Love and Hate (of my words)

It is a sentiment held by many that familiarity breeds contempt. Indeed, there is plenty of reason for this to hold true. Quite often, a person we admire someone from afar turns out to be a total jerkwad when we get to know them. It's a bit of a letdown, to say the least.

I find my view of my writing to be different, however. While POWERLESS--the manuscript formerly known as BARTON'S WOMEN--was out on its first round submissions, I pulled PARALLEL LIVES out of mothballs. I've probably explained this before, but the couple of newer things I was working on have sort of petered out a bit, and I feel very strongly about PARALLEL LIVES (maybe too strongly; we'll soon see). And what happened? When I started reading it over--Blech. Yuck. This is HORRIBLE! What was I thinking?--you get the idea, I'm sure you've all been there before.

But I read it through and I made a lot of notes and I spent a good amount of time rewriting--and now I'm on the cusp of sending it off to Carrie to see what she thinks (commence nailbiting). By the time I got to the end of PL, I was once again in love with the manuscript, and again thinking, "This is good. Yeah, this is real good!" In this case, familiarity seems to breed esteem, not contempt.

Of course, POWERLESS came through a round of submissions and Carrie and I decided I should take another look at it and make some tweaks--and now I find myself reading it over and saying...you guessed it: Blech, yuck, this is HORRIBLE, what was I thinking?

I know that feeling won't last. By the time I'm working through this manuscript I'll feel much better about it than I do at this very moment. Part of it is the difference between reading with a critical eye and actually doing the nuts-and-bolts work of wordsmithing, which is infinitely more fun. Part of it is also because I know POWERLESS is good. As I worked through it last time before it hit the bricks in search of a home, I found myself thinking the same things I thought while finishing up PARALLEL LIVES the last couple of weeks: "This is good. This is real good!" It's really just a matter of becoming more familiar with it.

Familiarity with my manuscript seems to weed out contempt. How about you?

Have a great weekend, all.

Some Numbers for Friday

This post was inspired by a recent thread on Absolute Write. It's already sunk to page 2 or 3 of the forum threads, so I won't link it here.

Let's throw out a few numbers, just for fun:

41       239       5.83
35       307       8.77
28       367      13.11

This 'table' shows the chapter count, total manuscript pages, and average pages/chapter of my first three novels I drafted to completion (i.e., story has distinctive beginning, middle and end). What got me looking at these numbers was a question on Absolute Write asking how long chapters should be. My smart-ass answer was "as long as they need to be," because, really, that is the only answer to a question like that. A chapter needs to tell a part of the story, and when it ends, it needs to leave the reader wanting to turn the page and read the next chapter. It doesn't matter if you accomplish this in two pages or ten, or two hundred--keep the reader interested and reading, keep the story moving forward.

The first line represents my first major effort, an untitled NaNoWriMo project begun now more years than I would care to remember. In a month's time, this project clocked in a hair over 50,000 words and was quickly abandoned in favor of PARALLEL LIVES (which is found on line 2). Roughly a year after starting PL, I went back to this NaNo project and spent several weeks rewriting it and expanding it--and promptly dropped it when BARTON'S WOMEN* exploded in my brain (in fact, while researching this, the 'last modified' date for the NaNo project is the day before I wrote my first words on BW; I think that, whenever I'm stuck, I should go back and work on this thing. Twice now it has led to better things). BW's stat line is at the bottom of the table.

I find a couple of things interesting about this. First is the fact that each successive work has increased by roughly the same amount over the previous work, about 60 manuscript pages. Second is the way the chapter counts and pages/chapter numbers fall and rise respectively. If I were handy with graphs and charts, I'd plot it out, but that would serve no real purpose other than to look spiffy, so we'll leave it out. Third is the question of what it means to me as a writer, if anything.

When I first started writing the NaNo, I didn't really think much about chapters. In fact, most of the organization of the chapters came after I had 'submitted' the novel for verification. It was written out of order, with line breaks and few chapters. For several days after NaNo ended, I was cutting and chopping and putting the story into proper order. As I read, I found natural ending points for chapters, so I stuck the word CHAPTER in between paragraphs and moved on. It was--and is--quite the mess. But I didn't think too hard or long about it.

