Of This and Other Worlds

On the weekend I sent off the first chapter and a three-page synopsis of Touching Indigo to my agent. I am itching to write more on that novel, but for practical reasons I now have to force myself to switch mental gears and start paying some serious attention to Wayfarer (a.k.a. the Knife sequel) instead.

So I've started by making myself a Timothy icon, and now I'm going to fiddle about with random faery-related ideas and hope I can come up with something resembling Plot by the deadline, which would be, oh, the end of this week.

*slightly hysterical laughter*

I won't complain, though. It's a nice position to be in.

I am proud to announce that during the month of April I did, indeed, achieve my goal:

50,000 words.
( How I did it )

Anyway, I still have about 25K to write, but I have definitely hit the home stretch and I'm very happy with my progress. My goals for May are to keep writing my 2000 words a day until I finish Touching Indigo, then put that first draft away for 4-6 weeks while I query some more agents and get started on the preliminary work for the next book. Then I'll either write the first draft of that novel or I'll revise Indigo, whichever seems most sensible at the time...

Thanks to jmprince and all the others who joined me on the Fast Draft Express! And I wish you all the best as you start on the next phase of your own projects!

The bad news: I did not write 20 pages on my first day of Fast Draft.
The good news: I wrote 10 pages (2,727 words).

I'm going to try again tomorrow, and Saturday, and see if I can get over the stumbling blocks my Internal Editor keeps setting up for me. If I can make a spreadsheet of scenes that need to be written, that should keep me from floundering around wondering what to write next.

Other things to be done ASAP include making a chart of Thea's colored alphabet and number associations so I can refer to it at a glance, and doing a character map of Thea and Faraday.

The character map link is part of a site for screenwriters, but the concept works for novels and short stories just as well, and now that I've found it I'm quite excited about working through the questions. If you've ever struggled with finding your characters' motivations and making them three-dimensional, or with figuring out how to come up with a plot worthy of these great characters you've invented, I highly recommend Laurie Hutzler's Emotional Toolbox.

Another cool concept I've started to make work for me: making point-form notes detailing the events of the story from the perspective of each character -- including the bits of that character's backstory that most define their personality and influence their actions. For secondary characters, who appear only intermittently or for just one section of the book, this is a pretty quick exercise but I can already see how helpful it will be later on -- I never have to stop and try to figure out where they are at any given time, or worry whether their individual stories make sense when they're not "on-screen", so to speak. It helps to remind me that these characters aren't props -- they're people, with lives of their own even if those lives aren't the story I'm telling.

Off to bed now. Yawn.

Since mid-January I have had two major illnesses -- one 24-hour bout that left me weak for days afterward, followed closely by the Flu O'Doom, which I am just now getting over two weeks later. I am tired of being tired, and sick of being sick, and generally ready to stop coughing now, thanks. And unsurprisingly, all this has put a crimp in my First Draft in 30 Days plans, leaving me stuck somewhere in the middle of Days 7-13 (Research).

I must confess, too, that this is one of my least favorite phases of Wiesner's outlining process. There are things in this section which bore me to fiery tears -- fact sheets ("there are twelve patrol officers in the precinct") and timelines and such. She also suggests making a list of your various characters' dialogue quirks, which is giving me flashbacks to Redwall with all the accents spelled out phonetically (noooooo), or Fflewddur Fflam saying "Great Belin!" every six paragraphs throughout the entire Chronicles of Prydain.

So I am cheating on Wiesner with Randy Ingermanson at the moment, and trying to decide which method I really want to go steady with. But since I haven't actually done anything new for about two and a half weeks, I should probably, y'know, make some forward progress first.

There is an outstanding problem with Indigo, however. It involves an Evil Conspiracy on the part of all my characters to drive me insane. ( Like this... )

However, my new objective is to take a page from novel_in_90 and churn out 750 words of something every day, whether it's plot notes or character interviews or (gasp!) actual writing. So I think I'll go and do that now.

As you have probably already noticed, Day Five in First Draft in 30 Days and Day Five on the actual calendar are... not so much in alignment. But I am still ahead of deadline, or at least I haven't missed my deadline yet. Remember I'm planning to do this in 90 days (max.) instead of 30, so you can do the math.

I have managed to plow through my Character Sketches, Setting Sketches and Research List, and today I finally broke through my mental block on the Plot Sketch. Now I am working on the Summary Outline -- a sort of essay detailing as much of the book as I can come up with at this point, from beginning to end (and allowing for any number of gaps in the middle, which will be filled in later).

