writing – Page 7 – Caroline M. Yoachim

Why my novel isn’t as good as A Deepness in the Sky

Day 6 JaNo – 2458 today, 13512 total

Lots and lots of words, but it doesn’t read like a novel. Fortunately, this is practice, so I’m not too concerned that the end result isn’t quite right. I’m starting to get a feel for what sorts of mistakes I’m making. A lot of it boils down to insufficient worldbuilding and character development. I spend as much time as I would have liked ironing out the details of the world and the nitty-gritty of the characters, and so the novel thus far doesn’t feel real. It has a vague disconnected quality to …

Just barely…

Day 5 JaNo – 2037 words today, 11054 total

Even closer to hitting quota dead-on today than I was yesterday. I’m becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the plot that I’ve outlined for myself, but maybe that’s a good thing, as it might be a sign that my characters are asserting themselves. However, while they seem to be unhappy with the things *I’ve* outlined for them to do, they aren’t exactly coming up with alternatives. Lazy characters. In any case, I’ve made it most of the way through chapter 5 at this point, and I have a couple of story-lines going. Now …

Like pulling teeth. . .

Day 4 of JaNo – 2059 words today, 9017 total

Slow going today, and I think what I ended up with was mostly pretty nasty stuff. I did manage to come up with some new creatures though, towards the end of the day, and I think that saved it. Oddly enough, I’m having a much easier time writing the chapters that come from the POV of what I thought was the secondary character. I think, though that he might be the more interesting of the two main POV characters I’ve got so far, so I may have to think about …

Good progress today

Day 3 of JaNo – 2,681 words today, 6958 total

Wrote all of chapter 3 this morning, and got a fair bit into chapter 4. I’ll definitely need to sit down this afternoon though, and outline what comes next, as chapter 4 is the last chapter for which I have a detailed outline. In addition to getting pretty good wordcount today, I’m feeling a bit happier with how the words came out. The first couple chapters had a decidedly choppy feel, almost more like detailed outlines than chapters, but today’s stuff reads a little smoother. Fingers crossed that I’m starting …

Writing in the Rain

Not literally, of course, as I’m inside and the rain is outside. But the weather has turned nasty once again, and with all the wind and rain I’m a bit worried that the power will go out.

* * *

Day 2 of JaNoWriMo – 2090 words today, 4277 total

My chapters are ending up rather shorter than I expected, which may be an artifact of my quota system. (I’m shooting for 2000 words per day, and the chapters are ending up 2k long.) More likely, I just tend to write things on the short side (I often end up …

And so it begins…

Happy New Year!

All the cool kids are posting summaries of 2006 on their blogs, so here’s mine: 16 short story submissions, resulting in 12 rejections and 1 acceptance (3 stories are currently out at markets). Not the most impressive numbers, but 2006 was a ramping-up year for me, writing-wise, with most of the submissions going out in the second half of the year. Attending Clarion helped me be more confident in sending stories out, as did friendly competition with my Clarion classmates (and not-so-friendly threats from a certain stuffed Zebra).

Hopefully I’ll have bigger numbers this year (I subbed …

JaNoWriMo

Since November was a bit too crazy for novel writing, I’ve joined up with some of my Clarion classmates for JaNoWriMo – JAnuary NOvel WRIting MOnth. In the interest of saving myself some prep work (January being right around the corner and all), I’ve opted to set my novel in the same world as ‘Tending the Mori Birds,’ which is the short story I sold to _Fantasy Magazine_. I consider this to be entirely a practice novel, so I’m going to do my best to burn through it as quickly as possible, and treat it solely as a learning experience. …

The Basics, Revisited

Back when I first started writing, I spent a fair amount of time looking through ‘how to write’ books (most useful for me being Sol Stein’s “On Writing”). Lately, while I’ve been happy with my stories on a word by word level, I haven’t been as thrilled with the bigger structure of the stories. So I decided it was time to have another look at some of the technique books to see if I can glean new insights from them now that I’ve had a bit more practical experience.

My focus-of-the-moment is to look for ways to make the words …

Sale #1

Well, my first Clarion story, “Tending the Mori Birds” was rejected at Clarkesworld, but I turned it around for a quick sale to Fantasy Magazine! It’s my very first sale, so of course I spent much of this past weekend celebrating (having heard on Friday that the story was accepted). And, as proof that I didn’t hallucinate the whole thing: http://oldcharliebrown.livejournal.com/87419.html.

Too jumpy for my own good….

(Or, “Why I shouldn’t drink a bunch of coffee and then sit at home by myself writing stories about corpses during a rainstorm”)

I’m up to 3,300 words on my corpse photography story, which is probably a bit past the halfway mark. I was making excellent progress on it this morning until a gust of wind blew pounding rain into my window right as a dead woman was sneaking up behind one of my characters. Let’s just say I’m a bit jumpy today, and leave it at that. I did manage not to spill my coffee (mainly due to the …

Tag: writing