I am so sorry that it has been so long since my last post here. I am also sorry that I won’t be updating again for several more weeks. You see, I am getting married on July 3, and we are going on a two-week honeymoon to Nova Scotia.

I will write about my travels when I return, I am sure. Until then, keep writing!

Yup, that’s right, everyone: I finished the first draft of We’ll Write You an Opera You Can’t Refuse! It needs lots of work, of course – editing, rewriting, critiques – but for now… for now I am going to bask in the joy of having finished a project. I finished a piece.

And tomorrow, I will get back to work on Ballk, because that one has been sitting alone for far too long. I’ve also got a list of pieces I should start editing in earnest, so assuming I can get myself organized for research and editing and all the rest of that fun stuff, my posts should be full of tidbits about my progress.

It’s funny how finishing one stage of the writing process feels like such a huge achievement. Of course, it is. It’s a major achievement to write an entire first draft. It’s bigger still to actually achieve the ever-elusive “final draft.” So much work goes into our stories, and it’s so scary to send them out into the world when they’re ready – but we do need to trust that they’re ready. If they aren’t, they’ll come back.

But that’s the future for Opera. It’s only just had its proper birthing. The labour was long and sometimes intense, but it’s over.

Next will come the task of raising it.

As I believe I mentioned at the end of my last post, I have ADHD. This makes focusing difficult, if not impossible at times. Sometimes I can focus on things I want to, sometimes I get fixated on something that really isn’t what I need to be focused on. It’s not really a matter of lack of focus, it’s more a matter of uncontrollable focus. (And there is a lot more to ADHD than just the problem of focusing and paying attention, but I have another blog for that.)

Tomorrow, I am beginning a new focus. It’s really a refocus, getting myself back to focusing on what I really want out of my life. I’ve drawn up a plan, and I’m going to do my best to follow it. We’ll see how it goes.

Part of the plan includes my writing goals. I need to focus more on my writing, on my editing, and on my submitting. I haven’t completed a single first draft yet this year, and I really ought to have four under my belt by now. Same with edited pieces. Instead, I have a few pieces that are completely finished (because I finished them a while ago) and a whole pile of unfinished pieces.

It’s way past time I finished those stories.

So tomorrow, I am going to pull out We’ll Write You An Opera You Can’t Refuse, and I will finish the current scene. And I will research markets for Fortresses Crash Into the Sea, and I will send it off to another ‘zine.

And regardless of whether or not Fortresses is accepted this time, regardless of whether or not I choose to keep going and actually finish Opera tomorrow, at least I will have focused for a time on something that is really incredibly important to me.

This month has been very busy, but life is slowing down a little now – finally!

It’s April, which means it’s Script Frenzy. It took me a week to decide that, rather than write the second graphic novel in a trilogy I began last April, I would write a movie based on a dream I had several months ago. I wrote two pages that day. This past Saturday, I finally got back to work on the script and wrote another eight pages. I haven’t written anymore of it since. Somehow I don’t think I’m going to meet the goal of 100 pages by April 30. That’s just a guess, mind you.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading this month, taking some time to re-examine my life goals and figure out just what it is I truly want out of life. What do I want to do with myself, where do I want to find myself in ten years? More importantly, what is the purpose for which I was created? I’ve been thinking about going back to school this fall (I want to get into grad school someday and become a psychologist). Oh, and I’ve been dealing with wedding planning, working part-time as an office temp, and continuing to edit reports for the company I’m contracted to.

So I haven’t been working on my writing very much lately, but I’ve been gathering material and ideas that will inform my writing when I at last sit down at the keyboard and start working on a novel or a short story or an essay. Some writers would say I’ve been in a slump for the last while; I prefer to look at it in this more positive light. It’s not that I don’t want to write, it’s that I’m getting distracted from writing. Other things feel more important right now: relationships, making money to help pay for the wedding and for school, reaching for the future. It’s probably going to be like this for another month or so, and then I’ll be into frantic wedding preparation mode for a month and honeymoon mode for the month after that. But come August, life will be settling down. I’ll be preparing to start school, but I won’t be doing full-time studies, so I am fantasizing that my life will return to one of blissful writing this summer.

Until then, everything is sporadic and my life is one of interruption and distraction.

(Well, it’s always full of distraction; I have ADHD, after all.)

I’m a writer, but I’m also a reader. When I was in grade school, I read constantly. I devoured novels as though my life depended on it. And my writing has been greatly influenced by what I read back then.

When I went to university, I stopped reading fiction as much and started reading non-fiction: text books, to be sure, but also books to research my papers and other books that I discovered through my research. My writing has also been influenced by this reading.

After university, there was the Internet. Reading blogs, reading articles online, doing research online, reading web comics… there is a wealth of words out there, and if you sift through the chaff you can find amazing nourishment for your mind.

