Though few of you out there would recognize the title, or have heard much about it, I wrote Thunderbird (you’d recognize it as Biohazards), polished it off, sent it to my beta readers, and even received feedback through a mentorship with a well-known author in SF&F. The feedback I received was very positive, with encouragement that it was ready for publication, and I submitted it to the rounds. I was also encouraged by the author to write the synopses for the two books that were meant to follow Thunderbird, which I did, but because I don’t want to waste time on something that might not sell, I didn’t write the books themselves.

There was one caveat. The style in which I wrote Thunderbird was very different than the previous books I’d written. It was harder, grittier, with a chopped-up first-person voice that I love, love, love, even now, a year later. But it’s so different and so rough that I can understand this book would be (and was) difficult for my beta readers to get into from the get go. Because I knew it was difficult — because one of my beta readers came back and told me that he absolutely hated the main character, but couldn’t find anything wrong with the character’s motives or actions, he just didn’t like her one bit, even though he couldn’t stop reading because he needed to know what happened next — I braced myself for a very hard round of queries.

Love or hate, the main character is an antihero — not because she’s a bad guy, but because she’s afraid. Maybe in some ways that’s why she’s an easy character to love, or an easy character to hate, because she’s looking in the mirror and deep down in the abyss, and she doesn’t like what she sees, but she keeps on trying because the darkness rising is bigger than her.

The queries aren’t over. I’m not giving up on Thunderbird or the sister books that are meant to follow, but I’ve moved on while waiting to hear back and I’m still writing.

When I can.

The day job eats a lot of my brain. I’ve taken to turning off a lot of things after I get home from work so that I can write. My chat programs have always been my biggest distraction, so I rarely boot them up, especially these days when I’m really running short on time.

Once I had Thunderbird out of my system, I went back to The Book^TM, also known as Neither Knight Nor Knave (or NKNK for short), because that book got so many agent bites I figured I could give it another rewrite to see if I could fix the problems and make it better and have it go the rounds.

I got as far as 60,000-some words before realizing that I’d need at least another 80,000-some words to get a complete book the way I was writing. The writing was better, the concept a bit stronger, the characters had drive and motivation and challenges, and the two main characters had their own voices in their own chapters, but, Oh My God, this had become the Book That Won’t Die and writing 100 words a day, never mind 1000, was hard, so hard, and I couldn’t do it anymore.

NKNK became KNK, or Knight And Knave.

So I went to hide in a play-by-post forum-based role-playing-game for Vampire the Masquerade where I got to write about characters I cared about, people who’d had a completely different set of challenges, with tormented pasts and disastrous backgrounds and difficult (un)lives. I watched my writing get confident again, I saw it get stronger, I learned how to say a whole lot without saying much, and I got my brain wrapped around the concept of complicated plots again. The best encouragement I got to write came from the ST of the game, who bounced with excitement every time I posted something new.

And every now and then I would look at the document that was perpetually open in my dashboard, and poke at it with a sharp stick, and sometimes I would write a thousand words while other times I’d just minimize Scrivener instead because I couldn’t stand to look at it.

It wasn’t working. I knew it wasn’t. In the meantime, I’d ekked another 10,000-some words — it took over two months, and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

I don’t remember when the epiphany came to beat me senseless or when I suddenly became hooked again, but I scrapped 70,000-some, nearly 80,000-some words of brilliant writing and great story and started over from scratch. From scratch. I didn’t look at the 70-80K I’d already written. I had new words from the get go.

It’s one month later, and NKNK isn’t called KNK anymore, and it doesn’t have a title at all, but I’m 60,000-some words in, GOOD words, with everything I want out of a story, knowing where I want to go to get to the end, and plenty of room to go back and tweak a few things that I realized were missing from the beginning.

And I’m happy. I know what the next book in this series will be about. I know what the next book I’m going to write will be about.

So that’s where I am with the writing.

Somewhere along the way, a resolution to “post more” resulted in “posting less”, though I still read my friends’ list with regularity and have been keeping up with everyone. I really do need to get into the habit of posting again.

Sorry about that, folks. I might need a few prods.

We don’t quite have the last one yet, but the snow drifts are pretty intense.

I hit the grocery store early this morning before the storm hit, and it was nice not to have to battle crowds for the last courgette, or to commiserate over the slim pickings in the broccoli cooler. Aside from the usual weekly groceries, I stocked up on Stuff^TM for making vegetarian lasagna. I haven’t made it in ages, and the prepackaged frozen stuff just doesn’t do.

If there was ever a day to spend over the stove making the sauce, cooking the pasta, and playing the part of a kid slathering messy sauce all over the place, it was today. I ended up with two pans for the freezer, one big one for my mom and dad, and another one for tonight.

Why is it not dinner time yet?

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

- John McCrae

Reply to Flanders Fields

Oh! sleep in peace where poppies grow;
The torch your falling hands let go
Was caught by us, again held high,
A beacon light in Flanders sky
That dims the stars to those below.
You are our dead, you held the foe,
And ere the poppies cease to blow,
We’ll prove our faith in you who lie
In Flanders Fields.
Oh! rest in peace, we quickly go
To you who bravely died, and know
In other fields was heard the cry,
For freedom’s cause, of you who lie,
So still asleep where poppies grow,
In Flanders Fields.

As in rumbling sound, to and fro,
The lightning flashes, sky aglow,
The mighty hosts appear, and high
Above the din of battle cry,
Scarce heard amidst the guns below,
Are fearless hearts who fight the foe,
And guard the place where poppies grow.
Oh! sleep in peace, all you who lie
In Flanders Fields.

