Fighting With the God of Thunder

I’m working on what I call my chainsaw edit of a paranormal romance novel (where I look at the overall structure of the novel and make all major changes to plot, character, flow, etc.) and I’ve found myself running into some issues with a side character.

But not just any side character–this particular one is Thor, God of Thunder.

I don’t particularly like writing side characters. I think they’re hard to do well and they complicate things. I like to stick to important characters (this isn’t necessarily main characters–it’s pretty much any character that is present throughout the story and directly affects things) and background characters.

When I originally wrote this book, Thor was unplanned. For that reason alone, it was necessary to look hard at him to see if he was affecting the plot in a negative manner. But he’s not, and he’s fun, and I rather like him a lot, so after careful consideration, I’m going to keep him.

Of course, you can’t just have a character in a book because you like them, however. So I’ve been working at integrating him into the plot. This has been slightly difficult. I need him to be important enough to justify his being there, but not so important that he’s pulling things away from the main characters and/or making major modifications to the plot at this juncture.

I may have finally figured things out, however. I hope to start any necessary rewrites next week, so we’ll see how things go.

Have you ever had a character that didn’t quite fit the first time through? Did you take them out or leave them in? Or can you think of a character in a book/movie/TV show/whatever where you’ve wondered why they were there?

Dealing with Side Characters

You know, Squiders, main characters are bad enough. They don’t do what you want them to do, or they forget the plot in a moment of passion, or you turn your back for a moment and they’ve decided being a bad guy sounds like a pretty good gig. But at least you know they’re important. When a scene goes the wrong way, at least they’re still in the center of it.

Side characters, however, are tougher. They walk a fine line between being important and being in the background. These are your sidekicks, your lackey bad guys, your friends and relations. They’re important to the characters somehow. They contribute to the plot…somehow. But they can’t do too much, or they become main characters. And they can’t do too little, or your reader wonders why they’re there.

It’s a hard line to tread. Each story, each plot, has different character needs. And very few novels can get away with no side characters at all. People, unfortunately, do not exist in a vacuum. And each side character provides their own issues. It might be your character’s mother, whom they obsess about constantly, but, in the end, provides little of use to either plot or characterization. It might be your character’s best friend, who is always around, providing witty banter, but isn’t there when your character needs her most so your reader wonders why you bothered to build her up so much. It might be the professor your character fights with the whole first half of the novel, only to disappear for the second half.

Unfortunately, there’s only one thing to do. You look at a side character, decide what they need to contribute to the plot, and then you either build them up so they fit their goal, or you dial them back (or, sometimes, get rid of them completely).

I’m having to do this right now. I’ve got a side character named Thor (yes, that Thor) that at the moment, sits on the cusp. I’m not quite sure which way he’s going to have to go to fit the story.

(Hopefully I will by the end of the day, though.)

Anything you’ve found helps with side characters, Squiders? Any you’re having issues with at the moment?

A Landsquid, a Turtleduck, and a Ghost Story Walk Into a Bar…

Hey, want to see what a landsquid looks like when you haven’t drawn one in a few months?

My imagination is weird.

Also, in celebration of the haunting season being afoot, you can read my new ghost story, The Door in the Attic, over at Turtleduck Press for free!

Alpaca Overlord Week: My Rise to Power

Today, I will tell you, my minions, of how I overcame Kit and her accursed landsquid to rise above the odds, to conquer trials and tribulations, and to inspire you with feelings of my greatness.

And to warn you that if you ever attempt anything similar, I shall crush you underneath my hooves and destroy everything and everyone you have ever loved.

Remember: top-secret and highly-trained genetically-engineered llama spies. EVERYWHERE. Even, possibly, your cat. I will know what you’re thinking possibly even before you yourself know. SO BEWARE.

I started with the Landsquid. Oh, he thought he was so smart, sticking ceiling turtles over my fence and inviting me over to watch sporting events and drink cocoa and occasionally foiling my schemes to steal all the top hats. Thought I’d never realize what he was up to. WELL. It was easy enough to suggest we watch the game at my house instead, and then, when he came over, I locked him in the basement with all those Sky Shark-forsaken ceiling turtles.

When I close my eyes, I can still hear his cries. Delightful.

Kit was a bit harder since I am, after all, a fictional character, but luckily I’ve seen enough Star Trek the Next Generation to learn from one Professor James Moriarty on how to break the fourth wall and escape into a world one was never supposed to belong to. Bwhahahaha!

I’m sure she never suspected she’d have to contend with her own creations. That’s the only way I can explain her total lack of preparedness. After all, she created me, so one would hope she was usually more up to snuff in terms of international espionage and hostage situations.

