The joys of editing

I’m not being facetious with that title. Editing can be tedious, it’s true, but as I undergo my final edits on this manuscript to ready it for submission, I find I’m relating to the text in an even deeper way than before. Which is difficult to believe, frankly, given the fact that I, you know, wrote it. And that I’ve reread the whole thing so many times I can quote large portions verbatim.

A couple of weeks ago, I took the train up to Seattle to visit Cat for something we called a Writing Workshop and Retreat. Cat is a technical writing editor, you see, adn while that is a whole different sort of editing from fiction editing, her eye is still incredibly helpful when it comes to tightening up the manuscript. Beyond the obvious editing of grammar and spelling, she’s terrific at helping me excise all those pesky slippages like passive voice constructions, ambiguous pronoun references, and excessive run-on sentences.

So there’s that. Which is awesome. But another facet of awesomeness is the way it’s helped me feel confident that I will know when a change is necessary, when it’s a matter of preference, when it’s a matter of style, and when it’s something I feel strongly enough about to fight for it. Not to fight with her about, you understand*, but just to defend my own choices when it comes up with a future editor. And it will, inevitably, and that’s a good thing. But I don’t want to be the kind of author who thinks that every word is precious, and who doesn’t receive editing instructions well, who argues about every comma splice and incomplete sentence. The fact is, as much as writing is a solitary creation process, good writing is a collaborative creation process, and I want to be a good writer.

*Our process is very simple: she edits ahead of me in chapters , and I come along behind considering each change, deciding whether to accept or reject each change (god bless Word’s “Track Changes” feature, btw).

Getting back to the point I originally started with…

As I go through considering each proposed change, it’s made me consider each one in a larger context. Even something as simple as an apostrophe can have implications for the whole story. For example, early on, Cat was removing all contractions, including those in dialogue, with the idea that I may want a more formal tone not just to the narrative, but to the characters’ voices.

That’s true to some degree: I don’t want the narrative to have contractions, and though I did a pretty meticulous job of removing them previously, I’m obviously not going to catch them all. Dialogue, however, is another matter. I don’t want my characters to sound stilted and unbelievable. But some characters don’t use contractions, or don’t use them as frequently as others. (Older characters vs. younger, for example.) And in the case of the mind-voices used in the story, not all. And in the case of the Big Bad, he/it not only doesn’t use contractions, his/its voice is in all caps.

Now this is something I did very intentionally throughout, and that didn’t change in this editing process. But because she had flagged every contraction, I was rereading each sentence and phrasing anew, and in some cases, hearing it a little differently. In some cases, I even decided to rearrange a sentence to avoid a contraction or spelling it out, because neither one was the right choice for that scene/character/tone.

Our Writing Workshop and Retreat was an astounding success. We got a great deal of work done and we work very well together, I’m happy to say. We had lots of fun and laughs (and chatting and eating and watching movies and fun times). I felt reinvigorated from my new view of the text, and I’m excited about forging ahead on edits. We’ll be doing it again very soon, and I can’t/cannot wait!

Book 2 and the impact of real life

Boy, Book 2 is not coming easy. I know where it begins and ends and have a pretty good idea of at least some of the plot points I want to cover in between. I have a clearer idea of the themes and character arcs than I did at this point in Book 1 (or for at least half of Book 1, for that matter). I’ve known the opening scenes of this book for almost 2 years now. And I now know these characters better than I know some of my real life friends and family.

So what the hell, Book 2?

Aside from the aforementioned opening scenes — which I wrote more than a year ago — and a pretty steamy (though not explicit) and intensely passionate scene that was the result of a fantastic brainstorming idea while I was at the coast around New Years’…I have very little to show of Book 2 at the moment. It’s not for lack of ideas, either, or knowing where it needs to go. Or excitement, for that matter. I don’t know what this is that has me kind of piddly-dinking around.

Writer’s Block? No, I don’t think so. I’ve had writer’s block before, and this doesn’t feel the same. I can feel the story in there, percolating, and hamsters that run the little wheels inside my brain are scurrying around as much as ever. Oh, I still have that undercurrent of panic that I imagine many writers experience when you don’t yet know exactly where the story is going and every little plot point and character evolution hasn’t been nailed down. But in general, I have a good grip on this story and what I want it to look like when I finish it.

