We interrupt this revision to bring you the following complaint:
God, I hate working with non-decimal currency.
It took an irritating amount of math to figure out what £46 13s. 4d. works out to in Elizabethan marks. (Seventy, in case you were wondering.) Doing calculations where there are twelvepence (d) to the shilling (s) and twenty shillings to the pound, and a mark is worth 13s. 4d., is a good argument for modern currency systems.
Okay, great Internets ubermind. I need a rather specific music recommendation.
I’m soundtracking Midnight Never Come, and I don’t seem to have anything appropriate for a particular scene. Of course, I can’t share the details of the scene, but the relevant thing I’m aiming for is the somewhat ominous ringing of bells. Deep bells, not little hand-bells, and it should seem like a threat rather than a triumphant sound. (What can I say? Faeries don’t like church bells.)
I know some of you listen to a great many movie scores, and that’s probably one of my best bets for finding something suitable. Any suggestions I could go looking for?
Edited to clarify: to borrow Deedop’s phrase, I need something aggressively ominous. I also need something that doesn’t sound too modern; I’m not actually using truly period music for this soundtrack (though I listened to some while writing the book), but I’m trying to avoid synthetic sounds.
This is one of those working habits that probably isn’t a good idea. But it’s how I work; Midnight Never Come is the eighth iteration of this approach. I’m used to it. And it has its benefits.
When I finished writing my first novel, I took a little time off, and then I started editing. Step one, of course, was to read through the novel, at which stage I marked it up with the major changes that needed to be made: continuity errors, bits that needed tightening, awkward sections, things I had to mention earlier or not drop later. This is, in my head, the “chainsaw edit” — the stage at which I take a chainsaw to the story. I mark it up with a red pen, and the goal is to make it look like I bled on the printout. If a page gets by clean, I feel like I’m not trying hard enough.
But what you have to bear in mind is that a page, in this situation, is not a standard manuscript formatted page of novel. It’s a miniscript page.
The miniscript is the part that’s probably a bad idea, but it has historical justification. The Harvard Band was going to some away game — Princeton or Cornell or some place we took a bus to the night before. Since I was always on the Study Bus (as opposed to the Raunch Bus), I decided I would use the trip as a chance to read through the novel. But even in my usual formatting (Times New Roman 12 pt., single-spaced), that was 198 pages of book, which is an awful lot to haul around. I decided to make it smaller.
The result was something my brain immediately dubbed the “miniscript,” the mini-manuscript. Times New Roman, 8 pt., full justification, half-inch margins, delete all page breaks between chapters, print on both sides of the page. Hole-punch the edge and secure it with those little metal rings, and you’ve got yourself a novel on forty pieces of paper — less if it’s a short novel, more if I ever write something that goes substantially past the 120K mark. I have eight of these things now. Maybe more; I can’t remember if I printed a miniscript for the atrocious first draft of Sunlight and Storm, or the revised draft of TNFKASotS*. I go through and mark them up with the red-pen chainsaw edit; then I go through again with a green pen, doing the line-edit. (That’s useless in places where I’ve radically changed scenes, but I just skip over those.)
What you need, to try this at home: forty pieces of paper (give or take), three metal rings, a red pen, a green pen, and microscopic handwriting.
Is it the best way to edit a novel? Probably not. But it’s how I edit a novel. Which is why the miniscript of Midnight Never Come came with me on a plane to Dallas, and acquired a sizeable bloodstain that has nothing to do with the quality of the story; my pen exploded during the flight. For portability, the miniscript can’t be beat.
—
*The Novel Formerly Known As SotS. That’s an acronym at the end, for the original title, which I’m not using so I’ll stop thinking about the book by that name. I’m failing, but I keep trying. My problems would be much reduced if I could just come up with a title I like.
I would like to open each of the five acts of Midnight Never Come with an epigraph.
(What, you thought I would actually be taking a really-and-truly break for any substantial length of time? Hah.)
I have sources picked out for four of the five, though in three of those cases there are several potential quotes I might use — which means they haven’t been firmly assigned to particular acts, except for the last one. In no particular order, therefore, they are: The Faerie Queene, The Book of the Courtier, The Prince, and Dr. Faustus.
I need one more.
