Quillings

Well, I’m finally back from the Starry Heaven novel workshop. It was held in Flagstaff, AZ, and was largely organized by Sarah K. Castle, one of my Clarion classmates from way back in 2006. We had a great group of authors there. Sarah K. Castle, Greg van Eekhout, Sarah Prineas, Deb Coates, Debbie Daughtee, Rob Ziegler, Eugene Myers, Jon Hansen, Sandra McDonald (not MacDonald!), Bill Shunn, Gary Shockley, and, well, me! The basic criterion for inclusion was that you had to have sold at least one story to a professional market, though I think nearly everyone surpassed this by far. The format was stolen from the Blue Heaven workshop, and it roughly goes like this: Days 1, 2, and 3, the writers all critique one another’s first 50 pages. Everyone crits everyone else’s stuff. It’s a brutal, free-for-all bash fest, and many a time the evil incarnation of the nice authors who showed up on Welcome Night appeared and gave wicked reviews. That’s tough, to sit there and get reviews from people that have all earned their stripes. Days 4, 5, and 6 were less demanding. You had to critique two other novels, and two other writers had critique yours. Lots of work to get ready for these few days (reading and preparing comments for two novels), but once they arrived it was fairly smooth sailing. The sessions were alotted two hours, but they lasted more like and hour and a half.

For my part, I learned a lot. As with any workshop, you learn as much about writing from listening to others critique something that you’ve also read and critiqued as you do from people critiquing your own work. It’s always eye opening for me to hear what other people have to say about something I’ve tried really hard to find all the faults in. Invariably there are things that I missed, and it’s in those moments that you can grow as a writer if you internalize those thoughts.

Don’t get me wrong. I got a ton out of my first-50 crits and my novel crits as well. I have an issue with likeable protagonists. I try to paint them as people that need to grow. I show them with weaknesses early on so that the reader can see that they’re not perfect, that they have room to grow. That they’re regular people, basically. But the way I go about doing it is a bit off, I think. First impressions really count in fiction. It’s important to show them with heroic or admirable qualities early so that later, when they do see the bad stuff, they’re already predisposed to like them. The exact same person could be portrayed in an opening scene, but if the bad stuff comes first, then that’s what sticks with the reader. Not that my characterization was exactly on the money, either. I was a bit off the mark with Nikandr, the Prince and windship captain who the story is largely focused on. He came across as infantile, whiny, petty. I certainly wasn’t trying to portray him that way, but that’s certainly the way he came across. So I need to work on that. I think (hope) that those traits begin to fall away as the book progresses, and so the majority of the rework is going to come in the early parts of the novel. But I’m sure those changes will lead to other changes later on.

So I have my work cut out for me. I’ve got a long way to go and a short time to get there (at least by my self-assigned schedule), but I’m very hopeful that the end product is in sight now. I’m going to shoot for having Winds done by the time World Fantasy rolls around.

I’ve been spending most of my writing time over the last few months on short stories. I had a few requests for rewrites from editors, one of which didn’t work out. The other is still out, but I’m crossing my fingers. It’s one of my Clarion stories from back in 2006, a story about a woman who tends bees. She uses the wax to create candles that can help people forget about someone they know by weaving a hair from the person into the wick. But things are turned upside down when she realizes that she used one of her own candles. Now she just has to figure out who it was she forgot. The rewrite really brought out some new aspects of the story that I hadn’t explored before. So I hope it gets picked up in its current form.

I’ve also been working on a collaboration. My second. The first one of my first efforts ever, with a friend who as also interested in writing but similarly new to the craft. Predictably, it didn’t work out. Neither of us were good enough to pull something like that off, so we set it aside.

The new one is a sci-fi story about a solar power transmission platform and a pair of solar flare racers that get caught between a chance to leave their brutal existence on the station for a new life on Earth and a growing movement to overthrow the choke hold the platforms have had on the working populace for decades. I’m working on it with Steve Gaskell, one of my fellow Clarionites. Needless to say, I’m a bit more up to a collaboration than I was back when. It’s been enlightening, as Steve and I have slightly different approaches to story generation. I really admired Steve’s work at Clarion, so it’s been fun batting story ideas back and forth and also editing each other’s drafts. We’re almost done with the first draft, and hopefully we’ll have it ready for review in early Feb.

We’ve been using Skype to talk back and forth about the story (he lives in the U.K., so Skype has been very useful). And we’re using Google docs to collaborate on the actual writing. That’s been … ok. From a collaboration standpoint, it’s great. We can edit one another’s stuff, add comments, etc., without handing a document back and forth via email. I was trying to do the Word doc shuffle in the beginning, and it was a real pain in the ass. But from a pure word processing standpoint, Google docs has a way to go. It’s a beta, so I’m trying to be charitable about it, but there are quite a few quirks (bugs) and quite a few features missing that I’m used to in Word. But it’ll work for this one story, and I’m sure it’ll improve as time goes on.

The Winds of Khalakovo has taken baby steps forward. I’m going to finish up the solar story with Steve and then hit it hard. I’d really like to have the second draft wrapped up in a few months and then send it out for full review.

