Character sketches

As part of my preparation for Camp NaNoWriMo, I’m writing character sketches. This is something I’ve never been very good at, going all the way back to grade school when I’d have to write them for creative writing or drama class. When I try to think of a character, I have a hard time making specific decisions about what the character is like. I have a vague feeling of the character, but when it comes to saying something like “My character’s personality traits are…” I get stuck.

I’m a very systematic person and I like to have a list or group of things to choose from. When deciding what to have for dinner, for example, my mind goes blank, but if I’ve got a menu in my hands, I’m fine. So I started out trying to fill in the character sketch questions in 90 Days to Your Novel, but I found many of them seemed too specific, like “What is your character’s favourite food?” It is, of course, important to know as much about your character as possible, but I found starting out with such specific questions was causing a block; I need to get a more general outline before I can start deciding the small stuff. So I looked at the character sketch template in Scrivener (is there anything this program doesn’t have?!) and found that it simply asks for things like”Physical Description”, ”Personality”, “Mannerisms”, “Background”, and ”Internal and External Conflict”. This pared down version is easier for me to start with and I can fill in specifics when I learn more about the character as I write.

However, when I got to “Personality” I felt like I’d been asked what I want for dinner. Trying to determine specifics from this vague feeling of a character was like trying to hold on to fog. Whenever I would try to think of traits to choose from, my mind would be blank, or would come up with things so clichéd and one-dimensional that they were useless. So I googled “Personality Traits” to see what the internet could tell me.

I figured I’d get some personality quizes (that I could pretend to fill out as my character) or maybe lists of some kind, but instead the very first hit was a Wikipedia article on the Big Five Personality Traits. This is a theory in the field of psychology that states that the personality of every person in the world can be broken down into five major categories: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. What this does for me is narrow down my choices; I look at each category in turn and think, ‘what traits (or opposite traits) of this category does my character have?’ Before you start to think that this would create cookie-cutter characters, think of how many different traits fit inside each of these broad categories and their opposites (which really amounts to 10 categories from which to choose traits). I’m finding it really useful for focussing the decisions I have to make into smaller, easier to handle chunks of information. Which is what makes my brain happy!

Writing, writing, writing

Yesterday I joined two online communities that I hope will help in my writing. The first is I finally joined National Novel Writing Month. I’ve known about this thing for years, but have never joined. NaNoWriMo isn’t actually until November, but they do have Camp NaNoWriMo, which takes place in July and August. In each case, the object is to write a 50,000 work novel in a month or less. You can track your progress by inputting your word count as you go, but you’re not declared a winner until you upload the finished draft and specially trained computer robots have checked it for authenticity. Authenticity doesn’t mean quality, it just means making sure you didn’t write “All work and no play make Homer something something” over and over again until the word count reaches 50,000. The purpose of this is to force you to just write, without second guessing or self-editing. Just write until you get to the end and then stop. Editing and revising comes later (the website provides support on that, as well) but in the meantime you’re left with a complete first draft of a novel and a feeling of accomplishment. Novels written in past NaNoWriMos include Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen, so that just goes to show what this event can accomplish.

The other thing I joined is 750words.com. This website is based on the Morning Pages exercise in The Artists Way by Julia Cameron. The premise is to write 750 words every day, about anything. This has a similar focus to NaNoWriMo, in that it gets you to just write, without self-editing or over thinking. It should also help form the habit of daily writing, which will help me in NaNoWriMo, as well as be a vehicle for brain dumping all the stuff that’s floating around in my head and fighting for focus. I’ve done it two days in a row, so far, and I find it very freeing. I just write stream of consciousness crap for 750 words (which only takes me about 15 minutes) and then I feel better and can start to write seriously, which is the point.

I’m thinking of writing the novel I’m currently working on as part of Camp NaNoWriMo in the August session, and then coming up with another novel idea for NaNoWriMo in November. If anyone has an idea for a November novel, please leave it in the comments. If I pick one of your suggestions and it ends up getting published, I’ll give you credit in the acknowledgements and a signed copy when it comes out.

Human ingenuity wins out

I know you’ve all been hanging on the edge of your seats to discover how the war with my mystery garden nemesis pans out. We spent all last week bringing the strawberry box inside until we could find the time and energy to tackle the problem in a more permanent way. My friend Dave’s suggestion in the comments was that we take care of it by means of a BB gun and hunting blind, but we don’t have space for a hunting blind on our balcony. Of course, we don’t believe in capital punishment just for eating our delicious strawberries, although I started to reconsider this stance when I sustained a spider bite bringing the box in one night. It was my second spider bite already this summer and it still itches, almost a week later.

