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.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Have yourself a Merry Little Chrismas

The sun, and its place in reality

Do you have a window that faces southwest?
You can keep track of the universe from your window.

Today is the winter solstice. This evening, at sunset, look out your window and see where the sun sets.

Is there a tree or a telephone pole or a house chimney or a notch in the hills or ... I dunnoh ... the flag pole of your favorite Italian restaurant ... just to the north side of the setting sun?
(That's the right side of the sun if you're in the northern hemisphere.)

There's nothing there?
Heck.
Well, go out and drive a big stake in the back yard or something.

Next June, on the 20th, come back and stand at the window at sunset. Mark the spot just to the south of the sun when it sets.
(That's left. You with me so far?)

You have created a net. Now you can play pingpong with the sun.

The sun will set between those two marks, every day, forever. The cradle of its setting travels slowly north. Then slowly south. Then slowly north ...

Your pre-societal ancestors saw the sun doing this and it filled them with dread and wonder. They knew then that the universe was not chaos, but a realm of law and rules, because -- look -- there was the very sun itself, obeying them.

When the sun got to the cold north end of its yearly bounce, everybody would
light bonfires,
(Yeah!!! Longer days coming!!! Warmth!!! Tender young lambs!!)
and get drunk
(Ale!!! Mead!! Wine!!)
and party
(Buxom wenches!! Studly dudes!)

We have responsibilities. Life is uncertain. We have to check the universe every once in a while to make sure it's running right.

If we stop paying attention, it might stop.

Sun ping pong.
You have to play to win.

Fresh Fiction and Romance Novel TV bragging

Me: But nobody will KNOW if I don't tell them.
Myself: It's bragging.
Me: If I ignore it, it's almost insulting. Like nobody told me. Like nobody noticed.
Myself: It's bragging. One does not flaunt oneself.
Me: It's an item of interest. It's informational.
Myself: It's bra--
I: Will you two stop it already and just SAY it.

Me (taking deep breath):

Fresh Fiction published
The Best Gift Books for 2008 according to Fresh Fiction Staff Members.

And the books are ...


Woman's Fiction -- Searching for Paradise in Parker, PA by Kris Radish

Paranormal Romance -- Nightkeepers by Jessica Andersen

Contemporary Romance -- Natural Born Charmer by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Chick Lit -- This is How It Happened by Jo Barrett

Historical Romance -- Spymaster's Lady by Joanna Bourne
(See. See. See. That's me!! Lookit!)

Erotic Romance -- Art of Desire by Cherie Feather

Romantic Suspense -- Take Me If You Can by Karen Kendall


Myself: You had to go and do it, didn't you?
Me: It's my blog. I get to put stuff like that on my own blog. I'm just saying it.
Myself: You are so bragging.
Me: I put in all seven names. All Seven. That makes it informational. And I'm in the middle so it's modest.
Myself: You put yourself in bold type. Why not just hire a flossing billboard?
I: Will you two just shut up? Jeesh. I can't take you anywhere.


Edited to reiterate:

I have been deeply honored by Michelle Buonfiglio at mylifetime here. She listed Spymaster's Lady as best book of the year.
I truly do not know what to say.

So I perform a modest and restrained ...
*Snoopy Dance*


Edited again to add:
The Wonderful people at Romance Novel TV here have nominated Spymaster's Lady among the Best of 2008. They've said such cool things.

And edited yet again:

RNTV didn't pick me for any titles. *pooh*
But I'm still pleased to have been nominated.

I got a nod from Romantic Times too.
*Yeah*

Kindly praise

I have been deeply honored by Michelle Buonfiglio at mylifetime here.

Oh my. What does one say? What does one say?

Technical Topics -- Talking Heads II

In My Lord and Spymaster, I had a dozen nuggets of backstory to pass along to the reader. So I wrote a Talking Heads scene. Adrian and Sebastian search Jess' bedroom.

How do you make a Talking Heads scene slightly less horrible than it might otherwise be?


-- Best choice is you turn the action of the scene into plot action. (i.e. You make it 'not' a Talking Heads scene. )

So, instead of folks sitting around the kitchen table, talking,
which does not change the outcome of the story and is not story action or even plot action,
you change it into folks sitting around the kitchen table building a bomb or performing an emergency lobotomy or cutting letters out of the newspaper for the ransom note
all of which are at least plot action.

