Galley of Forbidden Rose

The galley has arrived.

And the betas are on board.

Once upon a time this galley would have been a big ole pack of paper, brought to the door by UPS.  Now it is a pdf file, and I print it out myself and mark it up and e-mail a list of corrections back to the admirable Editorial Assistant at Berkley.

This is much more efficient. 

The galley is when you see 3000 things you want to change and you can fix 32 typos. 

More questions

Y'know, the whole blog thing is just a morass and murky swamp of talking about yerself.  This is not -- despite abundant evidence to the contrary -- my favorite activity. I feel like Dickinson's dreary public frog.

So. More Questions and more Answers.


5) Any advice for unpublished writers?

 Don't give up. Do work you're proud of. Have faith in yourself.

Sit down and write. Do it hour after hour, even when you think you're not producing good stuff.

And what is going to sound like contradicting those comments above --
Take joy in what you do.



6) What's next in this series?

Forbidden Rose will be out June 1. That's Maggie and Doyle's story. They meet during the French Revolution, at the height of the Terror.


7) Does she plot out the whole series first?

When I see this, I think, immediately, of Dorothy Dunnett. You look at the first scene of the first book of her House of Niccolo series and it is perfectly obvious Dunnett knew what was going to happen in the last scene of Book Eight.

I am not doing that,
on so many levels.

But, then, I'm not writing a series of books that tells a single story, so I don't have to plan out a whole story.
Instead, I'm basing distinct and separate stories in the same fictive universe. My characters intersect, not because one story leads to another, but because the 'world' I'm writing about is very small.

Covers

Covers . . . 
just because I felt like posting covers ...

ETA:  I have moved the covers below the fold so they will not slow the loading of the blog for slow machines.

Copy edits done on MAGGIE (Forbidden Rose)

We're finished.

I say goodbye to Justine and Guillaume LeBreton, (who is William Doyle) and Maggie and Hawker.

Though I'll get back to them in a week or so when I start plotting the JUSTINE manuscript . . . which used to be the ADRIAN manuscript in my head but is now Justine's story.

As to Forbidden Rose and all I wanted to accomplish . . .

it's either in there, or it's not.

This post-copyedit period is when I walk around muttering, "I could have made it really good if I had another month."

I'm probably fooling myself.

Copyedits of Forbidden

Coming down to the wire on this.

Have I ever indicated by some slight subtle bitty hint how much I hate and despise and abominate the Chicago Manual of Style? Loathe and abhor it? It is a subject that does not leave me gravelled for lack of synonyms.

Ok. Why do we use double quotes for emphasis?

As in --
After the court martial, she was "out of commission" for about a year.

Has nobody noticed that double quote marks are being used in great numbers by dialog?

Single quote marks, on the other hand, hang around at the pool all day drinking Sex on the Beach.

Has anybody noticed how confusing double quotes are when we want to emphasize stuff in the narration surrounding dialog.
So why don't we use single quote marks for this? Huh? Huh?

And colors. I am just steamed purple by the stupid no-hyphen-in-colors bloody rule. A blue and white set of dishes. A yellow green field of wheat.

Are we richer, linguistically, because we don't use the hyphen? Are we, like, saving the hyphens for something important?

Right now my annoyance centers on certain French usages, which is not really CMOS's fault, but I will be mad at them anyway.

Sans-cullotes and counter revolutionary are the 1790s terminology.

Sansculottes and counterrevolutionary are NOT.
They're mostly MODERN. But they're in Websters and thus the pure quill as far as CMOS is concerned, (See, I got a swipe in at CMOS.) Webster's being, if not God, at least a theoretical construct of Infinite Wisdom.

So I've been stetting counterrevolutionary like mad all through the text.
Bet you didn't know counter revolutionary was a 1790s word.

Close to the end of Maggie

I am close to the end of Maggie. Just a little writing still to do.

Feels good.

Title, title ... I've got a title

We're going to call the MAGGIE story, The Forbidden Rose.

I'm pleased with the title, which I have decided has all kinds of thematic relevance.
Forbidden Rose is set in the same fictive world as Spymaster I and II.

