Each day, I am challenging myself to write seven sentences on my tablet in my odd time. This should stick to the same story until complete.
I'm challenging myself to produce roughly 5000 words a week, in the recognition of reality that my 1K daily average goal will doubtless include missed days.
I'd like to publish one new title a month on average. I have no idea how I intend to do this.
From in_the_blue:
Leave a comment and I will tell you why I think you are brilliant and I am happy to see you around the internet.
(Yes, I"m looking at you!)
So 2013, goodnight, goodbye
You were lovely and bright
You were terrible, my!
I loved you, I hated you
I scribbled the mess of you
Oh, 2013! Goodnight, goodbye!
End of the year post and all that demands a lot more out of me than I'm willing to give. The analytical brain was left in bed this morning and is still sleeping peacefully against my pillow. The rest of me, creative but lazily, has been puttering about today, wishing to join the analytical brain in pleasant dreams and instead working my tail off and getting little in the way of writing done. Which is a nice way of saying, expect a ramble. I'm rambly when I'm sleepy.
This was a busy year, full of good things and bad. On a personal level, I got a job, went permanent, had a falling out with someone once precious to me, lost my great-uncle, and have had ups and downs in my relationship with my sister. Nevertheless, I also had the sweetest Christmas season I can remember, starting with a Thanksgiving I actually enjoyed before all the cleanup was done.
This was the year I did the 365 Challenge and wrote original fiction as prolifically as when I dove back into fandom and whipped out 300K words of posted fanfic alone. I met a new storyworld and had so many delightful prompts and questions, I never could keep up with them all, but it produced "Dowse and Bleed" and I expect several forthcoming novelettes, novels, and collections. Additionally, I met a storyworld everybody who's read it has loved and know that it will do well if I can get it fleshed out in book format.
This was the year I did Nano—again—and failed. Again. Ah, well. :deep sigh:
This was the year I started a collaborative novel that stands more than a chance of succeeding and reaching those wonderful words, THE END. Also, I now own Scrivener. Quadruple awesome.
This was the year I moved out from sharing a room with my sister to having my own (godsend), my family blessed me with my own Samsung tablet (horrible distraction!), and the year I pulled together some actual songs to give as gifts using Finale (super fun).
This was the year I finally worked up the nerve to participate in Yuletide. If I hadn't veteraned in I Need My Fics, it never would have happened. It was wonderful, really wonderful. I loved my fics.
On the bookish front, I got my own copy of Jane Eyre now (yay!), The Left Hand of Darkness (I've been wanting to read this for forever), and Allegiant (see previous post for more on that). At some point, I might mull out how I feel about Le Guin's book, but in case I don't, let me just say it was amazing how the narrative had so many angles. The story disguises itself as Genly's story and in a very small, small way it is, but it's really Estraven's story, and the depth it takes us into the culture is amazing. I'm so glad I finally got to read this classic. Thanks, Yuletide bookswap!
And next year? Next year, I'd like to write and publish, finish the Lena/Wesley book, finish fleshing out the heavier Kingdoms and Thorn and Vardin works that keep lying around, finish lithiumlaughter's fanfics "Everything is Blood" and "Body Heat," finish this collaboration with thecatisacritic, and maybe write some Divergent fanfic. I have that I must wait so long for the movie. :le sigh:
So thanks, last year, for being as big and complex and wonderful and challenging as you were and here's hoping the next year is big and wonderful for all of you. Happy New Year!
So I was pleasantly surprised. It pays to go in with your expectations on the floor. I received a gorgeous gift story for Yuletide that explored Four post-Allegiant, and it convinced me to finally buy the book, which I read in a couple hours this morning (Friday). Allegiant redeemed Insurgent for me. It brought the world together, painfully perhaps, but well. As for plot holes, I found none large enough to drive a truck through, but then, I've been in comics fandoms where these issues are on a whole other level.
So here goes some meta, hitting point by point the issues I was worried about and the stuff that blew me away in this book. From the beginning, I went looking for spoilers because at the end of Insurgent, I felt there was logic fail, and I have little tolerance for that. Spoilers implied there would be plenty.
When we first met Evelyn in book two, several things were quickly established:
Which is my way of saying, Roth extensively established the background for Evelyn's choosing Tobias over the city. It was beyond believable.
When I wrote up my Insurgent reactions, I noted then that I understood how he could get swept into Jeanine's mindset even though I hated him for it. The interactions between Tris and Caleb in Allegiant are spot-on. Caleb felt guilty and terrible but had been willing to sacrifice his family for what he truly believed was the greater good. I get that.
