Blogflog: Dickens, she ain't.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

URL: http://blog.laurellkhamilton.org/2007/01/twenty-pages-of-frost.html

LKH in bold, me not.

First of all, today was my first twenty page day on A LICK OF FROST. Very cool.

It saddens me a little that she was inadvertantly puntastic. While punmastery is one of those things I admire in a writer, accidental wit is . . . well, it's amusing, and usually for the wrong reasons. LKH is a Mistress of the Accident. Oh yes.

I'm choosing to ignore her bragging at getting twenty pages done in under four hours. I'm sure there are other people out there that can do this - hell, I probably could do it if I had sufficient inspiration. Sadly, I get bogged down by pesky things like plot and characterisation and language-y type things, so I tend to work a little slower. Maybe if I quit doing the whole thinking thing, I can be just like LKH!

My goal on this book for a minimum is still four pages. Since I've been working on it, I've had only two four page days. The rest have all been eight, nine, or ten pages. I might have had one eleven page day.

Because it's all about the page count, man. Never mind the word count, or even the quality - just so long as the page count is met. This...gives me flashbacks to NaNoWriMo, only it's scarier - A) because there's way more words on a page and B) she's definitely getting published after this.

Why can't we cut her off at 50,000 words?

You see why years ago I put my minimum page count at eight. I usually hit, or exceed eight pages, but there are days when eight is a burden. Four pages is rarely a burden.

Because being a highly successful writer and OMG NY TIMES BESTSELLER!!!!1! is such a chore. I mean, you only get to sit at home and write all day long while the rest of us sleep and bum around have to work, take care of families, study etc.. You know, real world stuff.

So on this book I've given myself permission to have bad days.

Anyone else getting the eerie mental image that she's gave Jon the construction paper, crayons and glitter and he's sitting in the corner, making permission slips?

To have those days when you don't want to work, and the book seems lifeless to you. On those days I know that I can do my four pages and I'm free for the rest of the day. Sometimes I even promise myself a reward for getting those pages. Go to a favorite restaurant for lunch, or to a favorite store. Spend the rest of the afternoon reading someone else's book in my favorite comfy spot with the dogs curled all around. Anything and everything to get me to sit down at the desk and do the work.

Oh my god, Laurell! You mean to say you're fallible like we mere mortals too!?! You have off days where you need a break?!?! OMG! MY LITTLE FANGIRL DREAMS ARE SIMPLY SHATTERED! SHATTERED, I SAY!!! [/sarcasm]

Hands up the writers in here that didn't know that breaks are a good thing and that we're allowed to take them whenever we want. Specially now, because Laurell's given us permission.

When setting your own page count per day don't judge on a good day. Always pick one of your worst days. The number you get on your next to worst day, that's the one to use as your page count.

Why do I say your next to worst day, and not your very worst day? Because your very worst day is the day you sit at your desk for eight or ten hours and have not a single page to show for your efforts.

<--I bring your attention to this icon that I made for marumae (but it's totally gankable ;D).

Because it's totally true. I hate sitting and spending eight hours looking at that blank word doc and not have a single word to show for it, let alone a page. A page is fucking godsend to me these days. Doubly so after I noticed that I've started to leave off mid-sentence - do you have any idea how annoying it is to come back the next night and find half a sentence written and have no idea how it was meant to finish?

But oh no, not our heroine. One page is simply not good enough. And now to continue her woefest:

I've had those days. All working writers have those days. Maybe Charles Dickens didn't have those days. It is reported by guests at a party at his house that he served drinks with one hand and continued to write OLIVER TWIST with the other. Yes, all writers are entitled to hate him just a little for that.

Man, this explains so much - she wants to be Dickens and is just an omg jellus hater right now because he could multitask!

I can't even concentrate on a good conversation in the midst of a large party, let alone keep writing on my current book.

Maybe if we took her to parties, liqoured her up and told her she had to write at the same time and she just mashed her nose against the keyboard, we might get a decent novel out of it.

God, I wonder how many more times she's going to bring up the Dickens thing. Her Dickensean principles are pastede on, YAYE! At this rate, she'll be wanking both the dragon AND Dickens. Such a busy girl.

Comments

[sharkbytes.livejournal.com]

Jon is totally making her permission slips. With the special So-Big Crayons and writing things like "this kewpon is good 4 1 inspyrational spanking" OR
"readeeemible for 1 trip to the kalendur store"

and major LOLZ at the Dickens reference...she's BEGGING to be compared to Anne Rice, and i'm happy to oblige. I do believe we're "interrogating the text from the wrong perspective" *weg*

[dwg.livejournal.com]

See, now I'm incredibly glad I made these Who icons from The Unquiet Dead) - which featured, funnily enough, Charles Dickens as played by Simon Callow:



I never thought they'd come in so very handy be so relevant. Just replace the Ninth Doctor with LKH and amusement doth abound.

