Category Archives: writing

Awards and Events and the Day-to-Day

Posted on February 18, 2019 | Comments Off on Awards and Events and the Day-to-Day

Two fun things to report today! This weekend I learned that my F/F novella, Graphite & Glitter, was a finalist in the novella category of the Southern Magic RWA (Birmingham, AL) Award of Excellence. Awesome news!

Also, I’ve been invited to appear at the Gwinnett County Book Festival in June. More details to come for those who are in the Atlanta area and would like to come.

As for the day-to-day, things are plugging along. Work on the house continues, we’re all generally doing well, and I’m within view of the finish line on the WIP that’s been lingering for far too long. Hoping to type THE END this month and be able to move on to the next project on my list!

Comments Off on Awards and Events and the Day-to-Day

Posted in appearances, author life, real life, writing

Glancing Back, but Moving Forward

Posted on December 31, 2018 | Comments Off on Glancing Back, but Moving Forward

2019 year pop art comic book text speech bubbleLike a lot of you, I’m ready to see the back of 2018. Sure, I had some great moments—buying a house, releasing a new novella and my first M/F story, taking some great trips, visiting with awesome friends—but overall, 2018 was one dumpster fire after another. I’m already side-eyeing 2019: you better behave yourself.

I had a list of things I wanted to do in 2018, but as it turned out, life had ideas of its own. I did get some things marked off the list. I bought a house and moved me and my parents into it. I upped the percentage of income I’m putting toward retirement. I paid off some debt. I attended three romance conferences (Spring Fling, RT, and RWA) and presented panels at two of them. I oversaw the Daily Dragon for Dragon Con. I submitted a partial and got a full request.

But some other things had to fall by the wayside. I didn’t finish the novel I wanted to finish (though I’m closing in on THE END). I cancelled two trips because I ran out of time. We still aren’t unpacked. So some things are definitely carrying over to the new year.

I’m not writing out a long list of resolutions or whatever this year. I just have a few goals:

  • Finish the novel that’s nearly done and submit the final.
  • Finish unpacking and getting settled into the new house.
  • Go to NECRWA and RWA.
  • Do the Dragon Con thing again.
  • Get into better writing habits in general.
  • Move more. I spent wayyyyy too much time sitting in front of a computer.

There we go: short and sweet. Looking forward to a better year in 2019 for everyone!

 

Comments Off on Glancing Back, but Moving Forward

Posted in author life, m/f, m/m, musings, novel, short story, teaching ben, the coffee shop around the corner, writing

A Little Drippy

Posted on August 6, 2018 | Comments Off on A Little Drippy

I never had a chance to write up a post about RWA. Let’s just say it was a great week and I saw a lot of awesome people, and I’ll tell you why I never wrote that post.

When I got home late that Sunday night—my flight from Denver got in at 10:30PM—my parents were still awake, so I stepped in to their room to say hi and then headed downstairs to crawl into my bed. As I walked into the room, I saw a dark spot on the top corner of my mattress. I looked closer, looked up… and saw that two of the ceiling tiles overhead were sagging, soaking wet. (As was my mattress.)

It turns out that Dad had discovered a leak from the toilet in their bathroom the previous Wednesday, while I was gone. It looked like something small, so he just turned off the water, and they either used the hall bathroom or turned on the water just long enough to flush. He didn’t call me about it because he didn’t think it was a big deal and didn’t want to bother me on my trip.

It was a big deal.

The water had seeped under most of the bathroom floor, the vanity, and the hallway on the other side of the wall. It had also dripped down into the insulation between floors, the ceiling tiles in the drop ceiling in the basement, and down into the floors below in two rooms. And, of course, onto my mattress.

We’ve had a restoration company out to assess everything and set up to dry it all out. The bathroom flooring and vanity are gone, along with the wet insulation and ceiling tiles and a bunch of baseboards. They’re hoping not to have to redo the flooring in the hallway and in one of the downstairs rooms, but that’ll depend on how well they dry out.

