Living the Fictional Dream

If you’re looking for a little shot of humor to brighten your day, check out writing group mate Stephanie’s story, “There’s Always Time for Cupcakes,” at Stories that Lift.

Have a delicious weekend, all!

Last night, at my writing group’s monthly write-in, I worked on revising a story that the group critiqued at the meeting in June. One of the main characters gives birth during this story. Now, as anyone who knows me or who has spent much time on this blog knows, I have given birth myself (and I will be doing so again later this year).

My familiarity with this subject matter led me to an interesting conundrum. How much detail on a subject like child birth is too much?

Juggling the amount of detail to include in a story is a balancing act sometimes. As a writer, you have to know more about your world than anyone else. This is especially true if you’re creating a fictional world from scratch (like a sprawling fantasy realm or a high tech sci-fi world), but I’ve found it true in literary and mainstream writing, as well.

You have to know your characters inside and out. You have to know much more of them and the world they live in that needs to show up on the page. In fact, if writers routinely put all the information they have on world building checklists and character descriptoin forms into their stories, readers would run away screaming at the minutia of it all.

So, all that to say, I know that I need to limit the baby birthing details in this story. However, I found while writing it that this particular subject was really hard to reign in. And then, when my writing group read it, I found out that details I thought were important and fairly universal, were actually too technical and apt to be misunderstood.

I had no idea no one else had heard of APGAR tests. Amniotic fluid was another stumbling block. Hard to talk about a woman’s water breaking without mentioning amniotic fluid!

And then there is the consideration of how much detail is too much on the ick-factor scale. Let’s face it — child birth is pretty gross. You’ve got fluid and cords and a placenta to deal with. Not to mention that, despite what you see on television, that baby does not pop out all clean and pretty — it’s actually kind of gray until it gets to breathing and that cottage cheese looking stuff that covers it… even I’m squicked out by that! I wouldn’t want to write a story where the readers stopped reading because the details were too disgusting. (And this particular story is actually in a genre which is traditionally read more by men than women, so the tolerance level for child birth ick might be even lower.)

On the other hand, though, I got many comments from the crit saying that they liked having the details because it helped ground them in the story. So, for all the bad things about including too much, you also want to make sure you include enough that your readers can fully imagine that fictional dream and be fully committed to it.

Last night at the write-in, I took another pass through the story with a critical eye for detail. I’m not sure I’m done tweaking it yet. There is actually another plot element that I’m toying with adding, which would make a new draft a definite. But, hopefully, detail-wise at least, I’ve sorted out some of the problems.

If you made it through this whole entry, feel free to let me know what you think on the subject. How much information about birthing babies is too much for you?

Happy writing (and reading), everyone!

Happy 4th of July, everyone! To celebrate this auspicious day, head on over to Every Day Fiction and read the story of the day, which is my story, “The Vote.”

It’s not actually a patriotic story. It doesn’t have anything to do with the holiday, at all. “The Vote” is my flash piece about the zombie apocalypse. The rest of this entry describes my inspiration and writing process. Unless you’re into spoilers, I would head on over to EDF now and read it, then come back and finish the blog entry.

I wrote the first draft of this story after I randomly watched the new version of Dawn of the Dead on TV. I stumbled upon it and got sucked in before I knew what was going on. In retrospect, that movie was not one I should have been watching. I’m OK with horror movies. I’ve never watched a lot of zombie movies, but I’m not against them per se. The things about Dawn of the Dead that affected me were the horrible things that humans will do to each other when circumstances are bad and the sheer hopelessness of the situation. (Spoiler for the movie: If it had ended after they sailed away instead of having the unhappy tag about the boat dying and the island being zombie-infested, too, I might have not been quite as disturbed afterwards.)

Anyway, Dawn of the Dead haunted me for days. Strangely enough, one of the prompts for my writing group’s prompts contest that month was to “write about something horrible.” And, thus, “The Vote” was born. Writing it helped me get the yuck of that movie out of my brain and lay DotD to rest.

