Category: Writing

Chronicles of Ghadid Trilogy, Draft Zero, The Unconquered City (Book 3), Writing, Writing Tips

Here We Go, Here We Go, Here We Go Again

K.A. Doore


Small human helping me plan for my deadlines.

I took a brief tour down memory/blog lane and huh – looks like just about this time last year, I was also struggling with the last 1/4 of my WIP and worried to death that I wouldn’t be able to make it work and my betas were going to hate it and everything was awful. Of course now, that WIP is The Perfect Assassin and I think much more fondly of it, but. Well.

There are certain elements of the writing/rewriting/revising process that you begin to anticipate after enough times around this delightfully slow and yet somehow also nauseatingly fast merry-go-round.

For instance, I know that at some point, I will love my story. The words will be easy. The scenes beautiful. I’ll itch to share it and every song I listen to will remind me of it and help create new scenes, fresh backstory, deeper emotions.

That point usually occurs about one week before I actually start writing the story. Sometimes it lasts a full two weeks into it.

Then the rollercoaster begins. The ecstatic, newly-in-love feeling fades. The writing is still fun, but it’s a Thing to be Done. It’s not a grind, not yet. There are still flashes of OMGWOW when bits and pieces of plot start to come together, when characters surprise you, when you briefly think you’re a secret genius.

And then, right about 3/4 or 5/6 of the way into your first (and second [and third]) draft, you realize you’re a fraud. There’s absolutely no way to save this mess of a story. Why even bother finishing it? You know it’s gone all wrong and you should probably just find a nice place in the woods to dig a hole real deep and drop it in. You know what, why not go ahead and drop your whole laptop in?

Then go home and take up beekeeping because wow, who decided to let you become a writer?

But as you try to remember if you even have a shovel – or maybe you should borrow your neighbor’s – I’ll tell you a secret:

You’re almost done. Keep going.

This is a part of the process. We all hit this bump. Fledgling writers often don’t complete a single story because they hit this murky awful point and don’t know that it just means they have to double down, that they’re almost through the worst of it. Heck, I wrote and rewrote (and rewrote [and rewrote]) the same fanfic for years and years and even now it stands uncompleted, only a chapter or two left to go. And it will never be completed.

But this story will be, and not just because I have a deadline. Actually, no: because of a deadline. I’ve been setting myself personal deadlines for years, well before I signed with an agent or snagged a publisher.

Keep going. Finish what you started, even if it means pulling teeth the entire way. Even if you just summarize what you think should happen. Even if you reach a point where you truly can’t go any further without reworking the whole plot and you type out “rocks fall, everyone dies.”

Because this, too, is a part of the process. And you have to get through it to have any chance of reaching the next part of the process.

Then when you’re here again, around mile 22 of 26, you’ll grimace but remember and know you’ve pushed through this before. And you will again.

And again.

And again.

*

Here’s current progress on Book Three, working title The Unconquered City, the story of an assassin turned monster hunter who’s really sick of people threatening her city. Now with more! conflagrations, omnipresent doom, and bittersweet homecomings.

Project: Book Three, Draft 0.5

Deadline: August

Current word count: 60,025 / 80000 words. 75% of the way there

 

Days of spring: 0

Snow: Why

Screams into the void: Yes

Chronicles of Ghadid Trilogy, Draft Zero, Life, The Unconquered City (Book 3), Writing

Hello Twitter, My Old Friend

K.A. Doore

I just finished a six week hiatus from Twitter. Or at least an attempted hiatus. To be honest, I dipped my toe in a few times with the excuse of checking DM’s only to get swept up into reading a few tweets before realizing what I was doing. But my slip-ups only reaffirmed my need for a break. Twitter is designed to be highly addictive and I clearly wasn’t immune.

Being away has given me a new perspective on Twitter and – hopefully – a new way to approach the site. My FOMO was pretty high those first few days (*coughs*weeks) but in the end, I didn’t miss as much as I’d expected. I still heard all the news and was able to celebrate some acquaintances accomplishments. If anything, being off Twitter helped me have a healthier relationship with the news, as often I’d learn about Things What Had Happened somewhat after the fact and therefore had a chance to understand the whole of it, instead of getting everyone’s instant, kneejerk reactions.

