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wizzardstaff posted:I think the main thing that confused me about the scene was that it was tied to Lorand's flight from Mollit, so I thought the "convenience" of the leg break must be related too. Like I thought that Lorand was expecting a beating from Mollit's crew and that maybe they'd show mercy if he was already hurt. But I guess knowing that he could easily be Healed might just make them more aggressive. Ah! Yep, that's a totally valid way of reading the sequence as written that I hadn't considered. wizzardstaff posted:You are probably not looking for giant rewrites at this stage, but here are some random unsolicited suggestions for alternate scenes: I love this suggestion! I don't even think it'd necessitate a rewrite specifically, just the addition of a new scene between the end of Chapter 1 and the beginning of Chapter 2. Slapstick, when done well, is hilarious for me. My two favorite examples: 1. Sanderson - the scene in Bands of Mourning where the main cast is fleeing New Seran (Bands of Mourning, Chapter 16). It's a payoff after two and a half books of character set up and one specific chapter (Bands of Mourning, Chapter 10). Chapter 10 is hilarious in itself. 2. There's a very old movie called 雞同鴨講 (translates roughly as "Chicken and Duck Talk") made by Michael Hui, one of the greatest Hong Kong comedians of all time. The entire 90 minute film sums up Hong Kong in the 1980s in pure, glorious slapstick. You might be more familiar with Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer which I'd say was highly influenced by Michael Hui's work. At about the 1 hour mark, we get 1 minute of setup immediately followed by the most memorable 3 minute slapstick fight/chase sequence of the film, complete with an instance of wire fu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4lt1iBeiEs&t=3604s Based on the current rate of my writing (35% through the target word count but only 25% through planned chapters), I think Enchanted Hat was right in saying that I probably am going to hit 50k words well before I finish the story. That means I don't know if I will have time left over to write this but I'll put it on the radar as a fun stretch goal! Leng fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 22:28
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I finished chapter 3 today. It felt very grim, between Talitha being intensely aware of all the men in her life sizing her up and Lorand seeing taxes devastate his farm. Not to mention an ailing grandmother. I definitely did not leave the chapter feeling upbeat.
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Nov 12, 2020 22:14
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wizzardstaff posted:I definitely did not leave the chapter feeling upbeat. Mission accomplished then  Let's hope Chapter 4 makes you feel better.
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Nov 13, 2020 14:05
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REWRITE: CHAPTER FOUR (5189 words) Day 9 (11/11/2020): 218 words on a non-writing day, though I did do some more detailed outlining Day 10 (12/11/2020): 1331 words, on a planned writing day that turned out to be incredibly non-productive because I was super distracted all day and had serious Blank Page Syndrome Day 11 (13/11/2020): 3640 words on a non-writing day. The words started flowing once I got past the first few pages of this chapter Planned outline for this chapter, including overflow from the planned outline for the previous chapter: Leng posted:Chapter 3: A ticket out of Widdertown The more detailed outline from Wednesday: quote:4.1: Lugal  Other than 4.1, I did...Leng posted:The first two scenes wound up much longer than I expected so last two high level plot points/3.3 are getting pushed to Chapter 4. Which is probably a good thing anyway, because I had a quick skim to remind myself of what's planned for Chapter 4 and while there are a lot of points listed, they feel quite fluffy so there should be room for Lugal's scene in there. I am a very bad judge of my own outline, apparently. Maybe it's a good thing though, because Chapter 5 didn't exactly have a lot in its outline. Link to Chapter 4: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-1Ivw0Tbo6QIzH9FSAHwvIk1oZiza22SKe3N9eRNQnc/edit?usp=sharing  Self-crit/Commentary
Canon References/Easter Eggs
Leng fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Nov 13, 2020 |
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Nov 13, 2020 14:59
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REWRITE: CHAPTER FIVE (5747 words) Surprise chapter release ahead of schedule! Mainly because I've been so panicked about my output per hour that I cranked up the writing on unscheduled days. Day 12 (14/11/2020): 799 words on an unscheduled writing day, which is very low output thanks to 4 hours of crippling Blank Page Syndrome Day 13 (15/11/2020): 797 words on a non-writing day Day 14 (16/11/2020): 4151 words on a non-writing day. This is my second highest word count in a day and a whole bunch of it happened during unscheduled nap time Planned outline for this chapter, including overflow from the planned outline for the previous chapter: Leng posted:Chapter 4: Gan Garee The more detailed outline: quote:5.1: The Guild House (not a typo, the detailed outline really does just kind of trail off there because I still have no idea what that looks like. At this stage I don't even know whether I'm going to try and flesh it out at a detailed outline level or just dive into writing it, because while the more detailed outline seemed to have helped in writing Chapter Three, it did nothing of the sort for Chapters Four and Five) As with Rewritten Chapter Four, I kind of did stuff that sort of but not really matched up to this. Perhaps I need to cut myself some slack from not slavishly following the outline, I mean not even Sanderson manages to do that perfectly. I had trouble understanding what he meant by him having to go and rebuild his outlines when he gets too far away from them and now I know. Link to Chapter 5: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1atVqcrQcwKlNCK37a7DNVgdyo1jkEZHi8UA4p0FQjM4/edit?usp=sharing Self-crit/Commentary
Questions for you guys: - just the one really: what have I gotten wrong about writing from a fourteen year old boy's perspective? Canon References/Easter Eggs
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Nov 16, 2020 15:00
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Leng posted:Questions for you guys: I was going to say "needs more awkward horniness" but then I got to Jovvi's introduction. 
