Trans/plant/portation

Exposition is well underway, and the characters have made their initial appearances. The readers are hooked into the plot, aware of the struggle, and have identified who the antagonist is, even if they don’t yet know his or her motivation. This is the sweet spot, at least for me, of the first draft. Tell your imagination to run wild, let go of whatever doubts you have, be they overwhelming or annoying vestiges. Don’t even worry about sticking to your outline right now. Let the story go where it needs to, and you can take a look at your original plans later.

We’ve had nearly a week of writing now, so hopefully the novel is spending quality time in your thoughts. If you write scenes now that you’ll later cut out of the text, that’s okay, because anything you put on paper right now only gets you closer to the characters and the story. You’ll have edits to make later and you can use them to imbue your themes, meta-level messages, and so forth. But for now, today, just run with it and enjoy the act of writing itself.

Tomorrow’s post will focus on pacing, but this Sunday, dive into the narrative and write whatever comes out of your fingertips. And enjoy NaNo.

is riddled with nausea. Well, at least in my case. After all of these years of sprained joints, broken bones, bouts of mono and shingles, I can’t say I’m surprised when acute illness or accident pops up, especially when it’s least convenient. Just a couple of years ago I had to flee the Census worker’s orientation with a sudden case of stomach flu. Seems like many times when I’m finally celebrating something terrific, like my own wedding, that’s exactly when part of my body gives out, like my left knee. I know I’m enacting a confirmation bias here, but I still worry there’s some grand curse on my bones and where they meet up with sinew and muscle.

So after something close to 20 rejections on my memoir, right about when I was thinking of self-publishing it just to get it out on the market, I received an email from a publisher I’d met at this year’s Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association, back in early August. He said he’d like to talk with me about where they are in the process of considering my memoir.

I spent 10 minutes rereading the three sentence email.  Read More…

Next week we’ll talk about what to do if you’re seriously behind on your NaNo word count, but for today, just feel the joy. That’s the joy of writing, not of falling behind on your word count. In case there was any confusion. Today, Day 2, is still in the throes of the beginning, when the vast majority of the writing still lies ahead, and all of the ideas that have been percolating in the writer’s head finally show up on the screen. It’s a day to relish that we’re in book-creation mode, worry-free. So stop worrying and write. It honestly doesn’t matter what comes out right now, because:

1. We’ll change it later in edits
2. Writing begets more writing
3. The draft will get better as it goes

That’s right, I said better. If we’re paying any kind of attention as we write, we’ll notice turns of phrase we tend to overuse, and avoid them, for example. We’ll decide we don’t like the sidekick and begin to describe her differently, noting that in draft #2 we need to go back and revise her earlier scenes. We’ll change a premise of the plot and watch it reach a new level of believability. We’ll sell the characters more. On Day 2, we are simply writing—maybe well, maybe less than well—but every castle starts with the first few layers of brick and mortar. Just push through and build the story’s foundation, and sure, feel free to take a moment and reflect that hey, wow, I’m writing something.

And then dive back in and type away. Happy NaNoing!

Speaking for myself, I am not a fan of the overenthusiastic pep talker. I’d prefer folks put down the pompoms and leave the marching bands alone, choosing instead for some quiet words of encouragement that sounds reasonable to my ear. So in that vein let me whisper in the first anti-rousing sentiment for NaNoWriMo 2011:

You can do this. People finish these 50,000-word projects all the time, and they’re not better than you. Get cracking. Read More…

This post originally appeared over on GayYA.org, a great place to talk about all things LGBTQ in young adult literature.

Like many writers I know, I took a meandering path to this writing profession, starting out confident and then dedicating a long decade in quicksand—I think it’s called self-doubt—after which I think I found myself in the center of the earth, and let me just say, it’s hotter than I thought it would be down there. During this long break I suppose I opted to have a sex change, and then I realized that I needed to write about my transition. I didn’t want to relate a tale of anguish and grief. Instead, I focused on the ludicrous situations that popped up as I navigated through gender roles, gathered information on doctors, civil courts, and resources, and klutzed into whatever manhood I now find myself. Where I have ended up as a writer is not where I estimated I’d find myself, but I understand now that all of my wanderlust has made me a much better storyteller. And along the way, I’ve identified my audience in young adult readers, in whatever stripe of gender and sexual orientation (or questioning place) they may be. I now have a good idea of my goals as a writer of transgender and queer experience. Read More…

