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Editorial Anonymous: Countdown: A Conversation with Deborah Wiles

In revision I throw out great wads of the plot (usually the entire second half), but as I do that, the light begins to dawn, I begin to understand who my characters are and what their motivations are, which inform their actions and reactions, and as these things begin coming clear, I go back and layer in foreshadowing and tension.

This novel sounds fascinating--no, I haven't read it, or anything by Deborah Wiles. But this paragraph struck me because it echoes my experience of writing a 129,000 word YA novel and then cutting out 48,000 words of it.

All that stuff I cut? It was useful. It was useful to me because it was time I spent with my protagonist. I didn't consciously think about characterization as much as I'd like to in the future--and yeah, I'd prefer not to chop a third off of my next MS--but in the process of writing all those scenes I was unconsciously working on characterization, if nothing else.

I'm tired of the way people laugh when I tell them my first draft clocked in at 129,000 words. Hello, it's not like I was ignorant of the expectations. I'd already written a YA trunk novel of 90,000 words. And yeah, writing long is something I've always wrestled with.

But I ain't sorry.

The time I spent writing that huge first draft was time well spent. Time getting to know my characters and my setting and the living situations of all the players. Some people walk around the mall holding imaginary conversations with their characters. Some people go off and do firsthand research, living as a migrant worker or whatever. I wrote.

No shame in that.

Where do I begin . . .

I keep thinking of things I should post to my blog, and then I never seem to get around to it. Then when I finally get time, I sit in front of the computer trying to remember what amazing insight I had and coming up empty.

I've been getting a lot of great revision done on Vanishing Act lately. I've crossed another milestone on the way down, and now I'm at 82,000 words. I really am finding that now, months later, it's easier for me to make some of the tough changes.

You're not supposed to blog about this, because allegedly agents and/or editor sometimes look up the blogs of people they're considering, and you don't want them to know how long you've been looking for or how many people have rejected you, but I sent out my very first query/partial for Vanishing Act Friday. (I guess if a really long time passes without a bite, I can always come back and edit this line out.)

While I was out, I also mailed off submissions for a writing contest for me and for my wife. There's kind of a funny story, there. I wanted to keep working on making my manuscript better for as long as I could, right up until the deadline. There were some specific searches I wanted to get done for junk words, passive constructions, and so forth. Like any metropolitan area I'm familiar with, we have a late night post office at the airport, where I tend to run things when I'm up against a postmark deadline. So I went into Friday night fully intending to get our submissions to the post office some time between 11 pm and midnight. I worked backward, figuring I should try to get there by eleven, to leave some cushion. I figured on a half hour of driving, so I should leave home by 10:30. I figured I'd give myself an hour to do all the printing and formatting (that may seem like a lot, but the contest had very specific guidelines. Names removed from manuscripts, a thirty word bio, a thirty word logline, three copies of the first fifty pages, and so forth. So I figured I wanted to be done trying to revise by nine or nine-thirty.

Well I'm not sure where the time went--I think putting the manuscript together took even longer than I allowed for--but I ended up leaving the house at 11:30. I got to the post office at 11:56, and ran in with my four packages. There wasn't a deadline really on the agent submission, so I did the three contest submissions first. As each postmarked stamp came out of the machine, I checked the date and did a little dance for each one that came out April 30th. When I finally did the one for the agent submission, it came out postmarked May 1.

O_O

Okay, maybe that was a bit closer than I intended to cut it.

Then again, I have friends who congratulate you if you get a tax refund of zero, because that means you avoided giving the government any more of your money than they were entitled to. I suppose you could call this a win, because I literally got every last possible second of revision in on these contest entries before I sent them out.

Breakthroughs and too much to think about

I often find myself thinking, in the course of a day or week, "Gee, I should blog about that." Then the next time I'm getting ready to post an entry I feel like I've had so many of those moments they've either jostled each other out of my head, or I feel too fatigued to even do them justice. My blog posts tend to be long anyway . . . I don't want to make them longer!

I just finished the first draft of a short story I've been wrestling with, it seems, forever. I--seriously--began and abandoned it four separate times before I finally got a story I could live with. The first time I got 542 words in before I figured out it was crap. The second time, 3694. Third attempt: 430. Fourth attempt, a whopping 4672 before I figured out it was going nowhere. And finally, over the course of just three days, I pulled together a draft I'm happy with at 5132. Hopefully when I revise I'll get it under that magic 5000 barrier.

