Anyone Else Need A Tissue

How to make yourself cry. I'm rewriting Fallen so here it goes.

Before



After



Ouch!

45 Scenes Down 20 To Go

No, not written. Well, some of them are, but I'm plotting. I need some more scenes between my pivotal fight scenes. I did add Villian POV. 4 whole scenes, but with the book Villian. Note there is a super villian at work as well. Not super as in Superman, but an overall villian that can never truly be defeated. There's a lot of physical action in my story. Maybe that's just me or just this story or just paranormal in general. If I could make each scene 2000 words long I'd be gold, but I tend to run between 1000 and 2000 with each scene after edits.

Yes, I'm rambling here. Should I give a peak into the super villian's mind or should we just see it through the other characters? He's got a lot going on in there and I don't know how much of it will be seen in this book. To be honest, this is a stand alone single title, but the super villian might cross into another couple of books I have ideas for. Ramble, ramble, ramble. Okay, gotta go and work some more on my plot. Last question -

Do you let your villian have a point of view? Do you like stories where you get into the villian's head?

Can You Guess What I Did Today?

Yep, I spent all day reading articles over at Morgan Hawke's website. I do feel like I have a slightly better understanding of the Character Arc and now have to sit down with my characters and feel them out. I'm horrible about filling our character sheets. After all what relevance does it really have on my story if my character had her wisdom teeth out when she was eighteen. Basically I think that there's a lot of information that I just don't need to know for the story and if I need to know it, it will be there. I do like the three question method of figuring out your character. Morgan Hawke stole it from PBW (Morgan says so on her site).

"And then what?Once you have a good Idea for a Character -- you need to make that character YOURS. Begin by asking three Questions*: (*Shamelessly stolen from Paperback Writer's blog.)

What are you, and what do you do?
What do you want?
What's the absolute worst possible thing that could happen to me?

You need to know all three of these answers with EVERY main character you craft for every story you write. (The Hero, the Ally, AND the Villain too!) The "worst possible thing" gives me EACH characters' Ordeal -- their darkest moment in the story. Combining all THREE "Worst Possible Things" creates the "Crash and Burn" moment in the story where everything falls apart just before the story's big Climax."

Tomorrow I vow not to read anything I haven't already read and actually put together a feasible plot for my story so that I may write said story during Fast Draft which begins this weekend. Yeah. Oh, and figure out where to print out 3 copies of the first 25 pages so that I may enter a contest. Deadline March 1st. :)

Plot Girl

Yeah, I love to plot what can I say. I'm still experimenting with different ways to plot. I did get my storyboard of the crap I wrote during NaNo. Okay, so it wasn't complete crap, it just wasn't what I wanted for the story. I'm replotting now. There's a method called the Snowflake method. It's interesting and since I've actually done a first draft I was able to complete some of it, but then I got distracted by GMC. Oh, yes, the basis for character arc, goal-motivation-conflict. I've heard tons about it and have thought about buying the book, but it will have to wait until I return stateside.

So, I do what I normally do when I'm trying to avoid or rather, clarify an issue. I pop open an explorer window and type something into google. That something led me to this website. Which in turn led me to Dark Erotica. Okay, first off, I'm not writing erotica either. I can barely say let alone write the f word and I like my happily ever afters. But Morgan Hawke has some awesome articles on writing.

I'm currently reading and using the Goal, Motivation & Conflict simplified post. I was laughing my head off at this particular post. The erotica plotlines are hilarious. I think I could spend a day or two just reading all her articles. Of course, at some point I would need to actually plot and write.

Candy Havens is hosting another fast draft. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Write_Workshop/ is the workshop group and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Write_WorkshopChat/ is the chatroom for the group. She's starting it on Jan 30th. She also has tons of old workshops which you can search through. It's a free group.

Villians Need Love Too

No I haven't fallen off the face of the Earth. I've been working sporadically on my plotting, reading Writing the Breakout Novel, and being paranoid about getting ready to return to the US. I think I've been reluctant about continuing to write because I have scenes written and though I'm not in love with them I might need to rework the entire excalating plot. This book is a lot of action and ramping up means adding some more. I thought about adding a subplot with her brother. A love subplot, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure what kind of subplots I should add. I haven't written the end because I need to work on the rest of the plot before I truly know what's going to happen in the climax. My villian keeps whispering his secrets to me. Why he's doing this. What he hopes to gain. What he's going to do next time. What would make him satisfied with the ending. How he's going to make things tough for more characters if I'm willing to write about them. He's got an agenda. He thinks that what he's doing will make everything better. He'd also like a little more POV. Currently there are two scenes in his POV, but he appears more than those. He's subtle, creative, intriquing and the epitomy of beauty in a male. What more can a woman ask from her villian. :) The question is "Is he evil?" My friend, only time will answer that question. Only time.

Workshops

Completely forgot Access Romance. They have courses coming up on Writing to Market and Writing a Silhouette Desire. They also allow you access to archived courses for $5 which is awesome.

One Contest Entered

I polished off the beginning of Fallen and had a few lovely people critique it. Now, I get to go through the rest of it. Replot to add in some subplots and figure out how to put it all into perspective. Oh, and wait until April to hear the results. Then I have a decision to make. Go back and revise Dragon's Heart or start the Time Travel. I guess it depends on how long Fallen takes. We have 9-1/2 weeks (catchy, eh?) before we head back to the US. So we'll see after I finish writing and revising whether I want to revise some more or research for the next one.