Sherri Cornelius

The morning has a ethereal quality to it, as I’m still carrying the feelings from my emotionally-charged dream. So often my moods are shaped by what I was dreaming when I woke up that morning, and while the images sometimes don’t make enough sense to hold on to upon waking, the emotion always does. I’ve battled strong emotions my whole life. Defined them, boxed them up, let them peek out in situations my forebrain deems appropriate. Sometimes they sneak out on their own, and that’s mortifying.

Lately I’ve realized that’s not healthy. Emotions are not a deformed and murderous twin who must be chained to the basement floor. They are part of me. So I’ve been working on feeling whatever emotion comes to me. Not necessarily letting it manifest outwardly, but looking at it, accepting it.

Well yesterday morning I sat down to write, and got that same old butterfly nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach. Sometimes when I get that feeling, I stand up and do something else without even thinking first, just my instinct telling me I need to run when I feel that dread. But yesterday I looked at it and wondered about it, and opened the document anyway. The next scene to be written was a hugely emotional one. When I finished I was drained and lonely, needed a hug so bad, but there was no one here but me.

Huge breakthrough. Because I’d examined my emotions at every step, I was able to make an important and previously unseen connection. The dread came from subconsciously knowing I would end my writing time feeling lonely and lost. All those emotions swirling around, yet there was no one I could unburden myself to. Even if my husband had been home, I couldn’t very well expect him to understand what was bothering me. He would probably just tell me, Get over it, it’s not your problem, it’s your character. No wonder novelists, actors, and other artistic types seem to have so much trouble with substance abuse. We take on emotions which aren’t our own, and which in the context of our lives have no ground. There’s no event to pin them to, yet we carry them with us. It can make one feel quite bonkers.

But seriously, now that I’ve realized this, I can start working around it. How about you? Do you find that your character’s emotions affect your life?

Don’t you hate it when you have an epiphany and then the next day you can’t remember what it was? I know I made some important neural pathways yesterday, but all I can do is trust they’ll kick in when I need them.

Despite my grogginess yesterday, I did have a pretty good writing day. I’m ready to be finished with this project so I can start on the next. Not sure what that will be yet, but I do have a few ideas which have been inside my head for a while and want to get outside:

• A middle grade or young adult book about orphans who go to live with their hoarding aunt, make a network of tunnels through her mountains of stuff, find treasure and have adventures (tentative title, Catacombia).
• A medieval fantasy about twin girls separated at birth, one of whom is adopted by an innkeeper and learns that her sister has been raised to be the dragon’s next sacrificial victim

I’d also like to finish a middle-grade that I started with my daughter several years ago–it’s about halfway finished–and I’d really like to revisit the Ea’s Gift world. That wouldn’t be wise, I guess, since it hasn’t sold yet. Better to spend my time on new things.

Have you had any new ideas lately? Care to share? I won’t steal them, promise.

Today is my husband’s birthday, the big Four-One. I’ll have the kids make him some pictures before he gets home from work, but otherwise we won’t do anything, which is the way he likes it. I’ll let him choose a football card on eBay for his present. He’d rather pick it himself, anyway. Hm, maybe I could make him his favorite dinner…

Yesterday I finished typing my scenes into yWriter, and today I’ll print the list to figure out where the new material needs to go. I’ve never been an organizing writer and had put myself in the “seat of the pants” category, however, I think I’ve found the circumstance when using a system can help me. It’s long since I pants-seated the original vision, and I have piles of scenes which need cohesion and a majorly-revised plot full of holes. I tried the notecard method, but it didn’t work for me then. Writing the long synopsis at the request of an editor broke things loose for me, allowed me to fix the plot problems, and gave me a direction. Next time I won’t wait so long before writing a long outline, and I won’t turn my nose up at organizational tools. I will no longer put myself in a category, neither pantser nor outliner, because labels are so limiting! Damn it!

Another thing I need to do is read some new books. The f/sf section of my library has old stuff plus each book carries the deadly air freshener molecule, so that’s out. I’m poor, so I can get just a few books off the bargain table, maybe. I thought about getting into one of those book-trading rings, but they’d smell like all the houses they were in before. I’m going to just open my mind to possibilities and see what comes up. One of the most limiting things I do to myself is to assume I know all my options, which makes me blind to others. My vision is wide open.

Yesterday I went through the printed scenes of my WIP, assessed each one’s viability, and inserted placeholder pages for scenes which were missing. I got about halfway through. By the time I’m finished I hope to have every major plot point mapped in, with plenty of room for fun extras like backstory and worldbuilding. The underworld where my story is set has mushy time, and to convey that uncertain, disjointed time I’m inserting random flashbacks. A lot of those have already been written, but there’s lots of room to be creative there, still. I’m excited.