Even small towns as isolated as Walla Walla, Washington, may fall prey to a zombie outbreak at some point, especially given the global nature of travel and commerce. Although only two state highways connect to the city, it does receive regular cargo shipments by truck and by rail, and it does house a working airport with connections to Seattle, a major seaport and airport on the West Coast. Looking at the nature, history, and geography of Walla Walla can help identify concrete strategies for defending against and surviving a zombie attack when it comes to the area. Strengths and weaknesses of the region, and specific tactics will be the subject of the rest of this brochure. Read More…

Like a flailing restaurant patron who has a chunk of beef stuck in his windpipe, I write speculative fiction. It’s a messy process, of combing through research so I retain a kernel of accuracy in the story, say of physics or history, of plot points and character sketches, scratched out, erased, and written over in my notebooks. There are many notecards and scraps of paper tucked into my journals, so many that I tend to break the bindings of lesser-made books. Don’t forget this detail, that sub-theme, this one scene that keeps popping up in my daydreams. I go back, rewrite, reconceive, get frustrated, re-execute, finally feel satisfied.

It could very well be that all of my energy is in vain, and none of it is any good. I think it’s healthy for writers to drink a cup of hubris with a side of humility every so often. There is so little that keeps us honest. Writing is supposed to be sellable, and to make it to the commercial market, it needs to be definable—what’s the synopsis, who’s the audience, is it like any other bestseller out there, what’s the genre? It had better not fit in too many boxes, or the marketing department at the publisher will implode like an old Vegas casino.

Octavia Butler was one of those writers who defied pretty much everything in publishing—its tightness on genre categories, certainly, but also its expectations around audience appeal, topics that could be covered in fiction, and what bestselling authors should look and sound like. Read More…

This post originally appeared on the amwriting blog.

Copious bubbles of advice flow out of the Internet for new writers—everything from opening lines that work to hanging in there through the middle of the first draft. Once a novel is completed, emerging writers can spend the majority of their waking hours searching for that perfect agent or press, hopeful that such recipients will go wild for their pages. All of the eagerness and pride and delicious fantasies about our future success—for we are nothing if not avid daydreamers—are blown away when rejection after rejection rolls in, clogging one’s in box. Suddenly that stream of advice looks chalky, harder to interpret, and the messages around handling professional no-thank-yous another cold stab of curtness. It’s difficult to hear the “just keep writing” mantra and adhere to it with the same level of joy as before. But take heart: this is all part of the process. Read More…

This past summer I published a short story that generated some feedback from readers, much of it the same. Happily enough, they said they wanted to see 200 more pages to the story; I’d flung a world at them that was similar to our own, but askew in several ways, most dramatically in that this world’s children all metamorphosized, sooner or later, into fantastic and mythical creatures.

Readers and publishing pros I know wanted to know why this was happening, something I knew in my own mind but hadn’t explained in the confines of the story, which only runs for 1,200 words. My goal in the story was to show the big and subtle changes that the main character—precociously named Hannah Pace—emerges with at the end of the story, but readers wanted to know what happened the next day. And the next after that. It was a flattering response. I smiled and wrote back, not communicating that this was all I’d intended. I was on the cusp of getting started on a new novel about a 500-year-old mummy in the 22nd Century (take that, genre purists), and I didn’t need ideas like lengthening a one-off short story into a long piece crowding my vision.

Well, it didn’t just crowd my plans, it upstaged them and then threw them out of the theater. Read More…

Many thanks to Ev for inviting me to guest blog today.  I’m so happy to be here, especially as it gives the new parents more time to spend with Emile. Congratulations to the whole family!

My husband is a project manager and sometimes I’ll be mulling some idea about how I’m spending my writing time and he’ll drop an idea on me that stops me in my tracks.  Here’s one of them:  being effective is not the same as being efficient.

Being effective is about results.

Being efficient is about process.

(He’s not responsible for any of this further mulling. So if you know Greg, don’t ask him to explain any of what I’m thinking. He gave up on that a long time ago.)

All the writers I know have other gigs in their lives.  Time is precious.  It’s not enough to be effective or efficient; we need to be both. Read More…