They tell me Forbidden is not going to have scantily clad people on the front.
I don't know whether this is good or bad.
Many folks like the scantily.
But I'm game for anything. It'll be interesting to to see what they'll come up with in the not-so-much-nekkid category.

In other news, I'm doing the first plot layout of Adrian . . .
and working like the devil to fix Forbidden Rose,
(I'm not used to calling it that.)
which still has plotholes you could drop a mack truck through.

But, y'know ...
the fun part of writing, for me, comes when I'm doing the last fixes on a manuscript and making the language just right, or when I'm dreaming up the basic story.

Now I get to do both of these at once.
Yip -- as it were --ee.

Images of the Sinti, circa 1800

I'm working on a scene in MAGGIE with a brief appearance of French gypsies in it.
I don't know whether the scene will stay in the manuscript.

The Sinti / Manouche / Bohemians / Roma / gypsies
are HARD to research in this period. There's just about no solid history on them.

The good part is I get to make stuff up.
The bad part is I have to make stuff up.

Here's some images.

I don't have a date on this one. The clothing is interesting. Striped skirt, unbound hair, long scarf over head and wrapped around, some sort of quilted shawl over shoulders and pinned in the front. There's something with sleeves under the shawl.

This is late C19, so I can't use it for details of clothing. But it's interesting.

We get -- lookit -- see the dishevelled, curly hair of the girl children. This appears in many pictures.

Here's 1750 London. See the loose red cloak. I find this red cloak over and over again for the whole century. I'm begining to think this may have been a long-term commonality.

The fortune teller is casting coffee grounds. I mean, how weird is that?

Close up view of the picture is here.

This one is from 1764. The print is Amsterdam, but I don't know where the scene is. It shows both male and female gypsy dress. And we got a cloak and head scarf on the woman. Hat with brim on man. Larger picture here.

Here's one from 1855. German, I think. The clothing is really irrelevant, so far from my date, but we got the hair loose. This seems to be a commonality, that long dark loose hair. Close up here.

Here's one from before 1818, probably in the north of England. This is very close to my target date of 1794.

And we got some cloaks, including two red ones, and the wide-brimmed, flat-crowned hats that we keep seeing. And we got dogs and a donkey.

The clothing, aside from the hats and the cloaks, looks pretty much like ordinary English country clothing of the period.
One can get a closer view here.

I took a look at Pyne's Microcosm. (I'll see if I can scan in pictures some time.) That dates from 1806. Microcosm shows English gypsies in the clothing of English country laborers.

In this painting we got a gypsy woman in England in 1839. This is sentimentalized and therefore not reliable as to clothing, but ... see the red cloak and the stripes and the loose hair. These would seem to be the stereotype that says 'gypsy' to sentimental painters.

For upclose here.

Another British painting here,

This one I can't copy to the blog, but you can track it down. We got with the donkey and the baskets on the donkey and, yes, a red cloak.

Nice set of period donkey baskets on this one.

And this cloak seems to have fringes on it.

Takes all kinds.

Moving along ...

This one was painted in England fairly close to the period. Red cloak again.

And lookit, lookit, lookit! see the baby strapped to the back under the cloak.

Oh my, yes. Good.

(They do this all over Africa today. It's how I used to carry the kid around when I was in Africa. Now I know the Rom did it. Yes! Lovely detail.)

Closeup view here.

Tents

The 1794 gypsies would have used 'bender tents'. here.

Here's a bender tent in use. This is loooong after 1794, of course, but the photo shows the form of the tent in detail.

These bender tents are typically shown in C18 and early C19 paintings with the fire built next to the entrance. There's a couple of paintings on this posting that show the tent and the fire next to it with a tripod and a pot.

They could also put the fire inside, which seems counter-intuitive.

(I had a period picture with a flap on top of the tent so the smoke could escape. My blog seems to have lost the image for me. I'll try to find it again.)

Here's a photo from 1910 or so with a 'double bender' tent on either side and the fire in between.

View of a two-wheeled cart as well.

Original here.

Here's a painting, England, 1797, so it is right on the dot in time. Red cloak. Turban sort of hat on the woman. A donkey.

Vardos

The traditional painted-wood, curved-top, live-in gypsy wagon described so well by Dickens in 1840 evolved roughly between 1810 and 1830.

