Moving! Again!

Hi guys! Just a quick note to let you all know we're moving today, and life is crazy as usual. I'm also blogging at my website address too, in case you missed some sweet author interviews.

Somehow I can't quite give up this blog, though, nostalgia and all. I can't quit you, Blogger!

So that's the scoop!

What's up with you guys? Ready for the holidays yet? *snicker*

Question: Should You Rewrite Every Trunk Novel?

My friend Joe and I were talking about rewriting old trunk novels. He's in the middle of redoing several books he's already finished, and me...well, you know me. I've done several rewrites with various results.

It got me thinking. There's trunk novels I've written that I still love, despite how broken they are. Every book really does teach you something, and if I didn't love something about it, I wouldn't have written it in the first place. I look back on them fondly, but realize that no amount of revision would save those books. If I ever wanted to unearth the premises and characters, I would have to start from scratch.

But should you?

Is it really necessary to rewrite every good idea you've ever had? A certain amount of reusing old ideas is going to happen no matter what, so parts of those books will live on. But maybe at the end of the day, it's necessary to let go of an idea, a setting, a group of characters, no matter how awesome they are, and move on.

I don't think I'm going to redo every book I've ever written. Sometimes you just have to put them in a trunk and call them done. It's sort of freeing, when you let it go like that.

What do you think? Would you go back and redo every good idea you have, or just let them be training wheels?

Plotting

So for the last few weeks I have been working on my next novel. I definitely need a break after that extensive rewrite, so it was time to work on a new project.

The idea came easily. The characters too. It's just this darned plot that I seem to be having troubles with. At first I was shocked, and then I thought something was wrong with me.

And then I realized it's just part of writing. We tend to forget how hard certain parts of the process are after we've moved on. Or we approach a new project with a "this time it will be magical" frame of mind. I know I do. I get so excited about my idea and the characters that when I stall out, it baffles me. 

"What a second? Wait...this is starting to feel like...yes, yes that's it...WORK."

But it is. As fun as writing can be, there's still a process. Even if you're a panster you still have to come up with the idea. You have to think about the characters, and then figure out how to start the book. Even if you sail through this, you're bound to get to a part in the middle where things start to feel like work. 

But that's as normal as feeling like your writing is blessed by the Book Fairies (they do so exist, and you can't tell me otherwise). If everyone who could make coherent sentences could write a book, there would be tons of them.

Funny slightly off topic observation: there are a lot of people out there who don't know how to write well.

I am not talking about perfect grammar and complex sentences. I am talking about writing a short paragraph that puts their ideas together in a coherent fashion that reads better than something a third grader could write. 

I noticed this when I started getting emails from people (not my writer friends, so no one out there feel guilty). These people from my everyday life know how to speak proper English. They are relatively intelligent, educated people. Yet when I received an email from them, it sounded like something a third grader might write.


Some of the mistakes are just my pet peeves. Over use of text-speak (lots of LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!! for example). Not capitalizing the first word in a sentence. Cramming the sentences together without rhyme or reason. 


But most of it was the way those sentences read. I don't know how else to describe it, other than it looked like something you'd write in third grade. At first I thought these people were just being lazy, but then it dawned on me: they didn't write a lot in their daily life. These are people who didn't have to write something longer than a grocery list in years, and now suddenly there's this magical email thing. 


And just because you can talk well, doesn't mean you're going to automatically be able to write well. 


All of this is to remind us that writing is a skill. It truly is. It's a skill we hone every time we write blog posts about Book Fairies, every time we think about our character's conflict, every time we, you know, write. 


P.S. I have valiantly checked, and rechecked, this post for typos. I always do, but since I was talking about writing skill it seemed extra important to make sure I didn't do something silly. Yet, it is early and I am so very tired. So I apologize for any typos in this post, and shall submit myself to the Grammar Police if there are any typos that escaped the purge. 

The Great Sleep Deprivation Experiment

I am so tired right now I feel like a zombie. I also suspect I will be coming up with more creative metaphors for feeling tired, especially after I have my baby, or as I like to call it The Great Sleep Deprivation Experiment.