Most annoying is that the hallway damage is right outside the only other bathroom upstairs, so the setup to dry that out blocked that bathroom. That means no upstairs bathroom, which means my parents have had to move into a hotel while the work is done. (And me too, mostly to be around to help them as needed, but also because the insurance offered to cover two rooms.)

The good news is that Mom and Dad (he cares less, LOL) will get a brand-new vanity and new flooring in their bathroom. What was there was fine, but it was basic builder-grade stuff, so this will be a definite upgrade. We’re also going to try to get their shower surround changed out to make it more accessible.

Thankfully, insurance will be covering the bulk of all this. We’ll pay a deductible and for the shower, since that wasn’t affected by the leak, but beyond that, it’ll be the cost of the shower work and then anything else extra we decide to do.

The biggest annoyance with all of this is the upheaval. We’ve been plugging away at getting unpacked and settled, but we haven’t been able to do much the past couple of weeks because of the leak, and now we’ll be out of the house over another weekend. I am going to come over during the weekend and do what I can, but every day the repairs take puts us farther behind on everything. And I’ve been relegated back to sleeping on a sofa or airbed until I can get my mattress replaced.

OH, and on top of all THAT, a few nights ago a light fixture in the kitchen fell with a huge kablang, scaring Mom and me out of a year of life. Thankfully, nothing broke, but since the fixture itself is so heavy, we’re going to look for something lighter to replace it with. Which means another repair/handy person in to install it.

Of course, all this I’m not getting much writing done. I have a full manuscript due to one publisher and sample chapters to another, and I haven’t written a word since I went to one of the writing sprints session in Denver. I’m hoping sleeping in a real bed for a few days will get me back on track.

So, I’m hoping to have some good news to report soon, both on the housing front and on the writing front. In the meantime, I’ll keep right on slogging through.

Just keep swimming, right?

Comments Off on A Little Drippy

Posted in personal, rwa, writing

Life or Something Like It

Posted on February 15, 2016 | Comments Off on Life or Something Like It

Just a little update on things. I’ll be headed to my parents’ in a few days, when my mom is scheduled to be able to go home from rehab. Her recovery from her broken ankle has been going well, and she’s passed the biggest hurdle: she can move from the bed to the wheelchair (or potty chair) and back, mostly on her own.

My other main projects are finishing my stack of RITA books (and logging the scores), and working on the Hands On novellas. I’m shooting to have all three done by the end of April. Unless something drastic happens, I plan to self-publish these. (More on that later, but just to head off any possible speculation, that has nothing to do with any problem with any publisher!)

Oh yeah… and I have a day job to do, too. 🙂

Currently writing: Rhythm & Blues, M/M novella (~78%)

Comments Off on Life or Something Like It

Posted in real life, writing

Planning Ahead: My 2015 Writing Schedule

Posted on November 14, 2014 | Comments Off on Planning Ahead: My 2015 Writing Schedule

2015_StuartMilesPutting together a writing schedule is a brand-new thing for me. I had a sort of de facto schedule for the second half of 2014, just because I had several deadlines that forced me to write stories in a specific order. I’m going to try to carry that on into 2015 and see if a schedule will help keep me on track.

Here’s my tentative writing schedule for 2015. Keep in mind this doesn’t include publisher edits, release dates, or event attendance—it’s just getting stories written, beta read, and ready for submission.

January–March: Nobody’s Son (Sons, Book 3)

March–June: Help Wanted (M/F contemporary)

June: Cabin Fever (anthology novella)

July: Snow Come Down (Christmas novella)

August–December: Under the Lights trilogy (NA, M/M, football)

I have firm deadlines for Nobody’s Son and the Cabin Fever novella. Everything else is super flexible at this point, except that I do want to have a novel ready to pitch at RWA next July. Right now, that’s slated to be the M/F title, but that could change. I’ll likely have at least one more short to fit in there too!

