Word count: 110,810
LBR census: Ladies and gentlemen, THE BLOOD HAS ARRIVED.
Authorial sadism: I’ve been looking forward to writing this bit for four months now. I’m pretty sure that makes me a Bad Person.
***
There’s nothing I can say at this point that wouldn’t constitute a spoiler. Except that we’ve hit the fun part.
Fun for me, anyway. My characters might beg to differ.
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.
Five parts down. Two to go.
And after ninety-six thousand words of book, the comet has finally shown up.
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.
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.
(I promise I won’t be so spammy with the book reports tomorrow.)
In other news — eighty thousand words! Astute observers will notice it’s been over two weeks since I announced the 70K mark. My two-day respite, during which I got two flashbacks written, turned out to be longer than intended, and then I missed another two days while traveling. That seems to be the pattern of this book, which is unlike any other book I’ve written: rather than my usual slow-and-steady pace, I’ve been hitting periodic droughts, then pushing rather faster than usual to make up the difference. I wrote 5K in the two days after getting back from Minneapolis, and my intent is to make 1500 every day between now and the end of the book. Mostly because that’s what I have to do in order to make my deadline while still leaving a margin for safety. And on top of that, I’m officially starting the revision before I finish the book, because this novel — again, unlike any other — is requiring me to rip out whole scenes, not just at the beginning, where I was faffing around without quite knowing what I was doing yet, but throughout. I’ve got two thousand words of utter crap in Part Four that accomplishes little more than introducing Irrith to a character Galen’s already met, which needs to be replaced with something more exciting.
(Like breaking into the newly-created British Museum to steal some artifacts. What? The place doesn’t open for business until early 1759, by which point I think my characters will be too occupied to work it into the plot, so theft it is.)
Anyway, yes, this has me a little stressed, because 1500 is kind of firmly fixed in my mind as a pace I can only keep up if I know pretty well where my plot is going, and that isn’t quite as true as I’d like it to be. I fear I might end up with more faffy scenes that will need replacing. Other people work that way and are fine, but it’s a new model for me, and not one I particularly like.
If it produces a good book, though, that’s all I really care about.
Word count: 80,003
LBR census: I’ve concluded that Midnight was the love-and-blood book, and Ashes was the blood-and-rhetoric book, which leaves this one to be the love-and-rhetoric book. But, true to the icon, I will have blood by the end.
Authorial sadism: It’s one of the laws of narrative that nothing good will happen on Friday the 13th. At least in an English faerie story. (Though apparently there’s no evidence for that superstition prior to the nineteenth century.)
1,172 words and one crash course in seventeenth-century telescope design later, I have my first flashback scene.
I’d forgotten how much fun these things are. When I was writing Midnight, flashbacks were my candy bars: nothing but a neat idea, without any need for the kind of set-up or take-down ordinary scenes require. I may try to write another tonight, if I can sort out the details; I still owe this book three others, that need to go somewhere in the stuff I’ve already written.
(There’s another reason I really enjoyed this one, but you all will have to wait until the book comes out to learn what that one is.)
Ladies and gents, we crossed the 70K line today. Which means this is officially Half A Book, assuming I end up in the reasonable neighborhood of my 140K goal.
I may celebrate by spending tomorrow, and possibly the next day, working on flashback scenes. I haven’t written any of them yet, and while I’m not sure which ones I want to stick in which parts of the story, I’ve come to suspect I won’t be able to figure that out properly until the scenes exist as more than one-line descriptions in my head. And while part of my scheduling here involves not counting flashback writing as words toward my daily goal, the early completion of Part Three means I’m still two days ahead of schedule, and spending those filling in other holes isn’t a terrible idea.
(I would do flashbacks and forward progress, but I’m also currently being sisyphized by another project, and three tasks at once is a bit much — even if the sisyphean one is a revision. I just can’t gear-shift that much.)
But hey. Half a book. Yay!
Word count: 70,393
LBR census: It’s going to be blood, if Irrith keeps on being so mouthy.
Authorial sadism: Hey, somebody needs to represent for eighteenth-century English chauvinism.
Word count: 60,301
LBR census: There will be blood. (Pity I hated that movie . . . .)
Authorial sadism: Aw, shut it, Irrith. The lunatic hasn’t attacked you. Yet.
