Stupid Middles

Well, squiders, if you’d asked me yesterday, I would have said my changeling story was going great! I figured out a potential title, writing was going good, I’d gotten my main characters into the same place. Things were lovely.

Today everything is awful.

It’s like when I was working on World’s Edge for Nano, actually. Now that I think about it, I had issues in the exact same spot then. The beginning is fine–there are things that need to happen to get the plot rolling, and then there are other things. And there are things that need to happen in the middle, and then things that need to happen at the end.

But that section between the beginning events and the midpoint is a sink hole.

In structural terms, I’ve heard this section of Act II referred to as the “reaction” phase. (Act II is often broken into two halves, one before the midpoint and one after.) Basically, the idea is that the main character is reacting to whatever the turning point between Acts I and II, and that goes on to the midpoint, when things pivot in some manner, and then in the second half the character makes a decision and starts to act on it.

It’s an easy place to get lost, unfortunately.

I don’t necessarily remember having middle issues in general, but it’s been a while since I’ve written a full novel draft from scratch and maybe I always have. Or maybe, because my pacing and structure used to have issues, I had different issues. Who knows? Besides, each book is different, and there are different problems each time.

But, anyway, my Act II Part 1 section has 20,000 words assigned to it, and I’m 10K in, and I’m a little lost. Each scene needs to progress the plot and the character arcs, so I can’t throw in a lot of random stuff, but I’m not quite sure what to do instead.

The good news is that, hooray, revision is a thing. And I know from experience that it is easier to tweak arcs and make sure theme and tone are consistent if the story is already written and you generally know where you’re going.

So I just need to get through this, and it can all be fixed later.

So that’s where I am. Aside from today being like pulling teeth, I’m on track and making fairly good progress, and I should be done with the draft by the end of July.

How are your projects going?

Promo: Ashes and Blood by Katie Zaber

This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by Goddess Fish Promotions. The author will award a $25 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn commenter. Click on the tour banner to see the other stops on the tour.

“I’ll start at the beginning. Long ago, before roads, before we built structures, before medicine was discovered, before the government was created, before man gained any knowledge, there were The Five. Independent from each other, The Five had a mutual respect for one another. They knew their roles in the world and their duty. They were gods…”

An adventure begins when an otherworldly tree captures the attention of Megan and her friends. The environment morphs around them, transferring them to an exotic planet. Stuck in a rural town still maimed by the plague, a chance encounter with a familiar face gives Megan and her friends some security during their adjustment period.

While settling into new, promising lives, they are attacked and stalked by planet Dalya’s humanoid inhabitants, who focus on Megan. One dark night, after an epic, magical attack, the Fae King’s knight is sent to fetch Megan. When she wakes up a prisoner, she learns that there is much more to this strange world, and it is oddly more like her own than she ever would have expected.

Read an Excerpt

Megan

It gives me chills to stand in front of the forest that morphed in front of my very eyes. I’m hesitant to walk through the tree line and down the path. The last time I walked down a path for leisure was a week ago. We had planned a picnic. Something simple, always easy to organize and do. It wasn’t hard planning our walk to Brynjar’s cabin today. What could go wrong?

I try hard not to think of all the possible outcomes—from returning to Earth to traveling to a completely new world.

Sarah and Dana were able to walk by without stopping to take notice or reflect. Ciara paused for a moment and then smiled gleefully, saying she had a good feeling.

I don’t. I feel dizzy, angry, and like I need to vomit. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to go into the woods that changed my life, I don’t want to meet Brynjar, and I don’t want to go back where it all started.

I don’t.

About the Author

Katie Zaber writes new adult fiction. With multiple projects spanning from being transported to an alternate universe, to past lives, reincarnation, and trapped souls, to prophesied pregnancies—there are more stories to tell. She lives in North New Jersey with her boyfriend.

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Dalya-Series-110665970357251
Website: https://zaberbooks.com/

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Ashes-Blood-Dalya-Book-1-ebook/dp/B087YJ8W87/ref=sr_1_1

a Rafflecopter giveaway https://widget-prime.rafflecopter.com/launch.js

Help! There’s Too Much Free Content!

Oh, hey, first of all, I remembered another Eurovision song that stood out to me. It’s Feker Libi by Eden Alene, representing Israel.

(Yes, Israel is allowed to participate in Eurovision despite not being in Europe. And so is Australia which…I don’t even know.)

(Also, I wrote down my favorite countries for this year, and now I cannot find the list anywhere. What the heck? It was right here on my desk and now it is MIA.)

Feker Libi by Eden Alene

But anyway.

