selenay | Entries tagged with segmented library

Me: I checked this thing out of the repository but it won't let me edit it. Is something wrong with the repository?
DBA: Have you tried checking it out to edit it?
Me: ...
Me: It's going to be one of those days, isn't it?

We're forecasted to have a huge snow storm on Sunday. The entire province is ready to cry. We're so far over our snow removal budget that it's become a joke and everyone is worn down by it. Hopefully this will be the last bad one of the season, but I'm not holding my breath.

I've booked a week off over Easter. I'm too worn down and need some recuperation time. My poor, abused back needs some recuperation time.

I'm also going to do Camp Nanowrimo this year, so that week off will give me a chance to get a solid bit of work done. I'm currently reading and making notes on Papercuts so that I can make the larger revisions it needs. I'm pretty sure that I've found the biggest plot issue and I know where to fix it, so that's good. It's a better book than I remember, but not yet good enough to go out on submission. My plan is to make the revisions by the end of the month and send it out to test readers, so I'll be itching for something new to play with in April.

At the moment, I'm pretty sure that I'll be plunging into the revised version of Zombie Circus. The one with the correct main character :-D I've got another novel in outlining stage that I'd like to tackle this year, but it needs more thinking before I start it.

I've also been working up some short stories with an eye to submit to magazines this year as well as querying agents. Even if all I get this year is rejections, I'm making 2015 the year that I throw myself at the publishing thing and see what happens.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Look, I did it! Papercuts is officially past the 50k mark. Not finished yet, but I'm enjoying this milestone :-D

Current Mood: pleased

Papercuts, my NaNo novel, is still on track and I still don't hate it. Woot!

(Usually I have a stage in a project where I hate my words and swear blind it's the worst thing I've written. I'm still waiting for that moment to hit with this.)

The interesting part about doing it as a NaNo novel is that we're encouraged not to go back and edit, and definitely not to go back and delete stuff. After all, it's the total word count that matters, so removing parts is going to put us behind. That doesn't mean I can't go back and add things, which I had to do last night when I realised that I'd missed out a key bit of information that needed to be passed from one character to another in a scene. Oops.

But that same scene includes some fairly hefty and unnecessary exposition, because it got away from me, and I know a lot of it will be getting cut during revisions. Normally, I'd already have thrown it out (and possibly regretted it later). For NaNo, I'm just highlighting it and leaving myself a comment that it's a section I need to trim down.

Who knows, I may need that information later. So at least I haven't junked it. When I make big cuts in revisions, I'm usually pretty careful about saving the words somewhere else in case I need them or can reuse them somehow. One of my bad habits is being less careful with mid-novel-in-progress revisions, so maybe the NaNo process is going to help me with that.

At some point, I need to do a post about Scrivener, which I'm using to actually write the novel for the first time. I've been using it to organise projects for a while, but still writing in Word. This time I've done the whole thing in Scrivener and I'm starting to understand why so many people love it.

I had this vague idea that I'd have time to edit and post a couple of fics that I've been sitting on for a few weeks. Um, no, this ain't gonna happen. I think they may end up being my Christmas present fics at this rate! All my December words will be going to finish Papercuts and write my Yuletide fics, so maybe it's wise to save those fics for, er, even longer than planned and throw them up on Christmas Eve.

I can pretend that was totally the plan, right? It's not like they were actually intended to be published in October...

Current Mood: productive

NaNoWriMo continues to go surprisingly well for me. Yay!

Papercuts should go over 30k words today, which is way ahead of where I thought I'd be. If anyone is doing the maths, that's a long way ahead of the NaNo goals, too. It's not quite the midway point, and I'm more than halfway to 50k already.

Which is good, because my goal is to have a complete first draft by the end of the year, and 50k would not make a complete novel at today's book lengths. The trick will be keeping the momentum up in December, when there are dozens of temptations and other things out that to distract me (such as Yuletide, eep!).

I haven't hit the mid-novel "this sucks, I'm never going to make it good" point yet, although I did hit a "argh, what happens next?" moment last night. I think that I've figured that out, though, and hopefully I won't be hitting too many of those :-D

(I keep reminding myself that even if the middle is a bit of a muddle in the first draft, revisions can fix that. It's a very important mantra. If I can stick the landing, I can go back and rejig a few bits to make the run-up to the landing make more sense.)

I've now got all the important characters and plot threads established. My main character still feels like the right choice, and the secondary characters that have popped up unexpectedly are fun to write. I was slightly concerned that my MC was too perfect, but she's fleshing out as I write, and I'm getting a good feel for her flaws and imperfections now.

