Feedback

Pretty soon I'll be ready for some feedback. If anyone's interested, (and you actually know me), email me. I'd love to send you a couple of chapters and see what you think.

Filling In the Back Story

I tried to work on Chapter 5 last night and failed miserably. I was so frustrated because I just couldn't figure out a way to get started. What really pissed me off was that I couldn't figure out why I couldn't figure out how to get started. This morning I finally figured out why I was stuck. Chapter 5 starts out with two of the characters that just aren't that well developed in my mind yet.

I know who the heroine is. I've known her for months now. Sure, she's changed a bit here and there as the story has evolved, but I know who she is - how she'll react in any situation. Same with the hero. He was harder, as I'm not a guy and can't necessarily get inside his head as well, but I know where he came from and I know where he's going.

The other characters aren't as well developed in my head yet. So before I can start Chapter 5, I need to fill in some of the back story on a few of the other characters. Once I finish that, I think I'll be on good shape to kick Chapter 5 out pretty quickly. I know what needs to happen, I just need to figure out how.

Chapter 5!

Whoo Hoo! I'm on to Chapter 5! This has been a very long ten days or so. I've been avoiding Chapter 5 for a while now. See I've written, rewritten, and edited Chapters 1-4 many times. Then I sent them off to a friend of mine who is a very talented writer. She was very busy and didn't get to read them until last night. Meanwhile I haven't wanted to move on until I found out if they "worked" or not. (So I worked on the middle chapters that needed some pretty significant editing.) She's incredibly talented and I value her opinion probably more than anyone else's.

Now that I have her feedback, I feel like I can move on. I have about half of Chapter 5 written, but I didn't want to go any further until I knew if what I'd written in the previous chapters held her attention. She doesn't read mystery or romance novels so I was hoping that the story would be compelling enough for her to keep reading. Well, she told me she wanted to find out what happened next, so I think I did my job. The story was cohesive enough to keep her interested and she cares enough about the main character to want to know what happens to her.

Can I just say that I nearly cried with relief?

Ok, enough about Chapters 1-4. Now I'm moving on to Chapter 5. Once I finish that, I can move on to edit all of the middle chapters. I probably have Chapters 6-14 already written. I have a nice gap for Chapters 15-17 and then I've written Chapters 18-20, which is where the book ends. I really need to get back to Chapter 5 now. Unfortunately, I can't quite figure out what I want to say next. Great. I've spent a week thinking about it and now I find I've thought so much about it, that I can't get it down on paper (or into the computer). Oh well. I'm just going to start writing and see where it leads me!

-Thanks Y! You're the best!

Coming Clean

I've been hiding what I'm doing for a long time. I started writing back in October. At first, I didn't even tell my family. After all, what if I failed? What if I couldn't even come up with a cohesive story? I started with a single scene, where the hero and the heroine meet again, after many years. She's at her weakest, he helps her to be strong again. That scene, and the ones immediately before and immediately after, which I wrote next, really didn't have anything to do with the main plot of the book. Sure, they were emotional, hopefully engaging, powerful scenes, but there really was no plot to them.

I didn't get to the scenes that actually had anything to do with the plot until much later, perhaps five or six weeks. Once I actually wrote Chapters 1 and 2, I finally felt like I could admit my plans to a few of my closest friends. Other than a few wonderful women on a bulletin board I frequent, no one knew about the book until about two weeks ago.

Since then, I've told three friends, and my father. That's it. I want to tell more people - hell, I want to shout it from the rooftops, but as I still have no idea if this book will be a success, I won't. I figure coming clean here is better than not at all. I hope, that when I finally do tell my friends and family, that they will forgive me for being so hopelessly wrapped up in this that I've ignored most of them for quite some time.

I'm sorry.

The Cutting Room Floor

In total, I've probably written over 200 Word pages for this novel. I've cut a lot of it. Huge sections - gone. So why did I write them? Well, two reasons stand out.

1. I didn't know any better. This is my first novel and I'm definitely learning a lot as I go along. Readers don't need to know everything, they need to draw their own conclusions. They need hints, but those hints should be at least a little obscure. No one wants to be told on page 15 that person X is the bad guy (or gal) and they'll kill someone by the end of the book.

2. I needed to complete the back story in my head. For example, in my novel, the heroine has some issues in her childhood that make it hard for her to fall in love. It's part of the conflict and the emotion in the story. In order to flesh out the story, I wrote a really boring section with letters from her parents explaining her whole childhood. It's been totally cut now. I didn't need it in the novel. Instead, I intersperced a few little hints about it here and there through the first few chapters.

So now I'm cutting stuff. Should I not have written it in the first place? Of course I should have. Especially for anything that falls under criteria #2. If I hadn't written the whole boring backstory with the letters, I wouldn't have as clear of a picture of who my heroine is. She wouldn't be the same person. Since I know her history (her boring history), I can predict how she'll react in some specific situations.

Enough blogging - back to editing.

-Patricia

Baby steps

Chapters 1 throuh 4 are largely done! Granted, I still need to have Chapters 3 and 4 evaluated by my two toughest critics. So maybe tomorrow I'll post that they still have massive amounts of editing to undergo, but more or less, they are done. Once I finish this run through of the book, I'll spend some time really honing the dialog. I need to examine the exact choice of words I use - especially between the two main characters. The best books I've read don't necessarily mirror real life.

For example, when I'm uncomfortable, I tend to use words such as "um" and "ah" and "eh". Really great English there I know. But that's how a lot of people really talk when they're uncomfortable. However, when writing, I don't think a reader really wants to read slang such as that. They want to be transported to another time, another place, another relationship.

