Here are some things I've learned this month:
1) It is much easier to work out the problems in a completed manuscript than an incomplete one.
2) Three years is really enough time to have thought through all the problems of character, world-building, and plot of a single novel.
3) I never have this feeling of smooth pleasantness when rewriting a short story. Short stories are too cramped. Every word counts. You can't just decide to make your theme more apparent by introducing a sub-plot. You can't just add words whenever you want. I think I am a writer-claustrophobe. I can't imagine having this much fun rewriting a short story. I've gone back to short stories three years later, too, and I can say, with honesty, that it's even less fun than rewriting after a month.
Anyway. Just thought I'd share with you my highly subjective recent experiences with novel-writing. Er. Re-writing.
I don't know if it's Mur Lafferty's familiar Southern accent* that swayed me, or her sweet reason, but her recent podcast about choosing to shelve her first novel really spoke to me.
I'm not quite to the same point yet on my first novel, but I'm 75% there. I know I can make it better than it is. I don't believe I can make it good enough to sell. I think I'd be better served by writing another novel and then taking a stab at rewriting The Bitter Road. It's just a matter of convincing myself that it's really okay to revise my plan yet again, since that makes me feel... flighty. On the other hand, recent successes have led me to think that maybe it's okay to be flightly as long as I'm getting results.
There are so many good things in The Bitter Road, and so many good things to add to it, but I may have to face facts: there aren't enough good things in it. I don't think it's the kind of book I'd have wanted to read when I was eleven. But I don't think it's an issue of I don't know how to do such a thing--it's just that I didn't manage it on the first time through. The plot is too constrained by being the first book in a trilogy, perhaps, and when the time comes to rewrite it, maybe I can bust out* of that mindset.
I don't know. I do think I'll declare this my self-indulgent month and think about Brook and her road after I get back from Montana--at the earliest.
Thanks for sticking with the angst-pangs of the first novel--if you've read this far.
* It's very clearly a North Carolinian accent, the kind of educated Southern accent I grew up with that sounds nothing at all like any kind of Southern accent I've ever heard anyone pretend to do. Even Andy Griffith's NC accent doesn't sound quite right to me--too much mountain twang, I guess?--but Mur's is like "pretend you're back in Durham." Soothing, after twelve years of hard Midwestern nasals, many of which insultingly come from my own sinuses now.
** Another North Carolina memory: the president of Food Lion walking through a green house on a TV commercial and saying "Spring is bustin' out all over!" and my 8th grade grammar teacher freaking out about it in class.
I took the day off to get a passle of writing done. The further I get into the manuscript, the more I end up fiddling with Chapter One. I'm not sure it's bad--it leads to things like foreshadowing and chock-a-block telling details, and I think Chapter One is currently the strongest Chapter One I've ever managed to produce, but I'm sick of Chapter One now and would like to just keep going with the rest of the damn book! I'm only one quarter done with the rewrite!
I have to leave for an appointment in about twenty minutes. When I come back, I'm hoping for an extremely productive afternoon in which I ignore Chapter One entirely.
Allow me to introduce a split in the writing category:
writing progress, and
writing process
Progress will be how much I've written. Process will be how I got there. If I ever find myself bored again, I will go back and try to index previous entries accordingly.
That information, btw, would be categorized under blogging, for lack of a better term, though technically, it should be something like "blogging administration."
But there is such a thing as picking too many nits.
Anyway, in honor of Monday, I bring you a return of the Weekly Update, below.
Last week (the last two weeks, really), I worked feverishly on outlining By Right of Conquest. I also finished "Sticks and Bones" and sent it out... aaaand, just today, got the rejection from JJA.
This week, I plan to begin writing BRC--my schedule is 5,000 words a week--and assemble all my notes for The Bitter Road. I have much variety in my received notes on that book: some people liked it, some people didn't. Some people think it just needs a polish, some people think it needs major overhaulage. At the moment, I side with the major overhaulage camp.
