Here's my current blurb:

All Simi wants is to convince her irresponsible, widowed brother-in-law to marry her so she can keep a closer eye on her young nephew. What could be more reasonable? His disinterest, and the disapproval of her river-dwelling village, are little deterrent for her. Her remaining sister Zera disapproves too, but Simi knows what needs to be done.

But when she, Zera, and their nephew end up lost on the river, Simi quickly has more than her family's well-being to worry about. A chance meeting with an old love--and an argument with him that breaks a glass mage's vase--gets the pair a spell that seems, to Simi, an awful lot like a curse.

The book's working title is Simi. It's a placeholder, and won't be the final title. Some titles I'm considering:
Smoke on the Glass
Flame on the River
In Which I Steal a House
I Steal My Family
A Thread in the Ashes
Woven in the Ashes
Woven From Ash
Mirror of Ash
Mirror of Pain
Glass and Smoke
A Broken Loom
Broken Tethers
Loom Broken
Tethers Broken
Two Houses Gone
Threads of Water and Fire
Night River
Threads of Night and Fire
Count the Passing Gardens
Count the River Gardens
Pain and Other Magic

There are a few top contenders in the list, but it's hard to find the balance of cool sounding name vs. imagery vs. importance in the story vs. the right mood/feel. Beyond the Mountain's title has a double meaning--in that book, the mountain is the symbol of the royal house. The deposed empress travels beyond the mountain, while struggling to figure out who she is beyond her lost royal-ness. In a scene where she passes the mountain, she learns something that makes her question whether she can escape her old self at all.

I want a similar title for this book, one that's both a literal and figurative image from the story, and that sounds intriguing without being misleading. For instance, the ones with “pain” in them make the book sound darker than it is. While it’s not a lighthearted romp, it’s also not that dark. No one dies, and there aren’t even cruel characters.

Last night I went to a New Year’s Eve party for the first time in 8 years. We played several games, including Quelf. I hadn’t played it in several years, but it’s a great game. From 10 through midnight, we streamed the ball dropping, except the part where the ball actually drops, which came 1m 40s after the WiFi gave up.

Then I went to bed, and I’ve started off 2018 by sleeping in till 8:45. Only my dog’s outdoor needs keep me from sleeping longer. Tomorrow it’s back to a 6:30 alarm.

So now it’s 2018. I’ve never made a New Year’s resolution before. A lot of people resolve to eat less, diet more, work out so many times a week, or read so many books, but stereotypically they fail by February. But I’ve decided a theme for 2018, and a goal for 2018, and a month-long resolution.

My theme: I apologize a lot. I try not to be an inconvenience to anyone. I drive faster when someone tailgates me. I try to be in the way as little as possible. Recently at the fabric store, there was 1 cashier and the line was getting 4 or 5 customers long. The woman checking out was at the counter a few minutes while the cashier rang up her fabric and activated several gift cards. It was slow. The customer turned to everyone else in the line and said, “Sorry!” She had no need to apologize. It’s a courtesy. But it’s like an admission that by shopping in a public shopping place and checking out in the checkout line, she’s an inconvenience.

So 2018 will be my year of not apologizing. I’ll still apologize for mistakes, I’ll say “excuse me” if I have to walk through someone’s conversation. But I won’t apologize for a slow checkout, I won’t apologize for driving a speed I’m comfortable with, I won’t apologize for your impatience, I won’t actively try to take up as little space in the world as possible.

Okay, so maybe I will sometimes. And when I don’t I’ll feel rude. But I’ll make an effort. Because I’m allowed to be right. I’m allowed to drive a safe speed. I’m allowed to exist with physical mass and use time to do tasks.

My 2018 goal: Publish both my works in progress. Beyond the Mountain needs another round or 2 of revisions and beta reading, then editing and all the publication steps. My other book (called Simi for now) isn’t as far along, but I’m thinking it needs less work.

My January resolution: Write every day for at least 2 pomodoro timers.

