To laugh or to cry?

The first rule of wannabe writers is 'Don't be a jerk.'
The second rule of wannabe writers is 'Don't be a jerk.'

The funny bit:
Check out the oh-so-classy reaction of this self-published author to a review that she didn't entirely approve of.

Note that the review isn't altogether bad. The reviewer even commends the story as entertaining until the end, but he does mention numerous typos, spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. The comments are where it all goes sour, as the author takes it upon herself to correct the reviewer, with such gems as 'My writing is just fine' or 'My book is great'. If you read further down the comments, you'll find she stands proudly by her terrible grammar and syntax, telling people to f*ck off.

Just scan the review to get the jist of it, and look at the first ten or so comments for that lovely, self-righteous feeling of 'OMG, are people really that unaware?' Comments are closed now, which is just as well, but it did put my stressful morning in perspective.

The serious bit:
What shocked me most in all of this what that the author seemed to imply in her comments that the reviewer didn't understand her sentences because they weren't English? I'm not even sure, as this woman's wording is terrible, but I felt so incensed by her even implying that! I spent so long making sure my English was faultless, for someone who can't even realise their writing is imcomprehensible to come out with such an argument was cringe-worthy.

For the record, I thought the reviewer was definitely too indulgent about her grammar/syntax/general massacre of the English language. I wouldn't even have reviewed the book. I'd probably have asked for a refund. And applied for a job as her editor.

Podcasts & Mary Robinette Kowal

I've never really liked listening to music on the radio - never knowing whether I'm going to like the next song really annoys me - but I like listening to shows regularly. I followed a few radio shows when I was younger, but I haven't in ages. I listen to Woman's Hour from time to time (especially when the amazing Kaite Welsh is on), but I get most of my spoken word entertainment from podcasts nowadays.

Ever since I discovered podcasts, about six or seven years ago (can't believe it's been that long!), I've been addicted to them. I used to listen to Harry Potter podcasts, as soon as they were out every week for several years when I was at uni. I couldn't watch any English-speaking TV, although I wouldn't go near French-dubbed movies with a barge-long pole, so these casts were my main source of authentic spoken English reference. I believe they're a huge part of why I have a bit of an American-ish accent when I speak.

Now though, I listen to writing podcasts, my favourites being Mur Lafferty's I Should Be Writing, which I've probably mentioned before, and the amazing, award-winning Writing Excuses. As I've a bit of an obsessive nerd, I've gone back in the archive and listened to every episode since both shows began. One of my favourite Writing Excuses episode ever is from back in 2009: Guest speaker Mary Robinette Kowal, Campbell-winning author and professional puppeteer (seriously, how cool is that?) talks about the four principles of puppetry and how to apply them to writing. Apart from being a fascinating insight into puppet theatre theory, it's a great discussion of what writing is about (mind-controlling the reader, among other things) and just a really fun talk to listen to.

So I think you should go listen to it here - Writing Excuses Season 3 Episode 14 - The Four Principles of Puppetry with Mary Robinette Kowal - and if you're as intrigued by Kowal's cool writing theories as I was, you should also read her Hugo-nominated novel, Shades of Milk and Honey (Tor Books, 2010, ISBN 978-0765325563 - order it from your local bookstore). I listened to the audiobook (read by Kowal, which was a lovely bonus) this week-end and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The story is basically Jane Austen with magic. Need I say more? Probably not, but in case you're not convinced, here's the boing-boing review.

As you may have noticed...

I'm not very consistent. Heck, I think it's even fair to say I'm quite inconsistent.

I consider this particular quirk of mine to be one of my more annoying character traits. Whenever I try to do something even remotely long term, like make a really fancy costume, exercise regularly, practise drawing, diet, write a book or, say, a blog... I tend to just stop after a while. It's why I like Nanowrimo and Script Frenzy so much: I find it much easier to focus on one month and rush something out, even if it's more difficult, than to do it slowly over a long period of time.

