Happy 2014!

Greetings, Earthlings Readers of this Blog!

I think I've given up on regularly updating over here (and I've been kind of spotty on my LJ). Most of my organization and time seems to be devoted to Tumblr. If you ever want to get a bird's eye view of what I'm doing over there, my archive page there is a pretty great way to see what kind of inanity I've been getting into lately.

But in the meantime, I've also been kind of busy, writing-wise. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I've devoted some serious time and effort into working on That Which is Greater again. I feel a little more comfortable to tell you it's for the Winter Break story, one of the three I promised to finish. I'm working on the fifth chapter (Max has the first four chapters to beta) and at this time, I'm uncertain as to how many chapters there will be. At least six, it looks like. Also, administratively, I've renamed the Winter Break story on AO3 to Snowball Fight for reasons I'm sure you can figure out. When I've completed the story, I'll let you know a posting date.

A Little Friday Fun - Greater!

A/N: This takes place between New Year's Eve and Happiest Place on Earth. Enjoy!

Chuck heard them when they came back, mostly because his weighs-less-than-one-hundred-pounds daughter somehow managed to sound like an elephant all of the time. Also, she didn’t believe in quiet chatter. She must have been in a good mood, for he could hear her all the way from his office/bedroom. Since he was at a good place to stop—his computer needed to render anyway—he picked up his empty soda glass and headed downstairs to greet the newly returned.

He found them in the kitchen, where Sarah was helping Violet out of her winter coat. “Hey, strangers,” he said.

“Daddy!” Violet rocketed at him as though it had been weeks instead of hours since she’d seen him last, leaving Sarah holding her coat. “You’re here!”

“Where else would I be? How was the movie?”

“Even better this time. Giselle was so pretty and I wasn’t even scared of the evil witch, not even when she turned into a dragon.” Violet let him go to bounce away, twirling around as she did so. Chuck raised an eyebrow at Sarah. “Though it’s silly.”

“What’s silly?”

“Dragons should have wings so they can fly.”

Sneak Peek: Greater #12!

Chapter 12, Title TBA, will be dropping tomorrow whenever I get around to, you know, remembering I am supposed to be putting a chapter up (seriously, guys, I am flaky). The good news is that it IS completed, but not beta’d at the time of writing this post. And even better news, I wrote 1500 words of Violet chattering to Carina last night. And if you think that all of Sarah’s biggest secrets (that Violet knows) aren’t getting babbled at 500 words a minute, you clearly don’t know me well. Hit the link to read more!

The Art of Finishing Up

Fezzywhig asked me something on Tumblr today, and I thought it might make a good writing entry on the blog, so I’m putting it over here, too. As with every piece of writing advice I give, please keep in mind that this may not necessarily apply to every writer. We’re all different, and those differences should be celebrated.

Fezzywhig asked: Apologies if this was asked before. As a prolific writer, have you ever been tempted to go back to a finished work and tweak or change it? Also a sideways question. Has anyone addressed you by one of your nom de plumes’s in person? If so how do you overcome the fanboy awkwardness?

Hey! I think somebody has asked me this before, but not in a public setting. And I definitely don’t mind getting asked a question multiple times, as long as that question isn’t, “IS THERE GOING TO BE A SEQUEL?” (while not commenting on the fic itself) or “WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO UPDATE SO AND SO?” when I’ve already said that that story is on hiatus. Also, a lot of it has to do with the tone of the question being asked. :)

To answer your first question: I’m tempted, a lot, to go back and change my work. Every time I reread it, I see something I could tweak or even rewrite. Just watch me reread That Which is Greater sometime. It will enlighten you as to how hard somebody can grit their teeth. There are entire chapters of that I would cut or rewrite in a heartbeat.

Now here’s where some authors are about to disagree with me because, even though I’m tempted to go back and rewrite things (like the first chapter of Fates, for example), I don’t, and I won’t. My philosophy is that once something is published, it gets minor cosmetic changes and nothing else (like, fixing a grammatical error, or using Angry Birds in 2002 on accident). I don’t believe in going back and rewriting my old fics because to me, those stories have been told. They’re done. Hopefully, I told them the best way I could, but it’s time to move on and to use the things I learned writing those fics to write newer and hopefully better tales.

Nanowrimo Survival Guide, Part II

This edition of the guide has some handy links for you, and not too much else at the moment. So, without further ado, let’s dive right in.

Write or Die

Write or Die is a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you’re fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences.

You know that lab experiment where you have to keep doing something or you get zapped? WOD is like the Word Processor version of that. There’s downloadable apps, it’s online if you want to use it there, too. You can customize how long you want to write and how “gentle” you want it to be when you stop writing. Kamikaze mode, just FYI, is insane, and if you do that one, you must be a glutton for punishment.

Written Kitten

Written Kitten was created by Skud, Emily and contributors. We like positive reinforcement, so we decided to make something a bit like writeordie but cuter and fuzzier. Images are randomly selected from Flickr's “most interesting” photos matching the tags “kitten” and “cute”. Enjoy!

WK is like WOD’s much nicer maiden aunt who gives you cookies and kittens instead of beating you mercilessly about the head. If you’re convinced your writing is lacking small, fuzzy creatures, it’s the perfect solution.

