In Which Our Heroine Forgets to Read Her Own Blog Post

I made a little bit of progress on the NaNo story today.  85 words.  Which is really only about two paragraphs.  So it's minimal progress.  But I'll take what I can get.

Last night I went to bed with two characters in my head-- Ethan and Harry.  I don't really know anything about these guys yet, but I figure if I stick with it I'll get to know them this month.  And then I woke up this morning with two paragraphs in my head about Mark and his bowel habits.  Who Mark is, what his relationship to Ethan and Harry is, and why he (or I) think anyone cares about his bowel habits is completely beyond me.  But I'm going with it.  hur.

I think, and I could be totally wrong here but it seems about right, that Mark is a bit of a Sheldonesque character.  (From The Big Bang Theory)  And I think that Ethan and Harry come in and disrupt his life in ways large and small.  In fact, I think Ethan and Harry are sort of modern day Gandalfs, and Mark is Bilbo, and the story is going to end up being a riff on The Hobbit.  Ethan and Harry drag Mark along with them on a Big Gay Adventure.

Hmm.  Ideas are churning.  This is good.  I'm supposed to be getting ready for my mom's Mary Kay Holiday Open House that starts on Friday (I have a few hand knit things that I'm putting out), but I may spend the day putting together a collage and soundtrack instead.  If I'm lucky I may even add another 85 words to my story.  At this rate I should hit the 50,000 word mark on June 13, 2013.

In goofy news, I was very proud of a new In Which statement that I came up with this morning, and I mentioned it in a comment on the last post.  And then I went back and re-read the post and discovered that I'd put it in the body of the post when I wrote it yesterday, and then promptly forgot it.  Because that is how my brain works.  (Julie's smooth brain has nothin' on me.)

So that's my progress so far.  And now, I think my sleeping pill is finally kicking in, so I'm going to post this and then go to bed.

'Night All!

September Gurls

I've been on a serious Bangles kick the last few days, and it finally dawned on me-- it's Jack music.  I'm going to have to take a look at some astrology references, but I think Ethan has a September birthday and Jack is December.  'Cause Jack seems to be associating this song strongly with the two of them.

On a purely aesthetic note (har), I don't like Susanna Hoffs' background vocals on this song at all.  (It's not so obvious in this live version, but her voice is a real kick in the teeth on the album version.)  She's too distinctive for background vocal and ends up standing out like a sore thumb.

The only other songs on Jack's soundtrack so far are Hazy Shade of Winter and If She Knew What She Wants.  (Jack is the "She" in that one.  He wouldn't even be offended at the idea.  He'd be the first to admit his head wasn't on quite straight (har) when he walked out on Ethan.)  So.  All Bangles.  I'm not sure if he's just a major Bangles fan, or if things will even out eventually.  I wasn't planning to start on his soundtrack yet.  In fact, I've been exceptionally lazy in the Magic/Discovery/writing department in the last couple weeks.  But I guess Jack is impatient.  He wants his happily ever after!

On a different topic, I have to admit I was wrong.  The garage sale went really well today.  Over $200 in sales and a full box less stuff packed up at the end of the day than went out this morning.  That's way better than I was expecting.  Mom is thrilled.

I'm Magic, Baby

Today was the last day of Lani's Making Magic class.  We talked about Discovery and how important that is to your writing.  Very inspiring stuff.  (I'm still a little unclear about the difference between Magic and Discovery, especially since two of the homework assignments are the same, but if it gets the juices flowing I guess it doesn't matter.)  I have lots of ideas bouncing around in my head, and I'm pretty sure those ideas are going to lead to other ideas which will eventually lead to a good story.

Yay, me!

Next weekend the Discovery class starts.  The first lesson is Soundtracks.  I might refine the one I've already put together in Magic.  I've already done a little bit of fiddling with it.  But mostly I want to poke around in tropes and with my collage (which is still 99% in my head and 0% assembled.)