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Nov 16, 2020 18:25
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wizzardstaff posted:I was going to say "needs more awkward horniness" but then I got to Jovvi's introduction. Well then, I'll have to dial it up for Chapter 6. I just finished the first scene and hopefully it hits the mark. 
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Nov 17, 2020 06:57
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REWRITE: CHAPTER SIX (5418 words) Day 15 (17/11/2020): 1674 words on a writing day, as I had carved out some writing time to do detailed outlining time. Day 16 (18/11/2020): 1077 words on a non-writing day, around other appointments Day 17 (19/11/2020): 1980 words on a writing day, lower than what I would normally get on a Thursday. I blame this on the fact that Rhythm of War is out and a very bad morning. I have been staying away from the Sanderson thread because carving out 15 hours to finish the book when I've got a word count to hit seems like a bad idea. The book will still be there after NaNoWriMo and I'm gonna reward myself with one chapter every time I finish 2k words. Day 18 (20/11/2020): 687 words to finish the chapter, so I can get straight into the next one. Planned outline for this chapter, including overflow from the planned outline for the previous chapter: Leng posted:Chapter 4: Gan Garee The more detailed outline: quote:6.1: Lorand Is it a good or a bad thing that I keep over outlining? I guess it's probably neither good nor bad, and just a thing. I now totally understand how Sanderson starts out planning a novella and ends up with a novel because I guess I'm basically in the process of doing the same thing. Link to Chapter 6: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-HdQ7oM3oQemWDgWxyJPc3hTEmiCVbbpQDPHc4BOnA/edit?usp=sharing Self-crit/Commentary
Questions for you guys: - how are we doing now on the awkward horniness quotient?  Canon References/Easter Eggs
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Nov 20, 2020 00:57
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You remember how I said the Sanderson influence was strong in your earlier chapters? This one, uh, diverges from his style a bit.  I like the reactions to Spirit magic as invasive and creepy. Purely a personal thing, but that helps address the worldbuilding musing that I was doing earlier. One minor thing wasn't quite clear to me: what does it mean to "tie someone's ability to speak to their breathing"? The way both you and Lorand describe it sounds very clinical and special, but functionally it doesn't seem different from making someone mute.
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Nov 22, 2020 23:27
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wizzardstaff posted:You remember how I said the Sanderson influence was strong in your earlier chapters? This one, uh, diverges from his style a bit. I'll count that as a success on the awkward horniness quotient! wizzardstaff posted:One minor thing wasn't quite clear to me: what does it mean to "tie someone's ability to speak to their breathing"? The way both you and Lorand describe it sounds very clinical and special, but functionally it doesn't seem different from making someone mute. Spoilers for Canon Book 6: According to Green's text, an Earth magic practitioner can apparently manipulate neural pathways. In the book, Ebro Syant (an Earth magic High in Gracely) is a short and fat Assembly member who uses his Blending to kidnap and rape a girl he has the hots for. After he rapes her, he uses his Blending on her so that any time she tries to tell somebody that he raped her, she starts choking on the words. She's supposed to have a lot of suitors so she thinks she'll be able to escape by getting married but he's a member of the Assembly so he manipulates things to get suitors to leave, so he can keep raping her at his leisure. She decides that death is preferable so she deliberately chokes to death trying to speak out about his crimes. Muting someone is less complicated as I think it just involves an Earth magic user futzing with the vocal chords by like, introducing temporary laryngitis or something. Whereas linking two different abilities to each other makes one dependent on the other. I.e. if you want to continue to be able to breathe, then don't talk. Now that I'm thinking about it, it could be argued that if you're affecting neural pathways in the brain, that really should be the domain of Spirit magic rather than Earth magic. I couldn't remember the specifics of the canon scene when writing this so I might have messed up on that one. So theoretically, Earth magic should be about affecting someone's physical state while Spirit magic is affecting someone's mental state. But I guess since we know physical damage to the brain does weird stuff to the neural pathways, I guess an argument could be made that Earth magic could kind of do something similar, though the counter argument would be that's probably a level of precision that Earth magic shouldn't grant. So...if I ever go back and do a second pass on this, I would probably just change it so that Delin muted the Acolyte instead of doing something more complicated that he'd probably need Spirit magic help for. Either way, both of us have spent more time thinking about this than Green actually did!
