Since I’m in Seattle from June 17th to July 31st to attend Clarion West, I’ve written a number of blog posts beforehand to post while I’m gone. I’ll be keeping an eye on the comments, but might take a while to respond.

More on Showcasing Shinies.

Lynne
by Diana Mallery

Emily
by Courtney A. Bernard

Emily
by Shaun O’Neil

Since I’m in Seattle from June 17th to July 31st to attend Clarion West, I’ve written a number of blog posts beforehand to post while I’m gone. I’ll be keeping an eye on the comments, but might take a while to respond.

This is the first of a temporary new feature on the blog — Showcasing Shinies.

Wherein I, er, showcase shinies. Specifically, the artwork of my characters I’ve commissioned, traded for, or been gifted over the years. I absolutely love seeing other people’s representations of my characters. I love drawing them myself, too — and sometimes do — but I lack the gift of multi-tasking, which means I don’t actually get much art done while I’m working on my writing.

Which is all the time.

Anyway, I’ll be presenting the art without my own commentary, since a) I always feel self-conscious about potential favoritism, and b) I love all of these to bits and pieces, and any commentary would swiftly devolve into “PURTY OH MY GOSH LOOK AT HOW PURTY.”

If you’re at all interested in having your characters drawn, I definitely suggest taking a look at the artists’ websites. Most of them take commissions, and at very reasonable prices to boot, and trust me — there’s nothing quite like that thrill of seeing your character face-to-face.

I have two posts a week scheduled, organized by character/novel. It seemed apt to start off where I started off: Wielders, my very first novel, now shelved. Meet my boys!

Chen and Nicholas
drawn by Suzanne Annaars

Nicholas
drawn by Peter V. Nguyen

The girls will be joining them in a couple of weeks!

I love reading writing advice. Whether it’s plain grammar stuff, about style or flow, about scenes or chapters or characters or world-building, about how to balance writing with the rest of your life, how to manipulate yourself into getting work done – it’s great, and I suck it up like a sponge. I love to learn.

But sometimes it depresses me, too. I’m a very disorganised writer – probably because I’m a very disorganised person. I don’t work well with schedules, I get up ridiculously late, I procrastinate, I play games and watch TV when I should write, all those things. I can stick to a schedule of 1000 words a day, or 1500 words a day, or 4000 words a day, but never for long.

Here’s some random information about my novels:

My first book, Wielders, took from January 2008-August 2008 to write. Lots of times I managed 2000 words in a day. Lots of times I went weeks without writing a word. Writing this book was not a good experience: part of this is because I started writing it in the very last year of art school, so I was stressed out with graduating, and after graduating, I really just wanted to do nothing for a while. It got done, though, and after years and years of never managing to write more than, say, 4000 words on a single story, it felt amazing.

Which gave me the confidence to try NaNoWriMo that same year. And, lo and behold, I knocked out over 70000 words in ten days. Always Read the Fae Print was born. The first four or so days, I wrote at least 10k a day.

That, too, felt amazing.

In 2009, I didn’t write much in the way of novels. I wrote a few short stories, and spent a lot of time revising the two novels I’d written then. I tried NaNoWriMo again that November, fed up with my lack of new-wordage: the first hour, I wrote 1600 words on a sequel to Fae Print, shelved it, and worked on a different project. I got to almost 19000 words before calling it quits. The project didn’t feel right, I had to produce a lot of artwork on a very short deadline for an upcoming exposition, and my cat Shady, who’d been with me nineteen years, died.

In March 2010, I started up again, this time with The Hands of Cally Wu. I wrote on a mostly steady schedule of 1000-1500 words a day, rarely less and often more, felt good about my productivity, and wrote about 40000 words in three weeks.

Then I put it on halt. I needed to do some brainstorming and get other things done – short stories, another round of Fae Print edits based on awesome beta feedback, beta-ing books for others…

I didn’t get back to it until mid-May. Since then, I’ve written about 12000 words. This past week? I wrote 400 words. No more. Not because I had other things to do, because I didn’t, really, and not because I didn’t want to, because I woke up every day telling myself I’m going to write now.

