New words from the new story!

After stalling on the "YAGSIP" (young adult ghost story in progress) for the better part of a month, I talked at my writing friends last night trying to figure out why I couldn't push into the 2nd quarter of the story.  They were enormously patient, letting me fret and fume my way into some clarity.

Here is a brief snippet at the beginning of the second "act".  Marco and Lorelei are both ghosts in an abandoned amusement park.

   I let myself drift through the park, letting the breeze carry me wherever it wanted. Yellowed newspaper skittered across the remains of the food court. They used to sell the most amazing fried dough. The powdered sugar coated everything, sticky fingers, your clothes, even the air and more than anything else, that was the smell of the park to me. Now it was gone and even my memory of it was failing. I could feel the seductive pull of oblivion.

    I floated away from the food court, shutting out the chaotic echo of competing music blaring from all the rides mingled with the laughter of a summer night crowd. Without memory, there wouldn’t be any pain. The spirit world promised peace. But then there wouldn’t be any Marco either. Anger boiled up inside me, its heat only an illusion, but a familiar one. Without it, I would be lost, with no way to find my killers.

    Besides, no one returned from the spirit realm. The few ghosts I knew about who were able to settle just vanished, with idiot smiles lingering after them like some spectral version of the Cheshire cat. What if it all was a big lie? Just like the whole heaven and hell thing I spent my life believing in, thanks to my mother’s obsession with the Church and all its saints. No, this was all there was: the unhappy dead, locked in an eternal twilight by their own misery. So be it. I’d be ready to let it all go and die for good if only Tess could help me get my revenge.

    The ever-present wind wrapped around me like a cloak made of ice. It siphoned the anger from me, tightening its grip as it fed and I struggled to slip free. Not wind, exactly, nothing that the living would feel except the most sensitive and even then, only as a momentary chill in the strongest of sunlight. It, too, made promises. The stronger it became, the clearer it whispered. Let go. Let us carry your rage. We can make it a beautiful weapon, far more powerful than your paltry specter could ever achieve.

    There were so many times over the past seven years I came close to listening to it, giving all my pain over to make the mordant field even stronger than it already was. But not now. Not when I could almost taste justice. I shuddered and stopped struggling, letting my body dissolve into fog. The coils grasped after me, but couldn’t keep me solid.

    "I’m surprised."

    I looked down. Lorelei stood staring up at where I had been. I didn’t want to talk to anyone now, least of all to her, but something more than simple curiosity pulled me back into shape. "What do you want from me now?"

    A brief sadness flickered across her face before she tightened her lips and narrowed her eyes. "You’re getting stronger." She didn’t look happy about it.

    "Disappointed? Maybe next time it’ll take me off your hands."

    Lorelei shook her head. "Every ghost it subsumes feeds its hunger and makes it harder for us to keep the balance. If you were going to sacrifice yourself, I wish you would have done it years ago. Before your rage could provide it a three course meal."

    "How sweet. Someone might even think you were worried about me."

    She clenched her teeth together, the muscles in her jaw bunching. Coils of mordant energy swirled around her ankles, stirring the dark fabric of her long skirts. "Watch yourself, Lorelei, or you might end up as tonight’s snack."

    "I think not." She kicked at the thickening fog. Where her boot touched it, the fog retreated.

    "Nice trick."

    Her hands tightened into fists. "I don’t know why I waste my time on you."

    That was a good question.

FM Merry Go Round Tour Topic: Revision

First, my apologies for my late post on the Merry-Go-Round-Blog-Tour.  The holiday weekend got away from me and I completely forgot that the 10th of the month was my day to write.  Ack!

So here are my thoughts on revision. 

It may make me an odd duck amongst my writing friends, but I absolutely love the revision process.  For me, most of the pain is in the first draft.  No matter what I've tried to do for organization, from full on outlining to seat of my pants plotting, to somewhere in between, the initial draft always runs into problems. 

Sometimes it's not trusting the reader.  Sometimes it's not capturing the characters' voices fully enough.  Sometimes it's plot holes.  Sometimes it's pacing.

No matter what the issue is, I know I can tackle it in the revision.  There's a precision and an elegance to revising that's rarely there for me on the first draft.  I'm also an amateur potter, so I can use a pottery analogy:

First drafts are centering and pulling up the clay walls into the rough shape of what you want the piece to be.

Revision is the shaping pulls and the trimming process. The place where your vision of what the clay can be comes into tangible reality.