-- Failing important plot action, you do the next best thing.
You liven things up with 'stage business'.

Stage business doesn't advance the plot, but it's interesting. Folks bend spoons with their psyches or learn to play the fiddle or get hiccups.

What else do we do to take the edge off a Talking Heads scene?

-- You layer on sensation, of course, as you would in any scene. Give visuals. Blow whistles. Waft forth the smell of brownies in the oven.

-- You make sure there's real info to share. That is, they don't already both know what's being said. ("As you know, Bob ...")

-- Your characters interact with each other. You enrich, expose and develop the characters. You might even sneak some story in this way.

-- And, most especially, your characters react to the information that's being conveyed. They wouldn't be talking about it if it weren't important to them.

OK. Coming to one of my specific instances of Talking Heads.

In the search-Jess's-bedroom scene I want to convey the backstory factoid that Jess had an old boyfriend.
Sebastian and Adrian do not sit at a table and swap info.

You got yer stage business
and yer visuals
and yer interaction between Sebastian and Adrian
and you got yer character reaction to what's being said.

Here's the scenelette:

Adrian tapped the letters together and looped the blue ribbon around them and made a jaunty bow. "Gods. I was never that young. I'm glad Jess was, for a while."

"It wasn't tied like that."

"I'm showing her somebody's been in here." He set the letters carefully back in the box and closed the lid. "Not a sparkling correspondent, young Ned, but I don't suppose she noticed."

That was the name written in the front of the Odyssey. "Who's Ned?"

Adrian was up, wandering the room, leaning to peer in at the fireplace. He waited just long enough to be annoying. "The Honorable Edward Harrington. She was fifteen. He was bright, likable, ambitious and quite sickeningly in love with her."

"A paragon."

"It has given me considerable satisfaction, over the years, to think of Jess, out in the straw in a horse barn, bestowing her virginity on that boy." He ran his thumb along the carving of the fireplace. The mantel was black marble and the design was scrolled leaves. "He had the face of a young Apollo."

Jess's lover. The one who'd put knowledge in her eyes. "What happened?"

Adrian shifted the firescreen aside. "Genuinely bad luck. Josiah shipped him out as supercargo, to see what he was made of. Edward Harrington died heroically off the Barbary Coast, saving the lives of two of his shipmates. He was seventeen." Adrian rolled up his shirtsleeves and knelt on the bricks of the hearth. "Jess spent the next year constructing Europe's best accounting system. I don't think she slept at all for a couple months."

"I see." He wasn't sure what he saw, except that he was jealous of a boy, half his age and dead.

"He was a better man than either of us." Adrian twitched a knife from its sheath on his left forearm. "And look here. Jess has been sloppy."************

What do I do to make the Talking Heads marginally palatable?

*****************

Adrian tapped the letters together and looped the blue ribbon around them and made a jaunty bow. That's stage business and visuals. "Gods. I was never that young. I'm glad Jess was, for a while."

"It wasn't tied like that."
There's human interaction. Sebastian is annoyed at Adrian. That's what interests the reader right now, not so much what was in the letters ... though that's supposed to be intriguing too.

"I'm showing her somebody's been in here."
Which is Adrian's reaction right back.
The Talking Heads don't just talk. They snipe.

Information comes to the reader under cover of these two guys being annoyed at each other. The reader doesn't have to care about the info. She can care about the two characters on stage.


He set the letters carefully back in the box and closed the lid. Stage action. "Not a sparkling correspondent, young Ned, but I don't suppose she noticed."

See the character interaction?
Adrian lures Sebastian to ask questions. Adrian , for reasons of his own, obviously wants to convey information.

The way the info is released becomes important. The characters have a reason to talk about the info. They have an attitude toward the info.

One of the dangers with Talking Heads is we can set them to chattering about stuff they don't really need to discuss.
So in a Talking Heads scene you always ask yourself -- why this info? Why between these two people? Why now?

... Here, it's because Adrian has something he wants to say.
That was the name written in the front of the Odyssey. "Who's Ned?" 

Adrian was up, wandering the room, leaning to peer in at the fireplace. He waited just long enough to be annoying.

Adrian doesn't just lay the information out for Sebastian like he was dealing cards. There's an ebb and flow to it. Adrian teases Sebastian with what he knows. Sebastian pulls info out of Adrian.

