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By Ellie, November 30, 2009 7:27 pm

There should have been an article on Friday, but with the Thanksgiving weekend, I didn’t feel like writing on a bloated stomach. On top of that, I had to get up early for Black Friday. No, I didn’t shop. I participated as an unwilling retail lackey.

Sales were actually not as fantastic as my boss thought they would be, and while I didn’t have to tear screaming customers away from each other, I was pretty beat and didn’t feel like writing. I didn’t feel like writing after I got off work on Saturday, either.

As for today, I had two teeth filled, and I feel more like grinding my teeth and taking naps than writing, too.

I know, it seems like I do nothing but make excuses for not posting regularly, but one of these days, I will get into a routine.

Tomorrow: writing lower grade fiction.

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By Ellie, November 23, 2009 8:18 pm

With the holidays right around the corner, all retail stores are preparing for the onslaught of rampant consumerism, even with the poor economy. The bookstore is really getting into it. The owner has come up with Holidays on the Harbor, filled with holiday cheer, carolers, and enough pine-scented candles to create sinus problems that’ll last until Valentine’s Day.

During the speech she gave to the employees, the owner started saying how the bookstore was really the only one doing anything Christmas-y. (I’m pretty sure there are some storefronts laced with holly and garland, but that’s not the point.) Then she pointed out how the bookstore is the retail anchorage for the entire town, and how the customers are the reason for the store’s existence. She points the latter out to nearly every customer and thanks them profusely for shopping local.

Later that day, one of the employees showed me an article in the November/December ‘09 issue of Poets & Writers. This magazine deals mostly with literary stuff, so I’m not interested in it, but I took a gander at an article titled Learning the Trade by Jeremiah Chamberlin. He’d worked in a bookstore out of college and learned about the business side of books: selling, returning, promoting. The stuff book lovers rarely, if ever, think about.

But it was the first paragraph that gave me pause:

Every few months, it seems, another landmark independent bookstore closes its doors–Harry Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee; Shaman Drum Bookshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and, more recently, Trover Shop in Washington, D.C. Each time, the dirge follows a familiar pattern: the bookshop is hailed as an anchor of the community, its importance as a literary hub is extolled, employees praise the working environment and their long-standing relationships with their customers, and the local citizenry is reminded ever so briefly that if you don’t spend your money at local businesses, those businesses disappear.

Needless to say, I’m kind of worried.

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By Ellie, November 20, 2009 2:54 pm

Only ten days until the NaNo ends. And it looks like I’m going to lose this one, too.

It isn’t that I’ve lost interest in my project(s). It’s just that I kept restarting it/them and wanting to spend time with it/them.

I also decided that this was going to be a middle-grade chapter book, which usually run up to 30K words. NaNo’s are supposed to be 50K. But I figured I could write another 20K of fluff and still win the thing.

I’ve heard of a lot of writers who go back and forth between scenes, or who will write the ending of their story and backtrack to the beginning. I’ve tried that with the two other NaNos for this year, but with the third and last one, I decided to go the traditional route. So far, I’ve written from the beginning and… I’m still in the beginning. My characters have yet to reach the “point of no return,” when they’ll be thrown into the action and can’t return to the way things used to be.

But I much prefer this to writing absolute crap, which was how I won the ‘07 NaNo. Trust me, that one was horrible. I used adverbs, purple prose, gratuitous sex scenes. A lot of gratuitous sex scenes. I didn’t really feel pride as I downloaded the little graphic that declared me a winner. I just felt… dirty. And not in the good way.

So, after doing this three times, I have to conclude that the NaNo may not be for me. I feel like I have to rush 50K words, no matter what, quality be damned. I have a hard time continuing any project if I think it’s crappy.

It was like that for the first NaNo. But, dammit, I wanted to win that thing. I kept going until I was sick of the story, characters, even the entire world I’d spent years creating. Two years later, I can only think of five small things to salvage from that wreck, which is pretty good. But I’d feel better about the experience itself if the story had been a quality first draft. Because I believe that quality first drafts are the difference between major rewrites/overhauls and some major tweaking and rewriting.

(At least, that’s what I believe. I’ve never written an entire story and then a second draft, so I have no personal experience to back up that thought. But writing well the first time around so the subsequent rewrites won’t be such a chore seems to make sense.)

Who knows? I might give the NaNo a try next year, just to see if I can win it with a damn good draft.

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By Ellie, November 16, 2009 6:43 pm

So I said that I was going to make up for not posting a few times. Obviously, that never happened. Do I have more excuses? Of course I do! Wanna hear ‘em?

We had a helluva nor’easter on Wednesday and Thursday. Surprisingly, the power never went out, but I was reluctant to work on the computer for too long. But my laptop did suffer some non-storm-related damage.

