writing
I went back and fiddled with a couple of things in Book 2 that were annoying me. I feel like you can tell when I took a break from writing, because all of a sudden I introduce 15 new story points that come from nowhere, don’t really fit, and don’t go any place. So some pruning and streamlining there.
Then I started up on Book 3, which has 21 chapters (20 + epilogue). I believe it’s the first editing pass on the book, and yes, it’s definitely a lot rougher than Book 1 or 2.
…and did a bunch of fleshing out of scenes! This on honestly not quite enough sleep, but I had a lot of thoughts last night and this morning, so it wasn’t difficult to pop things in.
I am getting to the end of the last book in the series! And the series! Whoo! Really just one final action scene and then the denouement. It’s interesting because this is the least traditional romance plotline in the series, and I suspect it’s veering more into adventure territory at this point, but hopefully readers will still find it satisfying. People seem to like Tribulations, and I was a bit worried about that one, so maybe I should worry less about this.
Busy day today, so I’m just doing some editing.
One of my pet peeves (keep in mind, I’m quite bad with names) is when characters are given really similar names. You know, “Elaine” and “Ellen”—like, there are thousands upon thousands of names out there, and this is what you do?
I always try to guard against that in my own work, but what I realized was that I had two characters whose names didn’t sound the same, but they looked similar written down. It’s more of a deal in book two, because one of the characters is much more prominent here than in book one.
So I took care of that—again, there are thousands upon thousands of names out there….
Since I got my second shingles shot yesterday, I’m not good for much today, so I thought I’d read a book my sister got me for my birthday: Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.
It reminds me a lot of Eats, Shoots & Leaves in that it’s waaaaaay more readable than one of the classic style guides or a grammar textbook while managing to cover a lot of very important information about how grammar works (including an entire section on ghost rules! yay!).
But I think there’s one aspect that less-experienced writers might find confusing. As you may have gathered from the subtitle, the book isn’t really intended to be the final word on anything.
The problem in my mind stems from the fact that Dreyer will sometimes posit his pet preferences as the “correct” (or more accurately, standard) way. They are not. If he’s noting that, hey, all the style guides disagree with him, but they’re wrong, you need to realize that he is espousing something that is not standard.
It’s fine if you want to use what Dreyer thinks ought to be standard English—maybe you agree with him that Dreyer’s English is better than regular English! But if you’re trying to convince a reader that you actually do know how to drive a bus, then you’re much better off using one of those standard style books he occasionally disagrees with.
I decided to re-read Trang, just to get myself geared up for the fourth book, and…whoopsie. Yeah. In the first book the layout of the diplomatic station isn’t especially important, and in the second book it’s only a little more important. But in the third book the station layout is HUGELY important. Meaning that I actually drew myself a detailed station layout for the first time for the third book, only to realize now that it contradicts some information in the first book.
I’m re-reading the second book now, just to see where the issue stands. I’ll give the third book another read as well. If the first and third book are the problems, then the choices are to fix either the third book or the first. The third book hasn’t gone to the copy editor yet (still waiting), so hopefully I can just take care of it easily in that book without having it mess up the plot (that will be what the additional read will be looking for). If it’s really not fixable in that book, then it’s going back to the first book, fixing that (plus the two typos I found)—but I wouldn’t bother to fix the paper version (I don’t even know if I can at this point, since I’m not using the same software), and of course anyone who got the e-book before I fixed it would still have an inconsistent copy.
Obviously this problem would have been avoided if I had done a detailed layout of the station at the outset, but I feel like that could have created problems, too. I do plan my books to an extent, but I don’t know what exactly is going to happen in each book until I write it. And this issue was caused by my being overly precise in the first book when it wasn’t essential to the plot, so that’s kind of annoying.
With one thing and another, I haven’t finished the betas on the next Trang novel yet, but I’ve been mulling over them and thinking about the fourth book, which I have a vague outline for but not much more. A couple of nights ago I had a really good idea for that book, and last night I basically a thunderstorm of ideas that resulted in my hopping out of bed, turning on the lights, and annoying the cat about a million times to write them down. So that was a lot of progress there, and I’m very happy about it. (My writing process is kind of a bitch, honestly—just ask my cat.)