And that, my dear peons, as they say, is that. By the by, I did not receive nearly as many tributes as I expected yesterday. You have one last chance and then – llamas.

Stories as Presents

The holidays are fast approaching, and it’s the time of year where you start to panic because you can’t seem to think of what your little brother might want, or what to get your friend who has everything (it turns out that not everyone like rum, no matter what the Landsquid thinks), or you wonder if it would be kissing-up if you make your boss brownies.

As a writer, you may think it’s a great idea to write stories for your presents.  In some cases, yes.  In others, no.  Let’s lay down some ground rules.

First of all, remember that it takes time to write a story.  Even a short story of a couple thousand words may take you at least a week to brainstorm, outline, write, edit, rewrite, and polish.  And then, depending on how you want to deliver it, you may need to format it, print it out, have it bound, etc.  Be realistic with the number you can get done.

Well, you may think, I’ll just write one story and give it to everyone.

Remember that your friends and families have different tastes.  For example, my mom loves scifi.  My sister is a romance kind of girl, and my dad reads historical fiction.  I’d be hard-pressed to write one story that appealed to all of them (although now I want to try…) and I bet the same is true of the people you know as well.

Additionally, if you write a story specifically for a person, then that person is touched.  You can tailor it to their tastes, perhaps use characters of yours that you know they like, and they’ll treasure it.  If you write a one-size fits all story and gift it to a number of people, it loses its charm.  It may even hint at laziness to its recipients, especially if they compare notes and find they all got the same thing.

Remember that some people don’t like to read (blasphemy, I know).  A story, personalized or no, is probably not going to be appreciated in that case.

That being said, a story can be a wonderful present.  If you have time and know someone will love it, go for it.

(Also, I make an exception if you’ve just had a book or short story published.  Give that baby away en masse.)

Speaking of wonderful presents, Turtleduck Press has recently released their first anthology, entitled Winter’s Night.  It’s full of wonderful winter and Christmas-themed stories and poems, and proceeds from the sales will go to UNICEF to hopefully make some poorer children’s holidays merry and bright.  Print copies are $4.99 and ebooks are only $.99.  It’ll make a good stocking stuffer for anyone who likes scifi/fantasy and it’s for a good cause.

Writing Serially

I belong to a prompt community.  I joined, oh, four years ago or so with the idea that I’d be able to use the prompts to stir the creative juices.  It hasn’t really worked out.  Oh, it’s not the community’s fault.  They are awesome, talented writers and the prompts are usually very interesting.  Something about the medium just doesn’t work for me.

Oh, sure, sometimes a prompt jolts something out of the creative centers of my brain.  When I joined originally, you had to post once every three months to stay a member, and I could usually manage something in that time frame.  But a few years ago they changed the requirement to once a month, and I knew the likelihood of ye olde brain coming up with something purely prompt based that often was pushing it.

(This is not to say that I have problems with ideas.  If anything, there are too many ideas floating around.  They just tend to be novel-shaped.)

So I decided to work on a serial novel, with a new part going up every month (or more often if I got around to it).  I’d already completed Hidden Worlds serially, so I knew it was something that I could do.

Two years later, I’m still working on that story.  I use the prompts to direct the next part, and feedback has generally been very good.

I outline very vaguely so this works well for me.

What does writing serially do for you?  I use it as a side project which helps me get through harder sections of my main projects.  It also allows you to work on something a relaxed pace and gain readers over time.

Things you should note about serial writing:

1.  Do it consistently.
I put up a new section every month.  This means my readers can expect a new section on a regular basis, that I know when it’s due so I’m thinking about/working on it when I should be, and that it doesn’t get eaten by other projects/life.

2.  Outline, at least a little.
The thing with writing serially is that you need to have an idea where the story is going to go, what kind of story it is, what promises you want to make to your readers.  What do you do if you get 25K in and realize you’ve written yourself in to a corner?  Alternately, if you make it three-fourths of the way into the story and do a genre change out of right field, people will not be happy.

3.  Reread the last few sections before picking back up.
This helps you remember where you are, what you named your characters, and what you were thinking when you left off.

Some publications are taking serial stories on now.  If you’d like to try for one of those, you need to have the entire story at least outlined before submitting.  They will not be as lenient as my prompt community if something goes off-kilter.

What about you, Squiders?  Ever write something serially?  What have your experiences been?

Revisiting Short Stories

Early on in this blog, I wrote a post wondering what the deal was with short stories, why everyone insisted on telling you to write them when they do not prepare you for novel-writing (and vice versa), and whether or not there was any sort of point.

Well, I figured it out.

Life’s been weird this year.  I haven’t really been able to work on my novel projects (for a variety of reasons), but I have been able to write and edit several short stories.

