The New Book Seems to be Taking Off

It took me over fifteen years to write my first book ... and it really wasn't very good.  I wrote it in my typical slapdash fashion, pulling writing all-nighters for days, even weeks, at a time and then ignoring it for weeks, even months.  I finally ended it just so I could say it was done, so I could put both of us out of our misery, so to speak.

I want to do it right this time around.

And so I pondered over what it was that I wanted to write, getting it down to two options.  I then wisely asked for input on Facebook and from my blog readers, and the historical mystery won out by a large margin.

I have been doing a lot of writing (just blogging, yes, but getting myself re-acclimated to the physical act of writing as it had been a distressingly long time), and I've also been thinking a lot about the story I want to write.  I've been (wait for it, friends and neighbors, and if you know me at all, prepare yourselves for a laugh ... I mean it, now is not the time to take a sip of your drink) researching.

And this morning, I woke up ready to write, so I did.

I wrote for an hour (674 words), then I made myself stop.

You might be wondering why I forced myself to stop when I was on a writing roll, in a writing place, feeling the writing groove.

It's pretty simple, really ... writing is like crack to me.  The way I feel when I'm really rocking my own stuff is, other than my family, the best feeling ever.  I do not want to stop, but it's like I burn myself out and have to recharge, and as a result, the story is choppy and lacks flow and cohesion and such because I am usually at such a different place when I go back to it after weeks or often months.

I have no idea of what the appropriate process is, what a typical word count is, how often is typical to spend writing over the course of a day.  I would really like to try to be more traditional about it, though, because my goal is to have this story (which is already written in my head, something that I've never had before, either ... I am usually as surprised by how my writing ends up as anyone else because I just sort of write and let it go where it will) finished before school starts back up.

When I stopped myself from writing my WIP, I needed a "cool down", which is what this post is, I suppose.

Anyway, I have to take Belle to the dentist in a bit, so I'll probably hold off on writing anymore (oh, but I want to so badly ...) until we get back.

Hopefully I'm approaching writing the right way this time around :-)

Accepting Criticism ... Along With a Special Thanks and a Really Cool Opportunity :-)

I truly believe that the reason my novel is still unpublished is that I suck at struggle with accepting criticism.  This is true in all facets of my life, but it's unquestionably the strongest with regard to my writing.

Why?  I suspect because, at least in terms of the tentatively titled Unbreakable, I put so much of myself into it, that I put many years of my life into it, that it has been a part of me for a very long time.

I spent a lot of this summer working on fixing up my novel, based in large part on suggestions and input from you, my lovely readers.

So I'm going to ask you to please do it again ... how's that for grateful ;-)?

Marcy over at Mainewords and Dianne from In High Spirits collaborate on what they call "First Impressions".  Basically, you can submit the first page of your manuscript, and both Marcy and Dianne will critique it publicly on their respective blogs.

If you're a writer, I strongly recommend this great opportunity.  I mean, the hardest thing to hear is that something that you've poured your heart and soul into stinks ... but at the same time, receiving specific feedback on how to improve it from fellow writers is absolutely invaluable.

I'm not getting torn to shreds, actually, which is cool :-)  The big issues seem to be my use of a mother's use of "revulsion" in terms of her son, and my affinity for extremely long sentences.  Both of these are excellent points and remind me that I still have much work to do.

But I'm feeling great about it (my new mindset is permeating all aspects of my life :-)), and am now really interested in finding a critique partner and really, seriously, 100% aggressively delving into getting that book published instead of waiting for someone to say, "I read an excerpt of your novel online, and it's amazing.  I'd love to represent you!" because clearly that is not going to happen ;-)

Anyway, special thanks to Marcy and Dianne, and I hope that you will go over to their respective blogs and add to the critique fest ... myself and my novel need all the help we can get ;-)

And again, please consider submitting a "First Impression" piece to these two wonderful ladies ... you won't be sorry.

Who Am I To Argue With Fate?

Do you believe in fate? Sometimes I get all cynical and think it's a bunch of crap, that karma does not in fact pay you back for living a life that focuses on bettering the world for others,doesn't bring down the people who bring so much pain and suffering into the world.

Then I have days like today where I realize that there has to be something ... call it God, call it fate, call it good luck, but man ...

