writing
I’ve been reading over The Rise of Renegade X, so I can read it back to back with The Trials of Renegade X, something I’ve never done so far, at least not since Trials was actually finished. Besides reading them for fun (because, OMG, I have a series, or at least if two books counts as a series, which it might not, but saying OMG, I have a … couplet? doesn’t have the same ring to it), I’m looking for style and spelling consistency while I do it, to make sure everything matches between books.
It’s interesting because as I read through it, I’m noticing that even though my voice hasn’t changed in the six years since I wrote this, my punctuation style has. I’m looking back at the first one and seeing that I used semi-colons. Seriously? I never use semi-colons, or at least not anymore. And I can see why I ended up using them then, but I just don’t structure my sentences the same way.
I’m also pretty sure I use a lot more italics these days, though that might be partly because I realized, while listening to the Harper Madigan audiobook, that no one will read the words as if they’re italicized unless I, you know, actually italicize them.
And since I’m republishing The Rise of Renegade X (someday, hopefully in the not-too-far future), it’s so tempting to think, “Well, I could just edit out those semi-colons, to make it match my style now.” But that is a big fat can of worms right there, and Chelsea’s first rule of revision is change as little as possible. That goes double for books that are already done, published, and have been being read and enjoyed by readers for years.
So I will just suck it up and face the facts that sometimes things change, and that’s okay. Also, I really doubt you guys are going to be reading the sequel, going, “WTF? There are NO semi-colons in this book! Where’s the smattering of properly used semi-colons I’ve come to expect from this series?!?!?!” (Though if you did, I suppose you’d be even more upset if I went and took them out of the first book. Best to just leave things as they are and let sleeping semi-colons lie.)
Back from the pony convention! Not that I was really gone, since I live here, but whatever.
For those of you who don’t know, Everfree NW is the local My Little Pony convention. I used to watch the original My Little Pony back in the early 80s, though I find that one doesn’t really hold up that well now that I’m an adult. But the new version of the show, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, is AMAZING. It’s on Netflix. Go check it out if you’ve never seen it.
Anyway, this was my first time at Everfree and my first time being a vendor at a con. (I make crocheted pony plushies.) I only saw the dealer’s room, but that’s my favorite part of conventions, plus the con pretty much came to me. VIPs from the show came by and complimented my ponies. The people from Friendship is Witchcraft stopped by, too (they re-edit episodes of the show and dub over them and it’s HILARIOUS and my favorite fan-made thing). And Peter New, the voice of Big Macintosh, came by and let me take a pic of him with my Big Macintosh plushie.
There was also a Sweet Apple Acres booth on the other side of the vendor’s hall, and a lady dressed up like Granny Smith. Every so often she’d shout that it was Cider Season, and for a limited time they’d sell little bottles of Apple Family cider, just like on the show. It was good times. And from my booth I met lots of cool people and saw lots of amazing costumes.
I had some Renegade X bookmarks on my table and told a few people that I was a writer and gave them one. Which was maybe a mistake, because I kept getting that, “Oh God, not another terrible writer–please strike me down before they start talking about their book!” look from people, which I haven’t gotten since before I was published. It wasn’t all their fault, though, since I’m horrible at telling people about my successes. (I blame the kids in elementary school and junior high who would come up to me and, in a mean, accusing voice, say, “You get straight As, don’t you?” Which, for the record, I didn’t, but that wasn’t really the point.) I always forget to mention the important stuff, like that I’m actually published and that Disney Channel is working on the movie. Oh, yeah, and that it’s freaking hilarious.
Oh, well. I like to think if they do end up looking up my book and reading the sample that they will be pleasantly blown away. Because, I mean, making cute crocheted toys is cool and all, but it doesn’t take nearly as much time and effort to learn as making awesome books does.
What are your successes? What skillz do you have that other people underestimate?
