There’s nothing quite like the thrill I get from building a world and populating it with people, customs, situations, and a history. I know we’re supposed to focus on character, and how plot is character and all that, but I just get this pumped-up thrill at coming up with a world for the people in my head to live in. Because the people in my head, to me at least, seem like everyday, average joes. But the worlds in which they live their “just trying to get by” lives are…special. Maybe it’s the armchair anthropologist in me, but I love seeing and imagining disparate cultures encounter one another.

I hate going to the grocery store. I’m there every week (sometimes twice a week), and it’s the same thing–buy food, yadda yadda. So I play this game when I’m there. It’s basically an imaginary game. “If I were shopping for provisions in ___, this would be like ____.” Sometimes I’m an Ancient Egyptian going to the bazaar. Sometimes I’m a Greek or Roman. Lots of time, I’m shopping in an outpost planet, far from the glittering center of my galaxy, and marveling at the lack of technology. Yeah, I’m a geek…so what?

What my little exercise encourages me to do is to step outside the boundaries of reference.  By viewing common activities through a foreign frame of reference, I end up distilling the essence of the experience, and understanding the underlying commonalities that lie therein.  The exchange of items of worth for goods and services on a (somewhat) equal value.  The fact that a little slip of paper can be worth nothing (my grocery list on the back of an envelope) or save me anywhere from one to five bucks (yay double coupon days).

It also highlights the effect that setting can have on a person.  My local grocery is laid out differently than the one a few exits down on the interstate.  In my imagination, the bazaar in Thebes is a vastly different place than the provisions shop and junk spacecraft flea-mart at the waystation just outside the jumpgate to the Perflaxian system.

Setting itself can have such a significant impact on a story that it creates a whole different experience, even with the same essential characters.  I’ve been working on an SF romantic adventure (yes, with hawt secks in it, too) that has gone through several iterations in the “noodling” stage (the stage after fleshing out characters where I “audition” them in several different plot scenarios likely to show up at some point in the story).  Recently, I ripped apart the setting and placed them in their current setting.  The entire story has changed, although the characters are the same folks.  They’re reacting differently, and the relationships between them are generating different conflict.

It’s an amazing thing, this writing gig.  I’m lucky I get to do it so much.

If you’re a writer, what’s your writing process like? Do you write, and pronounce it golden, having plotted out, hashed and rehashed your ideas before typing “Chapter One?” Or do you start from some arbitrary point and write whatever emerges from your subconscious, and then when the dust settles, you tear it apart, keep what works and chuck what doesn’t? Or does your writing process involve a combination of all three, and maybe a little something else.

Mine seems to change over time. Way back when I was young and foolish, I believed every word I wrote was Pure Gold. Now, of course, I realize that much of it was as cheesy as the K-Tel albums of the same name. Honestly, I couldn’t really figure out how to revise what I’d written, without serious outside help.

Many years later, of course, I now have a much better grasp on the mechanics of story–of plotting, and character arcs…and of revision. I know how to distill the essence of a scene and identify the points it makes and why it’s there…and sometimes even why it is where it is. To be fair, I did go to school for this a long time ago, but only for other authors’ work (authors who were, 90 % of the time, quite dead, and whose works had at least four hundred years to percolate through societal consciousness).

Right now, however, I’m currently caught between two processes. One is outlined by Karen Wiesner’s First Draft in 30 Days system. The system is actually a method for developing a very detailed outline in those 30 days, and counting that outline as the “draft.”  It’s very useful for people like me, who have limited formal writing time.    Having a scene outlined, knowing where it goes and why, and knowing what needs to be in it, is a theoretical savior of huge chunks of writing time and huge chunks of rewriting.  It allows you to perfect the plot progression before you write huge swathes of story that suddenly make no sense once you realize the story you want to tell isn’t the one you started out telling.
However, my second method is full of processes that are intrinsically appealing to me.  If you’ve ever been involved in NaNoWriMo - National Novel-Writing Month, or a BIAW - Book In A Week, you can understand the advantages of turning off your internal editor and just rolling with your instincts as far as they’ll take you.  For those of us who are obsessive about putting our characters in the perfect set-up, or who plot from a point that happens fairly early in the story, this “blast through until the end no matter how sucky it seems” approach helps us get past the obsessive noodling, and forces us to make the rest of the story into more than just an amorphous future blob of “To Be Written” brainmush.

