Sherri Cornelius

Printing out a novel for editing uses a lot of paper. Combine that with the kids’ 2-hour-long scribbling sessions, and it makes perfect sense to use my old manuscripts as scrap paper. I mean, it’s still good on one side, and though the kids can read, there’s nothing OMG-terrible in BVA; it doesn’t have sex scenes, per se, but the MC does think about sex in a flippant, jaded way, and there is colorful language. Still, nobody cares about the pieces of story on the other side of the page. The occasional cussword would go unnoticed.

So I thought.

I forgot my 11-year-old is a voracious reader with a vocabulary as big as mine. She wants to read all kinds of inappropriate books, as I did at her age, just because she’s already read everything appropriate in the house. Last night she told me she’d been reading the backs of these scrap papers, because BVA was “awesome.” She said sometimes she even gets several consecutive pages so she can read a bigger chunk at a time.

It’s hard to turn down someone who’s dying to read my work, and who will undoubtedly be complimentary. So after she begged me a while, I told her I would edit out the objectionable parts and let her read it. She’s already bugged me about it twice more this morning.

So now I’m wondering, will this affect how and what I write? I want to write things my kids will love. The hubs doesn’t read fiction anymore, so he doesn’t factor in. Sex scenes embarrass me. It seems like a no-brainer to stick with Middle Grade or Young Adult. BVA is going to YA editors, I think.

Something to think about.

Nothing seems right. I’m restless. Anxious.

Spots of news:

• I painted the soffit above my kitchen cabinets, finally. When we moved into this house there was terrible (TERRIBLE) 80s wallpaper, red and yellow plaid with touches of green, overlaid with an ornate fruit border. I figured bare walls were better than that wallpaper, and I was right. A while back I’d painted the backsplash a nice, bright blue, but the soffits were bare for about three years. Now it’s light coffee, a very nice neutral I found for $5 on the oopsie table at Lowe’s. I guess in a few more years I’ll get around to changing the green, red and yellow indoor-outdoor carpet. It’s ridiculous.
• On a related note, for your next painting project, you simply must use the low- or no-odor paint. I think they’ve changed the regulations for new paint so that it has to be low-odor, so that means get rid of your old, stinky stuff.
• My plan for the summer had been to read a lot and let my creative batteries charge, after the long, slow drain of BVA. Being a bit impoverished, I snatch up all the bargain books I can find (with apologies to the authors, but I wouldn’t be reading their books at all if I’d had to pay full price). I recently found a treasure trove at Big Lots, and picked up a few big names. The first I read was fellow Oklahoman Marcia Preston’s Trudy’s Promise. She writes with such beautiful, heartfelt simplicity. Now I’m working through Kate Mosse’s Sepulchre, quite a different style from Marcia. Sepulchre took a while to hook me, because I thought it would beat me to death with the “was”es and the “were”s. Once I got used to her style, though, I’ve enjoyed it.

So what’s been going on in your world?

I’ve stared at this blinking cursor a long time, so I guess I’ll just start. I do have things to say, but I think I addled my brain with all the nothing I’ve been doing.

It’s been a week since I turned in my manuscript. During that time I’ve basked in the glow of satisfaction, and also have identified some missed opportunities with the story. I could beat myself up about them, but I know those opportunities would never have become apparent if I hadn’t let it go. Having been through this process before, I know there’s always something I could have done better. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s that way with most writers, not just me, so I don’t worry about it too much. I did what I did and now the book has to stand up tall, or fall over like a drunk girl on a slippery barstool. (Those days are long behind me.)

Anyway, it’s done for now.

I’ve really enjoyed my break from writing. So much, in fact, that the first few days I started to worry I was enjoying it a little too much. Maybe I wouldn’t want to start a new project, or maybe I’m out of ideas, or…whatever. But by Friday I was feeling that familiar pull to the computer, and then over the weekend little random ideas started pinging my brain, and last night I even thought about brushing off an old middle-grade book I started a few Nanowrimos ago.

I’m not ready to dive into anything just yet, but at least the desire is still there.  The blinking cursor no longer mocks me. That’s nice.

Last night I cleaned out all the notes I’ve accumulated over the couple of years of writing this book, including handwritten, typed and printed pages, note cards and scraps. The pile filled the gerbil’s old 10-gallon tank. That’s a lot of trash. I did keep some notes, the ones showing the link between thought and finished product. Those were about five pages.

I’ve been working on this book so long, some of my newish blog buds might think it’s my first. There was another before BVA, a magical romp with a young lady on the run, forbidden love and fireballs. It was called Stolen Magic at first, and later changed to Ea’s Gift to avoid duplicating another published novel. This is the effort that caught my agent’s eye, even though it went nowhere and was eventually shelved.

