Partners in Time: The Series

I've been traveling like crazy over parts of England this past week, and today my family hit up Warwick Castle. It's an old castle that has been bought by the same company behind those wax museum statues (Madamn Tussaud's) and they've tried to recreate Medieval England more or less.

In the course of exploring a lot of the rooms in the place, I came across a Real Medieval Bathroom. And I was delighted it looked just like the one I described in PIT2, which I'd done research about!

( The passage from PIT2, narrated from Sam's POV )

I snapped these two photos here, which I uploaded to Flickr with some notes: Medieval Toilets for Manor Houses & Castles

There are clearly some differences, but I was delighted things were so on the money with the research I had done.

It's always so awesome to discover things like that!

-K

Right now, I'm visiting England for the first time. Actually, this is the first time I've ever left the U.S. (aside from the 24 hour trip to Vancouver B.C. that my homeroom class took my junior year of h.s.) It's already given me scads of experiences that I can use in my writing, particularly the sense one feels when they are a foreigner. I mean, the second I open my mouth I think it's fairly obvious I am not from around here...if the way I dress and behave does not already give someone that impression. I've never had this experience firsthand before, so I'm trying to take a lot of mental notes and impressions for writing. TIme travelers get that sort of thing all the time, after all.

Between jet lag, spending time with family, and seeing a lot of sights, I've really been lousy with writing progress. On the flight over here on Saturday, I managed to hack out the whole of Chapter 20, which was awesome. Five pages in one sitting! But after that point I had drained my battery a lot and the layover before the super long flight (to England, which was 8 hours) didn't give me much time to suck up more power. I suppose I could think of it as I got five days worth of progress done at once.

Today my brother and his wife worked, so my mom and I were at their house all day. But I pretty much used that time to catch up on uploading photos, doing some reading about the destinations we're hitting this weekend, and catching up on news back home. The weekend will be quite busy, and I may not take my laptop with me at all.

My mom did ask me if, after what I've seen these few days, would I write PIT2 differently, since that was set in medieval England. I can't say I would. The biggest thing that shocked me is the sunrise and sunset this area has. Being summer, the sun is setting after 10 P.M. and rising around 3 A.M. PIT2, set in January 1191, the sun would probably rise late and set early.

Also, I am going to get so much awesome research done for PIT 7 while here, even though I'm years away from starting it. That probably sounds kind of cryptic, huh.

-K

With a working laptop again and being back in my home state, I feel in a better frame of mine to write. There's something about Oregon that tends to stir up my PIT world, quite likely because the characters live in the state and so much of my life in Oregon inspired so many aspects of my series.

Progress-wise, I'm creeping along. I am still getting more done outside a house than in it. When I stay with my parents, I tend to have no decent place to set up shop and be undisturbed, so it's better for me to leave and hit up a coffee shop in the area. I keep looking at my notes and scratching my head at how little is left of the story to write, though. Huh.

Hopefully I can finish the current chapter soon...maybe before my mom and I fly to England at the end of the week! We'll see.

-K

The first week of summer break is usually wasted for me. I'm a person of routines and when my routine is disrupted I tend to flounder and flail a bit. Fortunately, it takes maybe a week to get a new routine established...unfortunately, this whole summer is going to be pretty unusual. Oh well.

I've made very slow, halting progress on PIT5 since school let out. My brain honestly feels like it's stuffed with cotton and it's hard for me to focus and plunge into the story. I think part of this does have to do with an inconsistent writing routine (as well as having my MO with writing totally disrupted and derailed since early May, when my laptop died...fortunately, next week, I will finally have my new one in my hands).

Writer's block, to me, does not happen too often...and even when it sort of does, it's not a block per se...I can write, I know where I'm going, but the zest and enjoyment is sapped from the activity. And that blows.

I've been kind of dreading the long solo drive (and a transatlantic flight) that lies in wait for me in the next week or so...but now I am wondering if that will be a great time to let my brain wander undistracted and force me to focus. I also hope that being in England in a few weeks and checking out some things for a future PIT storyline will also bring back my zest.

I could still get the rough draft of PIT5 done by August, which is my goal...we'll see.

-KS

With school now out for 7 weeks, I have some free time. Time that I can spend writing.

But not having a laptop is a downer. This is the best I can do when I want to get out of my bedroom/office and work:



For some reason, I am more easily distracted from writing when I use a pen and paper than I am with a laptop. I kept pausing to people-watch and sort of zone out. Huh.

