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Posts Tagged ‘novels’

70K

Last night was a triumph of sheer bloody-mindedness over, well, everything else.

You see, I didn’t get started writing until after 3 a.m. And I couldn’t sleep in today. And I had been watching horror movies since 11 that morning. And when I reached eleven hundred and some-odd words — a good total for the day, regardless — I made myself go just a little bit further, so I could retire for my insufficient night’s sleep knowing that I had crossed the 70K threshold.

So yeah. 70045 words on Midnight Never Come.

Act Four is giving me hives. This is the part of the book where, if I were still a little baby writer, somebody would probably sit the main characters down and Explain Everything they need to know to deal with the rest of the plot. But I’m not a little baby writer, and so I have to try to complicate it: interrupt the flow of information by throwing in threats and interpersonal conflicts and awkward moments and assassination attempts and misunderstandings and people forgetting to mention things and leaping to the wrong conclusions. (Which is why a part of the book I could have disposed of in a few thousand overly straightforward words will instead eat an entire act.)

My difficulties arise from figuring out who knows what, when they learned it, what will spark them into mentioning it, what conclusions they have drawn about it, and how I can juggle all of this together into a story that leads the main characters to where they need to go.

My thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions on how to write the crazy Tiresias scenes. I have a variety of plans in mind, some of which do involve staying up all night — more than I have been already, that is — and hopefully that will work out well.

Mush onward, to 80 and then 90K.

Authorial sadism: First Deven complains that I don’t give him any answers; then he complains about the answers I give him. Ungrateful bastard. (Though I will admit I tried to make “I did not have to” the most painful five words I’ve inflicted on him yet.)

LBR quota: I found a way to kill another character. Aren’t you proud of me?

release date (or at least month)

I forgot to mention this yesterday, but word on the street (i.e. a phone call with my editor) is that Midnight Never Come will be out in June of next year.

To you all, that’s nearly a year away. To me, that’s just around the corner. It’s amazing how an entire year can telescope down to nothingness when someone lays out for you just what needs to happen when to get that more distant event to occur on time.

grargh

Sometimes, to write 1082 words, one must first delete 363.

That revelation just wasn’t working there. It was one too many. From my perspective, there’s now a glaring question of why certain characters didn’t bring up a certain topic at a certain time, but hopefully I can distract readers from that temporary omission with some flourishes on a different front. The information will show up later; just not now.

It sucks that my net progress for the day is less than 1K, though. I know it happens sometimes, but it still sucks. (Especially when I deleted two hundred and change a week or so ago.) Things like this make my end-of-month goal just a little bit harder to achieve.

Edit: Oh, hell. I really am a bloody-minded OCD Virgo fanatic. 412 more puts me at 1494 for the night, and 1131 net.

And since I’m adding that, I might as well add these.

Authorial sadism: giving somebody a ride in the sixteenth century means sharing a saddle with them. i.e. getting very cozy.

LBR quota: it’s always more fun when the pain is caused by love.

How can I go crazy?

Okay, I know I’m crazy already. But I’m crazy in a “oh crap I’m trying to do way too much this summer and I’m going to snap” kind of way, which is not the way I need.

So — because I’m amused to see what responses I will get — I will throw this open to you, the great LJ mind.

Tiresias, a seer in Midnight Never Come, lost his mind years ago, through spending waaaaaaay too much time living in a faerie palace. He can’t tell his prophetic visions from the things around him from the stuff he’s just making up, and he’s lost any sense of when events are taking place; the few parts of the book written from his point of view will not have dates attached to them as everything else does, and do not take place in the order they’re presented. His is a very particularly dream-like madness.

. . . but I have a hard time remembering my dreams, and don’t do dream-like writing well. So I ask you, oh great LJ mind: what methods would you recommend for getting myself into the proper state of mind to write this book’s Tiresias scenes? How can I make myself go the right kind of crazy, or at least play it on TV the page?

Finit Act Three. (ish.)

We’ll call that the end of Act Three. It doesn’t have any flashbacks in it, and it should, but I don’t yet know what one of them is going to be, and the other will either be the coronation scene I have already written, or the scene that takes place after the execution of the Queen of Scots; I need to write Act Four before I’ll know which scene goes there and which one goes here.

I mentioned before that now’s when the backstory starts coming out. That’s a cool thing, from my point of view — the backstory is easily half of why I wanted to write this novel — but the corollary difficulty is that this chunk of the novel, the end of Act Three and probably a goodly chunk of Act Four, threatens to be very exposition-heavy. Which is undesirable at any time, but particularly in the middle of a book. (The only worse place to put it is the end.) So I need to find ways to convey that information without letting it slow the story down.

