Writing

Week One of NaNo is in the bag for me. I might get in a few more words today, but I kind of doubt it. I finished the week with 14,500 words. The real struggle is not going back and editing anything. Trust me, not all of this is good. But NaNo isn’t always about being great. It’s about letting go of your inner editor and just writing the story. Mine has already taken a turn or two and introduced me to a couple people I hadn’t known would have voices. Those bad guys are creeping me out.

I was extremely productive early in the week and I’m glad I made headway then. There’s a reason you write as long and as hard as you can when you can. It’s because there will be days when you may not have the time or opportunity to write as much as you want.

Friday was one of those days. I woke up early prepared to jump into a fresh chapter with both feet and I just knew I was going to get a lot done. Then Mr. Scott came home from having coffee with a friend and told me about an ad he’d heard on the radio. The Humane Society was offering a special on older dogs. We decided to go look.

The only senior dog wasn’t available for adoption due to an ear infection. But there was a two-year-old girl that stole our hearts. It was a moment of serendipity. I have a cat named Boo. I named her for Boo Radley from Too Kill a Mockingbird because she hid behind the door the first time we turned her loose in the house. We came across Scout this morning and when I double checked the sheet, I saw she was a female. And she had the sweetest smile.

What are the odds of finding a sweet girl named Scout to live with my Boo?

Now what are the odds that Boo and Scout were going to be instant buddies? Yeah… it was a couple days of introductions, over-excitement for the dog, and hurt feelings for the kitty. We’ve got a long way to go.

Meanwhile, I’m just trying to get the words on the paper and not self-edit. Let’s hope the pets and the characters in my book cooperate.

Question: What if you know nothing about the politics of South America but you want to use a nefarious government plot involving some South American country.

Answer: Too easy. Switch from Jack Daniels to a nice Malbec from Argentina and Google the snot out “current political issues South America.”

Seriously, one of my favorite parts in prepping for a new book is the research. I pick the subject and then start reading. In this case, I’m looking at risk assessments both political and financial. Once I pick a country or an idea, then I take the broad swipe for that locale. Sure I start with Wikipedia. I need it dumbed down just as far as you can—it’s a starting point for the lost and confused. Once I have an idea of where I want to go, then I branch out.

One of my favorite resources is the BBC news links. They often provide information is small chunks with links to the common questions. So if you’re looking at Columbia and you want to know who ELN and FARC are, you’ll usually see that in question form and can follow it to more information.

The major problem with doing this is that you can blow through a bunch of hours and get way off track. But you have to read a lot so you can condense it into a coherent paragraph. Readers want to have a clue, but they don’t want to read a damn Wikipedia entry with links. All they want to know is how and why this is relevant to your story. Unless your readers are into Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum, they don’t want to get bogged down in geo-politics. They want:

“Fred was being hunted by the Green Spider Organization. They were a group of murdering slugs from outer-Slobovia and Fred had pissed in their Wheaties when he killed their mascot during a raid.”

Only you, the author, cares when and how the Green Spiders came to be and the implications of them invading Modesto, California, to hunt down Fred.

Anyway, I was going somewhere with all this… something about liking research…

Oh, yeah… I got it. So, I spent the last six hours reading about politics and war in Columbia and may have come up with something plausible for the story. And if I didn’t, I’ll just pick another country… maybe Argentina. It’s all about the Malbec.

Is there anything scarier to an author than a blank page?
Define scary. Like being shot at scary, alone at midnight when you hear a noise in the house scary, or gas station sushi scary. Those are the editor type of scary.

Fear of the blank page isn’t really a problem for me. I think it falls under the annoyance level of things. Like fasting before bloodwork and finding a line at the lab when you get there. The page is just someplace to document the BS that rolls around in my head. It may hold a grocery list, a letter to a friend, or a great story idea. It also may be the repository for the garbage that I need to get out of my head.

Story ideas are a bit like those pre-printed grocery lists. I don’t need coffee every time I go to the store… wait… that’s a bad example. I don’t need flour or eggs every time I go to the store. But they’re on that pre-print list for the time you do need them. I have a list of story ideas that I’ve thought of over the years, but most of them are just that—ideas. Without characters and plots they aren’t really anything:
Girl meets boy
Fish out of water
Damsel in distress

Only mine are more like:
Embassy guards that are special ops – Girl meets boy
Musician/murder witness has to be stashed on a ranch – Fish out of water
Genealogist being stalked by crazy biker hitman – Damsel in Distress

They became:
The Embassy Guard
No Safe Haven – coming soon
A Shared Fear

For me, it all comes down to finding the right connection between people and plot. None of these were fully formed concepts when I started. They were ‘What if this happened?’ concepts.

