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I’ve been pretty bad the past few weeks about putting up stickies. The first weekend I missed I was in Washington DC visiting my little sister and my new brother-in-law, and after that NaNoWriMo got in the way. What’s that, you say? NaNo is in November? Not if you’re an ML like I happen to be this year – then NaNo starts in October with planning Kick-Off Parties and Write-Ins, trying to put together goodie bags and print out workbooks, and beating your region into RSVPing and deciding on a region name (we are currently deciding between Sweet Tea Wrimos and Swamp Things). So between my birthday, my trip to DC, and NaNo, October has been a busy month for me! Thank god next month all I have to do is write a 50,000 word novel. Although I still can’t promise to keep up with the stickies next month.
Speaking of NaNo – this week’s sticky comes from last year’s NaNo Novel, Phooka Tales. The premise of the book is that Holly’s fiance’ breaks up with her while she’s oversees for her job. This sticky shows how she feels while at work the next day. When something shitty like that happens it’s always nice to have something to take your mind off of it, but you can still feel it there, sitting inside you, and once you mind is on it again, forget trying to get anything done! No wonder Holly goes a bit crazy.
Now I’m off to get my soundtrack ready for this year’s Noveling Adventure. See you in December!
This week you are getting almost two stickies for the price of one! How lucky do you feel?
I’ve been splitting my time lately between Fie Eoin and Phooka Tales. With another NaNoWriMo almost upon us I’ve finally let Phooka Tales sit long enough to go back and start editing (and sometimes I just have days where I want a little Brett in my life), but Fie Eoin is my first baby and Kindra and Gar are very demanding. They don’t let FE sit dormant for long. I’ve also been storylining the Apollo and Daphne story, although I still need a name for that one.
This week you are getting almost two stickies for the price of one! How lucky do you feel?
This sticky was written well before the idea for Apollo and Daphne came to be. In fact, this story was written before NaNo last year, because I never did use that bottom half in Phooka Tales. I just wrote down everything that happened in the lab I worked in as inspiration for the story. By the time it came to write PT, I didn’t use most of what I had written down. A large chunk of in-lab storytelling was left by the wayside because it wasn’t as interesting as what happens when the creatures begin appearing. The in-lab stuff was just my cathartic way of dealing with work stress without quitting (or going crazy and seeing creatures myself!). I highly recommend writing stories where you fire all of your co-workers to relieve stress.
The top half of the sticky was me trying to decide how to introduce Gar’s friends into Fie Eoin. At first I had Gar introducing them to her as she joined them for breakfast on her first morning as a Warrior. But then I realized that their village isn’t that large, and Kindra would already know all of his friends from childhood. So I needed a new way to introduce them. I used the same part of the story to introduce the different groups in Fie Eoin – the senior warriors, the new warriors, the women and what they do while all the warriors are out being warriors all day. I think you can tell that the warriors are my favorite part.
It’s another really long sticky for this weekend, in part to celebrate the 4th of July. And for the 4th, Daphne - of Ask Daphne fame - held a writing-prompt contest. The three prompts were:
- I didn’t expect to actually go swimming…
- As American as apple pie…
- The heat from the grill made it seem a mirage…
At first I was thinking Fie Eoin, but to tell you the truth I’m a little burnt out on Fie Eoin right now. So while Sipi’s whale-fishing dip in the ocean might be interesting for the first prompt, I was actually leaning towards Holly Thompson and the second prompt. I ignored the third prompt completely, until after I tried writing an apple pie story that was a miserable flop. And then it came to me: Holly sees creatures, she thinks she’s crazy, it would seem a mirage… Bingo. And I spent the weekend furiously writing about Holly, Phooka, and the Manticore (when I wasn’t hanging out with the grandfolks, that is). Above is a couple of stickies I started at work, and the rest of the story can be found at Phooka Tales LJ. A little 4th-flavor coming at you from Scotland.