Here's the thing: I don't do well on lack of sleep. I just don't. I've always been like that. I usually get between 8-9 hours of sleep. How you might ask? I make sure to go to bed early or sleep in. Sleep is a priority to me, because I know how I am when I don't get enough. When you have a physically tiring job like massage therapy, it's hell if you haven't gotten enough sleep. 

Now that I've gotten pregnant the hours of sleep have increased, but also sort of not. I wake up in the middle of the night more (but not as much as I will in the coming months). I wake up early in the morning and can't fall back to sleep despite laying there for an hour. Today I just decided I couldn't lay there anymore and got up early. I was going to be tired anyway, I might as well get up. 

The kicker is I know this is nothing compared to having a newborn, but I guess I'll learn how to take a nap, right?

Last night I toured the maternity ward at the hospital. It was great. I got a lot of my questions answered, questions I am having a hard time finding answers to (like, how long am I going to be in the hospital after the delivery? Two days, if I don't need a C section. Will I get to keep the baby in the room with me or not? Yes, but there's also a nursery I can check the baby in if I need to sleep or take a shower. It's like a baby library.). I know I can Google stuff, but it all depends on the hospital and polices and then you find this website where people are sharing their horrible labor stories and it makes me want to pull all my hair out. So I have been wary of the Internets and their awesome power of information. 

But still, there are all these nagging questions I somehow must find answers to. Did you ever just not study for a big test? You were lazy and didn't bother. You forgot. Whatever the reason, you're sitting with a huge test in front of you and you are totally unprepared.

That's sort of how I feel right now. A lot of these baby questions have no clear answers to them. Like the pacifier thing. I don't want to shove a pacifier in my kid's mouth every time s/he gets fussy. I don't want a crutch. But on the other hand, I've read in books they reduce the risk of SIDS. How, I don't know. They are just supposed to. 

There's also the drugs during labor thing. I have a very high pain threshold. Very high. My jaw was locked open for three days and I didn't take any of the Percocet they gave me because I took one at the hospital and started hallucinating. I got a second hole pierced in my ears, and one side got infected badly enough to engulf the earring stud. That was a fun conversation. I come home from school and Mom says I've lost an earring. I say no, touching the two earring backs, I haven't. We check my earlobe more closely, and presto! The magic disappearing earring! The doctor had to cut it out of my head, and didn't give me an anesthetic beforehand (he was a swell guy). 

But I so don't want to test this pain threshold thing with natural childbirth. Just...no. I want something to take the edge off labor pains. I am not on board with a completely natural childbirth. Nothing against those brave souls who have done natural childbirth, but yeah I'd rather not test that pain endurance.




However, I would really rather not have an epidural. I don't like the idea of being numb from the waist down, and the midwife has to tell me when to push. I don't like the possibility of low back pain for the rest of my life. An epidural can also make the baby really sluggish. I want to experience the birth at least a little bit.

See, these are sort of important questions. And they aren't half of the decisions you never realize you have to make. Let the baby sleep in the room in a bassinet with you or not? Circumcision or not? Should I take a breastfeeding class or will the support from the Lactation consultants at the hospital be enough? Also, my best friend's mom was a Lactation consultant for year, so I can get extra help from her.

And our living space! We thought about trying to get a house, but might wait until my husband gets further into training. We have a two bedroom apartment, but the second bedroom is full. My desk, my husband's desk, we have a daybed, two bookshelves and a filing cabinet. We can either put things in storage/consolidate, or check and see how much more a three bedroom apartment would be. 


I actually felt sort of like this when I really got into writing. There were so many agents! Genres! Publishing considerations! Suddenly the entire publishing world opened up it's yawning maw and I was swallowed whole. I am trying to avoid this with the baby. Because this stuff might feel like a big deal, but I know it's not. I'm not going to know what I want to do until I get to that situation most of the time. 

It's very much like writing that first rough draft. There's a lot of trial and error, a lot of doing what seems like a good idea and what feels right.