But first, 9338 words of crap.

You don't go through that much failure without learning a thing or two. At least, I hope not. Let's see if I can articulate what I did learn. I set out with the hope of taking some of the lessons I'd been learning over the past year and coming up with something shiny and new that showcased my progress. Despite that, I found myself writing dull stories about unlikeable people. (Part of my problem is that I think stories should be entertaining first, but I also want mine to be meaningful. It's challenging to pull off both.)

Then I came up with a premise that had a lot more potential, but my next attempt suffered, I eventually concluded, from being too contrived.

I think this is a new realization for me. I tend to have a pretty good idea of where I want a story to start and where I want it to end, and sometimes I abuse the crap out of it to get it from point A to point B. It was as though I were working with a living thing that was resisting the contortions I was trying to put it through. I've talked about killing darlings in the forms of phrases and scenes, and yeah, that's hard for me, but one of the lessons I think I needed to learn here was to kill my darlings among the plot points too. There were some arbitrary things I was cramming in my story that were making it not work, and I was getting writer's block trying to force myself to write something broken.

When I finally threw my story away for the fourth time, kept the premise I liked, but totally reimagined what I was going to do with it, I immediately came up with something more streamlined. For anybody into Swain, I wrote it in scenes, and pretty much glossed over the sequels to keep it short. I had the disaster at the end of each scene immediately pose the new goal, and no angsty deliberation on what to do next. Maybe it's just a fluke, but I've read successful short story writers talk about the point where they got it, where they figured out what kinds of ideas could be fleshed out in five thousand words and which could not. When I came up with that sequence of scenes, I knew I had it. I knew I could write it, and I knew I could write it in about twenty pages. Nothing seemed too contrived, and I was eager to sit down and get it all down. All that trying and failing, and the final story took three days to type.

So maybe I've had my a ha moment, at least in that regard. Only time will tell.

I also found, as I wrote this story, that each time I started to go off in a boring or meandering direction, I figured it out within a paragraph or too. It may be that I've written so much crap that I've finally become attuned to what JoeCrap smells like, and I'm getting better at recognizing it before I generate too much of it. God I hope so.

My wife doesn't understand why I've been focusing on short stories, when I have a completed novel ms, and when there's no money in short stories. Here's why: my biggest problem as a writer, I think, is my verbosity. I need to learn to write tighter, not for the sake of my shorts, but for the sake of my novels. Just because you've got a hundred thousand words or more to play with doesn't mean anybody wants to read a bunch of stuff that doesn't move the story, that you were too undisciplined as a writer to leave out. I'm focusing on short stories because if I can master the art of getting a complete, engaging tale told in 5,000 words, my novels will get better.

So I've got this story. I'm just happy it's done, and I'm happy it's not overlong. I like to think it's good, but flush from writing the thing, who am I to say?

I'll put it up here in a day or so, encrypted, when I've had a chance to clean it up. If I know you--that includes people whose blogs I've commented on and people who've commented on mine before--then you're welcome to read it and give me your thoughts. Just drop me a line when the time comes and ask me for the key. Then you can tell me if it's any good or not.

Getting back to the idea in my first paragraph . . . that's not all I wanted to talk about in this post, but I'm going to stop here for now anyway, because if not it will be too rambly.

How far into your million are you?

I'm positive I read somewhere that Arthur C. Clarke said that a writer had about a million words of crap to get out of his or her system before he or she could write good stuff. When I tried to search for the exact quote, though, so I could use it in this post, I couldn't find it anywhere. It may be one of those urban legends . . . I found tons or references to this truism, but I couldn't find the original.

Here's what I did find:

"The first half-million words are just practice." -Dean Koontz

and:

"I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material. By finished, I mean completed, done, ready to submit, and written as well as you know how at the time you wrote it. You may be ashamed of it later, but that's another story." -Jerry Pournelle

Maybe Pournelle is the originator and I've just been misattributing it. *shrug*

The current-day version of that seems to be Malcolm Gladwell's observation that talent or intelligence are not the determining factors of success. They are necessary conditions, but not sufficient ones. Beyond a certain level of talent, it is not true, according to Gladwell, that more talented people enjoy more success. Once you have enough talent, what makes the difference is your drive. According to his research, it's 10,000 hours, to be much more specific. That's the number of hours he finds the most successful people have put into mastering their craft.

Well that's all well and good and even motivational, but I have no way to quantify the hours I've spent learning how to write, no way to judge how far along I am, so I'll just stick with the one million words, which I reckon must be emblematic of pretty much the same thing.

