WIPpet Wednesday

Well, it's Wednesday, which means I'm supposed to share part of a work in progress. Here's the problem:

I haven't worked on my current book since last week. I haven't had time. My cat had kittens and I've been doing lots of editing. So I haven't worked on anything new. However, though I'm done writing two other books, I am not done editing, so I declare that they are still in progress.

Without further ado, here are seven paragraphs from book 2 in my series, entitled Devil's Despair. Here's your sneak peak Nessa!

           Without a word, the three Devils disappeared, taking Sam and her baby with them. Sam was dizzy from the trip and fell flat when she was abruptly dropped. She scrambled to her feet, stumbling three steps before she gained her balance. She turned in a slow circle, taking in her surroundings. Her throat closed from terror, and her heart pounded in her chest.

            They were in a cave. She was surrounded by demons and Devils. There were people chained to the wall, bound hand and foot by shackles. Hell hounds paced the perimeter, and their growls filled the cavern. A man wearing worn-in jeans and a polo walked over, his face suspiciously friendly. He held out a hand.

            “Welcome to Hell. I’m Abalam. You are?”

            Azazel shoved her toward the man. “This is Samantha. She’s the Warrior’s sister. If anyone knows where he is, it’s gonna be her.”

            Abalam grinned. “Fantastic! I’ve got your room all set up for you. Follow me, please.” He led her down one of the cave’s off-shoots and into another chamber. A chair sat in the middle, anchored to the floor with a metal plate and with cuffs to hold her at the wrists and the ankles. In one corner were a twin mattress and a tray containing a plastic cup of water and a sandwich.

            Sam took in all in with a sinking feeling in her gut. “What’s this for?”

            “This is what I like to call my information station.” Abalam reached out and patted the chair proudly. “You’ll come to know and loathe it soon enough. I wanted to introduce you to the place so that you can make an informed decision about how this is going to go.”

Cover Art

I started writing when I was nine years old. About a year ago, I decided to try and get published. I thought writing a good book was the most important thing.

I was wrong.

Writing the book is just the beginning. First was the writing, then the editing, which is a beast in and of itself. After the editing came the blurb and the query letters, then sample chapters, and the waiting.

Let me tell you this in absolute terms: writing a 3-4 paragraph blurb and a one page query letter are both exponentially harder than writing a 100,000 word book. Unequivocally.

After all of that, which takes just as long as writing the thing, by the way, comes the contract, which I've written about before. Unfortunately, that's just the beginning.

Right now, I am at the cover part. Choosing a cover, designing a cover, approving a cover. Whatever part of it is yours, it is HARD. I have spent hours upon hours looking at stock photos. Going through them, looking at them with a magnifying glass, keeping a log of what I would change about each and what I like. I've been sharing them with the publisher, asking questions and just basically harassing them.

Yesterday, I gave up. See, I came to this conclusion: I am not an artist, nor am I a publisher. I write. I craft and sculpt words, not images. I have not one clue what I'm doing when we're dealing with graphics. So, instead of continuing to spend hours upon hours combing through images, I sent my publisher an email telling them that I give up and they can figure it out.

It's not that I don't want to be involved. I do. I can't wait to look at it and suggest tweaks and help make it what I see in my head. I just don't have the skills to do it myself. I also don't have the skills to edit my own work, which is why I have beta readers and is why my publisher's editing staff is going over my work. I learned a long time ago that my inability to catch my own typos is not something I should feel guilty about. Now it's my turn to figure out how to accept the fact that along with decidedly NOT being an editor, I am also most decidedly NOT a graphic artist.

And y'know what? Oh well. I wear enough hats.

Camp NaNoWriMo

I'm sure a lot of you don't know this, but July was Camp National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. It's an event where in 30 days, you attempt to write 50,000 words on either a new project or a current WIP. I knew about it in April when they did one, but didn't participate because I didn't think I write anywhere near 50,000 words in a month. That seemed like an insurmountable goal to me.

