Sometimes the best stories need a second look

I finished a draft for a new project recently. After being knee-deep in edits I wanted to do something fun and completely separate from my current books – and it was the right call. To work on something new was like a holiday to a place I’ve never been before. I got to explore and figure out the world as I went along, and I found myself simply delighted by what I found. I won’t say the book came together easily, but it didn’t take too many drafts to feel like I knew what this story was about.

While I let that draft rest for a time, I’m poking around with a story I wrote three years ago. A novella, it was an experiment in writing shorter narratives. Will I liked the story well enough, looking over it now with fresher eyes I started to see places in need of improvement. That part didn’t surprise me. I find the longer I’m away from a story, I return with new ideas to punch up or rewrite certain scenes. But this time however, I looked at the story and thought about punching up the word count.

Another author once told me a story is as long as it needs to be. Sometimes it’s obvious from the start, but other times you’ll only figure it out by writing the tale.

Looking back at this old story, I started seeing where I cut back on plot developments because of word count concerns. There were quite a few scenes that could be longer but I had cut them short because I was adamant about staying within the bounds of the word count. I wanted this to be a novella, to prove to myself that I can write shorter narratives. And I did finish it, but I always had the in the back of mind it could be improved somehow. As I look over the story now, thinking of how I first wrote it, I started to wonder that maybe this was never a novella at all. That this “novella” was a robust outline that I didn’t know how to make into a novel – but I do now.

While I’m certain there is a version of this story that could be a novella, I think a full novel will be the best way to tell all the things I wish to say. And if I wasn’t certain about this being a good choice, I refer to the notebook where I easily wrote six pages of possible changes and additions without pause. Six back-to-back pages written in pen, brimming with ideas as I got excited to retread an old story and transform it into the book it might have meant to be.

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There are fun things I get to do with my books as it comes time for promotion, but nothing is as joyful as putting together a doll to capture the spirit and whimsy of my book and main characters.

Free book alert!

Since it’s my birthday, I’m giving away an ARC copy of The Improvisers!

If you like to get your hands on a copy, simply select the button below and leave your name and the email you would like to be contacted with between now and 6/30. (This giveaway is US only)

Afterwards I’ll pick someone at random and reach out for further details.

I’ll be doing a giveaway each month leading up to Improvisers’s publication. As subscribers to my newsletter, you’ll only have to enter once to be automatically entered for the following months.

If you want to up your chances, you can also enter on my instagram.

I treat myself for my birthday and I have a treat for you

The arrival of June is special for me as it’s my birthday month and I treat myself in a number of ways all month, because why confine myself to a single day?

I just turned in copyedits for Improvisers. It was my last big hurrah with the book, and it’s here the book moves from a work in progress to complete. I get a PDF of how the book will look when it’s printed and I can’t make any drastic rewrites just smaller line edits.

This is also the stage where things get rather hard in another fashion. I have to start practicing how to condense the book into a few quippy statements AND have it make sense! Such is the paradox of writing. You write all these words and have to figure out how to convey all of it in much, much, less. It’s always a bit hard for me at first, since I’m so close to the story. I find myself wanting to tell everything, and it’s hard to figure out what’s key and compelling to those who know very little. But with anything, practice and necessity always helps me figure it out in the end!

We’re five months out from The Improvisers launching out into the world, and as a reminder of how close things are, I’ve gotten physical ARCs! It’s the first time I had early review copies of my books and it was a delightful surprise to have land on my doorstop.

Given I have limited shelf space, over the next few months there may be some giveaways, so be on the look out!

(Don’t worry, for those living the e-reader life, it’s also up on netgalley!)

Upcoming events

• I’ll be around (virtually!) for this year’s SFWA Nebula Conference, as well as being on a panel for one of my favorite topics, video games

• I’ll be at Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, VA in conversation with Esme Addison on June 19th

Other things

I’ve gotten back into taking walks as spring warmed up. I often say I get some of my best writing done while on a walk. I’ve noticed I have stopped listening to music while I’m out walking. It started by accident. I had misplaced my headphones, so I went without music, and found to my surprise I actually enjoyed the walk better.

It was nice to hear bird chatter, the twinkling of wind chimes, and all the ambient noise that was all around me. For so many years I pressed play on my music while on walks even thought my neighborhood is fairly quiet I always thought I needed music as some sort barrier between me and the world. While it’s fun to have my own soundtrack at times, there is a great delight to be without it.

Which is probably for the best, since I still haven’t found those headphones yet!

I turn in a draft! And then another! And start work on something else!

This past week I had the great pleasure of turning in the draft of The Starseekers to my editor. It closes out a writing marathon I’ve been undertaking since October in which I worked on the final draft The Improvisers, the draft Secret Project #1, the first draft of The Starseekers, and got them all turned in and sent on their merry ways.

