Lessons in Winning

I “won” NaNoWriMo. Winning is defined as crossing the 50,000 word threshold in the thirty days of November. I squeaked across the finish line with 50,182 words.

Along the way to 50,000 words, I learned a few things:

1. writing fast produces surprising material (already knew that)

2. when the inner critic, the inner fear monger gets its claws into my throat, I surf the web (already knew that)

3. an outside force helps me keep to my goals (already knew that)

So really, I learned nothing new, but I had an intensive month of experiencing the truth of those three factors in my writing.

The winners receive a certificate and the image at the upper right to post on blogs and social networking sites. Worth more than the sense of accomplishment or a certificate that will likely remain unprinted, I now have 50,000 words — the start to a new psychological suspense/suburban noir (still liking that label) novel, a moderately fleshed out story-line with a decent arc, two fairly well-rounded characters, two shadowy characters and a few people who have yet to make their voices audible.

I hope those lessons are now in my bloodstream to carry me through the final polish of my current novel. Maybe I’ll print that certificate after all, I need all the reminders I can get.

Sour Cream, Milk and Whipped Cream

Baked potatoes with a few pats of unsalted butter are one of my favorite comfort foods. Last night I had dinner in a steak house and forgot to ask them to leave off the sour cream so I could wallow in my butter and potato. I scraped most of the sour cream out, so my potato was still able to offer a satisfying carbohydrate calm.

A woman dined alone in the next booth. I never saw her face, just her wavy, shoulder-length gray hair. Along with her baked potato and steak, she ordered a glass of Cabernet. Mmmm. Just like me. She also ordered a glass of milk. I know people who have eaten mayonnaise and peanut butter sandwiches, pineapple and peanut butter sandwiches, but milk and Cabernet are right up there with foods that should never be joined. I can’t imagine either one of them tasting very good – dulled taste buds from a glass of cold milk followed by wine? Savoring the blackberry and earthen aromas of a Cab then drowning them in milk? I sipped my own wine and tried not to think about it.

One of my dinner companions ordered a frothy, fruity, icy drink topped with a few tablespoons of whipped cream. I can do without the fruit blend, but I adore whipped cream. A few dollops on a piece of pumpkin pie, swiping my finger through the bowl after whipping the real stuff, or un-whipped cream poured over apple crisp. Yum.

Across the aisle were two women finishing their dinner. One of them leaned across the aisle and asked what the drink was called. Then she attempted to sell us on her favorite food combination of all time – whipped cream with steak.

I said I’d hold off on blogging about food for awhile, but I couldn’t let this pass. You can’t make this stuff up. Surely one of these will be appearing soon in a piece of flash fiction.

Genre Madness

After only six months blogging, I’ve managed to find yet another opportunity to blog about genre angst.

This past weekend I attended the Berkeley Mystery Writers Intensive conference. I was a last minute registrant, spurred by Janet Reid’s post last week encouraging west coast writers to attend because they’d have a chance to meet Barbara Poelle. How could I resist? I spent the next few days  polishing/reading aloud my first 25 pages for review by a published novelist, reviewed my currently unrefined “pitch” and headed to Berkeley.

It was an awesome conference, populated with a gracious, entertaining, informative, supportive staff of presenters and nice and cozy with about 25 people seriously dedicated to the craft of writing crime fiction.

To summarize the trail to my genre meltdown, I read the first paragraph of my novel to the group during the session on first lines/first chapters. They laughed. Oh crap, it’s not a funny book, it gets fairly dark, it’s psychological suspense!! Someone commented it read like chick lit. Nooooooooooooo!!! Chick lit is fading, isn’t it? Chick lit meets noir, anyone? I maintained my equilibrium, reminded myself I was still working the first page, wasn’t entirely happy with the first paragraph, maybe it’s just setting the wrong tone. By the morning of the second day, I’d received some positive, offline feedback from fellow attendees and heard a few people quote my opening lines (at least I made an impression). I was calmer.

During my pitch practice, one of the authors hosting the event suggested, suburban noir. I love that. It’s not a defined genre, I won’t find agents listing it as a genre they represent, but it felt very comfortable and a tag I might use to describe my fiction. At the end of the agent Q&A on Sunday morning, Ms. Poelle suggested to another genre fence-sitter and I that it sounded like we had written upmarket women’s fiction. What the hell is that?

