Your regularly scheduled blog post will return when the writer has finished the first draft of her manuscript which will be next week because that’s her final deadline with her book coach!

p.s. The book coach wants to approach literary agents with my (as-yet-unfinished) book.

(yay 🙂 )

Writing is a lonely profession, where perseverance in the face of the world’s absolute indifference to your drive, talent and goals is essential.

So when a professional like my book coach Jennie compliments my work, I’m buoyed.

But when a professional like my book coach Jennie compliments my work on her own blog, to her own readers, I’m jazzed. 🙂

Here’s an excerpt from her most recent blog. (By the way, I’m Writer A… 🙂 )

Writer A came to me with a finished novel – sci fi YA – which she hoped to polish up before submission. She had been working on it for a long time and felt relatively confident in her effort – among other reasons because she is a creative writing teacher at a high school and knows her stuff.  But I asked her a few basic questions about the point of the book, the desire of the characters – and she couldn’t answer. She had a super cool scenario, but had not done any of the deep work that would make the narrative hold together over the course of a whole book. I also looked at her first chapter and there were glaring errors in the first pages that would make any agent say no and any reader pick up another book. Those errors were info dumps and head-hopping (moving from one character’s head to another within the same paragraph or scene.) These are extremely common problems.

(Ok, that’s not the compliment part…)
 
The amazing thing was that this writer was really talented in all other writerly ways.

(Here’s the compliment.)

She just hadn’t done the deep story work she needed to do, and she had few bad habits she simply could not see. “I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles,I wasn’t writing info dumps,” she later said to me. And yet she was…
 
We worked together for four weeks to nail down the internal logic of her story, and then she re-wrote those opening pages four times. I made her go back four times to the same five pages. I kept marking the info dumps and the head-hopping until she could see them herself, and avoid them. Then we followed the logic we had hammered out, and she wrote forward from there, revising her story as we went.

(Here was the hard, frustrating work.)
 
She is almost finished with a revised draft of her novel. There are no info dumps anywhere in sight and the POV problems are completely gone.  The narrative is seamless and riveting. I am not exaggerating when I say that her work has brought tears to my eyes.

(If that isn’t a compliment… )

It’s SO good.

(That, too.)

It’s a thousand times better than it was before. It has a thousand times better chance of finding an audience.

(I hope she’s right!)
 

(http://jennienash.com/how-to-write-a-book-blog/2017/8/3/what-does-a-book-coach-do-part-4-the-dangers-of-diybook-writing)

When I started my semester off in February, I had an ambitious goal: start and finish a draft of a new book, my third, before I returned to the classroom in September.

When I ran into roadblocks looking for literary agents to take on my already-finished manuscript, I shelved my original plans. I had to take time to fix Book #2  before I could go on to Book #3.

When I threw out everything I’d done on Book #2 and started from scratch, I chucked my original goal. There was no way I could rewrite my Phoenix Cells book and write a brand new one before the fall.

When my book coach Jennie sent me an e-mail last week asking if I’d thought about beta readers and literary agents, I thought she was crazy. Why would I think about the steps that come after a polished manuscript is completed when I haven’t even finished a first draft? But Jennie assured me I was well on track to finishing my draft by the end of August. It means I’ve had to pick up the pace–writing two scenes a week instead of two scenes every two weeks, but I’m determined to meet my deadlines.

Which got me thinking… maybe I will have accomplished my original goal after all. I wanted to write a brand new book, Book #3, and that’s exactly what I’ve done. While the name of my main character is the same as Book #2 and the concept that she has “super cells” remains consistent, everything else is different. Even Lyra herself is a different person. The plot is different, the setting, is different, the theme is different. The whole book is different.

So, I can either consider this a rewrite of Book #2, or I can consider this Book #3.

Some people might argue that it’s better to think of it as a rewrite–why tell yourself you failed at getting two novels published? But I’ve decided on the opposite. I like thinking of this as a brand new book.

Which means I will meet my goal of writing Book #3 after all.

(Yay for me. 🙂 )

It’s full-on summer, which  means, with my kids home from school, I’m a full-on mom.

Which means I have less time to write.

Which means I have to prioritize my writing time: work on my novel to get my first draft completed by the end of August or continue with my twice-weekly blog updates, since I’m discovering I don’t have time to do both.

Which means I have to cut back on my blog posts.

Which means I’ll now only be posting once a week about my progress–otherwise I won’t have any progress to post about. 🙂

Thanks for your support so far and we’ll chat again next week.

Did you know that adjectives describe nouns? Did you know that adjectives don’t erase them?

