Fiction Fragment Friday: NaNoWriMo 2013 Edition Part 2

We are now officially just over a week through National Novel Writing Month. I’ve been playing catch-up since day three, but I’ve almost managed to claw my way back to an even keel. If I can write approximately 3000 words today (*nervous laughter*) I’ll be back on track, and then if I can do that another one or two times (*even more nervous laughter*) I’ll be feeling a little better about my prospects.

I have to admit, the story isn’t going the way I had planned, and will probably need a major gutting and possibly an entire rewrite by the time I’m finished, if it’s ever going to be publishable. But even still, I’m having fun. So here’s another little excerpt, in which our narrator, Clover, discusses some of the details of the day the world ended.

—–

It began as strange reports on the evening news. I didn’t understand much of it at the time, and my parents seemed unable to explain it in a way that made sense to me, but the long and short was that a hole had appeared in the sky above Russia. Authorities were flabbergasted; scientists from all over the world rushed to study the anomaly. Aircraft were sent up to get a closer look. Pictures on the news showed an unfathomable phenomenon; the aircraft could fly up above the black mass and look down on it as though it was a giant inky disk just hanging in the air. The most advanced machinery could get no readings. It seemed to be exactly what it looked like – just a huge black nothingness.

Eventually the authorities had to try something different. People were freaking out and they needed to learn something, be able to at least give the public some idea of what the hell this thing was. So they sent some specially trained men up and they attempted to make contact.

I don’t remember much, but I remember that broadcast. My parents were on the edges of their seats waiting to find out what would happen when the men approached the anomaly. There were all kinds of theories floating around; people were wondering if it would be solid, or if perhaps it would prove to be a portal to another world. The truth answered none of the public questions and was the most terrifying shock of billions of people’s lives. When the men who had been trained and prepared and sent up to this truly unbelievable experience reached out and touched that anomaly, what they received was a reaction. A violent reaction.

People screamed in horror from both sides of the television set as the huge black hole in the sky became an angry huge black hole in the sky. It writhed and wiggled, and it pulsed with a power that sent the trained men flying out of their craft to hurtle back down to the ground. Before the viewers could get over the shock of watching a group of men plummeting to their deaths on live television, the hole began to expand. It grew and grew, blotting out the sun above the camera crew, covering all of Russia and moving on to the surrounding countries. I remember being amazed at how fast it happened. The news lady had barely recovered enough to begin recapping what was happening when the sun began to fade above our farmhouse. The strange black hole had expanded from Russia to Canada in less than ten minutes.

And then everything was darkness. All over the planet people panicked and prayed and lost their minds because the sky had vanished behind a wall of black nothingness.

Accountability Tuesdays – Week 13

Technology is a wonderful thing, you know? Here I am, on a bus on the way back to camp from a long day at work, and I’m listening to music on my iPhone while typing up an accountability post on my tablet with my bluetooth keyboard. My coworkers are getting a good laugh out of it, but to hell with them. I’m multitasking!

Okay, I may be feeling a bit looney this evening, so let’s get to the important parts so I can get this post scheduled for the morning and enjoy my evening trying to make up for several nights in a row of poor sleep.

Health and Body Image Goal

As has become a tradition, I have to admit that I’ve been a very bad girl this week. Since I arrived at camp for this shift I’ve polished off a fair number of sweets and no fewer than two (large) bags of chips (with cream soda to accompany). I haven’t even been bothering to put together half-decent lunches for myself…I’ve been snagging the pre-portioned containers of spaghetti and ham-and-cheese sandwiches. I’ve been bypassing the salad bar and healthier stir-fry meals daily because, let’s face it, I’m lazy and I have no willpower. Neither have I been getting any kind of exercise because of the aforementioned laziness and because if I want to also get a decent amount of writing in I would have to give up sleep. If you were reading the beginning of this post you know that I’m not sleeping well anyway. Why is that, I wonder? Am I stressed? I might be stressed.

Anyway, I made a decent effort today and ate better at least. I stil had the spaghetti, but I had yogurt and an orange for breakfast and somehow refrained from indulging in the nanaimo squares that I (for some goddamn reason) took to work with me today. Are you proud? You probably shouldn’t be. I don’t deserve pride, dammit! When I can report self-discipline for at least 7 days in a row, then you can be proud. Stow your pride for later.

