lizvogel

So, here I sit, some few chapters/15,000 words or so from the end of the novel. I know, in broad strokes, what still needs to happen: they find the bad guy's contact and interrogate him/her, the rebels do that thing I've been thinking about since I realized I had a sub-plot, the second both helps and gets in the way of the first, etc., etc.

And I've got no words.

This can mean a number of things, including that I've taken a wrong turn (don't think so, in this case), that there's some necessary element missing (quite likely), or that I'm utterly exhausted by various Life and can't brain (pretty much certain). The missing element requires brainstorming (if I don't just want to wait for it to appear, and I don't), so I've spent the afternoon playing with post-it notes, and organizing the remaining snippets I'm hoping to use, and reading plot-related articles. So far I've gotten that there's a bit I set up that will come in handy for a plot twist -- don't know what -- and there's a character I set up earlier that I meant to use again and haven't, and maybe he can provide the solution to the twist -- don't know how. And I've still got no words.

I remember something similar at about this point with the Haley novel, where I knew what happened and couldn't make it go. Maybe I should look up when that was, and see if I uncharacteristically made any journal entries that shed some light on the process.

The Oblique Strategies offering for this is "Don't be afraid of things because they're easy to do".

So maybe I should just go ahead and write the MC and compatriot chasing after the contact, which seems like it'll be too easy, and see what pops in to trip them up.

After a nap or three, that is. |)

Coming into Chapter 2 of Falling From Ground, I had the problem that I was looking at a giant unrelieved block of navel-gazing. Some of that's inevitable and even appropriate -- the MC's got quite a mess inside his head that he needs to sort out -- but there needs to be something actually happening, too, as leavening. And so when action starts happening that is related to the mess, in a few chapters, it won't be too much of a change of pace.

Went out to dinner with the housemate and tossed the problem around, and now someone's following him. Don't know who or why, yet, but that's okay. But the words still weren't happening. I'm coming up on end-of-month, and despite having sailed well over quota last month, I'm looking at a hell of a push to make word-count this time.

This is incredibly frustrating and more than a little scary. Beginnings are supposed to be the easy part! But then I got to thinking about the Haley novel, and how I had to re-research Zurich three times. And most of the messing-about-in-Zurich stuff is in the earlier parts.... So I checked my notes:

It took me five months to write Chapter 2 of Haley.

And something like nine months for the second chapter of Highway of Mirrors, though there's some first-novel learning-curve there. Which means this isn't a sign that this novel is going horribly off the rails, or that even the easy parts will be hard and nothing will ever be easy again. This is just part of my process.

It makes sense, when the enthusiasm for a new project meets the tedium of actually making it happen. And it's not necessarily a part of my process that I have to keep unaltered; I still want to make quota for this month, if I can. And I don't think the lull is due to any back-brain work that needs to be done: I can still generate world-building at the drop of a keystroke, for example. But it's useful to know that this is a thing I do, and right about at this point in a new novel, pretty consistently.

Now, get back to work.

And, with 4162 new words in the month of May, the Haley novel is done!

That's "done", of course. It's a novel, after all.

Technically, the writing was done by the end of the month, but the de-bracketing got done the next day. However, I'm giving myself a one-day grace period on account of getting the edit letter on my first ever professional sale OMG at the same time I was trying to wrap up the novel. And there's still the beta-review to be done, and whatever revisions come out of that.

But it's a kind of done, and I'll take it.

(My unstated goal was actually to finish before MediaWest. That didn't happen. Neither did finishing during MediaWest. And I'd meant "done" to mean done with the beta-revisions, too. But given how hard the last couple of chapters, and especially the last two scenes, were fighting me, I'm delighted to be any kind of done at all.)

It feels very weird, and immensely freeing, to be done with this thing. I've had "must finish book" repeating in my head for months now, to the point that I wasn't sleeping well toward the end because of it. And it's been nearly four years, start to for-now-finish, that this story's been on my plate (though I did, to be fair, take half a year off to write ...And The Kitchen Sink). It's been through one complete plot change and another significant alteration, and more stuck bits than I can rightly count. And now it's "done". There's still the beta-revisions on the last chapter, and then it's going to be drawered for a bit and we'll see what comes out of that, but it feels like an enormous weight is finally off my shoulders.

