lizvogel

Haley novel: 5106
Total new words in October: 5106

Target achieved! And thanks to being up all night last night, both chapters 7 & 8 are de-bracketed, and can be handed off to my alpha reader so she can tell me if I'm even remotely on the right track.

(Actually, only part of "all night" can be blamed on Haley. The rest was due to a very cute cat who curled up next to me and purred for petting. All night. There was a near-storm, and he seemed to want me close for reassurance, and he never does that. So yeah, no way was I leaving that.)

No big pushes to hit quota, just nice steady plodding, a little front-loaded toward the beginning of the month. Which is the way it's supposed to work.

Queries: Sent one or crossed off two every seven days, for a total of 3 queries sent this month.

That's all goals met. Go, me!


November's goals:

I'm not doing NaNo, but I was considering doing a NaNo-style push to get the Haley novel, if not done, at least a lot closer. However, given the way things have been going, I think I'm better off sticking to my slow-and-steady approach. Not that I'd mind if half a dozen chapters fell down over the next 30 days, but my official quota is still 5000 words.

The every-seven-days thing worked really well, so same again: one agent researched & queried or two researched & crossed off, accountable on the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th, working ahead permitted.

Onward!

(Whattaya know, for once I've actually managed to do the 'nother post!)

So, I've been flailing pretty hard on the Haley novel lately. I've worked out the new plot satisfactorily, for definitions of "plot" that include where the characters start and where they end up. But as I've said before, there's knowing what happens, and then there's knowing what happens.

And I've been stressing a lot over what happens. Trying to work out the intricate puzzle-piece steps of getting from E to Z. Trying, in short, to write a plot-driven book, or rest-of-book. And I've realized that I'm barking up not just the wrong tree, but possibly an entire wrong grove, if not outright forest.

Some things to remember, for the rest of this book and perhaps future ones:

1. When in doubt, play to my strengths. I'm good at character stuff, perhaps especially angsty character stuff. Intricate puzzle-piece plot, not so much. And I've been so focused on making the replacement plot work that I lost sight of anything else. This was never meant to be a plot-driven book, I've no desire to write all-plot-no-character, and let's face it, anybody who's looking for a Christie-esque puzzle will have given up long before the end of Chapter 7. I need to focus on the characters; while the plot has to hold together, it is primarily a framework to hang the character stuff on.

A practical demonstration: I had two options for a minor point in the scene I was working on the other night. I stopped and considered: which way would make my MC suffer more? And 900 words just fell out of my fingers.

2. Real mysteries don't do what I'm trying to do, either. This part of the book is essentially a mystery plot; my character has to figure out what the bad guy is up to, and how all these other people connect to it. This, I've been telling myself, mostly involves my character looking at a lot of accounting records and similar tedious legwork details. How on earth do you make that interesting?

Answer: You don't.

I've been studying mystery plots a bit lately. Mostly by watching Remington Steele, a task which is its own reward. Remington Steele is an all-around good show; while I primarily watch it for character, it also has solid mystery plots. Frequently -- I'd hazard more than half the time -- key clues to the mystery are found via the DMV, tax and financial records, and other equally exciting database searches. And yet, these are virtually never shown on screen. Oh, occasionally we'll see Laura surrounded by stacks of paper or Steele struggling with the computer, but even those are brief glimpses; we don't see the process. The vital information is presented by the simple expedient of one character telling it to another. (Mildred especially does a lot of this. A lot.)

And this is a thing I've been really struggling with in the current WIP. My MC needs to be looking up this sort of info, and since I've been doing spy-procedural stuff in other sections, I felt like I ought to show her doing it. But while I know generally what's in these sources, I don't know what they look like, so the usual descriptive tactics aren't available to me. And there's still the issue that even the cleverest wordsmithing can only do so much to make a computer search sound cool.

So the solution is: Don't describe it. Just present the end results to the reader, perhaps with some reported thought about how hard/easy it was to find. It feels like cheating, but it's cheating with a long and honorable tradition behind it.

3. Characters can talk to each other. The other significant thing in the above is that a character reveals the discovered-off-screen information by telling it to another character. This works great if you have a detective duo (or trio). It's trickier if you have a character flying solo. You can always have a character talk to themselves, of course, either outright or as reported thought, but it works a lot better if they've got someone to explain things to. (Cue every Doctor Who companion ever.) And my poor MC is flying solo for much of this story.

