Crusader Challenge I

I sat down to write the other day and...Veronica Mars called me. She sounded a little nasal when she asked me if I had time to go over some puzzling notes for her new mystery case. You know, the one about the love fountain in Rome. I told her I had to study for next week's exam. Yes. Two exams, two days in a row. She understood, and then she sneezed "quidditch!" 

"Bless you," I said, holding my phone between my cheek and shoulder.

She thanked me, and then blew her nose as loudly as an elephant warning its heard of incoming landslide. 

"Are you coming down with a cold?" I asked while flipping through my notes on phonetics. Allophones? Fortis and Lenis?

"Yeah- Quidditch!" She blew her nose again. "Sorry, how about I come by on Wednesday?"

"See yah then. It'll give us chance to go over some gossip." I hung up the phone. 

Poor girl. Ever since Sylar set her on fire in Heroes, her clever mind just hasn't been the same.

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Yeah, I know it's LAME. But I don't have time to write a proper story. I still wanted to take part. I seriously AM studying for two exams. One is on Monday, and the other on Tuesday. And then I have to turn in a short story for creative writing tomorrow. Talk about teacher collaboration! 

This is the first challenge of the Crusaders (a group of people working towards building an online platform - new members are welcome and should visit Rach's site to sign up: Writers' Platform-Building Crusade).

The bonus words were: Mars, quidditch, and elephant.

The prize this round is an interview with Rach, which will be the first with a Crusader of Rach's Insider Scoop Interviews. Which is, of course, a great way to get online coverage. (She has already interviewed Jody Hedlund and Caitie Flum).

Oh, and of course I know what quidditch is - I just decided to use it this way.

The Rach Writes Inaugural Writers’ Platform-Building Crusade

Crusade

That's a mouthful! But brilliant!

I'm cheating today since I won't write a post about writing. Well, I suppose this has to do with getting published in one way or another. I'm introducing my friend's Rachael Harrie's Crusade to help bloggers build their online platform. I joined the Crusade only two days ago and I've already gotten five new followers - some very nice people whom I'm excited to get to know better. Rachael still hasn't compiled the list so that we can go crazy and follow our fellow Crusaders, which means that people are already excited and are following commenters.

Why is it important to gather followers? Even though online presence isn't a requirement to get a fiction published (it is important for non-fiction), numbers are numbers, and if you have thousands of followers, it could tip the scale in your favour when you query an agent with a good story idea and a good story.

Will all those people read your blog? Probably not all of them, but many will, if you're interactive in turn and read their blogs. This is an opportunity to make more friends. There are so many cool people out there, and they all seem to be gathering in the Crusade ;)

I've copied and pasted Rach's requirements to join:

Let’s work it like this:

1. Follow along with my site if you don’t already (I want to build my online platform too of course) :)
2. Become a Crusader by leaving a comment to this post (include your blogging name and a link to your blog)
3. Write about the Crusade on your blog and link back to this post
4. Encourage your followers to come to Rach Writes… and join up (it will help them too!)
5. Tweet about the Crusade, including a link to this post (http://bit.ly/9kMySK) and #WPBC1. Encourage re-tweets. I'm @RachaelHarrie if you want to follow me in the Twitterverse too
6. Pop it on Facebook
7. Generally, spread the word…

I’ll publish a list of all the Crusaders on Rach Writes..., and I’ll update the list as people join in on future Crusades.

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That's it! I encourage all my readers to join this project. It's an amazing concept and Rachael is just the person to pull it off.

Goal for the day: Finish writing my MG!!!

Keep Writing!

Image: www.alertdriving.com/newsletter/wordpress/?p=491

As many of you know, I attended the WriteOnCon last week and learned heaps. There was one point that was made in at least two lectures that gave me a kick in the bum: Keep writing.

