Words/Time: 25 minutes typing new text into the computer for “Pithea.”
Author: Kristi
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 7, 2015
Words/Time: 32 minutes adding revisions for “Pithea” that were made on paper into the computer.
I am planning for a lighter week this week. My church’s VBS program starts tomorrow, and I’m a volunteer. For 5 days, I will wake up early, transport my two kids and their two cousins to church, then spend 3 hours taking the 2nd & 3rd graders around to the different stations. I did this last year (though with the next age group down) and remember being exhausted all week. So the rest of the evenings this week, I will work on my writing if I am alert enough and have time, but if not, I won’t feel guilty.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 6, 2015
Words/Time: 1124 words, revising “Pithea.” Naolin’s delusional, sick mind is shown a few more times (wow, not sick in the way that sort of made it sound…like, actually sick–poisoned, in fact). Missy and Drear don’t act so hostilely toward each other now (though I should probably find a place for him to actually tell her his name), and a lot of Missy mixing healing items and giving the unconscious man liquid (since I discovered weeks ago that that doesn’t actually work) has been removed.
Dream Every Day: Revisiting High School
When I was in high school, I took a creative writing class. It’s the only one I’ve ever taken, and I couldn’t tell you how alike or different it was from other such classes. There was a process we went through before we ever started writing for the short story part of class that has stuck with me for fifteen years. It was a process of coming up with multiple story seeds, before then choosing the one we wanted to develop into a story. One day we were instructed to come up with a setting and character that didn’t really go together. For example, I chose a British soldier at a Minnesota lake. Under that, it says:
“Why–the queen of England decided she wanted a vacation in a secluded spot and he was assigned to guard the family.
Conflict–the people who live around there are secretive, don’t know why he’s there, and don’t want him there.”
The scenario sounds ridiculous to me now, and I never wrote any further with that idea. However, for some reason, this exercise has stuck with me for a long time.
On the other hand, what is just an innocuous picture–a field of wildflowers–became the short story I turned in for that class. A short story the teacher loved and helped me to remember that I enjoy writing (I had written a lot in elementary school, then abandoned it for poetry). In an essay in that class, though, I apparently wrote that I didn’t think I’d have much reason to write fiction again in the future. That was fun to dig up from my past.
This colorful, foggy field became the setting of a frenzied, fear-filled search for a briefcase and a race against time for the protagonist in the story I wrote from it.
At the same time I was taking this creative writing class, I had the same teacher for English class. In English, we would get vocabulary lists, and for every list, one assignment was always to write some sort of paragraph or short story that incorporated at least 5 of the vocab words. A few of those ended up being great sources of creativity for me. One, a one-page short story, my teacher said was written well enough and had good enough character development that I could have turned it in for my short story in creative writing.
The point of all of this is to say that, while inspiration can certainly come from anywhere and sometimes nowhere, it is possible to create ideas using various methods and stimuli. Images, sounds, prompts, word lists, outlandish character/setting combos, even story scenarios provided by someone else, can produce seeds that may or may not be worth developing. The key is to keep all of the potential seeds somewhere that can be referenced later. One important rule of writing–never throw anything out. You never know if you’ll want to be able to look back at it 15 years later and write a blog post about it.
Dream for yourself: If anyone reading this wants to try their hand at some of these story seed starters, I encourage you to look at the image above, describe it in vivid detail, and use it as a setting for a scene. Then see where that takes you. Or, use the following list of words to create a paragraph or two–it can be a setting, a short story, or even a scene from something larger. (Remember, it’s from a school vocab list. If you don’t know the words, look them up! Expanding your vocabulary can always help with writing too.) It doesn’t have to produce a full story–just spark an idea. If anyone does write anything from my suggestions, feel free to share with me! I’d love to see what others come up with.
noxious
sub rosa
tete-a-tete
parvenu
a capella
postprandial
minatory
venal
quid pro quo
Continue reading below to read the short story I created with the words above (if you’re considering writing from the list yourself, don’t read mine yet; it’ll skew your ideas).
Dream, plan, write…
This has been my motto for the last year. I have tried to make sure every day contains at least a little writing work. For me, this can take more than one form:
Dream – This is the part where you ask, “What if…?” and “Why?” What if space were filled with vampires? What if the guy was the one who needed rescuing? Why would a British royal guard be camping in the woods of Montana? How different would the world be without shrimp? There are ways to force these ideas out of your head, but just as often, they just come on their own. When you’re driving, washing dishes, showering, even sleeping.
