Demon and Fairy WeWriWar 3

Hello Writing Warriors and my dear blog readers.

Thank you for all the comments on last Sunday's post, I really enjoyed reading all of them and I hope I didn't miss anyone when visiting back.
It seems that last week's excerpt left you with some questions about Kallisto. A part of me wanted to write an excerpt about it today by jumping to chapter 2 but it would probably make things even more confusing as we go, so let me answer first then stick with Seti for a while. Kallisto is not a water fairy, she is one the ground in her world while Seti is looking at her from a world above, if you ask me how the entire beach can stay on the top of the fairy tree, well I will just say it's magical. We could possibly deal into details about other dimension but I haven't done it in the novel. The way the different worlds are linked to each other will probably become clearer to you as we continue our story. 

In the preceding episode (second episode) Seti remembered how he had seen Kallisto for the first time through a flack on the beach. This time he is quite out of luck because she isn't here. Remember that in the first episode, he was flying to the beach in pain hoping to see her and get rid of his headache.

Here are today's 8 sentences.

He felt on the ground near the flack which was only enlightened by the reflection of the moon. 

Her see-saw was empty. 

He hesitated a little, trying to get his breath back, looking for her image in the pond. 

He imagined her here laughing and playing the flute just for him to hear but nothing worked. 

It was all useless, without her, there was no way the pain was going to disappear so easily. 

He sighed and stood up slowly, brusque movements were hurting him as if his brain was knocking against his head’s bones. 

He couldn’t stay here too long tonight. 

Without a last look, he flew away and didn’t notice the other demon who had just landed in the garden of her house and flew high speed through one of the second floor bedroom’s window. 

I hope you enjoyed this week-end snippet. See you around on the other Warriors' blogs and see you next week for more of Seti's adventure.

If you are interested, you can read more about Demon and Fairy here. 

Discover the excerpts of other participants through the Week-end Writing Warriors's blog here.  Facebook Snippet Sunday group for more posts here. 

10 tips to win NaNoWriMo

As JuNoWriMo is starting in 7 days, I though it would be a nice things to make a plan on how to win this tremendous challenge of writing at least 50000 words in a month. The first contest of this type, where you only compete with yourself, is NaNoWriMo and is held every November. I already wrote few posts containing tips, but I want to organize them better in one places and to add some more.

Tip 1: Write as much as possible as soon as possible 

(previous entry on that here)

In the perfect world, you have 31 days to write 50000 words, that's 1613 words a day. But that won't happen. We all have a life. We all have priorities and other things to do than writing. Even with 2 or 3 hours cleared up every day on your schedule to write, there is the research, the blocks, countless things hiding in the corner to just get in your way and make sure that you won't write. So the tip here is to write the most at the beginning. Instead of stopping as soon as you reach your daily 1613 words, keep going. I would advise to chose for yourself a slightly higher daily word goal and to stick to it as much as possible. Mine is generally 2500 words a day which means that every two days I am one day in advance. If I have a problem and can't write for a day I can still easily make it.

The second reason to choose a higher daily word goal is that the beginning of something new can be really exciting so it's really easy to write a lot. At the end you have seen your friends give up, you are maybe feeling alone with that, you want time with your relatives and family, you see that you are getting closer to your word goal but you are no where near the end of the novel which can be discouraging (I need about 80000 to 100000 words to finish mine so NaNo takes me above half way), he end is harder to write than the beginning. If you have more words than needed by the 20th of June, you can do all those things and still happily sit to write even if a little bit less. Save yourself the tears of being late.

Tip 2: Update your word count on the NaNo website every 5 minutes.

(previous entry on that here) 

This one is about motivation. And what keeps you motivated. Every word counts. Make them count, update your word count. Seeing the big number grow even a little is going to make you feel good. You will have a visual effect of it growing. You can even make up little games. 

1) I write for 5 minutes and see how much I can get, update. Let's beat the previous 5 minutes word count, update.

2) Write 100 words, update. Every one can write 100 words easily, remember that 50000 is only 100 words 500 times. Update.

