Traveller's Tales

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.

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.