The Writings and Musings of B.A. Matthews

The misery of the One Day author…

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 »

D&D and SIWC!

So, the last few days I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather… not actually sick, but a bit tired, a bit dizzy and certainly not able to concentrate like I normally am.  The usual stuff that doesn’t actually stop you, just makes everything ten times harder to do.  Especially things that you have to keep a modicrum of attention on.  Today, my drop was very noticible, mostly in gaming unfortunately.

Dungeons & Dragons (tabletop roleplaying) isn’t horribly confusing, but our game does have a lot of characters to remember, along with other world knowledge.  I know that I need to read up on the world we’re in again, so that I can remember all of the small world bits (rulers, the name of my characters homeland, ect.), but today it would have been nice to just remember the small things.  Like my mission… or what my mission means.

My character is a blunt-as-all-hell earth genasi (re: half human/half elemental). Female, of human stock, but she was raised among the dwarves by her human father.  Long story short, she’s a hard woman to please and although she’s confident about her abilities, she is hopeless when people skills are required.  Her sense of humor is macabre and can be confusing at times, and people tend to think she’s joking when she not, and serious when she’s joking.  All this means that she tends to feel alienated from those around her, and she has serious issues with self-confidence.

Fun character, but last night was horrible.  Her mission was to arrest this guy.  The official orders were “We need to arrest him and then interrogate him on a few things…”.  Okay well, what does he look like? (A half breed dwarf  and answer only slightly more precise than saying ‘you know, the elf with the bow’).  What are his skills? (We don’t know.)  What are we arresting him for? (We need to question him/interrogate him on stuff)  When did he arrive in the city? (sometime over the last few months and 3weeks).  My character decides that the guys obviously want him brought in for questioning, since they obviously don’t have enough information to arrest him for anything, and they are actually hoping to get him to admit guilt while holding him.  For a criminal, 24 hours of questioning is a pain, but easily do-able.  Me and my captain find him in disguise but he escapes.  Later, the coin I had tossed him to pay for a drink gets dropped at my feet.  After work I head to the bar he told me to look for him in, and find him waiting for me.  We chat, and the guy is intriguing.  Interesting, Intelligent, not afraid of a fight, and seems to find my character attractive.  We start talking, and I eventually convince him to turn himself in.  Apparently I’m throwing this guy to the wolves, and my captain and sergeant don’t just want info, they want to really throw the book at him.

Now, I’m not going to complain… it’s roleplaying after all, and mis-communications happen in real life all the time.  However, now my character is in a quandary.  Considering that she finds herself attracted to him, she wouldn’t have convinced him to turn himself in had she realized that they wanted him for more than a 24 hr ‘Where were you the night of the thirteenth?’ line of questioning.  I don’t think she’d even consider breaking him out of jail until every other option had been chased.  Most likely she would try to convince her bosses on leniency (my character convinced him to turn himself in after all. She was off duty, so she may not be listed as the arresting officer.  On the other hand, it looks better on the books if she was, since that explains why she was chasing it on her off-time.).  My question is now all motivation.  Would she care that much about a guy she just met?  Even one who intrigued her?  If she does, what level would she go to for him?  Would she post bail and tell him to stay hidden while she pulls some strings and gets him out?  Could she afford bail, even if she wanted to?  How about begging leniency from the courts, bribing the proper officials and then waiting for him to get out and handing him her own club to beat her with?  What about allowing him to tie her up and letting him do naughty things to her (hey, it’s been quite a while for the character… she can dream of ‘fun’ punishments, right?)  Even if he was forgiving enough to date her afterward (unlikely for a criminal), how far would she be willing to take a ‘fun’ punishment with her self-confidence issues?

This, in a nutshell, is why I love playing role playing games!  There is nothing else in the world that allows such a simple situation to be played in, experienced, and the human condition delved into in quite the same way.  For example, my life is actually quite boring.  The closest thing I’ve ever had to “criminal” boyfriend is the time an ex of mine got pulled in for questioning because he’d been seen with a guy known for petty theft.  The idea of her being so shy is also a factor, and since I’m a more outgoing person normally, I have to stop and think about what a shyer person would do in the same situation.  It’s an exercise in imaginative situations and character motivations, as well as helping with little things like dialog and character interactions.  On the other hand, I do experience the guilt in this sort of situation… I mean, come on.  A guy she’s attracted to is in jail because of her!

On the non-gaming front, I do have one bit of news worth talking about.  Today I signed up for a literary convention here in Canada happening in October.  The SiWC (Surrey International Writers Conference) is a literary convention, and should be a heck of a lot of fun.  They didn’t seem to have any interviews available with people who specifically work in the Dark Fantasy genre, but I was able to set up a ten minute meeting with Susan Chang from Tor Books and a 15 minute meeting with CC (Chris) Humphreys to discuss my novel.

CC (Chris) Humphreys writes Dark Historial Fiction and the Blue Pencil event is 15 minutes where he will work with me on defining my promise, fixing up those three pages and working at least a bit on presentation.  Speaking with editor Susan Chang will be brilliant as well, giving me the change to pimp my own story, and then to get information on how to improve my pitch,  suggestions on who may be interested in my genres and (if she’s interested in my book) showing her my three pages to three chapters of work.  It should be awesome and I can’t wait to go.

Happening in October, this literary conference has some incredible courses available, some incredible names as instructors and should really help me improve as a writer.  I’d suggest anyone interested in improving as a writer should think about attending!  I’ll definately let you all know my other thoughts after I’ve actually gone to it.

What do you guys think?  About my game or my trip?  Have a similar situation?  I’d love to have you share a comment!

Posted in Blogs on June 17th, 2010 by B.A. Matthews | | 6 Comments »

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