The Lifespan of a Novel

I'll bet some of you thought you'd get an update on March Madness when it was over, hmm?  Well, the week kind of got away from me so here it is a bit late.

I managed 9,672 words on Molly for March Madness.  If you remember back to my last post, this is just over 4,000 shy of where I wanted to be.  While that is a sad thing, it's not as bad as it might sound.

Last year, in the midst of my medical disasters, I wrote about 9,550 words for March Madness.  I was determined to do better this year, and I did...by just over 100 words.  While this was not the margin I'd hoped for, there's another side to this story that is the much more important one.

After the 2008 March Madness, I put down the novel with an exhausted sigh...and still haven't picked it up again.  Karth's Story is currently moldering in the corner, marking the first unfinished novel I've written since possibly 1995 or even earlier.  That said, I do have plans to jump back in and finish it up at some point, but I'm avoiding it for the time being.

What's different about this most recent March Madness is that Molly has already gained three more scenes and stands at 12,340.

For me, this is a creeping pace, and it's very rough going, but there are reasons for that which do not involve failure on my part.

Molly is an experiment, a novel being written using another writer's methodology.  As you might remember, I'm taking Holly Lisle's How to Think Sideways course right now.  I've found some parts of it click into holes in my process with a smooth glide while others it is like jamming a puzzle piece into the almost appropriate opposite.

Now I'm not your typical Thinking Sideways candidate, especially on the writing side, because I already have a serious pile of finished first drafts.  This has led to a disconnect with some of her lessons where I have already developed a system that works for me, sometimes similar, sometimes taking things a step further, and sometimes completely on another plane.  None of which negates the value of the class.

As a writer, I feel I should be constantly open to exploring new methods, new avenues.  Even if I have something that works perfectly, by expanding my horizons, I may discover a way to grow as a writer that my old method was obscuring.  And stagnation is something I oppose with every atom in my body.

Besides that, in the areas where my process is still mutating, having solid advice from an experienced writer who is able to communicate her methodology in ways that allow other writers, especially newer ones, to understand is never a bad thing.

However, speaking specifically on the process of preparing a story to fly, I'm too organic for her methodology.  While hers is valuable as a companion tool to recognize which scenes are solid and which scenes are likely to end up on the cutting room floor, it does not click me into the story enough so that I am living and breathing it.  I still need to make one of my style of outlines to achieve that, something it's too late in my process to do at this point for Molly.

So, my plan now is just to struggle through and recognize I've got a serious editing project ahead of me.

Oddly, this is a good thing because my editing process is still under development.  I've completed quite a few edits I think are successful, but the process is more cumbersome than I appreciate.  If Molly's first draft came through mostly clean, it would make a poor learning manuscript for the editing phase of the class.  We learn more when things are broken and going rough than when we can just skate, whether talking writing, academics, programming, or what have you.

Ultimately, Molly's in for a hard ride, but if she can come out gleaming, not only will I have learned a thing or two, but I think she'll have a nice run at the YA market.

And stats:
New Words: 721 words
44 scenes
14 complete - 32% of the novel
30 Scenes remain
26,443 Remaining word count
38,783 Estimated length - with an average of 881 words per scene.
12,340 Current Total

Belated update? I did finally finish the last steps of But a Pretty Bauble this week. The second draft ending word count is just shy of 80k at 79,841.

1. Clan not Tribe for the dragonkind
2. Hiba's eyes
3. What is the side of power for the king?
4. How far is it to the mine?
5. Hiba needs to call her father the king sometimes
6. Make sure the dragonkind never use the term nomad for themselves.
7. Check the frequency of "then"
8. Verify no contractions in narrative?
9. Check for "was not"
10. Check for "had had"
11. Chairs in Kader's study. Either at the desk or gone from the table.

And the countdown continues. Only two scenes remain in the Coma Wedding outline.

So...I reworked one of the scene blurbs today for a reason that I think merit's mentioning.

When I returned to the United States as a kid, I lived in Virginia and Massachusetts before moving out to California where I stayed until about 3 years ago. I'm still getting used to having seasons again when almost half my life was spent without significant ones.

Coma Wedding is a (largely) contemporary novel. It's set in the southern East Coast, and it begins in March and carries through to early November.