One thing I think I have to do now is swap the titles for the third and fourth book. Trials will make more sense with the fourth book, while Tribulations makes equally-good sense for the third. It does kind of lose the whole, “Oh what trials and tribula-a-tions” thing, and it means that I will once again be laboring on Trials, but that’s OK.
I got back the beta read of A Dislocated World (the World War II letters). It’s interesting because the questions simply aren’t that different than the questions for Trials: What’s an APO? Why doesn’t he know whether or not he needs to pay income tax? Is the Maine unit in Maine?
It really brings home something I realized in journalism school, which is that nonfictional stories and fictional stories are both stories, and should be treated as such. (This concept is really important to the movie Big Fish, and is a big part of why I liked it so much.) There is some essay, which of course I can’t find now, where a writer points out that, although science fiction is known for its world building, a problem with a lot of novels in other genres is that they don’t bother to do any world building when it would really enrich the book.
And a big part of the editing I’m doing with this nonfiction, historical book is world building. Nobody knows what the hell the ETO is anymore, nor how it differs from the CBI or the POA—you have to explain all that. You have to build this nonfiction, historical world, otherwise these letters won’t make any sense.
What else? The copy editor is available! Yay!
Part 2 is even longer than Part 1, so I read & input changes just for the first half of it. That was a lot easier on me than doing the same job all day—I need to change position more. The new place has a smaller office, so I’ve only had my regular desk chair out, but today I finally pumped up the old ball chair. Having two different chairs makes the office look crowded and messy, but it will be worth it to be able to work long hours and still have feeling in both feet….
The nervousness hits, right? It’s been so long—will the beta readers HATE the latest incarnation? Will it have been worth the wait? Oh God….
Took it easy today and just fixed some things that had bothered me after I finished writing yesterday. In the process I realized that a major scene in one of the last chapters…also happens about 10 chapters before. Whoops! The perils of having a lot of time pass between writing days!
I edited through chapter 29, which is as far as I've written.
I feel a little ergh about the first draft--the first section is great, but that's because [SPOILER] is happening, so there's kind of a natural story arc. The problem is that after [SPOILER] is [SPOILER]ed, things start to wander a bit. So I need to ramp up the tension a little, which I think should be doable, since [SPOILER] happens next--I just need to rework that part so that its full impact is felt, which isn't happening right now because [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER].
In addition, you can tell that there was a long interruption to writing it, because some of the much later chapters read like I'm trying to introduce the whole fictional world all over again. So that needs work before I push on.
I got some sleep last night, so today I took care of something I've been meaning to tend to for a while--I went through both Trang and Trust and copied out all the physical descriptions of the aliens. It's been a while since I've worked on this series, and I'm glad I posted a note to myself to do this when I was doing the rough draft, because in Trials I was giving the White Spiders eight legs instead of ten! (I did notice a minor continuity error between the first two books regarding the height of the Pincushions--let's just say they look bigger when they're charging you!)
I also noted the description of the station, the history of the portals, etc., etc.--stuff like this is why the Trang books are so much more complicated than a stand-alone novel. And honestly, this is why I have so much respect for the Harry Potter and the Remembrance of Things Past books--I mean, yeah, you can complain about this aspect or that, but given how tough it is just doing a regular series, trying to make something that's six or seven novels but is actually one ginormous book just sounds so hard!
I've been editing the hard copy over the past couple of days--12 chapters done!
I had an interesting moment because, since this is a YA book, I wanted to have my 12-year-old niece give it a read (she's done this for other writers, so it's not a huge, weird pressure for her). So I asked my sister about it. My sister has been putting out books of her own these days, and it was kind of alarming how she was like, "Yes, she can beta it! And this person can beta it! And that person can beta it! And this other person can beta it! Oh, if we're going to have all these people beta it, we can't leave so-and-so out!"
Oh my God--I had to stop her. It's just the difference in process: My sister will take something that she doesn't consider really done and have a million people beta the crap out of it. She's totally fine with that and considers it completely necessary. I wait until I'm basically happy with the book, and then let a couple of people who I trust beta it. Really all I'm expecting them to do is catch things I've missed--like, oops, you never described your protagonist, or oops, you've got some crucial event happening offstage. I feel like if you invite in all and sundry, you'll wind up with people like--well, like me if you asked me to read over your romance novel. People whose input is Less Than Helpful.
