Category: storytelling

Finding an illustrator

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 12 Comments

I have pretty much decided to self-publish my old novel, just to get it out in the world and out of my hair. It’s completely (professionally) edited at this point, and now I need a book cover illustrator, and am not sure where to start to look for one.

Well, actually, I take that back. I started with my gf, and she said she’d help hook me up with someone, but then never did, and at this point, I’m tired of nagging her about it. She’s sort of a flake that way.

I know LJ/DW is overflowing with artists, but I’m not sure where to go to get their attention. I have skimmed Craigslist for locals, but all that sort of makes me nervous.

I have the concept of the cover in my head, I just need someone with more talent than me to pull it off.

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.

NaNoWriMo Day 16

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

New words: 1,702
Total words: 30,920
Goal: 50,000

30920 / 50000
(61.84%)

NaNo notes: I sometimes wonder what people must make of my entries on writing, assuming they make anything of them at all. I must appear to have the most convoluted writing process ever. I can’t just do as other writers/NaNoers seem to do, say, “I have this idea for a story…” and then sit down to write it, challenged by coming up with good characters and plot to fit my idea. That is such a logical, top-down, blueprint-for-a-forest approach. No, I have no forest blueprint, no idea for a novel, I have only this urge to write that needs an outlet, and no idea what I want to say.

I must simply start planting trees willy-nilly, trees and rocks and random deers and other things one might find in a forest, then test my feelings about each of them and eliminate the things I don’t like, then generate some more. Eventually, a forest will emerge, and it will have some sort of theme/story to tell/thing to say that was buried deep in my subconscious in a way I have no direct access to.

Or if you prefer another metaphor, writing for me is like an archeological excavation. A Neolithic archeological excavation. I have to pull my story up out of the ground, piece by piece, and be able to tell the difference between stone tools and plain old stones that can be tossed away. After many years, I might have a story/ancient dwelling site. Or I may end up with a pile of rocks.

“What do you want to write about?”

“I don’t know. I’ll figure that out after I write it.”

That about sums it up.

NaNoWriMo Day 12

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ Leave a comment

New words: 1,928
Total words: 23,889
Goal: 50,000

23889 / 50000
(47.78%)

Quote-worthy snippet:

And when she came down, when she had her mind back, when things weren’t torment, restlessness licking like flame under her feet, crawling under her skin, buzzing in her head, not leaving her alone, she could see the havoc she’d wrought, and feel only supreme helplessness to stop it.

Because all the medications in the world couldn’t stop it–not the ones the so-called ‘professionals’ gave her, and not the ones she found herself.

NaNo notes: Well, it’s finally happened. I’ve marinated in the story this month long enough for words to come to me spontaneously *after* I’ve shut down the computer and closed the laptop and wandered away from my chair. Yesterday morning, I scribbled some stuff on a notepad at work soon after I arrived there, just because my laptop wasn’t up and running quite yet. Then, yesterday evening as I crawled into bed, another scene (dialogue, it’s almost always dialogue) played out in my head, forcing me to head back out to my writing chair, find a paper pad, and scribble it all down before sleep took most of it away. Sure enough, this morning, I’d forgotten I even wrote it, and only went looking for that pad as fatigue made me cringe in despair at the thought of having to feed the damned word count today. But my hastily scribbled bits could be typed into the computer and expanded on. A lot. I do really write too much. Which makes NaNo a Big Giant Enabler.

But honestly, writing stuff that isn’t pure crap is hard. It’s really hard. So you take those moments when the quality is effortlessness as a gift, because they come from a part of your brain that won’t perform on demand and that is much more intuitive and in touch with what you want to say.

Mulling out loud

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 18 Comments

So in the shaking-loose that is becoming a theme for NaNo ’10, I came up with this notion in the wee hours of this morning that I should merge two characters. Two major characters. I have this one character who is more than likely going to be the main character of at least the first book in what I hope will be a series, and my biggest hurdle with her is she is, frankly, dull. A couple of days’ writing of her going through her deceased grandmother’s belongings with warm sentimentality is making me cringe at the thought of being shelved with the feel-good chick-lit.

I needed to make her more interesting, give her complications, and the thought occurred to me for story-line reasons that she could have rejection issues. But I already have another, much more interesting character, with rejection issues. So then, I thought, “merge.” But then the question becomes, how?

The new hybrid character would be an archeology grad student like Boring Girl. But Boring Girl is white (possibly Jewish?) and Interesting Girl is asian. I’ve written Boring Girl as straight. Interesting Girl is gay. If I merge them, I either lose a POC character, or I lose one of the only straight characters in my novel. Having at least one major character be straight is sort of important to me so my story doesn’t get pigeon-holed as lesbian lit, but I think her straightness is part of the reason Boring Girl is boring. To me. I really don’t care about her love life or love life issues, unless she were to get together with a really unusually interesting guy character, which I did sort of have planned for her (but I haven’t gotten there yet).

Okay, so maybe she’s a bisexual asian archeology student with rejection issues. But then I’m stuck on her rejection issues. Some are family-related, but in Interesting Girl’s old back story, it was mostly that women were constantly breaking up with her. If I make her straight or bi, and have it that men are constantly breaking up with her, suddenly, it’s a romance movie cliche. Or maybe, both genders are constantly breaking up with her. That would be pretty pathetic. In an interesting way.

A wretched hive of scum and….

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 39 Comments

I have had some issues with my new story that have made my work on it…intermittent over the past two years. One of the biggest hurdles has been I don’t like my antagonists. Somehow, they have become paranoid minute-men taking potshots at invisible spirit-folk they fear just out of fear of what is unknown/out of their control, and no matter how justified I tried to make my antagonists (there really *are* some bad spirit-folk out there!), or personal their motivations (“I saw my own bruthah kilt by one of them!!1!”) they still seem horribly boring to me.

It’s like I just need there to be bad guys for my good guys to fight, and so I have set up these prop bad-guys, but I don’t care about them. And you know that will mean the reader won’t care about them, either.

Honestly, my story is going to turn into a Disney movie with a general “Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to the dark side!” moral.

So I try to take a cue from other writers, say, oh, Joss, and make my villains personal (“my heroine falls in love with a guy who is one of the antagonists and starts to see his point of view…whatever that is….”)

But I still…can’t get myself…to care about these people. They’re still props.

NaNoWriMo Day 4

~ Nancy E. Shaffer ~ 3 Comments

New words: 1,981
Total words: 8,793
Goal: 50,000

8793 / 50000
(17.59%)

Quote-worthy snippet:

He was just a guy Nathan ran into in a club. All tattoos and piercings, with a couple clones at either shoulder giving Nathan looks that bore right through and beyond him.

Interesting words used: grumbling buses. I’ve used that phrase before, because they really *do* grumble.

nano notes