(It's fairly easy to find exterior shots of late C19 vardos, but I haven't seen any C19 interior photos. It's after my period a good bit so I haven't pursued. One could start here, if fascinated.)

Before the 1830 wooden vardo, they had cloth- (canvas?) topped wagons.

These canvas-covered wagons were in use right up to C20. Canvas-tops and wood vardos were used by the same groups.

Here's a sentimental, undated painting, place unknown, but it looks European. Might be 1790 to 1830, going by the gentleman's outfit. And we got ourselves a canvas-covered wagon with four wheels. A larger version of this here.

These canvas-covered wagons were not 'living spaces' with windows and doors, stoves and built-in beds, like the vardos. The 1794 wagons and carts would have been enclosed from the rain and would have been used, along with the bender tents, for sleeping.

This is Czeck and far far later than the period, but it's how the cloth-covered wagons would have been used. See a larger, clearer version here.

In this painting from Van Gogh, 1888, we have both the traditional wooden vardo and a canvas-covered wagon.

And another mid C19 painting that shows a canvas covered wagon. Larger version here.

Here's an illustration from Guy Mannering, showing -- not very clearly -- a line of gypsies and their wagons. Publicaton date of the novel was 1815, but I don't know the date of the illustration.

Again, this is sentimentalize, so I distrust the details.

And here's a modern version of the canvas-covered wagon.

What's interesting about this photo ... the cart is two-wheeled. It's operating in a context of good roads. This implies that a four-wheeled cart is neither necessary nor universally desirable.

Interesting.

Now, am I justified in giving my French gypsies covered carts in 1794?


I have English gypsies with cloth-topped carts in the period.

So some gypsies had these carts.
And I have paintings of C18 French farmers with just exactly this type of two-wheeled covered cart.

So the technology was there.

But there's a plethora of pictorial gypsies without any carts at all.

Now, these are the Romantic paintings of 'Gypsies in a Woods' or 'Giving Alms to the Gypsies' and they tend to have a picturesque donkey curled to the side and no clutter anywhere and I just don't trust them on the workaday details at all.
(Pyne also doesn't show carts, but I think that's because he's concentrating on human figures at work.)


In the end, I have to make some guesses.

I'm also going to assume prosperous groups or large groups would have a cart or two. Small, poor families might not have carts.

I'm going to go with the assumption that French Rom had pretty much the same technology as English Rom and German Rom, etc.

(Records from the period show that about one-third of Gypsy men
condemned to the French galleys in C18 had been born outside France. So there was obviously much to-ing and forthing across borders.)

So I'm going to give my people carts.
Yeah!

Technical Topics -- 'First Meeting' scenes

For a while now, I've been pondering on the 'first meeting' scene of MAGGIE in a futile, disorganized, uncomfortable way.

Romance genre contains the story of a love relationship at its heart. The H&H tend to meet early so this central story gets underway.
One doesn't vamp indefinitely beforehand.

When I have nothing better to agonize over, lately, I've been looking and relooking at the first 5000 words of MAGGIE and asking myself when and where and how I should position this 'first meeting' scene.
At the opening of the ms?
A couple thousand words in?
And how do I coordinate this 'meeting' scene with the beginnings of the other six or seven stories I'm telling in the ms?

So last night I was mulling over 'first meeting scenes I have known' and naturally started thinking about Lucia St. Claire Robson's classic, The Tokaido Road.

Tokaido is not genre Romance, of course, since the stage ends up strewn with corpses at the end of Act V, a la Hamlet, and heaps of still-twitching corpses piled from horizon to horizon is a clue you're not in a Romance.

Tokaido is interesting to the great world of Romance, however, because it's the story of a love relationship where the H&H don't actually meet for most of the book. They exchange letters.

Tokaido differs from, for instance, Kinsale's My Sweet Folly, because in Folly the letters, though vital, are presented more or less as backstory and the 'first meeting' is an early and intrinsic part of the on-stage action.

So, anyway, I was uselessly pondering on all this last night.

My mind goes wandering off this way instead of doing serious work and I hold onto the pommel and kick my heels into its flanks,
(note to self -- 'Are those flanks that get kicked or is it some other part of the horse?')
and hope I'll wind up on the trail again, eventually.

