#writealong

Hi, faithful followers. As you may or may not know, I've been posting my progress on Cave Art, a novel about Malena, an aspiring archaeologist, over on my author page, aliciadelosreyes.wordpress.com. I've decided to take it down because:

I don't feel excited about sharing Cave Art with the world; the writing isn't good yet, the story isn't nailed down (in other words, it's a rough draft)

I don't feel good sharing my roughest work with the world; it's not my best writing (because it's a rough draft)

I feel way too much pressure to write a story that I used to love working on. It's not fun anymore!

I know I promised a rough draft to you all, and the novelty of this venture was that you would get to see my work change and evolve. I still think that's a worthwhile thing to share, but I'd like to have the end product finished before I show you its humble beginnings. 

And I realized while doing this project that one reason I love the writing part of writing is because no one knows about it. I get super embarrassed about sharing my work in real life, and I think I'd like to minimize the extra sharing as much as I can. I love getting feedback, but I have to reach the point where I want feedback before I can ask for it.

So, /writealong. Thanks to everyone who watched! I'll definitely keep posting chick lit and CLC-related stuff here, including a (gasp!) interview with my hero, the Crafty Chica.

Last week, my brain was dominated by the TwitterFiction Festival (which was fun! so much fun!). This week, it's dominated by a new nonfiction project which is so much more manageable and fun to think about than Cave Art right now. I am tempted to stop writing Cave Art and focus solely on this new project. I think it's possible I have too many projects going on.

BUT ALAS, that is what this writealong is all about: finishing big projects! Because finishing projects is fun, even if sometimes it's not fun while you're doing it!

So, here is another update from the land of Cave Art, where I have plotted Malena's smooching trajectory with Dominic, her love interest.

The Chick Lit Cookbook asks:

When do you put in a love scene? Which is the right moment? How do you know when to have your characters go at it and when to hold them back?

The short answer is: Wait as long as you can.

The long answer is: try mixing up a few tried-and-true templates until you get a romantic plotline that makes sense for your character and story.

I've decided to use a variation of the When-Harry-Met-Sally plotline:

~ When Harry Met Sally ~ Step 1: Girl and boy hate each other for no good reason. Both are strong personalities, or they disagree on a “deal-breaker” issue, or they come from feuding families, work for competing companies, etc. Step 2: Plot happens. Girl gets into a bind and calls boy for help because no one else is available. They share a moment. Potential Smooch #1 here, but hold off if you can. Step 3: More plot happens. Girl mellows out about the issue she and boy feuded about. Step 4. Girl realizes she loves boy. She finds him. Smooch #2 (or #1) here.

Maybe this seems a little simplistic. It is. I was trying to be funny. But really, aren't most romantic storylines pretty similar to each other? If there's no obstacle in the way, there's no story. If there's no reason why two people can't get together, they will. Unless they get in their own way, in which case you've got a When-Harry-Met-Sally.

Anyway, here's the gist of When-Malena-Met-Dominic:

Malena meets Dominic at the archaeology campsite. He's a bit aloof from the rest of the group. He doesn't always sleep in his tent, makes a lot of trips into town. 

Malena sees Dominic wearing something she hates--since she's into fashion, I'm thinking Crocs.

Malena forgets about Dominic for a while and has a brief thing with Damien, the young hotshot archaeologist.

Then CRISIS! Malena's accused of defacing the cave art. 

Dominic helps her out.

Damien lets her down. (Hmm, perhaps the two D names were a poor choice...?)

Malena finds out Dominic has kids, which explains his absences and long phone calls.

She realizes she has been into Dominic for a looong time.

Will Dominic realize the same thing? HOPE SO!

Hi friends. I am hard at work on Chapter 3, which is going better than Chapter 2. I've been writing at least a half hour every (week)day. But (BIG NEWS) the Internet is a huge distraction. I went to a coffee shop this morning that DIDN'T have wifi on purpose, just so I could force myself to write more than a paragraph without checking my @#$#@$@$ email. And I did write more than a paragraph.

In other news:

I found this tumblr that is awesome: lifeinreligiouspublishing​

I went to AWP and ran into two people from home who I did not expect to run into. I was only there for 2 hours! It was an AWP miracle!

I tried a Japanese hot dog from this food truck. It had Japanese toppings and it was delicious.

I have not folded my laundry in three days. I just move it from the bed to the floor and back onto the bed in the morning. Now that I'm typing this I see that moving it back onto the bed is kind of silly.

