Paperback Writer

I don’t know if you know this about me but I like to write dialogue.  And I like to write tough talking wildly sarcastic women to deliver that dialogue.  Vinnie, more formally known as Lavinia Price, is one such example.

She’s the main character of Vinnie and Ellie— one of my many non-fantasy WIPs (I really hate the title by the way. I just can’t think of anything else to call it).  It was the result of my first foray into the world of NaNoWriMo back in 2009. I set out wanting to write a chick lit novel, just to see if I could do it. And I guess since the story’s still unfinished (you’re shocked, I know), whether I can do it remains to be seen.

Anyway, Vinnie and Ellie is the story of Lavinia (who calls herself Nia but is called Vinnie by her friends) and the drop dead gorgeous Llewelyn (who calls himself Lew and is called Ellie by friends). They meet, they fall in love, complications arise but, at the end of the story, when it’s all said and done, these two will have a happy ending. It’s not quite written yet but I know that’s where it’ll end.

The scene I’m going to post below is their very first dialogue heavy meeting. (Or part of it anyway. As it often seems to be the case with me, the entire scene is much too long for this post.)  They meet in a bar where Vinnie is celebrating her unexpected unemployed status with a fifth of whiskey. Enter Lew, a guy just looking for a beer and place to sit.
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Cortney Pearson over at Writer By Day was kind enough to tag me in the Lucky Seven meme that’s sweeping the blogosphere.  In the process, she provided me with a perfect topic for today’s post.  Thanks, Cortney!

If you’re unfamiliar with this meme, the idea is for the readers of your blog to get a teeny tiny peek at your Work In Progress. I’ve enjoyed this meme.  It’s awesome how many people have such exciting snippets to share.

Here are the rules:

1.  Go to page 77 of your current WIP

2.  Go to line 7.

4.  Tag 7 other authors.

I was tagged last month and shared seven lines on page 77 of Effigy so this time time around, I’m going to share the seven lines from page 77 of Second Nature which is Effigy’s sequel.  This bit of a scene finds us smack in the middle of an argument between the main character, Cate and another character, Aaron.

“Oh, you are in for a world of hurt, John Boy,” she said.  “The second you put me down— the very second my feet touch the ground— I’m gonna make you bleed.”

That made Aaron laugh. Cate didn’t appreciate it.

“It’s an insult to girls everywhere, I know,” Cate said.  “I’ll make it up to them after I’ve finished making you cry, you pain in the ass emo freak.”

Now this is the part where I’m supposed to tag seven other authors and this is the part I always skip.  But, as I said last time, if you’re a writer who’s curious about what may lurk on page 77 of your own manuscript and want to share it with the world, please consider yourselves tagged.

Hope everyone has a terrific Monday. See y’all tomorrow.

This past Tuesday, I posted a picture of my big ass storyboard as part of a tour of my office space.  A few of my wonderful commenters expressed interest in knowing more about how exactly my storyboard is set up.  So this post will be devoted to answering this question. Below you’ll find close up pictures and descriptions of my process.  It’s probably the craziest process out there (and, judging by my slower than molasses rate of production, perhaps not the smartest) but I like it and I hope that maybe you find it interesting.  At the very least, it could be a tutorial in what not to do.  At any rate, I’d like to warn anyone who maybe hopes to one day read my novel to not look too closely at these pictures because they will contain spoilers.

If you don’t already know, I’m writing an epic fantasy series.  The first two novels are over 600 pages each which is not quite as long as A Song of Ice and Fire but still, a respectable length, I think.  Part of the problem I had in early drafts was keeping track of the wheres and the whens because, as is generally the case with epic fantasy, there are a lot of characters doing a lot of things at a lot of different times in a lot of different places and I kept screwing up the timeline.  The story also takes place in four separate countries.  None of these settings are equipped with wi-fi or telephones or a pair of cans connected by a string.  None of them have any sort of mail delivery service that doesn’t require the use of a horse or ship or some combination of the two.  All of this time needs to be accounted for.  All of these places need to have names and I need to remember that when, in chapter one, the capital city of Eluned is located in the northeast quadrant, it had better be in the same place come chapter twenty.