And still the poppies gently blow,
Between the crosses, row on row.
The larks, still bravely soaring high,
Are singing now their lullaby
To you who sleep where poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.

- John Mitchell

.

The difficult part is making it short, meaningful, and not letting it feel like an infodump.

It’s taken me one hour to write less than a hundred words. ARGH.

If someone tries to tell me writing is easy, I will rub their noses in a steaming pile of stinky infodump.

The other not-posting issue is not having anything to post about, but I’ll work on that, I promise.

So it’s 8:30 AM on a Saturday morning, and the cartoons that are on aren’t the ones I like to watch, so I thumbed the remote to Terminator: Salvation on the Movie Network. It was already a quarter in when I started watching it — Marcus had just met Kyle (the actor for whom, by the way, is as perfect a young-Kyle as I could imagine) — and now I’m about halfway through.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the movie, but only if I don’t think about it. Unfortunately, I had a brief flash of thinking in the middle of a snotball blizzard a little while ago, and I wondered:

If the theorem that computers don’t make mistakes — the humans who use them do is true, why do the Machines have such bad aim?

Unless I missed it somewhere, isn’t their mission to eradicate the human race? Or at least subdue them to the point where the humans are nothing but a herd of sheep…

In which case, why?

The Machines have no need for humans. Machines can build more Machines. Machines can build Machines to do every job a human would be needed for, so unless the Terminator series are the precursors for the Matrix movies, there is no purpose in keeping humans alive beyond, you know, infiltrating the humans, finding John Connor, ending the Resistance, yadda yadda yadda.

In which case, here’s another question: If John Connor is such a pain in the butt, why not take the easy route and nuke the planet, getting rid of everybody at once? It’s not as if Machines need a healthy planet in which to thrive.

It all comes down to believability, to make sure that every why question can be answered with something plausible. It’s the Mythbusters approach to character and plot building — is the condition at least possible?

That’s what I try to keep in mind when I write a story. It’s what makes me go back and rework something that might not work for someone else to at least lead them into figuring out the answer on their own, or explaining it outright.

I like Terminator: Salvation. It’s a smash-bang flick with nonstop action that picks up an audience and carries it all the way through the movie, kicking and screaming, until they sit down and realize the premise of the movie — that it’s not just humans who can suffer the human condition after all.

For me to like this movie, I have to turn off my brain. There’s just too many why questions that go unanswered. It’s not all that easy to turn off my brain when I read a book, and I end up tossing books that fail the believability test within the first three chapters. But the books that let me think, well, this is at least plausible (or don’t even give me the chance to get to that point), those are the books I cherish.

Now if only they’d pay authors the equivalent of a big movie budget, to make it fair…

I’ve been writing, and writing a lot; editing, revising, and rewriting. I am working again on NKNK while Biohazards — now named THUNDERBIRD is out on query.

Alas, it being the heavy-workoad period at my dayjob also means my free time is pinched, and finding time to post is made just that little bit harder.

Like I said — back, soon. Watch this space.

Draft Two of Biohazard — which now has an official title, at least insofar as I know what I’ll be calling it when I start querying agents — needs a bit of spit and polish, because there are typos…

Typos!

How embarrassing.

I finished this draft just before July 1st and forwarded a copy to my crit partner and to one other person who has no idea about the book whatsoever. I have heard back from one crit partner, who blazed through it in a rather short period of time, called me evil over the ending, and pointed out a few things that I can easily fix.

But now that I’m done, and waiting to hear back from the other two (well, three) people who have a copy of this draft, I don’t know what to do with myself.

Well, that’s not exactly true, but between being out of town last weekend, and being up to my eyebrows in Stuff^TM this weekend, it’s probably safer if I don’t start something right now, because I hate being interrupted — it drives me batty stopping something when I’m on a roll, or in the middle of something, so imagine how it’s like to not be able to stay awake until I’ve finished writing a book that just wants to spill out. Once the weekend’s over, though, I have things I want to do:

1. Update the website to be completely WordPress-based, not just the blog, to make it easier for me to update and add new pages;
2. Write the synopses for Biohazard 2 and Biohazard 3, which also have titles, but I’m not sharing them yet;
3. Go back to The Book^TM, the Maiden Voyage book that made it to the end of the harbour before listing badly to one side, as if it’d been nicked by a stealth torpedo. I intend on taking it apart and rebuilding it, to fix whatever holes there are, so that this time no one will want to say “no” to it.

Those are my three Things To Do this month, and it goes without saying that I’ll be polishing up Biohazard 1 and to put together the query letter to send out.

And at some point, I’ll actually enjoy the summer.

If the sweltering heat doesn’t get to me first.

In the news:

1. I’ve finished Draft Two of the current work in progress with the many-changing working titles (cWIP for short) and it is now in the hands of my two crit partners.
2. I acquired an iPad, and I love it to bits. I’ll go into this in more detail in another post.
3. There’s a WordPress iPad app, and I’ll be testing it soon. That might mean more posting overall, since I bring the iPad with me about 50% of the time when I leave the house, and all my on-the-computer time at home is usually spent writing Book-Stuff, or procrastinating on Book-Stuff.
4. Life is good.

How’s everyone?

It’ll go through a bit of manuscript formatting before I send it out to a couple of people for the first reading round.

It needs a lot of spit and polish, and some 5K fewer words (maybe more), but if nothing else I’m really happy with it.

Why?

Because when I wrote those last six words at the very end, I thought, my crit partners are going to KILL me.

And when they throw the book at me, that’ll be how I know it’s halfway decent.