Writing–September Projects

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

Having spent the better part of my summer working on two novels in some form, I’m feeling a little lost. For three months I knew exactly what I was going to be working on every day. Now that they’re done (for now), there’s a little rudderless panic that happens at first. I had mine and now it’s time to work.

It’s time to swing things back to the short story.

I’ve got seven stories that are ready for submission. I’ve got two that need to be revised. I’ve got two ideas that are begging to be written. And “Gone Missing” needs one more polish after one of my lovely beta readers caught a few mistakes. Okay, it’s more of a novella, but still. I can count it for this.

So between writing, revising, polishing, and submitting there’s plenty to keep me busy this month. And since I’ve acquired a few day jobs that I’ll be starting this month, it’ll be easier to work the short story projects into the new and changing schedule.

Of course, that’s a mental thing. It just feels easier because short stories come pre-broken down into bite sized chunks that I can work on. Novels feel like a huge chunk of meat that you have to swallow whole and I have trouble breaking them down and working them into a day job schedule without feeling like a slacker.

I’m straying from the point. The point is I have a lot of short story work to do this month and some decisions to make one which stories I want to submit and which ones I want to use at freebies.

Because I think we could use a few more freebies on the blog. Don’t you?

Speaking of if you check out the Outskirts tab up at the top, you’ll find that I’ve moved everything from the old site over so you don’t have to leave home to read about the Skirts!

I’m convenient like that.

Writing–The Novel Experiment

August 29, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

A few months ago (I think June, but I’m too lazy to go back and look for sure), I blogged about starting a new novel and writing it in a completely different way than I was used to. I was going to outline a few chapters, write those chapters, revise those chapters, and then move, sort of leapfrogging my way through the book.

I’ve admired the writes that can do that sort of thing. It looked like a much more efficient way to write a book. They don’t have to wait until their finished with the first draft to go back and fix glaring story problems or character issues. They revise as they go along to catch those things. Then when they do finish the first draft, they’ve got a whole lot less fixing to do. In other words, their first drafts put them a lot closer to a final draft.

That’s great for them. I still admire and envy them. But that’s not for me.

I used this technique with the Ivy novel (it still doesn’t have a title). While I did like not getting too far ahead in the outline so I could make adjustments and I liked the ability to go back and fix big story problems or combine chapters before I got too far ahead of myself, overall, I found the whole process rather tedious. By the time I started outlining the next few chapters I was relieved because I was sick of the chapters I’d been working on. That sickness has followed me all the way through the draft.

As of this post, I’ve still got two chapters to write and four chapters to revise (though, I don’t think I’ll be doing much of anything major to those chapters) and I’ll be done with the draft. Yes, I’ll be a lot closer to a final draft when I’m finished and that’s great, but I don’t think I want to write a novel this way again. At least not for a long time.

I do think I’ve picked up a couple of useful tricks from doing writing this way, though.

Not getting too far ahead in my outline is a great help. I think I need to start doing two outlines. The BIG outline of the general story arcs I want to tell. And the DETAIL outline of what goes in each chapter. The BIG outline will keep me from forgetting things. The DETAIL outline is what I need to stay on task (this is invaluable to me during NaNo when I must hit my word count for the day; I know exactly what I’m going to right about so I don’t have to waste time wondering). If I only outline a few chapters at a time, then I can make the adjustments I need to it without derailing the whole thing.

The second thing is that it’s okay to go back and change big, glaring story problems while writing the first draft. Okay, yes, this isn’t exactly time efficient during NaNo, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done. And it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done just because I am writing a first draft and I prefer to write it all the way through without revising. Sometimes it’s a benefit to break that self-imposed rule. In the end, it helps me out more than it hurts me.

So, while I think I will always be one of those writers that has to get it all down on paper in one go, I do think this experience has made me a little smarter about how I can go about that more efficiently.

Stick with me, kids. I’m learning.

Writing–Everything is Flat

August 22, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I go through periods in which I think everything is flat. Like Sprite that’s lost its fizz, my ideas, my stories, my everything has no life.

If I get an idea during this period (and that’s a pretty big if), it’s not very good. It’s just a little sliver of something that could be good, but I feel no buzz for it, no drive to put it down on paper. It’s something, but it’s more like nothing.