It just didn’t happen. I procrastinated. Sat around uselessly. (Well, okay. I did a lot of plotting, and feel like 250% better about the new ending I have planned. But still. No words.)

So, like I said, I’m disorganised. It’s frustrating, sometimes, to see people knock out words on a regular schedule, to make self-imposed deadlines, and talk about The Right Way to Write. Because I’d like to be able to do all that. That’s the weird thing: I’m only disorganised when it comes to getting things done. In my head, I’m totally anal-retentive about making lists, compartmentalising, schedules, all those things. Getting something done, though, especially on my own schedule, is hell. I don’t know if it’s simply me, or because my brain tends to work differently – autism and ADHD are having a big ol’ party in there so that probably affects some things – but it doesn’t matter.

Because in the end, you know… whatever. I get books done, I get them edited, I get them shipped off to beta readers and agents. I plan new books. I write those, too. I’m not always happy about the way it happens, but I’ve tried every other way and those didn’t work. Apparently, for me, the Right Way to Write is to go to bed late and to get up late and to marathon TV shows and doodle a lot and read other people’s books and play Worms on my cellphone. And then, when I feel like I’m ready to write, I throw words onto a screen until I get burned out, and then I take a breather for a few weeks or a few months and I do it again.

And however frustrating it can be for my oh-so-organised brain… in the end, the book gets done, and that part always, always feels good.

All of this is a really roundabout way of saying that you should read these blog posts by Hannah Moskowitz and Elana Johnson, because they both made me scream “YES! WHAT THEY SAID!” out loud and freak out my darling cat.

Also, I’ll stop with the stupidly long introspective posts soon. Probably when I get back into the practice of throwing words at a screen. I need to get this new-and-improved ending written some day!

13197 / 50000 words. 26% done!

The world is giving me conflicting messages.

First, Changelings You Should Know About blows up in my face, prompting me to work on Stranger instead; I figure I’ll give it a few days to see if it works out, and if not, I’ll go focus on editing Always Read the Fae Print. To my surprise, Stranger chugs along nicely, ending every day with a word count well ahead of schedule. There’s minor panic, because I have no ending, and no outline–until it gives me an ending and an outline.

Huzzah.

I’m optimistic. Happy to be writing a rough draft again, happy to be making progress, happy to have a freakin’ ending.

And then the world decides to be a jerk and sends me an invitation to a fancy art exposition–which would be fabulous, except I have to submit my art by November 20th.

SIGH.

So NaNo’s getting put on halt while I try to dash out four exposition-worthy pieces of art in record time. After that, I’ll have another ten days to try to finish the book in.

I can do that, right? I wrote a whole 70k in ten days last year. How hard can this be?

Gulp.

To spare you my OVERWHELMING PANIC, here’s your daily Face Your Manga dose.

Here’s two characters from Wielders, a book that’s technically shelved–but its characters won’t get out of my head. You know how it goes. On the left, Emily, who actually sports a dashing ‘fro, but the avatar maker didn’t sport that option. Not cool. Anyway, she’s an living breathing emo train, but the cutest one you ever did see.

On the right, Nicholas, the self-centered jerk every book truly needs.

… I have no cutesy anecdotes. He’s just a jerk. Sorry, Nicholas.

Anyway, I need to get back to drawing nekkid people, lest I get behind. (Did I mention this exposition has a theme? ‘Cause it does: nekkid people. How many people have a job that forces them to study nekkid people all day long? Seriously.)

One of these days, I’ll have something truly fascinating to post.

Today doesn’t seem to be that day, because all I have are South Park-style interpretations of my main characters from Wielders.

I was editing and needed a distraction, okay?