Plan – This is where you take that idea, that seed, and run with it. Meet and flesh out the characters. Decide on the right time and place. Start plotting. Not everyone does this step; some skip right from dreaming to writing. That’s okay too. But for the rest of us, it’s important to spend some time in the planning stage.
Write – This is the most self-explanatory stage, but often the most difficult to do. It is helpful to set goals along the way. Also important is saving the editing for later.
Revise – This is my absolute least favorite stage, but it has to be done. The question, though, is how to do it and how much to revise. My own mindset on revising has changed a lot in the last year, and I think I’m hating it less than I used to.
These different stages are often mixed up. Currently, on any given day, I may be working on revising one of two books, plotting another one, writing for a shorter bit that has no real plans, or who knows what else. And I’m always dreaming.
I’ve come to realize recently that, though I am not a published author, I have a lot of experience as a writer. I’ve been writing with some seriousness for 10 years and have grown a lot in both knowledge and skill. I’ve finished the first draft of two novels, which I’m told is an accomplishment in itself. And just in the last two years, I have learned a lot about all of these stages of writing. This blog has always been focused on my writing progress, but I have decided it’s time to branch out. I want to start sharing some of what I’ve learned, even extending to areas outside of those I mentioned above (like finding the right writing atmosphere). Hopefully someone will find some usefulness in my words.
I won’t try to say when or how often these posts might come out, because my family life is too unpredictable. The first post, about the “Dream” stage, will be shortly following this introductory post though.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 5, 2015
Words/Time: 992 words, revising “Pithea.” I’m going to go into more detail on the actual story than I normally do here, so bear with me. The book I am working on right now is a full rewrite of 5 shortish stories that I wrote as fanfiction around 10 years ago. They were fanfiction based on a video game that had very little plot of its own, so the plots and characters were completely my own invention.
Cut to more recent years, and I’ve built a new world of my own that will mostly accommodate those stories, yet be different from the game (in some ways, very different). The original stories were written as third-person limited POV, while this book is actually first-person, but told from a side character who is only in the second half of the book (and even then, somewhat sporadically). The part of the story I am working on now is when the main character meets the narrator character for the first time.
Originally, it went that Missy (the MC) had already seen Drear (the narrator) from a distance, and he’d kind of creeped her out. So when she found him later, bent over her sick friend, she assumed the worst. And that led to situations in which she mistrusted him, and it made perfect sense.
In the rewritten book, I tried to keep that mistrust (and the mystery about Drear being the brother of that sick friend). But basically, Missy has to break into Drear’s house and then act indignant. Drear’s identity being a secret is really forced, and his subsequent reveal is just clumsy.
So, though I’m very used to these scenes being one way (Drear doesn’t identify himself and Missy has good cause to think he’s untrustworthy) for 10 years, I am now finding that I have to almost completely re-plot what happens from this point forward. There’s no reason Missy can’t know right away who Drear is (he introduces himself at the beginning of the book and says he’s the brother of that other character), so I’m basically going to be rewriting the next several chapters. Which is kind of nice, because I’ve been missing the actual writing lately.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 4, 2015
Words/Time: 1059 words, revising “Pithea.” Missy’s first meeting with Aeldrim and Selunya is less awkward and forced. I hope. I went back to the original version from years ago to find the parts that I liked and hopefully it flows better now.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 2, 2015
Words/Time: 1155 words revising “Pithea” with two of my sisters over Skype. Also known as the 42nd meeting of the Tri-County Sisterhood of the Traveling Book. We finished the section on Pithean history that we started last week, which is a between-parts chunk of exposition. In the end, we felt pretty good about the whole thing, even though exposition is often thought of as boring. We do have a question about a really big issue that we will have to discuss further that will potentially break some of my world, but hopefully we can come to an answer that we like without ruining a foundational mechanic in my story world.
Daily Challenge Check-in: June 1, 2015
Words/Time: 30 minutes responding to notes made on the TCSTB shared document by one of the other members, in anticipation of our Skype meeting tomorrow night.
