Excerpt: Or Your Money Back

From Or Your Money Back. The POV is Seb, a dream who was brought to life and is now working for his creator.
_________

I am beginning to learn the business of The Dream Doctor. Thaddeus says it’s a slow season for dream actualization, so there are fewer clients to admit. Even Gail the protester seems to realize this, and she spends more of her time in front of the shop talking on her cell phone than hoisting her sign and shouting at passers by. I tilt the blinds beside my desk sometimes when I get bored and watch her eat her lunch. Every day she brings an orange, and she peels it a bit at a time, biting into the exposed flesh like it’s an apple instead of breaking away the individual segments. It leaves a mess on the sidewalk for me to clean up, but asking her to bag it herself only results in an argument - according to Gail, if God grew it from the ground, it’s not littering. I’m not sure God is mentioned in the city littering laws, but she leans so close to my face when she argues with her eyes so wide that I’m a little afraid to confront her with the facts.

Because of the slow stream of clients, it’s easy for me to get in time for my routes. And the routes are where most of my learning occurs.

I learn that I am in the business of wants. No one needs what we are selling - not really. For some, like the boy in the middle of the map who asked for a six-foot tall tiger emperor, their commission from The Dream Doctor actively complicates their lives. This boy’s mother complains to me because her son’s tiger has declared the house his kingdom and demanded to make a throne room out of her craft room.

“Derek never plays with him anymore,” she tells me, rolling her eyes. “‘His royal majesty’ has made a mess of my scrapbooking supplies, and he used up most of my beads making himself a crown.”

I add her comments to her client page. “Would you mind if I spoke to the, uh, emperor myself?”

“Do what you want, but he doesn’t speak English,” she shrugs with a small huff. To herself, she adds, “Wish I’d thought to get the Fail Safe.”

I try to ask my predecessor’s questions to the massive tiger who’s seated on a throne of cardboard boxes in the craft room, but all I get in return is growls.

A man living in a squalid rental house near the park has an elderly woman with large sheer wings living on his back porch. The entire time I’m talking with him, she’s puttering around in the kitchen, baking cookies. There are piles of cookies scattered all across the countertops, cookies on the end tables in the living room, cookies stacked precariously on the banister leading upstairs, and cookie crumbs everywhere. The man eats three cookies while answering my survey questions, and his dream offers me one. It’s warm and gooey, a perfect blend of bittersweet chocolate and toffee.

“Does she cook anything else?” I ask.

“Why?” says the dreamer, as if I’ve asked something incredibly stupid. That’s when I notice the pizza boxes stashed under the kitchen table.

One older widow on the top right corner of the map has at least twelve dreams living in her house, all of them cats. As I sit in her parlor between a stack of old magazines as tall as myself and a collection of ceramic angels, trying not to make a face at the mildewy air, she introduces me to all of her cats by name. All of her dream-cats were once real cats she had - and, she informs me, all of her real cats are destined to one day be reborn via Thaddeus’s business, assuming she dreams about them. I can’t tell the difference between the real cats and the dream cats.

A young woman in an apartment complex near the shop has a pet hedgehog that rides in her shirt pocket, whispering directions to her when she gets lost. I think this is my favorite use of Dream Doctor technology - until, that is, her boyfriend points out to me that she could have bought a GPS device instead and wouldn’t need to feed it.

Yes, it’s definitely a business of want. Listening to the dreamers talk about their dreams fills me with wonder. How can one world contain so much want? I was content when I was a figment of Bella’s imagination - I wanted nothing, needed nothing. Now, I find myself eyeing everything appealing around me, trying it on for size in my mind: clothing in shop windows, apartments I visit, lives belonging to other people. I think of what Sky asked me about wanting someone other than Bella, though, and I still can’t imagine that.

But I am beginning to figure out something I do want, above and beyond the shop windows and casually tried-on lives. A calling, maybe, like he was talking about. I think…I think I want to help someone. And I think I know just the someone to start with.

Mostly ravioli, it turned out.

A while back, after not having bought groceries for a few months, I made the mistake of going grocery shopping without a list. I didn't have any recipes I made on a regular basis at the time, so I didn't have a starting point from which to toss things into the cart. The idea of gathering everything I needed to feed myself seemed like a staggeringly huge task, and after so long without having shopped for my own food, I just couldn't remember what I usually bought. I wound up roaming the frozen food aisle wide-eyed, wringing my hands and going, "What do I EAT?"