Because of that, the fallout here was perfect. Caleb did need redemption, but the suicide mission wouldn't have given it to him. It would have taken away the time he needed to do the actual hard work of redemption, as it says later in the book of Peter,
"change is difficult, and comes slowly, and that is the work of many days strung together in a long line until the origin of them is forgotten."
That's what Caleb needs and I'm glad Tris gave him the chance to get it. As soon as I read the scene where everyone looks at him and guilts him into "volunteering," all of my insides were screaming this isn't right, this isn't a choice. It's guilt, cold and hard and simple. Tris realized that and finally admitted it and remembered that she promised she wouldn't have walked him to his own execution. If she had allowed Caleb to go through with it, she would have done something horribly despicable and gone against every good part of her there was.
In short, I wasn't sure if the build-up would be well done or not. It was. I believed in the way things played out. It was necessary and not even a little bit. It was downright coldly necessary.
Speaking of...
So someone remarked about how she fights off the death serum and gets taken down by a bullet. WTF?
Again, I get it. After Nita, there was no way on heaven or earth I would have believed there wasn't someone in there guarding. She would've gotten shot at point blank range in the Weapons Lab or outside of it after she deployed the memory serum. Guards just outside the door, remember? Okay, memory serum might have saved her, but I really wouldn't have believed in it. This was a suicide mission, flat-out. I wouldn't have believed in anyone's survival going into that.
It was beautifully done. I hate the result, but I believed in it. 'Nuff said.
So there were also those that thought Four's characterization suffered. I didn't believe that going in and I'm further unimpressed by the sentiment coming out. When you're not reading the thoughts behind his actions, he is just as strong and uncertain and hurting and stoic as portrayed in book number one. When you are reading the thoughts in his head, ignore them for a moment and read what he does and says on the outside. Yep. Still Four.
You don't get abused for sixteen years without getting broken. You don't go through your fear landscape and cringe like a child from a horrific image of your father and have that feeling go away a few months later just because you're in the middle of a war. In short, just because we feel his fear doesn't mean we're not seeing the exact same thing we saw before: someone who is very afraid of what few things he's afraid of, so much he has no room for other fears, and ignores his fear when deciding to act.
I was reminded a lot of the first few scenes in Divergent where Tris looks at him and recognizes the instability in him, the mercurial impulse he often squelches. We see it in Allegiant, and I respect him no less.
I always loved the idea of the factions, though obviously they didn't work out well in practice, but they seemed to improve the cities where they were implemented. Think about it. It was focus, something the Bureau had little of. The Faction system pushed GDs to focus on the virtue inherent in their tendencies instead of the weakness. They focused on the good that came from their genes and how to use that good to its best and fullest to better their society and lives. In short, factions maximized the benefit of their genetic tendencies and helped to minimize the side effects.
Peter was the perfect example of someone who was truly genetically damaged. If he had been born Dauntless, he would have had a chance. That was his aptitude, that was his genetics, and that showed when he took the memory serum.
Allegiant redeemed Peter for me because he described so well the difficulty of himself. He grew up in Candor, which promoted honest living, which would encourage him to do what he wanted to. But what he wanted to do was bad.
"I'm sick of doing bad things and liking it and then wondering what's wrong with me. I want it to be over. I want to start again."
That is genetic damage in a nutshell. He had genetic tendencies that he was not raised to suppress, but he also knew something was wrong with him. So yeah, I buy this world. I buy that there really was an issue which caused the Purity Wars, though it obviously got skewed toward the victors.
And then there's the cities. Do they make logical sense to me? Oddly, yes.
Genetic manipulation took time to "take" so to speak. Generations. So they inserted the corrected/restored DNA into those in the experiments and then had to wait out the generations until that manipulation "took." In the meantime, the struggles GDs went through weren't going to just go away in the waiting, so they gave them cities and then got all high and mighty and forgot it was people they were trying to help, not a faceless "problem."
So yeah, I get it. I get it.
The book was extraordinarily satisfying and I reread parts and almost bought the hardcover at King Soopers, but I really want all three in paperback. I don't care for hardcover, too bulky, but I adore paperbacks. So there's that.
It's the first book in a long time that made me want to write. It also finally cleared up why I couldn't seriously and deeply fanfic in this world. I apparently needed an entire arc. Now, I've got so many plot bunnies, I expect a monster if I don't keep my head on original fiction.
That's my summary. I can't say I loved the book, but I can say I enjoyed it and was satisfied by it and am very glad I finally read it.
So I made out like a bandit with two gorgeous gift fics, one for the Divergent trilogy and one for Roswell.
Tess, through the years.
Bookmarker's Notes
I have a thing for "hurts so good." This story hurts as it walks through Tess's life and the mental abuse Nasedo gave her, but it's so, so good. And the last line just slams you in the gut. Beautiful.