Liebster Award
I was nominated for a Liebster award by lovesstorms, who writes stories for Sims 3 and Sims 4 on her blog. She is also my sister (and one of the other two members of the TCSTB). There is a lot of camaraderie in that community, though I am not a part of it myself. My sister, though, decided to include my blog in her list of Sims 3 & 4 stories that she nominated. Normally, accepting this award includes nominating other blogs. However, to quote Cecily Q. Cauliflower, “I’m not going to [nominate] anybody because I’m ornery that way.” (Also because I’m not very jacked into the blogosphere and only read a few myself.) I am, however, going to answer the questions lovesstorms posed to her nominees. They are somewhat oriented toward Sims story writers, so I will only answer those I can.
1. When you write, do you choose the computer or paper/pen? I use both in different situations. I enjoy the experience of writing with a pencil and paper so much, so I do so now and then. However, it is just so much faster to write on the computer, so the bulk of my writing is done there.
3. What made you want to start writing? A book? Life? A person? Other? I’ve enjoyed writing since I was a kid. I still have a few stories that I started when I was ten or twelve and never finished (I fully intended to write a series of books both times, but never even finished one). I wrote (and finished) a few short stories in high school. My more recent push came from playing a video game and getting all sorts of ideas for characters and stories from it (not Sims). That was actually over 10 years ago. It took a lot of time and even more work to get to where I am now–writing original fiction in a world I created with characters that I have lived with for 10 years.
4. What’s a country you’ve always wanted to visit? It might sound cliche, but I’ve always wanted to go to England or Ireland. Or Germany.
5. Outside of the Sims, what’s another favorite game you play? I’ll answer this one, because I do play Sims, as well as other games. I actually prefer Sims 2 most of the time though, but I won’t go into reasons why. I tend to go through waves of what game I’m playing at the time. I haven’t played Sims in a while, but will go back to it someday and probably stick with it for a while then. For now, I’ve been playing Diablo 3 lately, and Civilizations games before that.
6. When you become disinterested in your story/characters, what do you do? This question is difficult for me to answer. I have a lot of ideas for stories in the same world, and a lot of characters to go with those stories. As of right now, including the one I’m revising currently, I have seven novel-length story ideas in mind. And outside of that, a lot more nuggets of ideas that could be grown into full stories. I have dozens of characters who overlap and some who are more solitary. I do sometimes get tired of revising “Pithea.” When that happens, I usually turn to working on “Pursuit of Power,” which is also in revision stage, but I haven’t delved as heavily into it. I’m still in the broad-changes stage of revision, since writing the novel during NaNoWriMo in 2014. And then sometimes, I just want to write and not edit, so I work on a storyline that isn’t even included in the count of 7 novel-length ideas, because it’s too narrow to be its own story, that takes place after “Pithea.”
I have it in my mind that when I get burned out on this world of stories and want to do something else, I will pull out a random prompt or such from one of many sources and just write something unrelated. But I never quite get to that.
7. When you write, do you prefer quiet or noise in the background? I used to prefer all quiet. Then I realized the joy of having something in the background. For a while I played writing-related music (yes, such a thing exists), but then I was introduced to coffitivity.com, and now I always have that up on my laptop or computer when I’m working.
10. Do you keep a notepad & pen/phone/tablet by your bed for those late night ideas? If so, do you actually get up and write them down? I do have a notepad in a drawer next to my bed. It looks like this: 
It’s always there, just in case, but it has turned into more of a dream journal (which is also currently neglected). Lately I’ve taken to bringing another notebook to bed with me, because I’ve been more actively trying to think of some specific things, and want to write them in that other notebook. Basically, I have tons of notebooks, big and small, so ideas tend to get stuck wherever. It’s a messy system.
11. When you write, do you just do a quick glance and post? Or do you take a day or two or more and proofread, move things around, delete, re-write, etc, etc? This last question is probably one I should skip, due to the fact that I’m not currently posting my writing online. However, I did used to write fanfiction and post it online, so I figured I’d answer based on that. I used to like to get a few chapters written into a story before posting the first chapter. Then I’d keep a buffer of 3 chapters, in case I had to make any changes to the actual story based on what I was still writing. I usually read over each chapter after I wrote it, sent it to a friend who was my biggest fan at the time (his words…well, actually he always said he was my “#1 fan.”), made any fixes that either of us found, then read over it one more time before I actually posted it. I usually did very little big changes or rewriting. I have since realized a lot of areas that could have been better, but I’ve had 10 years to get better.
Thanks again to my sister for nominating my blog for this reward. I know I’m keeping myself isolated by not nominating others, but I’ve always been the kind to keep to myself, so it’s in my nature. If anyone’s interested, check out lovesstorms’ blog for her Sims stories.
A Journey of Words 