Anyway, I decided to search through whatever old manuscripts of mine I could find, and see how far along I was in this progress. My wife called it cat-waxing, but I think I just needed to have a sense or progress, even if it turns out I'm not as far along as I would like to be. Even being at the beginning of a journey is better than spinning your wheels on ice. I've been struggling lately; maybe I've plateaued, or maybe I'm getting ready for a breakthrough, but I needed some reason for optimism this morning.

I looked through whatever old typewritten stuff I could find in the den--luckily, the wordcounts were up on the front page, where they were supposed to be--and searched through my hard drive. There's tons of writing that I lost in this way. The oldest stories I still have were written my junior year in college. But what the hell; anything I wrote before I was twenty probably doesn't count anyway. I also, based on the Pournelle quote, discounted every file that was begun but not completed--a shame that, because it probably cut my number in half.

So where am I? A little over a quarter of the way. That's a little embarrassing--that someone with lifelong aspirations of being a writer should have so little to show for it. Two completed novels and a handful of short stories. On the other hand, it gives me reason for optimism. One quarter of the way is a not-insubstantial fraction.

It's also reason for hope because it gives me reason to believe that, however good I am right now, it's not the upper limit. All I have to do is keep at it and I'll get better. And thirty-something Joe has a lot more drive and dedication (and discipline) than twenty-something Joe did.

So how far along are you in your million words?

EDIT TO ADD: If you equate a million words and ten thousand hours, that averages out to a hundred words an hour. Honestly, that seems pretty realistic to me. I mean sure, when the writing's going well I write much more than half a page per hour, but there are certainly plenty of times when I have much less to show for my hours of work.

It's 2008 somewhere . . .

In 2008 I . . .

• . . . resolved to get back to writing instead of dreaming about writing, wishing about writing, and remembering how much I used to love writing.
• . . . wrote Vanishing Act, my 100,000 word 120,000 word 105,000 word 90,000 word 83,714 word urban fantasy Young Adult modern fantasy Young Adult modern fantasy Young Adult contemporary fantasy Middle Grade contemporary fantasy Young Adult contemporary fantasy novel.
• . . . stumbled across Steven Gould's blog while looking for information about the forthcoming Jumper movie, which led me to a conversation on appropriate versus inappropriate Young Adult SF content on SF Signal, which in turn led me to discover Ellen Datlow's and Nancy Kress's blogs. These were the first three blogs I began reading (four if you count SF Signal), and before I knew it I was following links and stumbling across new blogs and setting up a Google Reader account, with which I now follow the blogs of four editors, twelve writers, and eighteen literary agents, thirteen of whom represent the sort of fiction I write.
• . . . was called a raging homophobe in that same SF Signal discussion, despite being a democrat who believes gays ought to have the legal right to marry, because I apparently wasn't willing to be quite as hateful as some other people. (Interestingly enough, Firefox don't know the word "homophobe.")
  
• . . . started my own blog. Maybe some day people will find this blog as useful and interesting as I have found all the blogs I follow.
• . . . attended two regional writers' conferences.
• . . . attended three science fiction Cons: FX, ReaderCon, and WorldCon.
• . . . voted for the Hugo awards.
• . . . attended the Hugo award ceremony. (This was a Big Deal to me.)
• . . . met a ton of writers and editors I admire, including Linnea Sinclair, Elizabeth Bear, Debra Doyle, James MacDonald, Ellen Datlow, Anne Aguirre, David Hartwell, Tanya Huff, Elizabeth Moon, Nancy Kress, George R. R. Martin, Robert Silverberg, S. M. Stirling, Joe Haldeman, and, believe it or not, tons more than I can remember. If you're a nerd like me, I can't recommend WorldCon enough.
  
• . . . discovered that, while all those people are way cool and talented, Sinclair, Doyle, MacDonald, and Aguirre take cool and generous to astonishing new levels.
  
• . . . was somehow lucky enough to get a published author to agree to mentor me. I won't say who, because I don't know if that's cool. (I don't want to drive a bunch of other wannabe's to this person.)
  
• . . . put some awful crap from 2007 more or less behind me.
• . . . failed to pay off the credit cards I ran up during that awful crap, largely because of all the travel we did this year. Oh well--it certainly can't be denied that we lived well. I'm sure that will stay with us longer than the bills will.
• . . . learned a ton about writing, both as a craft and as a business.
  
