No, I’m Not Dead, and When to Ignore a Beta Reader

It’s be a looooooong while since I’ve done a blog.  At least here.  I’ve done a couple over at DeviantArt.  Mostly because I started a new project while waiting for my beta readers, and since I have no intention of trying to get it published, I have no issues sticking it up for the masses to read.

I should probably stick up a donation thing.  I need to eat too, you know.

Despite how it’s appeared, I’m not really dead.  I’ve even managed to get work done on DEALING WITH DEMONS.  Not a ton, mind you, because my beta readers are fail.  They only ever send me stuff when I poke them with sharp objects.  And it’s almost to the point where I need to go stabbing again.  

Mostly, I’ve been busy being manic depressive (I hate spring.  I hate summer.  I wish I could stay in a cave and not come out again until fall.) having fun in the wonderful World of Warcraft, reading Jim Butcher, and facing the idiocy of bureaucracy that is University.  I’ve been writing at my new story a bit, FAERIE BAD LUCK, and I’ve been slowly chipping away at revising Jacky.  I’m on chapter six now.

See.  Not dead.  So on to the next topic.

When to Ignore a Beta Reader

I love my beta readers.  They’re a good group.  Really.  They’re very helpful.  The problem is, one has made assumptions, and glossed over details, and its affected the last two chapters she’s sent me.  The problem is, her advice is still good, even if I don’t agree with most of it.

Which leaves me wondering.  Should I rewrite this chapter, which after talking to her I’d planned to do, or do I ignore her well intentioned advice and leave it?  My other beta readers didn’t have the same issues.  They point out a couple of inconsistencies and things that confused them.  That’s cool.  That’s what beta readers are for.

But confusing a non-vampire for a vampire, thinking the two are the same (when they are sooooooo totally NOT) saying one of my descriptions was purple prose when it wasn’t.  Purple prose, in my book, is needlessly wordy description, often involving comparisons of persons to flowers, and renaming a person’s special bits so that it makes it less “dirty.”  You know what I mean.  ”Her creamy mounds.”  ”His quivering member.”  (Do they really quiver?  I mean, do they really?)  ”Her icy blue orbs.”  That, my friends, is purple prose.  You can just say “her white breasts.”  ”His warm cock.”  ”Her cold blue eyes.”  

When I say “His voice was deep and quiet and it blended perfectly with the shadows, was echoed by them, and reverberated from the darkness until it seemed it hadn’t been him that’d spoken at all, but the very night itself.”  that is exactly what I mean.  I don’t mean “His voice was deep and soft.”  I mean his voice was LITERALLY echoed by the shadows.  

Though, I admit, that last bit, “until it seemed it hadn’t been him that’d spoken at all, but the very night itself,” might be a little over the top.

But hey.  Jacky’s supposed to be scared of her mind.  Fear can make the littlest noise into a hulking monster.  Why not go a bit over the top?

So I disagree with my beta reader.  I don’t think it’s purple prose.  Just over the top.  And the only thing Bane and Revenant have in common is their hair is dark.  Bane’s is dark brown, and held back in a short tail.  Revenant’s is black and hangs in a mess of snarls to mid-back.  Bane dresses casually.  Rev does the whole punk-ass-gothic-biker-badass look.  Bane is HUMAN.  Rev is a vampire.  

Maybe I didn’t describe them well enough?

Kay.  Rant about my boys is over.

I come back to my question, though.  Should I ignore her, because the last two chapters clearly baffled her (I’m half convinced she didn’t actually read them through, just skimmed, but she says she read it, and I trust her).  Should I follow the advice I agree with?  But if I did that, then what would be the point of having beta readers, right?

And the biggy.  Should I rewrite this chapter?  Or maybe just the beginning of it?  One of the problems my beta reader had was that there are three encounter, three new characters introduced, in the span of three chapters, at the same location.  But it fits.  It makes sense to me.  It seems to make sense to my other two beta readers.  Or, at least, they haven’t said anything about it not fitting, about it being silly and unplausible.  