Any words I put down on paper are lackluster. The stories have no sparkle. It all just lays there on the page, flat as a day old flounder on newspaper. The entire act of writing is just going through the motions. Sure the story gets written, but it’s nothing more than a yawn on paper.

If I’m doing story revisions/rewrites, I can nail all of the grammar and spelling problems, but I can’t fix the story. I’m not “inspired” enough to see what changes I need to make to best serve the story.

It’s a funny feeling, going through a flat phase like that. It’s like I’ve got nothing, not even fumes in the tank. I look around at every project I’ve got going and I feel absolutely overwhelmed by the boredom of it all. Nothing is good, nothing is interesting, nothing is exciting.

The thing about this feeling is that it’s all inside and has nothing to do with the work. The work doesn’t change, but my perception of it does. And there’s no real reason for my perception to change, it just does.

I suppose it’s like sailors hitting the doldrums. One day, they’re just sailing along. The next day, they’re going nowhere, everything is so calm and so still and so STATIONARY.

I realize I’m whipping out a lot of metaphors and similes to explain this feeling, but that’s only because I’m having trouble capturing it in words. It’s a hard feeling to explain, but you know if you’ve had it. It’s an unmistakable feeling of flatness.

I just went through another stretch of flatness. For a couple of weeks I looked at my white board, at my writing projects to do list, and thought, “meh”. When I looked at the board then, I saw nothing worth mentioning, just the same old routine.

Then one day I woke up and proceeded to go through the motions of writing and found that the flatness wasn’t there anymore. The bubbles came back and with them came ideas worth writing down and going through with. The words I put on the paper had a little more spice. The problems that plagued my stories suddenly had solutions that had been there the whole time, I’m sure.

When the flatness leaves, when it fills out to become something round and whole again, it’s like a rush of air into a balloon. Suddenly I’m very full of everything I’d been lacking for the days or weeks before. And it makes me wonder how I ever survived being flat, how I could ever bear that happening.

I guess it’s because I don’t know it’s happening. Like a balloon, it slowly leaks out. Like a soda left to sit, the bubbles slowly leave until there’s nothing left but flatness.

Thankfully, it’s only temporary.

Writing–I Write For No One

August 15, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

This is a post of frustration. I want that known right up front. Because this might come off as whiny/bitchy/cranky/crabby/selfish and a whole lot of other not so nice words (that I’ve grown accustomed to being called).

But there’s a lot of frustration in writing. There’s frustration in trying to get the right tone, the right word choice, the right pacing, the right dialogue, the right word count.

And then there’s the frustration of getting your work published. Finding a publication that fits your story, following all of the guidelines (which an border on ridiculous, but that’s another post for another day), submitting, waiting, and then hoping that whoever is on the other end reading your work will like it and if they do like it, they can use it. And, of course, there’s the frustration of rejection that goes along with that. After so many times, you start wondering about the story in question.

Speaking of wondering, there’s also the frustration of being read. As in nobody seems to want to read your work. Friends, family, acquaintances, Twitter followers, Facebook friends, nobody is interested. No offense! But they just don’t like that kind of story.

It’s the last two frustrations that are currently topping my frustration cup.

I take submission guidelines seriously. I don’t want to waste their time or mine. As such, I scrutinize what publishers want very carefully. And it seems like what they want, I ain’t got. Finding a good fit for my stories seems to be getting harder and harder every time I look. I realize that part of the problem is my own limitations because there’s only one place that I submit to that doesn’t pay. Every other publication I look at has to give me some sort of coin for my work. And I limit myself even further because I try to approximate those token payments as closely I can to the work I’m submitting, i.e., how much would I lose on this story if this place published it.

I realize how snobby and entitled that sounds, but do you get paid for YOUR work? Yeah, I bet you do. Now considering I can put weeks/months into a 2,500 word story only to be offered five bucks for it (a penny a word is my baseline, so that story would net me 25 bucks), yeah, I’m going to shoot for a better payday.

This is a frustration I’ve mentioned before, but I’m mentioning it again because I feel it bears repeating. Call it a need for justification. It’s a head-banging-against-a-wall feeling that non-writers have trouble relating to.

The second frustration is really hitting me hard lately because I’m in need of some support and I don’t know where to go to get it. I write horror fiction for the most part. It’s not a genre that a lot of people I know care for. Of the ones that would read it, there seems to be a real lack of time on their part. Read that as they have lives and don’t have time to beta for me. And that’s fine. I understand it.

