Author: Trace

To V or Not to V

Okay, that’s really awful. I must be tired. So, I’ve spent a productive day tidying up loose ends so I can enjoy the rest of my week, stress-free, at Florida Pagan Gathering (camping+bonfires+hopefully, writing), and then I procrastinated the night away watching the pilot episode of the new “V.”

Tiny review, with spoilers: not bad, but not great, either. I love the cast they’ve assembled, including Battlestar, Firefly and 4400 alumni, but that’s no guarantee. Morena Baccarin as Anna the alien Visitor is dead-on, easily the best casting choice and acting talent. I love Alan Tudyk (FBI guy) and Joel Gretsch (a young priest) although lately Alan Tudyk’s stint against type as Alpha on Dollhouse totally tagged him as potential baddie, which this episode quickly confirmed. However, the show’s major problem, so far, is pacing. It felt like several episodes crammed into one: don’t set up a crazy-sounding conspiracy theory group and reveal that they’re legit in the same hour, don’t try to make the viewer like your platonic-nice-guy FBI partner and then reveal him to be an vicious alien bad guy, don’t hand us a likable priest who doubts the Vatican’s word that the Visitors are a blessing from God and then have him joining a potentially violent resistance group. I like characters who with rounded corners and angsty hearts go through gradual changes of motivation, give up on their dreams or compromise their ethics for the greater good with lots mental hand-wringing. V just isn’t capturing that.

Enough talk! Me write now.

Aahh! Progress?


I can’t seem to hit my NaNoWriMo word count goal, and it’s only the second day. Every time I sit down to write, I crank out a bit more, maybe a opening of a scene, then I start nodding off! What the hell? And, funny. I don’t feel sleepy now that I’ve stopped.

Still, 2585 words for what amounts to possibly three hours of drafting is not bad. It’s more than I would have done. The story isn’t exactly taking the shape I want yet, but the outline is there. Maybe I will post of synopsis of the outline on Tuesday.

Going to bed to try again in the morning. That seems to be my best time to write, overall, even though I am not a morning person.

Check out my Mighty Novel Progress Log! Cheesy, maybe, but what can I say? I’m a visual gal.

In the beginning…

In a little over an hour, I’ve managed 1557 words for the kick-off of NaNoWriMo. Admittedly, a portion was a prologue I wrote for this story a while back, but that’s the story I want to tell right now. After a busy day, I think the progress is not too shabby.

Falling asleep over the keyboard, gonna head to bed. More reflective writing tomorrow, I’m sure.

Here We Go!

I had ambitions to stay up late and complete my first few hundred words for NaNoWriMo–haha! Too much Halloween fun. But I have been working hard all week to mentally prepare, and I spent a bit of time this evening trying to convince my friend Mark to take the challenge, for mutual moral support. He’s a natural storyteller with three chapters down already, a synopsis of which I was happy to hear tonight (he’s building a YA story, kind of a Prairie-Home-Companion-meets-Practical-Magic, with several points of view, not something I feel good about doing in my writing).

I’ve been reading everything but my outline and notes, with plans to set aside No Plot, No Problem as well as Novelist’s Essential Guide to Creating Plot when the writing begins. Lots of how-to books on writing are terrible, but some are at least inspiring. Between the two (and I want it to be known that the latter was chosen without even a passing thought to the irony of the pairing) I’ve got a good feeling about the level of outlining I’ve done. I don’t want to overthink it, and I don’t want to work aimlessly.

One fun preparation activity suggested by the “NPNP” kit is called the Magna Carta I and II. Part I asks you to list novel elements you really love in novels (a few of mine were utopias, generation ships, forests and quests), and Part II asks for things you despise (such as rogues as love interests, bosom-heaving, evil children, and talking animals). Consider making lists like these for inspiration down the road.

Because I Have So Much Free Time

Wait, I don’t.
Anyway, I’m taking the challenge, finally, of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Write 50, 000 words in one month! I need some buddies to do this, anyone game?

I’m also climbing back on the horse of perpetual preparation for Clarion Writer’s Workshop 2010, and I feel especially motivated by the news that the admission window has been moved back to December 1st.

Life simply isn’t busy enough right now, between gardening, homeschooling, UU-ing, teaching and academic publishing/freelancing (and pretty much in that order of priority). It feels oddly secondary to mention that my proposal for the Virginia Tech “Gender, Bodies and Technology” conference was recently accepted –I’d actually forgotten about that news until just now.

Let me know, gotta go! It’s Farnham, ya’ll!

Journey’s End, Writer’s Block

It’s frustrating to see my blog sit fallow for 5 weeks, but it’s a worse feeling when there’s no writing to show for that time, either. Aargh!
I’ve just returned from upstate New York, where I attended my kid sister’s baby shower and took a few photos. I bought some apples and cheese, ate some bad food.
It’s a picturesque place, but I’m glad to be home.
The pic is from the old mill district in Little Falls, a few minutes from my sister’s place in the dismal town of Herkimer. At least the foliage was colorful.
I’m alive. As usual, I close with empty promises to blog more often.