With PL, however, I found myself worrying a bit. Most of my chapters felt fairly short (apparently 8.77 pages), and I was fine. Once in a while, however, I'd get one that was three pages. Or one that was 12 pages. And while I knew it didn't matter, it bothered me, so I would look for ways to fold the hot pants-length chapters in with longer ones, or try to split the really long ones up in a way that made sense. What I found was there was a reason those chapters were long or short; and splitting or combining led to more headaches. Eventually, I learned to stop worrying about it--the chapters would be as long or as short as they had to be.

When I started writing BW, I knew one thing right away: my chapters were going to be long. This was an actual, conscious decision I made very early in the process. Lots of scene breaks. BW and the NaNo have two things in common: both are written in 3rd person with multiple viewpoint characters, yet BW's chapters are much roomier. PL, on the other hand, is told in 1st person, with only one viewpoint character, which makes it feel much more contained.

Despite making that decision, I'm not beholden to it. I have a couple of 3-page chapters in BW--and probably one that comes close to 20. Ultimately, the chapters will be as long as they need to be. I have two other novels in draft form that I've started since BW, but it's too soon to tell where they will fit on the scale of things. And that brings me to that last point, what this means about me as a writer. I believe part of the upward trend, both in terms of total page count and pages/chapter, comes from me finding my stride, my voice as a writer. It will be interesting--for me, anyway--to see what the next one looks like, and the one after that, etc.

Have you looked at numbers like this? What kind of trends (if any) do you see?

*BARTON'S WOMEN is being subbed under another name. I'll talk about that at another time. It's still easier right now to refer to it by the old name.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!

Blathering On

So, Winter's Regret has been out for a few weeks now. Hopefully, you bought it, read it, and liked it. Hopefully, you liked my story, "An Unexpected Reunion." Being somewhat brain dead this week, I thought I'd share a little about how that story came about. I don't think there will be any great revelations here, but perhaps it will interest you. If not, have a nice weekend, and maybe I'll have a little more functionality next week.

Back in a time that's embarrassingly-long ago, an idea was born, an idea that grew into a manuscript I have mentioned here far too many times (hint: it's called PARALLEL LIVES). During the first two or three months I was drafting that novel, I was on fire. It seems new ideas and scenes were popping into my head constantly. It was almost like living with a movie or tape recorder inside my skull. Whatever else I was doing, the story was playing out, and when I had writing time, I was essentially transcribing what I had seen/heard/thought earlier.

At some point, the ideas dried up, but that was fine, because the story itself had run its course. And I did have a story (I should point out that a lot of these scenes just seemed to play out in my head independently of what had come before or what might come after; they were just ... scenes). But I also had too much. There were some scenes that were, functionally speaking, duplicates of other scenes. And some scenes that just didn't fit the way I thought they would when I first wrote them. Finally, there were some that I thought had to come out just because the thing was too long. "An Unexpected Reunion" fell into this category. I liked the chapter as it stood in the manuscript, but on further review, it wasn't essential. Out it came.

The tough part of turning that excerpt of a deleted chapter into a stand-alone short story was the fast that I still have plans on getting its parent published. So, I could have changed the names of the characters so they weren't people represented in the original manuscript and pretended it was its own thing, but I really didn't want to do that. Instead, I had to find a way to leave it open enough that, should (when) PL gets published, it all makes sense, but with enough of a story and conclusion that it leaves readers satisfied. I think I managed to do that.

That's it for me, hope you all have a nice weekend.

Hey! Because I'm always bad at this, if you're interested in buying Winter's Regret, it can be found

At Amazon or Smashwords or Createspace. Enjoy!

Grey Area--Or Is It Gray?

I'm an American. I was born here, raised here, and, except for a week in Nova Scotia, a weekend at Niagara Falls, and two weeks in the Virgin Islands, I've never set foot outside the United States. I like some British television (Dr. Who; Monty Python, and yes, Downton Abbey, though I'm hopelessly behind), and a lot of British music, but I'm hardly an Anglophile. I'd love to cross the pond and visit Jolly Old, but, no offense intended, I have no desire to make it my permanent home.

So, why can't I get grey and gray right?

I was dimly aware of a problem with it when I was writing PARALLEL LIVES. Whenever that word came up (and it came up a fair amount), I would pause—grey, or gray? I knew both were technically right, but that one was more right. And so I went with grey, because that one looked more right. But sometimes I went with gray, because  that one just rolled off my fingers. And sat some point, I'm sure I looked it up in the dictionary and found that 'gray' is the American usage. All right. Gray it is. (I should point out, I have problems with other 'British' words. I don't take 'offence' at insults. When I played hockey, I played defense, not defence. A 'bum' is a guy who panhandles on the subway, my car has a trunk, not a boot. My problem seems to be exclusively with grey and gray. I don't know why.)

