WIP Tuesday - Exposition Edition, Pt. 1

No updates for a while, I know.

In part, this is because I've given up on NaNo (mental health stuff, long story) and haven't particularly felt like admitting this publicly. You understand, I'm sure - the undying shame is a bit much. I made it to 18.7k, and am undecided on whether to finish it at some point or not. For now, I'm leaning towards yes, and am tentatively brainstorming plot fixes.

In part, it's because my cat Shady, who'd been with me for nineteen years, recently died, which has been hard on me. I didn't feel like I could do a blog post without mentioning that, and wasn't quite sure how to go about it, so, er, I guess this is it. I'd go into it more, but I'm not exactly sure what to say, so, y'know. I won't.

In part, it's because I'm terribly, terribly lazy.

In short - I managed to complete enough work to submit to the exposition, and over the course of the next month or so will be doing a bunch of posts where I show off my process. It's not a particularly exciting process, involving a lot of pastel dust and tea, but I have to have something to fill up this blog with, right?

So let's get to it. Drawing number one, also known as "Nekkid #1" and "Boobies!" and a variety of other names, none of which are suitable for the actual exposition.


My set-up. Lots and lots of soft pastels and pastel pencils, a fancy easel, and a computer to have the reference photo on. (I hear it's a good multi-tasker, too. It might even be able to use Twitter and check your e-mail while you're drawing. Just sayin'.)

As far as the drawing goes - this is 50x65cm drawing paper, 200 grams per square meter. Initially I sketched the drawing - including the shading outlines - with a brown pencil, which you should be able to see if you full-view, then went over it with a darker pencil. When I was happy with the basic shape and proportions, I started sketching in the darkest parts.

(This photo was taken on Wednesday, November 4th, 8.56 PM.)


Introduced two new colours. (Photo taken: 9.09 PM.)


... and a couple more, eventually layering them. (Photos taken: 9.17 PM, 9.34 PM, 9.59 PM.)


More colours and more layering. It's starting to take shape, especially when looked at from a distance. (10.37 PM.)


Adding in a background. In this case, because the focus is on the body, there doesn't need to be much detail. The darkness is essential, though - both because the intense shadows on the body indicate dark surroundings, and to make the light pop more. With the shape basically there, the trick now is to get the colours to look right, and for them to blend well. This includes an awful lot of layering and blending - which I do with my fingers, which is something nearly every professional will tell you not to do. I'm a rebel, I guess.

Because of the way the light changes between photos - day, night, lamps, flash or no flash, etc. - the colours look very different between shots. In this case, the photo on the right is closest to reality. (Photos taken: Tuesday, November 4th, 11.05 PM; Wednesday, November 5th, 1.40 PM. I'm a late sleeper.)


It seems a bit ridiculous to update photos with so little changes between them, but I decided to go ahead anyway, because... that's kind of the point. As the times I keep mentioning indicate, I draw fast. The basic set-up is usually done in a matter of hours. Actually finishing it is a matter of days of continuous work. You might not be able to see it, but it's there, and it's an equally important part of the process. (2.00 PM.)


And on the topic of silly details... Here's some other parts of the process. Smudging by hand has its side effects, and working with pastels this intensively causes huge amount of pastel dust build-up. You should be able to see a bunch inbetween the pastel sticks, as well as gravity-defying lines on the paper.


It is generally a good idea to draw/colour all parts of the body at the same time - that way you don't have to look around to see what colours you used, you don't suddenly realise you forgot about [x], et cetera.

As a rule, I don't have good ideas, and will save the face for last. (Thursday, November 5th, 11.57PM; Friday, November 6th, 12.10 AM & 12.22 AM.)


More ridiculous detail work. Spot the differences! (Friday, November 6th, 2.29 PM & 3.11 PM.)


... and then we come to something resembling an end. I'm sure I made more changes after this - among other things, I extended the background on the right - but you get the point. (Photo taken: Saturday, November 7, 11.22 PM. As you can imagine, I skipped a ton of shots inbetween.)

