PROSSA-seez

Since my last post, there has been some indication of life in the WIP. I have the comments to thank, in part, but also mindfulness that baby steps really are the most important, sometimes.

After a week at work that was extremely difficult - not because the work was hard, but thanks to office politics which demand emotional and professional bandwidth I don't have these days - I've returned for a new week with my head down and my feet steady. You have to keep your ambitions small when things are overwhelming, and a week that ends with the advice to document difficulties is overwhelming.

So the WIP may be viewed as a saving grace - something for my brain and soul to resort to, which is "under my control" (cue the laugh track of every author I know enjoying the idea they "control" their writing). Well, perhaps it is just a refuge - a puzzle to work under stress, a world outside the one I have to occupy day-to-day. A promise to be winkled out.

A week ago, it was scary facing the dragon, but right now it is oddly satisfying to contemplate going at something so big. With work being just as daunting, the strange truth is that the butter knife is turning out to be an unexpectedly efficacious tool.

The thing is to see it as a TOOL, rather than a weapon.

I don't want to kill a dragon. I want to write a book. It does seem rather fighting-a-beast terrifying, given that I have been out of the world I want to build for so long, but thanks to perspective and a certain assist from Jeff Sypeck, I realize that not only is this not a fight ... the fact is, it's an enterprise I can take or leave, and that somehow makes me want to claim it, to get the best of it, to create something remarkable.

Or just create something.

Whatever the words, the point is *motivation* - something I have not had for six months, really.

As with the WIP, so goes the job. I'm off my game - even just cognitively, my mom and I both are up against forgetting things, being blankly unable to identify how to deal with things, the recurring embarrassment of displaying our sieve-brains. It's pretty giddy, but I have trust that it is temporary. You have to.

And you have to work for a living. And, if you're a writer, you have to write. You don't have to publish, but you have to *write*.



And so. I entered my credentials for the expense system at work. All I'll need to do to start that item on my to-do list is hit "enter" when that bubbles up to the top of said list.

I sorted piles. I knew which pile is the easily-dispatched stuff, and I knew which pile I had to defer for today. It left me with a nice proportion of stuff I knew could be managed. I managed it. Printed nameplates. Scanned uploads. Scanned several small things to email to specific people. Deferred the items I'll have to scan and share around looking for who should see it. Laid out two FedExes. I'll enter credentials for that in the morning.

It sounds, perhaps, unbearably elementary, but it's just conscious inrementals I usually implement every day without the consciousness part:

What is routine is now something I have to think about, but that doesn't mean it's not advancing.



Inevitably, this is where I get all writerly and point out that it's the same for the WIP. Ooh, meta.

But it's true. Opening the doc can be a step, but of late it's not enough. One window amongst others can be ignored, so - having realized that research is my entry point - I squared off with the manuscript and found a piece of research I could manage. It is so vanishingly small it may seem silly: but, it was an image, already followed by the character description it inspired. I deleted the image.

That is work on a manuscript. Tiny work? Undoubtedly. But it is "in there", and "in" is where I wanted to be. Right?

This led me on to a more substantial idea, which might get very exciting indeed. The WIP having been born out of research for The Ax and the Vase, there are relics of that novel in this one. I put them in place in the years when WIP was related to Ax, even if it never was a "sequel" in my mind. And ... the stunningly obvious fact has at last pierced my callused brain, which is: that work is not relevant to this work.

My next step may be some deletions. If I ever feel the need to refer back to anything in Ax, I always have that manuscript available. But that may be absurd conjecture.

In the meantime: deletion is work. It is "in." I want to be in. So some extensive surgery could feel really good.

Leila: remember the time you got me to cut 60 pages out of Ax? I will think of you with a bloodthirsty smile as I get to slicing again.

The butterknife is a tool. Which can do a great deal, in the right hands (and when you know where to apply it).

It's pretty exciting.



I'm coming back to life. Not from death. Just from a long detour.

Thanks to Jeff and Leila, especially, for helping me find the path - and maybe lighting fires under my posterior.

Edits

My entry for Janet Reid's last flash fiction contest was completed at nearly three a.m. on Sunday morning - an unconscionable hour to hit the "submit" button on any writing (and comments on the internet), but ... I'm actually kind of happy with this piece.

Two edits did come to mind, and though they look small I think they make all the difference.

As published originally ...

"Eleven replies!"

Mom was frantic about the wedding. Cakes, invitations. She wasn't joyous, it was just her job to do, her attention to get, her show, her stress.

How had this become about her?

It became my way to prove her wrong. We’d have more than a pot to pee in.

But we couldn't even afford toilet paper. The last week before our first anniversary, dad drove 500 miles to help me move back home. OJ's slow chase on the TV. Rodney and I queerly relaxed. Dad wasn’t.

Hope crushes easy as a Dixie cup. We couldn’t afford those either.