Honestly, though?  I just can’t think of another order in which the characters are introduced.  Demon waits for Jacky at home.  Hurts her by his mere presence, leaves.  New neighbor comes to introduce himself (maybe I should make it late the next after noon?  I never mention time until the third chapter, but really, why would her neighbor be dropping by to say hi at o’thirty-in-the-god-forsaken-witching-hour?) She goes to bed (here’s where it’d be rewritten to having a dream) wakes up, is scared shitless and threatend by vampire.  After the demon had warned her to get wards installed, and to take self-defense lessons.  I was shooting for irony, with that one.  

Either I missed the mark completely, or my BR just didn’t get it.  Hard to tell which it is.

And back to the dilemma!

I was pleased how this chapter came out when I first wrote it.  I’m still pleased with it.  There are some points that need clarifying, and a bit more description, but do I really need to go and scrap it?

No.  I think not.  A simple change of timeline would help things make more sense, I do believe.

So there.  I worked out my problem on my own.  I can act on all the advice given me, without throwing away all that stuff that I think works.  It’s a win-win situation.

And if she still doesn’t like it, then pooh on her.  She’s never been huge into the whole vampire culture anyway. =P

Things That Eat Your Soul

A brief list:

Crocheting
World of Warcraft
Books
Boredom
School
Summer Vacation
Friends

All of these add up to the simple sum of little to no writing done in the last three or four months. Part of it is the waiting on beta readers to give me their feedback on DEALING WITH DEMONS so I can continue with the revising. I’ve long ago discovered that my OCD makes it really hard for me to work on multiple writing projects at once. It’s like going out to dinner. I eat all of one side, then the other, then the main dish. There’s no taking a bite of this, and some of that. Nope. It has to be all one thing at one time.

Don’t know why. That’s just the way I’ve always been.

Anyway! Know that you’ve learned a strange detail about me that you probably didn’t really want to know, back to the topic at hand.

Creative writing was great, though again, I couldn’t work on short stories and Jacky at the same time. When I work on something, I give all of myself to it until it’s done. (At least with writing. Art is another matter.) I expected that once school was out, I’d start back into the writing. Unfortunately this is not so. A lot of things happened the last two weeks of school, things that were more emotionally draining than mere finals. I’m still recovering from it, and heaven only knows how long that’s going to take. Hopefully not too long. I miss playing with Jacky and all our friends.

So I write a bit here and there, but not like I did before school. Life will go on, though. Writing will go on. It just might be a little slow in coming.

On a side note, we’re going to be turning my sister’s old room into an office. Until that’s done, I’m stuck with my laptop, since I don’t want to unpack my desktop, then have to move it around in a couple weeks. No big deal, really. Just another thing that’s going to eat up time and energy and steal a bit of my soul away from the things I really want to be doing.

A Little Puzzled

I rewrote a chapter of HERE BE VAMPIRES.  Mostly because work on DEALING WITH DEMONS is temporarily placed on hold.  I like it much better, though it let to something I wasn’t planning on happening in this book.  Which is fine.  It ups the conflict.  It works.

The problem is what’s next.

See, I know what I want to have happen, I just don’t know how to get there.  Probably because it’s one of those things I have a hard time wrapping my mind around.  Angry sex.  I just can’t figure out what would happen to lead up to it, or what would happen after it’s finished.

Suppose I just need to write it down and see how it goes.  

But not right now.  Right now I am off to class.

A Bit of What’s Going On

WoW ate my soul.  

‘Nough said.

No, but really?  One of the major problems is waiting on my beta readers.  I’ve gotten the chapters I need back from one of them.  There was some good stuff there, but not enough that I felt comfortable diving into revising Ch. 4.  Unfortunately, due to life, my other two betas haven’t had much time or energy to go through more.  

So I haven’t been doing much writing.

