What I read, Part 1

I was a bookworm growing up. There was no more favorite place for me than curled up on a beanbag chair in the library, or sneakily reading with a flashlight in my bedroom late at night.

I've gotten pickier over the years - when I was a teenager I'd read anything that had a science fiction or fantasy tag on it - but I still voraciously consume books, either ones I buy myself or ones I borrow off friends (who buy different authors from me.)

My best friend, having moved back in with us for her senior year in vet school, brought along three fresh book cases. I discovered a handful of my books on there, which I have taken back, but a treasure trove of books from authors I hadn't heard of as well.

I used to have a set book budget of $50 every month. When I quit my job, my book budget went away (this is why you do not quit your day job!) but I'll still pinch and scrounge and save up for books from the following authors:

• Terry Pratchett
• Teresa Medeiros
• Mary Balogh

I'm never disappointed with anything they write, so it's a good investment for me. And I can reread and reread and reread and still enjoy it.

I still try to make a little time to read books on a daily basis, although I make sure to space it out from my writing to avoid losing my own voice by trying to imitate the author of whatever it was I just read.

So today's read, borrowed from my best friend's bookshelf, is Lynn Kirkland's Dreams of Stardust.

I read other things besides books. I follow a ton of blogs, read webcomics, and read and post frantically on several forums. But those are topics for another day.

Return of the Room Mates

My husband and I purchased our first house last January. We've lived alone in happy, post-first-house bliss for about six months. We walked around in our underwear without worrying, we did unmentionable things in the living room and the kitchen, and we generally acted like we owned the place. Which we did.

My best friend, who is a vet student at the local university, reached the breaking point at her fraternity and desperately wanted to move out. She is claiming one of our bedrooms. Additionally, a dear friend (and previous room mate of ours) is moving back from a study abroad in Japan. She is claiming the other empty room, and they'll be sharing a bathroom.

It's going to be a shock going from having our own home all the time to having people around again. We've lived with both our room mates before, and love them both dearly like sisters, but this will be their first time sharing a space, and I'm hoping that all goes well.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, not much. I continue to plug along on Book #2 - it's at about 30,000 words now and many plot elements that were hazy have solidified - but now I'm grateful that this "career change" will allow me to stay home most of the day, and act as a sort of mother to my friends. Both will be under very stressful senior years, and they need someone to help take care of them. It's not much harder to cook for 3-4 people than it is for two, once you account for volume.

On the upside, my best friend has a far more extensive collection of books than I do (three tall bookshelves of romance novels alone!) and I'll be pillaging it for the next year for sure. Maybe someday, one of my books will grace her shelves as well.

The dying screams of an aging computer

A few weeks ago, my fuzzy little cat-child Weaver decided to leap onto my desk, directly onto a freshly made giant mug of hot tea. The tea spilled all over the computer desk, the computer, the wall behind the computer, a video game controller, and my external hard drive. Fortunately, the only permanently destroyed piece of electronics was the controller, but the computer itself has been on the fritz on and off ever since.

What started with some skips and freezes eventually cascaded into blue screens of death. I'm no slouch when it comes to computers (having worked in IT for several years), and while I managed to stem the flow of blood from the motherboard by doing a clean installation of Windows 7, I've been having a hard time with the card readers.

I keep all my writing on an 8 gig SDHC card. This allows me to transfer it back and forth from my desktop computer to my laptop (a tiny little Acer Aspire netbook) instantly.

When the tea spilled, several events happened in a rapid sequence. I yanked out the external hard drive, ran to the kitchen for paper towels, and tried to keep the mess from getting into the inner workings of the computer case. The latter effort succeeded, but the act of tearing out the USB external caused me to actually pull out the little black plastic stub that is enclosed in the USB port itself. This means that port is now completely dead and has a tendency to short out the rest of the ports on the front of the PC.

I believe I've got everything working, and under control again. I hope so. The netbook is unable to handle anything that requires more memory than Open Office or Google Chrome!

The time has perhaps come for me to replace the desktop. I will probably build my own to save money, but it's a pity - this computer is only two and a half years old.

Nothing lasts forever.

A thousand words a day

An easy, manageable goal.

That's a thousand words of new fiction text; not including any revisions, queries, or any of the other business that comes along with writing books and short stories. And of course, not including any blog or forum posts!

It doesn't sound like much, especially for a NaNoWriMo veteran like myself. But it adds up fast if you stay committed.

