Technical Topic -- Why the First Scene Should Be a Ghost

This topic is dedicated to all those people who keep working and working and changing stuff and
rewriting but never quite get past the first chapter or so.  They know the story they want to write. 
But they're stuck.

My advice.
Ahem.
Please. Just please.
Stop rewriting that first chapter.

Look,
the First Scene is plain bloody hard to write.


You have to juggle six or eight difficult initiating requirements to set up the story while also making sure the reader doesn't just shrug and put your book back on the shelf.

And these first couple scenes are hard because you know about nothing of what your characters are like and how they act and talk.  You don't even have all your plot laid out unless you're one of those annoying folks who do.  Yet here you have to write the First Scene as if you were familiar with all that stuff.

The first draft is a hit-the-ground-running-in-the-dark sorta thing, and the first thing you run into are the gorse bushes of the opening scene.

Ask me how I know this.


Anyhow
there is an intrinsic mismatch between having to open with fully developed characters, story knowledge, voice, and tone -- and the sad fact of not having these when you open your document and write  Scene One,  Chapter One, for the first time.

This a mismatch you maybe can solve by writing the First Chapter . . . last.
Or at least, later

Here you are in media res, as it were, struggling with Chapter Three and not really able to write it because you can't let go of an incomplete and imperfect Scene One.
You have to make the opening perfect.  You have to.  But, by the very nature of writing, you can't.

So maybe try this:
Go into your document and recolor the text of the First Chapter pale gray.
Like this.

That will remind you that the First Chapter is now a ghost.
It is insubstantial. It doesn't count.
Ignore it and move on. 
The First Chapter is allowed to be ugly and full of errors because it is a ghost and doesn't count.


You will return triumphantly to that First Chapter after you've written 50,000 words in the WIP, at which point you will wake up one morning and know what to do with Chapter One which will be a whole 'nother way than how you are handling it now.

Okay.  This won't help you if you're seriously paralyzed by doubt and perfectionism,
(in that case you go read Bird By Bird,)
but it may help if you just keep stumbling over your feet at the starting block.

Technical Topic -- What to do when you've done what you do

Congratulations on finishing your manuscript.
Woot woot.
Go celebrate.

We'll wait.




...  All through with dancing and whooping it up?
Now there are a few necessary steps to take to get from here to publication.

 I. Get Crits

What:  Turn some chapters of your manuscript over to harsh, knowledgeable critters.  Listen to what they say.  You need critters who haven't been with you every step of the way as you wrote.  Critters who are not your family or friends.

This is not putting a saucer of milk out for the tabby.  This is wrapping yourself in raw meat and stepping into the lion's cage.

How:  There's a Writer's Workshop in the Books and Writer's Forum.   Here.  Absolute Write, here has a 'Share Your Work' section.  Writer's Forum here has a Writers' Workshop.
If you are writing genre, there are probably specialized sites for writers of your genre.

Why:  Intelligent criticism of your work will help you write better and will prepare you to edit your manuscript.

II.  Let the manuscript rest

What:  Put the work away for as long as you can.  Six weeks.  Three months.  Six months.
(You spend this time working on the next ms and critting other folks' manuscripts, which is an excellent way to improve your own writing skills.)

How:  Print it out and put it in a locked drawer in the bottom of your desk.  Put all the work in a folder named "Open in January.

Why:  This lets you look at your own work with a critical editorial eye.  It gives you distance.

III.  Learn how publishing works

What:  Spend a solid 40 hours studying the publishing industry. 

How:  Start out by Googling everything you can find on the subject.  Then drop into places full of knowledgeable folks and ask questions.

Why:  If you were going to (a) take a job in Thailand for a year or (b) go to State Aggie to study animal husbandry or (c) work for Avis Rent-a-car, you'd do that much research about (a) the country, (b) the university or (c) the business.
Why would you go into writing with less preparation?

III. Learn about agents

What:  Start making a spread sheet of agents who work in your field.  See who they represent.  See who they sell to.  See what kind of deals they're making.  Find out what folks say about them. 
If they have an on-line presence, get a feel for who they are.

How:  Google.  Look at the acks in the front of books similar to your own writing.  Publisher's Lunch and Publisher's Marketplace.

Why:  That's the list you will query, when you query, if you decide you want an agent.  And after all, you have some time while your manuscript is resting. 

IV.  Revise

What:  When the manuscript has aged like, y'know, fine wine ... take it out of hiding and read it over.
Now you will revise.  Now you see what's wrong.

How: Read and correct as if someone else had written it.

Why:  Because, unless you have indeed done this, the manuscript is not as good as you can make it. 


V.  Find Beta Readers

What:  Beta readers take an entire manuscript that is ready for submission and crit it.  Beta readers, if possible, have never seen the manuscript before.

How:  Find them by doing beta reads for others.  Find them by making friends in writers forums.  Pay them in chocolate.

Why:  Because they will tell you if the whole thing works.  They'll point out illogical story lines.  They'll improve the manuscript.