The Winds of Khalakovo is officially done. First draft, that is. No rest for the weary. I have to get a synopsis and spruce up the first three chapters for my agent, and then it’s off to a short story I started in Stockholm and brainstorming for my next project (a YA science fantasy romp).

Winds clocked in at 160,808 words. I had planned on 120k for this novel, so obviously I overran. But (and this is a bug, erm, but) about midway through I realized that I needed one more point of view to truly tell this story. I had had two already, so I ended up with three POVs, and I think it turned out quite well. There are two warring factions of a Grand Duchy plus a group of downtrodden pacifists, so the three points of view allow the entire story to be told.

It’s really tough to tell at this point, as close as I am to the story, but it feels really good right now. The end is awfully rough. I felt myself wanting to finish really badly. I tried to curb those emotions, knowing that if I rushed it would just create more work on the other end, but I know I still ended up rushing some of the last several chapters. Even so, I’m excited about it. It feels like something I can hang my hat on. Or rather, that I’ll be able to once I get around to the next several drafts.

In other news, my house flooded. I’m in the Midwest, which as you know got positively hammered. Racine and Milwaukee counties got it rough in Wisconsin, though not nearly as bad as Iowa. Our house? Sewer backup. The good thing? It wasn’t as bad as some. The bad thing? No insurance. I would have sworn I had insurance for this, but the insurance guy says no. Still need to check my old insurance statements to see if it was there and was somehow dropped. The good news? It might be covered because of a faulty sump pump. Won’t know until the end of the month when the insurance adjuster gets beyond the fourteen-thousand other claims he has to evaluate.

I  was unfortunately gone for all of this. I got called away to a trip to Sweden. I’m still here, in fact. Writing from my hotel in Stockholm. Joanne called me a few days after I arrived and told me about the water she had found in the basement. It seemed like a small thing at first. Thought it was just rainwater. But over the next few days it became apparent that (A) it was sewer water and (B) even a small sewer backup is a big, big deal. Lots and lots of cleanup to take care of. And our basement was partially finished. So of course the water got just high enough to hit the insulation, and when that happens, it wicks the sewer water right up. They had to rip out the drywall to 16" and tear out all the insulation. Carpeting? Yeah, that too. All gone.

My only consolation is that I hadn’t yet finished everything I was going to finish in the basement. I’m actually glad at this point I didn’t put more money into it, because a certain portion of that would have been washed down the drain, almost completely literally.

Joanne kicked some serious ass while I was gone. I felt like crap not coming home, but the customer I’m visiting, Ericsson, would have needed me to come back in just a few weeks, and by the time I could have arrange to get home, the cleanup crew would have been essentially done with everything. So I would have come home to exactly what I’m coming home to tomorrow: a big gaping hole where my partially finished basement used to be. But that didn’t keep me from feeling like shit for quite some time. I still feel bad, but at least I won’t have to head back to Sweden, and I can just concentrate on recovering from the whole mess.

Again, I’m actually not terribly torn up about this. It’s just stuff, and a lot of people had it way worse than we did. We’ll recover in time. Hopefully the gubment will be able to help the people who lost their homes and/or livelihood.

My latest WIP, The Winds of Khalakovo, is nearly done. I’m thinking I have about 10k left to write. Maybe a touch more. I really want to put a stake in the ground and commit to finishing by the time I leave for WisCon, which is a scant ten days away, but I’m just not sure if something’s going to pop up that will require a bit more time and effort. So, instead, I’ll continue my 1k words per day metric and leave it at that. If it’s done by then, it’s done. If not, it will be shortly thereafter. I’d rather take my time, especially on the ending, than rush it for no good reason.

Still, despite the feeling of pressure and the potential of not quite getting there, I’m very excited to have it almost wrapped up. The story feels good. It’s not nearly as raw as a typical first draft would be because I often go back and revise as I feel the need. Not prose stuff, but plot stuff. In the past I’ve gotten in trouble by simply plowing ahead, either not knowing any better or figuring I can revise on the second draft. Trouble is, at least for me, I could head down a wrong path, and that could lead to all sorts of wrong decisions that would force me to revise much, much more than I would have if I had simply gone back and fixed the offending, ill-advised left turn. At this point in my writing I’m rather sensitive (I prefer to think of it as attuned) to the plot and whether or not its taking the right path. The problem with that is that I could become too safe, so I’m sensitive to that as well. Writing is a constant struggle to keep the story interesting but make it plausible as well - providing twists that are surprising yet believable.

I’ll wrap Winds, Take 1, soon, and I hope I can get it ready for beta readers (including my agent) by mid-summerish.

Also, wish me luck. I’m supposed to hear back relatively soon on my previous novel, The Tears of Tendali, from a couple of editors.

