Submitting and fear

On Saturday night, I submitted my first short story in several months. And it scared me.  It still does.

I don’t remember feeling like this before – sure, I’d get nervous, but I was always reasonably unconcerned about whether it was picked up or not. Other places to submit, other stories to write…

Now, however, it’s different. I’ve been outed, you might say, as a writer. It has been publicly acknowledged by a major publisher that I can write. So much so, they’re publishing my trilogy. This seems to have brought to life in me a fear of failure. I’m a writer. People expect me to write. Therefore, I should be selling stories. Every story I send out should sell.

This is patently stupid. People who have been at this game longer than I, have more success than I, get rejected. It’s not a judgement of them as a writer – it’s that particularly person making a call on that particular story. It doesn’t work for them. It doesn’t suit the rest of the stories in the anthology. They just bought a very similar story and can’t afford to have two of them.

I’ve been on that side of the ledger. I know that it’s about that story, not the writer. I’ve rejected good writers. I’ve rejected good friends, because the story wasn’t right for what I was doing. It never had me thinking “well, I guess the other people who have published them are wrong, and they can’t write”. It was just about that story.

I need to remember that, and not get scared of rejection, and keep writing and submitting the stories I want to see out in the world.

Changing plans

I had this week all sorted – Wednesday and Thursday were writing days, and then I’d be working Friday, Saturday, Sunday and in the evenings watching True Blood (Hubby will be away).

Then on Tuesday evening, just an hour before work finished, Nicole the Clutz struck again. I tripped over a pallet jack and in trying to stop my head from collecting the edge of the freezer, I almost wrenched my arm out of the socket. Ouch.

“Yeah, it’s sore, but no major damage, I’ll be fine,” says I as I get up Wednesday morning, barely able to move said arm. I changed the position of my chair so my arm was more relaxed and got typing. An hour and a bit later, I gave up. Mucho, mucho pain.

So, the plan was revised. I spent Wednesday reading (and hot, and pissed off that I wasn’t writing cause it’s not like I’ve got all the time in the world to get these books done), and then had a terrible night’s sleep (a bad shoulder and bruised leg are not conducive to comfortable resting). Yesterday, I decided to continue with the change of plans, and I’m now actually getting excited that I have.

Instead of writing, yesterday, I watched the first seven episodes of True Blood. Verdict? Well, apart from the fact that Anna Pacquin is just too cute for her own good, Bill isn’t resonating with me. I don’t know, but his vampireness is toooo obvious, if that sounds strange. I’m a bit confused – are vampires immediately recognisable, or not? I could go with the pale skin – what got me was the dark, brooding looks. The moment he walked in the bar, and started looking around, all dark and brooding, and then locked eyes with Sookie, my brain was screaming ‘vampire, vampire’. And those looks are sooo dark and brooding and, well dammit creepy, that I’m now having issues seeming him as the sex symbol he’s supposed to be. Will be interesting to see if he wins me over by the end of the series.

Instead of watching Sookie and Co after work today and tomorrow, I’m gonna try and write. I generally don’t write on the days that I’ve worked (unless I’ve got a late shift and so I write in the morning before hand). I’ve convinced myself I’m tired, and I’ve done my work for the day. Well now, I’m going to test those assumptions. If it turns out I can write after a day at work – will that free me up? Will inspiration come more easily if my mind knows it doesn’t have to wait a day or two or more before I’ll open up the novel? I’m looking forward to finding out.

I’m also looking forward to the scene coming up – the romance is heating up, baby! I LOVE this part of the book.

A question, and some random thoughts

Here’s the latest insight (as of about ten minutes ago) – I’ve decided there’s a damn good reason for having a trilogy written before finding a publisher, apart from having done all the work and making life easier for them. It’s because you never really know what’s going to happen in a story until you finish it, and a trilogy is a story over three books.

It was feedback from the fabulous Kaaren Sutcliffe over book two that planted this thought in my mind. Some of the stuff that she mentioned wasn’t working or that needed to be flagged better was stuff that either needs to be done in book one, or the clues made better in the first couple of books in order for the reader to go “ah, right” in book three. Particularly because of the fact each book is done from two new POVs.

So I’m now thinking that rather than drop book three, regardless of where I am on it, to work on book two in early December before the edits come for book one, I should keep working on and finish book three. So if I find there is stuff that needs to go into book one, or get tweaked there in order to suit the conclusion of the story in book three, I then have the chance to fix those things in the edit. However, if I leave finishing book three until January or February, as I was planning, and then find stuff that’s wrong in book one, well I’d have lost my chance to fix it.