I’ve alluded on here before to the impact of some real life stuff on my creative life, and though that real life stuff has been getting the attention it needs in order to keep me from wanting to rub soup in people’s hair, it’s still been interfering with my creative life. Time is always an issue, of course —  it’s always an issue for anyone who has to fit their writing life in the small gaps between a full-time job and a regular life — but more with my inner creative life. There’s a lot processing through my brain, and the last year has required a lot more brain power than usual. I’ve had to switch on the auxiliary power, so to speak.

I’m realizing now that it’s been obvious why I couldn’t get back into my writing groove. There just isn’t a lot of energy left for my creative spirit to draw from, and hasn’t been for awhile. Considering that creativity really draws a lot of power all on its own (since I’m apparently going with the whole power station metaphor here), the necessity of diverting some mental energy to other stuff has meant a blackout — or maybe a brownout — on the Creativity Power Grid.

What’s frustrating, however, is that it was the ability to retreat into writing that oftentimes gave me relief in the past from the same kinds of Life Stuff that’s intruded so much now. In the past, I would’ve used some of the power generated by the Creativity Power Grid to get through some of the energy shortages on the Life Power Grid. Except in this case, power’s being diverted away from the Creativity Power Grid, so it’s a problem that compounds itself.

Aaaaaand now that the power station analogy has been thoroughly beaten into the ground….

The point is, I’m not really where I want to be with Book 2 but as with most things in life, I don’t think there’s any shortcut around the hurdle that stands between me and making progress on Book 2. I’m going to have to actually clear that hurdle, or dismantle it. It’s frustrating, but journey, destination, yada yada. And maybe this is what I have to go through to make Book 2 (and 3) the stories they need to be.

Another step in the right direction

Progress! My Writerly Pursuits week is underway, and I actually am making some sort of progress on writing-related tasks.

On my agenda for this week, as previously mentioned, are tackling my query letter and synopsis. The former is a single page introduction letter to a potential agent, in which a writer has one or two paragraphs (three at the very most!) to distill the essence of the story and convince the agent to read further (i.e., either the attached synopsis, if they take them in submission, or to request a synopsis or a partial or full manuscript). The query letter is much like the blurb on the back cover a book meant to excite a potential reader into wanting to read the book itself.

It is very intimidating.

So I decided today to help myself get into the groove by instead tackling the synopsis. My idea here is that immersing myself in the story and getting into the mode of distilling it down for a synopsis will help me drill down on the way to sell the story in an even shorter format. Familiarity with the material and alla that. (I mean, obviously I’m familiar with the material since I wrote it, and have read and reread it approximately fifty gajillion times, but you know how it is when you get on a roll working on something, and you you hit that sweet spot of everything just flowing right along…that’s what I’m after.)

The synopsis is, depending on where you look and who you trust, anywhere from a 1 page to a 25 page summary of the main story and characters, including main plot twists and the ending. Kind of a big range, there. (There’s all kinds of contradictory information out there as to how long it should be, in the absence of an express definition in a submission guideline. And submission guidelines vary widely from agent to agent. So.) I’m going to go ahead and write mine up and then edit it down, with a goal of hitting somewhere between 5 and 7 pages. For almost 500 pages of manuscript, that ought to be quite a trick….

But work has begun, and I’m already onto page 3 and feeling quite chuffed with myself. So, as I say, progress is being had. In the course of working today, I wanted to look up a couple of things I remembered saving about synopsis tips in my handy bookmarked “Writing Stuff” folder. Over the last couple of years, I’ve accumulated quite a collection of links on all facets of publishing and writing and whatnot. And I’m pathologically organizational by nature, but as I’ve accumulated more and more links, the initial structure I’d set up and later modified has gotten less and less manageable for all of those links. Finding those tips I wanted took far longer than it should’ve, and I thought to myself, as I have many times in the last few months, that I really need to go through and reorganize the folders I’d set up for them to better reflect the way I’m using that folder now. A bit of a project that I just haven’t had time for, even as I keep adding links and terrific information gets buried under the sheer multitude of what I’ve accumulated. And then I thought “AHA!” Because, after all, that is exactly what this week is all about — taking the time I need to focus strictly on doing things for my writerly pursuits. (No I’m not avoiding that scary query letter. Am not. Am not. Shut up.)