Nevertheless, I like challenges, so I convinced myself to give it a go in July. I started off behind, and didn't get any writing in two of the first three days. It took me until day 10 to catch up to where I was supposed to be. By then, I was kinda hooked. See, they put you in virtual cabins, and you can see how other people are doing. If anything, I'm competitive. I wanted to win. I'm also goal oriented, so knowing that I had that goal, and knowing that if I didn't meet it, it would be there for everyone to see, really helped me stay on track.

Here's what I learned about me and my writing from Camp:

1. I like word wars, which is where you set a timer and see how many words you can write. Whoever has the most, wins. Adrian, my beta, is the only one who can beat me.
2. During a word war, I can consistently pound out 1000-1200 words in 30 minutes. Who knew?
3. Having a goal keeps me on track. This is the fastest I've ever completed a novel.
4. I like to win. I was determined to have the most words in my cabin, just to prove that I could.
5. I can write 50,000 words in 30 days. In fact, my total for the month of July, was 84,164.

I know a lot of you are writers, and if you're like me, some days the words flow and other days they don't. This experience really showed me that the block is all in my head. If I want to write, I can. I don't know if my fear of failing is just stronger than my writer's block, but this worked for me.

There's another round in November. You should all join me!

WIPpet Wednesday

What in the world is a WIPpet? I wondered that myself when it was suggested to me that I start doing these weekly posts. Here's the definition: A once weekly post about a current Work In Progress(WIP) where the only rule is that the post has to relate to the date. For example, since today is July 31st, you shall get 31 lines from my new WIP, which is entitled Devil's Salvation, and is the fourth book in my series. Hopefully you enjoy!

Chapter 2

Braxton was jerked from sleep by a pounding on his bedroom door. Gage’s voice came through the door. “Wake up. Angel invasion.”

Braxton groaned and rolled out of bed. He stumbled in the dark, yanking on pants and a wife beater over his boxers. He yanked open the door and blinked against the bright light. He saw Greer and Damon heading down the stairs, her hair mussed from sleep and him dressed only in shorts. Aradia came down the steps from Gage’s chambers, wearing one of his shirts and her own jeans.

“Did you wake Alaria up?”

Gage turned and nodded. “Yeah. The morning sickness is back. She said she’d be down when she was done throwing up.”

“Has Greer helped her?”

“Not yet this morning. Alaria won’t let anyone in until she’s done.”

“What the hell are the Angels doing here at—” he looked at his watch. “four-forty-three in the morning?”

“The fuck if I know.” The vampire yawned. “All I can tell you is that I was sound asleep and then there was a bright light and Gabriel was standing in my bedroom, telling me that I needed to assemble the troops and met him and Michael in the kitchen.”

Greer’s voice carried up the stairs. “Coffee’s on!”

Alaria emerged from her room, her hair scraped back from her face and into a ponytail. Her face was pale and drawn and there were black smudges beneath her eyes. She spared a quick look at each of the men before starting down the stairs. To her chagrin, she had to hold onto the railing as she climbed down and her knees shook by the end. She went straight to the coffee pot, pouring a cup and drinking deeply.

Gabriel looked at her with concern. “From my knowledge of human gestation, I believe caffeine is something that should be avoided during pregnancy.” He gestured to the coffee. “That liquid is quite high in it.”

Alaria glared at him over the rim of the cup. “Fuck you.” She smacked the empty mug down on the counter and sat next to Aradia. “I don’t need pregnancy advice from the son of a bitch that did the knocking up.”

“Traditionally, prospective fathers do get an opinion in the manner in which their child grows.” Gabriel perched across from her.

 

My Grammar Issues

No author has perfect grammar. Not one. Me included. In fact, I would argue that if I were to publish something without have passed it by the keen eyes of Adrian and Amy, it would be nearly painful to read. This is from someone who has an English degree.

Here's the thing: I don't feel too bad about it. After editing my first novel and learning where my problems are, I have caught myself finding the errors in other authors' work that I didn't notice before, especially if they're the same ones I make. For example, I am prone to this sentence structure:

He rolled the office chair across the floor with his feet, reached back t turn the knob on the door.