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Nov 23, 2020 14:28
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REWRITE: CHAPTER SEVEN (6032 words) Day 18 (20/11/2020): 1300 words. I had good intentions of doing more, but Blank Page Syndrome was really difficult to defeat this time, with Rhythm of War begging to be read. Day 19 (23/11/2020): 1855 words on a non-writing day, after a weekend long reading binge on Rhythm of War. It was so interesting to read this time around as I was hyper aware of things from a writer's perspective. Day 20 (24/11/2020): 2877 words to finish the chapter. I think I'm gonna aim to get another scene down tonight for the next chapter, because tomorrow's schedule is looking pretty bad for focused writing time Planned outline for this chapter, including overflow from the planned outline for the previous chapters: Leng posted:Chapter 5: Training–overview of their schedule The more detailed outline: quote:7.1: Lorand writes a letter home I had a bunch more points that were supposed to go in the clinic scene but when I got to writing it, none of them fit so I'm gonna shove them into the next chapter. Link to Chapter 7: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1180IhaZSFfHO9AWQzdeQ98pV5r8hfCOJBVFDLFhNBus/edit?usp=sharing Self-crit/Commentary
Canon References/Easter Eggs
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Nov 24, 2020 05:57
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REWRITE: CHAPTER EIGHT (5264 words) Day 20 (24/11/2020): 1249 words, which was a good start for a new chapter! Day 21 (25/11/2020): 90 words on a non-writing day. Any possibility of writing more got destroyed by a bunch of random urgent errands Day 22 (26/11/2020): 3925 words to finish the chapter. Pretty good output for me! Planned outline for this chapter, including overflow from the planned outline for the previous chapters: Leng posted:Chapter 6: Slice of life The more detailed outline: quote:Preparing for the Trials: Continuing with the trend since Chapter 3, the second half of that outline involving the Deep Caverns completely didn't happen so it's getting shoved into the next chapter. Link to Chapter 8: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10AWawzS1LW2nocUBZ2PbfHd18II5z0sDbSfHLXeWTMo/edit?usp=sharing Self-crit/Commentary
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Nov 26, 2020 13:51
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REWRITE: CHAPTER NINE (6124 words) Day 23 (27/11/2020): 1655 words, another good start for a new chapter! I had hoped for more, but writing time was eaten up by rebuilding the outline time, which is fine and good, especially when I can see the finish line in the distance. Day 24 (28/11/2020): 1295 words on my buffer writing day which turned into a non-writing day due to last minute plans. Some words happened first thing in the morning but the rest was done late at night. Day 25 (29/11/2020): 3174 words to finish the chapter. Planned outline for this chapter, including overflow from the planned outline for the previous chapters: Leng posted:Chapter 8: Specialized training–excursion to the western border? Deep Caverns? The more detailed outline, which included rejigging some of the original points so that I could finish off this rewrite in two chapters: quote:9.1: Lorand At this point, I have reconciled myself to the fact that the Deep Caverns are just not gonna happen in this rewrite. That's fine! That means there's a worldbuilding detail for Rewrite Book 2, if/when that happens. Link to Chapter 9: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RZjj-N4cb4DtUS2jhoKrlf7nLkBNGQ9H6Y5HElZkuiY/edit?usp=sharing Self-crit/Commentary
Questions for you guys: - how did the chapter leave you feeling at the end? - did you buy the "twist"? - did you feel like there were any plotholes or stuff that came out of nowhere? Canon References/Easter Eggs
Leng fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Nov 29, 2020 |
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Nov 29, 2020 07:11
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I don't have much to add (I'm rubbish at editing), but I will genuinely miss reading your chapters when this is done. Every one of them has left me wanting to read the next one to find out what happens (and this one is no exception), and the characters all feel like actual humans, a very welcome change from Green's writing. I hope you'll continue to rewrite her trash!