I know, I know. It’s not life or death that the novel is precisely categorized in the query letter. I know I’m an excessively precise person, but I have to put some-thing.

For a woman who makes her living in marketing, I’m having a terrible time with this marketing thing. A critical part of good marketing is clear positioning, a crisp message. I don’t think this is it: psychological suburban upmarket noir women’s suspense.

Astrobiology

Just as my subconscious was still working on story germs related to the fear of sharks and the greater likelihood of dying from a dog bite, I read this: Vatican looks to heavens for signs of alien life. What’s a paranoid, over-active imagination to do?

I’m one of a purportedly dying breed that still reads the daily newspaper (the ink on my fingers version). I have a foot-deep, 9×15 box half-filled with newspaper clippings. I’m determined not to be one of those old ladies who leaves this world surrounded by towering stacks of newspapers, so I clip religiously The ideas never stop: local crimes, Dear Abby, signs of madness (my favorite topic) on the global and political front, and my favorite — “he was such a nice guy” and “she was such a pleasant neighbor” — we just can’t believe he/she did something so horrifying!

I really don’t know what to say about the Vatican’s relatively new interest. I’m not Catholic, and I’m not overly-interested in the pursuit of extra terrestrials, although I did participate for a few years, via my employer, in SETI@home (uses idle cycles on Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence [SETI]). I suppose it intrigues me that an organization known for squelching divergent thought is interested in expanding its horizons, so to speak.

I do wonder what parishioners feel about their offerings going so far “off shore” (and Eureka! there’s the psychological suspense angle. See how blogging helps the fiction side?). Perhaps the Vatican’s open mind means there’s hope for the world after all.

Needing a laugh?

When I need a laugh from the more cynical side of the writing/publishing life, I love these two blogs:

The Intern – very appropriate for those of us in the throes of NaNoWriMo. I’m happy to say as of Sunday I’m over 30,000 words, so this post was particularly appropriate. (NaNoReVisMo is national novel revision month, coined by The Intern.)

The Rejectionist – almost always provides something slightly dark to laugh about, and occasional posts like these give me a shred of hope that my query won’t be entirely lost in a sea of me-toos (since I have no angels, vampires, shape shifters or wizards in my novel).

43 Minutes

According to the New York Times, Americans spend 43 minutes more per day watching TV than they did in 1999 (a whopping 4 hours and 49 minutes a day).

The Times estimated where that additional 43 minutes was spent ten years ago, and decided 4 minutes each day was spent making fun of a new internet search engine that aimed to challenge  AltaVista with the ridiculous name “Google”.

I spend four hours a week, max, watching TV. No time wasting for me. Although, thinking of Google and how it’s become one of my closest friends, I imagine it’s quite possible I spend another 4 hours a week satisfying my curiosity via Google. Then there’s four hours a week staring out the window, and four hours a week organizing my writing schedule and tracking projects in a spreadsheet and, oh wait a minute … how do I spend my time? It sounds like I need another spreadsheet tab to consider that question.

How do you “waste” time?

“Done’”!!!

Depending on how you define the word “DONE“, I’m DONE with my novel.

Told from the viewpoints of three Silicon Valley soccer moms, my psychological suspense novel follows the story of a fragile woman whose mental stability is threatened by an unconventional outsider.

This was my target date to be “DONE“, and as of today I’ve finished adding scenes, cutting scenes, and rewriting scenes and dialog sequences.

Of course, I was “DONE” when I finished the first draft. I was “DONE” when I finished a clean-sheet rewrite after the first draft. Was I DONE after rewrites 2-6, depending on how you count them? I’m “DONE” with beta reader feedback, critique group feedback and more beta reader feedback.

I’ll take the rest of November for a quick once-over to weed out some inconsistencies that popped up when I cut scenes.

Then it’s time to read it out loud — all 93,259 words. (I know that auditory polishing will help it shed more unnecessary words, a diet that should put it under 90,000). During voice breaks, I’ll finish compiling my list of agents and work on my query letter. (As you can tell from the brief summary above, my query  needs a lot of work.)

So yes, I’m “DONE“. Time to celebrate!!!