A note on all the times listed: I am an awful procrastinator, and there's a good chance I did things like check my e-mail, chat online, Twitter, watch TV, eat lunch, pet my cat, and stare off into nothingness in-between shots. This makes those times totally unreliable, but hey, it's better than nothing.

Also, none of these photos were edited in any way. They're straight from the camera.

I hope this was somewhat interesting/informative to those of you interested in art - or at least my art, because lord knows this is hardly a how-to guide. If you've got any questions, holler, and I'll do my best to answer them.

And check back in on some day that's not Wednesday for progress shot on another drawing. Next up: charcoal. My favourite :D

NaNoWriMo: Day Five (In Which Cory Talks About Way Too Many Different Things)

14972 / 50000 words. 30% done!

Note to self: getting work done on both writing and art, but not as much as you would have had you just been focusing on one or the other, actually feels amazingly unsatisfying.

But progress is progress, and I'm fairly happy with how the first of the drawings is going. It's kind of funny how every time I start working with soft pastels, I panic because I don't know how to use them - and every time it turns out just fine.

And no, telling myself that doesn't help one bit with the initial panic.

This time, I took photos of how it looks in the early stages, so there's probably another WIP Thursday in the future where I'll lay them all out and describe the process, and you can share my early moments of "WTF am I making!?"

It'll be fun. Promise.

On the writing front, I got one chapter done, as well as a bit of plotting. Having an ending is great, but inevitably followed up by realising all the problems that come with said ending.

But now I've got a list of issues to iron out, so I'll have something to think about when drawing. (Something other than "boobies!" or "this is NEVER going to work" or "I wonder what I'll have for dinner today", anyway.)

On the Face Your Manga front:



On the left: Lillian, my main character from Always Read the Fae Print. Don't be fooled by that innocent facade. She's cray-zee - but hopefully in a most enjoyable way. Oh, I'm already aching to start editing this book...

She's actually got a highly visible scar on her neck, but oddly enough, that wasn't an option in the program.

On the right, my perky goth character Merel, the previously mentioned female version of Leonard. She doesn't actually have that tattoo on her face, but it suits her perfectly.

This one cracks me up. It's so much like her. She's another character from Always Read the Fae Print. Disturbingly, she's probably the sanest of the lot.

... that should tell you a lot about this book.

Anyhow, it's off to bed with me. Gotta be up nice and early to take care of this mess of a house and then get it filthy with pastel dust again. Mmm, art.

NaNoWriMo: Day Four (During Which Cory Ups The Stakes)

13197 / 50000 words. 26% done!

The world is giving me conflicting messages.

First, Changelings You Should Know About blows up in my face, prompting me to work on Stranger instead; I figure I'll give it a few days to see if it works out, and if not, I'll go focus on editing Always Read the Fae Print. To my surprise, Stranger chugs along nicely, ending every day with a word count well ahead of schedule. There's minor panic, because I have no ending, and no outline--until it gives me an ending and an outline.

Huzzah.

I'm optimistic. Happy to be writing a rough draft again, happy to be making progress, happy to have a freakin' ending.

And then the world decides to be a jerk and sends me an invitation to a fancy art exposition--which would be fabulous, except I have to submit my art by November 20th.

SIGH.

So NaNo's getting put on halt while I try to dash out four exposition-worthy pieces of art in record time. After that, I'll have another ten days to try to finish the book in.

I can do that, right? I wrote a whole 70k in ten days last year. How hard can this be?

Gulp.

To spare you my OVERWHELMING PANIC, here's your daily Face Your Manga dose.



Here's two characters from Wielders, a book that's technically shelved--but its characters won't get out of my head. You know how it goes. On the left, Emily, who actually sports a dashing 'fro, but the avatar maker didn't sport that option. Not cool. Anyway, she's an living breathing emo train, but the cutest one you ever did see.

