novel

The Strangest Thing

/ PaigeRandall / 5 Comments

So one day you decide to write and write you do. You write morning, noon and night. Your try to fit in a semblance of a real life, work, family, friends, basic healthcare, maybe too little fitness, and you write a damn book.

For me, the first time around, writing Circling, most of the energy felt like adrenaline. It was probably a nice boost of endorphins. Forget the runner’s high, try the writer’s high! I would get up after hours motionless, except fingers on a keyboard, panting from expended energy. But it was all mental and unsustainable.
Eventually, by the later drafts of Circling, my physiological response to writing normalized, and it scared me. The energy was crazy, but it was magical too. What if the magic deserted me and I went back to being just plain me. I like writer me much more than other me.
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So on June 2, 2014, I started my second attempt at writing. Forever Falling picks up a few months after Circling ends. The story travels west with Anna’s brother Callum. Writing was a bit more staid. It was slow to start and my fingers danced much less aggressively across the keyboard. But it kept coming. The questions kept getting asked and answered and the voices kept talking. It took about three and a half months for a very respectable first draft, but it happened.
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I typed the magic words today. With Circling I didn’t type them until draft four. Forever Falling is a much cleaner first draft. POV and narrative inexperience plagued me the first time around. Not this time, lessons learned.
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Tonight I’ll celebrate with a bourbon and a steak. To me this combination tastes of pure satisfaction.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be working with an editor to put the finishing polish on Circling. I have decided to leave the traditional world of publishing behind. I’d much rather be the pilot of my own destiny. My goal is to have it in the hands of all the world in December.
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Raise a glass with me, if you will, tonight. Toast every beginning and every ending. And may every ending lead to a new beginning.

XO

The Creativity and The Business

/ PaigeRandall / 4 Comments

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I should be writing now, at least editing. I have a block of free time, a coffee, good wifi, perfect surroundings. Truth be told I’ve been drinking a bit and writing a blog seems more fun. Okay that isn’t entirely honest. I’ll dig a bit deeper. I am struggling to focus this week.

Forever Falling, my second novel is getting down to the nitty gritty end of the first draft. I finally got the photos off my new camera and I’m able to fill in setting description from a my summer travel. I took about 500 photos of houses in Asheville and I chose one to be the home of my female lead’s father. There are also scenic shots throughout the city and mountains of Asheville and Park City. So I went back to page one, word one, to fill in details and touch up dialog. The story has a nice shape for a first draft.

Meanwhile I am trying to focus on this mad business of publishing so I can set Circling somewhere, permanently. The choices are endless and they are all right. And they are all wrong. How much time do I want to devote pedaling my words to the world of traditional publishing? To agents? If I didn’t have a publishing background, the answer would be ZERO. It is a lot of work and one thing I know about myself is that I SUCK AT WAITING. I fucking suck at it. Sure, get back to me in 16 weeks. My reflux will eat a hole right through my esophagus and I’ll be a raging alcoholic in 16 weeks. I can only get so many refills on my Xanax.

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Or independent publishing? There are a LOT of ways to do this. The research required makes me what to lay my head down on this table at Starbucks and take a nap. It does not make me want to buckle down and finish Forever Falling.  And what on earth is worse for creativity than business. I’m a Marketing (un)professional.  I totally get the business is creativity philosophy, but it is a little bullshitty. It is what we creative types tell ourselves so we don’t put our heads in the oven Monday – Friday during business hours.

So writers. Feel free to weigh in on your experience with this process? I am wowed by you all. This is a labor of love and those who stick with it have my undying respect. How are you choosing to share your work? How are you birthing this labor of love?

(Please forgive incoherence and typos. It’s Friday night and I found a really good Malbec.)

For Worse Or For Better

/ PaigeRandall / 3 Comments

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A rainy Saturday is the perfect day to write. Unfortunately yesterday I had to attend a work event. Yes, it was outside, and mostly tented, but truly it was miserable. The tent sucked. The parking sucked. The traffic sucked. I am sure there was a place to pee, but I chose not to venture there.

My second novel, Forever Falling, is nearing the end of first drafting. My characters and I have about 10,000 more words to journey together, before I let them rest awhile. Shit is getting real, as they say, in this land of fiction.

This has been an excellent writing week. Two or three pivotal, very challenging, scenes are finally taking shape. When they started to unfold, the action was fairly clear, but the internal and external dialog were a bit muddled. I wasn’t nailing it. I wasn’t getting near enough to it. I was seeing it, but not feeling it. Then my week got weird.

I was having some fluttering in the area of my heart. It was absolutely nothing but still required an EKG, which failed after three attempts. It reported that my pacemaker is functioning perfectly. No, I do not have a pacemaker, but I appear to be a cyborg. This all required me to share way more of my anatomy with my slightly too cute above the neck doctor, than I typically choose too. Topless horror.

Then there was the annual celebration at work. Suffice to say I was standing in the middle of 160 sitting co-workers taking photos. My dress wrapped my foot and you can guess the rest. There are two ways to go from there, you can cry and run out of the room or understand that you have a captive audience and perform some standup. I chose the latter and while my material was off the cuff, it wasn’t terrible. My newest Facebook friend deemed me the next Jennifer Lawrence. Somewhat of a triumph. Still miserably stressful.

And then writing went to a very different level. Oddly this week I have been writing a humiliating experience for my male main character, Callum. Then the great work face plant happened and Callum’s feelings of shame and embarrassment became much more accessible. He was exposed (much like my breasts) and degraded (much like looking up at 160 co-workers from the floor). The timing on this was fantastic.  As much as I like writing from beautiful landscapes and listening to the pounding of the surf, there is something to be said for inserting the shitty day to day into the lives of your characters.

Long live the bullshit. It keeps this land of make believe more real.