Category Archives: Kabobbles on Writing

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It’s Not the Author Who Matters

Going along with the characters tell the story idea, there’s this thing that’s been bugging me, and I think that in many ways I highlighted this with Any Other Reality.

Yes, that story is, in many ways, a spoof. It pokes fun at a type of fiction that–don’t get me wrong, I love. I have given many years of my life and much effort–almost blood, sweat, and tears to this type of writing.

What it really gets at, though, in the end, is the authors.

And I include myself in that number. I’m not immune. The pygmies are even mentioned.

I think one of the worst things a writer can do is forget to respect their characters. They’re human (sometimes) and bound to make mistakes, but they generally have reasons for the choices that they make. Ignoring their basic motivations and history to tell the story the way the author wants it is not right. It’s a bad process, and going down that road will not improve anyone’s storytelling. As a reader, when a character makes a choice that comes out of left field, you’ve just about lost me. Sometimes I stick around to see why they did that, and other times I’m just done. I can tell I won’t like where it’s going if that stuff happens.

Some equate writing to playing god. That’s something I’ve never liked.

I create characters, yes. I create worlds. They live in these worlds.

Does that make me the puppet master?

I try very hard not to be. They have reasons and motivations, and really, I’m just telling their story. It’s like I was a silent witness to it, not that I was telling them what to do. I wrote it down, but I didn’t interact.

So I feel the story is the main thing. It’s all that matters.

Forget I was even there.

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Research Is a Matter of Definition

To be perfectly honest, most of the time I see research as a necessary evil.

Reality is one of those pesky details that frequently gets in the way of a good story.

I have a few stories, mostly historical mysteries, that are sitting around in some incomplete form because I’m not motivated enough to do the research necessary to make them authentic and realistic.

Research would be more interesting if it involved traveling, but most of the time, my research is limited to what I can find on the internet. I don’t get to go to exotic locations, though hanging out at the local museum and doing history fest I like to count as “research.” I even dress in as much period costume as I can.

Still, while pouring over books or browsing sites and trying to decide if they’re trustworthy or not, there are still fun ways to do research.

For instance, I’ve been asked to do a story where I change a part of a well known plot. I don’t really know how I’ll do it. Not yet.

But the movie has been remade three times, and guess what I get to do for research?

Oh, yes. I get to watch.

That’s my kind of research.

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The Story Before the Story Might Need Telling

A piece of my plot is… missing. It’s a conundrum.

It’s difficult to explain that without spoiling the entire plot of The Monster in My Garden Shed. I could try, but I think it’s better if I just work on figuring it out, and when I’ve got it fixed, people will know because I’ll finish the story. My brain processes better when I’m trying to sleep, so perhaps tonight, after having a long discussion about it, I will know what the deep dark secret is.

In the meantime, I distracted myself by writing more flashbacks–I could probably fill a whole novel with the relationship between two of the characters before the story starts, and I admit, it’s tempting to go to that story… only I think it would really only interest… me.  I can’t say that the earlier scenes I’ve written haven’t been enjoyed by at least one other person, but that’s a few scattered scenes, not a complete story of nothing but them.

Personally, I love the dynamics between characters, their interactions and especially their banter. Even if that was all a story was, I might just be okay with that. It doesn’t work for everyone, and even for me, as a writer, that pesky thing known as a plot comes in and intervenes. I do pretty well with plot. It’s not my enemy. It’s not necessarily my friend, though, either.

I think it’s safe to say we’re occasional allies, but mostly, it likes to ruin things for me.

The trick is in balancing plot with interaction and even introspection and dare I name my weakness? Description.

I think I have a fairly good system at this point. I write my banter and interaction, then I reread, I find the lack of description and introspection, and I add that in. It’s still unbalanced, but I do believe I’m getting better at it. I will probably never be one of those authors that paints an entire world with my words, but I know one thing for sure: you can hear the words my characters speak exactly as they say them. It’s something I’ve heard before, though for me, I do hear them as I write.

The voices are clear.

The plot? Maybe not so much.  This could be why summaries give me such fits to write.