[thekiwiwhoflew.livejournal.com]

My love for you burns. Like a love berserker.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Hush you, such talk will turn a girl's head.

[saadiira.livejournal.com]

Anyone else getting the eerie mental image that she's gave Jon the construction paper, crayons and glitter and he's sitting in the corner, making permission slips?


Have my unbabies now?

-Dira-

[sharkbytes.livejournal.com]

oh i might die laughing!!! Those are priceless!!!!

[rantingmule.livejournal.com]

Okay the Jon making permission slips thing just SLAYS ME. For seriouses.

At this rate, she'll be wanking both the dragon AND Dickens. Such a busy girl.

...would that make it a three-way wankfest?

Oh god, I think I killed my brains a little by typing that.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

She has two hands, it could work! *squicks self*

Course, she won't be getting twenty pages in under four hours done. Not unless she learns with ctrl + v is.

[lilian413.livejournal.com]

*blinks* *blinks again*

Oooohhh, I get it! This is not LKH herself writing these posts-- this a 12 year old fangirl. Because there's no way a serious, published writer will talk about things like 'good days', 'bad'days' (based on page count... editing, anyone?) and crap like that.

Right?

Right????

*is completely in denial*

[dwg.livejournal.com]

See, I have a theory that there was an accident with the sapce-time continuum and Adult!Laurell and Highschool!Laurell switched bodies - so there's the writer we came to know and enjoy trapped in the past, forever studying Shakespeare and Wuthering Heights while her teenage self is loosed in our current time to write all that very bad fic that she always wanted to do.

It's really the only thing that can explain all the crazy.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

This is what I mean by flashbacks to sort of NaNoWriMo - I was only aiming for 10,000 words at the time, and most of November I was stuck in, "OMG MUST WRITE!" mode. Which was fine for the first week, then I got distracted, needed a break and took a few days off, then came back with a bunch of shiny new ideas for things and worked on those on and off until the end.

That whole OMG MUST WRITE!!! headspace was not a very nice place to be. Glorifying it, and making the breaks we need to have sound like you're snorting pure cocaine through a hundred dollar note off a $10,000 a day hooker, or eating a ton of double choc fudge delight icecream, is not healthy, nor setting a great example to aspiring writers out there.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I'm now getting the chance to do drafts (omg, DRAFTS!) of a story that's been knocking around in my head for a few weeks now and while it's slow going, it's filling me with so much squee. It's nice to have an outline and a purpose instead of just writing the random stuff that pops into my head.

[ladymina.livejournal.com]

see that is why the creative writing course in uni didn't work for me.
We had deadlines, and had to produce work fit to be shown to others each week ...
I haven't really written a creative word since half way through the first creative writing course ... cause forcing it sucks the creativity right out of it, - not that you need to be that creative for bad pron though ...

[dwg.livejournal.com]

That right there is part of the reason why I stopped writing when I was at uni or working. Too much other crap to do, not enough to unwind and let the creative juices flow.

The flipside is, now that I'm totally unemployed and bum around, I'm writing like crazy but totally have no monies to support myself.

[ladymina.livejournal.com]

see, for me it worked out as long as I had a boring course after the creative writing course, cause writing assignements for creative writing was much more interesting than listening to a lecture about medieval literature between 1250 and 1300 or something similar interesting ...
I need to get my creativity into gear, cause I wanna write for a magazine when I am through with Uni
and I want to write a book for kids ... but that is just wishfull thinking

[icewyche.livejournal.com]

I HATED my college creative writing class. The prof was this really old guy who thought women should all write those lame, sweety-sweet Ladies' Home Journal/Reader's Digest-type of stories. F**k that noise - I wrote teen-oriented time travel sci-fi. The jerkwad told me my writing was "childish". Uh, yeah, because I was writing for KIDS, dumbass!

I've thought about NaNoWriMo, but a full-time job and thrice-weekly dance lessons kind of preclude that. :-( Oh, well. You're right, though - forcing creativity always seems to backfire miserably (check out recent MaryJanice Davidson for another sad example of this phenomenon).

[michael-b-lee.livejournal.com]

Her nonstop bragging about how many pages she writes a day bugs the ever-living shit out of me.

