MARCH MADNESS: INTRODUCTION

Words and I are excited to present a new feature for this month: March Madness! We'll be pitting sixteen characters from our favorite books, movies, and TV shows against each other all this month, discussing the various characters, and after four rounds, picking a winner. The characters are from just about every 'verse imaginable, so you shouldn't have any trouble finding a familiar face. If you're a little fuzzy on how this is going to work, so are we, but stick with us.

On the left side of our bracket, we have the magical characters, the alchemists, the benders, the geniuses, and anybody who's flat-out superhuman:

Bartimaeus from the Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud

Dobby from Harry Potter by JK Rowling

Nick Ryves from the Demon's Lexicon and sequels by Sarah Rees Brennan

V from V for Vendetta

Octavian Nothing from the Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by MT Anderson

River Tam from Firefly

Azula of the Fire Nation from Avatar: the Last Airbender

Edward Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist

On the right side of bracket, we have:

Eugenides from the Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner

Wesley from the Princess Bride

Domnovoi Butler from the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer

Zoe Alleyene from Firefly (I didn't know that Zoe had a last name either.)

Ursa of the Fire Nation from Avatar: the Last Airbender

Bellatrix Lestrange from the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling (I know she's a witch, but she snuck into this bracket, or, more likely, cursed some poor Muggle off of it)

Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory

The first round will be determined on who we think would win in a fight--brute strength. The second round will be determined by the contestants' finesse, trickery, or sneakiness. The third is a battle of wit, and the final round will be based entirely on style points.

Let's be clear, though--we're not advising that you bet money on any of this (and we have no idea how you'd collect bets if you did), but feel free to collect bragging rights when your pick advances to the next round. Sit back, check out the bracket, pick a favorite, and enjoy the game!

A (Writing) Exercise in Desperation

11:33 AM. Polish off second cup of coffee. If I leave now I'll get there earlier than yesterday. Means I'll wait longer before they get out, but I'll be farther ahead in the line. Fine by me.

11:45 AM. Forgot that this road leads back from lunch to the largest single employer in Georgia. My advantage over yesterday is totally shot.

11:48 AM. Moody is clear and I make an easy left onto 96. Maybe I've beat the rush.

12:00 PM. Stop driving perfectly on time...in a line of cars at least a quarter mile from the school.

12:01 PM. Cars fill all visible road behind me. State Road 96 is now a parking lot.

12:10 PM. Ten-minute mark. Realize that thought process resembles apocalyptic log.

12:11 PM. See woman walk by toward the school. Wonder where her car is.

12:13 PM. Regretting that second cup of coffee.

12:14 PM. Several cars pull out of the line and turn around. The majority of us have nowhere else to go.

12:16 PM. Gentleman jogs pas the car. Heat haze makes me think that cars ahead of me are moving. Just a cruel mirage.

12:17 PM. Girl and her little sister walk toward school. Their mom must have stayed in her air-conditioned car.

12:18 PM. Really regretting that second cup of coffee.

12:19 PM. Playlist ended. Can't be bothered to find new tunes.

12:21 PM. Moved twelve feet forward. Saw first woman walk back with happy daughter.

12:22 PM. Movement becoming more frequent. Still not in sight of school.

12:23 PM. Catch glimpse of highlighter-yellow-vested traffic cop. Second gentleman walks back. Daughter as tall as he is.

12:24 PM. Gentleman gives truck driver behind me directions. Truck skirts around me and bypasses the madness.

12:25 PM. In sight of school. Moving frequently. Memorizing log entries for later transcription.

12:26 PM. Intensely regretting that second cup of coffee.

12:27 PM. See cars pulled over in grass on side of road, drivers walking. Tempting, but it's prohibitively hot and I'm a wuss.

12:29 PM. Aforementioned grass-car is under the impression that she can make a left back onto this road. Due to the mercy of strangers she somehow succeeds.

12:30 PM. Kid rides by on bike, wondering what in the world is going on. I'm right there with you, kid.

12:31 PM. World has turned sufficiently that my window arm is now in the shade. Small mercies.

12:33 PM. Realization hits that the school has consolidated its two pickup lines into one for the day. WHY?! is unclear.

12:34 PM. Hope I turned off the coffee pot. Try not to think about coffee.

12:35 PM. Highlighter cop's job really sucks.

12:36 PM. Regretting every cup of coffee I've ever had.

12:40 PM. Turn on J-Rock, sing along, and headbob so that the woman in front of me who keeps looking in her rearview will wonder what I'm doing.

12:42 PM. See more grass-cars. Tempted again, but I'm so close now.

12:44 PM. Enter the school parking lot. Pass by king of the highlighter cops.

12:45 PM. Reach the point at which I stopped driving at noon yesterday.

