Winner of 'Inside Out' and Starting All Over Again

Thanks for stopping by and saying hello to Maria Snyder, blog friends. After a lengthy selection process (you know, writing names on pieces of paper and drawing one out of a hat) Myrna has been declared winner!

So Myrna, email me your address at kellybryson02(at)hotmail(dot)com. Thanks again to Maria for being so generous with her time and for providing such an awesome prize!

So, I've essentially finished Pulse. It's in the hands of some trusted beta readers, and though I will likely have to tweak a few things, I think it's in good shape. I have two query letters out to the agents that Mr. Agent suggested I contact, and a letter to Mr. Agent explaining what changes I've made in response to his feedback and thanking him for the feedback and for the referrals. That was a tricky letter to write, because I wanted to say, "Hey, I got what you were saying and I made some changes' without saying 'You were nice to me and now I shall never leave you alone!'

So. I wait. I check email. I recheck. I check the mailbox, but just once a day. I don't expect a response for another month at least, but that doesn't stop me from feeling like the phone is going to ring any second. Even though I KNOW noone is going to call me to ask for a partial. It's just how it is.

I like to change my phone ringer every once in a while because after a while, the sound of the phone ringing gets me stressed out. But what do you do with your email? Get a new account? Do you paint your mailbox? Fire your mailcarrier? There's nothing.

I was a little mopey on Saturday, and Nathan called me on it.

"You're upset because you finished your book! That's what's wrong with you!"

*crying* "That's *sniff* ridiculous! I'm FINE!"

It's been a little hard to let go. It's a lot like the feeling I've had a week before my babies were born. Just waiting. Empty. There's nothing to DO around here!

Of course, every room in our house needs to be gone through and roughly half our stuff will be going to Goodwill, but that's not what I want. I want the next project. So, I've started brainstorming. I was having trouble being freewheeling enough, so I changed the brainstorming title from 'Story Ideas' to 'Things That Interest Me'. There's a lot less pressure that way.

This is not that impressive visually, but this is where the Santa Fe River in FL disappears underground into caverns in the aquifer. Some crazy insane people scuba dive in there, but they're crazy insane and several of them have died. It resurfaces three miles down stream. My dad has been there after heavy rains and it was a churning whirlpool with logs beating against each other in a terrifying vortex. That's how he explained it to me, anyway;) It reminds me of brainstorming, of trying to get below the surface of the story,

 into the murky heart of the story.

I tried to get Nathan to brainstorm with me, but he was not interested since he had to give me the 'Your book is great and you're a good writer and everything is going to be fine' talk twice this weekend already. He actually threw a fake book idea out there that sparked off something else I was already thinking about, so I'm happy. I've got something to think about, at least.

How do you come up with new ideas? Do you wait for inspiration to hit you or do you think your way into inspiration?

Glutton for Punishment?

Prolific? Not so much.

I bet it took longer than six months for Tolkien to get this map right!

And where did he learn to write like that?

Oh, yeah. He invented a few languages and the most fully developed fantasy world ever.

I've been slaving on my WIP for a year and 8 months. I will say that at the beginning of that process, my understanding of structure, voice, POV etc. was limited to what I learned in high school. My high school english teachers were amazing, but still, there's a huge learning curve. Things like passive voice and the really real rules for commas were a mystery to me. Don't tell, but I still overcomma after the word 'but'. 

My WIP started out at as fodder for that box under the bed that every writer is required to have. Mine might end up in a box under my bed, on top of my old charcoal sketches of cow skulls (classic art class stuff!), but it's mostly better now.

My idea changed. Characters got older. The stakes got higher with every rewrite (still happening!). I renamed half the characters. Ok, all of them if you go back to my very first attempts. Everything has changed from my initial concept, except for the essence of my protagonist and her character arc. I just had to figure out how what situations would cause her to grow how I knew she could.

This took a long time. Not the ten years it took Susanna Clarke to write Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but it's felt really long and a bit circuitous.

I don't want the next book to take so long. Please, please, please, Second Story, don't be so hard to pin down.