Scrivener

Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft.

Scrivener, to me, is like Evernote and MS Word had a baby and it grew up to be Captain Awesome. It’s a great program. It’s a word processor, but it lets you store a bunch of different things in the same place—word documents, research, outlines, images, notes, etc. It’s great if you’re not organized (like me!), and it’s powerful and easy to use. Plus, the company offers an extended trial period during Nanowrimo.

They Fight Crime!

He's a Nobel prize-winning moralistic ex-con with a mysterious suitcase handcuffed to his arm. She's a high-kicking nymphomaniac mermaid on the trail of a serial killer. They fight crime!

Need a plot? Look no farther!

Try a Character Sheet

You can use this one here or try Googling a few. Fill them out about your character, or if you really want to get creative, AS your character. Get to know the people you’ll be spending November with while you can.

The Nanowrimo Survival Guide, Part I

I can’t actually give definitive rules for Nanowrimo because, let’s face it, I’ve always been of the opinion that no two writers are exactly alike. It’s like telling all artists to paint with only one brand of paint, or on one type of canvas, or even one category of subject. You just don’t do that.

That said, I’ve done Nanowrimo a few times, and I’ve only “lost” once (I moved cross-country in mid-November, so I kind of think I had an excuse, but you may proceed to mock me now), so I could probably give some advice. Which I will proceed to do after this fascinating introductory segment coming up right now.

So for the uninitiated, Nanowrimo stands from National Novel Writing Month. It takes place in November of every year, and has for the past several years. It was founded by an insane man named Chris Baty, who gathered a few of his close friends near and said, “Hey, why don’t we write a novel? In a month? Doesn’t that sound like a great way to cut through the excuses that get in the way of writing novels?”

And so it began. And the next year, more came to study at the feet of Chris Baty, and the next year, they brought their friends, and it grew into such an event that we regularly crash the Nanowrimo homepage. Hundreds of thousands of writers flock to this website every year with one goal: 50,000 words in 30 days.

Monday Updates #2

It’s Monday!

...that should probably never be said with excitement, huh? Well, even so, it is Monday, which means if you’re reading this, you’ve survived the weekend, or you’ve got really good wi-fi in whatever part of heaven or hell you ended up in. I guess if you’ve got eternity, that might be a good time to read my blog.

Frea Interprets Vonnegut - Rule #8

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Hey, look, I’m back and finishing this series! FINALLY! Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

We’re taught the value of the all-encompassing twist and the shocking blindside (in TV, that’s literal. Think of how many shows have relied on literal blindsides—there are two in the first season of Chuck alone. Hi, Nemesis and Intersect!). We’re taught that we must be cleverer than our audiences, that we must stun and dazzle and amaze at all costs. Keeping the suspense up to the last possible second is the most important thing about writing ever, according to today’s standards.

Vonnegut, here, is saying differently.

Frea Interprets Vonnegut - Rule #7

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

The alternate title of this rule: you can’t win them all.

Writing is psychological. With the advent of self-publishing overtaking traditional publishing, the idea seems to be that any random Joe off of the street can sit down at the computer and put out a book, and maybe they can. But what I’ve found is that writing can be the greatest thing ever and it can also be the worst feelings you will experience. You are literally baring your soul for the world to see, and a lot of those people just don't get that. Remember that narcissism I talked about earlier in this series? Probably not, as it was a couple months ago. But writing is narcissistic at its very core. You’re telling people that they should pay attention to you, that what you have to say is important. And because of that, it’s natural to want to be universally-liked. When somebody doesn’t like something you’ve written, it can feel like a punch to the gut. Some writers get defensive (I’m certainly guilty of this), others get depressed, and some will actually stop writing.

It’s actually hypocritical of me, somewhat, to tell you Don’t let them get to you because in truth, they’ve gotten to me a few times. But then, I’ve never claimed to be perfect—awesomely close, maybe, but that’s another blog post for another day—so I can say that:

Don’t let them get to you.

You will drive yourself crazy trying to please everyone. So: don’t. Pick your ideal audience and write for them. For me, I’m a Chuck fan that likes intelligent characters that aren’t humiliated for the sake of the plot or a silly joke. I enjoy a good romantic build-up, amusing one-liners, and a plot that won’t fall to shambles if poked hard enough . So I imagine my audience is the same and write for that audience. I keep that person—basically a mirror-me—in mind while I write, and I think: Am I explaining this correctly? Could this be clearer? Will they find this funny? Writing, normally a solitary activity, actually becomes something of a dialogue as I open it up to my imaginary audience.

… This is starting to sound a little like A Beautiful Mind, isn’t it? Rest assured, my imaginary audience isn’t sitting beside my computer desk, smoking an imaginary pipe. Though, honestly, I wouldn’t mind it so much if it was Paul Bettany…

So that’s what I think this rule is saying. Come up with the audience/person you want to impress and set out to impress them. If people don’t like your story, screw ’em.* At least you wrote the best, most honest story you could, then.

- Frea

Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

*If your story is universally hated, though, you might want to reevaluate your audience. Or possibly you’re a troll.

