WP Platinum Blog
Firstly, today you get an update. Not, unfortunately, on my submission. I still haven’t heard back anything from them. I’m still checking my email with panic every time it tells me I have a message but I’m not really expecting to hear anything until late May/June. No, my update is on my Asus Transformer. If you keep up with the blog you know that it broke down on Wednesday evening.
On Saturday I took in my computer to the place I bought it, Memory Express. My tablet was past its company warranty but it still had the manufacturer’s warranty. By the time we got there the unit wouldn’t turn on at all. The guy there was great though and offered to take care of it for me, since they can more easily deal with the company than I can. The gentleman said that I’d most likely have it back in 2-3 weeks (though as usual, it could take up to 8 weeks).
This leads up to a much happier author. I didn’t realize just how much I’d come to rely on it.
In other news, I have been working on two short stories and I have another story or so to post. The first one which should be posted in the next day or so (probably Tuesday) is a short story in a world I’m hoping to write in eventually. The second is a short story that’s fanfic, but it needs a little bit more work before I can put it up for you guys.
I’m doing quite a bit of work on my novel and finding that quite a bit of it requires rewrites. Not that the original was bad, but I’ve grown as an author and I’ve been able to see how/why I was messing up on it. It has been making my editing go by slowly but I am certain that it is making my novel that much better. I’m not rushing the editing process, but I am confident that I should be finished it by late June.
If I am don’t it in May or early June I have a trunk novel that I may work on during Camp Nanowrimo. I’ve been stuck on it for years but I recently had a breakthrough on it due to a short story prompt for our latest run of Pen Duels (our critique group is given two story prompts and we write one or both and then read them to the group and get a short critique done on them).
Will any of you be writing or taking part in this year’s Camp Nano? Which month? What will you be writing?
Posted in Blogs on April 22nd, 2012 by B.A. Matthews | | No Comments »
Okay, I wasn't quite that bad...
Some days it’s harder than others to get off that couch and get to work. Especially since, due to the necessity of living, my writing is still considered my “hobby” and not my “job”. The last week has been one of those days.
Not that I mean this in a bad way. As is the usual way of things, once you’re down sick with one thing it opens up your immune system to catch every single thing coming down the grapevine. It’s just a fact of life. So this time when I noticed my throat hurting I took a day or two, rested my hand a bit more and kept working.
Unfortunately it didn’t stay in my throat but decided that I should have a fever as well. I find fevers worse than the usual colds since they knock me out. An inherent weakness hits when I get a fever and my body shuts down for a few days. It’s hard to find the energy to do anything more than rest. So this long weekend I rested, though I wrote and worked as well.
Had I not been sick, I would have been a bit depressed with what productivity I had. However since I was sick, I am more than pleased with my work. I edited a short story for my critique group to look over and on Friday I wrote just over 2k to clear up an issue I’d discovered with Chapter 8. I also did a critique for my A Bitch of Writers group and on Sunday night I edited 6 pages of Falling through the Threshold.
I worked through this because in my heart, I know that I am called to write, whether I ever get published or not.
However, being sick again, did give me some time to do a bit of goal setting. From now one, I want to edit at least two and a half pages of my novel, Falling Through the Threshold, every day. So far, I’ve been able to more than keep to that. I wasn’t able to edit on Monday, since I had A Bitch of Writers meeting, but I got finished a preliminary edit on all of chapter 8 (12 pages) done on Tuesday.
Today I finished going through the chapter twice more, to double check my edits and make any changes that needed to be (which normally isn’t needed but today made me rewrite a page and a half to correct a something that wasn’t working and keep the tension up). That chapter is now ready to send out to my A Bitch of Writers group on Monday.
This even leaves me some time to write now! Which is good, since I have a Pen Duels meeting on Saturday that I need a short story for.
One other update before I run off to write. As of today, April 11, 2012, I haven’t heard anything back from the L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of Future contest. Supposedly, I should hear back from them sometime around June/July, so no big surprise there. However, I keep checking my phone desperately any time I get an email. I promise that as soon as I hear something, I’ll post about it.
P.S.- Just in case any of you happen to know (or know someone who knows), I’ve been trying to translate some words into Ancient Egyptian or Coptic and have reached nothing but dead ends here. So if you or someone you know would be willing to help me translate a few words, no more than three or four, into either of those languages, please, send me an email or comment below! Such a person would not only gain my eternal respect and gratitude but will also have their name immortalized in the acknowledgements section if/when this novel is eventually published.
Posted in Blogs on April 11th, 2012 by B.A. Matthews | | No Comments »
This is my final post on my process. The paper edits and beta reading stages! Thank you for staying with me through the whole discussion of my writing process.