When the walls come tumbling down, it's not just about people being set free. It's about how others are able to come in, too.
Bookmarker's Notes
This is beautifully layered and nuanced and developed, a character study of Tobias and the city of Chicago after everything that happened. It hurt but in a good way. It was slow, but in a rich way. I forgave canon for this story.
I got a good chunk on the collaboration chaptering done and have otherwise been creative in my procrastinate-on-Yuletide period:
My great plan of stop, drop, and Yuletide went by way of stop, drop, and decorate.
Ah, well. Merry Christmas season!
So I finally did an interesting breakdown of "Dowse and Bleed," also known as the story from inferno—so-called because my protagonist drives me batty. She tells her story grudgingly in an interesting raw but very veiled way. Slowly, but surely, I am coming to realize that all those layers are simply part and package of her: she hides things away even from herself; it just makes for a really lousy way to write a story. I have to dig deep, finish laying myself out raw, then look back at the prettyness of it before digging deep again and clawing my way down to the mess of it. Because that's where the story is—the mess.
That said, my breakdown:
INTRODUCTION: 1482 words
INVESTIGATION: 8482 words
CRISIS: 1252 words
RESOLUTION: 1488 words
The story doesn't have a lot of surprise twists and it seems rather oddly shaped if I think in terms of arcs (which I usually don't, was just curious), but I found it an interesting exercise to poke into this story to figure out how it ticked and why adding another layer is giving me grief.
Then I figured it out from looking at that breakdown and realizing what Rachelle was doing. In this story, you see Rachelle and only because I pried herself out of the surface level and asked her body what was going on and asked her emotions why this assignment was her story, what did it mean to her. But I look at this and I see why she was just so weary and kept side-stepping particular thoughts, feelings, and flashbacks. In short, this snippet from the first scene summed up the problem:
The answering machine clicked on. "Rachelle Winslow. Leave a message."
Her birth name in her own voice jarred her. It wasn't her name.
Who in the world calls herself by a name she doesn't consider hers? Someone who doesn't want to look at the other side of herself, the part she does consider hers. She's disassociating and it shows. What this story doesn't show is the operative. And that's why it keeps leaving little odd threads hanging out that don't quite gel, don't come together, don't make sense. I was in too deep and couldn't see what she was refusing to see because she already knew it was there.
So yeah. Round three.
So, thecatisacritic asked what would you as a writer tell you the writer of five or ten years ago? As an author's note to this, I probably wouldn't. Oddly enough. But put to, here goes:
Dear former self,
I know you always think of yourself as a writer, first and foremost, but I wanted to suggest to you that you start thinking of yourself as a human being. You'll never be able to un-engrain that deep writer-identity from your consciousness; you dug in too deep. Stop trying. God gave you a talent. Use it, hone it, focus it, but give up on trying to get rid of it.
It is important, no matter who tells you otherwise. There is nothing more powerful in this world than an idea except for love.
It's going to get worse. You're going to lose faith for a while, lose heart, forget everything you ever believed in and pretend you never believed in it in the first place—at least with your actions. You're going to go through a valley of hard times and testing, but stay strong. You're going to be okay. You've got a God who loves you even when you don't understand. You aren't a lost soul because you don't know how to find your way. You're a writer and you're His. Cling to that, and you'll be just fine.
Take it from someone who knows, 'kay?
Hugs (you'll need them),
the scribbler
So, this question—Can you tell me a bit about where you're at with fandom? How you got there?—from stormkpr...
I have gone through many phases of fandom. I'm sure for all of you who have stuck with me through several iterations and hiatuses that you already aware of this. Perhaps, you remember the times I've said I came back after a long flat-out absence from fandom. Well, here is my journey. It's not simple or pretty; in fact, it's pretty twisted, but here we go.
So I entered fandom at a young teen stage of my life when anything I loved was something of a fangirl situation and my dad and sister were both the same. I did more graphics than fic at first, but I did write some popular Roswell/Andromeda stuff before my parents changed their collective minds about fandom and cracked down on it. I deleted my profile and for a long time, kept my pictures and fanfic archived personally, but lost those in a move.
When I got old enough to return sometime after the 3rd X-Men movie came out, I was starting from scratch. I hadn't intended to return ever. I had for years simply resisted the impulse to do anything fannish when I wanted to until there was no longer an impulse to resist. But I did return. I did.
I talk about this from time to time, but it's still hard. I wrote a book. The first draft was so terrible, it's not even funny. I wrote and reworked and finally got somewhere I liked with it. The worldbuilding was phenomenal: it incorporated most of my core ideas for fictional worlds, which I still repurpose today. At the same time, I was in the process of writing another story, Rain, which dealt with a huge faith crisis by the characters when Team Five left the Projects, a top-secret branch of the military. These two books broke me.
