The Big One-Oh-Oh

Word count: 100,497
LBR census: Lots of talk of death. And love has taken a beating along the way.
Authorial sadism: That little house of cards Galen’s been living in has started to fall on his head.

***

I’m over the hump in several respects at once. The most obvious is the crossing of the hundred thousand word mark: sure, I’m only 1834 words closer to the end of the book than I was when I woke up this morning, but the psychological effect of watching the odometer tick over is enormous. The end of the book is no longer on the other side of a wall; I can see it now from where I’m standing.

The invisible one, to everyone but me, is in the revision. It’s been so painfully obvious to me that Part Four was where I started to lose my way; I stalled out a chunk of the way through it back in July, having to stop and rethink what I was doing, and what do you know? I’ve had to completely replace four scenes out of it, including the one I was writing when I stalled. Having made it past the last of those, however, the road ahead looks a hell of a lot smoother. Not that there isn’t stuff that needs fixing, but it’s of the “polish this and make it hit harder” sort rather than the “oh holy hell this scene isn’t even doing anything” sort. And I know which one I prefer. This wasn’t an 1834-word day; it was a 4762-word day, the rest of it being either flashback or replacements for existing crappy scenes. Tiring, but I’m done with that now.

I’m so close to the tipping point, too. (If I can have both a hump and a tipping point in this graph.) There’s about five thousand words of stuff left for me to muddle through, and then I hit the stuff I was semi-outlining last night: ten thousand words or so of scenes I think I’ll be able to roar right through. Then we’ll be into Part Seven, and the grand finale, which I hope will be very full of roaring.

But now I’m sleepy, and I’ve done my work, and it’s time for bed. Tomorrow, we begin the journey from 100 to 140.

different kinds of procrastination

The hardest thing is knowing when to push, and when not to.

Three hours ago I was sitting at my computer, trying to get started on the day’s revision and failing. There are two scenes that need total replacing today — one involving the Crow’s Head, one involving the British Museum — and I knew roughly what each one was going to do, but I just couldn’t get my brain in gear enough to produce a decent opening sentence for the first one.

Laziness? Or an actual block?

I went downstairs and played solitaire for a while. Told myself I really should get to work. Then remembered that I also need to write this part’s flashback scene, and maybe if I figured out exactly what that was doing I’d be more able to write the Crow’s Head bit, which is supposed to set up that flashback. So I called kniedzw into the room and we bounced ideas back and forth until I knew what to do with the flashback, and then I came back upstairs and wrote that and polished the bit that follows it, with Galen talking to Lune . . . then hit the wall again. Because the next scene after that is the British Museum one, which also needs replacing. And I wasn’t sure whether I should try to do that before I’ve replaced the previous scene or not. Grumble mutter smack into wall.

Back downstairs for more solitaire.

Ponder ponder. Is it too early to bring up a problem the characters run into later on? No — not if I rearrange the scenes. Put Galen’s conversation with Lune first; then the Crow’s Head scene can happen a couple of weeks later, much closer to the Museum thing, and oh hey Irrith has that favor she can call in, which I’ve been wondering what to do with — use that as setup for the Museum scene?

Bit by bit, it falls into place in my head, and a hell of a lot better than it would have if I’d made myself start writing the Crow’s Head stuff three hours ago. But it’s so hard to tell the difference: will delay improve anything? When you’re under a deadline, you can’t always err on the side of assuming that yes, it will. It was so very tempting to tell myself I could work on this part tomorrow . . . but that would put me a day behind. How can you know when that’s the right course of action, versus when you need to mush on?

At present, I’m writing a blog post about what I’ve figured out, instead of applying it to the book. I think that’s a pretty good sign that the useful procrastination is over and done with, and now it’s time to mush.

a glimpse ahead

Making notes right now, trying to figure out how many scenes it will take me to deal with a particular bit of plot. Am amused by: (7) Daring rescue!