The tens of thousands matter. More than a week’s work, unless I’m having a pretty fast week, and there’s few enough of them in your average book that they feel like real milestones.
Also, the next one will be the official “halfway point” of the book, in the hopes that I’m right about it being 140K in total.
Word count: 57,857
LBR census: Love. And awkward discussions of the various forms it takes.
Authorial sadism: Not one but two characters wrestling with some unfamiliar (not to say uncomfortable) feelings.
So I’m trying something a little different with this book. Normally — by which I mean, for nine books now, discounting only my first finished novel — I set myself a daily word-count goal, and use that to measure my progress. Usually the goal is a thousand words a day, and since that’s a minimum, not an average, I build up a little overage as I go, which helps make up for the days I miss, and gives me a margin of safety re: my deadline. (Since this became a professional thing, I use that time for revision, before sending it off to my editor.)
This time around, applying that schedule produces slightly hairy results. For one thing, this book is supposed to be longer, more like Ashes than Midnight. Also, I lost four straight weeks to travel: no forward progress during that whole time. So the five months I gave myself to write a 140K book wasn’t looking like enough, not unless I made assumptions about my overage that I didn’t really want to trust — especially not when even that left no time for revision.
I could have just set a higher goal: say, 1500/day. Or whatever. But I decided to hybridize.
This book is divided into seven parts. I did Part One before leaving town, Part Two by the end of June. So rather than pacing by word-count, I recently decided to do it by narrative chunks, and moreover to do so in a fashion that would leave me a solid couple of weeks for revision. In other words, Parts Three and Four in July, Five and Six in August, and Seven in September, with the book due at the beginning of October. The “hybrid” aspect comes in where I know that each part should be roughly 20K, of which 1K or so is going to be flashback (and therefore written outside my daily quota), so I worked backward to figure out how many words I should aim for in a given day, in order to (probably) finish the relevant part by its mini-deadline.
So far, it’s working out. Beating that quota, combined with a shorter section than anticipated, means I finished Part Three tonight, three days ahead of schedule. And here’s the other new thing: rather than just saying, “Sweet, I can get a head start on Part Four!” and diving in tomorrow, I’m going to take that evening off. I may, if I feel like it, backtrack to chisel off a few of my worse continuity errors in the existing text; or possibly do a flashback. Or not. But I get to take a day to regroup and think about Part Four — and still start two days early.
I don’t know if I can keep up this pace for the next two months. It’s definitely faster than my usual; not brutally so, but enough that it may start to tell in the long term. But I’m more comfortable with this math, for whatever reason, and that’s reason enough to give it a shot.
Word count: 50,839
LBR census: Love. This book is sadly lacking in blood so far, but the love is shaping up to be even more cruel, so it balances out.
Authorial sadism: Did I mention the love? Also, Irrith just planted her foot so firmly in her mouth I think she stepped on her liver. If faeries even have livers.
I’m roughly halfway through Part Three, and (assuming my target word count doesn’t end up being wildly off-base) a little over a third of the way through the book. It’s hard to pace myself, in terms of expectations; this is the first time I’ve set out to write a 140K book. (Ashes got there accidentally.) Normally I’d be thinking of this as the middle span of the story, since most of my novels, both published and unpublished, fall in the 100-120K range. I’m definitely in “the middle,” broadly speaking — this isn’t the beginning anymore, and it sure as heck isn’t the end — but I’m a good 20K away from the actual midpoint.
I must admit, I’m not sure a seven-part structure was my brightest idea ever. It’s a strange number, and not one we really have a model for, as far as story structure’s concerned, but it fits in other ways. I just have to figure out what kinds of things go in which sections. On the face of it, this should not be a challenge; after all, I could just pretend the part breaks aren’t there, and pace things however seems natural. But there’s such a thing as three-part structure, and such a thing as five-part structure (which I did, for the record, pay attention to while writing Midnight), and the four days of the Fire meant I needed four spans of time in Ashes which dictated some of my structure there, too. I just need to figure out what the seven-part version is.
Well, any way you slice it, the next part is the middle one, when the book stops heading away from the beginning and starts heading toward the end. And I know some of what will be happening then.
Now I just need to figure out what happens in the rest of Part Three . . . .
