Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos

Status update

Very little is going on at the moment. Heat is picking up and without A/C, I will soon be forced to edit my manuscript on my phone.
I’m a stressful person, and I can’t help but feel that even the smallest delay from my part will be a near-apocalyptic event in the long run. I’ve already been working on The Darkening for a little over a year (gosh, has it been that long? Time does fly, huh?) and I want to hold an edited version in my hands as soon as possible before someone outside myself sees it. Of course that doesn’t mean said edited version will be the final product. Far from it. But I also have two wonderful people waiting to beta for me (once again, thank you both!) and I really really REALLY want to hear their comments, particularly the negative ones, which are vital for my improvement. It will be a milestone of sorts, an indication I’ve actually produced something tangible, and the entire endeavour has moved forward. It will boost my morale. Working at the same novel for so long has made me feel like I’m in a stalemate. Thank God I don’t work on one solid 300 page long MS, but on separate scenes/chapters, each in their own individual folder. That way I get to see every week how much I have progressed. If not for that, I would have been overwhelmed.

OK, enough ranting and raving. Time for me to get back to work.

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos · 4 Comments

Back at it again

My phone rang this morning and notified me about the upcoming mount Everest I had to start climbing first thing tomorrow morning. It’s been 37 days since the last time I laid eyes on the first draft of my novel’s manuscript and the time has come for me to start editing and revising.

I’m gonna let that sink in for a while. Editing and revising.

The manuscript is 149k words long. I have to trim it down to 110 – 120k, no matter what, and make it more presentable. I also have to rewrite the first 10 or so chapters and condense them to 2 or maybe 3. Then carry on with the actual nit-picking. To be honest, I’m not looking forward to it. Not because I don’t like the book, but because I’m scared.

I’m scared because I think I won’t like anything from it. I’m scared because I’ve never done anything in that scale. Editing short stories somehow seem different now to me (strange, I know; after all it’s the same principle). Most of all I’m scared because I don’t know if my editing skills (which in turn mean my writing skills) are up to the task. In some ways I feel I’m back to square one where I had no work published and I was  uncertain of my ability to produce publishable material. Three publications in so far (fingers crossed to place the rest ones somewhere) and I still feel like a speck of sand that somehow has to reach the top of a mountain the size of Everest.

In those 37 days I wrote 3 short stories and finished translating one of them for a family member who doesn’t speak English, making this past November my most productive month so far. My aim with these stories is to place them all either in semi-pro or professional markets. I probably shouldn’t have high hopes for pro markets as they seem to prefer writers whose writing has something that I still lack. One thing is they have more experience in the craft than me. But I’ll try. If I do manage to get published in any of them (semi-pro or pro) then it will be a TREMENDOUS confidence boost that will reflect in the way I perceive my novel’s worth and my skill as a writer and storyteller. (The stories are now up on Scribophile, so if any of you is a member there and you’re interested in their genres, have a look at them)

Is it strange that I feel so stressed right now? Those of you who made it and traditionally published your books (fiction or non-fiction) did you feel like that as well? Am I experiencing a twisted version of what I should be feeling about the whole process? Or is it that I’m pushing myself too much, in order to prove to myself that I can do it?

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos · 2 Comments

And the end came at last

Yes, dear readers. The end of the first part of this journey has come to an end. I’m proud to announce the end of the first draft of my first novel, The Darkening. Allow me a moment for this to sink in with me ’cause I still find it hard to accept. *Chris breathes deeply*

If you’re in the same boat as me and you’ve just started writing or are about to finish your first novel, I can tell you for a fact that the feeling is strange. For me, there was a lot of joy but at the same time, a lot of emptiness, since the thing I had spent 5 months of my life on was now over. I need to find something else to work on for the next 1-2 months, as I intend to leave the story alone and not even think about it. That’s going to be VERY hard ’cause I need to know I finish things as soon as they get my hands on them. I can’t stand knowing I have things undone. That’s something else I have to re-educate myself. In a way one could say I felt like those people who are obsessed with something for many years and when they finally get what they want, afterwards they are left empty inside. I won’t say it’s not daunting. Quite honestly, it’s scares me. What really freaks me out is that feeling of emptiness. Perhaps at a deeper level I saw this project (being the first completed novel-length work) as the dearest of them all. I’m somewhat emotionally attached to it. Perhaps in a deep unconscious way I always thought I’d be working on it, even though I wanted to finish it. It may sound strange to you but it’s like when parents know they have to let their kids fly out of the nest yet they find it very hard to do so.