My former roommates remember this. I clung to their sleeves and cried, "You should know this! What do I EAT?" and they said, "Uh...food?"

This is about how I feel right after finishing a big revision.

Tonight I finished the second draft of Or Your Money Back. It's now 81,835 words long (over 11,000 words longer than before), more fleshed out in a lot of ways, and well on its way to being a finished book. I saved the finished draft, went out celebrating, sat down to write again...and stopped.

What do I WRITE?

You guys! You should know this! What do I WRITE?

I have a list somewhere, I think. Maybe I should go dig that up.

And hey, if all else fails, I can just throw some things in the cart and see what sticks.

From the Obsessive Writer school of home decorating

Like I said last post, I've been working on my revision of OYMB. After much swearing and a lot of caffeine, I realized I needed to see the book laid out visually, so I got out my stack of 3x5" notecards, filled one out for every scene in the book, and strung them up over my workspace so I could move them around at will.

It's kind of a neat decorating effect. This is my workspace right now:


I think there's some cosmic rule that prevents me from having enough desk space no matter how many desks I have pushed together. This is two desks and a TV tray, and I still can't fit everything. It's a comfortable setup, at least, and since it's in the middle of my apartment, I'm actually using it. So's the dog - you can see his red blanket right where my feet are supposed to go. He curls up there while I'm writing, which is cute, if counter-productive.

I'm loving the notecards system. I did it for one previous revision, but that was a much less streamlined process, so it didn't last. This? Useful. Here's a typical card:


Upper left corner: the current chapter in which this scene exists (four, in this case). The blue text is a quick description of the scene (my protagonist being dragged out to a bar by a new ally). Green text below it is stuff I want to add or subtract from the scene (fiddle with the dramatic volume of the scene, include a theme of agency I've been wanting do do more with by having Seb bring it up, and make Sky a sneakier bastard). Entirely new scenes I want to add are all green and have no chapter numbers.

Not all the notecards are as easy to understand as that one. Some of them are so shorthand I'm the only person who knows what they mean.


And some of them are bad inside jokes that make Kiah think I'm a dork.


You can identify the point at which I started getting bored with re-reading and marking up the first draft, because the notecards start getting more shorthand and weird. Like so:


Badly drawn Mr. T. approves of most things I do. He's kind of a yes-man.

My revised plan for revision goes like this:
Stage 1: Notecards
Stage 2: Edits and rewrites of scenes
Stage 3: Cleanup and polishing

I just started Stage 2 and am on chapter 2/12.

One last question

Or Your Money Back has been a test run for me in a lot of ways - Can I write a novel that takes less than 100,000 words? Can I write a stand-alone? Can I write something with a romance plot at the heart of it? The answer to all of these so far seems to be "Yes," but there's one more important question that I'm just getting to the bottom of, a week after putting down the first draft: Can I finish a book?

It's not the same as "Can I finish a first draft?" That I know I can do. I've done that three times now. The thing I wanted to know most, going into this project, was what happened when I put a story down for good. I've never done that before - not with an involving, novel-length thing. Prior to OYMB, what I'd written were installments of a fantasy trilogy (AKA The Beast That Ate My Adolescence) that I'd been working on for upwards of a decade. Because there was always another novel coming next in that series, I never had to really say goodbye to the characters. So I'm doing that now, for the first time.

I've lived every day with Seb & Co. for the last three months. They were welcome, quiet roommates, and now that I don't have them to focus on, I feel very slightly lost. You know that moment after you wake up from a really nice dream, when you're reaching to catch onto it but it's already gone, and you're a little disappointed? It's like that. Which is fitting, for this particular dreamy little book.

Apparently the answer to "Can I finish a book" is: yes, I can. I'm waking up from this book, stretching, scratching, yawning out morning breath.

So, new day. What's next?

Mmm, fresh manuscript.

Fresh beta reader first draft copies are sitting on my desk.

They're currently pristine, neatly bound packages with a lovely heft and a crisp paper smell.



In a few weeks, they'll come back to me marked up, dog-eared, and probably - knowing one of my beta readers - stained, with pieces of the binding missing.

