Between the slow (but dogged) pace of rewriting Bitter, my desire not to whine and the absence of good wordgeekery, interesting rejections or pretty much anything interesting to relate, there's been a dearth of recent entries.
So, I'll just leave you with this anecdote from the writing world:
The Difference Between Story and Plot
story: The king died, and the queen died.
plot: The king died, and then the queen died of grief.
Personally, I think the anecdote has plot and story mixed up, but you know. Semantics.
M'ris talks about 6th grade and the literary games she used to play.
She had much more accommodating friends than I did. Or maybe she was just better at making friends, which would be true. With my mom working nights a lot, I never really even considered sleepovers and such-like an option until she stopped.
My friends--they were good ones. We played a few literary games, mostly the one where I wrote the satiric tragi-comedy of our lives called "Sons of Chickens" during math class. But I don't think I could have ever gotten them to play a Secret Country-style game with me like M'ris did with her friends, which is how I imagine it being. For myself, it never occurred to me to re-enact books. Perhaps because I had no partners. Perhaps because I wanted things to be more real than that.
I made maps, mostly. I made a map of the backyard and where the portals to other worlds were (there were a few). I made maps of the woods that are now housing developments and named things in Anne of Green Gables style: Dryad's Bubble, Marshy Meadow, the Young Firs. Always so busy exploring and world-building that I never really got around to acting things out. Only with the distance of time can I see the story was there all along. The girl, the dog, the woods. Always the book in my pocket--and sometimes I didn't even know what I was fleeing, to go lie under the Young Firs and imagine that cold, damp pine needles in fact make a comfortable bed.
I feel like there is more to say; I'm merely uncertain of how to say it...
The Wings of the Falcon by Cynthia Voigt (26) (re-read n+1)
I think I mentioned at some point (somewhere) that I thought Oriel is a psychopath of sorts (or maybe a sociopath?). And re-reading this didn't fully destroy that illusion, except that he does have a conscience, it's just external and comes in the form of Griff.
But that's a really simplistic view of a very complex process. You can see Oriel becoming more and more Griff-like throughout the book. The beautiful thing is that Griff doesn't become more Oriel-like. I could make a big essay about it, in fact, using examples from the text, but I'm pretty sure I'm right, and it's nearly 1AM, and you're going to have to take my word for it.
What leapt out at me this time was the Christ-metaphor. Griff is Peter, the disciple who carries on with the message afterwards. The beauty of this metaphor is that Griff gives Oriel his Christ-like qualities (the ability maybe, but the desire, certainly, to put an end to bloodshed and killing) to begin with. And if you take it to the next level, it says (to me) that Christ learned compassion from humanity, and then returned it a thousand-fold. Oriel learned compassion and mercy from Griff, and returned it mulitiplied, likewise.
It's beautiful, read that way. That way only works at the metaphorical level, however; neither Oriel nor Griff is not superhuman or divine. Griff is Burl from Jackaroo: another "man who sees." Voigt used the notion of the "man who sees" to good effect in Jackaroo: that's how Gwyn decides to marry, because Gwyn is also a woman who sees, though her journey to that place is much rockier. On Fortune's Wheel suffers (if it suffers) because it takes until the last few chapters for either of the main characters to develop the trait displayed by Burl and Griff. (And, just to bring the final book of the series in, I believe the eponymous Elske is a woman who sees from the beginning, like Burl and Griff.)
As usual, the first half of the book is nearly too painful to read. The hopelessness and unsettledness of Griff and Oriel's lives is difficult. There is child abuse, torture, rape (of minor characters, but rape nonetheless) and enslavement to contend with. I never feel like I can breathe until they get over the mountains and meet Beryl. Even then, I know what's coming... though my first time through the book, I was taken entirely by surprise.
The point-of-view shift is abrupt, necessary and masterfully done, and if I didn't trust Voigt from the first two books in the series (and the rest of her opus), I'd have serious problems with it. I hear stories about people picking this book up first out of all Voigt's work, and I nearly shriek with terror at the news.
And what lies prior to the POV shift just makes me cry. Every single time.