Yesterday I wrote two alternative endings for the story, one of which will entail changing a great deal of the book and the main character. So, technically, I wrote The End three times in total. The fact however remains: after five months of writing, I finally scribbled down The End. I wrote Scene 1/Chapter 1 on 9 June 2014 and finished it on 8 November. The original plan was to spend 3 months on it, expecting that writing on my cell phone instead of my PC, wouldn’t interfere too much. I was wrong. At that time, as some of you may remember, I could hardly write 1000 words per day. Which meant that the book took 2 more months to finish.

On top of that, the book was supposed to end at no more than 120k words, from which I was hopeful I’d be able to cut around 15k-20k words during revisions. Alas, the book now stands at a whooping 149k words! That’s VERY bad, as I don’t think many agents would invest the time into something as big from a newbie. Even if I do manage to trim it down by 20k words, I’ll be left with 130k words, which is still not good enough. There’s always the possibility that I will need to squeeze the first 10 chapters/scenes into 2 in order to bring the inciting moment of the story closer to the beginning. If that’s the case then I’ll have to condense 30k words into no more than 8k at best. The thought makes me laugh but, make no mistake, it’s a not a happy laughter 😛

One thing’s true: the book is over! I like the characters and the complexity the main character has (madness and everything). I like the world a lot, which is probably what made me so eager to expand the similarly titled short story into a book.

Wow! I finished a book… Sometimes I catch myself pondering on that and it seems too overwhelming. I mean, it’s been a year and a half since I started writing. In that time I wrote half of my fantasy book, thought my writing skill was inadequate for the story (and pretty much everything else) and the world I had in mind, put it on hold in order to get more experience, started a new book and now… it’s finished. Even writing these words is hard, as my mind goes back and forth on that. To those of you have finished more than a book these words may read as too corny or too self-centred but to me this is huge. So bear with me please. I think I’ll be alright by next week. I think. I hope.

Some of you will be utilising this month to write as much as you can, thanks to NaNoWriMo. Whatever you do, no matter when you choose to do it (during NaNo or any other time in the year), just make sure you finish your book. That’s all that should matter. If you’re as passionate about it as I am (and most of you have started long before I did, so chances are you’re more passionate), then the rewards you’ll reap will be so many and so overwhelming 🙂

I’m going out to celebrate. I’m taking the day off. On Monday I’ll start working on a new short story and perhaps start outlining the next book 😉 It’s going to have a light cyberpunk theme to it, so it’ll be sci-fi. Too many ideas are floating in my head right now.

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos · 3 Comments

How to blow some steam off

Ever since I said to myself “you’re about to finish the draft, Chris” the process has slowed to a near stop. Well, not really to a stop but words come to me a lot harder and I fail to meet my daily writing quota. Which, for a near-perfectionist on selective issues (yes, I know it sounds weird but I’m not a perfectionist in everything in my life) like me, it’s annoying. Mind you, I’m not as much a perfectionist as Patrick Rothfuss is, so no, I don’t go as far as making 80 drafts for one story (11 is the highest I’ve ever done for a short story and my average seems to be around 8-9). It reaches the point where I feel guilty for not meeting my daily word limit, which in turn makes things worse ’cause I push myself harder and that only leads to even fewer words. So, I thought, it must be the fact that too much pressure has accumulated inside. Which isn’t productive.

So, I decided to try (and I stress the word try because it won’t be easy and chances are I’ll fail at it miserably) to do as many of the following things as possible.

1. I will try to stop being so caught up into how much better other people’s work is than mine.

Ever since I started I always, ALWAYS compared my work to professional writers’ work. Yes, it’s good to have their skill and their work as a guide but perhaps a perfectionist in writing (like me) goes beyond that, thus making writing a living hell for him/her.

