Writing–December Projects

December 5, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

December is always a screwy month for me. I’m coming down from NaNoWriMo, I’m dealing with the holiday gauntlet, and in general my time and energy is in flux. I never know what to schedule for myself during December because I never know how this roller coaster month is going to work out. I either give myself too much to do, decide to take on projects that are too ambitious, or I don’t give myself enough and I end up feeling like a slacker.

I’ve decided to err on the side of slackerdom this time around. I think I’m going to end up working on some Outskirts stuff. I’ve got a Paxton story I’m working on and some ideas for some Maisie Day stuff. I’ve got this idea for a couple novellas as written by Maisie (since she is a writer, you know). I think that’s what my morning project is going to end up as and I think I’m going to revise and cut down the Ivy novel I wrote over the summer to be one of Maisie’s. I’ve also got an idea for another one, but I haven’t done anything with it yet.

Working on all of that is both productive, but also low-commitment in a sense. There’s nothing urgent about it.

I will also continue my quest for rejections. It’s because obvious that I’m not going to meet my goal of 50 by the end of the year since I’m sitting at 15 right now. But 20 is within reach and I’ve got five stories out and four ready to go. If I finish the revisions on “Just Visiting” (I’ve already done most of the heavy lifting), that’ll be five. I didn’t submit at all in November, didn’t even really look around much. I need to finish the year with a final burst.

Trust me. It only LOOKS busy.

Writing–Rejecting “Just Visiting”

November 28, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I received a rejection for one of my short stories, “Just Visiting”. I wasn’t surprised by the rejection because I wasn’t thrilled with the story when I sent it. I was, though, surprised that I got feedback for it. Most places don’t have time to give feedback.

Most of the feedback was pretty critical and that sort of thing always stings. Even though I didn’t think the story was that great either, it still stings to have someone else say so. Rejection isn’t supposed to be taken personally when it comes to writing, but I’m human and sometimes I take it as such. My mindset wasn’t in the best place when I got that email.

I was already feeling questionable about the work I’d been doing on my NaNo project. The rejection for “Just Visiting” was a direct blow to the ego, particularly with the criticisms. Those two things combined with reading a book of short stories that I really like and think are good led me to question if I wasn’t wasting my time with this whole writing business.

However, there was one glimmer of hope for me. Included in the critique was one line of praise that really struck me. I was told the story had some good descriptive lines. When I first read the email, I wanted to respond and ask which ones because I feel like that is my weakest area as a writer. That one bit of positive feedback kept me hanging on and kept me from trashing the story all together.

After a few days of contemplation, letting the whole thing simmer on the back burner of my brain, I’ve now got a plan of how I can revise “Just Visiting” into what will hopefully be a better story.

I think my ego will appreciate the effort the next time I send it out.

Writing–NaNo Completed

November 21, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

What? Already?

Of course. That’s my goal every year. I always aim to finish before Thanksgiving and this year I finished nearly a week before the turkey deadline. I did fall short of some other goals, though.

I aim for 60,000 words. That didn’t happen this year. I ran out of story right around the 50,000 word mark, which is great for winning NaNo, but not so hot with my own personal pride. I could have added an additional ten thousand words on a related story that would reveal what really happened to the missing girl that sort of threads the story together, but in the end I decided to just stick with the novel itself and let my ego take that lump.

I also put an interesting restriction on myself. Since the story is set in the 70′, I challenged myself to not use any language that would have been censored on 70’s era television. It was a silly little challenge designed to make me think a little bit more on my dialogue and encourage myself to be a little more creative rather than relying on the easy out of swear words for insults and exclamations. I mostly did it. Mostly. I fully admit to writing while tired and not caring about this self-imposed little demand.

On the other hand, I really pushed myself on the word count, writing 4,000 words a day four days a week instead of just on the weekend like usual and then sticking to 2,000 words on the three days of the week that I worked more than one job. It’s nice to know that I can maintain that level of demand if I really put my mind to it.

Overall, I’m rather pleased with the way the novel worked out. Not getting too far ahead on my outlining wasn’t a big deal and I think actually helped me be a little more creative with my story since I wasn’t concerned about getting too far off track. On the other hand, I think I could have benefited with a general story line set out before hand instead of going in as cold as I did. I admit, I didn’t have an ending when I started and that usually doesn’t bode well for me. This time it worked out.