So I’m opening the floor to suggestions. My requirements are as follows:
1) The book/poem/play/whatever must be contemporary to the period of the novel. That is, published no later than 1590. (The first three books of TFQ came out then, and since nobody seems to have conclusive proof as to the date of Faustus, I’m going with the argument that puts it some time 1588-1590.) If it’s foreign, it needs to have been translated into English by 1590. If it’s substantially older than that period, my ideal would be for it to have been popular in the Elizabethan era; Beowulf wouldn’t cut it.
2) No Shakespeare. I haven’t bothered looking up what, if anything, of his got written before 1590, but even if there is something, I’m making a point of not shoehorning him into this novel.
3) I’d like to avoid repeating any of the authors I already have. Ergo, no Discorsi, no other plays of Marlowe’s, no Shepherdes Calendar or whatnot.
I know some of you are thorough-going Elizabethan geeks; any suggestions as to sources I could mine for that last epigraph?
Did I loan somebody my copy of The Unstrung Harp? You know, the little Edward Gorey book about the writing of novels, and the aftermath thereof.
I’ve been promising myself for a while now that I would get to read it when I finished Midnight Never Come. But now I’m finished, and I can’t find it.
<sad swan>
Midnight Never Come is complete, at 112,266 words.
I did not want to stop writing long enough to invent names for the two random knights guarding Invidiana, which resulted in the insertion of [Sir Whoever] and [Sir Whoever2] into the story.
I did, however, pause to look something up. ‘Twasn’t the looking up that amused me; it was that in the middle of the Exciting! Climax! of the Book!, the information I needed had to do with a Renaissance dance maneuver.
You’ll understand when you get there, folks. Sometimes, when stuff is blowing up around you, the only answer is to dance.
I was right.
There weren’t any good stopping points between the start of the explosions and the end of them.
6299 words later, all I’ve got left in Act Five is the denoument. Plus — as before — two dreams, two flashbacks, and an epilogue.
You’d think I would take tomorrow off, but you would be wrong.
Authorial sadism: You know what? There wasn’t any. Which isn’t to say nobody suffered. But no sadism.
LBR quota: As the icon says — concurrent.
Edited to add: BTW, cancel that thunderstorm. I don’t need it anymore.
I don’t suppose anyone can work some weather magic and summon up a good thunderstorm for me? Sometime late tonight, or anytime tomorrow?
Anyone?
Bueller?
<sigh>
Bunch of landmarks tonight.
The numerical one is 100K. Ladies and gents, we’re into six digits, and the explosions are truly beginning.
One of tonight’s scenes involved Deven being a righteous ass. Another one is of a sort where, to really prepare and get it right, I would have to go get a Ph.D in Renaissance theology. (And probably another one in Renaissance occultism.) Instead, I speed-read Frances Yates, and yes, that’s exactly as bad of an idea as those of you who recognize that name think it is. My brain nearly melted.
The third scene is the one I’ve been looking forward to since I sat in a cafe down the street from the British Museum, with my shoes wet and my hot chocolate getting cold, and wrote a line in my notes that had me giggling for days afterward. Yes, we finally got there, and it amuses me just as much today as it did two months ago.
I have two Tiresias scenes, two flashbacks, about half of Act Five, and an epilogue to go. (Yes, this book needs an epilogue. Also a prologue. Trust me.)
I’m saying “yes” a lot in this post.
It’s a downhill charge from here to the end.
Authorial sadism: For once, it was all the minor spear-carrying characters I was the meanest to, instead of the main ones. I like to mix things up a bit, don’t you know.
LBR quota: Love. No, really. I promise.
. . . okay, I admit, there’s a whole lotta blood just on the other side of the horizon, and the love is going to bring it down.
This book came to me courtesy of the inestimable Delia Sherman, along with several other works. I am most grateful to her.
It’s interesting to me that this project has, more than anything else I’ve ever done — including college and grad school — liberated me of the notion that I need to read a book cover-to-cover. I mainly read two chapters out of this one, those being the chapters that focused most generally on the relationship between Elizabeth and her courtiers. The rest of the book is broadly both chronological and focused on particular courtiers in particular scenarios; there’s a chapter, for example, on Norfolk’s downfall. Since a lot of that stuff predates the period in which I’m writing, and I’m running out of time for research, I decided to bypass it. Looks good, though.