That is not a good sentence. There should be an "and" instead of the comma, or reached should be reaching in order to keep the comma. So, how did I get into this habit? Well, a high school teacher once told me that I used compound sentence and the word "and" to much, and thus began a nearly ten year quest to avoid using the word "and". Turns out she was wrong and I was wrong for listening. Now that I know how often I did that, when I read some best selling author who has literally sold hundreds of millions of copies of their books and see that they do the same thing I did over and over and over again.

My other big thing is starting sentences with conjunction. I was almost constantly using "and" "but" "so" to start sentences.

Now that I've told you all about how bad of a grammarian I am, I'll get to the moral of the story....I got better. My second book was much better than my first, and I believe the third will be better than the second. I may be to the point where commas are my biggest consistent error, and I'm not sure anything will make that change.

The editing process is painful. It brings all your flaws to the forefront, and sometimes it feels overwhelming. Unfortunately, it's a valuable part of the process, and in my opinion, all authors need to find at least two good beta readers to find all those flaws. Because what's even worse than betas tearing apart your grammar is reviewers tearing apart your grammar after the book is published.

Absence

So I realized that it's been two months since I last posted. I know I need to get better at it because blogging is a great way to drum up readership, and there are at least a few of you who follow this.

I'm not going to give excuses. The truth is simple. I lost interest in it. I was writing Devil's Redemption, which is now done! Woohoo! Done, done, done!

I also enjoyed my summer, without the pressures of this.

However, I'm going to make an effort to be better at it, and I'm going to start doing WIPPET Wednesday, which is about my current work in progress, which is Devil's Salvation, the fourth book in my series and I believe the last to have the "Devil" title. There will be three more after this one unless I change my mind again.

And I'm very hopeful that my first book will come out in September or October. I'm very much looking forward to making those announcements and doing a cover reveal here. This is an exciting time for me and I hope you all stay with me through the ups and downs.

Writer's Block

I finished Devil's Despair. I'm thrilled with the ending and the way the story wrapped up and so far my beta readers seem to be liking it. I'm slowly working through the chapters and editing them so that they'll be shiny and clean before I send it off to the publisher. I expect this process to take 45-60 days at least. That's a lofty goal for fully editing with three betas.

That's not the problem. The problem is Book #3, Titled Devil's Redemption. I'm 12,000 words into it, which isn't chump change by any stretch of the imagination, but it's stalled.

I want to write. I love writing and spinning the story. Each time I write a book, I feel privileged to be the one who gets to tell these amazing stories of people I wish really existed. I'm lucky to be able to immerse myself in another world. And yet, I sit and stare at those 12k words, happy with them, and unable to continue. Not because I don't want to, or because I don't know where I want the story to go, but because I don't seem to be able to make my fingers move.

I blame it on editing.

Typos are natural. My characters have "waffled" instead of "wavered", driven "cats" instead of "cars" and somehow known English when they're time-traveling from 30 B.C. Greece. Yeah, it happened.(sidenote: said character is a witch who had been training for said time traveling for 25 years, which is highly sufficient to learn a language)

The point of this rambling is this: typos discourage me. I'm a perfectionist. Every time one of my betas marks an error, it depresses me. The bigger the typo, the worse it bothers. My biggest thing is my propensity to begin sentences with conjunctions. I was so aware of that during the writing of the second novel, that every time a conjunction is marked in this book, it just makes me feel as if I'm not making progress. I know it's not true. I have gone from 50+ per chapter to 2-3. That's a HUGE improvement, but it's something I've worked so hard on it that every time I fail, it feels like some personal shortcoming of mine as a writer and makes it hard for me to keep going on my current works.

The question then becomes: what do I do about it?

I wish I had the answer. For now, I keep trying to write, working on the editing and hoping that the desire to write the story will eventually overcome the pangs I feel when I make an error.