Traveller's Tales

No, not me — the owner of the fey mood would be Casnodyn ap Eira, a major character in The Grey Knight, and the target of yet another long-overdue character interview.  Casnodyn is a native of the Chrysialbau — in other words, he’s a fey beast in a very literal sense, and to get him right I needed to really dig into the mindset of these alien creatures.  So Cas gets a little free with his thinking, and the result is… well, very Fey, I think.

Go ahead and have a look for yourself; I’d love to know if he has the same effect on you that he does on me.

Though the character is not a new one, her interview is very recent — and this is as much an exercise in research and development as it is a lesson learned.  Any character I write that has more than a page or so of visibility simply needs a profile, a history and an interview if I’m going to do them justice.

Poor Elori Kelaru, Champion of Elwan, was lacking in all of these:  assuming (incorrectly) that I had the character locked down in my head, I plowed ahead and wrote her without doing a proper analysis.  Needless to say, it showed, so Job One has been to give her her due.  This interview is the first of the results of that in-depth analysis, and it reveals a much more interesting and subtle character than I imagined in passing.

So go ahead, pop on over and give her a read.

I obsess over research.

I mentioned this in passing a while ago, but I really didn’t get into how much I really obsess over it; just that I like to do it.  The example I gave then was about researching suspension bridges so I could extrapolate to make a magical one; what I didn’t mention was that I researched for two days solid, and then a bunch of hours stolen from work (er, I mean while I was having lunch) rounding out the details.  Now I can tell you about the oldest suspension bridges, about contests that were held to develop creative means of making them, about components of a suspension bridge, variants, and all sorts of things that, trust me, you probably don’t want to know.

Anyway, I’ve got a new bit of research going on now, inspired by the growing prominence of the Fey in the second book.  Casnodyn was the sole representative of the Courts in the first book (and, as he repeatedly insisted, he was never there in his official capacity at any rate), but their influence is going to be felt much more strongly in the second and thereafter.  Since I’d already used the name ‘Casnodyn’ as a prototype name, and since I know Casnodyn is Welsh, I figured, what the heck, I’d get some more Welsh names to cover the other Fey.

That’s when I found the Enwogion Cymru.

By Monday I’ll most likely have launched right past simply grabbing some Welsh names, sped at top speed through the obsessive loop and crash-landed in a place where I know enough about Welsh historical figures to teach a class.  This, of course, was not my intention, but I’m too caught up in it now to care.

That’s why I love research.

(Yes, I did the above pixelart as a mind break from the research.  I shamelessly stole the pattern from here, so if you want to make a more real-world version than mine, go for it.)

Appearing amazed about how long it’s been since you blogged is so last year.  Or maybe it’s the year before, I can’t keep track anymore.  Anyway, it’s not a big surprise, it’s obvious I haven’t written for a while since I didn’t, you know, log in.

But there’s good news, at least about The Grey Knight, and it’s the reason I haven’t done this in a while.  I’ve had a massive edit ongoing:  the first 200 pages have changed incredibly, with an eye towards clarifying the initial story elements and more quickly engaging the story.  As I described it to my writing friends, it’s been a bit like unraveling a tree-sized knot at the roots, and wondering idly whether the last strand you pulled was going to topple the entire tree.

But it’s nearing completion.  This weekend I’m determined to have this version, which I’ve christened “The Bloodbath,” complete (Version 10, revision D, to be technical, but that’s not very memorable, is it?).  It’s been a long road, and a lot of things have changed significantly – but all for the better, and all with careful and thoughtful consideration, with my finger on the pulse of the story and watching the hearts of my dear, stubborn characters as I tinker.

I’ve learned a lot in the last few months.  I’ll talk about that stuff in the future, as I absorb what it is I’ve actually learned, but it’s clear that just when you think you know how to do something – that’s when you should be wondering what the hell you’ve missed.  Chances are, it’s something important.

Later this weekend I’ll post another character interview, but for now I thought it would be worthwhile just to de-rust the blog fingers and post a quick status.  The interview is spooky but short, and it’s with an unexpectedly compelling companion, a secondary character who needed to be a bit better fleshed out – and, now that he is, the story is far better for it.  Coming soon.

Just a quick update really, as it’s been a while and I’ve been busy as, um, a generally very busy thing, being exceptionally busy.  But of interest to the writerly:

An Interview: Fellow author Realm Lovejoy and I met via the twitter #amwriting tag-community (which, if you’re a writer using twitter, you should most certainly join!), and while she’s got some great art up at her site for her upcoming novel CLAN, she was also kind enough to give me an opportunity to run off at the mouth during an interview at her site, where she also put my lead antagonist, Paldor, together for the first time in a visual format.  The interview may be more of the usual Finch drivel, but her art isn’t, so go have a look!

