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| "Well," I said to myself, after a lively Monday, "at least this afternoon I shall get some revisions done on Last Year's WIP!" Did I, in fact, do that? I think you know the answer: I wrote about 2k words of a short story, and the thing isn't done, and it's going to eat my whole writing brain until I finish it, I can tell. Is this the kind of story I can probably sell? Heck no! Why would my brain give me a marketable story when it could give me a creature feature? Anyway, I've got to try to push to finish this stupid thing so I can sleep or read or do literally anything else with my brain, and then I will give it to you all as an early Halloween present. |
| Yeah, I hate it when my brain makes me finish something unsellable (or just not good) before it lets me get on with other writing... |
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| Second kid lost their wisdom teeth today. I brought my notebook to the waiting room to figure out what's wrong with chapter 7 of Last Year's WIP, where my smoothly-proceeding revising ground to a halt--always a warning sign. Thinking about this on paper in my handy notebook was my irritated last resort for cracking this. I made discoveries! To begin, chapter 7 fails the test where you should, ideally, be able describe it in three sentences. (1: where does it start? 2: what happens? 3: what's different at the end?) My chapter 7 didn't have a 3--at least not about the external plot. The internal plot had change in it, which was good enough for drafting, but not for revision. (Caveats: You can have as many revisions as you like. You don't have to figure out everything on the first pass. You don't have to do anything the way I do. There's no *rules* of writing, just helpful stuff and unhelpful stuff. I'm not your mom and I can't make you.) Still, I think every chapter should have both internal and external plot movement. I'm pretty sure even lit fic should have both. (Muriel Sparks, surely the literary-est of the lit writers, had internal and external movement in her plots. Especially The Girls Of Slender Means, which had a bunch of symbolism about a Schiaparelli dress, but which ended with a literal bomb going off.) So then my task became deciding whether to move already-written plot events into that chapter or to invent new external events to allow the internal plot to unfold. I could have cut the chapter altogether, of course, and had the characters fast-travel to their destination. But I like the internal plot, and a revision that skimps the internal development is an error in the other direction. (Even Die Hard, surely the most external of genre stories, has internal plot events mixed with all the explosions. That's why McClane cries on the radio while picking glass out of his feet.) So, I invented some new external plot events. (I did this revising a different book, when I realized instead of having characters walk across a city, it would be more interesting if they had to walk across a rioting city. You'd think I'd remember.) Now I just have to rewrite the chapter. That's today's Revise This WIP! updates. Your turn: 1) What are you working on today? 2) What kind of notebook do you like? I like a Leuchtturm1917 with the dot grid. |
| Eldest had her wisdom teeth out today, so I am plying her with ice packs and protein shakes. Middle Kid gets *his* out tomorrow, which is one of the reasons why most people advise you to avoid having kids 18 months apart--they do everything at the same time, and you never get a chance to catch your breath between. (I wouldn't trade them for the world.) Sitting in waiting rooms *ought* to be the perfect time to think through writing problems, but I confess all I did was twiddle my thumbs and think about my kid being under anesthesia. So in lieu of anything useful and writing-related I can say today, here's a great writing blog I found: https://emmadarwin.substack.com/p/the-itch-of-writing-tool-kit2 I particularly like her essay on what she calls "psychic distance", which is the thing in some of my reviews that I've called "zooming in and out." |
