#DFWCON

I was discussing my latest chapter with my Critique Group (+Sara Hearin +Les Weiler) when one of my old college friends +Laura Irrgang told me about this writer's conference in Fort Worth, TX hosted each year called DFWCON. I looked it up, got excited and paid the $350 (late registration - fail on my part) to attend the weekend conference. I attend professional conferences all the time, but was thrilled to learn about one for writers (as it turns out, these aren't all that uncommon, but I didn't know that).

My expectations going in where completely based off of my experiences with other professional conferences (remember I run a city for a living - which funds my obsession with story crafting at the moment ;) so I thought I could really benefit from going, as unlike many other authors I didn't get a literature degree, or English degree, or anything even remotely like that so I didn't really have a basis for improving my skills beyond what I have found on the internet and the comments from my patient critique group. It turns out that my expectations were right on, and I wasn't disappointed at all. Two things that differ with this conference verses a typical professional conference: you are allowed one private pitch session with an agent of your genre in order to hopefully get represented; and, if you are lucky, you could take one of the limited seats for a genre specific workshop where the beginning of your story will be critiqued by professionals.

Upon arrival Saturday morning I checked in, got my assignments (Even though I registered late, I got into the special workshop, and I also got my pitch session assignment) and headed off to my first ever writer workshop. This one was for Speculative Fiction and Fantasy (duh). In advance, I had to prepare a Query Letter, Plot Summary, and bring my first two pages to be read aloud by myself and critiqued by an agent and an editor in the genre. AND I had to do this the very first thing on the first day – NERVES!!!- lol. So sitting in a room with ten other nervous authors and two very patient professionals, the first of us began to read. After the entire submission packet was read aloud, the two professionals critiqued the (As I would learn ‘all-important’) Query Letter, and then cut into the meat of the first two pages offering a sharp editor's eye. This process continued through the rest of the authors in the room, but I was next to last to go, so when it got to me, I was only able to read my Query and my first page of writing which greatly frustrated me. I wanted the same opportunity the others had, but in the end it went ok.

The Query fell flat, which I expected, because I hadn’t really figured out how to write a query yet and did so just to meet the requirements for the workshop. The story, on the other hand, was different. I had worked on that and had poured a lot into the opening. The agent wasn’t overly excited feeling that starting out with a drowning scene, while action oriented, caused her to say in her head, “He’s in armor – he’s already dead, why do I need to read about him drowning?” which I guess I can see, but I still think it’s the right beginning. The Editor, Lou Anders with Pyr Press didn’t feel the same way. He liked it, and didn’t offer any “cuts” like all the others before me had gotten. His comment was to add in more whit since I start my opening with whit. Good advice.

As the conference continued I moved onto breakout groups and other classes leaving any that didn’t live up to their billing, or wound up not talking to me within the first 15 minutes. I made sure that my schedule was full – no breaks for this guy (I had to earn back my late registration fee after all=) so I hit every course I could, often leaving one in the middle to go to another that was starting. By the end of the day (8:00 PM) I was exhausted but had uncovered several gems during the day.

Sunday started out just as busy as Saturday, but by lunch Sunday I was done. I didn’t see any after courses that I felt I just had to go to, so I left early. I was somewhat distraught because I would miss the fun of the “Gong Show” where anonymous Query letters were selected from the audience to be read aloud and the panel of agents would each hit their gong when they would have stopped reading. That sounded like a lot of fun, but with a 5 hour drive back to Austin, and my wife’s birthday in the mix, I decided for domestic tranquility over a late afternoon treat. I brought back several tools that will make my writing sharper, and more focused. I am eager to get started.

In summary, if you have the opportunity to go to a writers conference in your area – go. It was worth the registration, and I feel like I am in a much better position to write a manuscript that is full of a story worth retelling. Thanks to the DFW Writers Workshop for hosting this event. Check it out for yourself at www.dfwcon.com

Finding the Path - Post NaNoWriMo

Well I ended the month with 55,400 words added to the *story* I started years past. Everything was for a new book, but really the more of this I write the more I realize it will really be one BIG story that I have to split up into smaller bits. Know who else had to do the same...? Tolkien. Yup, the God of Fantasy. I guess I am in good company.

