The Edge of the Cliff

Something's happening. I'm so close to figuring it all out. It's like I'm standing at the edge of a cliff, staring into an abyss that no one I know has ever gone over before. It's scary, it's exciting, and a little mind-numbing. I won't lie--half the time I'm walking around on auto-pilot. My mind is...elsewhere. I'm on a mission.

I have to say that I do like the gushing people do over my writing, now. I go to the group meetings and expect to be ripped and have considerable improvements suggested. That is just not happening any more. They said this week they expect to be blown away from here on out. What's worse is that I am 100% confident I can deliver. I don't even think twice about it. Is that cocky? Is that a bad thing? I don't know.

Continual improvement is key. I love challenges, I crave them. But what if I truly become masterful with this? What if I accomplish my life-long dream? Complete the mission? I know I won't stop. I love it too much.

But something is missing. And I know exactly what that something is. I see it around me all day, every day. I think I know why I like that whole super hero thing so much. Some of the things I am capable of doing, other people just can't. It makes me different, and my upbringing and experiences have created a person who is well-liked an respected, but not understood very well by others. It sets me apart. Sometimes, I hate it. But it also gives me a sense of confidence--I can do things other people can't, and it's my little secret. You should see the looks on people's face when I mention that I write. I show them a chapter or something.

And then they stare at me with a whole new look on their faces. I would say probably a month after my divorce went final my paradigm shifted and something went off in my mind as it pertains to my writing. I sat down to work and I found my voice. I am able to get people who hate sci-fi to find themselves unable to stop reading my sci-fi tale.

"Are you coming this week?"

"Are you bringing more?"

"Can I pick your brain?"

"What's next? I have to know."

"What else have you written? We want to know."

If I can pull this trick with agents and editors, I will be set. That time is coming, soon. Miss Rayne, she tells me things as they happen. I write them down. Yes, the book is finished and the plot is the same. But I've layered it with character development and subplots that really add spice. I have no clue where I come up with any of this stuff. It just comes to me. I write it down.

Like when I went for my pee test for work, i had a vision of how to tie "Seed" together, which is something I'll work on after I get the EM series, the No Rest for the Wicked series, SUTR and the Hungry One done. Hey, maybe they'll even let me do Death Rally if I can sell. But anyway, that's enough dreaming for now. I have to go kill my MC and then resurrect her. :-)

Story

So, now that I'm out there a bit, one question keeps coming back to me already--where do I come up with this stuff?

For me, it doesn't take much. My mind is set on overdrive. I got the idea for Electrify Me when I was bored at work one day and a storm was rolling in. Lightning flashed across the sky as I considered an exercise from the writing book currently on my slate. I thought, "I wish someone would tell me to go to Hell, so I could laugh and say it's too late, because I'm already there." The lightning was amber in color, and it started pouring rain. So I thought, "Yeah, I'll call her Amber Rayne. And she'll throw lightning bolts. That'd be pretty cool." She started out as a sullen super villain.

But villains are...well, villains, and I already had the ultimate villain for Betrayal. So I decided to make it a hero's journey. How do I take a down-on-her-luck college student and make her into a hero? How do I take someone who's known only emotional pain and give them a moral code and strong values deep inside?

It just took off from there, and 225 pages later, I had a story. along the way I wrote an outline and detailed the points I wanted to make in each chapter. It'd be cool to do x here, I'd think, or y here. I'm hesitant to say too much about it because this is the book I'm going to push and I think I will be able to pick up an agent with it. I've made some serious changes in my style and took a big leap in my ability to tell a story, thanks to WWG and the criticism I got from Margie and the rejection letter from Lucienne back in 2011. They were all right about what was wrong with my work.

Of course, I'm sure I'll get a bunch of rejections again. But all I need is one agent to love it and I'm good. It features a lot of things that are going to be hot for a while. So I have time, but not much. Back to work for me.

Happy writing, y'all.