Having characters come near to stabbing each other in the middle of the exposition is one way to do it. But I mustn’t overuse that trick.

So this is why Act Four is something of a gaping void in my head. Not because I don’t have anything with which to fill it — I’ve got easily half a dozen major revelations that need to occur — but because I haven’t yet figured out how to make those revelations happen in exciting ways, with enough other stuff going around and between them. Act Five will be a cakewalk by comparison, as it will probably only have one Terrible Revelation (assuming it isn’t used to end Act Four), followed by a lot of stuff blowing up.

And somewhere in there, I need to go rewrite half of Act One, the Deven half. I can leave that segment in 1588, but what I’m doing with him there just Doesn’t Work. On the bright side, changing it means I’ll probably get to stick in a scene I had given up on having in the novel, namely, a chase across the roofs of Hampton Court Palace.

Anyway. Time to re-read Act Three and hope it doesn’t suck, then maybe noodle around a bit with how to start Act Four.

Three-fifths of the way done.

Authorial sadism: making Lune be herself during that conversation.

LBR tally: Rhetoric just stuck a knife between Love’s ribs, which I suppose counts as Blood, too.

turning point

I shouldn’t have stayed up this late, but I couldn’t stop in the middle of either of those scenes.

I’ve passed the halfway point in the novel. It came just shy of 60K — I’m at 60,210 right now — which might or might not be precisely half the wordcount; I think not. It’s probably about three-quarters of the way through Act Three. But it’s the point at which the novel pivots, at which it stops moving away from the beginning and starts moving toward the end.

Things went boom, as one might expect.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. Technically I wrote the crucial moment a month ago, on my way back from London, but it wasn’t real until it went into the novel. Now all the stuff that created this situation will start to come out. Now the depth of backstory — the reason I’m writing this novel — will become apparent.

Now my characters are scroooooowed.

It seems the right place to leave them for tonight.

Authorial sadism: All of it, of course. But the “forgive me” lines are the ones that hurt the most.

LBR quota: Love led to blood. As it so often does.

bloody heck.

When I don’t know a fact for this novel, I can make it up, within the limits of what I do know. So, for example, I don’t actually know which palace Elizabeth was living in during April 1590. But I know St. James’ was a royal palace, and that various other palaces were usually occupied in the summer or autumn or winter, so I can put her in St. James’ that spring and be content.

My problem is that, once I learn a fact, I can’t make myself ignore it.

The solution to this ought to be for me to stop researching. If I hadn’t dug through my books for more detailed information on Elizabeth’s coronation procession, I never would have found a reference to a text which some kind soul (hah) put online which lets me know exactly the route she took, and therefore I wouldn’t know she never went near Candlewick Street, and therefore the flashback scene I had in mind that requires her to be there during her coronation procession would be just fine and dandy in my mind.

But now I know. And I can’t make myself ignore her real processional route just because I want her to pass by a certain significant half-buried rock on Candlewick Street.

<grumble mutter hmpf>

Okay, fine. I’ll work this differently. But my life really would be easier if I could either stop researching, or ignore what I read. (But then what would be the point of reading it?)

50K!

Tonight, I passed fifty thousand words.

The problem is, once I pass 40K, I enter the dreaded Middle Of The Book. It’s a wasteland in which the initial momentum of starting a novel has worn off, the end is not yet in sight, there are a variety of things to be juggled that range from inoffensive little balls to flaming chainsaws, and there won’t be any more meaningful landmarks of progress until I hit 80K, which is the lower limit for what one might reasonably expect to publish as a fantasy novel.

So it turns out that an unexpected benefit of dividing this book into five acts is, I get other landmarks. Somewhere between about 60-65K, I will finish Act Three, and that is a closer thing to look forward to than 80K is. And it mitigates my usual difficulty at estimating total word-count; when I finish Act Three, I’ll be three-fifths of the way through the story, though not necessarily the work.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to hit 50K until a couple of nights from now, but this afternoon I wrote the other flashback Act Two needed, and stuck that in where it belongs.

<examines the flashback>

Apparently this novel is about people figuring out what it is they really want, and then deciding what price they’re willing to pay for it.

Most of them are paying too much.

Authorial sadism: Deven’s turn to be wrong wrong wrongitty wrong. (Except for the bit where he’s right. And that’s even meaner.)

LBR quota: Both blood and rhetoric, with love gasping for air as it tries not to get crushed to death.

MNC Book Report: The Queen’s Conjurer, Benjamin Woolley

Note to self: do not take hiatus of several weeks in the midst of reading a book for research. You will forget most of what you read in the first half.

