Tag Archives: Writing

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.

Posted on April 26, 2008 | 1 comment

I just cut about a thousand words from Meet the Larssons, because I realized that I did something to one of the main characters that either I shouldn’t have done, or shouldn’t have done yet. So I moved the original versions of the last two chapters I’d written (Chapters 23 and 24) into the Research folder of my Scrivener project file, and copied them back to salvage what I can (which, thankfully, is most of Chapter 23 and about half of Chapter 24). It’s not that I like going backwards, but it could have been much worse.

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Random Thursday Update

Posted on April 24, 2008 | Leave a comment

It’s been heating up at The Firm lately, which is one of the reasons I haven’t been posting as frequently. People get sued, people need suing (“Why’d you do it?” “He needed suin’.”), one of the senior partners gets hired, and eventually I get a phone call and my blogging dries up for a bit. This is just a quick update to kickstart my blogging muscles.

I’ve also been trying to make some progress on Meet the Larssons, which I put aside a few weeks ago in the push to finish the first draft of “Test Tube Beneficiary” and then get through the revisions. I’m back into it now, though, and I think it’s coming along. I’m going to have to change the name of the family at the center of the book though — I only noticed it recently, but one character, Astrid Larsson, has the same name as one of the main characters in S.M. Stirling’s Emberverse Trilogy. There’s no similarity between MTL and Mr. Stirling’s books, but it’s an easy enough change for me to make (hit REPLACE ALL and we’re done!). As a working title, though, I think I’ll leave it as Meet the Larssons, at least for now. It’s past 65,000 words, and I think I’m on track to meet my goal of finishing the first draft by the end of June. That will depend on how crazy things get at the office.

As for TTB, after three passes through it (two hand markups on paper, then one more set of revisions as I typed in the first two), I managed to cut a whopping 110 words, net — I cut a lot more than that, and but I added enough that it was effectively a wash. Between Passover and other commitments, I haven’t been able to get it into final shape to submit, but I expect to get that done in the next week or two. I accomplished Step One, buy more printer paper, on Monday

That’s enough for now. My blogging muscles are all wobbly. I’ll try to think of something interesting to say for tomorrow.

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Response to Weekend Assignment #212: Celebrate Poetry Month

Posted on April 20, 2008 | 11 comments

I’m no poet, but Karen at Outpost Mavarin has assigned us to write a poem to celebrate National Poetry Month, and in the interest of building character, I’ll give it a shot. In the interest of getting it over with, I’m going to go with haiku, because I think I can handle seventeen syllables of verse.

Dark early morning

bed shakes, I leap up and stand,

hear glasses clinking

In honor of the Great Chicago Earthquake of 2008.

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I Must Be Almost Done Editing…

Posted on April 15, 2008 | 2 comments

because I’m starting to HATE Test Tube Beneficiary.  I’ve been through it twice since Saturday morning, marking my changes using Pen and Paper v. 1.0.  I’ll type them in tonight, then print off a clean copy for Mrs. Unfocused to review.  If at all possible, I want to get TTB out the door by next Monday; otherwise, there’s a very real possibility that I’ll feed it to the shredder.

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I Hate Editing.

Posted on April 12, 2008 | 6 comments

I finished the first draft of Test Tube Beneficiary three weeks ago. I haven’t looked at since, because I wanted to give myself some distance. But it’s time to start editing, revising, and generally hacking away at it to get it into shape for submission. Last night I printed off a hard copy and marked up the first two pages.

Then I fell asleep.

This is going to take awhile.

I’m trying to keep in mind the advice Stephen King (I seem to refer to him a lot, but why not? he’s written a lot of good books) received from an editor who rejected one of his early short story submissions. I can’t find the quote in my copy of On Writing, but 37signals quotes the book the way I remember it:

Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: “Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”

Enough stalling. Time to get the knife and start cutting. I hope I can use the scalpel, and not the ax.

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And Now For Something Completely Different: Insomnia.

Posted on April 7, 2008 | 5 comments

I have never had any trouble falling asleep. I see television commercials for Lunesta or Ambien, and they don’t make any sense to me at all. I’ve been practicing law for 13 years, and a handful of times I’ve woken up in the middle of the night and stressed out about something, but I can’t remember the last time I got into bed and simply lay there, unable to fall asleep. Normally, the amount of time it takes me to fall asleep is immeasurably short; a “long time” is five minutes. (One exception: I often have trouble falling asleep in hotel rooms, for a variety of reasons that boil down to being uncomfortable. Special case.)

All of this is to underline how unusual it was last night, more than half an hour after Mrs. Unfocused and I turned out the lights, for me to still be wide awake. I wasn’t panicking about anything, or stressed out. I was physically wiped out from chasing Unfocused Girl on her bike and Unfocused Junior on his scooter up and down the block all afternoon, and had nodded off on the sofa before coming up to bed. I had no good explanation for why I couldn’t sleep. We had gone to sleep a little earlier than usual, but not by much, and considering how tired I was, it shouldn’t have been a problem.

Finally, I slipped out of bed and went downstairs. I spent an hour on the novel, which I had ignored all weekend while my father was in town and we were out enjoying the weather. After about 800 words, I went back upstairs, and fell asleep within a couple of minutes. This morning, I’m exhausted, but at least I have something to show for it.

I’m hoping this was a one-time problem, and not the beginning of a serious problem, where I can’t sleep if I don’t write. There are going to be plenty of days when I’m too busy to work on the novel, and I can’t afford to kill a night’s sleep every time that happens. I’d try warm milk, but I’m lactose intolerant. Maybe next time, I’ll just take a Benadryl.

