Keeping the Flame Hot

No, this isn't a post about erotica.

Thanks to real life (evil bastard) I haven't been on track with TGTD. Oh, sure, I'm sitting over 60k now, but that's more to do with tuning out my relatives than any real intensity on my part. Today, however, the wheels are turning. I rediscovered my drive for the story and I think it's coming along fine.

Did I mention that I managed over 50k in 11 days? I'm a little smug, yes, but there are others who wrote more than I did.

I've noticed that my writing is a lot sharper these days. I eliminate most of my grammatical penchants before I make them. Even the comma count is down, which is a good thing. (don't crit my blog, damnit--it's where commas are allowed to roam freely without fear of molestation--and adverbs too so nyaaaaaaah.)

At any rate, it is hard sometimes to get past the first few chapters when you start a new project. I am not a compulsive planner when I write; I have an idea of where the story will end, but how I get there and most of the plot turns are accidental. Usually I stall and sputter (remember Requiem?) until I figure out how best to get the story moving along. Terella has a fairly straightforward plot intention, but the road is twisted and gnarly and oh so deliciously indecent! My heroine begins as fairly sweet and naive and morphs through the story until she takes over the page and stomps all over it.

Killing superfluous dialogue tags as she goes.

For example, this is how we meet Aleira:

Aleira liked the rain. It slanted from the thickening sky as slashes of lavender. Overall it was, particularly at this time of year, a beautiful and relaxing thing to watch. She had heard rumors that in places across the great Mneosta Sea the rain was as silvery as the clouds that brought it. She didn’t necessarily believe it. For her, it was incomprehensible that rain could be anything other than the watery purple-hued streaks she loved. She let the hood fall back from her face, glorying in the feel of the water against her skin. For a girl with many problems, the rain was a wonderful thing.

Aleira was alone. She liked being alone. For as long as she could remember,it had always been thus. No matter what town she walked through, or what inn she entered in search of food and drink, she was the lone person in her life. It wasn’t very bad; it gave her time to think. Most of that thinking time she spent asking herself the selfsame question repeatedly.

Who am I?

She knew her name. She retained that one thing from ‘before.’ “Before’ referred to the time of darkness. ‘After’ referred to now. ‘After’ began when Aleira opened her eyes a month ago and found herself standing alone in the middle of a large field. She knew absolutely nothing about her origins: where she’d come from, who her family was, what she was doing or where she was going. The only clues she had were her name and the few possessions she owned.

Later on, she's more like this:

“Tell me, Rudianos,” she began softly, as the king stiffened into renewed fury at her use of his name. “Do you think I can’t see that makings of your past? Your father was a cruel man too, was he not? Didn’t he torture you and your younger sister, to mould you into what he thought royalty should be? Wasn’t it difficult for you as a child? All you wanted to do was run to your mother and weep, but you couldn’t because then he’d beat her too.”

The words came faster now, brought up from some well of information that she’d never known she possessed. “I always wonder what the product of emotional cruelty was. I see it now, enthroned and enriched by the suffering of those who don’t even know they are your victims. Your son stands behind me. He is a good man, a patient and gentle man who you ignored when he was growing. You had two older sons; he was unimportant. This son you left alone, spared the incessant brutality you spent upon his brothers as you tried to make them in your image. When they died, you
were left with him. He’d grown up in a different fashion, left to his tutors and beneath your notice. Now you’re frustrated because he isn’t as easy to shape as your other, maltreated, bestial offspring. He has a mind of his own, and prowess that you fear. Tell me, Rudianos: when you lie in your cold bed at night, whose face do you see before you go to sleep? Is it your own face, wreathed in glory and might? Or, is it the face of your son, above a sword that whistles for your throat?”

She smiled again, a sweet, innocent smile that belied the harsh impact of her words. “I know what it is you see. I know what it is that you fear. It is the usual thing for mortals to fear their own mortality. I will say this and no more: the death you receive, King of Vegoia, will be the death you have earned.”

It took her about 75 pages to reach that point. And just afterwards, she finds herself caught up in a war that she cannot stop. It's then that her atheism is confirmed; nothing quite like a moral crisis to give a girl doubts about the gods whoever they are. Oh, yes. And Ugarit? Poor fellow. I torture him in my inimitable mean fashion, but he keeps coming up the stronger for it.