The lack of writing threw me into a really rotten mood.  Of course, I didn’t know I was constantly angry because I wasn’t writing.  I didn’t realize that until I started working on a short story for my class yesterday.  Oh.  Look.  Writing makes me happy.  It filters out all those bad emotions and puts them to rest.  

Lesson learned.  I need to write more, even when I’m not working on Jacky.

This week is kinda hellish.  There’s no internet in the apartment for the first time since December.  This hasn’t made me happy.  Being able to drop the overwhelming stressful Human Biology does make me happy.  Now if only I can catch the teacher tomorrow before I have to leave.  I mean, I guess I could wait until thursday, catch him between classes, but I’d rather not have to race home, race to pack, and then race to the airport.

Because my best friend is getting married this Saturday, and I’m a maid of honor.  A break from school the week after spring break is pretty awesome.  

So, sorry for the silence.  I can’t promise that there’s going to be an end to it any time soon.  I’ll try to be better about my public ranting habits, though.

Killing Time

Here I am, doing a net group activity in creative writing, but because the people in my group are going over my story, I really have nothing to do.  So, here I am.  Blogging. 

I’d kinda like to pull out and work on DEALING WITH DEMONS, but I’d feel guilt about working on it, when really, I should be working on the story for the class.  It started with “The Incredible Roommates,” but it’s changed.  Of course it has.  It wasn’t really a short story, and that’s what I need for this class.  The new beginning is nice.  The tensions are good.  It’ll be more interesting.  

I just want to work on Jacky, though.

So, while the professor isn’t in the room, that’s what I’m going to do.

School is Death to Creativity

I’ll admit that it’s just not school that’s shot the progress on my book in the foot.  A certain amount of time has been going into playing WoW as well.  Though, now that I’m over that initial starry-eyed can’t-get-enough stage, it’s easier to pull myself from the game to put my attention to things I have to do.  Like homework.  It’s harder to do it for revisions.

Part of it is waiting on my two new beta readers.  I don’t want to get too far into the book, then have to go back to make additional changes to chapters I’ve already fixed.  Especially with the first nine chapters or so, because they follow the original book so closely.  The original book that I rewrote twice, and edited the beginning of at least three times.  To be honest, I’m getting kind of sick of it.  I’m looking forward to slaughtering the later chapters, the new stuff, because it’s still new.  But the beginning has that been-there-done-that feeling.  Why would I want to take time from a game to do something that I’ve already done upteen zillion times before?

Because I want to get this book published.

Jacky’s been feeling neglected lately, and I can tell.  Normally the characters of Jacky are not the last things I think about when I go to bed.  They have been.  All weekend.  I have to focus hard to keep my thoughts from straying to Jacky when I’m trying to go to sleep.  Because once I start thinking about it, the ideas, the characters, the things I can do to make their lives hell, then I know I’m not going to be sleeping any time soon.  So no thinking about my books before bed.

Still, I have been thinking about them.  I’ve thought of things I’d like to do in a new book.  Great things that will either screw Jacky up permanently, ruin her relationship with her guardian angel, or get a piece of her soul sold to Lusivar.  (Satan, if you will, but not the devil.  A devil is a completely different beast and a demon, and my Satan is a demon.  Anyway…)

I read the first chapter of DEALING WITH DEMONS, and she did something she wouldn’t have done–maybe couldn’t have done–a year or two ago.  She had some good points, and good ideas.  She didn’t just say “that’s so good,” like she used to.  If she had more time in her life, I’d actually sign her up as a beta reader, but alas, if I waited on her, I’d never get it done.  Never ever.

Which leaves me thinking.  Maybe I shouldn’t wait.  Maybe I should take what I have and run with it.  Though that leaves me with only one chapter to work on.  Poking my BRs just might be in order.  I suddenly have a yen to work on the revisions.

And that, my friends, is the entire reason for blogging.