Wrote a cumulative 3806 today in various new scenes, rummaging around in the guts of Part Two to make everything fall into the new order. Still need to replace the scene that introduces the CR itself, and then do at least a rough polish on the Magrat conversation, the coffee-house, and Carline; then probably wholesale replace 80% of the Vauxhall scene, and I’ll finally be ready to finish the scene I was in the middle of writing when I realized I needed to redo half of what I’d done.
One of the cherished delusions of the aspiring writer is that this stuff gets easier as you go. Sure, maybe you have to rework your first novel three times, but after a while you learn to produce clean drafts, right?
Yeah, I’m going the other way. I’ve never had to hack a book apart half as much as I’ve done with this one already. Please, please, don’t let this trend continue.
Word count: 36,810 and trying not to think about how I’m running to stay in place
LBR census: I had to work really hard to find a reason why it wasn’t blood.
Authorial sadism: Yes, Galen, when you get a good idea I will make you share it with the class.
Word count: 30,038
LBR census: I think fear counts as blood.
Authorial sadism: Since my last update . . . making Irrith play politics, and making Galen face down twenty-five tons of By The Way You Know You’re Mortal, Right?
Halfway through Part Two (of seven). I don’t feel like my narrative momentum has quite cohered yet, but we’re getting there. Mostly it’s still Irrith giving me trouble. Unlike Galen, she didn’t show up with her intestines on a platter, asking if I’d like to play with them; I’m having to pry useful conflict out of her.
This is what happens when you write a relatively care-free character. It’s hard, getting her to care about stuff.
But Galen’s at the Royal Society now. I wonder just how many photographed pages of minutes I’m going to read through before I decide I really don’t give a damn when Henry Cavendish first attended a meeting, and that nobody will much care if I put him there in late 1757. After all, biographical info on the guy is remarkably sketchy, so aside from the minutes, there’s probably no record at all of when he showed up for the first time. And given that I had to photograph handwritten pages out of giant leatherbound volumes you can only get by applying to use the Royal Society library and then filling out request forms, the odds of anybody being able to call me on my error are pretty low.
(If a piece of historical accuracy falls in a forest and there’s nobody qualified to notice, does it constitute an error?)
Er, nevermind. Since they helpfully put visitors at the beginning of each set of minutes, and those are easy to find, I, um, already found my answer. June 15th, 1758. Possibly not his first meeting, but the first one in the range I copied, and therefore the first that will appear in this narrative.
(If a piece of historical accuracy falls in a forest and a deranged writer runs over to prop it back up again, does it constitute grounds for involuntary commitment?)
Bedtime now. Before I go even crazier.
On the one hand, taking a month off from the comet book gave me time to rethink some important things in Part One, which will make it much easier to proceed from here.
On the other hand, taking a month off from the comet book killed my discipline and momentum like whoa and damn.
Some of that’s the jet lag talking, mind you, which has hit me far worse than usual. (Might have something to do with me being on the road for a straight month; mostly I was in the U.S., but jet lag is as much about your general level of energy as it is about time zones.) I actually took a nap this evening instead of going to see a movie, just because I knew if I didn’t, there was no way I’d stay conscious late enough to get my work done. Another thing lost in my absence was my ability to sleep through kniedzw‘s alarm, you see, so I’ve been up since 7:30, which is just not natural for me. And my attempt to get work done this afternoon failed miserably.
I had more success just now, despite the lethargy brought on by a longer-than-expected evening nap. 1057 words, sending Galen to Vauxhall. It’s a pity the gardens there are long gone; I would have loved the chance to wander around them, instead of trying to put eighteenth-century paintings together with later plan views to understand how the place was laid out.
Word count: 21,146
LBR census: Love. Somebody in Galen’s family had to not suck.
Authorial sadism: Making it a windy night. Though that was only a little mean. (I’ll have to try harder tomorrow.)
Now we’re at 20K. Once upon a time, this would have been a fifth of a book; since this novel’s planned for 140K, it’s a seventh.
That feels like quite a bit less.
But I made some interesting decisions in tonight’s writing, like answering the question of “how will this character find out about this otherwise well-concealed thing?” with the tidy solution of “they’ll tell him.” I need to make sure they have good reasons for that, of course, but it’ll be easier than contriving a reason he can stumble across it on his own. And this gives me a chance to spin a particular element of the Onyx Court in a direction I haven’t taken it before. When you’re writing a series, these things matter.