As I'd like to edit it ...

"Eleven replies!"

Mom was frantic about the wedding. Cakes, invitations. She wasn't joyous, it was just her job to do, her attention to get, her show, her stress.

How had this become about her?

It became my way to prove her wrong. We’d have more than a pot to pee in.

But we couldn't even afford toilet paper.
The last week before our first anniversary, dad drove 500 miles to help me move back home. OJ's slow chase on the TV. Rodney and I queerly relaxed. Dad wasn’t.

Plans crush easy as a Dixie cup. We couldn’t afford those either.


***


That "paper/the" break provides a necessary segue, a  beat and a physical separation to represent the 51 weeks that have passed.

Hopes and plans are different things, and ... to be honest, in this piece (which is not fiction), hope had little honest place. The PLAN, back then, had been to prove mom wrong, to get over those lies not actually in the text above, to transmogrify into a Grown Up magically, without actually maturing or growing. A plan (hope?) destined to failure.

We really were listening to O. J. Simpson's slow-speed chase as we packed up, and my dad definitely was unspeakably distressed. Beloved Ex and I really did find ourselves relaxed, after the decision to separate was made. We were done, the worst had happened (for the first time ...).

My mom, for the record, was NOT really like this. Well, not specially so. But it was a curious time, especially looking back on it. The wedding seemed, sometimes, to have little to do with me. Less still with BEx. There was a lot of part-playing going on at that time in my life, and I wasn't the only one doing it.

We did split a week before our first anniversary; it seemed a good idea, so as not to falsely celebrate. And yet, BEx had gotten me a gift. He'd researched - year one was cotton. I still have the woven throw he gave me; it's waiting to be laundered, having been a favored Gossamer-nap-spot this summer. We at the top layer of our wedding cake together, before dad even came, I think. I probably gained five or ten pounds. It was good cake, though. Almond. Golden pound cake.

The curious coda, of course, has been that BEx is what he is in my life. Still important, though we haven't seen one another face to face since September 2001. Still someone I admire - and, oddly enough, can depend upon.

He was a good man, and I knew that, and that was why I married him. If only I'd been a good woman. Or a woman at all. At least, I am a good friend. I was a rotten wife.

Still working on that part.

Small Days

For me, sometimes writing is less about getting words out of my brain or even researching than it is a period of exploring what's already on the pages, to look around different places in the manuscript, to throw a little polish and elbow grease into a rough edge or two, to find out whether there is anything I can delete.

These days are a pleasure for me, because even if it's not a "Wow, I wrote 8,000 words today!" accomplishment (in my life, I have never contemplated my word count by the day; though I have at least watched the total count on a manuscript), there is gratification in taking a walking tour, as it were. Yesterday, I read a passage to check the "your research is showing" quotient on it, and found myself loving the scene. I'm not sure I tweaked it at all.

Today, it's been making sure "I covered that." It's one of those can-I-delete-this-placeholder-infodump runs, which are sometimes tricky because: rabbit holes in abundance. But they can be really good runs, these romps across the manuscript.

And enticing, too. Enticed to and/or BY my own work? Heck yes. Yesterday, I looked in on the scene of the old midwife cleaning a newborn and evaluating the child's viability - the sort of scene that skirts the "your research is showing" issue all too closely, oftentimes. But as I read, I saw the light, felt the warmth of the quiet room, could sense the infantile quaking of the newly emerged life, her "eyes still closed and tight as beans", swaddling her for the first time, "at last to look at its mother." The detail, to me, right now, feels more tactile than "lookit what I researched, cool huh?"

We'll see, once I get as far as beta readers.  But for now, my own nascent, quaking little baby of a manuscript ... it looks viable.

Now I gotta clean it up.

Image: Google Labeled for reuse image search
By: peagreengirl

What Comes Before Alpha?

Not long ago, I found myself intrigued by another writer’s thoughts on reading others’ works, and we got into an exchange, and he shared his MS with me. I wanted to share my own in return, but AX has been done to death (sigh!) and the WIP is so early, everything I “write” is literally sketchy. To call it a draft is perhaps even a misnomer, because right now the only non-research work on the novel is telling MYSELF the story.

I threw what passes for a first chapter or so his way, and got very quick feedback, in detail.

The most interesting part of this is that he took it seriously enough TO critique it. To me, this “writing” is strictly throwaway; if it’s draft at all, it’s still only first draft, and that means nothing of it will exist after revision, perhaps not even after a first pass at it. The scene itself, I think is probably where the book does begin, but I’ve been wrong before (and then wrong again) – and I know how early I am in the progress; I know enough to know JUST how much I don’t know right now. Any statement I make about the WIP is bound to become idiotic in a year’s time, in two years’ time (deliver us all from its taking a decade again, but even so my work isn’t the sort of thing that moves like NaNo) (and now somebody needs to record that as a Weird Al style parody of Moves Like Jagger).