Then a movie came on TV -- the Lake House -- where the structure of the on-going action is the H&H exchanging letters.

Hmmm ... says I. Synchronicity.

Now it happened that I picked up Hot, by Julia Harper, out of the TBR pile because I don't generally give movies my whole attention and Hot was on top of Julia Ross, Nights of Sin, rather than under it, so Hot it was.

(Hot is funny and well-done. It's on some 'Best of 2008' lists and deserves to be.)

Now I'm a third of the way through Hot, and the 'first meeting' has still not come down.

The H&H are exchanging cell phone calls, cell phones being the new letters, which will deprive future generations of untold literary correspondence, won't it?

Anyhow, synchronicity squared.

So now I'm wondering if I might use this idea of webbing together 'relationship at a distance' later in the story when Maggie and Doyle are in Paris.

But maybe not. Probably I'll file this under 'cool stuff I can't use', which is a whole drawer in my mental filing cabinet.

Warm-up exercises

OK. Maggie and Doyle are about to meet.

But I'm 6700 words (of Rough Draft Two) in.
:headbang:
:more headbang:

I have no icons.
You must imagine.


Anyhow . . . That's too many words of warm-up.

I know better than this.

If somebody came to me and said they'd spent six chapters messing around in one head and then the other head, just revealing volumes about the characters,
but still hadn't brought the H&H face to face,
I'd say to scrap it all and start with the moment of meeting.

But -- dang it -- the shape feels right, even if it's not proper Romance genre plotting shape.
This feels like good story.

I will have to be more disciplined.

So . . . I'll write forward till I get some perspective.
When I have another ten chapters of RoughDraft2 under my belt I'll be stronger and wiser and able to cut this 6700 words of warm-up perplucketimity.

6700 / 130000 words. 5% done!


I'm going to plog onward (plog = slog + plot).

You remember the story about the two frogs who fell in the butter churn?

One of them was realistic and wise and knew he was doomed.
He gave up and drowned.

The other one was a fool. He just kept paddling and paddling and eventually he churned up a big pat of butter and climbed on top and floated there, safe and happy, till the milkmaid came in the morning and opened the churn and screamed bloody murder and beat him to death with the butter paddle.

I take comfort in these wise old fables.

Progress ... sorta

The good news is, I've pulled out paragraphs and sentences and a lot of weed-words from the early scenes,
so the beginning is speeding up some.

Maybe I won't need to toss out the whole first five chapters,
which I seriously consider doing on even days.

Tomorrow is an even day, so I will consider it.


The further good news is I've done some just excellent clever plotting to fix the major pacing problem that was clunking up the last quarter of the story.

Yeah!!!


The bad news is
I keep tossing out words and tightening up the Second Rough Draft.
Instead of moving along and making progress
I write and write and the word count doesn't go anywhere.

I hope I chug along faster now that my Maggie and Doyle are about to meet.

I wish I could do all this faster.

5700 / 130000 words. Only 4% done, unfortunately

On to the next draft

So. The First Rough Draft Of MAGGIE is done.

I've started the second draft, which I call the Second Rough Draft. I've finished Chapter Two.

2000 / 125000 words. 2% done
Second Rough Draft

On the other hand again ...

I spent three solid working days on the new opening.
I wrote a pretty good couple-thousand words.

But ... it isn't 'right'.

If somebody came to me and said,
"I have two openings. One drops us down in the middle of action. The other is folks thinking and talking and the action happened a week ago. Which should I use?"

I'd tell them to go for the action. Go for stuff happening. Danger and chaos and decisions belong on-stage, not mulled and mumbled over later.

But when I try to follow that advice,
it's just not working.
That will make me a little less ready to give advice, maybe.

So I'm going to go back to my original opening ... bunny scene and all.
Bunch of time and effort wasted. Much useless gnawing of fingernails.
I wish I didn't keep doing this to myself.

The old one-step-forward-two-steps-back

Sunday, I hit 76,000 words on the First Rough Draft.

Mostly, I have some bad writing to cover everything that's happening. There are a few important scenes in the last quarter of the manuscript that exist only as
"Maggie and Doyle stagger upstairs and make love'
or
'All the good guys sit at the kitchen table and plot'
or
'Everybody goes into one room. They duke it out and the bad guy loses.'