1,000 words a day is 365,000 words a year - or four full length novels with 45K in change for short stories.

I have a whiteboard above my desk, and every morning, I write the total goal word count. Today's goal was to hit 18,000 words on Book #2. So I sat on the couch, with the cat curled up next to me, and after a while I checked and I was at 18133. Spiffy keen!

Getting to know the characters

I'm dealing with a few new characters I had to invent for the sake of progressing the plot. They're a little thin right now, but I'll flesh them out later.

Usually, I start with a real person I know. A friend, an old professor, someone I met once at a convention and never spoke to again . . . all fair game. That's just for physical looks though. If every character were based on how I envision people looking, they'd be too pretty. Real people aren't perfect.

Then I'll tailor them to fit the role the character is fulfilling. For example, the character of Huliol in Book #2 is meant to look a bit like my high school's valedictorian. She's quiet, thoughtful, nice - a marked contrast to the volatile and temperamental Vazeria. But she's also naive, a romantic, and an optimist.

What drives her? What is her goal in life? Where did she come from? All these things will tell themselves to me as I'm writing her parts in the story - eventually. They may take a while to unfold. She is a secondary character, after all.

I don't think I really get to know her until the first draft of this book is done. Then as I'm revising, I'll change her dialogue around until I have her voice firmly in place.

It's the way with all the characters in my stories. I have to get to know them as I write them. If I try to do the D&D "build a character" route, it will force them into stereotypes. And that's the last thing I want.

Fast Typer, Fast writer?

Something I've known for a while is that I am a faster than average typist. I think it was tested at 60 WPS last time I went through an employment agency, but I'm capable of short bursts closer to 70 or so (provided I don't make typos.)

I chalk it up to learning how to really type during my later teenage years in Compuserve's chat rooms. In the early heydays of the Internet, back when chat rooms were the only thing to do (before the advent of FB, Farmville, and every flavor of MMO imaginable), they were remarkably crowded, and sometimes they'd be completely full and you couldn't even enter your favorite room.

As a result, if you wanted to maintain a conversation, you had to 1. read very fast and 2. type very fast. If you were a laggard, your conversation would end up scrolled up too fast for anyone to bother trying to chat with you.

Now I'm able to touch-type with the "floating" style, and I even use most of the appropriate fingers for hitting keys (right-hand pinky being a stark exception; it curls up when I type. I don't know why.) I also read fast, especially juicy fiction from a favorite author. I can knock out a paperback novel in a few uninterrupted hours.

But typing quickly is not the same thing as writing quickly, or so I thought. During the chat 'n challenges with the Divas, in 20 minutes I'm able to crank out 500-700 words, while others are only putting out 100-200. I think this is a reflection primarily of my typing speed. But it's also a reflection of my writing speed. I have the scene planned out in my mind well before I start writing it, even if I'm not sure of the specifics. And if something is terrible, I can always change it later. Some writers simply prefer to get it "right" on the first go round. So they write slower, but they have to do less revising later on.

There's no "proper" way to write, so long as the final result is high quality. But it's a bit of an ego boost to have high short term numerical output, at least!

Best laid plans . . .

An annual treat for me for the last half a dozen years has been ACEN in Chicago. I've done a lot of things on the fanfiction circuit at that convention, from the fanfic panel to running a writing workshop with the late Kristine Batey. In the last few years I've switched to running the FFXI panel, since Square Enix pretends that the midwest does not exist when planning their fan festivals.

This year, the convention was considered a no-go because I quit my job to become a housewife/writer/stay-at-home-layabout, and my share of our tax refund went to 10 glorious days in the Bay Area. Well worth the trade-off to me.

Now, my husband, wonderful, talented, funny, creative, and above all, employed, moves in anime circles but strictly in the non-fiction writing sense of them. He gets invited to conventions as a guest in order to add a shiny Dr. to the guest list (great for colleges who need to have guest professors to add some legitimacy to their tiny parties.) This is why I was schmoozing in the green room at Dragon*Con last year, and that was when I made my vow that someday I was going to be the invited guest, not him.

Well, he's done it again. There's a possibility of him being invited to ACEN as a last minute VIP guest. If he goes, I go, since we'll probably drive. And here I planned on having May as a nice, predictable free month, in which to finish up my rough draft of book #2.

I'm still not sure whether I should be angry or happy.