"The Honorable Edward Harrington. Ned. She was fifteen. He was bright, likable, ambitious and quite sickeningly in love with her." 

"A paragon."

"It has given me considerable satisfaction, over the years, to think of Jess, out in the straw in a horse barn, bestowing her virginity on that boy."

This is Adrian's emotional truth. The factoids are just slathered all over with meaning.

The way Adrian says this shows Adrian's awareness of who he's speaking to. Adrian wouldn't say this, this way, to anyone else.
Info filters to us through its source. If story facts are not modified in the guts of the man who holds them, we don't have real characters. Likewise, info is shaped towards its recipient.

We don't just 'tell a fact'. We tell the fact we see and understand. We tell it to our audience.

Our characters have to do this too.

OK. OK. This is true in any dialog.But it's especially important to keep the basic dialog rules in mind when we do Talking Heads. T.H. tempt us to forget everything we've ever learned about dialog.

He ran his thumb along the carving of the fireplace. The mantel was black marble and the design was scrolled leaves. Visuals. Stage business, too, I guess. "He had the face of a young Apollo."
Adrian's emotional reaction to the factoids.

We transfer the emotional punch of these old factoids into the present. The T.H. do not merely tell the old story; they experience that story now.

This is not an exchange of info. It's a replaying of old events and old truths with the character's current reactions.

Current reactions hold the reader's interest. Sometimes, they're story.



Jess's lover. The one who'd put knowledge in her eyes. That's the internal from Sebastian. "What happened?" 

Adrian shifted the firescreen aside. "Genuinely bad luck. Josiah shipped him out as supercargo, to see what he was made of. Edward Harrington died heroically off the Barbary Coast, saving the lives of two of his shipmates. He was seventeen." Adrian rolled up his shirtsleeves and knelt on the bricks of the hearth. "Jess spent the next year constructing Europe's best accounting system. I don't think she slept at all for a couple months."
That stuff above ... here's a minor technical.I'm doing the big long run of straight backstory here. I get it out of the way, all in one lump. What I've done ... I've laid big dollops of emotion before and after, and I'm hoping like mad that the reader doesn't get bored while I real quick-like slip all these little facts past her.

"I see." He wasn't sure what he saw, except that he was jealous of a boy, half his age and dead.

And we got us some internals.
Internals go with Talking Heads like Burns with Allen.
Sebastian thinks about what he's just been told. He reacts. He feels.
This is the necessary ingredient. This is what mitigates Talking Heads and all this factoid dropping. The human reaction pulls the reader through the scene.

"He was a better man than either of us." Adrian twitched a knife from its sheath on his left forearm. "And look here. Jess has been sloppy."

At this point, Adrian grabs us and jumps onto the next bit of stage business. We leap from past to present, from interior to exterior.
We go on to do an interval of solid, visual stage business. That's our respite before the final set of factoids lands like wet dough onto the floury board of the scene.

Technical Topics -- Talking Heads I

When to use 'Talking Heads'?

I brought up a message and response down in the comments trail that deals with one specific use of Talking Heads.


I stopped by to comment on MLAS (aka Jessamyn). I just started reading it . . . and was wondering if you kept the scene about Sebastien rooting through Jess's bedroom (I recall it from a previous post . . . and although it's a little different, it's still there!)
Yah! Why did you think an editor would cut it?


A raft of Really Cool Scenes got cut out of the manuscript. I had to write other stuff to replace them.

The searching-Jess's-room scene managed to escape the slaughter.
This pleased me.

Putting the matter in a philosophical teacup --

All scenes have to justify their existence.
Scenes that do not contain the H&H interacting really have to justify their existence.

At heart, the structure of the search-Jess's-bedroom scene is Talking Heads Exchange Information. Sebastian and Adrian are -- I hope -- interesting Talking Heads, exchanging vital information and doing nifty stage business while they're at it.
But they're still Talking Heads.

This is a weak structure for a scene. An easy, self-indulgent structure.
You have to ration yourself to maybe one or two Talking Head scenes per manuscript.
This kinda scene is the first to get chopped if your pacing is slow or you need to lose words. Rightly so.

So ... why is this scene in the final book?