After agonizing back and forth, I've decided to change a perfectly good opening for what may be a better one. I've lifted out Chapters One to Five, 12K words, and saved them in my discard file.

Now I'll redo the beginning. We're still in Rough Draft One mode.

So ... I'm back to:

64000 / 80000 words. 80% done

Progress of a sort, I suppose.

Writing along in Rough Draft One

Lots of stuff to write today. They're amorphous scenes, some of them, because I haven't done the research. I have to sketch.

My H&H feel mushy. Everybody else who walks on stage steals the story.

And I'm not happy with anybody's 'voice'.

Problems:
(minor) I'm still dithering about the action that kicks off the story.
(major) I don't have my teeth gripped into Maggie's motivations.


I didn't get much done yesterday. I stopped to chat with a friend.
Good prospects for work today though. They had Danish at the coffeeshop, (yeah!) and I think it may be going to rain.

Mulling the opening of Maggie

I'm zipping right along to the end of the First Rough Draft of MAGGIE.

Rough Draft One

64300 / 80000 words. 80% done!


You will note I'm much closer to finished with the First Rough Draft than I was a few days ago.
This is because the First Rough Draft is going to be shorter.
Not 130,000 words.
More along the lines of 80K.
Progress is like that. Illusionary. Or illusive. Or hiding in the bushes laughing at me. Or something.

Where I am ...

-- I have the last scenes imagined, but not written. Some I can see clearly and it's just a matter of sitting down and writing.
Some, not so much clear.
I'll keep plugging along, doing that.

-- Next ... I'll look at the 'shape' of everything that's happening in the whole plot. I'll see it visually and in color. I'll draw the plot on paper with high excitement points and low and see what characters are coming forward or falling back. I'll draw character arcs. See how my central love story is holding the stage.
Or not.

I do know I need more of Maggie and Doyle. I need them together more.


-- Then there's Major Research.
I have major and weird research to do.
I'll have to visit the university library. But I'm not going to find most of what I need.
I'll try.
Then I'll bother actual living folks only as a last resort.

-- There is this one pivotal scene.
I have to put my villain and Doyle and Maggie all in the same room right near the end. This is, of course, for the express purpose of allowing them to be, respectively villainous, heroic and heroine-oic.
And we do this denouement thingum.
I just need to get them there. Plausibly.
That's technical plotting junk and will doubtless clear itself up.


-- All the time, I can't decide which of three possible ways to write the opening scenes.
Things are not looking good for the bunny scene, though.

Alpha Heroes

Christine Wells said, over on the Berkley-Jove board : here


And Jo, about talking your way out rather than hitting someone--do you think that characteristic precludes Doyle from being alpha? I never quite know what an alpha male is. To me, he's the one who will take the lead in a given situation, the one other men/women will instinctively turn to to solve their problems. A man of action, yes, but not necessarily violence.

What does an alpha hero mean to you?


So I replied ...

I've done the ponder-ponder-muse-muse bit on this.

This starts out being a little confusing to me because 'alpha' in Romance does NOT mean the same thing as 'alpha' in animal behaviour. I keep forgetting that.

In Romance, 'alpha' is all about the power balance in the male-female relationship.

Set aside whether the hero is rich or competent or dangerous or useful to the community as a whole. Set aside whether he gives orders to other folks.
The alpha- or beta- ness of the hero, in Romance terms, lies in who gives the orders in the H&H relationship.

Do they eat Chinese or Thai? Who makes the decision -- or voluntarily passes decision power to the other?

Some of the most interesting stories involve changes in the balance of power
or struggles between the protagonists to determine the BoP
or relationships where strongly assertive H&Hs approach intimacy while dancing around an undetermined and unsettled BoP.

So ... you thought I'd never get to the point, didn't you?
... when I look at my super-competent Doyle. My sneaky and covert Doyle. My hyper-self-aware Doyle ....
I see him as alpha in a relationship.

Anyone this self-contained does not have within him the capacity for trust of a beta hero. It's going to be hard enough making Doyle even moderately honest and open when he falls in love.

This being the case, I must make Maggie self-contained and independent and a little isolated as well.

