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Tag: writing process

Creating a Serial

Hi friends! Hope you’re doing well! I’m not, we got hit by a TORNADO what the hell, but we persevere anyway. If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice you’re getting a section of Across Worlds with You each month. There will be 7-10 parts in total (not sure exactly where I’m breaking it up yet) so we’re good for the rest of the year, and then, in theory, it’ll get consolidated and released in book form. This is the fourth serial I’ve done. Hidden Worlds (one of our launch titles, recently received a 5-star review from Readers’ Favorite) started as a serial, many many years ago, and I had a scifi one that I wrote for a prompt community over the course of 10 years. (That one is a mess and will never see the light of day, unless I am very bored one day and feel the need to rip a project to shreds.) Last year I had Deep and Blue here, if you’d like to read over that, and now we’re onto Across Worlds with You. I actually outlined Across Worlds with You something like seven years ago. I’ve found that, sometimes, it’s better to outline a story (or at least write down important parts) even when you know you’re not going to write it right then. Brains are stupid; they forget stuff all the time. I don’t know how many stories or parts of stories I’ve lost over the years because I was like “Oh, yes, that’s amazing,…

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The Birth of a Story

I’ve just turned in the story that will become TDP’s next long work for sale, so I thought it might be fun to go back through some of the steps I took getting here. (Good luck trying to replicate them, though! The process of story inspiration is anything but linear, at least if you’re like me.) A few years before the pandemic, I was generating story ideas by looking at calls for submission from themed short-story anthologies. How those work is that an editor and a publisher collaborate to come up with a theme, often they’ll tap a few better-known authors to headline the anthology, and then they’ll put out a call to fill the rest of the slots. I wrote and submitted a few stories that way. More often, I wrote lots of notes about potential stories, but they needed more time to percolate, so they didn’t get finished in time for the anthology deadlines. That’s okay because most anthology themes aren’t so specific that the story would work only there and nowhere else (and if they are that specific, I don’t write for them, for exactly that reason). This story was one of those that needed to percolate. As often happens, I had an image in my head and a nameless feeling that came with it, but no plot, no character, nothing I could dig into to make it a story. Then the pandemonium arrived and, well, not much writing happened for a while. In the meantime, the…

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NaNoFail?

This year, I set out to do National Novel Writing Month for the first time in most of a decade. I’d won NaNo six times between 2005 and 2011, and then hadn’t really tried again since. Oh, I had made halfhearted attempts to use that NaNo energy to finish a partial novel or edit a draft, but I’d never come close to the wordcount and the free abandon of my six 50,000-word drafts. (No, none of them are available on Amazon. Because, that’s why.) So I really wanted to prove to myself that I still had the chops. Then Real Life hit. It wasn’t entirely unpredictable. In fact, it wasn’t unpredictable at all. I was out of town the first weekend, then back to work without a break. Then I started some new meds that gave me horrible insomnia for a week (a known side effect, so that wasn’t even a surprise). By the time I caught up on sleep from all of that, the month was half over. It’s not that I wasn’t writing. I took my laptop with me on the weekend trip and squeaked out a few hundred words each day. I came home and every day, even through the insomnia, I would put down another few hundred words. But for NaNo, you need to write 1,666 words every day for a month. If you miss one day, every other day requires more words. So I kept thinking that my daily wordcount would pick up after I…

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Everything old is new again

Those of you who are very observant probably noticed that this blog wasn’t posted yesterday like it was supposed to be. My bad. I need to put this on my calendar or something because I apparently can’t remember crap. Grump. But in cheerier news, I finally, finally, finally started the rewrite of Survivor, my psychological horror novel from 2004. It started its life as a carelessly written idea in a file I tucked away somewhere on my hard drive. When I decided to take a class on novel writing, and one of the requirements was a completely new idea, I happened to find it by accident. I worked on it literally for years, sometimes setting it aside for another book, but always came back to it. It fascinated and haunted me. In 2009, I finished the first draft. It was 225,000 words, too damn long but that was okay because I was quickly becoming the queen of the machete. I told myself for TEN FREAKING YEARS that I’d get to it, I’d get to it, but something was always getting in the way—important stuff, but stuff nonetheless. So when I found myself with a bit of room in my schedule and a writing challenge for this month, I said, “I wonder if I could finally do this. I’ve waited long enough.” So I did. In the beginning, it felt so wrong, because I remembered what the original was like. Even though 2004!Erin sucked as a writer, it still felt firmly…