There is a certain bitter sweetness to flashbacks and stories before the story. A prequel always has to end, and that ending is fixed and even known before the whole thing starts. That said, why would I go through the path and take it to the painful end that I know is coming?

I’m not sure. I faced this problem before with a story I set aside, and my only solution there was not to do it. This one is, of course, different, so I can’t say that I’d walk away from it entirely, and key points of the past have to be known to me, at the very least.

That reminds me. There is one moment I don’t think I’ve touched on for Garden Shed that I have to make sure I don’t forget about. I think I know where I’ll put it, though. I’m trying to keep these flashbacks relevant, and I know that this one would lead right into…

Oh, I can’t tell you that. I’d spoil the story.

After I’ve finished it, I might tell you what I mean by all these vague hints.

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It Was the Moon

Driving home last night, I couldn’t help but notice how orange the moon was.

I could only see the lower half of it, though it looked full.

It was amazing, really.

I watched it as I drove, always further away no matter how many miles passed going toward it.

What really drew me toward it was the orange, though. I kept thinking that if there was a moon in the Ascanati world in The Monster in My Garden Shed, then that would have been what it looked like.

I tried to take a picture of what I saw, but unfortunately, I don’t have the right camera for that kind of thing.

 

moon at night

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Said May Well Be the Worst Word Ever Invented

So I was writing this paragraph earlier:

“I agree with the necessity of washing them,” Garan said. They said you should wash even brand new stuff from the store before you wore it. Besides, while it might be a minor detail, one most people might not notice, the clothes would not smell right. They should smell like they’d been washed in the same place, by the same people, if the cover was going to be realistic. “I’m not going to feel comfortable until the threat is completely over.”

What is tripping me up is the first part, after the dialogue, where it goes Garan said and then they said.

It doesn’t sound right to me to use said twice right there.

So I go to look up said in the thesaurus. First, the one in my office program calls it an adjective and has no real alternatives other than aforementioned and stated. I blink, pull up the internet window, and go to my usual thesaurus site.

I get a list of possibilities. I read through them, repeatedly, dismissing each in turn. They don’t fit.

I go to another site, get that said is an adjective again–and no, I’m not denying that it has a use as an adjective, but is it too much for the sites and programs to connect said as the past participle of say? Do I actually have to go look for say?

Apparently so.

But then say comes up as an adverb.

You would think, “said” being probably one of the more common words in the English language, it wouldn’t be so hard to find the right alternative. I can still hear, echoing in my brain, the voice of my sixth grade English teacher as she ranted about the horror that is lack of variety and read aloud from a Nancy Drew book that basically went:

said Nancy.

said Bess.

said George.

said Nancy.

And my teacher gave us a list of things to use instead. I try not to use said, but sometimes it’s just what you have to do. If I use it, I try to pair up some kind of adverb with it, to say how they’re saying it, but in this case, my mind is a blank, the thesaurus has failed me, and I feel like banging my head against something.

Said, you are an evil word, and I’d stop using you if I could.

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One Story Is Not Enough

A lot of the time, when I finish a story, I spend a while lamenting the end of it.

It’s a bittersweet thing. The story is so much fun along the way, the characters are like friends, and then they’re gone. I don’t mean that they die because stories don’t mean everyone dies at the end–not usually, at least, though that’s the best thing to tell someone if they ask you about how a movie was or how it ends.

No, the characters still have their lives other than the story, but usually, unless I go back to reread their story, they don’t come around.

Occasionally, I get sequel ideas. A lot of the time, it’s more me wanting to get back those friends, and there’s no real plot there.

Some of them are more full-fledged, and they are ready to start right after the first is done.

Nickel and Dime is like that. I ended it yesterday, and I was immediately ready to move on to its sequel. Parts of that were so clear in my head that I was not about to stop.

Other sequels aren’t as easy to pin down. I keep thinking that Thyme and Whim should come back in an alien invasion story (yeah, so you’re so laughing now) and that Dennison should show up at the villa to disrupt Frankie and Rico’s lives, that maybe Jax should have his own story and continue Franklin and Mira’s a bit. I think there’s only one I finished recently that doesn’t have any potential sequels, and that’s the spoof. Still, the ideas I have for the others haven’t developed into anything I’d actually be able to turn into a book.

