An Ending: Rand al'Thor

This post contains spoilers for A Memory of Light. 

Read at your own peril.  

An Ending: The Wheel of Time

This post contains spoilers for A Memory of Light.

Read it at your own peril.

I am writing this on Saturday, January 12, 2013, though it won't post until Monday. I got up this morning at 8 am, promptly opened A Memory of Light for the first time, and continued reading it until 9:45 pm. I think it's safe to assume that between meals, bathroom breaks, and dealing with my dogs, I actually read it in under thirteen hours. I think that's a new record for me. 908 pages of small font in thirteen hours. But man, I couldn't have stopped if I wanted to.

It's finally over.

I didn't actually cry at any point, mainly because when I'm reading I'm so engrossed in a story that I rarely feel anything. It's not like watching a movie. It's more immediate than that. I'm just so in it that there really isn't a me sitting separate from it to cry. Which is weird and hard to explain. But my eyes did burn at several point, and when I got to the end, when I read those last words, I almost did cry.

I closed the book and sat there for a moment, leaning over it. I just...the ending...I...

No words.

It's hard to sum up how I feel as a whole, other than every time I read those last words of the book, I want to cry, though I can't explain why.

Maybe it's because for so long we've talked about how there are no beginnings, but it was a beginning. And finally, it was an ending.

I really can't express all the different things I'm feeling in one post because there are so many! So what I'm going to do instead is write a post about how I feel about each of the major character story lines and then probably a post about a whole much of miscellaneous characters.

I'll post one a day for the next two weeks, because I don't want to spend the next month drawing this out for people who don't care about the Wheel of Time. I think I can get it all done in that time. Right now I'm thinking the following schedule.

Tuesday (1/15): Rand
Wednesday (1/16): Mat
Thursday (1/17): Perrin
Friday (1/18): Egwene
Monday (1/21): Demandred
Tuesday (1/22): Tuon
Wednesday (1/23): Aviendha, Elayne, & Min
Thursday (1/24): Androl & Pevara
Friday (1/25): Miscellaneous
  
But now I also intend to re-read the whole series. Why? Various reasons, but mainly because I like to read a whole series with knowledge of the ending as I start from the beginning. 

And maybe just maybe I'll do it because I want to believe: "There are no endings, and never will be endings, to the turning of the Wheel of Time."

Query Take Three

The major feedback from Monday was "need more plot" but "love the last line" (which I do too!). So here is my second attempt at the query. What do you guys think? Too much? Not enough? Would you read it?

So keeping in mind Krista's reminder about needing to establish character, conflict, and stakes in a query, what do you guys think of the following:

Take Two:

Chris is doomed to life as a Norm--a normal 17-year-old, that is--until his wizard father develops an amulet that grants even the most un-magical of people wizard powers. After years of being the family pariah, as the only Norm in a family of wizards, Chris has the power he always wanted and his father is finally proud of him.

Finally a wizard, Chris is now allowed to attend Southeast Paranormal High School with his siblings and best friend. At Para High, popularity and power are intrinsically linked, and after Chris saves his classmates from an attack by a vicious spirit, he takes his places as the most popular student at the school.

However not everyone is happy with the development of his late and unexpected powers. The beautiful, MIT bound Marilla rebuffs all of Chris's attempts at friendship with suspicion, and when Chris's best friend, Jeremy, discovers Chris's powers are unnatural, he demands that Chris give up the amulet, which he views to be a threat to Norm and Para kind.

But Chris won't go back to the way life was before: being a reject in his own family and a second-class citizen. And now he's the most powerful wizard to ever live--powerful enough to tweak the minds of those who confront him.

After all, what's a little mind control  between friends?

THE DESCENT OF CHRIS CHAPPELL is an 81,000 word YA paranormal fantasy told from the viewpoints of both Chris and Marilla.

OK! So due to mid-day feedback, TAKE THREE!

Chris Chappell is doomed to life as a Norm--a normal 17-year-old, that is--until his wizard father develops an amulet that grants even the most un-magical of people wizard powers. After years of being the family pariah, as the only Norm in the Chappell family, Chris has the power he always wanted and his father is finally proud of him.

Officially a wizard, Chris is eligible to attend Southeast Paranormal High School with his siblings and best friend. At Para High, popularity and power are intrinsically linked, and after Chris saves his classmates from attack by a vicious spirit, he takes his place as the most popular student at the school.