For example, if I put the adjective “unpublished” in front of the noun “writer”, it simply describes what type of writer I am–the word doesn’t negate the fact that I am a writer.

This is a hard lesson for “new”, “emerging” writers to learn, and it’s one I re-learned during our trip to France.

In Nice, at a beautiful beach club on the Mediterranean, we encountered a couple of Canadians from Toronto–when you’re across the ocean in a foreign land, anyone from your country becomes a neighbour–so we got chatting.

I introduced myself as a high school English teacher. Christy introduced herself as a stay-at-home mom of three young children. We talked about our kids, we talked about our travel experiences (we both spent time in France as teenagers on an exchange!), we talked about our interests and families and histories. We talked all day.

Only when we were about to leave did Christy mention, in passing, that she also writes.

“Really?” I asked. “So do I!”

Turns out Christy writes young adult fiction. (She’s already self-published–check out her book Wicka and her website www.christydeveaux.com)

Turns out we had a lot more to talk about.

Now imagine if I’d had to courage to call myself a writer from the start–we would have had so much more time to share our writing experiences. But I’d gotten hung up on that adjective “unpublished”, so I chickened out.

And if it weren’t for Christy stepping up to say she writes, then I would have missed out.

So, new resolution: introduce myself as a writer. Because published or not, that’s what I am. One pesky little adjective can’t change that. 🙂

Memo to the cast and crew of  Phoenix Cell Savior:

We will be on hiatus for the next few weeks. All production, including blog posts will halt while the writer-creator-producer-director galavants off to France (lucky her).

Please be ready to report back to work the last week in July.

Have a good break.

Ayaan’s gone. I had to give her the boot.

Ayaan was supposed to be the teen girl who took Lyra in under her wing and showed her what a peer friendship could be like.

She did well in her initial role in my previous drafts. She lived overseas, where Lyra traveled, and she became a cultural guide. Ayaan, a quiet and introspective teen, was confident in herself, even as she chafed against the limited role of women in her society.

But Lyra no longer travels overseas. She stays in the U.S., so there’s no explicit need for a cultural guide.

Ok, I thought, but there is still a need for a cultural guide of a different sort–a girl about Lyra’s age who shows Lyra what “normal life” was really like. I naturally assumed I could recast Ayaan in that role.

Turns out I was wrong.

Ayaan simply didn’t fit. As I tried to write the scene where the two girls first meet, it wasn’t coming together. Every idea I had seemed wrong for Ayaan’s quiet character. Ayaan wouldn’t jump up on stage and belt out show tunes. Ayaan wouldn’t go on a vandalism streak. But those were some of the things I wanted Ayaan to do.

Ayaan refused. She had too much dignity to do what I asked, she told me.

So reluctantly, I had to fire her. Call it creative differences, if you like.

I auditioned a few other characters, but finally settled on Yasmine Smith, who has a different, more gregarious, open outlook on life than Ayaan. A third-generation American, Yasmine hated being saddled with an Arabic name while a devastating war rages in the Middle East, so she anglicized it to Jaz. Now we’re talking. Now I have a character ready to take her world by storm, and to drag Lyra along for the ride.

I’m pleased to welcome Jaz, but I’m sorry to see Ayaan go. She was a great character. Maybe one day, in another book, we’ll cross paths again.

Turns out I do know what I’m doing with this whole book thing. 🙂

Here are some comments from Jennie, my book coach. Her encouragement is invaluable. Makes me feel like I can actually accomplish this task.

On creating Lyra’s backstory:

OMG THIS IS SO GOOD —YOU KILLED IT!!! There are just a few TINY things to sort out…

And then there’s the question of how to let the reader into all this as you go along. But it’s a RICH RICH backstory that Lyra can draw upon as she does what she does — using it to make sense of everything.

SUPER well done!!!!

I’d love you to clean up the few questions I asked so you can use this as your Bible and have ALL the answers (and so I can use it as an example of awesome b/c you are SO good at being coached — WOW!

On the opening scene:

Your opening chapter is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!!!!! I’m STUNNED at the improvement you made — there’s NO TELLING ANYWHERE ??? It’s dramatic and logical and whole and just WOW.

On creating the backstory of secondary characters:

BRAVA on this document. It’s awesome!! Just a few things to clean up to make sure EVERYTHING fits and then you’ve GOT it.

The sister sketch. Great — all this works perfectly now.

I told you how much I LOVE LOVE LOVE what you did with this. You GOT it, Jen! Really! It’s SO excellent!

