The other thing I’m not going to blog about

Editing is…tough. Occasionally exciting, especially when trimming the unnecessary bits and tightening up the rest, but tough. And fairly pointless to describe in specifics, since none of y’all have read the novel. (There is a small group of people who have read it, or parts of it, or an earlier draft, but I think the crossover of them + blog readers is zero.)

The annoying thing is that once this is done, I’m onto the querying stage – the query letter is as polished as I can make it, and the synopsis *coughmumble* – and I’m not going to be liveblogging that either, for multiple erudite and thoughtfully considered reasons which can be boiled down to:

1. I am not an idiot.

Seriously, I wouldn’t blog about a job search – ‘hey, this company rejected me with an annoying form letter! To hell with them!’ etc. – and I can’t see this as much different.

Apart from the actual facts, it’s a matter of attitude. Even when I get an agent, I’ll be facing delays, lost e-mails, seemingly incomprehensible requests, and outright rejection from publishers, foreign agents, the marketing department, reviewers, you name it. And I really don’t want to be putting myself out there as the sort of writer who whines in public.

(Private is different. We all get to whine in private. I’m sure it’s in the Constitution or something.)

Also, if all I do is post ‘the Thundercat Agency rejected me in 3.2 picoseconds with a form letter that indicates my true vocation is making macaroni pies for Greggs‘, then wouldn’t you seriously wonder if maybe this is the case?

As La Shark pointed out: you are not invisible on the internet. And as I mentioned over there: I keep intending to put up a Post-It note saying DOES THIS NEED TO BE PERMANENTLY VISIBLE TO YOUR FUTURE AGENT, YOUR MOM, AND EVERYONE IN THE UNIVERSE? (I always assume permanency, what with the Wayback Machine and Google caching.) The only reason I don’t have such a Post-It note is because I don’t have a computer dedicated to internet use, so I’d have to keep moving the Post-It note, and then the sticky stuff wears off and it falls down and you step on it.

I’ve read a few blogs where the authors post – and eviscerate – the agency form letters they receive. That’s pretty much the opposite of what I hope to accomplish here.

So I guess until I get to start posting ‘ooh la, sold the French rights today’ entries, I’ll largely stick to craft.

…man, editing is tough.

I think I need a macaroni pie.

Editing poetry on the bus

It works reasonably well if you can drown out the screams of the small child setting himself on fire behind you.

In this case, I realized that the first two lines were perfectly good (after tweaking), and so were the last two lines (after being reverse-tweaked, because sometimes you make a change that doesn’t work), so I thought I was going to have to gut the middle, but it turns out that line 3 went in a random direction, so after doing a freewrite paragraph (‘So what the hell is going on here? No, really!’) I figured out how to bridge the gap, and how best to structure the list-of-five-items-one-of-which-is-repeated, and ooh that word is very cold but it can’t be.

Which, as I’d ditched my book on the way into town, was the perfect way to spend a bus trip on Saturday afternoon.

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.

How to identify a really good agent

The ones who go that extra mile for their clients!

Or, in this case, probably longer than a mile.

While wearing a lifejacket.

In a paddle boat.

The other day, Agent Kristin went whitewater rafting because one of her clients needed to experience that for the book she’s writing.

Maybe I should wait until signing an agent before I mention that my next book is partially set in Auschwitz.

(But it’s mostly in Budapest, and everyone likes Budapest, right?)

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.

A few pieces of genetic material

I’ve just had two pieces published on the Human Genre Project, run by SF writer Ken Macleod.

Southbound from Park Street

Photophobia

I have to say, I really like e-mailing the submission on Friday, receiving the acceptance letter on Monday morning, and finding that evening that the pieces are live.

It’s only just started, so more content will be added and there’s time to contribute your own!

Edited novel is edited

My recent non-novel project has been a critical edition of Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael (1889). While it isn’t completely impossible to find, it’s nearly so. You need either a) an excellent academic/copyright library or b) the patience to wait a few years for it to turn up on a used book website and then the ability to pounce, like unto Thundercat on a bit of fuzz, when the alert comes through. I have both, thankfully.

(I just tried to find copies on Worldcat but it refuses to tell me anything other than microfilm versions exist. Which is untrue because I know I borrowed a copy in the states at one point – it’s why I have the photocopy [yes, I KNOW]. But even in the UK, only four of the copyright libraries have it. according to COPAC.)

Anyway, in addition to scanning and checking a 140,000-word text – those triple-deckers were wordy; thank you, Mudie! – I wrote an introduction, found and typed in several appendices, and researched (not counting the ones for the introduction) 320 or so footnotes. And yet I’m sure there are some I missed, not even counting the ‘This reference has not been traced’ ones, because even when I was doing my final does-a-curly-quotation-mark-next-to-a-dash-go-the-right-way check, I thought, hmm, that sounds Biblical, and then I’m typing out Amos 6:3 and rejigging every subsequent ’see footnote x’ reference so they all point to the right ones.

Anyway, it’s as good as I can make it, and I’ll send it off to Valancourt as soon as I hear that they have recovered from the unpleasant relationship between a computer and a Big Gulp. This is, sadly, the second such story I’ve learned of this week, though in the other case it was coffee. I am presently instituting a regime of sippy cups.

Something BIG is DONE. YAY.

(And please go buy books from Valancourt while you’re waiting for mine.)

Congratulations!

My world has been full of rejections and not-hearing-back-which-means-rejection so I am absolutely thrilled that someone I know has not only received an acceptance, but a really good one.

Congratulations to Kelly Hourihan, who’s just been selected as the Boston Public Library Children’s Writer-in-Residence.  I’m not up on my residential fellowships but this has to be one of the peachiest ones going, and Kelly’s an amazing writer and great person who completely deserves it.

And darn sure I’ll be buying her book (from Better World Books, of course) as soon as it’s published.

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.

Rewriting is boring for everyone else

Seriously, there is nothing going on here that I could be dramatic about. I restructured chapter 11! The protagonist gets more angry than before! The second half of the book is a soggy mess!

So have my last two days’ worth of search engine referrals:

better world books coupon
doctor who remembrance day
nathan bransford font
natalie goldberg, action verbs
they shall not grow old doctor who
ive league – writing skills books
jennifer jackson synopsis
stephenie meyer can’t “research”
tracey s. rosenberg
quotation on anomie

I’m not going to be the one to tell Stephenie Meyer she can’t “research” but if you’d like to, be my guest!

Did I mention I was in Japan? Fantastic. I now wish to return there, and spend my entire life savings on cute little things to put inside bento boxes.

Oh, and it looks as though I was longlisted for a short story prize, but I’m still waiting for the shortlist to come out. If I’m on it, I’ll say something. If not, well, won’t be the first shortlist I’m not on. Also waiting for word on the other short story competition, and the travel grant.

Thundercat is waiting for Rhys to hurry up and toss a piece of that fish please. Thundercat likes fish. I had a couple of pieces of sushi in Japan (sssh, don’t tell the Vegetarian Society) but I have to say I don’t miss it enough to go back to eating it. On the other hand, gefilte fish is vegetarian, along the same lines as pork being kosher if it’s in Chinese food, so I’m not entirely anti-fish.