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Dec 2, 2020 02:03
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REWRITE: CHAPTER TEN (5645 words) Day 26 (30/11/2020): 174 words. During a horrific meeting that I was desperately trying to pretend was not happening. Day 27 (2/12/2020): 606 words. Day 28 (3/12/2020): 4865 words to finish the chapter and the book!  Planned outline for this chapter, including overflow from the planned outline for the previous chapters: Leng posted:Chapter 10: Return to Widdertown The more detailed outline, which included rejigging some of the original points so that I could finish off this rewrite in two chapters: quote:10.1: Lorand Link to Chapter 10: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KfPG4vSaI1hTF16Yet2xJrM26QGgRjw8PCJanZggQJs/edit?usp=sharing Self-crit/Commentary
Questions for you guys: - now that we're at the end of all the rewrite chapters there's only really one question that matters, though it has two parts: what would you rate my rewrite out of five and did I do better than Green? Canon References/Easter Eggs
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Dec 3, 2020 10:11
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A Small Car posted:I don't have much to add (I'm rubbish at editing), but I will genuinely miss reading your chapters when this is done. Every one of them has left me wanting to read the next one to find out what happens (and this one is no exception), and the characters all feel like actual humans, a very welcome change from Green's writing. I hope you'll continue to rewrite her trash! Thank you so much for the kind words! The fact that the rewrite has been entertaining enough for you to follow along and post is really rewarding. Hearing that you–a random internet stranger–enjoy my writing actually means more to me than hearing it from friends or family (mainly because I feel like they have to tell me nice things). I'm going to deliberately refrain from re-reading anything from the rewrite for a couple of weeks, but will likely return to do an overall reflection some time at the end of the year when my brain's had an opportunity to refresh. And then, well, I guess we'll see what happens! EDIT vvvvvvvv: wizzardstaff posted:The US Thanksgiving holiday and family life in general has really done a number on my schedule so I am something like 4 chapters behind now, but I want to echo the kudos. I've enjoyed what I've read so far, and there's no question that it's better than Green's stuff. I think it's different enough to stand well on its own, not just in reference to her work. Thank you!! This is amazing praise, far beyond what I had hoped for when I started so I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed (in a really good way). Leng fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Dec 4, 2020 |
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Dec 3, 2020 10:17
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The US Thanksgiving holiday and family life in general has really done a number on my schedule so I am something like 4 chapters behind now, but I want to echo the kudos. I've enjoyed what I've read so far, and there's no question that it's better than Green's stuff. I think it's different enough to stand well on its own, not just in reference to her work.
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Dec 3, 2020 18:58
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WRAP UP: Making an eBook! Given the number of projects and other pieces of work I've got going on, it's unlikely that I'll do another pass through what I've written so far. So I thought it'd be fun to wrap things up by taking a look at the production side of things and put everything together in one package! Designing a book cover  (note: do not do what I did if you are seriously considering self-publishing a book; pay an actual designer to design a good book cover, because the wisdom of the self-publishing thread says that your cover and blurb matter as much as your book) Looked at the Amazon Kindle store for best selling fantasy ebooks. They all have expensive illustrations of characters wielding swords or magic or both, or focused visuals on an important object (e.g. a crown) or badge or symbol of some sort. As I don't have the skills to pull anything like that off (and it's more time than I have to invest on a fun thing), I spent an hour on Canva.com and Flickr searching for free/creative commons licensed images of "magic" and "glowing", messing around with fonts and random font effects. I repeat: do not do what I did; this is not a good book cover!! Creating the Epub file I use Calibre as an eBook library manager and it has a built-in eBook editing function. Because I wrote each chapter as a standalone Google Doc, I needed to also install the EpubMerge plugin to compile everything into a single book. The default "Download" option in Google Docs allows you to download an EPUB file as well as a HTML file. Since ebooks are basically fancy file packages of HTML, either technically should work. In addition, Calibre has a built in ebook format converter so you can import a DOCX or whatever and it'd still be able to output an EPUB. Amazon Kindle accepts the MOBI format. I downloaded all of the chapters as EPUBs, imported them into Calibre, and then used EpubMerge to smush them together in a single file. At this point, you need to confirm the meta data for the book, which technically includes the blurb. I am bad at writing concisely and blurbs are a heck of a lot of work, so I just did a single sentence blurb. I will attempt a proper blurb later, probably after doing an overall reflection. By default, the cover page and title page are created for you, so all I had to do was edit it. A few sections had to be added in manually: the map, table of contents, acknowledgements. At this point, the book will look terrible. Like, really, really, really terrible. Mainly because whenever you export out of a word processor software into HTML it produces terrible code with in-line CSS everywhere. It will stick all of the general CSS into one <style> tag within the <head> section like this: code:This is before we even factor looking into the ridiculous nested tag nonsense around the actual text. Like this: code:code:The next two hours were spent using regex expressions to strip out all of the unnecessary span tags, replace the relevant ones with <em> tags for italicized text, then centering the section breaks and cleaning up other weird stuff. I either stuffed up one of my regex operations