No, they don’t help you hone your novel-writing skills.  But they give you a chance to experiment, a chance to get things done and out, and a chance to see some growth.

Let’s face it.  Novels take time.  Even the speediest of writers still takes about a month per first draft and the rest of us, well.  Then there are edits and rewrites, critiques and yet more edits.  Then you’ve got to write a query and a synopsis, research agents (assuming you don’t have one), and then submission can take years before you get a bite, assuming you ever do.

It’s a lot of work and success is long in coming.

I admittedly turned to the short stories because I was going insane not getting things done, and depending on length I can turn one out in a few hours to a few days.  But it’s been so freeing.  When you submit a short story somewhere, you don’t need to write a query, you just tell the publisher your title, genre, and word count, and you’re good to go.  Responses come more often, and it’s easier to have multiple projects out.  And best of all, I’m getting more encouraging responses than I ever have in my on/off year of novel submission.

So, no, they don’t help with the novels.  But they help you feel like you’re doing something, that your writing actually does not suck, and that maybe, one day, you will get this.  And we each of us need that boost from time to time.

100th Post Celebration

Tada!  100 posts!  Not too shabby for me and the Landsquid.  In celebration, I give you the top 5 posts thus far:

Collaborative Writing – Characters
Outlining
Writing with a Partner – Collaborative Editing
What Would You Put on a List of the 100 Best Scifi/Fantasy Books?
Of Sleep Deprivation and Haiku

Give me some feedback, Squiders.  Would you like me to post more often?  Less often?  (Currently I’m on a MWF schedule.)  Topics you’d like me to cover?  Topics you’d like me not to cover?  How do you like the drawings?

 

 

 

 

Kit Campbell and Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

You know how sometimes you watch some sort of movie (or read a book) and things just keep going wrong, and you think “This would never happen in real life.”

Yeeeaaaahhh.

Normally I don’t like to deviate from reading/writing/landsquids, but this is fairly epic and I feel the need to share.

So yesterday was supposed to be somewhat awesome.  I was to take an early flight to California, sit in on a meeting, and then have dinner/writing with my dear friend Ian (of Alpaca fame).  Afterwards I would sleep and fly back this morning, arriving, in, oh, 15 minutes or so.

Seeing how I am sitting here blogging instead of being on said return flight, we can guess how this is going to go.  My trip never made it off the ground, quite literally.

I got out of the house a little late yesterday morning, but made it through parking my car and security without issue.  When I arrived at the gate, I was one of the last people on the plane, and they asked that I gate check one of my carry-ons.  I agreed, since I had given myself a four hour buffer and would be able to wait at the onerously slow baggage claim at SFO without worrying about missing my meeting.  So I got onboard, sat down, opened the book I brought along, and all seemed fine.

We pushed off from the gate about twenty minutes late, taxied to what I swear was the furthest runway from the terminal, went to accelerate into take-off, and…the plane broke.  Something with the left engine.  So we turned around and taxied all the way back to the terminal.

People are starting to get antsy about connecting flights (our plane was going to continue on to Hong Kong and Ho Chi Minh City), but hey, I had buffer!  Although I am about 80 pages into my book at this point and am wondering if I should have brought more.

They identified a broken part, replaced it, and around an hour and a half after the plane was supposed to leave, we push back from the gate, taxi allllll the way to Furthest Runway Ever, go to take off, and…the plane breaks again.

At this point I don’t really want to take this particular aircraft anywhere.

So we taxi back to the gate, except we no longer have a gate, since we were supposed to leave two hours previously, so we have to sit and look at the terminal for half an hour until we get a gate, and, then, we sit there for another 15 minutes until they essentially tell us they don’t know what’s wrong with the plane, so we can get off and try to get other flights, they’ll offload the luggage, and, uh, good luck getting another flight to San Francisco today, because they’re booked full.

So it’s ~11:30 about now, and I realize that there is no physical way for me to fly to California at this point (even if there were seats) and make my meeting on time.  Plus this was a completely full 767 and the line to talk to Customer Service stretches all the way down the concourse and Hell, I’m not standing in that.

At this point, things are sad but not terribly bad.  Mechanical problems happen, and I would rather they happen on the ground than over Utah airspace.  So.  I am extremely disappointed about not being able to see Ian (and eat sushi), but I go about fixing things.  I call my boss and leave her a message explaining the situation and telling her I would be coming in and supporting the meeting remotely.  I text Ian to let him know I am not coming.  I call my company’s travel service and ask them to cancel the trip.  I call the person running said meeting to let him know I will be supporting remotely.