12:46 PM. Can't quite bring self to regret discovery of coffee bean.

12:50 PM. Spot a parking monitor huddling in a rare patch of shade. Lucky guy.

12:56 PM. Pickup successful. First order of business: find a bathroom.

12:59 PM. Can't get back onto 96 from Flash Foods. Take an alternate route home. Have an adventure.

1:37 PM. Arrive home. Confirm that I did, in fact, turn off the coffee pot.

The Enemy of the Good

"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
--Voltaire.

I'd never thought of myself as a perfectionist. I mean, I'm a WriMo. I don't care if something is good, as long as it helps me along the way to 50,000 words, right? If anyone suggested that I was a perfectionist when it came to writing, I have several thousand inane words of my characters joking about cannibalism that beg to differ.

Last month, I went to read through the book I wrote before this past November, a book I thought had a ton of potential. My sister loved it. My mom said I had finally mastered the art of creating a tight plot. Even Miri liked it. Me, I got about 100 pages and had to put it down. The thing was a corny mess. I wondered why I was still writing.

A couple days later, I started wondering where I went wrong with this book. It occurred to me that it might not be that the book was that bad, but that my expectations were too high. I thought about it a little more and realized that I had thought that this book was going to be a classic--maybe even a Great American Novel. Embarrassing but true.

Once I realized that nobody writes a Great American Novel on the first try (and that historical political fantasy/romance is probably not going to get on the classics shelf anytime soon), I could start reading again without being so critical. I even started enjoying it a little. A lot of the novel still sucks, but I don't hate so much any more. Now I know it doesn't have to be perfect.

For Those Thinking About Publication...

I'm probably not the best person to dispense advice on how to get published, seeing as I'm not even close, but I'm going to give it a try anyway.

Last year, I sent out 25 queries. I got 22 form rejections, one personalized rejection, 1 request for the first five pages (I know, it didn't make sense to me, either), and one request for a partial. Then I got a form rejection for the partial. That's a 4.34% success rate. So the batting average for 2009 was Not Good. I got the names of AgentQuery, and it said that all of them were seeking new clients.

This year, I sent out four query letters to agents I found here. So far, I've heard back from two agents, and both were requests for fulls. That's a 100% success rate. 2010 is on fire.

Here's the clincher. I didn't change my query letter, and I've made only minimal changes to my book. All I changed was the recipients of my query letter. I started sending to people who really want new clients. Judging by the numbers, that makes all the difference.

To wit: only query agents who really want to be queried!

On Names, or, Characters Do Name Themselves, I'm Not Crazy, I Swear

Anyone who knows me and has been on speaking terms with me since mid-October or so has heard me chatter (nigh incessantly at times) about my fifth National Novel Writing Month Novel, Clockwork Wings. And anyone who's spoken to me further knows that I attribute a lot of rather active traits to my characters - that I discuss them more in terms of living "people" than most people really get.

This year's effort stood out in a number of ways. From a practical standpoint, it's the second NaNo I've finished within November (the fourth NaNo I've finished overall) and the first I've finished within November with a book-length wordcount (my first year didn't precisely limp to its conclusion at 52k, but there wasn't a great deal of urgency in its pace). This year presented me with my greatest extra-NaNo workload - all the high school juniors in the audience can sympathize here - and somehow it was my best showing to date. (And I confess I'm worried about my next attempt, considering that several fellow Mooselings suffered something of a sixth-year NaNo slump. But I think my stubbornness is equal to the challenge.)

Maybe I'm finally learning to finish what I start. Maybe it's true that if you want something done, you should ask a busy person to do it - to quote Chris Baty, founder of NaNoWriMo, if you've already got a million things to do, adding number one-million-and-one is no big deal.

But I'd be remiss in not crediting this year's monumental sucess at least in part to my cast of characters - an astounding group of people that I'd known (if you'll forgive the conceit) anywhere from two weeks to four years before I started writing their story.

My focus on the characters was an interesting reversal: while many writers I've spoken with (though by no means all) identify themselves as either a plot writer or a character writer, I've always been an avowed setting writer. A compulsive worldbuilder. I started drawing maps shortly after reading The Chronicles of Narnia in the second grade - my middle school notebooks are riddled with them. I love flags, I love cultures, I especially love languages (as anyone who's seen my class schedule can attest) and there's no greater intellectual joy than creating a world that is complete unto itself, with its conceits and dysfunctions providing and enhancing any conflict, any story I could place there.

This time, now that I'm thinking about it, I guess the setting did come first, or a very (dimensions-wise) small part of it: the Gray Tower, the site of the execution of traitors, my analog to London's Tower Green. (I can admit this.) For most of 2006, I planned to write my second NaNo about a young captain of the royal guard who would be forced to execute her two best lieutenants and best friends. (I was a morbid twelve-year-old. Sue me.)