I can't wait.

Where it's at

I'm hanging out on my deck right now, reading this novel I just finished for the first time. The swinging bench from the yard got hauled up here last night, so with just a blanket and an extension cord, I have a totally swank little outdoor lounge going on.


I brought the dog's favorite pillow outside for him to lay on, but he had other ideas.


Back to reading.

I kind of like this book.

This has been the view at my kitchen table for the past two days:


The first draft of Or Your Money Back is done, with the following statistics:

69,536 words
12 chapters
191 pages, double spaced with 1" margins

Lots to celebrate tonight. And I'm celebrating with bargain pinot noir, chocolate stout, Alias, and cracky Supernatural fan fiction. Y'know - like a grown up! Courtesy those things and Kiah's camera, here is my new dust jacket-esque photo:


Cheers.

(Oh, and happy 100 posts to this blog! Thanks for reading.)

General update

Eyeballs-deep in work and novel WIP right now, so I might not have a proper entry here for a bit. Here's the gist of my current projects:

Writing: OYMB first draft is coming along nicely. This weekend I smacked a character in the head with a baseball bat and got my protagonist into a car on the way to Climactic Plot Events. Current status: 52,481 words, 9/13 chapters. I've got a couple days' worth of pay saved up, so I'm going to take two days off in the next week, lock myself in my apartment, and plow through the end of this book Misery-style. (But with an elderly terrier instead of Kathy Bates.)

Knitting: OH DEAR GOD. I can't work on any one project for more than a few minutes without getting fidgety like mad. It's infuriating. I've gotten a few inches done on the back of my Sylvi coat, a few rows on my Garter Yoke Cardi, a little bit of a scarf, a little bit of a sock, a little bit of another sock - and the list goes on. I've never been terribly project monogamous, but rotating a small army of knitting projects every five minutes is just ridiculous. Maybe it's because I've been so project monogamous in my writing lately, and my brain is staging a creative coup.

Spinning: Getting better. I've got a handful of little finished projects that I don't have pictures of. Here's one back when it was on the bobbin:


Also, I think I managed to infect my friend Lisa with the spinning bug, and I've got a pound and a half of bulk fiber en route to my apartment right now. Some of it has tencel in it. I'm excited.

Art: What? I've been doing art? Holy crap!


False alarm, I'm just dicking around with my oil paints.

Domesticity: I've been doing a ton of stuff in this realm lately, so I figured I'll count it as a project thing. In the last couple of months, I've been learning to cook and bake, and I've been decorating a little (the Supernatural motel room themed bathroom is on hold until I find the proper shower curtain, if you're wondering).

This weekend, my former roommates moved in downstairs, so I finally got my kitchen table back and completed my kitchen! Am unreasonably pleased with my doofy 50's-tastic table and its classy DIY decoration. (The flower is fake, the vase was a hand-me-down from a former roommate's mom, and the table runner is a modified obi from a costume I wore to an anime con a couple years bac.)


I've learned to make a couple of tasty recipes. The tastiest by a wide margin being Blueberry Boy Bait, which I made for a second time yesterday. Here's Kiah demonstrating how awesome Blueberry Boy Bait is.


And the finished Bait.


And that is what's up with me.

Research

In between other things today, I've been doing research for the novel WIP. Among the things I've learned today:

* Most baseball bat related deaths are due to either intentional attacks or pitchers getting hit in the head by high-speed balls.

* In Taiwan, you can buy baseball bats made specifically for self-defense. It's illegal to own a gun there, but you can own a "home defense bat."

* According to Texas Penal Code, you can't be prosecuted for assault with a deadly weapon for beating someone with a baseball bat - baseball bats do not count as "deadly weapons" because they were not designed for that purpose. (The Taiwanese man on that self-defense forum might disagree.)

* Controversy surrounds metal baseball bats and law suits have been had against their makers, but no official studies have been produced thus far to prove that they are, in fact, more dangerous than wooden bats.

* Aikido can be used to subdue an attacker with a baseball bat. (And look really badass in the process.)

* I am not the only writer on the internet looking to kill or seriously injure a character with a baseball bat.