I’m a little tired, but overall very pleased with myself. Out of the trio only one had a hard deadline (Improvisers of course!) but the other two I wanted to wrap up in a timely manner. I’ve been itching to start write something new, and after a short break I will dive into the wonder of new a story. Starting a new story is one of the reasons I made effort to stick the deadline I set for myself. I’ve been editing and revising for a while and starting a new draft is exciting. I also recognized the signs of when I needed to stop working on a story.

Knowing when to stop with a story is a key skill writers need to develop to avoid getting stuck in the quagmire of editing. I’ve been there often with previous stories, where I just kept poking and prodding and never quite finishing. It’s by finishing and letting a story sit, that you can better see what needs to be done – usually with fresher eyes.

How to develop such a skill is best done by having the habit of giving yourself deadlines. When tackling a project I give myself a date that I’d like to have the work done by. They’re always reasonable deadlines, and I give myself the grace to adjust the deadline as needed. I also play around with what a deadline means. Sometimes a deadline is a full stop of work and to move onto other work. Other times it is a checkpoint to see my progress so far. Having a date to reach allows me to see how much work I’ve gotten done, reflect on how it’s been going so far, and gauge how going forward will look. Every story I work on slightly different, and I change how I stick to deadline as needed. But no matter what I choose to do, I pause, I take a break, and I start planning the next big thing.

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The Improvisers officially has a date! Look for it on November 5th. It’s already starting to pop up in all the usual suspects like Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, and Amazon. Look for more information in the coming months. No cover yet but I do have some snazzy art of the main characters: Velma, an intrepid pilot and magical investigator and Dillon a nosy reporter who’s along for the ride for the mystery. It’s my magical take on 1930s with high flying adventure of magic, murder and more.

Girls Write Now Salon

I celebrate Halloween for the entire month of October. It’s easily my favorite holiday because there’s unabashed fun around it. The holiday invites you to play and pull off the mask you wear the rest of the year to reveal a bit more of your true self. Whether it’s to put on a costume, make delightfully scary treats, or to stick a giant skeleton in your front yard and have it tap dance.

It’s through my love of the holiday my next event is going on the spooky side. I’m hosting a writing salon and workshop that will dive into murder and mystery.

In partnership with Girls Write Now and the good folks at NaNaMoWri, I’ll be a hosting a free and virtual writing salon.

Joins us on October 6 @ 6pm ET for an evening of murder, magic, and mayhem!

Coming to rest for a brief time

I don’t hike, but I feel as I come to the end of the work on the draft of my next book it’s much like reaching the summit of a decent size mountain. I get to pause and bask in the sense of accomplishment, but even as I do so, I see the path back down to the ground below, and hope it will be easier going down opposed to the climb.

I believe I have reached the end of the major work for my current project. To get there was hard going. The rest of my summer had been enveloped with cycles of edits and revisions ending with Labor’s Day Weekend editing marathon where I spent the long weekend going through the entire book in one go. I broke the book up into thirds, planned out my breaks, utilized the pomodoro technique, and got down to business. It was lovely weekend despite the hard work – and it was very phsyical I was even doing stretching before I got into evening session! I also hit the page count I wanted to reach for each day. Of everything that was the best thing to come out the weekeend. It’s a ign the book is in its final draft stages because it meant I was able to get through large sections of the book without wanting to rewrite everything.

Now the book resting for just a little bit, before I do one final look. But this is just the polishing of key scenes, last checks for spelling and grammar, and tweaks to dialogue. It’s feels too early to say the book is done, but it’s definitely at a state that I’m not afraid to let others look.

While the book is resting, so I am. This is the first free weekend I had in months and I had to force myself to play a video games just to get away from anything book related so I can actually relax. But after focusing so intensely on something for so long to suddenly have nothing, makes you itch to do some other task like starting a new story idea you’ve been mulling over.

Resting doesn’t just mean taking a brief respite from writing, it also means trying to adjust my sleep scheudle. Besides making myself go to bed a half-hour earlier, I’ve also pulled a few paperbacks off my bookshelf to sit on my nightstand so I could grab that intsead of reading book off my tablet.

As for what’s next, production for The Improvisers will be ramping up soon I believe. Don’t have exact dates to share yet, other than forthcoming in the next year. But I have been some nice cover shaped things recently. I’ll be interesting to switch gears back to this book, but I spent enough time away from it I’m ready to bring it over the finish line!

Outside of writing I’ll also be doing a few fun things this fall.

At the end of this month I’ll be part an “Connecting Flight” Genre Benders and Blenders on September 30th @ 1pm PT. I’ll be chatting with a group fantastic writers as we discuss the tropes and how the break them and more. (Note this is part of 2023 Nebula programming, so if didn’t go this year you’ll have to register for the post-conference).