-KS

Today, feeling stifled in my room and at my iMac, I went to a coffee shop with the intent of sitting outside and writing by longhand.

I forgot how much of a pain this can be. The weather was great, save for the breeze that kept trying to whip away my papers. And I kept wishing I could scroll back and check something, but alas....

I get my new laptop two weeks from tomorrow. I am counting the days, as I am counting the days left in this school year. (Four, BTW.)

-K

Wow. So last week I was hideously bad and unproductive, writing-wise. I blame burial of essays to grade at work. Seriously, I felt that I just was grading non-stop all last week when I wasn't tweaking lesson plans, teaching, having meetings with parents, etc. Also, due to the state budget woes -- California is way in the red -- there's been added stress because my job next year is in danger...again.

Next Thursday is the last day with students, and next Friday is our last day. So the end is in sight! After that, my output should, I hope, shoot up tremendously!

I did get a page written finally today, though. I started on the weekend a sort of "false start" for Chapter 19. Then I decided, feh, let's time jump an hour or so and summarize instead of walking through everything. (I do wonder how much cutting will be done on PIT5 eventually...the draft is probably 75% of the way done and I'm 75,000 words in. I believe all the prior PIT books fell in the 80,000 - 90,000 range.) That helped my little patch of writer's block because I was...I am...so sick of the current event in the story and ready to move on to the next! Finally, finally, I am creeping towards that!

Beyond that, no real updates or news to share. And I'm still title-less. I suspect PIT5 will not be bestowed an original non-numeric moniker until after the first Beta read. Funny only because I've got a great title set up for PIT6.

-K

While looking over my outline notes a couple days ago, I realized with some shock that I was probably 3/4ths of the way through writing PIT5. This surprised me a little...I'd lost all track of time (no pun intended) and had been so focused at methodically plodding (ha, I wrote "plotting") along, crossing off chaps as I completed them, that I hadn't glanced ahead in a while.

I'm a couple pages into Chapter 18 right now (a Meg chapter) and the last one on my outline is a Chapter 24. So, yeah.

Despite the hassle of having no laptop on which to write away from home, I've managed to get about half a page of progress/day this week. I've printed out the most recent page/s of the story, reread and marked it up as I went, then added more either on paper or on a computer. (Then I e-mail myself the text, cut and paste it into the document, and presto.) This is how I used to write on the fly, and I'd forgotten that...it is a bit of a pain. But paradoxically I seem to write more in this sort of way. I think because it's awfully hard to surf the 'net when you have only a pen and paper at your disposal. (Well, there's the iPhone's foul temptation, but...yeah.)

I would be a fool to set a goal of completing Chapter 18 this weekend. Yes, it's a holiday weekend and yes, I am going nowhere. But I also have about 90 essays to grade that I've put off the last couple weeks...ugh. With three weeks left of this school year, things are going to get a wee bit crazy. Again. What else is new?

-K

After a run of great luck a few weeks ago -- which included the happy news of budgetary pink slips being rescinded in my district (so I will definitely have a job next school year), driving a DeLorean, and meeting my longtime favorite actor Michael J. Fox...twice! -- I had some rotten luck happen with various electrical devices. They included:

- Last Saturday, my PowerBook died. Kaput. This could've been worse for me if I hadn't already saved for and intended to get a MacBook in late June (timing it so I could buy it in Oregon and not pay sales tax) and there was nothing on my PB that I didn't have backed up already on my iMac. However, bottom line, I have no laptop until then and since I do most of my writing on a laptop.... This has tossed a kink into my progress.

- On Monday, my car's AC went on the fritz. Fortunately, that was fixed today for a sum that was not as bad as I anticipated.

- Tonight, my 5 month old iPhone decided to stop working...or charging. So tomorrow I get to go to the Apple Store and beg for help. Lovely.

Really, I hope that's the last of the bad run of luck for me!

PIT5 is, still, moving along. I've had to write segments by hand after marking up printed pages on the most recent stuff. I used to write like this a lot until I got so used to using a laptop. If I was in a revision stage, I would be dead in the water...you can't revise something easily without the whole beast at your access!

There's about four weeks left of the school year. This is my favorite time of year...the gradual slowing down of everything coupled with the celebrations and traditions and anticipations of time off. For my part, I look forward to being a fully functional person again by not rising at 5 A.M. for a couple months!

