Convention Zombie

I wake up and it’s really cold inside. I have my temperature set to 70 degrees. The temperature outside is sucking out the warmth, so I bump the gauge up a few degrees. Check outside: 36. Wind chill: 25. Yow!

No farmer’s market Saturday. I debate about going to breakfast. But I enjoy that and the people there. So I bundle up, curse at the wind, and drive on over. I’m 15 minutes later than usual because I was doing early morning yoga. No one is there.

After that, I zoom through the grocery store, feel like I need to take out a loan to buy food.  Too expensive!  Prices have gone up for me between $20 and $40.

After the late night on Friday, I’m tired, and I stay tired through Sunday.  Because I’m so tired, I opt to run Pro Writing Aid on the story.  That’s about where my mental power is. I’m impressed at what it finds that Word and Grammarly didn’t.  I’m surprised to discover that I’m using two British variations of words.  I add those to my autocorrect since I’m likely to use them again. 

The tool finds quite a bit that I do need to clean up, so I work my way through on and off between panels and a little Sunday morning.  I optimistically think that I’ll be able to jump back into fleshing out the climax Sunday afternoon after the last panel.  But alas, convention zombie wins.  Not even a nap helps!

The panels were a lot of fun.  I had ones on:

Do Series Go on For Too Long? We were all over the place on this one, with books and TV shows.  I’m reading J.D. Robb, which is around 50 books—and they’re still good.  But I’ve read other series where the author made a change at some point and the series lost what I liked about it.  Usually, it’s around book 7.  Problematic when the publisher wants more books in the series with this character and you’re getting burned out on it.

Genre Mixing: An interesting one of blending two genres.  The key for this is to know which genre shelf your book will be on and make sure that one is in charge.  I’ve seen a lot of writers add a little of this one, a little or that one, and maybe that one and end up having no genre at all.  Some may also not mash together well.  I don’t think thriller and romance can be blended effectively.  Very hard getting the pacing requirement of a thriller.  Kind of hard to develop a relationship when you’re running for your life.  The other was Horror-Romance.  Doesn’t mean someone hasn’t tried.  Doesn’t mean it worked either.  I also noted that a lot of Science Fiction Romances don’t work.  Most of them don’t understand science fiction.  They just plop a romance on an alien world, add aliens, and done, leaving a vaguely unsatisfying story.

Why Aren’t They Writing Like They Used To:  This one started with aspects of stories that are trending now that hadn’t in the past.  For instance, I was disappointed with a lot of books while I was growing up because there weren’t a lot of girls or women in them.  I wanted just something for me and was so ecstatic to see MZB’s Sword and Sorceress series.  I also noted that I wasn’t always as happy with having women in the action roles.  Women are built differently, a fact very obvious when I was in the military.  When you factor that in, it’s hard to write action scenes.  You have to think a lot about how to do them in a way realistically to what the woman character can do.  In Urban Fantasy, a lot of characters got super strength, super healing, or the part about being different like that got a hand-wavy thing like it didn’t matter.  In one thriller (written by a woman), the woman main character fell downstairs and out of the action scene while the sidekick did the fight.  Yeah, right.

It was a lot of fun!  Though I hope I’m not as much of a zombie on Monday!