All a-Twitter

Posted on December 14, 2013 by AmyBeth Inverness

Santa hat ovalI think I’ve decided to reform my blogging to twice a week. On Wednesdays I’ll do my regular ROW80 Updates. Then, any other time in the week (probably the weekend) I will do another post. It might be some random rambling. I am not going to do regular interviews anymore because, as wonderful that has been for making connections, it takes a LOT of effort and derails my brain. I’d like to take the best SciFi Question of the Day responses and put them on the blog (and there were some GREAT ones in November!) but it takes a lot of work to copy and paste from four different threads and then format them to look decent. I might try doing some screenshots, but that also loses something in translation.

Twitter 2013 12 14 polyamoryI’ve been doing a lot of late-night writing lately, and I often go to twitter to either spout off something that comes to mind, or ask a specific question. The twitterverse is usually very responsive to my questions! My WIP is polyamorous. Not the kinky kind…I present it as the norm for the society. But that raises all kinds of questions, like “If a person has a business dinner to attend, do they bring all seven spouses? Would they bring just one?” Really…the complications are endless, before you even start to talk about romance or relationships.

Twitter 2013 12 14 polyamory B

I was tweeting with BrittanyMarczak about how the complications give me an endless source of inspiration for romance novels. This is what I call Job Security!

One thing I noticed in this discussion is who favorited one of my tweets…

Since my pseudonym is AmyBeth Inverness, I am followed by numerous businesses in Inverness, Scotland, and I always follow them back (as soon as I realize I’m being followed. I admit, I don’t often check…)

One of my tweets was favorited by MacRae and Dick Toyota of Inverness. So, if you’re looking for a car, and you live in Scotland, pay them a visit and tell them I said hi!

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Late Update

Posted on December 12, 2013 by AmyBeth Inverness

ROW80LogocopyI admit I’m a bit lost. But things are good. In fact, the reason I’m a bit lost is because things are good!

I’m well over 80k in my WIP. I’m expecting it will top 100k, and if it’s a LOT more than 100k, I’ll probably edit down to that. Novels don’t pay by the word, but when an author has a story in their mind, it is what it is. Expanding or stretching too much changes its essence.

The problem is, my ROW80 goals said I’d leave NaNoWriMo behind in December, but I’m still going strong. However that’s a goal I have to alter. Finishing this novel is more important than…well, it’s important. Even though December has a lot of important stuff going on, not to mention Christmas in less than two weeks.

I paused NaNo in late November to finish up a story I wanted to submit, and I’m SO glad I did! I just got an acceptance letter for it! I’ll share more information as the publication date nears. It’s SciFi, for an anthology. Special thanks to Shoshanna Evers for reminding me, via twitter “if it’s under 4K, there’s no reason you can’t write it and have it be awesome in a couple days, IMHO” after I tweeted that I was considering giving up on my short story so as to not interrupt NaNo.

Ambassadors Mouse LunapicSpeaking of short stories, I noticed I hadn’t posted anything on the fiction side of the blog lately. I often do the Friday prompts from Write On Edge, but I hadn’t all through NaNoWriMo. I wrote a short story called The Ambassador’s Mouse and posted it on my fiction blog (Under Loch and Key.) It’s good to bust out a random short story every now and then. This one helped me get rid of some plot bunnies that were chasing my WIP. I have some very strong women in the WIP, and the FMC in The Ambassador’s Mouse is extremely submissive. I also needed a Christian Slater fix. 🙂 It’s 6k of erotica if you’d like to read it. That means over 18 only, so if you’re not 18 yet, you can’t click the link! And if you’re an artist who feels inspired to improve upon what I cobbled together in MS Paint, I’d love to see how you visualize Eleric and Emmicia…

I also finished my last class for ‘SciFi Utopias’ that I was taking with my hubby and enjoyed immensely. I am extraordinarily proud of relevantly citing The Zillionaire Vampire Cowboy’s Secret Werewolf Babies in my final paper:

Some may argue that a true utopia can only exist for a tiny population of one. In The Zillionaire Vampire Cowboy’s Secret Werewolf Babies (Bell) Rock Fangsworthy has a very specific set of ideals and needs. He is a zillionaire, so he can’t participate in a socialist utopia like Ecotopia (Callenbach) or Anarres (LeGuin) because he would not be able to keep his wealth. Like Lauren Olamina in Parable of the Sower (Butler) he has special abilities he must keep secret from the rest of the world. He might find, like her, a small group of like-minded or similarly talented people, otherwise he must live alone. And being a cowboy, for Rock Fangsworthy, Texas is heaven on earth. With all his wealth, he can’t buy the technology to create his own little utopia, he has to find it in the location that serves his needs alongside the people who share his ideals.