High Emotion Scenes

I really hate these.  But I think I need more of them.  I need more of that emotional conflict.  It makes for more entertaining reading.  A couple years ago, when I first started writing Jacky, I had no issue writing scenes with high emotions.  Sad, happy, angry, terrified.  No issues.  As I’ve gotten older, I guess I’ve started learning to control my emotions, so it’s gotten harder to let them out.  Maybe especially on paper (or screen, as the case may be).  

I need to get over this.  Bad things are going to happen to Jacky.  If they don’t, her life would be pretty boring, and there wouldn’t be much point writing about it.  So, I’m making a conscious effort to put more of the hard emotions back into my writing.  my beta reader thinks I need to work on Tory (and I agree, I do) make him more likable.  One of my plans for doing this is have him be a cause of emotional conflict for Jacky.  You know.  Little brother causing his big sister grief.  But also little brother getting into bad situations by trying help big sister.  It should work.  At least the idea of it works in my head.  We’ll have to wait and see how it comes out on paper.

Getting the Hang of Things

I’ve just gone over the mark-ups of my beta reader for chapter two.  As always, she made some interesting points.  More importantly, I agree with most of them, and the ones I don’t, I should explain Jacky’s reasoning a bit better.  So, it was my bad, not hers.  

Now that I’ve finished chapter one, I think I’m starting to get into the swing of revising.  I’ve done minor revising, and major rewriting, but never major revising and minor rewriting.  It’s a bit different than what I’ve gotten used to doing, and I think it’s going to take another couple chapters before I really get used to the idea of not having to rewrite entire chapters because of a couple of things that are wrong with them.  This chapter is going to be one of those.  I don’t need to make any huge changes, just small ones that are probably more important than a big change would be.

Having the whiteboard up on the wall helps.  Not only does it keep my thoughts and priorities straight, but it glares at me accusingly when I don’t work on Jacky at all.  Maybe I should stick my small whiteboard up too, so that human biology homework can glare at me balefully.  Maybe then I’d actually get it done, and stay on top of it.

Bleh.  Homework.  But that’s not what this blog is about.

There are some things I want to add.  Things that, I think, will make some of the characters more likable (no one likes poor Tory).  I just have to find a place to put it that won’t interrupt the flow of the story.  But that’s what outlines are for.  Which I have one.  It was interesting laying it out by chapter like that.  There’s a lot of chapters that are pointless.  Which will probably be hacked away or changed.  I’ll wait for the verdict from my beta readers before I doing anything too drastic.

In any case, progress has been made.  Not much, but enough to get me over the first little bump in the road to getting back into the swing of things.  We’ll see how tomorrow goes.

It’s Cold When You’ve Got the Flu

I don’t know where I got it, there are any number of likely candidates, but somehow, from someone, I picked up the bug.  That nasty bug that sits on your chest, making you cough and wheeze.  It’s hard to get a good breathe, and when you do, it just makes you cough again.  The cough wouldn’t be so bad, really.  It’s a dry cough, and as long as the throat is wet, it’s stays caged, growling quietly and waiting for a lax moment to spring out and attack the lung again.  But no, this cough just doesn’t go for the lung, shredding the throat as the lungs try to force it out.  It’s that the cough digs talons into my skull, right above the eyes.  I cough and it feels as if my head is going to burst.

Still, that in itself was bearable.  Even the mild fever wasn’t bad.  It meant I spent the night either too hot, or too hot and still feeling cold.  Nope.  It’s the fact that I now have a nose that feels stuffed with the gooey tails of demonic cotton tail rabbits.  

The sleeping all day wasn’t such a bad thing.  The first time I took a nap, I felt a bit better.  The second time, I woke up worse than before.  That just seems so unfair.  But what’s worse is there’s nothing to make it better.  I’m doped up on echinacea and vitamin C.  I tried chicken noodle soup yesterday, but it didn’t taste well.  The noodles felt slimy.  At least the broth was good.  Tea helps sooth the throat a bit, but the only tea that sounds or tastes appealing to me is Celestial’s Bengal Spice.  It tastes good in my mouth.  It eases the tingling of the treacherous claws of the cough in my throat, but it leaves my mouth dry.  It always has, even when I’m not sick.  I don’t like the dry mouth feeling.

