Year's Firsts.

WooHoo! First rejection of the year! But it was a nice, personalized one from F&SF. So wrong to call this 'rejection." Off to send that story elsewhere.

Are your stories out looking for a home? If so, congrats to you! If not, why not??

Check!

I got my first payment check yesterday for words I've written.  It's an amazing feeling.  So many years of practice, workshops, flattening my butt on at least a half dozen different computer chairs.  Novels, shorts, stories long since lost or abandoned, hundreds of thousands of words of fantasy that will never see the light of day because I needed that million words of crap before I could begin to make real progress.  Learning to connect with a reader.  Learning to find a balance between my internal editor and my dreams.  Learning to educate myself, because so much of the education of a writer happens either entirely from the inside or by deliberately, through an act of will and trust, separating the ego from the written word long enough to accept a professional opinion.  Learning who trust and when, especially myself (and when not to trust myself.)

The kewlest part of all this?  It's a beginning.  A long road to travel to begin, but that's the nature of this, and many other crafts.

A Dove Gray Disappointment

I received a rejection from the wonderful Nelson Literary Agency for my partial of Masks.  I'm disappointed, but also I'm aware that they have to be very, very selective.  They get so many queries, so many partials, so many manuscripts that if I was asked for a full manuscript I'd be very, very surprised (and delighted!)  They reminded me in the rejection that these things are subjective, and after Nathan's contest I can agree heartily.  I'm not taking it personally.  But the stars that danced in my eyes the past few days have fallen to earth.  Time to start my weekly query schedule again.  Hopefully I'll be looking at stars again soon!

Eyeing The End

Hit 81 pages on my script today. That's 17010 words (give or take) in word count speech. Only 3000 words left to go. And in two days. Heck, I've come up from behind from much farther during NaNo, so I'm not sweating the next two days at all.

It helps that I had a rather chatty character show up in the last scene. I never thought the Queen of England would be so chatty, but she was. She really wants to stage the show. And she was so much fun to write, I was tempted to let her. But I got through the scene and even stayed on subject and ended up two more pages along than I planned. Always a bonus. I'm trying to figure out a way to have the Queen make another appearance before the end.

I'm very close to the end now, too. I'm debating about having one more pass at an attempt on my heroine's life (which would be giggles of fun). Just one more, so my dashing first mate can save her. Or rather come in to find her saving herself and clean up the mess. Hee.

And then I get to blow up many ships. Fun.

I'm still enjoying this whole scripting process. And I'm already considering ideas for the rewrite. Yup, I'm going to take a week off from the script and then turn around and start on it again. But this time I won't have to nail myself in front of the typewriter with only the script. I can pick up Mummy Case again and Warrior Storm and another idea I've been toying with (because I'll have one story off the rough draft list, so it's time to add a new one, right?). It's actually an older idea that I've had a couple of failed attempts at, but I've had some new inspirations.

The one thing Script Frenzy has absolutely proven for me is that I like my pace of three to five pages a day and the freedom to work on whatever story is on hand that strikes my fancy for that day. I keep proving to myself that I can knuckle under and work on just the one story but it isn't my favorite way to write. So . . . I've decided I won't be participating in NaNo this year. Four years is good for me (hey, that's like going through High School, right? I'm graduating). But I'll be free to serve as cheering section and sounding board for any INKers who will be doing it again!

And I'll be encouraging you to give Script Frenzy a try next year!

63037 words

I've hit another landmark in Masks.

I'm now in totally new territory, and that feels fabulous and freeing. Well, I'm not going to deviate too terribly from the original plot, but the devil, and apparently temptation and satisfaction, are in the glorious details.

Sometimes a flash of reasoning or experience comes along, or something outside that gives a moment of inspiration. Facing the inevitability of death last night (this happens from time to time) and on this particular night, the fact that I would have to go onward alone, brought in huge waves of inspiration and insight into Mark's needs and pain. He is, more than any other character I've written, desperately alone and when he leaves his emotionally bereft shelter he is even more alone.

So when he's bonded as a jester, he's no longer alone, and that moment became huge. It also became more spiritual, thanks to some ideas that ambled into my brain at a convenient time about the spiritual world and what one possibility might be like, then tweaking that into the Masks universe.

I also managed, for once, to end the chapter on a cliffhanger. I don't have many habits from short story writing, especially since I'm not much good at short story writing, but one habit that clings is the one where you end on a resolution rather than an unresolution. Scenes don't have as much a problem as chapter endings, my chapters being roughly short story length. My mind takes me to the end of the chapter where something has resolved, and I don't continue past the point of resolution because that seems unnatural. I want to end it there and continue onward in the next chapter to the following related idea, sometimes with a transitionary idea that keeps the book unified. I think this habit may also come from essay writing (I think I may be better at essays than short stories but who can ever figure out what they're good at anyway?) where each paragraph is a complete idea that gently leads to the next idea with transitionary sentences. There is a minor resolution in each paragraph, and then the whole essay ends in a complete resolution with maybe a few unresolved questions--they'd better be unresolved for a reason and in there in the first place for a reason if you want a good essay--hanging about for intrigue.

One of my tasks when I go to polish this beastie is to check out, in a mechanical way, beginnings and endings of chapters and look at the structure and length of the chapters. I'm not really looking forward to that. The idea that I might have one less chapter end to fuss with is a relief and a pleasure, and now I can go outside and garden with a sense of a job somewhat done.