Writing–Revising the Long Ones

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

Through the power of NaNoWriMo, I’ve written a few novels. First drafts are always the hardest for me and NaNo is a great way for me to get that big idea out of my head and onto paper. However, I’ve only made it through one round of revisions on a couple of them before something else took their place on the priority list.

I keep the first round of revisions simple. I read through the manuscript and make notes on story elements that I want to change. Then I go back and make the changes. Depending on how bad the first draft is (usually pretty bad), I may end up rewriting a big portion of the novel. At the very least, a few chapters are guaranteed to be rewritten. It’s all part of the process.

And it’s a long process, but in the past I’ve been really good at sitting down and getting it done. Sometimes ideas occur to me during the revision process, but unless it immediately pertains to continuity, I rarely go back and change anything. I just note it for the next round (which I’ve never gotten to, but I still intend to get ther at some point).

However, I’ve run into something interesting with revising The World (Saving) Series. Because it’s taking me so long to revise it, the temptation to go back to the beginning with my new ideas and start on the second round of revisions.

I’m resisting this because I think it will work better for me to go through the whole manuscript and make these changes first. I’m sticking with the method that has worked before, basically. I don’t want to start the trend of going back and revising what I’ve already revised before I’m done revising or I’ll never be done revising, you know?

I envy the people that can revise as they go or stick with one chapter until it’s perfect and then move on to the next. If I did that, I’d never be done. Or I’d always be going back. My best bet is to keep chugging through one round after another to ensure that I finish the round.

It’s the slower option, but I think that right now, it’s the one that suits me best.

In this one case, I’ve got to resist temptation.

Kansas City Road Trip

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

The last weekend in June, my best friend of 25+ years, Haley, and I road tripped it on out to Kansas City. It’s about a six hour drive from our neck of the Illinois cornfield. Here are a few pictures and highlights.

-We made a pitstop and then ate dinner ten miles down the road. Finding a Maverick’s Steakhouse will do that to you. (FYI: We used to have a Maverick’s in town but it closed about 10 or 12 years ago. We miss that salad bar terribly.)

-Haley did the driving and did well for this being her first out of state roadtrip. She only had once incident of driving crazy (u-turn, driving on the shoulder, nearly taking the wrong exit all one right after another after a gas break…hilarious).

-There are A LOT of billboards on I-70. You could get rich selling ad space. Our favorites? Ad for a gun show next to an ad for an emergency medical clinic and an ad for an adult shop followed by a billboard saying the Jesus saves from pornography.

-Live Nude Girls and Arcade. No kidding. There’s a place on I-70 that advertises both strippers and an arcade. We’re told  (because we know people that have been there, of course) that you can basically play Frogger while watching nekkid girls dance. We’re thinking of going back there.

-Our ghettofabulous hotel.  Condoms in the vending machine next to the Crunch Bar and a drawing on our hotel room wall.

A buck for one? You could go next door to the gas station and get a box for better value.

 

Someone wasn't minding the kid. At least I hope it was a kid.

 -Gates Barbecue. So, so good.

Did I mention it was good?

-The Cubs game. The Cubs lost, we baked in the sun for seven innings, and Haley never got a hot dog (she kept asking the people in our row whenever they’d go to get something), but it was a good time. Great seats right above the Cubs bullpen, cool people sitting next to us, and back to back home runs.

Hello, Royals!
Turn us over. We're done.

 

You have to know the secret handshake to get into the bullpen.

 

There were hot dog races. I don't know why.

 

After the sun went down. Our sunscreen was fantastic. We should have been burnt to a crisp.

 -Sitting in the front row over the Cubs bullpen had its perks. Bullpen catcher Edgar Tovar smiled and waved at me and a security guard tossed Haley a bullpen ball.

-Between Denny’s and Cracker Barrel, we ate so much breakfast not at breakfast time.

-Golden Corral. It was the first time for both of us and now we see why Haley’s grandparents have the place favorited in their GPS. The food is fantastic (the guy in the commercials is still a jerk, though).

This is how you do dessert...a little bit of everything.

 -It’s worth noting that, while Golden Corral was good, there were mashed potatoes on the floor of my bathroom stall.

Photographic evidence.

 We had a fantastic time and before we were even done with the trip, we started talking about the next one. I can’t wait.

To be continued...

Writing–July Projects

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

That should be project as there is just one: revising The World (Saving) Series. I’ve been stalled on it for much too long, doing everything else first. This needs to be my focus.

It’s going to be a challenge even with no other writing projects going on. I’ve currently got a lot of stress going on at the day job and the last thing I want to do is come home and do more work. My goal, though, is to look at this as my way to de-stress after a long day. Come home, make progress on something I want to do and want to spend my life doing, and go to bed less stressed and feeling better.

I know these kinds of things don’t typically work out for me, but it’s worth a shot. What else am I going to do? It’s not going to revise itself.

