The Late 2008 - Shine in 2009

Like my cheesy title? *grin*

So, given it's what everyone else is doing*, I thought now would be a good time for my 2008 recap.

Raw stats first.

In 2008, I:

* wrote 161,207 words of fiction.
* finished a draft of TBAEO.
* did preliminary edits and replotting of TBAEO.
* worked on The Black Gates, then retired it at about chapter 5 - the plot Needs Work.
* started Logan. Wrote 10 chapters only to realise the story started at chapter 11. Put aside, as the MC was too boring.
* learned how to write short stories - hoorah! Total of 8 in various stages.
* edited my first 'proper' play. Wrote several others, including an 8 act one to be performed in a week's time.
* began The Project. Wrote half, outlined the rest, realised I hated the MC and put it aside.
* signed up to write a self-pubbed non-fic ebook, to be completed this month.
* began several MG novels for nano, none of which behaved, so they've been temporarily put aside.
* started Jesscapades, which I adore, and which at this point I'm planning to be my debut novel.

My main goals for the year were to make 10 submissions and have 3 complete manuscripts. Sadly, the year has been fraught with false starts, so I have only one :( As for submissions, I've done 12 :) So that's a success. Granted, a lot have been resubs, and I've had no bites yet though a couple of commendations and personalised rejections, but hey - I did more than 10 subs :) Rah!

Although on the one hand I feel like the year has been a bit of a failure - I haven't completed any novels that I'm happy with - on the other hand, my total word count is up by 60% on last year's count. And more importantly, I've learned a lot. Sure, I've had a lot of false starts - but I know why they were false starts, and each time, they've been for a different reason - which means I'm learning.

And now I've hit on a novel that I like, with a reasonably strong voice, a fun plot, a great MC... Mind you, I'm not halfway yet, so I'm hoping like mad that I like the book because it really is good (this is what the beta readers are saying) and not because I just haven't hit the wall yet (what my brain is saying).

So, this is what I've learned from each of my false starts this year:

1) TBAEO - not a false start, but something that DEFINITELY needs work before it can see the light of day. From this I learned perhaps my biggest lesson of the year - that I can finish a complete novel, and that I can dissect it and replot it to make it stronger.

2) The Black Gates - this is actually my first novel. I've been working on it off and on for years - and because of this, it's fraught with beginner mistakes - not least of which was a lack of original, interesting plot. I fixed that by introducing some great twists - but I'm yet to figure out how on earth it all goes together. It's not complex enough - but it's too complex. Gack.

3) Logan - heh. From this, I relearned the importance of having not only a strong MC, but one who has enough tension and internal conflict to drive the plot. Logan, the MC, was not strong enough to be a driving force - instead, he was someone who was driven, being forced and manipulated into making his decisions instead of reacting to the situation himself - and so he was boring. It was about now that I also realised that I didn't actually want to write traditional-style fantasy after all...

4) The Project. If TBAEO could be called an exercise in character development, then TP is its opposite: an exercise in plot. I set out to write this deliberately as a pot-boiler, simply to force myself to learn how to keep up the pace and tension, how to introduce stumbling blocks and small problems - in short, how to keep the middle from sagging. I succeeded pretty well, but unfortunately in doing so sacrificed character, and the MC turned into someone whom I didn't like, couldn't identify with, and just plain didn't want to write about.

5) The Edge and Gem series - I only made a tiny start on these at the beginning of Nano, but it reinforced for me the necessity of knowing your character's voice before writing the book.

6) Jesscapades. With luck, this one won't be a false start. So far (about 1/4 of the way in) it's got a great combination of character AND plot, and I'm excited to see just how much better this is than anything I've done before.

And that, my friends, was 2008. I know, I haven't talked about my goals for 2009 yet - but to be honest, I can't really get my head around the idea of new goals until this big camp (Jan 16-24) is over, and the dog book is written. I'll think about goals, and post them either in the final week of Jan, or in early Feb.

In the meantime - what's the biggest thing you learned in 2008?


* I was going to do it anyway. It just seemed like a good excuse O:)

Book Review: Armed and Magical by Lisa Shearin

Woohoo! 1 down, 156 to go :D

Quick Stats
Genre - Urban fantasy, with a street detective-esque bent
Length - about 300 pages
Author - Lisa Shearin

Overview
This is book 2 in the Raine Benares series. Raine has arrived at the Isle of Mid, and the Saghred has been placed in the Guardians' most secure containment rooms - only they're not terribly containing, not for the Saghred with its seemingly limitless power. But that's not Raine's real problem. The real problem is that there are about a bazillion different factions on the Isle, and they all want a piece of her - or her in pieces. Some of them aren't fussy.