< begin tangent > Does anyone truly have a relationship like in the romance novels? Of course not. Life just doesn't work that way. Do most people really say things like "It was eating me up inside, Emily, not knowing if you loved me.” His fingers brushed her hair and he pressed his lips to her cheek as he continued, his words softly echoing in her ear, “I knew we belonged together, the first time I touched you. These past days, seeing you injured, scared…you needed me, but that wasn’t enough. I needed it all. I needed you to love me.”

No, absolutely not. No one talks like that. But we (and here I'm speaking primarily of women, though I suspect some men feel the same way - I just don't know any) want someone to talk to us that way. We want a love that's so pure, so strong, that the man and woman can't possibly live without each other. < /tangent >

So I need to hone the dialog. Hell, I need to hone the dialog I just posted above. And if anyone has a significant other who actually talks like that...well, I don't know if I want to talk to him or her for ideas or if I want to tell you to go to hell .

Ok, back to editing.

-Patricia

Progress

In addition to lots of editing, I've got a couple major scenes left to write. See the good guys need to track down the bad guys. To do this, they have to fly from Seattle to San Francisco and track the bad guys down somwhere...I haven't gotten that far yet. But I skipped ahead a bit and started writing the big confession scene. You know which one I'm talking about - the one where the bad guy admits to the good guys exactly how he pulled off the whole damn thing, all the while holding a gun to their heads, planning on killing them before he makes his grand escape.

I had a hard time even starting to write this scene. I mean, come on...this is one of those unwritten rules of life. If you're the bad guy, the surest way to get caught is to hold the good guys at gunpoint (or in some other perilous situation) and confess to them what you've done. This is the way EVERY James Bond movie ends as well as the vast majority of mystery books. On the other hand, there's a reason this is the way every Bond movie ends - it just seems to work.

There are unanswered questions in this book. How does the bad guy get his top secret data? Why is he bad in the first place? Even though I've hinted at how this is all accomplished throughout the book, there are still lots of unanswered questions.

So tomorrow, I'll keep working through the scene. Maybe I'll even add a joke about the Bond tie in before I'm through.

-Patricia

Editing

I'm still editing. I'll be editing for a while, probably at least another month or so. We'll just forget about the fact that I still have two of the chapters towards the end to write. Yeah, we're going to ignore that for a while. They are two of the more complicated chapters because they deal with finally bringing down the bad guys and I need to figure out how to do that and have it be believable but more complicated than just having the good guys show up with guns drawn and say "Freeze".

But anyway, back to editing. It's harder than writing. Why? Because I know the story so well at this point. I could practically spit whole passages back at you from memory. So when I'm editing, I'm trying to figure out what the reader needs to know and what they don't need to know. Since I know everything (only with respect to this story), it's not easy for me to know what I can cut and still have the story make sense.

For example, do we really need to know how the consulting firm got started? Some of that's important, because it goes towards the history between our heroine and the people she's trying to protect. But can I show that history in another way? I'm generally not a huge fan of flashbacks. I think they can get complicated and confusing for the reader. Without flashbacks, however, the heroine has to "tell" someone everything. That's no fun either.

Hmmm. Ok, enough rambling. Time to just get over it and get back to editing.

Book Stress

I haven't told anyone about this blog yet. Why? I'm not really sure. It's probably partially because I haven't told many people at all that I'm actually writing a fiction book. I think I could count the number of people who know on one hand. Well, maybe one hand and a couple fingers.

So I'm sitting here, half watching CSI, and trying to rewrite Chapter 2 of the novel. It's a combination mystery/romance novel. There's crime, injury, love, sex, and action. It's the type of book I love to read.

The first four chapters are the hardest. In them, I need to set the scene, let the reader know what's going on and give them clues that they will hopefully only start to put together before the end of the book. When I first wrote them, they were horribly boring. I felt like I had to write EVERYTHING down. I was spelling out everything for the reader. But readers are intelligent. They don't want everything spelled out for them. A friend helped me understand that. Actually, two friends.

So now I'm going back through the first four chapters and cutting stuff. Some of what I'm cutting will make it back into later chapters - peppered here and there throughout the story. Some of it will end up on my clipboard, to be purged next time I reboot.

I hope this book is a success. I've poured so much of my heart and soul into the writing - not to mention my very small allotment of free time - that I'm desperate to make this work.

-fingers crossed

Random PSC Happenings, #1

I'm in Customer Service today (in the new office, commonly referred to as the hole). I'm talking with a friend when all of a sudden, the CSR in the next cubicle lets out this horrendous cry. We both just stared at her. She sounded like she was being attacked!

So, I decided to turn it into a little excerpt.

"No!" The delicate cry echoed from her lips with such horror that Tina recoiled
and leapt from her desk. Surely, her office mate, Kelly, was under attack, the
shock of her exclamation could mean nothing less. Rounding the cubicle wall, she
burst into hysterical laughter at the sight of Kelly, grasping her computer
monitor with desperate hands, pleading with it to restore her lost spreadsheets.

Why did I do this? I have no idea. Maybe it's because so many hysterical things happen at the office and I never write them down. Maybe it's because I'm seriously trying to become a fiction writer and I felt the need to stretch my wings. Maybe I was just bored.

-Patricia

Welcome!

I have no idea why I'm starting a blog. I guess because it's the "in" thing to do these days. Maybe because I feel like I have something to say. Or maybe it's because I need somewhere to post all these random thoughts I have. All I know is that I'm going to give this a shot. I have no idea what I'll post here. After all, I do have a website, and a tech blog. Why do I need a personal one? Well, maybe it's because part of my life doesn't seem to revolve around either of those two particular personas.

Who knows. Enjoy reading.

-Patricia