Perspective

Posted on September 30, 2014 by CrissyMoss

Perspective is a tricky thing. In drawing you pick a point in the distance, and you draw everything angled toward that point. But in life?

I’ve been working on “Mermaid’s Curse” since last November. I had written a really basic 1000 word plot before then, but I really started working on it during NaNoWriMo. Now that NaNo is just a month away I am acutely aware of the fact that it’s been almost a year and my novel isn’t finished yet.

But let’s get some perspective. This is the third novel I’ve written. The first two took me five years each to complete, and the first was TERRIBLE. The second is still sitting on my hard drive awaiting a day when I might finally be able to fix it, because it’s a good story, I just wasn’t a good writer when I wrote it.

“Mermaid’s Curse” is now 93,000 words long. It’s the longest single work of fiction I’ve ever written. And I think it’s good. Okay, it needs editing, and maybe a little trimming here and there, but I wouldn’t be embarrassed to let people read it. More importantly: I’m almost done with it.

I’m seven chapters away from pushing the novel away and saying “YAY! It’s done! I can give it to the editor and not look at it again for a while!”

Self imposed deadlines tell me I’m slow, lethargic even, as I watch other writers churn out thousands of words a day while I barely manage 500. That critical voice tells me I should have had this done MONTHS ago as I still struggle over how to write the final battle scene.

But one year is so much better than five! I should be excited and happy, even a little proud of myself that I am writing as quickly and well as I am at the moment. Not only did I write thirty-seven chapters of high fantasy adventure, I did a full edit on thirty of those chapters, and polished them as well as I was able. Seven more chapters, and a final polish, and it will be FINISHED. In a year.

When I take a step back and get some real perspective it makes me excited for the next project. Each one goes a little faster, so maybe the next novel will be done in six months. The next one after that in three. One step at a time.

If something isn’t quite going the way you want it to just take a step back and look at it from a different angle. Maybe from a new perspective there is still something good about the situation. Lost your sock? SHOPPING! Lost a job? Great time for a new one. Computer blew up? You needed an upgrade anyway. Computer crashed and you lost your almost complete novel? (Okay that one sucks, go back up your novel right now!)

A minor catastrophe!

Posted on September 22, 2014 by CrissyMoss

I’ve been keeping records of my daily word count for the last couple of years. I use them to watch how I’ve grown, push myself to write more each day, and try to see what slows me down. I keep track of how much I write on which projects, which also chronocolizes when I started each project, and when I finished them. It’s very useful data, and I’ve shown my charts here on my blog a few times.

Then last night I went to add my numbers for the day and looked down. For some reason it was saying march, not September. What? That’s not right.

I checked a few other pages. Blank. Blank. Blank. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!?!?

Wait, I just copied this file to DropBox, it’s okay, right? Open that one, and it’s the same. Blank months. No data.

Sinking heart as I realize what happened. I didn’t copy the file TO DropBox. I copied the file FROM DropBox. The old file, the one I hadn’t updated since March. The one that didn’t have anything filled out. Copied it right over the newer version with all the updates. And now it’s just gone.

Six months of data. Gone.

It wasn’t an entire lose. I did have one small backup. A spreadsheet for the Million Words club with daily totals. But the daily totals are just numbers. They don’t tell me what I wrote that day, how much I wrote on each project, what I started that day, and what I finished. So, at best it’s an incomplete vision.

The new spreadsheet. On the left is what it should look like. This is an old month, one with all the little data points I track. On the right is what I was able to salvage.

Now, I can go back through my blog and pull out those numbers so that I can at least get a view of what I actually wrote for publishing sake, and what I wrote to share in my blog. But other then that… I’m stuck.

Just goes to show that yes, you should backup your files. You should have them in several locations all of the time. And you should also make darn sure that when you copy something from one place to another you aren’t saving the old version over the new one.

What if I’d done this to my novel? 91,000 words GONE. It makes me cringe just thinking about it, more so because my first novel actually did die in a tragic computer crash, and that novel was over 100k.

Back up your stuff people. Make sure it’s safe!

Failure IS an Option

Posted on September 13, 2014 by CrissyMoss

I’m a huge fan of the Mythbusters. Science. Explosions. Mechanical stuff. Interesting ways of looking at a problem. How could I not be a fan?

