Better Than Dead

Here’s a meme I picked up from shalanna (who didn’t follow The Rules either. :-D)
The Rules:
Go to page 77 of your current MS.
Go to line 7.
Copy down the next 7 lines/sentences and post them as they’re written.  No cheating.

The current MS. being Shivery Bones, the one I am editing since I’m not writing anything new at the moment…

Here’s page 77, but not line 7.  Hey, I’m a writer.  I find it impossible to post something without context, so you’re getting the whole paragraph starting from line 4 and ending where it would have if I started on line 7 at the end of the next paragraph.  They are posted as currently written, however.

In this scene, Juana in 14^th century Cordoba, Spain, is dying of consumption and has no one reliable to care for her four-year-old son, Estevan.  She has just asked Fraile Diego Gonçales, a traveling friar, to care for the boy, and has been coughing up blood.

“Mama’s all right,” she told him in a strangled voice, and reached for the wooden ball he’d let drop. “Here’s your ball, sweetheart.” She let him off her lap, and cleaned her mouth and hands with the cloth as best she could. Estevan took the ball, but a vague worry wormed through his heart. He stole anxious glances at her.

The friar studied them long and hard, his face at war with itself: pity, chagrin, compassion, irritation. Finally, in a dry voice, shaking his head, he asked, “Why would you trust such a precious boy to a stranger like me?”

ETA:  There’s something about posting that makes all the icky stuff show up.

 
“Mama’s all right,” she told him in a strangled voice, and reached for the wooden ball he’d let drop. “Here’s your ball, toy, sweetheart.” She let him off her lap, and cleaned cleaning her mouth and hands with the cloth as best she could. Estevan took the ball, but a vague worry wormed through his heart. He stole anxious glances at her.

The friar studied them long and hard, his face at war with itself: pity, chagrin, compassion, irritation. Finally, in a dry voice, s Shaking his head, he asked, “Why would you trust such a precious boy to a stranger like me?”

The books I’m reading (I pick these up and put them down, but all of these are currently inching forward):

1. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
2. A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness (the book du jour)
3. Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Jung
4. Trickster: An Anthropological Memoir by Eileen Kane
5. Legends of the Fire Spirits by Robert W. Lebling
6. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch by Henry Miller
7. The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture by Walter L. Williams
8. When Ghosts Speak: Understanding the World of Earthbound Spirits by Mary Ann Winkowski
9. and my own book Shivery Bones, doing one last bloody read-through.

Books I’m writing: If you count worldbuilding and creative noodling, then I’m writing Carmina and The Numberless Stars.  If you’re talking about actual words getting written, then I ain’t currently writting nothin’.

The book I love the most: Couldn’t possibly choose.  I usually love the one I’m with.

The last book I received as a gift: I made a killing on book gift certificates.  I’ve included all the books I bought this way—not really to brag, but because I wouldn’t want any of these books to have their feelings hurt because I left them off the list.  (I anthropomorphize everything.) (Hi, Lisa!):

1. Caveat Emptor by Ruth Downie
2. Holy Ghosts: Or, How a (Not So) Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things That Go Bump in the Night by Gary Jansen
3. Spooky California: Tales of Hauntings, Strange Happenings, and Other Local Lore by S. E. Schlosser, Paul G. Hoffman (Illustrator)
4. Lover Unleashed by J. R. Ward
5. Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James
6. Red-Robed Priestess: A Novel (The Maeve Chronicles) by Elizabeth Cunningham
7. Untie the Strong Woman: Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Love for the Wild Soul by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
8. Meditations with Meister Eckhart by Matthew Fox
9. Tarot for Writers by Corrine Kenner
10. Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
11. Everyday Tarot by Gail Fairfield

The last book I gave as a gift: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.

You know that thing where you’ve edited a book so often you’ve cut all the life out of it? Yeah, that.

I’ve been reading the last hardcore edit I did on Shivery Bones with an eye towards e-booking it in some future when I magically have the time and wherewithal. I haven’t read it in a year and a half. This is the first reread where I think the edit has actually damaged the book. I went from 122k to 109k and that seems to have stripped some of the flow and life. Understand, we’re talking about a first draft that came in around 150k, which was definitely bloated and in need of cutting. But I think now that 122k version may actually have been pretty tight. The last edit cut into bone.

