Skyla's blog

In Which Skyla Quits Mondays & Dreams of Better Days

Maybe it's 'cause everyone is coming off the weekend. Or maybe it's just 'cause Monday is the unholy day of evilly evil in which people sacrifice babies and demons rise. But Mondays have invariably sucked this summer--the one thing that gets me through them is that it's usually just a half work day for me and I head to my mum's in the evening to watch Haven.

Today, what's helping is songs with wonderfully profane lyrics.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAV0XrbEwNc (via Sarah-Jane Lehoux)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nULKw8s061E

I notice the entire world is also still irritable and insane, like the whole universe is retrograding or something. Yours truly included. I go for walks at night and pass all the boats along the canal and keep thinking how lovely that would be--to just head off on vacation on the canal.

Yeah, I still think near constantly about how great it would be to unplug and move off the grid, because things are a ch-ch-changing and I'm growing fairly confident that I'm not cut out for all the things I always took as a given. So it's my current pipe dream, especially when the bad days outweigh all the good ones. Which is, like, always.

Especially Mondays.

So guess what, Monday: I QUIT! You no longer exist to me. You can see other people, I will see other days, and when you roll around next week, *I* am not getting out of bed until it's time for Haven. So FUCK YOU VERY MUCH!

Words of Wisdom #13

Even when you know what’s coming, some things still hit you like a punch in the gut.

Or like a demon imp dropping on your head.

~Dessa, Forsaken (which I SWEAR I'm not working on)

Bad Skyla

Yeah, so remember how I was going to NOT write a single word on the book after Wounded because I know it needs time to gel and stuff in my head for a few months?

Screenshot of my desktop just now:

*cough*

I have this issue when a new book and new world is hounding me--as soon as I know the narrator's name, I Must Write It. I can't ignore it past that point.

And then there's a point when I don't want to work on something at all, but it's circling my brain again and again, and then suddenly I'm in the scene and I know how it starts...

Yeah, I couldn't not write the words. Total insanity over here--I'm blaming the six hours I spent formatting manuscripts for ebooking today.

I might give the first chapter a shot this weekend, and then I should be so burnt out that I can go onto something else. Incidentally, the song that popped on iTunes when I broke open the file and typed a couple of lines? Syrup and Honey by Duffy. I swear the "Baby, baby, baby, spend your time on...me" part was the MS calling to me.

Words of Wisdom #12

I love clothes. It’s a fault, probably, but clothes are like a billboard to everyone you meet; easy to manipulate people if you know how to dress. Clothes tell people whether you’re a wimpy little girl, a sultry vixen, or a bad-ass chick they shouldn’t fuck with. I always waver between the latter two...except for that time I posed as someone peddling The Watchtower to get into my target’s house and make the kill. Surprisingly, no one opens the door for a Jehovah’s Witness in a satin bustier.

~Zara, Bloodlines (revised edition)

Random Thoughts Upon Finishing Book #16

Yes, I did it. Break out the alcohol, get the parade underway--the book is DED.

R.I.P.
Wounded
Date: August 23, 2010
Time of Death: 4:14 am EST
Final Word Count, Draft One: 102 160
Mourned by: NO ONE

I could have finished earlier, but I took some time to do dishes, bake, etc. For a book I wanted to just die already, I savoured its final, gasping breaths...AND it just feels unnatural to me to end a book before midnight. I did that, once--finished a first draft in the afternoon. I didn't know what to do with myself for the rest of the night. My prime writing time is between 8pm and 3-4am, and I tend to finish a book after a final marathon sprint in the wee hours of the morning. This is a sequel to one I accidentally wrote in the winter; that book, Abandoned, died at around 7am (and no, I hadn't just woken up).

I don't often blog during WIP writing, and certainly not about the process...but I talked about it a bit this time, and figured I could mention a few observations. I guess it's like a memorial and it'll be fun to re-read a few months from now.Read more

Updated Blog Is Updated

Yesterday we had a vet emergency; my furbaby Sophie has seasonal allergies and scratches a lot. Well, I heard a yelp and found out her eye was sore. The vet squeezed us in and I was right--she has a scratched cornea.

So she got a shot of a painkiller and two ointments, and we have another appointment for next Friday to make sure it's okay. I now have to put ointments in her eyes a combined five times a day (three for one, two for another). Have you ever tried to shove something in the eye of a forty pound beagle cross on your own when she's both wise to you and has the upper torso strength of an adult male German Shepherd? Yeah, it's not fun or easy.

Meanwhile, I'm determined to kill the book once and for all this weekend because I'm officially out of clean clothes, bedding, and towels, and I won't be fit to see anyone with only smelly clothes. So: dead book, then laundry. And dishes. Because I can't keep living like a college student.

I'm at 91K words and I had only intended the book to be 75K, like the first. AND I have about four scenes left to write. I think the muse is pushing the word count up on me again (that bitch) by extending a couple of scenes past what I knew would happen. Le sigh.

Now I have my battle music out; there will be blood. Hopefully not mine.

I'll see you when I'm victorious.

Killing the Book DED

I'm full into the stage known as "This Book Will Not Die." I got a taste of it around 65K, slogged through, and now at nearly 85K I just want the damn thing dead.

