Yak Shaving

Catchy title, eh? I've been doing a lot of thinking about yak shaving. Thinking about yak shaving is, in itself, yak shaving. What am I talking about? Funny you should ask.

You need to do something, in this example, write. But before you can write, you realize that you need to clean off your desk. So you make piles of paper. Now you need a place to put the piles.

You can put the piles on the chair!!!

But, the chair is broken. So you fix the chair in order to have a place to put the piles of paper that were on your desk, which needed to be cleaned off before you could write.

In fixing the chair, you realize that the fabric on the seat is torn!!

So you go shopping for new fabric to re-cover the chair which you have just fixed in order to have a place on which to put the piles of paper that were on the desk which you had to clear off in order to write.

When you take off the old fabric you realize that the stuffing is really shot, and the best chair stuffing is made from yak fur.

So you find yourself in the zoo, shaving a yak, in order to have stuffing with which to reupholster the chair that you needed to re-cover in order to have a place to put the piles of paper that you cleaned of your desk in order to write.

Yak shaving is the term used by my critique group to describe the behavior that includes (but is by no means limited to) circling the desk but not being able to land on the keyboard.

Thank you for reading. I don't know what you were supposed to be doing, but you have just shaved a yak....as did I.

More later.

Getting Back To Work

Vacation is over, and I regret to say that it's time to get cracking. The key word in the above sentence is "regret". Sigh. After taking two weeks off, I'm finding it difficult to get back into "work mode". Which may be why I'm blogging.

However, I did spend some time, on vacation, ogling the real "Jason," the man behind which my fictitious character lurks. Of course any resemblence between the character and anyone living or dead is strictly a product of the writer's over-active fantasy life. That said, I'm happy to report that Jason is still as hunky as ever, still wearing leathers where necessary, and shirtless when not. Jason sightings happened daily and I'm refueled with enough fantasy material to take me to the end of the story.

Speaking of the end of the story....the story has departed from the outline once again. Why these characters won't stay where I put them is beyond me. I wonder if that happens to other writers; they create characters that then take on a life of their own and do things that are unexpected? Is it just that I'm that good at creating characters or is it that I have an undiagnosed psychosis? Not funny.

Just checking in, dear readers, to let you know that I'm back in town and back at the keyboard. Ta for now.

Know Your Audience

A conversation on another blog got me to thinking (always a dicey area) about how important the choice of audience can be in the manuscript phase.

A number of years ago...more than I want to think about...I had asked a friend, who was himself a writer, to read a 1st-ish draft manuscript I'd written. Now, I was young and dewy-eyed and this was the very first novel length piece I'd ever actually finished. This friend, who was a mentor in a number of ways, agreed to read y book. Although this person said many things, I remember two things clearly: "Do you realize that all of your characters are sex addicts?" and "I guess it's alright, if you like that sort of thing."

Argh....

I was crushed.

I write in the midzone between Women's Contemporary Fiction with Romantic Elements, and Contemporary Romance with Erotic Elements. Depends on who you ask. I tend to go for the HEA (Happily Ever After) or Emotionally Satisfying Ending which, it was pointed out to me, defines Romance. Okay, I have no problem with either label.

But...what I found out after this person had read my book was that he despised Romance. There was no way he was going to like it, even if he assured me that he could remove his own preferences from his ability to critique. Hah!!! Not bloody likely.

After that awful critique, in which I took copious notes on what was wrong with the book, I fond myself completely unable to get past page 45 in any new venture. I went out and did some vocational training in a completely non-writing field, in which I've been successful...but I stopped writing. Rather I stopped writing as much as I could stop. Which means that from time to time I would come up with a story idea and explore it for anywhere from 10 to 45 pages, but I wouldn't actually let myself dig in to it. I was scared that I would produce more "I guess it's alright, if you like that sort of thing" critiques.

About a year ago, I asked a different friend (you must read her book...really) to give it a quick read and let me know if it was readable/salvageable. Her comments were that it read like a first draft (which it was), had a really good story idea, and it was completely up to me if I wanted to go back and rework it, or if I'd told that story and was done with it, to move on to something else.

I've been writing ever since.

What does she mean, putting words on the page in order?

I'm at the dangerous point of a manuscript. The dreaded middle. Wherein all the characters have been introduced, all the conflicts have been set up, and I know how it all ends. Part of me wants to clap my hands and say, "...and now we're done!!" and move on. But there's no book there yet. The story still only exists in my head. This could be enough if I were only creating stories for my own amusement, but I'm not. I'm creating stories for everyone else's amusement (or entertainment).

What we have now are characters and a plot and ending. So, how do we get from here to there.

As one of my mentors once said (he probably said it more than once, but you get the picture), "you write it."

To which I asked, "And just how do I go about doing that?"

"You put words on the page in order."

And that's what I do when I'm stuck. I remember that all I have to do, even when feeling terribly uninspired, is "put words on the page in order." They don't have to be well crafted sentences or witty dialog....first time through, they just have to be words on the page in order.

And so, there you have it. They answer to the mystery of how do I get from here to there....say it with me:

Put words on the page, in order