Feel

When writing, there's a certain element of "feel" that has to go into it. A lot, when I'm reading other unpublished writers, I see a lack of feel or that they've put too much of themselves into the work they're doing. I look at what I'm writing--I can see where I have used elements of myself in my characters, but I'm at a point where if you think you can get to know me through my writing or by examining my characters, you'd be very, very wrong. Some, I am nothing like.

But I do use elements of what I see going on around me every day. I am constantly people watching, paying attention to things, noticing things. I also have begun paying attention to how I feel in certain situations. A good example is how to write about what it feels like to be strongly attracted to someone. I know someone who makes my heart stop. I've seen this before, but it's rare and doesn't come around often, but basically it's this: when I look into her eyes, the world falls away, and all that's left is eternity. Her pupils get huge and she chews her lip. She often stares at me when she thinks I'm not looking. If I catch her, she tries to play it cool and usually fails, but it's ok. I like goofy, happy-go-lucky types who are imperfect. I don't know what any of it means, and in my situation--to be honest--it scares the shit out of me because I don't think I'm ready for that. I'm pretty sour on relationships right now.

But either she or I keep forcing run-ins. I'm easy to enough to avoid, so I know she follows me into the break room on purpose, since I have to walk by her desk to get there. Half the time we just sneaks stares at each other, and try to pretend we're not doing that. I wonder if she feels the same things when she looks at me. She is gorgeous, but it's kind of a moot point--we work in the same office and I have rules about that. I would say whatever's between us is powerful enough that, even though we're both smooth operators with everyone else, we get clumsy and awkward in each other's presence one-on-one. It's really funny sometimes, she drops things, I drop things or stumble with my words. Games, I know, but whatever. I don't think she's available, though, and like I said I don't date women I work with...but I might make an exception for this one if we could get past three minutes of small talk and avoiding the elephant in the room and we're both single.

Being a romantic, and a writer, there are a lot of great things I can come up with to say on the fly. I can talk the talk, man, even if I've never met a woman who appreciates it coming from me. But then I thought--why can't my characters do that? Why am I not using this? The entire situation is perfect for the chapter I'm working on right now. So I'm taking my feelings and channeling them into the work. Using the lines that I'd like to say and making them private thoughts for my character. We've all felt that way about someone at some time or another. It will help me connect to the reader, I think, and humanize a character who is not human.

So it's another cup of coffee and back to the grind. I get this right, the romantic aspect of the story, and I'm gold. Because without the romantic aspect, you won't sell. Take a look at the bestsellers, the ones they make into movies- action and romance heavy. I've decided to stretch out my book's romantic payoff. No longer does it happen in Chapter Three. I might withhold the outcome and make it on again off again until Book 3: The Underworld War.

But first things first. I made major changes to Book 1. Getting back to it. Happy writing y'all.

Progressions and Writing Groups

The improvements I've made over the past year or so stem directly from the scolding I got at the Sallas Writer's conference. There I was, among bestsellers, (I sat with Allison Brennan and had lunch with her group of peeps) famous editors (Margie Lawson took to picking on me all day, which was great, actually) and established agents (I talked to Lucienne Diver, one of the agents whose attention I'd craved since I started querying.)

Here's the one thing they all said to me: You have great ideas and a wonderful imagination. But, right now, you are lazy. You need to devote yourself to this. If you do, you can accomplish wonders.

I wasn't insulted. I knew that they were right. I was lazy, trying to make it on talent alone without really honing it. One of my friends/coworkers said, after reading my latest short story: There's a difference between a writer and a story teller. You are a story teller. I'm becoming one. I'm very close. But I have to keep working, keep writing, keep getting better. I'm not what I could be and I'm fully aware of the fact.

With the "unpleasantness" out of the way, I joined the Woodlands Writer's Guild and learned my first hard lesson--as good as it looks on paper, it means nothing if you can't read it aloud. Vee, one of my longtime critique partners, had been telling me to do this for a long time. And I didn't do it. Boy, it was gorgeous on the page and sounded AWFUL when read aloud. Clunky, clumsy, awkward, kinda like me around a beautiful woman. Totally embarrassed after my first read, I went home and got to work.

