Something new and shiny

I was inspired by a speaker at the local RWA chapter meeting, so I started a new blog:

http://steel-and-blood.blogspot.com/

Since I have the attention span of a gnat this blog will probably get a little dusty. Well see.

To scream or not to scream: Why I don't write horror

I just finished reading Richard Matheson's I am Legend. I must say it's an amazing story, quite a bit different from the movie (I really liked the movie too though). It's a brilliantly written. Especially the voice Matheson gives Robert Neville, you can actually feel him going mad right before your eyes.

Reaching the end of the story though, it left me thoughtful, but sad. Like many horror stories, just about everyone dies in the end (and through out the story for that matter). I have no problem with blood, gore or violence. That kind of stuff really doesn't bother me. Even killing people isn't that bad (I certainly do enough of that in my own stories). But the thing that always makes me think twice about starting a horror book/movie is the knowledge that there probably isn't going to be a happy ending.

I respect the Horror genre in all its bloody glory, but the more I read of it and watch it, the more I realize that this just isn't my cup of tea.

At the end of a story I want to feel better then when I started. I want to have learned something with the Hero or the Heroin. I want to see the characters move forward with their lives, stronger and better for their experiences. I want to feel like everything is going to be ok. It makes it hard for them to move on with their lives if they die at the end of the story.

So while I will continue to expand my reading into other genre's besides my own homeland of Fantasy, it will be a cold day in Hell before I write something with an "unhappy ever after".

Kissing the Frog: DiaW

I started out the week with the idea of trying to do a "Draft in a Week". I’d heard about this from my RWA meeting and I thought it would be a great way to get some of my stuff done.

The idea is to write 20+ pages a day for a week. In other words, it’s NaNoWriMo on steroids. For that gal who came up with the idea, that was enough to finish the first her first draft. The story I wanted to work on is epic fantasy, so 50k is a little more then half way through (with the 15k I’d already written). That’s enough of a chunk out of the book that I thought I’d give it a shot.

I got through three days and I must say it was quite revealing. When you have THAT many words to pump out, you have no time for slaking. At first I wasn’t sure I could do it, but on the first day I got 21 ½ pages done. So even a slow typer like me can bang out the pages. It’s definitely something I would recommend others give a try.

Several things I realized though:

1) Yes, I can write 20 pages a day, but to do that I can’t knit, watch TV or just chill on the sofa.

2) If I don’t have time to knit or just sit and think, my writing suffers. TV I can cut back on, but the down time after work, just before I put in my writing time for the day is critical.

3) and finally I realized that I’m not as lazy as I thought I was, this stuff just takes time.

That last one is hard for me. It always feels like I’m taking forever on this stuff. You’d think after working on project X for X number of months it would be done by now. The reality is that I’m probably on the quicker side of normal. No, I’m not putting out five books a year, but I’m making progress on a daily basis.

In the end that’s all I can really ask for.

Great Book

Since I've been waffling around with editing on In the Twilight Between I decided to do some reading to help me along. In doing this I came across a great book called "Self-editing for Fiction Writers" by Renni Browne and Dave King.

I really enjoyed reading it and it gave me lots of good ideas for fixing some of the problems that I was having as well as highlighting a few that I didn't realize I had. Plus some of the techniques they have give me a good excuse to use my pretty colored highlighters ;-)

A highly recommended read.

Cool link

My father passed on to me a really cool link the other day.

The place is called "Project Gutenberg". It's a web site with thousands of free ebooks and audio books. All the books are old and in the public domain. Lots of good stuff there (Jane Austen!).

I've been downloading all kinds of cool stuff all morning :-) Definitely worth a look.

Kissing the Frog

On this edition of kissing the frog, I want to talk about mediums.

No. Not the creepy ghost kind. I'm talking about pen and paper versus typing.

Since I finished The Stars Cry Out No More I've begun editing In the Twilight Between. It was going well, but I realized that I needed to rewrite several scenes. I hate rewriting things. I always feel like I do all the work just to get back to where I started. So I wasn't really surprised when I came to the first scene and my momentum ground to a halt. I would poke at it, maybe get 50 words then stopped again.

Then the other day I was talking to a friend and she showed me some of her notes that she had child on a clipboard.

Hmm... Paper.

I went home and pulled out my own clipboard and some loose papers and tried writing that troublesome scene again. Big difference. Now instead of just typing the scene, I was writing in a new medium. Everything felt fresh again and before I knew it I had over five (single space) pages written and had gotten over the hardest part of the scene.

Just that little change mad all the difference.

I return

So after a really really long month of helping out friends and sickness, I'm back.

I got absolutely nothing done writing wise last month, but I hope that August will be better.

Better post tomorrow. I promise.