I’ve been working on the beginning of La Cause, trying to find my way into the story. I’ve stepped back to the outline again, and it’s at last let me past the first roadblock. My stories seem to wander down cul de sacs and get turned around, and it can be very hard to find where the wrong turning took place. It may be that the turn just was made too soon and there are no wrong parts, just things in the wrong order. Hard to figure that out sometimes without tearing things apart first.

I’ve made a bit more progress on SanClare Scarlet, but I’m backburnering that for now so I can focus on La Cause. The stories are just too different to try to work on at the same time, especially with La Cause still being new territory I’m discovering. It’s hard not to work on the next SanClare book, though. I love those characters very much and want to get them to their next adventure. If only I wrote faster…

I have a new short story done I need to go back and edit. I rarely write short, so this was a fun change of pace. Now that I’ve let it sit for a bit, it should be ready to be reviewed with clear eyes. I hope I still like it as much during the editing as I did during the writing.

Denvention is less than a month away now. I need a vacation and some quality time with friends and fen. Can’t wait. I’ll have just had a birthday, so if anyone wants to bring me a present, feel free ;)

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I’ve cleared 10K tonight on SanClare Scarlet, take 2.03. I’d write more but I have company coming tomorrow, and I’m already up two hours later than I’d planned. 

This is good. I think this is good. I think I’ve found the threads that will weave this story together at last. I hate feeling like I’ve said that over and over, but I’ve been here before, slashing through the underbrush with my dull machete. Eventually I find the trail.

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I’ve been blogging away on non-writing things over at BlogNoir, but poor little Complete Fabrications has been neglected for almost two months!  I haven’t had too much to report. Transitions do really cause me lots of problems no matter how well I plot out things in advance or outline.  I get down to the big change from one part of the story to the next, and I always have to work my way through it carefully, trying on and tossing out various approaches. 

I made good progress this weekend, pushing through the point in the story where I need to shift from how things start to how they will no continue.  I like it.  I’m happy.  The characters are all miserable, but my three main POVers are all together in the same room at last and the part where I reunite two of the characters (a reunion that’s been giving me fits because it is very delicate and important for the rest of the book) fell into place at last, and it hits exactly the notes I need and want it to hit.

And so, chapter four ends with the word “treason.”

I bought my chair and ottoman last year?  Before this time last year?  Anyway, a while ago, and this has been the entirety of my sittin' furniture ever since (well, there is the very cushy camp chair, but it doesn't count).  With looming parental Christmas visit, however, something Had To Be Done!

So I bought a chaise.  I've wanted one but hadn't stirred myself to shop for one before now due to general cussedness.  I tried online shopping, but none of the chaise's I liked would have been delivered in time, so on a whim and after basically deciding to make do and sorry Mom and Dad, I went to a furniture store in the same strip mall as my gym and lo and behold -- really cool chaise!  Not a bad price AT ALL.  And when can they deliver it?  The Monday following the Wednesday when I bought it.  Yes, please!

I'll post a picture maybe tomorrow if the light is better.  It's a lovely red called cinnabar which looks great with my gold chair and came with a really pretty big pillow that also goes with the chair.  I've spent most of the evening sitting on it and took the laptop in to relax and write -- and wrote 500 words on SanClare Scarlet!  Score!

Chapter four was being so difficult, I skipped ahead to what would happen immediately after I got through the hospital bit.  Oddly enough, considering I only vaguely knew where I was going after the hospital bit, it worked.  Now I’m back to chapter four and filling in the transition.  It reminds me of that scene in Dead Poets’ Society (won’t quote since I only ever saw the movie in the theater)–in essence, stand on the desk to get a different view of the same old scene.  Change your perspective, and suddenly, it’s all much clearer.  I don’t know why, but it works.

First readers still approve!  I’m into chapter four now after some minor, improving edits suggested by said first readers and just wrestled through another of those transition scenes that always bog me down.  When I was first writing, I had the habit of just ending scenes abruptly and moving to the next important moment or scene, skipping over the Very Irksome Transitions.  Of course, this made things very choppy, so I cannot recommend it.  These days, I prefer to deal with the VITs as I go rather than doing a full “smooth crappy transitions” revision run-through later.

