Slaughtering Subplots

I set back to work on Jessamyn today.

While I was doing the polish of Anneka in two weeks, I had one of these exponential mental growth thingums. It was the first time I'd actually looked at an entire ms, the whole shebang, all in one piece.

I am now ruthless. I reapproach Jessamyn with a large clippers and a thirst for structural simplicities.

This means I'm going back to the beginning. I must shift some of the foundations an inch or two. But this is right. This is necessary. This is not merely quibble.

First ... I want to pull the conversation with Doyle out of Chapter One and replace it with a conversation with Kedger. I think. But then I have to get rid of Kedger somehow ... Maybe I'll come up with the answer when I'm asleep tonight.

Quiet Weekend

Mailed the ms of Anneka to Superagent Saturday morning, driving all the way into town to the Main Post Office. I paid money to send it fast. No real need to do so, of course ... but I still have this residual guilt for not being quite on time getting it done.

Then I took the weekend off. No writing. I reread Windflower by the Curtises ... and what a sad day it was when they stopped writing. Scrubbed the floor. Cooked everybody decent meals. Did loads and loads of laudry. Paid bills. Caught up with some of the writing critiques I had put off. I still haven't finished two of the crits yet. Tomorrow, I hope.

I had intended to indulge myself in TV ... but the cable went out. One of those ironies, I'd call it. Comcast took over our local system and does not yet have its ducks in a row.
It would be more correct to say they don't even have their ducks in the same flock.

Anyway. No TV.

I slept late.

The dog has started scratching again. Why am I perfectly certain we have not -- with two complete courses of antibiotics -- conquered its skin problems?
Why would a dog get skin rashes? This is so peculiar.

I dreamed last night about JESSAMYN and the need to reorganize it came to me. I must be ruthless. I must throw stuff out. I must suppress whole subplots.
Attila the Hun of plotting, that's me.

I'll head out to a coffee shop tomorrow. Just have to decide which one ...

Day 15 of Anneka polish -- done

Finished the Anneka polish about 2 o'clock.

Then sat down to print 407 pages.

(no. you don't really read this. It just shows my day.)

Add paper. Discover that printer is set for draft rather than display presentation. Figure out how to fix this which takes an incredibly long time. Print a while. Jam. Jam. Jam. Add paper. More problem with jamming. Decide to open a new ream of paper that will not be as DAMP as the opened ream. (Virginia climate) Add paper. Discover that for some reason pages 10 to 28 were never printed. Print them. Machine jams. Add paper. Reprint page 78 which has done that sticky-together bit where it comes out on two pages. Machine jams. Re-ink cartridge. Add paper. Discover that page 10 was, unfathomably, printed twice. Machine jams. Something wrong with the cartridge which involves taking it out and re-re-inking it. Add paper. Reprint page 235 which has done that sticky-together bit where it comes out on two pages. Add paper. Add paper. Add paper. Page 171 has stange shadows of letters upon it. Reprint. Machine jams. Add paper. Add paper. Add paper. Add paper. Reprint page 379 which has done that sticky-together bit where it comes out on two pages. Machine jams. Add paper. Add paper. Take entire manuscript and go through, checking to see that every page is actually there, in order, right side up and legible. Remove 11 blank pages that have wandered into the manuscript. Sit down to rest. Remember that I need a cover page and try to print it. Cannot print it because The Kid (through whose computer I must link to get to the printer) has her computer turned off. 'It's breaking up!, say's she, sounding like Scotty. Fiiiiinaly print cover page.

Look at completed manuscript. Wonder if I made the right choice of font.

It is now too late to go out and mail this puppy. Will do it tomorrow, then drop superagent a line to say it's mailed.

And so to bed.

Anneka Day 14

End of Day 14 out of 14

I did not finish the polish. I'm 101K out of 110K. 91.7%

Heck.

I will start printing the ms out tomorrow morning. Maybe by the time I get that first part printed I'll have polished the last part.

Is that cheating or something?

Anneka polish Day 13

On Day 13 ... we stand .. .


91K out of 111K

83%

The final, late, desperate polishing of Anneka ... I find myself obsessing over commas.
That is probably diagnostic of the last time you should look at a draft. When you find yourself obsessing over commas, it is time to move on.
Not that that's the only thing I'm obsessing about, you understand.

Anneka polish Day 12

And we finish up day 12 of 14.
Not doing too well

73K of 111

66.2%



At Panera, I stood, waiting for the coffee urns to free up so I could nip in and get another cup of coffee.

My heroine is saying ... "The moment I deliver you to safety and perform one small final task I have set myself, I shall slip away to become obscure and harmless as a hedgehog."