Yesterday, we finally had the time to deal with it. We got out the bird netting and bamboo sticks left over from when we made a protective cage around our 2′x6′ garden box last year (this is not our first time tangling with thieving neighbourhood critters) and some cotton string and made a strawberry cage.

We were able to leave the strawberries outside all night last night and not a single bite or pilfered berry. Although we haven’t been brining the onions in at night, they have also gone unmolested.

Now that that’s fixed, I just need to wait for this spider bite to heal.

Strawberry Theives

We hadn’t planned to grow strawberries this year. I’ve tried planting strawberries for several years and never had much luck. At best, I’ve gotten one or two small berries off the whole crop, so when we made up our garden plan back in February, strawberries weren’t even on the list. Nonetheless, back in April I was walking down the main street in my neighbourhood and I noticed that our local green grocer had strawberry plants for sale. They looked healthy and already had several blossoms. Something just clicked; the strawberries seemed to say, “This is the year”.

I bought 6 plants on a whim and planted them in one of the railing boxes on our balcony, the only plants out there at the time. The very next day, we had a hail storm that stripped the plants of most of their leaves and all of the petals. Stems were broken, and I worried that the plants might die just as they were getting settled. I wathced them every day, allowing the broken branches to stay on the plants as long as possible in the hopes that they were still getting some photosynthesi,s and dead heading them as each one finally died. But through it all sprouts of new growth began peeking up from the centre of the plants, and several weeks later they were all stronger and healthier than when I bought them, with nice big strawberries.

But it looks like something still doesn’t want me to have a strawberry crop. Two days ago, when I went out to check on the plants as I do every morning, I found a still-green strawberry with a big bite out of it, and another laying on the soil.  Two holes had also been dug in one of the railing boxes containing onions, but the onions themselves were undistrubed. Yesterday, I found the two largest berries on the soil with bites out of them. I don’t know if I have a squirrel (because of the holes in the onion patch) or birds, or a combination of both, but something must be done.

Two strawberries with bites taken out of them

We’re trying to devise some way of securing bird netting around them, but for now we’re just taking the whole planter in every night, since whatever is doing this seems to be nocturnal.

Adventures in book signing

I had two book signings this weekend: one Saturday at Yorkdale Indigo and one Sunday at the Eatons Centre indigo. Saturday’s signing was a learning experience because, for the first time since our very first signing at The Village Butcher, we didn’t bring food.

All the previous book signings we’ve brought samples, usually maple tarts and bison burgers. This required a larger outlay of money, and with the bison burgers Suman needed to bring an assistant to help heat and assemble them. So yesterday we decided to try the no-food approach, because it’s sometimes hard to justify paying $50-$100 on food, when we only get $1.30 each in royalties for each book sold.

Our average so far is to sell roughly half of the on-hand copies of the book. So if we started the signing with 50 copies, there are around 25 copies left when we sit down to sign the remaining copies. Having food is very useful because it’s a way to draw people over to our table, get them talking, and let the know how tasty the food in the book is. Yesterday, with no food in the offing, we only sold 3 books, our smallest number yet. We even had one person insist that we should have food, and said that he would come to our Sunday signing and buy a book if we had food (he didn’t). So the public has, literally, spoken; today there will be food.

Another interesting thing that happened at Saturday’s signing. About halfway through the event, a man walked up to our table. He walked right up to us with purpose, instead of veering over in response to my greeting, like most people. He walked right up to me and said, “I heard there’s a book signing. Is this the book signing?”

“Yes,” I said. “This is our book signing.”

“Who’s doing the book signing?”

“Well, we are. This is me,” and I pointed to my name on the book cover, “and this is my co-author,” and I point to Suman’s name, and then to Suman himself, who is standing slightly off from the table, talking with someone.

“Are you on Food Network?”

Right at this moment, I new where this would go. “No,” I answered honestly, although for a brief moment I considered lying and saying “Yes”. If he has to ask, clearly he doesn’t know everyone on Food Network. But aside from the fact that lying is wrong, there would probably be a bunch of follow up questions, like “What’s your show?” that would very quickly call me out. So I answered honestly, and the man turned and walked away without another word. Not even trying to find some way of winding the conversation down or even finding out more about the book itself to see if it was something he would be interested in. I hadn’t had the chance to give him my speil describing the book and the awards it’s won. He just turned and walked away, as if he had never started this conversation in the first place. Some people and their priorities!

