Echoes in a Hollow Space

Quote of the day:

"It is always best and safest to count on nothing from the Americans but words."

—Neville Chamberlain


For all you Sean Bean fans out there...The Field. I think you have to be pretty hardcore to put up with this one. I saw it at the height of my Sean Bean obsession, and for some reason it popped into my brain today on the drive into work.

This film was clearly designed to be an Important Film, a dramatic high at the end of Richard Harris's career, and consequently has much High Drama and Serious Acting. It also has one of the most ridiculous endings ever which, despite the seriousness I was supposed to be feeling, made me laugh my socks off. Any Monty Python fan would probably feel the same. There is livestock involved. Unfortunately, no French Taunters.

But Seanie has a nice Irish brogue, is gorgeous (of course), is partly a bad boy, partly a lover. Don't get me wrong, this is a seriously droopy film, and although it got some positive critical blah-blah at the time, I thought it mostly overdone and, ultimately, ridiculous. Fast forward through all the bits without Seanie in. But be sure to watch the end.

Oh, and for Sting fans and trivia collectors, Frances Tomelty, his first wife for whom he wrote his stalker song, "I'll Be Watching You," plays a young widow in this flick.


Writingness of the day: I managed to cut only 500 more words yesterday (and sweated to do that much). This portion of saggy middle wasn't as saggy as I remembered. I may have to take another pass through this monster once I finish this one. *sigh* I'll soldier on tomorrow, but I'm going to spend the lunch hour rereading "Eudora" one last time.

Meh. No gain, no cut yesterday. I cut, but had to add in some stuff to make vague things clearer. Clarity is a good thing. I don't begrudge it. The good news is that as I read through this ms. the new opening comes into clearer focus. The set piece I thought I was going to be able to cut from the middle of the ms. and stick on the front probably won't work. I'll have to write something new, but that's forming up. Which will add to the word count, but hopefully not by much. Short is the operative word here: prologue-y short, although I'll call it chapter one because it's in the same time period, et al. The other good news is that these chapters are pretty tight-as-written. I know there's some more baggage coming up in later chapters, but these read pretty well to me, even after all this time.

Today I plan on working on "Eudora's Song." I thought I should probably read it through once more before flinging it at FSF. But I might sneak in more work on Shivery Bones.

ETA: You know what I hate? When you finish a rewrite and you say to yourself, "I think I nailed it that time!" And you lay it aside so you can read it again in a month and gain a little perspective, and you read it a month later and . . . the illusive It remains unnailed. "Eudora" is a stronger story, but the damned middle still sags. I've done what I can for it at this moment in time, but I don't think it's enough. I'm still taking it off the hook and releasing it, though. It needs to get into the water and start swimming. Maybe I'll know better how to fix it the next time I catch it.

Interesting sight of the day: Somebody took out a fire hydrant on Admiralty Way in Marina del Rey. Normally this is a fast shoot winding through the Marina, wending my way from Westchester to Santa Monica. But the opportunities for exiting Admiralty are limited, so we were pretty much trapped there watching the impressive water display. It was shooting up in the air a good 100 feet or so. Since there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it, I went into my zen place and thought about how lucky I was not to be trying to get out of Heathrow today, or flying anywhere for that matter. Finally, the sheriff's department started squeezing cars by in one lane and we eventually merged and moved past.

The merging thing, it's funny. Some drivers are so rabid about being first, even though everyone is moving at a snail's pace. You're not getting ahead of me, you're not getting ahead of me! I'll crash my car into you!" It's chickenshit insane, but what are you going to do? I was in my zen place, so I let the bastard go ahead of me.

Which is not to say I'm not a maniac driver sometimes. It goes with the territory here in L.A. But this morning, apparently, my hormones were in balance and it wasn't a problem. Or maybe it was the lovely fragrance of White Light I smelled for the first time last night.


Quote of the day:

"Fear will always fall to wonder in those who are capable of it."

—Jeffrey Ford, Memoranda

Quotes of the day:

"We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out."

—Ray Bradbury


Love this one. He also said one of my favorite quotes about risk-taking and the creative act:

"Throw yourself off a cliff and build your wings on the way down."

He apparently liked that quote, too, for when giving speeches over the years he used several variants:

“Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.”

“Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.”

"First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down."


I think I prefer the simplicity of the first one. Or maybe I just like that one better because it was the first variant I heard and because it was quoted to me by my departed friend, Stephan. It has become something of a mantra for me in my creative process, anyway.

Writingness of the day:

It's official. I'm going to do another rewrite of Shivery Bones before sending out my next batch of agent queries, see if I can cut 20k. There are a number of things killing me on that book, I suspect, but surely the 143k length is one of them.


SURVEY (as opposed to Monday poll):

How many of you read Evil Editor?

Quote of the day:

"You only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree."

—G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

( Illustrated quote of the day. )

Writing talk of the day: I'm working on chapter 37 now. Chapter 32 has just been posted to the OWW. Major revelation in that chapter (hint). One everyone's been asking me about for months (hint). I'm working steadily towards the end of the book, reaching a rather frightening word count, see much cutting in my future. I already have some ideas about what can go, but I'm not tackling a rewrite for awhile after finishing this monster.