I was already subconsciously leaning toward addressing this: there's a scene where the MC's boss passes along a fistful of leads, several of which I'd tucked in before I quite knew what I was going to do with them. And to keep other factors balanced, I was setting my MC up to have to work with, hmm, not the antagonist, exactly, but another player whom she for very good reasons doesn't trust, but, for equally good reasons, has to keep at least somewhat involved. (Some of those reasons are the same reason, in fact.) So there's a question of how much she'll willingly tell this person, which limits their utility as a reveal-to-the-reader sounding board... but there are interesting character things I can do to work around that. Which takes me right back to #1, not coincidentally.

Add these up, and I might just be able to get a finished novel out of this thing.

Oh, yes, and:

4. Get the damn coffee, already. Yes, money, calories, whatever. Bought the double mocha?: 900 words, easily. Didn't really "need" the mocha?: struggling to write anything. You do the math.

Targets were: 3000 words.

original short fiction: 6836
old mission stories: 360 (plus some random stuff I'm not counting)
Haley novel: 111
Total new words in August: 7307

Ha! More than double the goal, and more than even my usual non-slack-cutting wordcount goal. Go, me!


3 queries.

Queries sent: 1

Oh, well. I was geared up to charge through all three on the 30th (yeah, all at the last minute, I know), but the second agent I tried is UK-based, which means different standards, also less social-media presence, and I kept finding contradictory reports on their business practices... and eventually I got so flummoxed that I couldn't tell if I wanted to cross them off just to be done with it, or query them just to be done with it. Which is a clear sign it's time to stop if ever there was one.


Finish the story for the ISFiC Writers Contest.

Done! And sent! (And now comes the waiting part.... Have I mentioned I'm bad at waiting?)


Figure out if the other story I've been shopping around is ready to go back out, and if it is, send it.

I figured it out. And then I waffled. And then I decided again. And... you get the idea. But I did finally commit to a version and chuck it back out into the ether -- a few days after the end of the month, granted, but I'm calling it close enough. It's done now, anyway.


And then get back to that novel I'm supposed to be writing.

Note that 111 words up there? Yeah! Not a lot in actual word-count, but it's carrying on from the point at which that novel's been stalled for absolute ages; I was beginning to be worried that that scene was terminally stuck. So any progress is good! And I can feel the right mind-set for the novel settling back in. Need to get cracking on actual words, yes, but I'm feeling good about the prospects. So, done.


That's two incontrovertibly done, one done, one done with rounding in my favor, and one at 1/3. Not bad!

I do need to get the querying under control; that one's been slipping under every month. Yes, it's work, and profoundly unrewarding. But eventually it will pay off -- but only if it gets done.

September's goals: 4000 words (gearing back up), a hefty chunk of which had better be on the Haley novel. 4 queries. And that's it; other opportunities as they come my way, of course, but it's time to focus back on core requirements.

Grossmünster translates as "great minster", which is pretty close to saying "big church". "Cathedral" conveys the level of grandeur and sheer size that I want my readers to get, so that's the word I should use.

Except that the Grossmünster was a major site in the Protestant Reformation.

And for all its colloquial usage, a cathedral is technically the seat of a bishop, and therefore Catholic.

"Ex-cathedral" really doesn't flow, and anyway it sounds like the Pope making an infallible statement about architecture.

So, do I get to say "the Grossmünster cathedral", or not?


These are the things that writers fret over....

One of the challenges of database design is not just accommodating current needs, but anticipating future ones. I'm good at doing this most of the time, but most =/= all.

Tags are a database. And there are some things I'm still talking about that were tagged a certain way for reasons that no longer apply, or that I no longer want to think about in that way.

If you reached this post by following the HoM tag for Highway of Mirrors, you'll want to continue with the niay tag.

If you reached this post by following the Haley novel tag for the as-of-this-posting-untitled Haley novel, you'll want to continue with the novel 2 tag, which it was before I finished something else first. ;-)


(And if you're reading this on LiveJournal, you'll have to find those tags yourself, as the links point to Dreamwidth. And if you're reading this on Dreamwidth and want the niay tags prior to May 2nd, 2009, you'll have to look on LiveJournal. Platform changes, bleargh.)