A pre-natal and baby book of sorts
Just came across this exchange in my first rough draft.
Linnea (new wife of the former Lindorm): “I’m sorry, but I will have to cry for a moment.”
Kennett (ex-lindorm), growing distressed: “Cry? What’s this cry?”
Runa: “It is a visceral emotional response, generally more common among the females of our species and frequently regarded as cathartic.”
Yippee!
Not bad for the first night after a full-week “sabatical.”
Not bad for any night, really.
I “sat a booth” at my local state fair for five hours today.
Then I collected my children from my mother before meeting some friends who proceeded to keep me company and help corral kids until nearly 10 tonight.
The interesting thing about sitting a booth is that you see people you may not have seen in a long time. And, of course, you exchange the obligatory How are you? and must make that devilishly challenging choice of how much to say.
Personally I hate “Fine.” as an answer. Just because it means *nothing* and you might as well not have spoken.
So here’s the line I actually managed to pull off the top of my head for someone who hasn’t seen me since I was wearing my second child (in a sling).
I’m keeping busy (an equally useless alternate for Fine.): three kids under age six, teaching myself guitar and working on a novel. (At this point I get the same twinge as I do when I tell people I’m 29 and add defensively:) I’m almost finished and I’ve had an editor ask me to send it to her when it’s done.
Why I feel this need to justify or explain myself to near strangers who care no more for me than for anyone else in this aimless mass of humanity, I don’t know.
And I forgot to mention at the time I start officially homeschooling my oldest this fall.
But I’ve got another 3 hours in a different booth tomorrow, so I’m sure I’ll get another chance to try and squish it all out.
I’ve been working on this with “no end in sight” since November 2006.
When I shifted my focus to a smaller portion of the story I was able to frame a smaller, more realistic, goal and had some form of hope that finishing a story was possible.
Last night I completed another chapter, and when I printed out my latest “status report” on the story I saw this “wonder of wonders”:
| Chapter 1 | The Meeting |
| Chapter 2 | Despoiling |
| Chapter 3 | Old friends and Others |
| Chapter 4 | The next meeting |
| Chapter 5 | The Storyteller |
| Chapter 6 | Unwilling Rescue |
| Chapter 7 | Without Honor |
| Chapter 8 | The Fitting |
| Chapter 9 | Princess Cecillia |
| Chapter 10 | Tykone’s Loss |
| Chapter 11 | The Wedding Night |
| Chapter 12 | Kjell’s discovery |
| Chapter 13 | Dangerous New Family |
| Chapter 14 | The Safety of the Swamp |
| Chapter 15 | Out-law for an In-law |
| Chapter 16 | Rescue in the Swamp |
| Started | |
| Ready for draft 2 |
The Chart says I’m almost done. I can hardly believe it.
And, yes, “done” is a highly subjective term. Just now I’m excited to have the possibility of having a complete story in writing.
It should go without saying that it will next be subject to revision, research and more revision. But, wow. This is closer than I’ve ever been to ending anything. And I’ve started a bunch.
So now I’m more than half-way through my scheduled chapters: 10 out of 17 1st-draft done.
And there’s this pesky chapter that has been jumping in and out of the book, and around within the order of this book. It’s causing more trouble again as I haven’t been able to decide which POV it needs.
Currently titled “Without Honor,” it shows a confrontation between a 1/2-djinn major character and a full-djinn: his father and the big-baddie. Useful scene because it shows the difference in power, avoids a talking-heads scenario, and shows a lot of relationship dynamics.
I have come down to writing two versions of the scene (neither is done yet, they’re both written about to the same point– in two different nap-time writing blocks), in order to see which has more of what I want to be shown by the scene.
When viewed by Runa (the novel’s voice-of-reason character), I end up with a completely different feel and set of characters revealed than when I’m in the head of Ivan, being nearly torn-up by his father after decades of careful grooming.
Ivan’s trying to leave the djinn-world for a human life. I imagine it’s a bit like trying to leave the mafia.
I might have to finish the whole book before I know which point of view, ultimately, will be the most useful. The main criteria I’ll use are
(H/T to the Book Therapy blog. If you had a search bar I would have linked two specific articles. :) )
Here’s one I haven’t seen before that illustrates a bit of Sol Stein’s “suspense technique” that I alluded to in my last post.
I know it didn’t originate there, but it sound’s better than “Go read Redwall.” which you can still do if you want to see this technique used with mathematical precision.