 
VI.  Re-revise in light of the Beta read

'nuff said.






VII.  Get an agent ... or not

Three months have passed since you declared your manuscript finished. 

You will have read 10,000 words arguing Indie/Big Press/Small Press.
You'll have the best manuscript you can write in one hand and a significant bit of WIP in the other. 

Now you make this decision.

One of Those 'Friends Without Benefits' Situations

A kindly reader asks:

"I was a little questioning about the interactions between Annique and Adrian. Some other reader's reviews suggested that he was a little bit in love with Annique, now obviously this was after he had met Justine so I was wondering if  you could elaborate  on this ..."


You roll your characters up in the same blanket in a ruined monastery and folks wonder if they're maybe a little bit more than 'good friends'.
But, really, I was just trying for friendship between those two, which is probably naïveté on my part.  Maybe there is a certain unlikeliness that one would cuddle up next to Hawker and feel only an innocent appreciation of the warmth.

Would they just be good friends, those two?

Well ... why friends at all?

Once Adrian and Annique meet, a sense of camaraderie between these two is almost inevitable.
They're experts in the same profession; they speak the same 'language' as it were; they depend on one another; they're running from the same enemy. 
And Adrian has always had an admirable gift of true friendship with women.

At the beginning of Spymaster's Lady, Annique feels protective toward Adrian and amused by him.  She likes him.  She respects him for the spy he is and the greater spy he will become.  But it's not romantic love.  (I maintain.)  Annique is sexually attracted to the older, harder, more powerful Grey instead of the wild, brave, brilliant boy her own age.      

But why not both?  Why not les sexy overtones between Adrian and Annique?
What are they, deficient in vitamins?

Well ... there's this.  Adrian quite deliberately marks out a platonic relationship between himself and Annique.  He teases, but makes no real sexual overtures.  Once it's clear Grey is attracted to her, Adrian doesn't let himself even think of her in a sexual way.  That's one of the virtues he brings from that criminal gang background of his youth.  A friend's woman is utterly taboo. 

And then, there's Justine. 
The influence of Justine defines the Adrian-Annique friendship.  She's only glancingly mentioned in Spymaster's Lady, and not by name, but she's at the forefront of Adrian's mind throughout the book.  We don't see this because we don't go into his thoughts, the book not being about Adrian, after all.  (We go into his POV once.  I think it's once.) 

The action of Spymaster's Lady takes up a few days after Justine shot Adrian.  (We see it happen in Black Hawk.)  When, in TSL, our feverish Hawker jokes about the wound, he's remembering that Justine led a pack of soldiers after him.  That she tried to kill him.  That's what he's not saying to Grey and Doyle when he's being lightheartedly heroic.
Justine's betrayal is the subtext of Adrian's behavior through much of Spymaster's Lady.

(I love to use the word 'subtext' and don't really care if I'm using it right.  Life improves tremendously when we learn not to care about using the word 'subtext' incorrectly.)

Anyhow, TSL opens with Adrian's betrayal and loss. That bullet hole defines Adrian's reaction to Annique.  He's been so battered by the end of his passionate, deadly, complex relationship with Justine that a new sexual attraction would only be painful.  The protective friendship with Annique is exactly the healing he needs.  Maybe the emotional tie with Annique is stronger because he thinks he's lost Justine forever. 

So anyhow -- responding to that question --  that is how I see the relationship between these two.  But every book is a partnership between the author and the reader.  If readers see the Adrian/Annique relationship differently and the books don't directly contradict . . .
Go for it.
Take the story where you want it to go.

Or, anyhow, go for it till I write something elsewise.

Technical Topic - Show Versus Tell III: The Motivation

Elsewhere, a writer asks:

"Can I just SAY why a character does something?  Can I just state it outright?

Isn't that 'telling' instead of showing?"

Well ... yes.
And so what if it is?

Sometimes we shows and sometimes we just sets ourselves down and tells.

Reveal motivation in action, in dialog, in facial expression, in physical reactions, by foreshadowing, through symbolism and metaphor. Let the other characters note what's going on in their dialog. Use internal Monologue.
Show. Tell. Send up smoke signals. Let there be a Goddamned voice coming down from the sky.

Your reader picks up the book with the TV blasting in the next room, her three small children running back and forth, and she's got 15 minutes before she has to go fix dinner.
Do her a favor. Be accessible.
Be clear.


Just plain stating the motivation is one vegetable in the minestrone, the kris knife in your arsenal, the metric torque wrench in your toolbox.

Any writing 'rule' that tells you to toss out a useful technique is doing you no favor.
There's no writing technique that can't be done well.

Technical Topics-- Those Gestures

Somebody asked elsewhere

 -- paraphrasing here --

"How do we find ways to describe the exact motion of jerking a thumb in some direction or nodding in agreement?"

It's hard to find lovely unique ways to describe some of those, "He jerked his chin in the direction of the cyclops," or "He pointed to where the treasure was buried," situations.