Two hours later, and my pathologically organized self is quite content with my newly restructured “Writing Stuff” folder, with renamed folders and rearranged subfolders and newly-added folders and subfolders and all the inevitable dead links weeded out. Oh, it’s enough to make my little OCD heart to go pitter pat.

Since I know that there are those among you who share either my writing passion or my OCD tendencies (or both!), I thought I’d share the end result. (Note that there are some duplications here, which were intentional, and that this doesn’t constitute everything in my writing universe; there are many blogs/sites that I follow with Bloglines or whatever, and so don’t need to keep bookmarked. And some that I do follow with those other methods that I also have bookmarked, because that’s just how I roll.)

Behold, for I am awesome!*  

*And for those of you asking yourselves, “Um…why didn’t she just share these via delicious/Google Bookmarks/etc.? Does she not realize this is soooooo Web 1.0**??” Well, boys and girls, doing so would require more than just a simple upload, would in fact require some sort of organizing or cleaning or whatever before and/or after doing so in order to make some sense of the wealth of information contained therein, and as I am currently doing my best to stay on task***, I am indeed opting for a less elegant, more brute force method.

**Also, when did Firefox start adding hidden gobbledygook code to their export bookmarks file? Because holy extraneous code, Batman!

***We will ignore the amount of time I already wasted doing both of those things before giving up realizing that it was going to take way more time than I wanted to spend. In other news, tagging is a great organizational method, but there is still something to be said for the tree system of organizing information. I AM LOOKING AT YOU DELICIOUS.

Delighting my inner Grammar Nazi

Oh yeah, this is going in the links list alright:

Learn Your Damn Homophones

Novel length

I’m working on edits, and in the back of my mind, thinking about the overall word count. Reading all kinds of industry blogs, you learn what an “acceptable” word count is — 90,000 to 150,000, roughly, depending on the type of book or genre. Romance is generally at the low end or shorter, urban/paranormal fantasy more toward the middle, historical fiction toward the end of that range. Literary fiction is somewhere in the middle. Epic fantasy is at the higher end, and often surpasses it.

Keeping in mind that 75,000 is roughly a 200 page book, when you get up toward 150,000 words, then you’ve got a meatier book on (or in?) your hands. You start moving past that, you begin to enter BFB territory: Big Fucking Brick. Which is why epic fantasy is sometimes called brick fantasy. Or doorstop fantasy.

Well, mine comes in just under 250,000 words, so it’s not just a brick, it’s a cement block. True, it’s epic fantasy, but I’m concerned about that word count, not gonna lie. Which isn’t to say I’m going to start cutting things just to cut them, but I’m trying to be judiciously ruthless as I work through drafts, seeing if there’s anything I can tighten further, or shorten, or remove entirely.

Short of cutting out entire plot lines, however, I don’t see it getting down to, say 200,000. I’ve read that agents/editors won’t reject an ms out of hand due to a high word count, that if it grabs them from the beginning then they’ll make it work (though it’ll no doubt mean some painful cutting in the editing stage), but I admit I’m nervous about that big number that’ll appear in my query letter and the top right corner of my ms. Querying is hard enough as it is, as is getting your ms noticed in the pile of submittals and slush.

There’s not a whole lot I can do about it, other than to make the story the very best I possibly can, work hard on writing an outstanding query, and try to make myself shine enough for a potential agent to look past that scary number and keep reading.

Back home

The coast was fabulous. We had great stormy weather for three days, though it cleared up enough late Thursday evening (very light sprinkles, light wind) that we could head out to the beach to greet the New Year. There was fog and the moon peeked through enough to light up the waves a bit, the waves themselves were still pretty sizeable, and it was chilly but not miserable. Magical, in other words. And I needed that. Don’t we all?