-K

Finished Chapter 17...although I decided as I wrote the end on it that I'm going to skip back a couple pages and rewrite things a tad. I think it will enhance suspense and all that jazz. And just generally work better. So it goes with the wacky first drafts!

I've (re)discovered something I've known in the past -- I am a better person if I write a little every day. So I've been trying to do just that, shoehorn in some time and get a half page or a whole page done. I am hoping I can continue this and sort of weave it into my daily routine...even though my "daily routine" will be changed once summer break starts in about 5 weeks.

This weekend is pretty busy with errands, lesson plans, etc, but after this it should be some smooth sailing for a while. I can't wait!

-K

I am still alive and breathing and writing. It's just been a crazy week-and-a-half. However, since I accomplished a few life goals/dreams in that time, I cannot complain at all!

Progress is still a trickle on PIT5 simply due to exhaustion, demands of work (5 weeks left before summer break!), and traveling on my part. I have gotten a couple pages under my belt since the last update, though, and I hope to get more this week. After this weekend I think I should be able to get a lot more done as I will be done with lesson planning for a couple months. (And done with traveling until late-ish June.)

I've also decided this summer to give PIT more of a push...my writing career, anyway. I've been slacking terribly on that for a couple years and once the book event in December happened, I've pretty much put promotion on the back burner. I will freely admit that selling myself and my writing is not my favorite part of the process -- frankly, I am not comfortable doing that at all...it feels bizarre -- but I just need to do it long enough until I get an agent to do the dirty work! (Or so I tell myself.)

-K

The new chapter has been started...I did it several days ago. I wound up going back and doing something I'd originally planned to end/begin a prior chapter with in the outline stages. I also realized that, logistically and scientifically, I need to change something else. Kind of minor, but will involve tracing several chaps back to alter a detail.

I'm about a page in currently. I don't anticipate getting much done in the next couple days, since I'm venturing off tomorrow on a "mini-vacation" down to Los Angeles for a weekend of geeking out over the Back to the Future film series. I may have time to write Friday evening if nothing else is happening (and the drive doesn't totally wipe me out), but I suspect Saturday and Sunday (when I drive back home 400 miles) will be shot.

I cannot wait until I finish the current piece of the story, though. I am so over writing it!

-K

So, I FINALLY finished Chapter 16 today. About time!

On Sunday, I got a page or two of writing done, spending some of my time outside on the porch since that works for me in warmer months. Monday, which I had off (still) due to Spring Break, I decided to spend as much time as possible writing. So I got work done in the early afternoon during my coffee time, then I packed up and headed out to a Davis coffee shop, where I got more work done. I sort of forced myself to do it.

And I got four pages done! But I was still not-quite-there with the end…maybe a paragraph or two away. I suppose that it is good that when I force myself to write, put my mind to it, I can produce. It takes some epic concentration, though. And caffeine. And determination to not be distracted by the Internet, which can be a powerful distraction!

When I output like that, though – in a huge spewing chunk of forced prose and progress – I usually feel like whatever I wrote is crap and is sloppy and so forth. Usually when I reread the passage, however, I am pleasantly surprised that it gels and flows fairly well. (I also notice redundancy, like the use of certain words. The word suddenly is a favorite with action scenes, for example!)

But I always work on the phrasing and word choice and all that at the second pass and beyond. My general philosophy with a first draft is, “Write first, ask questions and critique later.” Revision is when you polish it up so it looks like a glittery ol’ diamond. A rough draft is just that – rough and dull and with some sharp, unflattering edges. Both parts of writing have their good and bad points in my opinion. (For example, the thrill with a rough draft is the act of creating and of being surprised by decisions the character makes that veer slightly from the outline. The thrill of the revision is watching your work slowly become better by the day.)

Anyway, the biggest concern for a rough draft is getting the damned thing out and on paper in the first place.

Hopefully I can get the next chapter begun this weekend…God, I hope it won’t take a month to pen!

-K

Spring Break '09 is almost over, and I've done...very little writing! Sob. I did have a good excuse though.

1) I spent last weekend cleaning like crazy. The whole Spring Cleaning thing...that deep down cleaning and reorganizing that tends to strike maybe twice a year.

2) My mother came to visit me, so I was entertaining her from Sunday night to yesterday morning. Consequently, I was dead exhausted.

