The Main in the Mirror

Back in the day when I'd write fanfic or little short stories I ended up spending more time looking for the perfect character profile image than actually writing the piece. I guess that explains why I never properly finished anything.

This time around I'm also trying to focus (or not focus) on fleshing out the character as a person, in actions and dialogue and thoughts rather than their appearance. My plucky lead is not going to describe herself in the mirror in the first chapter or list her outfit for the day as mentioned in my Everywoman post, since that just makes me roll my eyes every single time I read it - even if a love of fashion is a perfectly fine character trait. (Stacey McGill of the Babysitter's Club, did you start this? That hideous sunflower print jumpsuit you described when you visited your dad in NYC will forever be imprinted on my imagination.)

If you're a writer, do you need to have a firm image in your mind of exactly what shade your main character's eyes are in order to write her effectively? Do readers need to know that she has brown hair with bangs sort of like Zooey Deschanel's and a slim body with a little beer-bulge tummy in order to embrace her properly?

I suppose it does help a little, but I'm just so scared of slipping down that Mary-Sue slide of silver hair and violet eyes (oh yes, I read a fantastic free ebook this week where the protagonist was thusly described, and her eyes were several times compared to pansies - I mean seriously). I guess if a character is written in first person (as mine is) they should probably have a relatively healthy or even slightly dismissive view of their appearance anyway. They're not going to call their own eyes 'sparkling sea green' and they aren't going to go on a sentence long description of how their autumn-coloured hair floats behind them, smelling slightly of cinnamon. If my character can catch her reflection in her greasy phone screen and think 'Damn girl, you really should do something about these caterpillars you call eyebrows,' does that make her a little more realistic and easier to empathise with? I'd like to think so.

Scheduling SOS

I’ve been on a roll lately after I wrote up a proper outline of my current story and decided to start my draft over and make things a whole lot more difficult for my hapless protagonist. My brain keeps popping up little drabbles of dialogue and snippets of scenes at the worst time, and my handbag and coffee table are littered with scraps of paper that I’ve scrawled on during my commute.

As a result, I’ve found myself wanting to stay in and write rather than go out with my friends and my poor boyfriend that I never see due to our horribly clashing work schedules (don’t tell him I call my story ‘my other boyfriend’ in my head). Between reading (you cheeky minx Gemma Burgess, I think I spent more time reading The Dating Detox at work yesterday than actually working) and writing and blogging and work and friends, how do I create a balance? Help!

Bad At Lunch

It’s not an uncommon instance that I forget to eat lunch in my break at work because I’m too busy tweeting/foruming/checking my Facebook Sims (shh) so I don’t get to sneak out for lunch until 3 or so and then there’s only the choice of Starbucks or McDonalds since all the decent sandwich places are closing up for the day. In each case I need to pass the bargain books place that’s opened up right near my office, where I have to force myself not to gaze wistfully at their window displays because I’ve been in there at least once already that week and I don’t need any more books when I already have an iPhone stuffed to the gills with unread ebooks and a chockers bookshelf at home oh but they’re just $5 and surely I’ve got $5 to spare and I don’t really need to get a 10-pack of nuggets anyway, ooh, look there’s a Jennifer Weiner novel.

I picked up Good in Bed the other day because I wasn’t sure if I’d read it or not and a little way in I realised I had actually read it before but I still devoured it hungrily until I realised what was coming up and my guts twisted in horror and anticipation as my eyes sprinted towards it and then that thing happened and I cried my eyes out, again. Oh, Jennifer Weiner, I wonder if I’ll ever be as good as you even if I write every day until I’m ninety-three.

Writing Some Words In Unique Arrangements

After a cop-out tweet where I said I hadn’t written a Monday blog post because I was too busy doing ‘real’ writing, I felt a little guilty and figured that maybe I could elaborate a little.

My writing space and style is pretty darn haphazard. I bang out most blog posts in Outlook during lunch breaks at work (leave work signature on the bottom so it looks somewhat like actual work) and then email them to myself, but as for my actual stories they’re in dribs and drabs all over the place most of the time until I can get them together.

Ever since I’ve started my current story I’ve had little exciting flashes of inspiration all over the place and it never seems to be when I’m sitting at my lovely big iMac on that dratted wooden chair with a nice candle burning and a glass of red wine. I’m usually too preoccupied with keeping my cat out of the way of the keyboard and the candle - although I failed at this the other day when her huge fluffy tail dipped into the flame and she didn’t notice until I yelped and pulled her away from it. Then of course she glared at me as if that stinky burnt cat smell was all MY fault, and stalked off to lick angrily at the little frizzled patch in her squirrelly tail.

Sorry, distracted by cat. See? It still happens when she’s not even here.

The bulk of what I’ve written so far has been typed out in bed on an ancient white iBook – not even a Macbook, it hails from way before that – that I bought from a friend ages ago in a computer emergency when my old lappy suddenly and alarmingly bit the dust with a lot of half-finished stories on it. After that I didn’t write for years.

