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.
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.
"The preference of women for men with high cheekbones helped shape human evolution, a new study claims.
"From earliest times women have opted for more placid partners with broad faces and smaller even teeth rather than larger males with more aggressive-looking canine teeth."
found at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/05/12/wboys12.xml
Hm. Every new theory wrecks another aspect of By Right of Conquest I thought I had firmly in hand.
(Reconsiders Lurian canines.)
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.
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 10:22:59 -0500 (EST)
From: Merrie Fuller
To: Merrie Haskell
Cora reaches the point (in loving Zikor) where she just doesn't *want*
to love another person. Contrast with Pard, who fools herself into thinking she *can't*.
__________________________________________
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2004 10:24:10 -0500 (EST)
From: Merrie Fuller
To: Merrie Haskell
Also, she *needs* to love Zikor in order to understand him and his
species.
__________________________________________
Not sure if these are very good notes. Hm.
I did manage to enter all my edits for "Souls on a String" on paper, and the story holds together much better than I was expecting. Now, just to enter them all electronically.
I've also written not-so-many words for By Right of Conquest, but I did catalogue the book today at work! We're training ourselves on the new library management system, and I got to make a brief cataloguing record for anything I wanted, and Merrie Haskell's By Right of Conquest exists in the practice database for a few months. Publication date: 2007. Well, that's certainly a goal.
Oh, well. I'm up over 6k words, which is nearly the length of the original short story that wouldn't be a short story, so I kind of feel good about that. Maybe I can run past that this weekend. Another goal. Something more realistic. I like it.
No, I didn't rewrite like the wind this weekend. Rewriting seems to go best at Write Club, anyway. Or on nights when there's a specific kind of burn-out staring me down, like creative burst burn-out.
I wrote about 3k words on By Right of Conquest, read up on the Great Trajanic Frieze, read Render Unto Caesar in one sitting (one long bath, actually), and started a short story that Dann thinks I should entitle "Whenever Love" and I'm calling "The Regency and Romans." It needs a better title. But I've gone ahead and written time-travel romance, by-passing the modern day. I'm sort of impressed with myself. (Won't be when I find out how many other people have done it, I'm sure.)
Beginning to think my Thing is Rome.
Not sure I'm pleased. I was hoping I didn't have a thing. But (at cursory glance) it does seem to show up in over 10% of my works.
Hm.
Did have a semi-realization this weekend, though: that just because you make yourself write when you aren't inspired, you shouldn't ignore inspirations. Because really, how often are inspirations with you? Not bloody often. I'm not as highly disciplined as a writer as I'd like to be, but of the times I write, it's rarely with Inspiration. Ignoring inspiration, who only visits on alternate days beginning with S and that have a 2 in the date, but never on months ending in "R"--that would be foolish.
Levels of inspiration exist, of course. I have inspiration often enough that Inspiration is not often bemoaned, and I probably get inspired every fortnight or so.
The Chariot, by the way, is the tarot card representing inspiration. It's about harnessing that force. It's a good lesson for today.
Not time to begin the novel, though. I mean, I've begun the novel a number of times now. Snippets of it have found themselves on the back of homework assignments and library call number sheets for five or six years now. A concerted effort was made last year when I tried to write the Short Story That Would Not Work. And I've been doing the outlining and such for the past week.
And on Friday, I sat down and wrote scene 0.1.
Why?
Because...
Because writing Scene 1 was impossible. I'm definitely one of those writers who pads the beginning, wrongly, unnecessarily. And I was getting that perfectionista panic at the thought of starting at Scene 1 and having it be less than it could because I was caught up in building background and stuff like that.
So, I kindly granted Myself permission to write as much of the story preceding Scene 1 as I wanted. Myself was very well-behaved and did not use this as a stalling tactic of another sort--Myself did not go back to when the main character was in utero or anything stupid like that. Two hours. I went back two hours in time. And it made all the difference.
In fact, until someone can make a strong case against them, I'm keeping Scenes 0.1 and 0.2 in the draft.
Scene 1 draws to a close. I went straight for the jugular on the rising action.
So, when I say it's time to begin, I do not, in any way, mean it's time to start telling the story or writing it down.
I mean it's time to start tracking word count. The only way, apparently, writers really have of understanding their progress, given how many writers do it.
In the morass of plot and structure and character and POV, it's the only thing tangible. Some days we live or die by the click of the word count button.
No, really.
96 scenes. Yes, that's right. I have written an outline detailing 96 scenes for By Right of Conquest.
I think it's going to happen.
My suspicions that it's going to happen are high, and based on knowing the end before the beginning and knowing so much about the world, and even more, knowing what happens afterwards. I know what I need to know. No groping in the dark this time; no jump-in-and-where-do-we-go-from-here?
So strange. I've never been so precise before. Which may be why I actually finish this novel.
My new theory, by the way: Creativity begets creativity. The more I dwell in writing, the more that writing gets done. Yep.
And I have a tagline, too: "All that is sacrificed is not lost." I stuck it at the top of my outline. It's not proper grammar, I don't think (should be: "not all that is sacrificed is lost"), but this flows better.
(hugs self)