2. I will try to share my work with more people in my old critique group over at Scribophile or get me a beta reader (people willing to help, please comment bellow, thank you 🙂 )

I haven’t uploaded anything or written anything new since June, which is when I wrote the first line of draft for the novel I’m working on. I’ve put on hold all other short stories I had in my mind and dedicated myself to finishing the novel. It paid off, since I’m about to finish BUT at the expense of getting a pat on the back by getting a positive critique or comment about my work every now and then. All I had to go with was my inner critic and, being a perfectionist when it comes to writing, that critic may be a little bit too harsh. Probably. Not sure yet.

3. I must try to get in touch with “free writing” by using creativity prompts, usually visual stimuli like fantasy/scifi/horror images (in my case that’s what I like the most).

This used to be an exercise for me, before I started working on The Darkening. To help me write on a daily basis, I usually scoured tumblr and deviantart hoping to find an image that would stir something in me (btw, I love the word “stir”. I should make a mental note to pay attention on the number of times I have used it in my novel). Then I would sit down and write a small story, usually no bigger than 1000 words. I used to love doing that but it’s been ages since the last time I did it.

4. I must try not to worry about me having gone way over my original word limit for my novel.

There’s very little I can do about this but I have to somehow convince myself that when I start revising The Darkening, I will be able to cut the story down between 100k – 105k words. Right now I’ve reached 130k and I’m still not done. 5 more scenes… God help me, if I make it and an agent asks me to trim it by 10%-20%. I’ll probably cry if I see such a request or just throw my pc out of the window.

5. I must try not to think of the pressure the unavoidable rejections will put on me, when I’ll be querying agents.

I don’t think I have much to say about this. It’s just something I have to learn to live with. All the rejections in the world when it comes to submitting short stories are probably not enough to toughen me up when agent hunting comes. *Chris gulped nervously and made a horrified face.*

Have you got any other ideas about the issue? Some miracle technique that allows you to blow some steam off when you need it? If, so please let the rest of us know and comment below.

Posted on by Chris Sarantopoulos

Status update: the closer I get to finishing, the further away I am from it.

It seems the closer I get to finishing the first draft, the longer I am from actually doing it. 7 more scenes/chapters remain before the last full stop, the so painfully sought-after “The End” and yet never in these past 4 months have I felt more tired and the end further away from me than now. I don’t know what’s wrong. Perhaps I’m fed up with it, perhaps something inside me tells me that the story sucks, that there are too many plot holes or the plot points are too far-fetched (it’s a post-apocalyptic story, which means people assign it the “sci-fi” tag, thus some parts of it, should be far-fetched to a certain extent, right?). Perhaps I feel that I have often led the (potential) reader by the hand too much, instead of letting him/her think about some things, perhaps it’s because a lot of my character development is done by showing his inner thoughts (going over the top with italics, perhaps?). The point is, where at one point a month ago I could sit down and write 1700 to 2000 words in a couple of hours (usually between 10 in the morning and be done by 1 in the afternoon with a 30-45 minute total break), now I can barely write 1000-1200 words up to 2 or 3 in the afternoon. The fact that I have exceeded my originally planned word limit for the draft doesn’t help either. The uncertainty I see before me, doesn’t help either.

125,147 words. Two scenes away from reaching the climax of the story and closing the main character’s arc. Seven scenes before the draft is over.

Any of you, dear readers/fellow writers, know if having only 5 chapters left for what follows the climax all the way to the end of the story is enough? I keep having the feeling that all the key points are in the wrong place, either too soon in the story or too late. Every time I read a technical book related to structure, I see things in my book that are wrong, when the previous structure-related book said it’s ok. It’s so frustrating! If I ever get to finish this thing, I’m so going out and celebrating it with the few friends who know I’m writing.

Of course, try as I might, I can’t see myself feeling relaxed after it, ’cause I will have to find beta readers or editors who know the craft of writing better than me. Wouldn’t things be sooooooo much easier if every one of us aspiring writers had two mentors by our side? One also aspiring writer or newly published who could help with the big, eye-hurting mistakes and then another one who would be a well known writer who’s been at it for years? How helpful would that be? Both could benefit noobs like me so much.

Too much whining. If you have an answer to my previous question, please let me know. Need to prepare the synopsis for the next scene/chapter for tomorrow. Until next time, I bid you all adieu.