On the right, Nicholas, the self-centered jerk every book truly needs.

... I have no cutesy anecdotes. He's just a jerk. Sorry, Nicholas.

Anyway, I need to get back to drawing nekkid people, lest I get behind. (Did I mention this exposition has a theme? 'Cause it does: nekkid people. How many people have a job that forces them to study nekkid people all day long? Seriously.)

WIP Wednesday, NaNo-style

So it's 1.30PM and I haven't written a thing yet.

I did, however, choose an excerpt to share with y'all for WIP Wednesday. (I'm kind of loving having another rough draft to work on. It's been so long, short stories notwithstanding.)

Scene: MC walks into the diner where she works and is confronted by Dan, her sort-of-adoptive younger brother who she hasn't seen in years.

Leonard, a colleague, tries to help her get rid of him.

“She hadn’t told you a thing, has she?” Dan's still looking at Leonard. “You think she’s just a regular fucking girl.”

My heart skips a beat. Feels like something is wrapping around my throat, suffocating me. “No,” I say. “Dan—no. You can’t—”

“Here.” He takes something from his pocket, thrusts it at Leonard. I make a grab for it—too late. Leonard’s already seen.

He only shrugs. “Yeah. It’s a photo. Good for you. Do I need to call my boss over or are you going to leave on your own?”

“This photo? Taken five years ago. Look at her. Just fucking look at her!”

He does—just a glance. It’s enough to know he’s starting to doubt.

None of that is in his voice when he goes on. “I don’t care. Please keep your voice down and leave.”

“She hasn’t changed. At all. Five years.”

“Xui Li, you don’t have to stay here. Just head into the back room, I’ll make sure this gets dealt with.”

I don’t move.

If Dan took after Lang in more ways than the physical—this could get ugly. I can’t leave Leonard. Or those kids. Not even their parents, who gave up on trying to keep the party going and are just standing there now, and staring, like it’s some kind of damned movie.

“You ever seen her eat?” Dan shouts. “Drink? Ever see her go to the bathroom, or—or cut herself, or bleed or burn? Did you see her hair grow? She ever cuts her nails? She’s not—fucking—human!”

“That’s ridiculous.” My voice sounds steady. Normal. I look at Dan as I say it and I don’t flinch.

Doesn’t matter.

Yeah, that's first person present tense. It's a first for me, as far as novels go. I'm still not entirely sure if I'm pulling it off well or if the story truly needs it, but that's the way it came to me and I'm finding it awfully hard to shake.

If nothing else, I figure it's good practice, right?

NaNoWriMo: Day Three (During Which Cory Attempts To Distract Herself With Shinies)

11164 / 50000 words. 22% done!

4k a day keeps the crazy stress away.

Er, sort of.

Hitting my goal of the day meant I allowed myself to go a leetle bit crazy with that Face Your Manga thing from yesterday. (Blame Cate for reminding me.)

Means I've got, er, twelve new avatars to show now, so I'm thinking I'll spread them out over a couple of posts. Gives me something to post during NaNo aside from crazy stressing over my lack of an outline.

(Oh holy crap how am I going to end this. And how am I only at 11k? Do I have enough story left for 60k? PANIC!)

Ahem.



On the left: Leonard, who will probably be renamed at some point. He's a main character in Stranger, and he's loud, unfamiliar with the concept of privacy, me time, and incapable of grasping subtlety. He's totally desperate for human contact, too. He sort of reminds me of Merel, a side character in Always Read the Fae Print, except she's better at picking up social cues and she's somewhat more laid-back.

Which, er, says a lot, if you know her.

On the right: Valentijn, a secondary character in Always Read the Fae Print and would-be main character of Changelings You Should Know About, which was my NaNo project for, oh, about sixty minutes.

... this picture of him makes me so happy. It's very him. He's cute, and he's a nerd, and I wub him, and I'd wub him a hell of a lot more if he actually let me write his book.

