Now With Less Rust

Overall, it was a good week on the writing front. I haven't hit my 10k word goal, but I'm hoping by the end of the afternoon to be around 8k or more. Though it doesn't feel like my word selection is the best, the rust is coming off.

I'd be farther along if a bear hadn't shown up one night. I was with my word processor when I heard the sound of the garbage can being knocked over. Bears don't come around much, but I knew what that sound was. By the time I got a flashlight, the bear had taken a bag of garbage and run off into the woods with it. Fortunately, garbage pickup was the day before, and there was only one bag. I could hear terrible crunching noises in the woods. I set the can back up and went inside and went back to the computer. Then I heard the can again. The bear had come back for seconds. Seriously? Bears never come back for seconds. That time it was hanging around, and I was able to see that it was a big black bear, the biggest one I've seen in real life. The few that have shown up in the past must have been young ones. This one was a real bear. I growled at it through the screen door and started saying, "Hey, bear! Hey, bear!" to scare it away like they do in Alaska. The young ones run away at almost anything. This one moseyed away like he'd seen it all before. He was a real bear.

My big mistake was going back to the computer and telling somebody about it. That ended up throwing off my word count for the night. I ended up in a discussion in which the other person wouldn't listen to what I was saying or even think it through. Every time that happens, I always think of the same thing.

Proverbs 18:13 He that answers a matter before he hears it, it is folly and shame unto him.

Firing off a snap judgment about something without thinking it through is foolishness. And that reminds me of another verse.

Proverbs 29:20 Do you see a man who is hasty in his words? There is more hope for a fool that for him.

Those are KJV updated to modern English. How do you get through to someone when the other person rushes to a quick conclusion but refuses to think? I don't always get it right, but I at least try to think through what the other person is saying.

Book Stuff

The good news is that some of the current writing is writing itself. I've put a lot of time into plotting without micromanaging every little detail. On the one hand that lets things flow better than pantsing does. On the other hand I should have done even more. I have a good enough grip on the concept of what I'm doing that it's going fairly smoothly all things considered, but I can foresee having to sit down and work more on subplots and the events between plot points. Something a lot of people have trouble with is a saggy middle, the zone between 25% and 75%. The beginning is easy. The end is easy. Filling the gap in the middle is one of the harder things to do. Knowing that, I know I need to put more work into the middle.

I'm thinking about putting the B'vellah War book 2 back on Amazon. I took it down and reworked it a while back, including last year. I didn't want to put anything else up without a real cover, but I'm thinking about putting it up with the old one.

Have a great weekend.

Dryer and Research

The dryer stopped heating on Tuesday. The new fuse I ordered arrived Thursday. It didn't fix it. The thermostat kit I ordered Thursday is scheduled to arrive Monday. Since I have Prime, I was hoping for Saturday. Maybe Amazon will surprise me. The fuse and kit together cost $20.02. Compare that to a repairman visit. It's almost like I'm paying myself to fix it. I've been using a clothesline I made to dry big things. Small things I can hang up indoors. It's that or buy some clothespins. I thought about it. I'm kind of torn between wooden and plastic. Wooden clothespins are very traditional, but would they grow mold? Plastic ones wouldn't, but they feel and look so cheap. At some point they would crack like plastic does over time. Wooden ones last forever.

Work continues on the writing front. I had to do some research this week. Normally, research is looking up a fact or reading enough of a subject to be able to write intelligibly about it in passing. It tends to be more of a speed bump than anything, though it does take time when I have to look up enough things. This week was the not fun kind of research that cuts into writing time. Due to not using the right search terms in the beginning, I had to dig to find what I was looking for, and I'm still not finished. I need a 3D star map of the stars around our solar system out to at least 50 light years and possibly up to 100. It's for the book outline I've been working on. I'm not a space engineer, but I want the science to be right. Specifically, I've been looking for earth-type suns that could be suitable places for habitable planets. Red dwarf stars could work if I wanted to do even more research. I don't want the story to be hard SF with stats and math every other page, but it can't be soft SF either. I need some hard SF details.

I've gotten some more writing done this week. It's felt sluggish and rusty and rough around the edges. I'm getting closer to a system that balances my French time with writing time. I'm thinking of making my word count goal at least 10k words per week, which is 40k+ per month. A standard SF/F novel is at least 80k words. A YA book is about 70k words, and a middle grade book ranges from 20k to 55k. My middle grade word count is tentatively 35k. If all went well, I could crank out my middle grade trilogy rough draft in under 3 months. When there's time for that.