I just hope the baby turns out better than my first rough draft.


I also hope this post makes sense, because I think I have fallen asleep.


What events have you experienced that you didn't feel completely prepared for?

Once More with Feeling: Starting Over on a Half Finished Draft

Today I am starting over on a book I have about 20,000 words of already. I set it aside in November, sure it was a steaming pile of garbage. Happily I read through it a few weeks ago, and it's not as bad as I thought.

This last week or so I have been preparing to start over on a book I was in the middle of writing. It's no easy feat. In the interest of saving you some grief, here are some ideas/guidelines to help you along, should you find yourself treading a new path in an old forest. 

1. Figure out what went wrong the first time.
When deciding to rewrite a book, or pick up a half-finished manuscript, it's important to know why you put it down in the first place. You had a good reason to set the manuscript aside the first time, and sadly, the book elves have not fixed those problems while you were off doing other things. 


If the problem was something like being super busy or sick, chances are you're doing a little better than those of us who stopped because we didn't know enough of the plot to carry us through the rest of the book (like me). 

2. Make a plan of action.
If your problem turned out to be lack of conflict or stale characters, make a plan of action of how you're going to fix that. Develop the characters or plan out the plot a little bit. Anything to keep you from reading up to where you left off and saying, "Hmmmmm what now?" Hopefully the time off from your book has given you some distance. Now isn't the time to edit the life out of the half finished book, but to figure out why you staled out. Like any other outline or plan for a book, chances are it's going to change once you get back into the book, but that's okay. Having a plan now will keep you from losing steam later.


3. Figure out how much of the original draft is salvageable.
Here's where your personal preferences might vary, so take this with a huge grain of salt. You need to figure out how much of the draft to keep, but personally, I don't think now is the time to start editing. Editing a half finished book isn't really going to do anything for you, and you might get stuck on commas and word choice and less on finishing the story.

Your objective while looking over your partial draft is to figure out how much, if any, is worth saving. This will also depend on how far into the book you actually got before jumping ship. For me, that first 20,000 was pretty solid. I wrote the scenes I knew I needed to be there, but stalled out when I couldn't figure out how to get the characters where they needed to be next. 


BUT. I am also planning on changing the POV from multiple first to multiple third, adding in an extra POV, and changing one of the current POV character's personality. So while the scenes are okay, there's going to be a lot of changes to the original draft. 


I've gone back and forth whether or not I wanted to make those changes, or let what I have stand now and change it during editing. I finally decided to go ahead and rewrite the scenes. Because a) it's not that far along into the story and b) making those changes will give me a better feel for my characters as I see them now.


However, if all you're doing is adding in another character, and tweaking some events, and your half finished manuscript is something like 50,000 words long, you might consider simply letting it stand as is, and fixing the errors in revision. It's really a personal call. Consider how long your draft is now, and the magnitude of the changes you plan to make. For me, if I am changing a few characters around, and adding in another, that's a change of large magnitude. I like to see how the characters come together, and how they act towards one another. Skipping over the crucial introductory scenes has never worked well for me in the past (one time I decided to skip two crucial characters meeting each other, and went straight for when they were being the best of buds. Turns out, the characters couldn't stand each other. Had I started with their introductory scenes, I would have saved myself some grief).


4. Plan new stuff.
This sounds a little weird, but hear me out.


You're going to be working on a book you've already started. That initial spark of "this is the bestest idea EVAR" is probably gone. You've already stalled on the book once. Not such a great track record when going back to write a book.

So try to re-imagine the book now. Even if you've taken only a few months off, you're a different person than you were before. Don't assume you can simply sit down with the old outline and just punch out the book as you originally saw it. Figure out why you stopped in the first place, but also add some new spice to the book. Maybe a new character, or a new location. Allow yourself to brainstorm for new events and ideas. You're still in the creative process of writing a book, so allow yourself to be creative. Giving yourself some new and cool things to look forward to in the draft will help you from feeling bored with the book.

What about you? How do you approach starting over on a half finished project? Any advice for me? Other than lots of chocolate of course.