In Your Write Mind 2013

I know it's been a month since the In Your Write Mind retreat, but I'm finally getting around to posting a bit about it. My apologies.

And as a side note, I will likely be taking a blogging hiatus for a while (undetermined amount of time), until I can get some other things in order. This doesn't mean I won't be writing! Revisions of Dead As Dreams are on my list. I did manage to write 2,600 words on another humorous fantasy short story in July, and that rough draft needs to be finished as well--those things and house stuff (before baby comes) are my high priorities, so that's why my blog will need to take a back seat! Writing Quest will still be run every month, unless an emergency arises. Don't fear, though, my blog will not die. ;)

There were a lot of fun modules I attended at In Your Write Mind: Things That Go Bump in Your Prose, Public Speaking for Authors, Cutting and Tightening Your Novel, Fabulous Beginnings and Unforgettable Endings, Self-Publishing, Time Management for Writers, The Promise and the Payoff, Women's Undergarments through the Ages, Working Magic and Religion in Fiction, The Best Time to Read Your Contract, Short Stories, Cracking the Code, Adding Emotion to the Page, World Building, More Stuff Tim Is Tired Of, "Wet Cement": Transgression and Risk in Fiction, and Young Adult (YA) Voice.

By no means will I be discussing everything I listed above. If many of the topics you see interest you, I highly recommend considering attending In Your Write Mind next year! There were many other topics as well which I didn't or couldn't attend.

Before I mention some great key points about the modules I attended, I did want to mention some of the presenters. The special guests this year were Lucienne Diver (agent), Laurie J. Edwards (editor), Treva Harte (editor), and D. Harlan Wilson (author). Other presenters included Tim Esaias, Mike Arnzen, Maria V. Snyder, Scott Johnson, Diana Botsford, Lawrence Connolly, Shelley Bates, Heidi Ruby Miller, and Jason Jack Miller. And that's not even a full list!

Onto the good stuff, right?

One of the modules I desperately needed and I think any writer could take from, at least one or two tips, was Lawrence Connolly's Time Management for Writers. The most important thing I took from the module was to find your best writing time. Many of us are busy, so our choices for time to write are limited, but if we take a step back and look at our schedules, we should be able to find some small chunks of time to write. During the module, we had to write in our daily activities into a schedule. For me, this was very much what felt like what people call an Unschedule. You fill in those hours with things that need to get done--work, getting ready in the morning, eating, etc. Then you see what open spots there are. For those open spots, you consider what the best time for you to write is. Are you more alert and awake and focused at a certain time? Do you have a one hour long lunch hour at work but don't take that entire time to eat and still have enough energy? You can find time to write, and if you look at your full (or not so full) schedule, you can analyze when you have an open slot and when your most productive writing time would be in those open slots.

The other big tip for time management that we all know but I think we need to remind ourselves constantly is that when you sit down to write, just write, allowing no other distractions. Don't check Facebook or e-mail--don't even open an internet browser! The phone rings? Leave it, if the call is important the person will leave a message. Door? Ignore. Significant other wants you to look at something not terribly important? Yell at him/her that you're writing and will look when you're done. Unless it's an emergency, don't let anything interrupt your writing time.

If you want to read more about this topic, Lawrence Connolly actually wrote a blog post on his module: Time Management for Writers.

I also enjoyed the World Building module presented by Lucienne Diver. There are so many things to consider and balance when building your own world (or when using our own world). Here, I wanted to at least list the 7 things she suggested you should consider when world building: Environment, Technology, Religion (especially importance of rituals), Politics, Family Unit, Economy, and Language (cursing shows what a society holds sacred or profane). All of these things should be taken into account when world building. Of course, not everything you know, as the writer, will make it into your novel, but it's important that you know all the facts.

Since this post is getting rather long, there is one more module I wanted to touch on--More Stuff Tim Is Tired Of. Tim Esaias was my mentor when I was in the Writing Popular Fiction program, and if anyone knows how to find inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and clean up prose, it's him! I won't go over everything he mentioned in his module, but just a few tips. One that made me cringe, since I have it in my original thesis novel, The Mind Behind the Mind, is the overuse of the name Haven for a city or town. If certain names are used too often, they become cliche, so try to avoid using ones you start to see often when you read.

Some silly stuff that doesn't make sense: ritual slicing of palm (you then deny use to that hand for quite a while and could hit many nerves), talking through clenched teeth (try it), tightening grip on a sword when it's about to be used, and characters who don't actually suffer the ill effects of wounds and illnesses. Tim is a fount of information, and I have a full page of notes from his 50-minute module, as well as some handouts he sent to the participants. If you see him listed as a presenter or panelist at a convention or workshop, don't hesitate to attend!

