Creative Outlets

 

Happy Sunday, all! Today's topic on the SFF Seven is The Hobby: What do you make when you aren't making words?

In all honesty, there hasn't been much time lately for my creativity to flourish anywhere but with writing. However, I have quite a few creative outlets, and I dip into them when I'm not writing. It's just that writing is all I've done this year *insert OMG face.* 

I've never met a house I couldn't decorate, or a used piece of furniture or artwork I couldn't refinish or repurpose. I've made a lot of things by hand, everything from clothes to fancy shower curtains to bedspreads to lampshades to headboards. I'm not too shabby with a power tool either. 

This winter, I'm determined to take a break and do some home decorating. I have a couple pieces of furniture I want to paint and try some gold leafing on, and I need to finish my office design and redecorate a hall bath. Maybe I'll share pictures here when I'm done.

I also love to cook, and I toy with photography. Cooking sprees seem to be most prominent when I have writer's block. Photography is more of a relaxing hobby than anything. I get very focused on the framing within the lens, and then I love the editing process too. Some of my photographs are hanging in my home, and I've taken headshots, engagement pictures, and graduation pics for several people. It's a lot of fun, and something I wish I had more time to work on.

How about you? What are some of your hobbies?

What hill will you die on, even if your copy editor insists otherwise?

 

If I have one weakness as a reader, and as a writer, it is the mystery, the rollercoaster, the silent scourge of the. . .

 

Ellipsis.

 

Editors would much rather we not overuse this literary device, and I believe I know why.

 

Consider what, exactly, is an ellipsis in formal understanding. Dictionary.com states, “the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.”

I disagree, in particular, with the latter half of the statement: “. . . superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.”

 

To me those three dots in between one word and another represent . . . universes. An abyss of unspoken thought, reserved emotion, joyous and painful history both known and unknown between two characters embarking in the muddy waters of a conversation in which such pauses are necessary, demanded even. Because there are simply some things that cannot, and should not, be put into beggared words. Some emotions, history and experiences eclipse the containment of spoken speech.

 

Context is quite often in the eye of the beholder—how do a mortal girl and an immortal demi-god share context? How does Hades elucidate his ancient pain to a young Persephone? He cannot . . . not in its entirety. Understanding the whole of his life and circumstances that led to a particular point are beyond her, except in the abstract. That abstract is the ellipsis. In the forced pause where she must set aside the immediacy of her thoughts and biases and . . . what? Consider what she does not know.

 

All of the above renders the term “superfluous,” well . . . superfluous. Nothing which is too big for words is unnecessary. Rather, it is the antithesis of unnecessary.

 

As a reader and writer of fantasy romance, I find ellipsis especially necessary when a character has neither the time nor the words to express a complicated concept, or they refuse to expose themselves to the weakness of doing so. As a writer, I utilize that trio of dots to hone the reader’s focus on the possibility that there is subtext and context on which I would like them to pause, close the book for a moment, and unravel.

 

What is your dragon Lord or your God of the Underworld avoiding? Why? What is their hidden agenda? The story would be ruined, robbed of wonder, if we put every thought and feeling into ink and pixels. If we leave nothing for imagination, we deprive the reader and characters of the journey of discovery.

 

As a reader, I particularly love these opportunities to close my eyes and delve into the inner workings of what a brooding Fae lord, or an immortal wizard, or a fractured heroine may be thinking or feeling. What they are admitting, and why. They point to the consequences should they put into inadequate words the whole of their hopes, their intentions, their scheming.

 

No . . . by denying the reader an ellipsis, we deprive them of the joy of deep reading. The joy of interpretation, of discovery. The joy of embarking on a journey in tandem with the author and characters in which the story the reader is imbibing comes alive in their head with nuance particular to them. Because, after all, no reader reads the same story like another. And in those three tiny universes are where stories morph into . . . epics.

 

That being said, I do have a rule. In drafting, I allow myself as many ellipses as I want. When I reread my story, I begin a new conversation with my characters. Is this ellipsis a time to hold back, or is it a time for plain speech? Will closing the gap of understanding sacrifice the communication (because some things need to be left unsaid) or is there greater benefit in showing one's verbal cards? Should you continue to veil your pain, or unleash it?

 

However, I err on the side of letting ellipses rein. Of allowing imagination to hold sway rather than boxing stories into claustrophobic cubes of singular understanding.

Emma Alysin is a 40 mumble mumble bi-racial American Muslim mom of five who writes SFR, PNR & Fantasy Romance.
Her dragons, fae, and bears will most interest readers who like their alphas strong, protective, and smokin’ hot; their heroines feisty, brainy, too grown to give a *uck, and over the age of 30.
Her stories feature men and women of diverse backgrounds.