Editing Goal

It’s not much, but I finally have something to report. That is, I’ve been looking over my previously edited pages, refamiliarizing myself with my manuscript. It’s not editing in the strictest sense, but I’m pretty much caught up, so any day now we should see some real progress, I promise.

1,000,000 Word Goal

As mentioned in my special post on Sunday, I’ve begun participating in Camp NaNoWriMo as of this morning. I’ve set myself a word count goal of 30,000 which, while not as ambitious as I would like to be, will bring me up to 100,000 words so far this year (if I’m successful). For my first day I’ve manged to write a little more than 1000 words so far, which is right on track. Wish me luck, and if you’d like to join me at NaNo Camp (it’s never too late!), take a swing by the website. My username for all NaNo events is Toreshi.

As for my weekly wordcount, I actually had a pretty damn good week, if I do say so myself. Not my best, but much better than the last three weeks (in fact, almost as much as the last three weeks combined). I wrote a total of 7435 words, which came from a combination of scenes for Parallels, a bit of blogging, and a few writing exercises and prompts that I tried out over the last two days. As a matter of fact, one of those prompts may very well turn into a full blown work in progress because it’s been pretty fun to write so far. As much as I would like to plow on and finish Parallels, I’ve been having a major blockage as to where to go next, so I’m thinking I might use Camp NaNo as an excuse to try a few new things, get the juices flowing as it were. Maybe I’ll even share some of what I end up with on Fiction Fragment Fridays. Look forward to it! 🙂

Liebster Award

Yay! A blogging award! It’s been a while since I received one of these, and they’re so much fun! Grizz-Tion recently nominated me for the Liebster Award, which is given to bloggers with fewer than 200 followers as a way to recognize them and support the pursuit of new followers to their blog. The rules of the award are as follows:

1. You must thank the person who nominated you.
2. You must answer the 11 questions your nominator has left for you.
3. You must nominate 11 other bloggers.
4. You must ask 11 questions of the bloggers you nominate.

So first things first, thank you very much Grizz-Tion! I found Grizz-Tion’s blog when we both participated in L. Palmer’s Hello’s and High Fives post. I was attracted to Grizz’s excellent short story, Kyoko the Book Thief. Go see it! Go see it now!

Second things second, I must answer the questions that Grizz left behind:

1. Long hair or short hair, on people?
Depends on the person. Generally I like short hair on men and my preference is for longer hair on women, but it depends on what looks best on the person. Some guys look good with longer hair, and some women look better with shorter hair.

2. Which would you rather do: walk 10 miles or be forced to run 100 yards…both as fast as you could for that pace?
I find myself trying to imagine exactly how long 100 yards is… I would probably go with the 100 yards because as hard as it would be, and as sick as I’d probably feel afterward, it would be over a helluva lot quicker. 10 miles is a long freakin’ way to walk!

3. If you found out that your role model was actually the opposite of what you looked up to, how would you react?
Probably with tears and accusations. 😛
Honestly though, I’m not sure. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve looked at someone as a “role model”. I have people I look up to, but I have a pretty firm grasp on the idea that no one is infallible and that there is no one out there who I’m going to agree with on every aspect, so I pretty much accept that people are going to disappoint me, basically. Does that sound cynical? It sounds cynical to me.

4. Writing by hand in a crowded park, or writing all alone on a computer with no one around, and why?
Depending on my mood, I’ve preferred both, but honestly I seem to write better when there are some distractions around me. Something about silence and being alone makes it hard for me to think…maybe because I’m so used to having a dozen people milling around me at work, or having my daughter running around and my husband talking to me while I’m home. I’ve adapted an ability to write while surrounded by noise and movement, so it’s actually become harder for me to do it in a peaceful environment.

5. Desert island – only 1 book to take with you, just 1. Why did you pick that one?
I’m going to get a little saucy on this one: I choose Survive! by Les Stroud, because…duh.