Have I shared my soundtrack yet?  Here it is:

Back to December- Taylor Swift
Fuck You- Cee Lo Green
Hit the Road Jack- Ray Charles
Human Heart- Carey Ott
If We Ever Meet Again- Katy Perry/Timbaland
Last Christmas- Glee Cast
Lush Life- Natalie Cole
Make You Feel My Love- Adele
Need You Now- Lady Antebellum
Turning Tables- Adele
Valerie- Amy Winehouse
What'll I Do- Rosemary Clooney
Breathe- Melissa Etheridge
Come On Up To the House- Sarah Jarosz
St. Patrick's Day- John Mayer
Big Bang Theory- Barenaked Ladies

St. Patrick's Day and Big Bang Theory are new additions.  St. Patrick's Day sparked a thought about structure (believe it or not), and led to some interesting (IMO) changes and plans.  I'm not 100% sure Big Bang Theory really belongs, although it sort of feels like it does.  Don't know why yet.  Mostly I just added it because I started watching the show this week (one of the local channels started airing two episodes a day during the "everyone else is running the evening news" time slot).  I don't know how I missed this show before. It's very funny, and the theme song is fucking addictive.  I figured, if I'm going to be humming the damn thing constantly anyway, might as well add it to the soundtrack.  I'd been thinking that Ethan was perhaps a tad bit nerdy, and this just reinforces it.  (Oh, please God, tell me I'm not going to have to learn how to play some table top, roll playing, 20 sided die game as research.  I love me some nerd boy, but that is totally not my thing.)

I think Breathe is going to have to come off the soundtrack, though.  The more I listen to all of it, the more I think that it's the other guy's song, not Ethan's.  And while some of those songs speak to the relationship as a whole, this is mostly Ethan's soundtrack.  The other guy will have his own soundtrack later.

Oh, oh, oh!  Good news!  The Other Guy has a name!  He's Jack.  It was right there, staring me in the face, and I finally got it.  (Hit the Road Jack.)

I think that's about all the writing news I have at the moment.  Eventually I'll get the collage done(ish), and I'll post a picture of that.  Oh, and while we're supposed to be working on soundtracks, which I feel pretty solid about at the moment, I'll be working on Kelley Armstrong's Outlining 101.  It's fabulous.  This is the program I followed (in my own special, Becky-ish way) in 2007, which was by far my best, most productive NaNo year.  (National Novel Writing Month for anyone unfamiliar.)  I want to mesh some of Lani's Magic/Discovery work with Kelley's Outlining 101 to hopefully get me on the right track and revved up for November 1st.  (I hadn't been planning to NaNo this year, but what the hell.  And since I'm off in my own world, doing my own thing and making it up as I go along, I might just start before Nov 1!  I know.  I'm such a rebel!)

If you're interested in checking out Kelley's writing info, go to her website, kelleyarmstrong.com, and join her forum and the OWG (Online Writing Group).  That's where you'll find her NaNo prep stuff, as well as lots of talented and welcoming fellow writers.

And now I think I really am done.  Pretty jazzed about all the work ahead of me.  But it's fun work.  Fwerk!

Brainstorming

I don't remember if I told you this or not (I started to write a post about it, fairly sure that I never finished), but I'm taking one of Lani's writing classes, Making Magic.  Last week we worked on soundtracks, this week we're doing collages.  I'm not visually artistic, so I'm struggling a bit. (Well, except for knitting, but that's more about following a pattern and mastering the mechanics.  You're on your own with collage.)

I'm supposed to be picking placeholders-- pictures of people, often actors, who represent the characters.  Sometimes it's the look, sometimes it's about the attitude or personality.  Whatever you need to help you make that person real in your head, until they take over and become their own person.  (People who've done much in the way of fiction writing will know what I mean.)

One of my characters, Ethan, is coming in pretty strong for me right now.  This is his story, told from his point of view.  He had this great boyfriend who dumped him suddenly right before Christmas, and he can't get over it.  He's bitter.  He doesn't understand why.  And now Christmas is coming around again, and so is the ex.  My big problem with Ethan is that I can't settle on what he looks like.  He's kind of an amorphous blob at the moment.  He shifts every time I look too close.  I can feel what he's feeling and know what he's thinking, but he won't let me see his face.