or the original output from Google Docs was terrible, because there were italicized direct thoughts that were completely messed up, with the wrong bits italicized. I had to add a few special classes to format the song Talitha sings in Chapter 3, Lorand's letter in Chapter 7 and the scroll he receives in Chapter 10 nicely. Then because I felt like it, I added some more classes to make the chapter headings and chapter titles look nicer, plus drop caps because why not? I don't know if the drop caps will come out nicely on other ereaders but hopefully I've written code that degrades gracefully so even if it doesn't show up properly, it won't look too weird. The EPUB looks pretty nice in the Calibre viewer:    And terrible as a MOBI (granted I haven't actually tried looking at this on my Kindle yet, maybe it doesn't suck so much on an actual Kindle, but wow does it look bad in the Calibre viewer as a MOBI file):   (why does MOBI split the title page across two pages? I don't know!)  (yuck, default ul list formatted bullets)  (oh those drop caps didn't work here) The AZW format seems to land somewhere in the middle, so if you're using a Kindle, that's probably the better format to download. After doing all of this, I can totally see why someone would want to pay US$45 for Scrivener or even US$199/US$249 for Vellum. There is no way that I would be spending any more time than this hassling with this annoying crap. And I'm speaking as someone who is an amateur level front-end web developer. If I had to do this by hand, I think I'd write in a HTML editor because of the agony of formatting the ebook file afterwards, though the writer side of my brain thinks that would be a horrendously bad idea because wow, is thinking about the correct HTML tags to stick in while I'm trying to get the flow and tone of the scene down the worst thing ever (besides Blank Page Syndrome). Download the eBook! (assuming you enjoyed this enough to want to add it to your elibrary) Available in AZW (Kindle), EPUB and MOBI (also Kindle, but uglier) formats. Well, this was a fun exercise in discovering just how annoying the ebook production process is. If/when I get into self-publishing, I will definitely be springing for Scrivener at least. No way am I going to repeat this exercise in self-flagellation; writing the book was hard enough!
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Dec 4, 2020 06:25
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The ebook was actually very helpful, thanks! I am on a mobile device rather than a computer most of the time, so popping it into my kindle app helped me get through the last four chapters rather than dealing with google docs. (The default iOS Books app completely choked on the epub, by the way. It only displayed the first and last two pages of each chapter.) Maybe it was because I was reading them all at once, but these chapters felt like they went by a little fast. There was a lot of “two weeks later....” that I felt like I wanted to dwell on more. I know one of your common criticisms of the original is that Green zooms in too much and describes day-by-day action in excruciating detail, and I felt like this may have swung the pendulum a little hard in the other direction. Finishing the book just reinforces the opinion I had earlier about this being a significant departure from Green’s work. You’ve taken the basic idea and put your own twist on it until the plot is entirely your own. I’d call it a success. Congrats on winning NaNoWriMo!
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Dec 7, 2020 00:48
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wizzardstaff posted:(The default iOS Books app completely choked on the epub, by the way. It only displayed the first and last two pages of each chapter.) Hrmm, looks like the Books app doesn't support certain HTML entities! code: (I'm...bizarrely happy about the fact that the drop caps work, though also pretty annoyed that for some reason the width of the text won't resize accordingly with the window. WHY) wizzardstaff posted:Maybe it was because I was reading them all at once, but these chapters felt like they went by a little fast. There was a lot of “two weeks later....” that I felt like I wanted to dwell on more. I know one of your common criticisms of the original is that Green zooms in too much and describes day-by-day action in excruciating detail, and I felt like this may have swung the pendulum a little hard in the other direction. This is 100% on point. There was so much stuff that I had planned but didn't get to. Here's a list of everything that was in the outline that I didn't get to:
The most obvious reason for why all of that got cut was simply because of time constraints and trying to keep the project from blowing out too much beyond the end of NaNoWriMo. The secondary reasons were: some was cut because I basically hadn't figured it out and didn't have any bright ideas in time; others got cut because I was like UGH fight scenes are hard and I don't know how to write them. The worst offender was probably skipping over the Trial of Duty. It's the second half of qualifying as High and was hyped up to be super hard and then I made it happen all off screen. I now understand why Will Wight writes the way he does. I've got a lot of writing to do in order to improve my economy with words. During this project, I was super conscious of the fact that most of my sentences only do one job when ideally, they should be doing two or more jobs at once. That means every time I change location, for example, I end up with a LOT of description to try and convey a concrete sense of place using more than just visual cues. I've been quite conscious of trying to use that to convey character at the same time but it's hard to do, especially when trying to juggle character growth on top of it. Tamora Pierce's Alanna: The First Adventure is under 50k and covers the titular character's entire eight year journey from page to knight. Somehow she still manages to convey a very detailed sense of Tortall. Probably because she's just very economical with words. wizzardstaff posted:Finishing the book just reinforces the opinion I had earlier about this being a significant departure from Green’s work. You’ve taken the basic idea and put your own twist on it until the plot is entirely your own. I’d call it a success. Congrats on winning NaNoWriMo! Thank you! And thanks for giving up your time to not only read it all the way through, but to take the time and thought to give such insightful feedback and critique.
