Weekly Check-In

Despite this being the last few days of the Savvy Boot Camp, it was a lazy week.  I read Kiss of Snow instead of sleeping, and slept instead of writing, and as soon as the clock rolled over to June 1st all responsibility to write like the wind was gone.  We still don’t know the results for who won the boot camp, but it was a close race to the end.  June is the month that I want to do revisions rather than writing, but I’m still writing.  I got off to a good start, but I’ll talk about that below.

I haven’t been talking about A Round of Words at all, and for that I fail.  I haven’t forgotten that I’m working on that challenge, but I haven’t been as mindful of updating my progress on it.  I solved that yesterday.

Blogging.

Judging by the twitter conversations and the comments left on Suzan’s blog and here I would say that the Let’s Talk About Sex series is off to a good start.  We discussed underwear and what that says about your characters.  Suzan took the girly side and I discussed all things buff and hunky.  This week we’re talking about heat levels and language particular to the romance genre.  While a lot of people already know this stuff, not everyone does and it’s good to talk about it.  We’re also having a blast while we’re at it, so that’s all that really matters.

Revising.

I started revisions on Rescue Me – again.  These were pretty light, going over what one of my critique partners suggested.  A lot of it was grammar, and of that commas.  I have comma issues.  I conquer the apostrophe and now the comma and I are at odds!

I’m really happy with Rescue Me.  I have it up over at Book Country for review if anyone is a member there and feels like giving me some feedback.  I plan to submit it next month after I take my submission package class and hammer out the submission details.  I’m less confident about those, but that’s the reson behind taking the classes!

This weekend I broke open Decoy.  I’m almost halfway through it and hoping to be done with this first pass in a few days.  It’s kind of ugly at this point and there’s a lot of red, but I’m hoping that in the end it will pay off and it will rock.  I’m crossing my fingers that I finish this draft Tuesday or Wednesday and then the super picky stuff starts.

Plotting.

Um, I’m kind of stalled out on plotting.  I’m worried that letting an idea stew this much is a bad idea.  I get bored of the shiny and move on to something else.  I still like the idea and I want to write it but it’s not a driving desire of want any more.  I’m afraid that this is bad.  Very bad.

I replotted my superhero story I was supposed to write during Boot Camp.  It’s a whole new idea and more naughty than the original, but again I waited too long to write it.  So I’m going to write the naughty one and just go for it.  If it flops in the draft process it flops and I’ll move on.

I plan on doing more reading this month to get myself in a place to write certain things.  We’ll see how this goes!!!

Writing.

Yeah, so since it’s June I’ve slacked on writing….

Project: Booty-Call Bust
Genre: romance
Type: novella
Progress: I had an idea for this while watching Deadliest Warrior, of all things.  The story is actually at a very interesting part, so it shouldn’t be hard to jump back in and hopefully hammer it out soon.  My problem is that I’ve been distracted by being lazy.  And revising.  I’m going to attempt to write 1-2K a day on this a day this week in tandem to doing revisions.  It’s not a lot, I know, but I want to keep the ball rolling and finish this sucker.

What I read.

• Kiss of Snow by Nalini Singh

Saying goodbye to Borders

There is a lot of discussion about Borders filing Chapter 11 and closing 200 stores.  I’m not talking about that so much as how it is saying goodbye to a place that fostered a new love.  There are plenty of bloggers who explain what’s happening to the book seller better than I could.  Here are a few:

• Wall Street Journal
• New York Times
• Pimp My Novel does a great two part explanation of what this means and what it could pave the way for. (Part I – Part II)

We got the news pretty fast that our favorite Borders was closing down.  I don’t think it really sank in until this morning when I was reading Paperback Writer.  I started thinking about the first time I visited that Borders.  It was NaNoWriMo ’09, my first year and I was hesitantly visiting all the nearby write-in’s in the hopes of meeting new people, writing some words and making some good memories.

3 of the now 6 #writersdatenight girls at the NaNoWriMo '10 kick off

I met a lot of people there, several of whom have become my fellow #writersdatenight crowd and Book Addicts friends.  After NaNoWriMo the weekly critique group started up again.  They met in the cafe at that Borders and since I was already hooked on writing and the idea of writing books, I started going and participating in the critique group.

Eventually schedules changed and I couldn’t attend the critique group, but several of us were such good friends that we wanted a weekly chance to get together anyways.  Since we met over writing, it seemed logical that writing would be involved in whatever it was we were doing.  So began #writersdatenight.