I mentioned earlier that my editing projects this time are both erotica stories. Now, I’m not a prude by any means, but I am demure. Sex and sexy things are mostly private for me, and while I don’t care if others feel comfortable talking about them, I was interested to see how I would react. It’s funny how un-erotic erotica can be when you’re looking for punctuation errors. I knew I would be fine when I made this note without blushing: “You said where Guy #1′s ____ is, but what about Guy #2′s _____?”

What language to use in my notes is something I’ve wondered about. Do I mirror the language of the story in notes like the one above? It sounds too dirty for a professional. So do I use the correct terminology? Well, that sounds too stiff and uptight (puns intended). So I think it’s cute to use nicknames, like you-know-what and hoo-ha, but that’s not precise enough. I guess I’ll go with correct terminology, since I am a professional, after all, and you can’t go wrong with penis and vulva.

If I miss the morning blogging window, I never think of blogging in the afternoon. Duh. If I have something to say, but either I already posted or I didn’t post that morning, do I jump on and make a new post? No. Because I put myself in boxes, and that is one of them: Blog every morning, and save any ideas for the next morning’s post. I don’t know why, and I know it’s dumb, and that’s why I’m blogging right now, because I have to shout to the world

I ROCK!

I printed out my book, right? Well I just got done separating the scenes, which was extremely satisfying. I have a buttload of stuff that needs writing, mostly toward the end, but at least now I can see what I have, right in front of my eyes. I have direction. Some of it can’t be used, but not much. Also, I have some scenes written from other PsOV that really work, and I’m reconsidering my single POV approach. And another thing? It’s good writing. You know how when you take a story out of the drawer in which you stuffed it with disgust some months ago and find that it isn’t as bad as you remember? In fact, it’s workable? Like, you wouldn’t kick someone out of bed for writing something similar? That surge you get? That’s me. I guess it’s clear how big of a deal this is to me. I’m pretty proud of myself. Ready to go. Glad I climbed out of some boxes and did this.

To top it off, I’m doing some really good editing work, and getting some housework done. I love productive days. Can you tell?

So I printed out my whole novel yesterday. Ever since Maggie stuck some toys down in the printer several years ago, it hasn’t wanted to feed the paper. The last time I printed a novel I had to feed each page by hand, and oh em gee, was that an exercise in tedium. So this time I was like, I’m gonna fix that bad boy before I even start. A few days ago, I took it apart (not easy, I don’t recommend it) and cleaned it thoroughly, made sure all the parts were free, and narrowed down the problem to a smooth roller which wasn’t gripping the paper.

I thought for a while about how I could enhance the gripping power of that roller. Double-stick tape would stick to the paper, too. I could wrap a rubber band around it, but finding one the right size would be tedious. How about if I roughed up the surface of the roller, by scraping it with a steak knife? But then it hit me: rubber cement. Rubber cement is rubbery (hence the name) and dries fast, and if you get it anywhere it shouldn’t be it rubs right off once it’s dry. I didn’t have much faith it would work. It was too easy.

But it did work! Woo! I printed out all my files with only one bad page. I didn’t run out of ink or anything.

I’m really glad I printed it out. I’m a total Scrooge when it comes to the printer. The cartridges are $20, and that’s for crappy remanufactured ones. The kids don’t print except on special occasions. I don’t print my writing. Now I’m thinking I need to do it. I really don’t think electronically. I’ve known for a long time that I work best with my hands, so why not get writing out here in the real world where I have some tactile input? Because I’m a total Scrooge, remember?

Well, no more. The words don’t look the same on a computer screen. I think it may be because I read so many others’ words on the same screen, it lessens the immediate response of my brain to my own words. But when I have my story on a bunch of pages in front of me, mine are the only words there. Also, I can rifle through to find the page I want, instead of having to remember which file it’s in.

I don’t know how much work I’ll be able to do on it today. Today the focus was going to be this Eternal Press story I’m editing, and I was going to do the sorting of pages when I needed a computer break. My sinuses are acting up, though, so I don’t know how much eye time I’ll have. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve been feeling pretty crappy the past few days, and apprently it’s that time of year, because my bud Fal has felt the same way, and she’s way up there in Illinois. I’m on the upswing, though, and I hope she is, too.

I love September. The word is nice, the birthstone is sapphire, the weather is cooler, the kids are firmly in school, football starts…There’s nothing to dislike about September. Well, we do have FOUR family birthdays in September–mine, my husband’s, my son’s, and my step-son’s–on top of the back-to-school expense, auto insurance is due and Christmas is just around the corner…So yeah, financially it’s usually pretty stressful in September. I haven’t had a birthday present in years. If I had the money I’d probably have to buy my present myself, anyway.

But still…September is nice. Energizing. Full of possibility.

