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Posts Tagged ‘scribble scribble scribble’

30K!

Got today’s writing done early, largely by dint of putting back in a half-finished scene I’d cut at the beginning of the month. Had to redo various bits of it, of course, but at least half of today’s wordage only required polishing, not invention from scratch. And this means I can run game tonight with a clear conscience, and not have to drag my brain to London after the session is done.

Word count: 30,006
LBR quota: We’re back to the Fenians, so it’s definitely rhetoric, with a forecast of blood.
Authorial sadism: No, Eliza, you still don’t get to talk to Miss Kittering.

20K! Finally!

It took me ten days to get here instead of five (thanks to five days spent backtracking on Eliza’s scenes), but I’m at twenty thousand words. Dead Rick is learning things about his own past — nice things, which are actually more painful in their way than the bad things would be. (Don’t worry; we’ll get to those, too.)

I’m approaching the midpoint of Part One, aiming for three parts in total. I may spend part of tomorrow working backward for where I want Eliza at the end of this section, to figure out what should happen between now and then; I should definitely spend part of tomorrow trying to figure out where I want Dead Rick to be headed. I know you can get to your destination by the headlights, but it would be great if I knew a few of the landmarks that lie beyond their beams.

Word count: 20,375
LBR quota: A brief hint of love. Even if Dead Rick can’t actually remember it.
Authorial sadism: Writing a whole scene of Dead Rick doing what he’s supposed to, then deciding to arrange things so that he actually wasn’t supposed to do it.

almost . . . there . . .

Come on, brain. We only need 150 more words, and then we can stop for tonight. And yes, that does mean you’ll have to figure out just what Dead Rick thinks he’s accomplishing by going to La Madura, but we’ve got to make a decision on that sooner or later. If it’s sooner, that means we can spend tomorrow thinking about its ramifications, and that will make tomorrow’s writing easier.

Of course, it would help if we knew what Dead Rick is supposed to be finding. And we already skipped over that one to start tonight’s work. This skipping-details thing, it is not working out so well for us.

15K! Still! Or rather, again!

Yesterday, when I sat down to write, my total wordcount was 15,085. When I stood up again, having written 1,092 words in the interim, my total wordcount was 15,085.

This has, with minor fluctuations in those last two digits, been my wordcount for the last five days. You see, the plan was this: I would write roughly 500 words a day throughout April, for an ending count of 15K, and then when May began I would kick it up to my regular pace of 1K.

But on May 1st, heading off to a friend’s concert, I finally had to face facts: I’d written the wrong beginning for Eliza. I was sitting there wondering what kind of plot complications I could think up to delay the event I wanted to end Part One with until the end of Part One, given that at present there was nothing stopping it from happening two scenes later, and nothing interesting to fill the intervening time with . . . and then it occurred to me that her immediate backstory had a number of complications that I’d just sort of skated over as a fait accompli. In part because one of those complications was something I didn’t have a detailed solution to, and it’s easier to get away with a non-detailed solution if you don’t show it onstage — but that was a pretty weak justification.

I had plot for Eliza. I’d just started her portion of the narrative after half of it was already done.

Now, the good news is that at least some of what I’ve already written for her might be salvageable. (I’ve already re-used one scene.) The rest will need heavy revision, since those scenes are full of the kind of establishing work that one puts into opening scenes, and that’s no longer needed; what’s left will probably be shorter, so I’ve still lost wordcount. And god knows it’s been frustrating to write a thousand words every day, then delete the obsolete scene and find I’m still at 15K.

But not nearly as frustrating as having to invent plot for Eliza because I skipped over the stuff I already had. So I cut the old scenes, and I write new ones, and the numbers look like I’m treading water — but they’ll start moving forward soon enough.

10K!

Thanks to April’s “500 a day” rule, missing several days has not prevented me from arriving at the 10K milestone on schedule.

For the record, the title hunt is still on. If you’ve sent me e-mail and not gotten a reply yet, I promise to take care of that soon. In the meanwhile, keep on suggesting; I appreciate all the help.

Word count: 10,025
LBR quota: It’s the River Fleet. I think it counts as blood.
Authorial sadism: Leaving Dead Rick standing knee-deep in the aforesaid Fleet, wondering whether he’s going to run into a tosher or Blacktooth Meg first.

so. close.

Gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh I am thisclose to being able to finish “Mad Maudlin” (no, I didn’t get it done last month) and the end of it is driving me batty. (Which is a funny joke, given the subject matter.) I just need to figure out what message Maud gives Peter, and then how to make the next bit happen in a dramatic way, and somewhere work in Peter doing that thing he shouldn’t do (moreso than he’s done already), and then it’ll be the tag scene and I’m done. We’re at 5,698 words, and there can’t be more than a thousand left, and WHY IS THIS STORY NOT DONE ALREADY.