See, I have–or had–a habit of placing my iPod earbuds on the laptop keyboard when I’m not using them. At one point, I forgot that I’d put them there and lowered the lid. Naturally, my action was met with some resistance, and my memory kicked in. “Oh, wait. I put my earbuds there.” But my husband decided to try his hand at closing the lid the whole way…

So now I have a cracked screen. My laptop is still usable, but there’s a black splotch at the lower left corner, accentuated by a cracked glass effect. The bottom of the screen is striped gray from the taskbar, which I had to move up just to access my programs, and since I couldn’t see the taskbar, I had to guess where it was so I could stretch it upwards. That was a fun 10 minutes.

I shudder to think how much it’s going to cost to get a replacement screen. I’d do it myself, but I don’t really know what kind of screen I have, and I’m not confident in my hardware skills. I’d probably fry my motherboard.

Then on Wednesday, my husband came home early from work with a little surprise for me:

This is Rain, a stray kitten he found in the warehouse. (As you can guess, her name came from the nasty storm.) She was found with another kitten, who’s on his way to finding a good home. We’re guessing that Rain is 4-5 weeks old; her eyes are still a little cross-eyed, as are all tiny kittens’ eyes. But she’s learned how to use a litter box, eat solid food, and lap up water. Still, caring for a kitten is a lot of work, especially when there are a lot of objects that aren’t exactly kitten-safe. I’ve been cutting up mat board from my graphic design/college days to build a barrier for the bed (anyone with cats knows that if a cat gets under the bed, he or she will stay under there for hours).

And since Kevin is allergic to cats, I’ve been busy cleaning the room. It’ll be an ongoing chore, of course, but there was a lot that I needed to do in order to make a large part of the room walkable, kitten-proof, and Kevin-and-cat-friendly.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past several days. I’ve also been thinking about how to run this site. Updating Mondays and Fridays sounds like a good idea–wait! I’ve been saying that I’ll update, but I never do. Okay, let’s try something else…

I will not update Mondays and Fridays. Mondays will not see posts about the publishing industry, books I’ve read and liked or hated, or random thoughts on authors and books. On Fridays, I will not write about writing or story ideas. I will let this site fall into obscurity yet again. I will fail at running a site! I will not resume regular posting this Friday, with thoughts on the NaNoWriMo and what I plan on doing with my current project!

That oughta do it…

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By Ellie, November 10, 2009 5:00 am

For those of you who haven’t scoured the Internet for writing activities, the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) might seem like an overly ambitious undertaking. And you’d be absolutely right: the task is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days, from November 1st to the 30th.

I’d thought about participating this year, then came up with a list of valid excuses: I couldn’t decide which project to tackle, I didn’t like rushing through a first draft, I couldn’t finish a complete story in 30 days…

But when November 1st rolled around, I realized what day it was. After only a minute of debating it, I signed up for it and picked a random project to rush through.

The project in question was a middle-grade novel I’d conceived a few weeks before (actually, it was more of a “re-conceiving” of a project from my late teens). Since middle-grade fiction seems to be easier to write than YA or adult fiction, I jumped right in with little to no concern for fully developed characters or a rough outline.

But a few days in, I gave up. The story was blending with another project I was reworking, a humorous webcomic that never took off for various reasons. (If you’re curious: 1) It was about college students, and the Internet gods know that we don’t need another one of those. 2) I really didn’t have the drive or motivation to keep it up.)

So I picked up another project I’d started several weeks before. Yeah, it was cheating, but I’d gone three days without writing my NaNo, and I felt that using a 7,000+ word novel would get me ahead of schedule. It did. For a day.

I abandoned that one, deciding that it needed more research before I could continue, and returned to the first NaNo.

So far, I’m sticking with the first NaNo, and with luck, I’ll see it to 50K. If not… well, it won’t be the first time I failed.

I first participated in ‘07, and the NaNo I wrote then was so atrocious, I will never reveal it to anyone. I’m ashamed that I even wrote it. You want to talk about a rushed job? Hack writing? Plot holes so big you can drive a Mack truck through them? How about characters who changed from chapter to chapter to the point where they resembled asylum escapees in an Off-Off-Broadway production? This NaNo had it all and absolutely nothing.

But I went past 50K words. And I felt dirty when I downloaded my award banner.

I participated again in ‘08. The previous year’s sacrifice was a fantasy novel, but this one was a YA sci-fi offering. I made it to the sacrificial table, ceremonial blade in hand, but never quite made the incision. (Yes, my analogies suck. It is pretty close to midnight as I’m writing this.) So I abandoned the NaNo, but felt pretty good, because I wasn’t going to rush through it.

We’ll see how ’09’s NaNo turns out.