Oh, and it's tentatively titled Truth From Lies, unless I decide otherwise.


And now? I'm taking some time off. I'll write some short stories, maybe even some fanfic, but for the next month or two I'm not undertaking any large projects. I also need to do some hard-core querying on Highway of Mirrors; I still have that date with the AAR database that I've been putting off to concentrate on Haley. Falling From Ground and Financial Wizardry are still waiting in the wings, but I want some down time before I tackle figuring out another set of novel-sized issues.

Writing: The process of banging your head against a brick wall until one of you falls down, and the blood drops fall in such a way as to form words.


I have figured out that one of the problems with the fighting-me-every-step-of-the-way final chapter is that I didn't know the antagonist's motivation. Specifically, there's an action X that's been bandied about in earlier chapters as a possibility, an action that she does not ultimately take. I know that she doesn't take action X; it would be wrong for the story, and it would be wrong for her character. But why doesn't she take action X? Why doesn't she take action X?

Five minutes after recognizing this question, I had the answer. And shortly after that, I had a small chunk of new dialog, and the necessary bit to make all the other bits of the scene fall into the order they should obviously be in. And not long after that, there was the opening scene of the chapter, neatly done.

As always, it helps a lot to ask the right questions.

The next bit that's being sticky involves two characters having an awkward conversation, which is difficult because awkward conversations are. I already suspect that I will not manage to imply certain characterization-related things as gracefully as I had hoped, but oh well. Forward momentum.

The next sticky bit after that is going to bring me back to the antagonist's motivation again. I know what happens and what kind of scene it's going to be; I know what she does and why. But I don't know what she thinks about it, and I'm going to have to, even if only a fraction of that comes through in the actual writing.

The last time I got stuck like this on an end scene, I tried writing it from the POV of a different character and then re-wrote it to match the POV of the rest of the book, and it helped a lot. I'm not going quite that far this time, but I did run some lines through the brain to clarify how the antagonist is seeing the scene.

And I discovered something interesting, which the end of that last sentence hints at.

The Haley novel is written from the single POV of the protagonist, in close-ish third person past tense. I like it that way, I'm comfortable with it. But if I were to write a scene from the POV of the antagonist, it would have to be in present tense. Because that's the way she thinks. Even though the entire book, as written, is in past tense. Even though I'm generally not keen on present tense, and certainly don't generally write in it. Huh.

There's a wealth of information about the antagonist's mind-set, in this. How she thinks of her role in the world, how she looks at the past and the future and her place in them. How, perhaps, she maintains herself in a very contradictory set of circumstances.

And hopefully, how she's going to get through this last scene, because it needs to get written, dammit.

What is it with this novel, that every time I say it's finally going decently, it stalls again? I am well and truly stalled now. Though I did manage a tricky bit of revision, small in terms of wordcount but significant in terms of plot. Yes, people have cell phones. If you want them to not have cell phones -- and there is a sound in-story reason for this, as well as the author-convenience reason -- you have to do something to take their cell phones away.

Now I just need to finish the bloody thing. About another chapter and a half should do it, which I could do in a week if the words would just come. Why won't the words come?!?

Haven't been posting much here lately, which generally means the writing's been going either really well, or really poorly. Yeah, I wish.

So Wendig had a post yesterday on The Varied Emotional Stages of Writing A Book, and as usual with such lists, half of it doesn't apply to me at all. But of the things which do apply, several are stuck on with industrial-grade adhesive, so much so that I'm going to quote the most applicable (and the shortest, which is only appropriate) in its entirety:

12. I Wrote Four Words Today (“The Trickled Pee”)

Every word is like extracting a rotten tooth with a pair of rusty needle-nose pliers. It is a day of great effort that yields nearly no result. A rich, full fruit tree with one fucking apple dangling.

That was yesterday. I had the whole afternoon and evening, and a super mocha... and I got something like 108 words. All day, for about 108 words.