However, not everyone is impressed with Chris's limitless powers. The beautiful, MIT bound Marilla rebuffs all of Chris's attempts at friendship. Being scientifically minded, Marilla is naturally suspicious of people who rely on magic to get them everything, but as she gets to know Chris, she finds her defenses weakening.

When his best friend, Jeremy, discovers Chris's powers are unnatural, Jeremy demands that Chris give up the amulet, which is a threat to both Norm and Para kind. But Chris will not go back to the way life was before: being a reject in his own family and a second-class citizen. And now he's the most powerful wizard to ever live--powerful enough to tweak the minds of those who confront him.

After all, what's a little mind control between friends?

THE DESCENT OF CHRIS CHAPPELL is an 81,000 word YA paranormal fantasy told from the viewpoints of both Chris and Marilla.

So...better?

Query Help!!

My dear, lovely, wonderful readers, today I need your assistance. I recently finished revising The Descent of Chris Chappell. It's down to a beautiful, lovely 81,000 words. (Uh...well beautiful, tragic 81,000 is probably a better description). And my beta readers have their hands on it as we speak, trying to turn it into a masterpiece.

But you see, I really hate query writing, and if I'm ever going to get published, I need to have a killer query. So below is the query for my story, and I would really really appreciate it if you guys could give me your reactions and feedback.

The most important question one must ask themselves when giving query feedback is: would you want to read the story the query is describing. So if you could especially help answer that question, (and why or why not) I would greatly appreciate it.

Any other advice/nitpicks/thoughts/feelings/concerns are greatly appreciated.

So without further ado, the QUERY:

Chris is doomed to the life of a Norm—a normal American 17-year-old that is—until his wizard father develops an amulet to grant even the most normal of people wizard powers. It’s all Chris ever wanted. With the amulet he becomes praiseworthy, popular, and powerful.

But not everyone is happy with the development of Chris’s late and unexpected powers, including Chris’s best friend, Jeremy. He thinks being a Norm is nothing to be ashamed of and realizes the dangerous implications of the amulet. It allows Chris to draw his power from the world around him, instead of from himself like a true wizard, giving him unlimited power. If it got into the wrong hands, the wielder of the amulet would be unstoppable. The amulet’s very existence is a danger to both wizard and Norm kind. Chris, however, is not willing to go back to being the shame of his family. He won’t go back to being on the outside looking in. And he’s now the most powerful wizard to ever live—powerful enough to tweak the minds of those who confront him.

After all, what’s a little mind control between friends?

The Descent of Chris Chappell is an 81,000 word YA paranormal fantasy told from two points of view.

So would you want to read this story? Why or why not? Other thoughts?

Thanksgiving? Already?

The other day at work, I was on the phone for a telecon. I was discussing scheduling stuff, trying to make sure we had time to get everything in, when someone said, "You know Thanksgiving is next week, right?"

No, I didn't. Somehow, I thought we had an entirely extra week in November and that Thanksgiving wasn't [what is now] this week but rather the week after. I feel like I've lost an entire week somewhere, guys. 

This week is Thanksgiving!

Which means Christmas is only like a month away, and that a HUGE HUGE HUGE work deadline is shortly after that, and A MEMORY OF LIGHT is only weeks away! (No longer months! We can talk in weeks!) 

And I'm not ready for any of these things. 

I still have Christmas presents I haven't bought, which is highly unusual for me. Normally, by Thanksgiving, I have all the presents I need to buy hidden in my closet. (Though why I hide them when I live alone and there is no one around to find them, I don't know). I don't have my plane ticket for flying home for Christmas purchased (which means it's going to cost me an arm and a leg). And all in all I'm just unprepared for it to be Christmas.

Let's not even get into how unprepared I am for the work deadline. Might be working some long hours coming up.

So are you guys ready for Thanksgiving and Christmas? Am I the only one it snuck up on this year?    

City of Bones Movie Trailer

Despite the fact I tend to write YA, you guys know I'm not a huge fan of it. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of YA books, but unlike "adult" or "MG" books which I generally always like, YA books and I have a long and tortured history.