Because I haven’t threaded my way through the last few twists yet, that’s why. Come on, brain, help me out on this one, and then we can sack out and watch Dexter. But until you do, we’re not going anywhere other than this chair, except maybe the bed to roll around and stare at the ceiling and try to figure things out. Work with me, here. We’re almost done.

Updated with revelation: Duh. You promised yourself this was a hack draft. This is you getting the framework down on the page, so you can go back and have experts help you make it better. So all that crap you’re worrying about is stuff you can fiddle with later. You’ll run it by three or four people to get the research stuff right, and then once you have that you can apply writer-brain and make it more exciting, and then you can have your crit group look at it and tell you where it still needs improvement. Obsessing over the finer points now may even prove to be a waste of time, as your clever ideas might get cut on account of being Wrong.

So just write the end, and let it suck, and worry about it later.

first update of the season

We’re in the season of noveling now, and so I’ve broken out the old progress icon.

I’ve given myself April to tiptoe around in, before I settle down and really start grooving. What does that mean? 500 words a day instead of 1000, and it’s not a huge deal if I miss one, so long as I have 15K by the end of the month. I’m a bit behind that curve right now, actually, but it’s easy enough to make up the difference.

So far I like what I’ve got. The Onyx Court books have gradually been moving down the social food chain — from the royal court, to Parliament, to the gentry, to a pair of thoroughly lower-class protagonists for this book. Dead Rick is in debt to criminals, and Eliza (sorry, d_c_m, she underwent a sudden name change) is currently scraping by as a housemaid. I’m actually kind of enjoying the grit.

Word count: 5146
LBR census: Given that half of this scene was spent talking about Fenian bombings, I think blood wins.
Authorial sadism: I think the Special Irish Branch may be after Eliza.

a (stupid) epiphany on start dates

April 1st is my start date for the Victorian book. Only not really, because it’s freaking April 1st, and I’ll just have had ankle surgery, so it might be more like April 2nd or 3rd. But anyway, I’m starting in April, and I’ve had this fixed in my head for a while.

But this is kind of a stressful thing. Will I be ready to start by April? I have a sense of who Eleanor is, but not what her circumstances will be at the beginning of the novel, nor how exactly she got there, nor what happened to the guy whose name may or may not be Jonathan. I don’t know what Dead Rick owes, nor who he owes it to. I kind of know where I’m aiming for with the end of the book, but that’s more than a hundred thousand words away, and what if this turns out like the comet book where I start writing and then figure out some of it’s wrong so I have to backtrack only then I’ve wasted that time and okay the reason I’m starting in April (instead of the usual May) is to give myself time to waste if I have to . . .

Why do I have to wait until April?

Well, because in April it’ll start being a thousand words a day, rain or shine, and if I write the scenes I already have in my head (one definite, one semi-definite, one rather vague), then that’s three scenes not queued up to get me going once I start. Except that I stopped and thought about it, and realized that’s stupid. I figure things out by writing them; I know this.

So today I wrote the prologue. (Actually I wrote the prologue back in 2007, when I thought I’d be doing this book before Ashes, but having written two intervening novels since then, I scrapped it and started fresh.) Some time this week I may write Eleanor’s first scene, or Dead Rick’s. And it may be partial and I may come back later to change things; hell, I may decide that Dead Rick is not in fact the right character for this book, which is one of the things I’ve been uncertain about. I may move Eleanor to a different part of London and kill her mother (or unkill her, since that’s another detail currently in limbo) and change my mind six times about what’s up with the daughter of the family Eleanor works for. But whatever I do, I’ll be better off poking at it now, casually, experimentally, without the pressure April will bring, because that vastly ups the odds that between now and then I’ll find the answers to some of the questions that are presently unanswered.

And the point is to get the words on the page. This isn’t NaNoWriMo, where it’s cheating to have some of your wordage done early. As long as I finish the thing by deadline, it doesn’t matter if I do it a thousand words a day or ten thousand words in a two-day binge and then nothing for a week.

So I’ve started writing the Victorian book. It isn’t April yet, but that’s okay. I have 857 words, and it’s a good start.

I’m supposed to be *finishing* stories, not *starting* them

zellandyne, I have 1,059 words of “The Wives of Paris” and it’s all your fault.

Not sure whose fault it is that I seem to be channeling yuki_onna-lite with this thing, though. It was supposed to be, I don’t know, like “Once a Goddess” or something. Instead I have a semi-bitter, self-aware narrative that’s already referenced Morgan le Fay and Hallgerðr, and narrowly missed having the Queen of Sheba join the party. (Lamia took her place.) It feels bizarrely like my story idea fell into somebody else’s paint can and came out the most unexpected color, not my usual look at all.