This week, in addition to finally pushing myself on a new WiP (I mean, really pushing it; the story isn't bursting out of my head at this point, but I've decided to force it a little bit, and things are moving), I decided to read through BARTON'S WOMEN. I'm trying very hard to give it an overview read, make sure I don't have any glaring iconsistencies, continuity errors, etc., etc. I'm making notes, but not getting into minutiae.

Except there's that grey/gray thing again. I came across the word, looked it up, realized I was again defaulting to grey, and made the switch. And then I did it again. And again. Yesterday, I did a 'find all' on my manuscript and found 19 instances of 'grey.' I will change them all.

And when the day comes for me to read over this new WiP, I will do it again.

Help me.

Do you have any words that consistently trip you up? What are they, and what do you do about them?

And, in celebration of this little word that gives me so much trouble, here's the only top-10 hit from the Grateful Dead, "Touch of Grey Gray." Have a great weekend, all!

Monday Musing: Facebook Party!

I will occasionally post something on my FB page titled, "How Not To Use Facebook, #[insert made up number between 1 and 1000 here] In A Series", and link to a news item where someone does something stupid with Facebook. Like this. I do this as a reminder that the things you put out there are out there, so pay attention. Facebook seems to loan itself to frequent bouts of stupidity, though I understand Twitter is not far behind. If I used Twitter, I would probably have a "How Not to Use Twitter" set of tweets, too, but I don't, so I don't.

I don't get a huge amount of friend requests anymore, which is fine by me. Declining or ignoring friend requests makes me feel kind of bad, unless it's someone I don't actually know. I've gotten at least two of those. One was from a guy who at least went to my high school, though we literally never exchanged a single word; the other was a guy I honestly never met, had no idea who he was or why he'd want to be my friend. Turns out he was a friend of a friend, and either combed her list for more friends, or just clicked the 'sure, why not?' button when my name came up in the "People You Might Know" list. Anyway, one of those at least gave me the opening scene for PARALLEL LIVES, so it wasn't a total loss (though it was later changed from a FB friend request to a phone call. I'm old school. Still, credit to Facebook for kickstarting the process).

Occasionally I'll get a friend request from one of the kids' friends. Those cause me particular angst. Do I want to be friends with that high school junior, that college freshman? Do they really want me to be friends with them? Have they really thought about the implications of granting some old geezer--a contemporary of their parents--access to their Facebook page? I'm up to about four of them now, and the glimpse into the life of the American teen is not as frightening as I thought. At least these kids are more sensible than 'Drivin drunk' dude, which makes me feel better. And some of them have an astonishing amount of 'old geezers' on their lists, including their parents. They speak in code, anyway, which is pretty much how I spoke when I was that age, so I don't know half of what is going on.

They want me! They want me!

This weekend I found myself on the receiving end of an invitation to a graduation party from one of these kids. Remember when we were kids, and you would get a party invitation in the mail? Real mail, not e-mail, I mean. In an envelope. With a stamp. When you got one of those, there was no doubt about your invitation status. You were invited! You made the list! Granted, there could be politics involved, even in second grade ("But Mom, I don't want to invite Jeffo!" "Shut up, Junior. His Dad is mayor. We've got to invite him!"), but it sure felt like you were wanted. Not so much with the Facebook mass invite. The doubting begins: "Does he really want me at that party? What would he think if I clicked 'Yes', just to mess with his head? What if I actually showed up? What if I didn't, and found out I was supposed to? Gaah!" Of course, when I popped by the Facebook party page and saw that I, and 333 of his other close friends, had been invited, I suspected a mistake. Sure enough, a few hours later, the event was cancelled. I'm waiting for my new invite, but I have a feeling I'll be waiting a long time.

Making the Case for Flat Villains

I've been thinking all week about Monday's post and your responses to it. Normally, I try to respond to all comments individually; with this one, however, I've decided to just do a follow up post.

