Murder Ponies

Let’s have a little talk about tweedle beetles unicorns.

So. Okay. I like unicorns. I’m not ashamed to admit it. In third grade, I was so into unicorns that I may or may not have formed an imaginary religion centered around them. I’m much more restrained about my love for unicorns now that I’m (allegedly) a grownup, but I still think they’re pretty cool.

But here’s the problem. A lot of the people making unicorn-related things (movies, stickers, etc) do not get what is cool about unicorns.

Even when I was a kid, sometimes family members who heard I liked unicorns would get me something with a unicorn on it that looked like this:

People.  People.  That is not a unicorn.  That is... I don’t even know.  A pig with a really big zit.

The great thing about unicorns is this: they are like horses, only armed for violence.

Unicorns are the original eco-terrorists. They’re badass, mystical defenders of the forest. They can melt into the woods like a ninja, wield powerful magic, and have a big impaling spike on their heads for melee combat. Everything about them screams “do not mess with me.”

And yet in books, games, and movies, 99% of the time they exist just to be captured, killed, or corrupted by bad guys. They’re worse than princesses.

The best (by which I mean most ironic) part is that there is always some talk about how powerful or elusive unicorns are supposed to be and how it must have taken a truly potent evil to do this awful thing. 

Dude. What self-respecting bad-guy hasn’t? Darkness... Voldemort... King Haggard... it’s like the initiation rite for the Cool Kids Club of Evil.

And mind you, this happens in books and movies that I absolutely love. But seriously, guys, we need more positive unicorn role models, here. We do have a few Princess Leias of the unicorn world — like, the Last Unicorn was definitely badass; and despite being purple, Twilight Sparkle doesn't back down from a fight... but they're the exceptions that prove the rule. We need more Sarah Connor/Katniss Everdeen kind of unicorns. They have so much badass guerrilla warrior potential!

I mean, look at that horn. What do you think it's for? It's not for butting heads in courtship displays. It's not for picking up radio signals. It’s for FATAL STABBING.

Unicorns are lethal murder ponies.

It’s time to start treating them like it.

And what have we learned today?

Horrible murderers are the snuggliest!

Robins Aren't the Only Thing Tweeting in the Slush

So, I’ve entered a pitch contest.

For those of you who may not know, in a typical pitch contest, hundreds of people submit pitches of their novels (usually consisting of a very short synopsis and/or the first page or so), and a small number are chosen and posted for a group of literary agents to compete over. They’re pretty cool even if you don’t get picked, because you get to meet other writers and find out what they’re working on. It gives you a real appreciation for how much talent is out there.

Of course, sometimes the talent of others can be hard to appreciate.

But once you beat your ego into submission, it’s a great experience.

One interesting sideshow that comes with many pitch contests is a very cool phenomenon called slush tweeting, in which the readers who choose the finalist entries make cryptic tweets about their selection process before the finalists are announced. Naturally, everyone who entered the contest stays glued to this feed like lab mice waiting for the next pellet.

Sometimes, the tweets can give you irrational confidence about your own chances.

Other times, the tweets can crush your hope like a VW Bug under the heel of a giant mutant sea lizard.

They can also engender the perverse urge to troll the judges with your next contest entry.

Eventually, trying to figure out whether any of the tweets are about your book leads to complete loss of sanity.

The smart thing to do might be to walk away from the Twitter feed. But the readers often post really good advice and pithy observations that can be useful to anyone. So it may be torture — but it’s worthwhile torture.

Or at least, it beats working.

And what have we learned today?

Wait, what’s wrong with a YA dystopian vampire Harry Potter novel?

Good Bones

I don’t know how it is for other people, but my own progress as a writer is full of “Well, duh” epiphanies.  You know... those moments when you realize something in this big flash of brilliance that should have been painfully obvious all along.

It’s comforting to me that no matter how far I feel I’ve come over the years, I still have a lot to learn.  Even really basic things that everyone else probably already knows.

Well... maybe comforting isn’t quite the right word.

A lot of my “Well, duh” realizations in recent years have been about structure.  I’m starting to believe that darn near everything comes down to structure, one way or another.  Plot... character... dialogue... if it doesn’t have good bones, you can dress it up all you want in pretty words, but it’s still going to be lame.

