Spitting Embers

lol oops

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:48:42 -0700

So I’ve let about…oh, five people read the first chapter of Crown of Fire at work. They all really dug it, though some folks had a little trouble with Kailas’s narration because she is sort of high-brow in her language.

The guy sitting next to me sees how much I write every day. He said to me yesterday, “Hey, I want to read the thing that you let everyone else read. Bring me a copy.”

I needed to print out a new copy for him because there have been clean-up edits done since I last let people read it. I opened up Scrivener and got it all ready to print. And then I made a mistake: I reread that chapter. Then I reread the next one, and the next one, and what I’ve done for chapter four.

It’s really, really, incredibly awful of me, but it’s Friday for me and I’ll have the weekend to get back on the horse for Disorder. I’m going to write Crown of Fire today.

LIW, morning of May 21st 2013

Tue, 21 May 2013 07:49:04 -0700

Major concerns for the day:

I haven’t yet really done any specific thinking about the book today. I think I’m more concerned with just sitting down and writing it.

So I’m going to do just that.

What would happen to Cam and Vita after Disorder, if they got a fairly happy ending?

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:30:00 -0700

…

HMM.

I CAN’T ANSWER THIS I’M SORRY

Who are some of your favourite supporting characters in disorder (apart from the leading Ladies themselves)?

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:29:00 -0700

I really, really like Cam’s big sister, Ash! She loves her sister incredibly hard and is her number one supporter in all things. She ties on that with Vita, but ekes out victory because she’s known Cam all her life and has intense big sister feels. She is a successful businesswoman at age twenty-seven and has nothing but good prospects ahead of her.

Vita’s aunt and uncle, Annamarie and Sebastian Matthews, are also really great! Sebastian is Cam’s doctor, and he helps her a lot. He’s very compassionate, as is his wife. They’re there for Vita a lot, and they come to be there for Cam as well in some small capacity or another.

There is also the Pembroke Welsh Corgi, whose name is Max. Max is a sweet, dumb dog. I like Max, too.

(look the only people I don’t like are Cam’s mom and dad everyone else gets high marks from me)

Why are Cam and Vita a good match? How do they help/complement each other?

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:24:00 -0700

Cam and Vita match each other (or closely do when Cam is not manic) for passion and drive, which is a pretty damn hard thing for either one of them. Because they understand the level of need to complete these dreams, they understand each other better as people. They figure out ways to support each other (Vita enforces bedtimes and med-taking; Cam helps Vita study for her test) while letting each other breathe (Vita avoids bothering Cam when she works on her comic; Cam tries to never interrupt while Vita is reading).

Cam is a charming piece of chaos in Vita’s otherwise very steady life, and Vita is a vital piece of steadiness in Cam’s fairly unsteady life. Vita needs something to be different in her life and give her concerns outside only becoming a doctor. Cam needs someone to keep her honest to her routines to lead a healthy life.

It’s probably a little unbalanced of who needs who, but they fit together pretty well.

What are your fave traits about Vita?

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:13:00 -0700

What is there to not like about Vita? She is incredibly mature and level-headed for going-on-twenty-three. She just gets shit done; she’s working toward a medical degree to be a proper psychiatrist, and she is wicked smart. Her patience is at a high enough level to deal with the shenanigans Cam gets up to, but she still has a really sharp temper when that patience ends.

Vita has a deep and abiding love for fiction, and has something of a hetero-crush on her personal hero, the Count of Monte Cristo. She will stay up until midnight or later until she gets the chemistry concept down, and then she’ll make herself smile the rest of the day because she put herself through it for her lifelong dream and she can’t get cranky for that. She loves things openly and freely and doesn’t hesitate in saying so.

I really love Vita, too. Cam is probably closer to me as a person, but Vita is just about on the same level of love for me.

(I might as well ask some questions about Disorder!) What are your fave traits about Cam?