I've been writing professionally for just over ten years now, and I've done a four-year stint as an editor/developer. Princess Laurell wants me to seriously believe she's written twenty pages of text in a single day? Bullshit. Ain't possible. Twenty pages of typewritten, single-spaced, 12-point text comes out to 12,000 words. Even if we're kind and say that Princess Laurell worked a 10-hour day, that's 1200 words an hour, non-stop. 600 words, or a full page of text, every thirty minutes. No distractions, no potty breaks, nothing but writing like a fiend for ten hours straight.

Or, to put it another way: if she can crank out that many words that fast, she could finish the draft of a 95,000 word novel (that's about 416 pages in paperback) in just eight days. And we all know she hasn't written a book to that length since her stuff started showing up in hardcover.

Now let's be generous and say she's double-spacing what she's writing. That's 6,000 words a day, or about 600 words per hour over 10 hours. That's actually a reasonable amount of word count for a professional writer (nearly every writer I ever worked with, either writing fiction or non-fiction, said they managed about 600 words an hour, on average). Again, though, this means she could knock out a 416-page paperback in sixteen days. We all know that ain't happening. She makes that plain on her own damn blog, wangsting for days about how tough "the Dragon" is, how she needs that "base camp" to keep her going, blah, blah, wangsty-blah.

She's being deliberately misleading in order to inflate her own ego, and it's a shame that she's willing to dishearten aspiring writers by setting a standard that's impossible to actually achieve. That pisses me off.

[artemis-rex.livejournal.com]

You know what I think? I think she writes a long, beautiful book, then cuts out the actual plot and gives us what's left.

It's the only explaination.

Oh God, let it be the explaination.

[michael-b-lee.livejournal.com]

So the "Dragon" is actually code for "that pesky plot and characterization that gets in the way of all the boring sex".

Hmmm. You may be onto something there.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Don't forget to take into account that she also claims to type at around 200 words per minute.

[michael-b-lee.livejournal.com]

Which means that she actually writes all twenty pages of single-spaced, 12-point text in just a single hour.

AAAAGHHHH!! *headsplodey*

There are spy satellites that can probably see my hate from orbit right now.

[sharkbytes.livejournal.com]

i could type 200 wpm too, if i just kept hitting the letters S-P-I-L-L over and over again..with a random "wet" thrown in for good measure :)

[pandaemonaeum.livejournal.com]

I would have to call bullshit on that, I audio-type 80 words per minute and am considered a fast typist. My mother can type around 125-130 words per minute and is considered a phenomenally fast typist. She types faster than her PC can cope with, certainly.

I cannot imagine someone typing 200 words a minute. That's 1000 characters in 60 seconds!

[dwg.livejournal.com]

usually I'm about 60-70 with a high accuracy, I can go faster if I don't really care about typos. But zomg, 200 would mean that my wrist would be fucked infinity ways to Sunday (instead of the mildly fucked as it is now) and I'd have no fingers.

I'm pretty sure my mother can type way faster than I can, but after watching her type like crazy, she also suffers from the "when faster, typing goot is badder" syndrome.

[catskin.livejournal.com]

My RSI not withstanding, I can knock out 70-80. No way could I manage 200 and I don't believe LKH can either. She's just copying and pasting dialogue and scenes from earlier books. and WE ALL KNOW IT.

I'd be more interested in hearing what her daily word count is.

[sister-ananke.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing she's writing with 14 point comic sans...

[michael-b-lee.livejournal.com]

I don't even think 14-point is big enough. If she does more than 2,000-4,000 words per day I would seriously be surprised.

I'd love to see someone on the Ask Laurell forum to actually ask her point-blank what format she writes in. Then we could see if she was willing to tell an outright lie or find some way to wiggle out of answering the question.

[swiftgold.livejournal.com]

Y'know, that is heartening to hear. I'd like to be a published author one day, but it takes me so dang long to *cough* get off LJ or the net sometimes and buckle down and do it. Even in fanfic, my chapters are about twenty-thirty pages long (11 pt Century, 1-1/2 spacing), and I'm lucky to get one done every six months if I allow myself to screw around as much as I want to. Still, it does make me feel better to hear that writing -that much- is pretty impossible.

My goal eventually is to do like Terry Pratchett and write 400 words a day no matter what, and more if one of those rare sparly writing rolls hit. (Somehow, though, reading about LKH and the fact that her stuff gets published inspires me to work like whoa.)

