Category: aethersphere

Original fiction project – weeks of 7/03 and 7/10/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

I was on the road last weekend and so didn’t have the opportunity to check in on the writing.

Dis/inhibition: I have started folding my editor’s corrections into the manuscript. She also had some really complex questions for me about my handling of race and subculture with my characters, questions I am doing my best to consider.

New story: I handed over chapter 1 of the story to the Sculptor to read a couple of weeks ago, and gave chapter 2 to her Wednesday morning, so I guess I’m on my way. She is reading mostly in a motivational/cheerleading capacity, and so far it does seem to be helping me keep working on this steadily, and dig a little deeper in each chapter as opposed to just spitting out a thin half-assed first draft as I have done in the past. Not that there’s anything wrong with that approach–it’s like writing and outlining at the same time; it helps you figure out what the story’s about. But I wanted to go deeper in this story’s first draft, and see where I can take it that might end up more interesting.

Currently in the midst of writing chapter 3.

Original fiction project – week of 6/26/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 10 Comments

Progress on my two main writing projects:

Dis/inhibition

I have four artists I ended up commissioning via etsy.com to illustrate the front cover of the book. Three of the four have finished, the other has promised an end-of-July completion. My most immediate goal, then, is to do the final edits on the text given to me by the editor I was working with last Spring. That’ll be my job for July.

New Story:

I’ve noticed many writers on my flist tend to give stories titles before they’ve finished writing the first draft. This seems very strange to me. It’s not until I’ve finished the first draft, or written the vast majority of it, that I know what a story’s even about, and my titles are almost always based on the theme of the story, or the central plot point.

Anyway, I peeked in at chapter 2 of the the new story Tuesday morning. It was interesting, reading what I’d left of it. The “voice” of the writing was all wrong for the featured character in that chapter. So I was able to see it with fresh eyes after three weeks. I started rewriting it here and there to make it sound more like her voice and less like my formal, over-educated-vocabulary Narrator Voice. I also picked up on the undertone of animosity between the two characters in the chapter that was only hinted at before and really brought it out.

I think, sometimes, when we’re busy writing a chapter and putting a lot of work into just getting words on the page, we sometimes become wedded to things that are bland or aren’t working well because it took so much effort to get any words down at all. Come back three weeks later, and you’ve forgotten all that effort, and all you can see is the ugh, and you fix it.

Short story long, before I knew it, I was essentially done chapter 2. I finished the week by starting to arrange my thoughts for chapter 3.

Original fiction project – week of 04/17/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

988 words this week.

I don’t know if word counts are going to be a sign of progress going forward, since I started actually writing the full first chapter this week. Which so far seems to mostly involve piecing together already-written words. I smooth over the gaps with new words, but I really have no idea how many of my words are new or old. I think the fact that I am actually trying to write a full chapter and not random story snippets that could end up anywhere is Major Progress.

So, go me.

Original fiction project – week of 04/03/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 9 Comments

1562 words this week. Yay me.

I’ve actually written a lot of words to this story, most of which I still feel will never end up in the actual first draft. I’m still unfocused, not sure what I really want to say. Aware of this frustration, I went to a writing workshop last night at Changing Hands bookstore. It was a spontaneous decision based on the description of the workshop, which was about “finding your voice.” I’ve taken workshops on that topic before, and I’m pretty aware of techniques for helping you determine what you really want to say in your writing, and express it in your own unique way. And yet I still struggle with it, so I thought I’d hear what some who wasn’t my old writer’s voice teacher had to say about it.

The speaker said something I already knew, which was you often won’t know what you’re trying to say until you’re done the first (or second or third) draft. Which I trust in, as it has happened to me before, but in the mean time, you have to find another motivation other than passion for your “point” to keep you returning to the story.

She didn’t delve a lot into techniques themselves since she was allowing the attendees to set the agenda, but she said enough that she sold me her book, which is, I suppose, what her purpose there was. I’ll see if the book has anything insightful to say.

In other writing news, I took anneth‘s suggestion and posted a “wanted” post on Etsy.com looking for illustrators. I got several replies, and since all of them made reasonable bids in the same ballpark, I am entertaining multiple preliminary sketches. It makes me feel like I’m “doing something already” with this old story, and that feels like a relief of something that’s been hanging over my head for a long time.

Original fiction project – week of 03/20/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 6 Comments

1829 words this week. And given that I had to work two 12-hour days at work (8 hours the other days), I am trying to figure out how I did that without collapsing. I remind myself I clocked nearly that many words on a daily basis during NaNo, but I’m still kinda impressed with myself. Especially since my story has been less inspiring to me of late.

But see, last weekend, I took some time to try to figure out why.

The problem, I think, is that my story has gotten very prosaic in tone, like it’s hardly a fantasy story anymore and more a scientific take on fantastical concepts, like you might see on Star Trek. So this week, I’ve been brainstorming ways to bring the “sense of magic” back into the story.

It was time well spent, because even though it felt like I wasn’t accomplishing anything poking around the internet reminding myself of the stories I found “magical”, or researching legends and fantastical creatures I felt had nothing to do with what I was writing about, voila, a week later, almost 2,000 words.