Again, I'm sorry for the delay of this post. I hope the information I imparted was worth the wait! I can't recommend enough actually attending the In Your Write Mind retreat, especially if you are serious about your writing.

NEXT UP: Hiatus. Length to be determined.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - World-Building and Structure

SPOILER ALERT! If you have not read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms there are spoilers in this essay.


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The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was a great dark epic fantasy that kept me turning the pages to find out what happened next. N. K. Jemisin did an excellent job with world-building, and the structure she used was a nice addition which added a whole new layer to the story.

I admit, I initially had a difficult time getting into the novel. Near the beginning, we get more of a world-building info dump, instead of story progression and characterization. I honestly think this was one of the drawbacks of the novel. Too much backstory and world-building right at the beginning has a tendency to drag the narrative down. The true pull into Yeine's world didn't come for me until she first meets Nahadoth, at the end of chapter three. "The black-haired man lifted his head to look at me. He was smiling. I could see his face now, and his mad, mad eyes, and I suddenly knew who he was. What he was" (23). Those words sucked me in, and I was lost in Yeine's world for the rest of the novel.

Nahadoth is a god, a fallen and imprisoned one, but a god nonetheless. He and the other gods who appear in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms are not only well-rounded characters, but the best vehicle Jemisin uses to expand the world-building. It's through the false and true stories of the gods, along with their previous war, that we truly learn about this world and how things work in it. Even though the entire novel is told from Yeine's point-of-view, we still see things from the gods' perspectives, either through her interactions with them or through strange dreams that visit her, dreams she has because within her is the soul of a dead goddess.

The structure Jemisin uses deviates a bit from the norm, but it all makes sense in the end and fits the story well. There are two main types of interruptions in the narrative. First, there are asides from Yeine, commenting on something she remembers, things important for the story. Second, there are small conversations between Yeine and who we eventually find out to be the goddess Enefa--the soul that shares Yeine's body. Even right at the beginning, we know Yeine struggles to remember. Almost the entire novel, until the very end, is her remembering the events that lead up to her death. And it's no secret that she's going to die at the end. "I am not as I once was. They have done this to me, broken me open and torn out my heart. I do not know who I am anymore" (1).

These interjections that Jemisin uses demonstrate how much Yeine tries to remember, and how hard it is for her to do so. When we reach the end of the novel, when Yeine's soul is hovering over the scene and watching things unfold, we understand she had been piecing things together all along as she told her tale--her death jarred her senses, and she had to remind herself of who she was and the events that led up to her death. In truth, the novel begins when she dies, and the entire novel is her putting the puzzle pieces together.

The interruptions also serve another purpose, though. It avoids an info dump at the end of the novel. Yeine's soul hovers in space, alongside Enefa's soul. And they talk, they communicate. If that entire conversation was at the end though, showing how Enefa encourages Yeine to remember, it would have brought the action of the novel's end to a grinding halt. By weaving in the conversation throughout the novel, we have the sense at the end, when Yeine rises again as a goddess in her own right, that so much more had gone on between Yeine and Enefa before Yeine was restored to her body. It also gives that disembodied feeling of how time is nothing to the gods, their conversations seemingly lasting for a long expanse and a short moment all at the same time.

Aside from my initial issues near the beginning, Jemisin successfully immersed me in the world of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. It comforts me to still see great dark epic fantasy written today, since it's my chosen genre. I look forward to reading the next book in the trilogy.


WORKS CITED

Jemisin, N. K. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Orbit: New York, 2010.


NEXT UP: A guest blog post from J. Gunnar Grey!

Fringe - This Decade's X-Files?

SPOILER ALERT! If you have not watched through Season 3, Episode 9 of Fringe, there are spoilers ahead.

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Fringe, a science fiction show in its third season on FOX, has the potential to be as successful as X-Files. The turn it took at the beginning of this season, though, could have driven many of its viewers away. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This may be a mid-season look at the show, but for those that have never seen it before, I'll go over some of the basics that I think makes this show great.