So last night, my computer suddenly went psycho. I mean, we're talking crazy. I was pretty sure it was a lost cause (whatever it was swept through the virus protection like wildfire), and Addie confirmed that this morning.

Of course, I had a decision to make. Should I go to a computer specialty store to see if they can repair the earliest version of a Netbook, or should I just get a new computer (which has been on the radar for awhile ... Netbooks have good points, but they also have severe limitations).

Anyway, I'm typing this on my beautiful, brand new laptop :-)

Back to fate for a minute, though.

I got this urge yesterday to print my novel. I have a hard time editing on a computer screen (it's kind of like why I don't have a Kindle or a Nook, despite my insatiable appetite for reading), and I knew I had a lot of work to do.

To make matters even more interesting, my printer is special and prints one page at a time. My completed novel is lengthy. Quite lengthy. It made more sense to just go to Staples, so I put it on a USB and paid far too much money to it printed.

Yeah, do you see why the "one page at a time" approach was just not feasible?

Anyway, while I was putting the novel onto a USB, I figured I might as well print out my current WIP, too. After all, it's in need of some editing as well.

When my computer appeared to be possessed by the equivalent of Charles Manson on acid, I was momentarily hysterical. Other than Addie and Belle (and possibly my dogs), those two pieces of writing are the most important thing in the world to me.

They weren't backed up until yesterday. (Stupid, I know)

Thank you, whatever force made me take care of that business yesterday. I owe you one!

And, if you're interested in exploring my novel in terms of critique or style or abject curiosity or whatev, you can read some of it here, and/or weigh in on a recent struggle I've had with it right here.

And, just because I'm excited about it, here's the hard-to-read dedication page (no pseudonyms there, but I don't think the people on the page would be offended ... interesting that I've written about most of them here under assumed names, though).

Writing Conundrum--Advice Appreciated

When I was in seventh grade, I had a really weird dream. It was incredibly vivid, it stayed with me for many days, almost haunting me, and then I decided to start writing what eventually became the first copy of what's now my completed novel manuscript.

That original piece bears little similarity to what exists now, of course. For one thing, the main character didn't exist at the time (talk about doing things back asswards, right?). Or one of the main characters. Or ... okay, guess I'd better explain this, because therein lies the base of my confusion.

The Gist of the Original Story:
A girl is hired to babysit for a neighboring family when the parents go away for a weekend. A ghost/witch/some sort of evil creature haunts the kids because she's the biological mother of one of the kids (who was, of course, adopted). Unfinished.

Now, this is of course a typical seventh grade story. It had kids banding together to fight an evil force. Period. Kabam. It really kind of stunk.

Gist of the Second Draft:
A girl with a really crappy home life is hired to babsit for a rich family that lives in town when the parents go away for a weekend. The oldest son of the family is, of course, hot ... and, of course, interested in the girl. They fall in love over the backdrop of protecting his little sister from the possessed spirit of his little sister's biological mother. Also unfinished.

I'm going to guess this was at approximately ninth grade or so. It was kind of soft core porn in parts written by a very inexperienced girl. I don't have an existing copy of this draft, but the parts I remember are just toe-curling.

Gist of the Third Draft:
Pretty much the same of the second draft, although better written (not that it was great, but it was a step up). The dialogue was pretty impressive in terms of capturing characterization and sounding realistic (which it should have ... I was, I think, a junior in high school and I'd of course aged my main characters to high school juniors, so I pretty much just wrote the way conversations I had with my friends would go ... this turned out to be a gift later on down the line). I also added several characters, the most notable being Roy Pentinicci.

I added a character named Roy into my novel as part of an ongoing joke with my brother and sister. I cannot divulge details about the back story of said sibling pact(it involves a gay porn magazine and idle chatter made by various relatives ... trust me, you don't want to know), but suffice it to say that the entire cast of unrealistic, formulaic characters would have died a long, slow death if Roy hadn't been created. Roy was initially a very small character that was the then-main character's best friend. He was kind of a jerk, a typical "bad boy", pretty much without limits. He was also, of course, hot (but in a different way than the Mr. Perfect "leading man").

Time goes by. I have a child, I go to college, I live, I laugh, I cry, I learn, I experience. I meet my friend Andy at a New Year's Eve party when I'm nineteen, and it occurs to me when we start hanging out a lot that he IS Roy. This motivates me to pull out the old manuscript and I realize, with both the eye of a slightly older me and my near-obsession with Andy, that Roy is really the most interesting part of the whole piece.

