Category Archives: Blog

Spent the whole day working on The Stupid Novel. Brain is nearing a liquified state, but I’m  beginning to believe that the thing may have some small measure of merit. Also that I may be capable of stringing an adequate sentence together–when the fates align on a blue moon and I’ve got enough caffeine in my bloodstream.

Two-thirds through this revision/review pass of part 3. Hoping to start my pass on part 4 tomorrow

The yummy dinner the hubby cooked turned my brain sludgey. Calling it a night, but at least Stupid Novel part 2 is a wrap.

Y’know, I’ve always worked better on an empty stomach.  It’s why I rarely eat during the day, so I can get more done. Really, what more does one need besides caffeine and sugar?

Mostly through reviewing part 2 of The Stupid Novel (reference framey: the place I got stymied, which requiring me to go back and do this review pass, was the closing bridge scene of the last part, which is part 5).

Not feeling like I’m making great progress–cut something like 150 words–but I do feel like I’m making some progress.  More importantly, my characters are reminding me of who they are, and I’m remembering as well how I managed to get as far into this novel to begin with: I like this story, and I want to tell it. Always a good thing to remember.

There are even parts that haven’t sucked beyond suckitude. I’ll take what I can get at this point. Continue reading →

I sometimes get emails from folks with writing questions, and a lot of the questions I see have to do with marketing and getting feedback on their work—which is why I put together the Markets and and Workshops pages on my website (and unless we’re buds and I’ve agreed to critique something of yours, please don’t send me your unpublished novel/story/manuscript to crit or edit. I simply don’t have the time). But a friend asked me a few writing questions that aren’t about marketing or feedback, and I wanted to share my take on them:

Q: What is there to write that hasn’t been written 100 times already?

Realistically? Nothing, probably. There’s always the chance of someone surprising me, so I don’t want to say “nothing” definitively. But the basic structures, themes, plots, and character tropes have been told and retold since before stories were written down.

When I write, I’m aware that whatever story I tell probably isn’t going to be original. Hell, I love fairy tales, and it doesn’t get much more “been done” than that. But y’know, Shakespeare didn’t write original stories either. He was shameless and boldfaced about swiping material from various sources. And he was, in my opinion, the greatest writer of the English language evah.

The trick, the goal, the thrill is in telling a story well and imbuing it with yourself, your voice, your perspective. If you write a good story, your readers won’t care that its underlying theme is ancient or that it’s a re-imagined fairy tale or whatever. Continue reading →

So I stared at The Stupid Novel, poked at it, prodded it, and kicked it, and it sprawled there, unmoving and lifeless.

Not good.

My difficulty completing The Stupid Novel, and all the novel predecessors languishing unfinished and pathetic on my hard drive, has got me wondering if I’ve been brash in my presumption that “writing is writing,” and if there are fundamental differences in strategies for writing a longer work versus a short story that I don’t know/have the experience to implement. Makes me wanna do a study comparing and contrasting the writing styles and processes of novelists versus short story writers…which sadly sounds hella more fun than thrashing alive The Stupid Novel.

But The Stupid Novel must be resurrected. So I decided to take my friend, Ari Marmell, up on his offer to rant and vent and whimper talk shop about novel-writing. And our back and forth has crystallized a niggling sense of absent voice I’ve been trying to ignore.

My frequent breaks from this project have inevitably blunted some of the internal tangibility I had for my characters: how they think and react, what they’d say and do, who they are. I wanted to focus on putting new words on the page, rather than getting bogged down in rehashing/revising what I’ve already written, so I’ve been avoiding a re-read of the earlier stuff. But it’s past time for me to admit that I’m beyond “bogged” and into “complete paralysis.”

Once more unto the breach. Rah.

During my annual DC2K Writers Group dinner with Ann Crispin at Dragon*Con, I whined and ranted about how close I was to finishing The Stupid Novel. The main scenes are in place, but I’m missing bridging scenes—essentially the bricks are all there, but there’s mortar missing. ‘Course without mortar, you don’t have a wall; you have a pile of bricks stacked in the general shape of a wall just waiting for an excitable wolf to come along and blow the whole thing down.

So Ann set me a deadline of the first of November to finish it. And now I’ve procrastinated as much as I can, fiddled with tasks totally unrelated to writing, and hit the o-my-god-this-is-so-late-maybe-it’ll-go-away-if-I-ignore-it break in my to-do list. I don’t think I can put it off any longer. It’s time to start up The Stupid Novel again.

Gleep.