Certain parts of the manuscript are better for that cutting, but other parts have a disjointed, lifeless feel. I’m considering going back to the the non-eviscerated versions of those scenes/chapters.

Some books can be cut down to bone and still retain life, but not all. I recently read a novel by an author I love. Her series tend to be magically imaginative and inventive, and her books are usually big. It doesn’t matter. I love being in them no matter how long they take to read. But she’s not on the bestseller lists, not quite, and I’ll bet you anything her publisher started blanching at those big manuscripts. I say that because the current book, part of a series I’ve loved as much as the author’s other books, is much shorter than previous ones. Throughout the reading, it felt incomplete to me, missing beats, wanting something that kept slipping through the fingers–cut to the bone and unable to quite articulate itself as those bones clattered along. A large part of the life had been taken away. I intuited that it had once been there, but no more.

In the current publishing climate, this is happening quite a lot to midlist writers. Even to some bestsellers, I hear. It’s a dirty, crying shame. These are half-books, not allowed to be what they naturally are. E-books, in the other hand, don’t have to be as skinny as paper books to “turn a profit.” (Though, don’t get me started on shaky publishing accounting. Better you should read this post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.) (Thanks, safewrite, for the link.)

E-books don’t care if you go a little long. Which is not to say they shouldn’t be edited and made as tight and crisp as possible, but you don’t have to kill them in the process. They don’t have to rattle along like a defleshed skeleton struggling to keep itself in one piece.

For a long time I’ve wanted to write a novel centering around Annia Sabina, the Ãœberbitch antagonist from my novel, Shivery Bones. I’ve always adored her, the unrepentant bad girl who sees absolutely no reason why she should be fair and democratic and decent. I figured she needed a proper coda after the way things were left with her at the end of Bones, and yesterday the plot for her novel blossomed in my mind like the lovely black rose she is.

I really have no time for writing beyond the occasional blog entry and fun games on other peoples’ blogs, but I guess I’m still a writer somewhere underneath it all. I haven’t got the full plot, but it’s bubbling, and I’m enjoying it. (The bubbling is always the funnest part.) I really think the world needs a novel about a righteous, unapologetic Ãœberbitch who will never, no no never again, be subject to the dictates of any man, and will never, never ever, be the bottom. Unless it amuses her to assume that position.

Yeah, I’ll be doing this one for fun if I ever get around to putting words on paper or screen. Many big ifs here. There is also that whole thing about man planning and God laughing. And if I do find the time to write it I’m not sure anyone will be interested in taking a chance on Sabina “in the current marketplace.” But I really don’t care about that. Fun is a valuable reason to write a novel, I think. Maybe the most valuable of all. Trust me on this.

Jim Van Pelt wrote an interesting post today. Take a paragraph of writing—your own or a master like Fitzgerald—and arrange it like a poem. Immediately, the vibrancy (or lack thereof) of the writing pops out in ways it doesn’t when arranged as a paragraph.

I decided to try this with the opening of my novel Shivery Bones. Here’s the original, which I’d previously thought decent-enough:

However, when I arranged it as a poem, the dead parts really jumped out at me. It didn’t have life or flow, I thought:

Jolene’s earthquake
passed through her midsection,
rolled along her limbs,
then off into the grass
beneath her toes to make
the ground shake. She fell,
gasping with pain and surprise
as the temblor radiated out
from her and across the yard,
the ground splitting
like an overripe peach.
The leaves of the trees
along the high wall shook
as if attacked by nerves,
swaying and groaning.
The wave crested inside Jolene,
her personal shaking stopped.
The earth and trees stilled
a moment later, and the ground
healed itself, closing as if
no trembling had ever occurred.

******************************

Immediately, the tweaking began:

Jolene’s earthquake
rolled through her midsection,
vibrated along her limbs,
sloughing off into the grass
beneath her toes, the ground
beneath an echo of her own shaking.
She fell, gasping with pain
and surprise as the temblor
radiated from her and
across the yard, the earth
splitting like an overripe peach.
The leaves of the trees along
the high wall quivered as from an attack
of nerves, swaying and groaning.
The wave crested inside Jolene,
her personal quaking done.
The earth and trees stilled,
the ground healed itself,
closing as if no trembling
had ever occurred.