I think part of it, too, is that (even though it's been taking me forever to get things done) I do like to be efficient. Waiting for an entire community to weigh in just seems like a big waste of time to me--they can do that after the book is published!
I've had a couple of high blood pressure readings at the doctor's office--I've pretty much always gotten white-coat syndrome with new doctors, but this is a doctor I've had for a while, so she was a bit hmmm about it. After tangling with the blood pressure machines at the supermarket (which are free for a reason) I went ahead and bought a home monitor--they're not expensive, and I really wanted to have reliable data. If there's a problem with my blood pressure, I don't want to ignore it and wind up like my brother, but I also don't want to be put on medication just because some doofus almost backed me over in the supermarket's parking lot.
I've been reading up on how to take accurate measurements (do it in the morning before you've had caffeine), plus I've been taking it at various times during the day just to get a sense of what my own patterns are. (At this point, it doesn't look like there's a real problem.)
So after I finally managed to get some writing today, I took my blood pressure. And in spite of the fact that 1. it's the afternoon, and 2. I drank a whole bunch of caffeine to help the writing along, my blood pressure reading was the lowest it's ever been--and I took it twice to make sure!
And, you know, this is what I have been telling people! Like, yes, what I'm doing for the family is very important and meaningful, and yes, there are other enjoyable activities out there--but they're not writing. They're just not. And if you're a writer, there is simply no substitute for the real thing!
One of the things that's been happening that's been preventing the writing is that I've been traveling A LOT over the past year or so.
There's been a few reasons for this. One is that I never did travel very much before, because I was a freelancer and travel meant I had to both pay for the trip and forgo earned income, so it was extremely expensive. The other thing is that my family was scattered all over the country, so what travel I did was to see family, not to go on some adventure.
We're more consolidated now, but because I've taken on a bigger role in the family's financial management, I've still had to travel quite a bit for family--and not fun trips, but ones undertaken to ensure that taxes are paid properly and the like. You know: Meet with lawyer. Meet with bank. Search in file cabinet for documents. Meet with lawyer....
I started to really resent this, and as a result I booked a bunch of fun travel. Everything I'd ever wanted to do, but couldn't before! Carpe diem! YOLO, dude!! I went to Hawaii! And London! I rode the Coast Starlight train all the way from Seattle to Los Angeles!
That was all great, but...lately when I see these things on my calendar, my reaction has been "Not ANOTHER one!" I realize that this is the very definition of a Rich Person Problem, but it's been very frustrating to me to not be making progress with the writing, and these trips really fracture my focus (especially when they are followed up by persistent sinus infections).
So, I have another trip coming up soon (with family, but it's supposed to be a fun trip, not a work trip), but then I should have no trips at least until the holiday season. I still want to travel, of course--I want to see the world! Whee!--but I need to find a better balance and try to schedule trips around the writing.
So, that blew, but it's pretty much over, and I'm catching up on everything that had to go on the back burner because I either wasn't here or was drowning in snot. (I'm also looking into ways of preventing sinus infections when I fly, because that keeps happening and it really sucks.)
In the meantime enjoy this Wall Street Journal article characterizing creative process as mental illness! Symptoms include:
1. Creating fictional characters
2. Creating storylines for them
3. Preferring creative work over working in retail
I am in huge trouble.
I'll probably start writing again tomorrow, but in the meantime I've been watching the movie versions of the Hunger Games books, which has been pretty interesting from a writing standpoint. (Spoilers ahead!!!)
I really liked the book The Hunger Games a lot, but I found Catching Fire and Mockingjay to be very disappointing, in no small part because they were very repetitive. ("Let's play the Hunger Games--again!") I haven't watched the two Mockingjay movies yet, so perhaps I'll be let down, but I have seen the movie versions of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire.
And I was really surpised by how good they were. With The Hunger Games I was surprised by how much the movie improved on what I thought was a very good book; with Catching Fire I was equally surprised by how much the movie improved what I thought was a tiresome and unoriginal book.
What made the difference? Getting the hell out of Katniss' head.
I realize that Katniss' voice is a big part of what made the series so popular with teenagers, and it's not like she doesn't have reason to be bitter and whiny, but bitter and whiny is what she is--the adults in her life suck, and she has to take on all this responsibility if she wants her family to survive. Being a teenager, she does so with as little grace as is possible, and she makes zero effort to understand the people around her--in her eyes, they're all just jerks and oppressors.