On revisions of Chapter 1:

You have a tendency to split a trigger — i.e. something triggers the character to think of a flashback or memory, but you talk about it in two places instead of just one, where it would be more powerful. As you write, watch for that.

But overall, this is just incredible progress. You totally GOT the show don’t tell thing — where YOU know the story and you are letting us watch it unfold. And you figured out how to let us inside this character’s head and really feel what she’s feeling. Write like this, and you’re gonna have so many fans!!!!

On my final chapter:

WOW Jen! Just WOW!

The person who wrote this last chapter is like a totally different writer than the one who wrote the chapter you first submitted to me. It’s specific, logical, dramatic, moving, powerful — it’s ALL THERE.

On my “Aha! Moment” scene (where Lyra resolves her inner conflict):

I am sitting here totally blown away and totally amazed and totally thrilled that I will one day get to say that I played a tiny part in bringing this extraordinary story to life because YOU ARE AMAZING and this story is AMAZING and you just KILLED this scene. Just KILLED it. You have written a powerful, visceral, real and timely lovely story — it feels like The Fault in Our Stars. Like Romeo and Juliet. Like a really LOVE story for our times. It’s just — WOW.

And what you had before was just so NOT. It’s the transformation that is blowing my mind. How you went from what you were writing to this. I can hardly believe it.

I know I sound like a broken record but WOW. You have total command of this story now. You are letting the reader IN. You are SHOWING us and it has such integrity from a story perspective. It’s just awesome! And now you have this aha moment scene and the first and last scene — you ​have the architecture of your book!!

Here’s the catch: the pressure! Jennie may think every scene I submit to her will be this good. 🙂

Still, it’s nice to know I’m on the right track.

Whew.

I loved Suzanne Collins’s book The Hunger Games. Katniss, the heroine, had to survive this epic, gladiator, fight-to-the-death prime time reality show nefariously created by the Capitol to keep the Districts in line. It all made such convincing sense–why the Capitol needed the Games, how they were televised, the rankings of the Tributes, the communication with their mentors, the dangers the Tributes faced, the manipulation of the Gamemakers…

When I was reading the book, there was a sense of, “well, of course that’s the way it is”, as if Collins had simply flipped through her history books of Panem [the country in which the book is set].

Now that I’m writing my own futuristic, dystopian world, I see that, wow, not so much. I would love to thumb through my world’s history books–or, even, more recently, its newspapers/magazines/news sites. Because I have so many questions about what this world looks like and why things are the way the are. The problem, of course, is that the information doesn’t exist. I have to make it all up.

Yet I have to make it all up to make sure it makes sense for the story.

Let’s take my quarantine camps for an example.

In this world, a future U.S., there is a devastating plague. After I figured out where it came from and how it affects people (airborne? contracted through bodily fluids? how contagious? how long to incubate? how long before people die?), I determined the government would send victims to quarantine camps as a way to try to contain the disease.

Of course, this being dystopian, it’s not just the sick who are sent. It’s also anyone who has come in contact with infected people–even if they themselves aren’t sick. Of course, hanging out in a quarantine camp will no doubt make you sick, ergo…

Why I need the quarantine camps: I need to put Lyra into a situation that only she, with her phoenix cells, can survive. I decided to create a character who may have antibodies in her system–she’s lived longer with the plague than anyone else. Ok, so what does this have to do with Lyra? Why not have the good doctors in the camp draw some blood and deliver it to the medical researchers desperately working on a cure?

Ah, that’s because there are no nurses or doctors or any officials in these camps. Once people go in, no one comes out.

Great. Now I have the set-up for Lyra. Since she can survive the plague which has killed everyone else, she can get in, get a vial of the all-important blood and get out.

So what do these quarantine camps look like? Where are they? How many are there across the country? How many people are in each camp? How long have they been open? How many people have been through each camp since they’ve been open? If there are no officials, how do they get food? Supplies? Since people are dying all the time, what happens to the bodies? How long do people last in a camp before they die? What are the social dynamics in the camp? How do people divide up? Is there violence, chaos, anarchy, or have they organized themselves in some way? If so, how? If the turnover of people is so swift, since the plague kills so quickly, how is order maintained? And how does the researcher know this girl has lived longer than anyone else? Does the government keep records? Do they track each person? Do they notify families after someone dies or do they not care?

You see my point? The questions never end! But somehow, they have to, for me to create a convincing environment that will challenge Lyra. Something that will help her confront her view of the world and her misbeliefs.

‘Cause as I said, it’s all about Lyra.

(Man, this girl is a a lot work. 🙂 )

[photo credit of quarantine sign: Matt Miller, papyrus.greenville.edu]