But it still frustrates the hell out of me.

It would be nice to have someone, anyone, take an actual interest in my work. Without me forcing them. Without me begging them to make some time to read a story. Without me feeling like I’m nagging people. Without me feeling like I’m guilting people into it.

But I haven’t reached that point in my career yet. I’m not in demand, even with people that actually know me. It’s understandable, but no less of a bummer.

And no less frustrating.

Writing–Rewarding Efforts

August 8, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

Swimming medals (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve read in more than one place that writers should reward themselves for the little accomplishments they have along the way of bigger successes. They should do that because writing is a long slog from first draft to publication and while you’re doing it, it feels like you’re doing it for nothing. You put in all of this work and in the end, you might not see a dime for it. Rewarding yourself during the process helps alleviate that hopeless feeling that tends to creep up when you’re not looking.

Personally, I think it’s a great idea. Eating some ice cream at the end of a first draft, drinking some wine after slogging through revisions, playing a video game after meeting the day’s word count, or going out with some friends after submitting that short story is great. It’s a nice motivator to get through the hard parts and it’s a nice release once you do. Whatever reward you come up with, good on ya. Whatever flips your skirt and rocks your boat.

I’ll just be over here wishing I could do the same thing.

I don’t reward myself. At all. Ever. Even on the rare occasion that a short story gets accepted somewhere, the most I do is pause for a fist pump and then get back to work.

Why?

I guess it’s because of the way I was raised. Yes, of all the things to blame on my parents, I blame not eating pizza after finishing a first draft of a novel. But it’s true. My parents didn’t believe in rewarding us kids for things we were supposed to do. I didn’t get an allowance for cleaning my room. I was supposed to do that. I didn’t get a trip to Dairy Queen for making good grades. I was supposed to do that. I remember when I was a kid finding out that my friends got paid a dollar amount for A’s and B’s. I asked my parents why I didn’t get paid like that.

I was supposed to do that.

So here I am, 32 years old, been writing most of my life, and while I approve of the idea of getting a treat for finishing a first draft or revisions or submitting or accomplishing anything, big or small, related to a writing career, I can’t bring myself to participate because…I’m supposed to do that.

I’m supposed to finish that first draft and finish those revisions and submit that story and do that research and this, that, and the other. It’s part of my job. I don’t get rewarded for supposed to’s.

I would imagine that my attitude won’t change much when (not if!) I get my first novel published.

Because as a writer, that’s what I’m supposed to do. And as I writer, I’m supposed to write another.

So, I’d better get on it.

There’s no time for me to celebrate supposed to’s.

Writing–August Projects

August 1, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

My focus in August is going to be finishing the revisions/rewrites on The World (Saving) Series. I’ve got less than ten chapters to go and while the rewriting is going to be heavy, it shouldn’t take me the whole month to finish.

I started two short stories at the end of last month, “Just Visiting” and “Lady on the Stairs” which I’ll be finishing as well.

And then…?

I need to get back to working on the Ivy novel. Things got derailed when I did my writing protest for a week last month. I’m not sure how much I like the outline/write/revise method. I think that’s where part of my writing frustration came from. I may just finish the outline and then write the rest of the novel so I can call it done. As it stands, I’ve written/revised over half of it so I wouldn’t be in horrible shape if I did it that way.

I’ve got half a mind to start outlining another big project. It’d be a freebie for the blog. However, I make no guarantees that anything will ever come of it. It’s just something I’m thinking of doing.

And of course, I continue on with the 50 Rejections saga. It’s been rather disappointing lately. I don’t want to talk about it now.

I’ll wait until I can go on and on at length in a post of its own.

Writing–Negative Reviews

July 25, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

It’s kind of blown up lately in the writing community concerning writers attacking readers because they leave less than favorable reviews on their books. If you Google “Goodreads negative reviews” you find all sorts of information and opinions on this business.

Now I’ve only had a few short stories published. I self-published a book of my short stories. I’ve posted some freebie short stories on my blog. Even with ALL of this material out there (I’m being facetious), I’ve never received a negative review.

I’ve never even been told that I suck, at least not in relation to my writing.

However, I have a feeling that I’ll be able to handle negative reviews. Why? Because I worked in retail.