• . . . pitched my novel to three agents, in person, all of whom seemed enthusiastic and interested, and all of whom requested partials.
• . . . failed to deliver said partials in anything like a timely manner, even though the novel was complete when I pitched it, because I decided it wasn't polished enough, and I didn't want to be That Guy who sends his stuff out before it's ready. Hopefully I haven't slammed any doors for myself, because these three agents, as luck would have it, are all fantastic agents I'd be thrilled to have represent me. I'll send the stuff out just as soon as my phalanx of beta-readers gets past chapter three.
• . . . entered a literary contest, which I failed to win.
• . . . submitted to an anthology right at the deadline, only to discover that, through some glitch, I sent them an empty file. Surprisingly enough, they declined to publish my empty document.
• . . . won the big prize in Moonrat's Mischief Fights Cancer raffle!
  
• . . . joined my state writers' association, and its local branch.
• . . . had three published authors read some of my novel and make very positive remarks about my writing.
  

. . . and probably a few other things that are slipping my mind. In terms of writing, it's been a damned fruitful year. I feel really close to breaking through--when I think of how close I was to basically giving up on my dream before this year, I am awestruck by how blessed I've been.

More than anything else, I am blessed to have a wife who has the same dream I do, so I never have to explain or justify what I'm doing, because she knows. Whatever sacrifices this dream takes, she's right there making them alongside me, and we're there to pick each other up in failure, and to celebrate each other's successes. She's at least as talented as I am, so even if I don't break through, I know she will. I'm lucky to get to watch her and learn from her.

Ever notice that your odometer doesn't change when you drive in reverse?

The rest of my darlings are safe . . . I'm done cutting for now.

I've gone from 120,084 words to 84,210, for a decrease of 35,874 words. Of course, the word count will continue to change as I continue to revise, but this is a good point to stop and take stock.

It took me about six months to write 120,000 words. It took four or five months to cut 35,000. The implication would seem to be that cutting is a lot harder than creating. I'll tell you what--it's a hell of a lot less fun. What's frustrating is that everyone focuses on how many words you've written as a way of measuring your accomplishment. Clarke said you had, what, 500,000 words of crap in you? What about the words you excise--don't those count toward your growth?A lot of people have a hard time grasping that I've been productive at all for the last five months, since my word count hasn't increased.

On the other hand, it really is a lot better now. So much of the stuff I cut was just crap. Stuff that, in hindsight, I'm not entirely sure why I wrote in the first place. Details, details, details. I am a detail-oriented person, but one thing I've learned is the difference between the telling detail and overwhelming the reader with minutae. Writing clichés be damned: sometimes you need to tell and not show.

I don't imagine I'm done by any stretch, but I'm finally down to a wordcount that is not totally unreasonable for YA, and that's something to celebrate.

Tomorrow, I hope to polish off my synopsis. I've got the bones of it done, but right now it's just a dry plot summary. I need to have it capture the feel of the book. After that, I'll focus on the material that agents are going to want to see in their partials. First thirty pages, first three chapters, whatever. I've got a week off coming up, so I should be in good shape to get that done. I'll also be trolling for beta readers, hopefully in the next week or so.

Weird milestones

I just crossed 90,000 words.

On my way *down*.

If you've been following this blog you know I've been struggling to chop down my bloated MS, but to anybody else, the idea of milestones that are *lower* than your current wordcount must seem odd at the least. F'rinstance, I can't help but notice that Writertopia doesn't have any counter doodads for *reducing* wordcounts.

80,000 may not be reachable, but for now, I'll take a moment to enjoy the accomplishment of deleting 25% of a draft.

They say that after you kill for the first time, it gets easier and easier . . .

So pretty much as soon as I decided that was it, I'd cut all I could, I needed to shift my focus from reducing wordcount to actively making the words that remain better . . . it got easier.

I knew from past experience that I couldn't cut substantially by going word by word. I've already learned that doing so just kills any nice turns of phrases or metaphors I might have while doing almost nothing for my word count. So I figured the thing to do was to cut scenes that weren't moving the story forward very much, and make some other scene accomplish whatever those scenes *were* doing for me. And this worked. I cut about 20,000 words this way. Unfortunately, this left me still pretty far from where the industry says a YA novel from a new author should be, but I couldn't cut any more scenes, so I decided to just go with what I had and hope for the best.

