Tag Archives: writing groups

And Da Winnah Is . . .

26 Thursday Nov 2015

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I just finished my NaNoWriMo submission, which has kept me busy for the past couple of days, hence no blog. Sorry!

This year I also chose cat narrators (see Eureka, under the “Fiction” tab) and maybe that’s gonna be my claim to fame when I die. I dunno. I’ve always enjoyed animal narrators myself–the genre is called “beast tales,” apparently.

Please note that I finished early–not as wicked early as some, true–so now I have all this mojo circulating in my bloodstream and you’re the only place to go with it. Unfortunately, my brain still isn’t awake (I found that I do my best and most prolific writing when I roll out of bed) and this may be randomness.

What’s bugging me in the back of my mind is a convo I had last year or so with the writing guru I sometimes do evaluations for. I brought up NaNoWriMo, and he said, dismissively to the point of mild contempt, “Oh, I have people do 50,000 words in a weekend.” Now, this is theoretically quite, quite possible. When typing, I’ve clocked myself at a rough 1K per hour, maybe a little more, and if you check in Friday, check out Sunday or possibly Monday, and don’t sleep–it’s doable. Thinking a moment on this brings out a feeling of sadness, of compassion: How pressured these folks must be! How hard these novels have been trying to claw their way out! But it’s so easy to let the world discourage you from being a writer, God knows. And that’s what the writing guru’s thing is–he midwifes those poor unborn novels into the world.

Now, we’re not necessarily talking about literary merit (whatever that is; when 50 Shades made it big, I officially Gave Up) or even readability. I see these texts at what is most often an early stage of their being–these writers have not yet been scared by the prospect of needing to EDIT, bless their pointy little heads and unscathed souls; let alone having shown them around and asked for critique. I suspect I am often the first beta reader (defined later) and most of them are . . . surprisingly OK, all things considering. True, some of them are awful, and a few of them are wonderful–so wonderful I wish it were professional to ask for a comp copy. But the difference between them and what they were before is that they have been born.

NaNo does a similar midwifery. Most WriMos in my area are college-age women, and in a culture that still silences women, especially brainy women, isn’t it great that they’re gonna pump out that fan novel they’ve been thinking about? Maybe it’s crappy, but as my late friend Barry Walden once said to me, years ago, “That’s one less piece of crap I have to write.”

(A moment of silence here for all writers lost to depression.)

A word on and for beta readers: If you don’t have them, join a writer’s group through Meetup and show them your stuff. They will (or should) understand that your work is still in beta (the software testing mode) and they will look for bugs in your code.

There will be (to your mind, anyway) many, many, many bugs in your code. You will learn the phrase “murder your darlings;” some of you might learn how to punctuate. And that’s a good thing. Trust me.

 

 

Like Me! Please Like Me!

16 Monday Feb 2015

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I’m hunting for a writing group. I’ve been advised to do this by many people, and now I’ve been semi-forced into it by WHAM (Whole Health Action Management). For those who didn’t click the link, this is a group I help run which meets for two months and has you choose a goal in the middle which you then pursue with peer support. It works pretty well–you’d be surprised what having to report on your new good habit will do for keeping it going. In the past, I joined a gym, made some progress on the meditation issue (which we’ll address here some other time), and now it’s time to enlarge my social circle. Aieeee!

So I went to Meetup, found a likely group that didn’t sound too scary, admitted my desire to commune with other sufferers and confessed my fetish for Victorian and genre novels. And now the moderator has to see. Oh dear. As if sending out query letters wasn’t bad enough.

That’s not going too well, either. One of the few people decent enough to get back to me at least cared enough to have his form letter say that he found my query interesting, but was overwhelmed with work at the time. SO much nicer than the standard refusal, which intimates that surely somebody somewhere will like your piece of dreck, but not them, no sirree Bob!

Well, we shall see on both counts. Meanwhile, I have been triggered into the dilemma of Wanting People to Like Me. I thought I was over that. In my salad days, I was a sex & drugs bimbo, seeking approval through suitable application of my ample cleavage. Bless the few people who saw past my people-pleasing facade and realized I was smart and funny too. Nowadays the whole mechanics have changed, and smart and funny’s all I’ve got: My cleavage is still ample, but even if I could tuck in selfies with my QLs, it would rather count against me.

“Smart and funny” is an almost infinitely harder job than “high and easy.” Smart requires treating my brain well, and being careful what I program it with. Funny chiefly requires NOT saying half the stuff that comes into my head, and this I owe to the beautiful Angie M. back in high school.

She was a senior, I was a freshman, and I had a massive schoolgirl crush on her, which she was kind about. And one day in Drama Club, after I’d called out something that the recipient took in the wrong way (which, hindsight admits, was the only way possible), Angie hauled me aside, sat me at her feet and said, “Look, Honey.” (I was in my mid-twenties before ditching this nickname, although some of my best friends are grandfathered in.) “You and I are Scorpios, and a lot of the time we think something is funny–but it’s not funny at all to other people.” Ah, puppy love. If only this 17-year-old mentress could have kept re-programming my brain for years: I heard her, and I never forgot it. I apologized to the girl I offended (who got over it in, oh, about two years) and have tried to watch my mouth ever since.

I can’t tell you how much of Max I’ve deleted because my beta reader pointed out that I would possibly offend somebody. Sigh. And this is important, because I want people to like my book. To like . . . me.

Part of me sheeping HATES THAT, but it is how it is.