That thing you do… my writing process

My writing buddy and up-coming Master of Horror, Jamie Schultz, tagged me up for the writing process blog. It's interesting because it's not one of those things I've ever sat down and analysed, so I learnt a few new things about the way my mind works in writing gear.

1. What am I working on?

At the moment I'm skipping past the half-way point on Fur Thing, which is part of the Blue Moon Detective series. What that stalls, I work on the next Crescent story, which is turning out a lot darker than I ever intended. And I'm playing with ideas for a couple of good old-fashioned ghost stories; real old-school balls to the wall horror (I hope.)

I tend to let those ideas ferment for a long time, waiting for them to either turn into something useable, or fade away if I can't make them work. Then I have the opposite situation, where the ideas come through and bounce up and down screaming at me until I have to write them NOW to get a bit of peace.

2. How does my work differ from others of it's genre?

I try and give things a bit of a twist that you hopefully don't find too often. The Crescent books fall under traditional/sword & sorcery - but the hawks are a new species, and people and interactions are complicated, and there isn't always a happy ending. The Blue Moon books feature a shifter that was born as a cat, a medicated house-cat, a vamp with serious Odin issues, a ghost that was traumatised both before and after death,  and a gay medium who adopts these people as his surrogate family when his own cut him off. And while they solve cases and help people, they all have good and bad points. I also have a fairly warped sense of humour that comes through in all of these; love and blood and oh-gods-the-world-is-ending needs a good punchline.

And of course, there's the pure slapstick, like House of F.A.R.T.

3. Why do I write what I do?

Well, according to my mother, it's all Stephen King's fault. I've always been drawn to horror and fantasy. But all fiction is a fantasy, and a lot of fact is horror. I think what really drew me in was that most of the stuff I grew up reading was unique, and pushed the boundaries. Romance never made me casually sidle into the lounge to finish reading a story, where there was light and other people to choose from if anything nasty decided to visit. Westerns never made me break out in a cold sweat as my mind stuttered over sentences. I LOVED that. I wanted the ability to do that to other people, to make someone check under their bed before they turn the light out.

That doesn't mean I won't explore other genres, eventually. The mind is a playground, and I haven't finished playing in this particular sand-pit yet - and there are a lot of other places to play - and combine with each other. That's the best part about writing. The only limits are the ones you place on yourself.

4. How does my writing process work?

I have a rough idea of future books, and I do a lot of research both for what I'm working on and future story lines - I took an on-line course in archeology in 2012 for one of the Blue Moon books I'm planning. I'd say 80-90% of the research doesn't show up overtly in the books. It's background, and it's how I paint the world and drive the characters, but it's more important that I have the knowledge ticking away in the back of my mind.  (Although researching weaponry and symbolism probably put me on a number of watch-lists, and the non-fiction part of my library would make the average profiler wet themselves.)

The actual writing part is trickier; and it's pretty much time-defined. My handwriting is terrible - drunken spider attempting the hokey-pokey kind of illegible - so I type everything. I used to handwrite all my stories as a kid, until my mom gave me her old typewriter. Doing shorthand in college did not do my handwriting any favours.

I'm a pantser - I know what the plan is, but I've tried writing outlines in the past and my characters tend to ignore them. Then again, I've never had a story go exactly to plan - once the characters start talking and moving, all pre-conceived notions are as much use as a pair of chocolate panties.
It's more a case of "Tell me what happened next." Which is cool, because if the story starts to bore me I figure it out immediately, and I can step in and change direction.

I have a roughly hour-long commute on London transport to work and back. With train changes and the ability to get a seat, this translates to roughly 45 minutes of writing time each way. I stick my writing playlist on and write on my phone. 30 minutes writing for lunch. Weekends are writing,  re-writing and fixing issues and typos.

Usually around the 25K mark I re-read and think that this is frigging horrible. At that point, I know I have to leave it alone and work on the other book or another story for a bit. If I go back and it still reeks, the decision is either fix or delete. 95% of the time it's fixable, and just needs a clean-up. The other 5% gets run past Stace for a yay or nay. If she wants more story, I'll give it a shot. If it's dubious or a no, I hit the delete button. (It's impossible to make that decision alone; I don't know a single writer that cruises through every book and is happy with it. Most of us get to the point where we re-read and want to curl up in a ball and suck our thumbs for a while; and you can't make a final decision at that point because you can't be objective.) On the rare occasion I've had to delete, I've taken the view that it's a positive. The next story will be stronger for the mistakes I made, and I hopefully know what not to do going forwards. Every time you write you learn and you grow, and hopefully I'll still be learning new tricks when I hit 90.

Once the story is done it heads for beta land, and I try to forget it. When I get it back, I go through it with the beta notes and fix what needs to be fixed. Then the editing process starts, and by the time you get done with that, part of you wants to set the bloody book on fire and dance around it screaming.

Then it gets ignored for a bit until the final re-read. Guaranteed this is when I find typos and issues that everybody missed, and 99% at least one still slips in when the publishing thing happens. It's annoying, but it happens.

While the story is in the final marinading stage, I work on the cover. I either paint from scratch, using CorelPainter, or I use one of my photo's and manipulate it. I have tons of pictures on my iphone and you can do amazing things with manipulating colours and light now, and it's a relaxing thing for me.

Then I have to figure out the synopsis/publishing blurb, which goes back to wanting to set the bloody thing on fire all over again.

Then I fight with tech and upload the thing. Amazon is pretty easy. Smashwords gave me a minor nervous breakdown, to the point I haven't gone near it in a while.


So there you have it - a brief view of my writing process.

