At risk of beating a dead horse

My first NaNo thing starts tomorrow so I'm spending today prepping by thinking about my opening paragraph and not writing. I'm terribly excited and went over the outline again to make sure I won't fall into any pitfalls like I did on Wednesday.

I'm still terribly embarrassed about that.

There's always a sense of trepidation that hits me before starting off a new project, that fear of "what if this time I don't finish, what if it's not good enough, what if I'm not qualified to tell this story" and it's pretty strong today.

But the work starts tomorrow and the fear will fade. Count on it.

Near Disasters and Fixing Them

So I've been talking a good game about how well NaNo prep is going. I've got the outlines for both September's and November's projects done. I have said goodbye to my loved ones and moved into the study. I'm pretty well set for the future.

Expect that while double checking my outline today I realized that I had forgotten a whole chapter. Just, chapter 5 was not there. So I had to re-read the whole outline, re-work my pacing, and see what could fit thematically in that space.

Always check your outlines. Check your outlines compulsively.

Old Projects Revisited

I'm going to be brief today, an early morning trip to the dentist has left me feeling nauseated and staring at the computer screen probably isn't helping.

As we continue our count down to September I've been poking at an old Southern Gothic of mine and realizing that it's not as garbage as I had remembered (this is why we put things done for a while) and that it's actually worth editing and trying to get published. So that's nominally had my attention. At least until the first, when I start Book Three of my series (distant applause).

I wrote a bunch of Flash Fiction and it was hard.

Flash Fiction, for those of you who aren't familiar, is a short bit of fiction around 1-2 thousand words. They're too short to be called short stories properly. However, they still require a beginning, middle and end. They've still got to have a setting and be gripping in someway. With the word limit, a lot of things are left vague but the story must still be clear.

In short, it's hard and I'm bad at it.

But that's what I've been doing. And what I've finished have actually come out alright.

Just goes to show you that with a little bit of application, and the knowledge that your P.A. will scold you if you cop out half way through because you're lazy and it's hard, you can do anything that you set your mind to.

In all seriousness though, Flash fiction is a great way to practice showing instead of telling in literature and pacing. I recommend adding it to your routine. The more you do it, the easier it is.

In Fanfiction, they're usually called drabbles or something. Remember kids, Fanfiction still counts as writing.

The importance of putting it down

I'm going to talk about a problem I have, and that is that if I don't do at least a little bit of work I feel shitty and like the whole day was a waste. This has and will inevitably lead to burnout, and burnout is the enemy.

Like all skills, writing is something you have to practice, and ideally you should practice every day but that's... not actually practical. You need to give your brain time to recharge and, almost more importantly, when you finish a story you need to set it down for at least a couple days so you can read through it with fresh eyes and catch the plot holes and errors you missed.

Also writing should be fun. I mean it's work and some days it's going to feel like work, but you wouldn't be doing it if you didn't enjoy it. No one is forcing you to write but you, I hope.

The problem with something being fun and also productive is that you want to do it all the time and you beat yourself up when you can't. Reward yourself on days you're not writing, not a lot, but something small and tell yourself that it's because you've done so much work and you need to let your brain refresh. Don't be an Aki, staring brain dead at the same short story because the concept of time off is foreign to you you tiny disaster.

Be smarter than an Aki

The Rats In The Walls.

So, as you can probably guess from the title, today I'm going to be talking about H.P Lovecraft's short story The Rats In The Walls. The first thing you have to understand is that until my beady little eyes fell upon Ex Oblivione, Rats was my favorite Lovecraft story and I still love it. When called upon to pick a name for a server or co-op game, Exham Priory is my default (with the occasional Watership Down reference for good measure).

But Goddamn, I just re-read it and it gets harder and harder to love. I re-read Rats today because I'm trying to write a haunted house story and went to an old standby in a similar vein.

1. The Rats In The Walls is not the dryest Lovecraft piece but his writing style remains very dry. We get paragraphs of mostly nothing, and all the horror is slam-dunked at the end. There's something to be said for build up, but maybe a little more build up wouldn't have killed anybody. 
2. The. Racism. Look, I get it, he wrote at a different time and that's how words were used back then. But Jesus Christ, H.P. Lovecraft is the most racist and xenophobic author I've ever dealt with. In my memory it's just the name of the cat that's a problem (a name I will not be typing) but no, it interweaves with the rest of the piece. 

The Rats In The Walls is a chilling story that means a lot to me. But some days I wish anyone else had written it. 

Gee Aki, Your Mom Lets You Write TWO NaNos?!?

Not actually my mother, but after a conversation with my husband we've decided to lift the entirely reasonable restrictions on how many months I get to lock myself in the study and cackle while typing. So, the good news is that I will be hopefully writing the rest of The Chained series this year, with book 3 being written during September and book 4 being written during normal-people NaNo in November.

Personally? I'm stoked. This series is my baby. I've got the outlines all done, playlists made up, cute and horrific character scenes playing behind my eyes.

What does this mean you can expect from me here? I'll probably be pretty cagey about what I'm writing and leave any real details for my tumblr (akisfiction.tumblr.com) which I update regularly but not on a real schedule. But you can still expect discussions of the themes I'm working with and problems as they arise.

