Oh my goodness, this is real!

I’m going to admit. I’m a procrastinator. I will wait as long as possible to do something so long as it can be done in enough time that I don’t lose sleep. (I like my sleep.) That is why I am currently writing a blog post and other things instead of studying for my final tomorrow. :)

At the beginning of this year, I mentioned that my goal is to get my first rejection letter. I need to do actually submit something or else I never will.

I haven’t yet. But I am working on it.

Like, I am actually gathering everything to submit this manuscript. Someone who I don’t know, but how could give me money, is actually going to read what I have written. (And probably promptly toss in the in the garbage.)

Yikes!

I’m almost freaking out and I’m almost getting excited at the same time. This is scary! And exciting. Both. Yeah. I might get addicted to this soon. :)

In the mean time, I must go eat lunch. I think the printer’s out of paper here anyway, so I can’t print anything until tonight. (Though I need to go obtain an envelope to mail this in.)

EDIT (about six hours later): Now I’m second guessing myself and thinking that maybe it isn’t ready. Oi! That’s why I need to do this. Because it’s never going to be ready for my satisfaction.

Sending off the babies.

If you don’t know, I’ve been working on writing a synopsis off and on for Shad over the course of the semester. I start thinking that I’ll probably be done soon, especially since I finished my semester today and school won’t start again until at least May 31st.

As such, I started looking for information about how to work on synopses. Unfortunately, they all say the same, obvious tips. Keep things basic. Don’t do anything stupid. Include only what’s needed. Ect.

However, I found this great blog post that summarizes all this rather well.  The Basics: Standard Manuscript Format and Mailing. The synopsis I skimmed, but he also included information on a cover letter.

Hopefully, this will help you all as well as it helped me.

The productive week.

I said I would start posting my word counts, to encourage me. :) Well, so much for that. I did, however, write this week so I might as well admit it.

Last time I posted, I had 19,009 words competed in mermaids. Since i didn’t write for almost two weeks, we can assume that is the same number. This week I have 24,985, which means that I wrote 5976 words.

Not only that, but I also imputed the paper edits of Shad’s synopsis, all 7 pages.

Oh, and I think I came up with a good enough title for Shad, at least until someone can really give me ideas: The Sweeper Pilot. Preferably it’d be fun of it showed up on the book as The Sweeper Pilot, but I think that works well enough. What do you think?

This was a productive week.

Will you READ it already?!

This past week in my life has been almost a literal whirlwind. In short, I was dropped from the nursing program at school and that sent me on a quest to find a new career goal between runs to the business office, professors, financial aid, and fighting off waves of sadness. Currently, I’m thinking education and I’m stuck between English for secondary ed or elementary ed. I’m trying to convince myself I don’t need to decide at this second, but that’s hard.

When my teachers first told me they needed to dismiss me, one thing they brought up is that I mentioned to someone I like writing. Obviously, I love writing.  If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here and I wouldn’t write the blog. However, I kinda dismissed that suggestion because a) my school doesn’t have the creative writing program I would like and b) it’s too competitive a field for a career and c) I’m too nice of a person.

All fine and good. I move on.

Then I discussed  my mermaid paper with my professor, Dr. D.  In spite of his doubts on my topic, he likes it. It has actually rather impressed him and Dr. D has, once again, mentioned publishing. I’m kinda like, “Okay, whatever. That might be cool.” I’m still staring at the chapter three section and trying to figure what to write exactly. Or even outline!

Moving on to announcing my dismissal on facebook and telling my nursing partners. (Obviously, some are shocked, because as someone put it,  I dominated the tests.) Someone in all of this asked me if I’m going to change my major to writing.

After that, I posted Just Trust Me with the hopes that people would read it. I got one person liking it and two people at least clicked on it. But no comments otherwise. Nothing.

Then I go back for this final nursing thing about administer withdrawal to protect my GPA and such. Blahblahblah. Anyway, I just mentioned to my teachers that I was writing a paper comparing mermaid folklore across the world. They asked me how I came upon this idea and I explained that I wrote the story for the writing contest at my school (no clue how I placed yet) and I decided to write it as a novel. I wanted to do some research about it first though. They thought it was awesome.

Then the provost of my school (less than 800 students) has never met me before. No big deal. But she recongized me AND she made comments about how I have really made a difference in the TRiO writing center and that Dr. D  has said that I write really well.

I only write for the student newspaper at school and to be honest, I’m not pleased with how my articles are coming out. I really wish I had someone to help me just iron out the little things and let me brainstorm with them. But I keep hearing about how good of a writer I am, or if I’m going to go into writing, but you know what?

But no one has read my fiction!

I think I write good fiction. I have come a long way in the eight years that I’ve been writing. And while some of my stories may not be up to the standards I would like, and I am a little on the slow side when it comes to editing, I really like the stories I have.

I even randomly started reading the ending of one of my stories that I haven’t touched in over a year because I randomly thought of it.

Everyone else knows that I write fiction too. Almost  everyone understands that this is a passion of mine.

But no one reads it!