Sharks, Octopuses and Spiders

All my life I’ve had an inexplicable fear of octopuses. I saw one only once in my life — a rather small specimen, hard to make out in the murky water in an aging aquarium. I was thinking about my terror of octopuses the other day because I read an article in the local paper about great white sharks in San Francisco Bay.

As various experts discussed the presence of great whites in the bay, it was noted that contrary to the image in Hollywood films, attacks by great whites are rare. Far more people die each year from dog bites or hitting deer with cars. Yet, people are afraid. The ocean is scary place — it’s dark, cold and full of unfamiliar creatures, like octopuses. (I thought it was octopi, but apparently octopuses is now preferred. Who issues these decrees?)

I don’t know if my terror stems from the smothering aspect of eight arms or something more fundamental. Perhaps I can somehow see myself reflected in four-legged creatures, in mammals, but this thing with eight gooey arms and a big blob of a body and barely recognizable facial features makes me shiver even as I type these words. I feel the same way about spiders of any significant size.

As octopuses floated around my brain, I opened up the latest issue of The New Yorker and was assaulted with this: an article about a food reviewer — Jonathan Gold. The accompanying sketch of an octopus with a tentacle in the soup was bad enough, but then I read a terrifying description of a meal capped with san nak ji (live octopus). “…the proprietor produced the main event, a plate of slippery gray tentacles, wiggling anxiously. ‘It’ll try to climb up the chopstick,’ Gold said, dousing a tentacle in sesame oil to loosen the grip of its suckers.”

That ought to kick start any diet plan.

In researching octopuses (very briefly because the images creep me out), I learned they aren’t eight-legged or eight-armed, they have six arms and two legs. Whatever. I won’t be worrying about sharks when I stick my toes in the pacific ocean this weekend, and the octopuses are too deep in the ocean to be of concern.

The point is, I’m not posting any cocktail fiction today because I’m caught in the tentacles of my submission to a flash fiction contest, NaNoWriMo, and editing my nearly completed novel.

Bon Appetit & Sweet Dreams.

Peer Pressure

Part of the benefit of NaNoWriMo is the peer pressure. We show up at our day jobs every day, in part, because of peer pressure, paycheck pressure. With fiction writing, until we have a publisher, the deadlines have to be self-imposed. And I’ve seen many slip past as I “re do” my timeline, readjust my plans.

So in addition to the virtual peer pressure of NaNoWriMo — I’m at 5,651 words as of yesterday, about 650 words “ahead of schedule” — I’m using today’s post to create some additional peer pressure.

I’m targeting November 11 (2009!) as the completion date for the final re-write of my WIP. That means all research nits will be completed. All that will remain is the final read-through (out loud) to polish it to the brightest shine I can manage.

By posting the date, I’m telling myself that nothing will de-rail me. I want this novel done this year. I’m ready for something new and ready to run the agent-seeking gauntlet for my psychological suspense novel, set in Silicon Valley.

Deadline Junkie

It seems I’m a deadline junkie. Just when I think I’ve set a manageable goal of finishing the final edit on my novel by mid-November, I decide, well, that’s not quite enough.

For some reason, Linda’s thoughts on NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), in which 100,000 crazed individuals around the globe write a novel in thirty days, elicited some perverse reaction. Linda mentioned the compulsion to stop and edit. It might have been that line that pushed me to action.

I’ve been editing for a very long time now. In the editing process, I’ve found lots of opportunity for fresh creativity, but let’s face it, I’ve been with these characters and this story for a long time. (There was that one holiday where I went off to write a novel in a year, so why not a novel in a month?)

On a whim, I registered, looked through a list I keep of stories I want to pursue in future novels, picked one and immediately two characters popped up. So I’m off and running. 1,667 words a day to reach the goal of 50k words in a month. I’m at 3506 as of today, so slightly ahead, and I’ll try to build a back-log this week just in case, you know, LIFE, intervenes this month.

Although I never thought I’d consider NaNoWriMo, I like the concept — force yourself to write so fast that you don’t have time to stop and critique yourself, thus shutting off the inner critic and allowing the creative side, the right brain, the muse — whatever you want to call it — a chance to speak unhindered. Well, almost.

For some reason, tight deadlines get my adrenaline flowing. And already I’m having fun watching what flows out onto the screen. Of course, it’s psychological suspense, and of course, I’m ahead of schedule on the final edits for my WIP, so that project will get done. Wish me luck.