One of the things they often say is: Failure is an option! And failure is an option for me, too.

We live in a world that is constantly striving for success. To get a job you have to be a go getter, extrovert, hard worker that is constantly kissing your bosses ass. Right? That’s how you get ahead. You don’t show your faults, or insecurities. You don’t cry when the boss doesn’t like your ideas. You don’t sweat it, just hold your chin high and keep going.

Then you have the Mythbusters who are constantly messing up. Adam burns his eyebrow off. Tory crashes a bicycle. Kari throws up. But they keep chugging along trying to test the myths and see what makes the world tick. They fail CONSTANTLY, but they learn in their failures and try again.

With me and my writing… failure is an option. Some days I completely fail and don’t get any writing done. Other days I feel guilty for slacking and I’ll go write a thousand words off the cuff. From each failure I learn something about myself, and how I work. I learn how long I can sit at the computer, and how much I can write before my brain starts ticking away at other things. I know what I can listen to, and what I can’t before I can’t concentrate on anything except the words in my headphones.

Failure is an option, because failure is a learning opportunity. Failure is a starting point. It can spawn new ideas and lead you down new paths.

But failure is frustrating too. I keep missing deadlines I give myself, and I keep pressing forward. Eventually I’m going to finish writing this book and have something to show for nearly a year of work, but till then I keep failing, and trying to find the bright spots in it. Like discovering how the curse was broken, or understanding the motive behind a character, or working out the language on a tricky section of text.

Now… back to writing. (It’s at 89.4k words atm.)

Meet my Character – Okira

Posted on September 1, 2014 by CrissyMoss

I had so much fun participating in the “Meet my Character Bloghop”. Maya Goode invited me, and I just couldn’t resist. It was a great opporunity to really define who Okira is.

1) What is the name of your character?
Okira is the offspring of a merman, and a witch. A magical, and very rare crossbreed.

2) When and where is the story set?
The story is set in the islands of The Sea of Tears on the world of Peyllen. It is a rich fantasy world where the inhabitants were birthed from the various elements, and their magic and make up reflect those elements. The Sea of Tears has been cut off from the rest of the world by a cult who control a kraken, and the kraken sees to it that no ship may enter or exit the Sea of Tears without the acolytes permission.

3) What should we know about him/her?
Okira is doubly cursed. Because of her heritage she can not enter the sea without the kraken feeling her magical essence and killing her. She was also cursed soon after her birth to die the moment she finds love.

4) What is the main conflict? What messes up his/her life?
The acolytes have hunted witches to the brink of extinction, and once they learn of Okira they seek her out to use her latent magical essence in a ritual that will change the entire Sea of Tears.

5) What is the personal goal of the character?
Okira wants to return to the sea, her mermaid blood calls out for her to do so, but she can only do so if the kraken is dead.

6) Is there a working title for this novel, and can we read more about it?
Mermaid’s Curse. You can find blurbs from the book here, here, here and here.

7) When can we expect the book to be published?
I am working on the final chapters, and once finished will send it out to be edited and get a good cover. Once that is done it will be published. It should be by the end of October.

My Bio
I live in the cloudy state of Washington near Seattle with my three children, and a cat. Manager of a little store by day, writer by night, I’ve published 20+ short stories and three novellas. Mermaid’s Curse will be the first full length novel. I do all of my own cover art, but have learned that you (almost) always need a good editor. I started publishing in earnest in April of 2013.

To find me, my work, and a newsletter where you can sign up for a free book go to crissymoss.com
I can also be found here: http://about.me/crissymoss

I was Tagged by:

Maya Goode is a short story author, novelist, and poet. Raised by an amazing mercurial woman who shared neither blood nor race, she lives on the edge of identities and writes deeply honest stories about the human journey. She is an alumna of Dominican University of California and resides somewhere between mountains and the ocean. Her first novel, Remigium Rising, will be published in Spring 2015. You can visit her at www.mayagoode.com

Twitter http://www.twitter.com/quotidianlight

Google Plus https://plus.google.com/+quotidianlight
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/quotidianlight

~Meet Next Week’s Author – Scott Richards~

Scott is a California-based author where he is forced to live with all of the characters in his head. Despite what you may hear shrieked into the night air, he is a sad, crazy little man.