This is why anything I write about the WIP is conceptual, rather than particular.

So it was actually a remarkable pleasure to get feedback like it was real writing. It provides something I didn’t really have with AX, and it also opens up doors – and poses questions.

The first of which is, if a beta reader is like a beta tester, making sure a product/novel is ready for RELEASE, and an alpha reader is the one who gets the fun of cleaning the butterknife … what comes even before alpha? I mean, I haven’t even bought a knife for this dragon, y’all, and it’s no time to go bandying at the beast while she’s still sleeping and I’m miles away in a little quiet glen.

Or something like that.



Feedback is that thing writers savor and sicken from; we can indulge too much and get indigestion, and we hate it and love it in equal measure, even simultaneously. Yet it is always – always – generous of anyone to GIVE a writer feedback. To fail in gratitude for any reader is foolish; even critique we don’t take on is an effort made on our behalf.

Feedback isn’t self-gratification. It is always a gift.

Even if the gift doesn’t fit, they took the time to give it. Even that one person in your crit group who always seems not to “get” your groove, if they speak to your work, the ONLY reason for that is “to make it better” (that their idea of “better” may involve invariably pretty people getting it on, or Must. Have. Werewolves. or whatever their particular thing, is beside the point). When you ask for it – and you get it – feedback is never anything but the result of someone thinking of your work.

That’s a hell of a big deal, really.

I lost Mr. X for a reader when he disagreed with other feedback I was taking, massive cuts to AX when he thought “there was good stuff in there.” And the thing is, he was right, there was good writing. It just wasn’t good writing that served the ultimate goal, which was telling the right parts of the story. He couldn’t take the waste; he was more attached to my darlings than I was. Except that: it wasn’t. Words can be very, very pretty indeed, and even exciting – and still have no use as one part of a whole. This is why the call it killing the darlings, of course. You don’t just kill off the ugly and the useless and the weak, you have to take the scimitar (or the butterknife …) to GOOD WORK, if it doesn’t honestly contribute to the greater structure.

There are many, many beautiful pieces of art and furniture and so on I admire and might even love to have, but not all the beauty in the world will actually fit inside my house.

This is what drafts are for.

And so I have a lot of pretty “writing” right now, which has earned the irritating scare quotes I know are probably giving some of you a case of the hives, and which will not be a part of the final MS. I’ll know it happened. I may even let it continue to exist electronically, for when I finally do get published, establish myself as a literary light, and the Ivy Leage university library of nobody’s dreams someday needs to curate my body of work for posterity.

(Or, y’know, just because I am vain.)

The pretty things don’t live any less because I don’t put them in a glass display case and preserve them at all costs.

Some pretty words are … just exercise.



But it’s always nicer to have an exercise partner, and to remember that writing *is* exactly that. That it is a limbering, a means to some kind of fitness, and that doing it with others takes away some of the fear and the anguish and can be motivating and just more fun.

I found out not long ago one of my dearest friends, TEO (The Elfin One), harbors regret that she never helped me when I asked her to beta read AX.

Now, I certainly complained about that blasted butterknife and no backup. And obviously that revision was not a good one; once That Certain Agent gave me an R&R, and good feedback, it got somewhere. But merely surviving the dragon wasn’t enough for that MS, not that first time.

But that someone would regret not being there with me? That she would apologize after all this time, and re-up for service on the WIP. That it would even be an emotional matter … ?

I was stunned. It had never occurred to me.



Like so much about writing, it hardly ever occurs to us as is doin’ it, that there’s anyone else in the world who’ll ever really, truly SEE, read, hear, be there in and with and for it. I still never have gotten the hang of being able to really feel it when anyone has my work. The idea is literally inconceivable, at least for my wee and paltry little brain.

And so empirical evidence there is someone stalking in the world I am still learning how to build … it’s curious, and one of those shocking surprises as an author.

This work exists. And it’s garnered an opinion, it’s sparked a thought.

Amazing. And I’m always glad, too, if that thought isn’t “yawn” or “what-the … !???”

The Thing About Reading

… specifically, the thing about reading multiple works by one author – is that, unless they’re exceptionally good, you learn their go-to strategies. If you’re smart and/or fortunate, you begin to feel your own. It’s not always repetition of words per se, but this is certainly a matter of the linguistic patterns on which we depend.

I have some suspicion that my tendency toward overwrought clauses and loquatiousness comes from some fear of simplistic repetitiveness (and very definitely from a family full of Impressive Speakers – for good or ill), but I also have decreasing illusions about the patterns I do have. Some readers go bananas dealing with my parentheticals or dash interruptions … I pretend to try to keep ellipses to a minimum, but know all too well I use them more than most writers ever would.

