…and then lose the notebook you put the schedule in?

*sigh*

It’s not really that bad. I think I just left it at the theater on Sunday. And I basically remember the schedule. But! The exciting part is that the schedule is all about finishing my manuscript and querying it by next Monday! Yup! I’m that close to finishing my third novel. Biiiiiig thanks to Jenna and the Pitts for helping me see what I need to do to whip it into shape. I’m really proud of it! Watch out NYC, here I come!

…and found this link which made my day in laughter. It’s  by travel writer Matt Gibson, and it’s on the dangers of picking a foreign language name when you don’t… quite… get the associated content of said name.

Though I must defend one of the names, Cash, as something that I have used for a character in a novel. But in my book, it’s the nickname of someone who’s real name is Cassius (a Latin name pronounced CASH-us (or CASS-ee-us in old, old Latin, but most people use the medieval Latin pronunciation now)), not a name in it’s own right. And if my name was Cassius, I might shorten it, too.

Otherwise… I’m finally at work on my epic fantasy of Heaven and Hell whose name I’m not telling the general public because I’m so dern excited about it. (I usually am lukewarm on my titles, but this one was so obvious and perfect… and I keep checking Amazon because I’m frankly shocked that it’s not already the title of a book.) Anywho, I was having a rough time because in the story there’s this initial brouhaha that happens… and then there’s a loooong time where stuff happens which is important, but the enormity of the stakes aren’t yet evident. And as any writer knows, stakes are key. But, thanks to my spate of fantasy reading, I’ve figured it out. Multiple plot threads. Der… I’ve been reading too many urban fantasies and romances where the plot necessarily centers on one or two people, and really, that’s not gonna work for this story. So now I have the plot line that’s going on in Heaven (the original one) and the plot line that’s going on in Hell (the new one that’s got very obvious stakes)… and eventually they are going to come together at the magical twisty moment in which the intensity of the stakes for all concerned get ratcheted up to epic.

I think I’d been worried that I wasn’t capable of balancing multiple plot lines (I almost wrote plot loins… I must be in RWA), but now that I’ve accepted the challenge, it’s really exciting and words are just flowing onto each new blank page. I’ve found that I need to work on one story and then open a new document and write another one, and then I’ll start putting them together. But I LOVE characters. I love their diversity and their strengths and weaknesses. I love bad guys with bits of good and good guys who fail. I love how viewpoint often determines who’s the hero and who’s the villain. And in a story about betrayal and forgiveness, having multiple viewpoints is exactly what I needed to add facets and shadings to questions of what is good and what is evil.

So… I’ve started on a blurb already, and here it is (and, OK, nobody reads my blog, so I’ll include the title):

The Judas Club is an epic fantasy of Heaven and Hell where angels, demons, the damned and the blessed struggle for identity and meaning after the worths of their souls have been judged – and the story of the Black Angels who straddle both worlds, braving Hell to offer the lost a second chance at salvation. (Here I need to figure out how to sum up in one or two sentences what the main characters’ GMCs (goal/motivation/conflicts) are (and there’re six of them – two Black Angels, a soul in Heaven, a soul in Hell, a demon and an angel). I’ll likely have to pick a couple and leave out the rest.) Until Jeshua of Bethlehem brings them all together to once again turn the establishment on its head – and dare the most dangerous rescue mission in the history of Heaven or Hell.

Wanna read it? I know I want to write it! It’s my fourth novel, and I’m drafting it now!!

The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks

And I mean LOST. If you like urban fantasy or you’re willing to try fantasy but you’re not big on monsters or you just really want something to completely suck all of your time and existence for about a week, you really need to read Brent Weeks’ The Way of Shadows. It came out about a year and a half ago, and I just read it on the rec of one of my ex-students and wow. SO good. The only problem with it, is that it’s 688 pages.

And it’s the first book in a trilogy.

And you won’t want to stop after the first one.

So I’m almost done with book 2 Shadow’s Edge (which is also well over 600 pages and I started last night immediately after turning the last page of TWoS and will finish before I go to sleep tonight and, I’m sure, start book 3), and I’m shocked I got my nose out of the book long enough to write this. It has one of the COOLEST protagonists I’ve read in a looooong time. I am completely lusting over Kylar Stern, and this isn’t even vaguely a romance novel – it’s a fantasy about assassins in a fictional world called Midcyru and awar that is raged between a mafia run country and the invading barbarians from the north with their goddess of death. So wicked awesome (and does at times require a pretty strong stomach).

This book has also made me think about a lot of writing type things and what is Weeks doing so right.

This book is a great study in the power of secondary characters. If I had one issue with this book it’s that I wish I’d written down a list of characters as I encountered them because omg there’s like five million. And I should have crossed them off as they die (which would be most of the list, but you know, that’s apparently the way of fantasy now… Thank George!).