6. If you were faced with 1 movie monster/bad guy/villain, which would you want to fight and why that one? (Be specific, no generic answers like zombies or vampires. I’m looking for Lestat, or the actual Wolfman.)
I had to think about this one for quite a while. There are a lot of great movie monsters and villains out there, and the thought of fighting most of them fills me with dread. In the end, I think I’m going to go with Darth Vader. Why? Well for one thing he’d probably just force-choke me and be done with it. For another, come on…Darth Vader, man.

7. What would you want the conversation to revolve around if you could sit down and talk to Jesus?
I’d want to talk about how his good intentions had spawned countless forms of ignorance, intolerance, and bigotry all over the world, and suggest to him that he really ought to come back and bitch-slap a few billion people.

8. Who should Cap’n Reynolds truly be with – Zoe, Kaylee, Inara, Saffron, or just stay alone and be bad-ass?
Inara, all the way. He should still be bad-ass and foolish, but it frustrates me to no end when those two get all SEXUAL TENSION! and *nothing happens*.

9. Les Stroud or Bear Grylls?
Neither. My vote is for the cameramen who have to put up with Grylls.

10. Personal choice for the event that will end civilization? Basically, how do you want the apocalypse to start?
You would think that my vote would be for zombies, but I’m not naive…I know that I would be one of the first poor bastards who gets eaten. Instead lets go with a giant meteor slamming into Earth. Maybe I’ll be one of the lucky ones who manages to stow away on the specially-built spaceships that takes off in hopes of establishing a colony on Mars.

11. Killing people just became legal, but only for those labelled huntable material. Which 3 celebrities would you want to be labelled as such and why?
Paris Hilton because she is quite possibly the worst role model for young kids who has ever walked the planet. Justin Bieber because omfg I’m so sick of hearing about him and his music is awful. Kristen Stewart because (despite and regardless of any opinion anyone else might have about her) I think she is quite possibly the worst actress I’ve ever seen and I can’t believe she keeps getting roles.

Third, I have to nominate more bloggers. I’m only picking five, rather than eleven, because (to be blunt) I don’t have time to go through all the blogs I follow and try to pick out 11 who have fewer than 200 followers. That said, I invite anyone who wishes to go ahead and continue on with this award as though I nominated them!

1. Lit and Scribbles with Jae

2. bellscave

3. Daniel Koeker

4. Can I Have a Breakdown After I Finish the Dishes?

5. Musings from the Writer’s Desk

Fourth, I have to submit 11 questions of my own:

1. When did you figure out what you wanted to do for a living, and did you succeed with your choices?

2. Why did you start blogging? Has that reason stayed the same or changed as you’ve blogged?

3. If you could bring one fictional character to life and have them be madly in love with you, who would you choose?

4. Be totally honest: do you really hate the sexy vampire trend, or do you secretly kinda dig it?

5. Tell me about something you’ve always wanted to do but never did, and why not?

6. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or My Little Pony?

7. Confess a guilty pleasure that you think other people won’t really understand.

8. Pick a pop culture phenomenon (a book, a movie, a video game, etc) that you absolutely hate and explain why.

9. Laid out before you are all the possible pizza ingredients in the world. What kind of pizza do you make?

10. Describe your perfect day of rest and relaxation.

11. Imagine your dream job (say, being a published author). Now imagine the most embarrassing/socially unacceptable version of your dream job (say, writing erotic literature for porno magazines). If you were offered this embarrassing version of your job and you knew that it was the only chance you were ever going to get at your dream job, would you do it?

Settling In

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

75. Choosing a setting

For me, this has never been a particularly difficult issue because for the most part my settings have been determined by the type of story I was writing. I spent most of my youth writing fantasy-based stories that, naturally, would occur in otherworldly settings, which isn’t so difficult because you get to make it up as you go along. As long as the setting makes sense for the scene you’re writing, all is well and good.