I'm setting her to useful and forceful actions, or course. But I'll also give her some kind of overt bang-slap-pop thing to do near the end -- probably in the confrontation with the villain -- just so everyone KNOWS she's powerful.

Technical Topics -- Preliminary thoughts on the Balance of Power

I blog over at the Berkley Jove site.
Here.
And I wrote a long and involved post and thought I'd compound the offense by double posting it. To wit:



This is what I'd originally posted:
All-in-all, this was a very useful bit of advice -- the call for a direct hero-and-villain confrontation. Thinkiing about it has helped me tremendously.

Christine Wells said:

That's the kind of thing you know in your gut should happen but sometimes you forget. And then someone reminds you and you say, of course! That's how such stories are usually told.

This discussion made me realize that the book I've just written is mainly my heroine's story and there is a final confrontation. But I'd like my hero to kick some butt at the end, too. I'll have to think about how I might arrange that...-

So I said:


Knowing nothing about the story, I'd nonetheless be in favor of bringing the hero in at the cusp of major struggle.

Otherwise you got all that missed an opportunity for H&H to interact and for their relationship to change or consolidate or whatever it is you're doing at that moment.

But that's the trick ... isn't it?
You bring your guy in without lessening the heroine.
You build power in both hero and heroine -- whatever power is appropriate to your characters -- without one power diminishing the other.



I try to do this. I've tried to give the overall story to the heroine. It is her 'quest', if you will.
But I want to keep the hero heroic.
And that means he has to have his own heroic story, not merely heroic attributes.

The way I think of it ... the shape of the plot should be reciprocal.

Even though I am writing 'her' story, I want the totality of the fiction to be such that if we looked at the line of events primarily from hero's Point of View, HE would plausibly be the one moving the plot.
The hero needs his own set of fruitful, effective action and a story that can be followed from beginning to growth to 'black moment' and denoument. His story doesn't have to happen 'on stage', but I feel it has to exist.

Because even where the heroine is primary,
the hero has to be an edgy force with motives of his own.
He has to be big enough to be heroic, here, in the story that's underfoot right now.
Heroism, like heroine-ism, is in the action.

Or, at least, that's what I think. I'm still working out the basics of this writing stuff.


Anyhow ...
what I've done with my villain confrontations, so far --

(Can I say 'so far' with only two books? It seems ... cheeky,)

I've made the true and important and meaty action lie between the HEROINE and the villain,
then I kinda call my hero in at the last moment to do some heavy lifting,
in part because his own 'story' calls for him being there.

This is probably not the best shape to that sort of scene.

This is a danger that the 'heavy lifting' of the scene -- which is apt to be full of bang-pop-slam action -- is so impressive, the reader can miss the quite obvious fact that the heroine -- like your heroine -- was managing nicely on her own.

So if you place your hero in the showdown scene with the villain,
which I think is a good idea,
you may wish to keep a lid on his contribution to the bang-pop-slam.
Which I have failed to do, myself.

The fact that BOTH H&H are winning needs to be, like, obvious.

Maybe you can have the heroine stab somebody or run over them with a truck.
Or something.

Making progress

I'm making progress. But I'm writing the easy parts, kinda.

What it is ...

My Averatec stopped printing the 'm'.
This makes an appreciable difficulty in writing, by the way. You'd be surprised how many words have 'm' in them.
I await a new keyboard.


Rough draft 1

59000 / 130000 words. 45% done!


Meanwhile, I'm sitting in coffee houses, working on my old laptop, doing the easy stuff.

This old laptop is the one I wrote Anneka on and I'm fond of it. But it is gaping open at the corners with its mechanical innards showing and 10% of the screen doesn't work and the 'b' key is unreliable.
Though not as unreliable as the 'm' on the Averatec.

My soul gets battered when my laptop doesn't work well. I have a close and personal relationship with my laptop.
We are more than friends.

So I am doing easy little sketches of the scenes I see.

Even taking this into account, I've made some progress.

Progress in Maggie

Moving right along in the rough draft of MAGGIE.

45200 / 130000 words. 35% done!


Very choppy. Very sketchy. and my H&H are not together. I'm trapped in the toils of the plot ...