My new toy

I have just discovered a piece of software that is going to make my writing life so much easier! It’s called Scrivener and it calls itself a writing studio, not just a word processor. And that’s no exaggeration. I’ve only been playing around with it for half an hour and I’m hooked!

Anyone familiar with the setup of Access, where you can have multiple files as part of one document, accessible from a left sidebar, will be able to picture the layout of Scrivener. The sidebar (called the Binder) is broken up into a manuscript component and a research component. The manuscript component is where you work on writing the drafts and can be broken up in different ways depending on what you’re writing (they have different templates for things like Fiction, Non-Fiction, Screenplays, that sort of thing). It operates under the assumption that it’s easier to work in parts that can be combined or rearranged as you work, although you can, of course, just write the whole document in one file, if you prefer. The research component allows you to manage all the external things that get referenced during the writing process – character sketches for fiction, research documents for non-fiction, etc. You can even set up a split screen so that you have the scene you’re writing on one side and something else that you’re referring to (a previous draft, a character sketch, a research article) right next to it.

This program really connects with my compulsion to organize and compartmentalize things. But one of the things I really appreciate is the aesthetics. Windows programs tend toward the utilitarian, which always bumms me out. I’m a very practacle person, but I respond much more favourably to a program that looks interesting than one that’s just a series of grey-outlined windows. This program has an option to use a  cork board view, where whatever you’re working on (scenes, character sketches, what have you) are displayed as if they are written on file cards and tacked on a cork board. You can click and drag to move scenes around, and they’ll move around in the Binder, too, and display in their new arrangement in the page mode. This is going to make my writing so much easier! I only wish I’d had it when I was writing From Pemmican to Poutine. When I think of how I had to try to juggle so many different documents at one time…

It’s only available on the Mac for the moment, but they’re launching a Windows version next month. The Windows version is currently in public beta, so I downloaded it for now because I can’t wait to start using it. We bought the Mac version today, but I like being able to work on my cute little netbook, instead of having the huge MacBook spread out on my lap. Plus, the two versions are compatible, so if I want to work on the Mac for some reason, I can!

I’ve so far spent the morning happily importing my existing work on the novel into Scrivener and organizing it in a way I like. I’ll do the same with the textile book shortly.

 

Humble appologies

Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve updated this thing. School took so much of my time and energy, and add to that promoting the book, that I just couldn’t stand the thought of adding to all that with more activity. But school is done and the book is going smoothly (two awards won, so far) that I feel I can start looking forward again and commit the regular posting.

Right now, one of my main focuses is finding a job. Yes, even award-winning authors need a day job, especially award-winning authors with two student loans to pay off. I’ve been sending out resumes for job postings and I’ve even begun cold contacting companies I’d like to work for, using my best business-style writing to beg for a job. If anyone knows of a company looking for a good information professional, please leave a comment. I will knit a pair of custom socks for anyone who helps land me a good job.

The other thing I’m working on is my next book: actually, my next two books. I’m writing them simultaneaously, because I just can’t stick to one or the other. Whenever I try to settle on one, the other starts to tug at my brain, so I’ve just given in and begun working on them both. One of the books is my next non-fiction, a work on textile history. I’m still in the research phase right now, which is perfect because it’s a break from writing. The other book is a novel, my first fiction book. I don’t want to get into specifics yet, because I’m still fleshing it out with the help of Sarah Domet’s book 90 Days to Your Novel, which sounds gimicky, but is a very helpful book.

Hopefully, this isn’t my last post for another year. I’ll post about some of the events I’ve done and the progress on each of my books a bit later, but for now I just wanted to get back into the blogging mindset.

Up for air

Just a quick post, because I’ve been so negligent here since my program started. Exams are this week, so I’m spending all my time studying. After Friday I’ll be free (for a week) before the seas of school swallow me up once more.

I’m reading or rereading John Wyndam books right now. I reread The Chrysalids last week, and enjoyed it as much this time around as I did the first time I read it 17 years ago. Maybe more, because I absorbed things that went past me when I was 12. I reread A Wrinkle in Time a few months ago and it definitely did not age as well. I’m reading The Kraken Wakes now, which is considerably slower and more dry than The Chrysalids, but I’m enjoying the underlying commentary about the news media. There are always so many layers to Wyndam’s books.

