It's All About What Works For You #amwriting

This is the first year since I wrote Keir that I haven't done a single NaNoWriMo. Not even Camp earlier in the year. And the really weird and worrying thing is, this is the first time I've seen others posting about their word count and I've merely shrugged rather than wish I'd joined in.

I know I'm burnt out. I've felt that for some time. The actual publishing side of being an author has virtually killed off my passion for writing, and I've given myself permission to not write and to not feel guilty about it right now. I hadn't written for almost 20 years when I sat down and started on Keir, so I know one day I'll come back to it.

But since Greta and Donna have talked about their writing processes and NaNoWriMo, I wanted to share my thoughts, especially as I see far too many writers who don't make the 50K in November getting depressed about it. Declaring themselves failures.

You. Are. NOT. A. Failure.

Did you get words down? Then you're a champ. A writer is someone who puts their butt in the chair and puts down words. It doesn't matter how many. It doesn't matter if they're crud. You've got them down, and they can be worked on, improved, polished up until they shine. That's how any author does it.

Confession time: I have never hit 50K. I've won a couple of Camp NaNoWriMos where you can set your own word count and I've used it to finish off shorts, or even to do edits on a novel, but never 50K straight. Even when the muse it in full flow, I'm normally burned out by 30K even on a good run. The two NaNo novellas I have published are both in the mid 40K range at complete, but didn't hit that count during the event. They're still complete and published works at the end of the day.

NaNoWriMo is definitely not for everyone, and you definitely shouldn't feel a failure for not hitting 50K. I think it's worth trying, but not using it as the measuring stick for your writing success. In general I've used Camp NaNo for finishing off projects/editing, and the main NaNo event too kickstart a project or clear my head of one that wouldn't leave me alone (my adorable zombie story, Restless In Peaceville, for example. Muse wanted to do it, I didn't think I could or should but she wouldn't shut up until it was done. That was some NaNo! O.o ). I didn't hit 50K but I achieved my own personal goals - things finished or off my mind, lol. My personal writing method is chaotic (and will probably make my two co-bloggers shudder). Not only am I a 'throw the words down and move on' writer, but I don't even write linearly! Bwahahaa!

I have tried plotting, but it doesn't work for me. I put down a few key scenes (they might be beginning and end and a few in between, but not necessarily), then fill the gaps. If I don't have a deadline, I might well do some editing/re-reading between writing sessions, but not during NaNo. Once the first draft is done, my next step is a brutal 'slash and burn' revision where I ruthlessly delete out the crud and weak words and repetitions, and rewrite the rest. After that, it's less destructive. :-P

But the key two points about this post and Greta's and Donna's are:
1. It's what works for you. It doesn't matter a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys what any other author does. It's no good at all forcing yourself to plot because so and so does and they're super popular for example (though I advocate for any author, new or experienced, to maybe try things they haven't before). When I first started out and saw lots of authors talking about plotting, I felt such a failure. I tried to force myself into it. It didn't work out and actually killed my enthusiasm for a story so much that I still haven't gone back to it. I've now come to the conclusion that I do my own kind of basic plotting by throwing down those few keys scenes and building around them, but that's as close as I get.
2. What matters next is what you do with that story after putting down the first words and before submitting to agents/publishers or publishing yourself. There is no one way it must be done but you do need to revise, self edit, spell check, and put it through an editor before release (yes, I've seen authors insist they don't need an editor because they self edit. I disagree. I want my book to be the absolute best it can and I never put anything out without it going through an editor. I've seen too many books where it looks like even basic spell check hasn't been used. I know editing costs, but if you can't at least get someone to proofread for you, prepare for complaints).
For me the process is those key scenes, filling in the gaps, a 'slash and burn' revision (I know that sounds awful), probably a couple more revisions before beta readers (then revising based on feedback), before a spell check and off to my editor. Depending on how it goes, there are generally at least three passes on developmental edits, followed by a line edit. Then it goes to my proofreader (who is also an editor, so she'll pick up on other details). It takes time and money, but I'm not doing it any other way.
The fastest I've got from first words to submission is four months - exceptional, and only because I wrote it for NaNoWriMo, subbed a sample during a call for NaNo novels at the time and got a request for a full. Normally I'll spend about two years on a piece from first words to submission/sending to my editor, even on a short story. It all depends.
Right now I'm doing the slash and burn revision on Keir's Shadow (Book Three of Redemption) because I wrote it some four years ago and have learned heaps about writing since then (especial about plot, romance, and character motivation, oh my!). There's also changes that need making because of the transformations books one and two have gone through. A large chunk of book three - 30K words - were written in one crazy day that left me I'll for about a week after because the words didn't stop coming. Just another example of how chaotic my writing methods are.
Conclusion: everyone is different. The five of us who blog here all have different methods, but we're all published authors so clearly our very individual writing processes have worked for us. Experiment and find what works best for you, but don't be afraid to try something new or even something old again at a future date. Just don't get bogged down in all the articles that say 'it must be done this way and no other'.
And don't get down about not hitting 50K for NaNoWriMo. It isn't the be all and end all. Oh, and while hitting 50K in November doesn't matter and as I repeatedly tell my eldest who is forever starting new stories - finishing is important. You can't publish an unfinished book.