From left to right: Lynne (will glare at you), Chen (will be nice at you), Emily (will be cute at you), Nicholas (will be cynical at you), Sara (will cut you).

(Actually, she’ll shoot you, but that thing didn’t have any guns. She’ll make do.)

Back to work. I’m still firmly aiming for my September 15th deadline for this draft, and I lost a lot of valuable time yesterday stressing out over the computer crash that I thought had killed all my edits from the day before… you don’t want to know. Really.

So, it’s been a few weeks, but not much has changed since my last post. I’m still dragging my way through this third draft of Wielders, but at least now, the end is in sight: I’m nearing the 60k mark, out of 92k.

I’m probably not going to reach my goal of finishing this draft by September 15th, but I’ll probably come close.

I hope.

Err, on to the snippet. Context: the PoV character, Emily, is reunited with her dad who ran off nearly a year previous for reasons he’s now explaining. The situation is complicated further by the deaths of both his wife and son (Emily’s mother and brother) in the time since he left.

      Dad kept his voice even. He was hurting – I knew he was hurting, but I kept my eyes stubbornly averted as he leaned over and sought them out. “Emily. Look at me.”
      I clutched my legs tighter.
      “Emily, you have to believe me. I thought I was doing the right thing. I never wanted to leave.”
      “She doesn’t have to do anything,” Lynne snapped. “You made the decision for her. She’s got the right—”
      “Lynne.” There was a dangerous tone to his voice, simmering under that fine outer wrapping of self-control and politeness. Even without looking, I knew his eyes were blazing. “Stay out of it.”
      “I’m just saying…”
      “Don’t.”
      The background noise of traffic came in through the window. It seemed to only add to the dead silence in the room, wrapped around us like humid summer air, warm and buzzing and impossible to escape.
      It should have given me time to think. Scrape my thoughts together to form even the faintest semblance of coherency.
      Instead, I swallowed and whispered, “They’re gone.”

In much less melodramatic news: my first ereader arrived today. I bought it on a whim on Monday. It’s the new Sony Reader Touch Edition, and it is shiny.

As usual, my wee attention whore of a cat needs to be in the picture as well. The keyboard is, after all, the perfect place for a geriatric cat to nap, didn’t you know? And it’s not like it impedes my writing or anything. Nah.

(Yes, Wielders has a prologue. Deal with it, y’all.)

I’m hip-deep in commission work, regular work, short story revisions, eying my mailbox for responses from short story markets I submitted to and various methods of procrastination, but I thought I’d do a quick blog post to drop off some art. Pam Noles has a WIP of a commission I’m doing for her on her blog, in a post entitled What I Said I Wanted Was Pissed Off Combat Unicorns Being Ridden By War Orcs.

How can you not click that link, seriously?

I’ve also got two lovely new commissions done for me to show off. Yes, I’ve been on a roll lately. My wallet is not happy, but I am, and what’s more important here?

Here’s another absolutely lovely drawing by C. Bernard, this time of Lillian, my main character from Always Read the Fae Print. (For a summary of this book, I refer you to a comment by K.V. Taylor from a few days ago: “Mwahahaha, sucks to be you, Lillian.” That sounds about right.)

Here, Shaun O’Neil drew Emily Boyer, one of the main character from Wielders. I just love this. How cute is she, seriously? The expression is spot-on for her.

Pretty art makes me so very, very happy.

And now to get back to working on this commission editing Rule of Threes beta reading a CP’s novel obsessively refreshing Duotrope listings. Mmm, productivity.

First, I thought this was an interesting discussion that’s probably relevant to every single writer in the known universe: when is good enough truly good enough? When is the book ready to submit?

Literary agent Jessica Faust started it off at the BookEnds blog with “Good Enough Is Never Enough”; author Michelle Sagara responds in disbelief here, and author/agent’s assistant Jodi Meadows and author Elizabeth Bear drop their own two cents in here and here, respectively.