All this PLANNING stuff brings up an excellent question. We hear the plotter vs. pantser discussion about the writing process all the time, but what about when it comes to your writing schedule? Do you plan things out, or do you just write whatever comes to you next?

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Comments Off on Planning Ahead: My 2015 Writing Schedule

Posted in goals, schedule, writing

NaNo? Nope

Posted on October 31, 2014 | 1 comment

redpenimageFor the past four years, I’ve been an eager participant in National Novel Writing Month. My first time out, in 2009, I was a “winner” with 53,000 words on a fanfic writing project. In 2010, I wrote 63,000 words that ended up as my first novel, Sand & Water.

The past two years, I haven’t gotten very far at all. I’ve tried two different projects and made little progress on either one (though one of them ended up as Unfortunate Son, which releases in January 2015). I don’t think my failure to finish the last two years means I’m done with NaNo by any means, but this year, I decided to step off the treadmill, for several reasons.

Reason one is simple: I have a short story due at the end of November, so even if I did sign up, I’d have to go in as a “rebel” and work on something else along with that to get to the 50k marker. I also have releases coming up in December and January, so I’ll be working on getting things together for blog posts and such. Finding time to write 50,000 words just isn’t going to be on the table this time.

That’s not to say that I won’t be working on other writing projects. Book three of the Sons series is due at the end of March, so I’ll be getting started on that soon. I’ve also had a back-burner (excuse the pun) story centered around barbecue cooking competitions, so I’m going to go to a competition in November to do research (and eat some yummy, yummy barbecue, of course). Plus, I have an M/F novel idea I’d like to take a shot at, possibly to have ready to pitch at RWA in July.

(And then there’s the whole YA thing to consider. Nessa won’t stop poking me!)

So yeah, I have plenty to work on in November, and beyond. It’s just not going on the wall on the NaNo site. Maybe in 2015, my schedule will line up right again, and I can jump back in. But either way, I hope everyone who is doing NaNo next month has a great time with it. It’s hard work, but even when I haven’t been a winner, I’ve always had fun with it. 🙂

1 Comment

Posted in nano, writing

Free Advice Can Cost You

Posted on June 30, 2014 | 3 comments

redpencil_thaikrit“NEVER DO THIS advice about writing style is rarely helpful. Writing is not an exact science. Authorial voice matters.”

I tweeted the above as part of a conversation on Twitter last week, and it got retweeted around a bit. I thought it deserved a little bit of expansion, so I wrote this post as a follow-up. 🙂

One thing that the internet has made easy is the dissemination of advice. Not just in the publishing world, of course, but the internet makes it simple for any random person (like, say, me) to set up a blog and start handing out suggestions, rules, guidelines, or manifestos about anything they want.

The proliferation of free advice is great for lots of things, including, in many cases, the publishing world. It’s easy to get help when you need it on anything from grammar to word use to location research. The problem comes when personal preferences or opinions are presented as facts. The end result is that there’s a lot of writing advice floating around that’s just not all that good.

When it comes to grammar and usage, most things are pretty clear-cut. There are widely agreed-upon rules regarding how to use the language, and even if not every source agrees, you’ll generally find consensus among different guides on things like word meanings, punctuation, and spelling. Where there isn’t a clear “winner,” a preference may emerge—or your publisher will have a house style that will take care of it.

Other issues aren’t so clear-cut. Idiomatic expressions, metaphors and similes, meter and flow… these are questions related to the author’s writing style, and they don’t have easy answers. They are likely to come down to clarity and authorial voice. To go back to that tweet, generally speaking, advice related to writing style that says to “NEVER DO THIS” is not helpful, no matter what “THIS” is.

Considering the collaborative nature of so much in publishing, it can be easy to forget that editing and writing are far different skills. Writing is a creative art, whereas editing is far more of a science. It’s all too easy for editors to get caught up in the science and lose sight of the art.

