I've been tagged! #mywritingprocess

I've been tagged in the Twitter meme #mywritingprocess. Here's all the sense I could make of myself:

1. What am I working on now?
Nothing, actually. It's midterm season, so I'm on hiatus. But I've got edits for DOVE ARISING's sequel percolating in my brain. Also, I keep getting distracted by this idea for a fantasy series.... I love it so much that I wish I'd decided to write it first. Probably can't start drafting these books until after I graduate!

2. How does my work differ from others?
I write strange characters that are still somehow relatable (this is not unique to me). The narrator of DOVE ARISING is a selectively mute biology nerd who loves her family to death. At one point, another character calls her "emotionally constipated." 

And because I'm a science major (ecology stuff, specifically), stuff from physics, chem, or bio class ends up in my books. I grill myself really hard about scientific accuracy, and I love stretching the idea of what's biologically possible in both my science fiction and fantasy.

Lastly, I write about everyone and their mommies and daddies. The last thing you'll find in my work is absent-parent syndrome...my own parents mean so much to me, and I love exploring the dynamics of parent-child relationships.

3. Why do I write what I do?
Sci-fi/fantasy is not only fun, it helps me get a good distance from my life. I'm in college, which can be pretty dramatic -- but being in school gives me ideas in a pretty obtuse way. If I wrote contemporary fiction, all the characters would wind up being people I know, which is not cool at all. 

4. How does my writing process work?
Eh. Hell if I know.

Like many people out there, I start off with a concept -- like people living on the Moon! Then I start hearing a voice in my head (yeah, it gets weird here), and spit ideas onto my MS Word interface. Drafting begins immediately.

I tend to outline as I go. Drafting is punctuated with conversations between me and my editor. Because I don't outline and plan as much as I should, my first draft looks like a total mess and I have to go through several rounds of revision. DOVE ARISING went through at least 20 drafts -- thank God my agent and editor have copious amounts of patience and faith in me.

The caveat: college. The semesters are ROUGH. Once midterms hit, I stop writing. But it doesn't mean that I stop thinking. By the time breaks come around, I'm so infected with the writing bug that I can spit out entire revisions in mere weeks. Last summer, I drafted the sequel to DOVE ARISING. Balancing everything is really hard, and the school-writing-school-writing discontinuity sometimes leaves me winded. But at least I never get writers block.

If you've read this far -- thanks for stopping by! Check out the enlightening #mywritingprocess of Kelly Fiore, who tagged me in. Here it is.  Ryan Dalton and Melissa Lenhardt are fellow taggees.

Happy reading and writing, everyone!

Winter Break Progress Report

This week (yep, the final 7 days before I head into the insanity that is spring semester), I turned in the DOVE ARISING copyedit and my revised draft of Book 2. I'm so relieved. Letting-steam-out-of-my-ears relieved.

The copyedit was the easier job by far. Penguin sent me a Word document checked for consistency (ie. making sure someone's shirt was black all the way through a scene) and grammar ("you put a comma in this kind of sentence earlier, so I'm going to add a comma here"). It was a relief knowing that two industry ninjas have my back with regard to embarrassing little foibles.

Working on that was really a kind of break from the Book 2 revision. These edits were BIG. I deleted entire chapters, changed characters' roles around, did more worldbuilding, etc. My editor at Writers House can tell you that I'm minimalist to a fault. My first drafts are tiny little things, almost novella size, with plot and characterization but little description. Then we start ripping things out and building them differently, and the books fill themselves out. I like to work on little details when the larger structure's been put in place.

My contract with Penguin, a pretty typical one, is such that I need to turn in an "acceptable" draft of Book 2 less than a month (!) after Book 1's publication date. Which means -- yup -- authors writing series are usually working on two or more books at once. It's not always a bad thing; if, say, ideas for Book 2 come up during finer edits of Book 1, we can change Book 1 to set up for those ideas in the sequel. 

In other news, I got jacket copy (blurb, author bio, summary: what's going to be printed on the -- er-- jacket). And cover art should be coming soon! 

Any writers out there? What does your editing process usually look like? I'm still new to this whole gig; I'd love to hear your stories.