Choices Is Going Live in One Week

Alright guys, it's almost here. I am officially announcing that starting next Thursday I will begin posting one chapter a week of my novel Choices.

Chapters one and two have been fixed/rewritten/updated and I am hoping to get chapter three done before the weekend is out. I've made the decision not to include any preambles when I post, so each week it will just be the chapter itself. I would love feedback from you if you are willing to give it. Just put any questions or comments you have in the comments for each post and I will do my best to respond to what you throw at me.

I've said it before and it bears saying again, I am really amazingly surprised at how happy and proud I am of how this story turned out. I truly hope that at least some of you enjoy it as well.

Like with my Stargate rewatch posts, I will be gathering all of the links to the chapters on their own page (the tab will be at the top of the blog, right above the post title) as they go live. I wrote up this introduction for that page, and I thought I'd put it up here for you guys as well, to give you a little bit of an idea of what the story is about and also put out the few disclaimers I am gonna deem necessary for this thing.

~*~

Choices is the novel I wrote for the 2011 National Novel Writing Month event  (also known as NaNoWriMo). The second draft was written in the spring and summer of 2012 and posted here on Searching For Me a chapter a week to share with my friends and family who have been asking me when and where they might read my story. I know this story isn't perfect, but I am ridiculously proud of it all the same, so I wanted to put it out there for anyone who might be interested in what (in my opinion at least) ended up being a really good story. 

When I started planning for the 2011 NaNoWriMo I actually had a very different story in mind. It was one I had been kicking about for a long time and finally thought I was ready to write. I was oh so very wrong on that score. The more I thought about that particular story the more I saw the holes in it, holes I had no real desire or ability to fill in at the time. But I was dreadfully attached to the two main characters, and I knew that I still wanted to write about them. So I thought about it for a bit and in the end I decided to just try them out in a different story, something smaller, something without the huge sweeping scale I was trying and so clearly failing to achieve. Choices was the result. 

Have you ever come across an interview with a writer trying to explain that a story just seemed to appear out of nowhere and almost write itself? This is pretty much what happened to me with this novel. Characters I thought would be throwaway encounters turned out to play major roles in the proceedings. People I thought were not that bad, just misunderstood perhaps, turned out to be positively dreadful at their cores. People I thought, hell, intended, to be antagonists ended up being allies after all was said and done. I had my main character, and I had her faithful companion, and once I let them loose on the page, it was really all I could do to follow along behind them on their ride.

I am hard-pressed to categorize Choices but I suppose at its core it is a romance. But it is also a coming of age story, and more importantly the story of a woman trying to find a way to live her life on her own terms in a day and age where society isn't really inclined to let her do so. It is a bit of a fantasy in the sense that it is not set in any world that we might recognize as our own, but there are none of the traditional fantasy elements to it. It is perhaps my tribute to the works of Austen, though I lack her subtlety and therefore my story (and characters) are rather more blunt than Miss Austen would ever have thought proper, I am sure. 

A disclaimer for those who choose to read this: 

As I said, it is a romance, so there will be some steamy bits. I had to close my eyes when writing a few of these scenes. I'm not saying this is erotic fiction, it's not. But these are real people doing the things real people do, and I don't want to catch anyone off guard. There are also some very not nice people doing some very not nice things. There are violent acts and appalling decisions made. I don't think I am overly graphic in describing any of this, but...well, my threshold is not your threshold. I think that perfectly reasonable adults should have no problem reading this, but in case I'm wrong about that. Well, at least you've been warned.

~*~

So, if your interest has been piqued, please check back here next Thursday for chapter one! 

That Warm Glowing Sense of Accomplishment

Hey, it's December? Yay! Look who's back! Hey guys! I missed you! Thank you for putting up with my foolishness over this past month. Believe me when I say, it was totally worth it.

Why is that?

Because I finished my novel! I finished my novel a whole day and a half early! I beat my 2010 word count by about 13,000 words too! My finished novel, Choices, weighs in at 88,044 words in fourteen chapters. What's more, I am actually amazingly satisfied with this story.