But we can step back and consider gestures in a wider sense.

The words that describe the movement of body parts depend on:
Whose POV are you in?
What emotion and meaning do the physical movements represent?
What reaction are you trying to call from the reader?

(My first advice is to get hold of some Dorothy Dunnet and watch her characters do gestures and indicate things. She is just so good.)

Now, I have my WIP in front of me -- the Pax Manuscript.  Let me look at some of the head/face/hand movements and try to figure out why I did them the way I did.

***
"Something stronger?" Galba nodded toward the upper shelf where a bottle of twenty-year-old brandy inserted itself into a row of books.
****

Simple straightforward nod. You get to do five or six nods in a manuscript. Don't beat yourself up about it.
Not everything has to be fancy.

(Never use nods to tag dialog. You're just wasting one of those five or six nods you're entitled to.)


***

She tossed her last handful of crumbs to the birds, dusted her hands, and motioned to the errand boy who was heading out into the square with a package under his arm.
***

Now 'motioned' is about as weak as you can get in the way of description.
Does she raise her hand up over her head and wave it back and forth? Does she make a beckoning with just her fingers?
We don't know.

But we don't have to know.
We can be vague for three reasons.

(a) The purpose and outcome of the gesture are crystal clear and straightforward and have no hidden depths.
The gesture doesn't mean more than 'come here'.

(b) We have a picture of what's going on. We 'see' her dust her hands of breadcrumbs. With that strong visual laid down, we can be vague about the beckoning part that comes next.

(c) Doesn't matter what the reader imagines that gesture to look like. We don't minutely describe it because it is inherently not important.

All that said, we don't use weak words like 'motioned', 'gestured', 'moved', 'pointed', 'indicated' and so on but two or three times each in any mansucript.


Here's another:
***
He'd left France with various English coins, handy for bribing. He fumbled one loose. Turned out to be a shilling.

He held it up. "There's two of these waiting for you at Number Seven, if I catch up with her." He

closed his hand and got ready to tuck the coin back in his pocket.

The boy's eyes shifted. "Down there." He pointed east. "She give me halfcrown to say she gone t'other way."

He flipped the shilling to the boy. Collect two more tonight."
*****

All these motions with the coin, with the boy's eyes, with his pointing, convey complex intention. But this is one of those counter-intuitive cases where the gestures are filled with information, but the intention doesn't live in the details of the motion.

We don't have to describe the exact gesture of tucking the coin away. The meaning of that gesture stands there shouting. It doesn't need the support of visuals. It doesn't need the internals to spell out what's going on.


Sometimes, a gesture needs support.
If we say merely,
She thumbed at the air behind her in the direction of Codyville.
"We go that way."
the motion sticks out like ... well ... a sore thumb, and we keep wanting to say something exciting and specific about the thumb motion itself.
But the motion of the thumb is not important.

It's the mood, intention, meaning and so on that's essential. So you put your creative energy into talking about mood, intention, internals and so on of the thumb stick rather than trying to describe the arc of the thumb with great beauty and vividness.

She clenched her teeth, making a sound midway between a dentist's drill and a pot boiling over. When she thumbed the air behind her in the direction of Codyville, it was if a particularly nasty ghost was following her and she had some hope of putting out its eye.
"We go that way," she said.

The second passage doesn't define the movement of the thumb any more clearly,
but we've added so much value to that motion in internals we don't have to add value to the simple physical act.

Thumbing toward something or jerking a chin in the direction of something you can maybe do twice in a manuscript.

After that your folks have to keep their chins and thumbs still and maybe just glance that way (2 times), indicate with a subtle lift of an eyebrow (once), roll their eyes toward (once), motion a languid hand in that direction (once), indicate with a hunch of the shoulder (once), nod toward (you have 5 or 6 nods, total), grimace at (once), twist to look at (once), notice over their left shoulder (once) ... well, you get the idea.

Another movement of hands:

***
She pressed her hands together in her lap, knuckle to knuckle, and waited.
****

Here, the motion and placement of the digits is important. We describe the exact location and placement of the hand because it is the visual that creates atmosphere for the reader. The visual itself becomes the comment.

I don't add internals. I pack information into the gesture.







****
Deliberately, she calmed her hands and set them together, loose in her lap. Her hands would whisper,

"I am not worried. I'm prepared to deal with you." It was an old saying of the Baldoni that lies are not words only. One deceives with every fingernail and toe.
***

And here we have both detailed motion and internals. Here the reader doesn't need to interpret the meaning of the hand motion and placement. I tell her what it means. Belt and suspenders, as it were.

Technical Topics -- How Does Action Relate to Length?

Starting out with an honi soit qui mal y pense, we're talking about how plot action relates to the number of words we need to write it.

Down in the comment trail, someone asks:

. . .  how do you judge if your plot is long enough? if you've got enough scenes or enough things going on to make a full length novel? This is a problem for me because I end up never writing because I've fretted over the story to death, wondering over the length.