Wow, it’s been a while since I posted (guess I was in the writer cave longer than I thought). I looked at my last post, where I had 19,000 words in the sequel. HA. Now I have 115,000 and it’s DONE! That’s right–this book is going to exist. It’s going to come out this September. And it’s going to be really freaking awesome (but I think you guys knew that part already). And if you’re wondering what 115,000 words actually means, I’ll tell you that the first one was 85,000 words, making this a much bigger book. I would estimate that gives you guys another 100 pages to read.
Of sex and math jokes.
Just kidding. There aren’t any math jokes in this one.
I had so much fun writing this book. And drank so much coffee. And, while I miss the characters again already, it feels good to have it done. I finished the first one nearly six years ago. Six freaking years. And there were times since then when I was absolutely certain there would be a sequel, and times when I was absolutely certain there would not. But you guys kept writing to me, telling me how much you loved Renegade X and asking when there would be another one. And if it hadn’t been for you guys telling me all that, I don’t know if I would have ever written it. But you did, and I did, and now I’ve finished the best book I’ve ever written. And I can’t wait for you guys to get to read it in September!
And since, no matter how much planning I do, books have a way of morphing and getting away from me as I write them (or at least the best ones do), I reworked the book description. The old one wasn’t inaccurate, but it wasn’t so much the story anymore either. So here’s the new blurb:
Can a half villain ever be a full hero?
Damien Locke didn’t choose for his supervillain mom to disown him—just because he sort of defied her and ruined her evil plans to take over Golden City—and he didn’t choose for his superpower to be flying, a superhero ability that involves his least favorite thing: heights. But now that he’s living with his dad’s superhero family and enrolling at Heroesworth Academy, he’s ready to embrace his new life, get his H, and finally belong somewhere. But belonging isn’t as easy as signing up for classes, and Damien finds himself struggling to fit in more than ever.
Just when he’s sure his fate as a hero has been decided, though, he gets a new villain power that he can’t control. And things only get worse when he accidentally screws up one of his sidekick Sarah’s gadgets, altering her personality and turning her into a crazed, anti-supervillain vigilante—leaving him no choice but to team up with her annoying superhero boyfriend if he hopes to have any chance of getting the old Sarah back, before she captures—or kills—another supervillain like him.
Newsletter subscribers got a sneak peek at this last week, and now, as promised, I am proud to present the description for The Trials of Renegade X:
Can a half villain ever be a full hero? Damien Locke didn’t choose for his supervillain mom to disown him—just because he sort of defied her and ruined her evil plans to take over Golden City—and he didn’t choose for his superpower to be flying, a superhero ability that involves his least favorite thing: heights. But now that he’s living with his dad’s superhero family and enrolling at Heroesworth Academy, he’s ready to embrace his new life, get his H, and finally belong somewhere. But belonging isn’t as easy as signing up for classes, and Damien finds himself struggling to fit in more than ever. Of course, it doesn’t help that his sidekick Sarah has a new hero boyfriend—not that he’s jealous or anything—or that, just when he’s sure his fate as a hero has been decided, he gets a new villain power he can’t control. And it’s so easy to slip into his old ways when he catches his supervillain girlfriend Kat committing a crime at Heroesworth and covers for her, charming his way out of trouble. But as Damien’s attempts to lead a purely hero life continue to backfire, he’ll have to learn to embrace both his hero and villain sides, or else risk pushing away everyone he cares about and losing any chance he has of ever finding his place in the world.
And there it is! I’ve tried to keep it exciting but not too spoilery. I’ve got about a week left on the current WIP, and then I’ll be back to working on Trials full time!
P.S. Today is coincidentally the four year anniversary of the day I got the offer for The Rise of Renegade X. Crazy how time flies!
Am almost done with WIP. Disclaimer, it is not Trials, which I know is what everyone is waiting for right now. (Understandable!) But it’s still a book that’s very important to me. It’s much darker than my other work–sort of a dark fantasy YA version of Dexter–and I am, like, 8 scenes away from being done with it, though some of those scenes might turn out to be more like plot points and actually be 2 or 3 scenes, especially near the big climactic boss battle part.