I think the search-bedroom scene survived the cuts because it was truly about character revelation. (i.e. it was not using 'character revelation' as an excuse for taking up space.)
The scene 'told' stuff about these three characters that would have been difficult to 'show' in any reasonable length of time . . . which is one of the justifications for Talking Heads.
The scene is short.
It found a spot where I could afford to slow the pacing.
And it made an efficient framework to reveal character.
I let Sebastian look at Jess's possessions and straightforwardly tell the reader what they 'said'.

You'll say this sort of scene isn't so much 'efficient' as 'bloody obvious' and 'heavy handed'.

Hmmm ... yes ....

This is a survey

Does anyone see a light blue column covering half the message on the left hand side of the blog?

Does anyone not see one?

This is one of those weirdnesses.

My screen looks like this ....











Well .... not the moire patterns part. That seems to be part of taking photos of your computer screen.



UPDATE

Ah. This is my very OWN Internet Explorer problem.
How exciting.

Stupid computer.

Thank you all for helping me to track down the culprit.

My Lord and Spymaster in Russian

A fine bit of news. My Lord and Spymaster will be translated into Russian. The publication date is estimated at eighteen months from now.

I do not look a gift horse in the mouth. I am grateful to the Berkley subsidiary rights folks. Yeah, subsidiary rights!!

But why Russian?

I had never thought about this one way or the other, you understand, but is Russia full of Romance readers?

... oh
Since I've got the message open,
the status report on Maggie is:

18400 / 120000 words. 15% done on the second rough draft!

I think Maggie is going to end up at 120,000 words. I've figured out how to simplify a plot point or two late in the story. And I de-created a minor character.
Poof.

I stopped today halfway through Chapter Eight. Tomorrow I should finish refining that, and then Maggie and Doyle (and Hawker,) take to the road.

The rabbit scene still lingers within the manuscript, glaring defiance, daring me to extract it.
I have not.
This is weak of me.

Romance Divas

So there's this workshop, see. Romance Divas. Wednesday to Friday. Go to Romance Divas and enter the Forums.

Not so much to listen to me nattering on. But I'm in illustrious company.


Why do I suddenly have a blue line running through my blog?
What can I do to make it stop?

He who increaseth blog increaseth trouble.

The Great Archive of The Spymaster Fictive Universe

I got an e-mail asking about the notes I keep on what's happening year by year in the fictive world.

These are the notes. I went back and pulled out stuff that would be spoilers. I think I got everything.
Anyhow, it's in the form of a bunch of pages, one by one. I couldn't find a better way to do this.

Women's Costume 1794 France, hairstyles, purses and cloaks

More clothing during the French Revolution.
Again, I'm looking at middle- and lower- class clothing of 1794. I'm after woman-on-the-street wear, rather than high fashion.

This section contains hairstyles, purses, and cloaks, which is a strange combination, but sometimes I'm strange.


Outerwear -- the Cloak


We have a 1795 short black cloak being worn over a jupe and caraco.

And look at the stripes. Young, old, city, country, with and without dogs, the French were mad for stripes.

When in doubt, French printmakers threw in a dog. Or maybe every woman in Paris had a little dog tagging along after her. Contemporary images seems to say this.
Here is the closeup.

This old gal probably taught third grade and scared her class to death. She scares the bejesus out of me, anyway.



Here's a red hood from a few years before 1790. It's French. I suspect the print has faded from a brighter original shade.


They had deep-red, wool, hooded cloaks all over England, too, in the countryside.

These red cloaks were the ordinary outer wear of ordinary women, robust, traditional country wear. They seems to have lasted at least fifty years on either side of 1800.



Another red cloak from the period, here. This one is made in England.
Why red? I dunnoh.



A printed-cotton, hooded cape from our period. You can find it Here, if you scroll patiently down the page.


This has a contrasting print lining we don't see. It's c.1780-90 from vintagetextiles which lives here.




Hair Cuts


We got hair.
Really, really short hair, a la mode de Titus, here

This is listed as circa 1794. But is it the first half of 1794, or the last half, after the fall of Robespierre?

Is this a la victime . . . ?
When did that start.
I just don't know.

Or we got very slightly longer hair. This is neck-length frizzy hair under a cap from a Lebrun self-portrait of 1790.

The frizzing is done on purpose, with curling irons.



