Bringing the Fun - Hobbies

Everyone on earth should have something they do just because they like doing it. Y'know. Within the bounds of legality and not harming others. I suspect most writers started out writing simply because they liked doing it. We write for ourselves first, then one day, it crosses our minds to write for an audience and on that day, something fundamentally shifts. No matter how much we talk about writing books or stories of our hearts, once we've committed to the thought of showing our work to someone else, we're no longer strictly writing to please ourselves. Even if we want to. Every whisper or overheard conversation about The Market is looking over our shoulders. It isn't to say that writing can't still be fun - it can. Fun, edifying, and engaging. But. There's also a weight that's been added to it, a pressure to perform, to be good enough. That weight, pressure, and subtle (or not) fear take a little extra helping of cognitive and emotional energy to sustain.

That's why is so vital to have other outlets that don't carry that charge of weight or pressure or fear. We still need to pursue some creative thing that isn't for anyone else. We need the freedom to be bad at something - not because it's fun to be bad at something but because there's space and joy and light around doing something that no one else cares about, where we aren't being badgered to turn fun into a side hustle of some kind. There's grace in getting to just enjoy something without succumbing to the drive of constant improvement. Hey. This is for fun. If I learn something and enjoy what I'm doing? Great. If I just have fun with what I'm doing and never learn another thing? That's great, too. Though, to be fair, it's legit to *try* turning a hobby into a side hustle and then noping out. Been there. Did that with cooking. Catered two big events, got rave reviews, took a look around and went 'oh, hell no' and went straight back to being a cooking hobbyist because yeesh. 

These days, I make random things from cardboard. Cat forts. A spirit house in very early stages. There's a massive stack of huge cardboard boxes on the back lanai waiting for me to build a kitty castle. When my box knife comes out of hiding, that project will get underway. At this point, I may have to go buy a box knife cause it's been a minute since I've seen the last one. 

I still cook. I like finding new recipes and trying dishes I haven't had before. It's taken a turn since I went whole food plant based vegan a few years ago. I had to learn a whole new set of cooking skills that upended a bunch of the conventional wisdom I'd been taught about cooking. It's a good time getting to try a new technique and new flavors. Sometimes I win. Sometimes I have to throw stuff away - not often, mind, but it does happen when I totally misjudge a recipe.

There's also gardening. I do enjoy getting out into the yard to work in the soil and create an oasis for my pollinators. It's a hobby both Mom and I enjoy, so it's a communal activity and the bonus is getting to work in cooperation with someone I value. And hey. Flowers. What's not to like?

Chapters and Scenes: Determining How Long They Should Be

 This week at the SFF Seven, we're talking about Managing Word Count. Do we rewrite to hit a certain number? Do we have a chapter/scene word allotment?

So, a lot of you know that one of my nicknames is the Meticulous Volcano. This comes from me being born on the Leo/Virgo cusp, which a friend informed me makes me a meticulous volcano and they're not wrong. I really am half and half - and this shows up in many ways. Yes, I have the passionate Leo nature, but I'm also the detail-oriented lover of spreadsheets. In my writing, this manifests in my total, far-end gardener/pantser/write for discovery process, which I track down to the tiniest detail, with charts. 

Do I have a chapter/scene word allotment? Yes, I do. It varies from book to book - something I land on intuitively - with some books and series running to longer chapters and some to shorter. The shortest chapters, which creates a brisker pace, are generally about 6-7 pages long, or about 1,700 words. Longer chapters give a more epic feel, a more luxurious pace, and can be as long as 23 pages (my record) and about 7K words long. On average, however, I keep longer chapters to around 16 pages or 4,500 words.  

For scenes, I follow the 3-Act 8-scene structure, which looks like this:

Mostly I use this structure as a series of guideposts, to know where I am as I write the book, which is always linear, from beginning to end. And this helps me to predict when I'll finish. Once I have Scene 1 complete, I can predict the final word count (8 times the word count of Scene 1). This number is solidified once I have Act 1 in place. Generally my books are 85K - 120K words long, so how long the individual segments are varies from about 11K to 15K words. 

In truth, "segment" is probably a better word than "scene," as applies to my novels. This structure is from screenwriting, so scenes can be more or less a single sequence. For me, a scene in this context is a contiguous segment of the story, one where a particular mini-arc is begun and completed. 

