I continue to pants* this book (Carrying Light) and as I write, there’s so many questions I need to address in the edits**:
This represents the plot holes in the current draft.
Is the collective’s reaction to the chaos outside too much, too soon?
Will they really invest in self-sufficiency when Luke, an Archetype who has seen collapse before, suggests they empty the coffers to buy items that will help them be self-sufficient?
Will they then realize that they can’t be entirely self-sufficient, that they can’t grow all the foods they need to survive given the amount of land they own?
Does the stalemate at the college’s gates last too long?
Do Sage and Forrest do enough drifting apart before they join forces again?
Is all their looking for alternatives to their current lifestyle filler or necessary world-building? (I’d say necessary world-building; otherwise their adaptations seem like magic)
Are there enough fantastical elements in this story?
* Pantsing: writing by the seat of one’s pants.
**This story is taking about two months to write. It will take about forever to edit.
Sometimes I write about writing. I don’t do this nearly as often as I should, because I don’t have meta-thoughts about writing that often.
I could write about exposition, for example. What wisdom do I have about exposition? Only the big one: Show, don’t tell. And the not so big one: Conversations can be a form of exposition if you’re not writing things like “Did you hear about Betty? She ran off with the milkman last week.”
I could write about writing characters. Where do my characters come from? They come from an amalgam of people and stories I have known. Then I “interrogate” the character to see if they feel consistent in who they are. I have conversations with the characters, I put them in situations. I talk to my husband about characters — for example, “Would they talk back to the police?” Gideon would; he tends to be human and somewhat anti-authoritarian. Most of my Archetypes and Nephilim would never talk back lest they be discovered. They’re not quite immortal, after all, and they would alarm the authorities. Luke would talk around the cops, though. He’s a lawyer, after all.
I want to write about this guy next.
I could write about publishing. There are many steps to publishing yourself; some of them go surprisingly smoothly, like most of the process on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP for those in the know). Others become a great source of frustration, like putting my book cover up on KDP.
I could write about hitting it big as a writer. No, I can’t, because I have not hit it big. Nor is it likely that I will, but that’s okay. I have a story to write, and it nags me at night. My characters (Sage Bertinelli and Forrest Gray at the moment) demand to be written.
I need to write more about writing, because there are so many topics … thank you, Hannah, for obliquely suggesting this!
Pantsing refers to a style of writing whereas one makes the story up as they go along. It’s part of the trinity of methods, the other two of which are planning and plantsing. Planning the story is just what it sounds like — from using an outline of each chapter to setting up scenes and documented world-building. Plantsing is somewhere between the chaos of making it up spontaneously and organizing everything.
Normally I am a plantser — I have “note cards” (a feature on Scrivener, the program I recommend for writing novels) for each chapter denoting what should happen in the chapter, and I see where those directions and the characters take me. But this time around, I have diverged from the note cards enough that I am most definitely pantsing.
For example, I was writing about how my characters in their collective (think commune, sort of) were going to cope with the potential for communications and shipping breakdown in the oncoming breakdown of American society, and I thought about replacement parts and fuel for the farm. While I was in the middle of writing that, I thought, “Oh my god, what are they going to do about the staple goods they don’t grow themselves?” The collective eats a certain amount of bread, for example, but they don’t raise the wheat themselves because only the wrong type of wheat grows in the Midwest. In addition, they’re vegetarian and bought rather than grew their legumes. They use their farm land for more suitable items for the collective, like fresh fruits and vegetables, as they could always buy the staples through the local food co-op. So they suddenly figured out they could have a food crisis. In striving to be self-sufficient, they blinded themselves to the fact that they were not self-sufficient, any more than other humans. They discovered this at the same point where I thought about it, of course.
I may edit this later, putting the food crisis before the capital goods crisis chronologically. But I may not, because if it occurred to me in that order, maybe it would have occurred to them in that order. Maybe the capital goods crisis they envisioned was the one the collective saw most clearly* and therefore first. Part of the process of pantsing is the harder job of editing down the line.
Photo by u0410u043du043du0430 u0420u044bu0436u043au043eu0432u0430 on Pexels.com
It’s been a wild ride writing this novel so far. I feel like I’m climbing a rock wall without a belayer. If I felt a lot better about my rock climbing skills, I would not feel like I needed belaying.** Ah, well. See you at the edit.
* This is known in cognitive psychology as the availability heuristic, whereas we believe the most readily imagined scenario is the most likely or important one. This heuristic is why young people buy life insurance and not disability insurance despite being 7 times more likely to die than to become disabled.
** I just about used the word ‘balayage’ here, which is a hair-dyeing technique. Oops.
I’m not the sort of person who rests well. I don’t sit and read much or watch television or videos often. I write in my spare time. I’m already working on my new classes for the fall semester (and I have two months before the fall semester starts).
Sometimes, however, I run out of steam. It usually happens when I have worries and work, and I don’t have enough energy for both. How do I know it’s happening?