Sherlock: I’ve finished reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for the first time, and oh man have I been missing out all these years.  Aside from the stories being individually quite good, the characterizations priceless and my own affinity for Holmes growing as I realize how utterly anti-social and unlikable he really is, I’ve found that Arthur Conan Doyle was, apprarently, as likable and forthright a gentleman as one could hope to be.  I can’t do ACD’s story justice here, but I’ll say that knowing the author of these famous and respected tales was humble, easy-going and generous definitely enhanced my own enjoyment of them.  If you’re not familiar, I urge you to learn more for yourself.

(I also have a personal theory now, that Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft were the bastard children of Edgar Allen Poe by different wives, but that’s a story for another day.)

Stormbringer:  Now that Sherlock’s on the “have-read” pile, Elric is next on the list.  I’ve already downed two of the seven prime Elric stories, and I’m finding myself enjoying them a lot more than I remembered I did the first time through, many years ago.  Full report when I’m done.

Scriptwriting: This is what I’ve been up to lately; while my super-agent Colleen goes through the latest version of the manuscript for The Grey Knight, I’ve been working on alternate media to tie into the novel’s backstory.  I’m really excited about the script, and while I can’t really go into detail quite yet, it’s turning into quite a serious live-action video production.  I’m very much looking forward to sharing the results with everyone when it’s finished.

That’s it for now; work on the sequel to The Grey Knight continues, but there’s a lot of forward momentum on Knight, and I’m enjoying the oblique approach to the fantasy world in my head, so while I’m still doing a lot of scenework on the sequel… I’m still having fun with Knight now, too.

Now that the edits are over — for now, at least! — I’m working on the second book again.  I’ve been doing what I always do when I’m working on a new story, which is writing all the cool scenes that come to me.  What eventually happens is I take those scenes, toss them back into the framework I created in the outline, and then stitch them together with all the other cool scenes until a novel happens (yeah, okay, it becomes a little more complicated than that at some point, but that’s the general idea).

(Tangent: new character alert, which means you should probably expect a new character interview in the next few days.)

(Second tangent: I once tried writing in linear fashion, beginning to end, but I just can’t do it — too many things pop into my head and need to get written; different scenes generate higher energy levels on different days, and while it’s all still forming I think it’s important to let the scene that’s screaming the loudest have the pen for the day.)

Anyway, the neat thing that happened today was that, for the very first time, I saw a scene from the third book.  The last book in the first part of the story; the end of the beginning, and I just saw how it ends.

It was awesome.

I have no idea if I can write it so it’s as awesome as I saw it, but when I saw it while I was sitting on the bus, stunned and watching it in my head as though it had been cast, filmed, produced and projected directly into my skull, I knew that’s how it had to go.  Because it was so totally awesome.

I’m excited because while the end of the overall story doesn’t come with the third book — this is a story of three threes, for reasons that become immensely clear — still, it represents a serious hard stop; the world changes viciously, violently and irrevocably at the end of the third book, and it’s a big enough leap, barrier, shift or evolution that it may almost feel like a new story when the second three kick in.  Anyway, while I always knew where things were heading, and what in general had to happen, the specifics were veiled to me.

Well, not after today they’re not.

Anyway, I love it when I see new pieces to the puzzle like that.  I know it’s going well when the scenes are revealed to me so clearly that all I have to do is sit my ass down and write as fast and as hard as I can before I forget what I just saw.  The psychotic break does all the hard creative work for me; all I have to do is take notes.

So while I’m not going to give in to the temptation of writing more of the third book, it really gives me another really cool thing to shoot for, you know?

Love this writing thing.

Yes, that means the edits to The Grey Knight are done!  Complete!  Finito!  This version, at least, is finished at last; huge structural changes blew through the manuscript, not entirely unlike how large cars blow through outdoor advertising signs during a tornado, and the result, much like with the signs, is a highly positive improvement on the original.  Colleen now has it, it’s out of my hands for at least a while, so now…

…now I have a lot to do!

I’m working on the sequel, of course, as well as its own sequel, in a tangential sort of way, and by definition worldbuilding and such.   I’m working pretty hard on putting other material together as well, stuff I’ll be adding here in the weeks and months to come.  Not giving anything away yet, but it’s fun making it so I hope it’s at least as fun getting it.

I have to admit, though, with the last month being pretty hot and heavy on edits… it’s a little odd to boot up the laptop and NOT open up the Knight manuscript.

So the Big Edit is… done!

Sort of.