Some other day!

NaNoWriMo: Day Two (During Which Cory Craves An Outline)

7175 / 50000 words. 14% done!

Can someone pretty please tell me what on earth is going to happen in chapters five and six?

Or any chapter after that?

I'm terrified.

And procrastinating. From Face Your Manga, an avatar of Yunupaya--



How cute is that? I'm going to need to collect these things.

But first, er, I should finish this book. I'm aiming for 60-70k; oh, the joys of YA.

Does it still count as YA if your MC is technically twenty-two, but has been physically stuck at age seventeen for the past five years?

Should I be worrying about that at this point?

Have I completely lost the ability to write using proper paragraphs?

NaNoWriMo: Day One (During Which Cory Is Completely Blindsided)

Well.

That was unexpected.

Despite all my werewolf love, at one AM last night - yes, that's a whopping hour after the start of NaNo, thank you very much - I felt pretty much like giving up.

Sometimes, it just doesn't feel right. This? Did not feel right.

I contemplated my options: keep pushing to see if I could get past this block, as I was only at 1500 words, or give up and start on the next draft of Always Read the Fae Print.

I went for option C, which involves writing another book entirely. For a plotter like me, it's pretty terrifying to start on something I haven't spent the six months brainstorming.

On the other hand? I guess this is what NaNo feels like. Who knows - something good might come out of it. So far, so good:

3047 / 50000 words. 6% done!

Anyway, the new book is a YA science-fiction, featuring the chick below as its main character.



Meet Yunupaya. She's a trans-dimensional refugee and she's very pleased to meet you.

The book has the positively awful working title of Stranger, which will certainly be changed once I kick my brain into high gear. For now, it's still too busy focusing on what on earth is happening in chapter four...

Here We Go Again

NaNoWriMo: T minus 101 minutes.

Yeah, I'm doing it again this year, and despite last year's success, I'm a nervous wreck. Instead of feeling comforted by knowing I can do this, I'm fretting over whether I can do it again. Sigh.

On the bright side, I got my first acceptance in over a year last week: Sniplits will be publishing my short story Rule of Threes. Yeah - that's the one with the man-eating salamanders. I'm mad excited, and really curious to hear it in audio form. That should keep me motivated for a few weeks, right?

Besides, this should be a fun project: werewolves, fae, Germanic gods, half-changelings, assassination plots... good times, good times.

From that description, you might gather that this is a sequel to last year's NaNo book, Always Read the Fae Print, with a working title of Changelings You Should Know About. Being a sequel, it's low-pressure - I'm not writing it with the gaol of eventual publication (that'd be a bit presumptuous, considering I haven't even started querying book one), but a) as practise and b) to get the voices in my head to shut up.

As a side project, I've made it my personal goal to convince as many people as possible to incorporate werewolves into their NaNo plot. Current count: 3.

I'll keep y'all posted.

Hour and a half left before I start writing. I guess I'd better go stare at my outline some more. Wish me luck!

Angry Unicorns: The Process, Part Deux

Yesterday, I left you with a half-coloured drawing of angry unicorns.

Today, we continue.

---

I coloured in the details on the orc faces.

I gave the unicorn highlights in their eyes.

I tinkered with the darkness of the horns to help create distance.

I shaded the unicorns, the orcs, played with the manes to give the vague illusion of silver, made sure some of the orcs and unicorns cast shadows on those behind them, made the unicorns in the background slightly faded, tested different background colours, and thought I just might be done.



It occurred to me that, unlike my usual MO, I hadn't mirrored the image yet.

(As a minor aside: if you're into art, for the love of a very angry herd of wild unicorns, mirror your images. Flip them horizontally in Photoshop, hold up a mirror if you work with real media. Take a picture with your digital camera and study the miniature version on its display. Hold the actual picture upside-down. You won't believe the number of mistakes you catch.)