Scene by scene, from “Page 1″ to “The End” I will do my edits for voice, word choice, grammar, continuity edits and the rest. I pay particular attention to whether the scene is doing what it needs to and that I’m including all the right foreshadowing to make my plot work. As I go through, I will make notes on everything for continuity sake. What colour’s eyes were the protagonists supposed to be and are they all the way through the novel? Was that sub-character wearing a red outfit in one scene and the next right after wearing black? I write it down while I’m doing my edits simply so that I have a clear and easy reference guide (particularly good if one characters needs to remember something from a previous chapter, saving you from having to find that scene and double check the information, it will be in your handy guide).
After I have finished the entire novel this way, I will have my critique group or friends take a look at it so that I know that I’m getting the characters across like I want them too. This is a very important step. In my current novel, I discovered that one of my protagonists was hated almost universally. I thought I’d written him to be unlikable, but sympathetic, but apparently the sympathy part was missing. This is the point at which I look at every critique and comment and decide if I am actually doing what I think I’m doing and if I’m not, I change it.
Which means that, yes at this point I edit through the novel again. At this point, I find my drafts are usually tightly written, doing what I want them to and that the characters are coming across correctly. Once I finish that, I have 4 or 5 Beta-Readers go through the thing with a fine tooth comb, asking questions, making observations and overall checking my work.
The edit based on their responses here is more limited. I’m usually not making giant edits here, but tweaking small things (since any big ones have been caught in the earlier stages).
This….. This is when I finally look at my manuscript and think, “I’m done.” It’s currently an exceptionally long process and I’m hoping that as I get more and more books under my belt that I will be able to tweak this further and trust my writing enough to take out a few of these steps. Until then I’m stuck with a very long process.
It’s worth it in my opinion. All the work, the pain and the frustration. At the end of it, you hold in your hand a perfect book. Something that you can send out into the world and be proud of. At least, until editors get ahold of it and send you back criticisms on it. At that point, this process will change a bit, though exactly how I can’t say, since I’ve never gotten to the end of the process.
My current book is in edits, in the stage when I’m having my critique group look at it. I’m hoping to have it ready to go to my Beta Readers by the end of March and to agents/publishers by the end of April. We’ll see how that goes and, of course, I’ll keep you updated here.
Posted in Blogs on March 2nd, 2012 by B.A. Matthews | | No Comments »
Welcome back! Sorry for the delay! Life jumped in. I’ll post the last part of this set on Friday!
Last week I discussed my writing process. This part can easily be described as my revision/editing process. Most of the focus here is on the Seven Anchor Scenes, what they are and what they do in your novel.
After reading through my novel, I open up three documents on my screen. One will be a copy of my plot (what I wanted the story to be), one will be my novel itself (what it became during the writing phase) and the last one will be a blank document. I read the story front to back once (making no changes) and then I’ll go back to the beginning of Chapter 1.
Slowly, I start to go through my novel again, scene by scene – conferring with my original plot – at a calmer pace. As I read each scene I write down in the black document what that scene in my novel is doing in 100 words or less (no more than 150 even if it’s an important anchor scene). If it’s not doing what that scene needs to do, I decide what that scene does need to be doing”. Then I decide if I’m cutting the chapter completely, editing it very heavily or if I need to rewrite that scene entirely. When I’m done going through the novel like this, I’ll have a 7 -10 page document. Beside each scene I’ll have a note of whether I’m keeping it, cutting it, rewriting it, or taking bits and pieces but leaving the rest.
Then I’ll go through and I will rewrite all of the scenes that need to be rewritten. This was the hardest part for my current novel… I had 40K+ to rewrite on it when all was said and done. After I have rewritten the scenes, I’ll go over that document with my scene by scene layout and I’ll identify my seven anchor scenes in it.
The seven anchor scenes are the seven scenes in your novel that provide the main story. The thing to remember is that every anchor scene (or most of them) come down to your protagonist making a choice.
Inciting Incident – The trouble that starts your book – We should find out about your characters most important thing (MIT), their goal and find out what is stopping them from reaching them.
Turning Point/Acceptance of Call to Action – This is the scene in which your character decides that they can’t just sit by the side anymore. They have to take action and fight for what they want.
Midpoint/Reversal of Fortune – Something changes, either making things easier for your protagonist or new information that changes the battlefield for the protagonist. Also, the end of Act I.
Act II Turning Point/Point of No Return – This will show us what happens that leads your character to the Choice that nothing will sway them from their appointed cause.
Act III Turning Point/Dark Moment – This scene will show your character making the choice to fight even though they think they’ll lose.
Climax – This is the final battle between your protagonist and antagonist.
Resolution – This is the happily/unhappily ever after ending. What does the world look like in that snapshot view? This is also where you tie up any loose ends and how the protagonist reacts to their story being at an end.
Remember that between each of these scenes, you have to make sure that things get constantly worse. A story without problems isn’t a story. It’s a happy daydream.