He is maintained by those familiar few for the rare nugget he spouts on occasion. These mad ramblings are recorded, then dictated back to old shoe-cobbling elves that have retired, but still like to “keep themselves busy” as stipulated per their Retired Original Union Group Home (R.O.U.G.H.) contract agreements.

Show your support for this noble cause.

Think of the children.

-Scott Richards
Author of the Darlicci’s Shroud series
Website: http://www.theshroudbetween.com
Newsletter: http://bit.ly/WSdktb

Can being an author get you arrested?

Posted on August 29, 2014 by CrissyMoss

Last night I was reading reddit and a new article came through. This time it stopped me in my tracks. A story about a fellow author who wrote a book and was then placed on leave for being “suspicious.” Others have mentioned he may have been arrested. They are definitely looking at charging him with something.

The facts, according to the article: He was a teacher at a middle school. He wrote two books under pen names. He published them on Amazon. The books were about “the largest school shooting in history.” Both works of fiction.

After reading it I posted the article to G+ and we had an interesting conversation that made me want to write a more in-depth blog post… so fair warning. It’s going to get deep around here.

Ever since 9/11, just 13 years ago, there have been many articles hitting the news about the over zealous “no tolerance” policies in our schools. Now, I will say that not all of it is due to 9/11. There was also Columbine, the Aurora theater shooting, and the recent school shootings in a few other states. We have had a lot more mass shootings, it seems, in the last decade then ever before.

Because of the no tolerance act we have now had:
A boy suspended for accidentally making his pop tart look like a gun.
A boy suspended for twirling a pencil.
7 year old yelled at for paper ‘gun’, then harassed and called a murderer by students.
A boy was suspended for having a PAPERCLIP in his pocket.

And there are TONS of examples where that came from.

What’s more interesting: The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) outlines “no tolerance polices” and has gone on record as saying: “Zero tolerance policies are complex, costly and generally ineffective.” They also say they cause racial discrimination, negative impact on education, high rate of repeat suspensions, and increase the drop out rate.

So… why not start suspending, or even arresting people who write books about school shootings. Never mind that you would need to arrest a lot of people who wrote similar books. Goodreads has a list of 39 books, all with school shootings in them.

It’s actually gotten a little scary here. With NSA watching everything we do, and news reporters suggesting police use water cannons on protesters, and everything else going on over in Ferguson at the moment, it’s feels like it is dangerous to be a citizen.

I spoke to a friend who lives in Europe and his view point of America at the moment is that it is one of the most dangerous places to live. That… that makes me sad, honestly. This use to be “the home of the free.” Is it now? I’m no longer sure.

I write what I write because it is what effects me. If I write about a school shooting it’s probably because I’m afraid one might happen to my children, not that I want to perpetrate one. If I write about a child that was abused it is because I was abused and I want others to know the signs of abuse so they can avoid it, not because I want to do it. If I write about murder, or nuclear bombs, or ghosts popping out of the grave to rip a persons head off.. it’s entertainment, it’s examination of things that effect society. The man who wrote Lolita wasn’t a child molester. VC Andrews didn’t have sex with her siblings. It’s writing.

1984, the thought police. Are we there yet? I hope not. But I don’t know anymore. I’m not proud of my country like I use to be either.

Around the web

Posted on August 20, 2014 by CrissyMoss

Some interesting articles you might enjoy.

John Green did an intro for Hannah Hart’s new Drunk Kitchen Cookbook. You can read it here.

George RR Martin talked about HBO catching up with him on the book series.

Why libraries are still better then Amazon. According to WSJ at least. (I tend to agree, though for other reasons then they give.)

Incredible photography of weaponry throughout the centuries.

25 authors that published great books before 25

Apps are where it’s at!

Posted on August 19, 2014 by CrissyMoss

Not long ago Humble Bundle updated their Android app.

Now, if you aren’t familiar with Humble Bundle it is an online marketplace that bundles games together and let’s you pay what you want for the games. A portion of the proceeds goes to charity. They also expanded to ebooks, digital comics, and often add sound tracks in with their games.

The app use to allow you to download the Android games you bought through their bundles, now it allows you to download the ebooks, comics and music as well.

This is amazing news! It is a pain in the neck trying to side load ebooks on my phone or tablet. Now I just open up the Humble Bundle app and download the comics and books I want to read, or the music I want to listen to, and it’s all right there. All accessible and regale right in the app.

