A rambling update, in the style of my Facebook statuses

If I haven't mentioned it: I'm working on a novel, and not one of the ones I've mentioned here before, either. It's a YA contemporary fantasy about an evil imaginary friend. I called it Creatures of the Mind back when I was wandering through the first draft, but now that I'm on the rewrite I think it needs another title. Usually I have no trouble with this, but for this one my mind keeps throwing up ideas like Walking With Julian and Walking Through Mountains, which sound like Nicholas Sparks novels. No disrespect to Mr. Sparks, but that's not really what I'm writing and I'd like something more... sinister. I briefly considered  Julian's Last Week, but decided it was too ambiguous. What do you guys think of Julian's Bodies?


Anyway, I'm on Chapter 5 now out of a projected ten or eleven, so that's pretty good-- and then I have to come around and rewrite the beginning, because that is how it always goes with my stories. And I'm also working on that winter story I mentioned on Twitter. I must admit that that one's really slow going-- but I shall persevere!


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So I finally finished reading The Scar by China Mieville.

And you guys.

YOU GUYS.

It is so amazing. I keep trying to explain to people how amazing this book is. They laugh at my enthusiasm and don't really seem to get it. But... it's like a perfect storm of flawless literary craftsmanship. The plot is complex and twisted in a way that drops the world out from under you every time a new secret is revealed. The characters are original and nuanced. I know a lot of people don't like Bellis Coldwine, but I personally was really able to sympathize with her. And poor Tanner Sack was just the perfect noble everyman. I didn't know when I picked up the book that it was the second in a trilogy, but apart from a lot of "foreign" vocabulary that was hard to stumble through I didn't have any trouble with it-- it stood alone just fine.  I will definitely be reading the other two New Crobuzon books, and everything else by Mieville I can get my hands on. (And possibly discovering how to make the little accent mark over the e so I can fangirl while spelling his name correctly.)

*cough* Anyway. So that's what I've been reading. Now I'm working on All The King's Men, which I did not appreciate properly when I failed to read it in college-- and after that is P.D. James' Pride and Prejudice sequel, Death Comes to Pemberley. (I am so excited about that one, I cannot tell you.) And there are other things, too. I love books, did I ever mention?

So. That's the news from Lake Woebegone. What are you up to now?

Neurotically yours

Someday I'm going to be a big, famous, published author, and my agent is going to yell at me for never updating my blog. It's not my fault... really... I'm just not a blogger at heart, I guess. Now, microblogging, yes: I will blog me some microblogs. Facebook, always, of course, and more recently Twitter for all things writing-related. For big blog posts, though, either I take so long to finish them that they're no longer relevant when I'm done, or they veer too far into personal territory and I leave them unfinished and unpublished.

I love you guys. (Not least because right now "you guys" consist mostly of my dear friends, my mom, and my sister.) But I don't think I'll ever be the kind of person to put a lot of in-depth personal baggage into a blog post. Even admitting that I have in-depth personal baggage is getting a bit too personal for me. I do like books, though, and occasionally I'll do a short book review on Goodreads. Should I cross-post those here? Would that help?

I am working on a short story right now that's making me twitchy with excitement. I've come to the (much-belated) realization, lately, that editing is the primary part of an author's job. Producing words is good, but (for me) easy: I can hammer out a thousand words in about ten minutes if I desperately need to. Reworking them into something I can stand behind, though... that takes a LOT of time and attention. "Under Glass" I finished pretty quickly, but mostly because I dedicated the better part of two days to writing and rewriting it. From rough draft to the form I posted here took... let me see... oh, really? Just six days? It seems like it was longer than that. The story I'm working on now, though (it's tentatively called "The Fairy's Kiss") has been in the works pretty much straight-on since October 5, and it's still not done. It's not the length, either: currently it measures just over 3,000 words. It's just... I want it to be perfect.

And I guess every writer wants their work to be perfect. And I guess every parent wants their child to be perfect. (I have committed to using "their" as a gender-neutral singular possessive pronoun, y'all-- just as I have committed to the Oxford comma. I AM AN AMERICAN REBEL.) And sometimes, as I'm working on this story and I rearrange something and it just clicks into place, I think that it might closely approach the vision I had of it in my head.

And sometimes I look at it and think it's crap.

I think this is just the artistic life in general, after all. I'm sure actors and painters and composers have the same neuroses. I know singers do. And maybe it's a part of human nature, to simultaneously be proud of and disgusted by what is, in essence, a representative of YOU.

Or maybe it's just me.

But I am really excited for this story to be done, and I am really hoping that it lives up to my dreams of what it could be.

