October, 2010
Halloween, NaNo, and sundry stuff.
I keep getting people asking if I’m planning to do NaNo. I’ve never done it in the past, just because something weird in my brain rebels against the idea of the impetus to write coming from outside myself. I totally love NaNo time, and get behind all my friends who do it, cheer them on, am happy when they get really into it–but I’ve never felt the desire to join in the fun for some reason. Anyway, this year I’ve come REALLY close to doing it, just because my housemate Amie is doing it, as well as the few writerfriends I’ve met in the Melbourne area, and a bunch of my friends back in the U.S. too. It even comes at a convenient time–I’ll be querying by then, and working on my next novel. But it JUST hit me why I can’t do it: I’m traveling and having family coming to visit starting November 1st and not leaving until November 20-something. Duh. (Yes, I only just made this connection now, okay, I’m dumb). So, to answer everyone: Alas, no, I’m not doing NaNo this year.
Updates! I’m still tweaking THE IRON WOOD, mostly because I appear to be incapable of letting it go. I’m waiting to hear back on a critique, while going over some line edits and suggestions from some friends who’ve been awesome enough to read it for me. I’m hoping to be ready to send it out in a couple of weeks though.
The Pitfalls of Passive Protagonists
As some of you know, last year I attended an absolutely phenomenal workshop, the Odyssey Writing Workshop up in New Hampshire. I had no idea when I applied just how great it would be, though. In all honesty? I went thinking to myself, “Well, I already know how to write. But this will be great for making connections and learning about the publishing world.”
That delusion lasted approximately twelve minutes into the first lecture on the first morning of the first day.
I encountered a lot of surprises in my own writing over the six weeks of the workshop, but the one that was by far the hardest to swallow was this:
I wrote passive heroines.
You know, there might just be lots of extra pesky words cluttering up your manuscript now and then.
See what I did there? Haha.
Anyway. It’s no big secret I’m trying to cut my manuscript right now. It needs to drop about 12,000 words to fit within the YA fantasy word limit of 100k. I’m getting a lot of help from other writers who’ve taken a look at my manuscript, especially Amie Kaufman and more recently Kat Zhang. Ultimately, though, I’m the one who has to make the call on the cuts.
Do I stand by my manuscript, and query agents with it even though it’s over the magic word limit? Or do I cut it, potentially at the expense of the story, so that it fits, and make certain I don’t alienate agents who are turned off by the high word count?