I started this book about a year and a half ago now, or at least this version of it, and as I mentioned in my last post, I was pretty dead last year, thanks to poor thyroid treatment. It feels like I’ve been working on this book a lot longer than that. I keep recounting the time in my head and being like, “Are you sure it wasn’t two and a half years?” Still, very slow for me, and there were times when I worried I was just going to be stuck in the middle of this book forever. And I finished no books at all last year, and it wasn’t very long ago that I was also worrying that I might never finish any books ever again. Even though I know from experience that that’s not true, it certainly felt true when I was a thyroid-less zombie with hardly enough thoughts to survive, let alone put in a book.
This also isn’t the first version of this book I’ve written. I’ve talked about this before, but this is a book I first wrote 6 or 7 years ago. That version was pretty flawed, though I loved it so much at the time. And it got me my first requests from agents, though ultimately that was all it got. And it kind of broke my heart that nothing ever happened with it. I spent years blaming this book for being a failure, and resenting myself for loving something so horribly flawed. Well, the book had issues, but there were still things about it that made it good–reasons why it got any agent interest in the first place–and so I’ve taken those good things and transported them into a new, better book.
So, anyway, my point is that while it’s always amazingly awesome to finish a book, finishing this one is going to be extra awesome. And then, once it’s done, I will be working like mad to finish up Trials. Which is also awesome–I know because I was rereading some of it the other day and had to force myself to put it down and not get sucked in, at least not until I’m officially working on it.
What about you guys? Are you close to any finish lines of your own?
So, I don’t think I ever mentioned why I chose to self-publish Harper Madigan: Junior High Private Eye. For those of you who don’t know, it’s a noir detective story. It’s also MG, so self-publishing it isn’t the most obvious path to get it into the hands of readers. A lot of people have misconceptions about self-publishing, or at least that’s what I’ve been noticing lately. (I did not notice much last year. Last year was a dead sort of year, what with my doctor mistakenly putting me on way too low of thyroid meds and turning me into a zombie, which made for very little writing and even less of everything else. But I got a new doctor and better meds and a better dosage. There’s more to the story, but that’s another post for another time.)
Anyway, the hard truth of publishing is that good books do not always get published. The Rise of Renegade X came this close to not finding any love at all and fading into obscurity on my hard drive. In fact, Harper Madigan got more editor love than Renegade X, with three separate editors falling in love with it and wanting to buy. But editors alone don’t decide what gets bought, no matter how much they love it, and their houses said no, they couldn’t sell it. So here’s me with this awesome book that I still want people to get to read, but no publisher.
So what’s a girl to do? Put on her DIY hat and PUBLISH IT HERSELF, that’s what. And you know what? Putting it all together myself was a lot of fun and I was able to do it quickly and easily and pretty much stress-free. It was also a great way to get started in the world of self-publishing before putting out The Trials of Renegade X. I am very pro hybrid-career at this point, and while I hope to continue to find traditional publishers for some books, it’s not something I can control. I can, however, control how many books I self-publish.
And speaking of Harper Madigan, I have some good news to share about it! But not yet. Soon, precioussss. Soon. And I have good news to share about Renegade X, but if I wait a little while, it may turn into really freaking awesome news, so, again, we must all wait.
Mark your calendars for September, 2013! That’s right, The Trials of Renegade X will be released next September! This might seem like a long way off, especially when you guys have been so patient–a lot of you have been waiting for this since 2010. But September is when everything can be done by–both on my end and for others involved in getting the project out the door–and it’s going to be amazing.
If you haven’t already, you can mark the sequel as “to read” on Goodreads or join the Facebook group to help spread the word!
And I have another book coming out next spring that hopefully I will be able to announce soon. It’s not Renegade X related, but if you like the voice in Renegade X, you’re going to love this one, too.