I’ve just completed a novella for a Liquid Silver anthology slated for Halloween ‘06 entitled A Witch In Time.  My contribution is, of course, the futuristic portion, and came in at just over 17,000 words.  But I didn’t write 17,000 words.  It was more like 35,000.  I started the story, wrote it about halfway, and then realized that this was not the droid I was looking for.  This story wasn’t the one I was writing.

So I ripped it apart and started again.  And again.  And again.  Until finally, my critique partner, the lovely and talented and just a bit twisted Roxy Harte suggested that I do something just wacky and off the wall.  “I’d love to see some sex on a parade float,” she said.

And the current incarnation of “Hounded” was born.

So hat tip to Roxy for kicking my creativity in the head…or in her case, flogging it where it hurts.

I started out writing Hounded with the 30-days method of plotting, so I fortunately did have a plot–at least an idea of where I wanted the story to go, events-wise.  A few days with Rox faithfully flogging me to write this scene or that helped me get to the scenes I needed to write.  In essence, I took two extremes in terms of writing process,  and found a happy middle ground.

It still shocks me.

…too bad it seems to be on my head half the time. :/

So this past weekend, I attended Lori Foster’s Readers and Authors Get-Together and had a great time at this relaxed and informal event. Around 45 authors were in attendance and almost 3000 USD was raised for our local battered womens’ shelter. I got to meet and chat with readers and other authors, some of whom I met for the first time, and others who I’ve known for years through various channels. As soon as I found out I could attend, I began anticipating it, because I knew I’d be in the company of readers and writers…and I could have some adult conversation that didn’t center around my kids.

I don’t think anyone can adequately imagine the helpless horror I felt when I finally arrived at the event on Saturday…and not five minutes into my first conversation the talk turned to…my kids.

Back in the BC era (before children), I used to chuckle at my coworkers who came in with kid stories. Oh, sure, they were entertaining, because what’s not funny about flushing a peanut butter sandwich down a toilet, or finding silly putty stuffed in the toes of your dress shoes? Especially as these things weren’t currently happening to me. But I always wondered why people talked so much about their kids.

The joke is on me now…because now I know. I sort of sat back in fascinated horror and watched myself tell people kid stories all day long. Instead of discussing the trends in publishing, or the exciting life I lead as a writer of sexy love stories (shyeeah), or even the e-published versus print published perpetual debate, I’m talking about finding Legos in my underwear drawer and my constant battle to keep the sand in the sandbox on the patio versus having it tracked into my house. And on the drive home, I worry that I no longer have much in common with people who cannot recite the release date of the latest talking animals movie off the tops of their heads or have intimate knowledge of the entire cast of Spongebob. So if you’re reading this blog and I bored you with kid stories, please accept my heartfelt apologies. If you were by some miracle enchanted by my children, then bless your heart, I’m glad I’m not completely socially inept.

So. Here I am, under a tight deadline for a new anthology to which I have the privilege of contributing a Futuristic. The subject matter for me is a goldmine of ideas, and I’m suffering no shortage of them. My shortage, however, lies in words. This is supposed to be a novella, dammit. And an erotic one at that. Unfortunately for me, my mind has chosen to go hog-wild and ape-shit on building a world (or actually, several) populated with all sorts of creatures strange and wonderful. My characters whine plaintively for attention…

Now couple that with the almost constant feeling of brain-emptiness I seem to be experienceing these days and you get this mental El Nino that’s wreaking havoc with writing systems all over the landscape of my mind.  However, when the wind comes…the smart sailor rides out the storm, and if that sailor is clever enough, she can maybe ride on it.  But only if she’s got sails.  My sails are writing exercises that allow me to focus my thoughts and hitch a ride on the story waiting to be told.  I’m always on the lookout for new sailcloth, though…so…if anybody out there has favorite writing exercises to get the juices flowing, I’m all up for it.