Not much else to say on this one, I think. But look out for more posts later today, probably, as I knock off reports on a few other books I’ve read lately.
I seem to have hit upon a workable method for writing the Tiresias pov scenes.
Talk to people about dreams and madness. Come up with core concepts for two of the four that need to be written (the other two I’m still uncertain about). Let these compost for a while. Late at night, put Tiresias’ music on loop. Make sure there will be no interruptions (this includes closing e-mail, of course). Turn off all the lights; leave about three small candles burning. Reset the computer display so Wordperfect gives you white text on a black background; this minimizes the light from the screen. Turn the screen off and lie on the floor for a while, thinking about Tiresias as if preparing to role-play him. When the scene starts to take shape, get up, write the scene longhand on the backs of random scraps of paper. Write hunching over the paper to see in the candlelight. Don’t worry about mispellings or other mistakes. Let your handwriting go to hell. (Bonus points for using the black-and-silver fountain pen you already and will forever associate with this novel.) Toss the sheets aside the instant they’re done and grab a fresh one; stream of consciousness is important. When you have one completed, turn the monitor back on, type it in. Go back a few steps and start on another one.
I had one done already; did two more tonight, for just shy of nine hundred words of present-tense madman point-of-view. I haven’t yet decided what the other two will be about, but I think — not that I have any distance on them at the moment — that I like the two I’ve done. (And the progenitor of them all, the original Tiresias scene, which I did ages ago.)
Drop that on top of 1556 words of forward progress on Act Five, and it’s a good day’s night’s work.
Authorial sadism: Calling in favors.
LBR quota: I loves me some bloody rhetoric.
This may possibly take the cake for Most Arcane Research Question I’ve Ever Asked Because Of Writing.
Is anybody out there familiar enough with Terrestrial Dynamic Time to tell me what if any conversions I need to make for a timestamp from 1547? As in, was 12:54 TD roughly noonish back then? The Wikipedia article on Terrestrial Time leaves me entirely unclear as to how closely that timestamp matches normal person time.
Edited to add: astroaztec has been kind enough to verify my math for me. It turns out the difference is truly negligible, so I needn’t worry.
My resolution of this morning has led to rank stupidity, of a probably necessary sort.
I had one scene left in Act Four. In keeping with the need for a higher pace, my goal for the night was not one thousand words, but that scene. I wasn’t sure how much that would be.
2169, in case you were wondering.
But wait! There’s more! You see, at that point I was over 89K. And that nice, tasty 90K landmark looked so close. I could write part of the first scene of Act Five, and feel really virtuous.
. . . except that the first scene ended up dropping me a hundred and fifty words shy of 90K, because it was so short.
So, in a fit of sheer bull-headedness, I started the next scene, praying I would get that 150 before I got into the meat of it, since I haven’t yet decided how [spoiler] is going to happen. I should have had two more days to make that decision, going at a normal pace, but tonight was not normal; tonight was 3041 words of headlong charging.
The novel is now 90005 words in length.
Act Four ran long, by a couple thousand words; that isn’t the end of the world, but when I revise I’ll see if I can’t tighten it. Act Five . . . you know how sometimes people say, “I know how long my legs are; they’re long enough to reach the ground”? Act Five will be long enough to reach the end. It may be short. I don’t kow. I’m just praying it doesn’t head too firmly in the other direction, because that would muck up this whole August 8th plan.
Unless I wrote 3K every day. But that would be a bad idea.
In fact, why am I still at my keyboard? Good night.
Authorial sadism: They figured out the plot.
LBR quota: Love and blood — my favorites.
This book wins, hands down, the prize for Coolest Piece of Random Trivia Discovered While Researching This Novel. (The downside is that the trivia in question appears a few pages in, and seems to have dominated the author’s thinking for the remainder of the text.)
The trivia is this. Elizabeth loved to nickname the people around her; Walsingham, for example, was her “Moor,” while Burghley was “Sir Spirit.” Three men in her reign got nicknamed “Eyes.” The first was Leicester, who signed his letters with a little glyph: two circles with dots inside, representing (of course) eyes. The second was Hatton, who ended up being called “Lids” to distinguish him from Leicester; he signed his letters with dotted triangles instead.
The third was John Dee. His special sign for his nickname was two circles guarded by a mark Deacon describes as “what might have been a square root sign or an elongated seven.”