An acquaintance online once identified my “voice” unerringly by dint of recognizing my tendency to overuse the word “just.” Ever since, I’ve been overly aware of its presence whenever I type it; yet it’s hardly alone in calling me out. I have an extreme problem with “actually” which, even aware of the problem, I have not reformed. Adverbs generally, one of those tools of our language so many publishing professionals would love to see banned and which therefore I defend and adore like the contrarian I am, are a pretty easy identifier. Too many writers use them in pointless ways; and none of us needs the padding. Yet they are a limber and lively part of our tongue, and it would be a great pity to kill them off wholesale thanks to those who use them poorly.

Ahem.

There’s one writer whose mass of termonological tics render every character’s voice identical, no matter their setting, mood, education, or demographics. The tics transcend character voice and insert an all too literal authorial voice which, because it spans dialogue, exposition, action, and all elemenets of novel upon novel upon novel upon novel, is distracting; unwelcome. It’s cumbersome and even maddening. Yet, because I’m a stubborn ass, I won’t put down a given novel – but will edit it in pen.

This is justified both by the fact that some works are re-run reads for me, and I want to be able to read one, ever, without having to mentally correct it all over again, tiny mental rants bursting forth over and over on every page spread. Oh, and by my smug-assed presumption that (hopefully …) it makes ME a better writer.

Learning from someone else’s mistakes.


I’m not as prescriptivist as I once was, and indeed have come to love the quivering weirdness of the written word, as it synthesizes the spoken, or thought, or comveys a story in simple ways, or dresses up in beautiful words and parades around making a magnificent spectacle of itself. If it does this by breaking rules, or breaking what people THINK are rules, all the better.

Still.

If it does this encumbered: writing sucks. If it’s shackled to an author’s own preconceptions or prejudices, ignorance (writing creatively, without research, is wonderfully valid, but writing in wilful blindness is not; see also, the geological unlikelihood of William Golding’s island for Lord of the Flies, on which we are nonetheless stranded and harrowed and broken down … versus any tale populated by lazily caricatured Mary Sues, none of which I will name for charity’s and safety’s sake) … it’s going to enchain an audience, rather than enfold and transport them.

And so it is, having just finished a cycle of reruns I will not repeat for years yet, I choose to finally spew a bit about the patterns____ repetitions thrust through my suffering wee and paltry little brain of late:

• Beginning. Every. Other. Sentence. With the word AND. It’s not a rule I give a crud about, but please quit flogging me with *unneccesary* and’s, and interminable riffs of this.
• Peppering single sentences with and, and, and; and and—and and. Paragraph-long sentences formed with these.
• “And then,”
• “Of course”
• “Suddenly” and "Immediately"
  (If there is any better way to slow the pace than constant repetition of these two descriptors: I don't want to learn it.)
• “Utterly”
• “Now”
• “That”
• “Which”
• “In sum”
• "Slowly”
  (Even I, adverbial defender that I am, can hardly identify an instance in the entire literary world where this is honestly a necessary descriptor; and, even if it’s important to specify, there are so many more interesting words than this one.)
• Stating the rules of the world even as deep as the END of a novel, by which point we really know these rules, authorial voice, we really really do and would beg you to stop explaining.
• Doing this even in the briefest of unnecessary clauses. You’re treating your audience like idiots. Seriously, stop it.
• Describing characters’ extreme attractiveness at every possible moment of a scene. Extra bonus points OFF if you insist upon detailing every point of an ensemble in doing this. Every time.
• All the characters are attractive. Even the extras. EVERYONE is attractive, and beauty equals goodness – even if the goodness is merely angst-ridden, terminally melodramatic evil. Hooray for pretty!
• Describing by fancy maker, pattern of drapery/upholstery fabric, age and theme of bric-a-brac, country-of-origin of rugs, ostentatiously tasteful paint color, and at all times most-expensive-possible materials comprising every possible corner of a room in which one single scene should take place in five minutes, but which I have to read about for six pages, because – these characters are conspicuously well off, get it? THIS IS WORLD-BUILDING, GET IT? (This author, not incidentally, happens to be obscenely wealthy, and I could give a hang less how they choose to (clearly) decorate their own personal home. Get on with it. This is not story.)
• Describing by artist or composer, and with exhaustive critical opinion, every overwrought piece of music with which the author has mentally scored, scene by scene, every single instant of a novel. I don’t give an aching damn what you were listening to while you wrote this, and once you’ve done this eighteen times in a single novel, I know you are just showing off how much you think you know about music, and it’s just as boring as when that one guy does it in a bar so he can prove how he is too good to hang out in bars and is really a wildly overeducated, intelligent, super sensitive snob I knew I didn’t liike in the first place and now find completely insufferable in the second place.
• Constant. Racist. Descriptions. CONSTANT. If anyone appears anywhere in any of these works, who is not whiter than a sheet of modern copy paper, they are: dumb, superstitious, and *strictly* present as accessories to the white people’s stories.
• No, seriously.
• The actual, explicit worship of the very words “white” or “pale” are impossible to ignore. And this is not a 19th century novelist whose attitudes can be glossed over. I mean, this writer makes The Ax and the Vase look progressive, and Ax doesn’t even contain diversity.