 But yay.

Also, Nano looks like a go, so I need to review my notes for La Cause and make sure I’m read to Do This Thing!  I tried in 2005 and didn’t have a good enough grasp of my idea so gave up.  I used 2006’s Nano month to work on major revisions to SanClare Black (didn’t quite make my personal target but came very close; didn’t count for “real” Nano in any case), but this year, I’m going to try to do it correctly and stick to it.  Just ’cause I think it might be a fun and liberating way to get a really bloody awful first draft of La Cause done.  I’m already telling myself to just write whatever including “this part sucks; fix later” and then DO the VITs and move on, always aiming for the final 50k target.

That’s my idea, at least.  We shall see.

I just finished chapter three of SanClare Scarlet (2.0), and I still really like the new direction, but it’s off to the first readers again for a gut-check.  As I said when I started this draft, I give up on word counters, but I’m just shy of 12K which, considering SanClare Black clocks in at about 125K, puts me at about 10%.  So.  That’s good.

Nanowrimo starts in a couple of weeks, and I think I’ll put making major progress on the book my Nano project.  Either that, or I’ll do La Cause as my Nano project–and idea I like rather better since it needs the jump-start more.  Hrm… Well, we’ll see how I feel closer to time.

Of course, it doesn’t help that I’ll be out of town the first few days of November at World Fantasy about which I am EXTREMELY excited.  But I’ve never been before, so–any advice anyone?  Stuff I should know? Stuff I should do? Stuff I should pack?

In very early drafts, SanClare Black was third-person omniscient.  This was entirely an accident because I didn’t have a firm grasp on my POV options at the time and hadn’t thought about what would work best for the story.  That all got sorted in subsequent drafts and it ended up very firmly third-person limited with only two POV characters.

And that was the initial plan for SanClare Scarlet, too, but after abortive first draft, I’ve realized I need more voices in this book. So it’ll still be 3rd/limited but there will be more characters doing the looking.  So far, I’ve written three.  I have at least two more in mind.  The main character will still carry the bulk of the POV as he did in SanClare Black.

Anyway, it’s fun to sort these things out in advance this time around.

Two of the things I didn’t do in first draft which I knew immediately upon realizing I’d written myself toward a cliff and therefore had to do in second draft have now been done.  I had avoided doing these obvious, character-true things for purely superficial reasons.  I didn’t want to be rid of these trappings, but the character did and to not have him take advantage of the very first opportunity to make these changes to his own life skewed everything that I’d written after.

Which gets us back to “murdering darlings.”  No matter how much I may love certain scenes or moments or trappings or notes in a story, if they overstay their welcome, even if they are small things, they can sour things.  Because then I have to rationalize why they’re still there and put those thoughts and words into the characters’ mouths, trying to explain away why the issue hasn’t been dealt with or why the thing hasn’t been discarded or why the argument hasn’t been fought.

And that’s the most useful thing I’ve found to do when plotting or writing: Just ask why.  Why is he doing that?  Why isn’t he doing that?  Why would she say that?  Why wouldn’t she just do this obvious thing?  These two little things the main character didn’t deal with in first draft turned into major roadblocks and all because I hadn’t pinned myself to the wall and demanded honest answers to “why doesn’t he do this now?” 

The answer turned out to be, “well, he does after all.”  And now the whole story is different.  And, I think, much better.

I give up on word counters.  After a good amount of progress, I had First Reader review, and I reviewed, and via her notes and my own sinking feelings, I realized the story had gone off the rails and was heading for a ditch.  Not a total loss — lots of good bits and pieces I can salvage — but the framework was just wrong, a relic of a prior draft of the story that didn’t reflect enough of the changes made in part one.  I’ve restarted and have New Chapter One almost done, and it’s very different and that sort of zingy, tingly right you get when you sing the perfect note.   It, too, will be revised and reviewed and tweaked and judged, but I know I’m on the right path now and, though that kills prior word-count, I also don’t care. 