The captain's name, from the first time I pictured her, was Marsa. I didn't look into it, didn't run searches on word elements like I do now that I've discovered BehindTheName.com. I just knew that it was her name, that it fit.

Marsa. My duty-bound militant guard captain.

Mars. Roman god of war.

I put this together in December (2009) and it blew my mind. I'd read mythology before, so I'm sure I was very, very subconsciously thinking it when creating this character, but it still surprised me, this accidentally perfect name.

That's not the only example. My main character this year popped up in a scenelet I wrote on the bus last May, and that morning in first period I asked for a female name at random. A good friend said, equally at random, "Claire." I decided I liked it, stuck it on, and didn't think much more about it until October came and I was putting together a plan for my story. Claire's clarity - her clear vision of problems and solutions, her brightness of outlook - were her defining characteristics. Another perfect name, without any input from me.

Now, several of my names were researched and planned. The deciding factor in naming the bodyguard Alexei was that one of its meanings was "protector"; my wing-technician Ciel was very intentionally named for the sky. Claire's parents were named, in a roundabout way, for the gods of tricks and fire in a couple of different mythologies, and that says a lot about their personalities. I liked names that say something about the character - I think it's my right as a writer to have as much fun as I possibly can with them.

And I do. Names are fun. Great fun.

But they're even more fun when they present themselves to me whole-cloth, hiding their true importance until I stumble across it.

Names. Reason number #23 I love writing.

A Motivation to Tell a Story

I'm angry. I'm extremely angry.

I'm a storyteller. I may not be the best nuts-and-bolts writer, and I'm certainly not the best at weaving my tales together and making everything make sense, but I am a storyteller and I take pride in that. Stories are important to me; I cry over the touching moments in anime, books, movies, anything. Storytelling is sacred to me.

So the abuse of it incites a righteous anger in me. WHY would a show - a show that was shaping up to be at least my second-favorite of all time - waste so many perfectly good elements? The kid who was obviously the reincarnation of the big bad of a hundred years ago shows up ONCE and disappears with no more mention made, no show down, nothing more than hints? A thirteen-year-old girl binds her soul to a demon from the Abyss, a deal that happens only when someone desperately wants to change the past, and we're never given the reason or even have it really alluded to? A nine-year-old boy - the brother of arguably the best character in the series, nonetheless! - is seen at the sight of a heinous tragedy, surrounded by corpses and flames and covered in blood, laughing at the sight of it all, and we are given nothing but the fairly obvious hints that he was in fact the killer of a main character, that he's using everyone in the story, that he retains his memories from that tragedy when NO ONE ELSE DOES, and the last time we see him in the show, all he says is that he wishes he could tell his brother, but he doesn't remember? No showdown with any of the setup villains, no closure for any of our beloved characters, and - this is probably the most heinous failure of the story, though if any of the major villains had popped back up I could have forgiven it - a clock imprinted on the main character in the THIRD EPISODE with the explicit statement that when it makes a full rotation, he'll be dragged into the Abyss (which is exactly as bad as it sounds - and we saw it happen to another character very early on, in gruesome and tearjerking fashion) - this clock, over the course of the series, ONLY MAKES IT TO THE SECOND MARKING OF TWELVE?!?

So, yeah, I can't remember the last time I was this angry. Tears were shed, parents were sufficiently exasperated; such is the life of a sentimental idiot.

I think it came on a bad day, too; I've had to deal with something of a disappointment from several people I've known for quite awhile, and I admit, when I sat down to finish this series, I wanted an escape. A story where the consequences of one's actions are destined to come about. An ideal. That's possible in stories.

And instead, I get one of the bigger letdowns of my lifetime of engaging in stories. It's not fair. It's really not.

But I knew this was a possibility. Another series I watched recently crashed and burned, but I wasn't nearly as attached to that one. I knew this might happen, much as I had hope for it not to, and I knew one of two things would happen:

One, I would be so depressed that my motivation to do anything would be sapped. I don't recall if this has happened, but I've been out of sorts lately and this show caught my fascination in a way that very few have.

Two, I would be angry, fired up, motivated to write a better story, to give my story a true ending, and to do it inside the confines of a month, just to show how much better I am than them.

Thankfully, it's the latter.

I cannot WAIT for NaNo to start.

Thought #7

Guys, forget about everything you've ever heard about writing. All you really need is a good friend who also writes and is willing to help you with your plot crises (and word-war during November.) Everything else is just filler.

Interjection #1

Derailing Ink's train of thought for...what year is it again?

Revising a book is stressful. School is stressful. Making costumes for fun and (a startling lack of) profit is stressful.