My thesis was “Technology Can Lead to Utopia or Dystopia”

Did you know there’s less than two weeks until Christmas?

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Just Thinking Out Loud

Posted on December 7, 2013 by AmyBeth Inverness

2013-Winner-Facebook-CoverFor NaNoWriMo this year, I returned to Kingdom Come. This is a planetary colony where happily committed polyamory is a normal way of life. I’ve succeeded at NaNo twice with KC stories, and last year when I used a different theme for NaNo, I crashed and burned.

There was a time when I thought that KC novels would be my bread and butter. I’ve worked out the details of the world, and it’s easy to write romances set there. Since it’s polyamorous, I have a wealth of untapped possibilities of conflict and romantic entanglements.

But these entanglements sometimes leave me flummoxed. I do have some poly friends (via internet; I met them because I was writing polyamory) but their experiences, though valuable, are not complete. In particular, I have no way of knowing how a group of only three or four might be pressured by society to expand the group to at lease six, a much more acceptable number.

I’m looking forward to writing an intriguing mess when group A (a married MMF group) is flirting with group B (A married MMFFF group) because together they make a “perfect eight” consisting of four men and four women. However, there is also “S” who is an ex-girlfriend of part of group B and the best friend of part of group A. Throw in a MM pair, a FF pair, and things get really complicated.

Of course, complicated can mean that my reader gets lost and loses interest in the story. It is a challenge to make sure the readers can easily remember which characters are important.

One way to do this is to focus on just one character. My 2011 NaNoNovel did this, which worked well since it was a romance about an arranged marriage. There was no question who would end up together…just whether or not they’d be happy!

Another way to do this is to write separate parts, each about a group of no more than five…three or four works better. My 2010 NaNoNovel did this, with part one being MMF, part two was FF finding M&M, then part three added one more F and joined them together.

Besides being polyamorous, people on KC are comfortable with the fact that human sexuality is not either/or. They usually simplify the description to saying that some people are at the heterosexual end of the spectrum and others are close to the homosexual end. Most people fall somewhere in between. So in the groups described above, the sexual preferences of each make everything even more complicated.

I began my 2013 NaNoNovel with the idea that I would focus on one character, however the first part turned out really focusing on all three. By the end of that part, the character I’d focused on had a partially HEA (Happily Ever After), but one of the M’s HEA was questionable.

Now I’m into part two, and I know that the final HEA will involve more than the original MMF. I know exactly who. My focus shifts to the M whose HEA is in question, but I do tell the story from different POVs. I try to limit these POVs though… one big giveaway that a character is going to be part of the final HEA is that they get a POV.

I have a scene coming up and I’m struggling with what the body language will look like. One married M who is slightly to the hetero side of center flirts with a married F who is very close to the homo end of the spectrum. The flirting is innocent and condoned by both marriages… the two married groups flirt with each other. The end result of this flirtation is that the M and F will become very close, but not in a sexual way. I don’t want their initial flirtation to be awkward or embarrassing, but I also want it to be adorable and non sexual, especially on the F part.

Part one ended up being around 70,000 words, which is just about perfect for a novel. Adding in part two, I thought it would be shorter, for a total of around 100,000 words, but now I’m thinking part two will be just as long as part one. That’s longer than I want. Yes, I could edit it down…

Or I could split it into two. Part one does get a HEA…but you get the sense that it is a fragile one. Part two has the MMF unit getting their final HEA with a few more additions to the group marriage.

The thing that appeals to me most about this approach is that it lets me tell a more complete story. I have another KC novel (Under the Radar) that is on the shelf for similar reasons… at the end of the story I knew that their HEA was fragile. The second story pulled it all together.

The thing I like least about this approach is that it makes neither novel function as a stand-alone, especially the “part two” novels. I prefer to be able to say that you could read any of my novels and know what’s going on without having to read the others first.