This is the bottom of the trend so far this month, but the high points weren't all that impressive, either. (Though pleasingly, if I can choke out a mere 250 words two days out of three, that's still on track for quota. Such as it is.) I am stuck. Stuck, stuck, stuck, increasingly stuck, and I don't know why. I have things for the characters to do (they're in the midst of a high-speed escape at this very moment), I've wedged in the orphaned bit in the best place for it to be, I know roughly where things are headed next... and it just won't go.

I am now going to go out and shovel expletive-deleted snow, in hopes that doing something physical will give my back-brain the leeway it needs to sort this out.

original short fiction: 1542
Haley novel: 3638
Total new words in January: 5180

Queries sent: 4

Quotas met!

I apparently spoke too soon about the Haley novel having inertia on its side. I took a little break around Christmas, fair enough, and my alpha reader had not one but two chapters in hand, and there was all that snow shoveling... and suddenly a few weeks had gone by, and a break was threatening to turn into a block. I'd love to blame part of it on the wait for feedback, but while my alpha-reader was definitely not flying at top speed, I knew perfectly well what the next chapter was going to be and wasn't anticipating her coming back with any major alterations (as, in the event, she did not). So nope, this one's all on me.

I tried a little prompt-fic to get the writing muscles limbered up again, and after a few false starts it did the trick nicely. I even got quite a good story out of it; in fact, it's off to a major market right now. And then it was a matter of grabbing myself by the scruff of my neck and throwing myself at the next chapter, and while it never quite got easier, it at least got less hard. I was pushing for word-count right up until the end of the month, but it got done. What I'm fondly referring to as "the giant info-dump conversation chapter" is at the de-bracketing point, and I even figured out (or found; back-brain, did you set that up on purpose?) a reason for the thing I need to not happen until the next chapter to not happen until the next chapter. ;-)

For February: same again; 5000 words, query every seven days. Forward momentum.

Haley novel: 6231
Total new words in December: 6231

Target achieved, and then some. Pleasingly, I topped 5000 on the 19th of the month, once again by mostly steady plodding with a few big bursts as the inspiration took me. That's the way to do it, brain.

Chapter 10 is now with the alpha reader -- which is a huge relief, as it means she now knows the Other Big Spoiler that I've been biting my tongue on for months. I'm once again at a point of having to figure out what happens next, but the basic parameters are defined by previous events, so it's just a matter of picking the most entertaining details. ;-) And the novel as a whole has topped 55,000 words, which means I'm beginning to get that lovely feeling of inertia being on my side.

Queries: Did the agent-gathering on the 7th, and somehow managed not to do anything else. Well, I did look into some agents, but got stymied by running across UK agents, with the corresponding different requirements and preference for snail-mail. (Postage for 3 chapters to the UK? I've got to think a little longer about whether I'm excited enough about an agent for that. And with the also-corresponding tendency to less social-media presence, it's harder to judge that.) Oh well, nobody really reads queries over the holidays anyway. Right?


For January: more of the same. 5000 words; one query sent (or two agents crossed off) every seven days. Submit short stories as feasible.

original short fiction: 292
Haley novel: 4963
Total new words in November: 5255

Whew! Would have been nice if most of that hadn't been in the last week, but there was this thing about having to throw out almost a thousand words because I revamped the plot again. I've a post half-written about that; suffice for now to say that that explains both the end-of-month push and the fact that the writing was dragging so very badly before then.

Queries: Whiffed the seven-day deadline more often than not, but it all got done before the month was over, so good enough. Crossed off five and queried two.


December's goals: 5000 words and a query every seven days, as before. I shouldn't need slack on the word-count, and besides, I think the novel is finally picking up. Possibility of an exception on the queries if too many agents are closed for the holidays, but I should be able to find four.

At least now I know why the writing's been going so poorly lately; I was totally jumping the gun on the latest plot development. (Red herrings, how I hate you.) It's nice of my subconscious to stop me before I'd gone too far down the wrong path, but it really could just send a freakin' memo.

The other problem is that I've been so focused on what the antagonist knows / is up to that I lost sight of what my main character knows -- and doesn't know. It's good to consider what's going on off-stage, but not to the exclusion of what's under the spotlight.