I am well aware there are no magic secret and I know I won't get better at writing without doing a large amount of writing. So I am trying to be more consistent, to do things in a less hectic way, a little bit at a time. I'm breaking my big goals into smaller ones, detailing the process on notecards, giving myself a time-frame to finish each small goal. To make sure I make good on these, I got myself a nifty corkboard that fits right next to my desk. I've divided it into three categories (To Do, Doing and Done). I add new goals to the To Do column, then move them into Doing and eventually Done, as I make progress. Right now, in Doing, I have:

- Create main characters, both protagonists and antagonists
- Figure out conflicts
- Plot story arc and character arcs
- Do worldbuilding/research
- Plot scenes

I got the idea from a Holly Lisle article. What I like most about her courses is that she's so incredibly well-organised. It's been helpful, although it hasn't revolutionised the way I write yet. At least, my writing space looks pretty cool:

HTRYN: Getting to know what I wrote.

A month after I started How to Revise Your Novel, how do I feel about it?

It's an eye-opener. It was designed to be just that, a course that makes the student look at their novel differently - taking it apart methodically, detaching themselves from their beloved characters in order to figure out where it went wrong and where it went right. This approach might not be right for everybody, but it appeals to me a lot. Stars Shine Brighter, though I love it still, is fraught with too many obvious mistakes and shortcomings to ignore. It's just not a very good story at that point. What's on the paper is nowhere near as shiny as what's in my mind, and even that is quite confused, so fixing it is no luxury.

Because Holly Lisle used to be a nurse, working in the ER, she uses medical metaphors to describe throughout the course. Your novel is an ER patient, who has just come in after a car-crash (or train-wreck, depending on how messed up it is). The first two months of the course, Lessons One to Eight (although it may take a lot longer than a week to work through some of the lessons), she defines as Triage, when the doctor/writer examines their patient/novel and figure out what is wrong with it.

During that first period, as a HTRYN student, you go through a number of re-reads of your novel in order to give the appropriate diagnosis (most likely it'll be diagnoses, really). Only after this long period of analysis, do you get to start making changes. Why? Because as you read your manuscript and identify its fault, sudden realisations about your work are bound to come and WHACK you around the head pretty much all the time. These are so common (and awesome!) that they even have a name on the HTRYN forums. They are the EUREKA MOMENTS!*

I will talk about the rest of the course when I get to it, but for now, let me tell you about my first few weeks of dissecting my novel.

How To Revise Your Novel, Lesson One:

Holly tells you straight up, when you read your first lesson, that it's probably the hardest one you'll have to go through. I don't know about future lessons yet, but I hope it's true because Lesson One was pretty though. Even after I had been warned that certain lessons may take longer than others to tackle, I was a bit shocked to find that Lesson One took me more than three weeks.

Lesson One isn't titled Magic, Despair and Grace for nothing. I thought I would stop several times and then I went on the boards, got some encouragements from graduates of the course and threw myself back into the task. I filled out the many worksheets, answering questions - What did I want my novel to be when I started? What is it like now? What came to life unplanned as I wrote it? - making notes on my manuscript every time I read something of notice - Is this good characterisation/bad characterisation? Why did this bit turn out to be so good/bad?, etc...

For me, the lesson highlighted many things that I suspected were wrong with the book and helped me see why. Because using the worksheets forced me to be methodical, it also squashed any illusions I could have, any argument I could try to oppose. Some of my characters are straw men and women. Some are flat, one-dimensional or just completely not what I would like them to be. Some bits of the plot make no sense and some elements I was fond of are just not shown at all. But I also know how this came to happen - hurrying through Nano, I left all the good stuff in my head and what made it to paper was mostly info-dumps, plot-holes and weak characters.

This may sound like it should be a depressing experience. But isn't the idea behind Nano that 'You can't revise a blank page'? Well, neither can you fix something if you don't know what's broken.