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Dec 7, 2020 13:07
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WRAP UP: Reflection Good riddance 2020! You've been a rubbish year overall, though I can say in all honesty that my NaNoWriMo win is the one good thing I'll take forward into the new year. May 2021 be a significant improvement on the total dumpster fire that was 2020 (though that's not really a high bar to clear, much like my original stated goal of writing something better than Green's mess). Speaking of, let's check in on those goals: Overall goals Leng posted:The goal is to write a better version of the story Green is trying to tell, while improving myself as a writer. I know I need to work on the following: In order: 1. Yes, there was definitely consistent writing going on during NaNoWriMo. Turns out what works is having a tangible word count, some public accountability and blocking time in my calendar. It makes me feel like I've got a real commitment, instead of a vague "here's a cool thing I want to do" intention which is very easy to let go of. 2. Yes! I think this is the first creative project I've embarked on for a long time that I can stick a fork in and call "done". 3. Yes. I did a reread of the whole thing in one sitting and it was a surreal feeling. While it's plenty flawed (a few too many timeskips, some important stuff happening off-screen, tone issues, some very unsubtle highlighting of themes in chapters, reliance on obvious writing structures) and could use a heavy line edit (things/words I do/use way too much: have characters counting things, the word "now", writing in past perfect, the word "actually", multiple characters "scowling", some random inconsistencies in tenses that slipped through unintentionally, a few egregious examples of bad sentence construction, tendency to default to the same sentence structures, etc), I would rate the prose significantly better than Green's original and better than the lazy rewrites I attempted this time last year. So on that baseline, my writing has improved. Yay! In more detail: Leng posted:REMINDERS/SELF-EDITING CHECKLIST Proportionally, I think I ended up within that 20-30% range for introspection on an overall basis, though there were certainly some chapters that were pretty heavy on introspection and others that were much lighter on it. Touch and taste is really freaking hard to remember to do. If I were going to do subsequent passes through the same work, I think this is one of those focus areas for me in revision. Same with writing distinct dialogue for the different characters: it's really, really hard and I suspect is something that will take me a while to get good at. Despite my complaints about writing fight/action scenes, on balance and in hindsight, I think writing beats/action came more easily than other things: once I knew what the different characters' goals were in the scene, it was easier to extrapolate what would likely happen and therefore easier to write (the problem then came down to word choice and sentence structure, rather than trying to figure out what would happen). There are definitely a few places that are infodumpy–hopefully nothing too cringeworthy though I think Chapter 7 with Lorand's letter home comes close to that. Long story short: I don't immediately hate half of what I've written, which either means I haven't put enough time/distance between me and the output, or I don't know better yet (with a narrow chance of the thing being not bad). This is a pretty toxic view to hold about one's own work, I know, but I feel like it's a mostly universal thing (for example, Sondheim hates his own lyrics for West Side Story, believe it or not, and Will Wight posts often on this subject including the day before his last released hit #1 for several days on the whole of the Amazon Kindle store, so I'm probably in good company). 4. I don't know about the characters being memorable (they're all a little trope-y), but I feel like the named characters were distinct from each other, in that you couldn't just randomly interchange them for one another, and they each had their own personalities. Let's call this one a work in progress, which is a result that I'm satisfied with. The creative process Leng posted:From past experience, I know my process goes something like this: Still quite accurate, though I'm pleased to say that I felt like it was much more balanced and sustainable during NaNoWriMo than usual, so this is a net win. I spent roughly 2 weeks–okay, a little more than 2 weeks, because I started thinking things over in my head once I knew I had committed to this project–planning stuff out, as this very thread attests to. Said planning turned out to be insufficient for me, because I also spent plenty of time struggling with Blank Page Syndrome–all of which was caused whenever I ran into a section of the outline that was too vague (e.g. "Gan Garee is a cool city") or needed research (e.g. what kind of plants grow in summer). There were only two real false starts–once at the end of Chapter 2 when I couldn't figure out how to wrap things up from Lorand's POV and once in Chapter 9, when I was trying to force myself to write more words per hour using the Pomodoro method. I don't think it works for me; I much prefer front loading my thinking so that writing time is just writing time and I get clean drafts at the end of it. The thought of