I am a serviceable writer, but I am a really dedicated and hard working re-writer.  If you ask my critique partners, they might tell you that I am a glutton for punishment, aka, really strong no-holds-barred crit.  Yes, that's true.  Except that I don't see it as punishment.  I see it as re (again) vision (seeing).  To see my story through the eyes of a reader and understand what works and doesn't work to tell that story is a gift beyond measure.  It is through the gift of that vision that I can return to a messy draft and craft something cohesive and whole from it.

That doesn't mean changing everything someone comments on.  It does mean analyzing patterns in the writing to find the places that lack clarity and improve them.

Right now, I'm slogging through the first draft of the YAGSIP (YA ghost story in progress).  The writing is going reasonably well, but I've run into a plot snag.  How do I know this?  I would rather edit something else then open the file for the new story.  But I will forge ahead, comforting myself with knowing that no matter how terrible the words that land on the page are today, they will be vastly improved and sharpened when I wrap my editing/revision brain around them. 

Happy re/vision, all!


Check out the revision thoughts of my fellow FMWriters here, where you will find a list of all the tour participants and links to their individual blogs.

Today's words from the ghost story in progress

I love when characters tell me things that I hadn't planned.  Yesterday I was writing this scene with my main character, Tess and her friend Nicole.  I didn't know why Nicole had to be there and it's hard to get pumped up to write a scene that meanders around looking for its purpose.  Then Nicole told me why she was important.  Here's a snippet from the day's writing.  Remember, this is ragged, first draft stuff.

      Nicole parked by the broken fence. "Some people swear this place is haunted."

      I jerked around in my seat to stare at her, my heart beating hard. "Did you ever see a ghost here?"

      She laughed. "Girlfriend, the only spirits I ever saw in this place were the ones I brought with me in little bottles," she said.

      I ducked under the slit in the fence and slipped inside the park. Nicole followed right behind me. "Jesus, Nic, I don't need a babysitter." I hefted my backpack. "Look. All set. Juice, granola bars, and chocolate."

      "Hey, you called me. And this is a full service taxi."

      "Whatever." I glanced back at her, watching out of the corner of my eye as we walked across the abandoned midway towards the bumper cars. If Marco was here, would Nicole see him? And if she didn't see him, did it mean he wasn't real?

      My bike was leaning where I'd left it. The sun poured in through the broken slats of the wood lathe surrounding the pavilion, casting long think shadows along the floor. I studied the patterns, looking for Marco but all I could see was the rusting cars and dead leaves. Staring at the alternating stripes of light and dark, I reached for my camera.

      "You didn't tell me you were on a photo shoot."

      I shrugged. "I said you didn't need to stay."

      Nicole stood behind me and off to the side. She was good about staying away from my peripheral vision and out of the path of the light. "What are you taking these for?"

      She didn't know I hadn't touched my camera since Thomas died--until yesterday  and I wasn't going to tell her I was ghost hunting. "Independent study project."

      "Let me see."

      I turned on the display and showed Nicole some of my shots.

      "You make it look almost beautiful," she said, comparing the pictures to the filthy arena.

      I looked up, staring out at the decaying place. "It is beautiful."

      Nicole snorted. "It's a wreck. And an eyesore. And a dangerous liability for the city."

      "God, you sound just like your dad." Her father was on the town council.

      "Well, get all your pictures now," she said, shrugging.
      "Why?"

      "Next month this place will be splinters."

      I grabbed the camera from her and clutched it to my chest. "What?"

      "The council voted on it a few weeks ago. They're worried about getting slapped with a lawsuit the city can't afford. This place is no man's land. The original owners declared bankruptcy and walked away. Some kid died here, don't you remember?"

      "What happened," I whispered. A chill walked its way up my spine and I looked up, certain I was being watched.

      "Well it was five or six years ago. Just before they closed the place. They say it was a park employee who snuck in after hours. He fell into the log flume pool and drowned. Probably drunk or high. There was a big investigation and they cited the owners for all sorts of safety violations." Nicole shrugged. "That's why they canceled our 6^th grade class trip here."

      That I did remember. I wasn't going to go, but Thomas was pissed as hell. "Do you remember who it was?" My throat was so tight I could barely get the words out.

      She shook her head. "Some high school kid from Chicago."

      A bitter wind kicked up dirt and scattered the litter at my feet. I shivered, looking for Marco, not sure what frightened me more--seeing him or just seeing the dust scattering the early morning light.

      "Come on, you ready to go?"

      I took the camera off idiot mode and started playing with the f-stop and shutter speed settings. "Why don't you head out? I'm going to be a while." I kept my voice as casual as I could. There wasn't any way I was going to leave now. Not until I could talk to Marco again. I didn't know how the whole ghost thing worked, but you couldn't haunt a place that didn't exist, right? If Thomas was here somewhere, I needed to find out. Marco was my only lead.