I'd like it noted I'm on my second copy of this book. I found a hardcover, and I'm not looking back--paperbacks of this series just do not hold up to constant reading. I am on very few second copies of many works--McKinley's The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown, and I need a new copy of Beauty; and thank goodness I started with the hardback versions of Smith's Court Duel and Crown Duel, because the paperback omnibus of the 2 which is called Crown Duel isn't going to hold up forever with repeated pawings and loanings. (I also need a new copy of Bradshaw's The Beacon at Alexandria, and I'll note that I've always owned the hardback of that.) A few others, as well. But I just wanted to mention what kind of company the Kingdom series keeps on my bookshelves.
I spent about twenty minutes at Write Club agonizing over word choice in The Bitter Road, specifically for Lord Dogwood's title. He was the Lord Chancellor when I wrote the first draft.
With this editing pass, it was very much time to get more careful in word choice. Everyone in the Mountain Kingdom has solid names: either relating to objects, or well-known concepts. Animals: Kestrel, Tiger, Merlin. (Birds outweigh mammals, I just realized.) Plants: Thistle, Rue, Ivy (and then there's the Lady of Apples, who doesn't seem to have a first name, in part because I can't find any good heirloom apple varieties that are obviously apples. Russet, maybe--that's the best I've got.) Metals and stones, though those are reserved for magic workers: Silver, Copper, etc. And, well. The King--which is his job, and he gets the name, because there's only one King at a time. Justice, who's parents, I think, may have been a bit rebellious, has the most abstract name, but it's a possible name in my world, and fits him well. Everything he does, after all, is motivated by his concept of justice. His, and his alone.
There is, in fact, only one smeerp in the book. One made-up word. (There are a few person-names which are not literal, but they are River Marchers on a diplomatic mission to the court of the Mountain King, and they're there for contrast and also as plot points.) The smeerp (and technically, it's not...) is Tair (which is just a slip of the tongue away from "Sir" and yes, they are essentially knights... knights with strange motivations and stranger loyalties). The Tair are Tair. Brook even points it out, once...
"You walk a dangerous line," Iain said. "The Tair are the keepers of these mountains, and the guardians of the ways here."
"Yes, you guard against the spread of history," Brook said. "What does the word Tair even mean?"
Kestrel said, "I don't understand your question. Tair is just Tair."
Brook shook her head. "No. It's not a Mountain Kingdom word. All our titles and names mean something. They have another use. We call our ruler the King, and we know what that means. We have a bird called the kingfisher, we have a plant called king's crown. We use it in stories: the Mountain eagle is the king of birds, the salmon is the king of fish. So, I ask you: what's a Tair?"
"Let's not distract ourselves from this task," Tair Iain said.
One of my first readers got irritated with the Tair at this point for shutting Brook's question down, but hey. There were circumstances. And secrets.
So, anyway. Lord Chancellor Dogwood. I felt that Chancellor was awfully French. I'm trying to find nice, Anglo-Saxon-rooted words for anything that's not conceptually solid (Justice, again, the exception, since I'm sure that's French--but even so, I think most people have conceptions of justice that feel pretty concrete to them, whether it's a mental image of a gavel or a court-room or just the memory of the first time they wailed to their parents: "That's not fair!"). Anglo-Saxon because I have this illusion that such words feel more solid, more primal. They tend to be shorter words with harder sounds; less Latinate all around.
Chancellor was out.
I dithered. Out loud. Thankfully, Write Club was kind. And suggested steward, which I poo-pooed until Lou threatened to get at dictionary. So, I went to look, and yeah. Ste from stig (the dictionary claimed) meaning house or hall in OE, and ward meaning guardian. A word with Anglo-Saxon origins, fitting thusly my criteria.
And tonight I've pulled out my OE books, and Barney's Word-Hoard has a lovely paragraph with all the OE words deriving from the Indo-European root *sta-. It has a lot to do with "stay" and "stand," actually, and places where one stands in battle as well as to do military service. And hey. A King's court is a great place to stand to do military service, and who's in charge of the court? The steward.
At one point Eric said, "This is an occasion where Tolkein works for you, because folks know the Steward of Gondor." When he first said it, I didn't want Tolkein to be working for me; I wanted to stand on my own. I'd already had to unname a character the White Witch because I felt it was too Tolkein-esque. But later, I realized Tolkein is the Imperial Jedi Master of Old English linguistics, and if steward was his choice, then, by the rules I set out above, it should be mine as well.
