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.

We watch Mike Holmes from time to time, my fiance and I, and the episode of Holmes on Homes that is on as I write this entry included the spectacular idiocy of a contractor who notched floor joists and ran pipes through the notches, then reinforced said floor joists with plywood on either side of each joist. In case you were wondering, that’s not a good idea. You actually aren’t supposed to notch floor joists because it ruins the integrity of the beam, making it more likely to break. You can drill holes through the middle of the joists, but the top and the bottom have to be sound. They work together  to support your weight when you walk on the floor. The top is compressed and the bottom is pulled; the middle doesn’t really do much. If you cut a notch in the wood, the part that is left will break under pressure, because it doesn’t have the other half to hold it together.

The same can be said of our writing. We must have a handle on the foundations of writing before we can expect what we write to be worthwhile. My monthly newsletters try to shed some light on these foundations. I’m going to briefly outline some of the necessities now.

1. Spelling. Yeah, sure, there’s spell check, but it doesn’t catch everything, and the English language is full of oddities. In addition to which, you need different spelling if you are writing for a US audience vs a Canadian or British audience. (I’m sure there are other countries that use British spelling besides Canada and Britain.)
2. Grammar. If spelling makes it so people know what the words are, grammar makes it so people know what the meaning is. How we order our words is incredibly important when it comes to meaning.
3. Punctuation. So few people know how to use the semicolon and the colon properly. It seems that even fewer understand periods and commas. An incorrectly placed comma can do more to destroy the integrity of a sentence than mis-ordered words.
4. Facts. You need to get your facts straight. You might make up a lot of things (e.g., We’ll Write You an Opera You Can’t Refuse is about the Italian musicians’ mob and is set in the Italian district of Halifax – I have no idea if there’s an Italian district of Halifax, and I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as a musicians’ mob), but you need to get some facts straight in order to preserve realism (e.g., the same story talks about real historical people and events and mentions pieces of music that would actually be performed by an orchestra or an opera company).
5. Plot. Okay, if you aren’t writing fiction you have a theme, but the concept still applies: you need to have a reason to write the piece, a flow to what you’re writing, and something to hold it all together. I wrote an essay in university about the use of the name John in Jane Eyre. That sentence just told you what held the paper together.

These five elements constitute your foundation, your floor joists. If you neglect any one of these, your work will be less. It will be weaker, and it won’t hold up under pressure.

This is where outside editors come in. I like to have other people read my work and let me know where I fell down, where things could be stronger. It’s similar to having Mike and his crew come in to fix up a house that an idiot contractor screwed up, but when it comes to my writing, I’m the one who has to do the work to “make it right.”

Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlander series, had quite the furor over on her blog last weekend. The posts in question, along with their comments, are gone now, which is too bad, but I honestly don’t blame her for deleting them in the end.

The initial post called out fanfic writers. Ms Gabaldon used comparisons that caused a huge uproar in the fandoms. She could have used a little bit of tact, and she was incorrect in her statement that fanfic is illegal, but I do believe her point was valid. The point of the initial post? She doesn’t want people to write fanfic about her characters and post it online.

For the uninitiated, fanfic is a genre(?) of writing wherein the author takes characters or elements of someone else’s work (be it television, movies, or books) and uses those characters or elements to create a new story. It’s gotten rather a bad rap in many circles due to the tendency of these stories to include eroticism – or just plain smut – that often pairs two characters who were never paired in such a manner in the original work. There is, in fact, a lot of what is called “slash” – that is, homoerotic fiction that (usually) pairs two male characters who are canonically heterosexual – written in the fanfic genre.

I, myself, do not read fanfic very often. Occasionally I will read a Combat! fanfic story that my mother has written (somehow Combat! fans manage to stay away from slash), but in general I don’t seek it out and don’t click on links to fanfic that I come across during my usual perusal of my friends page on LiveJournal. It stands to reason that I also do not write fanfic.

Something that I have noticed, which I very much appreciate about the fanfic I have come across (whether I read it or not) is the way the story is introduced. There is typically a header to the post that offers the reader a rating (similar to that used for rating movies), a list of warnings (e.g., sexuality, violence, language), the fandom (or fandoms if it is a cross-fandom story) being explored, and a disclaimer that notes who originally created the world and/or characters and states outright that the author of the story is just playing with them. Sometimes, a fanfic author will create a whole alternative universe, and when that happens, the header will note that this has occurred. Sometimes other authors will become so taken with this alternative universe that they start writing stories in this new continuity themselves, and they note that they are writing something in so-and-so’s continuity.

All in all, fanfic seems to have a lot of pretty clear rules about how things are to be done, and one of those rules is that if an author states that they do not condone fanfic, then there will be no fanfic of that author’s work.

Now that I’ve said all of that, what’s up with my post title this week?

Just what it says: it’s all derivative, and it’s all fanfic.

There are a limited number of stories in the world. I think somebody else said that first, but I have no idea who it was – just that it was said. I think it is important to realize that we, as authors, don’t write in a vacuum. We watch TV, or we watch movies, or (at the very least) we read books (and we’d better be reading, else what business have we to try to write). All of this media influences our writing. We like certain aspects of the things we read or watch, and we choose to include them in our own work. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but it is, I think, important that we recognize that it does happen. There is no truly original work in the world: it’s all derivative. What makes each new work original is the spin put on it, the twists and turns the author takes as he works to tell the story that has planted itself so firmly in his mind, and the author’s voice (assuming he has developed a unique one and is not simply imitating someone else’s).

I think “it’s all fanfic” is also a valid statement. High fantasy (sword and sorcerer type stories) hail back to Tolkein, Dungeons & Dragons, and other similar works. One of my favourite twentieth-century Christian fantasists, John White, made no bones of the fact that he based many aspects of his Anthropos books on C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series (e.g., children from our world go there; there are talking animals that help them defeat evil; there is an allegorical slant to the story, complete with a poorly-disguised Christ-figure and a crucifixion scene). So-called science fiction that doesn’t include a whole lot of actual science? That’s probably got a lot to do with Star Wars and Star Trek. And you can’t tell me that people who write romance novels (of the ripped/heaving bodices type) aren’t simply writing the types of stories they like reading in the genre. (Okay, yes, I realize that some of the people who write them don’t read them. But enough of them do, I think, to make it a valid statement.)

I will share some examples from my own writing.

1. Ballk is a children’s fantasy novel that is based loosely around John White’s Anthropos books. There is a girl who travels to another world and must defeat the evil queen to restore order to the place she finds herself.  It’s not so well-developed an imitation that there are talking animals or a Christ-figure, but the overarching plot elements are there.
2. Beast is a retelling of the fairy tale Beauty & the Beast. Immediately you know it’s fanfic, derivative, whatever else you want to call it. What’s different about my take on the story is that I’m telling it from the point-of-view of the Beast.
3. I write stories based on the Bible. By which I mean, I take a story from the Bible and choose a point-of-view and write it, with more detail, from that point-of-view. So far, I have written the creation story from Genesis, the story of the sacrifice of Isaac (from the point-of-view of Sarah, Isaac’s mother), and a couple of other stories. This is definitely fanfic.

What about you? Can you see your influences? What fandom do you write for? From what do your stories derive?

You know you do 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’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!