It's an interesting part of writing -- this relationship between what's going on in the book and how long the book is.  How many words will we use to convey our action?

Now, the short answer is; everybody has to find this out for themselves.

The Writer's Journey ... if the writer is a dog

What we do -- we write and write and write and build up a stack of stories.

This is the writer's 'prentice work.  This is the garage band years.  Among the very many things we're learning on this first leg of our writing journey is how many words it takes us to get a particular bit of plot action across.

We sit down and put words on the page and -- hey -- we find out that a fight with six bad guys in a back alley needs 2000 words.  A love scene, on the other hand, just keeps stretching out and stretching out till it logs in at 8000.   Walking across a street might be 30 words of action in one scene and the same 30-ish words plus 1000 words of introspection in another.

We learn the flavor and grit and idiosyncrasy of our own writing only when we have some writing to look at.

Some of those half million words, y'know

After the first half-million words
-- did I mention we serve a half-million-word apprenticeship? --
we get a practical sense of how much heft different sorts of scene are going to add to the manuscript.  We get a storyteller's 'feel' for how words run the pacing to build that narrative drive we want so much.

I guess maybe this wasn't the short answer after all.

Okay.  Short answer:
Everybody writes differently and you won't know how many words it takes you to write your action until you've done some writing.

Will you be one of those excellent writers who shoot through 60 plot points in 70,000 words and the reader does not feel rushed?  Or will you be one who tells essentially the same story in 120,000 words and not one of those words is trimable excess?

All that said -- and wasn't that a lot of 'all'? --  I am not going to condemn you to months and years of writing before you get an answer to your question.
No.  I am not going to do that.
Because I know that would discourage me and I see no reason why it wouldn't be daunting to even the brave soul I imagine you to be.
So.

Sure to be interesting scenes in your story

Best answer to your question is to write maybe eight of nine scenes that occur in the story
-- scenes that you are particularly fond of and can picture very well --
and see how many words you use.

This will give you a ballpark estimate of your action-to-words ratio . . . remembering that your first ratio is not necessarily where you are going to end up after a year of hard work writing and thinking.


Two common problems writers may start out with are being prolix, (that is, being tediously lengthy, long-winded, verbose, flowery, writerly, indirect and generally slowing the pacing to a crawl,)  or, on the other hand,  telegraphing the story, (which is talking about the action and racing along, never adding the description and internals and suchlike that draw the reader in.)

The first sort of writer comes up with 257,000-word Historicals.  The second, with 45,000-word Contemporary Romances.  Both of these are ... problematic when it comes to selling them.

But, while the gift of storytelling is just that -- a gift -- and inborn, the craft of writing can be learned.  (Though 'prolix' may end up being fixed by your long-suffering editor who pulls out the blue pencil and just crosses out paragraph after paragraph of internal nattering.)
(Ask me how I know this.)

What's important here is that these technique problems and many others get fixed only after you lay down words to fix.  No draft material lined up in neat pixels on the screen = no way to learn how to lean down or buff up the prose.  No way to acquire the fine art of padding a too-short manuscript with an exciting subplot.  No set of deft editing scalpels with which to cut away the excess.  

Write because you delight in writing.  Let the story come as it will.  Trust that you will solve whatever technical problems beset you.

And if in the end you discover that your 'natural' writing length is epic fantasy or novella --

We live in exciting times.  There's a market for writing at about all lengths. 

stack of paper attrib elchupacabrito

Backstory -- Finally, Two Rules

For various complex reasons -- none of them interesting -- I was reading an old post I'd written about backstory.  I found two rules I've decided to repeat here, since -- heck -- it's already written.

Two Rules for Adding Backstory.

The first rule is the 'Packing for Tahiti' rule

which is to say

you don't need as much as you think ...

because mostly you'll end up swimming along fine

and wrapping a towel around you 
when you get out
and sometimes,

you can just go naked.

The second rule is the 'Tangled Skein of Fate' rule, where,
 (and this might only apply to me and my tendency to construct silly and complicated plot lines)
if you find yourself having trouble slipping in the backstory,
then maybe you should reconsider
the very existence of
your backstory.

Do you need all this who-struck-John complication?

But then, with me, the need to reconsider my backstory
strikes with great frequency.

Technical Topic -- The Elements of Writing

Somebody asked elsewhere, "How do I write a Romance?" and "How do I write, anyway?"

I was thinking what advice I'd give someone who was just struggling with the first draft of the first manuscript.

What would I say if I wasn't going to say,
"Why don't you become a lawyer or an accountant or the manager of a sporting goods shop instead since that is going to pay a lot better and your evenings will not be filled with angst and scribbling and desperate searches for a word that is not 'suspicion' but sounds a little like it and means something close and what the devil is it ... ah skepticism!"  That kind of evening.

Anyhow, I was trying to come up with something important and basic to the tendons and muscle of writing and also useful and a good first step into the business of thinking like a writer.  (Bit of a mixed metaphor there, isn't it?)  