If you don't update for yourself be nice and update for others, find someone with who you can play catch up and see who reaches the goal first. 

Tip 3: 10 words are better than 1.

(previous entry on that here)    

I learned that one at a NaNoWriMo hang out when I was in Belfast for my first NaNoWriMo. Use adjectives, increase your word count by writing more than you want to. What you are writing now is a first draft, it will change when editing, everything will change and you will have plenty of time to find the right words later. Don't try to make it perfect now so that you don't need to edit it because you will need to edit it, there is no secret about it, you will edit it like mad anyway. Stay focus on your purpose, you want 50000 words and a finished draft. Add details. The more I do NaNoWriMo the more I find this advice useful, because the details you add actually help a lot when editing. If you don't really know how to say something adding a lot helps when you are trying to remember what it was all about when editing. Don't be afraid of useless words or ideas, at this point, they are your friends.

Tip 4: Flashbacks add three dimensions to your characters and words to your word count. 

(previous entry on that here) 

Let's say you are a little bit stuck. Your character is somewhere that you don't know and you don't know what he can do to get out of here and go back to the plot. Give him a break and time to think. Make him remember what happened before. I'm a big fan of flashbacks. In my first novel there is an entire relationship only built on flashbacks in someone's memory. Flashbacks make your characters more real, every body think about the past or project the future, readers relate more to characters they can do that with. Whenever you don't know where to move forward too, project the thought on the page, that will add to your word count. 

Tip 5: Abuse WRITE OR DIE! 

(previous entry on that here) 

I gave this advice for the past Camp NaNo last month to some people and they hated it because it was eating their precious words. I'm sorry to say but if they had been writing it wouldn't have (I can be really mean like that.) WRITE OR DIE is the replacement for a word war. You can't do a word war if you are alone, and word wars (another made for them is "words sprint") are so efficient to keep you going. I'm on the other side of the planet compared to most of my writing friends when I write they sleep. I use write or die to have my private word wars and it works as long as you keep writing. 

Tip 6: Think about what you are going to write during your "dead" moment. 

(previous entry on that here)

Contrarily to common beliefs, you don't need a computer, a notebook, a quiet room to be working on your novel. You can be working on your novel 24 hours a day. (Including when you sleep, yes, yes!) 

There are hundreds of moments when you are actually waiting for things (dead moments) and even moments when you are performing tasks that don't require your full attention and brain functions. 

I like to work under the shower. I was recently ask: "How can you write under the shower?" well it's very easy indeed. I think. I know where my characters are at and I'm creating what is happening next, then when I finally come back to the computer I just have to type. Thinking and typing at the same time can be slow. If you already did the thinking at least partially typing becomes a lot more efficient. It also give you the inertia to keep going. The easier the beginning of your writing session the longer you will keep at it.

Tip 7: Never stop at the end of a paragraph/chapter/section.

(previous entry on that here) 

Yes it totally makes sense to stop when you finish something, but at the same time it doesn't help you start again. So you finished your paragraph and you are happy. You just go to bed leaving your train of thoughts go away from the novel and when you open your document the next morning and start to write you don't know where to start because there is nothing before, nothing to give you a clue. When I wrote a linear novel, from point A to point B without really leaving the character, it might not happen much but when I was working on Demon World with three different stories going on simultaneously and alternating with each other, this tip became really handy. I always started to write the introduction of the next part before going to do something else. When in rare cases I didn't I had a lot of troubles knowing what to do next. The thing is that while you are in the writing process, you still have coherent ideas, if you stop the coherence might get lost.  

Tip 8: Don't edit. (But if you are to edit...)  

Don't edit. You can argue all you want, just cutting out large pieces of work in a moment of everything-I-write-is-bad-and-I-can't-stand-it-it-has-to-go crap is not going to help you toward your goal, which let me remind you in case you forgot with all my rambling advices, is to get your word count to 50000 words and call yourself a winner. But I know it's hard to avoid rewriting stuff, just rewrite the paragraph and add it to the entire thing, don't remove the previous work, those words were also written they count, no matter how bad they feel, they are still words and they are still yours and they are going to help you toward your goal even if you have to throw them away later. Don't go into a word killing hunt, keep them while they help you. 