Sad to say, I may have to consider The Bitter Road a lost cause, as is. It may very well need to be rewritten from scratch, without reference to the original manuscript, and with a singular eye towards following a logical chain of events with regards to the plot, and also controlling tone and character throughout. You know, like a book should be written. Like I'm trying to do with the new one. But we'll see. My work on the fourth draft will be dogged, persistent and low-key. I'm hoping it will be one of those happy moments when I realize "hey, I'm done!" instead of a big roller-coaster ride of fraught and overwroughtness.
I mean, that's what the current book is for.
This week, I also plan to make serious headway on at least one short story. It would be lovely to finish one--but not until after my 5k.
Whilst editing this thing (the novel), I ran into myself using bedcovers--and then switching to eiderdown a paragraph later.
Now... "bedcovers" is weak. There's really no question of its weakness. It is a catch-all word, and it works well enough to describe the fact that there's stuff on the bed, stuff that may even be flat and comfy, and it even gets around a lot of issues of cultural assumption...
I've spent ghastly amounts of effort trying to nail words to the wall in this book--effort that is quite possibly unnecessary, but functions at least as a sort of on-topic form of cat-waxing. I'm trying to use the most primary, basic words for certain concepts, to get to the linguistic knee-jerk reaction of my readers, to achieve a feeling of almost organic language. This is most important to me in names: the names of nearly everyone in the culture I'm writing about are that of concrete objects, ordinary items in many cases--plants, animals, metals. (There's a whole thing about naming conventions in my world, and it's important. This is not the cat-waxing part.)
I've done this with varying degrees of success. (I'm definitely at the point in this whole thing where I'm almost positive that a) this novel will never draw anyone in past the first page, and b) even if anyone ever reads this besides my faithful chica Julie, no one will get what I'm doing, or, as with so many things I've overdone in my life, certainly think I've spent too much time on an unimportant thing.
Oh, dear. That sounded like whining. I'm not fraught with misery, I'm not!
(cough)
Anyway. Concrete names. Main characters: Brook and Kestrel, for example. Secondary characters including Thistle, Ivy, Silver, Tansy, etc. Distinctive lack of smeerping names in this culture. Yadda, yadda. I can explain why, but maybe that's another entry for another time.
Concrete names, and concrete concepts. I formed the governmental structure for this world out of an Anglo-Saxon cloth, because I felt that, culturally, for Americans, a simple structure of a King and some retainers holding courts that relied on a common law system might evoke some feeling of distant, organic recognition. We learn about kings and kingdoms in kindergarten--granted, we learn that they somehow have something to do with religious persecution and make Pilgrims land on rocks and then there's a Yankee Doodle War (yep, that's my diatribe about our educational system)--and it's hard to avoid the fact that our government was built on making sense out of a legacy of monarchy. So much of our law being based on English common law makes the society that gave birth to English common law feel organic. Old English feels organic, too, and I'm hardly the first person to have noted that. For the past four hundred years, English speakers have been bemoaning high-falutin', fanciful, scholarly, Latinate words entering the English language... ok, maybe not so much in our lifetimes... but the sense that the first words are rougher, simpler, more basic remains.
Part of it could be leftover resentment from the Norman Conquest, for all I know, sent over in a cultural packet on the Mayflower to distribute to everyone who is descended linguistically from the English at the very least. Part of it could be that Anglo-Saxon words, on the whole, feel short--the ones we have left, anyway. Part of it could be that the left-over Anglo-Saxon words in our language salad are the earthier ones, the ones not appropriate for chivalric French conquerers... I don't know. I could go on all night. I practically have. Time to get back to quilt.
Entry: quilt
Function: noun
Definition: bed covering
Synonyms: batt, bedspread, blanket, comforter, counterpane, cover, coverlet, down, duvet, eiderdown, pad, patchwork, pouf, puff
Roget's New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.0.5)
Since I'd been striving for Anglo-Saxon roots in this book, I was fairly attracted to eiderdown. It has the flavor of the North to it. Well, no kidding--it's originally from the Icelandic (so the OED tells me) (sidenote about Icelandic: this one time, at bandcamp... I mean, this one time, I went to see what I thought was a play, and it turned out to be an edda. In the original Icelandic. Only some of it was supertitled, not all of it. While, in theory, this would be great fun, I had recently broken my talebone, and the staging was very strange, and I was in an altered state somewhere between pain and agitation and just zoning out because the whole thing was so weird. (Are there really multi-breasted blue men in Icelandic legend? Anyone? With giant rhino horns on their heads and long, dagger-like fingernails? I think I've mentioned this before, actually... Regardless, Icelandic apparently has enough in common with English that you can pick a few words out, here and there, hither and yon... thank you, Vikings. Thank you, Danelaw.)