Maybe a moment or two for some of them. I was considering small stories in a collection as a possible idea. Most authors would maybe give some holiday stories, but as I don’t celebrate them and actually loathe most holidays, that won’t happen. Still, a collection is a possibility.

It’s just that one book is too short a time to spend with a great character (or two or more) and sometimes you want to see more, even if there’s no long sequel, no second story to tell.

You won’t find me telling stories about their kids, though. No, that’s a personal pet peeve of mine. I hate the stories that turn it all about their kids, even if the kids are grown up. So I won’t go down that route.

A glimpse or two or a sequel, that I can do.

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No, App, You Are Not Allowed to Call Yourself Productive

Because if I wanted to go back in and re-space every single stupid letter in a document, I would not have attempted to use you in the first place.

You see, I had mobile word on my phone for a while, and then I was given the opportunity to get a used iphone. It was a great deal.

Except… The writing apps are really, really starting to piss me off.

Yesterday, Evernote lost what I’d been working on, and so I was a little miffed. I decided, in the end, that the thing was crap and didn’t attempt to recreate it, so I more or less forgave Evernote.

I say more or less because I’m still ticked at Evernote’s inability to process spaces. I did a search to see if I could turn off the wrapping thing because I’m not liking this whole my note is one big crappy mess without a space even though I know I used the space bar several times thing. Then it puts in these gray blocks and makes me fix every single space in it when I go to put it in my file. This wouldn’t be so bad, you know, if I wasn’t already OCD enough to need to fix all the stupid quotation marks so that they looked the same, with the curves instead of the straight up and down ones.

So, Evernote was already frustrating me a bit with the spacing issue, but then again today, it lost my changes. More than once. Now, I was told that it saved like crazy, but I’m not seeing it. I’m seeing that when I push save, I don’t get a save. I go to another app on the phone, and I lose what I just did, even thought I know I hit save. More than once.

Frustrated, I downloaded an alternate to this, one that I thought would be better because it was going to upload straight to google docs. I thought that I’d found something that would skip this annoying step.

I was wrong. Very, very wrong.

Not only did it not save part of what I was working on, just like Evernote, but this new one has a spacing issue of its own. It put in a space between every single letter in the document. At least with the other one, it was just the spaces between the words that I had to fix, but this one? Every freaking word.

I’m not pleased. I’m going to delete that app, and I guess I’m back to Evernote, but if I can’t resolve the formatting issue, the iphone might be a lost cause. I need a phone I can type on when I’m not at my computer, and if it can’t do that, then forget it. I have too much to write to waste time fixing these format issues.

Granted, the word mobile wasn’t perfect. It had the quotation issues, and yes, I still hate Word with a passion, but there has got to be a better solution than this.

Hell, I’d be better off sending myself emails! Maybe that’s what I’ll do instead.

I’ve got half-finished scenes for three stories that I won’t have time to fix before I sleep. Awesome.

On the other hand, I can play Plants vs. Zombies and actually see my email on the iphone.

*sigh*

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When an Outlet Isn’t Enough

I write for a number of reasons. I write because I love it. I write because the ideas never stop coming. I write because the characters need their stories told. I also write to escape. I write to process my world. I write as an outlet.

Today, though, was almost a day off from writing all together.

Had a bit of a wake up call happen last night–nothing bad, but it could have been a lot worse, and it made me think and made me take a look at a few things. It also left me feeling rather guilty because while nothing bad did happen, it could have, and it would have been my fault.

When I got home, I was wound up and usually I unwind by writing before bed. I didn’t. Couldn’t.

The underlying issues I was avoiding couldn’t be ignored for fic. They spilled out onto the fic, giving it a bad light. I was convinced that I’d lost touch with all my current stories: The Monster in My Garden Shed, The Not-So-Super Superhero, The Memory Collector, and the sequel to Nickel and Dime. I didn’t know where to take the first two, I thought I’d screwed up the third, and the fourth was going over the same thing over and over again with Effie and Garan’s current problems.