And that went on way, way longer than it should have.
Got a rejection from "Writers of the Future" that said I placed in the quarter-finals. Which led to about an hour of scratching my head wondering what a quarter-final was. Especially since "quarter" appeared in the same sentence twice.
Then I decided to get over it, and get on with the whole Bitter Road thing. There's nothing quite like medium-grade encouraging rejection to galvanize the processes...
I entered paper edits for a mere half-chapter last night on The Bitter Road.
Drat!
Must work faster.
Must also remember to print stories out and send them.
Oh, the slackage.
I'd say life was interfering--well, it is--but it's not good life, and it's not during my writing time. Work is imploding from outside forces. Everyone is freaking out about the new library management system. The irony here is that my boss is not freaking out--and neither am I--so you'd think I'd be implosion-impact free.
Not the case.
Thanks to Bookselling This Week, thank goodness, finally had some news about the Ursula Nordstrom Fiction Contest. Sarah Holmes won with Letters from Rapunzel. I look forward to reading it.
Interestingly, there were only 300 entries. (Doesn't seem like that many.)
Less interestingly, I still don't have an actual rejection in hand.
Ooh, look: press release. That's what I found when attempting to find out of Sarah Holmes has a home on the web.
"Taboos are responsible for the loss of some words. Words for death adn dying, for example, are often replaced by euphemisms, which themselves become tainted by their meanings and are in turn replaced by other words or euphemisms. OE [Old English] had an extremely commen verb, gewitan, meaning "to go away." By late OE, it had become a common euphemism for "to die." The ultimate loss of gewitan from the language is probably the result of its unpleasant associations with death."
--The Biography of the English Language by C.M. Millward, p. 126
That's a whole story in and of itself. The death of a word caused by the word meaning "death."
Where did my entry from yesterday go? I posted one about all the things I'd done this week! Crud.
Oh, well. Here's a reading quiz borrowed from Sherwood Smith. Hopefully someone will answer it.
1. Name a book you love no matter what anyone says.
2. Name a book you loathe no matter what anyone says.
3. Name a book you think is undeservedly obscure.
4. Name a book you think is undeservedly famous.
5. Name a book you think you ought to read.
6. Name a book you think I ought to read.
All hail the end of fraught. I went to Borders tonight to avoid sitting home and stumped, and managed to pound out the 100 necessary words to make Chapter 1 work for me.
For me, yes; not for everyone, but for me.
Then, I tweaked a bunch of stuff, and then I settled it away and wrote about 500 words on a new short, which may well work out nicely.
I can diagnose the problems of the first, second and third chapters of Bitter Road, structure-wise, but only in person. It takes two hands and a bunch of expressions that don't translate over the internet.
I diagnosed 'em for about an hour, possibly 2, before I went over to the Young Adult section of Borders, picked 10 books I knew fairly well and certainly loved, and brought them back for a semi-serious study of their first chapters. Diagnosis? Ok, maybe my first chapter doesn't have to be perfect--it just has to be engaging.
I mean, The Blue Sword starts off with orange trees, and Corlath doesn't even show up until chapter 2, and not until the end. Crown Duel's first chapter is composed of lots of little scenes, and you don't quite know where they're going--and there's a prologue, though it's brief. Sabriel's prologue is stultifying long, and the first chapter is nearly unbearable. Wrinkle in Time might be the most credible first chapter of the ones I picked up, but it's almost too long. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld's is definitely too long, though it ends at just the right point. Alanna: The First Adventure had a first chapter that was much better than I remembered, but that's not saying much. I think I had a few more, but I can't really remember them.
Anyway, at one point I was thinking, "Flawed first chapters, or even mediocre ones, do not mean that the book is bad. Or unreadable. Or unengaging. Or that people can't stand the first chapter, even." There are other things that work, other things than structure that carry the reader through. Arguably, more important things. Like pacing, writing, the hook, the characters, the conflict.
And yet...
I just don't know what to do. The structure is all wrong. And I've exhausted the easy options. The only ones left are so not easy that they may be nearly pointless. I don't know anymore.
Well, of a sort. I finished with my paper edits of Brook/The Bitter Road.