So, superficially, eiderdown seemed like a winner. But it's not common enough, actually. I don't think I knew that word while growing up, or if I did, I associated it strictly with my grandparents, who also called the couch a davenport. And Icelandic words not used in the Ultra-Common Lexicon of Nowadays (can I trademark that? It acronyzes neatly: UCLoN) reek of Northness. And while I enjoy Northness, I am not writing a book about Northness right now. That's a different book, for me. This book is non-directional, unless the direction is up: it's a book about mountains.
Back to my bedcovers. Quilt strikes the biggest, most concrete chord on the synonym list, to me. Even though the OED insists that it's Old French in origin... But even if it is OF in origin, it's in the UCLoN (well, it's in mine), and serves my purposes best.
And that, yer honor, is how I managed to not start working on the book again until 9PM (though I did put in an hour already, earlier).
Brook abandoned the hex when she heard the voices of men in the forest.
The new first sentence, replacing:
"Brook was digging a hex at the riverbank when she heard the first hint of trouble.
The sounds of men.
Distant voices muttered, too scattered by the leafless birches to make out. There was nothing threatening about them, except that they shouldn't have been there."
...and about 200 other words.
I'm still not happy. As first sentences go, they both bite (the new one bites with less tetanus-like tenacity, but it's not good, let alone great).
I have at least one more draft left to get that darn opening sentence worked out--at least the month of November (if not also December). We'll just have to see what my subconscious comes up with. But I've been working on this story in one form or another since I was 16 (the truth comes out!)--and in it's various incarnations, I've never hit on The Great Opening Sentence.
(le sigh)
(Would le sigh be a good category for sorting some of my entries into, or what? It'd be shorthand for "almost pretentious melodrama that no one else on earth cares about.")
Write Club was productive. I worked on the first quarter of The Bitter Road. One more day, and the first quarter will be in good shape. I feel vaguely on track to have draft three in hand by Halloween.
I also wrote a pivotal paragraph for "Coming Due," and finally introduced the not-Polynesians in "The Lonesome Dark." I wouldn't be working on short stories at all in favor of the novel, but at the same time, I'm very quickly learning not to waste small bursts of inspiration on specific projects.
I've not done a goals schema in a while--in part because I never quite manage to really nail my specific goals, y'know? But I'd be super-happy if I managed to finish the two library stories ("Coming Due" and "The Library Seed"), the space opera of manners ("Wedding Dress...") and "The Lonesome Dark" by end of year. Think I could do a story a week in November? Me neither.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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...
I'm not sure how this editing thing is actually going. I have pages with no notes, and pages with every other word rearranged, excised or replaced. But no pages where paragraphs or scenes get reordered, so I tend to think: am I doing this right?
Which isn't just rhetorical, except that there's actually no one to ask. This is the solitary part of being a writer. People can judge the result; people can tell you how they do it; no one can tell you if you're doing it right.
I assume.
Heavily.
Julie combed through Chapter 2 for me, and I did Chapters 1 & 2 myself as well, and part of 3.
Of Brook, you see.
I have to get this girl a proper title, by the way. Brook's Journey is, at best, the title of the series. Or just a working title.
Anyway. I figured out how to tighten some of the POV, but Kestrel is still appallingly distant from me. Drat. I may just try to rewrite Chapter 2 from scratch and see what happens.
Thought up several new Brook scenes while weeding the herb garden.
Of course Brook is going to worry about what happens to her garden if they never go back to the Hat House.
Duh.
(grin) Don't mind me.