| There are currently 31 chapters in Last Year's WIP, and I've gotten through revising 6 of them. I was feeling kind of bad about this, like I'm going unbearably slow, then I remembered: 1) How to do math. 6 is almost 1/5 of 31. I've been revising for about two weeks (while finishing the first draft of This Summer's WIP and setting up This Fall's WIP). Getting 1/5 through the project in two weeks isn't so bad. 2) That I always do this. More to the point even than the math is the irritating "know thyself" of it all. I pretty much never ever feel like I am doing anything about writing quickly enough. This is not logical, not even one teeny little bit. I'm not under any deadlines, here, because I haven't sold this manuscript. I don't win any prizes for speed. I'm not even comparing myself to any distinct standard. It is just a thing my brain does, wailing BUT WHY NOT FASTER?!?! as I try to lure it to rest, like catching a giddy, exhausted toddler with a bowl of fish crackers and getting them to sit still long enough to fall asleep on the couch. Brains are weird. Anyway, today I polished up a couple chapters of "Minerva Dreaming"  , I read some of Refuse To Be Done by Matt Bell (I don't know whether I recommend it yet or not), and I realized that I should, like, write a list of the scenes in Last Year's WIP. This is different than an outline or a synopsis. It is literally just "this happens. Then this happens. Then THIS happens. Then he feels angry." And it's a rather important tool when you know you have to chop out certain scenes and add in others, and move a THIRD category of scene around. Once you've got a list, you can just copy/paste, chop and change until it's right. Then you follow that map as you rewrite and revise. I DO recommend a scene list, if you're trying to find your way into a revision. |
| In Raven Gets Settled In Her New Town news, we have been visiting churches, trying to figure out where we fit. One place we visited one (1) time (they were very nice) and three people came bouncing up after the hymns to say you have a lovely voice! you have to sing in the choir! I smiled (this happens, I have a loud voice) and thought well, sure, but you all aren't the choir director, are you? I see dude has a doctorate; I bet he kind of has opinions about who he wants to recruit for his choir. Friends, that choir director has sweetly, gently, unrelentingly kept asking me to come to practice with the tenacity of a Duke basketball recruiter. I showed up tonight and one old lady yelled down the hall to another old lady IT'S THE ALTO! SHE'S BACK! I begin to think they take church choir kind of seriously down here? |
Now that This Summer's WIP ("The Long Dawn" ) is finished and put aside to cure, it's time to start thinking about writing plans for the autumn. My current goal is to do revisions on Last Year's WIP ("The Long Rain" ) during my morning writing session, which is about an hour and a half. Then do all the other stuff I have to do in my day. Then, in the cracks/evening hours, chip away at drafting New Fall WIP, which is this one:
I'm kind of excited about my shiny new story, friends. It has its own playlist, which rocks if I do say so myself. (https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4JZorIg0AbzbyDZ6No1LW3?si=AcYx5g1dQy2ZNkqoSw4j...) If you're interested in Minerva, let me know and I'll get you the passkey. What are your fall writing plans? |
Also, I was reminded today of this short story, which is kind of a fantasy western:
This one actually got published back in the day, and I still kind of like it--and I like the narrator, Mrs Silver, who is just trying to run a decent boardinghouse and not get swarmed by demons. |
| As I mentioned a while back, I've locked access to "Grave Goods" as I get it ready to shop for publication, but if you'd like to read it and haven't, just drop me a line and I'll get you the passkey. |
| So I have my arguments with the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, but among the helpful parts of that book are the concepts of 1) morning pages and 2) "artist dates". Morning pages are three pages of longhand journaling that you do every day to train yourself to write without judging yourself, basically. They're very useful if you have a noisy head. An artist date is you, once per week, going somewhere and consuming art, ideally in a different medium than yours. So if you write, you go to a gallery or whatever. Tonight I took The Husband to hear some live music at a local beer garden and it was *lovely*. I watched butterflies go by, saw flowers, heard a live mandolin for the first time in a long time. And it filled up my creative tank. If either of these practices appeal to you, I recommend them. (And you can probably find the Cameron book at your library if you're curious--it's pretty old--and then I can fuss about the stuff I disagree with when you tell me "hey, Raven, this Julia seems a bit goofy"). |