      "You sure you're okay?"

      I tossed her my pack. "Go ahead. Look inside. Portable meter, juice, food. I'm all set. No crisis today. Promise."

      "Pinky swear?"

      I smiled and nodded. She set the pack down without opening it.

      "Call me if you need anything, okay?"

      "Deal." My hands were twitchy on the camera. The icy breeze sliced through my thin jacket, but I wasn't going to give Nicole any reason to stay and try to convince me to leave. I had to be here today and I had to be alone.

Playing in a New Sandbox

Every time I start a new novel, it's a different experience.  While many things about the process are the same, for me, there's no cruising on autopilot.  Part of that is deliberately working on different characters and keeping the stories fresh with new voices and structures.  Part of it is that every blank page is new and terrifying in unique ways.

I did think, in my more naive days, that writing the first book was the hardest and that after that you had the roadmap all set.

I wish I could say that were true.  In reality, I still struggle with every story, trying to stay on that bleeding edge where I keep pushing myself to be a better writer.

This new story is interesting.  It's not the first time I've done alternating points of view, nor is it the first time I've done 1st person, but it is the first time I've worked with alternating first person points of view.  The challenge is differentiating the voices so that the reader never has any doubt who is speaking in any given scene or chapter.

First person is hard for me.  It usually takes me some time to find the character's authentic voice and not find my own voice intruding.  But I tried to work on this in 3rd person.  The story decidedly didn't cooperate.

Here's a brief snippet of my protagonist, Tess.  She's a 17 yo HS senior, mourning the death of her twin brother who killed himself and his girlfriend driving drunk a few months before.  She's also an insulin dependent diabetic who just experienced a severe blood sugar crisis.  The story largely takes place in an abandoned amusement park. (And this is first draft material--you have been warned!  LOL)

Photo by Timm Seuss, used under a creative commons license

We hobbled over to the bench, Nicole doing most of the work and I sat down more like a sack of potatoes than a person. But at least I didn't slither back onto the floor. The world was more or less staying put. Nicole's face was a set of round circles, from her dark eyes to the worried shape of her lips. "Wow, I think I'm going to live."

Nicole loomed over me, a red flush spreading over her dark skin. "Next time call a freaking ambulance."

"I'm sorry--"

"You stopped speaking to me. Not one word from you since Thomas' service." She pronounced it the Spanish way. Tomas. Her accent always got twice as strong when she was pissed. "And then you drag me out here to save your ass? You could have died." She crossed her arms over her chest, hugging herself. "If you get yourself killed, I'm not going to be the one to tell your folks."

She glared at me until I looked away and sucked down the last of the goo. I shook my head. It wasn't personal. Looking down at the wrapper in my hands was easier than figuring out what to say. I smoothed it out against my leg, listening to the plastic crinkle in the strained silence. Raspberry Flavored Energy Gel Blast. It was what marathoners used when they were running. "Where the hell did you get this crap?"

"It's mine. I started running. After." She shrugged. "Quit smoking, too. Cold turkey."

"You? Run?" Nicole hated anything remotely related to exercise. She stayed skinny on a steady diet of caffeine, cigarettes, and not sleeping. I laughed, but it ended in a wheeze and my head started throbbing.

"You think you're the only one who hurt because he died?" Nicole turned her back to me, but not before I saw her eyes fill with tears.

"I'm sorry," I whispered.

"It was like I lost both of you."

A gust of wind kicked up the trash at my feet, sending crumpled cigarette packs and condom wrappers skittering along the arena. The air sliced through my thin jacket. My body started to shiver so violently I almost tumbled from the bench. "Nic--I need to get home." It was hard to force the words out through my chattering teeth. I would have to figure out a way to make things right between us, but first I had to get warm and dry and check my blood sugar.

Nicole turned back to me. "Shit, girl, your lips are blue. Here." She slipped off her hoodie and tossed it to me.

I couldn't bring my hands up fast enough to catch it. It pooled at my feet. "I'm sorry." I wondered how many times I had said that this morning.

"Crap. You're in bad shape." She took off my raincoat and bundled me into her sweatshirt. The first thing I noticed was that it didn't smell like stale cigarette smoke. The second thing was how warm it was. "Come on. Let's get you home." Nicole bent down to shove everything I had emptied back into my backpack. "My car's just outside the fence. Can you make it?

I gritted my teeth and nodded. "What about my bike?"

"You'll have to come back for it."

I shivered again. The last thing I wanted to do was to come back to this place.