Since I hate to waste advice, as I give it so rarely *cough* (not)... I am dragging the advice I gave there, back here.

What I said:

The first and best advice to a beginning writer is -- Read.

Read for fun, of course.  Read widely.  Read well.  (i.e. read crap but don't just read crap books.)  Read the best of your genre.  Read outside your genre.

But also read, not as a reader, but as a writer.  

This is maybe somewhat like looking at scenes

Since you are going to write Romance genre I will send you to pick yourself up a couple of books by Nora Roberts and Jayne Ann Krentz. They should be available in your local used book store. Try for short books, something not as thick as your thumb.

Go invest in a set of highlighters -- yellow, red, green, blue etc.

After you've skimmed the book, go back and look at the first scene in Chapter Three. You're going to mark the beginning of the scene by drawing a pen line across the page.

Scenes are the building blocks of the writing and that's why we're cutting one out and looking at it.
Since you're maybe at the beginning of analyzing books, you can ask yourself -- "what makes a scene?"

Speaking very generally, a scene is in one setting; it deals with one problem or intention; and the main character of the scene is there from beginning to end.  When you go somewhere else and start doing something else or you switch to another focus character, you're in a different scene. Generally.

Writers, being wonderful altruistic folks, are apt to put a little space at the end of a scene or change the chapter altogether.

So. Go hunt down and mark the other end of the scene.
How long is this puppy? (Pages in paperback average 250 words per page.)

I have a JAK in hand, Copper Beach. Chapter Three is one scene, a talking heads scene between the protagonist and a boat captain. It's seven pages which is roughly 1750 words.  In JAK's The Family Way, Chapter Three is 22 pages, 5500 words.  J.D. Robb's ( Nora Robert's) Reunion in Death is a less straightforward scene because it starts with a technically beautiful flashback, but it's sixteen pages, 4000 words.

One reason to look at the length of a scene is that a common problem with early manuscripts is the scenes are too short. They're too short because they leave out or shortchange some elements of writing.

So we're going to mark those elements of writing and study them squirming on pins, metaphorically speaking. 

Anyhow.  Let us mark.

Red, green, blue, and the ever-popular fuschia

Mark all the dialog -- the stuff inside quote marks -- in red.
Mark all internals -- that is, when we see the character's thoughts -- in blue.
Mark anything that shows movement of the body in space -- sit, turn, walk, light a cigarette, shoot somebody -- in green.
Mark description -- color, smell, placement of objects, landscape, shape of somebody's nose -- in yellow.

Anything that's concerned with stuff happening outside of the scene can be fuschia or whatever you have left. 
Fuschia is for backstory. 
Fuschia is for fascinating factoids about the Lost Kingdom of Horowitz or how the ion-drive works.

Sometimes this outsider wordage will be a narrative intrusionary. Often this out-of-the-here-and-now comes in internals. And there's fuschia chat between the characters where they inexplicably tell each other what they both already know.
What all this fuschia boils down to, though, is the writer talking to the reader, passing along information.

So if the character says, "That's a pretty flower," it gets marked in red.

Looking at the elements of story. Putting them together

If the character goes on to think, A rose. I wonder why she has roses on the table. Did somebody send them to her? It gets marked in blue.

If the character knocks the ash off his cigarette, it's green.

If the character then thinks, We had roses in the garden of the priory, when I was seven or I'm going back there someday to root them out of the ground or My mother was a great gardener or I could grow roses if I had to, that might be fuschia.
It's not in the here-and-now of the story.


Let's say you start out with:

"That's a pretty flower," he said, taking a joint out of his wallet. A rose. I wonder why she has roses on the table. Did somebody send them to her?  Has she found herself another werewolf? He didn't care much for that possibility. He patted through his pockets. He had matches in here somewhere. He remembered . . . Mother had been a great gardener. She loved the flowers more than her children. We had roses everywhere in the garden of the priory, between the wolfsbane and the foxgloves, back when I was seven. A few red petals had fallen from the bouquet onto the white tablecloth. They were the color of blood.

Interpreting the elements, you might end up with something like:

"That's a pretty flower," he said, taking a joint out of his wallet. A rose. I wonder why she has roses on the table. Did somebody send them to her?  Has she found herself another werewolf? He didn't care much for that possibility. He patted through his pockets. He had matches in here somewhere. He remembered . . . Mother had been a great gardener. She loved the flowers more than her children. We had roses everywhere in the garden of the priory, between the wolfsbane and the foxgloves, back when I was seven. A few red petals had fallen from the bouquet onto the white tablecloth. They were the color of blood.

The 'parts of writing' -- dialog, action, description, even the excursion out of the scene and to another place and time  -- work together.
NR and JAK are masters of balancing these elements.

After you've done a dozen scenes from NR and JAK, go back to some of your own work and apply those highlighters. 

Class and the Spymaster Fictive Universe

I was writing to excellent reader Ann today, talking about the blog post I did on how we write about Regency-era slums and got to thinking about how I deal with 'class' in the books.