Here are a few examples of how working in retail and receiving negative reviews are similar:

I can’t find anything in this store/Why did you move everything around = I didn’t care for the pacing/theme/characters/story. This is a constructive complaint. When people would complain about not being able to find things and moving things around, it didn’t bother me much. First of all, I heard it so much it no longer held any meaning. Secondly, I agreed with them. No one hated moving things around more than the employees because then we had to move it, had to remember where it was, and had to deal with the complaints.

Likewise, people that don’t like a character, pace, or theme of a story provide an alternative perspective from all of the people slobbering all over my work. “Like” is a subjective thing and I can’t please everyone. There might be something I can learn from the people I’m not pleasing, providing they can present their point intelligently. If they can’t, well then, it’s going to hold no meaning for me.

I’ll shop somewhere else = I don’t like anything you write. If you want to shop somewhere else, somewhere that pleases you, then by all means, go and do just that. Likewise, if you don’t like anything I write, then please stop wasting your time with me and go read something by an author that you’ll enjoy. I appreciate you giving me a try, but if things aren’t working out, then we need to go our separate ways.

The one big difference between these two scenarios is that if you don’t like anything I write, I admit I’m a little bummed that my writing to jive with you; if you want to shop somewhere else, please do, and take your attitude with you (though I know you and your attitude will be back next week).

You suck = You suck. Yeah, “you suck” and really any sort of name calling, trolling, or self-entitled whining are pretty much the same no matter what the circumstance. These negative reviews are as prevalent as the people that insulted me while I worked retail and for very similar reasons. On the Internet, a person can hid behind the mask of anonymity and be a raging jack ass without fear of consequences or punishment. Working retail, people think they can treat you like garbage because you work a crap job and the customer is always right.

Well, the customer isn’t always right (and no retail gig I’ve ever had has paid me enough to put up with personal abuse and I didn’t and when I didn’t, I was accused by said asshole customer of being rude, go figure) and neither is a reviewer.

Thankfully, through the virtue of slogging in retail for several years, that when my first negative review comes, I’ll be prepared and I’ll know exactly how to handle it.

I’ve got the coping skills already in place.

Writing–Moving On Up

July 18, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

Okay, the title of this post is misleading because in truth I am not going anywhere. What has “moved on up” is a couple of items now gracing the link bar up top right underneath my lovely banner.

Notice the additions?

Here, I’ll help.

First of all, I’ve moved the links to the stories I’ve had published from the sidebar to the top. They were buried down there like I was ashamed of them and there’s no telling how many people missed them because there weren’t prominently displayed. So now if you click on the “Read me” link above, you’re taken right to the list. And the freebies are listed first, in case you’re not ready for a monetary commitment (hopefully reading the freebies will convince you to invest a little green in my work, you know what I’m saying?).

The second change is the addition of a new experiment under the heading “Chapter One”. This is a feedback experiment. All I’ve done is posted the first chapter of one of my novel manuscripts and asked a simple question: Would you read more of this book?

This accomplishes two things. One, it satisfies my need for feedback, positive or negative. Writing is lonely and a lot of it is done without any sort of encouragement or acknowledgement of any kind. When you get to a point in which you wonder whether or not you should be spending all of your time on this project, a little feedback helps, preferably honest feedback.

Yes, I realize that I’m setting myself up for serious disappointment if a bunch of people tell me that they wouldn’t read any more of the book. However, that’s not going to discourage me from finishing the rewrites and revisions. I want it to be done and it’s going to be done. It might, though, seriously discourage me from trying to get it published. But that’s a bridge that I’ll cross should I get there.

I think the bigger possibility is that no one will read the chapter at all. Or they might read it, but they won’t comment on it. And that’s a disappointment I’m used to and it’s not going to dissuade me much from going all the way with this book.

There’s something fun and risky about putting this first chapter out like this. It’s something I don’t normally do. My roommate reads a lot of my short stories when I’m in doubt, but my novel manuscripts are rarely seen by any other eyes. Letting it go like this is a step for me.

I’m pretty sure it’s a step in the right direction.

Writing–The Week I Didn’t Write

July 11, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

Between a heat wave that pretty much obliterated most of my productivity and a small “what am I doing with my life?” crisis, I didn’t write for a week.

That’s right. I didn’t write.