This is the future. Eventually someone is going to put an app together that will go around all the side load bs and just let me read the content I bought. It isn’t here yet, but I can see enough people asking for it that it is coming. Eventually. Maybe some authors child will be really into programming and will set it up for them.

Not only that, but if there are apps out there that provide this service then amazon will be forced to add an auto install for ebooks as well, something they haven’t done yet probably because they want it to be hard on you so you buy direct from them.

Truth is I don’t mind buying stuff from amazon I do it a lot. But I don’t buy EVERYTHING from amazon so I don’t want to be stuck side loading things all over the place. Plus I’d really like to see all my media in one spot so I can just search for books, games, or music I own and download from one app instead of all of them.

It’s interesting times we live in. Things are changing rapidly and in ten years this will probably seen like a minor irritation along the way to progress.

Abandoned books.

Posted on August 7, 2014 by CrissyMoss

The other day reddit had a thread suggesting that Goodreads should have an “abandoned” category for book lists.

This got me thinking. I’ve actually abandoned a lot of books the last couple years. More than ever before. Not always because they were bad books. Sometimes it was time management issues, or just not quite captivating enough. Every now and then I’d get involved in other things and just forget I was reading that particular book.

The are so many wonderful books out there and not enough time to read them. If there was a heaven it might be eternity in a library with every book ever written. (As long as it comes with a Starbucks.) But this isn’t heaven, it’s just Washington. We don’t have eternity, just 80 years or so. So picking and choosing which books to read is sometimes a bit important. I’m going to spend hours or days with this book, I want to enjoy the experience.

I don’t know if an abandoned book tag is a good idea, especially since people won’t be telling you why they abandoned it, but it would be interesting. You might learn some interesting things about a book, or people’s taste, or what keeps them turning the page.

There is a man who documents his abandoned books. In the The Immerse or Die report Jefferson Smith reads until the book has three ‘fatal flaws,’ and then he tells you what they are. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the book was unreadable or that he didn’t finish it, just that it had some major issues that pulled him out of the story enough for it to be a ‘fatal flaw.’

I know some of the things that pull me out of a story are too much foreshadowing, LOTS of grammar/spelling mistakes, inconsistency, and a style or plot so convoluted that I can’t follow it. There are more reasons, but those are the ones that come to mind right off the top of my head.

Why might you abandon a book? Would you want to share that with others? Would you want to know why others abandoned your book?

That last question… I think I’m a little too chicken to put my sorry up for speculation on Immerse or Die. At least for now.

Burn out

Posted on July 31, 2014 by CrissyMoss

Every November I participate in NaNoWriMo. It’s a tough month filled with a lot of writing and sitting in chairs all for the chance just to say I did it, I won.

It’s no wonder that right after NaNoWriMo a lot of people take a long break. We get burnt out. That’s 50k words worth of story completed and our minds are jelly.

But that’s not the only burn out an artist can suffer from.

I’ve been working on Mermaids Curse since October. Yes, that’s nine months with one project. I’ve completed a little over 81k words on it, rewritten over half of it already, and also thrown away about half as much as I’ve kept. That’s well over 100,000 words in the same project. It makes you sick of looking at it after a while.

Burn out can happen when you’ve spent too much time on the same project. When your pushing yourself too hard or when you aren’t taking care of the rest of yourself correctly.

For me, when I am really feeling it I will take a day or two to read something. I don’t get nearly enough time to read anymore. I often will switch projects for a day or two so that I’m still writing but not over working on the same project.

I know right now I feel like there is no end in sight for my dang novel and that makes writing and editing take that much longer. It’s that feeling of defeat that always gets in the way. Oddly enough, when I published ‘Footprints’ a couple months ago that gave me a burst of speed that carried me through the edits of half the book. But I haven’t published anything since then and I know that is part of the reason I’m having issues. Unfortunately I don’t have anything to publish so that isn’t an easy fix, but I’m not giving up.

The ultimate cure for burn out is just finishing the project and moving on to the next one. I know I’ll be so excited when I’m finally finished with Mermaids Curse.

So… This was my break and now I’m off to write some more.

Author Crissy Moss

The art of telling a good story.

Category Archives: On Writing