Writing EG was fun and exciting. I thought every book would be that way. Hahaha, what a silly goose I am.

Writing BVA felt like slicing open my own gut, pulling out my intestines, measuring the entire slippery length, then hauling them back in and stitching the wound myself. I didn’t realize till I finished that sentence how true it is. Now that it’s finished I can see why it was so hard, but that will be a post for another day.

I watched Avatar for the first time (the blue people one, not the last airbender one) with the family. Normally I don’t let the kids watch PG-13, but this was a special occasion. My son in particular has been bugging me to get it from Netflix–in fact, he watched it again this morning, and will probably watch it again before it’s gone–but I think we all ended up loving it just as much as he did. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was actually a good movie. I’d expected it to be a cookie-cutter special-effects blockbuster with a superficial “save the planet” message. What I found out, though, was a great story supported by heartfelt, emotional performances–with the added bonus of the OMG OUT OF THIS WORLD FANTASTIC special effects. Did I say OMG?

The Na’vi were so realistic that it gave me the hope that my work-no-longer-in-progress could someday be made into a believable movie. The last thing I’d want for a movie made out of my book is a bunch of people running around in lizard suits. Is that so much to ask?

Another week of musical themes as I try to decide what I want my website to say about me. I think this one is quite zen, only for some reason it’s not giving me the theme options in my dashboard, so it might change before you’ve even read this.

But the real news for the week is that I finished my book. Really.

No, stop laughing. I’m serious.

I spent all day Sunday in a marathon of editing, and at 9:30 pm a box popped up to let me know I had no more comments or tracked changes. The manuscript was clean. My eyes opened wide and then squeezed shut, and I put my face in my hands and squealed. I’m sure it didn’t look weird at all.

At the end I still had some formatting tweaks to do, but the story was done, damn it, so I saved the formatting for Monday morning. Once that was finished I began assembling the package to email Sara, my agent, and soon found that I’d not done an important step: rewriting the short synopsis to fit the new ending. Rackin-frackin mumble mumble… At this point I was so close I could smell it, and it smelled good. Gah!

So Monday was spent rewriting the rackin-frackin synopsis, and then late Monday night I composed possibly the most momentous email of my life up to this point. I attached the novel, the regular synopsis, and a longer, 17-page synopsis specifically requested by an interested publication…and hit send. My agent confirmed receipt just a few minutes ago. It’s out of my hands.

I really had no idea I’d be so relaxed once it was gone. I’ve gotten used to the low hum of anxiety that always, from the very beginning, accompanied this book. All day my thoughts would drift toward that waterfall: “Why am I doing this? I should be writing!” Now usually, the next thought is smashed on the rocks below: “I can’t write, okay? I have to clean the toilets sometime!” But today, I realized the waterfall was behind me, and whatever whitewater tossed my thoughts about, a sparkling pool lay beyond.

So basically, that was a beautiful metaphor for why I cleaned toilets without guilt today.

I have so many thoughts and feelings about finishing, some will have to wait for another day.

Moonrat had a nice post today about her Magician’s Book: “The perfect story you read as a child, and which since you read it has gone utterly unmatched and only vaguely echoed by anything else you read?” Hers was The Elven Bane.

Mine is, unfortunately, a book I can’t name.

The story is etched into my memory, as well as the names of some of the players, the settings and the emotions and situations. Etched, I say. Only problem is I did not retain the author’s name, nor the title of the story. It was not a book unto itself, because it was in a sf anthology. I remember it was fairly long, longer than all the other stories in the anthology. I wasn’t really old enough to judge the length of a story at the time, but looking back I’d estimate it at 20k words.

The anthology came from my dead grandmother’s library. We had a ton of books inherited from Grandma Jerry, all from the fifties and sixties, maybe up through the early seventies. This one seemed like a late sixties to me for some reason–maybe because it seemed really old in about 1980. Most of the books were book-of-the-month clubbers and Reader’s Digest Condensed, none of interest to an eleven year old, but a few gems were scattered among them, like this book. It’s almost certainly out of print now, but I wish I could read it again to see how it holds up. It took hold of my imagination the way few other stories have, and solidified my love of speculative fiction, though I didn’t know there was a difference back then. A story was a story.

You may stop reading here, as the rest of the post is the story as I remember it, but before you leave, answer this question: What’s your Magician’s Book?

It was set in a somewhat primitive future after an unnamed but presumably man-made disaster, the clues pointing to nuclear weapons. Babies were inspected for mutations at birth and, if found to be imperfect, were left in the forest to die. The child protagonist lived among the villagers, because parents hid her imperfection: six toes on each foot. The protag’s little sister, Petra, had a mutation that no one could see–telepathy.