It has been difficult to get back into reading fiction. I probably will never again read as voraciously as I once did, but it’s definitely not something I will ever give up completely, just as there have been certain authors who have consistently retained me as a reader through the years.

Four Authors I Read Regularly

Orson Scott Card (Science Fiction, Fantasy)
Lurlene McDaniel (Young Adult Inspirational)
Charles De Lint (Fantasy)
Robin McKinley (Fantasy)

Four Books I Recommend

Concerning the Spiritual in Art, by Wassily Kandinsky (Non-Fiction; an insightful look at the nature of art)
On Writing, by Stephen King (Non-Fiction; a by turns funny and serious book about the craft)
Sewer, Gas, and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy, by Matt Ruff (Futuristic Fiction; a very humourous novel that is well-written and has some amazing characters, as well as a great plot)
Lottery, by Patricia Wood (Fiction; a novel from the point-of-view of a man with an intellectual disability that has well-developed characters, an entertaining plot, and is incredibly believable across the board)

I read other authors, of course, but those are the four I look for most often in the bookstore. I own over 20 of Lurlene McDaniels’ books. And I would recommend other books, but these four, I think, offer an excellent assortment of theory, practice, and example.

Oh, by the way, if you go to the Artful Words web site, the April newsletter came out yesterday. Go check it out!

I’ve pretty much stalled out on everything at the moment. The last thing I wrote (that wasn’t a personal blog post, most of which have been rather whingey lately) was a guest post for my good friend Huushi’s blog (it’s not up yet; no worries, I’ll direct you when it’s time). This is too bad, because I had such high hopes for NaNoEdMo this year! Script Frenzy begins on Thursday, too, and I’m excited about continuing my story from last year but a bit uncertain about how well I’m going to do.

I blame it on temping. I decided it would be a good idea to start working full-time as a temp. I was wrong. While I like the work, it’s just not conducive to my writing aspirations. The housework is suffering, as well. I’ve been in touch with the temp agency, though, and they’re working with me. Once my current assignment is over, I’ll be moving into their part-time temp pool instead. I’m very hopeful that fewer hours away from home (and away from my laptop) will mean more hours of writing and housekeeping.

I’ll keep you updated, of course.

Editing a novel is very different from editing a short story. When I write a short story, I finish the first draft, get one of my writerly friends to read through it and give me some comments and critique (C&C), take what they’ve said and make some decisions about what to change, then get more C&C and make more changes. My final draft is usually my fourth draft, though sometimes it’s obvious that a piece is finished before that. It’s important to note, also, that when I say I “make some decisions about what to change,” that means that I read through the C&C and decide whether or not I think the proposed changes will actually make the story stronger. If a question makes it clear that the reader didn’t quite catch on to whatever it is I’m trying to do with the story, then I know there are things I need to change so that it’s clearer.

Well, I want to do that with my novels, but there’s a more complex (well, longer, at least) process involved here. Pointillism is the third book in a series. Tumbling is the first in the series, and Relevé is the second. Me being me, I wrote Tumbling for NaNoWriMo in 2008 and Pointillism for NaNoWriMo in 2009, and haven’t really done much beyond plotting Relevé. My series is in this state because I wrote the original first book in the series for NaNoWriMo 2006, but after writing Tumbling I realized that The Social Habits of Dolphins was really, really bad (though I love the title and want to use it someday for something else) and the characters were not as strong as they should be. So I revamped my idea for the series and began to plot Relevé (the replacement for The Social Habits of Dolphins, now the second book instead of the first)and Pointillism.

Confused yet? It doesn’t get any less confusing, trust me!

One of my friends read through Pointillism and gave me some great C&C. After I finished my read-through, I incorporated her notes with my own, and I now have a really comprehensive list of things to work on as I work on my second draft. (She read it in two days, she liked it so much; it took me longer, but I was anxious to get back to it every day because I wanted to know what happened next.)

I have sent that same friend the first draft of Tumbling. I’ve finished my first read-through and made a lot of notes. There are things in it that I need to make sure I incorporate into Pointillism and others that don’t hold up to scrutiny. And along the way, I’ve had some revelations about the main character of Relevé that have left me excited and sleep-deprived as I imagined how her story is going to go now that I know what really needs to happen to her.

But it’s NaNoEdMo this month, and I can’t wait to start editing until I receive my friend’s notes on Tumbling or have the first draft of Relevé ready to go. So what am I doing now?

Well, I like to use yWriter for my writing – novels and short stories. It’s a great free writing program that lets you organize your projects by chapter and scene (something that helps keep me organized and lets me know where I am in the story). I’ll probably write a post about how I use the program at some point, but right now I want to explain what I’m doing to Pointillism.