I'm writing a novel using my ebook, The Chick Lit Cookbook: A Guide to Writing Your Novel in 30 Minutes a Day. You can follow my progress at chicklitcookbook.tumblr.com. I'm posting files of each c...

New chapter of CAVE ART up on my author page (check on Novel in Progress, or click the link above).

I don't love this chapter. It doesn't do much. I love some paragraphs, but the scenes are kind of...lame. I need some more info about what archaeologists do (if you are an archaeologist, please [pretty please] contact me! alicia dot [email protected]. I will interview you for half an hour about what you do when it rains at your site, and if you really have to live in a tent). 

I wrote this after a couple of crazy days. My little brother's wedding was a smashing success, and he and his wife liked the quilt I made them. But taking a break from everything made me realize how exhausted I was of emailing reviewers and trying to hustle. I don't even really know what hustling is, but I'd been trying very hard to do it for about two months.

After we got back from the wedding, and following a week of rain and melancholy, I realized I needed to work other projects. Starting new things makes me happy. And the whole point of publishing a book is to write more (I keep thinking of a line Jimmy says in That Thing You Do! "And the whole point of this is to make more records." I am basically the angry frontman in my band right now.)

So, I started working on my next writing guide (Suck it up and Revise!) and another project that is still nascent about women making choices.

And guess what? It worked! I've returned to scaled-back marketing and it doesn't pain me. I've continued writing and applying and submitting my work places. Every week doesn't have to be stellar for things to get done.

I finally overcame my malaise and wrote something. It is melodramatic and melancholy (GUESS WHAT, IT'S STILL RAINING) and about mummies:

Let me tell you why I became an archaeologist; why, at twenty-three, I was knee deep in student loans and book fees and empty Ramen noodle cartons. When I was six years old, I was eating Rice Krispies with sugar one morning when my father showed up at the door. I didn’t recognize him at first—I had that feeling you get when you know someone, but they are in the wrong place. My dad wasn’t in his apartment downtown or at the playground across the street. He was at our door. My mom walked over—she was wearing a shell-pink dress with pleats in the skirt—and I slurped the milk from the bottom of the bowl, still staring at my dad. He walked over, tall and thin and dark-haired, same as me, and asked, “Do you want to go see some mummies, Malena?” He always called me by my full name.

“Mummies?” I asked. “In Egypt?” I jumped out of my chair. I’d just learned about mummies in school.

My dad smiled, a broad grin with one broken eyetooth. “Not those ones, smartypants,” he said, clearly impressed. I blushed. “There are mummies here, in New Mexico.”

 “Really?” I asked.            

I grabbed my blanket and my mom tucked gummy bears into my overalls pocket. “Remind him you get hungry at lunchtime,” she whispered.

“Mom,” I said, annoyed. She pursed her lips and tucked another packet into my other pocket.

Dad buckled me in the back seat and tucked my pink blanket around my lap just how I liked it. I really liked to rub the corner of the fleece, where the seam of the binding overlapped the soft part. We drove through the hot sun, the air conditioner blasting. My dad played the classic rock station and the DJ had a voice like Ronald McDonald. I watched the cacti fly by on the side of the highway.

We reached the museum just as it was opening, and the halls were still quiet as we wandered through, my dad clutching the museum map and pushing me down one hallway, then another, past the usual state history exhibits with pictures of Indians in big feather headdresses and Mexican-mural-like paintings of haciendas and white churches. The traveling exhibit was in a big open room in the center of the museum painted bright red. In the very center, an Inca mummy from Peru laid out, decorated in gold amulets and a paper-thin gold headdress. He was swathed in brown linen but I could see the indents of his eyes and his mouth, even his teeth. I stared at the fabric, the tiny fibers, and fingered my blanket.

“Pretty crazy, huh?” my dad said, lifting me up so I could get a better look. I gazed down in the top of the glass case. The headdress fanned the mummy’s head like rays from the sun. I nodded and looked at my dad.

“Your dad found a mummy once, did you know that?” my dad asked, setting me down.

“Really?” I knew he worked in a museum in Albuquerque, but this was news to me.

“In the basement,” he said, nodding solemnly. Then his face broke into a smile. “It was a mummified rat,” he said.

“Gross!”

“They used to mummify everything,” he said.

“In Egypt,” I told him.

“In Egypt,” he agreed. We walked towards the exit and back out to the car. I thought about the gold headdress the whole way home. The gold pieces looked thinner than a coloring book page.

My dad dropped me off at home in time for lunch, though I had eaten all my gummy bears in the car.

And that was the last time I saw him.