Beyond the Mountain has now been read and returned with feedback by 3 beta readers. One of them is related to me, and pretty easy to please as far as books go, so her comments were more encouraging. The other two betas’ comments were less encouraging.

Not that the readers were discouraging. But as I realized the problems my book has, I of course am very discouraged. There are large sections where little interesting happens. I can condense these parts, but it will throw the pacing off, not to mention making the novel much shorter. To counteract the condensing, I’ll need to add/expand other sections. That’s the part that has me staring at the screen doing nothing.

This week I’ve been trying to back up the beginning—which means writing a new scene. I know what I want to happen in this scene, yet words don’t come. In 6 days I managed 1,000 words. Yesterday I managed another 800 words, by purposefully making them garbage. For example:

National Novel Writing Month is in November. The goal is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. I've never participated, but I did my own Novel Writing Month in September. I drafted my book from start to finish in 53,456 words in 30 days. I later went back through and added a few details and fleshed out skimpy scenes,  and counted that as still the first draft, so in the end the draft was about 60,000. Decent for a first draft. My target for the book is about 80,000. (It has no title yet. The placeholder title is Simi.)

It helped that I outlined the book in August. I wouldn't succeed as a pantser. I wouldn't come up with anything decent. When I wrote Beyond the Mountain I knew the whole story beforehand, but didn't know what I was doing, and pantsed my way through it. The pantsed parts weren't so great. For Simi, I outlined as much as I could beforehand. I highly recommend Janice Hardy's Outlining Your Novel. She has you brainstorm a lot of aspects of your story, and the exercises have you write a lot down so you can see where you have gaps. (I also tried Libbie Hawker's Take Off Your Pants. It seemed okay for writers who already have a pretty good idea of their plot, but it doesn't take you through any brainstorming. I'll give it one more try on my next book.)

It also helped that I was on a time constraint. For Beyond the Mountain, I researched as I wrote, and it took me about 8 months to write the first draft. For Simi I wrote first, and now I need to do a bit of research to fact check and add setting details. I hope doing it this way won't take as long. Rather than researching everything and seeing what I can fit into the book, I'll be researching only the things I need to know.

Now comes revisions. There are a lot of books and websites dedicated to plot, structure, character arcs, writing fast, letting your first draft be sloppy, theme, and writing style. But I haven't seen many on revision. Revision for me usually means staring at the screen and knowing what my problem is, but not knowing how to fix it. And without a time constraint (why is there no NaNoRevMo?) it's easy to procastinate. Fortunately Simi had a pretty clean first draft, so that's a step forward already.

I'm getting closer to publishable-ness with Beyond the Mountain as well. I've had one round  of beta readers, and I know where it needs work. Now to figure out what to do about that.

"Write what you know."

That's the advice a lot of beginning writers hear. But if we just wrote what we knew, our characters would too often have our hobbies, live in our hometowns, and never do things we haven't experienced. Writing what you know limits fantasy, horror, science fiction, even historical fiction if we're not historians. It restricts most of us us from writing about doctors, lawyers, mental illnesses, horses, Peru, farmers, being rich, living in poverty... you get the idea.

(But at least it lets you write a choking-on-swamp-water scene based on the time you almost drowned on Dr Pepper at Qdoba because someone told a fart story.)

So my modification of this advice is:

"Write what you know. If you don't know it, learn it."

And to learn, we research. Sometimes we have to research very specific topics or questions that don't always get us answers. Sometimes we spend an hour looking up  names for grey, because we've already used ash and hematite, and the characters have never seen steel or concrete to compare a color to. And sometimes, we make weird searches and hope no one sees in our browser history that we Googled "man shave face how often."

So in the name of getting details right in my fiction, here are some searches I've made while writing Beyond the Mountain, of varying levels of weirdness. Not all of them even made it into the later drafts of the book.

1. stabbed knife through hand
2. banana beer
3. reproduction rate of cows
4. cape otter femur size
   
5. "sam hill" synonyms
6. do fish stink when you catch them
7. foods that start with sh
8. stitches and scabs
   
9. rammed earth speed by hand
10. carved wooden spoons ergonomic