Unfortunately, I have used the word 'hedgehog twice already in the first 50K words. To wit –
'She jerked away, flung herself to the far side of the bed, turned her back to him, and tucked herself tight as a hedgehog.'
'There would be, in those flowery fields beyond the wood, berries and many rabbits, even hedgehogs, if one were lucky.'

I simply cannot use 'hedgehog' in both the 'curled up' ref and the 'harmless as' ref because it is so vivid both places.

The 'in the fields' ref, thank God, passes under the radar. I don't have to go back and pull that one out.


So I said to the nice woman standing next to me ... 'What's an obscure and harmless animal that lives in England?' She offered me beavers, shrews, geckoes and chinchillas. Nice lady. Is it only me, or is everybody else in the world clueless?


Hmmm ... 'harmless as a dormouse' maybe. I prefer hedgehog in that spot, but if I can only use it once ....

Anneka Day 6

Last polishing. Day 6. No progress made today at all.

I went to Panera, settled down. Picked up my cup of coffee and began working. My machine blew up. Blew up every time I went into Microsoft Word.

AAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH.

I ran a virus scan. Went back to a sixty day old restore point. Defragged the disk. Looked for disk error.

None of this was the problem. I think it's Microsoft Word.

I've backed up. Now I'll head back into Word and see what happens ...


edited to add --


All the jiggery pokery with disk scan may have done some good. Word stopped blowing up around 6.

I finished the polish of 42K out of 118K. Good, for the amount of time I could devote to it.

Hearing voices

I was talking to a couple of fellow writers about POV and visualization and the first splash of creation across the canvas.

This came outta the exercise I'm doing for November in Books and Writers. An exercise on deep POV. Here. In that exercise I list some of the common techniques folks use to slip us into deep POV and ask everybody to go through a snippet of their own writing and recognize what techniques they're using. It's an opportunity to assess the technique matgrix, and maybe pick up a new tool or two, and a good chance for me to nip in and spot errors in POV presentation.


Anyhow. Talking about writing with these folks, comfy in the coffeeshop ....
One of my writer buddies has trouble moving her writing along because she is beset by voices in her head saying, 'No. That's not right. Fix it. Make it perfect.' I asked her if she'd read Bird by Bird, which some perfectionists find liberating, and she had, but it didn't. So she gets held back by the heels by this chorus of critical voices.

The other writer buddy has, I believe, a problem getting the internals on paper. She gives us dialog and description and action ... but not what people are thinking, feeling, planning, worrying about, intending and so on. We went through some pages of Anneka and she could point to the lines she, herself, wouldn't think to put in. The lines she lacked were of the backstory/internal-chatty/stream-of-consciousness sort – one set of the inside-the-skin stuff going on in the scene.
This writer is productive. I can't judge her writing because I haven't seen it, but a common crit seems to be that the writing feels 'flat' and the reader doesn't get to know or understand the characters.
I think she sees the interior of her character, but immediately 'edits out' the most private part of what's happening inside the skin. She never writes it because it's not 'relevant'. Her internal editor clicks in too early and too efficiently.

Just as an aside, her problem picking up internals suggests an exercise to me. To have the group pick a 500-800 word segment and give us only the stream of consciousness of one of the characters. Good for POV. Good for characterization. Good for visualization. Good for layering. Good for running several threads of approach through a scene.
Sounds like a nice little exercise. December maybe?
Such an exercise might be useful to my friend, assuming that is her problem and she has a problem at all which is a sizable couple of assumptions.

Moving along to what I wanted to say about mental noises and our visualization of scenes.
One friend is impeded by her internal critic. The other applies her internal editor too vigorously, too soon, and prunes out part of what she needs.

So I asked myself what internal voices I'm listening to.
I keep getting distracted by other stories. As soon as I 'tune in' to that particular level of consciousness, I can sink into a dozen possibilities. It's hard to keep myself telling the story I'm writing right now. Like a badly-trained hunting dog, I lose the scent and go chasing off after rabbits or mice when I'm supposed to be coursing deer. (And the others are more fun because they don't involve all that pesky typing.)
Discipline. Discipline. Discipline.

Back to Anneka for a bit

The dog chewed through the sofa pillow tonight. I now have a sofa pillow with the edge chewed off. Ah. The house just gets homier every day.

I'm going to put JESSAMYN to one side for two weeks to do a quick polish of ANNEKA. We shall see.

This would make me all optimistic and productive again, except that I have an Attila the Hun of a cold.

It's cool to polish a ms you haven't looked at for a while.

It's like this -- Before I went to live in Africa, way back when, I put a lot of stuff into storage. (Actually I put a lot of stuff into storage I meant to take with me and vice versa because the moving company was staffed by cretins who mixed the boxes up.)
Anyhow, when I came back from being overseas I pulled my stuff out of the crate. I'd forgotten all these nifty things I owned. It was like being given boxes and boxes of presents by somebody who had exactly my taste.