The book then obligingly shows you a picture of the mark, and yes: it looks like “007.”
I have no idea if Ian Fleming knew this, but Deacon doesn’t miss the chance to draw the connection for his readers. And this sets the tone of the book; while the last bio of Dee I read emphasized his scientific and magical work, this one runs with the idea that Dee was an intelligence agent in service to the royal government.
I’m not entirely certain what to do with Deacon’s claims. He’s not as good as he might be about telling you the basis for his conclusions about Dee’s activities, so I can’t be sure when the missions he outlines are things we definitely know happened, and when they’re educated speculation. That Dee occasionally passed information along to Walsingham and/or Burghley and/or Leicester, I can believe with no problem, but Deacon’s biography more or less positions that as the overarching purpose of his life. Dee, according to him, refused jobs he might have taken because they would have limited his ability to engage in intelligence work. His trips overseas were as much for spying as for anything else. And the angelic conversations . . . in Deacon’s view, Dee’s work with Kelley is most easily explained by assuming that much of it was used as a cover, a ciphered means of passing information to those who could act on it. Who would look for intelligence reports in the middle of one of those?
Um. I’m not sure what to do with this. Certainly there seems to have been at least one occasion that an angel informed Dee of something in cryptic terms, Dee passed the report along to the authorities, and they subsequently discovered Spanish agents attempting to burn down the forest which supplied timber to the royal navy, under conditions which matched the cryptic message of the angel. I’m not sure I buy into the thesis that spying was such a major focus of Dee’s work, though.
I’d have to read more about Dee to say for sure. But the nice thing about this research is, I’m doing it for a novel, not a dissertation. Which means I can appreciate Deacon for the details he gives, and discard his overall point if it doesn’t suit my purpose.
Edited to add: Hah. A footnote from Peter J. French’s John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus:
“Richard Deacon’s book, John Dee: Scientist, Geographer, Astrologer, and Secret Agent to Elizabeth I (London, 1968) does regrettably little to establish Dee’s true importance. In a rather sensational way, Deacon portrays Dee as ‘a roving James Bond of Tudor times’ [not, so far as I’m aware, an actual quote from that book — me], the master of a massive espionage system. He considers the ‘Spiritual Diaries’ a form of enciphering used for spying purposes. Deacon’s argument is tenuous at best, and his book is riddled with factual inaccuracies.”
I guess I’m glad I only read selections from it. But it’s good to hear someone else evaluate that thesis and find it to be kind of bunk.
On August 9th, I’m taking a trip to Dallas.
My current pace of work puts me neck-deep in the Giant ‘Splody that is the end of the book right around the time I’m supposed to be out of town. While this is what I have a laptop for, those are not the ideal conditions under which to be finishing a novel.
Nor is it ideal to take a lengthy break from writing said novel while in the middle of the Giant ‘Splody.
To this awkwardness, I can see only one solution:
Finish the book before I go.
. . . which I think I can do. Maybe. It will mean I’m even more head-munched over the next two weeks than I would be otherwise, but the bright side is, I could then relax while in Dallas, take a break, and come back refreshed to polish it up and get it to my editor. These are Good Things. But they are Good Things that would require me to work at something like pace-and-a-half to double-pace from now through August 8th.
I think I can do it. Maybe.
I’m going to give it a shot. (Yoda, get out of my head.) I know almost everything that lies between me and the end of the book, which is the usual metric for whether or not I can safely speed up. This should be feasible, right?
If you don’t hear from me again, please come find my headless corpse in my office and give it proper burial.
80K on the nose. It’s a meaningless benchmark, when you get down to it — the lower limit of what one can generally sell as adult fantasy, but not the lower limit of my contract — but it’s a nice round number, and the point at which I start feeling like the book will end sometime soon.
Where by “soon” I mean “in another thirty thousand words or so.”
I can see from here to the end of Act Four. Most of Act Five has fallen into place in my head, except for a few things involving Deven. I’m chugging up the last long slope of the rollercoaster; once we crest the top of that hill, it’s going to be a downhill charge from here to the end.
Probably. I’ve been known to be wrong before. But it doesn’t feel like I’ll be wrong.
