Good News of the Day!

Yes, I have been gone for longer than anticipated again, but I return with three pieces of good news!

Firstly, if you've been reading this blog for a bit, you may recall my mentioning a sci-fi novel. At one point it went by the the title Quarantined, which was then shortened to Q and then I abandoned that title altogehter when neither of those fit what the story had become. For probably about a year now, it's simply been known as The Untitled YA Sci-Fi Novel. And as of yesterday, The Untitled YA Sci-Fi Novel was completed.

Of course, I use the word completed lightly; this draft is finished. But I'm really happy about this. I've been working on this novel on and off, and then consistently this year, for over two years. I made a mess of it in November and spent the last two months cleaning it up and finishing it.

I hope to get a NaNo reviewer go over it and get some feedback, then work on it some more!

Bit of News #2 is that my friend and critique partner Stuart have started our collab blog. It is a writing blog, including book reviews, and we've gotten great reception so far. Check it out here!

And Bit of New #3 is that my final semester of undergraduate (and possibly all, but never say never) education is upon me, which means that I will be completing my senior thesis. My thesis is a new draft of my play, Straight on 'Til Morning, culminating in a staged reading of it. My playwriting professor has offered to be my mentor and I'm really excited. I'm meeting with my thesis teacher tomorrow to discuss the details and I really can't wait to meet up with my mentor on Wednesday. I'll keep you posted on how it goes!

:)

Right now, I'm editing part of my critique partner's novel while he's editing mine. This has actually never happened before, and we've been having fun saying that we can't be mean to one another because we have each other's babies. There is a big difference between what we're reading, though. I have the latest (of many) drafts of the fantasy novel he's been working on for years. He has the fourth draft of my second complete novel, which is contemporary suspense. I've read almost every draft of his novel; this is his first glimpse of mine.

I've mentioned how honest my friend is about my writing. I mean, he told me straight out that the intro of this book sucked. In fact, it sucked so much that it actually made him much less eager to read the rest of the novel. He has started it since, however, and is teasing me with Facebook messages that say things like, "Just thought I should tell you, I'm reading TOSOL again. The darkness is overwhelming." When we got together last, he asked me who I was reading when I was writing the novel. I mentioned John Green, and he nodded. "You can see his influence," my friend said, totally making my day. Another thing that did so? Him saying he was pulled into my novel. I was practically dancing.

I think this all goes to show that a) one can recover from a bad beginning and b) I am growing in my writing. :)

Being a Critique Partner

I've written previously about how great it is to have a critique partner, but I've never talked about how wonderful it is to BE a critique partner.

I think the most rewarding thing about it is the fact that someone is trusting you with their writing. I am very protective of mine and it takes me awhile to share it with someone I know. In fact, I still only show a few people and even fewer on a regular basis. The fact that someone is willing to hand over their baby to me and let me hack at it with a pen is pretty awesome.

I love editing other people's work- it's one of my favorite things to do. Even if the work is terrible (which my critique partner's never has been), it's still fun to go through and make suggestions. I feel like I'm really doing something. It's even better when it's good and I just have to make small changes.

Recently, my critique partner was getting some writing ready to submit for publication at his college. He e-mailed me and told me that he was submitted one of my favorite pieces of his. This was exciting enough, but then he wrote that he had attached it so that I could edit it one last time- he trusted my judgement. That was incredible.

If you don't have a critique partner- a steady one- I think you should get one. It's rewarding on both ends :)

In other news, my two essays are done, which means that I'm almost done work for the entire school term! I have lines to memorize for a performance, but writing-wise, I am FREEEE! April is full of European exploration starting on the first, and I can't wait!

"How Did I Get Here?"

Tonight I had that writing workshop that I signed up for, dropped out of, and then signed up for again. It was most definitely a learning process.

First of all, we were all given all of the pieces to read over beforehand. Not all of us got all of the pieces- I only got seven out of the ten. But I noticed a certain trend in the pieces I did recieve: they were all either short stories or prose poetry and they were all thoughtful and deep and dramatic. Lord knows what everyone thought when they opened up my dialogue-driven, snarky YA piece.

I'm not saying this in a self-deprecating way. I was confident in what I had submitted. But it was so radically different from anyone else's that it stuck out glaringly, and I still don't know if that was a good or bad thing; no one seemed to know how to react. Throughout the workshop, I was listening to other pieces being read and thinking, "How did I get here?"

The workshop itself was pretty awesome. We were put in this conference room in the castle (which used to be the owner's smoking room back in the late 1800s) and the thick wooden doors blocked out every sound. We could whisper and hear each other. It was a very cool and relaxing environment.