3) Natch, I decided to get a cold early on in my mom's visit, which has further drained me and addled my brain.

Tonight I did get some work done -- I buckled myself down at home and managed a page or so. (I tried working at Borders, but the hacking cough I have was annoying patrons nearby.) The plan is to continue that tomorrow and Monday (which I have off still) to wrap up the current chapter. Seriously, it needs to be done, and I tend to work better with momentum behind me. I just need to wedge in a few lame chores around that -- you know, grocery shopping, lesson plans, etc.

Next weekend looks quiet, but the three weekends that follow that will be busybusybusy. I'm starting to worry I may not finish this by August...my sort of goal. I suppose we'll see what the future brings.

-KS

Lately, due to the stress I've been under with work, I've found myself holding my breath subconsciously so that I feel like I can't breathe. Lovely feeling, that. But I am finding that as I sit down and really focus and write, that feeling slips away. It relaxes me, de-tenses me, and I can breathe normally again. Nice, that is.

Currently I am in a coffee shop, writing. This is what I see:





Exciting, eh? Outside it is windy like whoa...my car steered differently, that's how blustery it is outside. I'm in a windy part of the story, though, so I'm almost tempted to sit outside and savor. Except that I am also very allergic to all the pollens in the air now and would be miserable if I did that. Alas.

In semi-PIT related news, I am now officially going to England this summer! I am very excited. This gives me the chance to look at some of the sights I plan for Sam and Meg to see/visit during a future PIT story that involves the Elizabethean times. Very early research, LOL. Beyond that, I am just thrilled to finally have an experience of visiting a foreign culture and country....that fish out of water sense that will be so good to experience firsthand!

And now, I go back to writing. Because this will probably be all the work I get done for another week, alas.

-KS

I was thinking the other day about influences…actually, someone asked me about my influences regarding PIT, so I thought I’d compile a list of the ones I will consciously cop to having. (The subconscious is a whole other level!)

•  The biggest non-writing influence is easily the Back to the Future films. They captivated my imagination at the tender age of 13, and to this day I will get a silly grin on my face seeing the films. The time traveling, the paradoxes, the cause-and-effect, history-repeats-itself…and, importantly, the friendship that developed between two seemingly different characters.

•  The “Blossom Culp & Alexander Armsworth” books by Richard Peck. (There were four of these in various titles.) These are hard to find now – at least I had a hard time scoring any of them when I had my first “meet a writer I know and admire” experience a couple years ago when Peck did a reading and signing at a local Borders – but they definitely inspired the at-times bumpy friendship between Meg and Sam. With the exception of the first book in this quartet, all are narrated in Blossom's first person POV; The Ghost Belonged To Me was told from Alexander's POV. Since I liked ghosts and the supernatural and devoured books (fic and nonfic) on the subject, that was my "gateway" to these stories.

•  “Who Put A Hair in my Toothbrush?” by Jerry Spinelli. I read this book in late grade school (6th grade?) purchased through the Scholastic Book Club. The narration of this book – alternating between a brother and sister first person POV with each chapter – was something that I hadn’t seen before. The idea of telling a story in that way – representing the female and male POVs – inspired me to do that with PIT. I actually reread this book sometime in the last couple years, curious to see if it had held up in quality. (Eh, more or less.)

•  The “Time Team” Serial in the 3-2-1 Contact magazine. I’m absolutely dating myself here – it pains me to realize I'm now three decades old – but in the late 1980’s the children’s magazine started a monthly serial about two young time travelers. (I think they were ca. 13 years old…I can’t remember.) One was a guy, one was a girl. They were tossed together in sharing this secret by accident after the girl’s science project wound up being a time machine. It provoked possibilities to my imagination, though I felt I could do it better. (The writing quality was meh, and some of the adventures were pretty cliché, even to my young point of view.)

What I do find sort of sad (and I do have intentions of correcting this at some point) is that, with the exception of the BTTF films, I own none of these works that inspired me. Not anymore, anyway. Next time I visit my hometown, I should hit up Powell's Books.

In other news, progress comes in inches. This week is final exams for the quarter, so I am buried in grading. Lovely. Also, in an unrelated note, I'm going to start tagging entries in this blog. God knows why I have not done that yet. So I'll slowly sift my way through 'em all to give 'em a proper subject tag.

