Oh bother

Last day before nano... and I'm seriously considering changing my novel. Gah! "Why don't you do me a favor and shoot me." My novels keep getting tougher and tougher, in subject matter and in depth. Now, this is a good thing, we're supposed to take on more. How else do we grow as writers without reaching farther? But I have doubts about whether anyone will want to read this one except me.

Oh crud

Nano starts in five days.

Oddly, the score to Waterworld has been great outlining music for this novel. I say odd because that's not a score I would have picked as appropriate just off the shelf.

Am having trouble with setting for this book. I cannot get a handle on it. Okay, that's not exactly true. The POW camp is very clear in my mind, as is this one particular street in the city (not sure why that exact street or what I'll use it for, but I can see it!). It's the later action... it has no locale yet. Very unusual, as the locations are part of the foundation of a story for me.

Dang. Read the top of this entry and realized again how little time remains before I actually have to start cranking out words. Lots of 'em.

Eenie Meenie Miney, Moe?

Okay, read all notes on both potential nano novels, still vacillating, but now swinging back to POW. Had the right piece of the puzzle fall in my lap today. Watching/listening to a commentary on the 1948 film "Act of Violence" (excellent movie, btw), and the commentator began discussing identity, how it related to the two main characters, the noir genre, and the director. Takes something that simple sometimes, but I realized that's what a big part of POW is about: identity. I just couldn't label it until today, but now that I have, the novel just became much clearer in my mind. This pleases me greatly.

I've started compiling lists of names for it. It's stupid, but lack of the right names can be one of those annoying things that can really stall a project. And during nano is not the time to stall over something dumb. I'm not talking the main characters -- they're all already named. I'm talking the extras and secondary characters. But calling characters Jack 1, Jack 2, Jack 3 just doesn't cut it. Hence the name lists made up in advance. Need a character name? Just open the file, scan until something jumps out at me. Done. And in a fantasy novel, the flavor and sound of the names is important. Average novel potential name list for me needs 50-100 names in it. I won't use even half that, but I've got to have the selection at hand. Even that many's sometimes not enough, and I'll have to fish around elsewhere to supplement the list. Place names too... usually need a lengthy list of place names to choose from.

Draft!

Ahhhhh, sigh. The bliss of finishing something. It may be first draft, but it's still done and ready for editing. Some plot points and characters don't quite follow smoothly yet, as I wrote it out of order, but it's all there, all 10,000 words.

And now! Now, that it's out of my brain, I can start some serious nano thinking. Once again... too many projects and none of them screaming for attention. They're all exciting, I want them all done, but that extra 'write-me-now' spark is proving elusive. Leaning now, not towards the P.O.W. novel, but a YA book that was supposed to be last year's nano book, only Variance booted it aside. Gonna take a couple nights, review the notes on each book, see which one grabs me.

Dances with Fish

Wild... I was looking for this short story I have started, and as I was hunting through the files, I found one with a rather complex little SF short story outlined within. Characters, the world, everything. And I had no memory of it at all. I vaguely remember a couple things in there, but the bulk of it is brand new to me now. Wonder if that will make it easier or harder to write?

Not an auspicious beginning

Okay, so on my birthday, I wished for one thing. That my muse come back from whatever extended holiday he's been enjoying and work with me, damn it. In turn, I promised focus and industrious work on whatever he gave me.

So, big (BIG!) note to self: 'Dear Deb -- when making such promises about writing, do not -- repeat, do not start off your first writing night by watching any movie where Aldo Ray goes shirtless. It renders your brain (and most of the rest of you) to mush, from which it takes hours to recover. And little to no writing will get done, and you will just get pointlessly angry. Reading. Reading's the ticket. Thanks.'

Discipline? What's that?

Discipline looks a lot better when someone else is wearing the uniform.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I should be working on that novel. But I'm not. I'm working on the other novel. I'm unpacking boxes (got about 8 taken care of). I'm finishing off the contact paper in the last cupboard of the kitchen. I'm watching "L.A. Confidential" and wondering how I'd recast it if I'd been making it in the 50's. I'm cooking twice-baked potatoes for the gang. I'm sorting crud that's not mine in the garage. Oh yeah. And I'm working on the other novel. Because I can't get my brain into DTD mode. Need to watch "Where the Sidewalk Ends." Doesn't matter what mood I'm in. This is business. This is work. This is discipline.

Which I don't seem to have today. Sigh.

Getting back in the game

It helps to spend an hour figuring out your finances for the rest of the year, and realizing you will be worse than flat broke.

So. It will help, even a little bit, to start earning money for my writing again. So, I did a quickie look-see of my short stories and found all except one in need of serious rewrites. Cruised Ralan to see who takes reprints, found one that may be a nice fit, and sent it right off.

Tonight, I will do a serious evaluation of the various drafts of stories and see which ones are actually worthy of being sent out. My current goal is to work on shorts through the end of this weekend, complete and send out as many as possible. After that... it's on to the big stuff. DTD. No excuse not to finish the final draft and get it out the door.

And this means nano's out this year. The last thing I need to do right now is start a new novel, when I've got three completed and just in need of revisions. When those are revised and out the door, then I can both finish Variance and start the new one. Not until then.