After reading so much agreement with what I said (and much love for Les Mis), I started reconsidering. Yes, in general I like well-rounded villains, and remembering that the villain is the hero of his own story is a good place to start. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that literature is full of bad guys who are bad, period, and we don't always get the sense of 'self-heroism' from them. There are times when it's appropriate to give your villain the flat treatment. Making the case: Sauron, from The Lord of the Rings, and James LaValle, from my own Parallel Lives.

Sauron is one of the baddest bad guys ever. His whole purpose is to find his ring so that he can conquer all of Middle Earth and enslave its peoples. What we don't know is Sauron's motivation. Is he trying to live up to the impossibly high standards his parents set? Is he trying to woo Galadriel? Does he just want ocean-front property? We don't know, but we really don't need to know. Sauron is believable. History is littered with men who lived to conquer, and the book was written during the time of Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini and Stalin, men who tried to impose their will on the world. We've seen this villain in the real world, and we don't understand him any better here than in the pages of a book.

The other thing that makes Sauron work is narrative distance. We're never in his head, we never visit him in his tower in Mordor, we never even see him. That distance allows Tolkien the luxury of not having to give him a personality or fears or dreams beyond what we already know. In other words, he gets to leave out all the stuff we're told to put in if we want to have well-rounded characters. It's not supposed to work, but it does. If you have an overarching bad guy like Sauron, you may not need to give us more than the broadest view of what he wants.

And then there's the point of view of the story. When I sent out Parallel Lives to my first set of readers, I was rather worried that the story's antagonist, James LaValle, was too flat. Was he believable? I wondered. Did I need to give him more dimension, more depth?

The LaValle we see in the story is what we used to call a 'derelict' back in high school. He smokes pot by the bushel. He's disrespectful to teachers and disruptive in class (and not in a good way). He's a bully. And for some reason, he decides he doesn't like my protagonist, Chris Burke, and begins a systematic campaign of harassment that lasts throughout high school.

Now, it was tempting to go and give James some redeeming features, and to wonder why he's like this, but I resisted, based in part on the story's point of view. Parallel Lives is a first person narrative, told exclusively from Chris Burke's perspective. He can only know and react and respond to what he sees, to what James shows him. And James never shows him anything but his bad side. The closest we get to seeing another side of James is in this quote from a friend:

'"He used to be so nice," Madison told me once. James had just knocked the books from a seventh-grader's hands and scattered them halfway up the hall with a kick. "He taught half the kids on our block how to ride bikes."'

 So there's a hint that James wasn't always like this, but that's as far as I took it. In the story's present/past narrative, older, wiser Chris Burke has some theories on why James was such a jerk, and examines his own behavior to see how he may have unwittingly escalated the conflict between them. But he never knows for sure, because he can't truly get into James's head, and James isn't around anymore to give him an answer. His high school self never asked James, "Why do you have a problem with me?" though if he had, he almost certainly would have been told, "I don't like your face." Or maybe, "Because you were born." You know, those classic high school comebacks.

I was gratified when my readers told me I didn't need to do anything with LaValle. I think if you've attended high school, you've likely encountered someone like him. Beyond that, what we're allowed to see of James is limited by what Chris sees. In this case, James as continual jerkwad works; I can get away with leaving him as 'the sneering, jeering King of the Burnouts.'

So there you go. I think remembering that the villain is the hero of his own story is something to keep in mind, but before you break out the bicycle pumps and try to put more air into your bad guy, ask yourself whether you really need to or not. Consider the page time your villain gets; consider the point of view of the story. Only pump if it makes sense to pump.

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!

And Another New Year

Happy New Year to all of you, whether you've already celebrated because you're on the other side of the world or not. I hope 2013 is good to you and brings you all you hope for in life.

This is, of course, the time when we reflect on what we've done, set our goals for the coming year, and, quite often, make a series of predictions about what's going to happen in the world. I'm not much for the latter; I have no crystal ball, and I honestly don't understand enough about how the world works to have even a hope of a shred of accuracy over where we're going to end up as a society. And if I try to narrow down and focus on something like, say, publishing, I'm equally in the dark. About all I do know is that paper books aren't going away any time soon. Beyond that? Call me clueless.

But Bonnee Crawford fired the first shot across the bow of writerly resolutions (appropriate enough, given that she's one of those people who is already in the wild, wild world of 2013) when she asked in her blog last week: What is everyone else aiming for? And I thought about it and realize that my goals for this year (as a writer) are pretty much the same. So I took a look back to my first post of 2012, and here is what I found:

• Get an Agent.
• Write a New Book. 
• Improve, Improve, Improve.