My Hill to Die On

Were I to choose a hill to die upon, it would be something like this neolithic stone circle atop a green, grassy hill with a likely burial mound in the middle of it. 

However. If we're talking about copy edits. Well. I'm kind of a pain in the grass. 

Like Jeffe, I've had run ins with copy editors who've never met a metaphor they've liked. Most of the time, I can look at the suggested changes, raise my eye brows, snort and say, "You can fuck right off" to my inanimate computer screen at the same time I'm typing "Stet." 99.5% of the time, my copy editors save my backside - one caught an eye color change on a hero that both my editor and I had missed. So copy editors get big benefits of lots of doubts from me. And even if I disagree with copy edit, for most things, it just doesn't matter and I accept the change.

Where it does matter is when a copy editor harps on and on and on (usually about a metaphor, occasionally a genre trope) in a way that would change the voice of the story, the character, or me, then I get cranky. Really, really cranky. Cranky to the point that I once went to my editor and asked if I could never have that copy editor again. I felt like I was being childish or, worse, a diva. But she just laughed and said, "Absolutely. You aren't the first author to mention it. It won't be a problem going forward." That was a relief.

The only problem I have - and this is 100% a me thing - I'm stuck on subbing each other (3+ people) for one another (2 people). I just don't like the way one another sounds. I do like the way each other sounds. It's something I should probably get over. Probably. Mainly because I'm not sure it's really worth being on a hill for. Much less dying on that hill for.
 

Fighting the Good Fight for the Metaphor of It All

The Covenant is complete! Book 3 in A Covenant of Thorns, ROGUE'S PARADISE, is now out in the wild, walking its wild ways. Thanks to all for supporting this re-release of my very first dark fantasy romance trilogy. It's beyond wonderful to see these books finding a new audience after all these years. 

This week at the SFF Seven, we're talking about copyeditors and the arguments we have with them. We all have grammatical hills we'll die on - wisely or not - and we want to know what yours is! On what point will you refuse to give way, regardless of how the copyeditor might argue?

(I feel I should note at this point that the author/editor/copyeditor relationship is a symbiotic one. Even in traditional publishing - all rumor to the contrary of authors being "forced" to do x, y, z - seldom will anyone INSIST on a change. Almost always the author has final say, because it is their book, and they also bear final responsibility. It's in the contract. If an author commits slander or other blunders, the ultimate responsibility - financial, legal, and moral - rests with them.)

I, like most authors, have a love/hate relationship with copyeditors. On the one hand, they catch potentially horrifying errors. In fact, in the book above, the copyeditor corrected a character "peeing at her face" to "peering at her face" - something my editor and I had both missed and were hysterically relieved to have fixed.

We love them. We need them. As with all love/hate relationships, copyeditors drive us crazy. 

I won't fight about commas, as a rule. I really even don't care about the Oxford comma. I know people like to make jokes showing how important that Oxford comma is, but in most cases the context makes it clear. I don't get why copyeditors hate m-dashes so much, but I'll concede in many cases. I personally find semi-colons archaic and not all that useful, but whatever. 

You know what gets me, what I'll really fight for? 

Metaphorical language.

That's what kills me (yes, LITERALLY KILLS ME) about many copyeditors is that they can be so freaking literal. Some examples.

"His eyes can't really crawl over her. Imagine eyeballs rolling over her. Gross."

"Can a cloud really look sad?"

"I don't think this is a word."

I could go on. The thing is, as writers, we're often expanding the use of language. Dictionary definitions often include citations of first usage of a "new" word or expression. That's because language is our medium and we are the ones shaping it. Copyeditors are on the side of enforcing the status quo. So a writer ends up walking the line between bending to the regulatory insistence of correctness as the rules currently stand and being the iconoclast who breaks those rules to open up new worlds.

Guess which side I'm on?

Yeah, copyeditors hate me right back. 

But, I believe this push-pull is a part of our jobs, on both sides. We all want to produce the best book possible. We all love language and what it can do. I will say, however, to all the writers out there: believe in yourself and defend your words, because you are the fount of change. 

 

The Hill of Pedantry vs Copy Edits

This Week's Topic:

What hill will I die on, even if my copy editor insists otherwise?

On what hill will I perish for pedantry? 

The Oxford Comma.
Use it. Love it. Never relinquish it. No excuses.

In all fairness, my current copy editor is #TeamOxford too. When I worked in online publishing--where character count is king--the copy editors were not on this team. Ack. Wince. Grargh.

I love, love, love the copy editor I have now. She is worth every penny. 99.6% of the time I don't argue with her. It's "Accept Changes" all the way down the manuscript. I even surrendered to the idiom over the nominative use of "to be." (e.g. idiom = It's me. Grammatically correct = It is I.) She knows my style, works within it, and never tries to change my voice for the sake of AP or Chicago. Usually, if I ignore one of her edits it's because I've co-opted a "real" word for a fantastical definition. 