I did have a few little things I thought I could look at, though. Parts within important scenes where I was perhaps a little self-indulgent. Having Chris do or think about something just because *I* wanted to write about it. I also think I tended to spew more earlier in the book, because I wanted to make sure it wasn't too short. (Hah freaking hah.)

So I decided to take one last look, and cut . . . and cut . . . and cut. I've cut another six thousand words or so just this week and, what's more, I'm feeling that what's left behind is starting to take shape. It's starting to look halfway good to me again, and I'm regaining my enthusiasm. I actually got up at 5:30 this morning to work on my novel. And I'm really just getting started . . . I've only looked at the first five or six chapters this way. I might not make it down to my wordcount goal, but I'm starting to think I'll make it to within shouting distance of it.

It's funny.

Effect without cause, sub-atomic laws, scientific pause

I've been getting increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that I haven't made a backup of my novel since mid-August or so. I've since rectified that.

I think I can realistically cut another eight or nine-thousand words. Beyond that, I just don't know how to do it without making the story suffer. So I'm going to cut what I think I can but start moving away from cutting to more active suck-vacuuming. (i.e., concentrating on the quality of what remains, rather than on what to take out.)

In other news, I sure can be an insufferable prig sometimes.

Hey, I see that I got my 666th visitor. Greetings, satanic portent from Arkansas!

3.0

I've finished a round of cutting/editing/tightening up. I'm down to 103,219 words, which is still much too long. I have one or two people that I know would be interested in seeing it now, at this length, but If I'm going to have to cut another 20,000 or so words anyhow, it seems to make more sense to do that cutting before I submit to anyone. I'm going to take another look at my outline tonight and see what else I can find that could go.

On another note, I just realized that I never heard back on a story I submitted back in April. That's one frustrating thing with not doing simultaneous submissions. It takes so long for markets to get back to you that you forget all about your works that are out there. And this is at least the third story I can think of that I've never gotten a response back on. (Though at five months, it's not yet out of the question that I could get a response back before too long. I've got others that dropped off the face of the earth years ago. Including one agent's request for the full MS of Prototype. Dang it, when I spend the money to print and ship a 90,000 word MS, I'd at least like to hear back from people.)

(Before anybody mentions it, yes, I've queried the market. And on the other, older ones, yes I've long ago assumed the worst and moved on.)

Go me.

I don't know just how rare an achievement this is, but I am apparently a finalist in that short story contest I entered. W00t!

Also, I've cut off about 15,000 words from Vanishing Act. Lots more where that came from . . .

(And folks who ask to read short stories but then never provide any sort of reaction or response shouldn't throw stones . . . or, bitch about unupdated blogs . . . or, something like that.) :P

The Finish Line

Aaaaand I'm finally done with my first draft!

My second draft should be finished soon, because I've been working through it only a few chapters behind my first. Then my third and fourth will take a bit more time.

I am ready to be channeling my writing energy in a different direction for a while.

In addition to revising like mad now, I have a short story idea I want to find time to work on.

Great All-Star Game Tonight. As with my novel, though, I'm ready for it to be over. ;)

I leave tomorrow for ReaderCon by way of New York. Yay Spirit Airlines! I'll also be taking in a Yankees game on Monday (IIRC), so I get to say my own goodbye to The Stadium.

You know, the difference in polish between my epilogue and my opening is staggering. God I hope I can bring the beginning up to the level of the end. I learned so much through the writing of this, my second novel. I think this one will be good enough by the time I'm done with it to be publishable, as opposed to my first novel, which shall never see the light of day. Even if it doesn't find a home, though, I've learned enough to make the process worthwhile. I can't wait to begin the next one. Okay, that's a lie. I can wait. But I do have a rough idea and I'm excited to begin the process again.

First, though, I've got to chop Vanishing Act down by 20,000 words or so. At least.

Ding-Dong the Warlock's Dead

The title of this post has nothing to do with my book . . . folks who know me IRL may get it, and that's all I have to say about that. ;)

One more chapter done! One more, plus epilogue, to go! Craploads of revision to follow! Exclamation points for all!!!!!1!

At some point, I need to post a list of all the things I've been putting off until my draft is done, so I can keep them straight. Most of them will have to take place more or less at the same time, so I'll need a place to remind myself.