I have reached a milestone. Winds now stands at 100,000 words. I’m very psyched, not only for the word count, which to me holds a certain significance, but also because I can now, finally, see the end of the novel. I don’t yet know the exact details, but I know pretty well the events that lead up to the climax; I know the outcome of the climax; and I know where this all heads in the next novel. I’ve left the ending a little open ended because I want it to be as organic as possible. That is, I want to reach it and have it sprout directly from the events that lead up to it and the attitude of the characters who have lived through the book up to that point. I didn’t want to shoehorn the characters into a pre-determined ending, which has sometimes given me problems in the past. That’s not to say that I’ll let anything happen - I already confessed that I know what happens in very general terms - but I do want to be as open to new avenues as possible. That, at least for me in the writing of this book, has been my modus operandi, and it has worked incredibly well.

At least, it feels like it’s worked incredibly well. A while back, I read a post on (IIRC) Tobias Buckell’s site. He was talking about how now that he has more books under his belt he is more willing to allow a book to take him where it will. He grew more confident as time went on and he learned his chops and was able with that confidence to let his instincts run and trust that they wouldn’t steer him wrong. I feel like I’m reaching a similar place - not that I’m at the same place in my writing that Toby is, only that I’m feeling more comfortable in my skin, and that I’m able to trust that my sense of direction will guide me back to the right path even when a divergence shows up across my chosen trail.

Here’s something weird. I have had trouble reading other people’s blogs lately - writers in particular. I still scan them, but I do so quickly, and I haven’t commented much where I might have a year ago. It has to do with writing, both mine and others’. Writers talk a lot about their writing - their successes, failures, obstacles, progress. For some reason it creates noise, like if I absorb everything that everyone’s saying, my own writing would suffer. I think it has to do with the novel, and maybe it has to do with reading so many feelings, like if I internalized all that stuff that I would begin to become too conscious of the writing process instead of just writing. I feel sort of like I have to put blinders on; I have to prevent myself from getting distracted.

Anyone ever feel like this during a project? (And I recognize the irony: that if anyone did feel that way that they might not even read this…)

It feels good to be on the far side of halfway. The story actually feels like less than half, though I’ll admit that the ending is a bit fuzzy, so who knows. I don’t imagine it’ll end up being any more than 140k.

I’ve been pretty happy to realize that the organic approach, within the larger frame of an outline, is working pretty well. I feel like I’m more comfortable in my abilities, and so able to trust that I’ll be able to find my way. I’m also more able to go with certain instincts when they feel good.

My biggest worry, however, is creating twists. If you sit through any brainstorming exercise, or you’ve done it consciously yourself, you’ll realize that you should be wary of the first few things that come to mind. Those are the things that are easy, cliché, trite. It’s the fifth or sixth or seventh idea where the unexpected gems really show up. You have to be careful with those, too, though, because they’re the ones that can seem the most "convenient" for the author. That is, they’re unlikely to happen and so it can seem, in the context of the story, that the author just chose it to be so, as opposed to it happening organically from plot and character. Getting back to twists, it’s something I’ve really been trying to foster, the creation of unexpected yet logical-as-you-look back events in the story, the stuff that really catches the reader off guard and makes them want to keep reading.

I’ve been plugging away on the Russian Windship novel. It hasn’t been slow, per se. I’m up to 45k words, and I’ve done a number of other writing related projects over the past few months. So the progress is actually not too bad. The trouble is that I poke around the internet and I see all these sales of short stories and awards and inclusions in Best Of anthos (and more power to them!) and I feel like I’m stuck in mud. Like no matter how fast I go I’ll never be done with this novel. Ever.

Then again, there are positives. I’m happy to be working on a new novel. I’m happy it’s approaching its midway point. I’m happy that it’s going so well, because it’s really starting to come into shape. The tone, pacing, and milieu I was shooting for I think I’ve almost nailed. And I think the story itself is really solid.

My last novel is still making the rounds. But even so I’ve been working on revisions based on my own feelings about it, my increased skill level after Clarion, and feedback from my agent. It’s been a long time since I wrote a new novel. The first draft of Tears was done in the middle of 2004. Over three friggin years already! Ugh. I want a new novel. So in this respect I’m very happy to be tackling another large project. The revisions on Tears and the diversion to short stories were very helpful, but on the whole I’m glad I have another mountain to climb instead of a single, challenging cliff face.

Almost halfway up. A little more than halfway to go.

Cheer me on!

I’m tackling the Winds of Khalakovo once again. I had taken a break to pursue several other things that had been weighing my plate, but with those done, I’m back in the saddle.

It’s taken me several days to get back into the swing of things. I had lost touch with the characters, the plot, etc. It’s amazing how susceptible you can be to forgetting things about a story, particularly if you haven’t had time to really work through and discover the plot and the characters. But I’m getting there. Tonight was good. 1,700 words or so, and I have a vision for the next several thousand. I’m looking forward to things getting easier.

One of the things I’m having fun playing with is an autistic savant character. I don’t know much about him yet. But he does unexpected things, which is fun. And I want, in the end, for those things to make a certain sense, a scheme that isn’t readily visible when looking at any handful of his doings. Only the child knows. Well, the child and his keeper. But that’ll remain my secret…

23,400 / 110,000 (21.3%)