So, what do you think? Makes sense to me.

Now, the random stuff:

* Went to see Amelia last night with Hubby. Apart from the fact have sworn to never get a seat in the front row again (too old for that), we both agreed there were issues with the storyline. We both thought that there were aspects of her life that would have been fascinating to see eg how a girl from Kansas became a pilot, but were never shown then and instead got the salacious stuff like the open marriage (oooooohhh). Hubby also commented on the lack of tension in some of the scenes, and that had me thinking – not enough tension is something Kaaren commented on in the book (it doesn’t get ratcheted up enough in her opinion) and this movie suffered that as well. There were lots of opportunities for tension – this is a dangerous occupation we’re talking about here – but it never went far enough. particularly when you consider that most of the audience would know the story, and therefore know what was going to happen. And the choice to have the final flight going throughout the movie (and the story of her life told in flashback) didn’t work, cause it diluted the tension of watching that flight and wanting to see how she felt and what went wrong and when she realised she wasn’t going to make it. So, tension. Hard to create, but oh so necessary.

* After a bit of a slow down, my reading has started to speed up again. At the beginning of the year, I set myself the task of reading 52 books in the year, in order to get myself back into the habit of reading (cause it had really, really, REALLY dropped off). I passed that benchmark on on November 11, when I finished reading A Book of Endings (which seems quite fitting for the last book, wouldn’t you say?). Except in looking back over the list, I realised that 13 of those 52 books were re-reads of old books. Now, that’s all very fabulous, and I enjoyed them (particularly re-disovering books like Little Women and What Katy Did), but I wondered if in all honesty they could count as part of the 52, since it’s not like it’s a challenge to read books you know and enjoy. I, of course, decided they couldn’t. So I found myself having to read another 13 books (so sorry Deb, but Book of Endings won’t be the last book). I’ve since read a few more, and am in the middle of book 56. That means I have nine books to read in five and a half weeks. That’s not even two books a week. And the books I’ve got lined up? The book of the moment, Jeff Vandermeer’s Booklife, and the first four Anita Blake books, and a Sookie Stackhouse short story collection are among the picks. Should breeze through those nine books.

* Last Saturday, I went and did some hot glass work at the Canberra Glassworks (costs just $55 to go in and work with some glass and make your very own paperweight). I picked it up on Friday and it’s mega-cool. I’ll try to figure out a way to photograph it, but it’s been put in the new display cabinet in the loungeroom (which could well become the Murphy household equivalent of the poolroom).

The timetable for the next couple of months (writing wise)

I’ve had a chat with my editor at HarperCollins, and we’ve established a few dates for when things are happening. Thankfully, they fit in pretty neatly with the way I wanted to do things, so yay me!

So, here’s my plan for what I’ll be doing until the beginning of February, at least. From now until the end of November, I have two tasks – one is to polish and submit a short story for an anthology, the other is to re-write as much of Chance and Reward (book three) as I can (so far, prologue and the first three chapters are done).

December 1 to 20, I have another two tasks – one is to re-work Freedom to Be (book two) according to the thoughts of my beta readers, and get another short for another anthology polished and submitted.

December 21, I’ll have the edits for Love in Control (book one) in my hot little hands. I will be working on those edits from then until the middle of January (or as soon as I get it done). Yep, no Christmas break for this little red duck. Once Love in Control is back at the publishers, I’ll have one last crack at Freedom to Be in order to meet its initial deadline of February 1. For at least two weeks of this period, I’ll be at Berry with my fellow Fantasy Writers on Retreat (FWOR) group, so hopefully they’ll help diffuse the worst of the insanity.

After which, I think I’ll collapse for a day or two, catch my breath and then start furiously back onto Chance and Reward, which is due at the publishers in June. And in between that, there will be proofing Love in Control, and structural edits on Freedom to Be.

Heaven help me if I come across an anthology I want to be in in that time. And could someone please tell Battle for Odana to just stay in it’s box? I’ll get to it later next year.

Growing as a writer

So yesterday, I read through Chance and Reward – book three of the trilogy. I haven’t looked at this book for pretty-much spot on six years – it was October 2003 that I did the last edit of it.

A lot has changed since then – for starters, back then I was calling the gadda the opear, and I didn’t have the other guardians as involved. As for the changes that have occurred in the last few years, such as the introduction of the Forbidden Texts and the overarching storyline… Although I did have a spin out moment when I came across a passage where Ione is talking to Hampton about the FT (as I’ve taken to calling them) and I sat for a moment and stared at the page and thought to myself ‘Hang on, did they exist before I invented them...’