One of the best things to come out of NaNo, besides my new idea to add in a real world aspect to my fantasy story, was the people I met. From that I managed to network and find a few other like minded individuals (as far as they are striving to work on the craft, not that we see the world the same) and formed my own writers group. Tolkien got me to thinking, what I really needed was a CS Lewis friend and my own "Inklings" group. A group of individuals that aren't interested in patting me on the back and cheering me on (although those people are most appreciated and important for motivation) but rather are more interested in content, form, grammar, broken ideas, and can point out things that I, as the author, am blind to. I am extremely thankful to them. They are exactly what I need and I hope we go far into the future together. Les, Sara, Emily, Silver, and Marge - Thank you!

I have started Tweeting more. I am still new to it, but I try to access it daily. I am still wondering what people really want to hear from me on, so I am posting stuff about the progress of my story, as well as personal activities as they come up. My twitter is r_e_james so if you don't follow, please do.

I have come across numerous interesting links form other authors and publishers on twitter that I may start to republish here, in my blog. If you don't like that idea - feel free to email me and let me know.

It was the day before the day before Thanksgiving...

Its Tuesday. Since I last posted I have moved my word count upwards of 25,000. I should be around 33,000 words by now, so I need to pick up the pace and make some real progress over the Thanksgiving Holiday. Luckily I will be riding the train for 4.5 hours on Turkeyday up to my family in Fort Worth, so I plan to sit in the observation car, plug in and tear up writing. The internet connectivity is typically non-existent on the train, so no distractions. I do wish that the Amtrak train that runs the San Marcos - Fort Worth route would get outfitted with it though. Makes doing research on the fly very difficult as cell coverage is also quite limited in the more remote points of the trip.

As I go back and look at my writing thus far, I find that almost all of my chapters, or sections are right around 8,300 words. Is that coincidence you think? Is that just my style, or where my mind thinks good breaks in the story should happen? I dunno, but it is kinda freaking me out.

I mentioned in my last post that I had come up with a way to merge the real world and my fantasy world together, so I have been juggling between just writing in the real world and moving back into my fantasy land to finish off the last chapter I was working on. I have developed my female main character in the real world, her name is Caitlyn. Caitlyn is finishing her studies in Linguistics at Harvard University and has stumbled upon a journal written in an unknown language that has led her to a very remote area where a scientific/archeolgoical dig will reveal findings that shatter everyone's paradigm!

NaNoWriMo Update

Today is the 13th day of NaNoWriMo (yea 13) and I am currently at around 15,000 words. Thats slightly behind where I should be, but I think I will have a chance to catch up to the pace in the next few days.

One of the benefits so far of the exercise in writing, is that I came up with this really cool idea about how to merge my fantasy world with the real world and still keep it all believable (I hope anyway).

So now I have essentially two stories running - one that occurs today in the real world, and one that occurs in the fantasy world in the past. I haven't quite designed how the two will collide, but I plan for them to, I've just got to keep chewing on it in my mind for a while and looking for opportunities.

NaNoWriMo is here!

Oh I am super excited. NaNoWriMo began Nov 1 (All Saints Day, right? Cool!) So I started cranking out new ideas to get the story popping. Plus I get to solicit feedback on what I am writing immediately from others who, lets face it, are only motivated to critique mine so someone else will critique theirs. I am totally ok with that.

I tend to write late in the day (evening). I write better in the dark, and better in the winter. Don't know why, but that is when my creative juices really flow.

Today is day 3 of the competition and I am at roughly 8,800 words. As I mentioned in my last post, the goal is to get to 50,000 by the end of the month.

My motivation is high, and I am eager to hear what others think of the story. Off to work I go!