Interesting Side-Affects, or the Chapters the Other Me Wrote

Here's a bit of a strange one for you: I appear to written chapters I don't remember. At all.

The last bit I remember writing was a few pages after the last snippet I posted. I opened the document this weekend expecting to pretty much pick up from there. What I found were several chapters I'd written during the mild phase of migraine on-set/withdrawal, and I don't remember putting those words down.
They're pretty good - a few minor spelling hiccups that have been fixed, and it's obviously my writing, but I don't remember doing it. I was trying to figure out how to describe the hunters that have our two hawks cornered, and it turns out that's been done, and rather creepily too. (Well done, Migraine-Me.)

I've taken a look back through the work already down, and there are several bits I don't remember. Actually, I would have sworn blind I hadn't touched the PC on those days, since they match up to a couple of serious attacks in my migraine diary. And while it's still obviously me writing, those scenes have sharp, jagged little edges to them that are very interesting indeed, since I'm wondering if those word spikes correspond to the pain spikes.

At this point I'm not complaining, although it's a bit unnerving to realise part of me wants to write so badly that I'll do it subconsciously. (I do wish Migraine-Me would pay attention to spelling though; she's left a bit of a mess to clean up.) Those strange little scenes work well in the book, and although I may have to do a little more polishing to make sure the voice doesn't veer too wildly from place to place, I'm going to just read, edit and move on.

I haven't found anything in my research to indicate this is a thing for other migraine sufferers, though.   (I know the accepted term is migraneur. It makes me want to roll on the floor and bite the carpet, because it sounds like we have this fantastic adventure every time it hits, instead of praying for death and codeine, so I don't use it.) If anyone else has had this happen, I'd love to know. Otherwise I'll just have to accept this as some sort of apology from the pain gods and leave it at that.

One other interesting thing. I'm pain-free (yay, Botox!) but still noticing symptoms - the bruising under the eyes still appears, the hyper-sensitive smell and strange tastes still comes and goes. I can live with that. If I'm pain-free, I can live with that quite happily. I've had no light-show effects though, which correlates with the theory that those particular nerves are no longer being affected. I'm hoping that research eventually unearths the reasons for the rest of the symptoms, but my personal evidence suggests these are occurring in the brain itself, and not caused by the expansion of blood vessels against the facial nerves.

Weekly Roundup

The day by day thing is getting a little old, & since I'm usually working more than a little boring, so I'm going to try it another way..

Writing news:
Uploaded Dim as part of Sample Sunday to Scribd here. Not sure if I'm getting the hang of the tweet thing yet or not, but it can't hurt.
Have gone through WolfSong with a fine tooth comb (again!) and hopefully fixed all the issues. Which I am still sulking over - the biggest gripe a lot of readers have about Indies is poor editing and formatting. It doesn't matter that tree books have the same problem (some of which are worse that the average indie book by far) - if we want to take on the big boys, we need to better than average. So I may have shot myself in the foot by missing the word runs during the last edit before I hit the publish button.

 Also found a free programme called Calibre through Guido Henkel's blog, so I'm going to run the entire book through that & upload it back to Amazon next week. Hopefully this will also fix the ipad formatting issue - crossing fingers & toes on that one. All the creator asks for is a donation if you can afford it - for a programme that seems to eliminate 99% of formatting issues, this is a bargain, and a cause worth supporting.

Tossing an idea around for a new short story - I tend to write at least the first couple of pages purely in my head to see if it will go somewhere. This one is being stubborn - I know the end, and most of the middle, but it's having trouble starting off.

Other
I seem to be losing weight (yay!) with the healthy meals LSH is feeding me. I'm going to have withdrawal symptoms next week - I'm away 3 days for work - but can't complain. If this carries on, I will no longer look like a  pregnant hobbit, which can only be a good thing. (On a slightly less pleasant note, the two of us discovered an very unwanted side effect of the allowed chocolate on this diet. Let's just say if someone lit a match in the room the roof would leave the building. Fast.)

University is keeping me busy most nights & at the weekends. The subject of finance still makes me feel like I've just lost 50 IQ points, but thankfully it's one of the first modules. As long as I pass it, I'm happy. Unfortunately, it means sacrificing a lot of promotion time on the net - c'est la vie.

Like the rest of the world, (except China) I've been watching the situation in Egypt this week. Part of me is extremely glad another dictator has left the room. The rest of me is mourning the people that had to die for this to happen. Whether 1 person, a 100, or a 100 000 - the payment in blood is always too damn high.
My personal view on politicians is that anyone who wants that amount of power shouldn't be allowed anywhere near it.

Books
I was lucky enough to pick up Dreaming Anastasia by Joy Preble for free this week - the price has now gone up. I loved this - I'm waiting for pay day so I can get the follow-up.  Usually books written in the present tense irritate me - this was an absolute joy.
33 AD by David McAfee - a really cool take on the vampire myth; if you like an action packed read (call it swords & sandals) -  get this. Unfortunately, David has just made my books for pay day list that little bit longer.
I've already posted my review on The Judas Syndrome by Michael Poeltl, which I've been reading for a while. I'm going to be watching this author closely; I think there is serious blockbuster potential waiting to come out.

I'm currently busy with The Shadow Thieves by Anne Ursu. This is aimed at younger readers, but the sense of humour is wicked - I'm enjoying this.
Added to my pay day list is The Vampire Kitty Cat Chronicles. The sample should have come with a keyboard alert. The price on Amazon is pretty cheap; but since I'm doing my usual so-broke-can't-pay-attention thing, it has to wait.