It may not be a bad thing, though. You could read both parts of Under the Radar without ever reading my other KC novels. Same with my WIP, tentatively titled either A Brave New Whirl or From Earth to Kingdom Come.

Step one is to finish writing the actual story. Second, take some distance from it. I might define this distance as going back to Under the Radar and writing its part two. That would keep my brain in the same world. I’m just not sure whether that’s enough distance…

Step three is to go back through A Brave New Whirl and smooth it out, making it one long novel in two parts, that could be split into two novels. Then it’s off to the beta readers, and through as many cycles of revision as it takes to be ready to query.

Hopefully, querying will be successful, and then I get to polish it up even more. Even more hopefully, readers will like it enough that they’ll want to read more KC novels…and more…

Because I can always write more!

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Decisions, Decisions…

Posted on December 3, 2013 by AmyBeth Inverness

Day 30I totally rocked NaNoWriMo. I passed 50k on November 30, technically winning, I had 60k by the end of the month, and 72k by the end of the weekend. It’s only about 2/3 done, I think… I call what I’ve written so far “Part One” when the characters are still on the starliner. “Part Two” will take place on the planet, and will be shorter since a lot of the set-up happened in Part One. I’m trying to continue riding the high, continuing to churn out the words while the story is still in my head. I’m scared to death of losing it…not the actual plot, for that I can make notes…but the feel I have for the story that’s propelling me right now.

I mocked up another cover for the book, giving it a new title. My working title is “A Brave New Whirl” and I’ve also played with the idea of “From Earth to Kingdom Come.” The starliner in part one is The Jubilation of the Southern Cross, and that’s what I’m calling part one. The planet is Kingdom Come and that’s what I’m calling part two.Cover Version 02

I’m so glad I came back to this story for NaNo. It’s been on a shelf for a couple of years. When I took it down, I realized I’d written less than 2k, even though I had a good idea in my head what the rest of the story would be. I’m at the stage when I’m really enjoying it. I hope to be done by Christmas, then it will go onto the shelf just long enough for my brain to wrap around something completely different, like my Steampunk books or the Pangalactic Sojourners. After my brain has broken away from the story, I can go back to it and revise, use beta readers, and polish it up nicely. My goal for this book (besides, obviously, publication) is to have a professional story that I can be proud of and submit to either a contest (I have one in mind with PPW) or a workshop. This would be an excellent “first published novel” for me. It’s set in a world I’ve developed in detail, and in which I can set many more stories. I love writing Kingdom Come romances! This particular story also sets up the world well, because it is the story of two people immigrating to the world and noting all the cultural differences between this world and Earth.

So…for ROW80 my stated goal for December was to accept that NaNo was over, and take care of the real life stuff that usurps the month. I’m going to revise that to say I will finish my NaNo novel. Not a per day word count, but writing every day as much as I can.

And I need to make some decisions. Part of the reason I was able to succeed at NaNo was because the only regular blog posts I did were these Wednesday updates. I love doing interviews, but I think I’ll have to put them off until the New Year, at least. I will definitely be cutting back, and might get rid of the feature altogether even though it has brought me some wonderful contacts and friends. But my concentration needs to be on monetizing my career.

On a completely different note, my friend Wendy Russo is having a sale!

About January Black

Sixteen-year-old genius Matty Ducayn has never fit in on The Hill, an ordered place seriously lacking a sense of humor. After his school’s headmaster expels him for a small act of mischief, Matty’s future looks grim until King Hadrian comes to his rescue with a challenge: answer a question for a master’s diploma.

More than a second chance, this means freedom. Masters can choose where they work, a rarity among Regents, and the question is simple.

What was January Black?

It’s a ship. Everyone knows that. Hadrian rejects that answer, though, and Matty becomes compelled by curiosity and pride to solve the puzzle. When his search for an answer turns up long-buried state secrets, Matty’s journey becomes a collision course with a deadly royal decree. He’s been set up to fail, which forces him to choose. Run for his life with the challenge lost…or call the king’s bluff.

January Black is the silver medalist in the 2013 Readers’ Favorite Book Awards, Young Adult – Coming of Age category.