I mean that.
My grandmother means more to me than almost any other human on earth. She read what I had—and I was excited to share it—and was more than a little appalled. Oddly, it wasn't because of the issues I addressed, which is why I address those issues to this day. It was because some of the ways I grappled with those issues were in direct contradiction to my faith. My books about crises of faith became my crisis of faith and I literally got sick to my gut at the thought of ever writing my own work again. So I stopped cold. It was hard. That was the darkest period of my life. I was depressed, angry, hurt, sensitive, and not understanding how to find my way back to a God I hadn't even realized I'd walked away from.
Nevertheless, I have been a writer since I was old enough to know what a story was and how it was created. I had engraved that idea so deep into my identity that I literally couldn't not write. In despair, I turned to fanfiction. It changed my life.
It sounds melodramatic to say that, but it is something I have truly learned is my nature. When I cannot trust myself to write, I fanfic and in that second bout of fandom, I crossed over from amateur writer to absolute confidence in my own voice.
In the first three months of that year, I started three popular stories and wrote them consistently on a rotation basis. I was rather disciplined; it was nice.
Around that time, I got tendonitis, then I got on pau d'arco, a natural anti-inflammatory and the only one that helped me, and then I got an unexpected side effect I didn't track down to the tea until months and months later. I got insomnia. Every morning between 1 and 2 a.m., I woke up and could not go back to sleep unless it was the fifth or so such morning and I was exhausted.
Between that horribly early wake-up time and the time I got ready for work (more like 4:30 a.m.), I wrote fanfic. Needless to say, I racked up the word counts and produced roughly 300,000 words of posted fanfiction that year besides the unposted WIP stuff. My story count went through the roof and I had way too many balls in the air, but I wrote.
That's when I found out what I liked in a story, how to write a whole story, how to interpret reader feedback, what to ignore. I learned to experiment, to challenge myself, to post, and that's when I blew past the million words of crap line and more, knew it.
That's why it changed my life. When Dean Wesley Smith and company shared the first real information about the emerging independent author situation (and it was truly only just beginning), I immediately saw the parallel between the way fanfic was then handled and the way original fiction was going to be. I started thinking about it then, but I didn't really have one piece of my confidence back: the faith factor.
After all the grief that period gave me, you would think the return would have been huge, climactic, and so infinitely memorable, I would know the exact moment everything changed.
Well... No.
I read some stuff of Rabia Gale's and Natalie Whipple's and Kayla Olsen and kept hammering away until gradually, I did find enough peace to tentatively begin trusting God again. Though really it wasn't Him I hadn't trusted before, it was myself. I didn't trust myself to know if I was really with Him or not. When that happened, I shifted focus.
I started hammering away at a story. Well, stories, but most died on the vine. One made it, the first I'd finished after that horrible, horrible year: "The Singer." When lithiumlaughter recently read this story, she loved the main character. What I didn't know until today was that story mirrors my emotional journey. The most important thing I had died and I had to make peace with God over it before it could live again. And oddly, I think that story's playing a lot into Justus', which is probably why for so long, I didn't want to touch his story, afraid I'd screw it up as badly as I screwed up Rain.
When I finished that story, I'd proved that I really could write and finish something again that belonged to me. And I stepped sideways.
My original fiction worlds are so incredibly interrogative of the stories and poems and biblical themes and questions and struggles I love and fangirl that there is really, literally no difference between them to me. If anyone wants a catalog of the origin of one character or another, odds are 50% or better, they started out in my fandoms.
I thought I would balance fandom and canon at first but I couldn't do it. I immerse so deeply into one world or pairing at a time that everything comes unbalanced naturally all the time, and it's one or the other, this or that, move through sets of stories on rotation. Thus, I have hiatuses and do exchanges and go on the occasional original fiction binge, but none of them really take over my life. I have too many things I love to do and so have always spread myself too thin.
When I'm full up, I write. When I'm hurting and angry or scared, I fanfic.* When I'm empty and dry, I read and listen to music. There is very little overlap unless I force the issue, except reading. I always read.
This is my relationship to fandom. This is how I got there. It's one place I can be angry and hurt and afraid and lash out and cry out to God and the world, Why? I don't get it and somehow it's okay because then He answers back and no one else even knows the questions I was really asking. Sometimes I don't. For some things, there are no words.
For me, there are a lot of those some things.
*Fluffy, funny stuff just doesn't take a lot out of me, but that's a little different. I'm rarely invested in that stuff.