I have an image for the ex.  He's a pilot, I think.  I don't know what his name is yet.  So far he's been Dave, Dan, and Brad.  None of them fit.  So I'm just going to keep playing the "what name pops into my mind first" game periodically, and see what else comes up.  My biggest problem with Dave/Dan/Brad is that I don't know what is motivating him.  He basically walked out on Ethan, completely gone, out of his life, a couple days before Christmas.  Why?  What made him do that?  As far as Ethan is concerned, it was a douchey thing to do.  I know Dave/Dan/Brad had a reason for behaving that way.  It's got to be realistic, understandable, and redeemable.  Because I want these two guys together again.  But I don't know what the reason is.

What could make someone walk out on a relationship so suddenly?  What would make them change their mind a year later?  In my mind it feels like commitment phobia.  But does anyone want a hero who walks away utterly, no contact at all, and then appears a year later and says he wants you back?  How do you justify it?  How do you forgive it?

I did have one big revelation today.  It has to do with the structure of the story.  The first part is unquestionably Ethan's.  He's a teacher, so the story starts off at the beginning of the school year.  As the school year progresses, he finds himself rehashing the relationship.  Remembering the good times, re-examining those moments that might have been warning signs of what was to come.  Because he was really hit out of the blue when Dave/Dan/Brad walked away.  As we get closer to Christmas and the one year anniversary of the break up, Ethan gets madder.  The story ends with Dave/Dan/Brad knocking on the door a year after he left.  (You can play with stuff like this in m/m.  There's a lot more flexibility.  But it would never fly in mainstream romance.)

The second part of the story picks up from there.  It's all told from Dave/Dan/Brad's point of view.  (I really need to get a name for this guy.)  It will also cover two parallel time lines, his build up to walking out a year ago and his present struggle to get Ethan to take him back, with a little dash of how much he missed him after walking out.

So for the immediate future, I'm not too bad.  Ethan's story is first, and while I can't see him very well, I can feel him.  My biggest concern is that without knowing for sure what's going on with the Other Guy (I just can't type that list of names again-- it's getting depressing), I can't layer it in at all.  But then, Ethan is also clueless about what happened, so maybe it's not too bad.  More a question of whether or not I want to clue the reader in before Ethan figures everything out.  (That balance between letting the reader feel smart for figuring it out without making the character look dumb for not figuring it out.)

So.  Thoughts?  Why do people just get up and walk out one day, and what changes inside to let them come back?

Merry Christmas, Darling

I know I keep saying this, and then I never do anything.  But this time I really mean it.  (I think.)  I'm going to start writing again.

One of the m/m publishers that I've been reading a lot lately has a call out for holiday short stories and novellas.  5,000-18,000 words, due September 1st.  I can do that.  I just have to get into a Christmas frame of mind.  To achieve this I've been listening to Christmas music.  The fact that it's been in the middle 90s (a solid 15 degrees above normal for Indiana this time of year) isn't helping.  But I'm going to give it the old college try.

Tomorrow I'm going to start poking around the interwebs, looking for images to inspire me, both hunky and Christmassy.  If you have any favorites, please be sure to link them in the comments.  I could use all the support and inspiration I can get!  If I can figure out how I did the last computer collage, I'll make one and post it when it's ready.  If not, I might have to resort to paper and glue stick, and then God help you if you want to see it, because I haven't the foggiest where my digital camera is.  So, keep your fingers crossed that I find the collage website.

While you're crossing fingers, keep 'em crossed that I manage to get beyond the soundtrack and collage phase.  'Cause I'd really like to write this Christmas story and get it submitted!  (Once I get it written and into the hands of an editor I'll start worrying about whether or not anyone actually wants to publish it.)

Oh, and since I haven't done this for a while, my lip balm of the day is the thoroughly un-Christmassy lavender lemonade.

Happy Days Are Here Again!

Another round of good news on the medication front.  My doctor's office called this morning.  The makers of Savella (my other Fibro medication) approved my patient assistance, and there was 3 months worth of free meds waiting for me at the office!  Yay!  My Fibro meds are the only ones I take that are too new to have a generic, which means they are the most expensive.  Now that I'm getting both of them for free, my monthly med costs have gone down by about 3/4.  That's huge-- a significant line item in the monthly budget slashed.