Thursday I'm helping to facilitate a discussion (how's that for eduspeak?) about query letters even though I'm unpublished and know only what I read in books and online. I reckon I should have a draft of my own query, so I plan to spend tomorrow working on it. What the hell--I should post it here. Of course, I really really want to finish the damn thing before worrying about a query letter, so I desperately want to knock out the last chapter y todo tonight. That should be doable--the last few chapters have been so short. Not easy, because I wanted to pull off the climax right, but not really long either. I still feel like I have plenty of writing left in me today. Now that I've hit the climax, everything left is pretty much resolution, and I'm hoping that will be a lot easier to compose.

We'll see.

Too many pots on the stove

In the last week I've written chapter 22, begun chapter 23, and then been distracted. For some reason, I haven't felt like blogging. Oh yeah. Distracted.

Strange Horizon's submission window opened this week. I had this thought of subnmitting "War Crimes" just minutes after midnight Utah time, but it took me a couple days more than I expected to get it ready. First I had technical issues--my printer suddenly and inexplicably deciding not to work, until it had slept overnight, and then me losing my stylus--and then I had to work on chopping the story down to get under their maximum word count of 9,000. The printer . . . *sigh* It's a beautiful printer when it works. It's an OKI 3400, but it seems to have odd little connectivity glitches from time to time, that are a major pain to figure out. Even when I finally get it working, as often as not it's a mystery to me what finally did the trick. In this case, spending the night shut off seemed to get the printer going again. Maybe it perceived it as a warning. And then the stylus . . . a tablet PC's pretty useless without one! I spent an hour searching for it before it occurred to me to look in the pocket of the jeans I had taken off earlier.


Cutting "War Crimes" down has been eye-opening. I have put so much work into that story these past six months, and tightened it up quite a bit. I think I was so uncommonly pleased with the story when I first wrote it that I couldn't see the places where it needed to be improved. As I went through it this time, I found lots of places where I could tighten it up, remove redundant verbal diarrhea, and so on. I also found a lot of repetitive phrasing by using CTRL-F to count up how many times I used this or another specific phrase. That was eye-opening. And a bit disheartening: if it takes this much effort to clean up a short story I think is my best work, will I even be capable of tightening up my novel in the same way? I thought it would take an hour or two to get "War Crimes" ready to go out the door, and it took about three days. Hopefully the payoff will be worth it. But I don't know if I can give Vanishing Act anything like that close a reading.

Also, I haven't really gotten started looking for beta readers, but I worry that I'll get a lot of people who want to do me a favor but don't really have time to stick to the reading.

I'm debating taking a break from writing to try to read through as many of the Hugo nominees as I can, since votes are due in a couple of days. I wouldn't vote in a category in which I had not read all the contenders. No matter what, there will be categories I abstain in. On the other hand, I'm so close to the end and just twitching with every day that passes with me not finished. And even once I finish that first/second draft, there's so much I have to do before it's ready for anyone else's eyes.

Easily Distra--Hey, what's that?!

It's taken me nearly a week to finish my first draft of Chapter 20, and I've found myself really struggling to stay on task for some reason. Twenty was full of more logistical challenges. All my characters are converging on the same spot (Rome, GA, if you must know) and I've had to work out the timing--down to the hour now, and not just the day--and keep track of what everyone's doing at any given time. (Not to mention the weather!)

I passed a hundred thousand words. I wasn't sure what I should do with the graphic at that point. I didn't want it to say 100%, because I damn sure ain't done. On the other hand, I'm sure not aiming for 115,000 words. (Great. Now I need to stress about my novel being too long.) I know of some material I want to take out, so it will eventually get shorter, but for now I guess it's getting longer still.

I have two characters who are not detectives doing some amateur detective work, and that has made the writing a struggle, because it's one step further removed from the action. But sometimes this sort of thing must happen, no? I should go looking to see how writers of detective fiction deal with stake-outs and such.

I can't even call Chapter 20 done yet, because I started keeping a list of details to go back and add when I was done.

We live in a golden age, you know? For writers and for all of us. Chris, my protagonist, hitchhikes from Marietta to Rome, so what did I do? Used Google Street View to travel most of the area that he would have been walking between rides, to make sure I got it right. Meanwhile, my antagonists and some secondary characters all drive from Anderson, SC, to Rome, so I used Google Earth to plot a route and have it animated for me. Google Earth has gotten so smooth over the years that it really was like watching a view from a small plane or helicopter. (It also took half the morning to play the animation, but, whatever.) Isn't it amazing what we can do these days?

My wife is done with her draft. Color me green. Still, I'm not too far be--Is that a butterfly?!