Here’s where things start to get a bit hairy.  I abandon my fellow passengers to their giant line of doom and retreat to baggage claim, where I inquire after the bags they claimed would be offloaded from my flight.  They have not been.  They were apparently not planning on it despite telling us they would.  Apparently, they were just going to load the luggage on the next flight to San Francisco and let it go, despite the fact that the likelihood of more than a handful of people from that flight getting to San Francisco that day was crap.  The woman at the baggage counter explains that she will put in a call for someone to bring up my luggage, but it will be at least an hour.

I look at my watch.  I’ve got less than two hours to this meeting now.  I inform her that sooner will be better and go off to grab lunch from the limited selection since I am outside security at this point.  I have Taco Bell.  It is unsatisfying.

I’ve been waiting for my baggage ~45 minutes when the travel company calls me to inform me that they’ve been on hold with the airline this whole time, and the only way they will refund my money is if I talk to someone at the airport and get them to “uncheck” me in.  “Luckily, I am still at the airport,” I tell her.  She is surprised.  “So am I,”  I say.  “So am I.”

I go upstairs and manage to find a nice man who does whatever is necessary and gets me my refund while apologizing profusely for my inconvenience.

Then I go back in search of my bag, cursing that I let them gatecheck it.

My boss calls, worried because it’s been an hour and half since I called her and I hadn’t shown up yet.  I explain the situation.  She wishes me luck and leaves me to waste away next to the baggage carousel.

The baggage carousel turns on, but it is someone else’s bag.  I track down another baggage person and inquire if there’s a way to check on the status of my bag.

It goes downhill from here.  He looks it up, and tells me that, despite the fact that I have been waiting for an hour and a half and will definitely be late for my meeting now, that no one has gone to get my bag, and that no one will.  It’s inside a canister on the plane and they won’t open the canisters until the flight is cancelled or has arrived at its destination despite the fact that my bag should be RIGHT ON TOP because I gate checked it and was one of the last people on the plane.  I explain that it has medication and electronics in it because it was supposed to be a carry-on, but no go.  I put in a claim for lost luggage and leave the airport, seven hours after I stepped foot in it and having accomplished nothing except feeding my bag to the underbelly of a 767, perhaps never to be seen again.

I call the person running the meeting on the shuttlebus to the parking lot to get the call-in number for the meeting.  The act of doing so somehow causes me to lose my claim ticket for parking, which I discover after I have been dropped off.

I manage to retrieve my car.  I call into the meeting from my cell phone as I rush down the highway and can hear nothing because of road noise, but I did carve 15 minutes off the normal time the trip takes.

I finally get to work and support the meeting until 6:45 PM.

At this point I just want to go home and hide under the covers for the rest of the day.  But oh no, we are not done.  The highway is at a stand still, so I have to find a backway home.  I call my husband to find that he hasn’t had time to make dinner like he promised and, beyond that, has gone out for the evening, since he made plans when he thought I would be out of town.  I call my mom and sister, hoping for someone to spill my woes to, but they are unavailable.  I finally call my dad, who tells me he is in India, but consents to talk.  After fifteen minutes he tells me “this call will cost you about $30″ and is gone.  Thanks, Dad.

I go and get dinner at Tokyo Joe’s.  They mess up my order.

When I get home, I discover my side of the garage covered in boxes, and so I have to park on the driveway.

Luckily, that is where the madness ends.  I ate my dinner, cuddled with my cat, and watched Unsolved Mysteries and How I Met Your Mother until emotional balance was reattained.

My husband later informed me that my plane eventually left – six and a half hours after it was supposed to.

Also, my bag is still lost to time and space.  I got a call last night that it was en route and would get back to Denver about ~1:40 AM and they’d call me today about it, but I have yet to hear anything from that department.   Also, they called about 9, so I have to wonder where my bag went, because SFO is not that far away.

Well, I’m off to call my doctor for emergency meds.  Here’s hoping your day’s better than my yesterday was.

Following the White Rabbit

Let’s say you’re walking along, minding your own business, when BAM a story idea waylays you.  It’s interesting, it’s fun, it has all the information you need to sit down and get going.

Let us also assume that you are in a place where you can pick up a new project.

The problem?  It’s not your genre.  Or it’s not your age range.  Or it’s a new style, an unfamiliar POV, an uncomfortable narrator.  Something about it doesn’t fit in your writing niche.

What would you do?  (Or what have you done in the past?)  Do you let the story idea move on, looking for its next victim?  Or do you give it a try anyway, knowing that you have no experience in this area and may never write another book like it in your life?  Do you have limits (i.e. is something out of character okay for a short story, but not for a novel)?

(On a related note, anyone have any good examples of fantasy novels for 6-9 year olds?)