Bio-rhythms, Editors, and Metaphors

I don't know what's wrong with me, recently. I've been short tempered, grumpy, and negative. I have some ideas, but they're kind of personal, and you don't really want to know that kind of stuff. Probably something to do with my Bio-rhythm and internal chemistry. (I don't really believe in Bio-rhythms. They were a thing in the 1980's.)

I got my manuscript of The Galactic Battle Base: Trigger Warnings back from the editor I sent it to. He obviously didn't get my vision and chopped it into pieces, deleting much of what I thought was the focus of the story.

Either, I didn't explain my story clearly enough--through dialog, description, and character conflict-- or he went into it expecting to get one thing and was confused by finding another. I imagine it is a combination of the two.

So, with my current state of mind, I was pretty much torqued. With each correction and deletion I found myself becoming angrier and angrier. I had set myself a pretty demanding goal of getting this book published by mid May, to take it with me to the LDStorymakers conference. I could see, from the amount of work he was suggesting I do and with all the other things I have going, this was either an unrealistic goal, or it was going to require a whole lot of effort.

Instead, I shifted gears. (That's a metaphor. Some say you shouldn't use them when writing science fiction because the readers will take them literally. I would have to say, "Come on. You read science fiction. You're supposed to be more intelligent than the average reader. Don't be stupid." While I have a car with a manual transmission, this doesn't mean that I actually went out and changed from fourth speed down to third. Maybe this is a worn out metaphor, which is a danger when using them, but I think it's pretty apt.)

My biggest projects at the moment are The Pariah podcast and gearing up for www.Channillo.com.

With the podcast I have to get another episode recorded and in the can this month. That shouldn't be too hard, I have the next episode edited and ready to record. But I also need to edit the first five episodes and publish them as a chapter book for Kindle and Print on Demand, as I've promised my www.patreon.com supporters. With Channillo I had said I would do chapters from the Galactic Battle Base story, "Family Ties" and publish an episode every two weeks. I've decided, instead, I will also use chapters from "Trigger Warnings" as well and change the output to ever week instead of biweekly. This will allow me to focus on that story, develop each chapter with its own story arch, and hopefully make it clearer to the reader. Once I've gone completely through the novel in this manner, I can resubmit it to an editor and see if I'm closer to publication as a separate novel.

Okay. I've gotten that off my chest. My self-doubts have been aired.  Now, if I can adjust my bio-rhythm or my internal chemistry I'll feel much more like the author I thought I was two weeks ago and get back to getting things done.

A 5 minute post.

Ok.

Really quick. Here's what I've got going right now. And this is why I only have five minutes:

Fly Paper Boy is through its final revision and sent to editor for line and content edits. I've commissioned Dan Absalonsen to do the cover. We've talked a bit about what I'd like and he's excited about getting it done.

Shooting Stars is with an editor as well and I just got back chapters 3 through 7 to review and modify. A preliminary cover looks really nice as well.

Galactic Battle Base: Knife Cuts. I pledged to write the next 60K words of it to support Clarion Write Athon. That started on June 22nd and I only have 1000 words written so far. That's mostly because I reviewed the first 21K words I've written and deleted almost 1000 words at the same time. I'm on new ground now with only my outline to guide me, so I should be able to pump up the word count.

I supported Winston Crutchfield on a Kickstarter for the prize of editing a novel. So by August 2, when I finish the writeathon, I should be about ready to bring him into the loop.

Now, I'm off to writing.

Update:

Whenever I have started one of these blogs I have done so to update all my unknown and non-existent fans about what I am currently working on and where I am on the various projects.

So, here's how it stands.

1) Fly Paper Boy: Coming of Age. I just completed my third full edit. It now stands at over 99.5K words and I believe it is complete. I have a ten minute pitch session with an agent at the LDStory Maker's conference later this month. But, unless he actually begs me for it, my plan is to self publish it as an ebook and audiobook concurrently at Scribl.com. They have a new approach to selling and pricing self published books. I figure if I can get a few YA books on the site before anyone else does, I will have a toe hold in their market that would be advantaous.

2) Shooting Stars: A Magical Teenage Love Story from a Boy's Perspective. I just got rejected by Tor YA. I had decided a week after I sent of this submission that I wanted to switch my attention to self publishing. So I started recording this one last week, figuring I would be getting my rejection soon. I've noticed is my 100 Word Weekly Challenge stories that I had an echo going on. So, I set up my recording booth  and I've recorded the first two chapters three times now. I think I've finally got the feel I want the narration to have. Now I just need to keep charging through the remaining 300 pages. This will be my first submission to the Scribl.com system. As I am recording this story, which I thought was complete, I'm finding a number of things I need to edit. Therefore, I'm making this my fourth and final edit. I'm marking down the corrections I make while recording and will go through the ebook manuscript again before formatting it for download.