For once, just once, I want someone who has read what i have written in fiction to tell me that I’m a good writer, or ask me if I am going to look into writing, or something like that, I don’t want these people who don’t even know I wrote a novel to be suggesting I write as a career. Because for all they know, my writing stinks!

*end rant*

As it is, because I mentioned that I want my mermaid story to become an novel, I have now promised my nursing department a signed copy of it when it is published. I suppose it should be if, but I prefer to be optimistic.

The ban of a writer’s existence: the synopsis

I wrote a novel a while back. I edited it really carefully. I think it’s good. I don’t know, but I think.

The problem that I’m having is I need to write a synopsis for this novel in order to do anything with it. That leaves me confuzzled. I do searches and I can’t seem to learn a lot.

Which brings me to this week’s question.

Do you know if any good websites or tips for writing really good synopses?

Maybe, in view of this question, I should make it my goal this year to get my first rejection letter. (Ouch. That’s tough. But a good plan in my head.)

To want to write.

Well, I did it.

In spite of three nursing classes, a 6:30 AM clinical and two, small jobs, I have officially finished a rough draft of my story. Yes, it’s just a short story. Yes, it is just a rough draft. But it is something that I have finally finished.

I honestly think it’s a pretty awesome story. I had to change a few things from when I first started. Like, I added a section onto the beginning to more set the scene. And as I wrote, the characters talked to me more, so I learned a lot about their government. (That is particularly of excitement, since the characters are so difficult in talking during the school year.)  For example, the king’s children are elected to be the heir, so that way even though the main character, Avda, is the youngest, she may very well be the heir.

I also know I need to develop things a lot more, since I really want to build up Avda’s loyalty of government and all, and her desire to rule.

On a side note, I began to watch Firefly. That is such an awesome show, to be quite honest. But, the very interesting thing is that it made me start thinking about my pirate story again.

If you don’t know what Firefly is about, it’s basically about space pirates who are trying to survive in the world. Now does that make sense why I keep thinking about it? Let me give you an example as to why this helps. In the show, the people are very poor because they have a hard time getting a job. In my story, they’re actually rather rich, just because they aren’t picky. So the whole entire concept of my own story is being questioned by this show.

What makes that very strange is I didn’t want to watch Firefly when it first came out, because the conditions on the ship very closely resemble that of Shad. I figured that the ideas of Firefly would merge into Shad and I didn’t want that. Now… I’m not too sure.

I like that, because it makes my life actually easier. I might actually start writing it again soon.

On a more personal note, if you are reading this post, that means that I have broken 3,000 readers!

You guys also broke the record last month (September) for the most amount of visitors per month which is the second month in the row, and based on the current stats, we’re looking really good for this month too. So thanks ya’ll!

(And yes, I like the word ya’ll. It makes a plural second person, which we don’t have in English.)

The Summer of Failing the Writing Goals.

I’m disappointed by this summer.

I had all these goals. I was suppose to make some serious headway into my new novel.

I was suppose to work on writing a synopsis for Shad and hopefully try sending that around.

I was suppose to work on editing some of my smaller works.

And I did absolutely nothing.

This is very sad for me, because it shouldn’t have been that easy. And maybe I did lack some motivation, and some time. But school really wasn’t that hard. So maybe I’m slightly depressed. I don’t know. But whatever the reason, I didn’t get it done.

Now how bad is that?

If I was paying you for everything that I said I would write but didn’t, I’d be broke. (Though that’s not saying much, considering that I’m almost broke as it is.)  Maybe I’d need to take out a loan.

I think part of my problems is really that I don’t know what to do. I don’t. I think that I need to write a synopsis for Shad and I just stop and think, “What on Earth am I suppose to do here?” Maybe I should ask the english teacher at my school. I’m slowly getting a clue and thinking maybe just writing an outline, and then adding on, and all that would work but I honestly don’t know.

The other problem is all my creative juices are leaving. That quote I posted earlier this week from Orsan Scott Card is pretty much the exact opposite of my life at the moment. I walk through the whole day and get almost no plots.

Or maybe, I’m just walking through the day and I do get plots, but I’m understand all the more that I don’t know how to expand a plot, or do research, or anything like that, so I discard them, because I don’t want to write a bad story.

Anyway it goes, I didn’t write what I wanted to. And I think I sound some like my friend, who said that she’s going to work like frantic this weekend and try to get to her goal of 10,000 words for the summer, when she’s at just 800.

The sad part is, I’m even less than her. 5000 words is all I’ve written this summer.

So maybe I’ll join her on Sunday, when I can write again.

So long as I wake up.

do it your own way

So, I have recently been attempting to try something called the snowflake method of writing. (Forgive me absence of a link. I have very poor internet at the moment so finding it is difficult. If you are very curious, look at previous Friday posts.) Basically, you write small summaries of your story, and summaries of characters, and you continue to expand them until you have a good enough synopsis of everything that you can just write.

So, I tired it. I got as far as step three, where I write a synopsis of a character, and got stuck. First, I’ve never actually seen a synopsis of a character and second, although I have upward of ten characters, the story I think is mostly only told from Daria’s POV. Third, some of characters were stubborn and didn’t tell me what I wanted to know when I wanted to know.