Revising a book while going to school and making costumes at the same time is COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY IDIOTIC.

Next weekend is AWA. These were our costumes last year. We're rewearing them on Sunday, and our new ones this year are those cranked UP TO ELEVEN.

Which I just typed as EVELN. I think my characters are trying to tell me something. Ev, I'm going to finish revising your book just as soon as the costuming crush is over. Please don't hurt me.

I'll just be going to eat Baked Barbecue Lays and read Good Omens now. That's not stressful.

Thought #6

Thought of the Day:

An agent who asks for queries only by email asked for the first five pages of The Very Watery Ocean and Other Unnecessary Tales, also via email. I wonder if this is the wave of the future. First queries, then first five/ten/twenty pages, then the first fifty pages, then the full manuscript, then an offer of representation. Good news if you write great queries. Bad news if your writing is great but your queries are terrible.

Query Letters: the eighth circle of hell

This January, I had the honor of spending New Year's with my family, some friends, and Miri. After watching the whole New Year's Eve extravaganza on TV (and then flipping right back to Sweeny Todd), I decided what I really needed to do was create some New Year's resolutions, despite the fact that I didn't have an edited novel. I wanted to write, draw, and exercise daily. That didn't last a week. The other thing I wanted to do was to send out 50 query letters.

"Maybe 30 would be a little more manageable," Miri suggested.

"Yeah, I guess you're right," I said. "Hey, we should both send out 30 letters!"

"... how about 15?" Miri asked.

Since then, 15 query letters has been my goal, seeing as the other ones failed. So far, I've sent out four. Of course, I edited my novel and wrote a query letter, all of which took time. Then it was the middle of summer, and sending query letters when it's hot and icky does have an effect (just ask Miss Snark). So far, I've sent four query letters. I've gotten two rejections, one personalized. Still waiting on the other two.

I'm about to become very busy, and that probably won't let up until the end of the year. If I want to get those 11 letters out, it's gotta be today.

AgentQuery has given me 16 names that look appealing. It's a start.

Wish me luck!

A picture is worth 1k. Or 50k.

I'm tired, but I did it. I've bagged my fourth purple bar, and it feels good.

To all those who have won, congrats! To all those who have yet to win, keep going!

And join us for a Black Friday you'll never forget. Yes, I'll still be writing--my story looks like it has about twenty thousand words of life left in it, and I need to finish it before the momentum dissipates.

Or Kingdom Hearts - Re: Chain of Memories comes out.

The two coincide, really.

Another Update

Well, I managed to bust through the block on Friday with some good old-fashioned YouTube playlist therapy and an hour-long plotting session (which coincided with the YouTube playlist therapy). I think I've got most of the rest of the story plotted out. I'm going to try for an 8k day today and then maybe a 10k tomorrow.

Thanks for your support.

Update on the Writing Front

That is all.

The Project, or "It's Not Over Yet, Fools!"

I've been commanded to update the blog more often. It's a good habit to get into.

Cough-INK-cough.

So I was given an assignment in Lit class last week: represent a character from one of the works we've read this year...on a ceiling tile. I decided to take on two: Lucie Manette and Therese Defarge from Dickens's classic A Tale of Two Cities. While the book was difficult to read, the story was just amazing, and I love the striking contrasts between these two women.

And, because it turned out so well (honestly, I was floored, as I've never thought of myself as much of a painter), I posted pictures on the Internet. Check them out! See what you think.

I've also been brainstorming on The Queen's Architect. Current verdict: I didn't realize I had so many important characters. And I'm adding two more: Andrew and Rebekah, the apprentice and the betrothed. They're being quite nice about being dragged into this madness, and I love them already.

The Big Braggy Post

You knew this was coming, didn't you?

I'm an official NaNoWriMo 2007 winner! Sure, I still have to finish the book, but it went a whole lot better than last year, so I'm just happy all over. Pfft, and they say sophomore year is hardest. (Watch, next year I'll get hammered. Karma does not rest.)

My novel's called 'Disenchantment' and, in summary, America has launched a War on Magic and sends vampires, werewolves, and all degree of magical creatures into rehab. My protagonist, Jordan Allaway, is a 17-year-old human girl trying to have a normal senior year. Unfortunately for her, 'normal' is the last thing on her roommates' minds.

Sounds like a decent pitch, just have to send out the queries for my first NaNoWriMo novel and edit this one before I get to use it again.

On this business side of things, find out with how much your blog is worth here: http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-your-blog-worth/

I'd tell you how much mine is, but the Intrawebz aren't cooperating, and it's pitiful anyway.

(And, yes, perceptive readers, I snagged this from Holly Lisle. If she comes by and asks me to take it down, well, hey, that alone would probably double my blog worth anyway.)