(And, of course, I had all that toothpaste and shampoo and soap I'd meant to bring with me to Lagos.)

Picking up a manuscript after a couple months is like that. It's this real neat story, written just the way you'd write it. And you get to EDIT it.
So cool.

Reconsidering Anneka

I'm beginning to think I can work on ANNEKA a bit more. Really.

I see a way to cut about 8K words.


A friend, at Panera, bought an iced green tea, which I had never had before. Very odd. Sort of like koolaid for Martians.

Onward to the Rooftop Scene

Finished Chapters Twelve and Thirteen.

I'm not pleased with Thirteen, which is rambling and emotionally inconsistent and could be tightened up some.
Maybe I'll fix all that tomorrow.
Maybe I'll do that little thing.


The rooftop scene with the ferret is almost written in its entirety and is good. The rooftop scene with the ferret. Yeah!


In Thirteen I'm doing this technique thingum where I have the POV character continue a long internal monologue while somebody else walks around the room talking at length. I'll have to come back and look at this for a while to see if the technique works. I need some space away from it, before I can decide.

This is what I hate about the solitary business of writing. It's so hard to tell if something WORKS..

I can't remember whether I did this same thing anywhere in ANNEKA or not. If I did, is it a technique I should use again in the very next manuscript?

In other news ...

I'm almost done painting a bedroom upstairs. It was squashed bug green when we bought the house.

The people who owned the house before us liked the oddest colors. This is the smallest of the bedrooms so I said to meself ... let's paint it something bright and cheerful.
Yellow.

The yellow didn't work. For one thing, it never quite covered the green. Green lurked beneath it like a childhood trauma involving asparagus ...

you know how the medieval enamelists put blue as the underlayer for the white of flesh tones? ... (well, they did) ... it was kinda like that.
The green was gone but its malevolent aura remained.

This was a horrid, weak, trying-to-be-a-pastel yellow anyway. Not a robust daffodil yellow -- though that wouldn't have worked either.

This yellow looked like .... a biological specimen. An unhealthy specimen. The sort the doctor calls you back on.

So now I've made the room blue.

I'm not sure that's going to work either. This may be one of those rooms that cannot be painted any color in the sidereal universe and look right.

Like there are some scenes you can't write, no matter what you do, and you might as well just toss them out before you start and find some way to write around it and never have them go to Venice after all.
Except that you can't do that with a bedroom, can you?

I'm putting three bookcases into the bedroom to hold all the books. I would have finished that today too, except that the table saw stopped working.
Just stopped.
The warranty ran out on Tuesday. Do not tell me this is a coincidence.

Chapter Three of Jessamyn

About halfway through Chapter Three of Jessamyn. Amazing how much I can throw out without changing the plot any.
And what does that say about the writing?

I have a bunch of out-takes from Anneka that I'm managing to fold in here and there. Plot bits.

The Call

This business of getting 'the call' ... it is rather legendary in the genre.

At least for me, the significance was ...

I was talking to her
and she asked me what I was working on.
This may have been so I would stop doing the heavy breathing bit in her ear.
So I said I had another novel in progress.
"What's it about?" says she.

I am standing there with my brains in rigor from having received 'the call' and I cannot tell her what JESSAMYN is about even though I have written tens of thousands of words of it already and have a complicated outline in a .doc file labeled 'Complicated Outline.doc'.
"Ummmm ..." says I.
and then,
"It's set in 1810," says I,
that being the only factoid I can dredge out of the won ton soup that used to be my cerebral cortex.

She offers a supportive silence and I have to say something or she will begin to think I am really really stupid and she will not want to represent a gibbering idiot. She may already be having doubts.

"I'm using two secondary characters from ANNEKA in it," says I, grabbing another factoid as it swims by.

"Which two?"

Oh, good. Another question I can answer. "Doyle and Adrian."

"Adrian! That's wonderful! I fell a little in love with Adrian."

And all of a sudden it's all right. Because I'm a little in love with Adrian myself and I worried I'd carved out too big a role for a secondary character in the ms and it might have deformed the plot but she doesn't think so and she's a professional and should know that sort of thing.

This is the only other person on earth who's read the whole manuscript besides me and she really likes Adrian. She likes him.

It's going to be ok.

Agented

Happy Snoopy Dance.

I got 'The Call' yesterday.

I have an agent.
A marvelous agent.
A wonderful agent.

I cannot begin to say how happy I am and how much of a relief this is.

Now I can settle down to writing JESSAMYN
and stop worrying.

Now I can make ANNEKA better.
Now I can relax.

I can write,
which is what I want to do
and the agent can sell mss, which is presumably what she wants to do.

We will both be happy.
Life is good.