Quick Cross Promotion

Hello 100firstdraft readers!

For those of you who don't know, I've just started up a fitness blog to continue practicing my writing on my other love (along with God, but haven't got around to a blog on him yet, all in good time.)

If you find fitness interesting, and want answers to questions, ideas, challenges and some motivation, come across to fitbuster.blogspot.com.au

Would love to see you there. 

Also, did you realise you could become a follower to my blog? Check up the right hand side where it says 'follow by email', then you will never miss a post.

Plot Mash-Ups

Anyone that watches Glee will understand the concept of a 'mash-up'. Basically, you take two songs and mash them together to make something greater than the sum of the parts. 

Well, I found out the other day that stories need plot mash-ups. 

I have a good plot point for my current story: three children discover a secret railway used only by animals. 

Unfortunately, that is not a story. 

Listening to Writing Excuses, Season 1 Episode 1, they talk about how plots actually need to be two ideas to make a full story. Based on a theory by Orson Scott Card (I think), they stated that plots should be made up of a mundane plot idea and an extraordinary one. Though, I have to admit for a lot of their examples it sounded like just two awesome ideas. But, hey, if you have two awesome ideas, just go with it!

So, I have plot point number one, what I need is plot point number two. 

What can you do with a secret railway, children and animals? Well, my first plot has no conflict, just a method of movement. So, obviously I need a second plot that introduces conflict. 

My answer: creatures from another dimension that have found a way into this world.

Not yet sure how best to mash these together so that it makes a coherent story, but hopefully it will come as I write. 

Perhaps the creatures are currently bound to a particular location, but if they could capture the train, they would be able to take over the whole earth... 

My other idea was that halfway through just when the kids are about to win, the creatures take their memories and leave them stuck perpetually on the train, until they manage to regain their memories and fight themselves free...

Votes? Suggestions?

Practical Implications of Writing as Worship

So, today as I was walking to work I thought about what it would practically mean to try and live out writing as worship.

Now this blog post is going to use a lot of Christian terminology, but the principal applies just the same in a secular context. 

Imagine the big sports game is coming up (pretty easy for Melbournians, as Grand Final is on Saturday). Think of your anticipation, you've put in your footy tipping bets, got the esky, beer and snacks, cleaned up your house so you can actually get to the couch, checked on the standing of all your favourite players. Anyone injured, unable to play? Then, on the day, you stock up on ice, putting on your jersey and sit down in front of your wide screen TV not to be disturbed. 

Just taste your pleasure as the game comes on, as those men in way too tight shorts run through those banners. 

Imagine if sitting down to write was THAT exciting. That you would put up a big 'do not disturb' sign on your life for hours.

Or if football/sport is not your thing, imagine shopping. You've worked hard all week and told yourself that on Saturday you are doing to the shopping centre. You get up early, try to wear something nice because it is always depressing looking at beautiful clothes while dressed like a dag and you drive out there. You enter the sacred halls (I'm picturing Chadstone here, but whatever works for you) and you buy your favourite smoothy which has become a sort of ritual. You wander through the shops, your fingers just softly gliding over the silky satins. 

These are all forms of worship. Guy (that's his name, not just some random guy, but my Guy, that is my pastor Guy, Guy Mason) defined worship as ascribing value to something. With the Footy, dedicating your Saturday afternoon, when you could be doing anything, to watching those beefed up men running around after an inflated bladder, you are saying this is the most valuable thing you could be doing with your time. When you look forward to shopping all week, and spend hours passing through all the shops, you are saying that this is important to you. 

So what I'm arguing is that I should be ascribing value to my writing, because I think it is something God has called me to do. Not in that whole 'everyone must read my books because they are a revelation from God.' They might never get published. It might just be a discipline and learning experience for me. But that is enough. If God says it's valuable, than I should think it is valuable too.

Okay, so after that super long set up, I'm going to continue with the Christian stuff, but try if you can to apply it to your situation and worldview, whatever that may be.

The following is from a post from 2009 on Crossways Baptist Church's and is titled How To Prepare For Worship (topical, no?) I'm going to copy it here and then see if it works for writing.

"Αcceptable worship doesn’t happen spontaneously- you must prepare yourself. Let’s look at Hebrews 10:22. “Let us draw near with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” That verse begins with the phrase “let us draw near”-it is our call to worship. What follows are four checkpoints to help you prepare for worship.