This sticky shows the entrance of one of my favorite mythical creatures in Phooka Tales, the Kelpie, who also makes an appearance in Lane’s Girl as the symbol of the Morgan Family. In the book, each creature represents some part of Holly, and the Kelpie is her desire to give up. It is also connected to a very interesting back-story with the daughter of the couple she is staying with in Scotland. And let’s face it, I couldn’t set the second half of the book on the shores of the Loch Ness without making one creature crawl out of the depths (alas, Nessie does not have a cameo in Phooka Tales).
This sticky may look familiar. In fact, it is the same sticky that I put up last week, but with a few additions. I said that these were the last dozen or so scenes from the book, and I was crossing them out as I wrote them. I’m happy to say that on Thursday Night I finished writing Phooka Tales and drew my last line through the sticky! The last scene ended up being lunch, instead of dinner, but I was still happy to be finished.
And now I’m going to go play with my new dog – a gift to myself for finishing the book!
A lot of times I storyline way ahead of where I’m actually writing. In this case, I like to write down all of my scenes that I know are coming up so that I don’t forget to write them, or forget what order they are in. As I write them, I cross them off the list. The scenes above are the last dozen or so scenes in Phooka Tales, my NaNo Novel from 2008. While I finished the 50,000 words required in the month of November, I hadn’t yet finished the book itself. I’m proud to say I’m now six major scenes away from finishing the book. All that’s left is a phone call, a manticore attack, saying goodbye to Phooka… and you get the drift. There are, of course, minor scenes between all of these that have to be written, and “Chloe says goodbye” ended up being a very minor scene (actually, just a blurb at the beginning of “Holly calls Scott”), but for the most part when those six unlined scenes are finished being written Phooka Tales will be done as a first draft.
Then it’s time to go back to editing Fie Eoin!
It’s a little late in the day, but I did say I would be posting again starting in January – and gosh darn it, it’s January! I know, how did that happen already?
The first sticky of this year (the first sticky in almost a year, in fact) comes from Phooka Tales, my Nano-Novel from this past November. I am happy to say NaNo was a success for me this year, even with the added-on responsibility of Co-MLing for my area, and I have to think it was all due to the strange nature of the novel I wrote. They say write what you know, and Phooka Tales is ripped almost completely from real events that have happened at my job. At least until the creatures start showing up.
All of the things on the sticky above have come from working in the lab with the interesting mix of people I have worked with over the past few years. There was actually a girl who never wore socks. There was a sample that only had a question mark on it instead of a number. The lab does have a pair of well-used hangover glasses, and the bathroom joke was hilarious. And it seems that every day something new happens that I want to put into the book, or that inspires me to write the main character just a little bit more insane than I had planned. If I really thought about it, this sticky could become miles long, so the incidents above were the most memorable and made it into the book.
If you’ve read the About Me page, or been to the website, www.stickynotestories.com, you know that I work in a radiochemistry lab. We were just starting to receive samples from England this past fall when I came up with this week’s sticky note story, Phooka Tales. It’s about a girl who works in a radiochemistry lab, gets transferred to a lab in England/Scotland (not sure yet), and goes a bit crazy under all the stress. She starts seeing things that don’t exist: mythical creatures that are not common and so she doesn’t know immediately what they are and what is happening. It starts with a Brownie, and then a Manticore, and a Nixie, and then she makes friends with a Phooka, thus the title. All of these creatures came from Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You, which is part of the Spiderwick’s Chronicles, which my husband bought me for Christmas a few years back. The field guide is a cute little book full of mythological creatures that are both well-known and not so well-known. I chose a few of the less-known creatures for this story.
In today’s sticky, Holly Thompson has just been given Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You as a joke gift. As she’s flipping through it, however, she sees an animal that she has just recently had a bad night with. I thought it would be the Phooka at first, but now I’ve decided instead that it was the Manticore, because that is a much more frightening animal. She’s trying to convince one of her co-workers that this creature is what she saw, although a lab full of scientists is not likely to believe her.
And yes, I might have been having a rough time at work when I came up with this story. Perhaps I was going a little crazy myself.
