Weekly Wrap-Up: March 26

What Is This?

Following the lead of my mentor, friend, and exemplar, Tami Moore, this is a weekly article to document progress in meeting my writing goals as described here. I use an Excel spreadsheet to track all my work by category (blog post, copyediting work, creative writing) and item. So all I need to do is add up the “words” column and I’m good to go. This article will be counted, minus the first 150 words. However, it will be counted in the following week’s total. All other blog posts and creative writing count full credit. Copyediting for other writers is counted at ten percent of the starting word count for the document; style sheets for that copyediting will count twenty-five percent. Editing my own work, if and when I get to that point, will count fifty percent of the starting word count.

How Did I Do?

My weekly goal is 2,000 words. This was a good week: I had three blog articles, a smidgen of copyediting for a friend, and some creative writing. As soon as I post this, I’m going to do some more, but more on that in a bit.

• Blog: “Weekly Wrap-Up, March 19″—1,316 words
• Blog: “Dashes and Hyphens: The Long and Short of It”—1,777 words
• Copyediting—33 words (remember, that’s 10 percent of the total document)
• Blog: “Challenge Accepted: Dipping My Toes in the Shallow End”—377 words
• Darklight, Chapter 3 (continued)—1,643 words

Total: 5,146 words. Holy cow! So yeah…kinda makes up for only 1,087 last week, and 1,781 the week before, don’t you think? For the month of March, I’m already 4K words ahead of February, and should easily beat January’s 15K total.

I had a lot of fun writing the article on dashes, and even more fun with (well, maybe not fun, but got a lot out of) the 25-word challenge article and the exercise itself. (If I had cutlines in my blog, this is where you’d see “read more after the break.”)

25-Word Exercise

As I wrote on Wednesday, I entered the 25-word challenge/exercise at Miss Snark’s First Victim. I was pleasantly surprised at the generally favorable comments on my entry. I hooked a few, missed a few, and got some nibbles. The criticisms were fair, and, to be honest, about the same as my own misgivings about that opening. As I wrote to some friends this morning, it shouldn’t take 750 words of prologue or until the last line of Chapter 1 to set the hook with a reader. More on that in the next section.

Can anyone tell me what “romantic environmental suspense” is?

I also critiqued many of the entries (well over the requested minimum of ten, to be sure!). There were a lot of great openings in the 190 entries, there were a lot of near-misses, and there were a few that simply made me go, “huh?” (which I did, literally, in one critique, and was echoed by every subsequent critiquer). Then there were the genres. Can anyone tell me what the hell “romantic environmental suspense” is? And what, exactly, is the difference between “Romance” and “Women’s Fiction”? Or between “Women’s Fiction” and “Fiction”? There are shades of gray there I just cannot discern (and I think I don’t want to, either).

One category I’d like to see added, though, is “YAVN”—Yet Another Vampire Novel. That way, “Paranormal Fantasy” can mean something other than “Vampires.”

Sorry…was I ranting?

Darklight is Dead

Now there’s a hook!

One of the first critiques on my entry suggested I look up “Darklight” at Amazon Books. When I first started using that as the working title of my story, I meant to do exactly that, and never did. Yesterday, I found no less than three novels titled Darklight. Now granted, mine is a working title, but still…. Oh, and at least two of those are “Romances.” Ugh.

On the other hand, the 25-word exercise caused me to do a lot of introspection¹ yesterday. My story does read a lot more like a romance than hard science fiction. In the first place, through more than 10,000 words, there is no science fiction. There is a budding romance. There is no conflict (even romances have conflict—tons of it, in fact!). My hero and heroine (especially the latter) are cardboard cutouts. In fact, the heroine is so sweet and perfect, at least one beta reader almost went into diabetic shock. There’s a lot of local color: It almost reads like a travelogue of California’s Central Coast. In a word: boring.

I wrote 1,600 words yesterday that didn’t do one damned thing to create (or resolve) conflict. It didn’t advance the plot one millimeter. It did a nice job of describing dinner at a restaurant, and I think the dialogue and narrative both worked—but not for the story I want to tell!

I reached the conclusion that my story was simply a Barbie and Ken tale

Later in the day, I was talking with a friend, with whom I had shared what I wrote yesterday. She opined that the writing was good, it was effective, but confirmed what I just said in the preceding paragraph. She also told me (again) how much she didn’t care for my heroine. She said it differently, but the conclusion I reached was this: I was writing a Barbie and Ken story. Take out the occasional expletive, and it would be suitable for my five-year-old granddaughter.

Darklight Reincarnated

Yeah, it is that bad. So last night, I resolved to fix it. I’m abandoning the entire 10,000 word draft I have and starting over. Here’s the premise:

Nathan Castle is a private investigator who specializes in finding missing persons—runaways, family abductions, that sort of thing. He’s a retired Air Force pilot and special ops expert who was on the fast track for general officer rank until he became disenchanted with the military while in Iraq and Afghanistan. Devon Sinclair is a spoiled heiress (her mother’s side) and the daughter of Castle’s former commander, mentor, and sponsor, General Patrick Sinclair. Gen. Sinclair was killed in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon. But now, eight years later, Devon claims she’s found evidence he’s alive, and wants Castle to help her find him. The evidence leads the pair to UFO fanatics, FBI investigators, and blinding darkness.

And here’s the new opening:

Nathan Castle, Private Investigator, specialized in finding missing persons. Generally, they didn’t want to be found. Generally, they didn’t have a headstone at Arlington, either.

With that, I’m off to see whether I’ve figured out how to move this story along a wee bit faster than a gestating elephant. Have a great weekend, everyone!