Traveller's Tales

I’m editing.  I like what the results look like, and I think I’ll be very, very pleased with the end result.

But I am fighting a pitched battle with one of my lead characters, and he’s not giving an inch without inflicting pain or drawing blood.

This is the guy I had originally written in first person, present tense, as a way to make his thinking more accessible to the reader   (this was my theory, and my thought experiment has officially backfired and gone horribly wrong; lesson learned, mea culpa, see my other post about that).  Now I’m wrangling him into third person past, like the rest of the narrative.  What’s coming out, I like — but Oh My Freaking God he’s taking For Bloody Ever to make the transformation.

I keep re-reading the chapters I think I’ve just wrangled, only to find massive errors in tense and in person, even in the brand new stuff that’s gone in to replace the first-person ruminations.  Beyond that, I have to write, put it away, and re-read it fresh the next day because I’m not sure it’s reading true until well after I’ve written it.  The shift in POV is so jarring to me, after living with this character for so long in first person, that it’s even tough to be certain I’m writing well, and that’s not something I usually worry too much about.

I’m finding myself very interested in this phenomenon.  I’m fascinated that a mental construct like a character can associate itself so strongly with linguistic concepts (tense, point of view) that the process of revising those concepts can so thoroughly screw with my head.  It’s a serious crash course in pragmatics (not pragmatism), which I may have to dig into a bit deeper after this edit is done.

Wacky stuff.

“So now that we have the interruptive crap out of the way, how the hell is the book coming?”, one might ask.

Were one to ask, I’d answer thusly:

The new version went out in mid-March and got read quite thoroughly.  There were a few basic bits of feedback which I agree with enough to accept, incorporate and move on without question, and they’re on the edit schedule right now.

And then there was one major piece of feedback that absolutely made me piss fire.

There’s been this bit in the story that I was always really in love with, but that I’ve always known was a bit of a controversial (and possibly foolhardy) thing to do.  While the rest of the story reads in third person past, the fellow I’ve always imagined as the primary character reads in first person present.  The story was, when it wrote it this way, more about him than any of the others, and he’s a more modern-feeling character, so having him available as a stream-of-consciousness narrative made perfect sense.  It’s always been important to me that people understand and empathize with him, and I figured the best way to do that would be to have the reader right in his head.

Naturally, the feedback this time, incontrovertibly and inevitably, was ‘Lose the first person crap for crying out loud.’  Nicer than that, of course, but that was how I decided to interpret it when I first read it, and boy did I get lit.  I probably set a personal record for chain bitchery that day.

And then I sat my sorry ass down and really thought about all of the feedback instead of throwing a little kneejerk tantrum.

The novel has changed considerably over the years.  Not so much the story itself, at least not since the first big rewrite, but the structure has had some serious overhauls.  What was once a story about one guy, with two other characters thrown in for timing and interaction, really had turned into a story equally about three main characters.

So point the first: I realized I was shortchanging two of my three favorite guys by making the other guy different.  This was bad enough to give me pause.

Point the second was a painful but necessary detail.  One of the readers revealed that she was so thrown off by the change of tone that she found herself wanting to skip the part of the story I’d once considered central.  She graciously added that she enjoyed how the other parts were written, but the change in tone whenever the main guy showed up completely put her off that part of the story.

Wow.

A few bumps in the name of artistic expression are warning signs.  An engaged reader wanting to skip an entire part of the story is a massive all-hands-on-deck this-is-not-a-drill alarm bell.  It doesn’t matter how much I love the concept of doing things my way, if it’s kicking a reader out of the story, it’s broken.

My bitching died off pretty quickly after that.  My story had evolved, and what I’d loved years ago just wasn’t working anymore — and it reasonably took an external reader to see that, since I’ve been reading it pretty constantly in its current form for the last 8 years now.

I feel good about this change.  It’s been a long time coming (sorry, Shelly, you were right!), but now that I’m at this stage I feel like it’s one of the last big hurdles I’ll have to leap — it really has come a long way in the last few months, farther than I ever thought it needed to, but excellent progress that has only made the story stronger.

So just a little longer… just a few more changes… just over the next hill…

TLDR: Big changes are big, but give it another two months and I’ll have something that looks a lot more like a final draft than I do right now.

With all due apologies to JRRT, it was too appropriate not to use as today’s subject.

I’m back into The Grey Knight, the first book.  I’m executing some structural changes primarily based on good thinking from my kick-ass agent, who may have hit the nail on the head with a fascinating bit of counterintuitive, er, intuition.