Now, however, we go into the Month of Unpredictable Progress. I’ll be on the road, without my research materials or a quiet place to work half the time, so for the next four weeks, 1K/day goes out the window. I’ll get what I can get, when I can get it. And then in mid-June we’ll see what good that semi-composting time has done me.
(Hopefully a lot.)
Word count: 20,718
LBR census: Love (of the puppy-dog sort) and rhetoric (of the rebellious sort).
Authorial sadism: Knowing how to hook Irrith.
I have fifteen thousand words of book now. It seems like rapid progress — I just had 10K the other day! — but that’s because the number is still small. 5K won’t seem like much once I’m in the middle.
Word count: 15,205
LBR census: Hmmm. I’m actually not sure which this would qualify as.
Authorial sadism: Knowing enough of the ending to be able to foreshadow things. With malice.
***
What I’m having fun with right now is learning the quirks of my characters. I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet that the focus is shifting a little with this book; Lune will still be in it as a major character, but she’s not the faerie protagonist anymore. Frankly — to divulge a small spoiler from the end of Midnight — a Queen makes a bad protagonist for anything other than a very political story like Ashes; she just doesn’t have the freedom to go running off doing random things. My main character this time around is Irrith, whom you’ll be meeting in Ashes next month.
And there’s all kinds of new stuff to discover about her. She’s turning out to be charmingly amoral in certain ways; she has no compunctions about lying to mortals for the fun of it, and in fact enjoys making her lies as outrageous as she can get away with. Shocking people in general is a great game to her, actually. The scene I finished tonight ended with her and Segraine, a female knight of the Onyx Court, making plans to go investigate something, and Irrith just asked, “So which of us has to be the lady?” (I haven’t decided yet what the answer to that will be. Either way, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.)
As for Galen, the mortal protagonist — I have more to say about him that deserves his own post, but probably his most telling character moment yet came when he went home last scene. He’s young enough that he hasn’t set up a household of his own, and when I asked my hindbrain how we were going to start the scene of Galen At Home, it sent him sneaking in the servants’ entrance after dawn in an attempt to avoid his father.
There are distinct pleasures to be had in writing a single character long-term . . . but this, the odd unfolding of facets you hadn’t yet figured out were there, is especially a new-character thing. Irrith lies. Galen sneaks in the back door. These are the people I’ll be spending the next five months with.
So far, they’re entertaining me.
I promise not to do a wordcount update every day, but it’s nice to note the important events. Tonight’s work put me over ten thousand words, which is the first milestone on a very long path. (The plan is for this book to be more like the length of Ashes, i.e. circa 140K. Ten days done; a hundred and thirty to go.)
Barely an hour for this 1K, even with a very lengthy pause to research the coat colors of Greek horse breeds. Yeah, we’re still in the honeymoon phase, all right.
Actually, it began a while ago, when my agent asked me to write a sample of the next Onyx Court book to send out with the proposal. I already had nearly eight thousand words in the bank when I announced the deal.
But today is the real beginning, the day when I sit down and start cranking out words at a steady pace. The LBR icon will come back, I’m sure, for progress posts, but this first one gets my brand-spanking-new comet icon. (It really ought to be a pic of Halley’s comet, but the sad truth is that the 1986 return did not produce any pictures half so spectacular as this one — whichever comet it is — and the various older depictions don’t make great icons. You’d all be wondering what the white smudge is, or why I have a Bayeux Tapestry icon for an eighteenth-century book.)
Anyhoo. 1093 words: a hair over quota, to cross the 9K boundary and make myself feel good. I’ll talk more later about Galen, the mortal protagonist of this book, and the ways in which I’m going to have to stretch to write him, but so far, so good. I think it’s safe to say Galen is not in much danger of being boring.
Tomorrow, I get to play with a centaur . . .
“Remembering Light”
I had about 700-800 of that already, from some work about a week ago; the rest is new. And this is, in fact, a new Driftwood story. I’m having fun riffing off the random idea I came up with for the world this one centers on, extrapolating the consequences of it. Yay for putting sunlight at the heart of a story.
Probably could finish this in two more days — possibly one — I just need to figure out how to steer the characters to the idea that got this story rolling in the first place. And decide whether I’m trying to stick that extra strand in there or not.
On my way to bed, my imagination suggested that perhaps the Plan involved cross-dressing half-orcs, and, well, the story’s done now.
4,149 words.
But still no title, dammit.