Have you guys noticed that there’s a ton of free content floating around since everything locked down in mid-March? Webinars. Concerts. Whole plays and/or musicals. Special shows from groups like Cirque du Soleil. Classes on everything you could possibly want. Even my alma mater is doing free lectures, conveniently hosted over Zoom.

And the stuff for the small, mobile ones. Lord. Every service remotely related to learning put out a ton of stuff. Educational videos. Virtual field trips. Math and reading and art projects.

And I’ve been hoarding them. Well, not the stuff for the small, mobile ones. (Though I do still have a video from my father-in-law sitting in my inbox that I may, eventually, put on for them.) I did at first, worried about them being home and me needing to teach them. But then the virtual assignments started coming in from their teachers, and I found we didn’t really have time for any of the rest of that, in the end.

(We did do a virtual tour of the Winchester Mystery House. That was pretty good. I’ve been there a few times in person–including a flashlight tour on Halloween one year–and the virtual tour covered most of what you’d get from actually being there.)

I even made a list, right at the beginning, of things we could do to entertain ourselves. We’ve done a few–online storytime and making a blanket fort–but for the most part, they remain undone.

But even as I found that I didn’t need things for the small, mobile ones, and that I, too, have plenty to do, it hasn’t stopped me from hoarding some for me. They’re such great opportunities! I could learn so much!

Except now I have literal hours’, if not days’, worth of stuff to watch. And no real time to do so.

Are you running into this too? How do you deal with it? Do I delete the lot of it, knowing I don’t really have time? Do I ration it, a little of something every day, until I get through? How do I know from looking what is going to be worth my time versus what isn’t?

It’s kind of like downloading books cuz they’re available for free, and then never reading them.

Anyway, I’m trying to wade through my unread emails in my inbox and it is daunting.

How are you?

May is Going the Way of March

In that it feels like it’s taking a million years.

It’s the last week of school for the small, mobile ones, which is going very emotionally since they’re not getting to say goodbye in person. That’s been hard, especially since the smaller, mobile one will be going to a different school next year and may never see her school friends again.

Anyway, that’s been rough, and it’ll probably get worse before it gets better.

As part of our home curriculum, we’ve been watching Mythbusters (for Science!). Hulu has seasons 11-20 available for streaming, which is fun because the small, mobile ones really enjoy it, and because I must have stopped watching the show regularly before that, so most of the myths are new to me as well. There’s also a Mythbusters Jr. show which came out in 2019. We started with that one, and it was actually really great. But there’s only 10 episodes, so we got through that pretty dang quick.

The smaller, mobile one is also doing my drawing class with me this month. A lot of the focus of the class this month is on not being critical of yourself, and of just drawing to draw without worrying about everything being a work of art. We’re supposed to use normal paper and a pen, and she wants you to do confident lines as opposed to more sketchy lines.

It’s surprisingly hard. But fun! I have drawn some really awful things. And a couple of pretty good ones. Today we were supposed to practice drawing small things. I made the mistake of picking earphones to try and draw. The smaller, mobile one drew a bunch of adorable bees.

So, Eurovision is not happening this year, sadly, because life is cancelled, but they did put up all the songs that were in the running for the year, and have been putting up related programming on their YouTube channel (including contest shows from previous years). I was mostly underwhelmed this year (there are a lot of pretty songs, but nothing that really stood out) with the exception of what is, by far, the best Eurovision song of 2020:

Uno by Little Big, representing Russia

It is ridiculous and I love everything about it. They were robbed.

(Why is a Russian band singing in Spanish? Also, there is absolutely no substance to the song and I do not care.)

Aside from small, mobile one school drama, my month is going pretty well. I don’t have a lot of complaints thus far.

How is your May going, squiders? Is it lasting forever for you too? Did you watch the Eurovision songs for this year? Favorite?

More Thoughts on Star Trek: Picard

So, now I’m a little more than halfway through the first season of Star Trek: Picard, and I have Thoughts.

(Probably spoiler-y.)

And one of those thoughts is how depressing the universe has become. Everyone is sad. Everything has gone poorly. I was so excited to see Seven, but it was just the same.

It hurts to see beloved characters not get a happy ending. And it hurts to see new ones who are broken and confused.

I am a bit grumpy about that.

But!

I am so excited about the Romulans!

I love Romulans. They are my favorite Trek species, and I am so excited that they are getting so much screen time, and that we’re getting to see into their culture finally. AND THEY ARE SPEAKING RIHANNSU ONSCREEN. SOMEONE HAS GONE IN AND MADE RIHANNSU SPEAKABLE and my nerdy heart is so very full.