You may be wondering why I am so amazed at that fact, but the simple truth is, I really didn't think I was going to have it in me this year. I hemmed and hawed about what story to write, as some of you certainly may remember from previous posts. Initially, I thought I would do a massive Stargate fanfic crossing over all three television series. But I could never figure out how to get all of those characters in the same place. So then I moved on to doing a semi-fanfic, a story set in the Dragon Age universe but featuring original characters and only loosely involving the events of the game.

By October I had scrapped those ideas and decided to go with a story from my file of stashed story ideas--snippets that I wrote from random inspiration or outlines of a story that I put down on the page for later when it popped into my head. I had settled on a story and began doing the pre-November legwork. I named my characters, I wrote an outline, I drew a map. I played nations tetris with said map on more than one occasion. Toward the end of the month I started to get a bit frustrated because I had realized that the catalyst event for the story, the whole reason the characters had to do what they did in the way they did it, hung on a really flimsy plot device. I knew it needed to be reworked, but I couldn't really come up with a viable answer. Without that, there wasn't a story. At least, not the story I had thought I wanted to tell. In addition, I realized that this story would require me to write about wars between nations and several large-scale battles involving swords, archery, horses, and magic. That meant making a magic system. That meant doing a lot of research to write battle scenes I would be satisfied with. I realized I really didn't have it in me. It just wasn't there, not this year.

With a few days left before November began, I threw it all out. I kept the principal characters but I took them out of this huge sprawling fantasy set and put them instead into a very small setting. One city-state, inspired by the the era of Jane Austen, but not existing anywhere in our world. I removed the conflicts regarding the fates of nations from the table and replaced them with smaller, personal conflicts. No magic, no dragons, not even any swords (though, yes, there were horses). I drew a map, I wrote a loose story-guide, not an actual outline, just the series of big events I wanted to touch in my main character's tale. I decided to do something I never do, which is to write the story from first-person perspective.

I have to confess. When November first dawned, I didn't have very much faith in this story. I hadn't put nearly enough thought into it. I didn't know if I would be able to get a whole story out of it, let alone 50,000 words. Yet as soon as I sat down and started writing (and then pulled up a new page and wrote down a few sentences describing what should happen in each chapter so I had at least a little bit of a road map), a wonderful thing happened. The words and the story just started to flow. By about 20,000 words my characters had started taking over and were telling the story for me. Yes, I hit most of the main points I wanted to, but a lot of the other stuff surprised me. Someone I thought was essentially a good guy but who didn't really get along with the protagonist turned out to really actually be scum. Another person I thought would be a mild antagonist turned into my protagonist's best friend, as much to my surprise as to hers.

It's not a fantasy. It's not a big, sweeping epic. If anything, it's a romance, though aside from the (totally accidental) sappy happy ending, I don't know how much it really qualifies as that either. What this is in the end, is the story of a young woman who was content to let other make her choices for her, until she finally received a wake up call and decided to take control of her own damn life. It's not that simple for her, of course, when is it ever? The world she lives in doesn't really think women need to make that many of their own choices. She never really thought twice about that, until she did. So this is the story about how she figured out how to take control where she could and to make peace where she couldn't.

I still don't know if it's any good or not. But it doesn't matter. Because as unsure as I was about this story when it started? Now? Now, I love it. It is one of my favorite things I have ever written. It's not perfect. There are definite issues with the pacing. I know there are plot lines I started to develop and let fall by the wayside as the story progressed. It will need to be cleaned up. I hope to share it with you, in the new year. I won't promise to do so, because, well, there's always the chance that I'll pull it out in January, reread it, and realize I hate it. But if I don't, then I want to post it here, a chapter a week, for you to read if you'd like.

Even if it never sees the light of day again, it's still my novel. I'm still incredibly proud of it. Thank you, NaNoWriMo, for giving me the opportunity to write it. I can honestly say this story wouldn't have happened without you. I can't wait to see what we get up to together next year!

Emerging From My Shell (For a Few Days At Least)

Man, I kind of had a busy weekend. It was very unlike me, I have to say, considering I am the first person to describe myself as a hermit.

But this past week was Spring Break in Texas, which meant two things: my husband was out of town most of the week because he was playing at South By Southwest in Austin, and my friends who are teachers were free for daytime socializing.

So, with Hubby out of town, I was glad of the chance to hang out with people. And boy did I ever.

