Katy Cooper

So I have this job I actually love, that pays the bills, including health insurance and retirement. Most of the time, the job leaves me enough energy to write.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Now is one of those times. I’m working on a giant project that has to be completed by next Saturday, that involves solving all kinds of problems on the fly, and organizing a lot of labor, and just keeping track of buckets of stuff…and the real crunchy part can’t even begin until 6:00 PM on Friday.

So writing has fallen by the wayside, at least for the moment. I did manage to get the synopsis and three chapters off to the editor whose critique I won in April, so that was one thing. I’m pretty sure I’m going to hold off sending anything to the agent I met at the same time, because there’s no way I’ll get Dragonfly finished any time soon. I’d like to say I’m hoping for Labor Day, but that’s really more wild hope than realistic expectation. I really don’t want to send anything off until it’s done, so if there’s a request for more, more will be available.

Which is also why I’m not drafting any query letters right now.

Well, that and the fact I have no brain left.

I got the feedback I was waiting for and made some adjustments. I tried to read the first three chapters again to make sure the changes I made were small, bringing Ilsabet’s goal into slightly sharper relief, and didn’t pull things out of shape. But I couldn’t get through it — I’ve reached the point I can’t see things any more. So I decided I was just going to send it off as it is. It’s the best I can make it now.

And then I didn’t send it out. [Sigh.] Read the rest of this entry »

This is a seriously fly-by posting — the day gig has erupted, madness abounds, and I feel like I haven’t got two brain cells to rub together. Well, I do, but they’re all focused on orchestrating a 90+ person move, with all the attendant issues, not to mention all the craziness of a couple of construction projects. So it’s kind of hard to be coherent about writing.

Not that there’s much to report. I’m waiting for feedback on the first three chapters of Dragonfly before I send it on its merry requested way, and I’m trying to figure out how to rescue a whole section. Reading it, I realized it needs to be more, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how to get that onto the page.

What happens? How do I ratchet up the tension of Ilsabet’s kidnapping and her desire to be released without having a series of repetitious arguments? I think I’m suffering from my usual complaint, which is A Fear of Going Too Far, which usually leads to Not Going Far Enough. I think that’s the problem with that section of the story — it doesn’t go Far Enough. Knowing the problem is the first step…but fixing it is something else altogether.

I think I need help.

But that will have to wait until the move is done…

Well, let’s see: the entry in the PASIC contest is long gone, off to its coordinator. The big upside to that is it’s given me a synopsis I really like. It’s a bit on the long side, but I don’t think I can make it shorter without cutting the heart out of it, so I’m leaving it as is.

Right now, I’m working on revising the second and third chapters so I have a proposal ready to go — the first chapter has already been spiffed up for the contest. I think I’ll go through the rest of the book once chapters two and three are gleaming; things are shifting just a little bit and I need to align what I have.

Other than that, I’ve been thinking about the story and trying to figure out the events of the second half, the stuff that actually happens that tells the outward part of the story. The inward, character journey part I know. It’s just figuring out how that happens in the characters’ day-to-day lives that needs doing.

Since my last post, progress on writing the synopsis has been slow but steady. The slowness comes from having to boil what happens down to its clearest essence, while retaining the heart and spirit of the story. I have to think hard about what’s truly important and what relates most to the central storyline. And this is only a draft – I may finish and realize that I’ve been too ruthless in paring things down.

One thing I’ve realized is that a synopsis is inevitably a distorted version of the complete, full story. It has to be. In condensing a novel in all its complexity to a narrative that’s as short as it can be, a lot of stuff has to be jettisoned, and that changes the shape of what remains.   Read the rest of this entry »

My friend Barbara Tanner Wallace is blogging at the moody muses about her progress writing her latest wip. She’s had some very interesting things to say about the writing process in general, and her most recent post, about learning to respect your own process, resonated with me. I think it was part of the reason I was able to write the beginning of my synopsis.

I spent a lot of time last night thinking about the story, and I think that filled the well too. When I opened up my notebook on the bus this morning, the words just seemed to come. I knew what I wanted to say, which is more than I could have said yesterday.

Anyway, I think I’m going to take a leaf from Barbara’s book and blog about my progress in putting together a proposal (synopsis and first three chapters). I have places to send it, so no wasting time.

Together, we’ll see how it goes.

It’s been years, literal years, since the last time I wrote a synopsis. The reason for the delay is pretty simple: I haven’t had anything finished to send out, so no need to write a synopsis laying out what happens in the story.

I asked my writing friends for advice, and they were very forthcoming, but most of the resources they offered were for ways to figure out the turning points of your story and/or planning it out. I have all that — that’s one of the benefits of having planned out my story. I can look at my scene list and know where the turning points are. So I didn’t need help with that. Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend, I went to my local RWA chapter’s annual conference. I’ve gone every year since joining the chapter in 1996, and I always have a good time. This year was no exception. As always, it was a chance to connect with people I don’t get to see often enough. Some of those people come from far away; others are local. The end result is the same: I don’t get to spend enough time with any of them. If I had the whole weekend to spend with each of them, it wouldn’t be enough time. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure what I think about this idea. I have my doubts about it, but that’s because I can be suspicious and pessimistic. I don’t think publishing is in the business of being good to authors (which is not wrong) so a business model that’s really good for publishers isn’t necessarily any good for anyone else. On the other hand, it’s not necessarily bad for anyone else. Of course, I’ll be watching to see how this shakes out — it impacts me as a writer and may end up impacting me as a reader.

Even though I’ve planned out my story, to the point of having a list of scenes to be written, that doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. I can and do make changes as I go along. Yesterday, as I was finishing up what I thought was the midpoint scene, I opened up my scene list to see what was coming next, so I could start imagining it. The next three scenes seemed unnecessary to me, so I cut them, just like that. And then I took a look at the list as a whole to see what my change had done to the structure of my story.

I was very happy with what I found — the change shifted the midpoint to a place that made more sense, and it also shifted the 1/4 and 3/4 mark turning points to scenes that actually turned the story. That’s the thing about being flexible: sometimes it means your story becomes better.

So plan. But be willing to change.