Do I consciously write about social class in these books?
Yep.  I figger we all reveal our attitudes and beliefs unconsciously as we write ... so I might as well be aware I'm doing this and use it.



Take Lazarus.
Lazarus is motivated by resentment of the class that ruined his servant-girl mother and drove her into prostitution.  This is the class to which his father belongs.  The class Lazarus would enjoy if he'd been legitimate. 

Lazarus runs an empire of violence and theft, in part, because he figures his minions are entitled to take what they want.  The rich do.  Why shouldn't the poor?  He's self-educated and brilliant.  He can't help but see the inequity in the laws of England.  He ends up with great sympathy for the French Republican cause.

In his private life, his special ire is reserved for women of the privileged class who commit crimes that would land a servant girl in jail or send her to the gallows.  Again, class motivates his actions.
 

Adrian's life journey is shaped by a desire to become 'a gentleman'.  He walks, like Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, on sharp knives every step of the way.  He finds himself, like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, unable to go back to what he was and yet unable to be comfortable with what he becomes. 

He measures his own success by his ability to pass as a member of the upper class. And yet, Adrian only passes for a gentleman; he never becomes one.  He watches, judges, and shrewdly assesses the rich and powerful . . . as an outsider.  He can never buy into their narrower view of the world.  He uses privilege, but doesn't believe in it.

Adrian originally admired the French Revolution, liking the leveling effect.  Then ... an outtake from Forbidden Rose has him watching a tumbril take a family with teenage girls to the guillotine.  We don't see the scene onstage, unfortunately, but that was a turning point of his life.  It outraged him.  He would never again be tempted by revolutionary violence.  Years later, he rejects Napoleon as an ambitious opportunist.  By that time, by 1799, Adrian is wholly committed to the British Service. 

But he never rejects France's social reforms.  Philosophically, Adrian is all for dismantling aristocratic privilege.  He doesn't act on this because social equality is never offered to him as a viable choice in the 1789 to 1818 timeframe. 
One reason Adrian gets along with Justine is they have no basic philosophical disagreement.


Doyle is more sympathetic to the idea of an aristocracy.

He plays at being a coachman or a laborer without assuming the interior life of one.  He's an aristocrat inside.  Born one.  Schooled and trained as one.

More than that, Doyle's a practical man rather than an idealist.  He believes a hierarchical society is inevitable, so he aims for a humane and workable system -- a fair, stable, well-run government with gradual change toward equality and social mobility.


The discussion Adrian and Doyle have at the beginning of Forbidden Rose is meant to show their different points of view.  (This is prior to Hawker's disillusionment with the bloody side of revolution in France.)

[Doyle and Adrian approach the orangerie at the chateau. It's savagely destroyed.]
 
    Hawker followed him, crunching glass into the gravel.  “The boys in that stinking little village waited years to do this.” 
   “Did they?”
    “They dreamed of it. They’d sit in those pig houses in the village with the shutters closed and the wind leaking in. They’d think about these fancy weeds up here, being coddled, all warm and happy behind glass. Down there,they were freezing in the dark. Up here, they were growing flowers.”
     “That’s fixed, then. No more flowers.”
     Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hawker stoop and pick up a rock, draw back and throw. Glass fell with a thin, silver discord. The heroic revolutionaries of Voisemont had missed one pane. Destruction was now complete.   

Justine is my most ideological character.  In 1818 she's going through a period of disillusion, as idealists will.  She's seen Napoleon fall.  She's seen Paris turn away from the Revolution and accept the Royalists back in power.  It'll be a few years before she gets her political fire back. 

Justine saw her degradation and loss not as a male/female issue -- not so much, 'men did this to me' --  as a class and power issue.  'The rich can get away with anything.' "In a just society these things would not happen.'  She responds to her hurt with a desire to right the wrongs of society.  She becomes a political person.

Justine's journey is one of rebuilding herself after absolute destruction.  Part of this is reclaiming her place as an aristocrat. Though she's despised aristocrats, ironically, it's a measure of her complete healing when she can say,

     “I will come to live with you in your great mansion and be a lady again. I will be a DeCabrillac, and face down the world if they make accusations. I will shake out your haughty mansion like an old rag and make it comfortable to live in.”

She becomes something she has fought against, because Adrian needs this from her.  It's her gift to him.


Justine, too, is someone who doesn't buy into the class paradigm.  She may claim her name and position, but I see her taking her aristocratic space cynically.  She's gotten subtle in the Police Secrète.   Give her a few more years and she'll be the Grande Dame of the Reform Movement, infiltrating the camp of the enemy, still fighting the good fight.

Mischief and Mistletoe and my Own Short Story Therein

Pretty cover, isn't it?

This title may be unique in that it contains two words I have to 'think about' before I can spell them.  (Hint: I can actually spell 'and'.)

At Word Wenches I've posted a couple hundred words about some of the stuff that went through my mind while I was writing this short story.  Of equal interest, the other Wenches are doing somewhat the same thing, so if you follow along before and after my posting you will have a view into the minds of those other authors as well.