A lot of that, of course, is me just giving myself writing exercises that may not ever become part of the story, but that forced me to “write outside the box” I’ve shoved my story into.

And it gave me an interesting insight that is relevant to my story.

Much of the “prosaic” feel of it, I think, comes from me being conflicted about what point I’m trying to make in the story, and this goes back to a conflict in me as a person. I am one of those people who wishes every day that magic were real and that I could live a life where magic things happened. But I never see any evidence of the supernatural out in the world, and that frustrates me. I am not the sort of person who takes things on faith; it is in my nature to believe only in what can be proved, and withhold judgement on what can’t.

But more than that, there’s another part of me that doesn’t actually believe in the supernatural at all, and I guess that is the closest I get to an article of faith. I think there are plenty of things out there that cannot be explained by science, but that doesn’t mean they never will be; it just means they have a natural explanation that’s beyond our present level of scientific knowledge.

So on the one hand, I want magic to be real, and on the other hand, there is a real sense in which I don’t believe any magic could be real. And that’s where my story gets muddled. I can’t write about the supernatural and not have this urge to make it just “the natural that’s beyond our present understanding.” And that takes the “magic” out of the magic in my story.

I have no problem enjoying the supernatural in somebody else’s fiction: Buffy, Dresden Files, Harry Potter. But in my own?

I need to figure out a way to encapsulate my own conflict into my main character’s conflict, because I think that’s what I’m struggling to say in this story.

Original fiction project – week of 02/13/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 11 Comments

I had this spontaneous proclamation last Saturday evening. Well, more a spontaneous thought that I had earlier in the afternoon that I then found myself actually proclaiming out loud, much to my surprise. Surprise because what I proclaimed really is anti-Me where writing is concerned.

I asked my GF to read the first draft of my new story as I wrote it.

Now, I am not anywhere near ready to write it, but it is SOOOO anti-Me to have anyone read a first draft. I need the freedom to screw up mightily, take shortcuts with promissory notes to come back and finish something later, ramble until I figure out what my point is, and write stuff out of sequence.

The thing is, after my experience writing The Destroyer, I also see the value of throwing out a story piece by piece, seeing peoples’ reactions, then slowly letting the story evolve as I develop each new chapter. The motivating thing about having (a) reader(s) is that you have this external motivation to give the first draft your best effort and get it done, and I sort of need that external motivation to really get this thing moving.

In the meantime, I am still working on figuring out what the story is going to be about, developing my characters, and doing my world-building and mythology-weaving. And I’m doing it by writing actual prose words. Still happily contradicting myself, writing out of sequence, and leaving many bits as promissory notes, just like I need to do. As soon as the Sculptor finishes reading TD, though, it will be time to start sending her this story.

Before anyone asks, though (assuming they would), I am only going to let her read this first draft. Because this is not about feedback/constructive criticism, it’s about lighting the fire under my ass to get the story written. And I know she will limit herself to questions if she has them, a minor comment here and there, and embarrasingly effusive praise.

Original fiction project – week of 1/16/2011

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 7 Comments

I reached my goal of 9,300 words for the month early this week, then plunged into the task of organizing everything I’ve written since the beginning of November/or salvaged as usable from pre-November. Which is a lot of stuff.

I’m boggling at just how much my story has changed since what I had as of October. Just turning myself over to writing already as I did on Nov 1 has managed to bring so many new ideas I didn’t have before. A top-down idea generator, I am not.

But it’s good to step away and look at what you’ve got every once in a while and figure out what of it you want to expand on for the next writing sprint. That’s in February. Goal: 8,400 words.

Original fiction project – weeks of 12/19, 12/26/2010

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 4 Comments

Since last Saturday was a holiday and next Saturday is a holiday, this is going to suffice as my writing check-in for this couple of weeks.

Garbage in, garbage out: I’m as bound by culture, class, education, and personal experience as anyone is. And though I try not to forget that, sometimes I have to be smacked upside the head by what should be obvious.

I became aware during NaNo of an emerging theme in my story, something I wanted to write about that had me quite engaged. I was all excited about it until a few days later when I realized it was very much a Western liberal intellectual’s problem, one that a lot of other people probably couldn’t relate to, or wouldn’t find problematic at all. I had a main character inextricably locked up by scientific skepticism entering a world of the apparently supernatural.

That particular quandary is not by itself a bad problem to base a character on, but I had pretty much built up an entire plot/story mythology concept around it (the details of which I won’t go into here), and though the concept made sense for some of the Western World, A.D. 2010, it didn’t make much sense for a fair fraction of the Western World, and, you know, the rest of the globe, to whom it was supposed to apply equally.

Rather than scrap the whole thing, I’ve been working on refining my idea so it makes more sense as a global state of things. I’ve been reading extensively in world folklore, philosophy, science, and the borderlines where cutting-edge science becomes speculation.

I can get quite caught up in that, and forget I’m doing it to write a better story.

But I think it will be a better story in the end because of that.