*grin*

I may have to kill him to prove a point. Wouldn't that be a nice twist?

That's one of the great things about keeping the flame of your story hot--taking out your frustrations (or your joys) upon a helpless character who lives and dies by the power of your pen. Wow. What a feeling! It gives me the goosebumps just thinking about it.

I think a nice, prolonged, lovely death scene is just the ticket. Excuse me while I run to the thesaurus to find more synonyms for blood, guts, and disembowelment. This may be more fun than torturing Elves.

Making a word count...er...count

Okay--as requested by Pete at CarrPeeDiem:

Jeanne, Ava, Celina: As the highest-number rollers this week, I’d love it
if — either here, or on your blogs — you took a few minutes to talk about how
you write, what you do, what produces the high numbers. You don’t HAVE to,
but I know I’d find it interesting, even if no one else does…

I'm an odd bird. For one thing, I can sit down and read Gone With The Wind in an afternoon. I've always been able to read quickly and to comprehend what I read. And, to answer the inevitable next question: NO, I do NOT speed read. I've been reading since before the age of two, and my parents used to invite people over so that I'd read the TV Guide to them. I actually hurt myself crawling out of my crib in the middle of the night trying to get a book.

That translated fairly quickly into writing. I've mentioned on here before that I wrote my first novel-length story in my late teens. I got out of the daily writing grind when I left college, and only got back into it when a car wreck left me unable to work and with very few sources of entertainment. Try affording my book habit--I dare you.

So when I DID start writing, I was writing in order to be entertained. As an impatient person, I learned to type quickly. I always wanted to know what happened next. Every morning, I got up and armed with heating pads and medication, settled myself in the recliner in front of the very very old Dell desktop with no internet connection and sank myself into my story. Asphodel took me three months to write, Gift of Redemption about two. Tempation and Apostolate took about a month each. Darkshifters and Coils took about the same. Each book was over 100k, the largest hitting at 165 in its first draft mode.

Terella is on pace at the moment to be a five or six week project. I expect it to top out at about 135k, mostly because I've allowed myself to get sidetracked on a subplot. Once edited, it will be right at 105-110k.

So how do I do it? My recipe is simple. I have a room where I can shut the door. That's vital. I have music playlists created by me for specific types of scenes: fight music, love music, grief music, fun music--and none of those songs have words. I'm a huge classical music fan and I don't think I can write a war without Star Wars music. Period. On average, I write about 2000 words an hour. Sometimes, I can hit closer to three. Usually, I work for five hours a day on writing, while spending another two or three on rewrites or (God forbid they show up now) edits. By the way, I hard edit: red pencil on paper. It takes longer, I have to actually read what I've written, and I get a better feel for the flow of the piece.

In other words, writing is my full time job. It doesn't pay much yet, but I have hopes that it will. I write something every day, even if it's just in my journal because I'm too tired to sit up with my laptop. If I'm on pace, and the house stays relatively clean and there is no teenaged angst screeching up and down the stairs, I can write up to about 12k a day. I average between 7 and 9k, at least until after November 17th. My internal editor tends to catch most of my errors, although some of the typos I catch when I reread are amusing. And, unless something in 'real' life interferes, I stick to that schedule like glue. I tend to work on only one writing project at a time, using my rewrite time for whatever project is next up for release or submission. That allows me to concentrate solely on one plot, one set of characters, one world.

I immerse myself in it. I breathe it. Sometimes I dream plot resolutions. Sometimes, I dream scenes and have to get up and write them THEN. I just let it take over, and when it does lots and lots of words result. I'm not special; I'm just obsessed. If you factor in a few stops to blog, or to make a few posts, or to answer emails (I'm an addict!) or even just to stretch or fire up the heating pad again, I get rejuvenated and go right back to work. I stop and worry about the finer aspects of writing once the story is on the page.

In the end, it doesn't matter if I get the tea. In the end, it matters that I have a story I can work with. Once Terella reaches the horror which is the first rewrite, I may feel differently about the project. But, for right now, I can just let the story explode and hope that I type quickly enough to keep up with it.