I mirrored the image, felt like weeping bitter tears, and redlined (greenlined, in this case) some corrections.



It might not seem like much, but once you've gotten far enough to outline, colour, and shade, it's a freaking hassle. My bad entirely.

The image was completely tilted composition-wise, so I redrew the unicorn-mass in the background to better balance it. I adjusted the angle of the horn on the left unicorn and made a few other corrections to better balance the picture, including erasing and redrawing a unicorn head on the left and changing the position of the hind legs of the unicorn on the right. The other changes were less integral to the image as a whole, but just didn't look right when mirrored.

Back to work I went.



Here you can see the difference between the new unicorns (outlines) and old unicorns (faded white).



All those changes made. Another actual-size inset. Another realisation that, crap, I wasn't done yet - none of the lineweight variations showed up when resized.

(Are you noticing these blocks of text getting shorter and shorter?)



And after several attempts...

And playing with the background colours some more...

Yeah.

Done.

Finally.

Rock on!

---

What I Learned From The Angry Unicorns

• Horse heads are funny-lookin'.
  
• I need to take colours into account sooner.
  
• I need to not wait until I'm nearly done to mirror it.
  
• I need more practise colouring digitally.
  
• I need to do more stuff like this, because it's challenging as all hell, and that's always a good thing.

As suggested by the fab Ms. Noles, I might make a print out of this. Can't hurt!

Tomorrow, we get back to our not-so-regularly scheduled writing updates ;)

I Will Never Ever Get Tired Of The Phrase "Angry Unicorns"

The Actually Quite Mellow Plugging
Some quick linkage before I dive into the art-heavy, writing-lite post:
* K.V. Taylor is hosting a contest at her blog - only one more day to enter! Talk about your favourite atrocious-yet-lovable character and win cool stuff, such as:
* A copy of Grants Pass, a truly nifty post-apocalyptic anthology from Morrigan Books with a concept to die for.

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The Angry Unicorns
I thought that with all the focus on writing WIPs in the form of WIP Wednesdays, I thought I'd do a one-time-only WIP Thursday and show my art process in the form of a bunch of WIP shots.

After months of on-and-off work - mostly off, to my shame - I finally finished a commission for Pam Noles. Check it out:

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Why The Unicorns Are Angry
Back in May, there was a not-so-minor kerfuffle dubbed MammothFail '09, which resulted in a well-intentioned white SF author implying that, before the advent of the Internet, there were no non-white SF/F fans. This ties in to a more common belief that they don't exist, period. Tired of being constantly rendered invisible, someone on LiveJournal started the wild unicorn check-in, asking people who identify as a PoC/non-white fan of colour to make themselves known.

(As a minor aside: this post was in May. People are still commenting.)

Pam Noles mentioned on it in her blog, suggesting people take that phrase and run with it. The word was spread over a couple of other blogs, I was intrigued by the concept and interested in helping out, and doodled up the sketch to the right.

Pam came across it, dug it, and shot me an e-mail commissioning me to finish it. The rest is history (and described below).

---

How The Angry Unicorns Came To Be
First, I focused on refining the orcs. I enlarged the file and sketched over it on a new layer, adding details and fixing the poses where necessary. The orc on the left (our left) needed the most work - I drew the original sketch without putting an awful lot of thought into it, and now it was time to wonder exactly how someone would ride a horse an angry unicorn. The leg worked all right; the arm and head did not. The right orc was equally stiff-looking in the first picture - what I fixed was the leg (which was drawn up awkwardly initially) and the arm (which needed more foreshortening as well as a prominent hand).

At this point, I only used reference for the orcs' hands, as well as their designs, which were tossed together haphazardly based on Lord of the Rings merchandise and screenshots.

Next, I worked on roughly sketching out the unicorns - more detailed in the front, then fading into the background. I also started outlining on a new layer.