In other news, The Rise of Renegade X came out in Russian! I found out from a Russian fan messaging me on Facebook–one thing you learn very quickly in this business is that nobody tells authors anything. I knew we’d sold Russian rights, but I had no idea when it was coming out. Damien’s name in the translated version is “Damien Loki,” which seems appropriate. ;) Oh, and according to Google Translate, the Russian title is “The Desperate and Undefeated Renegade X.”
Frankly, I think writing fiction is the most important, most noblest career anyone can aspire to. That may just be my years of wanting it so badly brainwashing me into thinking that, but stories are important. They change lives, they comfort us when we’re sad (no one understands you like your favorite book, you know?), they let us glom up all the experiences of another person, both the fictional experiences of the characters and the real thoughts and emotions and tidbits of reality put in by the author. Stories are transformative and allow us to experience change in a safe setting.
And writing is hard. You could take a writing class, turn in all your assignments, and get an A but still be a crappy writer. It’s learnable, obviously, but it takes a lot of time and effort. People often say it’s a ten year apprenticeship, which it definitely was for me, though I guess it depends on how quickly you get in your million words/10,000 outlier hours. But that’s a lot, and that’s just to be publishable, just to start a writing career. And most people don’t have the discipline to put in the crazy time and effort it takes to become a pro writer. Everyone who’s read your books has a little piece of you in their minds now. That’s pretty amazing. More amazing, I think, than going to grad school or earning lots of money.
Once upon a time, in 2004, in a faraway land called Bellingham, WA, where the sky, the earth, and the sea are all the same shade of gray, I got it into my head that I wanted a portable writing device. I had a desktop at the time and I wanted to be able to write anywhere, whether that meant when I was out of the apartment or just when I was sitting on the couch. I did a lot of research and discovered the NEC Mobile Pro. (Which, as you can see if you follow the link, is also gray.) It was super portable, had an actual keyboard (not full size, but it worked), and it turned on and off instantly, which meant no waiting for my computer to boot up in order to write down any brilliant plot ideas I had at one in the morning.
I got a refurbished one off of eBay. It had a spot where you could plug in your dial up internet (LOL), and the one I got came with a WiFi card so you could connect to the network, even if it was kind of slow. But I never ended up using the internet on it. It was a little tiny box with Pocket Word and a word count meter and almost nothing else. There were no distractions, and it changed my life.
Or at least my writing life, which was pretty much the same thing. Not only was it light and portable and I could sit wherever I wanted with it or write in the quiet room at the university library, but I became way more productive. And it’s not that I’d never experienced periods of high productivity with my writing, even with the internet, but it was so much easier to get into that mode without having the option of turning to distractions every time I got stuck.
In the summer of 2007, the same summer I finally graduated college and the same summer that the last Harry Potter book came out, I wrote The Rise of Renegade X, all on that little computer. Then, two years later after I’d sold the book and gotten paid for it, I bought a shiny new laptop. I love my shiny not-so-new-anymore laptop that literally sparkles in the sunlight (there are blue sparkles on the lid, but they only show up in direct sunlight), and at the time I’d badly needed a computer that actually functioned, since my desktop was, on its good days, barely still functioning.
So I got the laptop, and it did all the computery things I wanted it to do, like play games and play videos (with sound! and without blue screening at random times!) and check my email 1,000 times a day. And gradually I stopped using my MobilePro. My laptop didn’t have a spot for the sync cable, my MobilePro had no USB ports, and my laptop couldn’t read the card that the MobilePro could actually save to, at least not without hooking up a separate card reader, and the card itself was unreliable and would frequently forget everything that I’d saved on it.
Anyway, since then I’ve been writing exclusively on my laptop, which has about a million distractions on it, including the internet, which I can’t stay away from. And if it’s not the internet, then it’s Spider Solitaire. And lately I’ve been especially prone to these distractions and I have a lot of writing projects I’m not making enough progress on, if any. So I decided it was time to go back to an internet-less computer.