Status Update
As mentioned above, despite my current disenchantment with writing, I am working on Keir's Shadow. Right now it's a bit like putting sticky plasters over the hole in the Titanic, but progress nonetheless. I promised the book for 2017, so I have a year - six months for me to fix it, then six months for Danielle Fine to kick my butt help me polish it. :-P I have always loved book three and there are some gems in the dirt, but there's an awful lot of dirt to shovel first.

Happenings
Today is absolutely the last day of the iBooks SFR Sale Event! Click HERE to be transported to 21 out of this world romances.

It's also your last chance to pick up my two scifi heroes at a discount before I start putting the prices back up - time travel romance with Keir ($1.99 instead of $4.99), and scifi adventure with Gethyon ($0.99 instead of $3.99).
 

A Science Fiction Romance Novel
Goodreads | Webpage
Available from...
iBooks | Nook | Kobo
Amazon | ARe | Smashwords

Gethyon

A Scifi Adventure Novel

Goodreads | Webpage

Amazon | Omnilit

B&N | Kobo | iBooks

Smashwords

No chook pics this week - the girls are fine despite the cold but I was indoors all last week nursing a cold - but here's some of my monsters enjoying some home fireworks and sparklers for Bonfire Night.

We Are Stardust

You probably remember the lyrics from this old song:

We are stardust
We are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Can you hear it playing in your head? (Gotcha...earworm!)

But just in case you're too young (or too old) to remember, here's a YouTube so you can catch the audio.

Those few lines are from the Joni Mitchell song, Woodstock, performed by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Poetic lyricry, for sure. But there's hard scientific truth in those words.

I picked up a copy of John Gribbin's Companion to the Cosmos at a local consignment shop and I've been reading and absorbing the ideas and theories ever since. I soon stumbled on the scientific underpinings of those romantic Mitchell words. This book provided detailed theories of the very beginnings of our universe, and how those words from the song ring true.

Or at least theoretically true.

Through math and physics, the particulars of those first few split seconds of the Big Bang have been worked out. How can scientists possibly know what happened all those billions of years ago, you wonder? Actually, according to Gribbin, the information from which the Big Bang and its mechanics are derived is "simple."

It's what came after--as the universe began to form and expand and change--that things get really complicated!

So what--via theory--is known about the phrase "We Are Stardust?"

Here's my extremely over-simplified (and that I can somewhat wrap my head around) version:

Just after the Big Bang explosion--and that does mean "just after"--at about .0001 or a tenth of a thousandth of a second, the universe was a hot fireball of radiation that was about 1,000 billion degrees above absolute zero.

Under these extreme conditions particles (protons, neurons and electrons) began to convert themselves from radiation into pairs of particles, swapping energy for mass. The particles of matter and anti-matter material that formed usually met and annihilated each other, but as the universe "cooled" (relatively speaking) there were just enough left-over particles--to the tune of about 1 in 1,000,000,000--to form everything we see in the universe today.

By one 1/100th of a second after creation, things were "calming down a little." The temperature had dropped to a mere 100 billion K and protons and neutrons were no longer being manufactured out of radiation.

And 1/10th of a second, the temperature was only 30 billion K.

At 1.01 seconds after the Big Bang, it was down to 10 billion K. (Can you say 'rapid cooling?')

Now, as the universe got "older" (relatively speaking again!) things really began to "slow down."

At 13.8 seconds after the Big Bang, the temperature was a mere 3 million K.

At 3 minutes and 2 seconds, it was only 1 billion K, which is only about 70 times hotter than the center of our Sun.

It took another 300,000 years to cool to 5,000 K, a temperature just slightly below the surface of our Sun. But remember, we're talking the entire universe being this temperature, which equated to everything in existence being a "hot soup."

A few hundred thousand years later, our universe became transparent, and only the echo of the Big Bang remained as background radiation to provide evidence to our species--some 15 billion years later--that it had happened at all.

Slowly, over unfathomable eons of time (*boggles!*) gravity pulled sheets of gases together to form into the first generation stars, and these stars formed galaxies, the galaxies formed superclusters and the superclusters formed chains. This became the basic structure of matter in the universe.

But those first generation stars aren't like the stars we know today.

The Big Bang theory was developed from Einstein's Theory of Relativity which puts forward that only helium, hydrogen and traces of a few light elements were produced at the time the universe came into existence. So those first stars were made up only of hydrogen and helium. It wasn't until later--billions and billions of years later--that these stars began to run out their life cycles and explode--and this is when carbon and other heavy elements were formed.

And so...we carbon-based life forms are indeed star dust. We carry in our bodies the stuff of dead stars, the remains of supernovas. In fact, about 40% of our bodies are made up of the fiery remnants of stars.

Our Sun is a relative newcomer, forming only about 5 billion years ago. The Earth is about 4.54 billion years old, give or take about 50 million years. (Although, surprise!--there was a new discovery put forward in June that implies the Earth--and the Moon--may be older than believed.)

Nice.  But what does all this have to do with writing Science Fiction Romance, you ask? Well...everything.

I like to think of it this way. If I were to write historicals, I'd research the place and time and conditions in which my story is set to get the facts right. Right?

But since I pen adventurous romances about planetary explorers and space fleet captains and interstellar escapees "boldly going" through space or discovering new worlds, now I've got an insiders' look at the pyrotechnics that created this wondrous universe...

...and that my hero and heroine are not only brave, resourceful and intelligent, but also chock full of ancient cosmic fireworks.

(Cue music. *wink*)

Have a great week and a fabulous Fourth of July!

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