(In case you're interested - the background colour is there because the standard white background is very annoying to work on. Staring at that brightness and contrast for so long can really hurt your eyes.)

I kept on outlining, and added another unicorn in the middle. The outlines of the front-and-centre unicorns are thicker than those of the others to give the illusion of closeness. Here's what it looked like without the sketch:



(Note: none of these insets are actual size. I worked on a 10,000x10,000 pixel canvas for this piece. That's 85x85cm, about 33.5x33.5".)

This was in August. Pam posted a slightly different version on her blog, which included a lighter background so the lines would be easier to see, and the sketch versions of some unicorns I hadn't outlined yet.

At this point, there's a pretty large gap in WIP versions. I finished outlining and started flatting - in other words, colouring on a layer positioned underneath. Because the line-art was all on different layers, this was a pretty tough job, made even tougher by the fact I had no freakin' idea how to colour it.

Unicorns are traditionally white, which also worked with the picture as I originally conceived it, which has them fading into a big ol' mass of white in the background, with only minimal outlines. Of course, due to the story behind this picture, it would make an awful lot of sense if the unicorns were anything but white - as they are in other wild-unicorn-herd-inspired art. I shot an e-mail to Pam asking her preference, she said she had none, and so I went ahead with how I'd originally envisioned it.

Unicorns problem solved.

This left the orcs - and at this point it became abundantly clear how little experience colouring I had. The orcs, who wear traditionally dark, grey/brown colours, were incredibly prominent in front of an all-white background of unicorns. (Going with the alternative of brown unicorns wouldn't have worked, either - that'd just have reversed the problem and made the orcs much harder to pick out.) On top of that, all those desaturated shades made the picture look awfully plain.

I played with the colours, saturating and desaturating them, darkening and lightening, upping and lowering the contrast... it took a while before I found a compromise I was happy with. Neither of the above problems are solved, but they're minimised.

Without any details filled in, this was the picture at that point -



(This time, the inset is actual size.)

The background is obscenely bright because that made it easier to spot when I missed colouring a few pixels. As an aside, to help with that same contract and to make clear which layers some of the mane/tail colours shared, they were originally bright shades of green, red and one other other absurdly bright colour I don't remember. It had a certain charm, I must say.


For part deux of this rapidly growing post, in which I actually fool myself into thinking I finished this thing early, check back tomorrow.

WIP Wednesday: The Rebirth (And Also, Dog Pictures)

Do I have an excuse for not posting for over a month?

... Good question.

Can I distract you with pictures of the new dog?



Meet Bo. She's 14 months old and enjoys escaping the house, running through busy traffic, and very nearly giving me a heart attack chasing after her. (This was my afternoon.)

She's Razzi's new girlfriend. It's True Doggy Love.



It feels almost wrong to put those in the same entry as the next snippet from my current WIP, which features a devout cynophobe as PoV character. It's from a short story I've been working on, set in the same 'verse as Always Read the Fae Print and my upcoming NaNoWriMo novel. (More on that later.)

I spun on my heels. “Dude,” I said. “Dude.”

“Is there a problem?” saccharine voices rang out in unison. One face glanced past the book piles, bone-thin fingers splayed out on the spines as if to steady itself, its eyes gleaming like the beads of mom’s hematite necklace; a dry, ash-grey tongue ran over its lips, nearly reaching the wart-like bump on the very tip of its nose.

I almost preferred the creepy ear-less dude.

“Please tell me you guys didn’t spike his drink.”

“We would never!” they exclaimed, their eyes opening wide. “Your accusations! We are offended, deeply offended!”

“Mm-hmm.”

“We misplaced our cup,” one of the fae insisted, shooting forward to perch on all fours on the pile of books closest to me; the scent of damp earth intermingled with those of aging paper and dust and the dubious foodstall across the path. “He did not bother to see if it was his, did he? His fault. His fault, never ours.”

“Right, well, it’s very funny, can you reverse it now?”

“Reverse? Of course, of course. For a price.”