But hey. 1,059 words, and I’d probably stay up to write more (it’s almost time for Penthesilea to show up, unless I decide to really embrace the whole culture-mash thing and make it Scáthach instead), but I do have to get up at a reasonable hour tomorrow. So I’ll let this sit, and pray the paint can hasn’t vanished by the time I come back.

wrong project, but oh well

Man, I don’t know what it is. All I have to do is decide, “I’m working on Thing X!,” and I will without fail come up with ideas for Thing Y instead.

In the current instance, that means I decided I would try to finish “The Unquiet Grave” by the end of the month, and promptly put down 1,022 words on “Mad Maudlin” instead. Not really complaining — I don’t care which short story I make progress on, so long as it’s one of them — but I really wish I could find a way to leverage this for novels. As I said on matociquala‘s LJ the other day, it seems to me like there should be a way to do it. Contract for Book A, write Book B instead; then contract for Book C, somehow convince yourself you’re working on that one for realz, whereupon you write Book A. Or something. But I fear deadlines might make that tough to wrangle.

Time to go think about “The Unquiet Grave” some more, in the hopes of finishing “Mad Maudlin” in the near future.

Squeaking the deadline by at least three hairs.

I never pulled an all-nighter to write a paper, but apparently I will pull them for stories.

(It isn’t really an all-nighter. The sun hasn’t risen yet.)

Something like 2K tonight, and now “And Blow Them at the Moon” is finally done. 8,120 words, which can certainly be tightened, though what the word-count effect will be of making the story actually work, I couldn’t tell you. And right now, I don’t care. I’ve got the damned thing on the page, and at the moment, that’s all that really matters.

Better.

Okay. I had to ignore the lunar eclipse and pull a new trick out of Magrat’s ear for the solar one, but at least it’s a cool trick. And I have 1,514 new words: two new scenes, which between them account for the time that had to elapse before Magrat went after Francis Tresham.

I’d love to get that scene written tonight, but it’s just not happening. Too much typing today — not just that wordage, but revision done on the earlier scenes, as I figured out what I was going to do next. And other stuff, too. So I’m going to get off the computer now.

But finishing in the next day or two suddenly looks a lot more feasible.

trying something entirely new

I don’t know how to get from where I left off last night to the end of the story — so instead I’m seeing if I can get from the end of the story to where I left off last night.

That is to say, earlier tonight I sat down and wrote a chunk of the final scene, then came back after a break and started writing the scene that comes before it. I’ll see how far I can get with that, then probably write the next one forward, and at that point I’ll have pretty much everything I know about this story. Whereupon I will hopefully figure out how to splice the two together.

This is utterly backwards for me, both literally and figuratively. I don’t write this way. But the other way wasn’t working, and hey, it’s only a short story; if I end up chucking out everything I wrote tonight, and everything I write tomorrow, it’s no huge loss. This may, like “Chrysalis,” be a story I need to write wrong before I can figure out how to write it right.

(I’m hoping for a result less broken than “Chrysalis” is. Fortunately, I’m also not attempting anything a tenth as arty as that story.)

1,173 very tangled words tonight. I think tomorrow I need to re-read chunks of my reference materials and get this crap straight in my head.

ETA: another 400 or so more. I remembered, or reconstructed, the way I wanted to handle what’s probably the most crucial turning point of the story; again, it may need replacing later, but at least I have it nailed down for the moment.

first you put the left down, and then the right

Since several people have suggested new wordmeters to me: does anybody know of one that, like the old Zokutou meter, allows you to show the new material you’ve added on since the last update? As in, yesterday I had 2064, today I wrote 1028, now I have 3098. I liked seeing the different-colored bit on the end of the bar, displaying your forward progress.

Anyway, that’s where I stand, after being not at all sure I was going to get anything written today. I know where I want the story to go, but getting there is proving to be the hard part.

John Johnson showed up in today’s work, for those of you sufficiently versed in your 1605 history to know who that is. (The real trick will be figuring out a sensible way to reveal him later, for those who don’t already know. I’m not trying to be terribly coy in-text about the fact that this is a Gunpowder Plot story, but since my protagonist doesn’t know that yet, there’s a fair bit of obfuscation happening as a consequence.)

Nggggh. Needs moar action, and also some way to use the eclipses. Surely I can come up with something.

racing the deadline

<misses the Zokutou word meter>

1280 words on “And Blow Them at the Moon” today, plus a hundred or two fleshing out the first scene I’d written, for a current total of 2064. I really want to finish this by the end of the month, which is doable if a) I figure out how to get Magrat to learn some but not all of what’s going on and b) the story doesn’t balloon out of control. The idea is to keep it below 10K at all costs, and preferably shorter than that, since the markets for such a length are limited.

Also, I need to figure out what to do with the eclipses. There were two of them, one lunar and one solar, in the weeks leading up to the Gunpowder Plot going kablooey; surely I can come up with something interesting to make out of that.