First Impressions
Fun! Oh yes, this stands up to my expectations well :) Just like Magic Lost, Trouble Found, the action starts right on page one, setting in place a chain of events that's exciting, dangerous, and above all, fun. I love Raine and her snarky, street-smart attitude :D

High Points
The general snarkiness of Raine, and the awesome, action-filled plot! She has a truly loveable cast of characters, from the rogue pirate Phealan to the sweet and not-quote-so-innocent-anymore Piaras, to the dreamy Guardian Michael, steamy badboy Tam... Ya know. The works B-)

And the plot just never stops; the pace is relentless from page one, and you're never quite sure what's going to blow up next. Lovely. Just the way things should be.

Low Points
The only minor qualm I have with this series of books is that, essentially, they are 'fluff'. I love and adore these books, and they have had a huge impact on my own writing - but they are ultimately there for entertainment. There isn't really any 'deeper meaning' behind them, and thus far in the two books I've read, there isn't a whole lot of character growth in Raine.

Some days, though, you just gotta have something that's entertaining, and easy on the brain... So there's nothing quintessentially wrong with fluff :)

Rating
So, because five stars, or marks-out-of-ten, or whatever, are boring, I'm going to rate my squillions of TBR books by where they're most suitable to read. I know, I'm a little odd, but work with me here...

So, this one has quite literally been my bathroom book for the last week %-) (Just fyi, my bathroom includes the bath, the toilet, the sink and the shower). I haven't really had time to read, but I started it in the bath last week and couldn't bear putting it away until I had time to finish it. So I've been reading it in snatches every time I'm in the bathroom.

It's a pretty good bathroom book, because it's so action-packed you can get a great deal of entertainment out of each chapter, while the plot is linear enough that you don't forget what was happening between times. The strong voice helps to keep the story fresh in your memory, too. The single only problem with it being a bathroom book is the carried-away factor, where someone bashes on the door and you realise you've been there for fifteen minutes O:)

And I confess, as I got to the climax, the book became a never-leave-my-side book until I finished it :D

Story Elements #2: Pace

Welcome to the second Story Elements article! If you missed the first one on conflict, check it out here. This article on pace follows on from the article on conflict. Why? Because you can have the most superb conflict in the world, but if you don't nail the pace, it'll come out boring.

First of all, what is pace?

Wordnet.princeton tells us that pace is the "rate of moving". The Glossary of Technical Terms for Comparative Reading suggests that pace is "the 'speed' at which a text moves; for example, an adventure story may be 'fast-moving' with lots of incident and dialogue, while a romantic novel may be 'slower', containing less action and more description".

I don't know about you, but I don't think that 'rate of moving' is terribly useful in terms of writing. And the glossary's definition, though more concretely related to writing, doesn't really help much either - basically, it can point at something and say whether it has pace or not, but it still doesn't tell us what it really is.

Here's a definition that strikes me as a whole lot more useful: 'Relative speed of progress or change.' Conflict, as we know, is change. Pace is the speed of conflict - the rate of change. In some books (romance, some chick lit, literary, possibly high fantasy) the rate of change is slower, and the overall tone of the book as a result is quieter. In other books - action, urban or contemporary fantasy, etc - changes happen quickly and the book feels faster, louder.

Both styles can be compelling, but often the difference is in what makes them compelling. Pacey books often compel the reader to keep reading by the sheer speed of events - things just keep happening and there's no 'convenient' place to stop and put the book down. Slower books still have a progression of events and conflict (else they would be neither interesting nor a narrative!), but they tend to rely more on characterisation and the like for their compulsion.

And just as both styles can be compelling, both can suffer from myriad problems. Too fast, and you risk losing your reader to confusion, tiring them out, and potentially skimping on things like characterisation and logic. Too slow and you also risk losing your reader, but this time to boredom.

For me, personally, the bigger problem is slowness. Well, it's currently the bigger problem :D Last year, when I started my first serious attempt at a novel, I ended up moving the story too fast and skimming over a lot of important world building and characterisation. As a result, readers were confused about the rules under which the world operated, and didn't really connect with the MC - because they weren't given a chance.

My second attempt suffered too far the other way. I'm talking here about Logan, and you can dig up the post in my archives where I decided that the first ten chapters - about 15,000 words - were backstory. Nothing happened.

Although this is a bit of a misnomer. Of course things happened; if they didn't, I'd have had nothing to write about, would I? The problem was, the things that were happening weren't imperative to the story. Sure, it was important that those things happened, and if they didn't there would BE no story... But I didn't need to tell the readers about them. It's like the 5-year-old's version of a story, where they repeat everything in all it's boring detail, as opposed to the adult's version, where they hit the high points and know that you'll fill in the other stuff yourself.

Of course, that's the trick. What stuff can you leave to the reader to fill in, and what can't you? This is the big, massive, gargantuan issue of Significance, something that I'm still coming to grips with in practice though I know the theory - and something I'll elaborate on next time ;)

PS. Because I love it so much, because the timing was perfect when I read it and things clicked in my head, and because it's just such a great example of a perfectly paced pacey book, I highly recommend Lisa Shearin's Magic Lost, Trouble Found as the book that taught me about how to do pace right. Of course, whether or not I've learnt my lesson well is another matter! :D