The simple summary is that you want to keep your reader tense. The way you do this is by not answering the questions as soon as they arise; you create a question an then take a walk with someone else getting in trouble before you go back.
Here is my chart:
Cutting edge, I know. Moving on.
What you see here is my effort to visually represent the pattern of each returning character’s appearances (by chapter).
That is, any characters appearing only once (my crowded Inn in Chapter 3: Old Friends and Others is a great example. Characters that don’t come back until a later installation) don’t make this list.
You can see my main character in the third row, and I was pleased to see my section-working has her plot advancing just about every-other chapter. This was my goal.
In the case where she appears in two chapters in a row (e.g., 2 to 3) I changed the POV (point of view) so that the interaction still feels different. We’re not in her head the next time we see her, so we still have the lingering question of how she recovered from the events of Chapter 2, and new information that we wouldn’t have seen from her POV: that her face is bruised.
~ ~ ~
This chart helped me in several ways.
This last is (currently) the most useful, not the least because of I’m at an early stage in this draft.
When I made my first version of this chart (While I snuggled my kids watching The Hephalump Movie) I realized that Ivan– the purple in the middle– disappeared after chapter 8 and reappeared at the denouement to produce the Perfect-Thing for the rest of the story.
I hate it when I read stuff like that, so I had to go back and look for other places to lay the foundation for that same act. Those are the empty circles I added.
The bottom color, Garm, needed to be added to almost every chapter Linnea (MC) is in because he’s her dog, and it’s a sort of plot-point that he’s always around. I had forgotten this as I went along.
I still have to decide how present her son (second from the bottom, light-green) is. There are some places he’s necessary and some places he just can’t be.
~
So, there it is, for what it’s worth. Very helpful exercise for me; maybe to someone else too.
Solid 3,000 words today. Jay gave me most of the afternoon to work. Good, good man.
Most of that increase was from importing and revising sections of the first draft to fit the new format. I’m still working at getting back into the rhythm of the story after being gone for a month. It’s harder than I had expected or I might not have let it alone so long.
Also working on a new spreadsheet to solidify the time-line of events (in the actual novel, not the whole world), where multiple things happen within a short time, and making sure that’s logical with travel-times and all.
This draft has been more streamlined than the first, so I am (when I let myself think that far ahead) waffling again on whether the story will be better served as three too-short books (I’m visualizing Spiderwick here) or one long-ish one.
Also, due to the need to polish my first 10-pages for a mss consult coming up, those pages are now (tentatively) available upon request. The tentatively part depends on whether I know you. ;) I’m not yet so confident about it all that I’ll give it to anyone.
E-mail me if you’re interested.
Still hoping to get a few hours of writing in after the kids’ bedtime. My goal is to be back to normal production by the end of the weekend. If I can do that I should still have the first book (or first third of the book) done by the time school starts.
Well, I’m up to 8 chapters “finished” out of 16 (yes, the number of chapters has gone up, too) to 1st-draft standards.
To combat my inner editor I’ve been making notes about what I need to clean up the next time around.
For example,
Chapter 7, The Fitting:
- Focus on narrowing POV and keeping it consistent.
- Eliminate any simpering or mooning over each other. Keep this as close to a “business” relationship as possible, otherwise, we can’t believe Torb’s not a jerk in Chapter 9.
He’s really not, and imagining he is doesn’t advance the story.
- clarify queen’s attitude toward MC
- Clarify her relationship with her son
Now for a complete change of pace I need to sit down and decide what I’m doing with a dozen 2 to 6-year-olds for an hour tomorrow.
Okay, I’ve just had my first flash of, This is really sloppy, this revision.
Letting it stay sloppy and moving to the next section because, hey, that’s what first drafts are for.
And I supose I should be pleased I got nearly half way through before my internal editor attacked me so hard, but it’s still a gross feeling.
I found a way to avert a tragedy in part-2 (one less person to die!), but the funny thing is that keeping him alive has made me more willing to consider killing-off somebody else I’ve been waffling on.
How awful is that!
~
My logical part tells me that I ought just to focus on the first part till that’s done, but since the story’s basically a single organism to me, I can’t really pick which part grows at any random time.
When I’m writing, sure, but brain flashes and deepening connections? Those are less volitional at this point.
~
I’d rather not lose any characters– they are like my friends, if not my “babies”– but I’m trying to remain open and honest about what best serves the story.
No casualties in in part one, though (according to the plan as it stands).