The 777 Challenge

If you’ve been following my blog for a long time you know that I’ve done this challenge multiple times before. Recently Mr Roland Clarke took on the challenge, and he put out an open invitation to anyone reading to give it a shot as well, so I decided to take up the mantel once more.

The 777 challenge requires you go to Page 7 of your work-in-progress, scroll down to Line 7 and share the next 7 sentences in a blog post. Once you have done this, you can tag 7 other bloggers to do the same with their work-in-progress.

The work-in-progress in question is, of course, Book One of my ‘The Other World’ series. It’s absolutely still a work in progress in the sense that some of it is sloppy and uncoordinated, but I’ll share it none-the-less, because that’s what the challenge is all about! So here we go…7 sentences starting with line 7 of the 7th page…

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“Oh, please, don’t look at me like that,” Tori groaned. Her hand found a ball of yarn and she threw it at Jared’s chest. “It’s bad enough getting it from everyone else, but I can’t handle it from you guys too!”

The two shared a look before turning to Tori.

“We’re sorry,” Krista said. “It’s just that, well, it’s not healthy, you know?”

“We’re just worried about you,” Jared added.

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So what do you think? Pretty vague, right? It just so happened that the challenge rules caused me to land on a scene that reveals absolutely nothing what-so-ever! Oh well, it still fun to share little tidbits.

So let’s play a game: What do you think the characters are talking about? Go on, have a guess!

As for tagging other bloggers, I’ll be doing the same as I usually do and extend an open invitation to anyone who would like to give it a go. If you do decide to try it out, please link back here so I can check out your excerpt!

Accountability Tuesdays – Week 32

As mentioned yesterday before my little excerpt, this weekend has been more than a little busy. We spent the entire weekend visiting family and taking part in various events. We even spent a chunk of time just shopping around with the baby in tow. It was all a good time, and we ended it off with the baby’s first trip to a super-wavy beach (which was a blast), but it finalized in the most exhausted me you could imagine. I slept approximately ten hours last night, and I swear I could sleep at least ten more. But the world moves on, there are more things to do, and so I’ll have to just pretend that I slept twenty hours, okay? Okay.

Health and Body Image Goal

*insert slightly insane laughter here*

I actually probably lost a pound or two over the past four days, because that seems to happen whenever we spend a chunk of time visiting down home, but for the most part I can honestly say that this goal did not even exist in my mind this week. The only exercise I did was dragging the baby around, and the only non-fatty food I ate was the vegetables that we had with our steak on Sunday. And that trend isn’t likely to end for a little while yet because I have a children’s birthday party to go to this evening (sugar sugar sugar), and then sometime over the next week and a half we are planning on a shopping trip to New Brunswick (fast food, fast food, fast food). Wish me luck in not actually gaining a bunch more weight!

Editing Goal

I’m a bit up in the air on this one. I didn’t technically do any editing for my zombie apocalypse novel, since I’m focusing on trying to transcribe my notebooks right now. But then again, I’m technically editing as I’m transcribing. The transcribed stuff will likely still be revised and edited further once I’ve gotten everything properly organized into Scrivener, but I am editing bits and pieces as I’m typing them up, so I guess you could say I’ve been doing mini-edits? Yeah, let’s go with “mini-edits”.

1,000,000 Word Goal

I didn’t get as much writing in as I was hoping, because I grossly overestimated how much time I would be able to spend on my laptop while down home visiting people, but I still managed a chunk. By counting my transcribed words (which, I have to be honest, I still feel a little skeezy about, but whatever), I managed to eek out 17166 words. A fair bit of that is also The Artist’s Way exercises and tasks, of which I have many more to do this week, so hopefully next week’s word count will be as good as this one was!

And speaking of The Artist’s Way, I’d better go work on a bit of that while I’ve got a chance, before that children’s party I mentioned earlier. Later!

Who Needs Sleep?

Didn’t I promise an update after my all-day traveling-across-the-country write-a-thon. I think I did. What happened to that?