That's not a huge problem with The Hunger Games book, but it is part of what makes the movie stronger: The gamemaker, who Katniss just sees as a heavy, is revealed in the movie to actually be a naive idealist, which was to me much more interesting.
Her limited viewpoint becomes more of a problem in the Catching Fire book because Katniss knows less. In The Hunger Games, there are actually two games going on at the same time: The overt game where you kill everyone else off, and the PR game where you win viewers' hearts. Katniss knows about the second game, and she plays it very well--which is why both she and Peeta survive.
In Catching Fire the second game is political revolution, and Katniss knows nothing about it. Her scope of vision is limited to survival, and her experience is limited as well--in her mind, the second Hunger Games isn't meaningfully different than the first.
Of course, it's entirely different, and the movie makes that evident much earlier. You see President Snow's political calculations, and you know that the decision to put Katniss in the Hunger Games again isn't just another lousy thing to fall upon her out of the blue, which is all it is to her. (Adults suck, man!)
And honestly, I had much more sympathy for her tunnel vision in the movie, because I wasn't trapped in it for the duration like I was in the book. At the end of both the book and the movie, Katniss is shocked to hear that, in response to the revolution, her home district has been destroyed. In the book, that annoyed the piss out of me--she's been afraid of something like that happening the whole time, she's been blathering on about it at length, over and over again. Why is she surprised? In the movie, her bafflement at the speed at which events have unfolded is simply more understandable--she is just a kid, after all.
I cannot for the life of me find the cheat sheet I made up for the soldiers that lists all their jobs, when they came onto the station, etc. I made it first with Trang, but it really reached its glory with Trust because Patch had so many scheduling conundrums to deal with in order to keep his laser tag games going and still have a proper team to go to the Cyclopes planet. Now I can't find it anywhere--ah, the perils of a lengthy hiatus. I guess after I finish this draft I'll have to read Trang and Trust again, and take notes!
So, I've got the rough draft of the young adult novel finished (YAY), plus about 34,000 words of Trials. So what I think I'm going to do is my first! ever! experiment with writing two novels at once.
The idea (and we'll see how this works in practice) is that working on one helps clear the brain to edit the other. So I'm planning to get back in on Trials, finish that draft, then edit the YA book, then edit Trials, etc.
Where I really see this breaking down is once things get to the production stage--I don't see myself laying out two books in a row and living to tell the tale. But that just means that, at that stage, I can choose which book goes out first--and I'm thinking that book should be Trials.
Anyway, all this of course relies on sleeping (I woke up at 4 am today and had a bloody nose. Either I'm a cokehead, or it is allergy season) and the general cooperation of life. We'll see how it goes.
Things are, as expected, kind of crazy right now--it's family stuff that I can't really talk about, but we've made some legal moves that will hopefully allow everyone to be taken care of in a way that is both effective and manageable for Team Responsible Adults. In the short term, it does mean a lot of extra work for me (I'm going to computerize things! A shocking idea, I know), but I'm hoping I can set things up so that I budget a certain amount of time for all that, and then can budget a certain amount of time for, you know, the stuff I actually enjoy doing. Like writing.
In the meantime, I watched This Is Not a Film, which is a movie about the Iranian film director Jafar Panahi and his experience being under house arrest and banned from making movies by the Iranian government.
It's excellent, but it's one of those movies (like Barton Fink or Adaptation) that is very much about being a creative person, which means that 95% of the people who watch it (even if they like it) really have no idea why it was made. The thing is, here's this guy who really is compelled to create, and he is prohibited from creating--so he's incredibly frustrated, which really brings out so much about the creative process because he's so nostalgic about it (plus he just can't not do it, no matter how dangerous it is).
The result is a movie that basically goes step-by-step through the various aspects of creativity: There's world creation (he literally tapes out a set onto his living-room rug), there's a whole meditation on how you start out making something but then it starts to make itself, and there's the fact that it's really therapeutic. At first Panahi's art is a welcome distraction from everything that's going on in the real world, but then what's going on in the real world become impossible to ignore (and there's that moment of guilt about having used art to escape). Finally, he gets behind the camera and starts making art out of what's going on!
Anyway, it's really brilliant--it's so much more than, "House arrest sucks!"--and I heartily recommend it. And obviously I hope Panahi gets his freedom sooner rather than later!