Anyhoo, in order to work out what was going on in the story and what I needed to add, I sat down and wrote a description of each scene, what it was intending to do, and then in red pen how I needed to change it (yep, did all this on paper – for some reason, I need to do a lot of this thinking stuff on paper, with the story open on the screen in front of me).

It was an interesting experience – seeing where I was as a writer six years ago, and where I am now. In terms of my writing style, I can clearly see the basis there of where I am now. It’s not as descriptive, and I’m much better with using detail to add value to the words, but all-in-all it’s pretty similar. The sentence structure in particular is very familiar, and in fact I had moved away from it and gotten a bit “I can play with grammar cause I’m being creative” and I’m now moving back to this more simple, straight-forward style.

The characterisation is pretty good, but the plotting is a bit hap-hazard. Well, I’ve always known I was better at one than the other. I’m amazed by the number of short scenes I came across that seemed to do nothing but put a character in a place or with someone, in a sort of ‘here’s where they are, in case you were wondering’ scenario. Scenes that either did nothing for the plot, or didn’t explore what they were doing fully enough.

There are some aspects of the romance that I really like – scenes that will pretty much remain as they are. And there are other aspects that need refining – firstly from Hampton’s side, and later from Mina’s. They both seem to give in to a certain aspect of the relationship too quickly – I’ve set them up with lots of potential for tension (much more than either of the other two couples) and I need to not be afraid to go there.

So, for this re-write, I’ve ended up with the closest thing to a writing plan that I’ve ever had – it’s going to be interesting to work through this process and see how it affects my creativity.

Meta-documents and good news.

Inspired by both Tansy Rayner Roberts (http://tansyrr.com/tansywp/art-of-meta-document/) and Scott Westerfeld (http://scottwesterfeld.com/blog/?p=1899), I’m going to take advantage of the sweet spot I’m in with the trilogy to work on my own meta-documents for Balance of Power.

Right now, I’m waiting on edits for Love in Control, I’ve got people reading Freedom to Be and I’m about to dive into the first re-write of Chance and Reward. This, therefore, seems a perfect time to make sure I’ve got control over things like timelines, glossaries and so on.

It also is something that can be put down, so if the edits arrive I can easily get stuck straight into them, as opposed to starting writing Chance and Reward and then finding I have to put it aside, which I wouldn’t like doing.

So that’s the plan for this week.

And in other news – the announcement has just come through that the Federal Government has decided to maintain the status quo and make no changes to parallel importation restrictions. The press announcement from Minister for Competition Craig Emerson said that the Government wasn’t interesting in beginning a new spending program for authors (which the Productivity Commission said would be necessary to offset the negative impact of removing the restrictions on authors and publishers) and that with changes to technology it was pointless to make the changes at the moment (which was the argument I made in my submission to the Commission in January – yay me!). So, things will remain, Australian Publishers will continue to be in a position to support and grow Australian writing talent and hopefully I will soon see my talented friends in the same position that I am – panicking over dead lines :)

Writing and the loner

One comment that often comes up is that writing is a lonely, solitary business. Well, in terms of the fact that you are generally alone when creating the work, that’s true. However, I don’t find it lonely or solitary. Or maybe, what I should say is that I LIKE that it’s lonely and solitary.

I am an introvert, and as such I require time alone on occasion or I will go mad. Quite literally. I’ve gone within a hair’s breadth of it recently and am now feeling much revived and enthused after Hubby went away last Thursday and I’ve had hours – even an entire day – alone. Poor Hubby, at times very unwanted. So being a writer, having to lock myself away and just be with myself and the story, suits me to the ground.

I find, however, that it’s not lonely cause I always have the company of the characters. Generally it is solitary (which I’ve made clear I like), but I’m also lucky enough to have a wonderful writing group with whom writing occasionally becomes very much a social experience. When I stop and think about it, I’m not really creating the work alone – there are friends I talk with about it, friends who help me solve problems, friends who read it and offer their feedback.

I wonder how people who are extraverted, social types go with the hours required to lock yourself away from real human contact and work on your manuscript, particularly during the editing process when you can even lose the companionship of your characters as you delve in the minutiae of things like word choice. Perhaps it is from them that the idea of writing being lonely has come.

When I think of all the jobs I’ve had over the years – teaching, journalism, retail – all of which require near-constant social interaction, it’s no wonder that I’ve become so desirous of making fiction writing my career. A life where I have to be alone, nearly every day? Sounds blissful.