What happened to that is that my days have become so jam-packed with work and writing that I haven’t been able to find the flippin’ time! Oh NaNo, how I love/loathe you.

So here’s the update:

– During my write-a-thon on Tuesday I wrote 1162 words while waiting in the Halifax Airport, 828 words during the flight from Halifax to Toronto, 3728 words on the flight from Toronto to Calgary, and 2111 words while riding in the bus on the way to camp, for a grand total of 7829 words in one day. Woo! That would have felt twice as good had I not been more than 7000 words behind at the time, thus all that effort was just to break even. o.O

– I am currently just managing to reach my word count goal every day. Reasonable, though I was really hoping to get ahead at some point so I can relax a little. Either way, the NaNo goal for the 9th of November is 15000 words and I just hit 15065.

And now, because I’m so nice, here’s a quick excerpt from what I’ve written so far. It’s unrefined, of course, because editing is for December, dammit. 🙂

“What is your name?” Tori asked. Her voice was wavering, but if the other noticed he didn’t acknowledge.

“Jacob,” he replied quickly. “Jacob Ravendale.”

“Jacob,” Tori echoed as she pulled herself to her feet. “I have a very important question for you, Jacob, and I need you to answer honestly and quickly, okay?” She set Jacob with a look that accepted no argument. He nodded. Tori raised her arm, and with one finger outstretched she pointed directly at the rising sun peaking up over the trees. With her voice continuing to betray her emotions with every word, she asked her question: “Which direction is that?”

Jacob looked confused and unsure at first, but when he saw the look on her face he sputtered out his answer quickly. “That’s West…your majesty.”

“West,” Tori whispered, her arm dropping. “The sun rises in the West.”

Jacob blinked several times. “O-of course?”

That was when Tori burst into laughter. It was not a laughter full of humor or amusement. It was a laughter filled with madness. Jacob stared nervously and took a step back as she cried out to the sky, looking for all the world like someone who had just lost the last bit of their mind.

Caution: Avoid At All Costs

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

43. Mistakes to avoid in manuscripts

My three answers to this prompt are based on personal experience with what I’ve seen people do when submitting excerpts to be critiqued on Critique Circle. If you’re a writer and you’re reading this, feel free to add suggestions of your own in the comments.

– One major thing I notice is that tons of people (at least when they’re looking for critiques) pass along pieces of their work that are drowning in spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors. This is a huge turnoff for anyone who is reading the piece, whether it be for critique, editing, or publishing purposes. I know that no one is perfect, definitely not myself, and that mistakes will be made, but when you’re reading a piece and you find ten spelling errors in the first half a dozen sentences, you begin to wonder if the piece was submitted to you by a five-year-old. Additionally, I’m sorry, but if you don’t have a half-decent grasp on grammar and punctuation, you might have to reconsider your field. Again, I know no one is perfect – I myself often feel that I’m putting in way too many commas while also feeling that every single one is justified – but if the person reading your piece is finding at least one mistake in every single sentence, you are absolutely not going to be taken seriously.

– Word abuse is a complaint I’ve come across many times, and I can definitely understand why. Have you ever read a book in which the author seemed obsessed with a few particular words or phrases and used them constantly to the point that it was both noticeable and annoying? I definitely have. It’s not something that any writer does on purpose (at least I don’t believe so), but sometimes there is just a word you enjoy and so it weasels its way into your work over and over again. I myself have a tendency to overuse the word “incredulous”. I don’t know why, but it seems to come up constantly and makes editing a nightmare as I struggle for different words to use to break up the bad habit.

