The Lifespan of a Novel

Okay, I received a spam with the above title, but a moment before I confirmed it to be spam, it got me thinking.

I hear people complaining about the hoops we have to jump through to submit our manuscripts, or talking about this or that exception who managed to ignore all the requirements and still get an agent, publisher, or sale.

To them, I say, “Looks matter.”

When you’re at the grocery store and there are twenty different zucchinis in the stack, do you just randomly grab one, or do you take the one that looks healthy? Maybe you’re not the type to poke and prod your way through the whole pile, but it’s rare that someone doesn’t at least check for tears or soft spots. No one wants to waste their money on something rotten.

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On one of my writing listservs, the question came up about alternate locations to avoid clichés. There are several writing books that
mention no kitchen, no coffee shops, no bars, no whatever.

The point of those mentions is not so much the setting as that these places tend to have low potential for conflict. The characters are most often sitting down and musing over things with their friends. Read the rest of this entry »

I drive my son and another student to school in the morning, a commute which brings us through rush hour traffic complicated by a lot of road construction with varied speed limits. This morning, as I was accelerating out of a 55 MPH zone up to the now 65 MPH speed limit, a silver sedan cut sharply over from the right.

Now the driving behavior was obvious. She hadn’t expected me to accelerate, and there was a truck right in front of her going even slower, so she wanted to move into the faster lane ahead of me (still slow moving in her mind) rather than behind. No problem, though she cut it a little close.

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The spell check really is your friend. No, your word processor doesn’t know how to spell everything, and it may suggest some bizarre alternatives, but again, it’s pointing out possible problems. Now here’s the trick. When you’re writing an otherworld piece, a fantasy, science fiction, or other variation, you can run into a lot of words that are not in the default business dictionary. However, all is not lost. Word (and most word processors) offers the option of custom dictionaries, text files that contain words you choose to put in there. This serves two purposes: you only have to verify the spelling once by adding it to the dictionary instead of using ignore. Second, when you’re done with your spell check, you can open the text file and compare the entries to make sure the main character isn’t Kitath in most instances but Kiteth whenever followed by an “‘s” for example. In my most recent copyedit, a minor character’s name changed spelling (an “i” to a “y”) in the last thirty pages. Without the custom dictionary, I might have missed the change since that character had been off-screen for some time before those thirty pages. It also provides a simple way of collecting the “unique” words if you choose to have a glossary for your work. All you need then is to define the terms.

To create a custom dictionary in Word 2003 (works with modifications for later versions of Word, and concepts should be similar for other word processors).

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Several people have been asking me about my pulse pen and what I thought about it. Only thing is that I hadn’t had the chance to take it out on a road trip yet. Well, now I have and here are the results. This is what the pen captured. You can see my lousy handwriting in its full glory…and I was even sort of trying to write well, okay, trying when I remembered :p. Then I ran it through the OCR software. It certainly isn’t perfect, but the reason for the picture is so you can see what it had to work with. My older son wrote a sentence to test it in his cursive and it translated perfectly. Maybe I should improve my handwriting? Oh, and the pen also recorded the audio for the whole presentation in a usable sound file despite sitting in the left-hand, second to last row of a curved lecture hall.

Anyway, on to the show! (more…)

I know it’s been a while since I posted something about my writing. It’s not that I haven’t been writing, editing, outlining, planning, submitting, etc. It’s that those activities are standard fair and so provoke little comment.

However, I am currently outlining a new story, and I’m watching it change as the story unfolds. I thought this might prove of interest to some of you.

Those who took my workshop Idea to Outline should find some of this familiar, but for the rest of you, my process goes in stages from idea, to initial synopsis, to breaking down that synopsis into scenes, to filling in the holes, at which point I’m ready to write.

Dry Boiled came to me as a voice, one I don’t normally do, but one perfect for the genre it seemed to be. (more…)

Writer's Flood

You hear a lot about writer’s block, but I’ve never heard anyone mention what I’m suffering from.

This is not the first time I’ve had this problem, but it still took a bit to realize what is happening, and I’m determined to come up with a better solution this time.

So what it writer’s flood you ask?

(more…)

I know it’s been a while since I did a writing post on my blog or LJ, but I’ve been having some difficulties there related to health issues that made me less inclined to keep up with things. However, that didn’t stop me from progressing, so here I am, finally updating NaNo.

I went back and read my posts (as sparse as they were on the topic) and realized that any reasonable person would assume the life block surged up and swallowed me again. That is far from the case. (more…)