I don’t think this is a perfect paragraph by any means, but I do think it’s an improved one. It might be worth trying this techniques for openings and other troublesome passages:

Jolene’s earthquake rolled through her midsection, vibrated along her limbs, sloughing off into the grass beneath her toes, the ground beneath an echo of her own shaking. She fell, gasping with pain and surprise as the temblor radiated from her and across the yard, the earth splitting like an overripe peach. The leaves of the trees along the high wall quivered as from an attack of nerves, swaying and groaning. The wave crested inside Jolene, her personal quaking done. The earth and trees stilled, the ground healed itself, closing as if no trembling had ever occurred.

If by chance you missed this over at Nathan Bransford’s blog, Valerie Kemp has written an excellent guest blog on the subject of first chapters.

It’s got me thinking of my own first chapters from my finished novels and analyzing why they succeeded or failed. Ms. Kemp makes the excellent point that a first chapter is a promise to the reader about what the rest of the book is going to be like. If it’s a high-action chapter, the reader probably expects the rest of the book to be high-action. If it’s leisurely and contemplative, then that projects into the reader’s mind a much different book.

She makes a number of excellent points which I won’t reiterate here—go read the original. But that concept up there in my previous paragraph is one of those should-be-obvious things that often gets overlooked. I know I’ve overlooked it many times. Sometimes I catch it in the rewrites and make good on that promise to the reader, sometimes not.

I’m thinking in particular of my third novel, Shivery Bones. The first chapter was an action-filled chase scene involving the hero, Ezra. Very in media res, and at the end a burst of unexpected magic. Which was gripping, but not reflective of the story as a whole. Oh yeah, there were actiony bits, more fights and chases, and throughout the book I like to think there were bursts of unexpected magic, but the bulk of the story was much more about the internal journeys of the hero and the heroine, Jolene. She has to learn to love and trust again after terrible tragedy and to accept the natural cycle of life, and Ezra…well, pretty much the same thing, with the added twist of realizing that true love is sometimes about sacrificing your own best interests for the sake of someone else.

None of that was in my first chapter. An early critter said something of the sort to me. “If I didn’t know you wrote more contemplative books, I probably wouldn’t have read on since this chapter has a lot of adrenaline going on.” I ignored that criticism, thinking it beside the point. Very late in the game with this novel, after I’d sent it out many times, I realized the truth of this insight. But it took a rejection from an agent to drive that nail home: “The rest of this book wasn’t what I expected from the first chapter.”

I wrote a new first chapter which at least had a more contemplative and mysterious vibe to it—centering on Jolene this time rather than Ezra, then transitioning into the action chapter. I think it makes a stronger novel. Unfortunately, during the years I tried selling it with its original first chapter, the market has become saturated with certain tropes used in the story, making it a hard sell, with diminishing chances it would sell. I’d moved on to novels four, five, and six so reluctantly trunked this one.

Would it have fared any better in the market if I’d taken my early betas advice and written a new chapter one back then? Absolutely impossible to say. There are probably other flaw bombs in there that haven’t yet exploded in my consciousness. But I do know that writing a new first chapter was the right thing for this book, and the right thing in terms of that implied promise to the reader.

I had me the nicest wish fulfillment dream last night. I dreamed I got an email from an agent named Anna Scott in the office of some BN agent I’d sent my ms. of Shivery Bones to. (I marketed the hell out of Shivery Bones and decided it was time to give that one a rest and move on to something else, but apparently, the old submariner part of my brain hasn’t given up flogging it.)

Not only did Anna of my dreams love the book and want to represent me, she’d even done preliminary checking with an editor at one of the big houses and they wanted to offer me $100,000(!). I met with her and we hit it off and I said, “Yes, I want you to represent me and I will sell this book to them for $100,000.” The End and everyone lived HEA.

Yes, I know. That would never happen in RL. Wish fulfillment! Straight from the land of the Happy Fairies of Nod!

I’d been awake a couple of hours before I remembered that Anna Scott was the name of the Julia Roberts character in Notting Hill (a wish fulfillment fantasy if there ever was one) (one that I happen to love, being a wish fulfillment fantasy kinda gal). I googled the name and there is a talent agent named Anna Scott, but no literary agents that I could see.

It would have been nice if it had been a wish fulfillment fantasy with precognitive overtones, but alas…