Traveller's Tales

Also, I know about the pop-up.

I’ve got a post up on the LibraryThing message boards to suss it, as I already use their service and would like to use their widget, given I’ve already done the hard work of cataloging a tiny fraction of my library there.

In the meantime, click OK and ignore the second Sherlock Holmes.  We all know there’s only one.

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.

First: apparently Shadee and I were thinking along similar lines today; she left a comment on a prior post regarding where to find good post-consumer bond paper — apparently The Green Office has a lot of good stuff along these lines. My own investigations led to a specific bond paper brand, Aspen 100, which is sold at OfficeMax by the ream, that is both 100% post-consumer content (i.e. contains no newly dead trees, only previously dead trees) and supposedly looks decent. Seems this is a more intelligent approach to eco-friendly printing than those silly “Please think of the environment before printing this email” signatures that are going around right now. OfficeMax’s online checkout and shipping fees are silly, but I’ll stop by one in NYC tomorrow and pick up a ream to give it a go.

Second: After my little episode procuring an actual printout of the current manuscript for The Grey Lord, I’ve managed to stare at it a number of times, do some line edits as I leaf through the pages and frown a bit. As I reflected on my inability to focus on the task at hand, it occurred to me that I may need to take it back yet another step; there’s too much actual detail in the manuscript now, and I need to think in less detail, not more. With that reflection, I wondered if I couldn’t use one of the tools I use in my mundane work life, OpenOffice Draw, to help with my writing life. I won’t get into specifics just yet, but if it ends up working for me I’ll post the results.

Third: I have run out of fudgesicles.

Stamps procured from the Lexington Avenue Post office; envelopes from the Duane Reade across the street. Watch out, Agent A, it’s coming and it has your name on it.

K, now I wait for a few weeks. To borrow a phrase from the massive multiplayer crowd… /twiddle.

In the meantime, I’ve reinstalled Lotus Word Pro on my laptop — not because I’m going to write in it (as much of a joy as that word processor was to use, I’m an Open Office fan now), but because a shedload of my old research, historical documentation and backstory is in various Word Pro docs, and if I’m serious about continuing to improve the Codex daily, I’m going to need that stuff. Not to mention the rules to the RPG that’s based in the same world as the book.

Lastly, I’m prioritizing time now on developing the promotional materials for Knight — mainly because they’re actually fun, and tell a bit more of a part of the story that really doesn’t have much detail. That and I don’t have to actively try to resolve some of Lord’s stickier problems while I focus on selling the first book. It’s only mulling, though, I promise — there have been some good new bits in Lord the last couple of days and the engine’s definitely on again.

I’ve been told several times now that I need to make a map for my novel. It’s one of those tired old cliches that every fantasy novel needs a big scribbled-upon map for people to stare at and refer to during the course of the book. I could be a cynical bastard and say it’s because the names are so wacky and the narratives so poor that without the map the average reader would be completely lost, but as a matter of fact I quite clearly remember a sense of youthful wonder, even magic when I first saw Tolkien’s map in The Hobbit. Part of that magic, certainly, was the undeniable fact that the fellow had a sense for the visual as well as the verbal, but it’s enough to force me to ignore my cynical thoughts and remember what drew me to fantasy in the first place.

That said, Napoleon Dynamite has as much artistic ability in his left pinkie finger as I do in my entire body, so the question immediately goes from one of necessity to one of execution. How the devil to do a thing like this? Truth be told I do have worldmaps, created in the extremely early 90s in Lotus Freelance Graphics, horrid polygonal things that, while accurately describing the relation of cities and landmarks in my world, do absolutely nothing magical in terms of appearance.

Enter the technology of the new millenium, or more precisely the software of ProFantasy Software. Stubborn, bull-headed software that absolutely requires that one do things in ways that appear at first to be utterly counterintuitive and highly annoying, but ways that I must admit grow on you. Having scanned a copy of my old maps, I plopped the bitmap in as a background and then proceeded to struggle with Campaign Cartographer to try and make a decent map out of the thing. After several ruinous attempts and one trip to the net to find a font I was missing (BudHand, if you must know), I’ve finally come up with something that’s not horrid, and at least is a damned sight better than what I’d started with.

So now I’ve got a map, or nearly so. I like the tool more the more I use it, though I do honestly think that some of their design choices are a bit overly stubborn. That said, so am I, so perhaps that’s why it’s growing on me.