I’m in the middle of the second incredibly delicate conversation with Elizabeth. At least this time it’s a conversation with Elizabeth, instead of a conversation at Elizabeth like the last one was, damned canny close-mouthed queen that she is. The rest of Act Four will go something like this: oh crap, I think we were wrong; a tricky conversation with a personified natural landmark; oh holy shit were we wrong. Then on to Act Five, and Blowing Stuff Up. (feyangel, you may consider that an unintended tribute to BSU Pyrotechnics.)
I just wish I could figure out that one last piece of Act Five.
Authorial sadism: We’re in the part of the book where I lose track of it all. But aside from what I did to Suspiria, I think my favorite is probably the bit where Deven and Lune realize how different their two Courts are. Or, y’know, having to talk at Elizabeth, instead of with her.
LBR quota: We’re never without all three these days, but rhetoric was at the top of today’s menu, with the other two as side dishes.
Quoth Mrissa, on her own work: “Any minute now the last third of this novel is going to hunker down and make breakfast out of most of my grey matter.”
Quoth me, in response: “You know, that perfectly encapsulates the current state of my life.”
I go to sleep, and I’m thinking of this book. I wake up, and I’m thinking of this book. Leave me unattended for five minutes, and where does my brain go? I can only break out of it by scheduling other things: there’s X-Files watching on Sunday; I’m going to go do that. (But if there’s a crazy person in the episode, my hindbrain is taking notes for Tiresias.) There’s D&D on Tuesday; I need to remember to switch gears. (And it’s a good thing Lessa’s so easy a character for me to play, or that wouldn’t work.) HP7’s coming out soon; I’ll be spending most of Saturday reading it. (If it takes me too long, will I quit so I can get my writing done, or just pull [another] all-nighter?)
The last time I remember a book eating my head so thoroughly, it was the first one I’d ever written. It was (and is) an urban fantasy set in Canada (no, I don’t know why; that’s where the book wanted to be), and during the home stretch, kniedzw would look at me periodically and say, “you’re in Canada, aren’t you?” Now it isn’t Canada; it’s the sixteenth century. It feels like my brain has taken up permanent residence in the story, and is only coming out occasionally to visit the twenty-first century, rather than the other way around.
I’ve got a theory for what the similarity means, and I hope it’s true. Writing that first novel was a watershed for me. I consider it my transition from apprentice to journeyman work; I’d acquired all the basic skills, the last one being the ability to finish what I started, and after that I was qualified to earn a day’s wages as a writer (though it took me some time to actually do so). I’m not going to claim MNC is my transition from journeyman to master — that shift is yet in my future — but I think, I hope, this is another watershed for me, another transition to a higher level of skill. It feels like it, when I’m not wallowing in Standard Writerly Self-Doubt, but it’s hard to judge how sharp and white and straight its teeth are when it’s lunching on my brain. (Oh yes, it’s getting not just breakfast, but lunch and dinner out of me.) It’s the best explanation I can think of for why none of the six novels I wrote in between, including Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch, ate my head this badly.
Or at least it’s the explanation I like best.
So if I’m staring off into space, or I don’t answer e-mails, or seem otherwise to be Not Quite Here, you’ll know why. I’m in Canada the sixteenth century. And since I probably have another thirty thousand words to go, I won’t be coming back any time soon.
Point A: I have stubbornly refused to miss a day of writing since the beginning of June.
Point B: It is a long-standing principle of mine that the day is not over until the sun has risen or I have slept.
Point C: Check the time-stamp on this post.
If A, and B, but C, then . . . I’m a bloody idiot, is what.
As the presence of the word “Aquarian” in the title might suggest, this book ranges from fuzzy-headed neopagan pablum, to fairly well-researched archaeological and folkloric history, to a random dissection of a William Blake poem, depending on which article you’re reading.
The middle category is, of course, the one that was the most useful to me. There isn’t a terrible amount in here that was utterly new, but it helped reinforce some stuff I already knew, and offered a vareity of tidbits (like the London Stone, or the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow, or a reminder of the existence of Walbrook) that I’m smuggling into the novel where I can. I wish the article on “London Leys and Lines” had been more useful to me, though. Alas, it failed to present me with the kind of sacred/mystical geography I was hoping for.
The other thing of use in here is the bibliographies attached to (most of) the articles. If I ever write that London novel that’s in my head (which, given the research it would require, I don’t even want to think about right now), I’ll have some good leads on books to pick up.
