Traveller's Tales

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.)

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, 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.

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.

So I decided to print the manuscript for TGL early today, so I could miss the rush and all the people trying to use the printers, right? I load up the document, hit print, go to the printer.

And do a double-take: it’s missing. Not the printout, the actual printer, replaced utterly by a shiny new printer where the old one should have been. Reasonably, my printout should be here, though, yes? Reasonably, yes, but in this version of the real world, no. No printout to be seen. I suddenly realize that they’ve changed out the printers like they were threatening to do for all those months, but they never set up my PC with the new local printer. I apparently printed to the old printer address, to which a nearby printer no longer answers.

No big deal, though, right? I go back to my desk, expecting to find the print manager showing me an error, that the old address is no longer valid and would I like to cancel please? Instead, the print manager has already closed, which means that the job has printed.

Somewhere.

Just not here.

Getting slightly desperate, I call the help desk and ask them to locate where printouts to the old printer address would go, and, in typically efficient, forward-thinking and informative fashion, they have absolutely no clue where the old address now goes to, because naturally their operation is so thorough and efficient that a problem of the sort I’m describing could never have happened without it somehow being my fault. After considerable muttering they set up a ticket for me to talk to network operations so I can try to track down the printer.

I wait, and I wait, and I wait some more, and while I’m waiting I get a call from an extension I don’t recognize. Hoping it’s the aforementioned network operations group, I pick up to discover that I’ve answered an irate woman from the 5th floor (I work on the 3rd), wondering if I’m the idiot that printed out a 110 page novel on her printer. Aware that this has suddenly become absurd, I (perhaps inappropriately, but hey I’m ad libbing here) correct her, saying that the document is actually a partial novel rather than a full novel. Belatedly realizing I’m probably pissing her off by playing semantics so early in the morning, I elaborate that yes, it was printed erroneously, and yes, I’m terribly sorry, and yes, I’ll say five Hail Mary’s and go to Confession after I remove the offending document from her printer.

So I march up to the 5th floor to retrieve the aforementioned ream of paper in my best hangdog fashion. She’s not there, but in the interim she has kindly binder-clipped the printout for me, so I feel even more like a stupid oaf as I pick up the parcel, and slink back to my desk as obscurely and quickly as possible.

Upon my return, I see that network operations has finally replied to my request via email: they have courteously sent me the entire network printer map for the 3rd floor, thus managing to provide encyclopedic information for a question I hadn’t asked, while simultaneously failing utterly to provide any information actually pertaining to the original problem (which, in any case, is now solved anyway). A comedy of errors from beginning to end; I can honestly see Palin and Cleese adding just a touch of their own personal styling to the tale and turning it into a saga that would rival their infamous Book Shop skit.

Only two positive results came of this bizarre little episode. One, I have my printout. Two, I now know how to print prank messages on everyone else’s printer on my floor.

I expect both will come in handy.

So yeah, I’m doing a lot of backstory work.  Part of my deal with myself is to do at least one entry in the Codex a day, so that way the damn thing starts taking on a bit more substance, but in honest reflection I have to wonder if I’m letting that get in the way of other writerly stuff, like, you know, the novel itself.

On the one hand, the Codex lets my rational brain take part in the creation process: it links histories, it defines technologies, it aggregates information about various bits and then spits them out in digestible chunks, which is all for the good, naturally.  I do tend to find that if I go all-out creative, doing solid writing and nothing else, I eventually sputter to a halt because part of my brain is being horribly neglected — so in that respect, the Codex is a great way to let the rational side involve itself in the creative process.

On the other hand, there’s a potentially significant logical problem that should be demanding my attention, and that’s the sneaking suspicion that the outline I’ve written for The Grey Lord is seriously flawed in parts, or at least underdeveloped.  Not in huge parts, but in significant enough parts that it probably warrants a going-over with scalpel and forceps.  And, this being the case, it’s quite possible that my current obsession with the Codex is a distraction from the elephant in the room.

I think what needs doing is for me to get an actual hard copy of the thing to review it in its current state.  I’ve been trying to review it on the PC, but screen by screen evaluation just doesn’t seem to be my bag; either I get distracted by the bits I’ve already written and like, or I skip through the problematic stuff with a little too much ease.  I need to see the thing on paper so I can scribble on it.  Apologies to the trees (I wonder if there’s a good recycled bond paper I can do this sort of thing on?), but this sounds like a good first step.

Between laziness, multiple crises and my lovable online addiction, I haven’t done much in My World(tm) lately. In some ways, this is bad, because I need to figure out exactly where I left off on book two. Although I outline (and had already done so extensively for The Grey Lord), I don’t write in a linear fashion, so there’s bound to be some confusion as to how exactly I was meaning to get to point G from point D, when point E was already taking me towards point J. That sort of thing. If it sounds confusing with letters, it’s much more so when there aren’t any, so it’s going to take some thinking to work out exactly what the hell is going on.

In some ways, though, this is actually pretty good. In between re-reading the parts of the second book that are already done, I end up questioning my original assumptions about the story, inserting my characters into alternate scenes and seeing if the story plays out better in other ways. There’s also a bunch of research to be done (speaking of which, does anyone know the smallest possible size a wood molecule can be and still be large enough to connect in a sheet? I’m sort of using this chart as a rough guide, but I’d like to know how much I can reasonably shave off from the thinnest bond size. It doesn’t have to be sturdy or even cohesive outside of another supporting structure, it just has to be thick enough to be technically a sheet of contiguous wood), so the left-brain right-brain interplay has caused a lot of interesting daydreaming, and from the daydreaming there’s some great new ideas popping up to fill in the blanks. Feedback loops are fun!

I guess that means that I’m revving up again. That’s good. It’s not “writing every day” good yet, but it’s definitely getting there.

(PS, after some more research it looks like I’m probably in the 10-100 nanometer range for my wood molecule, but I’d still like to get a properly informed and educated bit of information, so if there’s any bored microbiologists within viewing range of this blog, please set me straight!)

I ask because I don’t really know for sure. I’ve completed and polished several pivotal scenes from The Grey Lord, and I love how they’ve come out. I’ve added an important new character, removed a second, and re-relegated (sic) a third character I’d temporarily promoted to top-tier status to a position back amongst the strong supporting cast. Erik’s story has finally attained the crystal clarity that Anhak’s and Färus’s stories had already managed, and has in fact surpassed them in several ways.

Unfortunately, all this clarity has come at a steep price: my detailed outline is now officially screwed. I’m going to need to re-think the entire story structure with all of these revelations and changes. It’s not that the stories are changing catastrophically, but the way they interplay is definitely changing, and if I’m going to successfully weave them together the way I did in the first book I’m going to need to pull back and stare at the stories for a bit before I can move ahead.

The delay isn’t all a bad thing. There were definitely parts of the outline that were weaker than I wanted them to be, and with the new characters firmly in place it lets me create some compelling scenes between characters that otherwise would not have interacted, or who would have interacted in a much less interesting capacity. But it definitely requires a halt to forward momentum and a regroup as I work out how the new stuff changes the way the story gets told.

So yeah, I guess all told it’s progress. It just seems a bit counterintuitive to call it progress when it involves stopping and staring and cribbing notes instead of writing new chapters.