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:06:00 -0700

Cam is an earnest, sweet, massive comic book/novel/movie/any form of storytelling nerd. I dearly love that, even when not manic, she can talk for hours and hours about her passions and never once bore you or even really repeat herself. I love that she throws herself borderline violently into her projects, for better or for worse. She is confused by unabashed and honest love from people other than her sister, and has to figure out how to reconcile that against her own impulsiveness toward affection.

She is sometimes very silly, other times immature, and yet more times a young woman who comes into her own. I think Cam has gone through the most of all the characters in my head, and I sincerely adore most all of her traits.

LIW, evening of May 20th 2013

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:57:01 -0700

Accomplishments for the day:

I wrote a total of nine odd pages. We were annoyingly busy at work, so it was less than I’d hoped.

We’re getting a few more positive touches for Cam, sort of an emotional rebound from the crushing level of sad inflicted by her parents. Now that we’re on the last push between Cam’s sadness and the confrontation she has with her parents, I’m wondering if I should shorten the chapter slightly. I worry this is sort of me being impatient, but then when I think about it, it makes more sense. Why would they wait for a long time between Cam’s parents saying something horrible, then saying another even more horrible thing, and Cam confronting them in turn? It seems weird to me when I think about it.

I’ll just write the sort of shorter version and see how it works.

Now to answer all those asks.

LIW, mid-morning post of May 20th 2013

Mon, 20 May 2013 09:52:15 -0700

Ow. I made myself cry.

=> Reread what I’ve written and start writing => Leave tumblr open as always => Look...

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:23:47 -0700

=> Reread what I’ve written and start writing

=> Leave tumblr open as always

=> Look up

=> Suddenly five asks in my inbox, all about Disorder

=> I will answer them once I get home tonight

LIW, morning of May 20th 2013

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:01:52 -0700

Major concerns for the day:

I need to not wuss out on this story. It is so tempting to just set it aside again because it is going to officially stop being fun shortly. Even in writing these LIW posts I am putting it off. Urgh.

(Also, thank you, brain, for the vivid nightmare. I didn’t even read anything trigger-y before bed last night. You are not helping my willingness to write the difficult things.)

I’m going to meet myself halfway and do some rereading before putting my nose to the grindstone. I maintain: urgh.

LIW, evening for May 19th 2013

Sun, 19 May 2013 20:19:53 -0700

Accomplishments for the day:

I wrote quite a few pages today, just about ten or so. I would’ve written more, but my supervisor needed more help.

…I am already almost halfway through this notebook. I started it in the first week of May. Huh.

We’re now about five to ten real time minutes from shit officially hitting the fan: Cam’s going to call her sister, and then call her mother. I will be writing this tomorrow, as I am still desperately trying to get my sleep in order and I will be going to be soon.

Sorry, Cam. Rest assured that I have fully solidified your ending.

What's it about?

Sun, 19 May 2013 20:02:00 -0700

It’s the story of Cam Wilson, a twenty-going-on-twenty-one year old student attending the University of Puget Sound, how she meets and falls in love with her girlfriend, Vita Matthews, and how the two of them both discover Cam’s mental illness and deal with it. It is also the story of how Cam’s family does and does not deal with Cam’s diagnosis. It is very much a story of my own experiences dealing with mental illness and the way my family has or has not dealt with it. Not as bad as what Cam goes through, but seeds of it.

It’s meant to help me come to terms with my own diagnosis, since it’s still a hard diagnosis to deal with, and one that went from one hard thing to another as more symptoms presented (Cam is in the middle of this diagnosis shift at time of current writing).

It’s really hard, but I like it a lot. Cam and Vita are very dear to me, as is their story.

Ask me about Disorder

Sun, 19 May 2013 08:06:32 -0700

Ask me about Disorder:

Like I said, I like coming home to asks, and I’m curious as to whatever you folks may wonder about this book.