Here's another example of the very short hair. Goes just to the nape of the neck. Careful frizzing that's made to seem 'natural'. This one's from 1797. Is hair this very very short the victime style?
Hard to say.
Anyway, find it at home here.

See the high waist on the dress. This is one of the signs that this is a leetle bit later than 1794. The waist has moved all the way up. In 1794 it was still about halfway between natural waist and under the boobs.



Both waist and neck are gathered with a simple band.


And here's the long hair version that's common throughout the period. This example is not as frizzy as some ... more elaborate curls. You can see the characteristic shape with the hair loose down the back.

Oh. As long as we're here ...
This has one of those fichus that cross in the front and go all the way around the back to tie.


You can see almost this exact hairstyle here, dated to 1793, and here, dated to 1791- 1792. Click for closeup of those.



This one to the left shows the central part nicely. It dates from 1796




The long hair worn loose under a cap goes right down the social scale -- minus the elaborate frizzing. That lack of time-consuming frizz looks like a social indicator.
Here's tricoteuses with that length.

This is an out-of-era picture, and therefore more untrustworthy than usual. I think the total lack of frizzing of the hair is correct for this just-poor-as-all-get-out-class, but wouldn't trust the clothing details.

Here, in 1790, we see the longish and curled hair. On one woman, there in the back, it's ever so carefully frizzed and curled. On the other, seated figure the cut is similar, but more natural, less carefully controlled.












Pocketbooks and Purses

There are extant examples of fancy embroidered clutch pocketbooks. I guess one just walked around ... clutching them. I'd like to find a picture of one of these being carried. Haven't, so far. They may have been primarily to hold calling cards.

here's one. French 1780s. Click for closeup.

This is from Meg Andrews Antique Costumes and Textiles, at the website here.



Here we have another purse, 1780–1790 French silk; Length: 4 1/2 in. (11.4 cm)
How does this work? What are the ribbons for?

It's from the Met, Closeup here.

This one is c. 1790, French silk. Length: 7 5/16 in. (18.6 cm).
here's the close take on this purse. Also from the Met.

Now think about the size of this pack. It's seven inches. That's a little bitty thing. Maybe this was a card case . . .?

All Met refs are through http: //www.metmuseum. org

Tech Tops -- Best of the Worst #4

And a few more Best of the Worst in writing ...


POV -- Self-reference in POV

You want to flip the reader right out of deep POV? Let the POV character notice his own eyes brightening or himself smirking in triumph or that oddly pensive look crossing his face.

Unless the POV character deliberately smiles -- to make a point, to reassure someone, to communicate -- he doesn't notice that he's using his face muscles to smile. Thus it doesn't show up in his consciousness.

The POV character doesn't have to wriggle his face to convey emotion. He can just think about what he feels.

Not -- He wrinkled his forehead
But -- He felt mellow and hollow, but crisp


In POV, you can describe your guy's emotion down to the fifth digit to the right of the point.
There is no mystery.
Save the facial expressions for folks you're not sitting inside.

Test a phrase in First Person before you put it in your POV character's line of thought.

I pursed my lips and blew out.
I wrinkled my forehead.
I raised the corner of my mouth.
I arched a satiric eyebrow.
I wrinkled my forehead inquisitively.

If it doesn't sound natural in First Person, it doesn't belong in the POV character's thoughts.


Description -- Bespoke Metaphors

Metaphors are not one-size-fits-all.

It doesn't matter how cool the metaphor is, it has to fit the character who uses it.

Each POV character will have, as part of his 'voice', his own particular style of metaphor and simile.
A character will also have a readiness or a reluctance to use figurative language.
Caliban speaks in poetry.
Go figure.


So let's say we have a choleric little colonel, strutting about, and I want my characters to describe him.

In the POV of a fanciful character, the red-faced colonel is 'angry as a bantam rooster'.
A vulgar, downright character sees him, 'about to bust a gut'.
A fastidious, intellectual character would think about a 'red-faced, ranting Punch'.
A stolid, unimaginative character would mentally note the colonel simply as 'furious' or 'about to go off in an apoplexy'.

Figurative language arises not just from the object described, but from the nature of the POV character observing the object.



Description -- Cliche

Go ahead. Just use the cliche, already.

Not every paragraph needs a novel figure of speech. Not every metaphor has to knock the readers' socks off. Sometimes you want the readers' socks to stay exactly where they are.