Tip 9: Stop beating yourself up for being late and setting unreachable new daily word counts. 

So you had some little problems for the entire week but now it's over so you are going to write 5000 words a day. Now the end is near and you are going to stop being a very bad writer and you are going to sit at the computer and type until your fingers start bleeding on the keyboard. You need to stop being so bad and lazy and to write. And... let me tell you, this is not going to happen. 

Don't try making yourself a better person because that is not going to happen, it didn't happen during the previous NaNos and it won't happen during this one either. 

There is a large problem called the planing fallacy which basically says that people tend to overestimate what they can accomplish and result in taking more time than expected to do it. 

So here are some ideas to avoid becoming a victim of the planning fallacy. 

1) Remember the past. No matter how hard you tried you couldn't get to your daily word count. Reduce it. Remember, 10 words is better than 1 and 1 word is always better than 0. Create a new daily word goal that you can reach. If you reach it once, then twice, you are allowed to increase it again. Learn to know yourself and to know what you can accomplish for real, not in a dream or perfect state because those don't exist. 

2) Forget the past. You are late, too bad, no point whining about it, it won't help. Just forget about it, start the new day as a new start and write something, anything. 

Tip 10: Reward yourself for little wins. 

In general if you tell yourself that you'll get something when you reach this or that it keeps you going. Of course the last word that you are going to write is important, it makes you win. But you couldn't have win with only that word. You also needed the 49999 words which came before, every single one of them. This is better explained here on AJATT. He gives you a lot of examples. 

Reward yourself for small achievement. It will keep you happy and if that's not already enough, it will keep you writing.

Tip 11: Decide!

This is probably the most important tip because even if you don't follow any of the above it will make you a winner. You have to decide that you are going to win this no matter what. I believe that winning it is before anything else a decision.

I hope you found this helpful. Please share your winning plans with me and help create more tips to help more and more people be a NaNoWriMo winner. We need those books.  

 

France: Louvre Museum

En français

So I can't sleep knowing that I didn't write today... oh my! This sounds like a little obsession. 

Let's start a new travel series of posts about France. I always say that because I'm French I don't know anything about France, when you look at it people doing a lot of tourism in their own country are rare. But I still know a bit so I'm going to share it with you from today. 

Last Christmas/New Year holiday, I went back to France with my boyfriend so we actually needed to do some tourism as it was his first time in the country. Today are some picture that we took in Louvre Museum when we first stopped in Paris. 

Travel table of content

I just thought this was cute.

Actually one of my dreams is to go have a look at those in their real environment on Easter island.

3 tips to create places in novels

I already talked about how I create characters for my novels. Now that we have nice looking well developed characters we need a place to make them move an interact with each other, nobody lives really long in vacuum. So today I'll be talking about how I create places.

But first let me explain a bit about the places in Demon Soul, Attic Mirror and the rest of the Demon series.

The stories are set up in a house. This house has the particularity to be at the crossing between different World. Above, you have the Demon World which can be access either through the chimney in the living room or above the fairy tree in the garden. From the center of the fairy tree, you can go to the Fairy World. From the mirror in the attics you can go to a place called Teneria. The house is filled with children, the older ones have their own bedroom and the girls have private bathrooms. The younger children share rooms. Like any normal house there is a living room, a kitchen and a room to watch TV. In the attics again there are two side, on the right side rooms have been prepared for the children activities, Jayden's painting room, Ethan's laboratory... on the other side, it looks like an attic filled with old things and dust. At the end of the second floor corridor, there is a door to the library tower. In the basement live the vampires.

This description is the picture I have on my mind while writing the first drafts. The small problem with it is that it is not fit for readers because it only shows where things are, not what they look like, smell like and how to access them. It is also not fit for characters because there is no emotion in it. To create real places for your novel, something that you can actually use in the narrative you need to work on descriptions. Here are three tips that should help you get closer to your goal.

Tips number one: What is the place for and what do you want it to look like?