Kindle | Nook | Other Digital | Paperback | Signed Paperbacks | Add to Goodreads Shelf

Wendy S. Russo got her start writing in the sixth grade. That story involved a talisman with crystals that had to be found and assembled before bad things happened, and dialog that read like classroom roll call. Since then, she’s majored in journalism (for one semester), published poetry, taken a course on short novels, and watched most everything ever filmed by Quentin Tarantino. A Wyoming native transplanted in Baton Rouge, Wendy works for Louisiana State University as an IT analyst. She’s a wife, a mom, a Tiger, a Who Dat, and she falls asleep on her couch at 8:30 on weeknights. She can be found online in the following places:

Amazon | Authorgraph | Crescent Moon Press | Facebook | Google + | Pinterest | Twitter

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Na-No a Go-Go

Posted on November 26, 2013 by AmyBeth Inverness

Here’s the quick and dirty update! The graph says it all…Day 26

I learned something this week. Or, rather, something I already knew was confirmed.

Posting a story on the blog and putting up a generic call for beta readers and critique does not work for me.

I wrote a story for an antho, and although I had a clear idea in my mind what was going on, that was after months of thinking and creating and working out the details of exactly how this SciFi creature would interact with the world. It’s non-corporeal—meaning it doesn’t have a physical body—which made this story a challenge.

I loved the way it turned out, but I still had huge questions regarding whether or not it made sense, and was clear to the reader. Normally I’d pick a few beta reading friends and sit back and wait, but in this case the deadline was in less than two days, so I went another route.

Posting a story you intend to publish is always an iffy prospect. Publishers and editors may legitimately refuse a story, saying it was “previously published” if you put it up on your blog. I put the story up with a password, then posted the password. This made it so anyone who legitimately wanted to read it could easily get to it, but it cut way down on the number of people just casually wandered by. I was pleased to see a handful of hits soon, then a dozen, then more. A few of my friends (people I know in RL) gave me some feedback, but no one commented on the blog.

Fortunately, in the meantime, the editor decided to extend the deadline by ten days. And I’m so glad, because I was really beginning to suspect that most of the people looking at the post were going “WTF?” over my story, and not wanting to seem rude by saying so.

~facepalm~

I would much rather have a handful, or even a mob of people tell me “Ya…I just don’t get it,” or “That was just weird and I couldn’t follow it at all,” as opposed having the one editor look at my story and have the same reaction. With beta-readers giving me the news, I have a chance to fix it. If the editor is the first one to tell me, it means the story dies and goes back on the shelf, possibly never to find a home. Not only that, but then there are a bunch of beta readers and an editor out there identifying my name with a piece that’s just not professional.

I poked my bestie and her hubby and got some great feedback, and one of my other regulars admitted “I just don’t get it.” Then, in a last-ditch effort, I shared the post (no longer passworded) with  a a regular weekend blog hop. It only got four views. No comments.

I whined a little on twitter, admitting that I was pretty sure my lack of comments was due to the WTF? level of my story. A friend (and pro) took pity on me.  She read it for me and confirmed the WTF?, but also gave very specific feedback with several ways I might fix this. Even if there were no suggestions about how to fix it, just being specific about what exactly was confusing was helpful.

I can’t say I’ll never do it again… never post something and ask for feedback from “anyone who happens by.” But it certainly doesn’t seem to be the most effective way for me to get feedback.

I’m always happy to add more beta readers to the list! And if you are burning to read the WTF? version of my story, click the link and type the password below.

incorporeum

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Halfway! Wait…what… halfway was LAST week?

Posted on November 20, 2013 by AmyBeth Inverness

I’ll let the chart speak for itself. I’m still chasing the goal line, not quite reaching it. The plateau you see reflects that yesterday was a zero count day and I haven’t added much yet today. Day 20

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This One. This Time. This One Time…period.

Posted on November 12, 2013 by AmyBeth Inverness

Highland LeapSkip down for the ROW80 and NaNoWriMo update…

One great lesson I eventually learned from all those Highland Dancing competitions growing up was that I was being judged each time on that one performance of that one dance. If I didn’t get a medal for my Seann Triubhas, it didn’t mean I was a bad dancer. It didn’t mean I was bad at the Truibhas. It didn’t even necessarily mean that my Seann Truibhas was anything less than great that day. It simply meant that, that one day, other dancers in my group performed better than I did, in the eyes of that one judge.