Oh my, that felt good – if unseemly.

I may even be able to read one of these books ever again.



Just not within the next decade … or two. Actually. ()—and and and and. BOOP!


(Please feel free to initiate drinking games making fun of MY myriad tics and pretentions. All I ask is you comment and tell me about them, so we can all have fun. Cheers!)

Final Collection?

The History Blog takes us back to the back of a hagiography of a Bishop of Rheims, where we find a thousand-year-old piece of music, here performed by a pair of undegrads at St. John's college.  They create an exquisite window into the sound of the past; the beautiful sound of human voices in song:



The Arrant Pedant got thirteen out of fifteen on an online grammar quiz with intriguingly mercurial answers, rules, and scores.  Linguistically predictable (online quizzes are execrable), it's much more useful as a look at the reliability of Teh Intarwebs' infotainment and the interesting ineffability of "answers" found here ...

"You no longer need tennis balls in your life."





And, last but not least, Janet Reid takes us places.  This time:  "In a world ... where 'R&R' means 'revise and resubmit' ... and rejection just means rejection."  Even a really nice rejection.  Perhaps especially the really nice ones.

Twit

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
-- Blaise Pascal

Loving a good pun, this headline taking an opportunity to abbreviate “Twitter”– a veritable art form in condensed expression, sometimes – was too self-gratifying to resist.

Most contemporary writers know:  the irony of editing is that reducing word count once the “actual writing” is barfed out can be much harder work.  Revision can be so painstaking as to paralyze us outright.  What research to remove, what scenes to sacrifice, what action to abbreviate?  Down in the forests with our trusty butter knives, chasing dragons, it can get harder and harder to see the trees.

Beta readers, of course, are a wonderful thing.  The great and inimitable Leila Gaskin (herself an expert on dragons) nearly got kissed, once, when she simply told me to jettison sixty pages.  She’d been afraid to say it, but the instinct correct – AND shucking like that is a pretty easy job, compared to line-by-line word-shaving and migraine-by-migraine character analysis, scene analysis, structural retrofitting after deletions of same (lawzy, ask me how long it took to get rid of Clovis’ older sister, an historical figure by the way, who added nothing but bulk to our story!).  In revision, continuity can become a pernicious problem!

In microcosm, a lot of Twitter users – especially amongst my writer friends, I know – suffer pangs of a similar sort, getting everything into 140 characters.  I have witnessed that same Leila, sweating out a Tweet or three, sitting in panels at #JRW and sharing wisdom with the world.  Watching the process of paring but preserving voice and conveying a point was not merely entertaining, it was instructive.  I’ve felt that pain.  I’ve REHEARSED Tweets – not because I’m that anal-retentive, but because I know exactly how I want something said, and the limitations on my loquatiousness.

“That awkward moment when you exceed 140 and have to choose which grammar crime to commit.”

Those limitations on my loquatiousness are damned useful little beasts, though.  They keep you alert as hell, and, over the course of a couple years or so relearning how to communicate in microblog form (“Must! Leave! Room! For the BLOG LINK!”) illuminates for analytic eyes a new perspective.  And I still use the two-spaces-after-a-period system in most of my Tweets.  … Most …

Before I ever joined – and I only did so out of some curiosity about the medium, much-touted as one outlet to reach out to people as an author – I tended to stand with those snobs who pooh-pooh Twitter, under the idea that nothing worthwhile can possibly be shared in a 140-character entry.  The name itself hardly dispels this notion, evoking nothing but the confused, crowded noise of a flock of birds, and onomotopoeically silly to boot.  Much as I do with “secretary”, I intentionally call myself a Twit when mentioning my usage, because that’s what it sounds like the population should be called, for layered reasons.

It didn’t take me long, though, to come to appreciate both my friends there and the medium itself.  It forces my yapping-puppy mode of communcation into a harness, a discipline I’ve come to appreciate.  And it also affords me lines of communication with people who are almost universally intelligent and interesting.  I jump in and chat with men and women both sharing my interests and ideas, and exposing me to new ones.  Life there isn’t too hard to keep troll-free, and with the standard that anything I say online I would be willing to allow my mother or my nieces to read, I don’t think I’m too hard on anyone else, either.

The brevity of Twitter, too, means that even as your timeline rushes by – which, even with only about 700 followers, and following over 800 myself, provides quite the dizzying rush of links, observations, rallying cries, and incredibly funny posts and retweets – and conversations don’t get much bogged down.  I once live-tweeted Highlander with a couple of pals, we had a good time, then it was over – and you can do much the same with television and so on.  In much the same way I work crosswords with my mother over the phone, sharing entertainment virtually can be diverting, particularly when your IRL companionship is snuggly and furry, but still sub-verbal.