3) What I'm working on next. I'm aiming to release Shooting Stars by June 1 and Fly Paper Boy by Aug 30. I'd like to have one more released by Dec 31. The three I have in the background are Galactic Battle Base: Knife Cuts, Galactic Battle Base: Family Ties and this last years Nanowrimo, The Pariah. I think the story most ready to fine tune is Pariah, but last month I got a wild hare and started re-writing Knife Cuts. I think it is the one which is the most emotionally charged, and the most meaningful to me.

The Domingo Montoya Syndrome

I'm having a Domingo Montoya moment. Or maybe it's a phase.

You might remember from "The Princess Bride", Inigo Montoya sought the six fingered man, to kill him.

"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." 

I don't know how many times I've said that very line.

Domingo was a master sword maker and rarely did any work in his later years. He was so skilled that found the craft was no longer challenging. 

Then the six fingered man appeared and commissioned him to make a blade. This would be the ultimate challenge to his skill. The blade would require special balance to match the six fingered man's ability.

The book spends several pages on the making of the blade. But what I refer to now is how, at one moment, Domingo would be euphoric in his skill and achievement, and in the next, despairing over his ignorance and inability.

If you have never read the book, but enjoyed the movie, you really need to put this onto your reading list. The movie did a great job, but it's too short. There is so much more in the book.

After a November of knocking out 100k words in a month, and December of making my first pass through "Fly Paper Boy", editing it in less than a month, I was feeling pretty good about myself as a writer.

Then I downloaded three books from Audible, two by Brandon Sanderson and one by Tim Powers. Both of these authors are masters at "Showing and not telling". Their writing is immersive and takes you to the author's world in the first lines of their stories.

After writing a short story for an anthology in January, I returned to "Fly Paper Boy" for a serious edit, preparing it for the LDStory Makers Conference where I will use it in a publication workshop.

I am now at the Domingo Montoya low. 

I feel like my prose are swill and I'm looking at 95K words of 'sow's ear' I need to turn into a silk purse in the next month and a half.

Brandon Sanderson and Tim Powers are masters at the craft. Granted, I've been at this for only five years and haven't had the training and experience of either of these writers, but still, it looks like a steep hill to climb if I'm ever to get a story completed that a publisher would want to buy.

Anyway, for the next six weeks I'll be slogging through, changing thousands of words of 'telling' into 'showing'. Maybe at the end of it I'll feel more like I did at the end of December.

I'm a novelist.

I crossed another milestone today. I'd submitted my YA urban fantasy to my first choice of a publisher, and apparently they didn't think it was as good as I did. Actually, I thought they would reject it, but I wanted the LDS fiction market to get the first choice.

I got my first "Rejection Form Letter" today. I believe authors used to paper their walls with these. To do that now, I would have to print it out. Instead, I think I'll just copy it into a Word Doc and start a file for them.

Onward and upward. I've already sent it off to another publisher. There was a third publisher I found who I think is my best bet for getting published. They are using the newer method of, No Advancement, but 50% of the sales. They also accept simultaneous submissions, so if it comes to that, in another 90 days, I can shotgun it out to a few of these new wave publishers.

Other projects right now are a short story for an anthology, my 2011 Nano is still out to Beta Readers and I'm getting some good feedback. My original plan was to do my first edit on my 2013 Nano rough draft, but I've had some experiences recently that pointed me to 2010 Nano and I've started to read/edit that one.

We'll just have to see what actually ends up as my next novel.

Happy New Year

In the last quarter of 2013 I stepped up my writing career to a new level. I feel like I made some significant progress. Here are my four successes of that quarter:

1) Submitted a novel manuscript to a publisher. This was the major turning point for me. After five years of practicing it's time to start playing the game.

2) Purchased my dedicated website. If you are reading this, you're at my site. That's good.

3) In November I took my sixth Nanowrimo challenge. I've completed at least 50K words each year, but never really felt like I had a complete novel in that amount of time. This year I finished the story in 28 days with a total of 100,138 words. That was almost 3600 words a day.

4) I edited my 2011 Nano, "Fly Paper Boy: Coming of Age" before January 2014. That ended up with 93K words.

What I believe this shows is that I can create a rough draft in a short period of time. With this years Nano, I did outline heavily in October, but ended up only covering the first third of the plot in this novel. It also shows that I can take that rough draft and smooth it considerably in an equally short period of time.