It's two whole weeks away, but wish me luck!

Some thoughts on Language

So, this isn't much of a spoiler but one of the characters in The Chained series is properly Anglo-Saxon, by which I mean she died in 1016 or something, I'll have to double check my notes but circa William the Conqueror. For plot reasons (waggles fingers mysteriously) she has a working knowledge of modern English with occasional problems regarding sentence structure and mixing up modern and middle English vocabularies.

When I first tried to write her, I attempted to functionally teach myself old english and actually wrote out her dialogue. This proved tireless and unnecessary because the protagonist does not speak old english and likely neither does my reader base. I'm not Tolkien, I'm not trying to give anyone homework. So I took the old english out and just described her speaking rapidly in a strange language, this worked much better.

Fast forward to the end of the Series, where I have decided for plot reason (waggles fingers mysteriously) that she starts teaching Old English to the protagonist. Now I have to include the actual language and working definitions.

Why am I like this?

We just don't know.

The research rabbit hole

Finding the right facts for a story is important. You want it grounded in enough reality to flourish. But you do sorta have to cherry pick your facts. Want a story about life beyond the solar system? You're probably going to want to ignore that we can't actually go faster than light. Want a story about the horrors of the deep? You're going to have to make stuff up. Making stuff up is, at the end of the day, the job of a writer.

But you should still research things so you have a good selection of facts to cherry pick from. For example, I have the wiki page on Pyjama Sharks open right now along with a list of coral species and some facts about them. I'm writing a short horror story that involves sharks and coral and before I narrowed it down to the pyjama shark had to look at other species (I picked pyjama sharks because they're pretty small, pretty aggressive and really fucking cute). But it's easy to see how you could get lost in the search for knowledge because it's neat. And once you find all these good facts, you're going to want to use a lot of them.

• Let a lot of your sudden knowledge be backdrop to the story you're writing. YOU know how the shark goes vroom, but if it doesn't work with the story you have to not force it in. 
• A piece of advice I stole from an older writer who's name I can't remember was to mark where more research is needed with TK because it's easy to search TK in a manuscript and find the place immediately and by just marking it down you can keep writing what you can. I being lazier just tend to write things like FIGURE OUT HOW FAST THEY SWIM in all caps and keep going. 
• Limit yourself to three tabs of Wikipedia. Just do it. If you need more than that write for a bit and see if you actually need more than that. 

Research is important, it is very important and you should do it, but when you're writing fiction it's generally best to figure out your balance of fact to fiction before hand. Have some things you ignore and some facts you hyper focus on. 

Proper Sleep and Such

So I didn't sleep yesterday at all finally conking out after more than 24 hours last night around 10. This has put a damper on my work because it's hard to think through the cotton in my brain. However, I'm about half way done with that new project I mentioned on Wednesday, so I'll hopefully get more written over the weekend and have good news for you all soon.

Today, however, is mostly being spent screwing my head on properly because there's still some cotton behind my eyes.

New Projects

Kind of a short post today. My P.A and I came up with a new project that's eating most of my limited attention span. It did give me a good chance to think real hard about saliva though, and so I almost threw up.

That's always a good sign, isn't it?

I'm going with yes.

Anyway, I should get back to it, hopefully there'll be more details I can share soon.

Outlining Outlining And Furthermore, Outlining

Today we are spending the day with the outlines of a couple of projects. When I was a younger, lazier Aki I didn't tend to do much in the way out outlines and tended to just let my projects grow in whatever direction they saw fit. These days, however, I like to think I'm a wiser Aki and have learned the merits of a good, but flexible outline.
Nothing works for everything and there's a good chance that what works for me won't work for even most people, but this is my blog and I'm going to share my method for outlining.
Start simple, have a vague idea of what you want to have happen and write that down.
"But Aki," I hear you cry, "surely I don't need to write down the basic premise of the book I'm working on before I outline it"
Yes, you do. You will get up to make tea and it will be gone forever. Write it down in three different places.
Then decide how you want your work to be divided. With Diary I knew I wanted to tell and apocalypse story in three parts so I treated each section like its own novella. With most books, this is just going to be by chapter.
Start with Chapter 1 and have an extra document for brainstorming, the brainstorming doc contains everything, your cool idea for the middle, the gripping hook that came to you in the shower, spare characters, everything. Your outline starts with chapter 1. Figure out the main action for chapter 1 and jot that down, leave yourself enough wiggle room to add things while you're actually writing it but make sure it's detailed enough that you have a clear map of where you're going. Then do chapter 2, building from what you've written in chapter 1. I like to start with five things per chapter, but again, mileage may vary.
When you're done with your outline, keep it close, tinker with it, if you see places to add foreshadowing jot that down. Go in and change things as you see fit.
And that's Aki's quick and dirty guide to outlining.

Resurfacing after a long dark sleep

Hey all, sorry the blog has been inactive for so long but I'm really a very boring person and was having trouble thinking of what to put up. Unfortunately for all of us, the left hand of God, my P.A. has informed me that I need to get back into the swing of updating this blog more often. So I'm going to, because I fear no force on Earth the way I fear them.

Things have been slow, but I've been working, plugging along at a number of projects that will eventually bear fruit. Hoping to have good news for you all in the near future.