Twitter has provided moral support and encouragement under the #AmWriting, #AmEditing, and #AmQuerying hashtags more than once, and the occasional insight into the way I write.  This is no advertisement nor exhortation to join; just an observation, because all this interests me, and anything that changes or even develops my use of our language does too.

Do you belong?  (Let’s find each other there!)  Have you found it crystallizes in your own eyes the way you express things and share them?

I’d have written a shorter post … but that is for Twitter.

Unfamiliar Territory

The revisions I've been working on have brought out a side of me seldom of much prominence in my life.  I've been second-guessing myself a great deal.

The intensity of this, for me, is nothing like the self-doubt I know many suffer every day, and I'm grateful for that.  But its very unfamiliarity is knocking me off-kilter.

The polishing work started when an agent whose opinion I'm willing to internalize (you can't take all the advice) gave me feedback I agreed with and wanted to implement.  That was April 10, and here almost two months later I am very well along in the MSS.  I've made some changes slightly off-script from the advice given, fleshed out a number of scenes and characters after the draconian cuts of the last revision, and ...

... of course.  I found a pretty serious continuity problem.

How I managed this is beyond me, but I left Queen Saint Clotilde pregnant for about a year and a half.

Oh dear.

Of course, a mechanical fix like this is not all that straightforward, what with the ankle bone being connected to the knee bone and the knee bone being connected to the thigh bone, and so on all the way up and then back down into the nervous and circulatory and circulatory systems.  I'm angry on a few levels, that this happened at all - bewildered at how I could have missed it - and that I can work on something for so long and still be finding something so profoundly wrong with it.

It's humiliating.  It leads me to question whether this publishing thing is ever going to happen at all - whether it should.

These questions, it must be said, last about one second or so and my confidence arrogance reasserts itself.  But then I come up against - "am I taking too long!? I wanted to get back into querying really quickly! - and "am I not taking long enough? will what I am doing be substantial enough?" - and (probably scariest of all, particularly after stripping tens of thousands of words out in the previous edit) "am I adding TOO MUCH BULK???"


All I can do is trust myself, be grateful this particular agent was kind enough to give me feedback, NOT hang all my hopes on that, and do the work.  Listen to a lot of Star Trek while wielding the keyboard on the MSS.  And soldier on.

Ax will get out there, and we're getting closer and closer to that time.  Get it done in this first half of the year.  Get agented before 2015.  And then ...

More writing.

Time for me to soldier on.

Gaining Weight

Progress on the final polish has been quite gratifying; nearly one month in, I'm more than one-fourth the way through the whole, doing bits of backtracking here and there, but mostly moving front-to-back in a blissfully (semi-)logical progression.  I *still* find myself having mini-wigs about continuity, and even have adjusted a few nuts and bolts here and there for tightness.  But for the most part, this survey mission is not so grueling a proposition as the last - far too slow - edit.

This evening I've finally hit that point where I had a somewhat less "mini" wig out about the whole project.  You have to have these, and I'm not gnashing my teeth and yelling at furbabies - but it's still a little scary contemplating word counts.

I'd slimmed the work down to 118,297, and it now stands at 126,741.  To my author's sensibilities, this is both good and bad:  we, The Great Unpublished, are fed a steady diet (even for historical fiction) that manuscripts MUST BE SHORT (or, translated more kindly, that "every single word must move the plot forward").  The million sources for advice to aspiring authors is to cut every last bit that isn't propelling the action; even culturally, we've developed a real allergy to exposition and description.

And yet, the agent who told me to "get back to work" told me that the object of this would be to get some meat on the bones.  To put food in the kitchen, as it were.

I had cut scenes to the point that "establishing shots" were the barest "we were in the work room" or "we were on our horses" - with no depth of feeling within the characters, or texture in the world.  Some works, it just ain't easy to trim down to 118.3k.  And so, it is gratifying to be able to go in and provide more, rather than less.

It's also nigh-impossible (even for a pragmatist) not to get a little giddy at the thought of going too far.

Nearly ten-thousand words, and I'm 1/4 the way through.  *Shudder*

But I'm 1/4 the way through.  Close, actually, to 1/3.

Exciting.

I just hope I'm not on the wrong ... track.  Heh.



Also - please, will someone tell me who approved its becoming May 8?  How is it May 8?

Stealing from INXS?

I just had a little fun using the phrase "elegantly sated" in the latest polish, getting a bit of food on the tables, so to speak.  As much as this might sound like a certain INXS song, the fact is, this particular phrase is actually a tribute to someone - well, who once was - in my family.




We still quote him.  "It is an elegant sufficiency.  Anything more would be a superfluity."

