RIP Grandpa

I was at one point going to post a wrap-up on the whole Clara mystery now we've seen the finale.

But not now. My grandpa passed away over the weekend and I just can't blog about fluff. Armed forces day was on Saturday and when I remembered I wanted to cry all over. My grandpa served in the army during WWII. He flew B-17s over Europe. At one point he was shot down and didn't know of he'd landed in friendly territory or not. They didn't wear their shows when flying the planes so he wandered around barefoot for a couple days.

He lived a full and long life. And death was a blessing in some ways. But we'll miss him.

Happy Star Trek Day

Yeah, I have nothing really to blog about. I just want to wish everyone a happy Star Trek day. The new movie is out today and soon Trekkers everywhere will be introduced to the wonder that is Benedict Cumberbatch. Seriously, if you haven't watched BBC's Sherlock, do it. Such an amazing modernization of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories.

My love of Star Trek knows almost no limits. I've always been sad that the amazing Star Trek book titled Q-in-Law never got made into a movie. I can't believe Q never made it into one of the movies. He was seriously one of the best characters ever created. The best episodes of TNG were one of three: any episodes dealing with time travel, any involving the Borg, and any with Q. (The Lwaxana were awesome, too, which is why I'm so sad Q-in-Law never became a film.)

Star Trek broke barriers and stereotypes. It's a scrappy show that keeps kicking and helped spawn a generation of nerds. Hand-in-hand with Star Wars, nerd-dom hasn't been the sam since it came around. So long as there are nerds, the characters and stories spawned by one man's imagination will live long and prosper indeed.

WiP Wednesday 5/5/13-5/11/13

I actually have decent progress to report. I'd been kind of slogging through writing, doing my best to get some sort of word count in each day. Most days I wasn't that successful. Really, I was battling the inner doubt monster in order to get any words written.

I got almost all the way done with my revision read-through on the novella. One chapter of it left and I'll have all my notes done so I can actually go in and revise it.

I did break the 20K mark on the adventure novel. I actually beat that goal by nearly 4K words. So that was major progress. My MC has moved from Norway to Germany in his travels. (If you ever get to read this book, you'll understand what I mean.) I'm struggling with his voice. This book is written in 1st person and present tense so it's proving quite a challenge. That is what revisions are for, however.

How are your WiPs going?

Clara Oswin Oswald, Part 3

As I'm writing this, I've just finished watching "Nightmare in Silver" and am anxiously counting the days until next Saturday. (And at the same time wishing Saturday would never come because that means the end of the season.)

Before we get to this, some links:

Clara Oswin Oswald: A Theory in Progress (Part 1 of my Clara theory for your reading pleasure)
Clara Oswin Oswald: A Theory, Part 2 (Do I need to explain it?)

Really, I only have this to add:

Compare these two jackets. Do they not look like they could be from the same designer, same season? They're not identical and Clara's jacket in "Nightmare" looks blacker in most of the screenshots. But My first thought when I saw the episode was that she was wearing Rose's jacket.

This whole season the designers, from props department to wardrobe, have been putting in little things we Whovians are taking as nods to Rose. Red dresses, purses, gloves, roses in vases or in Clara's hair, etcetera. This is the first one that, on first look, screamed "Rose" to me. There has to be a Bad Wolf connection in here somewhere.

Or, as Darren Franich put it on his recap of "Nightmare", Clara's a red herring and there is no mystery to be solved about her or this season.

I wouldn't put it past Moffat.

One last thing to add, and I don't have a picture for it. But when Eleven is playing chess against Mr. Clever there's a moment where Clever is trying to convince Clara it's Eleven she's talking to and he goes on and on about how he's starting to like her. When he asks how she knew it was Clever and not Eleven she says he would rather die than say it.

He would rather die than say it. The Doctor never could bring himself to say it aloud to Rose, to say "I love you" to her. He would rather it go unsaid by him and let his meta-crisis clone say it in a whisper to prove they share the same memories. But it never got said for us Whovians to hear. And it wasn't said until he absolutely had to say it.

This isn't to say she's Rose. But if Bad Wolf knew all this future and seeded Clara throughout the Doctor's timeline, couldn't this be taken as a hint to the Doctor about what's going on?