By the way, for those playing at home, the current novel stats are:

Chapters: 8/13

Words: 46,879/70,000 (and starting to think this may be a shorter novel than planned, which is new for me!)

Permission to Write the Damsel in Distress

I've been thinking a lot lately about female characters - specifically, how difficult they can be to get right. I've always had trouble with this aspect of writing, probably because I've always been interested in reading feminist perspectives on literature, so I've wound up with every criticism of popular characterizations of women I've ever heard playing on repeat in my head. The moment I start writing a scene with a prominent female character, the chorus strikes up.

Portraying a female character as weak is demeaning to women.

She should kick ass and not need anybody's help.

But she can't kick too much ass, or she's obnoxious.

And she can't have too much sex because that makes her a temptress.

But she should own her sexuality because women's sexuality has long been repressed in literature.

But she can't actually need men, because that would make her weak, and portraying a female character as weak---

Lisa needs braces!

Dental plan!

Around it goes. Critical voices are eager to put limitations on what you should and shouldn't write about female characters, because female characters in fiction are held up as representatives of their non-fictional gender, the world's view of women, and/or the author's gender biases. It doesn't matter if they're in an everyday high school setting or hurtling through space in a bio-mechanical spacecraft: female characters get picked out as symbols for real-life gender issues. Male characters, on the other hand, are largely left alone to be read in the context of the story.

If I were a fictional character with a vagina, I would be pissed. I'd be marching about with signs reading "My bits don't dictate my characterization" and "I am not a stand-in for your societal issues!"

Author Sarah Rees Brennan has an excellent post, "Ladies, Please!", that deals with the balancing act of making a kickass female character. (It's well worth checking out even if you're not a writer - the woman is hilarious.) I do love the sort of female character she describes - strong, capable, and kickass without overshadowing the rest of the cast - and I've taken that entry to heart on previous projects.

My problem right now is, I'm working on a story where the most important female character is distinctly not kickass. She's living sequestered in a house by a man who basically owns her, legally, she has almost nonexistent independence, and in the end, she will very likely need honest-to-god Prince Charming style rescuing.

I love this character. She's smart, sarcastic, creative, and manipulative in a way I admire. But she's a Damsel In Distress, so everything I've read about writing as a feminist dictates that I shouldn't be writing her. I should be writing a character who's stronger, more independent, who can break herself out of the cage that's been constructed around her.

Every time I write a scene with her in it, I think, Is it enough that she wants to get out? Is it enough that she's got her own interests and strengths in spite of her lot in life? Will they take away my feminist card if she's not the one with the baseball bat in her hands when her oppressor takes a hit to the cranium? In essence, I've been asking myself: Is it okay to write a female character who doesn't kick ass?

And some might disagree with me, but after debating this with myself and the chorus for a few months, I'm gonna say yes. Because as much as I would love to present to the world a novel with an ass-kickin', name-takin' heroine who can be held up as a literary feminist icon, that's not this heroine. And that's not this book. This book is about characters who need help. They've been abandoned, abused, and misled, and they have to learn to rely on each other to make things better. Everyone will have moments of personal strength, but Luca, hiding in her basement, will never come out swinging the literal or verbal battleaxe, ready to dispense justice.

If this post is windy and muddled, it's because this is one of those issues that I'm still not sure quite how to address. It frustrates me deeply that I feel like I have to ask my own permission to write a character who makes sense for the story I'm working on, just because of her gender. This is my attempt to write it out so I can stop the Chorus of Conflicting Opinions from ringing out every single time she shows up on the page.

I'm writing a female character who doesn't kick ass. And I'm cool with that.

The interesting part will be watching how other people react to her.

The "I'm technically off work but here's a quick blog post before I go anyway" post

Knitting status update: Working on this scarf in Bex's gorgeous handspun:


And I finally finished the first of the pair of socks I started the week I moved out of my old place.


Lots of other fiber projects floating around. Enough that last night I sat down and took inventory of all my WIPs, stash yarn dedicated to particular upcoming projects, and undedicated stash yarn. I decided to knit strictly from my stash for the rest of the year (except for gift knits) after buying my wheel, and now I don't feel like that will be even a little bit of a challenge.