I can admit, Michael Hutchence's superfluity (though he actually was a tiny little thing; saw him live once, basically doing one long Armani-down-to-bike-shorts-and-combat-boots strip tease) did work for me, just fine.  Fortunately, my physics-major boyfriend at the time seemed not to mind

The vid still looks slick, modern, and even current to me.  Then again, I am old and wildly out of touch.  *Grin*

Cat's Eye(s)

For ten years, this was a catless household.  Sweet Siddy-La, for all her wonders, never was a cat girl, and she was blessing enough I was happy to be cat free as long as I was lucky enough to have her.  Every now and then, I'd think about how charming it is to have a pet you can scoop up and nuzzle, but I never felt deprived, not with her around.

In July, it'll be two years since I had a cat again, and Gossamer has been a pretty wonderful companion.  He and Penelope together are the source of more of my laughter than any other thing in the world.  They are dear in such different ways, and I'm so thankful I found each one of them.

One of the magical things about a cat is the high honor it can be to earn their trust.

Some people may be familiar with the way a cat can sit silently, regarding you, and make a point of squeezing its eyes shut for a second or two.  I wonder how many people know what this closed-eyes moment means, in feline parlance.

Many mammals express trust and/or submission by exposing their bellies - the ultimate expression of trust and acceptance of authority over themselves.  Cats are far less prone to expressing submission the way dogs may do with their humans - but they will sometimes tell you they trust you, which is as deep a communication as one creature can give another.  A cat who closes its eyes at you has given you the profoundest gift any of us can give:  its trust.

Image:  Wikimedia

Cats' eyes are known for their hugeness, their luminescence, their steady gaze.  They can be so intense, and those who know Gossie know his eyes are great green jewels.  As brightly as they photograph:  they look like that in life.  I used to joke, when he was a kitten and his coloring still softer and paler than it has become, that he had "snot-green" eyes.  But they've always been arresting little beams of light.  He's always had a remarkable little gaze.

By the time I adopted Goss, I had finally learned how to behave in forming a new relationship with a cat.  The main thing, even when they are VERY small still, is never to impose yourself on them physically.  You can offer pettin' and scoop 'em up twenty hours a day, as long as it's always an offer first, and you let them accept.

The amazing thing is how incredibly affectionate a cat you can find on your hands, when you don't start off your life with one, picking it up and snoodling on it, every time *you* feel like a snuggle.  How trusting a cat you can find before you, if you always, always - always - offer your attention openly, but stop just short of actually giving it every time, and let them consent, every time.

A hand held out, but not connecting for a pet or a caress, will attract a cat into a pet or a caress pretty much every time, if he has enough autonomy in the transaction that that last two or three inches is *his* to close, to make the connection.



It's like that, too, with writing - and, I think most particularly, with revising, with very fine polishing.

The work I'm doing now is not formation - not even restoration, but a revisiting.  This is the word that keeps coming to mind, when I describe it to anyone.

I'm not recreating what came before and I removed, but I'm opening a door to all the accumulated knowledge, the lost scenes, the descriptions and everything I know and did not use, or took out - and I'm finding that, what needs to be back in, is coming to the door, coming to me, without my having to really inventory the sum of what could be used, and wrestle it out of my head and onto the page.

The advantage of having worked on The Ax and the Vase for as long as I have is that I know its resources really well.  I live in a world littered with useful components, and if I don't force my way to one nifty thing or another - if I am open, exciting things will come.

Gossie knows I don't impose myself on his little body without his knowledge and consent.  Because of this, he's willing to close his eyes around me, because he trusts me with ... well, if not his person, then his feline, perhaps.  Because of this, I have a gregarious and friendly cat who is totally Mamma's Boy, even when neato new people are around who can give him exciting and new and yummy affection and admiration.  He's great with new people.  But he's more "my" pet than any cat I ever had before, and I've had some really nice cats in my day.

Ax seems, too, to trust me, and to come to me, at this point.  And as I type now, there seems to be a trusting little warm ball of grey nestling against my hip.  Aww.


It's ironic that learning how not to control something in life turns out to be the best way to get it to cooperate.

I really need to apply this to my human relationships ...

In Other News

I've been having FUN (of all things) taking the old butter knife to the dragon again, which is a perfectly daft response to a request for edits on a manuscript already revised something like four hundred eighty seven thousand times.  But it's a wise response when the request comes from someone of the caliber it came from.

It is also exactly the sort of personal mission which provides rather excellent diversion at a time when ... well, shall we say, Life is doing its thing.  Wielding a butter knife at a thousand-foot fire-breather does take one's mind off certain looming stresses, and I am then doubly grateful, not just for the attention from another great agent (one I don't intend to let slip through my fingers this time, if I can help it) but for the boon of the work itself.