Catwaxing

Finally finished chapter 19, which I'd hoped to finish Wednesday. I've been catwaxing in a big way this week; I'm not sure why. It's always been my experience before that the writing gets easier down the stretch, and for the most part that's been the case this time too, but I struggled a bit with this chapter. A lot of that is the need for research. Research takes time. There were a lot of logistical challenges to be ironed out in this chapter as well. How does person 1 get from point A to point B, what time is it when he gets there, how will he overcome this obstacle, and so forth.

My protagonist is, for the moment, a runaway. I feel some unease at the possibility that I might be glamorizing running away, but we don't write stories about characters with happy lives in which nothing happens, neh? To expiate my guilt, I've worked in phone numbers, 1-800-RUNAWAY and 1-800-4-A-CHILD, but I'm not sure how smoothly that comes off, or if it's totally obvious that I'm trying to work a PSA into my novel. We'll see if that stays in.

As part of my catwaxing, I've discovered Yahoo Answers. I've long said that I love teaching so much I'd do it for free, if I didn't need to put food on the table. Now I get to prove it! I'm such a nerd.

On author blogs . . . in moderation

I finished another chapter! *bounce*

This was an important chapter, because it provides the motivations for what all the characters will be doing from here on out. I hope I pulled it off well.

I'm about ready to start working on my query letter. Not ready to begin querying, mind you, but to give some thought to the letter. The leader of my local writers' group asked me if I would lead a discussion/training/critique on query letters a month from now. What the hell do I know? Just what I read online. I'm not any kind of expert until I write a query that, you know, lands an agent or something. But I have a big mouth and love to point people to the resources I have found, so I guess I walked into that one.

I read something on a blog--I can't remember if it was Kristin Nelson's or Lucienne Diver's, and I think I was browsing old posts, so it could be hard to find out which--that talked about how you should not blog about your book once an agent starts shopping it around, because you'll undercut his or her bargaining position with editors if you blog about rejections, how long s/he's had it, and so forth. Makes sense, but it got me to thinking afterward that any blogging about a WIP--unless it was already sold and being written on deadline--had that potential. After all, if I finish writing it in June and get an agent who's still shopping it around in March, that will send the same message, no? Oh, well. She didn't mention blogging before you had an agent, so I guess I'll take my chances. It's not like it matters--my WIP will sell in a heartbeat and it won't be an issue, neh? ;)

Speaking of lost blog posts, I read a post by some guy about how he uses hypnagogia to tap into his creativity, and it resonated with me, because it reminded me a lot of what I do (though I didn't know there was a fancy name for it), but when I went to look for it again, I couldn't for the life of me remember where I'd read it. *sigh*

And then there's lost blog comments. I posted two comments on Lynn Viehl's blog today, one that was reasonably thought out and one that was a throwaway. She moderates her comments, so neither showed up right away. A few hours later, my second post, the brief one, showed up, but not my first one. Lost in the ether?

I'm not sure how I feel about the practice of moderating comments. There are two blogs I read that do this: Viehl's and SF Novelists. On SF Novelists, because they're several writers on a single blog, it can sometimes take days for a comment to show up. I find it very off-putting to wait for days for my expression of sympathy or whatever to be deemed worthy of appearing on the page. On other blogs I read, I see dialogues break out between the various different comment-writers, and hey, sometimes even between comment-writers and the blog author. Isn't that the point? A little back in forth, instead of the stream of thoughts only flowing in one direction? But how can any sort of dialogue break out when comments have to sit in a holding pattern waiting to be approved?

Of course, the luxury of being a complete unknown is that nobody is showing up on my blog just be be insulting. I've dealt with generic trolls on other internet forums, but never my very own stalker-troll. I can see where that would be hurtful, a drain on psychic resources, what have you. So who knows how I'd feel if I had that experience. I know Elizabeth Bear keeps threatening to shut down commenting, and Steven Gould has had at least one troll pop up on his site. Is the benefit of shutting down trolls worth the price of shutting down conversation, though?

My instinct is to feel that it isn't. We'll see how I feel about it if the shoe is ever on the other foot, though.

Say, where the heck does that expression come from?

Rolling, Rolling, Rolling

Rawhide!

I wrote about three thousand words today, and finished chapter 17. I'm really excited about where I am in the plot right now. Things are hurrying toward the climax, and there's some exciting stuff going on now--and in the coming chapters too.