This book, as some of you might guess, is a biography of Doctor John Dee. I also need to pick up Dee’s diaries, probably, and give those a read-through (especially the parts around my time period), but first I figured I needed an orienting framework, a simple biography that would give me the context of the things noted down in those diaries.

If that’s what you’re after, this book seems pretty good. It has the virtue of acknowledging not just Dee’s mysticism, but also his scientific work and the political context in which he was operating. (That latter aspect in particular cemented my dissatisfaction with Lisa Goldstein’s novel The Alchemist’s Door, which I very much wanted to like but didn’t.) I suspect that balance might be a legacy of Dame Frances Yates, whose work I’ll be taking a look at — hopefully — if I have the time. From the overview given toward the end of this book, it sounds like a lot of biographies of Dee more or less write him off as a deluded crackpot, which does not serve my purposes at all.

Oh yes, I have a purpose in reading this. (Are you surprised?) I will admit that Dee is likely to show up in Midnight Never Come. For those of you — i.e. mrissa — who grimace at the thought, I promise to try and put him in right, up to and including reading Yates if I have the time. (I solemnly swear to depict John Dee as a Christian Cabalist, not as some kind of cracked-out mother-goddess-worshipping Elizabethan neo-pagan. Mris, who the hell did that to him?) The difficult part will be grokking Christian Cabalism well enough to try and depict it, and balancing that out with the ever-unanswered question of what the hell was going on with Edward Kelley. I can think of all kinds of interesting possibilities; I just don’t know which one will serve my purposes best.

Now, let’s see if I can finish off one of the other three or four books I’m halfway done with.

Finit Act Two.

A little while ago, I made a rambly post about how it might be problematic that a sizeable but not sizeable enough chunk of the book takes place in 1588, while the rest of it is in 1590. It’s about twenty-one thousand words, which is way too long to be anything like a prologue, but not really a third of the book, which I could justifiably label “Part One” and move on from there.

It is, however, approximately a fifth of a book.

And the five-act structure was, y’know, really popular back then.

So despite the fact that this book may end up having nothing to do with theatre aside from a title ganked from Marlowe, Midnight Never Come will be delivered in five Acts, possibly with a prologue and an epilogue, despite the usual shortcomings of such devices. I read up on five-act structure, so the book wouldn’t just be arbitrarily chopped into fifths, and it seems like it will fit very well. This was a pretty suitable Act Two, at least, and the next one will most definitely be an Act Three.

Anyway, I expected to be making this post tomorrow night or possibly the night after. But the Lune scene I was finishing ended about thirty words short of my 1K quota, and rather than falling into the bad habit of padding it out to make my goal (or letting myself stop, like a sane person might), I decided to get at least thirty words into the next scene.

. . . only, in the act of typing the scene header (I’m identifying where and when each scene takes place, since the story covers so much of both time and space), I changed my mind entirely about what the scene would be. Deven can do all that stuff I was intending at the beginning of Act Three. The last scene of Act Two ended up being less than three hundred words long — which is why I just wrote the whole damn thing. It seemed silly to get thirty words in and stop. So instead of starting a scene that would have taken at least one night to finish, probably two, I’m done right now.

Two Acts down. Three to go.

It’s a good place to be.

Authorial sadism: Swift kicks to the kidneys, and the unexpected replacement scene.

LBR quota: They’re all blood, you see.

omg i love computers squeeeee

Why do I not have an icon for hopping up and down in glee?

Earlier today, kniedzw posted about a program called Stellarium. Alas, it seems to base its Julian/Gregorian switch on the continental one in 1582, so in order to calculate anything for Midnight Never Come I have to do the adjustment myself — England didn’t switch calendars until 1752, on account of viewing calendar reform as some kind of sketchy papist plot. But with that done, I could, if I chose, find out what phase the moon is in and where it stands in the sky when Lune goes sneaking outside on March 6th, 1590, to meet with someone in the orchard at Richmond.

Computers are awesome.

But the biggest help is much less impressive. All I have to do is type “ncal -J 1590” into my unix prompt on sundell.net and I can find out what the dates should be for certain events I have taking place on Fridays, because my computer obligingly spits out a Julian calendar for the full year. And if I stick “-e” into that command, I can find out the date of Easter that year, which is actually relevant to the plot.

Computers are freaking awesome.

The fact that I can get this kind of information without leaving my office chair — okay, so at the moment I have to walk into kniedzw‘s office for Stellarium, since I haven’t installed it on my own computer — it’s just phenomenal. I said last year that I couldn’t imagine running Memento without the Internet, since even if it was occasionally inaccurate, it offered me a far greater wealth of information with far greater ease than anybody could have dreamt of ten years ago. I likewise couldn’t imagine writing Midnight Never Come without computers. Aside from the issues of writing a hundred thousand words longhand, I wouldn’t have Stellarium, the unix cal command, online access to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and dozens of other resources I make use of every single day.