The protag is found out, I think, or maybe not but for some reason she flees to the forest. Remember all those babies they left to die? They’ve created their own society in the woods, and they take in the protag. She meets an exceptionally lanky young man named (I think) Charles, and they war with the villagers.

So eventually, an airship comes and drops these filament things over the whole battlefield (can you say deus ex machina?) which hardens over everything and everyone, including the protag and her boyfriend. I remember a horse suffocating, but I can’t remember if everybody else died. I know the main people were cut free and taken up to the airship where they were transported across the nuclear wasteland to civilization. Apparently, Petra, the little sis, had contacted them telepathically, and they embrace the mutations.

After all that, I think I remember the protag’s name is Marie. Wish I could find that anthology again.

Once again, my self-imposed deadline for finishing BVA has come and gone.  This time it’s been finished, but I can’t stop finding things to fix. You know that stage, I’m sure. I’ve also come to the conclusion that my eyes will never be able to keep up with my imagination. That is, I think about my book all day, but the sinuses get irritated so easily that the eyes are always on the verge of fatigue. Looking at a computer screen and thinking at the same time is hard some days. I simply require more downtime than I feel I should.

I haven’t been online a whole lot to save my eyes for the really important stuff. I expect to send the book off to the agent within the week. She may have edits for me, but they shouldn’t take long. I’m ready. I’m done, now I just have to get the manuscript to agree.

Where to start, where to start?

Well first, I’m just coming out of a migraine so if you haven’t seen me around in a few days, that’s why. Darn sinusitis.

I quit drinking coffee for a while. Figured out that I can have one cup with no ill effect on my tummy, but my problem is stopping at one cup. I enjoy the ritual of the coffee, and also I feel like I owe it to the coffee to drink it. Weird, but that’s how it is. I think a lot of us have that “clean your plate” mentality, which affects all my habits around food. A while ago I said I was going to do better with my food choices, and I have. I’ve only lost about five pounds, but I’m really working on the habit part rather than focusing on losing weight. Things like making sure there are healthy things in the kitchen, not being lazy about cooking, and thinking about portions rather than just shoveling it in till I can’t anymore. Those are the things that will make me a healthy weight and keep me there. I can wait to hit that mark if I know it will last.

What else…

Oh yeah, I finished my book. Sent it to my first reader on Tuesday and had a migraine headache an hour later, whatever that means. Thinking of everything I’ve gone through during the course of this book is a bit overwhelming.

I didn’t have the confidence to write this book when I started. It doesn’t fit into a template, I see now.  I tried to make it fit a template and ended up spinning my wheels for a couple of years. For a long time my forebrain told me it was a mess, even though it made a lot of sense to me, and the characters spoke with their own voices. Only when I threw out the template did it come alive and drive me to the finish.

We’ll see how the public receives it, but whatever happens I’ve written the book I wanted to write, and that’s a pretty damn good feeling. Later in my career, I will say, “That’s when I learned how to be a writer.” Shoot, this whole BVA period has taught me how to live.

Well, I made a major decision as I wrap up my current book. See, the nature of the world in this book makes it likely that one would meet people from all over the world, and from lots of different eras. My main character is American but of Mexican descent; a supporting character is Spanish of some kind, and another is Scottish; lesser characters are Southern, Persian, British, and others. Not all of them speak English, but most of them do. That means a lot of accents to understand and apply, and besides the accents you have idioms unique to the individual culture. This is tough.

What I did while writing the book was write each character the way he/she sounded in my head, and for most of them this worked well enough to get the accent across. My Scottish guy was the exception.

He never sounded Scottish to me. I really really wanted him to be Scottish. Really really. However, although I’d decided he should be Scottish, I’d done very little research on how to actually make him seem Scottish. I thought I’d be able to layer it in at my leisure. I’m finding it’s not that easy. Also, there’s no real reason to have him be foreign, except that I wanted lots of different places represented.

So now I’m on the verge of completing the book, and changing “your” to “yer” ain’t gonna cut it. And I started asking myself, “If he didn’t sound like a Scot in your head, why did you make him one anyway, you dimwit?” And the answer is, I didn’t. I didn’t make him a Scot. He’s an American who sometimes says “wee lass” and “are ye out of your mind?” See? Now, I could go and make that “are ye out o’ yer maind?” and that would be fairly Scottish. But to go back and spend an extra month to add that accent to an entire character’s worth of dialogue wouldn’t have a good cost/benefit ratio.

So Caellum is now Scottish-American, if there is such a term. He’s still a rakish musician, still mysterious, still over-sexed, but I think he’ll be relieved to stop speaking with an accent. He wasn’t very good at it.