But from a writing perspective, he’s done a great job of giving them the work of making this gritty world real – so that even when our assassin hero does crappy things, he is still a hero compared to the rest of the world. And I can’t BELIEVE how much I let the main character get away with… and I still, as I’ve mentioned, love him. He’s a freaking assassin, for crying out loud. I have never in my life thought that was a profession I’d get behind, even fictionally.

But the secondary characters can do… anything. They can be depressingly hopeless… and teach the hero a lesson. They can make the completely wrong decision… and then when the hero goes with them out of love or loyalty, it’s no longer the protagonist’s fault for being too stupid to live, it’s his strength for being so connected. They are so useful to a writer. I need to think and concentrate on that. I guess in my writing world we’re so encouraged to have the hero and/or heroine on every page that it’s hard to give secondaries their glory.  But dang, Weeks does it. And I’m always excited to see the protagonist again… but I’m not sorry when I’m involved with somebody else, like I so often am in other books.

I’ve rarely read a book with so dern many well fleshed out, fascinating secondary characters. Like, I need a map with all of them sometimes, but once I remember which one this guy is again, it’s awesome.

So… if you have a reasonably strong stomach, read this book!

“Multitasking can actually lower your performance on IQ tests — by about 10 points. Smoking a joint only costs you 4 points. So if you have to choose between multitasking and marijuana, the choice should be clear, although your boss and your government probably see things differently. Bosses and governments love multitasking.”

- from Randy Ingermanson’s article “Organizing: Does Multitasking Make You Stupid?”

I don’t know where he got his statistics from, so maybe this is full of it, but, personally, I’d buy it.  Now, for clarification, I have a dirty little secret. I’ve lived in Austin, TX for fifteen years now and never gotten high. Yes, I am a strange beast. So my opinion on the quote might be as suspect as the facts in it. Buy I have noticed that while 2 glasses of wine have suspect value for my editing ability, they can make drafting a heckuva lot easier. I can focus, I don’t care if I sound stupid, I just type and type and type and type. And the results are usually not as bad as one would expect, and regardless it’s down on paper, which is more than I can say for a lot of days.

Not that I usually write under the influence – I have no aspirations to be one of those drunken, maudlin writer types – but I gotta admit there’s a certain fun to the occasional tippled typing.

However, I cannot write – drafting or editing – while chatting, talking on the phone, listening to a song that I want to sing along with (when I’m really mentally deep into my writing, music helps. When I’m not that deep into my writing, music hurts), or even while worrying about my calendar or the query letter I will one day write or the brilliant marketing strategy I’ll only get to use if I ever get this thing published. And once I let myself get distracted, it’s gone. I have the hardest time getting back in.

I feel bad sometimes, because I’ll finally be rolling along, and Scott will poke his head in the room and say something. Scott has a habit of doing hit and run conversations – he says one thing, expects a response, and then walks off. Then he’ll come back five minutes later, say one thing, expect a response, and walk off. And I don’t want to be rude to my most wonderful of husbands, but I don’t want to lose this thought train that was so hard to get onto  (especially while drafting – I can hop on and off the editing thought train much easier). So I’ve got a choice. Ignore him with a “talk to the hand” (too rude, I can’t do it – besides, even registering a conversation has started the derail), grunt a suitable sounding response based on his tone of voice (but not actually the words he said – if Scott ever came by and said “my company folded today” in a happy tone of voice, I’d probably grunt “Great!” at him) and take 30 seconds or so to get back into the draft, or hop off the train completely, ask him to repeat what he just said so that I can really register it, give him my full attention and a thoughtful reply, watch him walk off, and then turn back to my screen with no idea what to type next. And about the time I’ve almost gotten my rhythm back, he’ll come by for another drive-by. Make me want to scream and throw things.

Multi-tasking. I just can’t do it. And I’m finding more and more studies (with more statistics than the above) backing that while multitasking may increase the amount accomplished (or it may decrease it), it significantly reduces the quality of everything done. Can we get a Twelve-Step Program for those who want to move away from chaotic, multi-tasking dependence and learn to free our minds for good old fashioned one thing at a time?

[ request from Ingermanson that this be included with quotes:

Award-winning novelist Randy Ingermanson, "the Snowflake Guy," publishes the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine, with more than 19,000 readers, every month. If you want to learn the craft and marketing of fiction, AND make your writing more valuable to editors, AND have FUN doing it, visit  http://www.AdvancedFictionWriting.com.

Download your free Special Report on Tiger Marketing and get a free 5-Day Course in How To Publish a Novel.]

Last week I had two days of fabulous writing goodness pouring from brain to page, and today it’s back again to writing by mental cheese grater. I don’t know why sometimes it’s easy and there are words and words and words and sometimes it’s painful and there are no words to show for it. Or at least no good words to show for it. The good news is I’ve passed the halfway mark on novel three (woo…) and if I can only finish before angels and dragons become the next big thing (too late) I’m hoping it’ll do well querying.