Computers are the most awesome things EVAR.

book! (sort of.)

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a novel.

Not a complete novel, mind you. I didn’t somehow magically finish Midnight Never Come when you weren’t looking — though it would be awesome if I had. No, all I’ve done is pass the 40K mark, which is the official lower end for novel-hood, according to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula award guidelines.

The things you see on the shelf will all probably be 80K or longer (sometimes much longer). My contract specifies 90-110K, though this is generally flexible (within reason). I’ve got my own vague estimate of something between 100-120K, though as I pointed out in that meme, I’m crap at such estimates. In other words, this benchmark means something, but I don’t really know what it is.

But it seemed a good time to make a progress post.

Stuff’s starting to go more seriously ka-splody for the characters. Lune’s in trouble. Deven’s in trouble but doesn’t know it yet. [Names withheld] will be dying soon. Boom!

I can feel that I’m stretching myself with this book. Stretching myself with description: it’s the Renaissance, it’s fae, it’s stuff that demands more verbal embroidery than Doppelganger did . . . but while I stretch for that added detail, I also have to make sure I don’t wander off into elaborate prose that will alienate my readers who appreciate the simpler style. (And for my next trick . . . .) I’m stretching myself with the politics, tossing extra pieces onto my chessboard so this isn’t a story about half a dozen characters with clearly defined and obvious goals. I’m stretching myself with historical research, with depth of backstory, with attempts to make sure the things my characters achieve carry real prices, costlier than the ones I would normally subject them to.

And I need to make sure I don’t stretch so far that I crash and burn. Because I don’t really have the time to pick up flaming pieces of novel and scrub the soot off them for an in-depth repair job. Not if my publisher is going to get this thing on the shelves when they’re hoping to.

But stretching, of course, is good. Because I’m at the point where I look at my own past work and think of it as mediocre — well-loved mediocrity, mind you, and not without its good points, but I Can Do Better. And pushing to do better is how we succeed in this field.

Edited to add: I almost forgot these.

Authorial sadism: Oops, somebody overheard that?

LBR quota: Lately it’s been all about the rhetoric, of a particularly backstabby sort.

MNC Book Report: The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli

Technically this book doesn’t have much to do with the Elizabethan period, as it was written in early sixteenth century Italy, not late sixteenth century England. But I figured, y’know, I keep referring to Invidiana as Machiavellian (in descriptions of the novel, not within the novel itself), and I’d never read this book, so I figured I should.

Not a lot to say about it, except that it’s, um, less Machiavellian than I expected. Yeah, there’s the whole “ends justify the means” approach, and he does say it’s safer (not “better,” at least in my translation) to be feared rather than loved, but he also points out that you shouldn’t make your subjects hate you. (Which would be where Invidiana has gone wrong.) It’s a short book, and a quick read, especially if (like me) you skim over the examples he chooses from recent Italian politics.

The other major reason I picked it up is that I may put brief epigraphs at the beginning of each section, and I suspected this might provide me with some good ones. I have a couple of strong possibilities marked down now. Unfortunately, the other two things I want to read through in search of quotable quotes are The Book of the Courtier and The Faerie Queene, neither of which will be half so quick to get through.

novel soundtracking

I’m not sleepy yet, so you get another post about writing.

Or in this case, soundtracking.

I’ve had the habit of listening to specific pieces of music while writing since I got seriously going on what turned out to be my first complete novel. But it’s generally been a small number of songs associated with each book: usually about two. (And by “associated” I mean “I listened to them most of the time while writing the book,” which does, yes, lead to a terrifying number of repetitions.)

But since coming to grad school and getting involved in the local gaming community, I’ve picked up a local habit of making soundtracks for games: character soundtracks for the ones I’m playing in, game soundtracks for the one I ran. And I speculated, some time after I started doing so, that one day I might find myself making a proper novel soundtrack.

That day is today. Or rather, that novel is this novel; I knew months ago that Midnight Never Come would be the pioneer in this field.

The reason is obvious: as I’ve mentioned before, the novel grew out of one segment of that game I ran. I made quite a few soundtracks for Memento, and each segment basically ended up getting ten songs, which meant I had ten songs already associated with the seeds of this story. Not all of them are applicable, of course, since the novel is not identical to the game, but it gave me enough of a starting block that it felt quite natural to create a proper soundtrack for this book.

