I didn’t win a goat

In spite of the hopes of my roleplaying group – who made very mean comments about curry; I must learn “evil glare” before our next session – I did not actually receive a goat as part of my Gorgie City Farm poetry competition prize.

I did win sponsorship of one of the pygmy goats, and a picture of him (Toby!), both of which are taped to the side of a bookcase, as well as a £10 book token. I don’t know what I’m going to spend it on yet. But really, half the fun of gift certificates is mentally spending them a dozen times over.

What’s happening right now: the final edits of GB and gearing up for the next book (= pre-writing, outlining, minor research). Thankfully, as it won’t be a historical novel I don’t have to do the same immersion I did for the Third Reich book – no one is going to quibble that the tunic insignia are the wrong color – though obviously everything has to be consistent, and there are plenty of pitfalls with worldbuilding no matter what the context.

The main difficulty is that even after putting the Auschwitz novel aside, I have two very strong possibilities for the next project, and I want to write them both.

Now!

Possibility A has some plotting already completed but I just removed a major character and am not yet sure if I’ve lifted away the book’s spine by doing so. (You know, the way you have to eat certain kinds of fish?) And I need to get Possibility B to the stage where the ‘ooh shiny’ feeling wears off, and see whether there’s actually a plot there, rather than just a conceit.

So come November, I’ll be hard at work on the next book, but don’t ask me yet what it is.

And no, I won’t be doing NaNoWriMo. I have no problems with the concept, but I don’t need a little counter on my website to track my progress….

Do we always rewrite the same stories?

In some sense, yes, I think we all do, because we all have our obsessions and why would you want to write about something you didn’t like? (Money, I guess, or thinking that you can hit a trend in the market. I hope that works for you, if that’s the route you take.)

But it was a bit annoying to draft a story a couple of weeks ago and realize that I’ve pretty much been writing this same two-hander since, oh, HIGH SCHOOL.

Admittedly, I’ve branched out a bit – taking the three examples I can think of, the settings are bookstore -> library -> box office, so I’m getting away from bookish people (though it wasn’t without a struggle that I got the male character into a biker jacket – YES, bikers can be bookish too). And the female character is actually somewhat fictional, and Not Just Me.

So I suppose we’re talking a spiral rather than a circle, to paraphrase Jeanette Winterson’s comments about Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, which is okay.

Have finished up my summer money-earning job – though am still having nightmares about misshelving the books – and it’s now into my autumn money-earning jobs, and getting the novel finished, and oh I figured out my next novel. (I put the Auschwitz one on hold because I cannot bear to face another 2-3 years of Nazis without a break. Not wanting to get anywhere near rewriting THIS particular story.) I’m not sure yet if it’s YA; right now it could slip in either direction. I have to admit I’m a tad worried about what my career arc is going to look like depending on which way this goes, but as right now my career is non-existent, I should just work on writing the damn books.

What I’m doing given that I’m not blogging much these days

Mainly I’m busy a) trying to find work that will allow me to pay the bills (I’m sure you’ve noticed the job market is particularly dire at the moment) and b) doing a full edit of The Novel.

That’s actually not so bad at the moment. Slow, but not too bad. It helps to have the entire manuscript in a single binder. (Thankfully, my print cartridge – which had been showing signs of gasping out its last bit of toner – found the will to live again, following a good shaking, and printed everything legibly.) And now that I know what needs to be added, thanks to i) an ongoing list I’ve been keeping and ii) the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook exercises, going through chapter-by-chapter means I’m tightening things rather than flailing.

At least I’m telling myself that.

Ideally, I’d like this version to end up as a sea of red ink, and then revise the entire ms on the computer, and do one more stylistic pass, and then…stop! Query time.

Thundercat, meanwhile, is on the windowsill, sleeping in the sun. There isn’t much sun these days (“summer” in Scotland is, well, rainy), so I am going to go for a walk and soak up some of it as well.

Writing Backwards

So I rewrote the first half of the book (roughly, but at just under 40K I expect that to be half) and then said ‘um.’