I make a point of mentioning seasons, the turning of the leaves, the snow on the ground, the light turning dimmer, but I haven't quite absorbed them into my psyche. On one side of my outline is a little counter. I say how many days have passed in the book, and it comes up with a date based on adding to the "base date" back in March. This helps me keep track of the big holidays that would have to have some, no matter how minor, impact on the story. Things like Fourth of July doesn't slip by without someone mentioning it, without seeing a flag, or hearing a homegrown fireworks go off. Therefore, I need the calendar to make sure my characters notice costumed folks showing up on October 31st for example.

However, this also tells me what time of year the action is happening. As you might have guessed, two scenes from the end, I'm smack dab in the middle of November...in Virginia.

So two scenes ago, my heroine goes running outside with just an old gardening sweater as a coat. Some people can do that (like my kids) but to everyone else, she would be freezing. And so she is. I got the weather angle perfect there and even made it into a plot point :D.

But when I started into the next scene this morning and read over the blurb, I realized my outline failed to account for such a simple thing like season. I have them going out onto the porch in early evening for privacy...in NOVEMBER. It's not like they're going to bundle up first.

Since I didn't want to end the book two scenes prematurely by my heroine either dying of pneumonia or slipping on the icy steps and breaking her neck, I fixed it in the actual draft, but the problem in my outline has served as a timely reminder of the importance of tracking the time line closely, and of the myriad of ways weather has an impact on the story.

So what are the ways you handle weather in your stories, whether driven by reality in a contemporary setting or by the climate forces you've put into place?

And stats:

New Words: 1371 words

80 scenes

78 complete - 98% of the novel

2 Scenes remain

2686 Remaining word count

107436 Estimated length - with an average of 1343 words per scene.

104750 Current Total

Today signals the end of the first edit pass on But a Pretty Bauble.  All told, it was pretty easy, though I do have doubts about the overall, and about the ending in specific.

Am I ready to release it to critters? No.

I have a couple steps still to do:

1) I have one note of something I need to seed better in the beginning because it becomes crucial.
2) I have 7 continuity elements to check from the time it takes them to get to the mine and back to whether the dragonkind ever refer to themselves as nomads, to an overuse of the word "then."  Those will be fun to squirrel out :p.

Honestly, considering it was a raw rough draft, that's not a heck of a lot.  I added less than 5k in new text as I edited, though, and some sections were rewritten from scratch.

The oddest part of this was the outline.  Often I'll update things that change, but there were many scenes that when I read the outline blurb, I expected a continuity nightmare.  The writing didn't reflect this at all, but the difference between the writing and the blurb gave an interesting peek into just how the story had changed.

Anyway, the point is that it has moved to the next level.  It'll be interesting to see the reactions.

And stats:
Edited Today: 2,497 words
29 Chapters complete - 105% of the novel
0 Chapters remain
-3,891 Remaining word count
79,483 Current Total
75,592 Original Total
 

As a writer, I find myself gaining comfort in the oddest things. Today, I made myself cry. Not outright balling, but a tightened chest and watery eyes as the words on the page twisted my heart.

Now this is a novel I wrote. This is a novel that I know the ending to and already know that it'll come out all right.

So I have to wonder at the words affecting me, and hope that they'll affect all my readers in the same way.

I'm having some difficulty with But a Pretty Bauble. It's the kind of difficulty most writers claim to want with all their hearts, but facing the possibility in reality is nothing to write home about.

I have made some line-level changes, though there are whole pages that are "perfect," and have caught only one continuity error, a minor one. I'm swept up in the story, and this first draft is so far from raw that it's unbelievable.

Which is where I get to the problem. Have I achieved the impossible and produced an almost perfect draft (in comparison at least)? Or am I still, after letting it sit for three years, too close to the story to see the flaws?

When I weep, is it because I know how this should be, or because identifying with Hiba in this moment is impossible to avoid with what I managed to get on the page?

I'm not used to being this confident in a book, and at the same time having so little confidence :). But only time...and critters...will tell.

And stats (Note that I've passed the halfway point :D):

Edited Today: 6,301 words

16 Chapters complete - 59% of the novel

13 Chapters remain

30,773 Remaining word count

44,819 Current Total

77,493 Predicted Total

It's been a while since anyone has seen this title cross my posts, but I thought a short, fun fantasy might be just the ticket before I tackle another big one.