‘Cause now I’m really excited about where this is going.

And we’re back to the word-counting!  Tweakage took longer than planned.  Also, I blame Inda by Sherwood Smith.  Damn wonderful, completely engrossing, life-taking-over book.

Doing a bit of tweaking before moving on with SanClare Scarlet.  Once the tweaks are done, I’m thinking I’ll go back to La Cause and focus on getting some serious wordage done on it “for reals.”  In the meantime, I think the weather’s getting to me — I like it cool but it keeps vacillating between autumnal and dog-day and it’s wearing me down.

 

Ye Agent asked a couple of questions on his blog about process.  Here they are with my answers:

What is your favorite part of the writing process?
I don’t have a favorite part. I like pretty much every part of the process. After about the zillioneth round of editing the same thing, I can get pretty sick of it, but otherwise, I do like it all.

What do you do when you know you’ve done something wrong and haven’t yet figured out what the source of that wrongness is?
That depends on the work in progress. If it’s something I’m steeped in (such as the SanClare books), I almost never get that stuck. I go back and reread, and the bit that’s gumming up the flow usually reveals itself. With a newer piece (such as La Cause Sociériste), I generally go back to the plotting and look for the problem there. If I get really hung up (short stories — not my forte), I hand it to my First Readers to diagnose.

What would your answers be?

Back to SanClare Scarlet tonight.  My leapfrog plotting on La Cause is still being mentally revised.  I need to nail down the ending which is vaguely defined at the moment, and I need to sort out which of several candidates will win the fight for Central Plot.  I did find a picture in a magazine this weekend that the moment I saw it, I thought, “That’s Sophie-Katrine!”  And the looks of this model led me to figure out more about Sophie’s mysterious (but not dead and in-the-story somewhat) mother which is helping frame the whole backstory in a new and fun way. 

In the meantime, conflict enters the father/son-esque relationship of two of the main characters in SanClare Scarlet.  People aren’t speaking to each other.  Someone is justifiably angry about secrets kept from him.  And they haven’t even reached the capital yet!

Tonight went much better than the whole entire weekend has gone, wordage-wise.  I’ve been off and feeling overtired and distracted, but after Walker Bros. French Toast Therapy for dinner, I think everything’s going to be all right ;)

I reviewed my progress and read over my outline and realized I’d run through all the plot I’d worked out during my first leapfrog session (thank you, again, Linnea Sinclair), so tonight was spent working out the next hop.

I’m in the middle of chapter six, and this hop should take me to the end of the first third of the book.  I should adjust my counter as this book is much more likely to be about 120K rather than the 90K I’ve been saying on the counter [but the percentage goes up so fast when I’m only aiming at 90K].

Since there is a lot of existing content from my first draft well before I split the story into thirds (of which SanClare Scarlet is the second), reworking it is a bit tricky.  I can’t just follow it through because things have changed and need adjusted.  There’s some stuff that should just go away, no matter how I like it.  And then there’s some stuff that’s going to be even more useful this time around.

It’s funny to read through this very rough draft — there are parts of it where I had a *terrible* time maintaining POV, mostly because I wasn’t paying enough attention to that — I was just throwing all the ideas, words, etc., at the page as fast as I could type.  But it’s funny to read my usual third person limited turn into third person omniscient with no warning.  I point and laugh at myself, clean it up, and move on.

Maybe I should figure out how to do one of those sidebar counters.  But!  Until then — Whoo-hoo! Almost 20%!  This is a rough section that’s going to need some work, so much more slow-going… 

I actually cut a lot out of this existing part and I still made some blazin’ progress.  Some of what I cut includes info that needs to get put in somewhere here very soon in a different configuration, so that might slow me down a little.

Things are going well, but we’re still pretty far away from getting everyone to Court where I can start having all kinds of Fun with Intrigue! On the journey there, however, a legend is building which will complicate matters muchly once Court is reached :)

Made not as much progress as I’d hoped today — intentions thwarted by lunch plans going awry, post-storm/weekend tourist traffic in downtown Chicago, and just… y’know… stuff.  But still.  10%!  Woot.