I had so many new things to add into the second half and even more things to remove. Moving from multiple POV characters to a single one meant that quite a few scenes had to be either recast or dumped. What information was actually necessary? Could scenes be combined? Is that character I introduced in chapter 5 and never did anything else with going to come back into the novel, or just exist as a ‘I have to provide information and fulfil my Contractual Obligation as a historical character who was present at this event’ throwaway?

First thing I did was to go through the second half of the draft as it it existed, and note down all the plot points/character developments. Then I went through various files of scraps/ideas and added those. Which meant that I ended up with a loooooooooooooong list of items ranging from questions to entire scenes summarized in a sentence.

Trying to find the through-story wasn’t as difficult as it sounds, though that’s only because I’ve been working on this for TWO YEARS and have also learned quite a lot about cutting those tea-drinking scenes (tm Donald Maass) – or in my case, cocoa-drinking scenes. But the best way to do it was to start backwards.

Because I know the ending – or rather, I knew it, and then I ended up adding an extra chapter to extend it, which works a lot better (she says hopefully). And once you are working on the ending, it’s WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE down the slope because you have the momentum. So I put that all into place, in outline form.

Then, having written the final and penultimate chapters, I moved back to the ante-penultimate chapter, and not just because I am very fond of the word ‘ante-penultimate’. But apparently anteantepenultimate is not a word, though it should be, so once I’d sorted THAT chapter out, I moved back to the fourth-to-last and fifth-to-last.

Now, this still means I had to fit all the rest of the stuff (or decide to cut it because it didn’t fit) into the twelfth-through-sixth-through-last chapters. But thankfully I had plenty of markers (character X has to leave at this point, so character Y has to get that object to give her) and, of course, it’s only an outline, so I could move bits around as much as I wanted to.

Anyway, long blog entry short, outlining ‘the second half of the book’ wasn’t nearly as bad once I’d laid out exactly where everything needed to go. Of course, I had to add lots of things to my ’stuff to do in the first half’ file, because if something was going to be significant in chapter 18 then I’d need to make it part of the framework earlier.

The funny part is that I now keep thinking of that Sesame Street skit where three monsters (?) are telling a story, and the Beginning one gets to go ‘once upon a time’ and then the Middle one goes on and on until the End one finally cuts him off with ‘happily ever after.’ The Middle is definitely the toughest, but if it is a jumbled mess, then the End isn’t worth getting to.

Ducks in a row

It’s that stage of the novel where I have all the pieces (or at least know what pieces need to be added). I just have to get them all into place.

Hopeful yet frustrating at the same time.

Thundercat has decided I must not get up until I’m finished, and is parked adorably in my lap. Sadly for Thundercat, I need to switch to the other computer….

Threw my (current) query letter into the pot for Nathan Bransford’s Be an Agent for a Day. Someone has to reject the damn thing, so it might as well be a hundred random strangers on the internet before it’s Dream Agent….

Novel 1, College Basketball 0

Nathan Bransford, highly seeded in the Most Awesome Agent on the Web brackets, is offering a query critique (or a book from one of his authors, but I doubt most of us are thinking of THAT prize) to whoever wins his NCAA competition. I’m not in the running, as some pod person took over my brain when I was considering the relative merits of Connecticut vs Texas A&M, but it’s still good fun. If Cal-Stanford end up in a showdown in the women’s tourney I’ll offer a side bet.

(Don’t get me started on how the men’s competition is the default, needing no qualifier, but the women’s is the WOMEN’S tournament.)

Just finished (except for going over to smooth out the prose) the complete rewrite of chapter 1, a procedure which spiked 2000 words of excellent (if I do say so myself) character development and backstory.  But it was dragging down the momentum, and now that I’ve streamlined to one POV character, I should have room for some backstory tidbits further along the way.  I’m finding Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel workbook immeasurably helpful in the ‘need more tools in the workbox’ kind of way, and the ‘combining characters’ strategy is already looking quite promising.  The problem with writing a novel populated by historical people is that you – well, I – can’t simply ditch characters who were definitely there, but at least I can make them do double duty.

