Elizabeth Drakes's Site

Fantasy Romance

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New Years Resolutions 2019

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Another New Year’s Resolution post!

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I am trying really hard to set realistic goals this year. And I am going to check in on them quarterly.

 

My 2019 Resolutions:

1. Release Two Books This Year

Yes, I know we’d talked about three. But as long as I have a day job, I just don’t see that being realistic. I’d rather put out two books that I’m proud of than three that I think are only okay.

 

2. Write Three First Drafts

I’ve admitted that I spend a lot more time editing than writing, and that’s okay. BUT I need to make sure I always have a fresh supply of material to edit. The longer I spend time editing, the harder actually writing new material becomes. So this still needs to be a focus for me.

 

3. Eat food before it goes bad.

Didn’t see that one coming, did you? Our refrigerator is a black hole, and too often stuff goes in and I don’t find it until it’s sporting a mold colony. By eating what we buy, it saves us money and reduces our environmental footprint. We have a new, smaller, refrigerator. While it may seem counter-intuitive, I am hoping not being able to store as much and seeing more of it will help us achieve this goal.

 

4. Move at Least Three Days a Week

Walking. Biking. Whatever. Three days a week. This is a lot more doable since my office put in a small but very nice gym in the basement for employees. They even put in showers! I have already been working towards this goal, but I am adding it as I want to keep it at the forefront of my thoughts.

 

5. Keep a Food Journal

It’s hard to know what to change in your eating habits until you truly know what you are eating. I have a Fitbit I wear daily. It comes with a tracking program on the same app. I have tried to use it with varying degrees of success. I need to develop the habit of logging food, and that’s what this resolution is all about!

 

How about you? What are your resolutions? Have you started on them? Do you think you’re likely to keep them?

Writing Process: I Figured It Out

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After taking a hard if biased look at my current WIP, I figured out what’s been causing the writer’s block.

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But less cute.

You don’t see the antagonist.

At the 45k word point, you still haven’t met him.

I have read a great deal of writing help on making sure you develop your villain. Make them a hero in their own story.

While I know a great deal about the antagonist, everything he has been doing is behind the curtain. It’s something the characters must respond to, but the reader doesn’t see him.

This is partially on purpose as the antagonist doesn’t want you to know it’s him. He wants to stay hidden. He wants you to think it’s someone else, and he’s done a decent job of setting up that person.

Villain
More he loves power. But not too far off.

However, at this point in the story, I really need him to take a more active role. His plans are hanging in the balance. He wouldn’t allow them to fall apart because of inaction.

But, I haven’t shown him yet. It’s hard to do a big reveal when the reader doesn’t know him or anything about him.

At the same time, as a romance story is traditionally only told through the eyes of the hero or heroine, I can’t just jump into his head and show my audience what’s happening.

I need to go back and rework the story. Find a way to show who he is without revealing him.

That means a pretty significant rewrite on a piece of work that isn’t complete.

I try really hard not to do this, but I truly see no way forward. He must step up now and take action.

I suppose I could try the random reveal and then work him back into the story later.

I will ponder both options and see which way has the characters talking to me again.

writers-block-when-your-imaginary-friends-refuse-to-talk-to-24442489

 

NaNoWriMo 2018

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I will not be doing NaNoWriMo. I know. Blaspheme.

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And any love from your family.

For those who may not be familiar with this, November in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). As part of the celebration, authors join together and attempt to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

No, 50,000 words is not a full novel. Romance novels tend to be around 70,000-85,000 words.

But 50,000 words is A LOT for one month. A LOT. It’s almost 1,700 words a day.

Yeah, a lot.

Many people will tell authors that they *must* participate. That it shows them the pace of a true writer.

Yeah, no. Every writer is different. Every writer’s process is different.

For me, rough drafts are a tiny fraction of the work of creating a finished novel.

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To Love a Prince took me fourteen drafts. Yeah, Fourteen. After I discarded two different false starts.

Seducing the Ice Queen was ten drafts. Better, but still a lot more revising that drafting.

And while I still need to figure out how to shrink those number of drafts further and still have a product I am proud of, participating in NaNoWriMo will not get me there.

What it will do is make me stress even more, steal some of the joy of writing from me, and make my family hate my writing.

The after NaNoWriMo, I am still dealing with the unpleasant side effects while trying to get from 50,000 words to the 75,000+ words of a finished romance novel.

It also does nothing to conquer the editing process.

I’m going to posit that following NaNoWriMo might actually make my editing process more intense as I struggle to get the 1,700 words on the page rather than 1,700 words that make some sort of sense.

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Yes, most first drafts are dumpster fires. But there’s dumpster fires and then there’s industrial dumpster fires.

None of this means NaNoWriMo doesn’t work for other authors.

Whatever works for each writer is a valid form of writing, even if it means typing while standing on their head, or whatever else they may do.

Some authors swear by working at cafes. Or libraries. Or rainbow fields surrounded by unicorns.

I prefer sitting at my old computer desk or curled up in the recliner with my laptop. I like music but I don’t need it. I prefer my lap to be cat-free, but that isn’t always possible.

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Yeah, he’s cute. Until you want him to move.

I like to write when the kids aren’t awake, but again, not always possible. Sometimes I write on my lunch hour. Sometimes while my daughter is in dance class. I have toyed with the idea of dictation software so I can write in the car.

This is what works for me.

That new story I told you about? I’m over 40k words into it. I am hoping to have this first draft completed by the end of November. Then, it’s back to edits for Knight for Valor.

Progress!

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I have finished my current edit on Seducing the Ice Queen.

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*happy dance*

I am taking a short break from the story before starting my final line edit that focuses on things like comma usage, word variation, and not ending sentences with prepositions.