You see, back when I was a teenager, I spent a ton of time doing Star Trek roleplays in AOL chatrooms. We’re talking hours a week. I was on probably four or five different crews in various positions as various characters, plus there was a chatroom called Ten Forward Lounge, where you could go and hang out and roleplay whenever you wanted.

(Of course, we invariably had storylines going in there as well.)

One of my very favorite characters was a genetically-engineered Romulan Tal’Shiar officer who had been betrayed by her partner, picked up by the Federation and, since she was a child at the time (11, I think) was taken in by a Federation family and went on to become a Starfleet officer (and also a member of Starfleet Intelligence, because why not?).

How’s that for a mouthful of backstory? I was fourteen at the time I created her. But what it really came down to was that I wanted to play a Romulan but there was a dearth of Romulan specific sims (short for simulations), and the few that did exist were either too late or on the weekends, and that wasn’t feasible with school.

So that meant I needed a Romulan character to be in Starfleet, and man, I jumped through hoops to make that happen.

Now, back in the day, the Romulan language (Rihannsu, in Romulan) did exist to some extent–Diane Duane had started in some of her Trek novels and it had been expanded a bit–but we’re still talking about 30 pages when the entire thing was printed out. Which I know. Cuz I printed it out, so I could sprinkle in Romulan words in my dialogue (and also learn all the curse words).

But it wasn’t like Klingon. There was vocabulary and there was grammar put together, but most of the vocab was adjectives and nouns, so you couldn’t really parse together a whole sentence.

So, long story short (too late), I am SO EXCITED to see that it’s become a speakable language. If they put out an official Romulan dictionary and/or make it a course on Duolingo I am so there.

ROMULANS! I love them.

And I also love the Borg, at least old-school Borg, before they got a bit overdone in Voyager. (In my eighth grade tech ed class, when we made CO2 cars, I painted mine silver and put the Borg symbol on the top. And it beat everyone else, bwhahaha.) So the show has lots of Romulan stuff and lots of Borg stuff, and I am 100% there for all of that.

I just wish the characters weren’t so sad and hopeless. Discovery is a bit violent at times, but it still has that hopefulness, the idea that if we work together and make sacrifices, we can make the universe a better place. I hope Picard gets there too.

Watching/watched Picard, squiders? Thoughts? Thoughts about Trek in general (or Romulans in specific)?

(Oh, and that convoluted character I made up all those years ago? Became the inspiration for the main character in my high fantasy trilogy. Ha!)

Library Book Sale Finds: One for Sorrow by Mary Downing Hahn

As we discussed last September when I was doing my foundational book series, Wait Till Helen Comes was a formulative book for me when I was a child, one that is still creepy to this day. So when I spied a much newer Mary Downing Hahn book at the last library book sale I went to, I definitely grabbed it.

Title: One for Sorrow
Author: Mary Downing Hahn
Genre: Children’s horror
Publication Year: 2017

Pros: Still creepy
Cons: Suffers from protagonist issues

One for Sorrow is oddly timely, since it takes place during the Spanish Flu in 1918/1919. It follows Annie Browne, who has moved to a new town and started at a new school. She’s almost immediately latched onto by another girl, Elsie Schneider, who is hateful and mean and keeps Annie away from the other girls so she can’t make other friends.

Elsie is eventually home sick for a week, allowing Annie to get away from her and make new friends. But when Elsie dies of the Spanish Flu, it gives her the opportunity to make sure Annie can never get away from her.

I had to put the book down for a few days in the middle because life was so awful for poor Annie (though she’s kind of a pushover and will go along with bullying) and I didn’t want to deal with. But, in general, this book was a fast read, with good imagery,

My biggest complaint is Annie, and the way Annie is treated by the plot. Annie doesn’t do anything to try and help herself, really. She doesn’t stand up for anything, either when Elsie is pushing her into things she doesn’t want to do or when her new friends are doing things she doesn’t agree with. And once the haunting begins, it doesn’t get any better.

And–SPOILER ALERT–Annie doesn’t even do anything to get rid of Elsie, in the end. A nice old lady who can see ghosts conveniently comes along, and shows Elsie the way to move on.

It reminded me of the House of Many Ways, which we read as part of a readalong of the Howl’s Moving Castle series (Howl’s here, Castle in the Air here). In it, the main character is a little girl by the name of Charmain, but she doesn’t really do anything. Grown-ups come in at the end and do most of the real work, and it felt the same here.

House of Many Ways was one of the last things Diana Wynne Jones wrote before she died, and Mary Downing Hahn has been writing children’s horror for around 40 years. It makes me wonder…do authors, as they get older, sometimes feel bad about the danger they put their child protagonists into? Does it make more sense to them, over time, to have someone older and wiser come in and save the child?

