Since I moved to Florida, my blogs have been somewhat in disuse and now that I am back working on fiction, I figure I can do some more blogging. I often get asked what it is I do since no one really believes that anyone just sits and writes day in and day out. It's true I don't. Often I know what I want to write but the right words aren't there for me so I play games while I think, then write when the words are there. Many times I make a rough start, run out of words, play games until they come back, edit, play games until I know how to fix the piece, etc.
When I am problem solving I need to detach my brain from thinking about anything but the problem. Often I think about the problem without thinking about the problem by playing a game. It's a trick I learned while programming. I often would run into a difficulty, but if I just went to the bathroom, halfway there, the answer would come to me. Your back brain computes on problems like "what was the name of that guy we ate dinner with last week?" Things that you can't google. Instead your brain looks for all the hidden references and eventually comes up with the connection. I don't learn any more, either. I just learn where it is that has the information I need. Often in storing the connections I reach understanding about how the pieces fit together and so I remember it all in that fashion.
So in the past week, what I have been working on is planning mostly since I completed a large amount of work and needed to clarify what I thought I was working on and why and for whom.
I've been working on the last edits to my second novel. I had it edited during my move and I found that the editor introduced more errors into my novel than she fixed. Her premise was that it would work better as a young adult novel. Unfortunately, I wrote it as a novel about a community and for a slightly older audience even though I wanted it acceptable to young adults with permissive parents. Any one character didn't ever know what everyone was doing. The editor suggested deletion of important technology and setting. She did ask for a chronological story and the best I could do was two side by side chronologies, both going forward always from the beginning to the end. I did one whack at a fix and then my husband did a proofread and found a few typo'sthroughout here and there. The biggest change, though, that my husband found, was inconsistencies in my story dates and five chapters were out of order due to a number of reasons. How the story dates are presented has been an ongoing problem. I had them explicit, then made them implicit to work on an easier more flowing story, then made them explicit as a video collection, changed them to a news feed but both read more complicated so I am back to theoriginal explicit style and am finding the story reads without needing to look at the dates at all. Success, I guess.
I'm also working on short stories related to this second novel which may fit a number of calls for content so I've built a schedule for the rest of the month/year for that. These I've had to look for the research I did before and think about what the plot will be and how they should be built or revised. And did the research on some of the items.
I have four separate novels in work at the moment, and one short story collection outlined and another collection being built. One novel is a follow on to the first novel I wrote so I am writing short stories in that story line, especially with the hopes it will get published. One is a children's book that is made up of stories so I have 3 or 4 short stories in rough stages from that book and an outline I am following and an outer storyline begun. The other two started from the idea that I was going to build a trilogy and so I have been writing short stories for that, partly to copyright the characters and some of the technology. And as I take classes, instructors often ask for a certain type of scene or have an objective for writing. I try to fit those in with my the novels by having a topic list and an outline and a set of research materials for everything I am working on. Often these become a short story as I flesh them out. And because I am applying for an MFA program, I needed sample material that I assumed would be from what I planned to write so I built some of the work for those.
So my plan is to get the second novel out circulating to agents, publishers, and contests. And the short stories written to my schedule.
I also have three nonfiction books in work. My target was to just work the golf book this month but the wedding set me back two weeks. Oh, and do one sonnet a day since I am working on a collection of sonnets. I'm up to 8-10 and I need 20-25 but have another four in work at the moment and two I want to submit. I am also working on cleaning up my chapbooks as a potential book, and on two additional chapbooks, one on sffh poems, one on a reflective set of poems, one on teen trauma poems.
I've also worked on a number of articles behind the scenes. Typically, any time we travel, I get photos of where we stayed, where we went, and visit places that are on my target list for research. So my visit to Boston for my cousin's wedding produced much of that. I have an assignment at Yahoo on China articles and have researched quite a few topics that I find interesting but they don't happen to be the news of the moment--just interesting knowledge about the country in a variety of formats that need more facts to be ready. I also have worked some on taking some of my coursework at UCF and looked at altering them to be a article, doing some of the preliminary research. Plus I just started in at UCLA Extension on a class on writing articles for print publications--so I've been through Writer's Market looking at agents, conferences, and article types, read the 8+ chapters assigned for both weeks and looked through my available photographs. I have probably a dozen article in work, I just need time to flesh them out.
I also started painting my house. It is a color I don't really care for and is quite depressing to me. I like flowers and we're currently more like hedge. So we had the colors approved and I washed one side and began painting. My husband says we should hire it out and I think we may hire some of the work done. But I go crazy if I am forced to sit for endless hours and do nothing but write. So this is my outside work I get to do that isn't immobile. I want the house painted before I start a Masters degree because once I start I won't have time to do it. And I want some of this work that's been idling while I've been busy with classes at UCF to get completed so that I just package and submit until it gets accepted.
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