At this time, I’ll play around and move my timeline around, making certain I don’t have a really short acts, that my scenes are decently spaced out and all around that the scene is doing what I need it to (again). When I’m happy with what I have down, I’ll start my actual “paper” edits.
Posted in Blogs on February 28th, 2012 by B.A. Matthews | | 2 Comments »
Note: This is the first of a three part set of posts that will detail my writing process. I gloss over the actual planning and writing phases to make room for a very detailed selection of how I edit/revise my novels. If you’re interested in that information let me know and I’ll make a dedicated post for each!
I have a bit of a confession to make. I used to love writing but editing for me was impossible. During school, my idea of editing was rewriting/typing out the exact same thing I’d written originally, corrected for spelling mistakes and the occasional word choice. My teachers would tell me it needed editing but I didn’t understand what they meant. I was one of those kids who just wrote a decently clean first draft. Couple that with the fact that my teachers just assumed I’d been taught to edit when I hadn’t and you can imagine why the idea of editing terrified me.
Now here’s my second confession. I have learned to love editing. There is something about taking my raw magic (words on the page) and revising them, making them better and the story structure cleaner. Making certain that I am saying exactly what I wanted to say. Until recently though, I still told myself that I hated it. Why? Because I didn’t think I was competent enough to be doing it. I know that it’s really just the “author’s bane” getting the better of me. My low self-esteem is one of those things that I know I just need to deal with. So finally, I decided that I would take a writing course that focused on editing.
Last Sunday I finally finished it. It was a 6 week course, but honestly, calling it just a revision course is a little bit of false advertising. I considered it much more a lesson in story. The basis of the class and what we focused on was the main anchor scenes of a story and how they fit together. Personally, I would suggest taking this course whether you’re a pantser or a plotter. Pansters will learn the information about story that will then help inform their subconscious to make a better final project. Plotters on the other hand will have a better understanding of the narrative structure that will let them plan a better story from the start. Either way, this course will help put in your hands the tools needed to prove that your book is worth more than the mere sum of its parts
After I finished the course, I was asked by a friend of mine online (@Siri_Paulson) what tips I could share. I thought about it for a moment and then realized that what I had learned was more than could be put into a few tweets (although, that might be an interesting challenge in brevity later). I told her that instead of trying to condense it down I would do a blog post on it instead. That then bloomed into a nearly 2k discussion on my writing process, which is what you’re getting here.
First we start with the novel. I am a planner but not obsessively so. Before I begin writing I have a list of main characters, ideas for sub-characters that are only somewhat fleshed out, world building from an MC’s perspective done, and a 1-3 page plot detailing the broad strokes of my story written out. None of this information is set in stone. Some of it will be cut and placed directly into the novel, some of it will not make it in the final cut at all, some of it will be placed in discretely, a line here, an emotion there, whatever the story needs.
While I’m in the rough draft phase I will make minor edits to my plots, add in lists of my characters and try to keep straight the details (blue or brown eyes, that the continuity is correct and that the motivations are still in line for the character). Then once I have finished the draft, I put it away for no less than 3 months. That time is needed to let your story relax and set in your mind.
After that, I open up my novel and read it front to back. I don’t make any notes or any changes. I just think about that story and what I would like to see changed. This is where the true editing process begins.
Come back on Sunday for part two of my writing/editing process.
Posted in Blogs on February 23rd, 2012 by B.A. Matthews | | 2 Comments »
We are getting up there in days now. Nano is over half over and it is occurring to everybody worldwide that soon we will have to return to our normal, everyday, non-noveling lives. If you’ve been following me at all, you know that’s not my goal. I want to be a writer. Full time, staying at home, interacting with craft and creating novels. It’s a tough dream, but I’ll get there one day.
I’m not quite caught up yet. My current word total is 27,121. Like I said, a bit behind but nothing to be worried about yet… I would be working on my word count now, but I suddenly realized this blog needed to go up.
This has been an eye-opening month for me. I’ve learned so much about myself, even if I won’t be able to make full sense of it until December comes around and my Squishy Brains are back to normal. I can’t wait to share all of it with you.
In the meantime, keep writing. If writing isn’t what makes you want to get up and dance though, find out what that love is. There is something in all of us that we are called to do. Find that job and I while I can’t promise that you’ll never have to work, I can promise that you’ll be happier than you will doing anything else.
Posted in Blogs on November 18th, 2011 by B.A. Matthews | | Comments Off
Today I wrote 2476 words. I will say that the vast majority of those words were written very early this morning between midnight and 2 AM and most of the rest of it was spent editing. However this does bring my total to 23,050 words. This only puts me about 300 words behind my goal for tomorrow. However any extra words every tomorrow will be much appreciated since I won’t get tons done on Tuesday since its the day we will be having our midway bash. I’m having a lot of fun this nanowrimo.