As of right now, I rather like Night of the Nothing Man. It’s a pretty simple, straight-forward horror story. I’m thinking that it could be edited and revised down into a nice novella and I think I’m going to try for that.

All in all, I’m going to say this was a pretty successful NaNoWriMo. I certainly didn’t think it would turn out this well.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Writing–The Story Went “Boo!”

November 14, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

It’s not unusual for me to fall asleep thinking about a story I’m working on, particularly if it’s a big project like a novel. Many a night I drift off thinking about what happens next or what scenes need to be revised or what plot problems need to be fixed.

Most of my short stories are firmly in the horror genre. To date, I’ve only written one straight horror novel manuscript prior to this year’s NaNo project and in the end, I revised it to fit more in the vein of my other novels (a mix of horror, comedy, supernatural/fantasy). Every night during that November that I worked on that first draft, I fell asleep thinking about it. Mostly I thought about how boring it was. Writing it as straight horror wasn’t working out so well for me. But I plowed through it and called it done knowing I could fix it later.

Of all the nights that I fell asleep thinking about my scary stories, never once did anything I came up with keep me awake.

Until last week.

I tend to have trouble falling asleep and sleeping in general on Sunday nights. I don’t know if it’s the anticipation of the 6:30 Monday morning wake-up call or what. Last Sunday, as is typical for my November nights, I got into bed and attempted to drift off while thinking about my NaNo project. I was trying to figure out how to get my two MCs out of the cabin in the woods and back to their car with the bad guy looking in the window.

My brain tumbled this prospect around as I fell asleep, leading me down a promising path until sleep snuck in and the path suddenly turned and I jerked to consciousness though I wasn’t quite asleep, scared out of my wits.

I’ve never had one of my own stories do that to me. Never. I never think what I write is very scary. I rely on other people to tell me that the notes I attempted to hit and thought I hit were the right ones. But my own story jerking me out of a near sleep like that is new.

It makes me think I might be on to something here.

It also wrecked my Sunday sleep, yet again.

Let’s hope it was worth it.

Writing–November Projects

November 7, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

It’s NaNoWriMo time!

This year’s project is called Night of the Nothing Man. In addition to the challenges raised by not coming up with this novel idea until a week before the start, I’ve given myself some other guidelines that I’m going to try to follow as I write. I’ll reveal those at the end of the month.

If you recall, I wrote a novel manuscript this summer in a different fashion. I outlined a few chapters, wrote those chapters, and then revised those chapters before moving on. I’m going to be doing something similar with this NaNo project. I managed to get about six chapters outlined before the NaNo countdown clock wound down. This was partly by design. I do better during NaNo when I outline, but in the course of my writing, I end up changing or deviating from my outline that typically results in some frustrating revisions and rewrites. I liked the outlining and then writing of the summer novel experiment in that I stayed on track, but I could make changes. So I’m going to attempt to do NaNo in this fashion.

Dangerous business for me, but I like living on the edge.

Also during the month I’ll keep working on my Lucy and Jamie story. I’ve got a good idea where it’s going and I think it might be good for me to write a page or two of something else while working on NaNo. Kind of like a morning warm-up.

I may or may not start poking at The World (Saving) Series again. I’ve got an idea of some revisions I’d like to do and I’ve been kicking them around for the past couple of months. They wouldn’t be too taxing to do when I need an evening break from NaNo, but don’t want to be unproductive.

It should be a good month full of words.

Writing–Generating My NaNo Idea

October 31, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I wrote before how I was stuck on what to write for NaNo this year. I toyed with the idea of being a rebel and writing novellas instead, but even then I wasn’t too moved by the idea. I really wanted to stick to my November guns and go for my usual goal of 60,000 words before Thanksgiving. But I had nothing.

A NaNo buddy of mine whom I also follow on Twitter and also has a pretty rockin’ blog, Trinae Ross, told me that she was stuck for her NaNo idea, too, until she just started writing random words down on a piece of paper and then asking the usual questions of who, what, where, when, and why. It took her about four days for things to start to come together, but she ended up with something of substance that she could get to the point of outlining. She had a story.