And so I started a new WiP, this one centered around Roy. It started with his childhood as the son of a quasi-exiled Mafia hitman and the abuse he suffered at the hands of both parents. It dealt with his sister's sexual abuse at the hands of his father and the murder of his younger brother. It was a great character sketch, and definitely the best writing that I'd ever done up to that point ... but nothing really happened. Nothing really happened, that is, until Roy became a high school junior and was spending the weekend at his best friend's house with a babysitter and an evil possessed spirit shows up, and ...

Well, you can see what happened. I had two stories that were really one story, and I couldn't figure out what to do. It seemed necessary to me that both Roy's point of view and Susy's (the babysitting girl) were significant to the bottom line of the story ...

And so I started again, the piece that ultimately became Unbreakable, and it had two narrators, and of course it was told via flashback because I was an adult by this point, so I had to turn my main characters into adults that were reflecting on their traumatic childhoods--and their dual salvation from their horrible lives by the rich family who are no longer perfectly too good to be true.

It changed in other ways, too (for example, I'd made this incredible villain in Roy's father who was much more diabolical--and much more realistic--than some random witch/ghost thing, so I changed it to him holding the kids captive), and I was right about the dual storytelling giving the story far richer perspective.

The problem? It's long. Very long. Like, 150,000 words worth of long. I queried it and had several bites--requests for the first three chapters, two subsequent requests for the first 100 words, and a heady solicitation of the entire manuscript.

And then nothing.

And so I've been sitting on this novel for quite awhile. It's good, I know that. Is it good enough? Everyone who reads it seems to think so, but then again, most of them know me in real life (they do all finish it, though, and finish it quickly, so I guess that means something).

Anyway, I'm toying with the idea of separating out the stories, of pulling a reverse Dark Crystal and turning two stories that became one story back into two stories in the interest of manuscript length.

Any suggestions, thoughts, feedback would be much appreciated here.

In Case You're Interested ...

Because my mom is picking Addie up from rehearsal tonight (she drove herself to school and home, but her Friday night practices get out at ten and she's nervous driving that late when she's tired, an accommodation I'm more than happy to make), I am having a rare quiet evening at home.

I wasn't going to post here tonight because I'm very much behind on Zelda Lily and need to get a couple of pieces up there, but I was really touched by the reception that my WiP excerpt received (both the accolades and the critiques were wonderful feedback ... thank you!) and a few people asked for more, so I'm going to put up the second chapter.

Copying and pasting seems like kind of a cop-out, but it's kind of where I'm at tonight ;)

Oh, and if you didn't read the last excerpt (namely, Chapter One), you should probably read it first.

Oh, one more thing ... this character seems kind of Mary Sue-ish from the first two chapters, but he's really not. I am going to be reworking them a bit, though, since I just noticed when I was rereading it while fixing the paragraphs.

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From Annual by Katie Loud

2.

Christian checked the time as he walked to his red Saab convertible. He wouldn’t be able to go home and shower before soccer practice, and that bothered him a bit. Most of his teammates found it absolutely hysterical that Christian and to a slightly lesser degree his best friend Roy Pentinicci labored in the hot sun for forty hours a week all summer. Although their teasing on the rare days he showed up with green ankles didn’t really bother Christian, the sense of bewilderment in their eyes did.

His father was one of the wealthiest men in the country. There wasn’t a reason in the world for him to slave away mowing lawns, weeding gardens, erecting stone walls, accompanying balding, sweaty men with bad grammar.

But then, Christian had always been something of an enigma to his peers, a fact that bothered him not in the least. They wondered where his drive to excel came from, of course, why he worked his ass off to earn straight As at the prestigious Stephens Academy, what made him attend intensive extra baseball practices when he was already one of the best high school pitchers in the northeast. It seemed unfair, of course, that Brian McKenzie’s son should be brilliant, talented in numerous areas, and model-handsome, but Christian was just too likable a guy to hold it against him.