I poked gingerly at the sequel to "Reparations" last night (set in the same world, anyway). It's alternately calling itself "Reclamation" and something more clever that is written down somewhere I can't see from here. I re-read the first bit of it, and thought, "Yes! There, I have it, I have the plot--oops. It's gone again."
Bother.
So, fed up with the elusivity of "Reparations," I looked at "Antigone's" again, and it's proving equally elusive.
Yes, it's quite possible I'm Done With Short Stories For Now. I hope it won't be a long doneness. But on the other hand, I was Done With Novels for a while there, too, and you know. I'm over that.
And, and, I found a pretty piece of By Right of Conquest, which I showed to that novel's biggest fan, but he mostly just seemed flummoxed by it, since it was about a character I've never mentioned. Oops. But that's ok; it'll all make sense one day. It's only significant because it made me think, "Well, I know how to write some of it. Maybe I could just write around those areas I don't understand just yet." Non-sequentially. It's a thought. I'm not sure yet if I'm able to write non-sequentially, but why not give it a shot?
It's a thought. It might be a good summer side-project.
Actually, this whole dealing with elusive short stories is making me suspicious. I think it's probable that I'm about to (or just did) break through a plateau in the level of my writing, and I'm just... trying to deal with it.
Or maybe not. I might also be pretentious, and over-thinking it a bit.
Finally, Brook. I'm still distilling it, trying to figure out what to work on. Reading Sherwood Smith's philosophies avidly and turning over in my mind where I've been, where I'm going.
I realized that there's a point in Brook where people might think, "Gaugh! Message!" but ultimately, that was not my intent. Brook is blinded, both physically and clairvoyantly by a sorcerer, and has to deal with this; she regains physical sight, but not the other kind. It could be suspected that there's a Message in how she deals with this, but that was not my intention in the least. It's a plot point for the following books, as well as the thing which ultimately isolates her character from her peers. Yes, how she deals with it all is how I think people should deal with adversity, but that's not intended to be a Message, that's just the kind of people I want to write about.
Now, the fact that I spent all that time justifying myself, does that mean anything?
I absolutely must clean my office, and set a new writing schedule to go with my writing goals. Right now, there's no way to spread out and write at my desk. That's the other problem, you see; novel-writing (for me) has proven to be space intensive. Research books, book bible, notecards, notes, colored pens, all kinds of stuff. Tea or water. Space is necessary.
Rain has come. Every scent from the yard and garden is fighting its way in here. Lush. Yummy. The smell of green.
What's a little 3AM journal entry, between friends?
Yeah, I'm up. Writing. I can neither bring myself to give up or to let go. Not... just... yet.
Not when there's still something to say, and a way to say it better.
I can't figure out if I decided to pluck my eyebrows while thinking because it needs to be done or if I thought it would help keep me awake. Well, let's put it this way: the latter thought was not conscious. It seems to be working, though. My plot and eyebrows grow shapelier by the hour.
I wrote. A lot.
Brook's Journey is finished. About half of it is in second-draft stage, and ready to move to third, polishing draft stage. The other half is still in first-draft stage, and will have to skip draft two to go directly to draft three, but there's nothing I can do about that, eh?
207 manuscript pages. Just a little thing, kinda cute and floppy in size, the way a middle-reader book should be. Don't know about the rest of it, though, except that it's not cute and floppy in any other ways. May be too serious. May be a LOT too serious. We'll see. The whole middle-reader thing was kind of a fluke, anyway; when it comes back, it may go on to become something else.
Kayla has agreed to read it. That might be the most nerve-wracking part. An actual 9-year-old critiquing a book meant for her age range. (Funny aside: "If it's as long as Anne of Green Gables, forget it!" "No, no. It's just longer than any of your Lemony Snicket books." "Oh. That's ok, then.")
It's in Julie's hands now. I'm going to start inputting Lisa's notes tonight, and write the synopsis.
It'll be ready to go on Friday.
Sometimes it's disturbing to find out what we're capable of.
The site wanted to be down most of today, so no real writing update from me, as it's 10:53 and I'm struggling with the last chapter of Brook and fighting sleep all at the same time.