But because I am stupid a visual learner, I had a hard time keeping all this straight just in my head and confusingly scribbled notes in my notebooks.  I needed to see it laid out before me.  And thus, the storyboard was born.  I’ve had it for a little over a year now and I think it’s made a huge difference.  The first thing I put on it was the calendar:

This calendar covers the timeline for book one and about a third of book two.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do when I get to book three.  Or even the second half of book two.  But that’s a problem for another time.  The months and years at the top of each page were chosen almost completely at random (one sentence early in book two makes it not random).  I just needed them to help give my timeline shape. On each page is written the major events in the novel, who does what when.  I’ve planned the series to be at least five books long (I’d really like there to be six because I like the symmetry but I haven’t thought that far ahead yet)  and because there is some back and forth happening, each novel gets its own color ink. This way I know at a glance which notes corresponds to which novel.  The post-it notes indicate scenes that need to be fixed and are placed on the calendar near to the scene in question.

These are the post-it notes which still require my attention.  They’ve been moved from the storyboard to the bottom of my monitor so that when I start wasting away my time on Facebook or Twitter or Minesweeper or whatever (not that I ever do that), I’ll see them and guiltily stop what I am doing and go back to what I should be doing.  Sometimes it works.

This map was the second thing to be put on the big ass storyboard.  Yes, it’s a map of England and Scotland.  No, my story doesn’t take place in either England or Scotland but like the months and the years of my calendar, I’m using it to help me keep track of where everything is because in earlier drafts, I did lose a couple of villages and one managed to move from the west to the south and back again.  Oops.  And because I can’t draw, I used a map already in existence.  Each little pink slip is the name of a village/city in my book.

This is a series of emails I received from my last beta reader.  These are the notes she gave me.  The highlighted portions are the notes I wanted to make sure I really paid attention to. Hmmm. That makes it sound like I didn’t care about the rest. Which isn’t true. I am, as always, grateful for any and all feedback I receive.  I give it all very careful consideration.

This is a titles list for the entire planned series.  Five books, each written in three parts.  And don’t you just love that font?  I do.  It’s really the only reason I took the time to print out a copy of it.

This picture contains the BIGGEST DAMN SPOILERS of all so please just kind of squint when you look at it.  This is obviously a family tree  (created for free at  Family Echo).  I created it to help me keep track of characters.  Plus, it just kind of looks cool.  But because I couldn’t figure out how to get it to print everything (I am not known for my technical know how), I had to write in the rest.  It really worked out better this way because I don’t have the storyboard space for a multi-paged family tree.

This is the most embarrassing thing on the big ass storyboard, so much so that I’m a little surprised I posted it here.  Oh well.  This, in case it’s unclear, is the prototype for my book cover.  I know.  I’m such an amazing artist you don’t know why I’m wasting my talent writing books.  Please don’t injury yourselves laughing.  Seriously though, don’t hurt yourselves.  One afternoon last year, I got the idea to make a mock-up of something I thought would be cool but I have absolutely no artistic talent (which should be painfully obvious to you now) and I have no idea how to use photoshop or gimp or any of those types of programs.  So I decided to print out a couple of pictures (I don’t even have a color printer) that I liked (even if the woman is missing the top of her head and the guy would ideally be facing the other direction and not have a quiver of arrows on his back) and sketch in the rest.  The cross is supposed to be a dagger and the empty circle behind it is supposed to be something cool, like a stained glass window but I didn’t even know how to go about sketching that so it’s just a circle.