Not doing Stories By The Numbers this week because nothing’s changed and I’m feeling lazy.

Writing–Writing with a Day Job 3: The Reckoning

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

I don’t know if that’s accurate, but it’s a catchy title and I’m going to stick with it.

The duties at my day job have changed which means I no longer have the extra time at work to write. Downtime in between duties provided me with time to write blog posts or work on short stories. I couldn’t do a lot, but what I could do gave me time to do other things after the day job shift ended.

But this change means that my downtime is pretty much gone and i’m once again going to have to reconfigure how I do things. And since I’m having so much trouble doing things to begin with, this doesn’t bode well.

I am really struggling trying to achieve any kind of balance. This month I’ve managed to make a little progress on The World (Saving) Series, but I continue to fall further behind, which just depresses me and amplifies my struggling. I’ve put off posting any new story in the Outskirts Universe because I’d like to set-up an archive and use that instead, but I haven’t gotten around to doing that. My short stories sit, ready and waiting and unsent.

I feel like I’m losing hold of my dream in favor of a paycheck.

The emotional toll isn’t helping at all this sort of struggle is taking isn’t helping at all. It’s making me question my dedication to writing.

If I had my choice, I’d make money from writing. Unfortunately, I’m not to even close to that point. The way I’m going, I’m never going to get to that point. It’s very frustrating.

Logically, I’m going to have to change my schedule to meet my new needs (demands?). This may mean blogging less and shelving the Outskirts Universe Project until I can make some serious headway on The World (Saving) Series revisions. I need to get this round done.

If I can find some more hours in the day and some more energy, that could go a long way in helping me, too.

Stories By The Numbers

 -Submitted: 2
-Ready: 9
-Accepted/Rejected: 0

Bad Words: Uncaring, Unsympathetic

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

We’re not getting into the words that make people squirm. The harsher words; the ones that people want to gloss over and ignore. But remember what I said when I started this: people who love and care about me have called me these words.

I’ve gotten a tought rap with these two words, uncaring and unsympathetic. I’m a tough girl. I keep the touchy-feely emotions to myself. Emotions are messy and complicate problems and bung up solutions. I prefer to stay logical and either vent the emotions before or after I figure out what needs to be done. Sometimes the venting comes while I’m doing it, but it’s all very efficient.

I’m very efficient. Friends and family agree; they come to me for help because of my objectivity.

But! The other bad words have a tendency to taint the good words. Being logical and efficient and tough is fine unless you’re also selfish and unthinking and unaware. Then it’s not so great. It’s not viewed quite as kindly.

I admit to being uncaring and unsympathetic at times. Probably more often than I should be, more often than is socially acceptible.

Uncaring goes back to being selfish. If it’s not about me, I don’t care.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who choose to be victims who whine about their situations without a move to fix them, who create their own messes and sit in teh middle of them and cry. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who refuse to take responsibility for their own actions. There are a lot of people around like that. I’m kind of outnumbered in that respect.

I actually used to be quite sympathetic. When I was kid, I was sympathetic to the point of sensitive and sensitive to the point of tears. That sort of thing isn’t tolerated well in my family. We don’t do sensitive because sensitive is seen as weak and weak is bad. Weak doesn’t get you through life, it doesn’t get you through the sometimes cutting exchanges with my family, and it doesn’t get you any special treatment.

So, over time, I acquired a thicker skin and maybe it’s a little too thick in places. I might have gone a little too far to the other side. Got a little too tough.

I’ve been working on it. Trying to be a little more sympathetic to those that really deserve it. It’s not easy, but I’m making a few small strides in the right direction.

At least I think it’s the right direction. I won’t know until I get there, I suppose.

Writing–Rejection Persistence

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

As of last week, “Such a Pretty Face” has been rejected seven times since it placed 10th in the genre category of the Writer’s Digest Story Competition. Of all of the rejections I’ve received, the rejections for this story have been the most frustrating.

The little bit of success I got with this story, really the first bit of success I had as a writer, was enough to make me think that I had the talent and the skill to be a writer in terms of making a career of it. It gave me the confidence to keep sending out stories, to keep writing and revising, to keep accepting the challenges and rejections with the ultimate goal of acceptance. This story really started the ball rolling for me in terms of my writing career.

So it really knots my panties that I can’t seem to get it published. It was good enough to beat out 90 other people for a spot in the top ten, but not good enough to be seen in print.

The rational side of me knows that’s not necessarily the case and that rejection is subjective. It might not be the story the editor is looking for and that’s okay. It’s a difference of opinion, not a slight on the story.

But the irrational, emotional side of me wants to know what I’m doing wrong. Why is this story suddenly not good enough? Why doesn’t anyone like it? Why can’t I get this thing published? And then I start questioning whether or not I should keep sending it out.