As for rewriting to tighten the shape? Sometimes I do that. Usually not. I often worry that some segment will bulge out and need trimming, but it usually is fine by the end. Sometimes I break up chapters or trim parts that go on too long. Mostly I let the numbers be a loose guideline and I decided intuitively how to edit. 

A Process to Everything

 

There is so much, and at the same time, so little on my mind. 

Today I sat in my garden and watched the sunshine peek through my hollyhocks. I planted these stalks from seed. Watered them. Weeded around them. Dreamt of how lovely the blossoms would be. And, at long last, admire them. 

But one thing I didn’t plan for was the variety of life buzzing around the flowers. There are more types of bees in this flower bed than I knew existed! There are hoverflies and butterflies, beetles and moths, fliers and crawlers I can’t name. It’s amazing!

And all of that is like writing a book.

It starts off by cultivating an idea. Then you weed out the bad details so the good stuff has room to spread. You dream about the plot and characters. And then you type The End. But the real magic happens after that when your book is out in the world, surrounded by life, interacting with life. And it’s amazing.

Happy daydreaming, friends!

What’s on your mind this week?

Learning to Love the Winter Garden

 

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is, verbatim, On Your Mind (Winter).

So, I'm posting a photo I took this morning from the winter garden. We've had a mild winter, and the secret garden is walled and makes a protected microclimate, so I actually have a winter garden. 

Some of you may know that I love to garden. I mention it in interviews when I'm asked what I do that isn't reading or writing. Gardening is a big piece. It sounds like a small thing when I say it, but nurturing a garden, planning it, spending time in it, all shape how I live. 

I became interested in the concept of a winter garden back when I lived in Wyoming and winters were so very bleak. The idea is to plan a garden with the entire season in mind. It's easier to envision the spring flowers, the midsummer lushness, adding in the plants that bloom in the autumn, but thinking toward the largely leafless winter is a different kind of vision. What plants bring visual interest in their starker, hibernating states? What offers spots of color in a more monochromatic landscape? 

Part of the trick is loving the winter garden for what it is, not trying to replicate the garden of warmer seasons.

I think this is a metaphor for a great deal in our lives, as gardens tend to be.

Painted Yourself into a Corner? Retcon FTW!

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "World Rules and Painting Yourself into a Corner: What's a rule of your world established in a previous book that complicated things for you in a later book?"

This has happened to me SO MANY TIMES.

It's a downside of writing for discovery or being a gardener - which some people call "pantsing" - because I discover the world as I write the story. Sometimes I'm writing a later book in a series and I discover that some decision I made in an earlier book is limiting what I can do. The real bite is this is almost always some minor, stupid detail that I just threw out there for no good reason. Very often, it could've been left out entirely and nothing would've changed.

I've actually learned from past errors this way, and I'm much more careful these days about adding random worldbuilding details unless I'm SURE I want to live with them.

Mostly, anyway.

Except for one I found recently.

I've been writing book 3 of the Forgotten Empires trilogy, THE PROMISED QUEEN (cover teased above). That means I've been listening to the audio books of THE ORCHID THRONE and THE FIERY CROWN, just to gather up all the threads of the story. Well, I found a careless remark in THE ORCHID THRONE that blows a huge part of the worldbuilding reveal in THE PROMISED QUEEN. As in, totally contradicts what we discover later. 

And it's not even important, that toss-off line in THE ORCHID THRONE! I could've deleted it and no one would've cared or noticed. 

But no.

What to do???

I had three choices, I figured:

1) Change my big reveal in THE PROMISED QUEEN*

2) Pretend I didn't know about that line in THE ORCHID THRONE**

3) Retcon*** it.

Door #3, please! 

I'll even confess here how I did it, though I won't give the details of the exact mistake. I had Lia said she lied. It actually works just fine because she's an accomplished liar - self-confessed - and she had good reason to lie about that thing, at that time and place. Is it perfect? Maybe not. Does it work? I think so. 

And now you all know...

___________________________

*No way
**Risky, because I know one of you would pick up on it
***For those who don't know, retconning is short for "retroactive continuity" and it means to "revise (an aspect of a fictional work) retrospectively, typically by introducing a piece of new information that imposes a different interpretation on previously described events."