Will ponder that as I go to sleep. Maybe I’ll wake up with an idea.

necessary sacrifices

I’ve started over on “And Blow Them at the Moon.” As much as I like the opening scene I’d written, it just doesn’t fit the story; it introduces an additional pov (a bad decision, if I want to keep this thing short) and the tone is too light-hearted. This is not, I fear, going to be a light-hearted story. Not given what happened to Father Garnet, and to the conspirators, in the end.

(Man, reading about the Gunpowder Plot is depressing. Especially Sir Everard Digby. Talk about a waste.)

So that’s 614 words of a new start, and already I think it’s better. Father Garnet praying in Thames Street, and Magrat confronting the fact that she is displaying conduct unbecoming to a church grim. I need to find a way to say more about him, but maybe that will fit into a later scene.

step by step, we’ll get there

While I was in Boston, I finally figured out what “And Blow Them at the Moon” wants to be about. The Gunpowder Plot, obviously; but that’s a long and complicated tale to fit into a short story, and could easily turn into a tedious history lesson instead of an interesting piece of fiction. Ideally, this will not be like Deeds of Men — i.e. not pitched primarily at people who have already read one or both novels, and please God not twenty-one thousand words long again — what I want is a short story I can try and sell to a proper market. Which means I need some frame I can put on the Gunpowder Plot, a frame that consists of a character and an engaging emotional arc for same.

While being an Onyx Court story. And it needs to explain some of the weirdnesses in the history, most notably the Monteagle Letter. That’s not too much to ask for, right?

So I think I found it, and my 599 words I had in December are now 1,105. Not a huge amount of progress, but I think I’m going to have to do a lot of wrangling to make this thing happen; I suspect there will be a great deal of infodumping that later gets scrubbed out, as I sort through what actually matters to a) my protagonist and b) my reader. Which means my progress will likely remain slow. But I’m going to try to get this done soon; today I ordered a metric ton of research material for the next book, and I need to get my head out of the seventeenth century and into the nineteenth asap.

And, y’know, it would be nice to get a story done in the first week or two of the year. Good omens and all.

crawling out of the sickbed

I came down with a cold right after Thanksgiving that seems to have segued with hardly a pause into a second cold, which means I’ve been sick for all of December so far. Bear with me as I try to get some actual business done here.

First of all, and I should have posted this sooner: Epic fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss is putting his fame to good use by raising money for Heifer International. More details at that link, and all of the related posts can be found under this tag, but the short form is that he’s selling off lottery tickets for a giant mountain of prizes, including signed books from many fabulous authors (and also me). Go forth and win swag in the name of a good cause.

Second: this seems an ideal time to remind people of the existence of Anthology Builder, a service that lets you buy short stories and have them bound into a print-on-demand anthology of your own design. My own stories are here, and there’s enough of them now to make a decent-sized antho (especially since you can print Deeds of Men); or you can mix and match with other authors. AB has built up quite a nice selection now, and this is a great way to try out the short fiction of various writers you’ve heard good things about.

Third: I am 599 words into “And Blow Them at the Moon,” aka the Onyx Court Gunpowder Plot story. I’m still not sure how exactly this thing is going to end, but it’s begun with Cornwall’s two most incompetent knockers trying to dig a hole for their own faerie palace in Westminster, which is amusing me. And being amused seems like a good way to start.

The goal is to finish that story and another one that needs a proper title before the end of the month. Whether or not I will manage both depends in large part on whether I can manage to find my way out of these stupid colds.

Look! It’s, like, actual short story production!

1663 / 4000

I miss the Zokutou meter. <sniff>

If I weren’t getting sleepy, I might try to finish “Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing” (the story I blame mrissa for) tonight. But I’ve done more than 1300 already, and I suppose it’s just as well to spend a little extra time pondering just what Hel might say to Loki, especially while there’s a snake dripping venom on his face.

(Or more to the point, while there’s a snake dripping venom into the bowl above his face. Because Sigyn’s going to be sitting there during this whole conversation. And won’t that be interesting.)

But hey. It’s like I’m actually writing a short story or something. I’d forgotten what that feels like . . . .

avalanching

5008 words for Labor Day.

It isn’t labor if you love what you’re doing.

Almost done. Almost. It was five thousand because this was the climax; yesterday I wrote the first of the two scenes I’ve been wanting to write since I put together this proposal more than a year ago, and today I wrote the second. Ding, dong, the plot is dead, but the denoument lives on. There’s a bit of work to be done yet — at least one day’s worth, possibly two. We’ll see.

So very nearly done.

Word count: 130,090
LBR census: Blood and love, and some horrible, horrible rhetoric.
Authorial sadism: Memento people know I was never sure which Merriman I was crueler to, Francis or Philip. There’s no Philip Merriman in this story, but Galen’s taken his place. ‘Nuff said.