I think one of the most difficult things for a fiction editor to learn is how to fix problems without damaging the inherent voice of the author. Even when editors have good reasons for their suggested changes, that doesn’t mean they’re right, or what’s best for the story. I’m not advocating starting editorial fights by any means, but authors who feel strongly about the way they’ve written something shouldn’t hesitate to argue in favor of keeping it.

With every set of edits I receive, I go through basically the same process. I make one pass through to accept or fix everything that I immediately agree with: typos, missing words, incorrect words, and so on. Anything that needs more consideration or that I disagree with gets skipped. Most of the time, that first review clears most of the editor’s comments.

On the second trip through, I look at things more closely. If I agree with the editor’s comment, then I figure out a way to fix it. If I don’t, I mark the passage and explain my reasoning in a comment. Most of the second category contains instances where I think the editor has misread something or has corrected something that wasn’t actually wrong. Often, the choice comes down to “I think it reads better this way.” And pretty much every time, my version is what makes it through to the final copy. Not because I’m “right” and the editor is “wrong,” but because there is no right or wrong, only a preference. And my name is the one that’s on the story.

So the lesson? As with anything on the internet, don’t take every piece of writing advice you read at face value. Figure out what works for your story. And most of all, never say “NEVER.”

Image courtesy of thaikrit / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

3 Comments

Posted in editing, musings, style, writing

Let’s Talk Process

Posted on May 12, 2014 | 1 comment

quillparchment_SimonHowdenOMG NOOOOOOOOOO, NOT ANOTHER POST ABOUT PROCESS! HIDE YO KIDS, HIDE YO MAMA!

Ahem.

So this is the thing. When you get a group of authors together for any length of time, the topic of conversation will invariably turn to sex. I MEAN. Writing process.

(… also sex. But that’s another post.)

“Everyone should do THIS,” one author will gush. “I always [outline to the nth degree/pants it all/fast draft/go through 34839743 revisions/draft in quill and parchment] and it works every time!”

Well, bully for you. No, really. I’m glad you’ve found something that works for you. That’s great!

But I’m not you. And what works for you could be the kiss of death for me.

I’m a short story writer. I can pants a short story in a few days, and a novella in not much longer. If I have a decent story idea and a couple of well-formed characters, I can cough up 10k in no time.

Set a 60,000-word minimum in front of me, and it’s an entirely different story. So to speak.

I cannot pants a novel. I’ve tried. I have several (for high values of “several”) projects that sit forlorn, shunted off to the side, because I don’t have the foggiest freakin’ idea where they’re supposed to go next. I can start a story just fine. I might even be able to write an ending for it. But those fiddly little bits in the middle will trip me up every time.

Unless I write a synopsis first.

No, wait! Don’t run away! Hear me out!

I know how much authors hate writing synopses. The only thing that gets close to as many complaints from the authors I know is writing blurbs. And actually, the very first thing I write for a story is a blurb, but I don’t worry about making it non-sucky. I’ll probably spend a little time figuring out the main characters, too. But it’s writing a synopsis that takes a story from a passing thought to Srs. Bznss.

Writing the synopsis before writing the story kills two birds for me. It serves as an outline for the story, and it saves me from having to write a synopsis from scratch after I finish the story. Does the synopsis hold up intact? Nope. Never. Stories take on a life of their own. Characters do crazy things. But the synopsis isn’t carved in stone. It can be revised at any point—before, during, or after the story is written and revised.

For my first novel, Sand & Water, I wrote a synopsis of about 2,500 words, and nearly all of that ended up in the book. But as it turned out, that was only about two thirds of the story. I had a few ideas in mind for a possible sequel, but I realized as I wrote that those parts needed to go into that book. So they did, and I added all that to the synopsis.