Luckily, my pups are great listeners. I read aloud over and over again until it flows. I was reading this YA book I have called "The Name of the Game was Murder" by Joan Lowery Nixon. In it, the MC says about an author "his words tumbled and flowed like a river into a waterfall." I thought, "Yeah, I need to write like THAT." and it's been my goal ever since.

So, how do I find out if I've reached that goal? Writer's groups. I haven't read in a while. Right now, I am sharing "the Pit" to get ready for the WD contest. Some people love it as is. Others all say the same thing: leave the character's first name out of it, they couldn't put it down, and that they felt cheated because there isn't more of it.

There is more--the Pit is an offshoot of Electrify Me. I won't say too much more about that story, but it's a flashback to the same MC at seventeen. EM takes place when she's twenty and in college. The Pit shows why she's kinda of messed up in the head, why she has such strong character and morals, and why she and Jennings hate each other. (Jennings shows up in Chapter 13 of the novel.) It's basically a morality play, good vs evil. But within good, there's a little evil. And within evil, there's a little good.

I like to play those kinds of themes and deliberately place them in my characters. Even Evil Erin from Betrayal is only that way because she has no choice--she's a sociopath. She wants to be different, she even tries to be different. But without any concept of right and wrong, without any real feelings, she can't be. She just is. And she does whatever she wants. Naomi from Betrayal is the good guy, but she's just as crazy as Erin. The difference is that Naomi possesses empathy and has a moral code instilled in her by her adopted father.

so, there I go again, with my preachy morals. I can't wait to go back and fix Betrayal. But after I'm done with EM, I'm going back to Somewhere Under the Rainbow, the story for which this blog url was named. It was my first, and it has so much potential for the YA market. Plus I love the character of Lacey Carter. She's a mixture of every girl I've ever fallen for.

Wait; wasn't I being preachy? Yeah, go join a writer's group if you want to be any good. You have a better chance of winning the Power Ball than being the next Stephanie Meyer. Most writers have to work at it. They aren't able to sell an idea and learn how to write better through the publishing process.

Happy writing, y'all.

Character Study

Hello. I'm starting this blog over. I don't really know how I'm going to theme it, or really what to write in it at all. I am, however, going to start writing in it. Today, I did a lot of people watching. People are interesting, especially women. That's probably because I'm a guy and I like women. But it helps when writing female characters to start picking up female ticks and remembering them to add detail. What they say, how they walk, what they talk about. I've been experimenting with things like complimenting them on stuff guys don't usually notice, like their shoes or their hair or their outfits. It's interesting the responses I get. I've noticed something- women either ignore me, give me one dirty look and ignore me, or always make eye contact, smile, and say hello. Some even regularly try to engage me in conversation afterward. There is one, though, who does all three, and I have got to ask her why, because it's weird and I'm dying to know what's up with that. I think I'm going to use whatever she says in a YA I'm going to go back to when I get done with (or get tired of) working on Electrify Me. But so far, so good, I'm writing some killer stuff. I think I might actually be making "The Leap" from writing crap to writing something decent somebody might want to publish. There really is an art to it. I find myself making "artsy" decisions all the time. Like, "If I do this here, it has this effect." Or "I should hint here and--show, don't tell!--let the story do a slow reveal, yeah, create tension." It's odd, but it's like I understand something I always missed before. I'm getting better at non dialogue/action scenes, which I've always struggled with. I realize now that setting a scene is important, or your character's basically operating in a vacuum. Boring. Anyway, when I finish the chapter I'll post it here. Who knows? Maybe someone will read this thing and comment so I can fix it. I'll pick a topic or something and discuss next time. But I've got pizza to eat and writing to do, so happy writing y'all. -CK