I am currently going through and making sure that I have characters listed for every scene. This is not a feature that I have used extensively as yet, but I am hopeful that it will help me keep my story more organized. I am also applying “items” to each scene. I put quotes around the word because I’m using the items feature to keep track of my subplots (I don’t write mysteries or high fantasy, so I don’t really have a lot of items to keep track of; YA fiction, however, does have a lot of subplots). I’m also rating the tension, humour, and romance in each scene. I’m hopeful that using these features and printing reports once I’m finished will help me see where I need to add or take away – do I need another scene for this subplot? what about changing the dialogue? is the climax too soon? – things like that.

We’ll Write You an Opera You Can’t Refuse has been on hiatus for long enough. I’m hoping that I will be able to get it finished soon. I just need to dig in and get it done! When the first draft is finally finished, I am going to reward myself by plotting out Relevé on paper. Right now it’s all in my head, and it is screaming to get out. I figure I’ll eke it out slowly, writing a bit here and a bit there, always as a reward for finishing something less appealing. My goal is to actually have all three of these novels in the same stage of editing at the same time, so they can be finished and maybe published at the same time, as well. We’ll see how that goes.

I kept meaning to write last week, but I didn’t have anything to report, really, and I was crazybusy with my new job, so it just… never happened. (I’m temping now. Working outside the home takes away from writing time, which is sad, but it brings in extra cash, for which I am grateful. Not that we need the money, but I needed more to do in a day and extra is always nice.)

However, this past Monday (March 1) was the beginning of National Novel Editing Month (NaNoEdMo), so I started a read-through of Pointillism, the novel I wrote during NaNoWriMo 2009. I made notes in the margins and tracked my changes (some of Word’s features are quite useful; these are two of them). Next I’m going to add in the comments my friend Chelsea made when she read through the first draft. Then I’ll copy my changes into my yWriter file and start working on the pacing, using the notes I have in the margins. I also have some research I need to do. (Easy stuff: I need to locate a gymnastics club that will allow me to come watch practice.) This afternoon at my writers’ group, I’m going to see how much of the commentary I can get melded together and how many changes I can get made.

I am still hoping to get We’ll Write You an Opera You Can’t Refuse finished. I’m babysitting tonight, so once the kids are in bed I will hopefully have time and be in the right headspace to actually get some writing done. You never know – I might hit a groove!

And that is what I have been up to lately and what I hope to accomplish in the next little while. I may or may not get back to the read-through of Tumbling before the end of the month, too. We shall have to see!

Last week, when I normally would have posted an update, I was in Calgary, shopping for a wedding dress and making a few arrangements. The wedding is July 3, it will be in Calgary, and we’re nowhere near ready. (I have a blog about it; you can read updates there.)

Bad news: Fortresses Crash to the Sea was rejected; this time with a form letter. I’m going to go back to the place I think should be a perfect fit and see if they’re accepting new submissions, because I really do think this story deserves to be read widely. (And I’m not just saying that because I wrote it!)

I have some good news, though! On the flight to Calgary, I finished reading Stephen King’s On Writing, one of those writing books everyone recommends constantly. Well, I’ll be recommending this one, too. Excellent book! Inspiring and funny and full of awesome advice. And a few days prior, the book inspired me to redo the basic outline for We’ll Write You an Opera You Can’t Refuse… and I managed to get half of the next scene written, to boot! So I’m still way behind on my writing goals, but this story is going to be finished eventually, and that makes me happy!

Just a short update this week. I’ll try to have something more substantial to report next week.

As we were packing up our instruments after band rehearsal on Monday evening last week, the tuba player who was a part of my conversation with the percussionist about We’ll Write You an Opera You Can’t Refuse asked me if I was done writing the story yet. I had to say no, and asked if he wanted to read it (I was definitely surprised he asked about it). The answer was yes, and I began to wonder what I’d gotten myself into. I mean, usually I only talk about my writing projects with my writer friends, the poor people who read my LiveJournal, and my fiance. I don’t ask other people to look at a first draft unless I’m looking for some kind of “expert” opinion.

And, of course, I didn’t write a word on that story this past week. I didn’t get any editing of my own stuff done, either. I worked on the reports I edit for my contract, and I signed up with a temp agency, but that’s really about it. I didn’t even get much done in the way of knitting or crocheting!

So I have no actual progress to report this week. Everything is still at the exact same place it was last time I posted, except that I’ve added a piece to my list of first drafts. Because I’m a glutton for punishment or something, I guess.

At least it’s not really a setback… it’s just stagnant. Can’t let it sit for too long, though, or it’ll start to reek. I’ll hop back in the saddle tomorrow, no worries – and maybe when I post next week, I’ll have some progress to report!