But I don’t want to drop Twitter entirely. It is useful in keeping in touch with a number of far-flung friends, and while I read my news on actual news websites now, a lot of publishing news happens on Twitter, so it’s a good idea to keep the ear to the bird, if you will.

To keep that bird from nibbling my ear and distracting me from writing, though, I’m going to set a few rules for myself.

One: as many news-related terms as possible are gonna be muted. I rode that rollercoaster all last year and it’s time to get off because I’m tired of the motion sickness.

Two: I’ve installed a new blocking app that will only let me on Twitter at certain times. No more endless scrolling.

Three: I will engage more than I post.

And four: if I have a thought that is more than a tweet, it will be a blog post, not a thread. There’s something to be said for the lost art of blogging and I aim to keep this space alive as much as possible.

Of course all that also means that if you catch me breaking any of those rules feel free to publicly shame me. 😉

*

Here’s current progress on Book Three, working title The Unconquered City, the story of an assassin turned monster hunter who’s really sick of people threatening her city. Now with more! necromancy, large bodies of water, and sudden, yet inevitable betrayals.

Project: Book Three, Draft 0.5

Deadline: August

Current word count: 50,017 out of 80,000

Cats scritched: Two

Cadbury eggs consumed: One

Toddlers chased screeching around the house: Yes

Chronicles of Ghadid Trilogy, Draft Zero, The Unconquered City (Book 3), Writing, Writing Tips

Worldbuilding: Layers of Paint

K.A. Doore

Photo by Alice Achterhof on Unsplash

For the longest time I labored under the impression that most writers sat down and spent a few weeks building their world(s) and then they were done. This notion was fueled by the way a lot of writers talk about worldbuilding, especially when it comes down to the details: you gotta know this, you gotta know that, you gotta take this into account, you gotta cast your stars across the sky and meticulously describe their patterns and spill sand across your deserts and account for every grain – all of which was implied necessary to have in place before you could begin crating the story itself.

There are certainly writers out there who do exactly that, and do it successfully. But in my experience, worldbuilding is less a single act of creation and more a continuous layering of paint.

Side note: check out the world’s largest ball of paint. At the heart of that beast is a single baseball. The rest is layers upon layers (upon layers [upon layers {upon layers}]) of paint.

You have to start with something, yes. A canvas of some shape for your paint, be it actual canvas or a baseball or a soccer ball or perhaps, a moped. But then you start writing, and that’s where the layers come in.

Layer upon layer upon layer, you build your world. Each draft another layer, each revision another layer, each edit another layer, until you’re dabbing paint here and there and that original baseball or moped is so buried as to be invisible and it looks as if you’d planned the story that way all along.

But looks are deceptive and it’s easy to gaze upon others’ finished works and pretend they’d been that way all along. Yet I can all but guarantee there’s a sports object somewhere under those layers that doesn’t look much like the end product.

Case in point, I was still tweaking minor worldbuilding details as I read through my copy edits for Book 1 and am still adding to the world in book 3. It could easily be never ending. Thank goodness for deadlines, amiright?

*

Here’s current progress on Book Three, working title The Unconquered City, the story of an assassin turned monster hunter who’s really sick of people threatening her city. Now with more! magic fights, adoring crowds, and messy laboratories.

Project: Book Three, Draft 0.5

Deadline: August

Current word count: 41,216 / 80000 words. 51% of the way there

 

Cups of tea: 3

Cups of tea, IRL: 23

Sunny days: All of them

Sunny days, IRL: 1

Chronicles of Ghadid Trilogy, Draft Zero, The Unconquered City (Book 3), Writing

The Reason Why

K.A. Doore

Some days, you struggle and struggle and struggle to find the right words. You wonder why you chose such a profession. You spend some time researching other potential professions. Every idea, every thought, every word you manage to eke out feels ridiculous and wrong.