It’s an in-progress thing; I haven’t chosen songs for certain characters yet (like oh, say, Deven), and a lot of the “event” tracks are also undecided. But I thought I’d provide a sampler, so that anybody who recognizes these songs will have an idea of the mood of the book. (Mostly you need a good film score collection for this one; I’m not the sort of writer who can use a lot of modern pop music to inspire a sixteenth-century novel.)

The soundtrack to date . . . .

MNC Book Report: English Court Life, Ralph Dutton

I grabbed this book because it was on the shelf next to The English Court, which I reported on a little while ago. Unfortunately, it turns out to be the first useless research book I’ve read.

Dutton describes his purpose as “to show the influence of the reigning monarch on the way of life carried on at his court, and also how and where he lived.” Unfortunately, because it goes from Henry VII to George II (three hundred years) in just over 200 pages, the result is unavoidably shallow. And also unbalanced: Mary I, who reigned for five years, gets fourteen pages of coverage, while Edward VI, who ruled for six, gets two.

I had hoped for this book to be a good complement to The English Court, giving me a better idea of daily life during the period. No dice. It contains a few anecdotes I wasn’t familiar with before, but it ends up reading like a half-baked history, failing to really cover the events of the period (which the author admits he isn’t trying to do) while failing to dig into the practicalities of life back then (which is what he was supposed to be doing). And while the chapter on Elizabeth isn’t completely idolatrous, Dutton appears to be firmly in the camp of Gloriana, extolling her virtues and achievements while mostly glossing over her flaws.

On the bright side, I only read the Tudor section, so I only wasted eighty-five pages of my life, instead of 220.

Oh well. I can’t hit a home run with every book, I suppose.

I WIN.

Okay, I know I said I wouldn’t be making daily posts about Midnight Never Come, but if yesterday was “I had inspiration for breakfast” day, today is “And Clio has decided she loves me” day.

When writing a historical novel, one rapidly discovers, history frustrates you to no end by not lining up the way you want it to. (Dammit, why hasn’t Walsingham’s daughter married Essex yet? Or if she has — which she may — why hasn’t it become public knowledge yet? This book may be over by October 1590. Etc.)

But then, every so often, history decides to hand you exactly what you need, with a red bow on top.

Without realizing I was doing it, I set this scene in the very month when Fitzwilliam accused Perrot of treason. And — if that wasn’t enough — Perrot is Walsingham’s client.

I do not expect this to mean anything to any of you, and I will be surprised if it does. It doesn’t have to mean anything. The point is, when I went looking for some reason to have Deven investigating the current status of Irish politics in the English court, I discovered the current Lord Lieutenant of Ireland leveling accusations of treason at the previous Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, whose patron happens to be the guy I wanted to be sending Deven off on that investigation.

All hail the Muse of History. She’s a bitch most of the time, but then she does something so nice that, for a little while, you forget about all the other frustration, and you remember why historical fiction can be awesome.

Authorial sadism: making Deven talk politics while his pants are trying to fall off.

LBR quota: I’d say accusations of treason count as blood and rhetoric both.

*blink*

Dude. I must have eaten inspiration for breakfast today.

While engaged in late-night stupidity at Kinko’s (involving photocopiers, a paper slicer, metric crap-tons of scotch tape, and the Agas woodcut of Elizabethan London), I had an epiphany about the plot point my brain insists on calling the Great Misunderstanding — even though it isn’t really a misunderstanding at all.

Yes, I just found a way to make my characters’ lives suck more. Aren’t you glad? I know they’re glad. (Hah.)

I would be writing those scenes right now, but the late-night stupidity has tired me out, so to bed. But I have more leftover ham and applesauce in the fridge, which is what I had for breakfast today; maybe I’ll have the rest of it tomorrow and see what else pops into my head . . . .

oh, hey.

I figured out something fascinating about Lune today. Sometimes it happens like this: the realization just fell into my lap, out of nowhere. I don’t even think I was thinking about Midnight Never Come at the time. It was just, blar, need a break, I think I’ll read the Tiptree antho I got at ICFA, do I want a Sprite to drink?, oh, that’s what’s going on with her.

Or rather, what should be going on with her. It isn’t really in the text yet. In fact, there’s stuff in the text that probably contradicts what I realized today. I’ll need to think about how I’m going to work this in. But I will do so, one way or another — even though it will require some revision — because boy howdy is it important.

I like important. Important means the book just got one step better. (Or will, once I’ve put this in there.)

LBR tally: it’s actually been love for the last few days. With a bit of rhetoric (i.e. politics) mixed in.

Authorial sadism: the love is the sadistic thing.