Revising is all about that muddled middle

For the past week or so I felt like I was hacking away with a machete at my book, as I started making my judicious cuts. It’s going well for the most part. A few changes I made, such as culling characters and tweaking some others helped me get pretty close to the goals I sent. These change allowed me to refocus scenes – I even took a scene from the latter end of the book to replace a similar scene with the same beats earlier on. And just last night I started reworking one of my “darlings”, a scene that until now I’ve been so convinced I needed to keep in the book, until I realized it wasn’t as crucial as I thought and the changes I could make with it will be better all around.

But the most interesting thing I found so far is that most of my cuts have been coming from the middle.

Interesting, but not surprising.

I call the middle of the book while drafting, the muddled middle. The middle is where writers meet despair and the first real walls that keep them from progressing a story appear. It the part where a writer is most tempted to give up and throw their computer into the ocean. Starting a book is often easy, you have the energy of the new idea and a lot of things to set up that require lots and lots of words. Endings are much the same. You usually have a vague idea of where the story needs to end (or stop if writing a series). But the middle is different.

The middle can be a quagmire for the unprepared.

A middle is there you have to keep the journey going from A to Z, and keep it well paced, engaging, and do about a dozen things at once. Sometimes you have ideas. Sometimes you have no ideas. Sometimes you have too many. While an outline can help, there’s a deeper reason that it causes so much up trouble.

Writing is hard overall because in there was numerous of possibilities to take a story. Yes, you have genre conventions to follow if you like, but largely as a writer you are in control about how the story progresses. And sometimes that leads to the paradox of choice. The gist of it is that having all the options available to you is actually a bad thing. Having all the options at your fingertips cause you to stress too much about making the right choice. It’s why you spend 20 minutes trying to find a movie to watch of your streaming service of choice, or why you get overwhelmed at a large menu at a restaurant. And it’s why I think writers get struck with writer’s block. It’s not that you don’t know how to move forward, you don’t know what path to take. And when you have to forward due to a deadline or a schedule, you take a stab in the dark and try to see how it goes. Sometimes it works and you get to the other side as planned. Other times, you find yourself deleting scene after scene.

They’re not all bad though. The muddle middle could be a very active brainstorm in a sense, and that by working your way through you can find out what works and what doesn’t. For me muddled middles is about my thought process while drafting, weighing all the choices as I weave my story together. Ultimately it’s more important to me to go forward even if the scene is less than ideal. And even if in the revisions I end cutting up scene (or many scenes), I still retain just enough that I can rework into something even better. Because by going through the muddle I’m more certain about what to do next.

Some things of note:

• I recently dropped by the Between the Reads podcast for a lovely chat about my books and other related topics. Check it out on most places you listen to your podcast or head directly to the website: https://www.betweenthereads.com/nicole-glover/

• I finally got a chance to watch the new the D&D movie. A very good time all around and it was also especially nice to have a fantasy property that leaned more on the lighter side! There’s been many fantasy adaptions lately, but nearly all of them are super serious and without the whimsy. It was nice to watch something that embraced all the reasons why I love stories about magic and wasn’t afraid to get silly.

Sometimes I do my best writing by letting my mind wonder

I jumped back into the saddle this week with my current draft. I’ve been away for about two months, letting it simmer before I entered this last leg of work. While I stayed busy in the meantime, I still felt pretty fresh jumping right it.

When I took a step away I was very vague about how long that would be. My deadline to turn the book isn’t until much later, so I had the time and breathing room to take as long as I needed. But I knew I could stay away forever, yet two months seemed to be the perfect fit. I needed a break from the book to work on a few other things. When I wrapped up that, I was ready to resume work on this book. I knew I was ready not when I got the itch to get back to work, but when I started visualizing revising scenes in the book.

I do a lot writing simply by letting my mind wonder as I stare out my windows or walls. I guess it could be akin to daydreaming except a bit more focused. I imagine how a scene might unfold and it’s much like a stage play with snippets of dialogue and actions. These are alternative takes, usually very drastic takes, on how to do a scene. I like to visualize the most dramatic turn, because then I’ll know how far to take a scene. And also the more dramatic turn usually means more writing. Imagining them out first is good way for me to save time. It is a lot effort to bang out words on a keyboard, so picturing out things in my mind’s eye saves me a lot of heartbreak. Me imagining out scenes is very important right now because I have a few key tasks for this revision, with top of the list cutting 30,000, if not 40,000 words.

Yes, you read that right.

I tend to overwrite my first few drafts, because at early stage of the book’s life it’s still free flowing. I put everything I want in the book, and then take a good hard look at what parts are necessary. Through the revision I catch scenes that are redundant in tone and undercurrent the power of what I call to call “tent pole” moments. They usually aren’t bad scenes, but sometimes they run too long or even there for my own indulgences. While I don’t remove everything I do rework those scenes to make them better support everything else I’m doing with the story.