I did tons of research and got this slightly used HP Mini for a great deal on eBay:
This netbook ended up being the perfect combo of everything I wanted. USB ports, card reader, runs actual Windows (instead of CE) so it can handle Open Office and doesn’t screw up formatting when I’m passing files between computers. It’s lightweight and gets almost 10 hours off one battery charge and it comes out of hibernating instantly, and the boot up time when I turn it on is super fast, too. And the keyboard, which you can see in this next picture, is just how I wanted it. Chicklet style with a hard base.
(As you can see in this pic, I am clearly working hard on The Trials of Renegade X.)
I uninstalled any unnecessary programs, deleted all the games, and left the whole thing not connected to the network. It has my writing programs and that’s pretty much it. It’s amazing how big a difference not having those distractions makes! Instead of being unfocused and looking for ways to procrastinate, I’m actually, you know, working.
Sometimes it pays to know what works best for you. If the internet is there, I will poke at it. I won’t be able to leave it alone, and I know this about myself. And it can make working on my laptop a source of stress. In contrast, the netbook feels like a quiet, stress-free workspace that is just me and my books and the tools to make them better.
So, I can admit that the beginning of the year was a lot busier than I expected (A LOT busier). I pubbed my middle grade noir mystery, Harper Madigan: Junior High Private Eye. I expanded from doing commissions on DeviantArt to an actual Etsy business. I was taking grad school classes. I spent my spring break working a (stressful) temp job. And I finished up another temp job earlier this month.
If I never work another 9-5 job, I will not be shedding any tears. I am seriously not cut out for it. Probably most of us aren’t. I keep reading about how more and more of us are turning to freelance work, so I know it’s not just me.
But anyway! Some of you have been asking about The Trials of Renegade X and how it’s coming along. And now that my workload has mellowed out and the nervous breakdown meter is no longer on orange alert, I’ve finally been able to sit down with this book again and make some progress. (For those of you not reading this directly from my site, the word count bar is up to 5,700, about 8% of the expected total.)
And this isn’t really a surprise, but I LOVE this story. Even though I’ve had it planned out for months, it’s hard to get back into writing when I haven’t done it in a while, and especially when I haven’t been writing regularly. But the more time I spend working on this, the more I love it and the more into it I am. I’ve crossed the threshold of “Juggling all this stuff is hard! *WHINE*” to “OMG, I can’t wait to put in this and this and this, and THIS cool thing goes here, and wait, there was a better way to phrase that sentence I wrote five pages ago…” It’s like the difference between pushing a piano upstairs and sliding down the banister. (Not that I can slide down banisters. But, you know, if I *could,* then I’m sure that’s what it would be like. For the record, I’m pretty sure I can’t push a piano upstairs either. In fact, I’m more likely to pull off a really awesome banister slide than I am to move a piano at all.)
And The Trials of Renegade X now has a Facebook page. It’s where I’m posting my daily word count. Go there, press like, and you can watch the book grow (and shrink and then grow again, as books are wont to do…) and show your support and tell your friends and all that. I mean, you do have friends, don’t you? And you wouldn’t want to be accused of depriving them of something awesome, right? RIGHT? *makes squinty accusing eyes*
Ahem.
Anyway, you might be wondering when this book will be done, and, more importantly, when can you have it??? Well, according to my estimations–*types random numbers in giant calculator with one of those paper rolls coming out the back*–I should be done with the first draft in 2 – 3 months. But you never know when I might get crazy obsessed and not be able to stop myself from doing anything besides writing. But you also never know when life will get completely overwhelming and get in the way. So, yeah, 2 – 3 months. Then there’s editing and revising to do. And then–THEN–you can have it. And by my calculations, that means it will be out some time this fall, late November at the latest. Which means it’ll be out in time for the holidays and you can surprise all your friends you “forgot” to link to the FB page with copies and you will be crowned the best gift giver ever. (Or at least until next year.)
So that’s the scoop on the sequel. I’ll know more about the release date as I get closer to finishing the book. In the mean time, go read Harper Madigan. It’s awesome and it made this Top Ten Underappreciated Books List.