This list is probably the most complete thing in the writing process about creating a place, you can add everything about places where you have been to use them as references. I generally like to look at pictures. It is also useful to think about dimensions for a room. I have demons flying out through the windows so my windows need to be large enough for them to jump in the side and maybe spread their wings out. You need to consider how many people will be in the room to make it large enough. Tell about the light, the colors, the smell, the noises, what is present in the room and what can be expected to be there but isn't. 

Now let us create a nice place for our character. As the first tips post showed the birth of Lizzy, let's now create Lizzy's environment. We have see the room a bit before now it's time to give it some more substance.

• Lizzy is a pianist so we need a room with a piano.
• It is for a concert so the piano is at the bottom on a stage and there are sits going up. 
• The sits are not very comfortable, only black cushions attached to the wooden benches without back holders or resting places for arms. They are on uninterrupted lines so you can enter the rows either from the left or right sides of the room. There are other sits on the right side of the entrance, three by three along the wall but from them it is difficult to see the stage.
• It's in a small town so the room is not too big, it can contain about three hundred people.
• The entrance of the room is at the top of the stairs. It takes about three large steps to reach the first row of sits and there is a wood railing before them. 
• There are drawing on the walls made by children for some sort of school festivals, and also an advertisement for the church charity event. The walls are not smooth, there is red carpet on them, dusty and old for about one meter high on the left and right side, the rest of the wall is dusty white roughcast. 
• There are long and thin windows near the ceiling, but not enough light can get through so you need to turn on the electric light when entering.  
• There are lights above the sits, two rows of three neons.  
• There is a heavy curtain separating the stage from the rest of the room, a red curtain looking a lot older than the carpets. 
• The stage is a little elevated from the ground by about twenty centimeters. It's one meter and a half away from the last row of sits. 
• The floor of the stage is made of dark wood with traces of shoes on, as if a lot of people have walked in over the years and there are a lot of scratches, some leading to the piano.
• It's a black grand piano covered with a stained yellow blanket. 
• The room smells like paint and dust, it seems it hadn't been opened for a long time.

 Something like this give a rough idea of the room. You can always add more and you don't have to use all of it later or all at once, it's just the place where you come back to pick up ideas.



Tips number two: Create a small paragraph describing the place from a neutral point of view, imagine that you are entering the room for the first time and note what you notice first.

By setting yourself in the room you are more likely to notice the important details as the opposite of the details that a character will notice due to there personality. Your main purpose in this case is to set a neutral point of view and to show to yourself where you need to act by comparing the list to the paragraph and noticing what you used. This helps to emphasize perceptions over feelings so you need to refrain from giving your point of view and if you like the room or not, leave it to your characters. I think of it as an action description. Something with only enough details to be viable.

The room where the concert was supposed to be held was in a tall building in the center of the city. The first time we went there it was rainy. The room was situated on the first floor but we still had to climb stairs to reach the entrance door. The manager pushed the door in front of me and entered to turn on the light. It was dark and the neon took some times to turn on. I search of the windows, they were small and narrow along the ceiling. The ceiling seemed high. I took few steps to reach the wooden railing and have a better look at the room's disposition. There were sits going down to the stage and my sight was blocked by a large red curtain going down to the floor. I turned to the right to face the manager and notice a second row of sits along the walls. 
"Can you open the curtain?" I asked.
The manager didn't answer but walked down. I followed him. He climbed on the stage and pulled the curtain from the middle. It wasn't one curtain, there were two and he has to pull on them to get them to open. I climbed on the stage as well, almost tripped on the small step and pulled on the second curtain. It was heavy. The piano was in a corner, with a dusty yellow blanket on it. I walked straight at it.
"Can we have light in here as well?" I asked turning around to look  at the sits. There could easily be three hundred people in this room. The sits didn't seem comfortable enough for a lengthy concert. The manager turned on the lights on the stage, they were coming from above the curtain. I would have to put the piano close to the edge of the stage to see my fingers.

This reads really cold. I have to say that I had to force myself a bit to notice the colors. It's the kind of description I would use in an action scene if the surrounding is not really important. It's rushed through the room, we don't know what people really use it for. It doesn't bring any feeling or emotion. This form is an important reference for me because if I want a very light description (which I often use) it contains the element which seems to be the most important.