You can tell it will be exciting, because it has an exclamation mark.

political linkage, all in one place

I’ve had various things open in tabs for a while now, but the truth of the matter is that I probably won’t have the brain-power to say anything substantive about them until, oh, November. So screw it. I’ll just toss them up in a single post, and leave it at that. If you aren’t interested in politics, cruise on by.

New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit — Bill Maher, expressing a lot of my concerns about what happens when the profit motive becomes the governing principle of various fields.

Touching back to principles — Abi Sutherland on the need for the government to protect the individual against the corporation.

The GOP’s Misplaced Rage — pretty much a classic case of “I didn’t leave my party; my party left me.” Bruce Bartlett, long-time Republican economist and old-school developer of supply-side economics, on the ways in which our current problems are the GOP’s fault. I don’t necessarily agree with his ideas on how we could and should fix the problems, but this guy is exactly what I see lacking in the face of the Republican Party today: an intelligent, principled man whose views I can respect even when I disagree with him.

An Officer’s Experience in Our Christian Military — this worries me. A lot.

Five.

Five parts down. Two to go.

And after ninety-six thousand words of book, the comet has finally shown up.

if only he’d gotten started sooner

Dang it. Joseph Priestley has robbed me of my chance to use the word “dephlogisticated” in this book.

(The term, and the substance it was coined to describe, didn’t come on the scientific scene until his experiments in the mid-1770s. So I can’t talk about dephlogisticated air — aka oxygen — because nobody knows about it yet.)

Pity. It’s such a fun word.

Happens every book.

Books have stages they go through, and after a while, you learn to recognize your own particular set.

Over here at Castle N, we’ve reached the stage of “All right, I really should sit down and get started on revising oh hey this hallway really needs vacuuming.”

(I have no cat to vacuum, alas.)

Fifty more to go. (Thereabouts.)

Word count: 91,133
LBR census: Some rather bloody rhetoric.
Authorial sadism: You’re the one who said it, Irrith. And you’ll remember that by the end of the book.

***

I may be semi-scarce for about the next month, and as I’ve said to a couple of people lately, I can sum up the reason why quite succinctly:

We’ve secretly replaced Marie Brennan’s usual novel-writing process with that of another author. Let’s see if she notices!

Why, yes. Yes, I have. >_<

I know plenty of writers who produce multiple drafts: first they write a vague, bumbling one full of plot hooks that don’t go anywhere and ideas that get jammed in willy-nilly two thirds of the way through, etc. Then, having figured out what the book is about, they go back and write a second draft (sometimes more), getting closer each time to the target. And that’s fine. It works great for them. It would probably even work great for me, so long as I did one very important thing: budgeted enough time before the deadline to allow for multiple drafts.

But I didn’t, because almost all of my previous ten novels* have conformed to my usual declaration, “I tend to write fairly clean first drafts.” Doppelganger, for example, underwent only three substantive changes on its way to publication: I deleted the opening scene, rearranged the early chapters so they cut between Miryo and Mirage more frequently, and unkilled a character for use in the sequel. Everything else was polishing.

This book . . . not so much. I could speculate for hours as to why that’s the case, but the upshot of it all is that I’m throwing out and replacing a much larger quantity of wordage than I’m accustomed to doing. My killfile, wherein I keep everything paragraph-sized or larger that’s been cut from the book, is twenty-five thousand words long. All of it deserves to be there; the sections and scenes I’m replacing them with are about 230% better than my first attempts. But that’s 25K of book I’ve written without getting any closer to the end.

So what I’ve been doing for a week and change, and will be doing for about another month, is kind of sort of writing my second draft while writing my first. That is, I’m slapping 1500 words minimum onto the back end of the book, heading just as fast as I can for the finish line, while also revising 4000 words minimum in the existing text. On the days when that means polishing, life’s good. On the days when it’s actually 2K of new scene plus 2K of polishing, life’s harder.

As you might imagine, this is a little tiring.