My beloved Five Minute Fiction is another example of this. It’s flash, with a tight time limit. Whatever comes out between 8:30 and 8:45 on Tuesday nights is what I’ve got. Sometimes it’s gold, sometimes it’s crap. Tonight, with two minutes left I realized that instead of writing a piece of flash, I’d begun a story that would be at least 2k if I finished it (I probably won’t.) My friends Kyle and Gwen rocked it this week; both are finalists! Of course I’d love to be a finalist every week. But that doesn’t happen. It doesn’t mean I’m a bad writer, it just means that one story I produced that one time wasn’t so great.

If you look at any successful Hollywood actor, you’ll see at least a few great movies or shows. But you’ll also see more than a few duds in the cache. Having those few duds doesn’t mean they’re a bad actor…it means that one project didn’t turn out as well as the others.

As a writer, one can feel pressure from both within and without to have every word on the page sparkle like diamonds. Ira Glass puts this beautifully…

The advantage in being a writer is that we usually have the option of editing, revising, and polishing our work, or alternatively scrapping the whole thing before anyone else sees it. We can write ten stories and shelve six of them. Of the four that are left, we can polish and publish, and hope that at least one of them hits that certain something that readers want.

I have a lot of stories on the shelf. That’s not a bad thing…I’ve grown a lot as a writer in the last three years. When I look at my early work, including stories I wrote before 2010 (when I decided to go pro) I see the seeds of something that could be great, and I see words that will forever remain in the back of the drawer, never to see the light of day. Hopefully, having now exercised my writing muscles for a few years, having a few small successes as well as my share of rejections, I can move on to greater things. My NaNo Novel might not be it. But one of these stories will be.

My ROW80 Goals are NaNo-centric. As you can see from the graph, I started strong but slipped, partly due to my goobear’s 6th birthday party. (No regrets! It was fantastic!) But I’m close enough to the goal line that I’m not really frustrated, just not as comfortable as I’d like.Day 12PS… no interviews or SciFi Q of the day posts until NaNoWriMo is DONE!

 

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On the First Day of NaNoWriMo, My True Love Gave to Me…

Posted on November 5, 2013 by AmyBeth Inverness

ROW80LogocopyIt’s the first week of NaNoWriMo and I’m OK. Just OK. Not great, not even comfortable, but OK. At the dawn of day 5, my word count is a nice even 7k. I was above the line until yesterday, then a few small yet time-consuming and uber-annoying real life events intervened, as well as the fact that I had my weekly SciFi Utopias class with my hubby.

I have no idea whether the surplus of odd events lately is just a phase, or whether it’s a new norm to which I need to adjust. Like when you time your ride to work, knowing it should take you sixteen minutes, yet every morning it takes you twenty-two minutes and you’re always late. Don’t tell your boss every day “I don’t know what happened, I left early enough, but ___.” Just apologize, and start leaving earlier. I used to eat breakfast at work (we had a nice cafeteria when I worked for the phone company) just to make sure I was never late again.Day 05

My ROW80 Goals? They’re NaNoCentric. I was above the goal line until yesterday. I’m just under it today, but can probably make that up.

Oh, and my true love?

Last week I was sick. Just a cold, but bad enough that all I wanted to do was curl up in bed and try not to cough too hard. Several days last week, my hubby came home from work a couple of hours early so he could take care of the kids after school. This also involves picking them up… our littlest is in Kindergarten, and our teenager has special needs, both of which require face-to-face pick up.

Being sick had several casualties:

  1. Big kid made her orthodontist appointment thanks to Daddy, but we forgot to call the school and let them (and her special-needs team) know that she would be late. This prompted an incident resembling the scene in Office Space where Peter neglects to put a cover sheet on his TPS report and his boss takes it upon himself to correct him.
  2. We made the orthodontist, but missed the dentist for both girls. This is now rescheduled.
  3. I had an overdraft in my checking account, even though I haven’t written a check in more than a decade. Fortunately, it was less than $20 and I have overdraft protection.
  4. I gave up completely on one submission I wanted to do. I put the story on the shelf and might finish it someday. The antho was for Lycanthropic erotica, and I had an interesting twist I liked.
  5. I didn’t finish the submission I really want to turn in. I still have about a week, but that also takes time from NaNoWriMo.
  6. I missed one Monday Night SciFi class, and although I had the homework pre-finished for that class and turned it in via my hubby (this was early in my illness) I wasn’t able to finish the homework for the next week (last night.) Fortunately, the teacher was kind enough to extend the deadline by a day. Actually, I should be doing that right now, not writing a blog post…
  7. Invitations for my Kindergartner’s birthday party didn’t go out two weeks in advance, they went out only one week in advance, and only to her school class. We missed church and therefore missed giving invitations to the other little kids there.
  8. The entire family missed church, since neither parent was feeling well and hubby hates going without me. Church is important to me, and I want my kids to feel how important it is. They both missed their choir rehearsals that day, and big kid missed Youth Group.
  9. All that, and of course the housework is even behinder than it usually is.

