of victory has taken place. And it’s that sympathy towards the hero that will leave people remembering them long after they’ve put your book down.
In other news, me and a few friends got to head to the theatre today and we got to watch Disney’s new movie, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I must admit, it’s a good movie and Disney seems to have succeeded finally in a movie kids will like for the explosions and yet a plot and characters set that the adults won’t mind watching. The basic premise (in case you don’t know) is an epic centuries long battle between good and evil wizards culminating in a final battle between the sorcerer told of in prophesy and the head of the evil organization. The world of the sorcerers lies in ours, just hidden through concentrated effort on the side of the good wizards. The movie had an engaging plot, made fun of itself in all the right places, fun characters with generally complete motivations and a great CG budget that didn’t take away from the plot. Some of the decisions were silly or obvious and, of course, the story had its share of shaky science along with a bit of a weak info-dump opening scene, but these didn’t really take away from the movie. There was only one promise that I felt the movie didn’t quite keep at the end, and even then, they kept the promise, just not in a way I thought worked with the plot. Basically, instead of taking something one twist further they stopped and went with the first choice. I put off that minor disappointment to me temporarily forgetting that this was a Disney movie… and that they are not known for taking their twists one step further.
My final assessment though is that this movie is worth the money to go see. It will definitely be entering my video collection when it comes out on video. Especially if you are a fan of Urban Fantasy (meaning modern day mixes of magic and science) this is definitely a movie you’ll be able to appreciate. Oh, Kudos go to Nicholas Cage who plays his part brilliantly and yet, every other character in the movie held their own weight as well. Unlike with The Last Airbender, it was not two actors doing a brilliant job, but everyone coming through with a good performance based on their characters. Hey, that means we actually got a good movie with decent acting… definitely something worth taking a look at, right?
I promise, now that my health is on the uprise, I will have more to discuss with you next week, as well as both the next part of Dual Melodies and a new music review for you to read, to make up for my inability to post things up as often as I would have otherwise enjoyed the last two weeks. See you all then!
Posted in Blogs on July 18th, 2010 by B.A. Matthews | | 14 Comments »
Well, I’m back after way too long an absence. It’s been nearly a week after all. I only got one post up and no writing up this week either. I do apologize. I was supposed to have more time than I ended up finding. On the other hand, it turned out to be an odd week all around, so perhaps it’s just par for the course.
Unfortunately, I found out that the weekend long game that I mentioned previously had been cancelled. So my weekend plans died, to be replaced by other more regular plans, although still busy enough that every day had something (for instance, Saturday officially became “recover/sleep day” from the party the night before). Speaking of which, on Thursday my husband and I went to see The Last Airbender.
It was a really fun movie and I’d suggest going to see it. However, I do suggest that you go in with low expectations. Expect a great action movie, with wonderful element-bending effects, but don’t expect much else. The acting was terrible (generally, at least. Assif Mondi did a great job as a villian, and the woman who played Princess Yue was exceptional. Uncle Iro was great, although true to the original he was not, and yet his character motivations were definitely still in place.) The story, unfortunately, turned into one big info dump and Aang decided that scaring an army without ever hurting a man, was the best way to deal with them… ‘cause you know, when army men get scared they always turn tail and run away instead of desperately attacking the thing that threatened them. I’d actually suggest watching the cartoon instead. It was much better in the places that mattered like plot and story, even if it wasn’t so cool in the “3-D/live-action” end of it.
Other than the movie though (and a new book I’m reading… don’t worry I’ll be posting a review of it next week), all I’ve been doing is gaming recently.
Alehandra, my priestess/summoner(also known as the Scourge of Lirr), has been saving people left/right and centre and had to make one of the harder decisions she’s had to make in a while. We found a torturer and one of his victims… not a pretty site, especially since the girl was still alive. Alehandra realized that she couldn’t save the woman, so she killed her out of mercy. The men in the group had tried taking on the guy, but were getting their asses whooped… and even when that’s due to insane roles on the GM’s part, it’s scary. Knowing that my character could die, especially if this guy was higher level than us, I decided that Alehandra still would insist that this evil man had to die. So, my character healed up the party and started the attack against him again. By a wonder we succeeded! My character is so energized about it. Now if we can just get these rescued people out of here, we’ll have it made.
Talia, the kick-ass swords-genasi-woman, has a just found out about a meeting arranged with her superior at work. She’s busy wondering what she could have done wrong lately, though it’s more likely that they’ll be commending her on getting Dremere to turn himself in and getting him to join the watch than wanting to punish her for something… maybe another job that they’re having trouble with? Also, her date with a Dwarven priest has been postponed, which means she may end up choosing Dremere accidently, even if as a guy he’s all wrong for her. Mind you, the dwarf did mention that it was clan matters calling him back… I’d hate to not give him a fair chance due to family concerns.
Rapture, the cheerleader sorceress, may be having the “it’s not you, it’s me” talk with her boyfriend… which is surprising in that it’s not Rapture dumping him, but him dumping her. Not that this relationship has been a match made in heaven by any means. He got out of a bad relationship about a year ago, and hasn’t really gotten on well since. And right now, Rapture seems pretty damned perfect since she’s a nympho who he can actually talk to about metaphysical stuff. The real problem is that his old fiancé is still holding a torch for him and trying to ruin the relationship. She’s smearing Rapture’s reputation by calling her a whore, and her boyfriend just made the situation worse by getting drunk and “buying” her away from her boss for an evening. On the other hand, I suppose she has just cause. Not only did Rapture steal her guy, but she also smashed the girl verbally at a party, before she knew who she was. In fact, if memory serves me, she told the girl that while Rapture’s dress may have been bought by her boyfriend, that at least she hadn’t needed her father to buy her a date. Yeah… A great smack-down, considering I had no idea who she was at the time. **Sigh** Good times, good times.
I don’t have my new brothel owner finished yet, but as I won’t get a chance to play her for a few more weeks, I can work on finishing it.
I will be putting a few of the pictures I’ve drawn up soon… I do give everybody some warning though. I’m only a hobby artist at the best of times. On the writing front, I am doing Julnowrimo, but as of Day Three, I hadn’t gotten a chance to do any writing yet. Not that I expected much more, since I knew that this week was going to be insane. I can’t wait to start writing tomorrow though… hopefully some before my game (yes, more D&D. This time I’m playing a catgirl Battle Dancer named Mmrumbra or ‘Rum for short) and definitely some afterwards!
Posted in Blogs on July 4th, 2010 by B.A. Matthews | | 6 Comments »