We won't discuss the gray hairs I've given her over my Use of Capping All The Things.

Or my love of ellipses.

Or my abuse of hyphens.

One day, I'll win the "keeping semicolons in dialogue" disagreement, though.  

Once I muster the courage. 😅

Book Club Author Chat with Charissa Weaks

Hey all! I will be chatting with Liz @LittleBoneLibrary and Emily @EmilyintheArchives on Tuesday at 5pm EST | 7pm CST | 8pm EST. This chat is via Zoom, so Zoom links will be sent by the hosts on Tuesday. I would love to chat with you about my books, writing, and author life in general!

To register, just fill out this form. You can even submit your questions via the form.

I hope to see you there!!

Happy Reading,

Charissa

 

The Drive to Develop a Writing Practice

Look for the cover reveal for SHADOW WIZARD, book one in Renegades of Magic, the new trilogy continuing the Bonds of Magic epic tale! I'm getting the preorders set up today and plan to do the cover reveal on Instagram tomorrow, August 11, 2022. Members of my private Facebook group, Jeffe's Closet, may get a sneak peek ;-)

This week at the SFF Seven, we're asking: how has your writing practice changed over time?

It's interesting because the topic-suggester framed it as "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" - my college French demanded I get the saying correct - which is a French saying that acknowledges that the more things change, the more they stay the same. In other words, that surface details may alter over time, but the essence of the thing, the recognizable cycle of events, is fundamentally inalterable. Often it's applied to history. So this suggests that our writing practice may change over time, but it also stays the same. Is this this case?

I'm saying no, at least for me. My writing practice has changed considerably since my newbie days. I was reflecting recently that, as a teen and young woman, I didn't really know how to apply myself to improving at a task. This largely came from the fact that, in school all the way through high school, I could get by without really trying. I had a good auditory and visual memory, and I tested well, so I didn't need to work hard to get A's. (Except in math, which I thought I wasn't good at, even though they put me in accelerated math classes. Turns out I likely wasn't good at it because I didn't like math, so I didn't listen in class. Oops.) In college and grad school, a number of professors began riding me to apply myself, to study and do the practice problems. I kind of tried to - especially when I had to retake Immunology for my biology major and really didn't want to have to retake second semester of organic chemistry - but there was a major problem: I didn't know how to study.

I remember thinking I needed to learn how to study, but I was mostly flailing about. It was only when I had novel deadlines to meet that I got very good at refining my ability to work in concentrated ways, incrementally, day after day. I don't often think of messages I'd like to give to my younger self, but I now wish I could advise that college student, that graduate student, to develop the habit of working for a couple of hours every morning. This is my best brain time. If I had done that in school, if I had spent just that much time working practice problems and reviewing the material, I likely would have done much better.

Of course, then I might have ended up as a research scientist after all, when I'm so happy as a novelist. Maybe it took working on something I truly cared about to inspire me to develop the practice to do it. Que sera, sera!

The Ever-Evolving Process of Writing

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose:

How has my writing practice changed over time?

For those who aren't French speakers (like me), Merriam-Webster defines the translation as The more things change, the more they stay the same. It's a quote attributed to French novelist Karr. Now that I'm momentarily smart(er), I'll tell you what has changed in my writing process over the last two decades.

I plot. Not too deeply. Skeleton. Too much info winds up killing my joy of exploration as the story unfolds. Also, I plot to make sure I have one strong throughline, a general sense of character dev, and the foundation of world rules. More than that, and I'm wasting time on things that won't make it into the draft because the fullness of storytelling inevitably reveals surprises and twists that obliterate the details in an overplotted outline.

I've discovered I have a particular style in which--if a new chapter occurs in a setting different from the last chapter--I will open the chapter by setting the stage. I can't mentally progress with the scene if I don't have the staging clear in my head, thus clearly described on the page. To me, establishing the sensory experience for the reader is important for them to continue the journey with the POV character. It's by no means a "rule" of writing. It's purely my personal quirk. If I don't do it, I will stare at a blank page wondering why the hell the words won't flow. 

I've also learned that when I suffer Work Avoidance it's because I've fucked up something in a recent chapter that's preventing the story from continuing as it should. Events may fit within the scope of the plot but something, something, is amiss. It could be the way the Protag approaches the issue is wrong for the character--it fails to consider trauma, personality, or relationships. Or it could be that I've gone overboard with the conflict and left myself no room for escalation of risk later in the book. Or it could be that actions and consequences aren't suitably balanced. I have to return to the last two or three chapters I've written to find the glitch and repair it so I can get back on the train to Donesville. 

Most of all, I've learned not to fight my process. It is what it is...and it is continually evolving.