These days the poor little iBook can’t do anything on the internet very well, not even Gmail. I can’t download any word processing programs because they just don’t work on the outdated OS, so I type in text edit. I feel like having such a dearth of formatting options as well as stilted and horrible internet is much better for my productivity than having no internet at all. Mainly because I try to research stuff and then get so frustrated that I just give up, add a placeholder, and go back to writing.

I have a few scraps written in pencil in a small palm-sized notebook that I carry in my handbag, although I don’t know why I do it since these days when the bug hits on the train I just type it straight into my iPhone’s note app. I wrote a nice chunk of paragraphs this way on the trip home yesterday and was bitterly disappointed when we reached my station. Maybe I should have stayed on and hoped for a round trip.

I’ve also got a bunch of brainfarts stored as drafts in my Gmail account. I can see that number every time I open it up and muse that I should really get them out of there, but then I think – they’re so SAFE there. No critical hard drive failure is gonna take those ideas away from me… unless Google goes down, but then we’ve all got bigger problems. I’d use Google Docs as a backup but you don’t even want to know what the poor little iBook does when I try to access that.

So that’s it – now please tell me that other writers are as hopeless at organising their word vomit as I am.

Fellow Fangirls, We Gotta Quit This Shit

So this next topic is only, sort of, tangentially related to writing, and for that I apologise - I just can't stop shaking my head over this. The story I'm working on at the moment involves a movie star (sigh) and so, in need of uh, inspiration, I tracked the tags of a few of my favourites on Tumblr. Now, lots of people like movie stars. They're good looking and smart and their lives are exciting for whatever reason, so whenever something new happens the media and the fangirls go crazy.

Case in point - this one actor. Recently he's hooked up with an old flame so now when I hop on for a nice spot of eye candy all I get are blurry photos of him with beard and baseball cap, out with his pretty lady. Poor dude hasn't been out for lunch this week without the paps in his face (apparently he likes tacos, that's cool, I love tacos too). Now the fangirls are moaning fit to burst and posting the stalker shots with pink-tinged photoshop filters and multiple crying reaction gifs. Now, I'm guilty of reblogging a reaction gif thread or two (come on, Doctor Who gets emotional) but do you really need to be so invested in this one guy's life? There's so much talk of 'Oh she's not good enough for him' and 'She's not the sort of girl he always said he liked' and of course the old 'She's only interested in him again since he was in that awesome movie.'

So hold on, you're interested in him for what? His humanitarian efforts? How well he treats his dog? The fact that he'd probably leave the toilet seat down for you? Please.

It's also interesting to note the disparity of fan reactions between actors who are in a long-term relationships and actors who have been, as far as the fans are aware, single for a while. When this other actor and his wife had a baby, everyone was all 'Oh they're such an adorable family' and 'I wish I was her,' but when a single actor hooks up with someone, suddenly all the barbs come out and the poor woman is a trolloping slutbag out to steal the man ten thousand fans were destined to marry? Ugh.

(The word trolloping is now making me laugh because it sounds sort of like galloping and is giving me mental images of pouty brunettes in ponytails and lipgloss trolloping around on invisible Monty Python horses.)

Anyway. Surely if you like an actor you can appreciate that most of them would like some respect and privacy and to not be judged on anything they do in their personal life. I can't even imagine what a nightmare it would be having strangers with cameras follow you around trying to make money out of your private moments. This actor seems like a pretty good dude, and I'm sure that is part of why his fanbase loves him so much. I bet he'd respect your personal space, so why can't you let him have his?

Now let me look at these pecs in private.

The Proof Is In The Puzzling

I’m currently reading a gripping mystery that I found for free on Amazon (oh, cloud-connected Kindle app on my iPhone, you’re so beautiful), but what’s taking me out of it is that it’s quite clear that the story was originally written in Third Person Omniscient and then very sloppily switched to First Person after the fact. There are regular personal pronoun errors such as these:

(…Whose fingers are you licking again? The old lady you’re talking to? That’s sort of creepy and awkward.)

Add the fact that the omniscient aspects, where we hear the (often completely redundant) internal monologue of another character that’s not the protagonist, have simply been changed to italics, and it’s pretty chaotic and confusing. Which is sad, because it takes away from the small-town murder mystery that I’m quite enjoying.

I know I do a lot of complaining about these stories that I download for nothing and consume greedily, but it is a little disappointing that things like this, as well as simple typos and grammatical errors, are rife in the market. I understand that most of these books are bashed out pretty quickly and uploaded by their author, but a little proofreading and editing go a long way.

Back in the day when I wrote fanfic (no, I’m not telling you what fandoms) it was a necessity in some communities to find yourself a Beta reader (or maybe two or three), who’d go over your story and make sure everything made sense before you uploaded. I had some pretty okay Betas, who would just have a quick skim for typos and proclaim it all fine, and some excellent Betas who would question the authenticity of canon references, help me rewrite sentences that weren't flowing, and even assisted me with the plot. I beta-read myself a few times, and tried to be as helpful as I could, to make sure none of my charges ever uploaded a page that wasn't as perfect as we could make it.

It'd be nice if we could see a bit more of that in the self-published ebook community these days.