At her suggestion, I decided to try it. Sitting and thinking wasn’t helping me any. The blank I was drawing was just getting blanker. So I grabbed one of my plentiful notebooks, flipped to a blank page, took pen in hand, and wrote down the first things that came to my mind.

“Guys like him aren’t very good at staying dead.” The 70’s. Nighttime. A face in a window. A room full of newspaper articles. A missing girl. An attempted abduction. Two teenagers.

And from there I started asking questions. Who is this guy? Why doesn’t he stay dead? Why this decade? Who is this face? Who are these kids? What do the articles say?

The page filled up pretty quickly with my answers and other scribblings. More importantly, I was pretty happy with what I was jotting down. Just like what happened with Trinae, my story started to come together.

Even at the eleventh hour going into NaNo I still have some work to do (I’ll get into the details next week), but I’m feeling so much better about this project than I was a week ago when I didn’t even have a project to work with. At least I have a place to start when the clock strikes midnight.

I am horrible at networking and socializing. I don’t work very hard at including myself in the writing community because there’s a still a chunk of me that doesn’t think I belong because I don’t have enough credits to my name. But through NaNo and through Twitter, I’ve met some pretty cool fellow writers that don’t hold me to the same high standards that I hold myself to when it comes to inclusion and for that I am grateful.

Without Trinae, I’d still be spinning my wheels.

Writing–A Morning Project

October 24, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

Two or three days a week (depending on the week) I get up at 6:30 AM to supervise the neighbor boy before school and then I take him there. From 6:45 to about 8:10 every morning I sit at the table and let the boy know what time it is. Time for your shower. Time for breakfast. Time to go. In between this time monitoring, he plays his DS and I write.

I didn’t plan on writing during these mornings. When I first started the gig, I wasn’t sure exactly how much wrangling would be required. Turns out that there’s usually not much and since it is so early in the morning, Twitter isn’t exactly jumping. Once I’ve caught up on my timeline, taken my turn for SongPop and Words With Friends, and read a few blog or new articles on my phone, I still have quite a bit of time to fill.

So I started bringing a notebook with me so I could “scribble”. I didn’t really have anything in mind to work on that first morning, so to pass the time I decided to write Lucy and Jamie’s backstory. You might remember them from a previous blog entry about characters that pop up without a story. I had a pretty good idea who these to characters were, so I wrote about Lucy meeting Jamie for the first time, which began with Lucy talking to Jamie’s adoptive mother Lindy. It was a fun little thing with no expectations.

And from that bit of scribbling came an actual idea for a story.

That’s what I’ve been working on two or three mornings a week for the past month or so. I managed to get a page or two written while sitting at the table keeping track of the time. It’s a different approach for me, at least in terms of what I’ve been used to doing for the past few years.

First of all, I’m writing long hand, which isn’t that unusual when I’m writing short stories, but I sense that this will be longer (I’m thinking novella range). I usually don’t write longer stories longhand because what I write down, I must type up.

Second of all, when I am working on a project, I adhere to the write every day rule. For me, I feel like it’s important for me to get that first draft out as fast as possible. This first draft is only getting written a couple of pages at a time no more than three days a week.

Lastly, with my longer works I’ve fallen into the need for an outline. I prefer to know where I’m going when I start putting the story on the page. With this project, I’m just going one page at a time and not thinking any farther ahead than necessary. I’m just seeing where this story goes.

I have to admit, this is a fresh approach is rather freeing. It’s not quite so serious business. I’m not putting excessive demands on myself. I’m just supposed to write every morning while I wait for the boy to get ready for school. It’s just a way to pass the time.

It’s going back to a time when writing was just a hobby and not a career-in-the-making.

Call it a change of pace.

Writing–Gone Missing: Another Self-Published Experiment

October 17, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

Gone Missing was a short story that went a longer than a normal short story and ended up becoming a novella. Once I was finished with it and had it revised and all polished up I went…”Okay, now what do I do with this?”