Frea Interprets Vonnegut — Rule #6

Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

Hm...I’m going to be honest for a minute here: I get the feeling that this might be the rule everybody has been waiting to see me interpret. “Yay! Finally! The sadist rule! The one Frea has completely taken to heart! If there’s anybody that knows how to be sadistic to characters, it’s Frea O’Scanlin!”

Which, okay, point. But seriously, I hate being mean to my characters.

Frea Interprets Vonnegut — Rule #5

Start as close to the end as possible.

Frea Interprets Vonnegut — Rule #4

Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.

Frea Interprets Vonnegut — Rule #3

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Frea Interprets Vonnegut — Rule #2

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

You know what turns me off of most fiction faster than anything else?

• “Improper grammar!”
• “Didn’t do the research!”
• “Summary says ‘first story/wrote while drunk lolol!’”

...Okay, there are a lot of turn-offs for me. Improper grammar is probably my number one pet peeve (people: these are the reason beta readers exist. Seriously), but a major, major, major turn-off is unsympathetic characters. Especially unsympathetic main characters.

Frea Interprets Vonnegut — Rule #1

Hi, all. I got bored and started dissecting Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Rules. I've got them set up to post automatically throughout the week, so feel free to keep checking back and see "Frea's interpretations of a much better writer's words."

They should be...interesting. At the very least.

Something to Think About

Okay, so today I'm just posting Kurt Vonnegut's 8 rules of creative writing. I was given a handout with these on them in my senior creative writing class in college (yes, to nobody's surprise, I was a creative writing/screenwriting minor), and I randomly revisited them tonight. They're handy for every single writing situation (number 3 in particular), so I thought I'd share.

Enjoy!

Lights! Camera! ...Now what?

Hey, everybody! Compared to some, I haven't been around the Chuck fandom for a long time. I mean, the great and mighty mxpw has a story on the second page of the archives at fanfiction.net, and if that's not a sign of old age, I don't know what—I mean, wow, mxpw is great, right? So full of wisdom and so smart, too!

Anyway, what I was getting at before I insulted Maximus, I haven't been around the fandom a long time in comparison to some of the greats, so I missed some big things in the early days. One of those things was Sharpasamarble, who's still working on his five-part series that starts with Chuck vs. Auld Lang Syne. And if you want a good measuring point as to how long this series has been around? Auld Lang Syne was started during season ONE. And Sharp still updates on the latest in the series, Chuck vs. the Watch. He was one of the first authors I read when I started reading Chuckfic and is one of my favorite authors today, so you can imagine my sheer excitement and glee when he volunteered to write something for Castle Inanity.

Yes, I said VOLUNTEERED. In no way, shape, or form do I have Sharpasamarble chained up in the basement next to Maximus.  That is RUMOR, people, not fact!

One of Sharp's writing strengths is writing action. I'm a bad person: I skip ahead during action scenes on the page, but with his, I usually end up paying attention, so I asked him to give some advice about just that today (how to write action, not how to pay attention). Recently, Sharp's taken some time off writing fanfiction, so you may not have seen him around. I kind of feel like he has a good excuse, though, since he's been focused on writing people actually pay him for. Check out his article after the break!

mxpw's Scribe Theater Three Thousand

So it seemed like the first part of my two-part introspective on Frea was a fair success. Awesome. I wasn’t sure how it’d go over, but people seemed to like it and find some merit to my analysis. And that’s good, because Frea has ordered me to do the second part, and well, I’d like to avoid the lash, so here it is.

The point of this column is world building: what it is, how you do it, and how do you do it well? These are all tricky questions to answer, as quality world building is fundamental to quality writing, and without it, your story will almost certainly fall apart.

mxpw's Scribe Theater Three Thousand

I think it’s a pretty safe assumption that most of you reading this right now are Chuck fans. We all know the very basic plot of the show, right? Underachieving nerd suddenly downloads a massive computer database full of the United States’ most important secrets into his brain. It’s like Johnny Mnemonic meets The Matrix meets James Bond meets Get Smart meets Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show meets West Side Story meets, etc… You get the point.

mxpw's Scribe Theater Three Thousand

So earlier I wrote about suspending your disbelief while watching TV or reading a book. I talked about how important it is to immerse your audience in the world you've created for them because if you don't, they'll no longer be your audience. Well, I touched on that briefly, but now I'm going to go more in-depth with the whole idea.

I am going to discuss how you get your audience to suspend their belief and then I'm going to cover what happens when you don't.

How to make your readers/audience suspsend their disbelief

There is a lot that goes into this, as it's such a broad range of ideas, but ultimately, it all comes down to one thing: you must committ. Frea and I have discussed this what seems ad nauseum on this blog but it really is one of the single most important tenets a writer should follow. Commit. No matter what you do, commit to it. Not committing to your plan of action is the fastest way to breaking your audience's interest in your product or ruining their suspension of disbelief.

Typically there are two ways most shows go about convincing their audience to suspend their disbelief (this applies primarily to premises that are fantastical or full of science fiction elements): they either play it completely straight and serious or they introduce satirical elements into their presentation and present it as a