I have nightmares: I’m not showing up to my classes because everything is detaining me and I’m half-naked and I can’t find the classroom and my mother wants something from me and … And then there’s the one I had last night: I was in a driveway and a garbage truck plowed into me and bounced my car onto my parents’ roof and somehow it was all my fault because I stopped. (My dreams are breathless, run-on sentences.)
I worry more, sometimes even about things that happened forty years ago.
I have trouble sleeping because of the first two points.
I get weepy, especially over one more thing to do.
Taking a break from the overload is imperative for my health because too much stress could put me into hypomania/depression. It’s hard to stop myself from forward motion until my body just puts the brakes on without consulting me. I’ve just had enough.
I’ve been writing for twelve years. I started, strangely, three months after being diagnosed with bipolar 2, which I hadn’t realized till today. I know I didn’t start writing as a coping mechanism or as character insertion (my first characters were not me) and I didn’t write about being bipolar. I think I started writing because being treated for bipolar helped me focus on continuous tasks instead of pouring all my energy on the whim of the moment.
I was not a good writer at first — I wrote each chapter as if they were separate episodes, like short stories strung together. I didn’t feel like I wrote an overarching plot. The novels (I use the term loosely) I wrote then I have had to revise several times such that only the characters are the same. I learned a lot from revising them.
My first draft is not my novel. Over the years, the novels have needed less and less rewriting, but there are always things to fix in second and third (and fourth, and …) drafts.
Developmental editors are an important part of your writing toolbox. It is worth paying for them.
There are three ways to write a novel: Plotting, pantsing, and plantsing.
Plotting: an organized outline at the beginning, and following the outline.
Pantsing: writing it as one goes along, without the outline.
Plantsing: writing with a rough outline but pantsing through the chapters.
I am a plantser.
Scrivener is a great program for composing my work, especially plantsing.
Scrivener arranges itself around a chapter format and a synopsis form that I use to guide my chapters. I use it like pantsing with training wheels.
One can get templates for Scrivener novel-writing that incorporate plotting frameworks, such as Save the Cat and Romancing the Plot.
ProWritingAid was another investment I don’t regret — my grammar has improved in ways I hadn’t considered before. I have lessened my passive verb structure massively.
Writing is the easy and fun part. I still don’t think I have the hang of promotion (and this blog is part of my proof of that.)
My favorite novel is always the one I just finished.
The most important thing I learned? That I can write. The second? That there’s a whole lot of luck in being discovered, and luck hasn’t come to me quite yet.
I feel like I could have learned more in 12 years, and maybe I have, but these are the biggest things I can think of. I hope they’re helpful to someone!
It’s already time for me to start planning my next Kringle novel. Why? It’s only May!
This is my 2023 Kringle novel cover.
The Kringle novel I write for this year will be for Winter 2025, so it’s even more ahead of time. A year and a half for a novel?
The ideas start in May so I have a while to play around with them in my head while I work on other things. Plots often come up on car rides with my husband, and there are more of those in the summer season (which, in my academic calendar, starts about May 1).
There are so many tropes to play with in romance — two of my Kringle books so far have mystery elements, two are enemies to lovers, a couple are friends to lovers, one involves second love, but no boy next door, snowed in at an inn, billionaire, bad boy or mafia yet. (I don’t foresee doing the latter three, to be honest. I like cinnamon roll guys myself.)
Friday, on one of those car rides, we decided that the next novel would be another second love with a touch of snowed in at an inn, where a divorced woman goes for a lone Christmas retreat at a great lodge, only to meet a local bar owner who hasn’t met the right woman in town.
The actual writing doesn’t happen till the Christmas season, November 1st-to be exact. That’s the season for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. I won’t get it done then, but I will be well on my way. The benefit of this schedule is that I’m in the mood for Christmas, surrounded by the trappings of Christmas and immersed in Christmas carols, while I’m writing.
January through May is when I’m reworking the story, editing and refining. That needs to be done by October 1, which is publishing time. The cover gets finalized by the end of summer, and August is when I’m doing the mechanics of getting the novel uploaded onto the Kindle Direct Publishing site.
Other things are happening at the same time, of course. Teaching college from August – May, writing on other books and publishing them. I tend to keep busy, and I think it’s a blessing that I cannot be idle for too long. And that I love to write, and that there’s a Starbucks nearby.
My next Kringle-related activity is to go one more round through the 2024 novel, Kringle Through the Snow, which I actually wrote in January of this year because I thought I would never write another Kringle novel. But I can’t quit, because it’s now one of my Christmas rituals.
So Merry Christmas in May, and watch for Kringle Through the Snow on October 1!
Several of my books (two published, one nearly ready to publish, two needing a good go-over, one currently being written — that many already?) exist in the Hidden in Plain Sight universe — a world just like the one we’re living in, except with preternatural and virtually immortal beings and their half-human offspring. The stories are just as much (if not more) about how the beings deal with what they call Earthside.