… I have no intelligent thoughts to add. I haven’t reached the querying stage with either of my books, but already, I’m wondering how I’ll know when I’m ready for it. It’s always good to know you’re not alone.

As far as WIP Wednesday goes, I have two offerings: first, a snippet from the book I’m currently editing, Wielders.

      Chen barely seemed to hear me. His head tilted to the side, eyes distant. One hand slipped from his jacket pocket.
      I nudged him. “Wake up, Wilkins.”
      “Hm—?”
      “Vision?” I half dreaded an affirmative answer, half hoped for one. It was better than just hanging around East Bumblefuck suburbia.
      (The town’s name did, incidentally, start with a B, but fuck if I knew the rest.)
      “Yeah…” He touched two fingers to the bruise on his jaw and turned ninety degrees. Uncertainly, he looked down a narrow street, residential aside from the café on the corner announcing its Happy Hour that night. Young trees, probably planted only that year, lined the curb. “We should head in there… I think. There’s something going on. Or there will be.”
      “Doesn’t that mean we should head the other way?” I lingered behind. Chen was already on the move. “Is this like last night? Because that didn’t get us anyplace good.”
      “That was different.” Judging from last time he’d sounded this distracted, asking further would probably get me sweet FA.
      I followed, keeping my expression appropriately glum in case he looked over his shoulder.

Second, a portrait commission I’m currently beating into submission:

Last week Monday, the 27th, was the last day of filming for Sterren op het Doek, the Dutch TV show I’ll be appearing on. It’ll likely air on July 2nd, on Dutch channel Nederland 2. Because three days of filming need to be squeezed into half an hour, I’m very curious which parts will make it in.

I’m not allowed to put the portraits I made for it online, or talk about which portrait ended up “winning”, but I don’t think they’ll object to putting minor previews online. (Especially since the readership of this blog isn’t exactly their target audience.) Because I work fast, I ended up doing two portraits – one in charcoal, one in soft pastels – and to my surprise, I ended up happy enough with both that I had no idea which one to to use in the end.

     

All in all, it was an amazing experience, and I’m thrilled with both how my portraits turned out – some of my best work yet – and with how filming went. I can’t think of a single thing I regret. I can’t wait to see the end result and share the full drawings online.

In the part, participating artists reported a sharp increase in commissions after the airing of their episode, which means I expect to have little time left for writing come July. For this reason, I’m already scheduling my writing schedule for the next few months. My plan is to finish this draft of Always Read the Fae Print and send it to betas before I leave on holiday come May 26th. At this rate, that should be eminently doable: I’m at chapter 36 of 43, and though I still need to weave some information and character bits into earlier scenes and do cutting where possible, I’m optimistic. If I have a couple of extra days, I’ll also do some minor content edits for Wielders, which I’ll then print out and take with me to line edit while sunbathing on the luxurious beaches of Kos. The thought alone makes me purr.

It’s been much too long since I posted. Here’s the low-down of all the exciting and not-so-exciting things that have been happening lately:

• I’m making a lot of progress on editing Always Read the Fae Print. I didn’t make my original goal of finishing it before March, sure, and I didn’t quite manage to achieve my second goal of having it done before April, either, but if I keep going at this rate, May should be doable. (The question is if I’ll be able to keep up this rate.)

  I’ve been focusing on getting all the major plot elements in place, which resulted, for the most part, in cutting and writing entire scenes and chapters and weaving the resulting changes into the rest of the book. I’m nearly done with this part – just the epilogue left to go – but I have a lot of work left to do after that. A couple of characters need a personality overhaul, while others need theirs to shine through more clearly. I need to iron out some continuity issues and weave in exposition here and there. The problem with fantasy is that there are a lot of things I know about this world that my readers don’t, and I completely forget to tell them.