-KS

I have been methodically plodding through the writing of Chapter 15 for what has felt like millions of years. However...I finally got that done today! YES! Now I can move on to Chapter 16. Unfortunately (?) the action sequence continues, as it shall for a couple more chapters before I slow down a bit to take stock of things. (Or the characters get to take stock of things.)

Writing action sequences is, in my opinion, hard. You are essentially narrating about something that happens fast and unfolds in a brief amount of time. When you spend days, weeks, or months writing those scenes, it starts to mess with your sense of timing and pace in the story. I am 100% sure I will do scads of editing on the last chapter when I reread everything...wouldn't surprised me if I used some of the same phrasing or terms too much since the brain tends to forget that stuff if you spend too much time writing one scene.

PIT4 was such an easy birth; I can see that PIT5 is going to be a slippery, fussy little bastard. I am still hoping I can wrap up the first draft in the summer, though. FYI, the current word count is about 63,000. And the story is maybe 1/3rd done. Egads.

-KS

Did a little writing today...slowly as Sam inches towards his goal (in the chapter), so I inch to mine.

On the way home I plugged my beloved iPhone into the tape deck of my car and listened to the most recent version of my "PIT Soundtrack." There's no way these can all fit on one CD now. So, behind the cut, if you are curious, the songs in roughly the order (so far) of the stories they really tie into. (And these belay my musical tastes, I suppose, which is poppy/alternative/rock.

( Version...what, 8.0 now? )

Some of those are a little tongue-in-cheek (well, the last one for PIT5) and a few of them are hard to classify with just one story. But.

Interesting how many are for PIT4. Egads. But I guess that story has several layers to it.

My God, I hope I can get Sam's current chapter done this week!

-KS

Titles are a beast to come up with for me. Often times I come up with a title well after a story has been started. It's rare I have a title ahead of any kind of draft or outline of a story, though sometimes it happens. To me, a title is of Great Importance. I like mine to also have double meanings to them or puns. Like, take PIT4's: Family Matters. It worked great because it was about family matters, i.e. family stuff, and it was also saying that FAMILY matters. Win-win, yo!

Although PIT5 has crossed the 100 page mark [in the NeoOffice word document where I'm writing it], I still have no title whatsoever for "the pirate story." I'm hoping that will change in the next few months, though PIT2 was pretty much done and about to go to the publisher before I got a title for it, though. (Contributed by a friend of mine, I believe.)

Hilariously, though PIT6 is still more than a year from being started, is not outlined, and exists no more than a paragraphical summary I jotted down a few years ago, I came up with a title for it this afternoon at lunch. It just randomly came to me. Whether or not I stick with it -- I mean, seriously, the story's plot could change enough to render the title useless -- remains to be seen. Still!

I fear that PIT5 is going to be a TERRIBLE title to birth, and expect to solicit suggestions from my Betas once they get a look-see on the first draft.

-K

One of my favorite books is Gone With the Wind. I did not read it until I was in my early twenties and my mom recommended it to me. (My taste in books is not quite to either of my parents.... Mom loves romance, Dad loves science-fiction. I like multigenre stuff.) Anyway, now I read it about once a year. When I really love a book, I don't want to read it too often. I'd just finished up a sort of sequel to the original (Rhett Butler's People...not the dreadful Scarlett, which I've been warned to avoid like the plague), so I wanted to reread the classic.

This led me to look up the author, Margaret Mitchell, since I was sort of curious why the woman only wrote one book. Although I chide my students that Wikipedia is the devil and should be avoided (for academic research projects), it is where I first go to get some general information on any subject matter I am curious about. So there I went.

What surprised me in that Wikipedia article was how Mitchell evidently wrote the novel -- she wrote it completely out of sequence, with the very last chapter first, and other chapters in no particular order.

This boggles my mind. I know some writers will hop around like that, but I cannot imagine ever doing something like that in the writing process! I tend to start on the first page, Chapter 1, and go chronologically straight through. Even if there is a scene or segment I am bursting to write, I will put that urge aside until I reach it naturally. I suppose I am a linear thinking, through and through. Complicated plots or story twists require copious amounts of charts and near models for me to write. (There were a lot of those with both PIT3 and PIT4, considering the subject of potential futures and alternate realities.)

Speaking of writing...still hacking away on the same chapter. I'm really hoping to chain myself somewhere this weekend to get it done! Because, seriously, I'd like to feel like the story is moving forward instead of treading water.

-K