Goals for the first quarter of 2014 are:

1) Edit "The Pariah" (2013 Nano)

2) Write a short story for Jeff Hite's new anthology about a magic portal beneath the kitchen sink. I'll look for the link.

3) Fine tune Fly Paper Boy for submission. It's currently out to several beta readers and I've asked them to read it and get back to me with in 30 days.

Other things on the back burners are outlining the second and third books for "Shooting Stars", outline for the final book of "The Price of Friendship", a first edit on "Human Magnetism", my Nano from 2012, and finally, the second book after "The Pariah".

That should be enough to keep me busy.

Norvaljoe

Writing Excuses Podcast, Oct 14, 2013

I was listening to the Writing Excuses Podcast yesterday. If you are trying to write genre fiction at any level and you haven't found this podcast, you really need to. Here's the link: http://www.writingexcuses.com/

I found it because I'm a Brandon Sanderson fan. But, there are four authors who are all intelligent, imaginative, and humorous. 

There was a question about "organic" writing. Also known as "seat of the pants" writing, if you're not familiar with the term, it's when you just  start writing with an idea, not really knowing where it will go. Really, even with organic writing, you should have an ending in mind before you start writing to give your plot some direction, but some organic writers don't even have that. The question was, what do you do to keep your plot moving, when you're an organic writer, and you don't know where to go next. 

Brandon suggested something that I really liked. He said to imagine what's the worst thing that could happen to your protagonist, of course while moving the plot forward, and what is the best thing that could happen. Then figure out how to make it look like the worst thing is going to happen and have her/him overcome in it a way that no one will expect.

I know Brandon is very "Architectural" in outlining a story, which is the opposite of organic. Mary, on the podcast, is more in between the two extremes. But, she does lay out what she wants to happen in each chapter. Someone else also mentioned that a person doesn't need to write linearly. If you're an organic writer and you're stuck, move to another section and write, even if it's far down the eventual plot line. In writing that part you might find how to bring the two pieces together.

In preparing for Nanowrimo this year I am going much more extreme in my planning than I have in years past. My first three Nanos were very organic. My second year I found myself writing myself into plot circles. I got more than 65K words written but never finished the story. 

Last year was the first time I really had an outline of the whole book, but as usual got off on enough organic tangents that I was still interested in the story as it developed. Sometimes the plot twists which are best are those unexpected ones which surprise you as you write them.

This year I am world building and character building the heck out of it. I've got tectonic plates, weather and ocean current patterns. I have races with differing values and leaders with conflicting political intentions and hidden agendas.

I think my fear in the first few years was that I would get into it, write a story, finish and not have enough words. I find that much less of a concern now. In fact, this may be the year that I have too much story for one book. We'll see.

If you're a Nanowrimer, I'd love to be a writing buddy with you so that we can encourage one another. Here's a big surprise, my Nanowrimo name is Norvaljoe. Look me up. I follow back anyone who follows me.

Here's the link: http://nanowrimo.org/participants/norvaljoe 

Nanowrimo 2013

I just signed up for 2013. 

This is my fifth Nano in a row. I had only just begun to write when I started my first on in 2008. When I finished that one, I had 51,000 words of garbage. I tried to rewrite it a year ago and got bogged down trying to stay in-sync with what I had written before, but that was way too hard. I just completely started over. 60K words later I got bogged down again. I'll probably start that one over again, someday....

This year I'm basing the novel on a short story I wrote during the summer about the Pig-Frog, or Pariah. I've been world building the heck out of it, (A lot different than my first Nano, when I essentially had an idea of how I wanted to start it and ran with it.) 

I have a good idea of how the story will go through the first half and most of the events toward the end, but I need to work out a little more conflict and a twist or two. There is a blerb and a piece of the short story on my Nanowrimo site.

If you do Nanowrimo, too. Let me know so we can be writing buddies.  

My site is: http://nanowrimo.org/participants/norvaljoe 

I've started my own website.

Any surprise I named my website, "norvaljoe.com"? 

I started writing five years ago with my first entry to the 100 Word Stories Weekly Challenge, which is now at http://wwwoneadayuntilthedayidie.com. It seemed that most people who participated used some kind of pseudonym.  I didn't know, at the time, that a lot of the people participating were from Second Life, and those were their character's names. But I went ahead and used my alter ego of many years and submitted my story under the name of Norvaljoe.

Two weeks later, I tried to change to my real name, but Lawrence Simon, who ran the weekly challenge, just wouldn't let it die. Since that time I have usually referred to myself as Philip 'Norvaljoe' Carroll when writing, allowing readers, or listeners, both old and new to recognize me.

Please bear with me as I learn to make this website more beautiful. It's taken me three weeks to get this far. So, it may be a while before it looks truly refined.