Eenie Meenie Minie HOLY BACK FAT! I've got a LOT to keep up with

When I first sat down to start writing this story that has been brewing in my mind since, well since forever, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I mean I had written 35-50 page papers in college, 50 or so page short stories, and yeah, I could totally tackle a novel. No biggie right?

Well what started out as a simple concept has ballooned into a true epic. At last count I had over 100 named characters. That is not counting the generic ones with names like "Helmsman" or "Corporal" or "Fairy".

I named groups of military units, classes at the Mage Academy, books, swamps, trees, and my oh my how it grew unmanageable. I mean its no big deal in a short story to handle all of these moving "named" parts, but in an epic it becomes critical. You can't call the group of soldier carrying the shields "Shieldbarers" in chapter 3 and then later in Chapter 11 after you have forgotten all about naming them 8 chapters ago start calling them Shieldguard. This nuance may not seem like a big deal, but trust me it is a big deal, and it is ravaging my story!

I am a pretty well organized person. I've written down all of my brilliant ideas as I have had them. I have written down notes, and developed ideas into workable plot lines. I collected art, and began to draft sketches of my main characters, but by god did I say that Henrik had Blue eyes, Grey Eyes, Silver eyes or brown? Now I got to go back through and search for his description, and PRAY I only described it once.

Once you add in descriptions, names, titles, places, buildings, groups, organizations, you can see that these little details quickly go from being a support for the plot, to crippling it because I can't think with all of the clutter in my brain. Now consider that often I sit down to write and do so from beginning to end of chapter...but it may be weeks or longer before that happens. Wanna guess how many of those details I can retain in my mind after I haven't thought about the story for 3 weeks or longer? Let me help you - NONE - lol.

*sigh*

So shifting gears (I'll tie back in momentarily) National Novel Writing Month, lovingly known as NaNoWriMo begins in November. I participated last year, but didn't participate much or get much accomplished, despite having so much ground work prepared. The concept is it is a voluntary competition to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. If you do it, you win. If you don't then you still win, just not "officially" because after all, you may not have written 50,000 words but you got motivated and actually wrote something.

So in my prep work for NaNoWriMo this year I stumbled upon a tool developed by another NaNoWriMo participant who is also a computer programmer who had the same problem I described at the beginning of this blogpost. He couldn't keep up with who was who, who was where, who was where when and what they had with them so he developed yWriter, a FREE software that OMG has blown my mind and totally saved me from drowning under detail. Its not sexy, after all it was written by a programmer, so it looks very LOGICAL, and not very APPLE if you know what I mean - but luckily there was a video tutorial explaining how to get started. It lets you do all kinds of cool things that a novelist needs, such as create characters where you can input all of their bio's, details, looks, notes, organizational membership and the like. You can create scenes, and locations, and tie them to chapters. You can rearrange the chapters to put them in different order. You can say WHEN a scene begins, how long it takes, and which characters you created are in it. Whoa! What a great tool. My problem now is I pretty much have to stop, and retrofit what I have already written to be in the program. However, I really can't get much further ahead until I do. Sure when I get those surges of inspiration I can still crank out a chapter real fast in the mean time. It just may mean that Henrik has green eyes.

Brain Drain

Well, I sure didn't intend for real life to interject itself in such a way as to drain away my creative juices, but it did. I couldn't draw up the ability to wisk myself away to my world for well over two months. Ouch - I am sorry for those that were excited to read my blog. I'll do better to not disappear so long again.

So to catch you up - after going through total brain drain and not being able to muster any creativity, last week I sat down and wrote an entire chapter, and the creative drive is back. My ideas have started firing off again, and my list of things to incorporate is once again growing! It is nice to have my mojo back.

So new chapter - its currently titled "To Be King", and introduces an antagonist. He is young, brooding, and plays with dark magics that he doesn't completely understand. He's in love, in as much as his twisted worldview can understand that emotion to be. It was fun writing the chapter. I honestly don't know how much of it I will keep - as its not the best thing I have ever written, but it was pure and raw, which I very much needed.