So I guess I got some goopy personal baggage in here after all. I hope you guys are proud of me!

XOXO, and happy Thanksgiving--

Kate

Under Glass (Halloween Story 2011)

I spent this past weekend in western North Carolina, in the home of my good friend Brittany. She had the lovely idea of celebrating fall with a creepy-story write-a-thon à la Mary Shelley and friends. Here is my entry, all polished up. I hope that you'll enjoy it.

Coming Attractions

Rule I keep forgetting: If a thought is too complicated for a Tweet or status update, blog about it!

I keep starting blog posts and not finishing them. This is not entirely because I am lazy (though of course that is part of the reason). The big thing is that (drumroll) I am a very private person. No, really. I'll start a post about, say, existential angst, or body image, or what I think is wrong with the world-- and then I'll decide I'm revealing too much about myself, click "Save Now" to let it cool a bit, and never go back to it again.

Talking about books, though, is easy. Talking about my constant struggle with my writing process? For some reason I'm comfortable with that. So here you go:

I'm thinking about posting scenes from a story I'm working on in webcomic-style updates. That is, instead of a whole story (to be posted, um, when I finish it) you'll get a polished scene at a time until I'm done with it. This will start when I have a finished handwritten story transcribed and mostly edited-- so you're probably looking at about a month or so. But at least it's something.

More on the slow evolution of my writing process, huzzah.

I'm working out a kind of assembly-line process for my stories. In case anyone is interested-- and for my own documentary purposes-- the current process is as follows:

1) Start with a twenty-minute free-write of whatever's next in the outline, dictating the story to myself as I type it.

2) (This is a new step.) Add in significant sensory details, from the least to the most obvious: taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight.

3) Read through the new material once, cutting excess as I see it.

4) Go back to the beginning again and read the whole thing aloud. This brings a lot of needed adjustments to mind.

5) Read through the whole thing one more time, then save it for later revisions and move on.

I tend, however, to do most of the editing in between looking at interesting links from Facebook, Twitter and Blogger-- look at a page, fix a paragraph, etc. This makes the process much slower, of course, but I've tried just not surfing until I finished my page count and it failed dramatically. Anyway, everything is research. *shifty eyes*


So that's what I'm doing. I'm at 7500 words on Dwellers now, and I expect the word-count will go up a lot more now that I've added descriptions to this draft. I know this all probably sounds weird and backwards to a seasoned writer, but I'm in an experimental stage right now. When I finally reach the end, I'll put the draft aside for later revision-- may or may not try to get through a first draft of the next (unrelated) project before revising this one.

Still trucking through Middlesex. I'm past the halfway mark now. Woot!

Writing process, cont'd.

It's a funny thing, writing seriously. As I told my friend Brittany a while back, I feel as if I've simultaneously leveled up and leveled down. I'm getting a much better sense of what works and what doesn't, what's unnecessary, what's cliche. I'm starting to know what's not going to untangle in the edits-- and I feel compelled to do something about it.

I never mentioned her that, at the beginning of January, I decided to start over on Dwellers Below. Scrap it. The 82,000 words on the side of the page are a memorial to what once was. The current total is closer to 6,000-- and that's after three weeks of steady work. Sure, the words are better, and I'm much closer to the story I originally wanted to tell. At the same time, though, it's pretty discouraging to go in a day from "halfway there" to "just getting started."

I've had to relax a bit on the short story I'm writing, though-- if I'd kept up the inch-by-inch perfectionism there I'd never have finished it. I've finally finished writing the first draft in a grand sweep, and just started the first pare-down. This story was inspired by a dream I had six or seven years ago, so I'm pretty excited to get it polished and move on to the next thing.

Frustrations aside, though, it's been a lot of fun figuring out my writing process. I sincerely hope that the fun will continue!

(P.S. I finished Green Rider about a week ago, loved it to death, and am dying to get on to the next book in the sequel. The problem: I've forbidden myself to buy any more ebooks until I'm at least done with the next book on my reading list.

Which is Middlesex.

At least these behemoths are easy to carry around on a Kindle!)

Have not actually dropped off the Earth

If anyone was wondering where I've been, I've been on Twitter. Yes, I know: boo, hiss, heaven forfend, etc. I never really thought I'd get a Twitter account, but as it turns out it's a great place for one-liner updates too small for a proper blog entry.

If you (three) were wanting a proper blog entry, though, I plan on making one as soon as I drag myself through the first draft of this short story. (Turns out they're hard. Who knew?)

Love, kisses, and remember: I'm @amongthegoblins.