OYMB status update: Wrote 8500 words in the last three days, including finishing two chapters. Today I start a new chapter that involves alcohol, vandalism, and a monologue I've been looking forward to since before I started writing this draft. The character who gets the monologue has just informed me that he wants to do it while plastered, and that is just peachy by me.

And I'm off.

State of the Manuscript

I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but I always remember when I'm at home, and as I think I've previously said, I am currently an internetless hermit type. Anyway. About that novel.

Or Your Money Back currently stands at 27,136 words and 5 complete chapters. I'm expecting it to hit somewhere in the 70,000-80,000 words range, and after plotting, re-plotting, and ruining my aunt's 1994 nature calendar with a set of markers, I finally have a solid working outline that spans a total of 13 chapters.

This means the first draft is about 38% done as it stands. It needs to be all done by September, when I start an independent study course to revise it. I'm a little nervous about having less than half the draft done this late in the summer, but I've set myself some firm rules that will make sure I reach my goal. They're actually taken from an old set of rules I set for myself (and followed for six months successfully) in my first year of grad school.

The Rules:

1. Write 2,000 words a day, minimum. Keep a log of wordcounts in the back of current writing notebook. Only words in Scrivener count, but words written in a notebook and typed up will count the day they're typed.

2. Taking a day off is okay, but aim for no more than one a week. Two, if the week's wordcount has been extremely productive.

3. Days when less than 2,000 words are written count as a zero, but the words written can be counted toward the next day's 2,000.

There are lots of little footnotes to these rules, most of them involving caffeine and chocolate intake, but that's the gist. It works pretty well for me, especially on days when I hit the 2,000 early - then I start getting competitive with myself, pushing for a new record on daily wordcount. I think my personal best still stands at 5,500, from February 2008 when I spent a day plowing through the climactic chapters of Core powered by a one-liter of Dr. Pepper.

At any rate, I wrote 3,300 words last night and another 1,100 when I got up this morning, and I'm ridiculously happy with this draft so far. I just hit the point in the novel where it launches itself out of setup (which I don't much like) and into PLOT, so now every scene I get to write is something I've been looking forward to. I'm surprised cartoon hearts haven't been following me around all day.

Since I got my spinning wheel my brain has been defaulting to "Is it time to spin yet?" whenever it has idle time. As of this morning, the switch has flipped to "Is it time to write Seb yet?"

And yes, actually, it is!

Or Your Money Back: The Soundtrack

There's one central part of my writing process that I've never seen suggested in a book on fiction writing. I know it's not uncommon - at least two other writers I know do this. It's a fun exercise that helps me keep a story percolating between writing sessions: I make soundtracks.

The list of playlists I've made in iTunes betrays my epic nerditude for story soundtracks. I have a few playlists that a normal person might've made, like "Songs to sing along to" and "Songs for road trips," but the vast majority of my playlists are story soundtracks. I make one for every novel I write. And every short story I work on for more than a week. And occasionally just for single key scenes I need to write ("Tiern/Rowyn FIGHT" is a romping good mix, IMHO). Making soundtracks helps me sort out what I want a story or scene to feel like, and sometimes what direction I want it to take. And it plays into my obsessive nature, which is a bonus.

I've been listening to my Or Your Money Back soundtrack a lot lately. The two songs that got me started building the mix are Queen's "Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy" and Incubus's "Drive," which represent pretty damn accurately where I wanted Seb to be as a character at the beginning and end of the book.

The soundtrack:

Queen - Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy
Fresh out of the box lover boy idealism, confident and upbeat. This is so Seb it hurts.

Vertical Horizon - Everything You Want
"I'm everything you want/I'm everything you need[...]/But I mean nothing to you and I don't know why." Seb's relationship with his dreamer, in a nutshell.

Kristin Chenoweth - Hopelessly Devoted to You (from the Pushing Daisies soundtrack)
Like Olive, Seb is the sort of character who might have a lovesick musical number while closing up at a pie shop. If he worked at a pie shop.

The Coral - Dreaming of You
"In my lonely room/while I'm dreaming of you/oh what can I do/I still need you but/I don't want you now"

Dave Matthews Band - Crash Into Me
Tender. Tactile. Stalkery. That's my boy.

Wreckless Eric - Whole Wide World
Here for tone/message more than literal lyrics. Seb is fixated on there being one person for him.