writing 30k words to figure out what I'm actually writing about is terrifying (and I am currently coming to that realization about my major project which I have gone back to now that NaNoWriMo is done and in denial about the need to throw out half the work at the moment). Length Leng posted:I've written about ~1300 words of outline and the same bit from Sanderson's Skyward outline is about ~4200 words. Since Skyward is about 2.7 times as long as my 50k word count and I've used point form, hopefully this is about the right amount of story. There's 23 bullet points right now and I was planning on 16-20 chapters, so maybe I overestimated and 1-2 bullets per 3000-4000 word chapter is ok, or my chapters are gonna be longer than I planned. I guess we'll see what happens! Maybe I'll have to come back and mess around with the plot more later. Leng posted:How long is your story? I ended up at close to 57k words (56,810 to be exact), with 11 characters (whom I'd count as: Lorand, Talitha, Delin, Solthia, Camil, Grami Riven, Lugal, Rion, Hestir, Mildon, Mollit; the rest, in haphazard order–Phor, Allia, Raina, Ravis, High Lord Advisor Moord, Jovvi, Elmin, Ginge, Bensia, Driffin, Gerdol, Eslinna, Jeris, Vallant, Palafar, Vish, Ennis, Idroy, Refe–are basically cameos or window dressing), 9 locations (Widdertown–including the Coll cottage, the Riven cottage, the town itself and its surrounds, Gan Garee–the island and city in general, the Guild House, the Healing clinic and the palace training yards, and the maze) and I'd say 4 MICE threads (Lorand discovering who he is <c>, Talitha discovering who she is<c>, leaving Widdertown <m> and becoming a High practitioner <e>, nested as <c><c><m><e></e></m></c></c> since we see him return to Widdertown to complete the Hero's Journey). Plugging that into the formula, I should have written ((11 + 9) * 750 * 4)/1.5 = 40,000 words yet I went 42% over that, thus supporting my intuition that I am not a very concise writer or possibly because I am bad at doing maths because if I put my original estimate into the formula, I get 19,500 words or maybe the formula is way overrated because I feel like I tried to keep the scope of this story pretty small still ended up way over the projected word count despite not even getting to a long list of things that I had seeded in earlier chapters and then didn't write about.Whatever! The key takeaway is I now have a better handle on what feels like a natural length in a chapter for me (answer: somewhere between 5000-6000 words) and exactly how much plot I can achieve in a chapter and therefore how many chapters are needed overall. Themes/promises Leng posted:I feel like everything I've outlined is...adequate but I can't tell if what I'm doing is good or bad and I don't know how Green's themes of control are going to get worked in. Maybe that's just going to be something I keep in the back of my mind as I write by focusing on how characters are controlled and try to control others. This doesn't really surprise me though - I have found that I rarely approach storytelling by consciously thinking about themes; my themes tend to emerge during the writing process and only become obvious later. Leng posted:Effectively, the story in Rewritten Book 1 is: "A young man leaves home to become a powerful magician in an attempt to save his family’s farm from being seized by a corrupt agent of the nobility. He discovers that the seeds of corruption are widespread across the Empire and vows to change that by becoming part of the next Seated Blending." I think what I ended up writing was "A young boy tries to save his family from destitution by attempting to fill his dead older brother's shoes. The only way he can secure his family's future is to become a powerful magician in service of the Empire by challenging a deadly Trial." At the end, Lorand doesn't so much as vow to become part of the next Seated Blending, but rather to stop an insane Delin from becoming more powerful, setting the scene for a potential sequel. While I ended up with themes for each chapter, I didn't start out with these planned (the only thing I planned, as you guys saw, was the key plot points), so no wonder I didn't manage to stick to Green's themes of control. But I suppose that themes are something you have to feel passionate about as an author to embed in your work and I'm not as obsessed with the idea of control as Green is, so here we are. What next? With NaNoWriMo concluded successfully, it's back to the more ambitious creative project I was stalled on last year (an original musical). I spent the second last week in December reviewing everything that had been written and did a very honest assessment of the status. This rewrite gave me some much needed distance from the project as well as a better grasp on storytelling principles. The conclusion was pretty depressing: there's 26 songs that have been written and I thought I had another 10 or so to go to wrap up the show (for comparison: Rent has 43, Hamilton has 46, Avenue Q has 21, Book of Mormon has 16, Wicked has 19, In the Heights has 23), and of those 26 that have already been written, there's 12 that work (mostly), 8 that need revising, and 6 that just plain don't. And what I mean with regards to whether a song "works" or not runs the gamut from "this song does not advance character/plot" to "this song is in the wrong place in the show/sung by the wrong