The Checkpoint of Sincerity – We are to draw near “with a sincere heart.” That speaks of a genuine heart, devoted to pursuing God. It is hypocritical to be worshiping God when you are really apathetic or preoccupied with self. Draw near to God with your whole heart.

The Checkpoint of Fidelity – We are to draw near “in full assurance of faith.” ... [cut bits as not highly relevant to this] You too are to be fully assured that God accepts your worship, not because of what you do, but because of what Jesus did in providing atonement for you.

The Checkpoint of Humility – We are to draw near to God “having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience.” That is, you come to God with the knowledge that you are unworthy to be in His presence. The only reason anyone can come to Him is the blood of Christ, which was shed on the cross as a cleansing for sin.

The Checkpoint of Purity – We are to draw near having “our bodies washed with pure water.” That refers to the daily cleansing by the Word of God. The process of sanctification ferrets out sinful thoughts and exposes sinful behavior. Before you worship, confess the sins that God uncovered through His Word so you can draw near in purity."

The first aspect that needs highlighting is the whole drawing near thing. I actually have to come to write in order for this whole thing to work. 

Action: Make appointments to write and keep them. 

Sincerity: I'm drawn to the whole 'don't be apathetic or preoccupied with self.' It's true, these are really detrimental to writing (and watching sport: if you are thinking about work the whole time, everyone throws things at you and tells you to get off the couch.) 

Action: take a few minutes before starting to drop all thoughts of self, and find my excitement in the exercise. 

Fidelity: For me this means trusting in my Muse. I do the turning up faithfully and trust that he is doing the rest. (Sort of like my whole thing with Walking on Water with Tap Shoes.)

Action: Trust my Muse.

Humility: Just as we are humbled that we can't play as well as those men can, or that we can't design and makes clothes as beautiful as the ones we see in the shops and must have, so in writing as worship, I need to acknowledge that I can't actually write brilliantly myself. Any gifts I have are from God. And the purpose of this is not to make me feel bad or worthless, but grateful for what I have been given. And relieved, because the pressure is not on me.

Action: Admit that any good writing I do is from God, and let that release me from fear.

Purity: For me concerning writing, this means letting go of all thoughts of writing for the money/fame/men (who wants more women? I have plenty of those, bring on the good looking men!). I need to approach my writing with a purity of intent that focuses on telling a story because it should be told, even if there isn't a 'market' for it at the moment, etc. 

Action: Focus on the story and the process, not potential results. 

Those are my thoughts on worship. What they actually amount to in practical terms appears to be:

1. stopping before I sit down to write, 

2. put aside my worries for the day, 

3. listening to some worship music (this just helps me focus my mind) and 

4. laying my heart before God. 

Then going from there. Tried it tonight and I think it worked sort of well (have more words, though now have three starts to the Secret Railway, which really would have been better if I had moved forward with just one of them. Oh well).

I don't know, do you think I am stretching this all too much? Do you have another interpretation?

Worship and Writing.

Have just come back from my first small group meeting convicted about my writing.

Following on from the sermon on Sunday, we were looking at John 12:1-8, where Mary takes a bottle of perfume worth a year's wage (so, what, around $60,000?) and pours it over Jesus' feet and then dries his feet with her hair.

One of the things we were looking at was just how extravagant a gesture of worship it was, in cost and in personal humility.

A while ago, before I started this challenge, I was lagging in my writing and felt God trying to connect it to worship: my writing as an act of worship for God. 

Today that came back to me. 

Am I being extravagant in my writing? Well, the general premise of writing a draft every 2 weeks is pretty out there. But is my attitude towards it equal to it? Do I rush to write, trying to hold on that little bit longer, putting everything else off so I can spend more time on it? 

And the answer is no. Today I got a total of about 2,000 words done, and then went and had a four hour nap. Yes, this is a children's book so it's going to be shorter, but I don't want to be justifying why I'm not spending time doing it. I just want to be doing it.

So, I've told my small group that I want to try and approach my writing as worship this week, and asked them to hold me accountable next week.

I am now opening it up to all of you as well. 

Writing will be my extravagant, sacrificial, public worship of God (I think those were the main points of the sermon). If you hear me being negative or with an ungrateful attitude, pull me up on it. 