The host of the workshop is an academic librarian here at my school and is also a published writer (of short stories, I believe.) I've seen her around, but we've never really met, and I expected her to be either really mean or too shy to even really speak. But instead she was this quietly lively, fun person who gave everyone great feedback.

I had expected to see some people I knew, but there was only one person I had met there; most of the participants were graduate students, which was a little intimidating. But they all turned out to be very nice, too.

I was the last to go- I think she went in the order in which she had recieved our pieces, and due to the rehearsal debacle, I submitted mine six days late. Again, it was very weird because, after all of the flowy, deep prose poetry, my excerpt was like having a bucket of cold water dumped over you. It was more marked than one night in Play & Screenwriting when we present our monologues; the girl before me had jut finished weeping as a dying soldier and then I jumped in with a piece of fast-paced, ridiculous excuses.

Overall, though, the piece was well-recieved. People were pretty complimentary of it and they also gave me some fantastic suggestions- some of which I've already taken. I'm really glad I participated; it was awesome to be sitting in a room of people who are just as dedicated to this as I am. I hope I can do something like that again :)


(Also, I'm now officially a creative writing minor at school!)

Success/Failure

Today was a huge day, writing-wise, because it was my first day of having my writing workshopped in my two major composition classes.

For Poetry & Fiction, we're required to submit our pieces the class day before our work is to be critiqued, and when I submitted mine on Thursday evening, I was pretty confident about what I was sending in. After all, it was just a continuation of what my classmates already liked. We weren't really encouraged to submit "past" work (though it's still a WIP), but we were allowed to if we so wished. I decided to turn in something I had already worked on because I don't write well on demand. I like to fine-tune things until I don't think they can be fine-tuned anymore.
So anyway, I turned this piece in and I was feeling good about it. I felt good about up until last night. Then I woke up this morning with butterflies. 'Why did I send that?' 'What if they hate it after they liked the other part?'
Of course, there was nothing I could do to stop the inevitable. They'd already read it anyway, so my worries were moot. I walked into class very nervous, sat through the first person's presentation very nervously. Then it was my turn.

And... they liked it. They liked the dialogue and the pace and a good number of other things. Of course, it wasn't all rainbows and flowers- there was critisism. My teacher's pretty good at asking probing questions that get the class and the writer thinking. So after this, the class asked me a lot of good questions and gave me suggestions. And while it was technically "critical"... it was incredibly HELPFUL. Like, there was some stuff that really got me thinking and will cause some big tweaks to be put into not only the scene I gave, but the larger story. It was great.


So because of this success, I was excited to go to my Play & Screenwriting class. My first scene, a five minute piece, would be read and critiqued. I put in a ton of work into the piece- it took me about a week and a half to get the structure that I wanted and I was pretty proud of how it went. So I skipped off to class this evening and had my scene read second.
Almost as soon as it started to be read, I knew something was wrong. When did the pace get so slow? Why were there so many run-on sentences for the older character? And why was there so little conflict in the beginning of the scene?
But these were only the minor problems. The further we got into the reading, the more the tension grew in the air. Part of our workshopping is that we start off with something we liked and you could just feel people going, 'What on earth am I going to say about this?!'
It wasn't that it was terrible written. It wasn't. But I guess I was so focused on making that certain structure work that I forgot about other important stuff, namely characterization, and it was a glaring problem.
When we finally, blessedly reached the end, there was a long silence as people desperately tried to think of things to say that were complimentary. Thankfully, they actually tried and didn't resort to things like, "Well, the paper you used is certainly... white..." But there wasn't much to be said.
My piece was (nicely) torn to shreds. But it wasn't even the critiques they made- it was that the things they felt were going on- that the older character was this evil, evil woman and the younger character was this poor overworked girl and the main theme was that the latter felt overworked... that wasn't what I was going for at all. When I wrote it, I saw the older woman as a person who was covering up nerves through bossiness and I actually worried that the younger woman would come off as ridiculously shallow.

I read a quote recently that if there is any confusion as to what's going on in a book, play, or any piece of writing, it's always the writer's fault that the problem is present- the reader's just doing the best they can with what they're given. So I wasn't upset with my class for not understanding what I was going for, because I'll be the first to admit that it wasn't there.
But to be honest, I was still shocked at how badly the whole thing went. I had set mysef up for success, so excited from the afternoon that I honestly hadn't even considered failure. So when it came, it was ten times worse. I almost cried in the middle of class.

Now I'm a little overwhelmed. Not only do I have to have the rewrites for this awful scene, which is going to be painful and due in two weeks, but I have a ten-page scene due next week, a new fiction piece in two weeks, and other stuff to memorize for, like, yesterday.

Sometimes, the things you love can be the things that stress you out the most.