Some days you pull forth each word with great effort, occasionally stumbling through a paragraph in a rush of words only to hit another wall just like before, again. You can glimpse the reason you do all this during those stumbles, just ahead and always, always out of reach.

And some days, the right song comes on while you’re driving down the road and story plots and ideas and pieces start to click, click, click together in your head and the next thing you know, you’re sitting in a coffee shop drinking apricot tea and you’ve just written 1k of backstory for a character you didn’t think needed much backstory but now all these other parts make sense and you can feel the story growing, expanding, solidifying into something real.

The pieces have turned and moved and shifted and now the wall you were standing in front of has a door and you can’t wait to find out what lies beyond. And it’s exhilarating and it’s beautiful and it’s painful

And you remember: this is why you write.

*

Here’s current progress on Book Three, working title The Unconquered City, the story of an assassin turned monster hunter who’s really sick of people threatening her city. Now with more! awkward conversations, wholesale confrontations, and… snow?

Project: Book Three, Draft 0.5

Deadline: August

Current word count: 33455 / 80000 words. 42% of the way there

Mountains, high: One

Valleys, low: Zero

Rivers, wide: Zero

Times I’ve Listened to That One Song On Repeat: 57

Chronicles of Ghadid Trilogy, Draft Zero, Pre-pub, The Unconquered City (Book 3), Writing

From the Debut Trenches: The Copy Edits Are Among Us

K.A. Doore

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Things that I have been unduly excited about since I discovered they were a Thing:
– Flannel sheets
– Bat boxes that have the Batman logo
– Copy edits

One of the things I’ve realized I’m good at over the years has been picky details. Since learning the exact nature of copy editing, I’ve been more than a little eager to see them in the inky flesh. Going through a novel line by line, hunting out spelling and grammatical errors, as well as continuity errors, sounds like my kind of party.

But ohmygoodness, was I not prepared for the style sheet.

See, in order to catch those continuity errors, a copy editor must first figure out what the continuity is. Which for any book can be a load of biscuits and fun, but for fantasy novels gets even trickier. All those made up terms and systems – aka worldbuilding – become Real. And the copy editor must not only understand those terms, but make sure they’re used consistently within the established rules of the world.

So they make a style sheet. And in it, they list all of the characters, major or minor or sub-minor, and their relationships to the other characters. They also list all the bizarre terms you made up. They also create a timeline. It’s meticulous and it’s picky and it’s beautiful.

If this whole writing thing doesn’t work out, I think I’ll try my hand at copy-editing. Just saying.

If it’s weird to see all your made-up people and terms treated like Real, it’s even weirder to see the copy edit document itself. I knew it’d be marked up. What I didn’t realize was that it’d be formatted to look like a book. Guys. This is getting legit.

I did a first pass of the copy edits already, and it doesn’t look nearly as frightening or intimidating as I’d feared/expected. I’ll take my time going over each change, but so far it breaks down to:

– 94% changing an en dash to an em dash
– 2.7% saving my bacon by catching continuity errors
– 1.2% fixing typos/homophones
– 2.1% highlighting echoes*

Bless you, Copy Editor. And bless all copy editors everywhere, because it takes a very keen and practiced eye to catch this stuff.

Progress will slow a little on book 3 while I go through my copy edits, but I planned for that and also one of these is due MUCH sooner than the other, so.

Here’s current progress on Book Three, working title The Unconquered City, the story of an assassin turned monster hunter who’s really sick of people threatening her city. Now with more! terse conversations, monster hunters, and quiet cups of tea.

Project: Book Three, Draft 0.5

Deadline: August

Current word count: 24558 / 80000 words. 31%

Fancy bracelets: 2

Awkward conversations: 4

Broken glass: All of it

Chronicles of Ghadid Trilogy, Draft Zero, The Unconquered City (Book 3), Writing

Spring-inning

K.A. Doore

The forecast predicts we’re gonna get 40s from here on until March, the trees are budding, the bulbs are bulbening, and the river has claimed most of the nearby park and golf course – which means we can officially call it. Winter is fading. It’s Spring-inning.

