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This girl has got a smile that can make me cry.

She flies outside this cage
Singing girl-mad words
I keep her dark thoughts deep inside
As black as stone
And mad as birds

This is based on the main character of my second NaNo novel, and the photography I did last week in Benton Park.

Had to do a little day-to-night action on the BG photo, but I am very pleased with it. Click here for full size (it’s worth it, much better at 1200px wide)

Also at Rendo for those who hang there.

During the process of NaNoWriMo, you learn a lot. You obviously learn about your own novel and you learn about writing in general, but you also learn a lot about yourself – as a person and a writer. What you’re capable of, your best working patterns, your hidden feelings about things which suddenly become glaringly obvious when they’re words on a screen instead of amorphous attitudes floating around in your head.

So first, you learn about these bizarre characters you have created, and what they’re up to. You learn how they talk to each other and how their world works. Some of it feels like it’s under your control, but a lot of it feels like it really isn’t. I honestly don’t know that I make things the way they are in my writing, they just are that way and I chronicle them.

Last year I had what I thought was a much stronger basis for my first novel: a cool original character, a universe to put her in, some antagonists for her to deal with, some things for her to figure out. This year I had no earthly idea what I was going to be doing, I only knew who my main character was. For a while I was sure that there wasn’t even a story there. I didn’t know what the hell this chick was doing in town. When I finally figured out why she was here I was as surprised as anyone else might have been.

Speaking of town – I made some fundamental mistakes last year, and I think the biggest one was setting the book in a city I had never lived in, only visited. While I did (and still do) love all things Savannah, the NaNo process doesn’t lend itself to lots of research time during the month. Having to leave lots of notes to yourself (figure out setting, where is this place?, find a picture of a street sign from this neighborhood, etc.) means there are chunks of writing you just can’t do during the month. This year I not only re-set the original novel to take place in St. Louis, but I also set the sequel here too. That made things much, much easier. Want to write about South Grand or the CWE? I can drive right over there for reference shots, or just to soak up the atmosphere. I included places that I shop, that I drink, that I eat. It was not only fun to fictionalize those things, but it reads much more authentically.

I was hesitant to set a book here, for a couple of reasons. I think that part of me didn’t want to be that girl – the girl who writes about the place she lives. There’s that familiarity breeding contempt thing, where I automatically think of St. Louis as being sub-standard, because I grew up here. But then I thought about it and realized I was being ridiculous, or reverse snobby or something. St. Louis is an interesting city, and even if it wasn’t I wouldn’t be much of a writer if I couldn’t make this setting work for me.

I think part of my fear was also that I didn’t want people to have an easy frame of reference into my writing. Since most of my friends also live here (and they will eventually be the first people to read what I write) they will be able to spot right away if something is inauthentic or incorrect or badly represented. And I don’t want that to be distracting for them. I can also guarantee I will want to drop kick the first asshole who says “Yeah, but Tower Grove Park is all bluegrass, they don’t have any fescue there!” or something equally nitpicky. But then again I can’t control the level of assholishness of others, and if they want to play spot-the-incongruity instead of read a book, what the hell. So I took some liberties. It’s fiction.

You also learn about yourself and your own writing style. For example, I can’t write in the morning. I can putter around in the morning, I can drink tea and do research and play on the computer and pretend I will start writing, but I never got anything done before about 4 p.m. Sorry morning writer people who swear you have to write 250 words before you take your fist pee of the day. That doesn’t work for me. 4 p.m.-11 p.m. is my window. I also learned that I can write in the house, with all its myriad distractions. Last year I was a coffee shop writer, convinced that only outside my home could I clear my mind and get some work done. With Jake being sick and needing me to keep an eye on him I was forced to write at home in the beginning of the month. Turns out I can write just as well there. Sometimes a coffee shop can be good if you have to marathon, but for normal daily writing, home works for me just fine.

I’ve learned that a big part of my review process is re-reading my work out loud. When I do that I recognize where the flow and pattern of the words is off. I hear where another word would sound better and I spot where I’ve used the same word 3x on the same page, and need to bust out the thesaurus. Reviewing out loud = key.

I’ve learned that the time you give yourself for pondering plot points is just as important, if not more so, than time you give yourself at the keyboard. I’ve learned that I do my best plot-related thinking in the shower (I’ve also learned that since that’s the case, this isn’t a good month to have your water heater go out.) The smoothest, best writing sessions I had were right after “Aha!” moments in the shower, when whole chapters would come to me at once. After that it was really just going to get it all down on paper, rather than sitting at the keyboard wanting to bash it with my head.