The reason it is fun is that I'm not doing anything to restore old work once scrapped.  I'm reinventing.  I come from the generation weaned on reinvetion (reboots), a generation with a lifetime lease on the word "re-imagine".  Some of what I'm doing, far from being a retrieval or recycling (I am really trying to use all the re-prefixed terms I can in this paragraph ... apparently ...), is entirely new work.

It even struck me that one supporting character, who needs some meat on her bones, is indeed the one secret I've kept all the time I have been working on Ax.  She's the only avatar for myself in the work.  I try not to be the precious, over-invested author, living vicariously in my characters (and making them all talented and beautiful beyond description).  But at some point, I consciously decided that I'd use my own physical description for her, and perhaps some personality.  (Emphasis on the perhaps - I have no musical talent, and lost my ability to sing even with mediocre ability years ago.)

What this work has made me realize is that, because she's the closest thing to me I invested in the work, I *shrank* from giving her a real presence.  This was true even before the revision massive campaign of cuts.  And so, it is liberating to actually give her a smile, a breath, a little scene or two.

I had fun, too, reinventing the tale of Basina and the animals - a legend of Clovis' mother, likely invented long after the fact, meant to evoke the degeneration of the Merovingian dynasty.  I told the tale with an oral cadence, with the lilt of a fairytale; it's a short passage, but it puts BLOOD in the veins of the meat I'm trying to hang on my bones.

Oh dear, and my metaphors are REally getting bent like overworked copper.  Time for me to cease musing, hit save, and proably log off for the night.

Meat

Of the most recent four requests-for-a-full I had out (for those of you who aren't querying authors, a "full" means those agents who have asked to read the entire manuscript), I did not get any feedback from three of them.

One is a very very lovely woman I've met before whom I knew probably was not the right match for me, but you don't not-submit when someone gives the go-ahead - you never do know, in this world.  One seemed to me not really a personality match - and, indeed, I never even heard from her after submission, which from *my* end is a write-off.  Another was the ridiculously delightful Victoria Skurnick, who agreed to an interview on my blog as well (I need to get on that) but who, in the end, really doesn't do my genre, so as much as I adored her I knew it wasn't a good bet, and she was just as kind in letting me down as she was in opening the option to begin with.

The last one, though, whose name shall remain un-mentioned for now as I'm not convinced that book is closed, so to speak, provided nicely specific requirements and the salutation, "Back to work!"

The good news is, I agree with the feedback.  Indeed, during the last revision, cutting tens of thousands of words out of a completely ridiculous draft, I had thoughts cross my mind which reflect similar expectations.  So I'm going back to work - taking the butter knife back to the dragon's lair - and doing what I can to spread a bit of oleo.

The even better news than that is that this should not be a very big job.  It's a matter of some restoration, but not masses of new writing - nor of new cutting.  It's a matter of set dressing, essentially, and - of course - it does mean suspending any new querying for the time.  I won't pretend an excuse to suspend querying isn't welcome - even as sanguine as I am about the process, I don't think *anyone* would call it a pleasurable one.

And so today, back still hinky and kinky, enjoying my clean house, the open windows, a bout of laundry-doing, and the occasional nestle, I'm perusing scenes to see which ones are too free-floating--and SWEATING about my thoughts on which ones are "there" enough.  And, of course, dealing with the impulse to get into other things as well.  "Oh, wait, that character needs ..." and so on.  Some of it I should probably indulge.

But some of it I need to restrain as well - because here is the major thing:  this is not something I have endless time to fool around with.  An editorial agent (SQUEE) *might* care enough about my work to consider it twice.  The last time that happened, I took far too long, and the world changed by the time I got back to the interested party, and it transpired that there no longer was interest by the time I finished with the butter knife.

Part of the process of being a "potential" (published) author is learning, and learning-how-to-do at that.  I learned a lot, losing what I wanted to hope was a Dream Agent.

Not interested in losing another.

Complete

Though the "tracking" posts were a tool to keep me working, I will add ... only one more ... just to note that the final polish is finished.

With the Author's Note, word count is now 126,092.  Novel alone:  118,298.

Tracking

With Note:  127,276.  Without:  119,541.  And only a little left to skim through at this point.  If I can't finish tomorrow night, it will be Tuesday.

Tracking

Psst ... I have this secret hope I may finish the final revision tomorrow.  Don't tell anybody, m'kay?  Thanks.

With Author's Note:  129,603

Without:  121,868

Good night!

Tracking

As of this morning - with the Author's Note - a nice, satisfying:  129,999!

Without:  122,264.

Yay!

Tracking

With Author's Note, as of today:  131,066.

Without:  123, 331.

Tracking

It's been over a month since I updated the word count tracking.  I didn't spend nearly enough of my time off between jobs, or the holiday, finishing up the final polish.  Pouring on some more coal this week ...

131, 611.  Without the author's note:  123, 878.

Tracking

Word count, end of today:  134,021 (126,288 without Author's Note)