I couldn’t even bring myself to type on my older projects  because all my writing seemed… bad. Not worth fixing or working on bad.

This is the state I get in where I know things are really bad. If I can’t write, then I’m in a place that worries me.

I told myself it was just the day. I’d take today off from writing and things would look better in the morning. Morning came, and I was not over it. I still thought they were all horribly flawed and not worth fixing, even if I knew where to go with them.

Distracting myself with the games on my phone wasn’t working, though they are very addicting little apps. Talking it out was somewhat helpful, though since it had to be done by chat, it caused some confusion and frustration, too.

It was getting later and later, and it looked like there would be no writing done today at all. I did some minor edits to the second Nickel and Dime–which, by the way, continues to vex me with its refusal to get named–and I had a strange idea for how to go on with it, so I opened up the file and started working on it.

Of course, that was about when it became time to get dinner and go out for the evening, so the scene wasn’t done when I left. Out and about, I used the phone to start today’s Not-So-Super post.

Writing today was more of a battle than an outlet, but I do think that I am better for it, not just in the sense of settling some of my issues in real life but also for taking that look at the stories and acknowledging what might need to change and figuring out where to take them and knowing that they are still worth it, even if they need a bit of work.

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Writer or Author?

I finally decided that I had to actually subscribe, because this is good stuff and I’m getting to it late. Not that it’s out of date, but I could have been thinking about this six days ago, and it might have helped me when I was dealing with the “all my writing is crap” phase the other day.

What am I talking about? This article from Dean Wesley Smith: Writer vs. Author.

I like Dean’s stuff. He gets me thinking. The bold text is from his article, it’s not mine. I’m just reacting here to it, thinking it all out on “paper,” as it were.

Anyway, I have to wonder if there’s a bit of a gray area here.  I’m not sure.

I’ve always considered myself a writer. Yes, when I was younger, in my early days, I used to say, “I’ll be a published author.”

However, that phrase never sat well with me, and while I can’t pin down the specifics of when I stopped using it, I’ve been calling myself a writer for a long time now. I don’t say I’m an author, not even with Just a Whim out there in circulation. I am a writer.

Then I read the article and went–am I really an writer? Or am I an author? Or what?

 

A Writer is a person who writes.

An Author is a person who has written.


By those definitions, then, I’m both. On the surface, at least. I have written. I have published. I am still writing, though. Currently up on my computer and being flipped between as I process my thoughts (remember, I am the crazy multitasker) is a story file, the second novel in a series, and I haven’t published the first one.

 

A Writer is always focused on the story they are writing at the moment, always focused on the story coming next to write. A Writer is always focused on the future.


I have four stories at the moment, so I can’t say that I’m on one in particular, but when I’m rotating between them (as I do in my mad multitasking way), I am focused on the one I’m working on at the time. I don’t know about the future, though. I know the ideas don’t stop coming, so I’m always complaining that I don’t have time for them and when will I get that time?

 

An Author is always focused on what they have written.

An Author is always focused into the past.


Well, here’s the thing: since I published Just a Whim, I haven’t opened it since. I love it, but I don’t even want to look at it. Have I thought about it in other senses? Of course. Is it selling? Is anyone interested in it? Should I tell someone else about it? Was it worth publishing in the first place? (The answer to that last one was, of course, yes.) I do reread my old stuff periodically, but I don’t think I’m focused on the past.

I know–no gray area yet. I’m getting there.

 

A Writer is a person who writes the next story.

An Author is a person who spends their time promoting their last story.


I have been, or thought I was, doing both. The blog, the website, the facebook, that’s all part of promoting the last book. It’s not just about the last book. Oh, no. In fact, I’ve talked very little about Just a Whim since I started doing this blogging thing. Just a Whim was published in October. I started blogging in November. I fixed the website in November. Since then, though, I’ve finished four novels, started The Not-So-Super Superhero daily blog story, and it is one of four that I’m working on right now.