Persistence is a big part of success in the writing business. I know that. Every writer and writing magazine says so and I believe it. It’s logic. But there comes a point when I start questioning the persistence and start to think that maybe the story isn’t meant to published.

I hit that point with “Such a Pretty Face” at about rejection number four. I started questioning the wisdom in sending the story out. I had my bit of success with it and maybe that’s all I was meant to have with this story. It’s kind of an odd, illogical thought, but one that I have when I get back that rejection. I’m prone to those odd thoughts.

I keep sending it out, though, because I keep coming across anthologies that I think might be a good fit for it. And I’m always disappointed more with those rejections than any other story.

I once again received a rejection for “Such a Pretty Face” and I’m once again debating the wisdom of sending it back out again. But, it’s in the ready pile, waiting. Because I know I’ll come across someplace irresistable and I’ll send it out.

And I’ll dread the rejection that may come back.

Stories By The Numbers

 -Submitted: 2
-Ready: 9
-Accepted/Rejected: o

Fat Girl Belly Dancing

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

Several years ago, let’s guess 2004, I decided that I needed to get healthy. Not just lose weight, although that was part of the goal, but to change my eating habits, excercise more, and strengthen my body. I chose to do this slowly, hoping that the new changes would stick. More than once I had tried to start exercising and never had the follow through because, well, I hated it.

So this time, instead of once again hiking my fat ass up on the treadmill and walking mile after boring mile (I really don’t like walking unless I’m getting somewhere), I looked for an alternative. I decided to try yoga. It was easy enough that I could stick with it, but difficult enough that it challenged my muscles. At the time it fit into my schedule well as I was going to college (that was my third stint). I popped in the DVD and did twenty minutes before school. As time went on, I started learning new poses and incorporating them into my own, made-up routines.

I was actually impressed with the difference. Maybe I didn’t lose a ton of weight in the first few months that I did it, but I noticed that I was getting stronger and that I was feeling better. It was enough to encourage me to stick to it. It became the core of my exercise program.

After a good solid year of yoga, I added weights to the regime. And then after some time doing that, I looked to add some cardio to my workout routine.

I started with dancing at first. I just put on some music and bust some moves like I did back in the day when I was hitting the under 21 club on a regular basis (the whole motivation for me to get into shape was that I felt I wasn’t keeping up on the dance floor as well as I used to). It was fine for awhile, but I got bored with it pretty quickly, oddly enough.

Then I happened to catch a belly dancing workout program on FitTV, back when it was FitTv, before Oprah took things over and messed it all up. It looked challenging enough to give me a workout, but fun enough that I’d stick to it. And I felt that it would work with the yoga and the weights I was already doing it.

When I started belly dancing, I was terrible. No doubt about it. I was required to use muscles that I didn’t know I had. But slowly, I started to get more of the moves down. It got to a point where I had memorized every routine of every episode (they only aired one season on a loop) and I was keeping up with them pretty well.

My routine paid off and I lost weight because of it. More importantly I felt better.

But belly dancing had an unintended effect on me. It brought out a latent femininity and sexuality that I didn’t realize I’d had.

I grew up as a tomboy. Yeah, I wore dresses up until the third grade, but they did little to deter me from playing hard with the boys. My mother always said that she didn’t raise girls. I’ve never been very good at being girly. And because I do tend to hang out with boys more than girls and because it’s kind of a rule that if you want to be respected by the boys, you have to be like the boys, that’s how I rolled.

So imagine my surprise when I started doing this very feminine dance and actually enjoying the sexy, girly qualities it brought out in me. I gained even more confidence and felt beautiful despite the fact that the world condemned me (and still does) because I’d never be a size 0. I didn’t think that I could ever somehow incorporate my tomboy self that always have been into the strong, sexy self that I always wanted to be and come out a full person. It’s funny that an exercise routine could do that to me.

So here I am now, having gained back all of the weight I worked so hard to lose and I’m trying to find a way to lose it again. So I’m going back to the beginning: yoga, weights, belly dance. It worked before, it can work again.

More importantly, I need to get back to the state of mind I was in when I was doing this routine the first time.

I need to get back to being a fat girl belly dancing.

Tales From the Day Jobs: Father’s Day

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

As should be established through my babblings by now, writing full-time is my ultimate goal, but right now a day job pays the bills. I’ve had a few jobs in my time: fast food, retail, credit union, and currently, a transportation company. I’m one of those people who likes to have a good time no matter what I’m doing. Work is no exception. Thankfully, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a several like minded people. Between my co-workers and the customers, I’ve racked up quite a few entertaining stories, all in the name of surviving the grind.

And because I have no shame, I thought a good Friday feature would be to share a few of those stories from time to time. Prepare yourselves accordingly.