WiP Wednesday 4/28/13-5/4/13

Uh, yeah.

Progress on the revision was nominal at best. I had several nights of poor sleep which led to sleeping to the last possible moment so I wasn't a zombie when it came to my day job. I'm still working on a read-through to get the bigger issue stuff. When I do something like this, I use the comments feature in my word processor after copying and pasting the entire story into a new file. The file with the comments gets renamed "Draft #" and the clean file gets the story name for a label. I'm aiming to have the read-through done this week so I can start in on revisions next week.

As for the first draft of the other book, progress was also pretty slow. I'm really rusty at this whole drafting thing after so many months off from writing. I'm looking to break at least the 20K mark this week (and will report in on that next week). I don't know why but this time around trying to draft this book I'm not feeling so bad about the book. (I really hated it when I wrote the first 16K of the book a few months back so I put it in the dust drawer.)

How are your WiPs going?

Science and Me

I like science fiction. Maybe not necessarily to read, but definitely to watch. One of my strongest memories of childhood revolves around Star Trek: The Next Generation. My parents would order pizza and we'd all four of us (I have a brother) gather around the coffee table and watch the newest episode. Pizza and Star Trek go hand-in-hand for me.

I was going to share a story about my brother but it doesn't really relate. And he'd kill me for it and I'd rather live to see comments on this post.

Star Wars is another big one in our house. I've honestly never understood the whole Star Trek vs. Star Wars debate. And I've especially never understood people who declare someone else uncool or unworthy of being a sci-fi lover if they actually like Star Trek and Star Wars. Really? I can't like both for equal but different reasons? Seriously, one is a tale of a past we could have risen from and the other is the tale of a future we could still grab onto and hang on tight as we ride through it.

I still enjoy a good sci-fi tale. Really I should watch Battlestar Gallactica. My mom watched the new series a couple years back. Sci-fi Channel or BBCAmerica ran the entire series, two episodes each Saturday night. I watch Haven, Warehouse 13, and Doctor Who. And currently my mom and I are working our way through Eureka on Netflix. (Which would actually be a subject for another day. I have some bones to pick with the show right now.)

But writing it? That's another beast all together. I did all right in science classes growing up, but they were never my favorite. Hence why I majored in Humanities and then English (for my bachelor's and master's degrees, respectively). I don't care enough about the why and how of science technology to write it convincingly in fiction. And I struggle to read it for the same reason. I think sometimes sci-fi authors get so caught up in their cleverness with scientific theories that the tech overpowers the characters and the story itself. I don't want to read a thesis disguised as fiction, I want to read a story about people, about events that matter to them in a relatable way.

WiP Wednesday 4/21-4/27

Progress last week was pretty nil. I've been really stuck and I can tell that by all the ways I found to procrastinate jumping back into this rewrite. But Saturday it really, really hit me what the problem was. I was thinking about that piece of advice you always see floating around. You know the one. Work on something not related to the book you're revising or querying or on submission with. It's given for various reasons, but it's advice that needs to be followed.

If I were asked the question, "What are you working on that isn't related to Woven or reliant upon it getting published?" well–

My answer? I have a contemporary YA that I've plotted out, an NA title that is 1/3 written that I'm toying with picking up again, and that's it. The majority of what I have spent my creative capital on in the last two or so years is all connected to this one book that I have on query right now. I think why I'm so blocked and uninterested in this rewrite is that I subconsciously (and now perhaps not so subconsciously) fear that I'm setting myself up for heartbreak by working on something that so heavily relies on something not in my control to ever get seen by readers.

So, I'm reevaluating and looking at some of these other projects I've had ideas for and abandoned over the last couple of years. Maybe something will spark and I can find a project to work on.

Meantime, I did get the contemporary YA plotted. I just would need character sheets and then I could start writing. So that's probably, most likely, where I'm headed from here. But I do still have that NA action-adventure novel I abandoned a while back calling my name. I may revisit it in the near future. Because I still love the story and the idea behind it so it's perhaps worth trying to save.

How are your WiPs going?

If you have a question you're dying to ask me, something you want me to address either here on my site or over at the Dojo, send it to info(at)stephanie-mcgee(dot)com

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