I don’t want to gush too much just yet, mainly because there’s no guarantee that this change will result in a sale — but I do like what it’s doing to the story, and her fresh perspective has absolutely helped make things gel.

Basically, the critiques I’d been getting had been about pacing (of the ‘builds too slow’ variety).  My agent’s advice was to make the chapters longer.  I gave that a little WTF at first myself, and then I went back and re-read the first few chapters.

And you know what I found?  Holy shit, they’re too short.

The Grey Knight’s story is a whirlpool, not a straight line; there are three primary stories that begin separate and unconnected, and then slowly come together until they smack head-on into each other with a bang near the end.  Practically, that means a lot of scene switching, and, logically, I need to really get a reader invested in each primary character, to make them interested enough in each to want to go back to them after a scene switches to a different primary POV.

Short chapters, clearly, would not facilitate this reader-character bonding process, and as I re-read those early chapters, I’m forced to agree with her analysis: the early ride is way too bouncy.  Later on, I think it works just fine, first, because the reader is familiar with the characters now, and second, because the pace of the chapters speeding up as they near the conclusion makes perfect sense.  But early on… man, really bad idea.

I’m midly surprised I didn’t see it myself, but focusing so much on keeping things fast-paced, I wasn’t looking at the manuscript with the right set of eyes.  It’s a great bit of Craft wisdom to pick up, and already the story reads MUCH better as a result of the change, even to me.  I do hope it’s not just me, but I really think we’ve got something here.

Edits are in progress; my new netbook is a truly excellent technical partner, but I also have to give some credit to TextBlockWriter, which helped me visualize the structural change in the document before I started dragging chapters all over the place.  I’ve got a self-imposed completion date of 3/12 and a self-imposed delivery to my agent on 3/13.  She keeps telling me end of the month, but the writing is hot and fast, there’s some great stuff coming out in between the structural edits, and I want it out there again.

So, apologies if I’m a little scarce between now and then, but I’ve got a novel to polish.

I’m noticing something odd:  ever since I got my new little netbook and started writing on the bus, my job has gotten easier to stomach.

Now, maybe it’s a coincidence, which is entirely possible given it hasn’t been all that long since I started using it, but I’ve got this weird feeling that giving myself more time to do my own writing is resulting in me being better able to deal with the massive piles of bullshit that tend to get flung around at work.

So now I’m wondering if there’s a direct correlation between one’s personal artistic frustrations and one’s ability to do the “day job.”

Let me elaborate a little.

With all my time consumed by work during the week, I’ve grown resentful of all the time the paycheck steals from me, and the rigors of the job itself, combined with a not-negligible commute, have resulted in me often coming home too tired to write, or waking up too late to steal half an hour before the last bus shows up.

Enter the netbook.  While I can’t write for part of the ride (yes, I do get mildly motion sick, and the twisty windy rural roads near my house are way too twisty and windy for me to keep my lunch down if I’m trying to write), the latter part is smooth sailing, and I can get a good 30-45 minutes of writing in before we pull into NYC or leave the highways.

So now that I’ve done that for a week, I’m suddenly finding a bit more energy available for the job, find myself willing to make a bit more effort to keep things rolling along.  Which in a way doesn’t make sense, because I’m doing more than I was, but in a way it does, because I’ve recovered some great opportunities to do what I love to do.

So I guess I do think there’s some sort of correlation between having time for artistic expression and being able to deal with the mundane crap we all do to bring home the paycheck.  Don’t get me wrong, if I win the lottery I’m still outta there — but for now, this is a nice little discovery, and it’ll do nicely.

Finally, by way of backhanded review: my Acer netbook is the best money I’ve spent on myself in a long time.

(And no, I still haven’t installed World of Warcraft on it!)

I haven’t talked about the writing for a while.  That’s not because nothing has been happening, but rather because it’s been happening quite a lot and, well, I wanted to actually write, rather than write about it.

So, although I haven’t stopped writing, it’s time to write about it now, because something neat happened and I want to blather about it a bit.

There’s a part of the story where Erik, our leading man, finds himself in Highbranch, a city (if you choose not to tangent on the link) predictably tree-ish in nature.  It’s not a casual visit; in fact, he’s a prisoner there, and finds himself under heavy suspicion and questioning by various and sundry officials, but he’s not strapped in chains just yet, as the people who live there believe in things like due process, at least to an extent.

At one point, Erik is instructed to visit a specific place in order to see some ancient artwork that his enemies claim prove his association with the fellow currently giving everyone fits.  The first time I wrote this bit, I assumed that this location was just your basic art gallery sort of place, and I simply segued to Erik seeing what he needed to see.  It worked at the time, but as part of the overall re-treatment I’m giving the story, I realized there was another way to do this that would have a great deal more impact.