There were two articles in particular that spoke of this, Give Yourself Permission, by Molly O'Neill, and Keeping Your Chin up in the Face of Rejection, by Crystal Stranaghan. Crystal encourages writers to write their next piece while waiting for replies from queried agents. Molly encourages writers to give themselves permission to "...do what you need to protect yourself as a writer—to turn off the internet, or to stop reading blogs for awhile, or to avoid Twitter—and enable yourself to do that thing which writers must do—TO WRITE."

Woah! Stop right there! I should not follow the writer community on the internet for a while? That got me thinking. Since I started looking for information on how to submit, etc. I've spent every spare moment on the internet to learn, make connections, and build an online platform. We're talking months! But to stop all that and just write? Of course I can do that, and I should! I'm starting university in two weeks and I feel time slipping away. I suddenly realized that I don't have time to hang out on the internet anymore. I don't have to twitter - I don't want to twitter. I love blogging, but it takes so long to think of a topic, write, link, edit, find a good picture, read, re-read, re-re-read, etc. that it's taking away some serious writing time. I want to build an online presence, but I also need to write. How can I balance both?

I didn't follow the WriteOnCon in exact order. In the former part of the days I did, but since each day ended at night here, I usually missed the last two events. So I finally watched the live workshop with Daisy Whitney about Building an Online Presence yesterday, and there I got my answer. She talks about how you don't have to take part in every social media on the internet. If you don't like to tweet - then don't tweet. If you don't like blogging - then don't blog. So I decided that I'm going to blog and follow a few discussion forums, and then build my Facebook account later, since I really like Facebook.

Then there was the question of how often I should blog. It takes up to an hour to put together a blog and try to make it as perfect as I can. Daisy says that it's okay to blog just once a week, as long as you're consistent. That means blogging the same day of the week, every week. That way, the readers know when to expect material from you. The people following you won't stop reading just because you don't blog as often.

So I've decided to blog once a week, at least until I've finished the first draft of the second book. I haven't decided which day that should be, it depends on my uni-schedule, but this will be my entry for this week.

Today alone, I've managed to ignore the internet (until now, but my brain is fried), and I've finished 7,000 words of the first book. Okay, 3,000 of those were already written, so technically that's 4,000 words today. Not bad! I've also finished outlining the book, but after I outlined it, I went back to writing, and I felt a little constricted because of the outline. It was stifling my creativity. So I'm going to use another advice of Molly's: Give yourself permission to stray from your outline.

So I have the outline, but I feel like I need to fill in the blanks, and I can never come up with something if that's what I feel I need to do to prolong the chapter. That's why I'm going to use the outline as points and just write the story as it wants to be written. That's what I did with Book of Black and it turned out awesome.

What am I doing with Book of Black, now that I've started on Book of White? I found critique partners! While they read the manuscript and comment, I use my time to write the second novel. I finally let go of my fears and sent the manuscript to three different people, four if you count a friend of mine who isn't a writer. Can someone steal it, or parts of it? Sure! But I have various versions of the manuscript printed at home, the first five pages and query up on a forum, and on my blog, and I've sent the manuscript to more than one person, so they'd be able to back me up if something gets stolen.

I realized after WriteOnCon that my manuscript isn't nearly ready. I got an auto-rejection from agent Natalie M. Fischer because the manuscript was 110,000 words long (she was commenting on query entries live at WOC), and it taught me that many of the rejections I've gotten might be auto-rejections because of the word count (and because the query synopsis was terrible! I have a new and shiny one ready for the next agent I query - when the manuscript has been revised). Natalie says YA manuscripts should be 90,000 words, +5,000 at the most. Some manuscripts can be longer, but they need to be exceptional, so it's hard to get past the query stage. My critique partners are going to point out things that can be cut/edited.

There are also other things that need to be fixed: Character depth, dialog, and such. I also need to list the tension points and see if they're working as intended. And then I learned that I probably shouldn't have made a universal query letter for all the agents I queried. I should have personalized each one (more than just write the name of said agency). I can send many at a time, as long as they're personalized and don't feel like form-queries. Apparently form-queries are one sure way of getting form-rejections.