My "weekend" actually started on Thursday, when one of my friends came into town for lunch and she and Baby Girl and I enjoyed a fine meal at Riscky's BBQ (yum). If I am rating restaurants solely on the quality of their sweet tea (which I have been known to do), Riscky's is way, way up there, I have to say. Though I feel I must also mention that we decided to indulge in dessert (a first for me at this particular establishment, actually), and the carrot cake was also absolutely fantabulous. Even Baby Girl enjoyed it. After lunch, we hung at my house and played with Baby Girl in the backyard for a bit before walking up to Sonic. It was just too nice to stay indoors.

Friday I met up at the Fort Worth Zoo with a couple who are both teachers and who have a son a few weeks younger than Baby Girl. They had initially wanted to try going on Wednesday, which is half-price admission day, but I am thankful that we decided to move the trip to Friday instead. It was bonkers crazy crowded enough then! We mostly had a good time, wisely deciding to hit up the Texas Wild portion of the zoo at the start of our trip. It's in the very back of the zoo, and since we got there at opening and headed to the back first, it was not that crowded until we started making our way back to the rest of the zoo. But none of the three of us are very good with large crowds, and so we were quite quickly drained of energy and didn't hit up too many exhibits after that. We did get to check out the new outdoor addition to the penguin exhibit, and that was kind of awesome. Of course, then Baby Girl had something of a meltdown, which was less awesome. She desperately wanted just to push her stroller around and when I tried to put her back in it, she did not approve. Sigh. Usually I let her have a bit more free reign and wander around more when we go there, but usually there are not nearly so many other people we have to look out for, and she made it very clear that she did not appreciate not getting her way. She eventually calmed down once we started making our way through MOLA (Museum of Living Art, it is a really, really cool exhibit). But it was a pretty exhausting morning for all of us. Still, gotta love the zoo.

Baby Girl tries to catch some fish.

She enjoyed exploring the interactive displays.

Saturday was Super Social Day, to be sure. My super awesome mother-in-law came over to stay with Baby Girl and I got to go out and have some not-Mommy time. I met up with the friend I had lunch with on Thursday as well as three other friends at Grapevine Mills mall and we all had an absolutely fantastic lunch. Then we bummed around the mall for a bit (I found a super cute pair of flip-flops for Baby Girl for only $3. Okay, so I had a little bit of Mommy time).

Later that afternoon, three of us went to see the movie Paul and absolutely loved it. Seriously, this movie was hilarious. I was laughing pretty much the whole time. Almost as awesome as the good time with my friends and the incredible movie? The AMC at Grapevine now has a bar and kitchen--which means they now have iced tea! I was thrilled to learn this, as even as we were walking into the theater I was bemoaning the fact that there aren't enough theaters that sell iced tea. There really, really aren't. But now there is at least one more.

Yesterday was much more relaxed, though there was still some socializing. I slept in until I absolutely had to get Baby Girl up, and woke up to find my husband in bed with me (yay) as the band had taken a bus to South By and ridden home after the last gig Saturday night. I let him sleep in until I absolutely had to get him up for lunch purposes, and until then I hung out with Baby Girl and began watching the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice (featuring Colin Firth, yum). While doing that I also picked up my Doctor Who scarf and made a pretty good deal of progress on it.

After lunch, Hubby's brother stopped by to say hi and visit with Baby Girl, and some of our friends (the couple I had enjoyed lunch with on Saturday but who had not been able to stay for the movie) stopped by as well to visit a little (and see Baby Girl). They walked to Sonic with us, and barring a few issues when our order was delivered (unsweet tea is a horrid, horrid thing, especially when you are expecting sugary goodness), it was a lovely way to wrap up the afternoon.

The evening was spent in much the same manner as the morning--with Baby Girl, my knitting, and Jane Austen. There was, of course, some tea involved. I could hardly be watching such a British show and making such a British thing as a Doctor Who scarf without having a good cup of tea, could I? Baby Girl thought she should be able to have a cup of tea as well (actually, she wanted my cup of tea), but I managed to distract her so I could drink it in relative peace.

All in all, I think it was a fantastic (and long) weekend. Now I am looking forward to a rather more normal and quiet week. Let's just see if that happens, shall we?