Moved to Livejournal

Yet again (go ahead and laugh at me) I'm relocating my blog. I've been spending a lot of time on LJ on a private journal and have come to really prefer the format and all to blogspot. I like userpics, the friends page, all that jazz. So I'm relocating. I've copied and backdated a lot of my blogspot entries (though not all because an awful lot of them are boring and/or irrelevant, about false-starts and the like) over to my new journal here.

Motivation

Posting this in an attempt to force myself to get back to work on Deception. I took a sort of unplanned break from it in the midst of Potter mania after hitting my 90,000 word goal and now really need to get back to it and just bang it out. I figure if I post updates here, I'll have to own up if I don't get some work done.

I've set a new goal for Deception, 105,000 words, based on my estimate of what I'll need in order to wrap up the story. I will update probably every Monday morning with my progress.

So, as of right now, this is where I stand on completing the Deception manuscript:

91,078 / 115,000 (79.2%)

And this is where I stand with the Taggert Twins 1 revision, because I totally got sidetracked when I realized I had major plot holes to finish. And even though I resolved them, I haven't been able to tie myself to a chair and focus on the revision. This I will also update every Monday morning (is in pages rather than words):

21 / 208 (10.1%)

Verdict on the book banning

I'd blogged a while ago about the banning of Maureen Johnson's The Bermudez Triangle solely for having homosexual (though in no way explicit) content. There's a verdict now. You can read her post here, if you're interested.

In short, the school library will allow the book. However, it must be kept on a reserve shelf and only checked out for school assignments by students who have parental permission.

How asinine. And slippery slope. Dangerous precedent. All of the above.

Oh, and this is on the heels of the librarian on the book banning committee having been removed from her position and the school librarian resigning. What a world we live in.

Footloose, anyone?

"Baby shoes for sale, never used."

Say what you will about Hemingway; I know he's far from my favorite author. In fact, I generally avoid his writings like the plague. But who else could write such a powerful story in under 7 words?

"Baby shoes for sale, never used."

What's your 7-word story?

90k and still kicking

Well, I just hit my goal of 90,000 words for this book. At work, on my lunch break. After giving myself a silent cheer so as not to draw the eyes of more composed individuals in the office, I return to the writing. Because, although the goal I set for myself has been reached, this book is far from over.

In fact, I've just realized that, come revision time, probably a good chunk of what I've written is going to go out the window. Because it just doesn't work with the turn the book took in, oh, just the last thousand words.

Now, mind you, this is not some major plot twist. I haven't changed whodunit or why. I haven't changed the ending. I haven't changed the story in and of itself. But the route to get to the ending has just taken a very large--and hopefully rather interesting--detour. I'm going to say I've probably still got at least 20,000 words to go.

Which, again, means that I won't feel so horrible cutting entire scenes, entire chapters, when I sit down with my red pen. Because, let's face it, for most of us, taking out large chunks of our hard-won words is really quite painful. I'm still not going to like it but knowing that there's a lot of the story left may be able to soothe me.

Maybe.

It's funny. I know I've blogged about this before. But anyway. We talk about characters running away with us, doing their own thing. In my case, and not for the first time, the story has done that. I was writing one simple scene, one key scene that's intended to be the sort of turning point, the point at which the protagonist finally turns down the road toward finding the truth. And then it just popped into my head that this was the perfect opportunity for . . . well, I'm not going to elaborate. But it was just the perfect opportunity and I couldn't resist but it's making me really take it in a different direction from this point forward.

I also strongly suspect that my protagonist has just shifted from one character to another. But that's a change that's been a long time coming, I think, so I'm not too bothered. I'm just a bit worried about how to make that mesh with the beginning of the book, where the guy who just became the protag can't be included. Unless... hmm. Perhaps. Yes, that might work nicely. Massive changes though.

But that's what revision's all about, isn't it?

Fandom

With the world in the throes of Harry Potter mania, what with the release of Order of the Phoenix today and the next book coming out in just ten days, I was thinking last night about Fandom and how it develops. Fandom, for those who might not have heard the word, refers to the following a particular story/book/universe achieves, and all that that implies--how ravenously fans devour books, how highly anticipated new releases are, the prevalence of fan fiction and fan sites on the Internet.

And it occurred to me that it seems that only sci-fi and fantasy works achieve the mega-followings in the world of entertainment. Look at the devotion of fans to Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and the mother of all Fandom, Star Trek. The only non-sci-fi/fantasy thing I can think of that might even come close to paralleling the devotion with which fans seek out anything and everything to do with these fictional worlds is Pirates of the Caribbean, which could probably fall into the fantasy camp but I think of more as action/adventure.

Why is this? Is it a product of exposure (the fact that Star Wars, for example, has probably nearly 100 books published, plus resource books, video and board games, toy lines, etc.). Or is that exposure the result of the fan base?

Any thoughts?

(None of this is to suggest that books and movies outside the sci-fi and fantasy genres don't have their own rabid followings. There is just something about these large fandoms that seems unmatched anywhere else.)

Home Stretch

Well, I'm in the home stretch on Deception, the adult mystery/pseudo-suspense I've been writing for the last 2 1/2 months. I've got 10,000 words to go before I hit my 90k goal. I fell short on my TT draft; hit 52k when I was going for 60k. This one, I'll surpass. There's still too much wide open to wrap up in such a small number of words and I'm by no means interested in rushing through.

Exceeding my goal will mean I don't feel so bad cutting the crap out of it when I start revising. Which I'm absolutely going to need to do, because this book has been doing its own thing from somewhere around the 40k mark. Just went off on its own, weaving its own story and leaving me to try to figure it all out along with my characters.

I think I'm just about there. Miracle of miracles.

I've started writing an urban fantasy. Done a lot of planning and I've gone a few thousand words in on the story itself. That'll be my next project and I think it'll be a fun one. It's my first real exercise in worldbuilding and its really going to make me stretch my creative muscles. Also, my research abilities. I need to hit the library; I need to expand my reading repertoire into books about vampires and werewolves. I blame Rowling's lovely Remus Lupin for my sudden interest in such creatures. I also need to read up on the rest of the genre, especially UF-style detective stories/mysteries.

But, before I pick up on writing that again, I'm going to set aside some time for revision. I'm nowhere in revising the Taggert Twins book and I'm going to have to start revising Deception. The good thing is that I've got all the big plot problems that arose in writing TT resolved, I think; I just need to put them into the book now. That's going to require quite a bit of rewriting, I think, but the book will be so much better for it. I'm quite excited, actually.

And I know the title Deception sucks. It's only a working title until I can devote the hours necessary to figure out a decent title. Because I'm firmly convinced that titles are evil incarnate and put on this earth to drive me to drink. Excessively.