As part of the current blogversation on synopses, Justine Larbalestier writes on her experience with synopses and why it’s easier to do them before you write the book (my emphasis).
This is the part where I die laughing. Not a planner, me.
I guess I wrote a synopsis of the theater book before I wrote it: it was 50,000 words and took a month, and the book isn’t following it very closely.
Filed by scriniary at 7:28 pm under Writing
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It’s about that time of year again.
Results for 2005:
* Stick with the daily writing schedule (7 hours/week) – Did well enough at this, and surpassed it, for much of the year. Lately things have been backsliding.
* Finish the third draft of Lost Magic (by June) and send the whole thing to beta readers. – Yep. And submitted it, which goal had been set five years ago.
* Research, outline, and otherwise plan the rewrite of the zeroth draft of the theater book, and then start rewriting it from scratch. – Yep. (Granted, it’s pretty easy to meet a goal that says “start”. Maybe I should set more of those.)
* Do the characterization and description exercises, and critique regularly – No. In fact, I don’t remember what description exercises I’m referring to. I did well at critting for the first half of the year, but once my own book was done, I stopped.
For 2006:
* Keep sending Lost Magic to agents. One response is still pending, and I need to make a list of more agents to submit to. It’d be more efficient to send to more than two at a time. Probably need to revise my synopsis as well.
* Completely finish the theater book. This is an ambitious goal for me, especially given the slow pace of the past couple months. But I’m not spending five years on a book again.
* Spend more time on writing – that has to happen if I’m going to make the previous goal.
* Do the emotion exercises I said I’d do last year, and do two crits/month minimum. (Or enough to submit things for critique.)
Filed by scriniary at 3:49 am under Life, Writing
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Food: Beef stew/soup
Highly adapted from a recipe in this month’s Cooking Light. Forgot the 2 tbsp of dijon mustard. Made in the crockpot, so there was no browning of the beef or sauteeing of onion. Also no browned flour to thicken. Used less than a quarter of the liquid it called for and it was still soupy.
Tasted good though.
Filed by scriniary at 8:04 am under Food
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Plans for any sort of productivity today were spoiled by Tamara Siler Jones’ Ghosts in the Snow, which is a really good fantasy mystery.
Filed by scriniary at 8:10 am under Books
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I have finally uploaded the first section of my notes about early life at Harvard College.
Three more chapters of notes to go. At this rate they’ll be up in 2010.
The notes are very skimpy, the result of transcribing five-year-old handwritten scribbles made when I thought I could go look at the book in the library any time I wanted.
It’s a nice project to have around – makes me feel I’ve done something useful with my time when really I’m just putting off working on chapter 2.
In other website additions, I added a link to the Colonial Williamsburg magazine, which is a fun source of colonial (mostly Virginia, of course) info.
Filed by scriniary at 1:09 am under Site Changes
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Finished McKillip’s Alphabet of Thorn. As always, it was beautifully written. The plot was quite predictable once all the puzzle pieces were laid out, but it was enjoyable to watch it all come together, and the decisions at the end didn’t necessarily have to go the way they did.
Filed by scriniary at 6:48 am under Books
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Arcaedia asks about the difference between the terms “pre-published” and “unpublished”. Pre-published, to me, sounds like someone is trying too hard to distance themselves from the unpublished masses.
In the comments, some people say they dislike “aspiring”, which is the term I usually use. Not sure why I use it. I suppose it’s my occasional habit of being overly correct, even though in the phrase “unpublished fantasy novelist”, it’s clear enough that “unpublished” applies only to fantasy novels.
Filed by scriniary at 7:16 am under Writing
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1. I don’t remember not being able to read.
2. In 2nd or 3rd grade, the girl down the street told me she didn’t like to read, and I didn’t understand how anyone could not like to read.
3. I have never not read fantasy. The only of my favorites that weren’t fantasy were the Little House books, and the big books of Greek and Native American mythology.
4. On a family vacation when I was (in elementary school?), I met a woman who had known Laura Ingalls Wilder.
5. Despite that, I didn’t realize books were written by actual people until I was in my early 20s. Similarly, it never occurred to me to write down all the stories I made up in my head.
6. I no longer finish every book I start.
7. The summer between college and grad school, I read well over a book a day, including a lot of things I didn’t particularly like, because I wanted to be familiar with them. Most of my life, my average was more like 1-2 a week.
9. I don’t fetishize books as physical objects, although I no longer tear off and eat the corners of the pages.
10. I have not read most of the books I own, especially the nonfiction.
11. I didn’t move from the library’s juvenile section to the adult section, or discover that it had a science fiction section, until the summer I was 12 or 13 and volunteered there. I spent a lot of time shelving books. Before then, it hadn’t occurred to me that anything outside juvenile would be interesting.
12. As I remember, in elementary school, I took the reading book home on the first day of class and read the whole thing, every year, and never thought that was odd.
13. I heard “Put that book down now!” rather a lot as a child.
14. I stopped reading on May 31, 2002. The next novel I read was probably that December.
15. I’m slowly starting again – have read about five novels this year, not counting the ones on tape.
16. When I started this I didn’t think I could come up with 15 things, and now I’ve thought of many more.
Filed by scriniary at 5:51 am under Books
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Merrie Haskell made a delightful list of writer sins. I need to get my magnets repolarized so I stick to my chair better.
Food: Cinnamon-spiced Pork and Prunes Plums
Once again from Cooking Light. This was *amazingly* good. Very simple – the flavorings are cinnamon, cloves, and wine – and it smells like a holiday while it’s cooking, which is not for long.
Filed by scriniary at 4:38 pm under Food, Writing
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