Yes. I can say “behinder.” Poetic license, you know.

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Icky-Poo

Posted on October 30, 2013 by AmyBeth Inverness

Lunar Shorts 02The only upside I can fathom to being sick is that I hope to get over it BEFORE NaNoWriMo.

I’ve given up on one story I wanted to finish this month. The deadline’s just a couple days away, and even though I made some awesome notes for the story, that’s as far as it went. Onto the shelf it goes.

Tonight, I did finish a Lunar Short I love. It’s one of those stories where the actual plot isn’t extremely clear, but you do go “Aww!” at the end. It’s in the hands of a beta reader now, and hopefully will only need a little revision before I send it to the editor.

There is another story I want to tie up, and I think I still will even though I’m sick and NaNo is looming. The deadline is mid NaNo, so I plan to finish the rough draft in the next few days, then do a revision a week later before I send it in. I’d rather give in another month off and then a final revision, but the deadline is nearing.

So I’m in line with my ROW80 goals (NaNo Prep) though just barely hanging on. I don’t think I’ll have a glorious, fully fleshed outline before I dive in this year, but I’m still in it to win it. 50k or more AND a complete story.

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Planning

Posted on October 28, 2013 by AmyBeth Inverness

Cover background BHow do you strike a balance between preparing and doing?

One good thing about NaNoWriMo is that it gives the writer a defined time when they need to be writing. No longer plotting. No longer outlining. No longer cruising the web for artistic images that just happen to look like one’s main character.

#AmWriting

One the most difficult lessons I learned in college is that I have a tendency to make grandiose plans, so grandiose that not even a superhuman could finish them. Compounding this issue is the knowledge that my father was suspended from college for a similar issue…not finishing things. Can I blame genetics?

This semester I’m taking a college class with my hubby: Science Fiction Utopias. It fulfills a credit he needs for his degree, and it’s just fun for me. Also, since hubs works at the college and I teach there in the spring (not to mention that we both got our Associates’ degrees there) it’s relatively cheap. I’ve been keeping up with the homework without too much trouble. It’s mostly reading and writing, and I’ve been forcing myself not to get carried away with the writing part.

At the beginning of the semester, I was so excited about having a regular night out with my hubby, doing something fun, that I bought some fabric and got crafty, covering a folder and a notebook with spacey fabric. This made me happy. I also planned to make a bag out of the fabric to carry these in. More than halfway through the semester, the fabric is still sitting there. Although it would be handy to have a right-sized bag to carry my few school supplies, it’s not really necessary. It’s not the kind of preparation I need to do.

Sometimes, it’s not so obvious what preps are useful, and which are superfluous. In an ideal world, I’d be able to do all kinds of little things to prepare for November. I’d have interviews and blog posts pre-written and scheduled. I’d have all the shorts I plan to submit already sent off to editors. I’d have meals prepared and frozen to easily go in the crock pot or oven. I’d have found pictures that resembled not just the main characters, but the secondary ones. I’d have a mocked-up cover, a blurb, and a complete outline.

OK… I do have a cover half mocked-up. I have permission from two arts, Catherine Sherman who is the photographer, and my friend Pony Horton who added the SciFi effects. Now I’m just waiting to hear from a model/actress if I can add her headshot…

I finished up a couple of submissions, and I think I’m giving up on one that I wanted to do, but the deadline is too close. I need to finish a Lunar Short, a guest blog post, and a story for an antho I still want to submit to. (The deadline is mid-NaNo, but I can take time out for one revision if I can get the rough draft done before November.)

The big thing that still needs to be done, besides the aforementioned small projects, are my outline for NaNoWriMo. Right now it looks like a bunch of random notes. I need to translate that to something more organized.

And dinners? This year’s plan includes having my 14yo do more of that!

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