I notice that I did not include an excerpt of the story.  I will do so here:

******

She fell out of the dream, thumping down, cold and trembling, into reality and night.

A hand clamped over her mouth.  A body, heavy as lead, held her down, muffled her in the blankets so tightly she couldn't break loose.  Couldn't get her hands free to claw.  The strength was huge, hard, unfightable, male, infinitely strong, and it surrounded her everywhere. 

He muttered into her ear.  "It's me, dammit.  It's Jack.  Hold still and listen!"

The fire had died low and orange.  She saw images of the fire in his eyes, close, close.  Her body knew Jack.  It had been two years since they touched, but she knew him instantly.

She went still.     

The timbers of the old inn creaked and groaned like the hull of a ship in high seas.  Outside, winds twisted and howled and pulled at the glass of the window.  The draft up the chimney was a shrill, intermittent whine.  In the big bed in the corner, Miss Trimm snored determinedly.  The French girl slept silently in the trundle bed.     

"You know me now," Jack said.  "You'll be quiet?"

She nodded.  Oh, she knew him, all right. 

His hand went away, but he didn't.  He stayed, covering her with his weight, looking down.  He had the same hard eyes.  Even when she'd been in love with him, even when she'd thought he was harmless, she'd always seen the hardness in his eyes and wondered about it.

He jerked his head once in the direction of the door and let her go.  Noiseless, he lifted himself away from her and was gone into the dark of the hallway.

**********

Intrigue and Mistletoe

 

Mischief and Mistletoe is out in the big wide world as of last week.  I am so delighted to be part of this anthology. 

Let me just meander aside here for an instant and mentiion that I haven't written a short story since I was in Grade School, so the whole concept was a bit baffling.  I had ta kinda feel my way through this.
Since I write Regency spies as my own particular metier, I figured my contribution to the anthology should be ... Regency spies.

I'm sticking with the secrecy and intrigue, of which there was any amount lying about in this time period, but shifting my focus just a bit.  One of the sad realities about spies in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries is that much of the spying they engaged in was against their own countrymen.  While the English crown certainly worried about the French armies milling about across the Channel, they were somewhat more terrified of the disaffected at home. They spied upon them diligently. 

In several of my books, my protagonists have been patriots on opposite sides of the long, bitter political struggle between France and England. In this short story, I considered the problems of a spy working in his own country.



For the rest of this posting ...  pop on over to Word Wenches through this link here.

Technical Topics - Fight Scene

I was thinking about how we do fight scenes.  I'm kinda writing one.  Though not quite.

It's more an ambush scene.

So, anyhow,  I've gone back to look at a particular fight scene.  This one occurs early in My Lord and Spymaster.  Adrian and Sebastian meet Jess in an alley.  Violence ensues. No surprise.

Now, unlike those guys who write car chases for the movies, I'm not just fitting in 8 minutes of special effects.  I'm trying to tell 'story' with this fight action. Story leads up to the fight, lies inside it, and continues afterwards.
The little scenelet here is not really 'about' the fighting (though fighting might be the whole point in another sort of book.)  My goal, in writing this fight scene, is to show Sebastian's reaction, rather than the details of fight.

Writing fight scenes or furious action scenes of any kind, the technique includes short, easy sentences and lots of Germanic-origin words. Lots of white space. You try not to get bogged down in description. And, of course, the POV character thinks and acts like himself all through the action.  You use all your POV tricks to make this happen.

So let me look at a fight scene.

***

"Behind you! Sebastian!" Adrian's shout.

He saw them then. Silent as beetles, two men scuttled toward him.

More followed, slipping from doorways and corners. Under cover of the rain and fog, the pack had stalked in, unseen, converging from three directions. They were Irish, from the Gaelic they tossed back and forth. They carried knives and clubs and chains. These were vermin from the dockside, deadly and cold as ice.* They'd sent the girl as a honey pot to hold him while the gang closed in. She'd smiled at him while she was planning to watch him die. **

"Run from me." He let her loose. "Run fast."

But she backed away, wide eyed, breathing hard.*** "How? Nobody knows I'm here." That was shock in her voice and fear. She turned in a circle, looking for a hole in the net closing round them. And he knew she was no part of this. No decoy.

"More of them down that way. A baker's dozen." Adrian dropped out of the fog, into his usual place, taking the left. They were two against that many. Long odds.

He picked a target--one in front, where his friends would see him die--and threw.^ The bravo collapsed with a sucking, bubbling neck wound. The familiar stink of death rose in the alley. He pulled his second knife.

The thugs hesitated, sending glances back and forth, fingering blade and cudgel. Attack or retreat. It could go either way.

Then one man broke ranks and lunged for the girl.

She was fast as a little cat. He'd give her that. Cat quick, writhing, she bit the filthy arm that held her and knocked a knife aside and wrenched loose. She skipped back, clutching a long shallow cut on her forearm. "Not hurt. I'm not hurt."

