Anywhoo, I decided to put the contemporary books aside for a moment. Just couldn't get my mind set into them. Instead, I decided to play with a sci-fi story idea I had hanging around for awhile. It's essentially a marriage of convenience story-- or maybe in this case an inconvenient, forced contracted sexual alliance. The hero is a retired cyborg soldier with the unfortunate but duly earned nickname of The Beast of Beltrane-3. I've got some vaguish ideas for connected stories featuring his fellow brother-in-arms cyborgs, but that's for late.r.
These are the models for my H: Griffen Heller and h: Neri Senator. I know the actor's name is Ty Olsson (and he's Canadian to boot!). Not sure who the female model is. I'd love some more pics of her as inspiration, though.
Dang they look good together! --but he needs a tan :-P I've had pics of him on my hard drive for about a week now, but just found her pic this morning.
Last thing, I'm doing a Fast Draft with Catrina Brown for the next couple of weeks, so I'll post my progress in the comments to keep me honest. *g* I'm only aiming for 10 pages/day though. I know enough about how I write to know that I can only turn off my internal editor so much.
2 comments:
What exactly is a fast draft, ma'am?
I think it's something Candace Haven came up with. She now offers a workshop for it, but I was on a yahoo group she ran that she did it for free. Essentially, you turn your internal editor off. You do a lot of prep work - character GMC, background, and plot out your story/scenes (I guess to the degree that works for you because for some peeps, the minute they've written out a detailed outline, the urge to write the story is gone.) Once you've done your prep work, you commit to writing 20 pages/day. =:-o I know, right? lol. Lots of peep swear by this though. At some point that push to write to meet the target, becomes easier.
If you get stuck, just skip ahead and write another scene. You can leave yourself placeholders if you want (ie: "write scene in restaurant where H/h argue" you can come back later and write the scene in the restaurant).
What you end up with is a butt ugly, bare-bones, but fully completed story.
Now you edit and revise, and edit and revise, and edit and revise your little heart out until the story is ready for critting or sending to your cps.
But at least you have, theoretically, *completed* a single-title lenght book in 20 to 30 days.
For myself, I'm modifying this approach a bit because just bulldozing ahead with the writing ultimately doesn't work *for me*. I've tried this many times with the same result. I lose emotional connectivity to the story/characters and the writing becomes a slog and everything I write seems boring and dead.
So, this time around, I've turned off my internal editor enough so that I'm not forever tweaking phrasing/description. I've hardly written a word on setting and clothing or facial expressions, or what a character may be feeling, deciding if I should use a beat or a dialogue tag.
Interestingly enough, all this is making the dialogue work a little harder at this initial stage.
Also, while I enjoy revising/editing to a degree. I don't want to end up throwing out 1/2 the story or doing a crazy amount of rewrites because the first draft was essentially written as a stream of conciousness. lol.
I just googled,and here's a link that describe Fast Draft pretty decently:
http://jamigold.com/2011/11/can-you-fast-draft/
If you try this, good luck. And join me on twitter (where I'm doing a series of 1K1hr or post in the comments on my facebook page.
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