What I mean is, everything I wanted to get done, is done.  But there are other things that I’ve discovered, in the process of getting the things that needed to get done, done, that now also need to get done.

For one, the manuscript bloated.  Predictable, and something a more experienced writer would have known intuitively would happen as a result of an edit that deep, but I hadn’t thought about it along those lines, so I need to do a third pass, to trim the bloat.

There’s more, of course — a lot of little things that I found while I was digging around in there.  I won’t go into the gory details, but it’s going to put a few more days on the edit schedule.  Definitely not weeks, and the worst, I think, is over.  Very much thinking it’ll be DONE done by end of the holiday weekend.

And at least it won’t depend on bus drivers knowing how to not drive like a piston, or seatmates oozing over into my side of the seat, or the fans not being on — I’m off starting Thursday, and that’s all edit time, baby!

(well, not ALL edit time, there’ll be fun and OMGWTFBBQ to be had, considering it’s the 4th… but that’s a lot of good time for writing, and my new writer’s hideaway beckons!)

Other people call that “editing,” I suppose, but that’s what my edits were like during the first pass of this latest, most complex revision.  I mentioned that earlier, so I’m not going to belabor the point other than to say it was hard but rewarding, and I’m really happy with the resultant edits, now that the first, painful pass is complete.

So now it’s a simple numbers game.  I’m about 3/4 of the way through the second pass of the big revision, and I’m doing it like this:

Because it was such a sweeping change, I feel as though I should be not only checking the changes for little tense and person shifts I missed the first time through (and there are a scant few of those), but also checking to assure I’ve kept tone and character intact. I had some good insights towards the end of the first pass that standardized some concepts and let me work in a little bit of the original internal dialogue without defeating the purposes of the original person/tense shift, so now I’ve gone through and made sure I’ve leveraged those ideas throughout the book.

As for the changes, I feel as though they’ve made for a much stronger story.  It’s okay if Erik relies on denial and dissimulation to survive, psychologically speaking, so long as the reader can perceive the internal conflict he’s going through and identify with it, or at least understand that it’s a defense mechanism being used by a desperate man under duress to try to cope with a highly stressful and deadly situation.  That makes him sympathetic, even tragic — which is good, considering what I’ll be doing to him soon…

But that’s a story for another day.

In the meantime, 3/4 done with pass 2 means that pass will be done tomorrow — I’ve been doing a quarter a day on this pass.  After that, there’s some basic polishing to be done, a few minor elements to incorporate, and some verbage to trim, and it’ll be ready for lobbing at my agent and co-conspirator.

I’ve invested a lot of bitching into the painful process of ripping out a first person present tense  narrative and re-tuning it for third person past tense.  The tense is psychologically tough; the character has been a first-person thinker for quite a number of years now, so that’s what’s causing so much of  the ‘go back and re-read it, and correct all the tense mistakes’ process.  Maddening, as I generally consider my grammar to be moderately polished, and mistakes like those look seriously grade-school.

I think I’m done bitching about switching into third person though.  In fact, since I’ve already given away the game in the post subject, I’ll say I think it’s not only necessary, but it’s fixing a lot of what I didn’t realize was broken.

Yeah, stuff was broken.

Among many other things, I’m an actor.  Unlike my writing, which is on the brink of professional art, I’ve been paid many times in the past for my acting, and I’m told I’m pretty good at it.  Because of that skill set, I do a lot of dialogue in my head before I commit it to paper — give myself a little private performance, lay the characters and the scene out, figure out what dialogue sounds awkward, that sort of thing.

For the first-person narrative, I’d do the same thing to get the character’s thoughts nailed down before I wrote them.  Unfortunately, I now realize I was acting more than I was writing, and that’s where the bulk of the disconnect — which is resulting in the POV shift — took place.

It’s taken the last few reviews of the manuscript to realize it, but the first person POV was actually robbing that character of depth, because I was failing to weave external expressions and unconscious mannerisms into his internal ruminations.  I hadn’t realized it because, when I ‘did the part’ in my head, he was plenty deep, plenty conflicted, his physical confidence and mental competence short-circuited by severe disorientation, physical conflict and psychological horror.

But many of the acting cues I ’saw’ while I was doing my own internal performance failed to make it to the paper, because he was thinking to himself and I didn’t know how to fit the action into his internal dialogue.  The fidgeting, the nervous glances, the smiles a bit too wide — very, very few of these kinds of things made it to text, and so he came off as a much shallower jerk than he really is.

And really, turning people off from one of your primary POV characters isn’t such a smart thing.  Donaldson may have been able to do it, but I’m not Donaldson, and I did not want this character to be anywhere near as disliked as Covenant.

And so, I’ve made progress.  Much yet to do, but the work continues.