Tips number three: Create a small paragraph describing the place with your character inside. What are they doing? What do they see? How do they feel?

In this case you will write a paragraph for your character first interaction with this room in the story you intend to write. I generally write those paragraphs before the first draft as much as I can. When I read the first draft through when editing or when I'm stuck while writing it, I go back to those location paragraphs to add something to the story. They serve as reference but can also be used partially or entirely in the draft. It helps making sure that your character has a consistent behavior with its surroundings. They also give some substance to the story. I might go to a new place unexpectedly and write some of those while editing as well. It is never too late. You can use different characters for the same place, it makes the editing easier and the story richer. You don't need to do it for all places in the novel but I feel it helpful to do it for the most important at least.

So let's go back to Lizzy now. She is coming back to her country side city so she already know the place.

Lizzy knew where the place was, she didn't really need anyone to show it to her but the manager had insisted to accompany her. It was typical from small town people, they were carving novelty. Since she arrived, she hadn't been left alone, she needed a break. He turned the keys in the key hole. Lizzy wished she had been alone as he pushed the door open, so much memories where hiding in every corner of the room. He entered first and turned on the light. Lizzy was already looking at the room, both hands on the railing, she stroke it gently and pushed herself a bit forward. It had changed, the room was different than in her memory. They had replaced the empty space with black sits. As a kid, she had to pushed chairs to place them on the stairs, there were chairs nowhere to be seen. It was looking ugly and uncomfortable. The drawings on the walls had changed too. She had almost thought about seeing hers but of course they had been removed and replaced by the one of the current kids at school. She walked on the left side looking at the drawings. They had also put some carpet on part of the walls, as a kid she had hurt her fingers on the roughcast so many time running up and down the stairs. She had an urge of touching the walls but refrained. She wasn't alone. The manager was following her.

"It has been a while since your last visit. Do you like what we have done to the place?" he asked in a jovial manner.

"Yes", Lizzy lied slowly. She hated the place.

"The piano is still the same", he said going down a bit faster and climbing on stage. 

Lizzy repressed a sigh, the piano should have been the first thing to be changed. The manager pulled on the red curtains. The same old red curtains. Lizzy couldn't repress a smile. She had been hiding in those curtains many time, at least a part of her childhood remained untouched. 

"You are going to give us a great concert miss, it's rare for this place hold such event" the manager said inviting her to climb on stage.

It was the same wooden stage and as Lizzy climbed on she remembered the cracking sound of it. She turned slowly to the center of the room. It had the same smell of dust and paint she remembered as a kid, the smell of her childhood. She closed her eyes an instant trying not to remember. This room was also the place where she had been the most ridiculed in her life. She could see their faces, hear their laughters as she didn't remember the notes, she could feel her fingers tensed on the keyboard. She was twelve by then, she thought she had forgotten but she had just escaped and now it was all coming back to her or more exactly, she had willingly come back to it.

"Miss are you alright?" the manager said behind her.

Lizzy put a forced smile on her face clench her fist as much as she could around the strap of her purse.

"Of course, this is perfect" she said turning around. 

Here we have Lizzy having fun in the room. I feel a bit bad for her. The description is a lot warmer with feelings included and also seems more natural than the first one. The main difference between this paragraph and the previous one is that Lizzy don't stop on the same things. She notice the changes that I wasn't aware of. The description is really something personal for her. If I had been using the manager in this scene it would probably be a lot reduced or he would have pointed at what the last changed had been or discuss the charity event from the church. 

I hope you enjoyed the tips and that you found them helpful. Let me know what you think and how you create your own characters.

 

6 week Challenge update : refusing to speak English

I am still playing catch up with the challenge and life tends to come in the way a bit at time. I can't possibly turn my life to 100 percent Japanese but at least they are some areas which can be worked with. 