I’ve learned that my writing is dark, sarcastic, negative, funny, intense and possibly hard to take in large quantities – just like me. I’ve learned that when I try to write in a way that’s positive, cheery or optimistic I end up wanting to punch myself in the face until I pass out from it. That’s not to say there’s no hope or optimism or good things in anything I write, it’s just that it has to come out in a way that’s natural for me, and forcing a different tone isn’t going to work. Some of my characters are more positive than others, but the writing itself is just dark. I experience the world as a hostile place, full of horror and badness and confusing pockets of evil, and that’s what I convey when I write about it. Sometimes the world flashes some good things my way, and those come through too, but not being true to my own authentic way of being in the world makes for very bad, very painful writing.

I’ve learned that I can make myself do things I don’t want to do. That I can do things even when I am bored of them, that I can challenge myself and live up to that challenge. That’s good. That’s what makes me proud of me right now.

That’s also bad, because if I can set challenges with regard to writing and live up to them, then I can probably challenge myself to do other things I don’t want to do, and live up to that too. That sucks. I now have no more excuses for not getting some other areas of my life together. “I just can’t make myself do that.” no longer appears to be an option, so I will have to face up to actually doing some things, or being honest that I just refuse to make myself do them. Personal accountability sucks.

One book I’ve really found useful in this process (and I think I will continue to find it useful in the revision process) is the Gotham Writer’s Workshop “Writing Fiction” which has all kinds of practical useful reminders about writing style.

I’ve also been using The Complete Encyclopedia of Elves, Goblins, And Other Little Creatures by Pierre DuBois which is densely written, but has some good information and inspiration in it.

Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds by Bernd Heinrich  has been invaluable, as has the website Language is a Virus with their awesome character name generators and databases.

Anyway, I think that’s all for what I learned this month. Now comes the harder part – revision! But first I think a few weeks of reading, reading other first-person novels primarily, to see how good writers do it – and just some time away from the book so I can come at it with fresh eyes.

Thanks for putting up with my ranting and raving this month, and thanks to everyone who encouraged me to get this done. I appreciate your support.

Last year was my first year participating in NaNoWriMo. I had a crazy-insane wild ride and I did win by getting to 50k words. I got the complete structure of my novel down so I have a beginning, middle and end to my story, I just needed to do more research and rewrites. (“Just” probably needs to be in quotes there.)

Right after November I had a major trauma at work, broke a bone, got really sick and then proceeded to have an utterly crap year. Last year’s novel is therefore not completed. I am still working on it whenever I can. I understand that this is not National Novel Editing Month, so I shouldn’t use it to work on an old piece.

I’d always planned a sequel to last year’s story. That was bopping around in my head even as the first book took shape, so I am considering writing that this year – but I hesitate because last year’s novel isn’t finished and shiny-pretty with a beautiful bow on top. Since I am new to this, I need advice.

On the one hand, writing the sequel may help me to refine the original. On the other hand… what? Will writing something new before the old thing is totally put to bed destroy the creative process on the first piece? I have a situation this year in which I can take significant time off work to devote to writing in November, and I hate to pass up a year of participation just because I haven’t finalized my last work.

So, for those of you who’ve been doing this for a while, what is the best course of action? To write or not to write?

I can say that the editing and revision of a novel is much more tedious and time-consuming than the actual first-draft writing of a novel. Very stop and go, very “crap, does that make any sense with what I said three chapters before?” and stuff like that.

What’s funny is that as I was writing the first draft I made little notes to myself, “research blah-blah, look up the date that such and such happened, find out about xyz” Well today, sitting at the gelateria and writing with Todd doing homework next to me I ran into a psychiatric/medical question that I had noted “ask Todd the correct psych diagnosis for this disorder.” So I was able to stop what I was doing and ask him, and that was an interesting discussion.

For each of the main characters in the book I’ve created play lists. “What would be on their iPod” kind of stuff and also songs that I feel capture parts of their personalities. Maybe part of my issue today is that my main character is kind of depressive and feels out of control and helpless. I’ve been listening to her play list all day to get me in the frame of mind to write her and that’s probably having an effect. I’ve switched over to a more hell-raising character’s list, which may perk me up.

Also, the “delete” key on my new laptop’s keyboard is in the place where the “backspace” key was on my old one. That fucks me up because I am a big back-spacer. That’s irritating, and instead of blaming the keyboard and my finger-memory, I blame myself for being stupid, every time I do it.

Lastly, the gelateria guy asked Todd if I was his wife. Why that should be so funny to me, I don’t know. I suppose most people who don’t know us assume that we’re a couple. But it made me laugh anyway.

Breathe through it
write a list
of desires

Make a toast
make a wish
slash some tires

Paint a heart repeating, beating
“don’t give up, don’t give up.”