So, rather than letting Erik just bamf into that art gallery, I decided to let him walk there, as I had a scene in mind where his entry and journey to the center of the exhibit was a slow crescendo to panic and revelation.

That’s when the throwaway detail became not so throwaway.

I had never really fleshed out the art gallery concept beyond it being, well, some random art galleryish sort of place, so while I gave Erik and his new friend, Elori, some time to get acquainted on the way, I ruminated on it a bit.  Erik’s antagonist in this part of the story tells them to go see an exhibit ‘near’ this specific place, so obviously the antagonist had known something I didn’t.  So, as I wandered the massive, curving boughs with Erik and Elori, I had this sudden vision of what that place really was.  Suddenly I had a new hook into the world, a new insight into the people, a new subtly impressive place to see and a feeling to share.  I’m endlessly excited when I discover new places in this poor, ruined fictional world of mine, and this no-longer-just-an-art-gallery place quickly became an object of wonder and delight — so much so that the pages that followed were an utter blur.

I won’t give the details away, because a blog post won’t do it justice.  But not only does it give Highbranch yet another level of depth and realism it didn’t have before, it reconnects Erik with the tragedies of his recent past in a way I hadn’t been able to work out before, and it gives he and Elori an awesome, genuine bonding moment they will need in the hours and days to come.

So, moral of blog post, never throw away a detail — you never know what you’re selling short when you do.

Finally picked one up; they had a model that lists for too much money on sale for just barely cheap enough for me to consider, and then when I convinced myself I’d actually write on the bus with it, I finally succumbed.

So there it is, the little devil — and to justify the expense, I have actually been writing on the bus with it!  Well, attempting in some cases, as there are definitely some lessons to learn when trying to use it.  Like, those twisty windy roads near my house?  I shouldn’t try to use it when we’re driving on those.  And when some rude SOB leans all the way back in their chair?  Yeah, it’s not real useful then.  Especially because the keyboard layout is a little modified from the usual — scale is slightly smaller, and keyboard layout is scrunched a bit, so typing blind won’t work until I’ve relearned the keyboard.  Soon, but not yet.

Aside from that, though, this morning was a great proof of concept.  I napped until the highway, then broke out the little beast, lit up OpenOffice and went to town.  Already knew what I wanted to do, and while I didn’t finish, I certainly made enough of a dent to know I’ll be using this even more.

If I can snake some lunchtime I’ll pop the hood open and do some more, but at least I can start reclaiming some of the travel time I thought I’d sacrificed forever to the gods of Transit last year.

…must… resist temptation… do not install… no WoW… no WoW!

So, wow.  Stared at TGL’s manuscript yesterday night.  Flipped pages, pondered paragraphs, tinkered with sentences, but all in all was pretty much a zero-sum on the writing front.

I’ve suddenly realized it’s time to read the damned thing front to back and see where I’m really at.

This is part of the curse of non-linear writing: sometimes, I have to stop myself, get my head out of the weeds, get a look around and figure out what I was doing. It’s not that I don’t know where things are going, but the interactions between all the different threads is getting a bit fuzzy in my head and I really need to be precise about how they wind together.

So I guess that  means I get to read for a couple of days!

So today, I needed to get my awesome go-getting literary agent a copy of the one-page synopses that detail what happen in the second and third books of the series — The Grey Lord, which I’ve mentioned here before, and The Grey God, the third book, which I haven’t.

There is, of course, an excellent reason for me not having mentioned The Grey God before, and that’s because, well, I haven’t really thought much about it yet.  Oh, sure, I knew it was the end of the first big story arc, and it was going to be awesome and have armies and fights and climaxes and heroes and villains and dark evil wicked cool things in it, and I even wrote one scene of it as a prologue to the first book that I’ll probably leave out, but aside from that it was a bit… oh, amorphous, I suppose.

Anyway, I had a one-page synopsis already written for The Grey Lord, and it wasn’t even all that bad, so I sent that along quickly with a modicum of spit and polish (light on the spit).  I was delighted to discover, as I went through my files, that I had also dutifully written a one-page synopsis for The Grey God at around the same time as I’d written the one for TGL.  Eager to send it along, I popped it open to see what I’d come up with, and immediately saw that it was Cack.

The reason it was Cack, of course, has something to do with not having thought much about it yet.  I’d even go as far as to say that it had a Lot to do with it.  Quite a lot, in fact.