The other day I thought about the female lead and tried to find two things that would work together: a job and a reason for that job to have put her in danger. I don’t want to write another cop—the last two standalones are cops and they’re a lot of work to get right. While almost anyone can be in danger from something they saw, I just finished a ‘witness in danger’ book, so the next person needs to have been caught up in something at work. Finding something different and interesting is where the issues occur.

Plus, it needs to be plausible… yeah… always an issue. I now have a character, a job, and a reason for her to be in danger. That’s a concept and I can now work out the plot and the timeline. I’m seven days away from NaNo and I’m hopeful that I’ll have the plot worked out by then.

Now comes the scary part—actually writing the damn thing. Onward!

Well, here we are again closing in on November and another National Novel (NaNo) Writing Month (WriMo). This is when normally rational authors go completely stupid and attempt to write a novel of 50,000 words or more in 30 days. Yeah… it’s a pretty damn dumb thing to do but everyone needs to show their professional idiocy every once in a while.

It’s been a few years since I approached NaNo with a new project in mind. For the last four years, I’ve gone into NaNo with a project already in progress or as a jump start to a book that would take several months to write. The last time I did this as a standalone start-to-finish project was to write Saving Emily in November 2011. I wrote the entire basic draft of that novel in the 30-day window. It took a couple months of rewrites and edits to be ready for publication, but the basic book was accomplished in November.

When I got up this morning, I had no intent to participate in NaNo. I have two books in beta and edit and Blood Link VIII in progress. Truth be told, I also had no standalone in mind. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Seriously, not a clue. I lamented that fact and in the course of a conversation, I decided a walk and a nap were in order. I took the walk and didn’t come up with anything, but when I stretched out for the nap, I closed my eyes and wished I was still on the gulf coast and taking a walk at the surf’s edge.

Just that quick, there it was. I knew where the book would be set and I saw the two people involved. I got up and ran for my laptop. Within an hour, I’d worked out the premise and I have the basic story.

Unnamed NaNo Novel – 2016

Lisa Piper works from home. She ghost writes autobiographies for military people and edits novels. She prefers suspense, but seems to be stuck with a lot of romance lately. That’s okay, it all pays the bills even if it leaves her feeling like a bit of a failure in her personal life. She’s divorced, and though she hates her ex, an abusive drunken former deputy sheriff, she’s not a man-hater in general. She’s stopped looking though and wants nothing more than to be left alone. Her ex-husband Clint is out of prison and not a happy camper. She’s not hiding but she’s worried. He’s crazy violent and hates her for putting him in prison She’s a former weapons instructor for the county and struggles with sleeping through the night. She’s not able to move on. She also doesn’t know how the hell she’s become almost 50 years old. She has one son in the military – typical boy child who calls every couple of weeks if he thinks of it. She’s a solid, hard shell over a pretty soft interior.

Henry Allen (Skip) Green is a walking disaster. He’s a retired Army Master Sergeant who spent his life in Special Forces. He’s had way too many tours, plus a butt load of covert work in South America. He’s lean, mean, covered with scars, and at a loss about what to do now. He’s been clean of opiates for almost a year, but he’s struggling with pain from some damage from his last trip into S.A. He’s pretty sure his active days in the field are over now and he’s going to be relegated to planning and logistics. That’s great money, but not exactly how he saw his life. Skip is staying at his friends place for a couple weeks while he rehabs. He’s mulling an offer from one of the “learn tactics” schools that his old friend runs. He’s divorced with a boy and a girl in their 20s. They check-in but everyone is doing their own thing, and he doesn’t want to intrude. They get along, but he was an absentee Dad and his ex made sure the kids knew it.

Trouble:
The author of the book she’s editing told secrets and he’s been murdered. Someone wants that manuscript back. They are willing to kill to get it. She has it both in hard copy and on disc. Clint is also back and she’s pretty sure he’s stalking her, but she can’t prove it and doesn’t want to be the woman who cries wolf. It’s going to get bad and bloody, but Skip knows how to manage that kind of problem.

Lisa Ann Jackson Piper, 48 (12 Jun 1968), blondish, pony-tail, blue/grey eyes, 5-6, 135 pounds, athletic, energetic, coffee, wine, independent, resilient.

Henry Allen “Skip” Green, 51 (14 Jan 1965), dark hair going gray, brown eyes, 5’-11”, 200 pounds, rangy, kind of moody, coffee, laying off the hard stuff, battle scarred, weary, lonely.

Now to get the plot and chapter chart ready so I can figure out what happens when. C’mon, November. I’m ready.