During my last stint in retail I worked as a jewelry sales coordinator. At the time my departement featured a “gift wall”, mostly filled with ceramic statues and jewelry boxes. The items changed depending on the holiday, but my department typically didn’t get anything for Father’s Day. However, an assistant manager asked me to clear a two foot section of my wall to fill with good gift items for Dad.

Since this was a weekend project, I ended up acquiring help from a couple of people from different departments that didn’t have as much going on. Our collaboration resulted in some obvious items: wallets, caps, tackle boxes, flashlights, golf balls-very stereotypical stuff. And then, as a joke on the assistant manager (because he was our favorite assistant to torment), we added boxes of condoms, neatly placed along side everything else.

Struggling to maintain straight faces, we called the manager over to inspect our work. He declared it adequate and that was it. He didn’t notice the condoms.

So the jooke changed. We left the condoms on the gift wall to see who would notice them.

Nobody of authority did. We kept waiting for someone to notice but no one said anything, much to our amusement.

The Monday following the holiday, everything left on the gift wall went back to its proper departments, condoms included.

Happy Father’s Day, indeed.

Writing–Taking Out

~ Kiki Writes ~ 1 Comment

Last week I wrote about adding in to make a word count; this week I’m going to talk about taking out.

This is something I don’t have to do very often. Like I said before, I’m very bare bones. I usually fall below word count maximums.

Unless it’s flash fiction.

I typically don’t set out to write flash fiction, but my shorter short stories sometimes put me in that ballpark. And if I can find a place that suits the story, I’ll look to start cutting to make the word count.

Since flash fiction doesn’t offer much in the way of extra words and since my story is pretty short to begin with, I’m not usually cutting huge chunks of story; it’s typically just a couple of hundred words. Which doesn’t sound too difficult, but when what you’ve got is what you NEED to tell a story and you can’t lose much of anything or risk losing the integrity of the story, it’s pretty hard.

That’s when creativity and word choice become critical.

Granted, word choice is always important, but it’s a true test when cutting a story that really can’t afford much cutting. I have to say even more with one word because that’s all I’ve got.

This cutting also forces me to get creative with my sentence structure. No time for detours, I have to get right to the point. I have to state the idea as quickly and succinctly as possible without compromising grammar (too much), flow, style, readability, or enjoyment.

I’ve done this to a few stories, however so far the success is only measure by my actually getting it done to my own satisfaction. I’ve yet to get any flash fiction accepted for publication. Not for lack of trying, though.

And it’s nice to know that I have the cutting tools I need to make my stories better.

Stories By The Numbers

 -Submitted: 2
-Ready: 8
-Rejected: 1 (“Such a Pretty Face” once again finds no love)

The Reading of the Lips

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

Papa was hard of hearing. He had a good ear and a bad ear, and over the course of the years, the good ear got worse. We learned at a very young age to make sure we had Papa’s attention before we spoke and to speak loudly and slowly. Papa could hear some, but he also read lips to help fill in the blanks.

I grew up understanding the concept of reading lips, but as someone who could hear, didn’t really think much about it beyond knowing it helped Papa undstand us.

Then my mom turned me on to baseball and the Cubs.

The manager when I was a kid was Don Zimmer and he was a fiery, round man who liked to argue with the umpires. I remember him getting thrown out of several games. There’s nothing like a kid’s curiousity and I was dying to know what Don Zimmer said to get thrown out of the games. Since I couldn’t hear, I decided to do what Papa did and learn to read lips.

I taught myself by watching movies that I had memorized. I knew all the words, so I’d watch them without the sound on and watch how the actors spoke. From there it was just a matter of translating what I saw there to other people. It took some practice, but I got the hang of it.

The new skill served me well. I finally could figure out what Don Zimmer was saying when he argued with the umpires.

Turned out it was a long string of curse words, but the magic word seemed to be “mother fucker”. If you’re worried about my young girl’s mind being warped by being exposed to that word, please don’t. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard it…er…read it.

Since then I’ve applied it to more than just baseball. I’ve developed my own troubles hearing in certain situations and lip reading has bailed me out of some awkward situations.

I’ve also developed the odd habit of watching TV with the sound off. I’ve watched a lot of TV shows that way and for the most part I can keep up with the show. Obviously, I’m at a disadvantage if the speaker has their back to me or if there’s a lot of movement. However, I have gotten pretty good at filling in the blanks.

Or in the case of SyFy movies, making the movie even more interesting.

Now that I’ve gone full circle in a sense and am back to watching baseball regularly, I find myself once again being thankful for my skill. Sure it’s great for arguing managers, but my skills have improved since I was a kid. Now I use it to see what guys are talking about in the dugout and on the mound. I get a heads up at what pitch is coming next and I get to see what the guys on the bench and in the bullpen are discussing (hint: it’s not always baseball).

I’m still stumped by Spanish, though.

That’ll be the next level.