So that’s what I’ve done, from mid-afternoon until, well, about twenty minutes ago: I’ve thought long and hard about The Grey God, and ultimately come up with some stuff I really like.  New places to go, new things to see, new research to do and, most importantly, some great conflicts to mark the end of this particular cycle in the story.  Hopefully, I’ve also come up with a one-page synopsis that is not only Not Cack, but is also a reasonably good representation of where I want to take the story and how I intend to get there.

So that was my day, which was awesome, providing yet more circumstantial evidence that I really do enjoy this writing thing.

As for the reasons I’ve been away for a bit, I’ll cover that in a later post.  Not quite ready to talk about that other stuff yet, because I’m superstitious, but I’ll get around to it.

but then the spacemen abducted me, used a maser on my brain to alter my perception of the passage of time, and fed me chocolate.  It was very good chocolate, which is always nice during an abduction, but as a result of the very good chocolate, the only thing I can remember for certain is the fact that they did in fact have very good chocolate.

Damn those sly spacemen anyway.

In other news, nobody at work can function without me being physically in the building, so I have not yet been able to indulge in actual vacation time yet, despite having been scheduled to indulge in exactly that kind of time for the entire week.  In this regard, the aforementioned chocolate is not quite as effective at making me forget details, which is both a good thing and a bad thing.  Primarily bad at the moment, as it results in much weeping and gnashing of teeth, but I expect it’ll be good in hindsight.

Lastly, someone whose work I quite like is showing a preliminary interest in the manuscript.  This is actually an incredibly cool thing and something I’d much prefer to turn into a headline while leaping from one tall building to the next (with or without a cape), but I must reasonably temper this news because (a) “preliminary interest” is not equivalent to “ready to purchase lock, stock and barrel,” and (b) I still have a quantity of residual chocolate to consume.

That is all.  More when the chocolate lets me remember I need to post again.

The last few months have been hell on my creative drive.

As much as I like to bitch (check the size of the ‘bitching’ tag on the left), this actually isn’t one; it’s an observation, and perhaps a diagnostic, but not a bitch.

I’ve always been fond of saying that the job is a paycheck, not Art, which is code for giving myself an excuse for not getting incredibly stressed out to the point of going bug-eyed and wondering where the sharp cutlery is when I deal with the inevitable brats, idiots and egotists at work.  I’m in advertising, so not only do I get those separately, they often come in cunning combinations of the three — which is why it’s so important I maintain that distinction.

Lately I’ve come under the guidance of a Man of Business.  I am not categorizing him in this in this way to mock him, nor am I engaging in the art of sarcasm in any way when I say that.  I say it, because this is a man for whom his job IS his art.  Having made this observation, it’s actually profound to watch him in action, and proof positive to me that for every medium, there is an Artist.  Subtle nuances of human interaction are the clearest indicators to him; shifts in process alert him to emergencies buried deeply in complex projects, and for one of the very few times in my life I find myself constantly learning.

It has, however, been my great misfortune to join forces with this fellow at precisely the moment the business decides to collapse in upon itself with all the fury of an obsessive-compulsive chasing after a white whale.  As a result, the Artist has gone manic in an attempt to save said business from consuming itself in a cannibalistic orgy the likes of which even the Donner Party would have balked at, and my life, as a result of that association, has gone from the casual contemplation of a paycheck to furious reactionary firefighting.  Given the current economy, and the fact that my first manuscript sale is unlikely to make me independently wealthy (sure, I can dream, but I can buy lottery tickets and not win, too), this is probably a good thing long-term… but with the aforementioned Artist demanding so much of my energy, as well as demanding ever-higher levels of performance and observation from me as we go, it’s a full-on brain screw when it comes to the imaginary world in my head.

Acknowledging that the work situation is not going to change any time soon, the simple truth is that business will never be my Art — there’s never been any question about that, and if that’s a self-imposed limitation, I can live with it.  With that established, then, the key to reclaiming my own Artistry has to be regaining control of my own time, and the only way I can think of to do that under the pressures of work is by adopting and maintaining a strict schedule.  With regular 12-hour days sapping my energy, nights are lost except for mindless media consumption, so I have to claim the mornings as my own.  This means resisting the siren song of online gaming for overly late evenings, it means not throwing the alarm clock at the wall during the early mornings, and somehow working out how not to get wretchedly motion-sick while writing on the bus (something I’ll gladly take hints regarding, if anyone has any).

…of course, it’ll be much harder to establish these habits this holiday season, as I fully expect to engage in some bad behavior (and, by the way, have thoroughly earned the opportunity to misbehave over the last year!).  But when the New Year comes and the feces begin to impact the rotating oscillator yet again, at least I know I have a plan.