I know I'm explaining this all in foggy terms, but if I went into details this post would be even longer and I couldn't do justice to the course anyway. More on Lesson two coming up as I complete it!


*The Eureka moments are also referred to as epiphanies very often, but I favour the more science-y, less religiously-charged term. Shocker.

How To Revise Your Novel

For my first ever NaNo, in 2008, I wrote a novel about space pirates called Stars Shine Brighter. I had amazing characters and great ideas and concepts when I started out and, as it so often happens, the magic didn't translate onto what I'd written. Now, even though the first draft is a mess, I've still been in love with the characters ever since, figuring out more and more about them and their personalities and trying to write more. From these attempts, more snippets of text were born, but no significant progress was made.

So I decided to do something that had been tempting me for a while and sign up for Holly Lisle's novel revision course, the appropriately named 'How To Revise Your Novel'. I feel like HTRYN is going to be a good thing for me, because it structures things in a way that I quite like. How much vaguer could I be, huh? Information on the course can be found here at http://howtoreviseyournovel.com/. Now, I know the page looks corny and all, but I've read some of Holly Lisle's previous essays and fiction [and blogged about it] and I really do like her style and what she has to say. I'm just a sucker for anything structured like a class.

So right now I'm fighting my way through Week One of the course, which Lisle defines as the hardest one, because you have to set yourself a whole new bunch of targets, which you do by reading your manuscript and writing down every time you think something sucks. Which I my case happens often. Updates on this will follow as I work through the course.

My goal for the coming week is to finish Week One and start on Week Two after that.

Oh, lookie, it's mid-May!

April has come and gone in a whirl of script-writing, event-organising and mild swearing. I have tried to be a good ML and I think on some level I achieved that, although motivation strongly lagged after I started finding myself alone at write-ins. Script Frenzy was pretty cool, but it's not as popular as NaNoWriMo and its participants tend to be more of the online type, I think. If only because the fact that there even were MLs for London this year wasn't so widely known.

I'm proud to say that I have won Script Frenzy, with the 100-page mark reached on Friday the 30th around 9pm. I swear one year I'll win before the late evening on the last day. I wrote an adaptation of a romance novel I'd started for JulNoWriMo last year and it went pretty well. It's actually the closest I've come yet to finishing any story, but it's not finished yet, of course. The young padawan, much learning yet to process has. I also had fun with the format although it was a bit difficult to get to grips with it at first. I'm sure I went a bit OTT on visual gimmicks, montages and symbolic things, but I feel like I learnt at least a bit. So that was good.

Now, tell me about your month of April, people. Did you try your hand at Script Frenzy? If so, did you like it or not? Did you find script-writing to be just the thing for you? Or just the thing to avoid? Will you be taking part again next year? Will you give it a try if you haven't yet?

Don't worry, I'm still around...

I'm just quite bad at organising myself and at actually doing stuff. Also, I've been a bit ill recently, which induces tiredness and lazyness. I also haven't written at all in a while, which means the Guilt Monkeys have been visiting, Failure Hyenas and Shame Yodels in toe. It's hard to feel great and enthusiastic about posting on your Serious Writing Blog if you haven't been doing any writing.

Thankfully, Script Frenzy is coming soon, which means I will definitely be writing a 100-page script in 30 days in April. I am very excited about Screnzy this year, all the more so because a Municipal Liaison for London, so I get to organise lots of amazing activities, parties and write-ins.

On the reading front, everything goes smoothly, I've read the graphic novel Kick-Ass because I saw the trailer for the movie and it looked awesome and a Regency romance novel entitled Everything And The Moon, which wasn't that great. Right now I'm reading Temeraire, by Naomi Novik and I absolutely love it. Not that I expected to dislike a book about ships, dragons and the war between France and England, but still, the book fills me with glee and it should be the subject of my next book post.