Some times ... maybe most times ... trite is OK.

What it is ...
Trite, familiar metaphors pass under the reader's radar. Like the hint of cinnamon in the chocolate, the paprika in the dumpling, the onion in the soup, they enriches the taste without making everybody stop and think, 'Hey! What the hell was that?"

Colorful metaphor -- that beautiful, fresh, unusual, original image -- can stick up like a sore thumb.
It can distract.
It can throw off the pacing, as the reader takes an extra beat to unravel it or simply to appreciate it.

If you don't want the reader stopping to look at the language, instead of what you're saying -- if you're trying to move things along in a lively way -- avoid those standout metaphors.

Save all that novelty for more contemplative, slower passages when you want the reader to pause and think about the guests star-scattered on the grass.

Cliché can also have the advantage of a succinct and emphatic clarity.
'Red flag to a bull' is a hackneyed phrase. But we know exactly what it means. In five words we get across a huge concept.
It is not always necessary to re-invent the wheel.
(Says I, using a cliché, because it is fast and exact and vivid.)

Do 'sore thumbs' actually stick out?




Description. Personalizing the object

Description, on its own, is not just of riveting interest, generally.

So attach your characters to objects and description.

Show, not merely the object, but how object and character are related. Continually put the character into the picture. Turn a general observation of some solid whatsit into an action, with the character doing something.

Not -- It was gray and gloomy up there, with an hour or two before night closed in.
But -- He shaded his eyes against the rain and inspected the gray and gloomy up there. He had an hour or two before night closed in.

Not -- The space under the oak tree gave some shelter from the rain and had a good, unobstructed view of their Frenchwoman.
But -- They made a silent agreement and crossed the courtyard in the rain, side by side, to stand under the oak tree. They had a good, unobstructed view of their Frenchwoman.

(Oh. This last example also happens to be a case of "showing with action instead of stating a reason, cause or emotion". I talk about that elsewhere. We drop the phrase, 'gave some shelter' because the actions now show the reader that the oak gives shelter. It would be repetitive to say it outright.)

Description of the tree holds us to a static and descriptive sorta feeling.
We 'personalize' the objects and the description. Now it's not an oak tree with a neutral description. It's an oak tree with our characters under it, sheltering. The oak tree has become part of the story. It's no longer just scenery.



Not -- There had to be some way to deal with the meerkats
But -- He'd find some way to deal with the meerkats.

Not -- The ruined side of his face was towards her.
But -- He held the ruined side of his face towards her.

Not -- The whole expedition was at risk because of that sharp-tongued scarecrow in there.
But -- He risked all of them if he got squeamish about that sharp-tongued scarecrow in there.


Personalizing objects this way is another of those twofers. We more fully describe the object and we define our character.


Travelling further into Obviousland, here.
I talk elsewhere about the verb 'to be'.
Some of the examples above are just prime examples of how the verb 'to be' can be weak.
Up there ... the verbs 'to find,' 'to risk,' and 'to hold' -- while not anything wildly special as verbs go -- are still infinitely stronger than 'to be'.



Varying sentence length

Short sentence after short sentence ... or phrases that are all the same length for half a page ... do the fingernail-on-a-blackboard bit on the poor reader.
Long sentences wind their convoluted, complicated, endless way to ... well ... the next long sentence. A slow slog for the poor reader.

Want to know if you're making one mistake or the other? Read it aloud.

Or you can spot the numbers.
Flip to a random, non-dialog, not-furious-action page of the WIP and use the wordcount feature. Consecutive sentences of 27, 26, 23, 30, 29, 21, 27, 19 will likely feel heavy as bad fruitcake. A run of 7, 10, 14, 3, 19, 5, 10, 8 will feel like bumper cars. Y'know. Abrupt.
More desirable is a lively balance of 19, 27, 3, 26, 15, 9, 12, 30.

You get a reward for varying your sentence length. When tucked in among their longer comrades, short sentences just leap out of ambush.
Whap.

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

Buenas noticias

Spymaster's Lady will be out in Spanish in about eighteen months.

Cool.
That is, fresca.

another lolcat

I worked good today. I was productive and scholarly and a useful member of the writing community. I DESERVE a few minutes lolcatting.

Right.

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.