character" to "this song is not hitting the right emotional notes" to "this song just plain sucks and doesn't fit with the rest of the score" to "I love this song but it doesn't fit in the show so I really don't want to cut it but I can't leave it in because if I do it ruins the show". Most of the issues go back to "book" problems with character arcs, keeping a focus on the key themes and the promise/progress/payoff alignment. Welp. It won't be the first time that I've thrown out at least half of what's been written, but it sure does suck doing it again. First thing on the list is doing a new outline and making sure I've got my bloody characters and the promise/progress/payoffs RIGHT before I forge ahead with doing anything else. I found Sanderson's outlining method worked well for novel writing, so let's see how I go using the same method on a musical. Writing a show is a lot more involved than writing a novel–for one thing, songs are way more complicated–so I'm giving myself most of next year to finish the musical. In the mean time, I'll be turning my posting attention back to the hate-read of the canon books over in Book Barn. This thread will stay open for crits and other general discussion. I really enjoyed doing NaNoWriMo in 2020 so in all likelihood I'll end up doing NaNoWriMo again in 2021. Whether it'll be a rewrite of the sequel or something else, I don't know and can't commit to at the moment, but if I do decide to go ahead with a rewritten book 2, I'll pick up the project in this same thread.
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Jan 1, 2021 05:42
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A follow up!Leng posted:Designing a book cover Last year I did a no effort cover because covers are hard and I had zero energy left to doing a nice cover and also because I didn't think I could DIY a nice one. Lately, I've been reading up on book cover design in preparation for NaNoWriMo 2021 (the plan is to write something original this year, and then publish it). In true "write to market" form, I'm starting with the cover and the blurb, because the cover and blurb combined matter as much as, if not more than, the actual book! Most of the really helpful stuff has been from Derek Murphy, who runs CreativIndie.com which has a lot of self-publishing resources, including this: https://diybookcovers.com/download-templates/ Anyway. Here's where I got to after a couple of hours. Honestly can't figure out if that border adds or detracts from the cover. The drawing of Lorand's master's bracelet took me way too long for something so simple and the details of the links at the sides still aren't quite right, but whatever! It's a huge improvement from the original, which definitely was very much "  SELF-PUBLISHED! SELF-PUBLISHED! SELF-PUBLISHED! "
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Oct 10, 2021 15:43
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Yay follow up! Personally, I like the cover without the border the best, it's very clean. I have no idea if it's what you were going for, but it reminds me of the Game of Thrones book covers (that five book set with the red, white, blue yellow, and green covers, I can't find a picture right now).
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Oct 12, 2021 04:02
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A Small Car posted:Yay follow up! Personally, I like the cover without the border the best, it's very clean. I have no idea if it's what you were going for, but it reminds me of the Game of Thrones book covers (that five book set with the red, white, blue yellow, and green covers, I can't find a picture right now). Thanks for the feedback! That vibe is most definitely what I'm going for. There's a definite trend in fantasy covers where it's just a close up of an object (usually an important and significant object, either explicitly in narrative or thematically/symbolically for the book) and objects are MUCH easier to illustrate compared to people!
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Oct 12, 2021 23:28
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Happy New Year! I have another follow up, of sorts. Last year, my writing group gave me a prompt that would work for the prologue of a rewritten Book 2. It's pretty rough and has not been edited, but I thought you guys might like to read something that isn't a Lorand or Talitha POV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YVjTpZidn8Hz56KDRJX43eUnPWXsFxcorRiW6_3sV3k/edit?usp=sharing I didn't post it before, because I had some vague intentions of revising it if/when I got around to doing a rewritten book 2, but that doesn't look like it's going to be likely, though, because NaNoWriMo 2021 went verrrry well. Well enough that I'm planning on self-publishing the original fiction I wrote! Here's the current draft of the blurb:Leng posted:Petition (Resonance Crystal Legacy: Volume 1) It is a new adult single POV first in series fantasy novel, and my comparable titles (inasmuch as my crappy MS Paint efforts resemble actual works of art ) are:
I'm currently looking for beta readers, so if you like my writing and this sounds like something you might enjoy reading, please PM me (or if you don't have PMs let me know in this thread how I can reach out to you)!
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Jan 4, 2022 06:47
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