In other news, I've got the Kindle down to 724 items.  So far it hasn't made a bit of difference.  In fact, the battery is dying even faster.  But that might be because of all the clicking around to delete stuff.  I'll go back to more normal usage for the next couple of days and see if there's any improvement.

And more good news-- I have a solid story idea to work on.  Last night I was thinking about a story I started almost 15 years ago and abandoned.  The actual pages are long gone at this point (trust me, it's no loss), but the idea lingered.  As I was falling asleep last night it fused with another scrap of an idea, and suddenly I have a viable story idea.  In the next few days I'm going to work on Kelley Armstrong's Outlining 101, and then I want to start writing March 1st.  I'm not going to push myself to NaNo it.  I'm afraid I'll flame out in a couple of days at that kind of pace.  But I'd definitely like to finish March with a nice chunk of pages.  I've also had a little bit of a brain wave about the story I was working on last fall during Discovery.  So I think I may end up outlining both at the same time.  We'll see how confused I get.

Lip Balm Flavor of the Day: Gingerale

Feeling Weepie

After reading several really good books lately I'm in that moody, creative place where I feel like I want to start writing again.  I've been listening to music again, something I haven't done much of in the last couple of months. 

I don't have much on my mp3 player, comparatively speaking.  (Someone I follow on twitter said today that she has 10,005 songs on hers, and was pondering if she should if she should delete 5 songs to bring it back to a tidy 10,000.  My old but serviceable mp3 has about 1/10 that capacity.)  But there's still enough stuff on there that I forget what I have.

So I was cruising through the other day, looking for something good, when I rediscovered The Weepies.  I only have three of their songs, but I've been listening to those three songs on repeat ever since.  I'm thinking about taking the $2 in free mp3 downloads that Amazon if offering right now (promo code: VDAYMP3S) plus some of the gift certificate credit that I have saved up and downloading a few more songs, or possibly their whole catalog.  I could see this music being the core of a soundtrack.  I know I said this before, but I just logged in over at Wiz IQ, and I'm going to go through the Discovery class again, this time with less moving and distractions.

And here is a video I found for one of the songs I've had on repeat.  It's not an official video, they don't appear to have made one, which is a shame.  But it's still pretty good.  I'd love to know where the images are from, if anyone knows.  Looks like something Japanese to me, and while I have wide ranging tastes, this is an area that I'm completely unfamiliar with.  Some of the clips look pretty romantic, and I'd like to check them out.

And now, Take It From Me!

Re-Discovering

Last fall, in a burst of creative desperation, I took Lani/Lucy's Discovery class.  I'd just moved away from the home I loved to live with my parents on the other side of the country.  The yankee side.  The class was my attempt to hang on to my image of who I was as a person before my health trampled me.

It wasn't a terribly successful venture, not through any fault of Lani's.  The day after I arrived in Massachusetts my parents got an offer on their house.  What might have been difficult suddenly became impossible.  I attended all the classes, but there was no time or space or energy to do the assignments or participate in any meaningful way.

At about the same time I got the idea for the book review blog, and suddenly my attention was split even further.  About a month ago I decided that I really wanted to get serious about the blog.  I want the reviews to go up like clockwork.  I want to have interesting reading related essays at least a couple times a month.  Good steady content will drive more people to the site and increase comments.  Eventually, it will become what I want it to be: a conversation about books among people who love them.  But that relies on me reading and reviewing at a steady rate, at least once a week.  My current reading project, which should wrap up next week I hope, hasn't allowed that.  But after the first of the year I want to be going great guns.

The desire to review, the personal train wreck of the class, and the fact that I've done basically no fiction writing in the last four years led me to the idea that fiction writing wasn't the dream for me anymore.  I decided to quietly shelve the idea.  Nothing else about my life was what I'd dreamed or hoped or even wanted.  Walking away seemed like the right thing to do.

That, of course, is when the itch returned.  The idea, the very, very small idea.  Someone laughing.  They're happy.  I have not the tiniest clue who they are or what their story might be.  But I think I want to write it.  Just for me.  Not for a publisher.  Not for my imagined future adoring fans.  Just for me. 