Also, I got my first dead body on the page. It's probably a weird thing that I always feel more confident about a story when the death and mayhem start kicking in, but I do. That probably says something terrible about my psyche.

(The body isn't technically on the page. It's elsewhere, off-screen, but people know about it and are worrying, which is the important part for the plot.)

So, yeah, NaNoWriMo is going shockingly well and eating my brain, but it's leaving me with very little time for other types of writing. Oh well, that's the way it has to be for now :-D

In other news...

Mum returned to England last night. I'm both relieved to have my house back to myself, and oddly hollow because I'd got used to her company. I'm not usually this conflicted about her leaving. Maybe that's because this was a bit of a weird year during her visit? I was working a hell of a lot, tons of overtime, and Mum helped me to stay sane through some of the worst of it. That part of the project is over, so I don't need all the help anymore, but it meant that I never reached the "argh! get my mother out of my hair!" stage that I usually get to. Huh.

Current Mood: creative

After today, I am going to be off work for six entire, whole days. It will be glorious. I need the break so much, just to catch up on sleep.

So far, my NaNo novel is going pretty damn well. I'm still enjoying it, and I'm actually having more fun with it the further I get into it. There is one scene that will probably lose the first few paragraph in revisions, and another I know will need expanding, but I'm not actively hating it. Remind me of these positive feelings when I hit the mid-novel, everything sucks, part of writing, okay?

At least I still feel confident that I have the right MC on this one :-D And yesterday, I got to throw in a library description from my research, which made me squee a little as I wrote.

Unfortunately, this morning I wandered onto Twitter and immediately got filled in on the latest SFF fandom explosion. Reading to figure out what the hell everyone was talking about was beyond depressing, and made me a bit afraid for the nebulous potential future when I might be a published author. I know that there will be negative reviews, it's inevitable, but the idea that a reviewer could take such a dislike to specific authors that they mount campaigns against them and anyone who enjoys their work is...frankly, terrifying.

And this comes after a couple of weeks of reading about two separate authors who hunted down, stalked, and even attacked (in one case) negative reviewers.

It's enough to make an aspiring writer want to throw in the towel and never ever let any of my original fic see the light of day. Fanfic 5eva!!111!!!

(Except it turns out this morning's shitstorm culprit started out in fanfic land many years ago, and committed many of the same offenses there. So, you know, fanfic land isn't any friendlier than original fic land, sometimes.)

On the one hand, I wish I hadn't fallen down the link trail. On the other hand, ignorance isn't always bliss, if there's a chance you'll walk into the same traps as previous people have. At least, in the event I do sell anything, I know this is something that could happen and can be braced for it. At least a little bit.

Now I need to go and find some happy things, and then I need to write my novel some more. Today is the day I get to write a little reveal I've been looking forward to, so it's going to be fun.

Current Mood: depressed

The first weekend of NaNo is over, and I have ended up significantly ahead of where I'd hoped to be. Woo hoo! I'd been aiming to have 4k done, but I'm currently at 6,291 for two days of work, which gives me a nice buffer against anything work can throw at me this week.

I'm also through chapter two, which was something I'd been a bit nervous about. Chapter one was pretty solid in my mind--it's the hook chapter and I'd been itching to write it--but chapter two had a lot of work to do. It needed to introduce my MC's grown up home life (she's a child in chapter one), set her up in the real world library, and introduce several new characters to populate the world a bit.

That's a lot of heavy lifting. It's going to need to revisions because parts of the writing felt flat to me, but it's less terrible than I expected. Several minor characters acquired names and hints of personality. One of the big secondary characters jumped off the page for me, turning out to be much mouthier (and a bit swearier) than I expected, which is going to be fun to write.

An unplanned spooky end to the chapter appeared, which is hopefully going to make sense later but can always be revised out if it doesn't.

Despite all the short stories I wrote and the planning I did, I'm already discovering exciting new things about this book and the characters in it :-D

Chapter three starts today. A conversation for it has been running around my head for the last day or two, so I'm feeling ready to write it. This is also the chapter where I start to introduce the main big evil plotline, and I'm really looking forward to writing that.

This is definitely going better than I expected :-)

Current Mood: creative

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selenay

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Writing and other things
And done! NaNo style :-)
Still NaNo-ing, woot!
Another NaNo update...and Mum has flown away again
Running out into the dark cold night...
NaNo update the first

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Entries tagged with segmented library

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Writing and other things

And done! NaNo style :-)

Still NaNo-ing, woot!

Another NaNo update...and Mum has flown away again

Running out into the dark cold night...

NaNo update the first