I just discovered a new blog, Hot Guys Reading Books. Just awesome! I could stare at that website all day, if I wasn’t already married to a hot guy who reads books (and comics! Hott!). I have several pictures of Nyron reading books in exotic locations on our travels, but he wouldn’t let me submit any of them. I’ll have to take a new to send in one of these days.

Ok, I’m going to bury myself in my notes about library roles and MARC21 coding. If you don’t hear from me in a week, send in a search party.

Setting my baby free

The book edits are done. I finished it on Monday and sent it back to the publisher, with a slight feeling of sadness. At this point, the publisher is going to go over my changes and only send it back to me if there’s anything significant that I need to approve or change.  In fact, she’s probably already finished by now and has moved on to typesetting the pages, the last stage before printing Advanced Reading Copies to send off to reviewers. Any changes I might want to make, any further revisions I feel my work needs, it’s too late now. The words on those pages are the words that will always be there, for as long as this book exists somewhere in the world. There’s a frightening finality in that, which caused me to hover with my cursor over the [Send] button for a moment before clicking. It’s said that finishing with a book is like sending a child off to university, knowing that you’ve done all you can to make it the best it can be, but from now on it has to live in the world on its own. I wonder if authors get used to it, or if even Stephen King, as he pops out books like Michelle Dugger pops out babies, still feels like this after each one goes out for print.

It only lasted for a moment, though, and then I felt a sense of freedom. Empty nest time! The first thing I did was clean the kitchen, something I haven’t been able to do in the middle of the day for a few weeks. When you’re working on a deadline, anything that can be put off for later, is, and I found myself routinely doing the dishes at 10:30 or 11:00 at night before going to bed.  It’s wonderful to have it done by lunch time. Then I spent some time in my studio making a cover for my new laptop.  I bought a pretty new Toshiba netbook for school, the brown one, so I’m turning an old felted thrift store sweater into a cover so that it stays nice and shiny. I’ve also been doing lots of relaxing and watching tv.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll spend some time playing video games, who knows?! Although I felt some sadness at sending my baby out into the world, the feeling of calm and relaxation has lasted longer.

That is, until we have to start marketing.  Then the work starts again.

Editing

I’ve got the edits back from the publisher, so the book is in its final stages.  Even though I know it’s the normal practice, it’s seemed strange to me that people have already paid money for my book, when it’s not even finished yet.  I have to go through the edits (highlighted for me thanks to a computer program called Track Changes), approve or reject them as needed and send it back.  The editor only did copy editing rather than the substantial edit I’d been expecting, so I’m doing a bit more revision on my own; hopefully there won’t be too much back and forth before the final draft gets confirmed and typeset for printing.  We’d like to get review copies printed in time for the Book Expos, at least the one here in Toronto if not the American one.

Suman and I met up yesterday to talk marketing.  The publishing house will be sending out review copies, but that’s about all we’ll get in terms of promotion.  We’re still hoping to do a launch somehow, we need to figure out how much it will cost.  We also talked about making little promotional items tied to the book, like fridge magnet measurement conversion charts and bookmarks, as well as local grocers and butcher shops to approach about carrying the book or having us for signings.  My local butcher has been excited for the book since the first and asks me whenever I go there to buy chicken breasts or ground beef when it’s coming out.  He definitely wants us for a signing, too.  For some reason, signings are what I’m really excited for.  I’ve been to quite a few signings of my favourite authors, and having a signing of my own feels like “making it” for me.  Of course, I know I’ll likely get tired of them quickly, but for now I can still look ahead with anticipation.  Does anyone have any brilliant marketing suggestions for the book?  Since we have a budget of $0, it has to be things we can do relatively inexpensively, or are at least worth the money spent.

I had lunch with my friend Rita at the Gladstone.  She copy edited the manuscript before we sent it to the publisher and she’s helping me work on the index. In Kurt Vonegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle one of his characters, a professional indexer, says that an author should never index their own book because it tells too much about the author’s personal feelings and obsessions. I think that an author should never index their own work, because it’s hard to be objective and make decisions about what index worthy.  But on the other hand, I’m glad I’m doing it myself because I’m kind of anal about indexing and cataloguing and I don’t think I would really trust anyone else to do it.  :)

Rita and I also did a gardening swap.  I gave her a bag of my homemade compost and she gave me seeds for sunflowers, muskmelons, spinach.  Every warm day is 1 day closer to gardening!