Better Than Dead

Some of you who have known me for a long time, and read my stuff for a long time, may remember Hortensia Bustamante. She’s the strong-willed sister of the Bustamante Brothers of Dos Lunas County, the first white settlers to invade the Kintache Indian homeland.

Ever since I finished Venus in Transit, my Dos Lunas County novel, strong-willed Hortensia has been bugging me. “Where my novel?” she’s been asking.

I’ve explained patiently that I’m working on other things now, to make a change from Dos Lunas, but Hortensia has never been one to listen to the reasoning of her writer when she’s made up her mind about something. “Where’s my novel?” she repeats at every chance.

I staved off her insistence some time back by writing a 30k plus novella, but—although she liked it quite well—she’s informed me that it isn’t sufficient. Her story deserves expanding and exploring. I have been thinking along those same lines myself for some time and even had several ideas on how to do that, but I hadn’t thought of taking on that challenge at this juncture.

“It’s time,” Hortensia insists.

I find myself sighing fatalistically a lot these days. My imagination ping ponged all last week between chapter two of the Carmina novel and a short story, and I’ve been considering that maybe it’s time to start the rewrite on Venus in Transit. All the while Hortensia kept crooning in my ear: “It’s time. Where’s my novel? It’s time.”

I pulled the novella out today just to, yanno, look at it. Hortensia squee’d with glee. I told her not to get her hopes up. She scoffed.

So I don’t know what I’m working on now. Perhaps Hortensia would be the antidote to my restless. I’m sure Venus would be. Maybe I’ll let Venus and Hortensia and Carmina and Sea Eyes from the short story fight it out amongst themselves. Just let me know when you’ve figured it out, gang. Only, don’t start sending me tweets advocating for yourselves. That would be one step too far over the line.

And so I’m off again on what appears to be yet another novel. I got close to 14k on the other one, Sympathetic Magic, before I realized it just wasn’t coming together. Inside me, mostly. I wasn’t seeing and feeling it like I should and it stopped going.

So I’m letting it rest now and I’ve got this other thing that’s been obsessing me. Since I have no deadlines, as a wise friend pointed out, I might as well take advantage of that luxury to work on something that’s really speaking to me. I hope this one takes.

This character, Carmilla, will be a challenge to bring off. She isn’t particularly sympathetic, although I hope she finds redemption by the end of things. She’s holding her cards close to the vest, though, and not showing me. She’d better give me a glimpse soon. I think she just wants to play with me for a while longer. She does have a cruel streak.

Here’s the opening—still very rough and new.

(more…)

The upbeat (for me) tone of the current WIP has not been matching my mood or life circumstances lately, so I find myself wanting to write something darker.  I also thought perhaps I should work on something with series or trilogy potential since I understand that standalone novels might be a tough sell these days.  I don’t think I should (and don’t want) to write to the market, but  the circumstances of mood/market might be an excuse to work on something my subconscious has been leaning towards for weeks now—maybe much longer.

My second novel, Blood Geek, was set in a traveling carnival in 1938 and although the novel itself was flawed and I trunked it long ago, I’ve always thought there was quite a bit of life left in the setting I created for it.  I could see a number of potential stories revolving around minor characters in that carnival.  Apparently, my hindbrain thought so, too, because I have been assiduously collecting historical data and pictures from the 1930s and early 1940s. It’s been an almost unconscious process.  I see myself stashing this information in folders and occasionally ask, “What do you propose to do with this stuff?”  To which my backbrain answers coyly, “You know perfectly well.”

I suspect I do.  I’m not sure it’s the place where I should be putting my energy now, but I reckon I have little choice or control about some things in my life or in the market. I’ve got to write what I can when I can, and push through to the finish of something—which takes a lot of commitment and a certain kind of obsession.  If I am not properly obsessed with an idea or a piece of work chances are it will be an interminable struggle with little pay off.  Without the obsession, it may not be the right time for that work.  Perhaps it will never have a time, or maybe it will take the vast, subterranean journey through the aquifer that my carnival idea has taken and come bubbling up again years hence, fresh and full of life.  Done with waiting, it declares its time is now, that I must set all else aside because it is finally ready.

But the question is, am I?

Of thinking my novel-in-revision sucks the suck monkey’s toes. I’ve been cutting and fixing, but I think there’s plenty of mess left over. I want to see if I can cut at least another 2k before throwing myself on the mercy of my betas.

No matter how promising a novel starts out, it always reaches this despair stage. But that’s probably a good thing. Otherwise, we might love them so much we never wanted to let them go.

And every novel must be let go—and not just in the sense of “If you love something, let it go. If it comes back to you, it’s yours. If not, track it down and kill it.” Oh wait, that’s not how that goes, is it?

Well, letting go means never having to say you’re sorry.

Wait. That’s not what I’m trying to say, either. What I’m trying to say is that letting go of a novel is about liberating yourself to work on the next thing. I am so ready to work on the next thing.

Being a character-based writer means that generally plots tend to accumulate around who my protagonists are rather than the other way around. So I usually have the illusion of knowing a great deal about my people before I officially commit them to the page—officially being when I actually type “Chapter 1” at the top of the file. Every once in awhile I get a surprise.

That seems to have happened with chapter one of the new novel, Time in a Bottle. (Really dislike that name, really need to think of another.) As soon as the protagonist, Molly, spilled onto the page, she came across much perkier than I’d originally envisioned her. Younger. More a creature of sunshine than I would have made her out to be. I resisted this pull, even typing a note to myself at the top of chapter one: “Age her up, serious her down.” But she refused my admonition. She persisted in being who she was.