Oh, I like it so much. I hope that's not a curse. I hope it's not bad, and I just can't tell.
So, I didn't have time tonight, what with wedding anniversary celebrations and all, to do any actual editing. But I sat down with Scene and Structure by Jack M. Bickham--which I've been picking through slowly--and thought I'd see how my scenes condense, conflict-wise.
I found the results somewhat humorous. Like Cliff Notes Theatre.
I have to say, it's helping me. In spite of the ridiculousness.
Scene 1
"Let me in."
"No."
"It's my house."
"No!"
"Why?"
"King's in there."
"So's my mom!"
"So?"
"So? MY HOUSE!"
"Peasant!"
"Snob!"
"Girl!"
"I'll shake my yarrow at you!"
Scene 2:
"King! What's wrong?"
"(gurgle)"
"Oh, no! Sorcerous attack! Don't die, King!"
"(gurgle)"
"Get the witch!"
"The witch is already dead!"
"Drat--sorcerous attack!"
"(gurgle)"
"We're losing him!"
"We have to call him out of it!"
"(stab!)"
"You woke me from the killing nightmare with pain..."
"Just doing my job."
"...ow."
I owe Lisa for singling out The Bitter Road as a title.
I owe Eric for the notion that the Angry Star is only one light-year off.
I owe Julie for keeping better track of the characters in her head than I do in mine.
Still ten chapters from the end of the paper revision, and days from finishing typing all the new crap in, and I'm getting maudlin because I feel the done-ness. It's like when you smell fall on the air in early August.
Fortunately, I've found that chapters sixteen through twenty are not too bad.
Unfortunately, I've found that there are a lot of chapters missing.
Fortunately, I don't think that it will be too hard to add them in...
Unfortunately, that definitely gives me a feeling of being back at square one. Drafting new chapters means first draft to me.
Neither fortunate or unfortunate: I've almost definitely decided to retitle this book The Bitter Road and name the series Brook's Journey. Even though I'm not sure I like how it being part of a series will potentially muck up the selling process.
And again, neither fortunate or unfortunate, I've pretty much figured I'm ready to start Brook II, whatever that will be called. Almost right away. When I say "ready," I mean that I know the plot and can see the beginning, the middle and the end in my head. I'm not ready ready. By any stretch.
May Battle
Oooh... I'm so late in posting this!
Didn't know:
Garrison finish - a finish in which the winner comes from behind
verbicide - deliberate distortion of the sense of a word
inspissate - to make thick
flyblown - impure, corrupt, seedy-- or infested with eggs of a blowfly
Did know:
ascetic, hackle, quixotic, decorous, Panglossian, clement, boondoggle, recalcitrant, flummox, melange, cognizable, facile, small beer, petulant, Milquetoast, beguile, lachrymose, salient, aplomb, mollycoddle, equanimity, demean, neophyte, Dunkirk, tantamount, confection, hoise.
What I find interesting is that I can't bring myself to throw any of these little slips of paper away. They have word histories on the backs. I always say, "I'm going to need that some day..."
Silly.
I've edited about a third of Brook's Journey.
I'm describing it as pruning a big topiary, and I have a three-foot radius to work in, and at best, I can ask other people standing further back if it's starting to look like a penguin or a peacock. And, sometimes I'm allowed to go into the house and look at the topiary from a window, and I can see that it's green from that distance, and does at least look like a bird.
It's funny. I'm both concerned by the lack of and impressed with the extent of my progress. But before the concern gets too big (and the impressed feeling doesn't have that danger, trust me), I remember where I am.
I decided to start writing seriously some time ago when I found this little notebook at the Island Bookstore in Mackinaw City. It's a heavily edited quote from Thoreau: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've always imagined." (The original seems to be: "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." The imperative was the inspiration, however.)
It was enough. My dream was not to be published (well, not the whole dream, nor the most important part). My dream was to sit at my desk and write. To live in my head and peer out the window of my eyes at the computer screen. It's not a dream a lot of people have, I don't think. I don't know that many people want to live in their heads the way I do. But it is my dream, and it was both so much easier and so much harder to get here than I expected.