I went back to reread my early posts about But a Pretty Bauble, and they make me tremble for what's to come.  That said, at least this time I can feel the shape of the novel, the weight of it pressing against my hands.

So far I have edited the first four chapters.  The main characters have all been introduced, the main conflict and major secondary conflict have floated across the page...umm, make that two secondary conflicts...and I'm certainly not hating it.  I think this is a novel I'll require outside feedback on before I can tell if it works or not.  We'll see.  I may be able to see major issues as I get further in.

At one-seventh of the way, though, I'm tweaking, clarifying, and cleaning up some truly horrendous NaNo prose, but seeing no major changes at all.  Oh, and I am faithfully murdering sentence-level darlings that still resonate, but just don't work with what surrounds them.

Whatever happens, I think it'll be a fun excursion from my normally more complicated texts.

And stats:
Edited Today: 4,644 words
4 Chapters complete - 14% of the novel
46 Chapters remain
64,714 Remaining word count
10,878 Current Total
76,253 Predicted Total
 

I have a confession to make.

I have been hiding from this blog. Not that you might have noticed because my postings have always been rather spotty ever since I started it, but those are the facts.

Thanks to a surgical complication, I spent most of 2008 seriously ill and dosed on half a dozen medications including high-level narcotics for pain. This ended with a total hysterectomy last September (once they finally figured out what was going on with me. I'm so irradiated I probably glow in the dark :D).

Why is this relevant?

Since the surgery and freedom from constant severe pain, I've been muzzy headed. Now I tried my darnedest to accept, having been sick for a year, that it might take up to that long before I was back to normal, but it hasn't been fun. On the other hand, my levels of frustration and upset at this fact were just as vague even though the implications were to eliminate the ability to multitask and reduce me to almost no spontaneous creative energy. I've been "drifting" through everything, unable to remember consistently, and unable to get stressed and worried about it even as unnatural as that may seem.

This is why I've been ducking my "writing" blog. It's not writer's block, exactly. It's more like writer's haze. But either way, it has been worth more than my energy to talk about what's going on here. Among other things, though I drag my characters through horror, they always come out of it. I believe in happy endings...or at least ones with the possibility of being better. So I couldn't talk about this until I had something hopeful to say.

And here it is: hormones actually affect the ability to think. And not, as my dear friend Val said, only in a negative way despite the trend of teenagers and thought.

I'm only on day two of having a brain, so I can't be totally conclusive, but here's my pattern, and it certainly seems pattern-like.

After the surgery, I was put on a hormone patch (hormone replacement therapy is automatic for surgical menopause because your body isn't ready for the transition).

That level was too low, shown by hot flashes and the need for too much sleep, so they upped the dose.

The new dose seemed to resolve the two main issues and left me to recover from the surgery and illness (which I credited with the slowly reducing memory issues and creative haze).

But the patch proved incompatible with an active live style, the glue failing to hold up to perspiration :p.

So I requested a pill. They put me on a lower dose because pills don't have as many levels and you want to be on the lowest effective dose.

Now, with my recovered brain, I can see that my ability to cognate reduced back to the early surgical recovery days. I couldn't even program, my typing speed dropped because I couldn't think of what to type, my vocabulary reduced, my ability to spell went out the window, and I couldn't find the energy to care about typos. (Fun as I'm preparing to teach an intensive class, eh?)

So when the sample was starting to run out, in a rare flash of inspiration, I asked my doc if the hormones can affect thought. She didn't know for sure, but was willing to give me a higher dose to see. This dose is higher even than I was on the patch.

And I just wrote over 1k in about an hour on Coma Wedding!

You might think this is nothing much considering that I managed NaNo before, but first of all that was on the higher level patch and second of all it was a real struggle with rare flashes of creativity.

So, for those of you on hormone therapy for whatever reason, if you're experiencing writer's haze, you might ask to try a higher level...or add more soy to your diet depending.

I know there will still be aspects that I'll have to adjust to, but it is so much easier now that I don't have to fight through dense fog to articulate a single word. I noticed the effect on my writing most dramatically, but it impacted everything from coding to having a face-to-face conversation. While life sure was interesting, it was the Chinese curse interesting :p.

Who knows...you might see more posts about what I'm doing now that I'm past this :).