I've been told that the secret to that is Outlining *enter heavenly choir*. Check out this awesome post on plotting over at Teresa Frohock's blog. She organized in a way that I can only dream of and a fabulous writer and friend. I fully expect to see her books in stores in the next 2 years.

I've been told (no link, this was at a writer's conference) that research is the key, that if you do your character sketch and research your setting, that the story will unfold like a beautiful flower. Okay, perhaps that's an exaggeration, but that was the general idea.

It's been said that using personality profiles, interviewing your characters, and drawing pictures of them will help you to know them better.

I've even heard of a novelist who starts every book by drawing a detailed map and fitting the story to the map.

I'm not sure which of these ways will work for me. Right now I'm trying research, and my brain is boiling.

How do you develop a niggling idea into a full plot?
Glutton for Punishment?

One Potato, Two Potato

I am a woman plagued by projects.

• Pulse, a 110,000 word project at least three edits from completion.
  
• Three picture books I've written for my kids. (I inked a drawing this week. At this rate I'll finish one book every five years.)
  
• A midgrade novel about a girl who becomes queen of the pirates when her pirate parents die.
  
• The short story "The Sweet Life" that I previously posted, but needs the tension ratcheted up (and four hundred words cut so that I can submit it to the ROSE and THORN ezine-accepting submissions again as of today!).
  
• A short story I've outlined wherein a man lives in a culture where he must set up his spouse with a new lover before he can dump her- and in the process of finding someone willing to take her, he remembers the good things about her and changes his mind.
  
• There's this werewolf astronaut story challenge floating around.
  
• I have a couch to recover.
  
• And a rocker.
  
• And I want to terrace the back yard and am researching price points on materials and a Bobcat.
  
• My next novel, about an Ancient Egyptian woman searching through time to find her lost son. I wrote the opening scene maybe two years ago and haven't gotten back to it.
  
• Oh yeah...this blog.
  
  

I was talking to my sister, Jenny, who is an AMAZING artist and clothing designer, about her recent meet 'n greet with a brand representative Urban Outfitters corporate (she's the set designer in the Urban in Salt Lake City). The woman asked her where she gets her ideas, and Jenny said to me (nicely) that that is a question that people who create do not ask. They know that you take a butterfly net with you everywhere you go, collecting things until some of them fit together.

You don't have to know when you're going to use an idea, just that it appeals to you, that it feels real. For instance, the grass in front of a church we drive by is bare in places like the bald patches of fur on a mangy dog. I have no place to use that right now, but maybe I will one day. Maybe in my next novel Atum-Re (or whatever her name ends up being) will journey into a fertile land that an army has marched through and that is how the earth will look to her. I don't know.

Another example--I was struggling to come up with a way to transport my current protagonist between worlds. Then we went swimming in a cenote, a sacred sinkhole that was a religious center for the ancient Mayans. They believed it was an entryway into the spirit world, which was perfect.

I tend to get bored with things—my long-suffering husband has dealt with too many 90% completed projects to count (but who doesn't like sheets of drywall leaned against the kitchen wall for a year?)—so sticking with one story has been a struggle.

I decided a year ago that my novel is the priority. I keep a list of edits to make and when I'm tired of going in order, I'll pick something from the list. I'm doing my third edit onscreen (I'm in Ch. 17, I think) and my fourth edit on paper (Ch. Ten- just finished nine this morning. Yea me!)

In my defense, short stories are part of my long-term goal of being a (paid) writer. I am trying to get some publishing credentials so I'll have something to put at the bottom of my query letter, and the process of getting a short story published should teach me a few things. Because how can you hope to hold a reader through four hundred pages if you can't hold them through ten?

To keep sane (relatively, at least), I take every Sunday off from writing or other projects. It's a time to relax and clear my mind. But every Monday morning, I start thinking about it again, and then it's go go go!

For me, the trouble is not getting ideas, but deciding which one to chase. Which is my next topic. Any tips?

Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson. You find the present tense and the past perfect.

Glutton for Punishment?