Reading - The Lovely Bones

I've just finished to read Alice Sebold's best-selling novel The Lovely Bones. Susie Salmon (like the fish) is 14 when she is murdered by a man who lives in the neighbourhood. After her death, she looks back at earth from her own personal heaven, observing the lives of her loved ones, as they have to learn to live without her and cope with her death.

The front cover and the friends who had already read the book all told me it was one of these compulsive reads that can be devoured in a single sitting and on this subject I beg to differ. Even by my slow standards of reading, taking over a week to read one single novel is a little much.

I feel the characterisation is really the strong point of the book. That and, you know, the story's premise - it's original and gripping and beautifully well-served by Sebold's writing. For once, the back cover isn't exaggerating, the writing really is great. The characters' feelings, their reactions to the dreadful events dropped onto them, their relationships to each other, how they grow and degrade, all of this is masterfully crafted and feels incredibly genuine. I truly admire Sebold for that.

I found the story to be a little bit slow-paced and not just as great as the hype around it had led me to expect, but it should be taken into account that I was spoilt before reading the book. I also found the ending of the book to be quite weird and nonsensical and I liked the realistic elements of the story better than the few supernatural ones. I'm quite eager to see what the movie is like, now.

One thing I'm not that good at is multitasking...

When I made the conscious decision to start practising my writing more seriously, I knew that my issue would probably be to stay focused and determined, to keep at it regularly and establish a habit that I could rely on. I'm interested in a lot of things and I like to try out new activities as well as tried and tested hobbies I've come to love dearly.

I tend to organise my spare times a bit like I do my meals - i.e. not at all. I am mostly a nibbler and occasionally a binger when it comes to food and leisure, but I am never very organised or regular in what I do. I eat when I want to and I practise my hobbies when I want to. It should be that easy, shouldn't it? I like to write, I want to get better at it, therefore I should just be able to do it whenever I want. And that should be quite often because I always like to tell stories.

It seems to me like I pour into my writing a huge amount of hopes and expectations, and maybe, just like with food, these things I expect of myself are what can charge something I love with more guilt and worry than pleasure. And just like with food, I don't want to let that happen and I won't.

Maybe I should christen these posts Wacky Metaphorical Wednesdays, as I seem to be getting the hang of those metaphors. And at least, if they're not that great now, they'll get better!

Writing - The Artist's Way

Mur Lafferty, the author and podcaster behind I Should Be Writing, the podcast for wannabe writers, is currently releasing a series of video podcasts about Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way, a twelve-week course in 'Discovering and Recovering your Creative Self'.

I like courses, because they give you a framework and I thought that doing this along with ISBW would help me do it properly and not abandon. I decided to shell out the £15 for the book despite Lafferty's warning that it might be a little bit heavy on the whole spirituality side for the sceptics among us. I was quite concerned about this because sceptic is a bit of an understatement when it comes to my views on religion. And in fact it does irk me quite a lot when Julia Cameron tells that I will be able to connect with God better and that I will inspiration from it. But I decided I could live with being irked and it may be worth it.

The Artist's Way's method works on introspection a lot and it includes doing three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness journalling first thing every morning. I am very much hoping this will help me improve my phrasing and get rid of some of the stiffness in my writing which I discussed last week. Of course I'm using a notebook with lines stupidly close together so it's a lot of writing and it takes about 20 to 30 minutes to do - of course that probably wouldn't be a problem if I was able to get up a bit earlier or sacrifice my morning internet browsing to do my three pages. So far I've done most of my week-day morning pages at work during free periods or after work and I could feel the difference with the morning pages that I actually did first thing in the morning.

One thing I am worried about is that in doing this course and in getting ready for Script Frenzy next month (I'll be writing my script and organising events for the Frenzy, as I'm one of the London MLs), I will be so busy talking and thinking about writing that I won't actually do any writing. This has happened to me in the past, so I'll have to be careful to not let that repeat itself. It's going to be a challenge, but hopefully one that I can come out of as an improved writer.