I’ve long since learned that when a character pulls that hard in a certain direction, I really need to shut up and follow. I’m just along for the ride, after all, and most times they really do know best. If I analyze this in that light, I see that the story which is going to unfold might actually work better with this personality. She’s going to be dealing with the shadow world of the subconscious, helping to dispel some of those shadows, so it really doesn’t make sense that she’s as serious as I tried to make her. She’s going to need that sunshine to get through this, to even buy into this mess in the first place. She’s something of a rescuer, after all.

Of course, sometimes I’ve been fooled in this regard, too. Sometimes a character pulls me off in an unexpected direction and it turns out to be a dead end. Generally, this means I haven’t gotten to know them as well as I thought I had before starting out on the journey and they turned out to be tricksters, having their teasing way with me. This can be painful and require much rewriting.

But hey, writing is rewriting, right? There’s always going to be a lot of that in my future.

Revision isn’t usually painful for me.  It’s a chance to make better and I actually kind of like it after the agony of the first draft.  That is, until I hit the sucky chapters.  Then it’s embarrassing.  There are about three chapters in the middle of this book that are hellacious and need to be gutted, maybe completely redone, maybe scrapped.  The information in them is conveyed through to the end of the story, but there has got to be a better, more dynamic way to get that information across to the reader.  I’ve done a little of that kind of thing along the way, but these chapters will need a major overhaul, I think.

The urge to stop the read-through in its tracks and battle with these chapters is strong, very strong, but I’m going to press ahead.  The purpose of this read-through is to clean up language and frayed threads and places where I decided to take the story in a slightly different direction, not to do a massive restructure.  To make it readable, in other words.  I want to continue on, noting stuff I think needs to be slapped silly so that when I get to the second draft after betas have given me feedback I have a clear mandate for who and what’s butt to kick.

But man, those sucky chapters…really do suck.  And I really do want to fix them.

Recently, someone posted a list of her unfinished story projects and because I’m a magpie and must steal ooo! shiny! objects from others and put them in my own nest (and, admittedly, because I’m something of a masochist) I decided to do the same.

Going through my ideas folder was too depressing, so I’ve only listed things that I’d done some work on—at least a scene or two, though in some cases considerably more.  (That was somewhat depressing, too, but I’m hoping this may be a goad to action.)  Some of these stories are so close to being finished, but I just can’t seem to get them there, either because I’m missing some key plot element or because the character isn’t coming together as wanted, or whatever.  I threw in the unfinished novels, too.

Some of these stories and novels are creaky ancient and may never have their day, but many others are actively being worked on/thought about/added to here and there. Many of the stories are from the Dos Lunas County cycle, as noted, and I haven’t decided if they are stories in their own right or writing exercises to help me understand parts of my worldbuilding/characters.  Certainly all of them started out to be stories in their own right.  Other stories are connected to other novels/worldbuilding.

(more…)

Now that I’m halfway through the read-through of Venus in Transit I’m beginning to get that thrill of anticipation at the thought of finally being able to work on something new. There are some stories I want to get to for rewrites and for first writes, but the big subterranean beasts that have been swimming in the deeps for ages now have also made their break for the surface. Two novels seem to be vying for the attention of my forebrain, feeding me bits and pieces of themselves at odd times of day or night. My research reading seems to swing back and forth between the two subject matters, too.

One is a story involving an 18th century cunning man and the 21st century fallout from his old magic. That one even has most of a chapter one done, plus the 17k novella on which it’s based. For this I’ve been reading some fascinating stuff on JSTOR and also a book called, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History by Owen Davies. I have about three more books on cunning folk lined up on my shelves, too.

The other is a very fractured and weird sort of fairy story in which Faerie hardly appears at all, and whatever fairies show themselves are neither flittery little beings of light, nor dark and sinister monsters. Or, as recently portrayed, sex mad stud muffins. Although, because I’m writing it, I imagine there will be sex. Is there not air?

These fairies are more like I imagine fairies would be if fairies do be: neither fundamentally good nor bad, just profoundly uninterested in the well-being of humanity, unless some poor hapless fool intrudes upon their space by accident or intent. Then it’s watch out mortal, you’ll pay for your trespass.

I have scads of books on fairies and fairylore. My current reading includes Meeting the Other Crowd: The Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland by Eddie Lenihan and Carolyn Eve Green which informed a lot of my current thinking on the subject. I’ve also been playing with The Heart of Faerie Oracle by Wendy and Brian Froud, which is an absolutely gorgeous work of art. I can stare and stare at each one of those cards. There is so much rich detail in them—and gorgeous, as I say.

I ask myself if the world needs another novel of Faerie and I’m inclined to think not, there’s such a glut. But I also know that when the leviathans make a break for open waters, I’d better follow whichever is the strongest swimmer, hitch my darling coracle to their flukes and hang on for dear life, or get left adrift far out to sea. The leviathans choose me, not the other way around.

I always put a date in the filename when I start a new draft of a novel as a convenient reference for when I started, then tend to gloss over them and ignore them as irrelevant.  I just looked at the date on the file for the first draft of Venus in Transit: June 26, 2009.  That means I spent just about a year on the damned thing.  I would have sworn I was at least at the year and a half mark.  It seemed interminable.  It was a longer time span than other recent novels have taken to produce a first draft, and it was interminable, but dang.  I’m surprised.

Oh, and I was able to leave the draft alone for one whole day in order to fix up and post a short story I wrote about a month ago.  I woke up this morning itching to do the read-through on Venus.

I apparently have my writing Jones back.

Talk to me again when I’m halfway through the read-through.  My attitude may have altered somewhat.

Thirty chapters, an epilogue, and over 120k (and ohmygod, that has to be cut down a lot), but for now I am