I think I’m going to try a technique with my novel that I used for the long synopsis. For the synopsis, I wrote and typed everything out, then I cut apart the scenes and rearranged them into the best order. It’s one of those things I’ve tried before according to someone else’s instructions with no success, but once I threw out my internal rule book and played it by ear, it worked out well. With the novel I’ve tried notecards, but writing a hundred notecards and deciding which information is important enough to go on each notecard was just too unwieldy, so I decided I wasn’t an organizer after all. But again, I had fallen into the trap lots of writers fall into–the “should” trap, the “rules” trap, the “everybody knows better than I do” trap.

So I’m going to make up this technique as I go along. I’ll print out the whole book–backstory, current scenes, deleted scenes–and staple together the pages of each scene, cutting the page with scissors if necessary to separate them. After that…I don’t know. We’ll see. I hesitate to tell you exactly what I do, because I don’t want to perpetuate that “rules” mentality. Art doesn’t follow rules.

The feedback I received on the long synopsis may be the best ever. Many of the reader’s comments overlapped, giving me specific areas to focus on, and I have every intention of emailing this tomorrow, just like I’d planned. So raise your glass, or mug, or whatever, and join me in toasting Sarah, Matthew, Vanessa, Dane, Ian and Tony for a job well done. Kristy had offered to help, but life got in the way (this is me officially letting her off the hook). She still gets the brownie points, because it means a lot that she was interested in the first place. So to all my critters, thank you so much! If this thing lands me a deal, you will have had a direct hand in getting me there.

On a technical note, did you know you can register on my website? I didn’t either, until I did some snooping around my WordPress dashboard. If you have an avatar which shows up on every other site but this one, registering as a user might fix it. I’m not sure how it works, so if anybody tries it out, could you tell me about your experience? The link is in the upper right-hand corner of the header.

Looks like it’ll be a rainy day here in Blossomland. Just before the kids got on the bus a black wall cloud rolled over us, and now it’s raining pretty hard. Doesn’t look like it’ll be severe, just dark, warm, windy and wet. My favorite kind of day. It will make it extra hard to concentrate, though, especially since I stayed up too late last night talking to my brother on the phone.

A couple more readers got back to me with notes on my synopsis, so that makes four, which is a good number to start my rewrite. The response has been mostly positive, but there are a few places that all four readers pegged, so that’s where I’ll start. I love how each reader brings his/her own personality to the critique–like, the mysterious M., language dude extraordinaire, told me the meanings of some of the names I’d chosen for my characters, and the meanings sort of fit the characters’ roles. To answer his question, the fit of the names is accidental–except for the name of the main character, Drina, which in Spanish is short for Alexandrina and means “defender of mankind,” I assume because of Alexander the Great. “Defender of Mankind” is a good title for Drina Ramirez.

I was right, it’s hard to concentrate. I think I’ll have to take my work in small sips today, and that work is: to continue where I left off editing yesterday; start rewriting the synopsis; housework; pay bills; other miscellaneous things I can fit in here and there. I have a feeling the housework will be the easiest of those tasks; I don’t have to think to load the dishwasher.

So here’s a question for you: Do you do anything special to pick names for your characters? Do the names come immediately, or do you have to study and research and pick just the right one?

My mind is sort of a blank this morning, but I feel like connecting with the world so I’m posting anyway. I apologize in advance for any inanity which may follow.

Over the weekend a couple of my first readers got back to me with comments on my long synopsis. Their advice was right on and exactly what I needed, pointing out things I am too close to see. Really invaluable. I’m sure the rest of my readers will have just as much insight. I’ll do an in-depth report once it’s a done deal, probably by the end of the week.

While I’m waiting to finish my synopsis, I have my editing job to do. Last week I received my next two assignments from Eternal Press. To my surprise, they are both classified as erotica. Now, I’ve never edited erotica before, although I did go through a time when I thought I might be able to write some. (Not.) By the way, the link goes to my old blog because the comments somehow didn’t get imported over here on my older posts. The comments are funny.

So anyway, yeah, I’m editing erotica. So far it’s been very–ahem–interesting. It’s smashing my preconceived notions of erotic literature and bringing to light some personal attitudes which have always operated unseen. Eye-opening, in a number of ways.

On the health front, I found out toothpaste irritates my skin and is probably why my tongue always feels burny. On the other hand, the knuckle on my broken finger popped and I regained some range of motion. I hope this bodes well for having a full recovery.

I pulled all my WIP files to one location and started organizing them. Cuts, backstory, notes, different chunks of chapters, the working doc, 3 different synopses, etc. I’m a very sloppy saver, so my file names are not nearly descriptive enough to immediately know what they are, and also they are saved to two different computers and a backup hard drive. I have the same file name 10 times on 4 different documents. It’s atrocious. If anybody has any thoughts on a better way to organize and evaluate what to save and what to delete, please let me know. If nobody has a better idea, I’ll import all the files into Page Four, see how that works.

Have a great week.