I made a significant change to the outline--this paragraph is not it--that is making writing Chapter 2 more boring than I thought it would be. See, I expected to make Malena fall in love with this hot young archaeologist wunderkind (every time I see that word I think of B.J. Novak in that scene from The Office where he says, "People have been saying the word 'wunderkind,' and I guess...they're right.") but INSTEAD I thought it would be an interesting plot twist to have her fall for Damien Jones, the evil professor's godson, who gets sent to the archaeology site on a secret mission. I think the real problem is Damien hasn't been devastatingly handsome in my mind, and at the risk of sounding supremely shallow, that was going to be Malena's main impetus for sneaking into his sleeping bag, so to speak.

I'm writing a novel using my ebook, The Chick Lit Cookbook: A Guide to Writing Your Novel in 30 Minutes a Day. You can follow my progress at chicklitcookbook.tumblr.com. I'm posting files of each c...

I'll be posting PDFs of my rough draft of CAVE ART, a chick lit/archaeological thriller-ish novel about an archaeology student named Malena  who solves a mystery in the biggest collection of cave art in the US (and falls in love, of course). You can read each chapter of the draft here throughout the writealong.

Great news--there was cake at my baby brother's wedding! Also, he got married without a hitch, and my sister was the MC, and my other sister made cupcakes and flew them across the country. Cheers to everybody!

And now back to writing. I have outlined and written my first scene and chosen first person (thanks to Beastlifeforever [beast life forever!!] for the vote!). So now, it's time to WRITE SCENES. 

The Chick Lit Cookbook says:

Each of the events in your extremely basic outline has to happen in a scene —an action-filled moment where characters talk and interact. When your main character meets the leading man, the reader needs to get information about the man, the main character and the scenery. There is typically dialogue between them, and maybe some action.

A classic example of this scene has the main character walking along, carrying a stack of papers, when all of a sudden she drops them.The man steps in to help her pick them up and there is a spark. Shazam! They are on their way to being in love.

This scene can be broken into three parts: 1.The setting, where we see the main character. This includes her surroundings, such as, perhaps, a sidewalk in a busy city where she is walking with a stack of papers. 2. The moment of change, where she drops her papers. 3. And the resolution, which propels the plot. In this case, the resolution of the scene comes in the form of a man who helps the woman with her papers — and, in the process, becomes a player in the plot.

I once confused my class for weeks discussing "scenes" without explaining that I'm talking about scenes like scenes in movies--not scenery or setting. The scenes in your book are where the action takes place. 

Meredith Hall taught me that writing scenes is how you become a good writer. Most fiction that I read is all scenes, though some have more reflection than others (I just read This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, and that was more thought than I usually enjoy, but still mostly action [do not read that book unless you want to be really bummed about everything for a few days. Also, it's a great book.]).  

I personally love writing scenes. You know how writers say they hate actually writing? I love actually writing scenes. I LOVE IT. I hate revising, but I love making up things that happen.

When I write scenes, I imagine what happens, and then I write it down. I play it like a movie in my head, tweaking things until they sound possible or "true." Then I try to notice the important details that I'm imagining, like my character's tone of voice, or what they are looking at, and I write those details down.

And so, without further ado, CAVE ART continues. If you need to reread my first scene, it's here.

Are these pictures getting old for anybody? I'm going to go ahead and upload the actual files for the rest of my scenes later today on my author site. I'll post the link when it's live.

Intrepid followers, I am in all likelihood eating cake, toasting my little brother, or screaming at my sisters (with joy!) right now, but I have a consolation prize for those of you who do not get to go on "ski break" this year:

MY PLOT!

Yes, I have the entire book outlined, and yes, of course I will share it with you.

As a glimmer of insight, my "process" is much better described as a disaster area with notes. I wrote the outline once, then I rewrote the whole thing, and in between this writing and rewriting, I googled things like the names of oil companies in Montana and universities that have American archaeology programs. I also checked a lot of email and read the Internet. I did this in the morning while drinking coffee, eating cereal, and occasionally meowing at the cat. It probably took me an hour and a half, but I had two plots to write out--the basic chick lit transformation plot, and the archaeological mystery plot!

Thought I had been mulling this story over for months (seven months, in fact!) I didn't get a breakthrough ("she loves fashion!") until I actually started writing in my blue notebook. 

Ok, here are my notes:

And a bonus NEW SUB-FLAW:

I've got some ideas for scenes--I mentioned that I want Dominic to wear something Mel disapproves of. I've also got some massive plot holes. I will cross those bridges when I come to them. And God only knows how much I love to revise.