- The Weepies, Not Your Year

I guess I am pretty introspective at the moment. I am not really trying to be, but to be honest I haven’t really tried to be anything at all for the last eight months, except alive.

Last summer when my Mom got better after being so sick, I swore that nothing non-fatal would ever seem serious to me again. And that really lasted for a while. I did my best to embrace life, to forge new connections, to be happy. Things were going well at work, at home, in my personal life. It was exciting and new and fun. But there’s no accounting for fate, what will happen and how/whether we will be able to accept it. If I had known at this time last year what the following year would be like… I think I would have just given up on it, quit my job and gone to live on the beach somewhere. And I would have hucked sharp rocks at anyone who tried to get within 30 feet of me.

Maybe the only reason we don’t get to see into the future is that none of us would choose to live it if we saw it coming. It was hard enough to live through this year once, I would never choose to do it again.

Life is seeming better right now. The summer, full of sun and flowers, is in front of me. I am off for vacation next week and will have the chance to finish my Savannah research for CWaCS. That means a hell of a lot to me. Not just the getting out of town aspect, but the “finishing something I challenged myself to do” aspect, too. Things at work are absolutely dismal, but dismal is four-and-a-half steps up from where they were in March. I finally got a diagnosis for WTF my problem is (again I remind you that it’s not mental – I don’t CARE what it seems like to you). I can walk (almost) normally again, with little pain on most days, although my foot has a tendency to swell up all crazy-like if I sit too long, and I feel like someone’s dead grandma when I take my first few steps each morning. But I can get out and about, I am not trapped in the house for day after endless, depressing, repetitive, gray day. I am back to where I was last year at this time – a state of “OK, OK this isn’t as bad as all that. I can do this. I really think I can do this.”

Hopeful, I think we call that.

And I am trying to look forward rather than back. Trying hard.

But by nature I like (love? need?) to dwell on things, pick them apart, put them back together until I really see how they work – and I am in that phase now. Maybe I need that phase right now. To be honest, I had enough on my plate just trying to stay alive this winter. I didn’t have time or energy to ponder, understand or learn. Just moving my exhausted, broken carcass from place to place and doing the basics needed to survive – that took every ounce of will I had, and then a few. So now that I have some energy to spare, some time on my hands, some new internal strength reserves from which to draw, I am in full-on wonder mode. If it bores you, there are many,many porn sites within a few clicks of here, knock yourself out.

What I am dwelling on right now is the fact that I seem to keep learning the same lessons over and over. And each time they seem so shiny-new, and I think “How did I not know that before?” and then I read something I wrote a long time ago, or re-read something I underlined in a book a long time ago and I realize that I DID know that before, I just didn’t know it THIS MUCH.

My wise, beloved, former therapist once told me that you need to learn the same things over and over in life. You can know something on Monday and know it on a different level on Wednesday. Friday you can know it ten times more. A year from Friday and you know it in a new way, about a new thing. Understanding comes in layers, you rarely get to bottom.

I haven’t gotten to the bottom of any of my own lessons yet, I suspect. Right now I am working on three things.

This summer I am going to:

1) Let the past fall away
2) Dare
3) Stop trying to fix things which are irreparably broken

It’s that last one I anticipate trouble with. I am nothing if not tenacious. I hate to accept broken as a diagnosis – for situations or people. I know that I need to, but I suspect I am going to spend most of my life relearning that particular lesson.

The character is exactly the same, but the hairstyle and clothing style have changed.

I couldn’t find any good interior wall shots (growth market, anyone… anyone…?) so I cobbled this together from some furniture in my runtime and images from one of DAZ’s “Dark Designs” packs. I was pleased with the result. I am not going to bother to post this anywhere other than here, as it makes no sense to anyone but… me really – and then only as part of a larger series. Anyway – hope you enjoy.

Of varying quality and interest to anyone I guess, but for fun here are a couple of ‘em.

This is intended as a background image for a titles/intro page, using some of the common motifs from the  novel – of which moths are one.

Main character, Yumi. Obviously for a graphic novel she can be as wackily dressed and crazy as I want her to be. As the pen-and-paper novel progressed I discovered that she actually passes for mortal most of the time, so her style of dress had to evolve into something involving less tape on the the nipples. At least in public!

One of Yumi’s dead. A little surprsied to find himself in that state, and the specific line of dialoge here is “What the hell is with this tie?”

As his story unfolds.

Yumi’s sister, and her pet raven. Same thing as above applies to her style of dress.

A walk in the Savannah evening. Can you tell from her depiction that she’s a bit of a rule-breaker?