So when I say I'm super fan-girl excited about the City of Bones movie (being billed as "The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones"), you know I don't say that lightly. But I loved the book. And this trailer looks seriously amazing:

Now if you haven't read the book I know what some of you guys are thinking. It just seems like another Twilight ripoff. The trailer seems all "girl and guy inexplicably drawn to each other" and "only this girl can save the world" and "blah blah every YA trope ever made into existence. I know guys. I know. 

But that is not what this book is like; go read my short review of the book and come back.

Read it? Good. I know the review was also vague. So let's get into some enticing clarifications.

Imagine a villain who has all the ferocity and power of Voldemort, topped with the suave and charm we're told Voldemort had as a younger man. The sort of villain who doesn't just attract your regular "evil" types, but also decent people with his words and ideas. A revolutionary if you will, whose revolution turns out to be darker than anyone expected.

And imagine that villain is played by Jonathan Rhys Meyer. 

What? That's not enough for you? Ok, I get it, you want to actually know what the plot is about. 

Clary, a regular average girl, witnesses two teens murder another teen in a dance club. When she freaks out and tries to report it, no one else sees what she's talking about. Shortly after, her mother goes missing and Clary is attacked by a strange creature in her own home. She is saved by the a fore mentioned murderer--an enigmatic boy named Jace--and taken to his home, the "Institute", a training ground for "Shadowhunters".

Shadowhunters are half angel/half human, also known as the Nephilim. They essentially police the fantastical underbelly of our world: where werewolves, vampires, and demons live. By all rights, as a "mundane" (i.e. muggle, normal person), Clary shouldn't have been able to see the murder of the demon in the club. And neither should have mother been kidnapped. 

There must be more to Clary than there seems to be. And as everyone will soon discover, Clary is not the only one with a hidden past. No one is who they seem to be. And there is a villain who has been orchestrating everything from the shadows.

In short, it's going to be awesome.

And you should totally read the book.

(P.S. Remember when I mentioned Magnus Bane as a member of my Alien Response team a while back? Magnus Bane is from this book.)

Draft Zero

Since tomorrow marks halfway through the month of November, it seems appropriate to post about how NaNoWriMo is going for me. And long story short it’s harder than I expected.

I expected NaNoWriMo to be easy. You’re talking to the girl who once busted out 10,000 words in four hours. I live and breathe writing. I have loved writing since the sixth grade when I wrote that first terrible Star Wars story. (Note: It wasn’t terrible because it was Star Wars. It was terrible because it had no plot. Also, for the record, though it probably does count as fan fiction, all of the characters were completely original. It just took place in the Star Wars universe. Basically, I shortcut world building). Writing is what I do. All the time. For fun.

So I thought getting 50,000 words in a month would be no problem. Instead I’ve found it to be intensely painful every step of the way.

The words didn’t flow like I was used to. I realized that as much as I knew about my main character, Zeke, I actually didn’t know him. I only knew the text book facts of his life. I didn’t know him as a person. I didn’t know his voice. And it wasn’t just him, my main character, I didn’t know. It was everyone. Every side character, every friend and enemy Zeke has. I didn’t know who these people were.

And that’s when I realized something.

I was trying to write a Draft One, when I wasn’t ready to. I needed to write a Draft Zero first.

“Draft Zero” may be an unfamiliar term to you. I’m not sure it’s something I’ve ever heard someone else use, though in my head I use it all the time. I’m just going to go ahead and blame my boss in my day job for this one, since he’s talks a lot about “Zeroeth Order Success”. Essentially, a level below the level that should be first…

So why do I say “Draft Zero” instead of “Draft One”? Well, because I’ve discovered there are two different kinds of first drafts.

The kind of used to dealing with recently is what I’d call a Draft One. It’s a draft of a new story in a world I completely understand with characters I completely understand. Sometimes, that’s because it’s a sequel (though I tend to not write too many sequels as of right now). With a sequel, I’m writing in a world I already completely created. I don’t need to stop every too pages and ask myself if people would behave a certain way in that world or what sort of technology they have. I already know that. Often, I already know most of the characters too. They are the same people from the previous story, or people closely involved with the people in the previous story. I know who these people are. I understand their world.