Things could be worse, though.  I could have been sicker this morning, and unable to do my presentation in grammar class.  I could have had a harder time breathing in band, when we had a national association coming to listen to us to determine our worth.  It could have knocked me flat this morning the way it did this evening, but it didn’t.  And I’m grateful for it.

I’m going to have to hit Wal-Mart again.  Probably tomorrow.  My tissue supply isn’t going to last.  Not at the rate my nose is leaking.  Maybe I’ll try a new tea.  Lemon, or mint.  Either of those sounds like it would have a better after effect than the chai.  But not right now.  This is one of those times I wish I was home, cause my mom would go get the stuff for me.  Or even my sister, for that matter.  But I’m alone, and the thought of going to Wal-Mart makes me want to cry.

God I wish I was home.  I never get homesick the way I do when I’m not feeling well.  

Maybe what I need is a boyfriend to take care of me.  Such a pleasant thought, that.

This is probably more rambling from a sick person than you really cared to hear (well, read, but whatever), so I’m going to go snuggle up in bed with my cup of chai, my mound of blankets, a large bottle of water, box of tissues, and a book.  It’ll be nice to get some reading done while I’m drinking my tea, but after that, I think I’m going to go back to sleep.  Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

To Ailsa

You know, it’d be way neat if we could reply to comments.  I thought there was a reply button, and it did this neat little thing, but I couldn’t see the whole message, so I went to the post to read it all over again, making sure I got everything right, but when I opened a new window, the mysterious reply link was gone.

So I’ll make my reply to you here.  You’re more likely to see it that way.  ^_^

Yes, Tory was originally her older brother (by legal adoption, don’t forget).  They were childhood friends, growing up together.  They met as tots and just hit it off.  After the “incident” with Jacky’s parents and a demon, Tory’s parents took Jacky in at first until one of her relatives could be contacted and take her off their hands.  When her father’s parents said rather firmly they wanted nothing to do with her, she in danger of being tossed into the system and lost, but Tory’s parents were already caring for her, and because Tory threatened to run away with Jacky, wherever she went, they caved in and signed up for adoption.  

Lots of back story that doesn’t really get mentioned in the book in detail.  It’ll happen eventually, in a future book, but I’m don’t want to spoil anything.

Whether Tory is a year older, or a year younger, it doesn’t change much.  Jacky wants to protect him, and doesn’t want him getting tangled up in her wretched messes.  Which are dangerous for anyone, let alone a mild mannered intern like Tory.

I can’t remember about that club scene.  I think it changed drastically.  But no, it wouldn’t change her feelings at all.  I mean, my sister is six years younger than I am, and even though I’m uber protective of her, I would not want to go someplace like a club–or hell, even the mall–without her being there with me.  I’m more comfortable in my own skin when she’s around, mostly because she accepts me and all my strangeness.  Tory gives Jacky the same kind of acceptance.  Jacky’s strange, and scarred horribly, both physically and emotionally, but he lover her anyway.  Age wouldn’t change that.

I appreciate the input.  It’s always great to get different feedback from different people, just because they see things in a bit different light.  Though ya.  CHOSEN went through a really big weed-whacker to emerge reborn as DEALING WITH DEMONS.

Still, the problem remains that I have no idea what name I would like to give Tory.  I’ve been toying with the idea of him having some name completely different, and still have Jacky call him Tory affectionately because of some issue pronouncing his name when they were little.  Or something.  

I don’t know.  It still bears a lot of thinking on.

Thank you, Ailsa, for your comment and the helpfulness of it.  I really appreciate it.

And if you’re in any doubt as to whom I’m addressing, she listed her web-blog as To See a World in a Grain of Sand.