The series is very character-driven, with one extended family of Archetypes (the immortals) and Nephilim (the half-humans) prominent in the plots. There are also several humans featured prominently. The books occur over a timeline of 20 years. As a result, I have to manage events in several characters’ lives.
For example, there was the Baby Boom. At one point, Nephilim were sterile, then their Maker decided they weren’t. (There is a reason, but the book hasn’t been written yet.) As many of them were in relationships and accustomed to not using birth control, there were babies. So yesterday I was going to write a story about four characters in Chicago going on a walk through the powder keg of a city pre-collapse. Three were Nephilim, one human, and all have strong personalities so it was going to be fun. Until I realized: Wait, Allan and Celestine have a kid. And later, wait,one of those two is the father to twins. And the original idea collapsed, because I didn’t see these parents taking the kids out for a field trip on volatile streets. Nor did I see them leaving the kids with babysitters while there were riots on corners nearby. I don’t know how to write the story now.
This happens all the time. Are Batarel and Ty in Chicago or at Barn Swallows’ Dance1 right now? (Barn Swallows’ Dance, ever since they completed their field trip.) How do I keep Josh from being held hostage with the English Department during the siege of Illinois? (He has a vision and stays home from work that day. I knew a guy who survived 9/11 because he didn’t feel like going to work that day.) Just where is Hard Promises located? (Cook County IL sold off a lot of its forest preserve property, and the collective’s founders grabbed Beaubien Woods.)
It’s hard to take notes on these twists and turns because I can’t predict what I’ll need for the future. So I search through the previous books (thank goodness Scrivener has a pretty robust search engine) and find the details I need.
I’m sure this will keep happening. When does Barn Swallows’ Dance first connect with Hearts are Mountains?
1: Barn Swallows Dance, Hard Promises, and Hearts are Mountains are all agricultural collectives. They have as residents a mix of humans, Archetypes, and Nephilim.
I shy away from writing about dark subjects in my blog. It’s strange because I’ve had several dark times in my life. I don’t want people to think I’m pandering for attention, even though the reason writers post their works in the first place is to get attention.
I won’t write dark for dark’s sake, nor will I use gratuitous trauma as a shortcut to character development. Yes, someone’s past will contribute to their character. But I won’t use trauma as the only character trait or even the main one, and only if it’s pertinent to the story. (See also the “fridging” phenomenon—killing a girlfriend character to motivate the main male character.)
Writing about dark topics in my stories is something I must work my way up to every time. For example, the body count in Apocalypse. I had trouble killing anyone, but a developmental editor told me that the last battle had to look hopeless, so I killed eight characters. I also, ironically, edited that book for gratuitous darkness because I had tried the cheap way to make it darker.
Sometimes an entire book is dark. Carrying Light, one of the two I’m currently writing, is a dark novel, being that it’s written at the cusp of the collapse of the United States. Apocalypse is dark, because the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. But it was hard to write these dark enough at first.
In the end, I think darkness needs to balance light. That’s just me; I know there are people who write dark all the time, with lots of death, depersonalization, and alienation. I can’t write there, because all my writing adopts a quote from ee cummings: “The single secret will still be man.”
Kringle Through the Snow is going pretty well. I keep writing on it, and it’s lively and fun. Sierra and Wade are about to have a nice evening analyzing The Grinch. And sitting next to each other on the couch because Shadow Lord, the immense Newfie, will take up the rest of the couch. Shadow Lord has an agenda.
Carrying Light is languishing in the bottom of my To Be Written pile. I just don’t know why that isn’t flowing, except it has nothing to do with characters. I don’t think it is plot. It is picky little details, like “Where is Janice going to work if the gift shop is no longer open and she’s getting no orders for pottery?” I feel sorry for Janice, but the collective can’t fix that problem for a while, for the good of the plot.
Okay, one book at a time, 750-1500 words at a time. I’ll finish the Kringle book first, then worry about Carrying Light. Oh, and fix the other book, the one I want to publish in December. Who, me busy?
According to National Pen, handwriting has benefits over typing. From higher cognitive engagement to memory recall, the slower process of handwriting engages the mind more. Admittedly, National Pen may have a bias, given that they’re in the business of selling pens. However, a recent report in Frontiers in Psychology spells out similar findings.
As a writer of novels, I find writing 70,000 plus words by hand painful (literally — arthritis) and the thought of typing all that handwriting into its necessary digital form is daunting. I foresee handwriting the first draft of a novel doubling my process time, and I don’t feel like my writing is suffering that much by typing the story.
I think there has to be a way I can harness the power of handwriting. I used to do free writing when I was stuck with a scene or a character, and I haven’t done that as much recently because I haven’t felt I needed to. But what if I free-wrote before sitting down at the computer as a general practice, to gather my thoughts and project them forward? A writing ritual?
My husband bought me two composition books to start the ritual. I have fountain pens to write with, which gives this more of a ritual air. The idea is to consider and write about the upcoming scene and free-write, then see if it makes getting those words more smooth.
Words Like Me 