Initially, I’d just decided to take a 3-day weekend from writing, something I hadn’t done in a while. Like I said, I was having a bit of a crisis and I needed to take a break and reset. However, with the heat (I don’t have A/C in my room where I spend most of my time and do most of my work) those three days stretched out to a week.

Part of my crisis was the doubt that I should be wasting all of my time writing. I’ve been getting frustrated with it, the lack of progress, the lack of motivation, the fact that it felt like work. I decided to take a few days off and see how I felt about writing. If I thought I could leave it, then I would. I didn’t know what I would do, but I’d find something.

As it turns out, not writing was actually a good thing. Oh, I still want to make my living as a writer and I’m still going to write. But not writing helped me gain some perspective on my situation.

First of all, just because I wasn’t writing didn’t mean I wasn’t still thinking like a writer. What I mean is even though I was on break, I was still getting ideas. Ideas for new stories, ideas for revisions, ideas for rewrites. I did a lot of jotting down while I wasn’t writing. It was nice having the ideas just come to me like that instead of trying to force them or beg them to come out of hiding.

And I still did other writing. I kept up with my blog posts and I wrote in my journal. I also scribbled on a couple of other goof projects, stuff that will never see the light of day. I could do it because I had the time to do it and I didn’t feel guilty about devoting twenty minutes to writing down a bit that came to mind.

I will admit that I was very bored without my writing. Yes, sometimes (lately most of the time) it feels like a pain and a chore, but without it, I was often left staring at my computer screen wondering what I should do. Sure I read more and of course I watched baseball, but that didn’t really fill the time like writing does.

In the end, not writing for a week helped me more than if I’d pushed through it and made myself write. I needed that time to reset, recharge, and re-evaluate what I was doing and how I was doing it.

I’m back to the grind again, working on a few different projects. It still feels like work sometimes. But it feels like the right kind of work now.

Writing–50 Shades of…Um…

July 4, 2012January 22, 2016 ~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

First of all, let me say that aside from excerpts, I haven’t read 50 Shades of Grey. And the excerpts I’ve looked at read like fanfiction. Which is fine, except this is a best selling book and a kick right to the nuts of my ego.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a knock on fanfiction. I like fanfiction. I wrote A LOT of fanfiction (well over 100 stories in at least 10 different fandoms, if not more; I can’t really remember). For me it was a great training ground. You’ve got to write a lot to learn how to be a better writer and I put in my time doing fanfiction. With characters and worlds ready-made, it was very easy to drop a story down on it and see what I could do with it. And I did a lot.

To this day, I feel my greatest fanfiction accomplishment was writing a story for a fandom that I knew little about. I mean I hadn’t even seen the movie the fandom was based around. My friend challenged me, told me some key details, and then let me go. Somehow, I was able to write a story deemed accurate and very in-canon. I’m still very pleased that I could do that.

However, in terms of popularity, nothing can compare to a story I wrote years ago. I’m not going to name the story, or hell, even the fandom because the Internet is forever and I don’t want anyone looking it up. I HATED that story. I hated it when I wrote it and I still hate it now. It was supposed to be a little one shot fic, but so many people clamored for more than I caved in and wrote more. To date, it probably eclipses everything I’ve ever written, original and fanfiction, in terms of popularity.

I’ve read it a couple of times since it was originally posted over a decade ago and while I still hate it, I also see how far I’ve come as a writer since. I still hate that story, but now I hate it on different levels, from the bones on up.

When 50 Shades of Grey first came out and its Twilight fanfic origins revealed, I gave a passing thought about giving my popular fanfic story the same treatment. Just find/replace the names and post it to see if anyone would still think it was so great.

With my luck, they would. People would clamor over it now like they did back then and some publisher would want to buy it and then I’d have to go stick my head in the washing machine because it’s old enough that it’ll run the spin cycle without the lead closed. I couldn’t imagine being forever tied to that story, to have my success based on that story. It’s garbage and I know it and the fact that people would be willing to ignore the garbage-ness of it would make me wonder why I ever bothered to get better as a writer at all.

Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? I’m working on novel manuscripts, making a concerted effort to get better as a writer, and a piece of renamed fanfiction hits the best seller list. Jealous? Of course. Disappointed? Absolutely.

It makes me wonder why I’m wasting my time.

Maybe I should have stuck to fanfiction.