But yes, beyond my half-entry yesterday, the writing retreat was fabulous and refreshing, and productive. Two 4500 word days, and one 1200 word one. Not half bad.
In fact, almost all done.
Edited to add: finished at 11:54PM.
Lisa kindly read 2/3 of the work and gave me constructive criticism, in exactly the vein I needed (after all, no matter how necessary, instructing me to gut the work at this stage is not constructive).
More another time.
Very close to the end. Good retreat. Got through the worst attacks of being fraught with misery by having people shriek "miiiiiseryyyyyyyy" at me.
Love my lovely friends.
Brook's Journey may actually be... a reasonably good book.
Merely 1200 again last night. But I underestimated my wordcount, and as it turns out (less whatever I do tonight), I only need two 6,500 word days this weekend.
Noooo problem.
The plot clicks along. My broken out plot-conflict-tension sequences have found new ways of arranging themselves, finding new nooks and crannies to roost in rather than flying forward in straight lines--ie, some things have become foreshadowed, and others have become "found" instead of "contrived" in flavor.
I watched Elizabeth Bear's livejournal through the writing of Stratford Man, and now I think I understand the joy she felt every time she reported, "Hey! I know how to do this!"
Hey! I know how to do this!
Of course, it's still tempered by "Hey! I have no idea how to do this," but still.
In other writing news, F&SF has been holding onto "Souls on a String" for more than a week. It's not quite enough of a happening to get the rejectomancy coins out, but I find it interesting. Don't think I've had to wait longer than 9 days before, and we're working on 11 here. Probably just means it got lost in the mail. Bah. Stupid hopes. You go squish now.
Brook is blind for the next eight chapters.
(sigh)
I hope no one finds the plot too disingenous or contrived, but hell, that's always been my stumbling block while plotting. "Someone is going to think this is contrived, roll their eyes, and not enjoy it." I think this may be why gaming is detrimental to the writing process. My writing process, anyway.
Only 1500 words last night. Not good. I'd argue that they were a hard 1500 words, and that's true, but I only stopped because I was falling asleep at my computer. I could have gone to get tea or something, but I gave in and slept instead.
We also had a nice thunderstorm, and Merlin let me hold him for almost ten minutes--contentedly.
I'm trying to figure out my next step. I'm not writing nearly as quickly as I need to be to meet this ridiculous deadline. I have high hopes for this weekend--I only need two 8k days right now, and that's not counting what I might do tonight or Friday night. And I've had 8k days at the cottage* before, with my peeps around.
I also need to get this read, so I think on Friday I'll print out whatever I have done and see who's willing to read for me whilst at said cottage. Julie has already volunteered--maybe Lisa or Eric will fall prey to my fluttering lashes and entreating tone. And whatever bribery I can come up with. Perhaps chocolate-covered almonds.
* "The Cottage": Many folks in Michigan have a place they go to Up North that they call The Cottage. Sometimes it's a slowing disintegrating cabin in the middle of frickin' B.F.E., where you go to get drunk and THEN shoot at deer. Other times, it's a Lake Michigan beach house that sleeps 22 and has its own marina. Ya jes never know.
from Weaver's Michigan Accent Pronunciation Guide
Cottage in the familial lexicon while I was growing up meant my aunt's house on the Cedar River, a cold, fast-running trout-stream. At first it was a trailer-type thing, but later became a house, which in turn became a really cool house, all surrounded by cedar forest. Activities at the cottage usually involve endless days at the local swimming hole and/or tubing down the river over and over and over, and maybe going to visit the Aunt's Amish neighbors to buy eggs, or picking berries on another neighbor's 40-acre deer preserve--bucolic, rural things of a nearly Luddite nature.
Cottage in Dann's family lexicon is, always was, and always will be a hundred-year-old house built on the very edge of Gun Lake where much boating and swimming ensues. It has a much more urbanized/country-club feel to it, aided by the fact that there are something like 4 different boating experiences to choose from and the constant drone of jet-skis all weekend. Also, the TV, which is never off, whereas the TV at the other cottage is just so much furniture.