One of them is limited interaction in English on social media, adopting the sorry-guys-but-I'll-talk-to-you-later-or-you-can-also-learn-Japanese attitude especially for other writers editing works, beta-reading novels, commenting on writing groups. It works more or less but I still like to preform some English reading especially with other bloggers from the Week-end Writing Warriors.

One other parts of my life I worked on this week were for official phone calls and hospital stuff. I "annoyed" people until I could actually understand what they were talking about.
For the phone call it was more or less some kind of "accident". I needed a new credit card as mine was expiring so I had my boyfriend calling, I mean that's important stuff, I lack confidence and well it needs to be well done. The problem here is that the people on the phone refused to talk to him, to let him translate what they would say to me and to let him translate what I would say to them. So far so good to make things easy for me. So I told them, 日本語で頑張ります technically I'll do my best in Japanese, the poor girl decided to finally give up and to send me someone who could speak English, but there was no one at that time so she asked me to call later and I refused. Fact is that was the second time calling and in between I had send them a form which hadn't been taken into account, I can't really survive without credit card, seeing that it pays for some of the bills. So she had no choice but to speak slowly and to let me give her the information in Japanese. Result: It worked. I have something to totally brag about and a new credit card. 

The same experience happened few hours later at the hospital. The nurses ended up discussing the best way to explain things to me as if I wasn't 50 centimeters away and actually refusing to let me come back with a friend to help (health stuff is that confidential) even if I was the one asking for it. I ended up explaining them what I understood from their conversation and it worked somehow. Results I know a lot of things about contraceptive pills that I ignored before but don't ask me to reexplain it in Japanese, the new vocabulary slipped out of my mind when I left the place. 

One other good thing is friends. I don't have anyone to talk to in Sendai but at least I have a lot of friends in Chofu and they organise events at the week-end. Ending up with me spending the day speaking Japanese. 私は英語分かない、フランス語も分かない(I don't understand English or French) That makes them laugh a bit but then I got the drift and talk to me in Japanese like there was nothing else to do anyway. Sorry guys I'll help you with your English after the challenge (when I'm fluent ;) ) Result:　リンダの日本語上手くなった。 I say epic win.

I also restarted to read ビブリア古書堂の事件手帖 at the beginning (13 pages so far) and a friend stopped a bit to explain me some characters' readings. I can "get" the meaning but I can't get the sound of those kanjis yet. Everytime someone stopped near me to ask "You're reading in Japanese? Can you understand?" I was saying "hum, no." which is kind of true, I have a lot of trouble to define how much and which part I can understand but somehow I can follow the story. I had the same experience in other languages so I know I'm doing it the right way but if I can't explaining to myself I don't see how I can explain it to other. So they end up looking at me strangely like "that crazy girl is pretending to read a book but doesn't understand it and it's a really complicated one" and I just smile and say 日本語頑張ります。Why am I not reading 魔女の宅急便 or 星の王子さま which would be easier is another mystery.

I'm still 16 hours behind but that should become 11 by the end of the day at least, Japanese music is playing in my ears right now. 

 

Japan: a little bit more about 江の島

En français

I already have so many blog posts about the small island: Japan : 江の島, Japan : 江の島 once again, part 1, Japan : 江の島 once again, part 2, Japan : on the way to　鎌倉 tiny stop to 江の島, Japan : 江の島, 鷹と鷲 that I don't really know what else to say. So I will just show you the last pictures from last week-end. The island didn't change much, it's every time the same but I feel like I know it more and more every time I go there. I can also take the trains to go there without really thinking about it. When I came back alone on Sunday night I took five trains changing to make the most time efficient trip without even having to check my way anywhere. I guess I'm getting good at moving around in Japan. It reminded me when I was playing with my friends at guessing the number of stations and their names between the place we were at and our destination with different trains. A lot of fun. 

Travel table of content

Japan : 江の島, 鷹と鷲

En français 

I like 江の島 (Enoshima) a lot. One of my favorite things over there are the 鷹(hawks) and 鷲(eagles). Every time I have been there before, they had been flying on the island, especially on the other side where they can nest in the rocks. But this time, I was really lucky to have them fly on the beach, looping, circling and stealing food from our group and from other people. 

Travel table of content