But sometimes it’s not a sequel. More often than not, for me, it’s a world I created a long time ago and wrote a (terrible) story in when I was younger. I was an extremely prolific writer in my middle school and high school years. I created new worlds all the time, and I wrote down as many details and thoughts about them as I could. Most of them I even wrote stories about. And they were pretty terrible. Epically terrible even. However, in college I re-discovered a lot of those old stories, and I re-imagined them. This worked very similar to any sequel work I’ve done. In many ways I already understood the worlds. I might have to redefine an aspect or two, or sometimes I even mashed two old worlds together to create a new world which required a lot of rework, but for the most part it was like smoothing out something I already created. More like the revision process than the draft process, even though essentially every word I wrote was brand new and nothing like what I wrote in my younger days.

A perfect example of this would be The Descent of Chris Chappell. The idea for that story had been in my head since I was fourteen. And I finally wrote a first draft last year, literally ten years after I had the idea. For ten years that idea was stewing in the back of my mind, pulling in all sorts of awesome creative juices. For ten years I had been writing random scenes and sequences, figuring out who these characters were. And then one day it just clicked. Thus the 10,000 words in 4 hours. I wrote a first draft. It wasn’t beautiful. It needed a lot of work. (Still needs a lot of work. I’m almost done with Draft 2). But it came to me fairly easily. Because these characters were people I’d known for ten years.

Which brings us to the idea of a Draft Zero. This is a completely new story. I had the idea for the setting for this world maybe a year ago, and didn’t play around with it much. I just wrote it down somewhere that this would be a cool world. And then for NaNoWriMo I decided to write a story in that world.

And it’s not going well. Because I’m expecting it to work like a Draft One. And it’s not. It’s a Draft Zero.

In a Draft One process, I know things are going to need to be revised but that for the most part they are working in the right direction. In this Draft Zero process, I don’t even know that. I’ve written ten chapters (20,000 words!) and I’m just now beginning to know who these characters are. I don’t even know them fully. Essentially every sentence, every word, and every idea I’ve written is going to have to be completely thrown out.

What I’m learning is that this draft is completely crap. Completely. And I’m going to have throw the whole thing out.

Just like I did with those old drafts in high school.

This crappy draft is what my old drafts in high school were to my recent stories, as in it barely counts as existing. Hence, Draft Zero.

Before NaNoWriMo began I never realized how long it had been since I’ve done a Draft Zero. In undergrad I worked almost exclusively in one world, the world of Spirit Riddled, which I’ve written about fairly often here. I created that story, from scratch my sophomore year. It wasn’t based on anything from high school, but that sophomore was extremely creatively productive and I essentially created a Draft Zero. It wasn’t a pure draft in many ways. I wrote well over 80,000 words on just random scenes between characters and events that I thought might come to pass. And then I went back and wrote a draft one. Then I revised it. Twice. Revising it for a third time before shopping it around has been on my list of things to do for quite some time.

Then I began to focus on Descent. Which had tons of Draft Zero work done in high school on it.

There was one other original story I began to work on in undergrad and I would argue it’s still in the Draft Zero phase. I’ve written tons of backstory and what I think might happen, but I haven’t actually started on a Draft One yet.

And I guess this NaNoWriMo has really taught me that the Draft Zero is critical to my writing process.

I just can’t sit down and write 50,000 continuous words in the same story and expect to feel good about it, and expect to call that my first draft. That’s not how my process works. I need to give myself more freedom than that. I need to write 80,000 words of what might be, what could be, just to develop the world and how the characters interact with each other. Those 80,000 words don’t need to be continuous. They can be fun scenes. They can be pointless scenes where characters do nothing but talk and interact. They can be nothing that will ever, ever make it into a finished draft.

And that’s ok. That’s my process. Because I’m a weird mix of a gardener and an architect. I can’t write a story without a plan, without a vague outline. But I can’t write an outline without having detailed knowledge of who my characters are and what world they live in. And I can only create that knowledge with free form writing. So I make a test garden, where I plant whatever the heck I want and watch how it grows. Then when I see what those seeds become, I go back and I design a brand new garden.

If I get nothing else out of NaNoWriMo this month other than it has taught me this critical fact about my process, then that’s ok. And from this moment on, I’m going to go forward with my NaNoWriMo in a different way. I will write 50,000 words, but I’m not going to feel rushed to make it a story, to make it coherent. I’m going to have my characters walk in a corridor talking back in forth just to see what happens. I’m going to isolate them in a room just to see what happens. I’m going to write about characters who will never appear in the story just to explore the world.

And that's ok. 

So how about you, what's your process?