The Not-So-Mystical Writing Process

I can resist no meme. As usual, taken from KV Taylor. (The questions, that is, not the answers, though you wouldn't guess it at first.)

1. Are you a “pantser” or a “plotter?”
Plotter, oh so definitely a plotter. I assign a notebook to each book and spend a couple of months putting together an outline of a somewhat coherent story before I write the first line. That's not to say I'm unwilling to deviate from the outline should a better idea come to me later on, though, as it usually does - in every draft. The major changes happen in the second draft, where I flesh things out, add complications and fix the inevitable plotholes.

2. Detailed character sketches or “their character will be revealed to me as a I write”?
Both. I generally have a good grasp of a character's personality beforehand, even if I can't always put it into words. The character grows and evolves during the writing, and in the second draft I smoothen things out, removing contradictions and strengthening the aspects important to the storyline. Characters are crazy important to me, so I spend an awful lot of time figuring out backstory and psycho-analysing their relations to the other people in their life.

3. Do you know your characters’ goals, motivations, and conflicts before you start writing or is that something else you discover only after you start writing?
It's pretty much the same as question #2 - I know their major goals and motivations beforehand (at least, for the main characters) but they can change and become deeper during the process.

4. Books on plotting – useful or harmful?
Couldn't tell, never read one. Maybe I should, considering it's a weak spot of mine, but since I've only been able to finish very few writing books... I think I'm just going to wing it until I find myself smashing my head into a brick wall.

5. Are you a procrastinator or does the itch to write keep at you until you sit down and work?
Both, disturbingly. I itch while procrastinating. I really have to force myself to focus and get work done unless I'm neck-deep in a rush of productivity - and those don't tend to last longer than a week or so.

6. Do you write in short bursts of creative energy, or can you sit down and write for hours at a time?
Neither? If I force myself for long enough, I can often end up with long bursts of creative energy if I hit my stride, but those wear off after a couple of days and are fueled less by sheer force of will than excitement that things are going well.

It's a crap process, to be honest. I'm working on it!

7. Are you a morning or afternoon writer?
Depends entirely on how well things are going and what time I get up. If I get up early, it's easier to get started immediately; if I sleep in, it can take until evening. On top of that, sometimes it takes hours of procrastination before things get going, sometimes I can get started straightaway... there's no pattern.

8. Do you write with music/the noise of children/in a cafe or other public setting, or do you need complete silence to concentrate?
Some background noise is fine, but I rarely work with music on. I can (and do) draw with music, for example, but writing is near-impossible. I always listen to the lyrics whenever I have music on, and since those words conflict with those of the story, it just doesn't work.

9. Computer or longhand? (or typewriter?)
Computer. I type at 100-120WPM and could never hope to match that speed longhand. That said, I do all my plotting longhand. For some reason, it's just easier that way.

10. Do you know the ending before you type Chapter One?
Absolutely. I need to know where I'm going. Details might, and probably will change, but I can't work without a clear direction, both for character and plot reasons.

11. Does what’s selling in the market influence how and what you write?
Not really. I can get inspired by some things (did I ever mention how there probably wouldn't be any Always Read the Fae Print without this post?, but that's not really a conscious decision.

12. Editing – love it or hate it?
Effing hate it. I have no objectivity.

Do I need to waste more words on that? I hope not. (I'd just have to edit them out in the end, anyway. Insert inappropriate swearing here!)


That was fun. I'd love to see more people's takes on this :D

Shiny Shiny Sony Reader

I've had my Sony Reader for a couple of weeks now, but I haven't had the chance to use it as much as I'd like; I've been busy with various things, ranging from editing to being sick to procrastination, and life gets in the way. (Today, I found myself working as a background extra for a Dutch TV show. I don't know either, dudes.)

Still, I wanted to share a few of my initial impressions - specifically the ones that'll be useful to the writers reading this blog.

Which is just about all of you. Right.