My first thought was to self-publish it as eBook, but then I decided against it. I thought I should at least give traditional publishing a try. So I looked into the possibilities, but couldn’t find anything that said to me it would be a comfortable fit. Remember, I’m that person that doesn’t want to waste anyone’s time so the criteria for a story has to match up damn near perfectly with what I’m trying to sell.

I debated on it for a bit and after an informal poll, I decided to bite the bullet and self-publish again.

My last self-publishing escapade, Rejected, was hardly a smashing success. It took nearly 10 months before I made the minimum through Lulu ($5) to get paid. I also ended up going through two different self-publishers (Lulu and Amazon) so I could get my book done in print and digital (Lulu covered everything but Kindle, which is why I had to go through Amazon). I still don’t think I’ve made $5 through Kindle sales. Self-publishing takes a lot of promotion and word of mouth and I’ll be honest, after about a month of it I felt like I was flogging a dead horse.

The idea of going at this all again was not an enticing one.

However, my ego driven need to be read proved too strong. Even without the informal poll of five people saying they’d read it if I published it, I knew that’s what was going to happen. Like going on the Tilt-A-Whirl after eating too much funnel cake. You know you’re going to puke, but you can’t resist the temptation to spin your car as fast as you can.

This time I chose to go through Smashwords. Several authors I follow on Twitter use it. It’s strictly eBooks and I wouldn’t have to go through more than one place for the novella to be available for different devices (distribution is a little different story). I felt like it would be a good fit.

So, we’ll see how this self-publishing run goes. I’m not expecting to make myself millions by this endeavor, but I’m curious to see if Gone Missing will be read more than Rejected just by going through a different self-publisher.

Don’t worry. Any downloads made after reading this blog entry will not be considered as tampering with the result.

Writing–NaNo?

October 10, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

You may have noticed if you read my October Projects post that NaNoWriMo was left off of my To Do List. There’s a very good reason for that.

I have no idea what I’m going to do.

In past years I’ve gotten my NaNo idea in September, August, July. I once came up with my idea in March and held onto it until November.

But this year I’ve got nothing.

I’ve thought about going rogue this year. Instead of writing a 60K word novel like I usually do, I’d write two 25-30K word novellas. I’ve got a couple of ideas that I could use for it. They’re pretty good, but neither one I think would flesh out to be an entire novel. Doing them both as novellas would satisfy the word count even if it wasn’t exactly a novel.

I’m not completely sold on the idea though. I’m a bit of a traditionalist. Even though I’d really like to do those novellas (as they’d be part of the Outskirts Universe so they’d be useful to have done) and doing both would count, I’d still feel like I was cheating a little bit.

So if I don’t do the novellas, what do I do?

Logic tells me that I should do something in the Outskirts Universe. That’s my “thing”, after all. On the other hand, it might do me some good to break out and do something completely different.

I don’t know.

The good news is I’ve got about three weeks to figure something out and get it outlined. The bad news is I feel like right now, I’ll take all three of those weeks to come up with something and won’t start outlining anything until 10PM on October 31st.

No matter. I’m up for the challenge.

Writing–October Projects

October 3, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I’ve really only got two projects in mind for October.

The first is a freebie project. To celebrate my favorite holiday, Halloween, I’m going to post a new freebie horror story every Wednesday, the last coming out on Halloween and being directly related to my favorite movie related to the holiday (like “How the Night Haunts”). So check the freebie page every Wednesday for a new fix. I’m still in the process of selecting the other three stories.

And I have to write the fourth.

No worries. It’ll be fine.

The second project is self-publishing my novella “Gone Missing”. Five people on Twitter said they’d read it and that sealed it for me. Okay, maybe not. Maybe it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but was on the fence because I thought I should give traditional publishing a shot at it first. And then I took a look at the market and went, “Yeah, okay, I’ll just do this myself.” My “not a fit” monster rises again.

I’m thinking it will be all digital unless there’s a sudden demand for print copies (I don’t think there will be). I just have to decide what venue to use.

The short story submitting continues. Battling my own insecurities about whether or not I should submit a story some place is rather tiresome, but it’s a very real obstacle that I’m dealing with. The finished stories are piling up.

It’s time to just bite the bullet and submit.