Thriving in the Darkest Hour

I read an awesome blog post by Robin LaFevers the other day on Writer Unboxed. It's about how a writer can not only survive but thrive in that "almost there" phase before they get an agent and a pub deal. It spoke so deeply to me, because I've been in that "almost there" phase, or the "Dark Night of the Soul" as Robin put it, for well over a year now. I was a semi-finalist in one online writing contest, and won my age category in another popular online pitch contest, but the agents that requested ended up passing. I got very complimentary feedback from an agent that loved my writing but had something too similar, and requests to submit my future work from a couple others. In essence, it's been an extremely frustrating period of near misses. A period of good, but not good enough.


Reading Robin's post was like a beacon in my dark night, and inspired me to keep at it with gusto. Not that I was thinking of quitting, but it enabled me to smell the roses again. In her post she talks about using this phase in your pre-career to really amp up the excellence in your craft. So, being the list freak that I am, I decided to list out what I felt were the main elements of a story, with the sub-elements that make a novel delicious. My goal with this is to take an honest look at how I stack up in these various areas, both overall and for each book I've written, since each book is of course a unique creature. Here's the list of elements I came up with:

• Character
  • Depth, details, uniqueness
  • Motivations
  • Emotions
  • Relationships
  • Dialogue
  • POV
  • Character voice
  • Arc
  • Antagonists
  •  
• Plot
  • Concept – new or archetypal?
  • Scenes
  • Pacing
  • Tension
  • Hooks and Cliffhangers
  • Turning points – inner and outer
  • Twists/surprises
     
• Voice/Style/Skill
  • Writer’s voice/style
  • Skill with words, mastery of craft
  • Structure
  • “Feel” of the story
  • Ability to immerse reader
  • Subtext
     
• Worldbuilding
  • Description – range from lush to minimal
  • Visual and full-sensory experience of reader
  • Details – whether real or fantasy world
  • Setting as character 

So, writer friends: have you experienced a dark time in your writing career? What do you think of the list above - what did I miss? How do you self-evaluate?


I'll let you know how my self-evaluation process goes. I've been reading writing craft books and I have some other exercises to experiment with. Whatever you're up to, I hope the summer is unfolding beautifully!

Gratitude and Other Random Introspection As the Year Draws to a Close

I've just finished probably my fifth plate over the last two days of Thanksgiving food. I LOVE TG food, especially my dear Tofurkey. It makes this vegetarian a happy girl :) Anyways, I've been remiss in blogging lately so I thought I would post some random notes/thoughts on what I've been up to and what I'm planning as the year winds down.

• The first being, how IS the year already almost over? How did it happen? Last night I saw the first Christmas lights and it was shocking, even though I know it's almost December. Time is flying.
• I have a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving. While I'm going through a big transition in my personal life right now, there are so many things I'm grateful for. I won't bore you with them, except for one: I love my writer friends SO much. Fellow bloggers and Twitter friends, I am always astounded at your awesomeness and I've known some of you for years now, and it makes me happy.
• Speaking of bloggers, I rarely blog anymore, but am on Twitter almost daily. So, if you're one of my blog peeps that I am not following on Twitter, please send me a message and I'll add you to my daily list. My handle is @aachamberlynn (or just click to find me!).
• I am currently editing the book I got sudden and crazy inspiration for and wrote in 6 weeks. It's pretty rough. I've got a big edit to-do list. But I've been working hard and I'm hoping to have it query ready by January.
• I'm also going to submit a short story I wrote earlier in the year to some lit magazines and hope I can find a home for that. I might do that this weekend.
• I have a busy schedule of fun concerts, art shows and parties to attend in December, which is unusual for me, so I'm excited to branch out and be a butterfly for the month!

So, as the year wraps up, what are you aiming to finish up? What makes you happy and grateful? Do you find yourself gravitating more to Twitter than the blogosphere? Whatever you're up to, I hope it's awesome and makes you sparkle inside and out. TTFN, writer friends!

Adventures with Neil

I am very psyched to share about my trip this last weekend to Atlanta to see Neil Gaiman on his last U.S. book signing tour. This was my second time being in the physical presence of my favorite author. The first was in 2011 at World Fantasy Con in San Diego, which you can read about here.

The adventure started out by picking up my friends Ann Marie and her boyfriend Lee and driving five hours from Florida to ATL. We got to the site of the event, a small women's college, about three hours before Neil was scheduled to talk and went to grab something to eat. When we got back like thirty minutes later, there were hundreds of people in line ahead of us. We had to wait in the blazing sun for over an hour to pick up our tickets, but it was a very pretty and magical looking ticket indeed:

 

After that, we had to get in the longest line I've ever seen, which spanned like half the campus, to wait to get into the building. This is the line when we got to the back (though it's missing about thirty people on the left side), and what you can see below is only about a fifth of the whole thing. Can you see how far it stretches into the distance???

 

 

We finally got in and sat in the balcony at the back of a large auditorium. Neil spoke at about 7:30 and as usual was smart and charming and super cool. He read from Ocean at the End of the Lane and then had a brief Q&A, though he refused to answer more than three Dr. Who questions. My favorite answer? When asked how he approached a writing project, he said, "I just sidle up next to it and say Hullo."

 

This is the gorgeous building we were in:

 

 

After Neil spoke the serious waiting began. We had about six hundred people ahead of us to get our books signed. Finally, after midnight and eight hours of waiting total (eight!), we got our books signed. And it was totally worth it. Neil was so friendly and made a point to talk to everyone even though he'd been signing for hours. He said he liked my shirt, which just about made me giggle like a school girl, and I asked him about something he'd said he was working on when I saw him in 2011, and then we were through and it was over, and I didn't regret one bit of the waiting.

 

Here is a pic of me and Neil, with most of my makeup melted off from waiting in the Georgia heat and a beam of light cutting across my head:

 

 

Silly as it sounds, I feel changed every time I see Neil. It solidifies my aspirations as a writer, and helps me dream of the future. I want to be the cool author with an eight hour line. I want to travel the world and make good art and inspire others. I want to free the imagination of countless readers and change how they see the world every time they pick up one of my books.

 

So, yeah. It was a pretty rad weekend :)

 

**Update** LOL, I just read my old WFC 2011 post where I talk about waiting ONE WHOLE HOUR to get Neil to sign my book. Oh, perspective...

 





Musings...duality...multi-colored glasses

Hello, fellow writers! Weekly update on rejections and other pertinent writing business: I’ve gotten a couple new form rejections. I’ve also sent out about five new queries. Just plugging away, trying to maintain my optimism. All of your lovely and insightful comments make me feel so much better!  Also, since I got some questions about me and my MC, I've added a couple pages to the blog which I hope you'll enjoy.

My musings of late… duality. As I was updating my blogger profile a couple weeks ago, I realized that in so many things I hold opposite opinions or preferences simultaneously. For instance, two of my very favorite movies – Under the Tuscan Sun and The Matrix. One a sappy chic flick, the other an intense action film. Music, too. On any given day on the drive to work, I might listen to Vivaldi and Green Day… Natalie Merchant and Linkin Park… Madonna and Dropkick Murphys. Even how I dress is eclectic – one day I might dress a little preppy and sophisticated, another I might wear khaki cut-offs and a hippy top. Ideas are often the same. I might feel one way about something, but at the same time have a very differing opinion.

So, is this just me, or is it a writer thing? I’ve kind of wondered if writers are more prone to seeing things through multi-colored glasses because we’re open-minded, out-of-the-box storytellers. We often put ourselves in the different perspectives of our characters, so are used to seeing things in lots of different ways all at once. Does anyone else experience this, too?