One-Fourth Done!

I went past 5000 words today, which means I'm still behind, but I got caught up by quite a bit. My deadline is toward the end of July, so I might still be good.

With Fairy Godmothered--and I'm beginning to think a title change might be in order--I'm trying to keep on target even when I have some writer's block. Yesterday morning I woke up with some great ideas and banged out several thousand words before everyone else got up. I'm still getting to know my characters and until I get to that point, things can be a little rocky.

I'm often inspired by movies, and in this case, the inspiration is Dangerous Liaisons from 1988. Fairy Godmothered is not going to be anywhere near that risque--in fact, next to The Sevenfold Spell it's going to be squeaky-clean--but I'm giving the novella a French setting and I have some dressing scenes for which I needed to consult the opening scenes of Dangerous Liaisons. Every time I watch that movie, I think, no wonder there was a French revolution.

My favorite characters so far? The jealous stepsisters. I got one who is genuinely bad, but the other just has a character weakness with jealousy. Ought to be fun.

Dear Mr. White, This is all your fault.

Word Count Status: Unchanged. My copyedits for The Sevenfold Spell came in and I had to work on those, and then of course I needed to reread the whole thing, because this is the version that is "final".

RedRoom had a blog post idea that I found interesting--they wanted you to write a letter to your favorite author. I took the idea and changed it a bit: write a letter to the author who inspired you to write fiction. Please feel free to do this as well. Here's mine:

Dear Mr. White,

This is all your fault. If I had not read The Once and Future King, I might have had a quiet life, free from any writing urges. Instead, you had to go and make the craft of writing a novel look so darned fun, which of course, is how it turned out for me.

Because of your Pellinore, I tried my hand at writing humor. Because of your Wart, I am not afraid of letting my characters look foolish to the other characters for a while—as long as they don’t look foolish to the reader. Because of your Lancelot, I’m not afraid of writing about plain and even outright ugly characters. Beauty gets boring, but ugly can be surprisingly interesting.

After I finished The Once and Future King for the umpteenth time, I tried to write a story about a knight who was heavily based on your Lancelot. His name was Gilbert Von Roth, and he was a knight in the First Crusade. He had carrot-red hair and was horribly clumsy--unless he was in battle. Then, he was a deadly whirlwind. He was the first character I ever fell in love with.

It took me years, Mr. White, to stop writing in a voice that imitated yours.

So this is all your fault. And for that, I thank you.

Yours truly,

Tia Nevitt

(If you write a letter, please let me know!)

Cover Art Ideas

Word Count Status: 2074 out of 20,000 words. This was my half-week, so I'm happy with this, plus I'll be doing some more writing tonight.

~*~

On Thursday, I heard from the marketing department from Carina Press. They wanted me to fill out a Cover Art Fact Sheet. She said to go ahead and find some images on the internet and include them. So I went nuts on her. I figured it would be better to give too much information than not enough.Here are the images I found.

This is a medieval city in Brittany, France.

http://www.clos-saint-cadreuc.com/Images/Dinan.jpg

This is a re-enacter at the spinning wheel. She is almost exactly as I imagine Talia and the cheerless basement in which she works:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/04/09/world/09medieval.xlarge1.jpg

Here is a spinning wheel:

http://www.daz3d.com/i/3d-models/-/spinning-wheel?item=3961&_m=d

Here is a fairy working her magic from the Nutcracker sequence in Fantasia.

http://www.inetres.com/gp/anime/fantasia/f04_02.jpg

Check out the blooms of magic at the bottom of this image:

http://one1more2time3.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/nutcracker-707.jpg

Love these understated magic effects:

http://one1more2time3.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/fantasia-comp-nutcr1.jpg

Here’s another one with the fairies:

http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/SecurityKitten/fantasia2.jpg

They wanted a lot of other stuff too, including my bio, my online hang-outs, my synopsis and my "visual hooks." It was fun to put together, and pretty exciting! I am very interested in seeing what they come up with.

Working to a Deadline

As I mentioned in previous posts, I seem to do well with deadlines. Therefore, I'm giving myself a deadline for my next novella, which I'm now calling Fairy Godmothered. I'm only shooting for 20,000 words, so deadline is six weeks from tonight, rounded up to the next Sunday. Therefore, my deadline is:

July 25th!

With this deadline, I'll have to write 5000 words a week, then I'll need to take a week away from it and spend the last week editing and revising. 5000 words a week would not be possible without my laptop, but since I now have it, I'm going to go for it. My husband is thoroughly behind me, so that will help.

In order to keep myself honest, I'm going to post my weekly progress here, on Sundays. I'm taking this week as my half-week, so I'll use this time to perfect my six-sentence outline and expand it into a decent synopsis. I also have some pilot scenes I want to write. I wrote about 2000 words initially, but most of that will be cut and I'm starting almost over. But that's ok; that's the way I write.

And ready ... set ... go!