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April Weekend, April Blog Chain.

Posted on April 6, 2008 | 3 comments

The first weekend with real spring weather, at last! My father flew out for the weekend, and we had a good visit. Yesterday morning, we took the kids out front to ride their bikes on the sidewalk, both still with training wheels. After about 15 minutes, Unfocused Girl pulled up in front of me and asked me to take off her training wheels, because she said they were slowing her down. I could not get the wrenches fast enough. It took a little work, but she made it a few wobbly feet before we had to knock off.

We spent the afternoon at the nearby Park District Nature Center, walking the woods and wetlands. Tomorrow I’ll post some of the pictures Unfocused Girl took. She and Junior had a blast running up and down the trails.

This afternoon, Unfocused Girl was back on the bike. She can now ride the entire length of the block without help (she still needs me to hold the bike steady when she starts, though), but only SOUTHBOUND. Coming back up the block, she goes in bursts of five to ten feet, starting and stopping or falling down. Our block is perfectly flat, so it isn’t a question of incline. It’s very strange, but we’re working on it.

So there it is. Right up at the top of the list of great moments in parenting: when your kid comes to you and asks to have the training wheels taken off her bike.

Junior wants to use her training wheels for some kind of project. We’ll see.

I’ve joined the Absolute Write April Blog Chain. I can’t seem to get onto the Absolute Write website tonight, but it doesn’t look like it’s my turn yet. Here’s the list of participants (I’m third):

Auria Cortes

Polenth’s Quill

Unfocused Me

Spittin’ (out words) Like a Llama

Food History

Life In Scribbletown

For The First Time

Polyamory From the Inside Out

Livininsanity

Spynotes

A Wayward Journey

Virtual Wordsmith

I’m supposed to be preparing materials for a short speech I’m giving next week for work, so I should probably go back to that. After all, I don’t want to end up like these guys, although there’s really no danger of that, at least not from over-blogging.

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50K.

Posted on March 25, 2008 | Leave a comment

I just passed a milestone on Meet the Larssons: 50,000 words (50,083 as of 10:24pm CDT, to be exact). It’s a long way from done, but it’s moving along nicely. I have the word meter set for 100,000 as my target, and that’s probably right for the first draft. I expect to cut some of that in revision — maybe 10,000 words — not to make it shorter but because I’ve either overwritten some of the technical details (what we refer to at the firm as “lawyer stuff,” or would, if we weren’t charging for it) or just to tighten up the prose. I also expect to have to write additional scenes or partial scenes, so it may all net out even in the end.

My target when I’ve finally crunched through the editing process is somewhere between 90,000 and 110,000 words, which should be enough to tell the story without channeling James Michener (I should be so lucky). By no coincidence, this seems to be the range that editors and agents are looking for from a first-time novelist (at least according to Editorial Ass and Nathan Bransford; I also noticed that it’s what Scalzi hit with Zoe’s Tale).

Fifty thousand words is not just the halfway point for my target word count for MTL; it is also the target word count for NaNoWriMo, which I plan to use to hack through as much as I can of my second novel in November. Apparently, all I need to be able to do in November is knock out an average of three times as many words on the novel each day as I have managed for MTL.

No problem.

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I’m Done!

Posted on March 22, 2008 | 7 comments

The first draft of Test Tube Beneficiary is done, done, done. It’s my first complete work of fiction (not counting the flash fic I posted on my Fiction page last month — it’s still there, if you’re interested) in 16 years. Go, me.

I’m going to print it now, and go to bed.

Update (6:10pm): I published this post originally at 1:03am. I’m finally having my celebratory glass of wine. Most importantly, the Mrs. read TTB this morning, and gave it her seal of approval. I was (and am) very excited that she didn’t hate it — by the time I woke up this morning, I had convinced myself that it would need to be largely rewritten — and, despite the facts that she doesn’t particularly like science fiction and that I used to help her fall asleep by telling her about my cases, she really liked it. The only real issue is whether it’s actually science fiction: she thinks that it may be so near-future, and the extrapolation may be so subtle, that it doesn’t actually qualify as sci-fi. It’s not ready to send out yet — I need to take it through the revision process — but when it is, I’ll have to evaluate the potential markets.

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Test Tube Beneficiary: The Final Push

Posted on March 20, 2008 | 1 comment

Until Tuesday, progress on “Test Tube Beneficiary,” my short story in progress, had come to a halt while I tried to make some headway on the novel. On Tuesday, though, I brought my MacBook on the train and got a few hundred words written on TTB. On Wednesday morning, I rewrote the last couple of paragraphs I had written on the train home the day before, and realized that while I knew how the story was to end, I had no idea how I was going to get there.

I went to the gym over lunch and had a decent run (listening to I Should Be Writing on the iPod, natch), and by the time I was done with my shower, I had the roadmap to the finish. I stood dripping wet in the locker room with a towel wrapped around my waist, tapping away on the crackberry to get it all down in an email to myself (using Gmail so none of it ends up on the firm’s server).

Between the train home and what I wrote after the kids got to bed, I knocked out 2300 words yesterday. I did more on the train this morning. I’ll be done by the end of the weekend, if not before. Then — and this is the key, this is one of the big lessons from reviewing all those rejection slips — I’m going to have to edit the thing. But not before I open up a nice bottle of wine and celebrate a little.

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