The Killers - Mr. Brightside
This song is in two of my story soundtracks at the moment. I don't know what's up with my protagonists wanting people who are taken.

Jimmy Eat World - Sweetness
A budding sense of jadedness, set to cheery music.

Kansas - Carry on Wayward Son
This ends up in every damn soundtrack I make lately. I blame Supernatural. (It does have an appropriate theme, though.)

Foo Fighters - Learn to Fly
"Fly along with me/I can't quite make it alone/Try to make this life my own."

Snow Patrol - Chocolate
"This could be the very minute/I'm aware I'm alive/All these places feel like home." Another self-discovery song - and probably my favorite music video of this bunch.

Asia - Heat of the Moment
I have no shame. I just love this. It's the sort of song Seb would sing along to at full volume while driving.

Snow Patrol - Crack the Shutters
Very tactile first-person protagonist. Fleshy times with love interest. Lack of shame will probably serve me well.

Incubus - Drive
Seb's second character song - independence, subverting authority, taking responsibility for himself. The lyric "When I drive myself/my light is found" plays heavily into a monologue one of his supporting characters has. Like "Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy," pretty much perfect for the character at this point in the story.

Coldplay - Don't Panic
Seb's biggest strength is probably his ability to see the beauty in things. Even months after his creation, he looks at the world with a sense of awe. He probably drives the people around him nuts.

Foo Fighters - M.I.A.
The tone I'm aiming at for the ending.

Heartache, love, and self-discovery, set to cheery tunes. This is what I associate with Seb. Listening to it while I'm walking home lets me crawl inside his head a little. It's pretty good writing music, too.

Agreeable projects

This morning, I sat down before work to see if I could get another paragraph or so squeezed in on Or Your Money Back. Instead, I wound up writing almost 700 new words in half an hour. Scanning back over them when I was getting ready to take off, I realized that all of them were pretty good words. They drew out the protagonist's big internal conflict, planted seeds for three of the four main plot threads in the book, kept the POV consistent, and set up by boy Seb to be pushed out the door into oncoming plot.

This sort of unexpected progress happens just about every time I sit down to work on this project first thing in the morning. Meanwhile, at night, I hem and haw and spin in my chair between sentences. And it's just the opposite with my other novel WIP, Sum. I think OYMB is just a morning book.

I should set my alarm for earlier.

In other news, I've got another project in progress that's behaving nicely. On Tuesday I cast-on my Garter Yoke Cardigan (AKA "The air conditioning in this building can bite me" because it's going to be my summer cardi for my occasionally arctic office). I'm doing it in Knit Picks City Tweed HW, which I'd never tried before ordering a sweater's worth, so it was a bit of a gamble.

Oh my god, jackpot.

It's a soft, silky wool-alpaca blend with fluffy neutral tweedy bits. I think it may be producing some sort of seratonin-releasing chemical, because every time I pick up the yoke of my sweater, I get happy. If it's as nice to wear as it is to knit with, I may not be able to keep the finished sweater in my office like I planned.

Oh, and the pattern's pretty nice, too.

Like comparing apples to giant mutant apples

Well, I'm all hatted out and ready for a change of topic. How about you?

Today marks the first day of my Very Serious First Draft Writing Period, in which my primary goal is to work up a solid first draft of Or Your Money Back, the novel on the table. Last night I kicked off the VSFDWP by sketching out an outline based on writer Jennifer R. Hubbard's useful post on outlining. Hubbard suggests jotting down a quick ten-chapter outline to get the main events of the book spread out, so I did.

I was nervous starting out this exercise, because I didn't think I could do it. The novels I've written previously are sprawling, cantankerous giants that couldn't easily be condensed into ten main events. Their preliminary outlines spanned multiple pages. So, up to this point, I have always written these unweildy monsters of books, and I wasn't sure I had it in me to condense a novel into such a short space. But after a few minutes of outlining, it became apparent that this novel is going to be very, very different from my previous stuff.

Previous novels average:

• 22 chapter preliminary outline
• 11 subplots
  
• 230,000 word first draft

(Yeah, I know. I told you they were monsters.)