Got some really great writing done, I’m so pleased to say. Some of it was story work, but the really exciting work I did was six pages on some very important ceremonies that will be integral to the plot of book 2, and the overall arc of the trilogy. I may end up writing that section very soon, even though it doesn’t come until the middle of the story, because I’m so energized by what I came up with.

Oh, to be at the coast more! So inspiring, and I can’t say enough about the therapeutic aspect of our very special routine of holing up in our little cabin with lots of food and blankets and watching great movies and not having to do much of anything. I love our little vacations so much, and they put me in such a writerly mood.

Though I suppose it’s possible to have too much of a good thing, and that if I could do it all the time, then the magic and inspiration would be gone. Rather dubious that it’s possible where the Oregon Coast is concerned, but I’ll concede that it is possible.

Writer's block, sort of

Still waiting for that kindling to catch fire. It’s not really writer’s block, but almost completely due a horrible stretch of months in which I’ve had absolutely no motivation to write. That it so completely foreign to me that it’s just as bad as the things I’ve been trying to deal with and process.

Writing is my outlet, it’s my refuge. Whether I’m writing on a current project or am inspired to start a new one, or even just writing in my journal, I honestly cannot remember a time since college that I wasn’t actively writing (college being a time when I had no time to eat, let alone anything else). I won’t say that I write every single day, because of course life happens. But writing — and this story that I hope to publish in particular — has been a part of my life every. single. day. Whether it’s working out plot or character issues while I’m driving (an excellent time to do brainstorming) or doing research or revising already-written chapters, or actually, you know, writing, I devote at least two hours every day to one or all of those tasks (what I collectively call writing). It’s not something I even have to make myself do, I just…do it. I can’t imagine not doing it.

Well now I can, of course. And not having that in my life as regularly and dependably as the rise and fall of the sun has only amplified the unsettling disconnectedness of this period I’ve been working my way through. I know I can’t force it, that for whatever reason, I have to go through this right now, in the way that it’s happening. But wow, do I feel like unequipped without that outlet as a copiing mechanism.

It’ll come back, I know. I don’t even have anxiety that it won’t, despite that brief panic mentioned int eh previous post. I think that knowledge is probably the only thing sustaining me through this strange period, otherwise…well, I hate to contemplate the alternative.

But in the meantime, I feel like the clock is ticking. The clock is one of my own making, of course, but it’s there. I have things I want to be doing, things I’d planned to be doing by now. I should be further along by now, should be querying at the very least, and have a nice solid start on the second book. I should have my synopsis finished, and…

…but I can’t continue that list or I really will freak out. Something, something is telling me to trust this feeling and let the rest come when it comes, to ignore that impatient tapping of the foot and the paranoid worry that all eyes are on me wondering, “when are you going to get moving on this already?”.

In good time, in good time. Trust in that.

Work begins

I’m writing the second book now. I actually started it more than a year ago, and set down the first sentences within a couple months of finishing the first one. I’ve fiddled with it off and on since, but not felt compelled to really sit down and write more than a few days here or there.

I even started to worry recently that the second book wasn’t going to come for me. The circumstances of this book versus the first are so different. Well I suppose they always are, and whatever the specifics, everyone’s second outing is bound up in far more anxiety and pressure than the first, isn’t it? Sophomore slump and alla that.

I just let myself be. Focused on other things and trusted (hoped?) that the inspiration would push me forward just as it did before, that I would begin when I was ready. Still, I couldn’t help but worry as the days and weeks became months, and I’ve found myself opening up the file to see if I couldn’t just help things along a bit.

It is coming. Not in that lightning strike of inspiration that happened three years ago, but more like a slow burn, a match set to kindling, slowly building to a steady fire. I’m still in the kindling stage — well, still waiting for the newspaper to catch the kindling afire, actually — but I think it’s going to be okay. I’ve felt the need to carry my writing journal again, though I haven’t written much in it yet, and find myself putting together playlists again, as well. These are signs that I’m getting ready for the ideas to come, and that familiar drive to propel me once again.

thankful for: gary lightbody, earphones, dark, rainy days