But hey, live and learn. I’ve gotten careless about leaving myself a margin of safety; if I’m intending to write a 140K book, then I give myself five months to do it and assume that’ll work out, probably with time to spare. I’ll know better for the Victorian book. I’ve already worked out my schedule for that one, and it involves a big honking overbudget of time just in case that one goes more like this book has. And in the meantime, I’ll just keep my nose to the grindstone, and pray I still have a brain left when all of this is done.

*The sole exception to the above rule was #4, where I wrote one draft that wasn’t so much vague and bumbling as Utter Crap, and then threw it out and wrote something radically different and thirty thousand words longer. But I wasn’t under a deadline then.

Free fiction! Mine and other people’s.

One thing you get from being published in print magazines, that you don’t get from the online ones: author copies.

Sometimes, more than you need.

I’ve got a stack here of random magazine issues, each one of them with a story of mine in it, above and beyond the copies I’m keeping for posterity. I’d like to get rid of them, to good homes — but how to arrange that? With a contest, of course!

It consists of three easy steps:

1) Blog in some fashion about the Onyx Court series. It can cover any piece of the series: Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, Deeds of Men, one of the upcoming books. Your post can be anything you want: a review, historical nitpicking, speculation about what’s coming, fanfiction/fanart, pictures of your cat dressed in a homemade Invidiana costume — whatever.

2) E-mail me a link to your blog post. Send it to marie {dot} brennan {at} gmail {dot} com.

3) Profit! Or at least be entered for a chance to do so.

The items up for grabs are as follows:

That’s eleven potential winners, all told. You’ve got until September 1st to post something and notify me of it — which is plenty of time to sew that costume for your cat, so get cracking!

I should have checked this ages ago.

I’m an idiot.

When I pitched the new Onyx Court novels, I gave both of them working titles, because they sound more like real novels if they aren’t called “the comet book” and “the Victorian book.” In the Victorian case, it was a working title because I’m not terribly enthusiastic about the phrase I chose. In the comet case, by contrast, the phrase is fine; I just thought the passage I’d pulled it from didn’t have enough bearing on the plot to work as an epigraph, which is what I’ve done with the previous two.

And I’ve gone months without digging up the aforementioned passage and taking a second look at it. Which is where the idiocy comes in, because as it turns out, it works very well indeed.

So! I have a title! Unless my editor tells me to change it, but he said he was fine with it back when I thought I wasn’t, so we can hope not. The Book Formerly Referred to As the Comet Book will henceforth be referred to as A Star Shall Fall — Star or SSF when I’m feeling informal.

(You can tell the Victorian title is Totally Wrong, because it doesn’t have a verb in it.)

Anyway, I hope y’all like. I think I do.

got it!!!

Okay, so I didn’t take anyone’s suggestion. But I’m going to award the prize to kizmet_42, whose nomination of “The Green Lion” for its alchemical resonance led me to my choice:

The Crow’s Head.

Which is a) alchemical, b) pub-like, c) suitable to the Onyx Court, and d) a reference to the supposed burial of Bran the Blessed’s head in London.

kizmet_42, send your address to marie dot brennan at gmail dot com, and I’ll send you your prize.

name a faerie pub!

This one especially goes out to all the Brits, who are more familiar than your average American with the verbal genre known as the Pub Name.

There is a tavern of sorts in the Onyx Hall. I need a good name for it. Right now it’s the White Stag because of the folkloric connections, but really, that’s far too clean and ordinary-sounding. (It was going to be the Ash and Thorn, but that’s been co-opted for something else.) So: suggest to me suitable faerie pub names. If I end up picking yours, I’ll send you a signed copy of In Ashes Lie.

I should have posted this before

Strange Horizons is running a fund drive — this being one of their regular means of keeping the magazine afloat — and if you donate, you’ll be entered in a drawing for one of these prizes, which (for those interested in such things) includes signed sets of my two series. Along with a bonanza of awesomeness from other people, of course.

And if you donate before 11:59:59 PST today, John Scalzi will match your donation, up to a total of $500. So now’s a good time to do it. Go forth and support!

fun facts to know and tell

The Monument to the Great Fire of London — which started in a baker’s house — was the site of six suicides between 1788 to 1842 (when they enclosed the gallery to stop people jumping off).