This is what I do when I have to work out problems in chapters, more specifically the ordering of scenes.  I wrote about it in detail back in January but here’s a recap:  each slip of paper has written on it a one line description of the scene.  Blank slips of paper represent scenes that need to exist but don’t yet because I don’t know what they are yet.  In this format, I can easily shuffle them around until I nail down the order I want them to be in.  Transitions and flow between scenes are very important to me and this helps me make the most of it.  Most of the time.  When my dining room table isn’t available for this exercise (read: when I’m too lazy to clean it off…), I use post-it notes and my Serenity movie poster.

So there you have it.  Those are the contents of my big ass storyboard (and my dining room table).  Not traditional in any sense but when have I ever done anything traditional?  I apologize for the length of this post. I hope you don’t regret your interest in the big ass storyboard.  I hope you didn’t fall asleep at your computer while reading it.  And if you did, I hope you didn’t drool all over the keyboard.  Talk about your messy clean up.

Have a great weekend, all.  See you Monday.

Hey, raise your hands if you thought I’d be blogging about the movie!  Although I really do love that movie and invite you to tell me your favorite quotes and/or scenes from that movie, this post is about my own personal office space.  That’s right.  I’m fortunate enough to have not just a corner but an entire room in which to write so I’m posting pictures of where the magic occasionally happens.  Be still your beating hearts, right?  Right.

Let’s start the tour, shall we?

To answer your question, yes.  My desk is normally this neat.  A while back when I was trying to solve the problem of one particular character and was adding and deleting scenes like they were going out of fashion, the desk was much messier as it was covered in paper copies of each and every one of those scenes as I attempted to Frankenstein the right scene out of them. I figured it out eventually and the desk has since been restored to its normal sense of order. In the lower left hand corner, you can see the copies of my book, Effigy,  made exclusively for me as a gift from my brother and sister-in-law. This will probably sound egotistical and definitely weird but I just like to touch them and thinking about the day when I might get to see them on a shelf in a bookstore somewhere.  Some days I actually write the book.  Some days.

Now that you’ve seen where the magic happens, I can show you how the magic happens. The goblets were made for me by my sister, B. This probably wasn’t the use for them she had envisioned but I seldom do what others envision. Except for all those times when I do just that.  Eeek!  Conformity!

This is the room’s closet which is filled with books, obviously, but they’re all writing themed books and literature textbooks (I used to teach high school English— fear that.) and magazines. All my old notebooks are in here as well as my sword and dagger collection. It looks less organized than it really is. But just barely.

This is the big ass storyboard being protected by the big ass (and not at all lazy) German shepherd.  I posted this picture on this blog a little while ago when I was lamenting how far behind I am in my edits and rewrites.  The little yellow and pink post-it notes were all corrections that needed to be made.  I am pleased to report that there is only one of these notes remaining on the big ass storyboard.  The rest of them are now taped to my monitor.  And there are only five of them.  And two of them are recent additions that didn’t make the storyboard picture.  I’m not sure where to place that in the ‘progress’ continuum.

Well, right now I have to progress out of here.  I have an early shift at The Store and rumor has it that I get to refold both the men’s and the women’s jean walls.  Now be still my beating heart.

God, I gotta finish this book (and sell a million copies) so I can quit that job.

See you all tomorrow.

Today is a prime example of how preparing posts ahead of time can save you a lot of pain sitting in front of the computer saying (or crying) “C…what starts with C?  Why doesn’t anything start with C?  What ever will I write about?”

I ended up going with Catherine Cole, as you may have guessed from my overly clever title.  Catherine, or Cate as she prefers to be known, is the main character of my WIP, Second Nature.  I don’t know if writers are supposed to have favorites amongst their darlings, but I’m pretty sure Cate’s mine.  She’s a tough talking, wildly sarcastic, pop culture referencing woman and these traits make her an absolute delight to write for.  Sometimes I forget I have other characters when Cate’s in the mix.

Anyway, The scene I’m going to post is her opening scene.  I can’t post the entire scene; it’s entirely too long but if you’re interested, the entire scene can be read HERE.

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