Blue plaid button-up shirt and green camo pants?

I still love my honey, even if he can’t dress my baby, lol!

Just so you know, if you leave your journal out on the dining room table, the journal you’ve been keeping for two years, and you then leave the room, your toddler will take a crayon to it. He will scribble all over several of the pages, maybe even important things, or profound things, or all those sweet baby things you wrote about him when he was little. Yes, he will scribble it all out, with a big fat orange crayon. Just so you know.

Also, I find it funny how these Friday updates never end up happening until Monday. Toddler rules, I tell you!

not a writer:

There are these forks in a novel, just like in real life, where the character makes a decision that branches off a whole different future than they might have had otherwise. But the thing is, in real life, we don’t get to see those other dimensions and what our lives might have been like had we made different decisions.

In a novel, I can. My problem has been, I think, that as I went about this business of writing a novel for the first time, I was trying too hard to hold on to parts of those old futures, the different scenes that happened in whatever dimension of the lives they might have lived. This stupid novel has been through dozens of drafts and idea stages, and these poor characters have been through so many possible scenarios.

It took me writing about half of the thing to finally find what the heart of the story actually was, and so now I’m finding that things that I wrote for old drafts don’t really matter to the story as a whole. Maybe, at one point, in an old old draft, many dimensions ago, they did matter. Now, not so much.

So this is what I’ve been working on this week, thinking about which parts of the story really belong, really matter, which dimension should my characters live in, and it’s honestly driving me a little crazy.

And for the record, my hubby absolutely thinks I’m crazy when I talk about my characters like this, like they’re voices in my head or something. Do other writers talk about their characters like this, or am I really crazy?

Changing the POV from third to first really changed everything. It honestly did, and I really didn’t expect it would be so different. So, when I was wondering before whether this was starting a second draft, or starting over, I think it’s probably closer to starting over. Better than starting from scratch, but you know, starting over just the same. Everything is being rebuilt from the ground up. Blank slate.

I think I might try out NaNoWriMo, and I obviously won’t finish the whole novel in that month, but I’ll commit to the 50,000 words anyway. It might be an interesting challenge. Maybe I’ll try early mornings? Maybe hubby will get up with me and work on that million-dollar idea that he keeps distracting himself from with television shows? What do you say, Hubby?

Novel stats:

Part 1, four chapters
13,400 wds and 41 pages.

I’m liking the structure of novels like Then We Came to the End, and The Feast of Love, where the novel is broken up into broad sections, then further broken up into chapters. I think I’m going to adopt this strategy, which actually resembles what I was badly doing when I first started, and wrote big fat monstrous chapters. I think those big fat chapters were supposed to be sections.

So, my first section/part has four brand-spanking-new chapters. It could use just a bit more plumping up and polishing, but I’m nearly finished with it, and hope to finish it off by the end of the week. Then move on to the second section/part, obviously, since the second comes after the first, lol. Do you see how clever I am?

There will be seven section/parts. I might get all creative and give them titles, or maybe I’ll be boring and just number them. Creative sounds better than boring, of course, but we’ll see.

Happy writing

I love that I still have all my old journals and blog entries, dating back to when I was about nineteen. I’m writing a novel about this very particular age, between 18 and 24, when you’re absolutely not a child anymore, and so very barely an adult. Just so ambiguously in between that it’s maddening. Do you remember that age? Before children, before real jobs, when you had time to sit around, in between morning classes and nighttime waitressing shifts, to just drink beer and smoke weed and ponder the intricacies of life?

The 23-year-old me wrote that 24 is when it’s time to grow up. That one is “no longer, at all, a child anymore, but undeniably an adult.” I would have 23-year-old Laura talk to 28-year-old Laura’s husband this morning, and I think he would beg to differ

God, I knew it all back then. I knew everything! What an age that was, when you just know it all. And then, as you get older, you figure out little by little that you just didn’t have a clue.

I wrote this in July of 2004, when I was 23. I don’t even remember who this was about, lol.

Some people:

The way she is sometimes, this person, is like we’re not even inhabitants of the same planet. Or at least, I’m not an inhabitant of her planet. And it makes me mad, because she just kind of floats along, like the world is her game, like she’s about to wake up from one of those really trippy dreams.

But what she doesn’t realize is that she’s not actually dreaming, and that the rest of us have been awake all along.

Some people are just like that. And you stick with them, because you love them, even though it doesn’t really matter, because they are so completely out of it that they can’t tell you from somebody else, from anyone in the whole world.

And dramatic. Oh, how dramatic I was!

not a writer:

Just this week I remembered this really twisted and fascinating French film I saw years and years ago, Jeux D’Enfants (Love Me If You Dare). Trailer here.