Book Review

The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

I finished this book a few weeks ago, and when I finally put it down, I exclaimed to my hubbie, “This is the best f’ing book I ever read.”

Basic synopsis: A group of friends and colleagues, several of whom happen to be Jesuits, are sent to find the source of musical transmissions coming from another planet. The only survivor to return is a traumatized priest who can’t bring himself to discuss what happened to the rest of the crew. The restoration of his battered body and badly shaken faith, and the story of the journey itself, are interwoven into twin narratives that kept me completely hooked.

I read this book on a recommendation, and I am so glad I did. It is a very slow burn, but haunting and extremely well-done. While several characters in the book are Jesuit, I would not call it a Christian book; I’m not a Christian (but I am a student of faith), and I enjoyed the book immensely. Faith is just part of who the people are.

However, this is a sci-fi book that is about ethics and character, not about action. Readers who enjoyed Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim, which I can’t suggest strongly enough, will like this book. Readers who dig on writers like John Ringo will dislike its attention to character and lengthy discussion about morality. The book’s greatest success, I think, is convincing the reader that each character is unique and interesting. It’s a tragedy, and the reader knows that from the beginning. I felt something for each character because they seemed like real people; I cried more than once. Not everyone’s cup of tea, certainly.

From a writer’s perspective, Russell’s narrative technique is what impressed me most and kept me reading. I have little patience these days for crummy language and trite ideas. The dialogue is nearly flawless, and effortless for the reader to experience. Well worth a read for the student of technique.

About Plotting and Exposition

This is what I’m thinking about these days, stuff I never learned in the two years I put in as an undergrad with creative fiction and non-fiction writing classes.

One of the challenges of the fiction writer, especially in sci-fi, is presenting exposition on setting or backstory without coming off as tedious. It’s what I’ve heard Cory Doctorow call the “info-dump,” and apparently, a big chunk of it is something to avoid.

For instance, it’s not a good idea to start off telling a whole back-story in a prologue just to set the scene. Or in the middle of a conversation, the main character should not ruminate at length to give the reader an idea of what’s going on or the other character’s past history, and so on.

So, how does this get done? The info has to be presented somehow. As I read (or usually, re-reading), I’m noticing how the author in question accomplishes the task. Use of flashbacks, the out-of-place or otherwise ignorant main character or secondary (who needs to have everything explained), or some other device.

Love it or hate it, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is an interesting example of this. I re-read this recently, and by the way, I’m kinda in a “wish-I-could-love-it” mood about it, but I don’t exactly hate it. Make sense?

How to present big chunks of backstory about Harry’s worst enemy while staying with the protagonist? If someone just told him, that might be dull. Instead, Rowling uses the Pensieve, which imparts the memories of others in scenes the reader can see. Harry and Dumbledore discuss the import of the memories before and after (it’s somewhat less dull that way).

Presto. When it comes to sci-fi, devices may be cybernetic instead of magical, but the concept is the same.

Mega Challenge

Aside from having a funky name, I like the ‘tude over at flash site Brain Harvest, especially the mustaches. They’re Clarion workshop alumni who wanted to make something happen. I like it. Plus, a contest deadline is always motivating, to me anyhow.

Thanks to Jamie for posting this.

Argh!

So, I’m alive, and in spite of the fact I haven’t posted in FIVE FRIGGIN’ WEEKS. Two unfortunate things have happened, causally relating to this:

My cat threw up on my laptop. Seriously, I am not making that up. Right in the middle of the keyboard, so now a bunch of keys don’t function. Maybe I could have had some fun with synonyms, trying to work without those keys, but since one of them is A, another is W and another is Delete, I really couldn’t manage. I must use Delete more than any other key (it takes the place of the PC Backspace).

Also, I have a high-maintenance guest in my home in the form of my mother-in-law. That might sound amusing until you hear that she has Alzheimer’s. That condition is not without some humor, as anyone caring for someone like that can tell you, but mostly it’s a pain in the backside (sorry, honey). I won’t go into it here, but suffice to say, it’s distracting, and six weeks of it is too much for me (four down, two to go). I haven’t written much of anything other than lesson plans in weeks.

Stir in wacky offspring who resists sleeping and homeschooling plus the stress of three different not-fun deadlines on top of gearing up for Fall teaching. I was kinda close to mental breakdown at one point, but somehow recovered with help from loved ones, and I’m invigorated by the directed study I’m teaching. So, here I am!

In the interim, I got a rejection from Every Day Fiction, which I’m actually a little relieved by. After submitting, I started to think my piece really didn’t fit in with what they do there, in terms of themes people seem to enjoy as well as quality (only sometimes, though). Not to sound sour grapes-ish, but I’ve been aggrieved by the appearance of typos and other issues with more than a few posts. That is really not snarky pseudo-superiority, that’s just the English teacher in me talking. I’ve not been published yet, outside my freelance news features and academic stuff, so I can’t gripe there. It’s just that with some of the issues I’ve seen, it rankled a bit that my rejection note encouraged me to rework the story and submit to a “more forgiving” venue. But I’m glad for another reason: that story’s been percolating a little in my head, and I think it could be a traditional-length piece with some work.

Look for more regular postings from here on out.