So I am doing both. I gave more people copies of Just a Whim and one of them more of the new ones to read over. And that file is still open. I’ve already added words to it while I thought about this post.

Promotion is what I continue to argue over, too.

 

Writers tend to believe that their own writing is the best promotion.


I would so much rather let my books do the talking. I want the next book to promote Just a Whim. I want those pieces back so I can finish the next one and get it up there and let that do the talking, not me. I’ve got them in edits and cover art is coming a long for most of them, but the one thing I know I can’t do is edit on my own. I’ll miss something. I’m too close to the story. So I can edit, but mostly, I push that off to other people and work on the next one, fixing according to their comments when I get them, but my focus is the next one.


A Writer gets feedback from the simple act of writing and finishing stories.

An Author must get feedback from external sources such as reviews, sales, promotions, editors, workshops, and so on.


I love writing. I’m always writing.  I get a thrill–but also a depression from finishing stories. I know the characters’ story is done, and I’m going to miss them. So that part is sad. On the other hand, I finished, and that is a major yay and victory dance moment. (Don’t even ask–I’m not sharing the victory dance.)

On the other hand, though, stories are meant to be shared. I wrote what I wrote for me and the characters, but it’s not quite… finished until it’s shared, until someone else loves it, too. That is why I email sections of my stories to someone as soon as I finish them, why I put it on the ereader and shove it at my mother and command her to read it, why I’ve got it posted in some places where people can read it, why I’ll email it to anyone willing to read it. I need to share.

When no one comments or barely acknowledges it, it is discouraging. I wrote a wonderful story I wanted to share, and no one is buying it or telling me they like it or even reading it as far as I can tell. Sometimes sales or reviews are the only way you know it’s being read, and you get a little desperate looking for that acknowledgement and you start wondering… Was it really that bad? Was I wrong to write it?

It’s not wrong to write it, even if I’m the only one that will appreciate it. I love it. I worked hard on it. No one else has to love it, and realistically, they’ll never feel the same way as I do about the story. That’s just life.

So then if you consider this part here:

 

All Writers need to do is write the next story and when it’s done, get it to readers and continue on writing the next story and the next and the next.

And that’s the point I am trying to get to. Each person must decide why they write.

Is it to be published and get acclaim? Then you are more than likely an Author.

If you write because you love to tell stories, love the fear and the joy and the excitement of entertaining yourself while telling stories, then you are more than likely a Writer.


I’m a writer. I’m a writer… but with a little dash of an author thrown in there. I think that sums me up well, or at least as well as anything can.

 

Edit: I’m told that I missed the point of the article, though. As long as I keep writing, I’m still a writer. Sounds so simple put like that, doesn’t it? 😛

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Edits, Edits, So Many to Do

Editing has to be the longest process in a book.

Possibly, in the past, publishing was the longest, but the thing is, once the format and cover art are done, it can be published as an ebook within a relatively short time. Really, how long the site takes to make it “live” is not nearly as long as editing a story can take.

Now, before, arguably, editing was a part of this publishing process. It still is, I guess, but I tend to separate it in my mind from the “publish” part where the button gets clicked and websites make the book available to the world.

What I learned the last time I went through this process, though, was that the actual end part, the final step, was so much simpler than the ones along the road.

My main delay in getting Just a Whim out there was really myself. I had edits, but I was scared to take those last steps and put them in and format it.

I find myself with almost the opposite problem now. I’ve got four complete stories–novels–and another three nearing that point, but I don’t have edits. In the last week, I’ve gone over them myself, with new fresh edits for Nickel and Dime, In the Family, Variety Store, and Any Other Reality. I’ve begun edits on The Memory Collector and after that, I’ll move onto another one. I’ve got plenty of them to work on, and while I’ve been putting off All the Men in My Life since I’ve been expecting edits back on that one, so it will probably be the last.

I was joking with myself about editing all of them in January, but with only a few more days to go, that’s not that likely, not with four novels to do and two of them over 80,000 words long. Still, it would be good to get as close to that as possible.

Every little edit is a step closer to publishing, after all.