[michael-b-lee.livejournal.com]

What I tell people is start small. Write whatever you're comfortable with, or have time for. I don't care if it's 100 words a day. That's still 100 words you didn't have the day before. Sooner or later, that adds up.

And the more you do it, the easier it gets. Soon you'll double that rate, then double it again.

You can do it. Stick with it.

[swiftgold.livejournal.com]

Thanks ^__^ I've wanted to be a "real writer" for a while now, and my sister finished the first version of our book ten years ago this year (and sent it to a publisher, but damn, it sucked, since we were kids. Luckily, no reply at all, much less a soul-crushing rejection). It took us three years to do that. It's been six or seven since we started to re-write it, but it isn't something that makes me want to claw my eyes out now. Motivation is the kicker, especially with a dayjob that sucks it out. But definitely, starting small is the way to go.

*looks at old post* -sparkly. I hate when I notice typoes after the fact...

Blah, thanks for letting me ramble. ^^;

[swiftgold.livejournal.com]

*another edit* - 'my sister and I finished the first version' - yeah. I shouldn't try to post tonight, apparently. :P

[catskin.livejournal.com]

I've been writing forever and usually manage 1000 words a day when I really put my mind to it. I got a literary agent last year (yay!) after years of writing suck and bad, and my novel is being hawked to publishers in NY at this very minute. Persevere - you'll make it if you really want it.

[catskin.livejournal.com]

Lol, yes, and then I can start a crappy, pretentious, fan-bashing blog and go crazy too!

[catskin.livejournal.com]

And I, I shall build myself an ivory tower, fill it with yes-men and become teh Greetest Writter EVAH no matter what you all say!!!11!!!

Oh God, I'm no longer sure I want to be published.

[swiftgold.livejournal.com]

Thanks, and good luck with getting published! ^_^ I'm pretty confident of the quality, it's just a matter of stopping the lazy (or the being sick, stupid winter) long enough...

[michael-b-lee.livejournal.com]

The most I've ever written was 12,000 words in 16 hours, and that wasn't even fiction. I was worthless for about a week after that. You burn out really fast doing something like that.

But you are right. Some writers do manage incredible spurts of productivity at times. Maybe LKH even does, at times (If so? My advice is SLOW DOWN.), but even so, her claims are wildly exaggerated.

[randomsome1.livejournal.com]

My personal record is about 25k in three days--but I was crazy-inspired then and only slept about four hours during the entire thing.

[randomsome1.livejournal.com]

This 600-word-an-hour thing makes me feel so much better about myself. I'll admit, for a while here I was trying to figure out what was wrong that she could turn out page after page after page (of crap) while I struggled with my own stuff.

[ninthwraith.livejournal.com]

I can write six single-spaced, 12 pt. draft pages an hour in Open Office (1" side margins) a very good day when the words are flowing well. By the time I finish nine to twelve pages of draft, I'm mentally tired and need a break. This is about two hours of work. When it's flowing, and I'm working from an outline and know *exactly* where I'm going.

I type 110 wpm when I'm typing and not writing - and that's tested wpm, not some number I've pulled out of my arse. So even when you consider I'm a fast typist, that doesn't help up the page speed.

I can see LKH doing twenty pages in one day if she's writing absolute schlock, not caring about what she's putting down at all. I can also see her mentally and physically exhausted if she's trying to do it day after day. Your brain isn't meant to concentrate that hard for that long.

If she's using stimulants all day long, all bets are off.

In any case, if she is actually doing this and not making it up, I think it's a great way to burn out. We already know she has a real problem knowing what quality writing is these days. I don't know why she thinks she's running a race to crank out as many pages as quickly as possible. That's never been the sign of a good writer... Unless she's Isaac Asimov.

[cookie-wolf.livejournal.com]

do you have any idea how annoying it is to come back the next night and find half a sentence written and have no idea how it was meant to finish?

God yes. I always have to erase the sentence and start over. I can't even get a page down in a week sometimes, forget about TWENTY A FUCKING DAY.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Oh god, I'm not alone! *clings*

Not to mention, I think I'd kill my brain if I did twenty pages in a day. Like, seriously - you could serve it on toast, it'd be so fried and scrambled. I wouldn't write again for at least a month.

[cookie-wolf.livejournal.com]

I can write 20 pages in a day if it's in my notebook. But I write really big. On the computer, size 12 font? Uh uh, not happening.

[ninthwraith.livejournal.com]

Reading this, I can't help but remember something a character in *Buffy the Vampire Slayer* (ironically enough) said to Buffy herself.

"Being 'chosen' doesn't mean you're better than the rest of us. It only means you're luckier."