Composition
I'm revising The Witch's Alphabet and it's slow going. I always swear that I will do my best to write clean, keep continuity and tidy up worldbuilding as I go.
It never works out.
I basically have three (and a bonus) stages when I write a book in a new setting:
I. ZOMG THIS IS THE BEST IDEA EVER. When I say things like "Why CAN'T the Soviet Union have established a colony on the moon 14 years before the Apollo 11 mission?" and throw in the kitchen sink.
II. This sucks. I hate it. Where I go through and correct all of my stupid excited errors, like my heroine's hair changing color or flagrant violation of my own world's rules (Like Soviets flying around their moon colony on jetpacks...)
III. Detail work. The book is readable but it still has a lot of fixing to go through. This is where I am now, and I still hate it. I'm not a natural editor and I always seize up and panic that everything is going to be Worse and I am a failure, a hack and undeserving of a cookie.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Polish. Everything works, flows and follows the dictates of logic, but it's still a little ugly. It needs a final going-over before it's ready to meet its prom date, ie my editor and various booksellers.
Writing YA is really hard. Anyone who says it's "easier" than adult fiction deserves a kick in the shins. Not only do your voice and word choices have to be pitch-perfect, but you must inhabit the brain of someone who is (if you're an adult) basically an alien being. You have to reach back into some choice teen angst and make it your own all over again. Teenagers are different from adults. When I was a teen writer, I had the opposite struggle--my adult characters were cartoony and over the top. Now, I'm trying to remember what it was like to be genuinely worried Gwen Stefani was going to take Gavin Rossdale off the market and that I'd never be taken seriously, or figure out what I wanted out of my life. I like the challenge, though. Writing adult SFF is a completely different feeling. It's like switching jobs--you want to do well and you have a skillset, but the application and methods have changed completely.
So, I'm back to that. In the meantime, when I can't take reading through notes and tracking changes in my MS any more, I still take pictures:
I'm not going to use this one in my Iron Codex blog, but I like the ghosting effect (which is an accident, not a filter.) I'm excited to get that up and running in September and I'm already collecting content and ideas. It'll be basically an online publication--there won't be a "fourth wall" where I talk about the book and my writing, but instead you'll be getting a series of micro-fictions and images related to the Codex. You'll get a glimpse into Aoife's world and I'll get to have fun writing about it. Win/win.
Originally published at Caitlin Kittredge.
It never works out.
I basically have three (and a bonus) stages when I write a book in a new setting:
I. ZOMG THIS IS THE BEST IDEA EVER. When I say things like "Why CAN'T the Soviet Union have established a colony on the moon 14 years before the Apollo 11 mission?" and throw in the kitchen sink.
II. This sucks. I hate it. Where I go through and correct all of my stupid excited errors, like my heroine's hair changing color or flagrant violation of my own world's rules (Like Soviets flying around their moon colony on jetpacks...)
III. Detail work. The book is readable but it still has a lot of fixing to go through. This is where I am now, and I still hate it. I'm not a natural editor and I always seize up and panic that everything is going to be Worse and I am a failure, a hack and undeserving of a cookie.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Polish. Everything works, flows and follows the dictates of logic, but it's still a little ugly. It needs a final going-over before it's ready to meet its prom date, ie my editor and various booksellers.
Writing YA is really hard. Anyone who says it's "easier" than adult fiction deserves a kick in the shins. Not only do your voice and word choices have to be pitch-perfect, but you must inhabit the brain of someone who is (if you're an adult) basically an alien being. You have to reach back into some choice teen angst and make it your own all over again. Teenagers are different from adults. When I was a teen writer, I had the opposite struggle--my adult characters were cartoony and over the top. Now, I'm trying to remember what it was like to be genuinely worried Gwen Stefani was going to take Gavin Rossdale off the market and that I'd never be taken seriously, or figure out what I wanted out of my life. I like the challenge, though. Writing adult SFF is a completely different feeling. It's like switching jobs--you want to do well and you have a skillset, but the application and methods have changed completely.
So, I'm back to that. In the meantime, when I can't take reading through notes and tracking changes in my MS any more, I still take pictures:
I'm not going to use this one in my Iron Codex blog, but I like the ghosting effect (which is an accident, not a filter.) I'm excited to get that up and running in September and I'm already collecting content and ideas. It'll be basically an online publication--there won't be a "fourth wall" where I talk about the book and my writing, but instead you'll be getting a series of micro-fictions and images related to the Codex. You'll get a glimpse into Aoife's world and I'll get to have fun writing about it. Win/win.
Originally published at Caitlin Kittredge.