Remembering this movie makes me want to add some of these kind of mischievous games to Danny and Lexi’s grown-up adventures, because they had a childhood friendship like that, always keeping secrets and getting into trouble together. Just because they grow up, doesn’t mean they have to stop having childish fun. Though I’m sure it wouldn’t be so twisted as this movie (because this movie is really twisted!).

I don’t know why I’m so fond of the childhood friendship to romance story. I certainly never had a childhood boyfriend of any kind. Maybe I’m recalling a past life or something

Question for my writer friends - if you’re already writing a novel, will you still participate in NaNoWriMo somehow, or just go at it as you have been? I was wondering if I might want to commit myself to a word count for November or something.

And then there is this I liked (stolen from scobberlotch)

Vonnegut’s 8 rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

not a novelist: writer talk

Found! Superhero Nation: focuses on comic/fantasy/superhero writing, but has lots of great general writing advice. I particularly like the series of common first-time novelist mistakes. And the Mary Sue test, because my characters tend to be too sweet/good/unflawed.

So after many months of fighting both starting the novel in my characters’ teenage years, and writing it in first person, I have caved in. Why do I fight these things?

First-person feels so intimate! It’s a million times different than third-person. It’s like, here, let me take off my shoes, I’m going to walk around inside your brain for a while! I knew my characters. I knew them well. But now I’m trying to feel what it’s like to be them. And crap, that’s weird. It’s like watching them from the outside for the past six or so months, and then crawling into their heads and thinking, am I allowed to be here?

But then, lol, I’m their god, so of course I’m allowed to be here.

I’m finding out things from first-person that I didn’t know from third, obviously. I’ve only re-written the first chapter so far, but already, I’m surprised. For example, I didn’t know Danny was SO sad! He should be, given the circumstances, but I guess he kept it hidden from me just like he keeps it hidden from everybody. Man! I can’t wait to see what I find out about Lexi in the next chapter. I did rewrite a couple paragraphs for her, and found out one thing already. She likes to play games! She’s a bit of a tease even. LOL, you can only imagine how those two are going to conflict

I wonder how this is going to change the story, yet again…?

But it will work better, I think. I don’t pretend to know these things anymore. One thing I do know is that first-person naturally remedies any kind of syrupy/sentimental description phrases I might try to write. Because people just don’t describe things that way in natural voice.

Another thing I’m changing in this go-around is the structure, a little. Short evenly-alternating chapters between Danny and Lexi (at least to start). This is at my hubby’s brilliant advice. Because, he says, you can’t spend 30 or so pages falling in love with one character and then be dropped in another character’s head, and be expected to love her the same. Hubby is not a novelist (but thinks he could be, if he had the time – and doesn’t everybody?), but has read a lot, and is a movie buff – so he knows about good stories.

Courtney’s writing challenge:

Courtney, I’m sorry I’m so late on your writing challenge. My whole manuscript is kind of in shambles right now. This paragraph is both a paragraph I like and don’t like:

Lexi had an asthma attack when we were eight, and that was something I didn’t care to ever see happen again. Her mother asked me to keep her calm when it happened, as she put a nebulizer together and strapped the mask to Lexi’s face, as Lexi’s lips turned an ashy kind of blue. “Keep her calm,” her mother said, holding the phone to her ear while she ran around, throwing random things into a bag. Keep her calm? I was eight, and I thought Lexi was dying. I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. So Lexi’s mother took hold of me, sat me down, leaned Lexi back into my chest and she said, “Talk to her. Just keep talking.” I didn’t know what to say, so I sang her a song. And the only song I could come up with was some French song my mother sang sometimes. “Dites-moi pourquoi la vie est belle?” Lexi’s chest heaved and caved in underneath the breast bone, caved in around each rib, like she was trying to fill her lungs through a straw. I held her at the shoulders, not wanting to put any more pressure on her chest than was already there. The song was a short one, and when it was over, I started it again, these French words I didn’t even understand. Her mother hung up the phone and said, “That’s good, Danny, can you keep doing that in the car?” So I did, all the way to the hospital, for as long as I was needed.

The process: this memory just kind of fell out of me when I had Danny in a mall, seeing Lexi again when they haven’t been speaking for years. He notes that she obviously managed to grow up without him – and this was the memory that came to mind.

I like it because I think it conveys the closeness of their friendship as children. I like it because (I think) it feels kind of intense, because it’s one of those traumatizing memories that stick in your brain and you never forget.

I don’t like it because it’s a flashback and I don’t quite know where to work it in. I’m trying to work it in as soon as I can, because when Danny is talking about this girl who ditched him when they were eleven, I want the reader to feel how close they were, and why it matters to him so much. But I’m also fighting with establishing the scene first, before going into flashback. Tricky, tricky. I’m also wondering if the pronouns are clear enough for the two different females in the scene, because in some places, I can see where they wouldn’t be?

Toddler calls…