The Writing Process Blog Hop

Instead of writing wibbles today, I joined a blog hop! +Patricia Lynne invited me, and I’ll talk a little about her (or repeat what she wanted me to say) first:

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Patricia Lynne is a Young Adult writer who never thought writing would become so integral to her life. What started out as a fun way to kill time has turned into an obsession with story ideas crowding her brain at inconvenient times. When she's not writing, she's knitting (you don't have to be a granny to knit!) or making jewelry. More morbid obsessions include reading serial killer profilers. Currently, she lives with her hubby in Upper Michigan, loves to dye her hair the colors of the rainbow, and hopes to have what resembles a petting zoo one day.

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Process? Me? Well, I actually have a pretty strict process, but it begins after the first draft. Still, let’s see what I can come up with. There are four questions to answer, which helps.

1) What are you working on?

I usually have three or four projects going at once, in different stages of completion. The fourth Accidental Sorcerers story, Into the Icebound, went to beta readers over the weekend. The next one, tentatively called The Halls of Nightwalk, is an incomplete draft.

Then there’s a zombie novella, and a collaboration with +Angela Kulig that we’ll probably get started on next month, and a dozen or so other things I’d like to get started this year. Dayjobs can be so pesky.

2) How does your work differ from others in its genre?

I’m writing Accidental Sorcerers as a series of novellas, 30K to 40K words each. Most fantasy tends to runs 2–3 times that long. But in the end, there will be about eight stories, so the overall word count should be fairly similar to an epic trilogy.

The other distinction is that the dominant race on Termag (their world) is red rather than white, and the main characters are citizens of a matriarchy.

3) Why do you write what you do?

I tend to write whichever story is most insistent to get out. I’ve had characters bouncing around the inside of my head, driving me to distraction until I finally give up and get their stories written.

4) How does your writing process work?

I’m mostly a pantser, but I've lately begun to at least set up a skeleton if not a formal outline before I start writing. But I’m definitely not a linear writer. If I want to motivate myself to get started with a story, I’ll start with a pivotal scene and work my way out from there. I did that quite a bit with White Pickups; I wrote pieces of the story here and there and worried about how to connect them later. It all worked out pretty well.

After I have the first draft done, I pretty much live in a checklist until I fire the Launch Cannon. There’s a lot going on, with lots of different people I have to wrangle, and it’s easy to forget any part of it. Writing, not so much—I keep filling in holes until I have a complete story.

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So that’s it in a nutshell. Let me know if you want to participate next week, and I’ll shoot you a pic and bio.