I can’t lie. I’m going to miss the snow and the painfully cold 10 degree days. But time keeps churning and soon we’ll be eyeballs-deep in bugs and humidity, so it’s best to enjoy each day as it comes.

That’s my mantra in general lately. 2019 stills seems painfully far off, but I will only get to live through the pre-pub debut process once, so I’m gonna enjoy it. So far it’s been pretty calm and chill, with just the occasional inkling of the excitement (and terror!) that is to come and the occasional context-free flailing. I appreciate the slower-than-usual ramp up, because I’ve been able to stick my toe in and begin mentally (and physically) preparing for the Actual Thing because wow, if the last month has been any indication with its softballs, I am Not Prepared.

Wow, how is that for vaguebooking/subtweeting/whatever it is the kids are calling it these days?

 

Here’s current progress on Book Three, working title The Unconquered City, the story of an assassin turned monster hunter who’s really sick of people threatening her city. Now with more! rioting, Shocking Revelations (TM), and one-on-one rooftop “lessons.”

Project: Book Three, Draft 0.5

Deadline: August

Current word count: 17,723 out of 80,000

Knives thrown: 7

Double-entendres made: 3

Times that I have made myself blush: 11

The Unconquered City (Book 3), Writing

Book 3, Draft 0.5

K.A. Doore

I started Book Three back in July and got a sizeable chunk done (50k words! woo!), but then edits for 1 & 2 intervened and months passed and now here I am again. Staring into the abyss.

I’ve spent the last two weeks grappling with this book, the plot I have, the words I’ve written. I started and stopped and started again where I’d left off. But I finally realized I needed to just go ahead and start from the very beginning (it’s a very good place to start [now it’s stuck in your head too {you’re welcome}]).

Since I didn’t even reach a Rocks Fall Everyone Dies ending with that draft, I don’t officially get to move on to draft one. But it’s not really a draft zero, since I’ve got a pretty solid handle on what’s gonna happen. So let’s compromise and call it Draft 0.5. Still nowhere close to the finished product, but also not flailing alone in the dark with a blindfold and a basket of chips.

You know the drill by now. I’ll report back here once a week (or month) with progress updates as a way to shame myself into maintaining said progress. ‘Cause I’ve got a deadline to make and a story to wrap up and a whole lot of teeth to gnash. My teeth? Maybe yours. Whose teeth are these anyway? Why am I holding teeth??

 

Here’s current progress on Book Three, working title The Unconquered City, the story of an assassin turned monster hunter who’s gonna keep her city safe no matter the cost. Now with more! monster fights, healing magic, and tragic backstory.

Project: Book Three, Draft 0.5

Deadline: August

Current word count: 1,974 out of 80,000

Body count: 0

Monster count: Baker’s dozen

Sand?: Everywhere.

Chronicles of Ghadid Trilogy, Writing, Writing Tips

How (Not) to Write a Novella

K.A. Doore

First, write a book. Then, realize there’s a perfect part of said book that could be expanded into a short story.

Sketch out a short outline. Think: this will be easy. Feel: this will be hard.

Finish revising your book. Come back to the short story idea. Realize you kinda maybe need to write it because what happens in it will largely inform your next book. Check your schedule. Find some time to commit wholeheartedly. Two weeks should be enough. It’s only a short story, right?

After one week, google: how long is a short story supposed to be anyway?

After two weeks, google: how long is too long for a short story?

After three weeks, google: how long is a novella?

After four weeks, google: why is everything I touch a novel?

Set it aside unfinished because you have other projects with Actual Deadlines. Hit those deadlines. Celebrate.

Gradually become aware of a general sense of unease. Realize the short story is watching. Waiting.

Metaphorically (and literally, because you don’t want flu do you?) wash your hands. Return to the short story. Accept that the short story is not really a short story by any stretch of the imagination.

Pretend you were writing a novella all along.

Rewrite the not-so-short story from scratch. Despair when it keeps growing longer.

Rewrite the novella with an eye toward trimming some of that verdant verbiage. Growl in frustration when it somehow gains words.