The most complicated portion of the process is cutting characters from the story. I like a nice robust supporting cast but I have a bad habit of making characters that overlap with others. It might be because I write murder mysteries but cutting characters has never been a problem for me no matter how deep in the revisions process I am in. A lot of times the excess characters can be merged with another one quite easily, because they already have similar roles in the narrative. Doing this doesn’t always help trim up the book, but it trims up some of the narrative in places, which is just as important!

News & Tidbits

I had an amazing time at this year’s Imaginairium Book Fest! It ended up being a gorgeous weekend after all the threats of rain faded away. I got to meet loads of readers, both and new and returning faces. I’ve been so busy writing these year, it’s nice to be surrounded by finished books! And I had great chats with a number of authors that were there. Time just flew past on both days and before I knew it was time to head home, to recuperate and see to charging up my social battery.

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I’m offering up signed copies of the UK editions of my books (plus some swag!) in an upcoming auction with Romance for Reproductive Justice. The auction goes live on June 10th @ 9am PDT and closes June 11th @ 7pm PDT. Check it out and take part if you like.

In a couple of weeks I’ll be in DC for the Imaginarium Book Festival. It’s a free book festival held a really snazzy place not far from the National Mall. The event runs from 10 -4 on Saturday and 11-4 on Sunday.

There’s going to be be great lineup of authors there, a photo booth, a scavenger hunt, and of course lot of books! I was there last year and it pretty fun then, but it sounds like this year is going to be bigger and better.

My table is #21, right in the center of things.

I’ll be on a Lit Talk panel (saving the best for last!) on Sunday, 5/21 – 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM.

So come on by if you’re in the DMV area.

Lots of words, so little time

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The funny thing about writing is sometimes you have to write a different story to figure out the problems in the one currently working on.

I’m taking a little break from my next book to let it breathe before diving back in for another round of edits. While I planned to work on short stories or make notes for a back burner project, but one more morning I randomly decided I’m going to write a novella.

Well not so randomly.

This is novella is a side story featuring characters from the world of my books that won’t, for logistical reasons, get much page time but I still found them very interesting. I know they’re interesting because the idea for the story popped into my mind during a walk and that evening I had a few thousand words on a page and dozen open tabs on my web browser.

I even got to the “muddled middle” this week, the point in any story where I am tempted to delete everything I’ve written and run to the woods, but I soon was trucking along through the muddle eager to get to the end. I think it’s mostly because it was fun to cut loose while drafting again. I’ve been in editing mode for a year and half now as I move between rounds of edits for my next two books. It’s nice to pull words out of the ether and enjoy the ride of storytelling I’m on, and it’s even nicer to write something I’m not looking to sell. This story right now is for me, and it’s freeing in many ways. I can explore, I can experiment, and more importantly I can enjoy the writing process. It’s still a break, if you call taking on more writing work as break. But it’s through this break I might have solved a problem I’ve been grappling with in my current book.

My biggest hurdle I have as a writer is focusing on the tree in front of me and ignoring the rest of the forest. I lock in on minute detail attempting to keep the element in the book. That particular elements, whether it’s a character, minor historical fact, just random bit trivia I like, becomes so important I try to keep it in the book no matter what. Worse, I consider it set in stone, forgetting my own advice: that no story is done until it’s dispersed for consumption.

In some ways writing opens you up to all the possibilities a story can take you, and it’s the work of a very good writer to figure out what is the best possible way for that story to unfold. It’s something instinctive, that comes with both time and practice, but it’s also just going on with your gut feeling.

Which is why I’m working on the surprise novella. My gut tells me that this is what I should be working on for moment( as long as I don’t drag out the work). I need the break for obsession over minor details. A change of pace. A pause. A gift of time for myself. And a moment to fall back in love with writing. While the novella isn’t that closely tied to the book I’m working on, it’s the act of working on something else that matters. Focusing on other work gives me time to reflect and mull over other plot points. It allows me to step back from the book, and see the forest again and everything that brings it to life.

I know when end my self-appointed break I will return with new vigor to explore and seek all the places I have yet to turn my focus on.

And then I’m trucking along with my little surprise book.

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Some things I enjoyed lately:

• The Last of Us (tv show) – I haven’t played the game yet despite snapping it up in a recent sale, but that was no barrier to keep me from enjoying the show. I had a lot of fun guessing what might be nods to the actual game play, and speculating what bits I’ll see when I finally do great around to the the game.

• Ghost of Tsushima – Grabbed this one in a sale after hearing all the great reviews. Love the simplistic UI and balanced game play. I was really surprised at the well roundness of the female characters featured throughout the game.

• All the Knowledge in the World by Simon Garfield – It’s a history about encyclopedia, and who knew it had such an interesting? I was more curious that someone had written such a book than the actual subject but I came away with more appreciation for them. The chapters of the book are titled alphabetically arranged, which was an obvious but delightful surprise for me.

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