And that's also the end of my fanfic run... I was just revving up on MM too, but I can't spend time on it any more. Not right now. Maybe after I get some more stuff out the door, I can slip in a few hours a week on it.

Crowd scenes

My conscious brain is a very visual thing, and it can hang onto a lot at once when I'm seeing a story unfold in my eye. It's like Cinemascope. Except you can't write in Cinemascope. You can write broadly or narrowly, but you only have sentences chained together to form your vision. Each sentence feels like a spotlight, even when you're writing broadly, and you have to point the spotlight correctly or the scene goes astray.

I've got eleven major characters with speaking roles crammed in one room with forty other extras and a band. It's the scene that sets up the entire rest of the story, and everybody has to be kept straight. If I had to think about what I want to accomplish in this scene, try to plan it out, use my conscious visual brain, I'd go nuts. This is where I rely on the subconscious's in-the-can version playing in my head. Which, yes, is different from what my conscious brain sees. My conscious brain sees the sets and the cameramen and actors and lights and marks on the floor. It wants to shout orders and play director. The subconscious shows me the 'finished' product. It already has the camera angles, the focus, and I trust it to be what the story needs.

And, of course, there's always the blessing of re-writes, which are usually not so much re-envisioning the scene, but refining how I describe what the subconscious shows me. It's odd to me sometimes how much the physical act of writing a story has little to do with the words. That probably makes little sense, even to other writers, but it's how I work.

Marquee change. Again.

More mental reshuffling on P.O.W. Now the good guy (the lt.) has been re-cast. (as opposed to the good bad guy (the maj.) who changed shape a couple weeks ago.) I was picturing a John Kerr/Joe Cable type for the lieutenant. Young, fresh, rather naive, though still a good soldier. Nope, that's not working out at all. Watching the movie "Battle Cry" last night, I realized that was not the type I wanted. I wanted young, fresh, reluctant, and a good soldier. Someone who doesn't say "I don't know if I can do that but I'll try because I have to" and go in and do the job, but someone who says "sure, I could do that, but I don't want to, so leave me alone." Much better foil for the major, and then when The Scene comes... it's even more devastating. And that makes me very happy. It also now makes me excited about both roles, whereas the maj. was stealing all the thunder before. Now the lt. is his match.

Ahhhh, I love writing.

And oddly, the Aldo Ray character in the movie that inspired this switch is not at all like the lt. in my story. He's not reluctant, isn't a loner (I sort of got a William Holden/Stalag 17 attitude imposed on him, LOL!) . It's just that I can see him being the way I want in my story. That's usually the way it goes. Someone grabs my attention and I think, that's nice, but what if he was like this instead? And the new character is off and running.

Did anyone see where August went?

I love it when stories refuse to obey me. Okay, let me rephrase. I love it when there's actually nothing written yet, and the story is still in formation phase. When reworking it doesn't involve trashing 100 pages of story and starting over.

My new novel (working title of P.O.W. cuz I gotta call it something), which I do believe I will give a shot at for nano this year, is in that lovely formation phase where there is nothing but beautiful discovery after beautiful discovery. The whole thing kicked off from a what-if branch off of an unsatisfying tv episode I watched, and it's now so far removed from that, I can barely recognize its origins. But the casting of the lead was one of the driving forces. Only he won't stay who I want him to be. The lead has turned into a totally different guy, and the guy I wanted has taken over the other lead character.

You know, the bad guy.

Who now that I watch my subconscious shift and change this story around, know that this takeover means I've got my heroes mixed up. Again. Must be another sign you're reading one of my books. Yeah, the characters aren't who you think they are. Didn't realize quite how grey I was on the borders of good and evil where my lead men are concerned. Okay, I knew, I've always known, but it still surprises me when it pops up in a book. Weird how I can still be surprised by such things.

Some serious blog neglect

Boy, I haven't been around here lately. Blame it on buying a new house, trying to sell the old one. Really did a number on my creative brain cells. They did not want to function. They're coming around now that escrow has closed, the move is pending, and the next phase of my life is about to begin.

So I was catching up on Storytellers Unplugged, and the following section from an essay by Brian Knight caught my eye:

(rant alert – most of the so-called envelope-pushers who self publish their work via Publish America and Lulu like to call their abuse of the rules of grammar Experimental, but leaving the “Speech Tags” out of the dialog in your novel isn’t innovative, it’s just dumb).

Which quite cracked me up because I know at least one writer who that would apply to. The annoyingly conspicuous absence of dialogue tags, that is.

Rather interested to see what project I get into as soon as the move is out of the way and I'm settled. Revisions on DTD? Or starting the new POW novel? Or should I save the latter for Nano, even though I promised myself I wasn't going to do nano this year. And I'm curious to see how revisions go on DTD, because when I started it, I had specific actors in mind to play the leads (not that "casting" lasts beyond the conceptual period -- the characters rapidly come into their own shortly into the writing process). But now, one of those could/should be played by someone else, and I'm quite curious to know if that will subconsciously color the re-write a bit, and if so, how.