And lo and behold, I find that I actually have a plot. It's nothing special -- "linear" would perhaps be the kindest word for it at this point, and there are elements which will require a good deal of finesse if I'm to keep them from appearing cliched and predictable. But it is at least a rough map from Point A to Point B. And I can already pick out scenes which are going to be a lot of fun to write, which gives me something to work toward and look forward to. Best of all, a character I didn't know existed until a few days ago has not only become three-dimensional, she's starting to insist on taking a significant role in the action, which surprises but does not displease me.

Still working on alternate character names -- though I do think that I'm going to end up keeping Thea after all, and it's only Dr. Tristram Leith's last name I need to change.

Okay, okay, so I got distracted and am... well, not exactly behind schedule, as I still have until the 15th to complete Day 1-6, but not exactly on schedule either.

Mind you, I don't have enough information in my head yet about the secondary characters for Indigo to write down more than a line or two for each of them, and I already wrote down all the thoughts I had on Thea and Leith on Days One and Two. Today I'm supposed to be making notes of the various settings in the book, and compiling a research list -- but I don't know yet what specific settings I'm going to need, and since the majority of the book's action takes place in a town where I lived for ten years, I'm not too worried about getting the details wrong.

On a tangential note, though -- I'm trying to decide whether to set Indigo in the actual Sudbury, or a fictional northern Ontario town just like it. The advantage of a fictionalized city is that I can rearrange landmarks and make up new ones without local readers saying, "Hey, there's no such place as Trufflehunter's on Lasalle Boulevard!" It also prevents any potential English readers being confused (since there's a Sudbury in the south of England which is manifestly different from the Canadian one).

On the other hand, it's just possible that nobody actually cares about that stuff so long as the general feel of the place and the major geographic and historical details are right. james_bow, care to weigh in on why you chose to invent Clarksbury rather than work with an actual town? It might help me to decide what I want to do. And, of course, anyone else with experience of reading or writing about contemporary places is heartily invited to comment.

***

BUT I DIGRESS AS USUAL. The actual point of this entry is to present the fruit of my distractableness, in the form of my revised hook for Knife:

( The New NEW Hook )

I've tried to include the added plot and conflict details that Miss Snark and the Snarklings requested, and I think the result is an improvement over the original, but I'm still not sure if it covers all the necessary bases. Thoughts? Suggestions? Squashy tomatoes?

ETA a totally different version of the hook, just to confuse the issue for everyone and MAKE YOU ALL SHARE MY PAIN.

So. As I think I said before, come January I intend to try the method Karen Wiesner lays out in her book First Draft in 30 Days. Until now I've shied away from outlines because they seemed such dry, lifeless things, just the skeleton of a story with none of the Good Bits. I always thought that if I knew how the story went, there'd be no reason for me to write it -- that having an outline would spoil all the fun and the wonder, and suck away my creative drive. I was an inveterate seat-of-the-pants writer -- a "pantser".

However, having just gone through a major revision of Knife using my earlier draft more as an outline than anything else, and not only enjoying the process (mostly) but feeling that the book is considerably better as a result of having that existing structure behind it, WHY DO I WRITE SUCH LONG SENTENCES WILL SOMEONE PLEASE MAKE ME STOP, where was I? Oh, yes --

Uh, anyway. Yeah. I rewrote the book. From the old draft. And it was really not that bad. It was actually nice not to have to worry about whether the plot would come together, or how. And even though my creative engine was driving along a track already laid, and I knew exactly where all the stations were, I still made discoveries along the way. My characters surprised me from time to time -- these people I've known for thirteen years, or thought I knew. And there was one bit, not present in any of the earlier drafts, that actually made me tear up -- me, who almost never cries at books, ended up crying over my own book.

So apparently it's not creatively stifling to have the plot and other major details sorted out in advance after all. And that means there's a chance that Wiesner's outlining method, or something similar, could work for me.

In the New Year, I hope to use this LJ as a progress journal as I work my way through the outline for, uh, either Wayfarer or Touching Indigo or both -- I still haven't decided yet. I'm not going to go into spoilery detail about what I'm writing, but I do want to keep a record of how well the First Draft method is working for me, and how I feel about the process.

In the meantime, completely unrelated to the above, you should all go and watch the sad, smelly saga of the exploding whale.