Cottage in my personal lexicon has come to mean Dann's cottage, and since my aunt now lives all year in her cottage, it has become an un-cottage, and now I call it the River. I'd prefer, in fact, to just call them the River and the Lake respectively, but I'm not that consistent.
Scribble, scribble, scribble.
I cut more than I wrote yesterday. The defecit makes me shaky. (By some definitions of shaky.) Fortunately, I had Julie for moral support--we went to Borders to escape March Madness at home, and wrote (while making fun of our fellow cafe dwellers, or maybe we just did that afterwards--young braggart and young appeaser on a first date, living up to their social models in an unattractive way--really, I'd expect better of the children of Ann Arbor).
From 2 until about 6:30. Phew. Then, came home and wrote some more. Until about 11. And there was about an hour of writing before 2.
The weather has been blustery and very March-like all weekend.
Perhaps that's the wind I mean in the title.
Perhaps it's something else. Dann has been gorging on inappropriate foodstuff all through the tourney. Enough said.
It rained hard in the night. We have the swamp in the backyard to prove it. I'm glad that (so far) that Michigan didn't pull the classic snow-on-the-first-day-of-Spring joke. Rain is perfectly acceptable. The thunderstorm was very nice, in fact.
I wrote about 2k on Brook last night, edited another 3k v. carefully, and skipped editing another 7k. I'm not displeased with this progress. While I do need to concentrate on adding more to the manuscript, and quickly, I think this rate of speed could very well work.
I know, intellectually, that writing books for younger readers is not easier. In fact, I spent many moments floundering for a 4th grade way of saying "diplomatically expressionless" last night. Trying to let the sophistication stay in the plotting, the emotion and not show through in the words, without sounding contrived or dumbed-down--yes. That's hard work. But it's work I think I can do.
But it feels easier anyway. The path through story is more linear. The sub-plots aren't as convoluted. I can go for the easier emotions, not because I think children feel less or anything idiotic like that, but because they don't (I didn't) spend as much time telling themselves how they should feel. Adults, maybe, tell them how they should feel, but I have managed to summon up my 12-year-old frustrations with adults just fine.
Dwinn is my hero; he talked me through a significant plot point for Brook's Journey tonight.
Why'd he do that, you ask?
Because I had this brief, wild thought that this contest would be the perfect thing for Brook.
The thought is looking even wilder, now, but at the same time, I have managed to plot out a tight 40-50k middle-reader book, 17k of which is already written. (The other 23k of Brook that already exists quite clearly goes in the next book.)
Yes, with a deadline of April 15th, I'm probably fooling myself into thinking I can write the rest and polish it enough to enter this contest. Not to mention that I'll be in Scotland from April 2nd on, and the logistics of polishing a novel and then emailing it back to the States for some sucker to print and mail for me is just close enough to impossible... so my actual deadline would be April 2nd.
This would, of course, be a contest that requires the whole manuscript. First three chapters and synopsis? That'd be something. But this, this probably is impossible.
So, of course I'm going to try.
There's a sandwich called "Roger's Revelation" served at a local restaurant, and I've always wondered what the Revelation was.
Somedays, when I have a revelation, and then realize I had it (two separate and distinct processes, really), I try to pigeonhole it. Usually I say I had an epiphany or an enlightenment. But today I had a revelation, and really, but for the lack of bread, meat and cheese, it was Roger's Revelation: it was just that good.
Brook's Journey, my monstrous YA novel which should be nearly complete at 50k words but disastrously isn't, is really more than one novel.
You may all go "Duh!" and smack me now, but hey, it's a revelation to me.
Structure is my native enemy. Anyone who talks to me regularly knows this. I can spin a yarn, but it's darn hard to tell where the beginning, middle and end of it are. And sometimes, the point is lost, and sometimes, the tangents are phenominal.
So, clearly, obviously, I've been trying to tell the whole story at once, and I need to settle down and tell the pieces. Brook's beginning may be enough of a beginning for a YA novel. In fact, it is. The Royal Courtship, that's another novel (and also the fleeing thereof). The travel and the time in the City by the Sea, another novel. Coming back and confronting Justice: novel 4.
Duh.
DUH.
Roger's Revelation.
Oh, yeah.