Rewrite again. Keep it within the realm of believability re: word counts and re: novellas.

Finish something that could be called a draft.

Dig a hole in the backyard.

Yes, through the two feet of snow.

Bury the draft. Pat that snow back into place.

Practice saying: I never write novellas. What novella? I was home with my cats at 8.36pm on the 21st of January and you can’t prove a thing. I’ve never seen a novella in my life.

Wait for spring and see what grows.

Life, Pre-pub

Goodbye 2017, Hello 2018

K.A. Doore

IMG_20171225_080831_947

If you ask any writer (or artist [or human being]), they’ll say that 2017 was a rough year. Full of distractions and worry and dread. Yet despite all of that, we kept on keeping on. I’m not exception – while I wasted countless hours on what-ifs and not sleeping, the work still had to be done. And it got done.

But man, am I exhausted. Hopefully 2018 will be a little less emotionally draining.

But 2017 wasn’t all bad. Personally, it was pretty great. My highlights:

– Wrote the first draft of Book One
– Wrote the second draft of Book One
– Revised Book One
– Sent Book One out to betas
– Revised Book One based on beta feedback
– Sent Book One to my editor
– Revised Book One based on my editor’s feedback
– Turned in Book One (🎉🎉🎉)
– Hacked 20,000 words off of Book Two
– Going line by line, entirely rewrote Book Two
– 2/3rds way through first draft of Book Three

 

And that’s only the writing highlights. Outside of that, I also:

– Broke my personal 5k record
– Turned 31
– Took a baby to Germany and survived
– Attended my first conference (Sirens ’17 wot wot!)
– Dayjobbed the stuffing out of my dayjob
– Learned how to throw a proper punch
– Held back the tides of unwashed dishes and dirty laundry
– Kept a baby alive and helped her evolve into a toddler

 

Writing it out like that makes it seem as if I was riding the waves, but at the time it felt like I was drowning more often than not. 2018 should be better (and easier?) for a number of reasons, not the least of which we’ll have a toddler and not an infant who refuses to sleep more than 45min at a time (oh god never again).

2018 is actually shaping up to be pretty fun/exciting for me, personally. And maybe for you, at least come the end of the year. So what have I got going in 2018?

– Polish up Book Two
– See/reveal the cover for Book One (!!)
– Write, rewrite, revise, edit, & polish Book Three
– Hit up Tucson Festival of Books
– Sirens 2018 (!!)
– Bid farewell to my lovely desert assassins and start a new project
– Keep a small human alive

 

Yeah. Okay. No small task. But if I survived 2017 and all it entailed, I can certainly survive – even thrive in? – 2018.

May you let 2017 go and embrace the new year with hope and light. ❤

Chronicles of Ghadid Trilogy, The Impossible Contract (Book 2), Writing, Writing Tips

How to cut 20,000 Words

K.A. Doore

First – and this is the most important step – write a novel that is 35,000 words too long.

Be told by several people that you really ought to cut some of that. Agonize over every word for a month and manage to cut 15,000 words. Rejoice!

Realize that the novel is still 20,000 words too long. Decide it will be a problem for future you.

Let the novel sit for two years.

Revisit, because finally you really need to trim that beast down. You ask your betas to point out places that should be cut, places where the plot dragged or they got bored. Your editor highlights entire chapters. Realize that those two years actually made it easier for you to see what you can cut. Notice a few patterns:

– You over describe everything.
– You over describe everything.
– You really like to talk about sand.
– You over describe everything.

Begin cutting a word here and there. Then a paragraph. Now, drunk on power, start cutting entire pages. Cackle maniacally. Stay up too late. Drink too much coffee.

Convinced you’ve cut at least 10,000 words, doublecheck your word count.

You’ve only cut 300 words.

Yell into the void that is Twitter. Pour another cup of tea. Start again with a word here, a word there. Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Congrats! You’ve cut 10,000 words. You still need to trim another 5-10k. You wonder if your editor will notice. You know she will.

Decide it will be a problem for future you.