LIW, morning of May 19th 2013

Sun, 19 May 2013 07:51:00 -0700

Major concerns for the day:

I gotta buckle down and write today, come hell or high water. All I got in the shower this morning was the ending and how to change it to make it potentially more positive for Cam. Reached through a lot of hardship, but positive. I just have to get through these next 2.33 chapters (because chapter seven is really almost done).

So I’m going to futz with a playlist to listen to at work (3 hours isn’t long enough to not loop and make me bored) and get some work done before I head out.

Also, I will shortly be making a post soliciting asks about Disorder. Because I am wanting to answer questions about it.

LIW, evening of May 18th 2013

Sat, 18 May 2013 20:25:00 -0700

Accomplishments for the day:

I wrote a bit. We were busy with stupid people at work and I was catching up with Mag, so not a ton was done before lunch. Then my body decided to crash really hard and I spent the last hour and a half or so just staring at the computer screen.

On the plus side, I thought of a way to make a couple of prior scenes more cheerful and positive while doing the dishes just now. I am looking back on happier scenes a lot because I am about an hour or two of real time in the novel between where I am and what’s going to happen with Cam and her mother. It is not fun. The rest of the novel isn’t really going to be.

LIW, morning of May 18th 2013

Sat, 18 May 2013 08:32:34 -0700

Major concerns for the day:

It’s going to be hard to write today because we’ve finally hit a breaking point: Cam is about to get her second diagnosis that will help her understand herself because it’s more accurate, but be even more of a bullet in the foot to her relationship with her family, much as it was with me and mine.

Still have to explain why Vita was crying after her birth mother called, too. I’m bouncing between two possibilities and leaning toward a more positive one, which may or may not require some dialogue retooling. I can do that later in editing, I guess. For now it really has to be Cam’s story progressing more…well, poorly, really.

Here’s hoping today is slow.

oh hell

Sat, 18 May 2013 07:08:07 -0700

I never check my phone. I turn it on silent at the start of work and then forget to even look at it until the next morning when I plug it in to charge.

The message light was blinking when I pulled it out of my bag this morning. Not only did I have a bunch of wrong number missed calls (plus one voicemail), I had a text from Mag. She was apologizing for what I described as eye-rolling at Vita’s original problems. Now it’s way too early in the day on Saturday to text her back and say I’m sorry and tell her she wasn’t a jerk and that it wound up helping in the long run.

I am dumb. I will text her when it is not stupidly early.

LIW, evening of May 17th 2013

Fri, 17 May 2013 20:39:03 -0700

Accomplishments for the day:

I managed to mostly rework the bad scene into a decent one that successfully led into Cam’s second diagnosis. Hopefully, this will continue into the dead time tomorrow. Again hopefully, there will be a lot of dead time this weekend.

I’d post more but I’m still incredibly tired. Here’s to more ambien CR.

LIW, midmorning post on May 17th 2013

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:50:22 -0700

Cutting because I’m going to ramble about once-spoiler-y things about Vita.

A long, long time ago, I showed Mag the original plans for Cam and Vita and a few other characters. In that original plan, Vita was to have abusive parents.

But now that I’m writing the scene where that’s revealed, I see why Mag rolled her eyes at me and said “not everyone needs to have bad parents.”

It’s boring, and I don’t like it. I don’t like that there’s arbitrary tragedy in Vita’s life when I haven’t really done any sort of proper foreshadowing—and that was because it never seemed appropriate. She never seemed like she had major problems in her life, and you know what? I like that. I like that she’s only got issues with her birth parents and not real horrible problems like Cam has with hers. I like this newly developing idea that she has crooked fingers on her left out of a childhood accident and it’s more that she has some abandonment issues, not that she suffered abuse.

I’m not going to overhaul anything in the strictest sense other than this scene I’ve been writing the last four or five days, and making notes to myself to edit things accordingly in earlier chapters. But dammit, this would take away from Vita’s character and what she has to offer to the story.

I feel stupid not picking up on it earlier. Hindsight and all that.