Ride that elephant over the plot-Alps, Hannibal!

So once again, I find myself traveling on a Friday so please forgive the brevity of this post (anytime I say that, I'm reminded of that Simpsons episode where Marge writes Ringo Starr and he replies to her--and all fans'--letter: "Please excuse the lateness of my reply"...anyone remember that? Crap, am I digressing ALREADY?)

I'm in the final stages of yet another revision. But it's good this time around! After long days and nights of stewing and stressing over the storyline, I think I've figured out a really difficult point in the manuscript: the climax.

And as I've figured this part out, other things are coming together, too! Red herrings that I factored in before are coming to fruition. Characterizations that I struggled for before are blossoming right before my eyes. My main character still needs to find a way out of that hideous dress she's wearing, but we'll find a way to do that! Appropriately!

It's like Hannibal from the A-Team always says, "I love it when a plan comes together." When we reach this stage of putting things together, streamlining plotlines, etc. I think we can amaze ourselves when we realize how much we've actually thought it through.

We are great writers. Or great writers waiting to happen. Perseverance is the key, of course. But don't forget to take time to lean back and smoke your metaphorical cigar, glorying in your brilliant plan.


Mr. T type sidekick optional, of course.

Since no love is perfect: Part Deux

Last week, I asked you to tell me something about your writing that you hated. I was actually kind of surprised by the answers-- just about everyone said they hate that they write slowly! That might be my fault. Most of the people who responded know that I write pretty quickly. But I've said it before, and I'll say it again, folks: I am a FREAK. I am NOT NORMAL. And-- I'm pretty much where you guys are right now, myself. I realized that I started this book in January, which didn't seem so long ago in March, but in May seems really, REALLY far away. This is a looooooong time for me.

Although, last year, I was working on one book for over six months, and it still isn't finished, so there's that. I hope this one doesn't turn out that way, personally, as I'd rather like to have it done soon.

Anyway, moving on-- last week was fun, and all, but I really, really want to bring the mood back up and make us all fall in love with ourselves all over again. So this week, tell me something that you LOVE about your writing!

Mine? I love piecing words together. It's like a puzzle, and finding that perfect fit is just . . . thrilling. I love putting sentences together that read like poetry, but still convey the story to be told within them. And I love my characters, and my stories-- even though they may not be my strongest parts.

So there. That's mine. Now tell me yours!

Collaboration in the Age of the Internet

I have no idea if any of you follow me on Twitter or not, but if you do you might have seen the hashtag #sprr floating around in my Twitter stream for the past two weeks or so. And of course by now you're probably wondering what the devil the dang thing actually means.

The short version is that, after a discussion early last week, myself, Ren Cummins (@rencummins), Theresa Meyers (@theresa_meyers), Anabel Portilo (@nemone7), and Angyl (@syferlocke) decided to write a round robin story. A Steampunk round robin story, that eventually turned into a Steampunk Romance involving Air Pirates, an evil Empire, and a ridiculously vibrant world of arid landscapes, high mountains, derring-do, floating cities, and super mega powered airships. The "Air Pirate" is a woman, incidentally, with a dashing male Air Fleet captain sent by the Queen-Empress to catch her.

In deciding to write this story, we were presented with a unique problem. Theresa and Ren are located in Washington state, I live in Massachusetts, Angyl calls Kansas his home, and Anabel lives in Ireland. How to conquer this time and distance differential so all five of us can work on the story? We could've spent time emailing a Word doc back and forth, but there's a distinct difficulty with that method. This difficulty being that we'd need to figure out a hard-and-fast order for who writes when and the word count limit that each person would have before passing it along to the next person. An additional problem is that there'd be a certain amount of lag while the next person read what had come before and then figured out what they wanted to write.

However! I'd recently begun a project -- tentatively called "Purity Distilled" -- where I shared the file I was working on with Theresa, Anabel, and Ren via Google's Docs application. If you don't know anything about Google Docs, http://docs.google.com, it's a fantastic web-based program that mimics Open Office or Microsoft's program suite with a word processor, a presentation program, a spreadsheet program, etc. The Google Docs format allows you to create a document and instantly share it with anyone you select so each person can either Edit or only View the document in question. I'm a HUGE fan of Google Docs, and do a large amount of writing in their service particularly in regards to my freelance articles or anything that I want to access from multiple computers.

The end result of all this is that we're currently writing the round robin story in a Google Docs word processing file, which allows real-time collaboration on the same document across all the time zones we're in. The added benefit is that there's a Chat column active when multiple people are viewing the same document. So Anabel, Angyl, Ren, Theresa, and I can both write and discuss what we're writing all at the same time. The only real challenge now is figuring out a time when we can all sign in to the doc to work on the story. But when that happens, hooboy is the discussion and the writing fast and furious. It feels like we're all sitting around a table chatting while we work on this awesomely vibrant tale that we've all come up with.

Ain't collaboration in the age of the Internet fun?

Why Twitter is Awesome for Writers

This isn't going to be the standard argument for Twitter's usefulness to writers. Seeing as everyone's been told backwards and forwards until their heads spin that Twitter is good for networking and building your brand, that argument is very old hat by now. And in fact, I'm reasonably sure that y'all are sick of hearing about it.

No, there's a different reason that Twitter is amazing for writers, and here's why: at 9:52 am Eastern time on Monday, Februrary 28, Theresa Meyers wondered on Twitter if Steampunk science could develop a machine that detected whether a woman was a virgin or not. This sparked a discussion of how you'd make the machine actually function properly, which involved @nemone7 and @SyferLocke among others.

Aaaand things snowballed from there, until you come to yesterday when I spent a good portion of my workday sketching out a short story called "The Trials of the Virgin." To be fair, Theresa will probably say I was the one who sparked my own idea because I made a comment about virgin sacrifices working to get someone published and she just played off that, but I'm still blaming her for sparking my idea (my blog, my rules).

The idea was sparked in conversation on Monday -- it's now Thursday and I already have a basic outline and plot development document (sort of) put together along with slightly over 1,000 words written on the story itself. Then I found out about Carina Press's call for holiday or winter-themed Steampunk submissions, and now I'm planning to maybe turn this short story into a novella and send it along to them. Or maybe keep it at short story level and send it to David Lee Summer's Tales of the Talisman magazine during the reading period in July. It all depends on where I am when Carina Press's deadline of June 15 rolls around.

What's my point here? Well, Theresa lives in Seattle; Nemone7 lives in Dublin; @SyferLocke lives in Wichita, Kansas; and I myself make my home in Eastern Massachusetts. Because of Twitter, and the connections it engenders among people, the four of us were able to talk back and forth about an idea that one person mentioned. And yesterday, Theresa, Nemone7, and I spent at least an hour collaborating on the Google Documents outline I'd made for "The Trials of the Virgin."

Even ten years ago, this sort of long-distance cross communication wasn't possible outside of knowing each other's email addresses or belonging to an internet chat room. Go back 20 years, or 30 years, and this electronic collaboration does not exist. In the age of Twitter, you can have four creative people separated by time zones and distance collaborating on the same idea.

How is that not awesome?