Lookin' sharp!

Part of the reason it took me so long to figure this out is that not too long ago, I couldn’t really see structure.  Heck, I only vaguely knew it was a thing.  My writing professors weren’t really into structure in college and grad school.

My first clue came from reading Story by Robert McKee (which is about screenplay writing, but as the name implies, works for fiction, too).  That book is jam-packed with “Well, duh” revelations, like how something should actually change in every scene, which was a big one for me.  (I was embarrassingly into “show the reader the status quo” scenes before that.)

After enough times asking myself “Does this scene contribute anything to the story?” and “What changes in this scene?” and “Is this character progressing along her arc?” and stuff like that, I finally began to actually see the structure.  This makes everything so much easier.

I’m sure lots of people could do that all along, and it’s no big deal to them. But for me, it was like raising one eyebrow.  When I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be able to raise one eyebrow (so I could look at people sardonically, I guess?), and I struggled for about a year and just couldn’t do it.  Then, finally, I found the secret one-eyebrow-raise muscle, and wow, there it was!  I still had to train that muscle up, and there are still many people who raise one eyebrow better than I do, but I can do it.

This is a large part of what’s made revision more fun in recent years (see earlier post).  Trying to fix things is way more satisfying (and, I hope, effective) when you feel like you can actually see what you’re doing.

Otherwise, you can wind up doing this.

It’s taken a lot of the frustration and mystery out of revision for me.  Now, whether it lets me do something awesome, like raising one eyebrow, remains to be seen.

And what have we learned today?

Fluid dynamics are hard.

The Waiting Game

So.  My middle grade novel is out on sub to agents.

Yeah... that was pretty much my January.

I could say more, but really, the comic sums it up nicely.

Revision: Journey to Better than Boring

I’ve been writing books for pretty much my entire life.  Before I could actually write words, I’d make picture books and staple them together.  But I didn’t really start revising books until I was, oh, in my twenties.

The main reason for this was that until then, I wrote them all out with an actual pen on paper.  This is because I’m old.

Actually, that’s not entirely true.  I also typed stories on our electric typewriter, which made me feel about as grownup as is humanly possible.  The chemical smell of the ribbon was so professional, and the big ka-CHUNK... zzzzzing! when you hit a carriage return gave you a sense of accomplishment that is entirely missing from this era of text wrap.

I started writing novels on the computer when I was around 10-ish (hilariously terrible novels, naturally), but the thing that really screwed me was my love of blank books.  I would (at the time) way rather write something out longhand in a bunch of blank books than type it on a computer.  Because blank books were clearly made of magic.

Even that’s not entirely it, though, because in high school I wrote a (godawful) novel just on random lined pads, and put it in a binder.  I guess there was something satisfying in the physicality of having an ever-increasing stack of written pages that is missing from having an ever-increasing... number of bytes?

Yeah... that’s not quite doing it for me on a visceral level.

Suffice to say that my practice up until college was to start to write a novel, either make it partway through or finish it, read it to myself in happy accomplishment, and then move on to the next one.  Because by that point, I had some other idea trying to burn its way out of my skull.

Then, at some point, it became clear to me that I needed to actually revise things and make them better.  This was scary.

After all, the book was there, complete: a single, seamless thing.  How could I break it down into pieces?  How could I figure out where to add stuff, remove stuff, change stuff?  If I changed one thing, then WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO ALL THE OTHER THINGS?!?!?

I hated revision.  I just wanted to be done with it.

But that changed.  First, I learned the joys of deleting.  There is something really satisfying in cutting an entire scene that isn’t doing anything for the story — it’s easy, it gets your word count down (which is the direction I usually need to go), and it often makes things magically tighter and snappier.  Now I’ve gotten to the point where sometimes I’ll write a scene, look at it, and that very same night realize that it isn’t advancing the story and cut the whole thing.

Then I learned to rewrite scenes, which was tougher for me: taking the same basic scene, but starting it over again, approaching it a different way.  This was (and still can be) hard, because I had to be willing to let go of what I’d already written as the Way It Happened, and consider my story to be something much more fluid, that could go down all sorts of different ways.