– The dreaded Mary-Sue Effect, or more recently known as the Bella Swan Conundrum. If you’ve never heard of a Mary Sue, it’s a name given to characters who are unnaturally perfect, with no discernible flaws to speak of. These characters are written to be the ideal person, loved by everyone, someone who never makes mistakes and is naturally perfect at everything that matters. These types of characters have existed for a long time, but one of the new pop-culture-reference examples is Bella Swan from the Twilight Saga. Bella is not special in any way, other than for the fact that the psychic vampire Edward Cullen cannot read her mind. And yet, despite her decidedly common nature, she is portrayed as (to put it bluntly) the Center of the Universe. All the male characters love her, except for the ones who think her important enough to want to kill. She is constantly surrounded by danger, drama, and conflict, and she always comes out of it completely unscathed. She succeeds in everything she tries. This is not how a main character should be. Some readers love this kind of character because they like to imagine that they are that character…this is called wish fulfillment, and while it can serve it’s purpose, it is not good literature. Good characters should have flaws. They should make stupid mistakes and suffer for them. They should have to struggle for their successes, and they should have to deal with all the same issues that life throws at all of us. If you want to make a good character, make them real, not ideal.

I Write Like…

A while ago I stumbled upon this website, I Write Like, and just recently a fellow blogger linked to it and brought it back to my attention again. The idea, basically, is that you copy and paste an excerpt of your writing to the webpage and it analyzes it and tells you which author you write like. It analyzes based on word choices and writing style (which I’m assuming refers to sentence structure or some such); I can’t imagine that it’s terribly accurate, but it’s still interesting to see who you get. 🙂

For my zombie novel, Nowhere to Hide, I got Charles Dickens, even when I had the site analyze super-creepy and/or gory scenes. It has me very interested to actually read some Charles Dickens that isn’t Oliver Twist. o.o

For my Final Fantasy fanfic, I got Edgar Allan Poe, which just fathoms me. I could imagine getting Poe for my horror novel, but for a video game fan fiction? Wuh?

For my supernatural romance, tentatively titled Moonlight, I got David Foster Wallace. I have no idea who this is, so I’m going to have to do my research, but if his writing is anything like mine in this particular piece, I’m very interested already. lol

I analyzed several different scenes from my fantasy epic novel because it’s been written and re-written so many times that nothing fits together properly anymore. I got Jonathan Swift and Ursula K. Le Guin for two of the scenes, neither of whom I’ve heard of so again I must do my research. For another of the scenes I got Stephanie Meyer, which has prompted me to re-analzye my own writing stat.

The bits and pieces of what will someday be a space fantasy gave me Anne Rice. I know Anne Rice, of course, but I’ll have to read some more of her work to actually get an idea of whether this is accurate.

And finally, my Chrono Trigger fanfic gave me…J.R.R. Tolkien. o.O I, uh…totally can’t see it, but thanks for the compliment, I Write Like! lol

The thing that really amused me about this was that – with the exception of the aforementioned fantasy epic – I tried multiple scenes of each work and got the same results regardless, so there must be something there that the site is seeing. Very interesting. Now if only I could glean some of the success of these famous authors! lol

Lucky 7 Returns

Because I’ve been having a hard time getting my brain to concoct literate blog entries the past few days, and because Lucky 7 amused me the first time I tried it, I thought I’d do it again. 🙂

For those who missed it the first time, the rules are thus:

1. Go to page 77 of your current MS (manuscript)
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines as they’re written– no cheating!
4. Tag 7 other writers
5. Let them know!

Again, I’m skipping the tagging other writers. Anyone who comes across this can feel free to steal it. 🙂

So here’s my second Lucky 7 excerpt, this time taken from the fantasy adventure novel I’ve had in the works for many years now:

Together the two of them looked down at the tip of a sword that was sticking through its chest.

The Shadow may have shrieked its death cry; Kira wasn’t sure because her hearing was starting to go strangely muffled. She felt like her ears were stuffed with cotton. She felt immensely weak and tired as the Shadow’s claws melted away from her wounds, and suddenly she found she’d dropped to her knees without realizing it. The colors of the world around her were fading, a funny thing. Now she couldn’t hear anything at all.

As the last bits of the Shadow melted away from the sword, Kira looked up at Jacob’s horrified face before passing out.

An interesting excerpt. I remember that scene being written better. When I do eventually finish my zombie novel this is definitely the next story in line for completion. 🙂