  After a first draft of 78500 words, I now have approximately 102500. Not bad for a book I originally didn’t think would make it up to 60000. My goal is to edit it down to about 90000, but we’ll see where the story takes me. Even after cutting out earlier scenes that didn’t work for the plot, I should be able to get rid of a lot – some conversations run too long, information is repeated, and hopefully I’ll be able to streamline the plot somewhere around the middle where it veers off course.

  Overall, I’m optimistic. This is hard work, but it’s ever-so-rewarding.

• Man, that was one long list item.
• To those interested in following my progress, I’m keeping track on my blog sidebar even when I’m not actively updating my blog. Because it’s editing rather than drafting, the numbers will go up and down, but any change means progress, right?
• Nathan Bransford is holding an interesting challenge on his blog that I hope to participate in. In short: people send their queries, fake or real, off to Nathan Bransford, who posts 50 of them up on the blog come Monday, April 13th. Others respond, playing agent for a day, rejecting or requesting materials and hopefully giving some helpful feedback. There are some published books nestled in there as well. Those “agents” who end up requesting the most published books win a prize and the query writers get some valuable feedback. (Readers of my blog might recognise my query if he selects it, but I trust you guys not to cheat.)

  As much as I like helping people with their queries (all this obsessive research I’ve done over the past eighteen months has to be good for something, right?), I’m really interested in getting an outsider’s view on my query. Everybody I’ve shown it to so far already knows the book, or at least what it’s about.

• Speaking of contests, I recently won one of Jeri Smith-Ready’s over at her blog. I received an ARC of her new book, Bad to the Bone. Glee ensued. Naturally, I immediately rushed to the nearest online store to buy myself the first part of the series, Wicked Game, which I’m currently ensconced in when not editing, drawing or working. I’m really enjoying it so far! I can’t wait to finish it and move on to Bad to the Bone. What’s the point in receiving an ARC if you can’t read it before the rest of the world gets to?

  On a side-note, I’m struck by the similarities between Wicked Game and Always Read the Fae Print in genre and other details, among them song titles for chapters and a best friend who believes in magic without any proof vs. a main character who knows it’s true but can’t tell her. Part of me is concerned – if this ever sees the light of day, hopefully no one will think that’s where the ideas came from – and part of me is excited: there’s a market for my kind of stuff out there!

• In yet another spectacular computer failure, I just lost the file I kept Always Read the Fae Print‘s deleted scenes in. That hurts. Sure, I deleted them, but the point of having a file to put them in was to a) ease the pain of getting rid of them and b) have them in case I want to re-use some of it later, which I did.
• On Monday, March 23rd, I had my first day of filming for Sterren op het Doek, the TV show I talked about in my previous post. It was a fantastic experience. The celebrity I was assigned to was well-known Dutch football coach Foppe de Haan. I’ve made some progress on a portrait that I’m fairly pleased with. It needs a lot of work, but it has potential. Though I posted a snapshot of an early stage on my Twitter account a while back, I don’t think I’ll be posting further work-in-progress shots, let alone the final product. I have to get people watching the episode somehow, right?

  In a slight change of plans, the next day of filming won’t be until April 15th, with the final shoots happening on April 27th, one day before my birthday. The episode will likely air in June, but late May/early July are also possible. I’m furiously hoping it won’t be until after June 4th, when I return from vacation, but that’s why DVDs and the Internet were invented.

• All #queryfail and #agentfail drama aside, I remain excited about the querying progress. I can deal with rejection: I just want my work done and out there, already. Plus, I love drafting query letters, and I can’t wait to see if they’re as gripping as I hope they are. Querying seems such a universally dreaded activity – am I the only one looking forward to this?

  Between Sterren op het Doek, work, vacation, the facts that Always Read the Fae Print is only halfway in its second draft and that Wielders isn’t back from all beta readers yet, I highly doubt I’ll be able to achieve my original goal of querying in June. However, July or August should be doable, if I work hard enough, and I plan to…

  … assuming I don’t drown in portrait commissions following the airing of my episode. There’s worse things than being kept from one art because you’re busy getting rich from the other one.