On day two of this break, a whole new idea smacked me. I started writing it, and after two days, I’m over 4,000 words into it and still going strong! If not for this pesky thing called a day job, I’d be much farther along.

The characters are really coming alive, and that’s the best part about writing for me.

Yes it’s a first draft, and I both love and fear this draft. I love it because anything is possible. Because as I write it, I get to know the characters. Their foibles, fallacies, and strengths. I am a pantser, so this first draft is where I learn what happens to the characters and how they get their happily-ever-after.

*squee*

However, I also fear it because I’m staring at a blank sheet. There is nothing there to rearrange, fix or correct. It’s empty, waiting for those first words that will spur the next eleven revisions. There is no wordsmithed beauty to it. It’s raw and dirty, this first draft.

And that’s okay.

I just have to get it on the page.

After the blow my writing took back in July, I am ecstatic that my muse came back to sit on my shoulder again.

Magic

I’ve missed her, and I’ve missed the joy of creating new worlds and the people in them.

My Little Secret

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Okay, maybe not so secret. I’ve been struggling with this latest rewrite on my novel.

When I received my beta readers’ comments, I read through them, nodded vigorously, and spent the next ten days revising my WIP with these comments in mind. I think they added a lot to the story.

BetaReader

Then I received the comments from my paid editor.

I read through them twice. I pondered them. I told myself over and over again that editors are usually correct and these are changes I need to make.

But actually making them?

That hasn’t really happened easily. After more than a month, I have completed less than 1/3 of what I did in ten days for beta reader comments.

But then I’m not terribly surprised.

I read the comments again, and one recommended that there was so little going on in the story that I should consider chopping it down to a novella. That surprised me as one of my beta readers liked how plot driven this novel was.

But then who wants to be told about a character’s emotional state more than once in a romance novel? Yes, that was sarcasm. Sorry.

Interestingly, one of my beta readers wanted more description of character emotion.

Weddinghearthands
Getting here is the story.

Another comment recommended using flashbacks to tell the back story rather than have so much of it come through dialogue. After all, who is Auburn and Eli? That told me the editor hadn’t done any research on me, or read the part where I told her this was the second book of a series. It also told me she didn’t read much in the romance genre as I can’t remember once, in over thirty years of reading romance novels, where an author used a flashback. I’ve also read a lot of writing advice about not using them as it rips the reader out of your world.

I’m not certain the editor was revising a romance novel with a mystery supporting it. I think she was revising a mystery with a romance in it. But that’s not what I wrote. Or what I wanted to write.

I’m now more than a month away from when I received the editor’s advice. I will take some of it. For example, I will try to give you more insight into the villain and why he was doing what he was doing. Make him appear less one-dimensional and motivated by more than greed and jealousy. I can do that. I can also try to throw in a few more red herrings.

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But honestly, I am starting to see how bad advice can be worse than no advice at all. Worse yet is bad advice mixed with a bit of good. Trying to sort through it and pick out the parts that work, without swallowing the bad parts, is tricky.

It’s extremely hard to put so much of yourself into something like a book, then hand it out to a stranger. A professional, but still a stranger, and pay for their help to make it better.

It’s harder still when you’re not sure they’re right.

5 Reasons Why Things Are Stressful and Crazy

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I am beside myself these days, and it’s killing my creativity. Here are five stressors I am trying to control.

  1. Got My Edits Back

I am still new to working with freelance editors. I have in my mind what I think will happen, but so far, it has not been the case. I got the edits back on Seducing the Ice Queen. The editor made some good points, though I wish she would’ve also provided a path to fixing the issues she identified. Simply telling me something is broken is not the same as using experience to give me a nudge into what it would take to fix it. I could also tell she was not as experienced with the romance genre as I would have liked.

At first, the comments were crushing, and I put the novel away for a week. I’ve pondered them a bit more, thinking about some of the areas where she found issue. While I’m not going to change my purple prose, there are some things I can do to make the work better. I doubt I will use this editor again as I think finding a true romance editor would be the best way for me to learn and improve my writing.

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Feels like it most days.

 

2. Girls’ Rooms

They are done! I took us a while, especially the last little bits like getting black out blinds made and installed, but their rooms look terrific. Now, to keep them that way.

 

3. House Move

We had talked about moving to a larger home, then decided against it. Not only is a smaller mortgage and lower taxes a nice thing (our property taxes as a % of value of our home are some of the highest in the country), but we quickly discovered that finding a home in the school districts we wanted with trees and a bit of a yard was all but impossible. After seeing what was out there, and the price tags attached, we decided to stay in our current house.

MovingSucks
Maybe not that drastic…

 

4. Fitting Comfortably Into Our House

I know, right? Such troubles, but real enough for us. It’s amazing how much stuff you collect living in the same place for over a decade. Longest time I’ve lived in one place.

So once we decided to stay in our house, we committed to “fitting” into this house. We are going through closets, desks, dressers, the basement, etc. and attempting to do a hard purge. My question to myself and my spouse is, “Would we have paid to move it?”. If the answer is no, it goes in the Goodwill pile. We’ve been very good supporters of Goodwill these days.

 

5. Kitchen Remodel

*ducks*

Yes, you’d think the chaos of fixing up the girls’ rooms would’ve cured me, but I’ve hated out kitchen since we moved into the house. We did a partial remodel 12 years ago, and the company that did it did an awful job. So bad that tile flooring that should last 50 years is already pulling up. Yeah. Bad. That and our cabinets are vintage 1970s. They are not in great shape, and the blind corners make half of the cabinet space unusable. We’ve hired a designer who has put together a lovely plan. Now, we interview contractors… Wish me luck!!

KitchenRemodel