As expected, the Reader is just lovely for, well, reading. The text resize function works great, the screen is a perfect size, the page refresh rarte is much shorter and less obnoxious than I'd expected, and the device is very comfortable to hold and use regardless of how you choose to turn the pages (either slide a finger across or press a key).

The one downside is the contrast. Since I have the touch screen version, the background is a little darker than most e-readers - or so I hear, as I've never used any others - and this is very noticable. Though it works fine in natural light, indoors, you'll need awfully bright light to read comfortably. The (yellow-tinted) light in my living room is dubious; the bathroom light is perfect.

Er, not that I took it with me when I went to brush my teeth or anything.

I have to say, though, the software that came with the Reader is terrible. It crashed several times and now freezes up constantly when syncing - not to mention that you can't edit the author/title tags for some inexplicable reason. A search for Mac software compatible with my version of the Reader is still underway.

A lot of us writerly types might want to use it to edit, which I was sincerely looking forward to. To be honest, I'm somewhat let down on this front. It offers several options to edit a document: you can highlight text, you can jot down notes on the page in handwriting, or you can dog-ear a page. Revising the text directly doesn't seem to be an option, as far as I can tell.

The handwriting function is the most versatile. As you enter edit mode, you can use your fingers or the pen (use the pen!) to strike through text or jot down notes, which can later be accessed in both the document itself and the notes function, which allows you to easily browse through your own comments.

As with most touch screens, writing with the pen takes some time to get used to, and it forces you to write much larger than the actual text. That said, it'd still be doable to use for editing if not for one major downside - the way it transfers your notes to the computer is absolutely ridiculous.

While it does save the page with both the original text and your notes as a separate image file, it does so at a ridiculously tiny resolution, making the text completely illegible. It does save the notes at a regular size in a separate Illustrator file - but without the original text, giving you a lot of orphaned strike-throughs and out-of-context corrections.

My head hurts just thinking about it.

Yes, you can still use the Reader as you might use hardcopy edits/notes - that is, reference the Reader directly while incorporating the changes into your Word file - but having them on the same screen would have made this function so much easier to use.

So, it's on-screen or hardcopy edits for me - which reminds me that I really ought to get back to editing Wielders. I'm desperate to finish this draft before the month is out, and I expect y'all to hold me to that.

WIP Wednesday & The Plague

Still editing Wielders. It's looking more and more doubtful I'll manage my (ridiculous arbitrary self-imposed) deadline of September 15th, but I've decided to forgive myself on account of coming down with the plague. That is, swine flu.

Yeah. I'm not even joking.

So work has pretty much come to a grinding halt, but in theory, I'm working on chapter fifteen (out of nineteen, plus a tiny epilogue), which consists of a whopping twenty-one pages:



So far, I've gone through nine of them, but only belatedly realised I forgot to focus on any of my actual goals, so I'll probably just start over again later. Good times!

I'd choose a snippet to include, but er, I can't really concentrate enough to read, or be at the computer for that long. (You know. Because of the swine flu. Okay, I can't help it, I think it's freaking hilarious. But enough about my bizarre sense of humour...)

So, I'm going to grab a snuggly blanket and even snugglier kitty and camp out on the couch. Animal Planet awaits!

Presenting the Wielders Cast

One of these days, I'll have something truly fascinating to post.

Today doesn't seem to be that day, because all I have are South Park-style interpretations of my main characters from Wielders.

I was editing and needed a distraction, okay?



From left to right: Lynne (will glare at you), Chen (will be nice at you), Emily (will be cute at you), Nicholas (will be cynical at you), Sara (will cut you).

(Actually, she'll shoot you, but that thing didn't have any guns. She'll make do.)

Back to work. I'm still firmly aiming for my September 15th deadline for this draft, and I lost a lot of valuable time yesterday stressing out over the computer crash that I thought had killed all my edits from the day before... you don't want to know. Really.