I won’t deny that I haven’t had my down days but I will say that I’ve been enjoying it a lot. One of my goals for this nanowrimo was to learn how to do this as a full-time job. That means spending time on it every night, still keeping up my relationship with my husband and being able to keep up my work at my day job. The last year I’ve been feeling like I’ve been working a second full-time job but this shows me that I can indeed do it.
One of the things that help me make today a really great day was that today I got a little bit of recognition. The Daily Mongerer is an online writing newspaper. Every day they post a link to people’s blogs and tweets of interest to writers. Yesterday, they featured my “Nanowrimo, Day Twelve” blog post.
It was a very small thing but it really felt like it was huge. It also really helped that a friend of mine said, “when they soon I’m going to be able to say I knew her back when…” when I told her I still have quite a ways to go before I got to that point she commented, “it’s never met anyone with the determination and drives to learn all about the process like you do. It will be sooner than you think.”
I know it’s just because I am a proud Story Wonk that loves learning about craft, but that was one of the sweetest things that anybody’s ever said to me. It reminded me that the best part of the recognition isn’t people that I don’t know saying that I’ve gotten somewhere, but the people I do know saying that I deserve to be there.
Posted in Blogs on November 14th, 2011 by B.A. Matthews | | Comments Off
Today I managed to reach 1,826 words which brings my total up to 13,763. It was a hard day I won’t argue, especially since I work full-time job as well. While I was sitting at the local Nanowrimo meet up, I was very surprised to have one of our ML’s come up to me and said that she shocked as to how we can do it. I didn’t realize this before, but this is her first year participating in Nanowrimo where she actually has a full-time job. It got me thinking about how much I actually put into my writing each year.
Before this year, my writing took a backseat to almost everything else. It was something I would do whenever I had free time. This year though, I have really been trying to improve and of course to finish my first draft. This year it actually felt much more like a second full-time job that it felt like hobby. A lot of it has been how I’ve been considering it. My thought was that it was paying me for it that I could be excused for taking the time that I thought I needed this.
I realized earlier this year that this was not the case. I needed to spend more time on it if I truly want to make it a viable option. Honestly this last year has taught me a lot about my writing. Perhaps even more importantly, it is taught me an awful lot about myself.
The first is that if my tendinitis isn’t hurting when I start writing than it takes an awful lot of writing before it will start. Conversely, writing at my daily job is a lot more painful. A year ago I thought writing was writing but I now realize that there is something different with the way I type at work then the way I type at home. I don’t know exactly what the difference is but I do know what it means for me. It means that I really need to get out my job.
My husband has made me the glorious offer that I can make half of what I normally do over a two-year period as an advance for writing that I can quit my job. But I’m wondering if I might not be able to get out of it sooner. Depending on how much I get when I do begin selling my writing, I may be able to start doing my job part time. I don’t know if it would be viable or not but I think if I want to help my hands to heal then I need to start looking at these options.
I don’t know what, if any, changes this will mean for me next year, but I do know that it will be very interesting to find out.
Posted in Blogs on November 9th, 2011 by B.A. Matthews | | Comments Off
Day 3 of Nanowrimo is here and nearly gone. However, I can say that I’m still on task for my word count. My current total is 6,979 words. It’s over what I need it to be by a day and a bit, which makes me quite pleased. After I finish posting this blog, I’ll more than likely go back to my works and write an additional 21 words on something to make it 7k even. My hand is hurting a little bit, but its not too bad yet.
I am learning interesting things about myself though. For instance, my hand hurts more when I type at my day job, than it does if I type doing my writing. I assume that its because I want to do this work and I don’t really want to be working at my day job, but still, I find it interesting. Does this mean that if I could quit my job and work on my writing full time that I could heal my hand? That I could only worry about it if I really overwork myself, typing 4k or more in a single day?
It’s a pipe dream for the moment. Unattainable, as things stand, so I won’t be able to find out. Even after I sell my first book, I know that I will still need to work at the day job until my books have had time to get me a bit of an audience. It will be interesting to see though.
My book is going well. I’ve finished one chapter of Dual Melodies, and started a second one focusing on Crystal. I’ve also finished two scenes on my WIP, Falling Through the Threshold. The book is coming to together, though my last scene will need quite a bit of editing. Even knowing what the scene needed, it was difficult to write. Something seems wrong with it, but I’m not certain if it is a motivation issue or something else.
What are you at? Have you reached your 5,001th word yet? What has been the most difficult scene that you’ve worked on so far this Nanowrimo? What do you think about my idea about my hand?
Posted in Blogs on November 3rd, 2011 by B.A. Matthews | | Comments Off
Please feel free to comment about any of your thoughts on this piece. Was it good? What did you enjoy? What about the characters? Let me know!