Thundercat is sitting on my lap, occasionally licking my hand in that ‘I am SO starving that I am going to eat your fingers!!!!’ kind of way, so I’d better stave off immediate disaster.

Whole lotta rewriting going on

I’m doing a complete edit-through [what, it's not a word? Guess I just invented one!], and when I started the full ms was about 90,000 words, but the final five chapters hadn’t been touched in months and were pretty short compared to the rest of the work.

I’m about 75% of the way through the manuscript. I currently have 87,000 words….

…with 18,000 words in the ‘deleted scraps’ document that I began at the start of the edit-through.

No wonder this is taking a while.

Thankfully, around chapter 8 I really revved into high gear with regard to reducing the filler and getting more character-motivated plot going. I think when I go through the book next, I’ll be trimming a lot of fat from the earlier chapters.

I’d prefer to stay between 80-90K, but there’s some wiggle room here.

How to make an entire and mostly unnecessary scene go away

1. Change the timing of the previous scene from lunch to dinner. Then you don’t need to worry about how everyone spends their time between afternoon and evening.

2. Make a list of all the useful information that scene conveyed, and integrate it where possible in the earlier scene.

2a. Ditch the bit of dialogue that never really worked anyway.

Polyphony is hard!

Otherwise known as, multiple characters can be really confusing.

I regret having to ditch some, but when I went through three chapters and removed all but two characters, I found that I only needed to rewrite one scene to keep the plot moving – in other words, out of 2500 deleted words, I only had one necessary scene. There were a few observations I want to work back in, but that should be easy enough to do in dialogue format. It’s always a wake-up call when you cut things and the novel doesn’t suffer for it – and in fact, improves, as you clear out the underbrush. Phyllis Eisenstein once mentioned something about having deleted some thousands of words, then joining the two ends together and finding they came together seamlessly.

My theory is that if I reread it and don’t notice anything’s missing, then it really doesn’t need to be there.

So I’m effectively left with two narrative voices, emphasis on voices, because if they sound alike there’s no point in splitting it at all, and I still feel that’s where the book needs to go.

Meanwhile, getting critical responses to my first chapter has been an eye-opener, not least of which in the sense of ‘everyone’s going to think differently.’ One reader had primarily minor suggestions with some advice about structure, one felt the writing was good but that major structural changes are required, and one – well, ‘they misread the draft!’ sounds like a knee-jerk response, but I can’t think of any other way to interpret the most important part of the feedback. The reader’s belief that the book is fatally flawed and unpublishable (even by a small press) seems to be based on the assumption that the character flaws in the opening chapter are continued all the way through the end of the novel. I didn’t include a synopsis, which (hopefully) would have clarified things. It’s a reminder to me to make the reader aware that the character – who’s a young Nazi – is capable of breaking out of that mindset, and to weave that in from the beginning, because I don’t want the reader to think ‘this is all played out on a single emotional level,’ but I refuse to believe the book is unpublishable.

Well, my next reader is an agent rather than an author, so it will be interesting to see which of the readers they agree with – or, more likely, they’ll have yet another response….

Delayed entry

Oops, I meant to post this days weeks ago, and it got stuck as a draft. I am still traveling – the Library of Congress was a bit sloppily-run, but I got all my books so I was happy – so here it is now as a placeholder until I write something else:

I know this blog is rather turning into the Nathan Bransford lovefest but my goodness, the man is clever. His latest burst of genius is whether you have a plot.

I do, but you’d never have known it from my synopsis – or, rather, I’m sure the plot is there, but it’s been a bit buried.

The good thing is that I don’t think there will be too much work needed because it’s been there all along.

Something I learned way back in Astro 101 (or whatever the number was), in relation to why a certain star couldn’t be seen: it’s there but it just isn’t visible. I think this is true in life on many occasions.