So i resorted back to my old fall back. I went back to paper.

I don’t know what it is about paper or why I can operate better with paper, but ever since I started writing, I have almost always done my brainstorming on paper. Just scrap paper with my microbiology notes works well enough. And I fill these pages with tiny, tiny little letters and sentences and thoughts.

And it worked. Mostly.

I figured out some of the characters’ names. I figured out what kind of scenes I need. I figured out a lot of plot holes. I figured out almost everything that i couldn’t figure out on paper. The only thing, that I know of, that I haven’t figured out yet is what happens to one of the character’s sisters.

So the only other question I have is if I want to change the POV. Orginally I was going to write this much like I wrote Shad, with only there being the main character, Daria’s, POV. But now that I’m looking at it and I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, I want to put in more POVs.  Particularly, if I can do it, the captain’s, because that would add a lot of tension if the reader knows why Daria suddenly got a promotion, but Daria doesn’t know why.  (If you have any thoughts about putting the antagonist’s POV in a story, I’d really like to hear them.)

My only problem is it might make things weird, but I think it might be worth it to have it weird.

Anyway, lesson learned: If you know that something works, sometimes that is your best bet when you’re stuck in a story. Sometimes something new works, but sometimes the way you’ve always done it works too, and we have just stopped it for whatever reason.

I’m going to start working on the outline, and maybe I’ll be writing it by next week. (This is a real time post, if you care, so next week is really next week.) No such luck with Shad though. These synopses  seem harder than I thought and I’m lacking the motivation to write it.

It’s not procrastination as much as fear.

I thought I knew what I was going to write about today, until I began to think about myself instead. See my friend as recently began sending query letters to agents and the like and besides all the strange emotions that arouses in me, I find myself feeling oddly hollow.  I know I should be happy for her but… she’s the slow writer. She’s the one who takes forever writing almost anything. I’m the fast one. In a way, I should be doing this first.

I’m the one who has had a book to send out for a while.

And this started me thinking. Why do I do this to myself? Why do I get to a point and stop?

I do this a lot in my life. I need to get a job but all I do is say that I’m applying for jobs A, B, C, D, and E, and then maybe I’ll apply for B and E. Nor do I get any of the jobs. I need to buy something and first I use the excuse that I don’t know where to find it. Then, I just don’t do it. I need to get work study so I go to the person in charge of work study and say that I need it. I get the locations and I do nothing. (Well, I talked to one, was turned down, and that was all.)  I say that I need to e-mail someone about tutoring a class and I never get around to it.

I wrote a novel and I just let it sit on my computer, doing nothing.

The problem is I don’t know what to do, and then I get so scared that I don’t do anything. It’s not that I don’t want a job, and I don’t want to buy the thing for my computer and I don’t want to be published. It’s that I use my lack of knowledge as a crutch for fear.

So, I’m trying not to be so scared of things. I’m going on vacation next week (will mention later.) and I’m hoping that I can work maybe on my query for Shad.  And work on my new novel. And finish with editing When Darkness Swallows, which I haven’t gotten back to yet. And maybe, if I work very hard, I can get over this little issue I’m having of not doing anything and actually get further ahead in my life.

About vacation. I’m going on vacation start next Monday. I do not foresee any serious reduction in posts, since I already have most of them written. However, I will not be able to answer comments as much as normal, since my internet will be limited. (That doesn’t mean don’t comment. i like comments. :) ) I’ll be back in the beginning of August.

Victory is mine!

So I’m writing my current story, “To be Held,” finally! It’s been two to three weeks since I’ve been able to write, so I’m rather happy.

That being said, I posted last week about how complicated it is when your characters have secrets and you don’t want everything spilled at the same time That is why this story is so difficult for me actually, because it is a strongly secret and suspicion based story. But… well I did something and I think it worked out.

What I did was I wrote out all of my characters’ secrets, whose secret it was, and why it was important to the story. Then, with all the secrets written in front of me, I ordered the secrets based off of how I wanted they to be revealed.  With that, I could easily look at my newly-created cheat sheet and figure out what the next scene had to be about.

So, scene one I needed to create enough tension that would cause Carmen (the main character) to become suspicious of Edmond. That’s all I’ll say. I don’t want to give anything away. What’s even better is that I think I did it. Edmond gives her enough hints that he knows more than he’s saying.

Then, today, I surprised myself by being able to write scene two. This one had some surprises for myself, mostly that all of my characters wanted to talk at the exact instant and tell all of their secrets. And… I let them actually. Which I know, in a story based on suspicion and distrust, it doesn’t make sense, but it did actually. And I didn’t reveal everything. Just… most everything.

So I am very satisfied with myself to be quite honest. I’ve written ten pages in the past two days and I like how it is coming out thus far. However, I listened to the song it was based on today again and I discovered it is very loosely based on the song. Oh well. I still like the story a lot. (Have I ever written a summery? I’m not sure. I’ll have to check.)

Oh, and about editing Shad, I honestly don’t know what to do exactly. I have one more chapter to read through however, and then I’m done with that, but about writing a synopsis… that is just totally overwhelming. I’ll see. Next week I’ll (hopefully) get off.