THE ROMA SEVEN

Putting 85,000 words together for the first time, is something I am proud of.

“First time,” is the keywords there.

I am brand new to this. My grammar sucks, my word choices are sometimes  limited and a thesaurus becomes my bible. BUT I think I do have a story to tell, and all that other stuff can be fixed by a professional.

One of the steps in this process, is throwing some of the work in front of people. Friends and family being one. But the real hard task is throwing yourself to the wolves. Putting your work in front of the eyes of strangers, who are established writers. People who have been doing this for years, AND putting it in front of them publicly mind you. Then getting critiques publicly, which anyone can see. That is a really hard thing to do; but I do it.

It is always helpful, but honestly, it is sometimes discouraging. I’ve always been kind of oversensitive, so this does effect me when I see something that I felt I wrote very well, get ripped apart. But I need to deal with that and expect that. In a twisted sense I need that.

So I will continue throwing myself to the wolves.

When this is done I will self-publish it to Kindle and Create a space and the like. And if anyone gets a copy, I will have to deal with the reviews. So these critiques I subject myself to, is my training ground to thicken my skin.

All that being said, these people who do the critiques on my samples, are WRITERS. They are very technical. And at the end of the day, some of the stuff that they point out, a reader (who doesn’t write) probably won’t notice some of these things.

Maybe I should join a readers forum, and ask if they would critique some of my work.

Anyways, I don’t know who, if anyone reads this rambling. But I am growing to like this idea, and having a place to express what’s in my head, that doesn’t just stay in my head.

RR

Where do my characters names come from?

Let me tell you. After so much research on putting a novel together, I have learnt, there are many commonalities. But each writer has their own individual strategies on putting their story together also.

I mentioned on a previous post, if you read it. ( READ MY STUFF YO!), that I don’t do outlines. I write a word, and then let the story lead me.

But what about the names of my characters?

Here’s what I did. I came up with the story idea. Then picture the character’s faces. I pictured their actions. I pictured their motivations, flaws bla bla bla etc etc etc.

Putting a name to them was a challenge. So what I did was this.

I went down my Facebook list. I thought about people I knew in the past, even as far as peeps I just met once. Some that weren’t even on Facebook, rather their names were dropped in my head when I brainstormed.

A lot of the names in this story are names of people I know or knew. Never exactly though. Sometimes it is a combination of someone’s first name, and someone else’s last name. Sometimes it’s someone’s middle name. Sometimes I even take someone’s name and change it a bit, but it’s very similar to the person’s name.

I don’t do this with all my characters, but there are quite a few.

So once I finalize this book. Anyone I know, especially my high school friends, will now easily recognize some names of people.

In closing, I never chose these names, based on relationship, I chose them based on coolness.

Back to editing.

RR

I’m going to get used to this blogging thing. Two in one day. Don’t worry it will die down. This is just to let you know, I have cleaned up Chapter 1 and 2 to the point of showing it publicly.

Still needs real editing from someone more qualified, but you will get the point. There maybe grammar errors and such. But I’m not the best when it comes to grammar. At the same time I’m not THAT bad.

Going through a second time around is interesting. From start to finish I have grown when it comes to writing. And after doing just two chapters, I now realize, that second draft might be harder than the first. Me vs me is a tough match.

Anyways, if you look above by the about me, you will see the two columns that say chapter 1 and chapter 2. These will be the only chapters I disclose. So you may not get the idea where I’m going with this. I just wanted to share just a small piece.

Anyways let me know what you think. http://romavii.com/writing/chapters/

Is this where I’m suppose to say like my Facebook page, follow my blog, follow me on Twitter… I actually don’t even use twitter but I have an account. And I think this blog site updates it for me. Maybe one day I will look at my twitter account.

RR

Since I was a kid I always liked to write. It was never something a lot of people knew. Back then though, it was mainly poetry and maybe a few very short little stories.

It was probably around 15 years ago that I decided that I was going to write a screenplay. Just for fun. I got books on how to write this and that. I used the internet for researching the how to’s.

Outline, outline, outline! Know your characters! Write their bio’s!

This is what I learned. From that screenplay to every novel I attempted writing this is what I would do. Learn different techniques to outline the damn book. Guess what? I only ever started and quit at the outline.

The time I spent on these stupid outlines, I could have been writing actual chapters.

Then in 2012, when I came up with “THE ROMA SEVEN”. I said screw the outlines, I’m just going to start putting the words on the paper and let the story take a life of it’s own. It was working as I pounded out two or three chapters. Then for some reason I quit. But it always stayed in my head.

I still had those pages, so this past February, I continued almost everyday. As of August 13, 2015, I have spewed out a full story. FINALLY!

As I dive into the second draft, there is a ton of work to do. Once I clean up Chapter 1 a little bit, I will post it as a preview on here. It will still be considered a rough draft however, so bear with me.

RR