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No tears, no screams. Pluck to the backbone. She was also damnably in his way. He shoved her behind him, between him and Adrian. Protected as she could be.

If this lasts long, she'll get killed. "Mine on the right." He threw and his blade hit badly and glanced off a collar bone. ^^ One man down. One wounded. That would have been two dead if he'd had the sense to stay sober. "Waste of a knife. Damn."

His last knife was in his boot. Not for throwing. This one was for killing up close.

He forced his mind to the pattern the attackers wove, trying to spot the leader. Kill the leader and the others might scatter. Adrian danced a path through the bullyboys, breaking bones with that lead-weighted cane of his. ^^^

No way to get the woman to safety. She stayed in his shadow, using him as a shield, white-faced. She's been in street fights before.

Then he didn't think about her at all. Chain whistled past. He grabbed it and jerked the man off balance and drove his knife through a gap in the leather waistcoat, up under the breastbone, to the heart.

For an instant he stood locked, face to face, with the man he'd just killed--a thickset red-head with pale skin and vicious, gleeful, mad blue eyes. Outrage and disbelief pulsed out at him . . . and drained away. The eyes went blank.

Then the dead bastard thrashed, rolled with the knife, and took it down with him as he fell.

No time to get it back. A crowbar cracked down on his shoulder with a bright, sour, copper pain. He fell, dodged a boot, and rolled away as Adrian took down his attacker.

The girl screamed.

Up. He had to get up. He was on his feet, shaking his head, trying to see through a black haze. The girl was stretched between two men, being dragged away. He staggered through madness and confusion, fog and pain. Adrian was swearing a blue streak.

Under the chaos, he heard a monstrous racket of wheels on cobblestone. A goods wagon rounded the corner.

The girl tore loose, leaving her cloak behind. She reeled straight into the path of the horses and slipped on wet cobbles. She had a split second to look up and see hooves. Her face was a mask of raw terror.

He launched himself toward her. Too late. He knew he'd be too late.
The driver wrenched on the reins. Horses reared and squealed.

Frantic, she jack-knifed away from the striking hooves. She was so close to scrambling to safety . . .

attrib onceandfuturelaura

She slipped on the rain-slick cobbles. The wagon skidded. Iron rims shrieked on the stone. The wheel hit the side of her head with a soft, horrible thud. She whipped around, and wavered upright for an instant, and slumped to the dirty stones of the street.

Gaelic broke out. Shouts back and forth. Limping, dragging their wounded with them, the gang retreated.

He stepped over a body and ran to the girl.

She lay huddled on her side, as if sleeping, covered with blood and mud, her pretty dress torn halfway off her. Her hand lay upcurled on the cobbles, open to the falling rain.

******

* We've done a description of the alley in the chapter and a half before this so we don't have to describe the setting any.  We do have to sketch of description of the oncoming villains, because they are a new addition.  Having sketched them in right first,  we don't need to talk about the setting or the combatants during the actual fight sequence. This is a Good Thing.

** This fight scene serves several story purposes. One purpose is to show Sebastian that Jess is honest. In the fight scene we travel from Sebsatian suspecting her to Sebastian admiring her.
Because Sebastian changes his mind, the fight scene is also a transformation scene. Important stuff happens that could only happen under this sort of challenge.

attrib filmhirek

*** A fight scene is not just blows and weapons and footwork.  When appropriate, it's facial expression and body reaction.

^ We don't say, 'Sebastian is a skilled fighter'. We show him well-armed.  We show him planning and thinking like a skilled fighter.


^^ Fights are not just about skilled moves, perfectly executed. There's also one klutz screwup after another and good, solid, well-planned actions that don't work.

^^^ My fight scenes are wordy and internalized, rather than fast, brutal and explicit.  That's because I'm writing historical love stories aimed at women.  I figger at least some of them do not want to hear the details of blood and gore.  The '8-minute-car-chase' school of writing may not appeal.

What suits my purposes will not suit everybody.  Learning to write fight scenes involves comparing the flavor and technique of many styles.


Oh.  I said it's good to use all the POV tricks.  Here's the ones included.

-- Internal Monologue: If this lasts long, she'll get killed.

-- Self-directed comments that do not quite become Internal Monologue: No time to get it back; Up. He had to get up; Too late. He knew he'd be too late.

-- Specialized knowledge only the POV character can have: Adrian dropped out of the fog, into his usual place, taking the left.

-- Word choice that sounds like the POV character talking: fast as a little cat; damnably in his way; pluck to the backbone; the dead bastard thrashed.  Sebastian calls Jess, 'The woman' because he doesn't know her name yet.

-- Decision by the POV character, provided without buffer: He picked a target; he threw.

-- Judgement and assessment made by the POV character: That would have been two dead if he'd had the sense to stay sober; Kill the leader and the others might scatter.

-- Sensation is POV-directed and POV-immediate: he stood locked, face to face, with the man; disbelief pulsed out at him; a bright, sour, copper pain.