The story has been through several drafts since then. The first draft was all character development, and the action an after-thought at the end. The second draft cut out a lot of the character development and focused more on Jill’s great escape (the second draft also allowed Jill to get away, when she and everyone on the semi died in the first draft). Thanks to two rounds of critiques from my intrepid writing group, I found a good balance between the two, and I’m pretty happy with the final product.

In case you’re wondering, I don’t really think Jill survives for a long and happy life. It is possible. Though it was cut from the final version, her uncle has a provisioned survival bunker. Maybe she makes it there on her rattle-trap forklift, finds other survivors, and is able to wait out the zombie apocalypse with them until the zombies run out of prey and become inanimate again. But, sadly, chances are, Jill will find another pack of zombies when she’s almost out of gas and weak from lack of food and they’ll take her down.

However, I think it’s better to leave her ultimate fate to the minds of the reader. The glimmer of hope at the end is enough to help those of us who prefer things not to be totally dismal and depressing. And readers who do prefer the “realistic” depressing ending can easily fill that in for themselves. That’s what flash fiction is all about, right? Giving just enough that the story takes on a life of its own.

If you read “The Vote” and enjoyed it, please vote on its star rating on the EDF site. The more star votes a story has, the better shot is has of making it into the top stories classification. And I always love to hear from people who liked my stories — a comment on the story at EDF or a comment here on the blog would be great.

Happy 4th of July, everyone. And don’t let the zombies put the bite on you!

Hello to anyone who’s still out there! Sorry for the long delay between posts. Times have been crazy of late, but more on that later.

I have a few tidbits of news to share. First of all, Every Day Fiction has released the table of contents for July 2010, and guess who’s on it? Yours truly! I’ve had reprints published this year, but this will be my first official new story published in 2010. I’m excited! And the TOC mentioned me specifically as a “returning favorite.” That was nice to read.

Tune into EDF on the 4th of July and read my story, “The Vote.” I’m not going to say too much about the story until the 4th, but I will warn you ahead of time that it’s not a 4th of July story. In fact, its more apocalyptic than patriotic. But I had an interesting voyage writing and revising it, so I’m thrilled that it’s going to be joining my other stories published by EDF.

In other news, I received a contributor’s copy the other day. It was print issue #2 of Residential Aliens, which includes a reprint of my story, “The Sorcerer’s Wife.” The story originally appeared in the ResAliens webzine, and has now graced their print ‘zine, as well. If you’d like a copy for your very own, click here. It’s a great little ‘zine. I’m really happy with it. And if you want to read TSW online, it’s still available in the ResAliens archives.

My writing group had its annual Story Every Day (SED) contest in June. Sadly, I was the winner. The goal of the story is to write a new story of at least 500 words every day for two weeks. The winner is the person with the most stories, and if there is a tie, the winner is the person with the most stories and the highest word count. I say sadly I was the winner because I was able to write a whopping… wait for it… three stories. **sigh** Not a banner year for the SED contest. But, on the bright side, every story written is a good thing, so three (or two, or one, as others in the group wrote) is something to be proud of. I was hoping for more, but my muse just was not cooperating.

Why wasn’t my muse cooperating, do you ask? Well, I guess it is time to tell y’all. On the personal front, there has been stuff going on, contributing to the “crazy” in my life that I mentioned earlier.

For those readers who haven’t heard, I am pregnant. Again! Less than a year after my darling little girl was born, Hubby and I find ourselves expecting number 2. It was definitely sooner than we had planned (if this little one carries to term, as sister did not, they will be 14 months apart), but we are very excited. The new baby is due in September.

For some reason, though, when I’m pregnant, my muse clams up on me. Hence not much activity around the old blog, or on my writing in general.

Add that to working full-time, chasing around after a little girl who is crawling like the wind and working on that walking thing, and planning a first birthday party for next week, and life has been hectic to the max. I’m loving every minute, though (OK… maybe not the actual work, but even that is not so bad, LOL).

I hope all of you out there in blog land are doing well. I miss reading everyone’s blogs and commenting. If I ever have a bit of spare time, I really want to get back to that. I hope you’re all doing well, and that everyone is having a truly fantastic summer (as well as super-high word counts!).