Comment and remind me.

Also, feel free to add your name to the accountability list. Maybe writing is not your form of worship, but let us know what you want to focus on, and let us know how you go.

Exciting Discovery for Christian and/or Australian Unpublished Authors

Well, am continuing in my search for places to submit my manuscript, in case I just happen to get rejected by the first few (which would totally never happen to me, just all those other not so good authors, like J.K. Rowlings).

And as I'm going along, I thought I would share some of the places I've found in case other people are interested. Once I feel I've gone through and exhausted most of the options, I'll do a summary blog post. But you might as well read this blog post now that you are here.

Today I submitted to Pan McMillan's Manuscript Monday (who take unsolicited manuscripts on Mondays), as well as to the American Christian Literary Agent Steve Laube (I had to do a query letter for first).

A friend then pointed out that I should check out Allen and Unwin (another of Australia's biggest publishers). And guess what? They accept unsolicited manuscripts on Fridays for The Friday Pitch! So, guess what I'll be doing on Friday. (though can't work out if it has to be submitted only on Fridays, or they only check their emails on Fridays. Pan McMillan made it very clear it had to be submitted on Monday between 10 am and something like 4pm, but not so clear for Allen and Unwin). Am glad that the big houses do still take some unsolicited manuscripts. I know that it will be read super quickly by an unpaid intern, but they promise that it will at least be read. 

My other discovery today was Authonomy run by Harper Collins. I found it because it was recommended by Zondervan. Previously I've mentioned Christian Manuscript Submission which I thought I would try if my other options fell through. This is a website where you can upload a proposal for 6 months, with a fee of $98 (USD I assume). It is supposedly browsed by a lot of the big publishing houses in the US looking for Christian material.

Authonomy is pretty similar, except it's free, based in the UK and is run by one of the big publishing houses. Also, it has this strange process of recommendations by readers which I'm still working out.

Anyway, it's free and might bring my manuscript to the attention of more people, which can only be a good thing (I think, feel free to tell me otherwise). And it's covering the UK, which I haven't done yet. 

So, yah for free stuff!

Once I test it out a bit more, if I discover anything more useful about it I'll let you know. 

As to my own writing: spent quite a bit of time dancing around my apartment and cleaning it (can now see most of the kitchen bench which is super cool). Also rather annoyingly found out that you shouldn't put a newly serviced bike on white carpet. Didn't even think about the oil. And carpet cleaner is not really cutting it. Any cleaning advice welcome.

But what has this to do with writing? Okay, you caught me, not much. This is made slightly more embarrassing as I gave a talk at work today on Time Management and staying focused.  The talk went really well actually, in that my colleagues didn't want to stone me for being a pretentious prat, which I was afraid of. Whether it actually speeds up work is yet to be seen. (And if anyone from work is reading this blog at work, I'm really glad you are reading this, but bad assessor, bad!)

Though, after I cleaned my apartment, tried to save my carpet, had dinner and did some researching into manuscript submissions, I started work on my new draft - The Secret Railway. 

Side note: I googled the title to make sure that it wasn't already a book, because it just sounded like such a good title I couldn't believe it would still be free. Turns out it is the name of a Canadian anime series in French from like the late 1970's. As I am pretty sure my readers won't get it confused, I'm sticking with my title until someone sues me. Though, the anime did look rather cute and interesting. There was some on Youtube, though I haven't looked at it yet, saving that for later procrastination.

Anyway, my Secret Railway is the children's story that I came up with after waking up from a dream. The dream itself was rather scary and dark, but has given me an idea for a rather sweet and hopefully interesting middle grades story. 

So I started off planning to just write up the brief outline I had from my notebook (sleeping with notebook next to head pays off!), but got carried away and have been writing out the chapters in rather a lot of detail, and then got caught up in bits of dialogue, etc as I went along. I now have it planned out in detail until chapter 8 (2,000 words of plan, which for me is a lot), I think that is 1/3 of the way through the book. Though I might have just worked out all the easy bits. But still, the rest will hopefully come to me. 

Tomorrow I will start writing it out in full and see how I go.

Will put up a brief synopsis on the synopses page, though might have to leave the ending ambiguous... well, more ambiguous than synopses usually are, that is. 

Good Night and Sleep Tight.