One more pesky scene whipped into shape!

After a weekend of editing and attempting to create a semblance of order in my yard, I managed to edit a little over five chapters and plant almost all of the plants I bought the first week of May! 🙂

My biggest struggle of the weekend was one pesky scene that took hours to get right. Hours! I just took a look at it this morning and can’t remember why it took so long… It seems like a small, simple scene. But that illustrates a point that I remind myself of when I’m frustrated with a section: the reader will never know how bad the first draft of a scene is, nor how much time you spent on it, nor how many times you got exasperated and had to take a break to pull some of the endless supply of weeds in your garden. The reader will see the final scene, and won’t have any idea that you went through such turmoil unless you post about it on your blog.

This particular scene was one of the few scenes that needed a lot of work in the original draft, but which I’d left to work on later. It contained lot of references to something I’d decided to remove completely, so I had to take those out without disrupting the flow of the story. There were a few things that needed to be cleared up with the choreography, and I added in a few small references to tie in the character’s emotion to the previous scene because it would still be on her mind. It feels a lot better! And since I’m an optimist, instead of dwelling on the fact that I spent so much time on what is currently a 1500-word scene, I’m thrilled that it was the only scene I worked on over the weekend that required that much work. 🙂

The other thing I’ve been working on lately is the Fantasy in the City bundle that launches a week from today! I’m really, really excited about this bundle. It’s the first one I’ve ever been in, which is pretty exciting, but putting it together (since I’m the organizer) has turned out to be a lot more fun than I would have expected. Plus it’s super cool to look at the not-yet-live page on the BundleRabbit website and see all twenty short story covers together. There are some fantastic stories that I can’t wait to read myself!

And because I’m a multitasker, I’ve started to think about the novella I’ll get back to as soon as I hand the novel over to my editor, as well as what types of things I might write for the writing class I’m taking in the fall. In that class I’ll be focusing on historical fiction. I’m hoping the class will help me figure out more about an idea I have for a series set in the American West in the late 1800s. I have at least two of the side stories worked out, and I have three main characters I love – or are they all main characters? I’m not yet sure. So this summer I’m doing research on the time period, which will hopefully help me get my head in the right place for this class. And yes, it is kind of funny to be working on fantasy stories while thinking about Westerns!

2016-06-12 Dakota Ridge

Bundling up

For the past week, my writing time has been spent on the BundleRabbit bundle I’m curating, and on the two writing classes I’m taking (one more week left for both classes – but there’s no more homework!).

The bundle is named “Fantasy in the City” and is, as you might have guessed, filled with urban fantasy short stories. 🙂 The main character in my story “The City Trees” is a dryad. Here’s the cover:

The City Trees cover

This story is set in the same world as my in progress novel The Language of Water. That novel will be in a series, and I debated putting the series name on the short story cover, then finally decided doing so wouldn’t mean anything to people until the series is out.

Bundle-wise, there’s still quite a bit of work left for me to do. I spent quite a bit of time this weekend looking at background images for the bundle. The background image will be displayed on the sales page, above the montage of cover images. It’s important because it should convey something about the bundle to potential readers, but that’s a bit of a challenge since there are twenty different authors in this bundle! I’ve narrowed it down to three possible images, and should have that finalized shortly.

I’ll also need to put together variants of this image for the other authors to use if they choose to. Next up is to write an exciting, compelling description that will make anyone who sees it rush to buy the bundle. 🙂

I’m really excited about the launch. I’ve never participated – much less organized! – anything like this before, and it’s really fun. Plus there are a lot of great stories in the bundle that I can’t wait to read!

2016-06-03 Dakota Ridge

Does it get any easier?

Does it get any easier?

Yes and no.

Yes, sometimes I write stories where the words flow from my fingertips.

No, sometimes I have a great idea, and I sit down to write a story and realize there’s a key part I haven’t yet figured out, and whatever I’m supposed to figure out remains hidden for a while.

Yes, either way things go, I eventually figure out the story.

Sure, sometimes a story feels like it’s writing itself, and sometimes it feels like a chore. This can – obviously – be easier or more challenging for the writer. The important part is: when reading the final version, the reader has no clue which parts were easy/hard. (Unless you make a point of mentioning it on your blog, which of course I’m not doing. Really.)

What’s interesting – and a relief! – is not that the reader is unaware of any turmoil I might have (although that’s a nice bonus), but that every time I have to fight to write a story, I realize there was a reason behind my frustration.

With my latest story, The City Trees, I thought – two months ago! – easy, peasy. This can’t possibly take more than a few hours max to write.

Wow, was Past Jamie wrong.

This story took days, not mere hours. I wrote the opening weeks ago, and figured out the ending shortly after that. But the middle was fuzzy. I thought I’d do one thing, then realized that wouldn’t work in today’s world – and this story is set in the present day. Then I tried to make that same scenario fit the times, which didn’t work at all.

Finally I came up with a plot twist that was new to even me, and I thought through the details and realized it would work. We’ll see if I’m right, but it feels good, and it answered a hitherto unanswered question for the series I’m writing. (Only one question, mind you – I still have a long list!)

In doing this, I learned a valuable – and (now) very obvious lesson. Don’t put off doing something thinking you’ll magically figure it out and it will be easier later on.

With this story, I started writing one scene the way I originally envisioned it, then when I realized I hadn’t thought through everything I had to delete a whole chunk of text. Since this is a short story it wasn’t really that many words, but still! They were good words! Just not right for this particular story.

All that said, the lesson was valuable. I’ve had good luck in the past where I put something off thinking my subconscious would work out the details, but clearly that is not always going to happen. Sometimes you just have to plow through.

2016-05-28 Dakota Ridge