Two were bakers, and one was the daughter of a baker.

Maybe someday I’ll write a short story about the vengeful faerie who went around trying to provoke bakers into suicide because Farynor didn’t sweep his damn floor.

eeeeee!

THANK YOU, NEIL GAIMAN.

Because you posted tonight about watching the Perseids, thus reminding me that we’re at (well, one day past) the peak. So I ran outside and wandered around until I found the darkest spot I was going to get short of hopping in the car and driving into the hills (and believe me, I thought about it), and I stood on the sidewalk with my head craned all the way back and my hands cupped around my eyes to block out the street lamps, and then I saw something that might have been a faint streak. Then another, near the edge of my glasses, where I wasn’t really looking. Then a third, bright and clear, right in the middle, with a brief trail just to prove I hadn’t made it up.

Tonight, I saw the first shooting stars of my life.

Awesome.

but what do I do *tonight*?

The good news: there are two less-than-stellar scenes in Part Four that I’d kind of like to replace, and I just figured out what scenes ought to go there.

The bad news: they’re the next two scenes I was going to write for Part Five.

The result: since I need to make forward progress through the book regardless, and writing replacement scenes for existing book doesn’t count, Irrith gets the brunt of my not-even-half-baked idea for tonight. Which means she’s about to end up in a meeting with a bunch of people she really doesn’t like.

I just hope this doesn’t turn out to be a scene I’ll have to replace a few weeks from now . . . .

ETA: I don’t think I’ll have to replace it. Terrifying as it was to leap headfirst into a major plot twist without more than three minutes’ consideration and without having put in place the foundations it’s supposedly standing on, it feels very, very right. The stakes went up as if somebody put rockets on them. And those two scenes will do much better in Part Four than the stuff currently there, which was supposed to go somewhere and never did.

what the hell did we spend our time learning?

Watched Charlie Wilson’s War last night.

Got furious, again, over the state of history education in this country.

Maybe somewhere in the U.S., there are schools that do a decent job teaching history. God knows I didn’t go to one of them, and neither did anybody I’ve ever talked to about this. We never seemed to make it past the Civil War; even in junior high, when U.S. history was split over two years, the first one ending with the Civil War and Reconstruction, we still didn’t get through the twentieth century. Why? Because we started the second year by recapping . . . the Civil War and Reconstruction. And then got bogged down reading All Quiet on the Western Front. I know nothing about the Korean War. (Except that I think technically I’m supposed to call it the Korean Conflict.) What I know about Vietnam, I got from movies. Ditto WWII, mostly. And when it comes to things like Afghanistan (the subject of Charlie Wilson’s War) or our involvement in Iran, there are whole oceans of historical incident I’m ignorant of.

Historical incident that is very goddamned relevant right now. How many people in the U.S. — especially those under the age of 30 — understand the ways in which our problems in Afghanistan are of our own creation? We wanted to stop the Soviets, so we poured weapons and support into the hands of the Afghans, and then wandered off as soon as the commies went away. What’s worse than rampant interventionism? Half-assed interventionism. But thank God we’ve learned our les — oh, wait.

You can’t learn from history if you never learned it in the first place, people.

I want the history textbook I never got. I want a single-volume overview of United States history, 1900-1999, that will tell me the basics about the Korean War Conflict and Vietnam, about Afghanistan and Iran and Iran-Contra and the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, about all those things that were kind of important to U.S. policy and foreign relations that might be tripping us up today, and most especially about the ones I’ve never even heard of and so can’t list here. Bonus points if it has colorful pictures and informative sidebars and maybe a brief quiz at the end of each chapter, because when it comes to this stuff, I’m about at a junior-high level of comprehension.

I don’t even know if that book exists. If it does, I don’t have time to read it anyway, because the downside of writing the Onyx Court series is that most of my nonfiction reading is about Britain. But I can always buy it and hold onto it until the next time I hear about some war I never even knew we fought, and then maybe I’ll drop everything for a few days and learn about my own country.