Strangely enough, the first time I had a little difficulty with setting was the first time I wrote a story that takes place in the real world. My zombie apocalypse novel takes place on modern-day Earth, which you would think would be simple enough to write, but it was surprisingly difficult. For one thing I didn’t want to anchor my characters to a specific area because, to be blunt, I didn’t want to have to deal with the research that would be involved in making sure I had that setting accurate enough. I wouldn’t want to eventually get the novel published and have readers from that particular area start wailing at me that I’d gotten their hometown all wrong. And I didn’t want to use my own home area because, to put it simply, that would be too easy. I live right by the Atlantic Ocean, in an area that is rife with fishing and recreational boating. If my characters didn’t immediately hop on a boat to avoid the undead hoard my readers would spend the rest of the book thinking, “These people are absolute morons.”

So I decided to go a little vague. My main character never outright says where she lives, and the only time a town name ever comes into play it’s a very generic-sounding town that could exist pretty much anywhere in North America. But then I got into another sticky situation. See, I didn’t want my characters to spend the entire novel in this one particular area. I wanted to show how the apocalypse was affecting different areas and different people, so I had to play around a bit. The story starts in a large city, but there are also smaller towns involved, as well as a back-woods kind of area that is very secluded. It was a bit strange to write, since I’m used to having myself firmly planted in a single important setting, but it was also fun and rewarding to get to play around with all these different places.

Will you be my (critique) friend?

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

26. How to find a critique group or partner

This can be harder than it sounds. The problem, I think, is that lots of writers want someone to read and critique their work, but they don’t want to have to do anything in return. It’s not that we’re selfish people by nature or anything, it’s just that we’re very, very busy. How can we concentrate on our own manuscripts when we have to critique this story our crit-partner sent us? And lord forbid we have multiple crit-partners and have to deal with multiple story-swaps. Yikes!

So what seems to happen is that we’ll hunt someone down, we’ll think we’ve established a partnership, but then one or the other will start to slack off. Weeks or months will go by without a critique being passed along so that only one person is benefiting from the relationship, or even worse, both people slack off and no one is benefiting.

This is the reason I joined Critique Circle. It’s an online critique group with a bit of a twist. See, the way they keep everyone honest is that you need points in order to submit some of your own work, and the only way to get points is by critiquing someone’s work. You get 1 point for each critique you write, with additional points if the piece you critique is a particularly long one, and you need 3 points to submit something of your own. Submissions go up in week-long stints and if you want to submit more than one piece in a given week it will cost you 6 points for the additional submission. It actually works quite well. I believe I submitted 3 or 4 chapters of Nowhere to Hide before I took a break to actually, you know…finish the novel, and each of my submissions got 5 or more critiques, most of them very helpful. There will, of course, always be people who write quick and dirty critiques just to get the points, but that is why the site also has a rating system. You can rate and comment on critiques you are given. I’m not entirely clear on what happens with those ratings as I’ve never had to deal with it myself, but overall it’s a very good system that works well. So if you’re looking for a critique partner, you should definitely head on over!

The Trick is to Learn From Them

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

22. List the biggest mistakes you made in your first manuscript

For the purpose of this post, I am going to use Nowhere to Hide, my zombie apocalypse novel, because it is the only (non-fan-fiction) manuscript I’ve ever finished (minus the editing part, which is happening now). So, without further ado:

– I didn’t plan anything. While I’ve mentioned before that I’m not the planning type and that I tend to prefer just writing, I suspect that having a general layout (at the very least) would have significantly decreased the length of time it took me to finish this story.

– I wrote a prologue. I personally don’t see this as a ‘mistake’, exactly, but after having a number of people on Critique Circle tell me that the prologue was pointless and detracted from the story, I guess it was maybe a mistake.

– I started a “shout-out” naming convention, giving my characters last names of famous horror-guru authors/directors/etc, and then promptly forgot about following through with it once I hit the fourth character.

– Looking back at certain sections of the story, I see that I rushed through things that I didn’t find as interesting, but are actually fairly important parts of the overall narrative.

– I didn’t establish character stories. I’m sure this isn’t a necessity for everyone, but if there’s one aspect of the planning process that I, personally, should be doing, it’s creating character backgrounds ahead of time. I tend to just go with the flow, and more often than not I find myself writing my main character’s feelings or actions to reflect how I think I would feel or act, but that’s not really a smart way of doing things. Not all of my characters can have my exact personal thoughts and beliefs. That’s just foolish. What I really need to start doing is establishing my character’s lives and personalities before I presume to write about them.