My happiest times writing were back when I first started.  Every night I'd come home from work, eat dinner, and then sit down to write on my word processor.  (Did you ever use one of those?  It was like the bastard child of a typewriter and a Speak & Spell.)  Every night I'd work on my story.  I wasn't picturing the beta readers, I wasn't wondering what some editor or agent might think.  I was just telling my story to a very interested party-- me.  I want to go back to that.  I want to write because it's fun and I like it, and damn what anyone else thinks.  But first I need a story.  So I'm going to do Discovery again.

Lani leaves the class recording up and available to class members.  Tonight I downloaded them.  Maybe next week or maybe sometime after the first of the year I'm going to go through them again.  I want to find out who that laughing person is.  I want to know why they were laughing.  And I want to laugh along with them. 

Ordinarily I'd wonder if I was setting myself up for another fall, to do this again after failing so recently.  But you know, it's funny.  It was only two months ago, but it feels like a lifetime.  Like I was a different person then than I am now.  I think there's value for me in those lessons if I just play around with it, take it at my own pace, and see what happens.

I still intend to pull my act together with the book blog.  I feel bad that I haven't been as steady and organized as I would have liked.  (Also, with only two of us reviewing, the work load is much heavier than I anticipated.  If anyone else would like to write a review or two, please let me know.)  I think if I can develop a routine for all of my writing, and that includes blogging here, too, the whole process will smooth out.

It's the getting started that's hard.

Collage!

Check it out!  I made a collage!

Discovery 2010

see more of my photos

This was homework for the Discovery class I've been taking.  My computer has been in the shop for most of the last week and a half, and I was feeling pretty frustrated.  But I got my baby back today, and I was able to spend a couple of hours finding just the right images (I'd already picked out some) and putting them together.  This probably isn't the end of the collaging for this project.  There's still a boat load of stuff I need to figure out.  But this feels like a good start.

It's In The Cards

Discovery class starts on Sunday, and to prepare I've been doing things to top up the creativity tank.  The last few weeks have sucked a lot out of me, and I rather desperately need the refill.  I've been reading everything I can get my hands on, particularly stuff I've been looking forward to but haven't read yet for one reason or another.  I've been listening to my mp3 player and song samples on Amazon.  (The first lesson is on creating a soundtrack for your book, and I'm really looking forward to that.)  And yesterday I did something I haven't done in way too long-- I pulled out my tarot deck.

I have an on again/off again relationship with the tarot.  It's an interesting study, but it is a study, a discipline.  It takes work to master reading the cards, and work is something I haven't done much of in the last few years.  (I'm trying really hard to purge the word "lazy" from my vocabulary.  I am not lazy.  I have chronic, involuntary health problems that suck up energy and brain power.  There's a world of difference.  Maybe if I keep telling myself that I'll believe it some day.) 

Seven or eight years ago I took a tarot class, and periodically I pick up a book again and try to drum the meanings of the cards into my head.  They don't stick.  Probably because I need to stop reading the book and start looking at the cards.  There's intuition in there somewhere, after all I'm a Scorpio.  I just need to find a way to trust it.

Anyway, last night I picked up my cards and shuffled through them to see if anything jumped out at me.  Two did:

Nine of Wands

Eight of Cups

The Nine is from the deck I use, Hanson-Roberts, and is the card that made me want to buy the deck years ago.  I couldn't find a Google image of the Eight from Hanson-Roberts, so this is the Rider-Waite image.  They are very similar.  Choosing the Eight was instinctive, but after thinking about it for a minute it totally makes sense.  This card is about walking away, starting over, which is where I am right now.  What didn't dawn on me right away is that the Nine has almost the exact opposite meaning: persevering, staying the course.  I think the Nine might be the card of my life overall.  My health is something that I will have to deal with every day for the rest of my life, and unless there's a major change in treatment options, I don't see it getting significantly better.  But the way I was attempting so soldier on just wasn't working for me.  I had to walk away and start over.  So in a weird way, these two contradictory cards really express where I am in my life. 

I appreciate the insight, but I'm hoping that if I look through the cards again in a few days that they'll tell me a little bit about my characters this time!