How hard is it to sit down and write every day? Sitting down is easy. Holding a pen is easy. Every day takes effort. But writing, in the fashion that the dream demands: hard. Hard, but wonderful.
And I like where I am, living with those windows, dreaming that dream.
All five members were in attendance. I believe all five wrote. In between scaring away other cafe patrons.
I edited about two chapters, in between being incredibly fraught. Stupidly fraught, too. Something about "not knowing what I'm doing" and "being really boring."
It's middle-of-the-novel-itis, I think. I just didn't realize it comes back in the middle of editing, too.
Julie, Empress of All She Surveys, made the Minions a little haven in webspace, all privacy-locked and such, where we can submit and critique stories. After waiting a few days, and noting the lack of activity, I went and rounded up three stories that I'm having trouble with and posted them.
In re-reading "Huntswoman" and "Bound by Spells," I discovered they don't suck as bad as I thought. I'm getting better at pacing and the hook and conflict. I think. It certainly feels better, not like I'm relying on mere language to bring people through, which was not a reliable tactic in the least.
"Star and Galaxy," well, I still don't know.
Hopefully, ze Minions will tell me.
I'm on Chapter 9 of my Brook edit, btw, something that the subconscious is spurring on, knowing that the rejection will come soon. (In theory. Am I going to have to wait until July 1st? Or later? Come on. Now I'm having doubts that my manuscript even made it! What does it take to get a little rejection around here?)
Chapter 9 of 31, so I'm about a third done. I'm not finding much in the way of moronic mistakes--one or two total slips of grammar (referring to Justice as the Justice) and one complete logical problem (clearly stating in one chapter that Kestrel doesn't have the Hand, and then suggesting later that he does; not a major plot point though).
I have decided to completely rewrite Chapters 1 & 2, blind. Reread them one night and wake up and rewrite them the next morning. This should allow me to revisit them freshly and not have to stumble with cutting around the POV that is there and that remains inadequate to the task. I think.
And I have betas! Boy howdy do I have betas. Unexpected betas, in addition to the hoped-for beta of Mris. I just hope that they all respond at once, so I can quiver like a bowlful of gooseberry jam and sit like a lump on the couch for a week watching Angel on DVD and get over the harsh truths. And there'd better be harsh truths, dammit. I'm not sending this out and about for praise and larks and mere line edits (though line edits are nice, as are praise and larks). I'm sending it out and about to get better. So that friendly but impersonal eyes can reject it before completely impersonal eyes can. Yes. I'd best get cracking, hadn't I? If I want something to send them. If I want to be gooseberry jam for a week.
The subconscious knows. Far better than the conscious mind does, anyway. On Tuesday, June 15th will be a week away, and we're both (conscious and subconscious minds) stomping around looking darkly at the calendar and direly at every large bubble envelope we see.
Are they kidding? Are they not sending rejections out on this writing contest until the last week? Until after the winner is chosen and notified (June 15th)? Do they not have rolling rejections? And did no one on the internet enter the contest and blog about it? The Ursula Nordstrom Contest, that's what I'm talking about. I hear nothing. I've got my ear to the ground, and I've heard nothing--heard nothing about anyone entering it, let alone getting rejections yet.
Utter madness. Utterly maddening. They don't post the winner's name until July 1st, but I thought for sure that they'd be sending rejections before June 15th.
Well, they have a week. I'll probably get the rejection tomorrow, and boy won't my face be eggy.
Spent the day gardening, and have the sunburn on my arms and the dirt under my fingernails to show for it.
I feel that there's some grand lesson learned that I should share, but there's not. I've been gardening for years; when I was about nine or so, I asked my grandmother for a patch of earth, just like the kids in The Secret Garden, and made a go of it. I learned slowly and without overbearing supervision, but not through trial and error either. By high school, I had convinced my mom--who had never liked to garden, for she considered it subsistence-level work (the joy of being raised on a farm)--to let me have an herb garden out back, and I worked in it every morning before school.
I've not been so diligent in the years I've lived with Dann, but I've felt a return to the old ways recently. Perhaps it's something that goes hand in hand with writing. I was excessively productive in high school, both writing and gardening. Maybe it's all part and parcel of having returned to who I think I truly am.
Ok. Maybe there was a lesson in it after all.