Well, the sad thing is I still don't have an agent. But I've also backed off the query process a bit lately. The overwhelming silence from agents since the first round went out in April is significant. I believe in Parallel Lives, but I think I'm still pretty bad at the querying thing. So I spent most of NaNoReviMo pounding away at my query. Sent out a newer version at the beginning of December, got some rejects, got some more silence, and I'm back in the query workshop. I'd have asked Santa for a new query for Christmas, but let's face it, this has got to come from me. I realize that an inability to create an articulate query could point up to troubles in the manuscript, but I don't believe that's the case with PL. I would not, however, be surprised to find myself querying some of the same agents who rejected PL with Barton's Women.

And speaking of which, that was one goal I definitively met. At the time I wrote my goals for 2012, Barton's Women was still just a glimmer of an idea born of a hurricane. Six days later, in my writer's group, I wrote the first paragraphs. I finished an first draft in August, read and revised, and have it out with some excellent critters. My wife has read it and given me invaluable feedback. So my list for 2013 includes doing another revise round on that one and getting it out in front of agents, too.

As for the new, new book, I mentioned a while back that I had an idea that was floating in my head. Though I've not had that crystallizing "Ah ha!" moment with it, I've decided to try to write my way into it and have made some headway. It's definitely proceeding slowly so far, but it is proceeding. I certainly hope to be able to finish a draft of it in 2013.

Finally, we should always strive to keep improving. This is a tough one, since I am the Doubting Writer, after all, and I'm always going to find my work...not as good as I want it to be. On the other hand, I"m pretty sure that Barton's Women was in better shape when I sent it out for critting than Parallel Lives at the same stage of its life. But I've kept reading, I think when I read, and I'm trying to crit where I can. I haven't read many books on the craft this year, but I'll be honest, a couple of the ones that everyone cites as being Godly have left me kind of flat. I'll have to look into some others and see how they strike me.

And now I've rambled on too long. I wish you all a very happy new year, with good things for you and your family.

And just for fun, here's the Grateful Dead New Year from 1980/81. I cut out about two minutes of the late Bill Graham riding on top of a giant skull to the stage. Happy New Year, all!

Meet The New Boss...

...same as the old boss.

Last year, YA author Peggy Eddleman started something new. NaNoWriMo about to take off, but Peggy wasn't ready to write; she was in the middle of revising. So she threw an idea out there: 

"We could REVISE 50,000 words in November. Or, we could make a different, personalized goal that fits with our needs better. FINISH revising. CUT a certain amount of words. ADD a certain number of words. Work on the revision letter I just got from my agent. :) EDIT a certain number of chapters. Whatever works. We just each decide what our goal is, then WORK LIKE CRAZY TO GET THERE. And have fun while we're doing it!"

And so, NaNoReviMo was born. A group of around 20 or so folks who were not ready to WriMo joined together. We kept in touch through the month of November (and beyond) via e-mail. We reported our progress, providing advice and encouragement, and generally cheered each other on. It was fun to be part of, and nice to know we were not alone, that there were others who were struggling with the finishing process known as 'editing'. Even though I claimed I was going to participate in NaNoWriMo, I ended up spending more of my November NaNoReviMoing (anything can be verbalized, folks) PARALLEL LIVES.

Tara Tyler's great badge! Roar!

A year later, I'm back at the same spot.

While Barton's Women was taking a rest back in August, I re-read Parallel Lives and made some notes, found some things that didn't sit right with me. It's not huge, in terms of words (i.e., I'm not talking about tearing it down to nothing and starting from scrap; this isn't a complete rewrite), but it could be huge in terms of agent response, which has been underwhelming so far. I found some troubling gaps and holes that need repair, which in turn will lead to a stronger query and synopsis. The goal is simple: by the end of the month, have the novel revitalized and ready to go (again) to a refreshed list of agents. Simple, right? By the time that's done, I'll be ready to take the revising tools to Barton's Women, and, hopefully, the Next Thing will be firm enough in my mind to start writing. And NEXT November, with any luck, I'll be revising THAT one.

What about you? Writing, revising, or something else? If you're ready to revise, consider dropping by Jessie Humphries' blog to add yourself to the list, and join the ReviMo fun.

Have a great weekend!