Have a great weekend.

Plotting

There are two types of writers: pantsers and plotters. Pantsers write by the seat of their pants not knowing what comes next. Plotters plan the story out ahead of time. Some people, like me, use a combination of the two. For Messengers I did quite a lot of pantsing, although I brainstormed a bunch of scenes ahead of time that I thought would be cool and did a good amount of thinking through scenes ahead of time, especially dialogue. I didn't always know exactly what came next at the paragraph level, but I always had something to aim for. I was never lost or suffering from writer's block. I knew the ending ahead of time and tried to point everything toward that. The B'vellah War series is more plotted. Avatars of Espionage is even more plotted.

This week I've been working on plotting. I'm still doing the French thing and am still trying to find a balance between time for that and writing time. Nevertheless, I was able to put some quality time into the writing front. As part of becoming more professional, I'm trying to develop a plot outline for the next bit of writing and get better at plotting in general. I've been brainstorming cool scenes and trying to fit them into a coherent, flowing narrative. I don't mind plotting the overall story, but I tend to pants characters. I'll have an idea of who the character is up front and explore the person through writing the story to really learn the character. In Messengers, I developed the characters ahead of time and added personal details as the story went along. Later, I had to go back and flesh out the beginning characterizations some.

The problem with pantsing is that it takes, I've read, something like four(?) times as much work as plotting. I don't like the sound of that, and I know how much revision I had to do with Messengers and and how much less it took for Avatars. I had to make multiple passes through Messengers, concentrating on a specific thing for each pass. I've been trying to get away from that. I added a lot of cool things in revision, but it takes forever. I'd rather work it out ahead of time.

I did some writing this week but quickly discovered I did not do enough plotting. I'm thinking about plotting out the middle grade trilogy as practice and save the writing of it as a future project. Middle grade books are very short. I might do 35k maximum words instead of the minimum 80k for SF or F. A plot outline would be fairly short in comparison to the word count. I need some practice, but I don't want to get bogged down by it or spend an excessive amount of time on it.

It's not very exciting, but that's where things were this week. The big roadblock was I got bitten three times by what had to be a spider. I have two big red blotches on my stomach and a third smaller one in a rough line going up. By the end of the day when it's time to write, I've been super tired. They're getting better though and shrinking. I'm guessing a spider was under the edge of the bathroom sink and crawled onto me while I was brushing my teeth.

Have a great weekend.

The Force Was With Me

On May 4th, someone who owed me money gave me some change that included two quarters. I noticed they looked older and checked the dates. One was 1977. The other was 1980. As any pre-Disney Star Wars fan knows, Star Wars came out in 1977 and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980. There was none of this A New Hope stuff back then. That came later with the prequels. I got two Star Wars year quarters on May the Fourth Be With You day. Coincidence?

Yeah, it was a coincidence, but it was a fun one. Although, the rabbis will tell you there's no such thing as coincidence. Hmm.

It was not a very productive week on the writing front. I had a couple of teeth worked on at the dentist. It wasn't as bad as it usually is. Except for the drill on the tooth with the cavity. The dentist injected Novocaine, one assumes, into my jaw and then went to check on another patient. Along the way, her glasses came apart, and she had to fix them. When she got back, my jaw was well and truly numb. However, my tooth didn't know that. I could feel the drill taking off the tooth layer and then a bit of the layer underneath that. My tooth could feel the circular movement of the drill. What an odd sensation.

Well, of course that hurt. I suffered through it as anyone strong and manly would have. It was good practice in case I'm ever tortured for information by enemy spies. It always hurts when I have a tooth drilled. I wonder if my roots are too deep for the Novocaine. I don't know if that's even a thing. The solution is for the dentist to shoot more Novocaine into the jaw. No. I don't do that any more. It took forever for the normal dose to wear off as it was. I had to skip lunch.

The commercial book I have on the back burner is what I was thinking about this week. I'm trying to figure out how to make it into a trilogy. I'm not sure I can. The story is pretty complete on its own. Anything after it would be its own story but set in the same universe. I might be able to use some other book ideas I've had on the shelf. Since the commercial book is SF, I might be able to bring the SF book set on a space station near Saturn(or Jupiter) into that universe. I'm not sure how it would work. But I need to wrap up the B'vellah War series. I put some thought into that, too, the second half of book 3 specifically.

Have a great weekend.