I’ll admit that’s a pretty big leap to take based off of two data points. I would need to make an actual study of it–read different children authors’ books over time, see if there’s a trend toward children becoming less proactive throughout the books. But it did strike me as an interesting coincidence.

What do you think, squiders? Have you noticed this trend, or am I seeing things that aren’t there? Read this book, or any other newer Mary Downing Hahn book?

2020 is Lasting Forever and Yet…

…and yet, nothing is getting done.

Well, not nothing. But I think it feels like nothing, for a lot of people, because of the distortion in how time is passing. Since it feels like a hugely long time period, it feels like we should have been able to do a bunch, but it’s all an illusion.

That being said, April went pretty well for me. I set a goal of 10,000 words on my changeling story for camp, which I managed (as well as my two prompt responses for the month, and several pages on my handwritten story).

Speaking on the handwritten story, I’m running into an issue I didn’t consider, which is that I’m having issues figuring out my pacing. As you know, pacing is not something that comes naturally to me, and I’ve started building my pacing into my outlining to help me not have to add it in during revision.

Now, I haven’t outlined the handwritten story that completely (I did major plot points and plot/character arcs), but even if I had, word count is hard to tell, so it’s a little hard to tell where I am in the great scheme of my story. That’s a little problematic, but it’s probably not the end of the world if I just let the story go and fix it later. I have experience with that, at least.

The changeling story is going pretty well, actually! This is my third start on the story (the previous two starts add up to about 6K total) and I’m about 12K right now out of what I think will be about 75K in the end. I haven’t actually re-outlined or changed anything (except character names keep changing between drafts–the MC’s name has changed each iteration, and the love interest and sister have both also gone through a name change) but I did add in another point of view. We’ll see how that goes in the long run–I’d originally planned on setting it up like a romance (so female main character and male main character points of view) but my inclination is that this will work better for the story overall.

Well, we’ll see.

It feels weird not to be working on the nonfiction books after working on them for so long, but also nice to be done with the project. And there’s the SkillShare classes too, so it’s not like I’m abandoning the idea completely.

My goals for May are to write 20K on the changeling story, another 5 pages on the handwritten story, and do my two monthly prompt responses. I’ve also picked another drawing class to take and will be doing a story arc class as part of my year of education.

May kind of feels like it’s going to go the way March did–taking a million years because everything changes from day to day–but I guess we’ll have to see.

How are you doing, squiders? Any major plans for the month?

Foundational Books: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

So, if you remember, oh, last summer, I went through some of the books that have made me who I am today, as a writer, but also in general.

(Apologies for being late AGAIN, I can’t even blame the quarantine this time. I did a push to finally get my new SkillShare class live–I always forget how long it takes to edit the videos, and my new microphone is so sensitive I had to get up at 5 am to avoid noise from the small, mobile ones and the neighbors.)

(It’s here, if you’re interested. It’s about setting goals in your writing and sticking with them.)

But I realized I forgot perhaps the most important book at all. The one that I’ve read the most times over the years. The one that I turn to when I need comfort, or I need to sleep after I read/watch something too scary. The one I used for my senior quote in high school. The one I used scenes from to try out for plays. The one I can still quote bits of from memory.

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

I don’t remember who recommended the book to me, but I first read it back in middle school (my copy is the 35th anniversary edition, and we’re coming up on the 60th anniversary, so that tells you how long it’s been in my life). And who knows how many times I read it over in middle and high school. As an adult, I’ve read it less often, but I still do re-read it periodically (I’m currently reading it to the small, mobile ones).

The entire book is a masterful play on words and concepts. Even as an adult I really appreciate the pure mastery of the idea. (I perhaps understand the Humbug better now than I did as a kid.) We have Milo, our bored main character who doesn’t see why anything is worth the bother. When he receives a toy tollbooth from who knows where, he decides to play with it, because he doesn’t have anything better to do. But it allows him access to a world where knowledge is more literal than in real life.

It’s hard to put the book into words, really. This is a book that I have loved so much and so long that I find my tendency is to wax poetic about its many fine features and scenes, and sometimes I get a bit spoiler-y and we can’t have that.

I highly recommend it to anyone, anyone who’s loved learning at any point in their lives, anyone who likes puns, anyone who likes a rewarding story about friendship and what’s possible if you decide to try.

But I will leave you with my favorite quote from the book, from the Whether Man in Chapter 2:

Whether or not you find your own way, you’re bound to find some way. If you happen to find my way, please return it, as it was lost years ago. I imagine by now it’s quite rusty.

The Phantom Tollbooth

Read The Phantom Tollbooth, squiders? Favorite character? (I am partial to Tock.) Other related thoughts?