I was struck by a desire to work on Brook today so intense that I was salivating. So, now my food and writing motivators are mixed up. Great.
It's not nearly so intense now, after finishing work, taking a nap and eating dinner, but as 8PM starts go, I'm pretty chipper. I hope to get in at least four hours of work tonight on various projects--filling in the blanks of editing boredom with something from The Lists.
And if The Lists won't do, why there are half a dozen novel projects to outline and a half dozen other to start from outlines and thirty or forty to start jotting down more concrete notes. And if that won't do, I have non-sequential By Right of Conquest to do... and...
I'm never going to finish half of what's in my head. I know some people find that sort of knowledge reassuring. I'm not sure how I rate it.
Oh, The Lists. Why not?
Rewrite Shorts List:
Bound by Spells (fat is a feminist issue + vampires)
The Paradise Covenant (space opera + therapy)
The Roman and the Regency (time travel romance)
The Subletter of my Subletter (ridiculously bad pun sci-fi)
Finish Shorts List:
Reclamation (time travel + biowarfare)
Alloy of Optimism (gay marriage + bioengineering)
Untitled Letter Story (time travel + potential insanity)
The Death Office (religious and family politics on a distant planet)
Unadilla Apocalypse Blues (small towns + apocalypse)
Love and the Ghost of Charlotte Bronte (uh... the title says it all)
Start Shorts List:
Majuscule (12th c. Renaissance + King Arthur + monks)
Untitled Psyche story (meta-sci-fi-fabling)
I managed to edit chapter 4 last night.
It will be easier once I get past the stuff that's older. I keep insisting that's true. The newer stuff, though hurriedly written, is better written. That has to be the case. I'm banking on it, right now.
I realized that Kestrel as a POV character is detached because he's detached. How do you write from a quiet character's POV without losing his essential mystery? Oh, I may very well have written myself into a corner with that one. I guess the thing to do is to make him so very much more mysterious to Brook, so that there's at least conflict between who he really is and who she thinks he is. That probably means a lot more work. I'm going to add it to the list of things to look at after this next pass, possibly in the pass after that one.
Right now I'm tightening language and structure. That's all I can really focus on at one time. Next pass, I'll be looking at units of conflict and heightening tension. I guess that Kestrel/Brook conflict would fit in with that ok. The pass after that? Should be the one where first readers (or is it second readers at this point) report back.
So far, for first readers, I have Paula, Melinda, Steph, Kayla, and possibly Eric, Lisa and Julie. While that's probably enough, I guess I'd like someone besides Paula who doesn't know me in person. As Julie says, "Sometimes I can just hear you in my head, explaining what you've written." You see how that might be a detriment to the process? There are no agents or editors who have the dubious benefit of having my voice in their heads.
Meaning, volunteers welcome. If you don't know me personally, anyway.
After a weekend of gardening and cheese and croquet and feeling that I was coming down with something, I came down with something.
But this (being home, sick) allowed me to turn my attentions the galleys for "Reparations," which bequeathed unto me a certain simple-minded delight I hope doesn't go away when and if I'm a jaded old writer.
Yep. There was a little squee in getting the galleys, and a little more when Jay Lake wrote the galley group at large back to say that he was traveling and wouldn't get to them today. Yes. Squee from getting a group email on the collegial level from Jay Lake. I'm not sure if this means good or bad things about me. It probably doesn't mean anything at all...
Ah, well. I've played so many other aspects of my life on the reserved side. It was time to be a little goofy out where people could see me.
Really, I meant to just sign on and write: "Reparations" will be up soon.
Because, after all, I'm rewriting, and shouldn't stop to do anything, squee or otherwise. (1)
I'm even sorta thinking of putting a big sign on the office door that says something to that effect, not that my husband has even looked like he was going to come bother me.
I sooo digress.
(1) Is it bad that I'm really, seriously thinking about putting slashy subtext between Kestrel and Justice, just to please an as-yet unearned bank of fans? It's just a little slashy subtext, hardly there at all. And the thought mostly brought up the fact that Kestrel and Justice don't really have a scene together later in the book, which is something I need to remedy anyway.
This thought completely brought to you by Write Club, who've been taking turns mocking me about the potential fandom for my book for about a month now.
I suppose this is why you have friends...