I plan to spend tomorrow writing. It's my Father's Day gift to myself: time to write. I'd like to get a scene or so ahead of my pace so I feel like I can take a day off, maybe go out and have some fun, and not feel guilty about it.

For now, I'm Good Tired (a Harry Chapin reference) so I'm keeping this post short.

Summer, and the living is easy

So I can finally concentrate on writing without that pesky day job interzzzzzzzz . . . Uh? Oh, sorry.

After some much needed R&R, and some even more needed contemplation on Where The Hell My Plot Is Going, I'm making progress again. For the second time in as many weeks, I've re-outlined the rest of Vanishing Act. Or maybe I completed a drastic re-outlining that I was only halfway through last week, though I didn't realize it at the time. My stalkee (I don't know whether it's better to give credit where credit is due or to avoid the appearance of name-dropping but the name is elsewhere in this blog) was kind enough to point out about a half-dozen holes in my remaining plot, and rather than fix those, I came up with a way to streamline the ending, eliminating a lot of them in the process. It also improves some stuff she hadn't even commented on--the fact that my climax was being brought on by a very minor character, instead of by the actions of my principals. I wrote that minor character out of the story altogether, replotted the rest of it, and I feel like I've got something a lot tighter and more manageable now. I wrote a lot last night and this morning, and it's coming so much more easily now. I finished chapter 16 today, which is why I'm giving myself permission to spend time blogging. ;)

I'm actually looking forward to doing a big revising sweep once this draft is done . . . finding ways to make my language less clunky and to incorporate all the different good tips I've been getting from authors' blogs and from the online class I'm taking. I think I can be done with this draft in a little over three weeks without pushing too hard. Hopefully if I push just a bit harder, I can substantially decrease that. Then the challenge will be coming up with readers.

All of the various readers that Cor had--including her so-called crit group--have pretty much quit keeping up. There's nothing wrong with her novel--I think it's a hell of a lot more marketable than mine is--but people are busy. They have their lives to live and even those that see themselves as writers are not necessarily as devoted to the idea of getting stuff done now at all costs, with no excuses. So what are my chances of avoiding the same fate? I can probably get a dozen people or so to read the first chapter, but I'll be lucky if I have one (besides Cor, of course) still reading by the twelfth.

I got some exciting ideas for my short story nugget. I hope I have it in me to pull this together, and that I can find the time without sacrificing progress on Vanishing Act.

In other news, our air conditioner is crapping out. Florida in June without functional air conditioning . . . fun. I don't know where the money to fix it is going to come from. Hell, I don't know where the money for WorldCon is going to come from, and I very badly want to go.

Still . . . *gasp* . . . alive

Work is killing me . . . two nights in a row going to sleep after 2 am. (And that's all I'm going to say about the time). But still I've managed to find some time to write, if only a little bit--fifteen chapters done so far! Senior grades are due Thursday and my professional development binder is due more or less now, and then I'll get a (relatively) quiet week or so before it all starts again, but for underclassmen.

People don't realize the extent to which the last week of the school year is hell for a high school teacher. (And if you teach a mix of seniors and underclassmen, it's two weeks of hell.)

But this blog is about writing, not about teaching. So let me talk about that. Once again I had the experience of finding a scene impossible to write until I realized that I was keeping a character from acting consistently with his motivations. It's freaky and awesome all at once how the story won't let itself be railroaded. If I'm doing something wrong, I just sit there, paralyzed, unable to write.

I had another cool (to me) experience last Friday. I was on a plane and hoping to take advantage of the time to get some writing done. This was when I realized that I had totally failed to consider my protagonist's mental state and motivation in the scene I was struggling with, and had the epiphany that made it possible. But I still wasn't ready to write. I needed to re-envision the scene now that I better understood how my protagonist was feeling. So I daydreamed, basically, trying to get in his head. Well, Chris, my protagonist, had just been through a pretty awful experience, something humiliating and heart-breaking. As I put myself in his shoes, I found myself becoming more outwardly angry and sad. Intellectually I knew these were not my emotions, but I found myself genuinely feeling Chris's, and I had this sudden realization of what I must look like if anybody happened to look my way--I bet it was scary!

Anyway, I'm probably the only person who finds that interesting, but that's the whole reason I started this blog. So I could gush about quasi-mystical experiences like that without boring anybody who might find him- or herself my captive audience. Those are the moments I'm finding astounding and rewarding. I need a blog label for the posts that have these rambling reflection. Maybe "gushical."

In other news: Fifteen days! Fifteen days until vacation! :)