Or Your Money Back:

• 10 chapter preliminary outline - it fit easily
  
• 2 subplots
• max 100,000 word first draft (expecting closer to 70k)

Also, while writing the sprawling monster-books, I couldn't see quite where they were going when they started, how the characters would change, or what the books' endings would be like. Writing those books was all about the journey, with no concrete destination in sight. For OYMB, I've already got a pretty good notion of how the major events play out and how the characters change. The last scene is written down in my notebook, and I'm looking forward to that ending.

Really looking forward to it. I've never written a happy ending to a longer story before. And not only is this one happy - tonally, it's taking hints from The Shawshank Redemption's ending, which is my all-time favorite ending of anything. (Even catching the last five minutes of that movie on TV, I bawl like a sissy, but in a good way.)

Anywho, back to work.

My summer project

I've been looking forward to this. A while back, I promised myself that as soon as I was done with my coursework this semester, I'd dive right into this novel. It started as a short story I wrote for class last spring, then quickly grew into a longer romance/adventure/coming of age story in my head. Here's the pitch:

The Dream Doctor can bring the objects of your wildest dreams to life, for a reasonable price, and terminate them if they don't live up to the 100% money back guarantee. Brought to life as a surprise birthday present for the woman who dreams about him every night, patented Dream Doctor creation Sebastian expects to live a blissful life with his beloved dreamer, Bella. But when Bella scowls instead of swooning, Sebastian gets sent back to the shop for a refund. Kept by the Dream Doctor as an assistant, Sebastian takes on the job of checking in on the Doctor's other dream creations around the city. He forms quick bonds with two of the ill-fated dreams on his monthly house call list - a muse stuck with a short-tempered artist and a disgruntled fantasy character who wants to overthrow the dreamers. Caught between his creator and his new friends, Sebastian has to find his place in a world that wasn't meant for him - and discover if he, the man of Bella's dreams, can cast aside his programming to love someone else.

Or Your Money Back, science fiction (?), should be around 80,000 words.

I have a printout of the original short story to mark up, a 3-subject notebook to fill, a new pencil and eraser, and from now until September to enjoy Seb's most agreeable company. Ready...set...

Sketchy - Seb character design

Cart master: "Bring out yer dead!"

Muse: "Here's one."

Writer: "I'm not dead!"

Cart master: "'Ere, she says she's not dead."

Muse: "She is!"

Writer: "I'm not!"

Cart master: "She isn't?"

Muse: "Well, she will be soon. She hasn't written anything usable in a week."

Writer: "I'm getting better!"

Muse: "No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment."

Cart master: "Well, I can't take her like that. 'S against regulations."

Writer: "I don't want to go on the cart!"

Anyway.

The moment I'm no longer buried in school, I'll start writing Seb and his godawful sandals.

Touching base with a few characters

Dear Tiern,

I am not neglecting you. I promise. I'm at the tail end of a work-intensive semester, and I'd rather put your current chapter down for a few weeks than rush through it and churn out pages of crap that I'll regret later. In addition, your very, very long story is coming to an end. Figuring out how all the ends tie up takes a lot of mental percolation, so I'm doing that right now, even though I'm not writing you. This work is just as important as the actual writing.

So please stop complaining that I've left you hanging. It's only going to be for a little while longer, and it's not even that bad a spot in the story to be waiting in - you have beer and appetizers, for crap's sake! Besides, you survived being left in the midst of awkward revelations in J's kitchen for almost two years when I started college. This should be a cake walk.

Love and minor strangulation,
Your writer

P.S. I'm still debating giving you a sex scene in this book. Stop pestering me about this little hiatus, and maybe you'll get it.

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Dear Seb,

You were a real, live character to me from the first line I scribbled down, your story is quirky and engaging, I adore the cast you've surrounded yourself with, and to top it all off, you're the most polite, easy to write narrator I've ever worked with.

Please hold on a little longer, sweetie. You're my summer project, and I am so excited to write you. (Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if your story became my first published novel. Don't rub that in with Tiern, though - I think he's already jealous.)

Premature love,
Your soon-to-be writer

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Dear Sunshine, Kat, and Ronnie,

Have you seen my project list for this summer? Please chill. I will write you when I get a chance.

If you really want to speed things up, go help Seb with his romance plot. Dude needs all the help he can get.

Hugs, sympathy, and flicks on the ear (respectively),
Your eventual writer