I broke 10,000 . . .

. . . and it's only day four.  Not bad.

I have a class tomorrow night, so I prolly won't get as much done.  But I've got a comfortable lead to fall back on.

And I can sleep a little more soundly tonight, I think, for other reasons . . . 

Why, Yes, I Am Crazy . . .

I'd initially planned to sit out this year's NaNoWriMo, on the basis that I had a novel to revise and a number of other projects on my plate.

Suffice to say that one such project got removed from my plate and left enough room that I figured, what the heck, let's give it another go.

My current tally is over eight thousand words.  And, to make it even more ridiculous, it is a sequel to the very first NaNoWriMo I successfully completed.  So next year, I'll pretty much be stuck writing something new.

I am enjoying it immensely.  It is light, fluffy, self-indulgent, utterly unpublishable and exactly what I needed to be doing.

So the next month or so will be taken up with that.  I'll poke here periodically and let y'all know how it's coming along.

Wrinkles

So yesterday evening, I decided to save a few ounces of gasoline and walk to the grocery store instead of driving.  It was a longish walk, but not impossible, and it gave me loads of time to think.

And as I walked, I came up with two ways to rewrite two crucial scenes that made so much more sense.  I got so excited, I went ahead and plowed into one of those scenes and wound up staying well past my bedtime hashing it out.

I'm still figuring it out exactly.  But one of the downsides is that all the subsequent scenes that refer back to that moment now have to be rewritten.  The little wrinkle it leaves has to be pushed all the way to the edge of the table.

I think before I tackle the other rewritten scene, I should read through to keep track of what other parts refer back to it, so I'll know where I need to smooth things once I know what it's been changed to.

But it's starting to get addictive again, which is a good thing at this point, I think.

The Wrong End

Once in a while, when I mention that I've finished a manuscript and I'm in the middle of revising it with the intent to submit it for publication, someone will suggest something along the lines of "Well, if that doesn't work out, you can always self-publish, right?"

I sort of smile and shake my head when people say that.

I think the digital printing revolution is a marvelous thing, I truly do.  My parents actually created their own small press, using Lulu as a printer, so my mother could create a simple and inexpensive textbook for clinical nursing instruction. And, of course, my years in the poetry scene have introduced me to many a traveling poet selling self-published chapbooks in order to have enough gas money to make it to the next gig.

But for novel-length fiction, self-publishing is doing the hard work from the wrong end.

My intent is to do the hard work at the front end--at grinding and polishing this chunk of prose into something that makes it to #14 on the Slushkiller list.  (At this point, I think I'm at least at #7 but probably no higher than #9.)  Because once I reach that point, I can relax.  The contract is signed, the book is printed, the books go to bookstores and (I sincerely hope) people buy them.

But if I take what I have, take it to Lulu, slap a cover on it and say "Yay!  I'm published!" then the hard work has just begun.  Then I have to find a million ways to wave this book in people's faces and say "Hey!  Ya wanna buy a book?"  And believe me, that's a hell of a lot harder to do when people can't go to your local Borders or B&N and pick the thing up, thumb through it, think "hm, this looks interesting" and put down the cash for it.

Yes, there are self-publishing success stories of people who have managed bookstore placement by acting like a small press.  Here's the thing--they weren't fiction.  When you're dealing with information, it's easier to determine if the book will be successful because it can be measured in how useful the information is.  When you're dealing with art, it's much harder to quantify.  And, the fact of the matter is, there is already a metric ton of self-published novels by people who were too impatient to polish their work to the level it needed, so the moment a bookstore buyer sees self-published fiction, the assumption is that it will be crap.  And it's a pretty safe bet.

I have no interest in having to struggle to reassure people that, really, it's not as bad as the pixelated cover might imply.  Frankly, I don't want to have to reassure people of anything--I want them to buy my books in such a way that I never see them do it.

And, yes, that's ambitious.  Which is why I understand I have a lot of work left to do.

More Scenes to Murder

I haven't had much time to work on the manuscript, because several other projects are demanding my attention, but the thing was in a pile on the floor for several days after the last time I did some work on it and I just tidied the stack a bit and put it in the bag I've been keeping it in.

As I was going through the pages, I came across a note I'd scribbled at the bottom margin of a certain scene.

Is there a point to any of this?

It looks like I have many more darlings to kill. My plan of action at this point it to chop out the meandery and cringeworthy bits and then start adding all the details I glossed over in my race to the November 30 finish line.  Subtraction before addition.  We'll see how it works.

Taking the Gun Down

If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act. --Anton Chekhov

The term Chekhov's Gun has its own Wikipedia entry, as I discovered as I was trying to track down the exact quote. (As it turns out, there is no exact quote, since Chekhov reiterated the point in a number of places--I used the quote from the footnotes to the entry.)

The point being, if you introduce an element into a story, then you need to follow up on it. I just changed two lines in the novel, simply because they hinted at something that ended up not happening. At the time I wrote it, things were still in an open-ended state of flux and it was a distinct possibility, but ultimately there was no need for it to happen and it didn't.

So I cut the line, replaced it with something that emphasized what did end up happening and I could feel the whole thing weaving together a little more tightly.

There are still a lot of loose spots that need to be tightened (or cut!) but I'm feeling more confident with each change that this thing could indeed be shaped into something worth reading.

I've also been going through the slightly embarrassing process of what might be termed de-Sue-ifying my narrator. There are, I must confess, a few too many times where she is reassured of her wonderfulness in the course of the draft. Old fanfic habits die hard, I suppose. So I'm paring those down and trying to make people's reactions more like those of actual human beings (where applicable.) Having seen the horrors that result when the author identifies a little too closely with the narrator, I know I have to watch myself.

I also have to be careful I don't end up spending more time blogging about the process than actually engaging in it.

Killing a Darling

I just removed an extended scene from the manuscript that dropped the wordcount by some five thousand words.

And you know what?  The two points between fit together seamlessly.

There are some lovely bits in there, and I'll miss them, but I can always go back to the raw draft and revisit them if I really feel the need to.  But when I read over the pages, I realized that as much fun as it was to write and as clever as some of the lines were, the entire sequence served no purpose except to kill time.  Which is great when you're trying to hit the 50,000 mark by the end of November, but not so great when you're trying to shape it into something compelling.

There's one bit I may have to extract and insert elsewhere.  I haven't decided yet.

Right now, a lot of my energies are being taken up with some other projects of mine, but it felt good to sneak in and do that one simple thing.