I still have a long way to go before I feel like I’m really good at this.  But I’ve recently hit another milestone... To my surprise, on my latest major revision project, I found that I was actually enjoying revising.  I always hated it, but this time it was... kind of fun.  It was a Green Eggs and Ham moment.

Of course, that may have just been because even revising a novel is still way more fun than my day job (technical writing), which was the other thing I could have been doing.  But I’ll take what I can get.

And what have we learned today?

Everything is more epic with dragons.

The Perils of Feedback

The funny thing about getting feedback on a book is that I am entirely at odds with myself in what I want.

On the one hand, I want this:

On the other hand, if I actually get a response remotely along those lines to a request for feedback, this is my internal reaction:

Thus, I’ve found it useful to ask my test readers a list of questions that will hopefully help identify ways to make the book better while still giving them room to tell me how wonderful it is, should they feel inclined to do so.  (Which may sound greedy, but hey, after spending several months to a year on a project, sometimes you do kinda need a little validation before jumping into round two.)

Ideally, the questions get the readers thinking about specific elements of the book that worked or didn’t work for them, thereby avoiding the classic traps of feedback that is either too vague...

...or too specific...

...or too tied in to the reader’s particular worldview.

When the feedback finally comes in, I read it eagerly.  And then begins the overthinking...

...and the defensiveness:

Finally, I work through all that stuff and get to the point where I can be properly analytical about it.  Often feedback will identify a problem, but suggest a solution that won’t work for my vision for the book — but that doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real.

This time around, getting feedback was particularly interesting, because I had two readers who were actually in my target age group for the middle grade novel I’m working on (one 9 and one 11).  The kids gave surprisingly awesome advice, and they identified some things the adults missed.  There were also some parts that the kids really liked that the adults didn’t comment on, and vice versa.  It all reminded me that kids and adults read for different things, and made me really glad that I had both adult and kid readers.

It did mean that my older daughter found the best way ever to get to stay up late, however.

And what have we learned today?

You can’t post a picture of one daughter and not the other.

Making Time

Sometimes, people ask me, “Melissa, how do you find the time to be creative when you have two kids?”

This is generally the cue for hysteria-tinged laughter.  Because finding time is not something I do.  I carve time ruthlessly out of the flesh of an angry T-Rex while clinging to the side of an out-of-control bullet train with one broken arm and an alligator clamped onto my leg.  And now that I’ve written that, I need to draw it, because those are the rules of this blog:

More specifically, for the first year after I had my first baby, I didn’t find time to do creative things.  It was the first time since I was about 7 years old that I wasn’t working on a book, and aside from taking some sporadic notes on certain ideas I had for a later project, I was practically creatively dead.

If you’ve ever had a small baby who never wants to be put down and NEVER EVER SLEEPS, you might understand why.  I actually learned to surf the internet with my toe while nursing.  And I got voice software, but let’s say the technology was far from perfect.

Things got a bit better as the baby got older.  Then, finally, my kids went to school, and suddenly, for the first time in years, I actually had a few hours a day to myself.

Quickly, I learned that if I wanted to get creative stuff done in the extremely limited time I had available, I had to cut almost all other leisure activities from my life.  I allowed myself virtually no movies, TV, or internet surfing; limited social media; and even (sob) drastically reduced reading time.  It was tough, but it let me get a little writing in every day.

However, I may have overdone it a bit.

Finding a balance where I could fit things like hygiene and actual time with my husband into a day along with parenting and creative projects was difficult, but at times I managed to succeed for a while... though it meant never getting to experience many things that sounded wonderful, like Zombieland or Downton Abbey.  (For the record, I do mean to correct those sad gaps in my cultural education at some point.)

Then employment struck.  Now I work for the entire time my kids are at school.  When they come home, I have to help them with homework, spend some good mommy time with them, make them dinner, bathe them when possible, and get them to bed at a reasonable hour. When they’re in bed, I finally get to write...

...Or do I?

And what have we learned today?

Chasing down a bullet train while clinging to a T-Rex is way cooler.