People have been very nice about "Grave Goods" , which I posted pretty much still warm from the oven on the day I finished writing it. If you read it then, you might be interested in this version, which has been edited with some great suggestions from Max Griffin 🏳️🌈   (one of the finest reviewers on this site) and with my own personal editing rules, to wit: Breanna's Editing Rules 1. Do a global search for "that" and delete most of them. 2. Get rid of repetitions unless they're on purpose. 3. Try to cut 10% of word count. (Rule 3 will make rules 1 and 2 happen if you've missed anything.) Sometimes I get into a weird headspace and need to also have: 4. Do a global search for "felt, saw, heard" and delete these filter words unless for some reason they're important (they usually are not). Anyway, you'll see that these rules didn't strip the voice or character out of this short story, but it did tighten the prose, strip out a few bits of flabby repetition or telling, and give me room to include a new paragraph and invent the phrase "map-star", which I'm quite fond of. Note: I will be putting this under passkey at the end of the week (for publication reasons), but if you don't manage to look at it before then and you want to, just drop me a line and I'll get you the key. |
| What an excellent day. It kind of started yesterday, in fact, when everybody was so kind about "Grave Goods" . Then, my kids had the first day of school today, and it went as well as can be expected (I only yelled DO NOT THROW THAT ALGEBRA BOOK once). My middle one confided in me that he intends to write A Novel this year as his English comp project, which... he is the right age. Then I did some polishing on a couple of chapters that I think really make them better. Then I got a passel of lovely reviews--I have the nicest critique partners, and the most helpful. And then, like a cherry on top, Charles  sent me a lovely awardicon for "Rosewood Box" . My scrawny, blue-collar magic thieves never looked so good. |
Well so I was GOING to take like a whole week off from writing, and just read and review and generally tend the other parts of my life. But I've had the beginning of this short story kicking around in my hard drive FOREVER, and today the rest of it decided to be born. So here you go:
It's a ghost story, sort of, and a campfire story, sort of, and a sheep story...sort of. Enjoy. |
| In under the wire, I have finally posted the last chapter of "The Long Dawn" , aka This Summer's WIP. School starts next week for my kids, so I have achieved my goal of "don't be drafting feverishly at the same time that you're feverishly figuring out school in a new place". Wahoo! I'm going to celebrate by... going to bed, I guess. I'll celebrate tomorrow. (Anybody who would like to read a novel about a pair of awkward magic dorks who fall in love and also kinda save the kingdom a little, let me know and I will get you the passkey.) |
| So I have long wondered if it's something about my face-- people just randomly up and tell me stuff. I don't mean people I have known for a while, and I don't mean people in a situation where telling each other stuff is kind of expected, like prayer meeting, I mean random people in the grocery store, at the train station, at the library, or, in today's feature, in the waiting room at the clinic while I was waiting for my kid to see if they need their wisdom teeth out. (They do.) The receptionist started telling me about her son, who works in Phoenix, who doesn't like it there, and her granddaughters, who she's so worried about, and how her daughter-in-law isn't raising these kids right--for a solid 20 minutes--and friends, I did not even say "and how is YOUR day going?" Note: another client came in after a bit. Receptionist did not tell THEM about Phoenix and granddaughters on the path to ruin. She just took their insurance cards and then sat quietly, so it's not that she does this to everyone. I've had the person slicing ham for me at the supermarket deli counter pour their heart out to me about their messy divorce. A random lady at the library told me about her son who won't talk to her, and She Doesn't Know Why! (I think I know why.) I know about strangers' miscarriages, breakups, parents in nursing homes, babies who won't nurse, babies who nurse too much, total strangers' mental health diagnoses, total strangers' fears that their significant other is running around, on and on, you name it. Once, in college, I met someone and literally the second thing out of their mouth after "nice to meet you" was to tell me about a family member's tragic death. This does not happen to my husband, I checked. So, do we think it's my face? |
Raven  -An honest, concerned spy?  Nah. Just keep being an honest, concerned writer and fellow human being. Y'know, things you're good at and enjoy. |
| It's partly that you look kind, but probably even more that you look interested. So few do that people catch on right away. That interested look is probably part of the same reason you are a writer, because you are playing with the ways that people can act and be. But it does lead to lengthy convos at the deli counter. |
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