I’m sure there’s more, but I don’t really have to bash myself all night long, do I? 🙂

Interesting Indeed…

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

17. The most interesting piece of research you came across

As mentioned in my previous post, my “research” for “Nowhere to Hide” was nothing more than the fact that I watched a lot of zombie movies, read a lot of zombie books, and played a lot of zombie games before deciding to write my own zombie apocalypse novel. The result of this “research” method is that I’ve learned a lot about zombie culture, if you will, and gotten a lot of looks at how different people (directors, authors, game producers) see zombies.

The most interesting thing I came across during that period of zombie overload was a book that (evidently) many, many people have read: “The Zombie Survival Guide” by Max Brooks. I actually bought the book for my husband back a few years ago, before it became evident that I am actually the zombie nut in the family. The book is written like an actual survival guide, with the interwoven backstory that the zombie outbreak has already occurred. The author goes into great detail about the physiology and abilities of zombies, what kinds of weapons are best to use, how to find shelter, etc etc etc. It’s an interesting (if not disturbing) read. No one particular piece of information stands out to me as the “most interesting”, but the book in itself should hold that spot because of the extreme detail put into it. Max Brooks is a man who really, really things a lot about zombies. o.O

Going from B to Y…huh?

I’ve heard it said by many authors that the beginning and end of a story are the easiest, and that it’s all the muck in the middle that makes everything so difficult. I’m the exact opposite. When I come up with a story idea it’s the middle bits that come to me first. Usually it’s a scene that pops into my brain, clear as day. For instance, when I first got it into my head that I was going to write a zombie apocalypse, the first thing that I imagined was my main character, a young adult woman, running through the streets during the chaos and coming across an empty baby stroller spattered in blood. That scene never made it into the story (at least not yet…) but if it had it would have been three or four chapters in. When I first starting working on my fantasy story I had this one scene in my brain that held all my attention; the two male characters, who are alternate world versions of each other, meet and nearly kill each over because of their mutual feelings for the main female character. That scene ended up being dead in the middle of the overall story. The same goes for fanfictions I’ve written. It always seems to be a scene right in the middle of the story that plays itself out in my mind first and demands itself to be written.

The beginning and end of the story are completely different issues. I have major problems with the ‘A’ and ‘Z’ of my stories.

My beginnings tend to be a mixture of bland and rushed. I seem to be awful at introducing my world and characters; whenever I read back through what I’ve written it sounds very methodical, like I’m simply handing my reader a character sheet that explains everything they’re going to need to know. Additionally, I tend to rush through openings because all I want to do is to get into the fun parts of the story. The fantasy story I mentioned is a great example of this one…I’ve rewritten the opening to that story at least a dozen times and it still sounds awful to me.

My endings…well that’s a tough one because I don’t have very many of them! The only stories I’ve really finished were fanfictions, and there’s only so many ways you can end a story based on a pre-existing world, assuming you want to keep continuity (which I do). The few times that I’ve managed to get to the end of one of my original stories, I’ve had a lot of problems. For example, I’m working on the end of my zombie novel right now, and I’m at a complete loss for what to do. I have a general idea; I have questions I’m going to answer and a scene or two I can already see in my mind. But I also have a hundred questions of my own, many of them concerning who is going to live and who is going to die, which is of paramount importance in a story like this. In my fantasy story I’ve spent literally years now trying to decide how the story ends because every possibility has connotations that bother me and I can’t decide which eventuality frustrates me the least.

I have to admit, this makes me feel a bit like an oddity in the author world. Everyone else always seems to know exactly how to begin and exactly how they want to finish, while I’m sitting here banging out all the central scenes that mean nothing unless I can enclose them properly. Tell me I’m not alone here, please? lol
As an afterthought for this post, I didn’t manage a second week in a row of my 1000-word-a-day challenge due to obvious reasons (see previous post), which is why I didn’t make a post about my progress. If anyone was wondering though, I managed to write just over 1000 words each day on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, and about 500 words on Wednesday. I’ve got a decent head-start on this week though, so wish me luck!