The Death Effect

Oh ho, Check Me Out

| rachelhamm

I spent my afternoon/ evening today outlining The Death Effect with index cards, multi-colored pens and pushpins, and a cork-board.  And I was completely wrong about feeling pigeon-holed.  I feel completely the opposite.  I am inspired!

I went through the word document where I’ve been writing TDE and I made a notecard for each chapter/scene.  Each character POV got a different color pen/ink.  I then put the notecards in chronological order by character and pinned them to the board.  If I’d already written the first draft of the chapter, the notecard got a clear pin.  If I’d already written a partial first draft of the chapter, the notecard got a green pin.  And if it was just a concept/idea for the chapter, the notecard got a blue or purple pin (I didn’t have enough of one or the other color!).

As I wrote out these cards and put them in order, I found myself thinking about what happens to each character- where the story takes them.  It was amazing.  I was visualizing scenes again!  In fact, I imagined the last scene of my semi MC, Taylor, and she’s been causing me major problems lately.  You see, I tend to base my main characters on myself and the people close to me.  I can’t help it, it’s just the way I am.  One of these days I’ll write an MC who is in no way like me or anyone I know, but for now…  Okay, so back to my original point.  Taylor has been giving me a hard time lately because I like Taylor, but the person in my life who she is based on has really been pissing me off lately.  She’s been a flat out B*tch to me.  I’m sure she doesn’t read this blog, but just in case, I won’t mention her by name.  Anyways, because this real person has been pissing me off, I haven’t been able to write Taylor with any degree of objectivity or feeling.  But, this outlining exercise has really worked to get me out of my funk!  I was able to separate Taylor from my real life drama, because Taylor is experiencing a much different kind of pain than I am, and  now I know exactly where her story is going.  I’m so excited.

I’m sure that my outline will change.  In fact, when I typed it up (because I’m OCD like that- I mean what if something happens to all the cards, I needed a backup!) I already changed things.   And I’m sure that I’ll add more chapters than I have planned right now, but I feel rejuvenated.

God, I needed this.  I needed some hope.  I need something in my life that feels like it’s on an upward climb, not a downward spiral.

Part of me feels like this book is going to produce some of my best writing, yet another part of me is so scared that it will be just another thing I don’t finish.  Hopefully with this rocking outline, I’ll continue to remain motivated.

Visualizing the Scene

| rachelhamm

When I was writing the first draft of Twenty-Five, it was so easy.  Scenes just came to me.  I knew exactly how the characters were going to act and react because I could see it.  I would visualize a scene for a couple of days and then write it down.  It was really cool because scenes from all over the book would pop into my head, so I didn’t have to write chronologically, but I knew exactly where they were going to go.

With my other attempted books, the visualization of scenes hasn’t really worked.  It’s not really something I can WILL to happen, you know?  But with The Death Effect, it’s starting to happen again.  I’m seeing scenes in my head, but they are only little moments, so I have a little less to go on.

***Spoiler Alert!*** For example, I keep picturing this one moment, at the funeral of one of the MC’s where her birth mother and her adoptive mother see each other and thank each other.  It’s just this little fragment in my head, but it keeps playing over and over again and I can’t wait to write it out.  I know one other scene that is going to result from this encounter, so the visualization is beginning to work for me again.  I just hope it keeps up, because I REALLY want to finish this book.  I’m already proud of it, and I’ve only written thirteen chapters!

I think I need to do some kind of outlining/planning for TDE because all these ideas are floating around and I have no idea where they fit into the book.  With Twenty-Five it was easy because I wrote it knowing the time-frame and knowing that I wanted each chapter to represent one month.  But TDE is only spanning a couple weeks at most and there are so many POV’s and each character is affected by different things at different times.  The timeline is very complex and I’ve only gotten a few days out in my head.

But with outlining, I’m worried about pigeon-holing myself.  I don’t want to say, THESE ARE THE SCENES THAT ARE GOING TO BE IN THE BOOK.  I want to be fluid and free to change the direction of the story.  I’m going to give it a try and hope that I don’t have to throw it in the trash in a couple of weeks!

And I’m going to hope that little scenes keep appearing in my head.  I don’t want to FORCE this book to be written.  I want it to WANT to be written.

RANDOM

| rachelhamm

I found this quote online the other day and I have fallen in love with it: “I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”  ~Agatha Christie.

It’s just so damn true.  I’m in the middle of probably the hardest time in my life right now.  I’m financially drowning and my social calendar has never been bleaker, but I still know that life is this precious gift I’ve been given.  Yeah, life sucks once and a while and lately it’s sucked all the time, but even days of 99% shittyness (sorry, spell check refuses to tell me how to properly spell this word) there’s always at least 1% greatness.

Take today for example.  I just logged on to my dashboard to check things out and even though I haven’t posted anything new in a while, there hasn’t been a single day in the past 2 weeks where this blog hasn’t gotten at least 6 views.  That’s pretty cool.  I know it doesn’t seem like a lot, but when I first started I’d have several days in a row with 0 views, so I feel like I’m moving up in the world.  Especially since I don’t really know how to advertise myself very well yet.  And, I checked the search terms people used to find my page and this was one of them: a give stick a pen up her virgin.  I’m TOTALLY serious about that.  Someone typed “a give stick a pen up her virgin” into google or yahoo or some other search engine and then clicked on a link to my blog.  Isn’t that just the most hilarious search term you’ve ever heard?

Makes me kind of glad that even in cyberspace I’m the first virgin people think of!

Oh, and to continue my ramblings of randomness, I’ve started work on a new project called The Death Effect.  I’ll create a page for it along with my other projects in a day or so.

And I got the nicest rejection email today.  Here’s a little snippet: “I’ve read your sample pages, and while I think you show great potential as a writer, I’m sorry to say that the project just isn’t a perfect fit with my current needs. This has less to do with your strengths as a writer and more to do with my goals as an agent and the trends of the current literary marketplace.”

Well, thank you, Ms. Super Agent.  I would have really enjoyed working with you, but how can I be upset when you tell me I have potential?  I might just print out that one sentence and stick on the wall behind my desk so I can stare at it when I’m writing.  That’s not weird, right?

OH!  And, Twenty-Five has made it to the #9 spot on the All-Time Rankings at The Next Big Writer.  I’m pretty happy about that.  I’m waiting for the administration to realize it so that my novel is given a spot on the All-Time Top Ten list.  When he does realize it, I’ll get access to a cool logo that I can use when marketing/advertising/selling my book, and you can bet I’ll be re-writing my query to include it’s shiny new status!

So, that’s what’s been going on in my life.  Oh, and I’m looking for a new job, but I may have mentioned that before.  Keep your fingers crossed for me.  I have to have one by January 1st.  Anyone out there in cyberland looking for a freelance editor?  I’m pretty kick-ass at finding grammatical errors and I can use a comma with the best of them!  I don’t have any “education” or “experience” but I can give you several references of writers on TNBW who love my editing skills!

Man, this post has really lived up to its title!