Each week we get together, eat at the deli, spend several hours writing, and then walk next door to indulge in a book, or whatever new releases are out.  In a lot of ways, that Borders fostered what has become my writer and reader support system.  I might be saying goodbye to the entity that made the opportunity for me to be where I am today, but we’ll continue, and so will Borders.  Hopefully they’ll pick up the pieces and move on as well.

Eric, from Pimp My Novel, in his second blog about the bankruptcy talks about the room made for savvy indie stores to step into the holes left by Borders.  I would really like to see this happen.  In late 2010 the biggest indie store in the DFW area closed it’s doors and relocated even further away.  I have yet to visit the store, and wouldn’t see a point to if it weren’t for a book release party of an author I’m friendly with.  If a new indie store opened that was even just a half hour drive for me - I would drive that far at least!

The world needs books and places where people can browse all the shiny covers and buy their very own piece of the word pool.

Be Careful Who You Make Angry

So the other day I realized that Valentine’s Day was very near.  Great, huh?  Oh well!  Nothing earth shatteringly huge was happening so I went on with my bad self and checked out twitter – where I found a link for this very intriguing contest.  Larissa Ione was proposing that people submit the names of their crummy ex-boyfriends to be the names of people she will be killing off in her third Lords of Deliverance book.

Well of course I had to submit my two worst boyfriends!

One is guilty of trying to pressure me to have sex with him and then dumping me in the middle of the city at midnight and leaving me.

The second cheated on me with three other girls behind my back and tried to schedule our canoodling time around his WoW schedule.  Oh, and it’s his friends who rated him out because they liked me better than him.

And today, because I’m lame and haven’t been checking blogs, I get an email saying one of my ex’s is going to be killeded in a smexy book!!  I decided that I’m thrilled, ecstatic, and overjoyed at this news.  Thank you, Larissa Ione, I now need to own all your books.

This just goes to show that you really do need to be careful who you anger, and the things you do to people.  You could very well be immortalized in fiction as the lame guy who dies the pathetic death.  Not that I know that’s how my ex will die, I’m just throwing out something non-heroic.

*side note, Eternal Rider is the first of the Lords of Deliverance books and will be out in April 2011.  As I understand it, my ex will die in book three.  Happy reading!

I will not be number four, five or six hundred, Mr. Frey

Sometimes, you just see something and you have to say no.

Just no.

You might remember a situation with an author who was on Oprah with a shocking memoir about the difficulties he’d experienced in his life.  After some investigation, it was proven that his memoir was nothing but a bushel of lies.  For those details, you can reference this article on NY Times.

Until I started looking into this new movie made from a book called I Am Number Four, I would never have connected these two things.  However, it is James Frey, author of that fictitious memoir, who is behind the book and movie.  All it took was one tweet on my part to unearth a very disturbing picture behind the production of this book and movie.

You can read the full expose on New York Magazine written by a student from Columbia who almost got sucked into the black hole that is James Frey.

In short, James Frey wants to create an artists sweat shop where authors churn out easily marketable books on a system that is very similar to Hollywood’s work for hire system.  However, he pays hardly nothing and exploits young writers ideas and desire to see their stuff in print, and isn’t apologetic at all for it.

There have been plenty of other authors and authorities more established than I am that have spoken out about this.  You can do a quick internet search in google and discover the extent of the uproar fairly easily.  There’s information out there about the fiasco that this has caused.

I’m not going to talk about that.  James Frey, from what I understand of him, is many dirty words I will refrain from saying in a public forum.  Nothing is gained from establishing that yet again.  I pity the writers who have signed up for something like Full Fathom Five, which is the program Frey set up for writers to write for him and push content out of.  These are probably people who just want to get their novels published, stick their foot in the door, and live their dream.  That’s what really gets me, is that these people have signed up to be taken advantage of.

I won’t be going to see I Am Number Four, I won’t read the book, and I will consciously make an effort to not read or purchase a book produced by that entity.

Writing Tools

I started to talk about tools while doing my World Building blogs, but realized it was too much of a tangent, so this blog is a supplement to that series, as well as general housekeeping-for-writers advice.

There are several different schools of thought for what program to write your novel in.  I’ve found that some people don’t really care while others will fanatically try to draw you into their cult-of-whatever.

I use Word simply because it has all the fancy tools I could ever hope to want when simply writing words and it’s easy to track my daily progress as far as words written.  Not all programs have a spell check, which is why I prefer Word over another free program, yWriter.