For the novel I just finished drafting, Unfortunate Son, I had more experience under my belt and a better idea of what it would take to tell the story. I wrote the first few chapters before I wrote the synopsis, and it took a few tries and some time to get the story to flow the way it needed to. Once I had that locked in pretty well, I was able to actually finish the book. (Though I still have some things to add to both book and synopsis before they’re finalized.)

I started writing original fiction four years ago. It’s taken me this long to figure out a novel-writing process that actually seems to work for me. It’s never an exact science, of course. Every story is different. But now I have a place to start from, and it’s getting the synopsis out of my head and onto the page.

So, here are SHAE’S TEN STEPS TO WRITING A STORY:

  1. Get story idea
  2. Write blurb
  3. Develop main characters
  4. Write full synopsis
  5. Write story draft
  6. Revise story
  7. Revise synopsis
  8. Revise blurb
  9. Submit
  10. PROFIT

Will this work for anyone else? I have no idea. I just know that it works for me. And so I’ll keep doing it, until and unless it falls apart completely, or something that works better comes along.

So go ahead and talk process with other authors! Maybe you’ll give someone an idea, or get one from someone else. Just don’t expect anyone else’s process to work exactly like yours. As long as you get the same results in the end—a finished story—nothing else really matters. 🙂

Image courtesy of Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

1 Comment

Posted in musings, writing

On Goals and “Failing” to Reach Them

Posted on April 25, 2014 | 1 comment

I’m at the Dreamspinner author workshop in Portland today. The previous two workshops have been packed with great information and a lot of fun, and I’m sure this one will be the same. One of the best discussions last year, led by Andrew Grey, was about setting goals for our writing.

Now, it’s worth saying here that Andrew is probably not the best example for most of us. Last year, he reported that in the previous year, he had written 1.1 million words. He was still working a full-time office job then, and he’d write a thousand words on his lunch hour every day. The man is a thousand times more dedicated than I will ever be!

One of Andrew’s biggest points is that goals should be things over which authors have complete control. Writing a novel is a good goal; signing a contract with a publisher for that novel isn’t. (But self-publishing that novel would be.) It’s fine to have wish lists (signing with an agent, getting a contract for that series, hitting a bestseller list), but those should be separate from goal setting.

As part of Andrew’s presentation, each of us set down a goal or two for our writing for the coming year. When my turn came, I went for something I considered midrange: 250,000 words, and two novels. I’ve written more words than that in a single year before, and I had two novels fairly well laid out and partially written, so it didn’t seem too much of a stretch.

Shows what I know.

I don’t want to make it sound like I flopped entirely. I did finish one novel, which is huge because that’s only my second one. I also completed a novella and three short stories. So it wasn’t like I sat around doing nothing. Technically, though, I fell far short of my goals. Counting all the stories I finished between last year’s DSP workshop and this year’s, I wrote approximately 114,000 words.

But the exercise was a good one because it taught me a big lesson: I needed to stop tracking word counts on a daily basis. When I do that, I pay more attention to counts than to story. I abandoned that practice early this year, and since then, I’ve written one complete short story (in less than a week) and wrote something over 40,000 words to finish a novel that’s been languishing for nearly two years. I’d call that a success.

What I’m doing now is counting words only in a general sense of accomplishment (“I’m over 55k on my novel!” “Got in 3,500 words today, wow!”) until I have a complete draft of the story. That 114,000 word count includes the three stories I’ve published in the past year, the one that’s on submission now, and the novel I just finished. I worked on several other projects, so my total word count is higher, but I don’t know how much higher, because I’m not tracking it.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about what my goals for the coming year should be. Finishing another novel, definitely. But I might skip listing a word count goal and focus on story count instead. I wrote five stories this year; for next year, I might go for five again, but try to make at least two of them novels.

At any rate, the last thing I’m going to do is kick myself for not hitting my goals. Setting those goals taught me lessons that will help me as a writer, and that’s the most important goal of all.

1 Comment

Posted in author life, musings, works in progress, writing