Category: Musings & Ramblings

Baby o’Clock

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We got back from California almost two weeks ago now. Every time we go, it feels more and more like going home. Something about the hills rising up out of the earth, crumpled and creased and golden. The highways, wide and flat and sinuous. The ocean, beating against the sand.

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Going away was good for us. For me. I feel like I’m finally starting to settle into life with the baby. Sure, everybody said that life would change, but I didn’t think it would be that different. Call me naïve, but I thought I would finally have time to get things done. As anyone reading this who has had a kid knows, that didn’t happen.

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The reality is that her favorite place to nap is on me, or her dad. That even though she can’t speak, she has plenty of ways of getting across what she wants. And what she wants is to be right where I am.

So I blog with my phone while she’s nursing. I read books with one hand while walking around holding her with the other.  But mostly, I accept that the to do list is limited to one item per day.

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And some days, I’m even okay with that.

New Year’s Wishes

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings1 Comment

I wish for you to be challenged, and that you rise to meet those challenges with determination and perseverance.  That you find within yourself the ability to do what you always thought was impossible.  That you learn things about yourself that surprise and delight you.

I wish for you to be lucky. The kind of luck that leaves dollar bills on the sidewalks and four-leaf clovers in your path. That sweeps the unexpected into your life where it is most needed.

And, as always, I wish that you love and are loved and find new loves.

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See also Neil Gaiman’s New Year’s Wishes.

And the lovely Ali Trotta’s.

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I’ll link to other wishes as I come across them.  If you have one, or know of one I’ve missed, drop me a line in the comments.

“The Whooshing Sound They Make”

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The revisions have been going slowly. So slowly that I’d begun to think I’d set an impossible deadline for myself, that there was no way I was going to have the second draft of this ready by the beginning of August.  It was really starting to make me crazy.  After all, when I was doing revisions to Pomegranate House in January, I was blowing through pages and pages of material in each sitting. I didn’t get why I was having such a difficult time here.

Then, about a week ago, I finally figured out what was going on. I’m not revising, I’m rewriting.*  There’s a few parts, like the opening, that I’ve left largely intact, but almost everything else has gone straight to the chopping block.  Truth is, it’s been so long (over 6 years!) since I’ve worked on the second draft of a novel that I forgot what it was like.  And because this first draft was good — not great, but good — I somehow thought that would translate to less rewriting.

This new draft? It’s really good. Still not great, but it’s starting to sing. It’s also falling into place plot-wise.  There’s a big chunk near the end that I’ve been worrying over, because I knew I would need to cut out or completely re-write most of it.  It’s that chunk, in fact, that put me off revising for so long, because I simply had no idea what to do with it.  Now?  I’m not so worried by the fact that most of it is going to hit the cutting room floor and stay there.  In fact, I think the book will be better for it.

What does all this mean for my deadline?  Well, after seven weeks I’m about a third of the way through the original novel, but I’ve written an extra 10,000 words.   I also think my pace is going to pick up a bit, now that I’ve made my peace with the fact that this is a rewrite.  There’s no way I’ll have a completed draft in two weeks, but mid-end August might not be too far outside the realm of possibility.

 

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* I see rewriting as the thing that happens when you take your original scenes and rewrite them completely, adding or subtracting characters, text, dialogue, plot points, etc.  I see revising as the thing that happens when you tweak a word here or there, or maybe sprinkle in a few additional scenes, but otherwise leave the thing mostly intact.  I’m sure different people call these different things, or the same things, but it’s what I mean here, for purposes of this post.

When the Words Won’t Come

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For the past few few weeks – the past few months, really – I’ve been having trouble writing.  It came on bit by bit, manifesting itself first in an uncertainty about how my current WIP was going to unfold, then as a somewhat scatter-shot attempt to work on other projects while I let the WIP alone, and now as an inability to make myself sit down and write in the mornings.  Those of you who are writers have probably been here (or some version of here) before.  For those of you who aren’t, I can’t even begin to describe how it feels.  Equal parts frustration and misery, with a dash of fury for seasoning.

It took me 6 years from starting the Persephone novel to querying it.  A good bit of that time was letting the novel sit in the back of my head while I thought about where it needed to go.  At the time, I thought it was because I was busy with law school.  Now, I’m wondering if the sit and stew period is part of my writing process and, if it is, what to do about it.  I don’t want to sit on this novel for another three years.  I also don’t want to find myself writing utter rubbish simply to put words on the page.  I’m not sure yet if the solution is to turn to another project for a time, or to go back to outlining and plotting this one, but neither is going to happen unless I can get myself back into the habit of sitting down to write every morning.

Mostly, I’m trying to be California Zen about it all.  Trying to be okay with my limitations, and with working within those.  Trying to be okay with the fact that I’ve gotten a lot of rejections lately, because that’s what happens to writers, even good ones.  Trying to forgive myself when I don’t sit down and write in the morning.  Because life isn’t going to get any less busy or less crazy, and re-working the balance now doesn’t mean I’m not going to have to do it again in six months, or six months after that.  And, above all, remembering why I write in the first place – for those moments when everything clicks, and the words do come, and everything is golden.

The Monster in the Maze

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings1 Comment

Plot is not my strong point.

If you’re looking for beautifully written language, for characters with depth and knowledge and humanity, for a voice that’s all it’s own, I’m your girl.  But plot?  I’m terrible at twisting the threads of my character’s fates, at telling them where and when and how to move.  I can give them motivation, but I stink at placing obstacles in their way.

You remember how, in Sim City, you could chose to subject your city to earthquakes or fires or alien invasions?  I was the kid who always disabled that option.  I liked all my Sims.  I didn’t want to see them destroyed.

It’s the same with my characters. I don’t want to make them go through the Fire Swamp, falling into the quicksand and battling Rodents of Unusual Size.  I don’t want to put them into situations they can’t get out of themselves.

The result tends to be that scenes which should be filled with tension end too early.  In my current WIP, one of the characters goes into the forest, gets a little lost, but comes back half an hour later, unscathed, and with strawberries.  In the next draft, she’s going to disappear for more than thirty minutes, and there will definitely be Consequences.  Problem solved.

The harder thing to fix is that feeling of drag around the 2/3 point, right about when the bad guys should be starting to close in.   This happens in my current WIP.  Where there should be several chapters of nail-biting, page-turning, edge-of-the-seat tension, I end up with several chapters of world building instead.  My notes to myself, after I read back through this, were something along the lines of “WTF??”

Fear not, though.  I have a plan.  I’m going to create a page in my Scrivener for the novel titled “Very Bad Things.”  And I’m going to write down all the bad things that can happen to my characters.  All of them.  Everything from death to dismemberment to imprisonment to torture.  When I’m done, I should have enough disasters to keep the plot moving and the pages turning.

Whether my characters forgive me for it is another matter entirely.