Imagine that there is a parallel universe out there, one that reflects our own in many ways. Of course there are differences--the twin towers still stand, technology is more advanced, and they contain fringe events (kind of dimensional holes, glitches from our own dimension) by sealing the location, and the people, in some sort of gelatinous mixture. They have to contain it, or our world may destroy theirs. We don't get a glimpse of this parallel universe until the end of Season 1, though, and it's not until the end of Season 2 that our main characters cross over to this different reality. In our world, Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), along with Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) and his son, Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson), explore the odd fringe events taking place here. This eventually leads them to discover the parallel universe, a world that sees itself at war with our own--the people there think the only way to save their world is to destroy ours. Rich world-building and a well thought out plot sucks you into Fringe. Even though Olivia and her team investigate weird events, in the end those odd events still have some type of explanation (whether it's explained during the episode or a season or two later).

Yes, the world the writers have built is great, but the true shining star is the characterization. Olivia is an FBI agent who loses her fiance to a fringe event, eventually finding out he was involved. She's assigned to investigate these events. I'll admit, in Season 1, her character was the hardest for me to swallow. She felt a bit flat because I didn't see a lot of emotion from her. Seasons 2 and 3 have changed my mind, her character being fleshed out little by little. As far as we know, she is the only person who can safely cross over to the other side.

The first time we meet Dr. Walter Bishop, he's in a mental institution. A brilliant scientific mind that has fractured. He is the comic relief of this show, and by far the best character, in my opinion. His character is quirky and needy, but he still has much of the scientific knowledge needed to investigate the fringe events.

Peter Bishop, who originally was estranged from his father, is the perfect foil for Walter, and eventually a love interest for Olivia. It just so happens that Peter is actually from the other dimension (unknown to him until the end of Season 2). Walter's son died, and he couldn't bear to see this other Peter die, so he crossed over--the only way to save Peter was to bring him back to our world. This was the event that caused the instability in the other world.

It's about time I get to season three, don't you think? It starts out slowly. Our Olivia is trapped in the other world, while their Olivia is infiltrating our dimension. Walter, Peter, and other characters have no clue that there is an impostor in their midst. Our Olivia is brainwashed (with the help of some drugs and memories) to think that she is actually the Olivia from the other world. Great set-up for the beginning of the season, no? I thought it was, but it didn't stay that way.

They alternate episodes, one in the other world, then one in ours. Makes sense. Unfortunately, once our Olivia is finally brainwashed, the episodes in the other world left a bitter taste in my mouth. The characters around her weren't developed to their full potential, which made them come across cardboard and felt like mere tools. Not only that, but anything we discovered about this world didn't have as big as an impact as I think it could have. I contest that it is far more interesting to explore a new world from the eyes of a stranger. Since Olivia thought she belonged there, we saw the world from familiar eyes, so everything to her was ordinary and commonplace. The world failed to come alive for me--it had been more alive when Olivia, Walter, and Peter had crossed over initially at the end of Season 2, since they were all discovering the differences compared to our world.

The big thing that sunk me, and made it hard for me to hang on from episode to episode, was the length of time it took for our Olivia to finally get home and, more importantly, for everyone on our side to figure out that the Olivia working with them was an impostor! It's not until Episode 8 when the Olivias end up back in their respective worlds. I can see a few episodes, but not nearly half the season.

Episode 8 was great, I have to admit that. It just kills me that it took so damn long to get there. Walter was in prime form in the episode--I'm still laughing over the word he created, Vagenda (you have to watch the episode to get the context, it's well worth it). A lot of action, twists and turns, speed bumps, and someone's life sadly ends. Good fun, but it should have come four episodes sooner, in my opinion.

Am I alone in my feelings? No, I'm pretty sure I'm not. My husband read a few articles throughout the last few months that reflected dissatisfaction, and the viewers were slowly declining. I think stretching things out so long was what did it. Is there hope? Yes, I believe so. Fringe is an excellently imagined story, and if the writers pick up the pace and start throwing more punches concerning the war (which our side now knows about), then they can redeem themselves. Every series has a slump period. I can only hope that the viewers they lost will come back or new viewers will start watching. Fringe should have at least two more seasons in it--not sure if it will reach eight seasons like X-Files. It has held its own going up against the original CSI, Supernatural, and Nikita, among other powerhouse shows.

This is the clincher, though--starting at the end of January, Fringe will move to a Friday time slot (it has been airing on Thursday nights, with some odd Monday night episodes during Season 2). Many people consider Friday a death slot. Will the final bell toll, or will Fringe embrace that time slot as X-Files did in the past? Perhaps in the mirror dimension, they've already hit the cancel button, or perhaps it's been renewed for another ten seasons! No matter what, I'm sure Fringe has plenty of surprises in store for the future.


NEXT UP: Resolutions and Goals for 2011, and a look back at 2010.