Now, I do use yWriter during NaNoWriMo because I don’t want to be distracted with things like misspelled words, sentence fragments or anything fancy at all.  However, yWriter has some seriously cool organizational tools.  In each project, or novel in the program, you have tabs to record important Items, Locations, Characters, Notes and divide your scenes and chapters up for easy navigation.  You can even keep track of each Scene as far as the Goal:Conflict:Outcome, or the day and time.  yWriter is provided free by Spacejock.

Scrivener has been out for some time for Mac users, but as of late 2010 there is a Beta version out for Windows based programs.  Currently you can use the Beta version from update to update without having to pay for it, but eventually it will be a program to buy.  I wrote in Scrivener for a while, and I think that when they settle on it and put it out for sale I might try it again.  There are some things that I didn’t like very much, but it gives you a lot of options for keeping research notes, characters, pictures and note cards on hand in one handy program.  It’s worth downloading the Beta and testing out!

The one program I am almost fanatical about is Microsoft’s OneNote.  You divide your projects up into Notebooks with tabs.  A lot of people organize and use it in different methods, so I’ll spare you how I set mine up.  It’s a handy program to paste and organize things in.  One of the things that stole my heart about it is that it saves automatically. You. Never. Ever. Have. To. Press. Save.  Because it’s already saved it for you!

This bit isn’t a program, it’s a template provided free of charge by the amazing Lynn Viehl, author of science fiction and romance and tons of other genres.  On the Freebies section of her blog, she has her Novel Notebook template in .pdf format for free.  I’ve copied this and pasted it into OneNote to create a template.

Dropbox.  Oh man, how my life was incomplete until I found out about this!  Dropbox allows you to have a shared file between computers.  You can even share that file between several computers, or even lots of your friends!  You can trade music, video files, documents – anything!  It’s super handy and you don’t have to keep those USB drives handy.

So those are a few programs and freebies I’ve used.  I’m going to use the Lynn Viehl template and walk through parts of it in my blogging series.

Hope that’s helpful!

More Hosting Issues

I know that those who are coming from cidwrites.com must be wondering why the sudden change.

The answer is that I’ve had a lot of hosting issues over the last year and finally I got tired of paying for services I was not receiving and having continuous problems with my website.  It shouldn’t be this difficult, really.  So, I’m going to be switching to a free site for a while, lick my wounds, decide what I want to do as far as my website.  I’m going to try to transfer all my old posts over here, but no promises unfortunately.

Well, other than those issues, I’m experiencing these lovely rolling power outages thanks to the fluke weird weather storm. So – I’m going ahead and posting this now before the power goes out – yet again!

To Florida!

Bright and early tomorrow morning I’ll be headed to Florida for work stuff, so considering that I’m just now sitting here having lunch and thinking about packing, it’s a decent thought that I won’t be around much.

Until the weekend!

Talking about my eReader

I haven’t really talked about my eReader – except that I got it and have been reading on it and put my own stuff on it to read through. So I thought I would pause the regularly scheduled program to make some comments about the sony daily ereader!

When I first started considering an ereader, the thing I was questioning was the way the pages flip. They blip a little between one page and the next. When I was previewing different ereaders that bothered me – a lot. Now, after reading several books on my ereader – it doesn’t bother me at all.

I think possibly what I like the most about the ereader is the instant gratification factor. Finished the first book in the series you’re reading? Buy the second with a tap of a finger! Except for setting up my list of books to review for January I’ve kept myself to a system of buying only the book I want to be reading right now. This is a good move since it’s cutting down on the number of books I grab and buy. That’s one reason why I end up with 70 books sitting around my apartment to read! Instead I just have a massive Wish List that I scroll through and pick something from.

Specifically to the sony eReader, I love the collections feature. I can create a “shelf” of certain books. I use this to group books that are arcs, fit a certain designation, or the most frequently in use – my Short List shelf with all of the books I want to read in the immediate future.

I have yet to really mess with the drawing or ebook capabilities, but reading on the daily is a lot of fun.

The size is a little cumbersome at times, so I find myself shifting my hands a lot. I need a booklight as well. Every now and then the screen lags on commands, but for the most part it works like a dream!

I didn’t think I would convert to the ebook team, but there’s just something so very convenient about the size of the ereader as opposed to all the space books take up in my apartment. I’m not going to stop buying physical books, but I’m more selective about what I purchase in hardcopy.