A Note on E-Piracy and The Two-Year Novel

Looking over my blog, DaWG M just remarked that by talking about borrowing a copy of The Two-Year Novel from DaWG S I'm advertising that we violated the terms of sale and have committed piracy. Just in case anyone else is concerned about this, I'd like to clarify things.

This is not an illegal copy of the book. I am currently using the only extant copy of this ebook acquired through the original purchase. The terms of sale state "No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means..." We did not reproduce the book except, perhaps, in the most technical sense. DaWG S attached the book to an email to me and then deleted her copy. I will be returning it to her when I've had a chance to try it out for a bit - without keeping a copy - and, if I've found the book helpful, buying my own copy then.

I don't want to deprive anyone of the income they've earned by producing and selling a good product. However, money is tight for me, as well. I don't have the ready cash to purchase every ebook I think I would like or use. Trust me, I'd have a lot more books by now if I could. :) Though I enjoy the convenience of ebooks and am aware that it's the only cost-effective way for some books to get into print, I strongly believe that publishing in an electronic format should not make it illegal for readers to preview or borrow books.

I'm not doing anything unethical. Whether I'm doing anything illegal is up to Lazette Gifford - but I hope she'll at least email me before she sues.

Isaiah, 2YN Week One: Idea

Wow, two posts in one night? How'd I manage that? Head for the bunkers, folks, the world's obviously about to end.

This was a whole lot harder than I thought it was going to be. I thought I had a solid idea, but when I tried to put it into words it became painfully obvious that I only had half of an idea, at best. I didn't have a central conflict or even a clue what kind of novel I wanted to write. I mean, I knew it was a fantasy, but dark? Romantic? Mystical? Hardboiled? I had no idea. I spent days trying to come up with something - anything - that gave me some insight into the basics of what this novel was about.

In the end, though I made some progress, I'm still not really sure. But rather than get hung up on trying to figure the whole novel out right now (which this whole having a plan to follow for developing the book thing was supposed to avoid, anyway) I decided to keep the idea a little vague, still, and hope that future exercises will help me figure it out.

I'm not sure I'm completely happy with it, but it's a starting point. I've posted it here: http://skadhisgydhja.livejournal.com/35247.html.

It's a private post - you will need a LiveJournal account and to be on my writing filter in order to see it. If you'd like to included on that filter, comment on my journal here: http://skadhisgydhja.livejournal.com/35026.html and I'll add you.

Calgon, Take Me Away!

So today, after the second person nagged at me about doing this plotting exercise (Isaiah) instead of "finishing what you've already started" - and I almost bit their head off about it - I got to thinking.

I'm currently juggling six seperate jobs, though only three of them pay anything at the moment. Writing is one of them. But after I've spent all day focused on my other jobs, pounding out the stuff I have to do, I need writing to be a bit more of a fun time right now. And it's not like this project is completely self-indulgent - I am hoping to learn quite a bit from it. I'm almost done with my current freelance web design project and with my current software configuration project, and once those are over (provided I'm not too stressed over being broke to deal with anything else) I'll likely have a bit more energy for headway on my works in progress.

Until then I'm happy with escapism, thank you very much.

Isaiah, It's a Bit Early for Trouble, Innit?

So, the first step of the 2YN project is to come up with a sentence that describes the basic idea of your book, and then expand it into a 50 - 100 word paragraph. Every sample in the book is plot-based, and all I have so far is a character and a half and a vague scenario. And though I know it probably doesn't have to be a plot-based summary, "So there's this guy, and he meets this other person" just doesn't seem good enough somehow. :P So I'm trying to flesh it out a bit and come up with a general idea of what kind of book I want.

Which is all well and good, but in the middle of generating ideas for the plot I managed to question and possibly rearrange two major components of the parts I'd already decided on. Which, as I already mentioned, weren't exactly in abundance to begin with. Having since thought about it a bit more, I think I'm going to stay with my original idea for the characters (I was considering switching the genders of the two main characters) but an event I was assuming would occur long before the start of the book probably needs to happen during.

Anyway, all that and I'm still not sure what's actually going to happen in the book. I'm still hoping to have the assignment done by tomorrow sometime.

Creative Income

I've been reading a lot of books on writing lately (I rediscovered my local library) and doing some exercises. I think I've read too many in too short a time to really be able to review them, though. I got a book called A Passion for Narrative that I was hoping would give me a set of exercises that would help me develop Isaiah, but while the exercises were interesting and set up to fully develop a story, they required that one work with specific story elements rather than letting one develop one's own original work. When I mentioned that I was looking for a set of exercises that would help me develop a novel, DaWG S let me borrow her copy of The 2 Year Novel by Lazette Gifford. It looks good, so I'll be using that for awhile to see if it works for me.

I've been learning, though it's all still in the stage of bubbling around messily in my head rather than coalescing into anything I can express. Between BayCon and this I've really been focussed on absorption rather than production for the last month or so. I think I'm about ready to turn that around and start writing again.

Changing Rhythms

Well, I did okay on Story-A-Day for awhile - by the 12th I'd got six stories done and a couple more started - but then I burned out. That's still more short stories than I've written in the past decade, though. :) Despite feeling creatively exhausted by the end, I think it was worth it.

I had two realisations about my writing, though. The first was that I'm trying to balance three full-time things - work, writing and the farm - and I really only have time for two. This was depressing. Then I realised that wasn't exactly correct. The farm work is seasonal (and right now is the busiest time of year) and so my writing needs to be, too. In April and May, and then again in October and November, I need to focus on the homestead and let my writing kind of take a back seat. The rest of the year the property and stock only need basic maintenance and I can spend more time on my writing. I think I can be happy with that kind of seasonal flux.

I'm going to Baycon this weekend with M--------. I'm really looking forward to the mini-vacation, and to some of the fascinating panels they have, many of which are specifically about creating fantasy and science fiction.

Bootstrapping My Writing, or Trying To

I'm taking a break from my projects, for now, and doing two new things to help get myself writing again.

The first is taking a new idea and experimenting with planning a book the organised way - from detailed character sheets to charting out my plot completely to determining my themes to blocking my scenes with all pertinent information - all before I start writing. For now, I'm calling the project "Isaiah" after one main character. I tend to be a largely organic writer, so I want to try this kind of process and see what I can learn from it. I'm also planning on blogging the process as I do it, so that I have a record of it later.

The second is a challenge on Forward Motion, a writing community started by Holly Lisle and maintained by Lazette Gifford. It's called "Story-a-Day" and, as the name implies, involves writing one short story every day for the month of May. You have to use the prompt generators given in the challenge, and every story has to be complete and over 500 words. I don't know if I'll manage to do it, but I think I'll have fun trying. If you want, you can read my stories as I post them here. You have to log in to the Forward Motion site to see them; this is because of rights protection. If you don't want to join Forward Motion but still want to read the horrid stories as I produce them this month, let me know and I can email them.

I did write a story last night, in my evening writers' group, and I've posted it as my first story. It's not great - it's really a partial scene from a longer work surrounded by summary, and it's written awkwardly because I was under a time limit - but I think the idea has some merit. I may actually end up using it as a seed for a longer work one day.