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Thank God for Physical Therapy

Well, of course it’s a Godsend after having foot surgery. I’m getting my mobility back, one step at time. But did you know that PT is really good for writerly brainstorming? We do mostly the same things every time—strength building, weight bearing, massage. At the end, I get “stim and cold pack” which just means using a TENS unit to give me electrical pulses and putting an ice pack on my foot. So there’s about fifteen minutes where I’m literally doing nothing but thinking. Or resting. Or zoning. Sleeping, no. Not yet, anyway. <grin> So I hit a wall in The Vanishing, my work in progress. Reaper Girl #3. Due in August. (No pressure.) I couldn’t figure out how to get from one place in the plot to another. Everything I thought about felt lame and too easy and contrived. I’d last left Leliel and Rick at their favorite diner, sharing breakfast and discussing the <something spoilery> they found. They needed to discover the next plotty bit. I was tired of not writing (Sunday doesn’t count because Game of Thrones finale) or writing just a few hundred words (deadline) so I started poking my muse and asking her questions. And while I am still a bit shaky on the what, I do have a bonus why. I figured out quite a lot in that short fifteen-minute period. I have literally had no other time to really dig into it. I was planning on doing a freewrite—which I still might do—but…

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When I’m Not Writing…

I get twitchy. Out of sorts. Ideas feel like they are going to explode out of me if I don’t get them down on the screen. It’s just not pretty. There have been a few times when I stopped writing regularly. Once was after my first ankle surgery, where I didn’t touch the computer for a week. Another, which I’ve talked about at great length, was due to the trigeminal neuralgia attacks and not being able to concentrate. I could write around 100 words a day (and I did, resulting in this) but while it felt good, it also felt like not enough. I need to be able to immerse myself in the world and characters of a story. I need momentum. I depend on it, actually, to keep me moving. I can rack up quite a few words even at 500 words a day if I do it every single day. Let’s talk about the last time I wrote anything regularly. That was the Fireborn revision back in December, which required some rewrites, but not a whole lot. There was my antho story, Of Poison and Promises. The anthology released in March. I’ve also finished my online serial, Sun Touched, and I just need to revise the last installment before posting it on May 1st. I did write a bit on Oubliette, an older novel, but for only two days. And last week, I started book #3 of my Reaper Girl Chronicles, The Vanishing. The muse/right brain/writer brain is…

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My Writing Process

So last time I talked about how writing wasn’t fun anymore. I’m still working on that problem, most recently by writing flash fiction (very very short stories). Just the other day, I finally submitted a flash fiction story that I’m happy with. Even though it’s less than 300 words, my process for that story was kind of a microcosm of my process for longer stories as well. So I thought I’d share… Step 1. Decide on a concept to write about. In this case, I was writing something to submit to a themed anthology with some specific parameters. I’ve done that before with some success–even if I don’t end up submitting to the particular anthology that sparked the idea, it helps kick-start my brain. Other times, I’ve started with a one-line “what if” idea. Step 2. Brainstorm several different stories based on that initial concept. This stage often involves research. The idea here is that whatever I come up with first is probably also what other writers will think of first, so I need to keep brainstorming until I find something more interesting or unusual. Step 3. Write an exploratory draft based on one of those story ideas, with more research as needed. At short-story length, I don’t outline much (if it’s flash fiction, not at all). I just throw a bunch of ideas on the page and see what sticks. By the end of the draft, I’ll have a clearer idea of what I was trying to do with…

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