There's no other way to describe this part of the process. You're nearly at the finish line but not quite far enough to breathe with relief yet. It consumes every thought you have from the time you wake up after only five hours of sleep to when you go to bed a few hours after the point when you're exhausted. Eating is a chore, bathing is a chore, chores are...well, chores. You go through the day job like a maniac and keep checking the clock to see if it's quittin' time yet because the book is giving you its Siren Call of Death and you can't ignore. It NEEDS to die already.

I've completed fifteen other novels (and started countless others but we won't go there). I know this process now; I KNOW soon I will be standing over this book's corpse victorious, sweaty, and probably smelly with a bloody knife in my hand. I know it's putting up a fight now, but in those final moments, it'll accept the inevitable and death will be a mercy.

But it just can't come fast enough.

And the end of a book tends to be the most draining; this is where hearts are broken, the stakes are impossibly high, and my heroine just wants to curl up and kick the proverbial bucket. And I almost want to join her because I'm just so damn tired. I'm sitting in that corner with her now, begging for it all to be over...and I know that soon it will be and I'll then I'll have to wind down from the teary exhaustion. Worse still, I'll get that twinge of excitement and dread because I'll do it all again with the third book in a few months (hopefully for NaNo).

Ah, writers. We're a crazy bunch.

Now I'm off again to get day job stuff done and feel vaguely guilty for not getting laundry done and cutting my treadmill time in half. I'll keep my head down, push through while thoughts of the final scenes swirl in my head, then bring in an air strike to try take down the book's defenses tonight.

In the meantime, here's a couple of lines from the WIP that I think best sum it up today:

Clouds above me were blackish-blue, like ugly bruises on an already weary night. We were beaten down, this night and me, and now both of us hid and hoped for morning when the fists would stop pummelling.

I just don't know if I'm the pummelled or the pummeller this time.

Confession

I first saw Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet the summer before I turned thirteen, right when I first read the play. And I watched it at least once a day for over a year. From then on, I typically watch it once a year or so and it remains my favourite movie of all time. (And please, please, don't talk to me about any other version, because they simply don't exist to me, kinda like how the A&E version of Pride and Prejudice is the only one.)Read more

Technology Fail...

One of my email addresses was hacked a few days ago and sent a link to all my contacts. Thankfully, I didn't have to many contacts in my address book; I typically memorize anyone I have to email regularly from that account (it's mostly just one I use for PayPal and other stuff). So I changed my password, ran two virus scanners (both clean)...then tonight decided to delete the remaining addresses in my book there. Just in case, right?

Of course, I have no fucking clue how to navigate Yahoo most of the time--I went to my contacts, selected them, and deleted them.

Coincidentally, this email address is also my YIM handle. And what did I manage to do? Delete the forty odd people I have on YIM (which I use mostly for work).

Le sigh.

So, to save my memory and patience--IF you are one of my YIM contacts, please add me back. Same old handle, which I won't repeat here 'cause I don't need the stalkers finding me. :-P

It's 4am--I really should be in bed and not messing around with stuff...

"Dess"

I got my heroine into some trouble this evening...

Hurt like a million fishhooks dug in deep everywhere the blood touched. And it pulled. Pulled blood through tissue, bones through flesh, dragging me inside out. Tugging, ripping, tearing—I wailed a high-pitched sound that clawed behind my eyes and hurt my own ears. Then I was tumbling, falling, hitting the floor and I felt my bones rattle. Black spots danced over my eyes and a blurry, greyscale filter slid over the world. Agony burned hot like fire scalding my skin—

And I blinked. Bright white light like stars bursting stabbed my eyes. Faded.

Desert. Colour returned but it was shades of brown and flecks of golden sand for miles, blue sky that seemed infinite. A warm breeze tickled my skin, blew sand over my toes. I felt light, like the breeze could run through me—faint and ethereal, a ghost who would blow away if a high wind kicked up.

I drifted. Sun cut a huge orange circle into the horizon and heat travelled above the ground fluid like water. A throb started low in my temples, the way it does if you stand up quickly and feel lightheaded for too long. The sun sparked the gold in the sand and it glittered; a desert of stars in the ground rather than the sky. That sand burned the soles of my feet with each step, driving spikes of fire up, up, straight into my legs. The air was too heavy for me, weighing me down, and I struggled to take it into my lungs—

A little word broke through the haze around me, tickling my ears. “Dess...”

I slammed back into the world like I’d been dropped from a skyscraper into the pavement. Throat raw, mouth open, I realized I was still screaming and couldn’t stop. My pulse thundered in my ears, skin burned, and I flailed, arched, shook as if in seizure. Heels slipped and kicked uselessly in something liquid. Head thumped on the polished tile hard enough that stars flickered over my eyes.

Then a dark figure was over me; hands on my face, my tensed jaw; smoothing hair, soothing skin. “Dess...?”

That one little word. Over and over ‘til it lost meaning to my brain. Dess...Dess...Dess... It was a whisper, an embrace, a promise—it was everything in this scary, painful world suddenly and I clung to it because I was too afraid of what would happen if I let go.

“It’s gonna be okay, Dess...”