So people asked Roy, who was not quite as likable and not technically a McKenzie, why on earth the two of them worked for a landscaper instead of just pushing paper at one of Mr. McKenzie’s many offices. Roy had been taken in by Brian and Belinda McKenzie when his famously dysfunctional family imploded in the fall of his freshman year. They were his legal guardians, but they were not his parents. He explained that his Porsche was a strings-attached present for his sixteenth birthday, the strings being that he pay his car insurance with money he worked for. As a three-season athlete and an honors student, this was impossible to accomplish during the school year. Hence, a summer job was necessary. That Brian McKenzie had made the same arrangement with his own son (and bought him a far less ostentatious car) when Christian turned sixteen a year later was what confused, almost frustrated people. What could possibly be the point?

Christian toiled without complaint, Roy with characteristic token grumbling. They both knew full well this was a life lesson that Brian McKenzie wanted them to learn young and completely, something akin to the two of them leading Christian’s younger sisters and brother out with shovels whenever it snowed rather than hiring a plow truck to clear their more-of-a-private-road-than-a-driveway. They worshiped Brian McKenzie equally.

Christian was early for practice, so he took a quick locker room shower, watching the greens and browns disappear down the drain with something akin to relief. He got dressed, put on his shin guards, and walked to the field. Although practice didn’t start until four, there were already a number of boys in gym shorts and Stephens Academy Soccer t-shirts running around on the field. One of them, a good looking dark-haired boy with brown eyes that dominated his face, saw Christian walking down the hill to the field and ran over.

“You just leave work?”

“Yeah, took a shower here.”

“Clearly a better man than I am, McKenzie. I got the hell out as soon as I possibly could.”

“Pete told me he offered you next summer in advance.”

Roy nodded. “It was strangely nice to hear.”

“You seen Bobby?”

“Nope.”

“Yup!" Both turned and looked up the hill as their longtime friend Bobby Smith started down, his gait unsteady. “Yup, you’ve sure as fuck seen me now.”

The other team members had started moving toward them, drawn by the decibel of Bobby’s voice. A tall African-American boy, Jamie Costello, took in the situation and sprinted suddenly to Bobby’s side. Jamie had been tight with Bobby, Roy, and Christian for years, and he knew that Bobby needed to make it into the goal; as long as he was in his element, nobody would notice that he was extremely drunk. Roy followed Jamie, getting on Bobby’s other side, and the two lifted him up and past their teammates to where Christian was busily moving the net into position in anticipation of Bobby’s arrival.

It was an old drill.

Excerpt From Novel #2

It's funny how time flies. Back in the early days of this blog, I posted an excerpt from my second novel, noting that it was "very unfinished" and "very much a work in progress".

Sadly, it's still both unfinished (although not as "very" as it once was) and a work in progress (although much progress has been made).

Happily, I have a lot more followers now than I did when I originally posted this excerpt (and the excerpt itself has changed a bit), so I figured I'd share it in the hopes of entertaining you and garnering feedback.

This is the first chapter ...

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From Annual by Katie Loud

1.
Christian McKenzie was sixteen years old the last time he used a time clock to punch out of work.

His sneakers left green smudges on the cement floor of the main storage building at Peter Neal Landscaping as he walked toward the back office to turn in his timecard. He tapped the buff-colored rectangle measuring out a forty-hour workweek against his khaki shorts in the innate way that musicians do. Christian was surprised to see Pete Neal himself, owner of the landscaping business that had employed him for two summers now, sitting behind the desk in his tiny office.

“Why you still here?” Pete asked, standing and hitching up his fatigue pants. Although his pants were always falling down, his t-shirts were never without oval sweat stains at the armpits, and his few remaining teeth were gray and rotting, Christian liked him. Pete had always been fair.

“I wanted to finish that stone wall for you, sir. It’s my last day.” Pete nodded.

“Yeah, Pentinicci already reminded me.”

“He still here?”

“Hell, no. He was gone soon’s his eight hours was up.” Pete grumbled a bit more before saying what he’d been leading up to. “I told him job’s here for him next summer, same as I’m saying to you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Neal. I’ll be needing a job next summer between graduation and college, and you’ve been good to me.”

“You’re a good worker, McKenzie.” Pete held out a calloused hand, and Christian shook it gratefully.

“I’ll, uh, see you around, I’m sure.” Christian was uncomfortable. Pete’s company did the extensive landscaping at his parents’ mansion, a fact that both of them were a little embarrassed about and which neither of them mentioned. “And I will be back next year, sir.”

But he wasn’t. The trajectory of his life changed forever that evening when his girlfriend told him she was pregnant.