( More stuff on new writing projects, finding themes and books that influenced my novels. )

I love anything that smacks of randomness, so I had to do this meme. In which you post your blog's first line of the first post of each month.

The year in review, as inspired by merebrilliante and prestoimp:

( Read More )

"If, as you live your life, you find yourself mentally composing LJ entries about it, post this exact same sentence in your Live Journal."


But you all knew that about me anyway.

Things I thought of blogging about today: Of how some readers confuse current times with historical times and think current cultural mores are the way things have always been. 

Why I didn't blog it: Bizzy.  I may still blog it.  Or just think about it.

Goofy thought of the day:  I should start a band called the Jimi Schmendrix Experience.

Cliché du jour: I stared open-mouthed at him.

Darling du jour: n/a - Nothing really opened up my third eye.

Gratitude of the day: To those who offered to beta my novelette.  'Preciate skit!

Agony of the day:  Boiling down the two page synopsis for Shivery Bones to one page.  Oh. The. Humanity.

Refrigerator of the day:  In deference to those who have moral standards (unlike myself), I've put this behind a cut.  If buymeaclue wanders by, the erotic Ancient Greek pot we discussed some months back is right below the green car.

Here There Be Man Parts&

[broken link]

Frustration of the day: Netscape won't let me access my flist page. I can access it all right if I use Safari, but none of the click throughs work on Netscape. Which makes no kind of sense! I can click on the individual friend, I've checked all the settings, but I can't click through to the flist page from the entry page or my blog page or the UserInfo page.

Oh, and on Safari, I can get into the flist page, but it's not displaying correctly. And although it says I'm logged in at the top, I still have to log in every time I leave a comment.

Grrr. (This is me looking like that demon-ugly dog.)

Interesting thing of the day: They featured the Magic Castle on one of the local TV programs, an exclusive membership club in Hollywood. I hope to go there for my birthday in September. One of the people I work with is a professional magician and a member there and can get us free passes. But that's some months down the road...

Most ungrammatical news story of the day: On a "Netscape News With CNN" article about Stonehenge: "From where did those bluestones comes?"

Writerly question of the day: Why rewrite The Little Mermaid (Andersen version, not Disney version) when you've covered no new territory, brought no new insights to the table, haven't changed the structure in any way? In fact, the only new element seems to be that this writer set the story in his imaginary, contemporary North American city that he's set so many stories in. I finished the story and thought, "What was the point of that?"

Of course, the whole "covering new territory" issue is one that I run up against quite a bit in my own writing.

Or at least in my current WIP and the last novel that is currently in an editorial holding pattern. I'm told over and over that it's next to impossible to write anything new about vampires; many refuse to read my stuff because they can't believe they'll find anything there for themselves. Yet when people actually do read my stuff they're often surprised, often say, "This is different." Many won't give it a chance, though.

My favorite crit along these lines was: "If I liked vampire books, I'd probably be delighted to read more."

The way I look at it is this: either a book is good or it isn't; either you enjoy reading it or you don't. Even if it's not your usual "type" of book, if you pick it up and enjoy it, why stop reading because it isn't what you usually read? It's impossible to answer that—readers do what they do; people think the way they think.

I've been guilty of it myself, but often when I violate my own reading rules, I find wonderful surprises. The loveliest surprise I've had in recent years is James Hetley's The Summer Country. When I read the blurb some years back I thought, "Not another urban retelling of Celtic myth! Blech." I'd read quite a lot of that and had a prejudice that it would be paint-by-numbers fiction. Then I read a review of the sequel, The Winter Oak, and that made me believe that perhaps there was something different going on with these books. So I bought The Summer Country and I absolutely fell in love with it. Gobbled up The Winter Oak soon after. They were both lovely surprises and now I'll read anything James Hetley puts out, even if it seems like a retelling—because even if some of the elements are familiar territory, he brings a new character gravitas to the table; he makes me see the familiar in a new way.

There's a difference in spirit between a retelling just because you can get away with it and a retelling because your writer's heart has found new value in the material. I think the reader can tell the difference, even if they can't quite put their finger on why one thing works and another doesn't. I hope I'm writing because I've found new value in the material, but I obviously don't have the perspective to judge.

The thing is, I've never perceived my stuff as vampire fiction. My stories are about people trying to cope with a disease that leaves them alienated from the human society that they crave, the love that they need, and with tough moral dilemmas that they try hard to reconcile. They are human beings, not supernatural creatures. They have values (some of them even family values!) and ethics, and try to stay on the side of morality, to show compassion, to weed out the vampires who don't. They are fallible, though, and sometimes fall from grace.

I guess that's been done before, too. But my writer's heart insists there's still value to be had there.

It's frustrating and I wish sometimes the muse hadn't insisted on taking this particular path. I've created other worlds that don't tread such familiar roads, that are not viewed with the same disdain as vampires. But for the moment, this is where my passion lies. To write a novel, I think you've got to have at least some fire in the belly for an idea. At least it's that way for me. It's such a long process that something more than "Gosh, I need to write a novel" has to push me forward. And right now, these characters are providing that burning engine. Other characters and other worlds may catch fire down the line, but for right now, this is what I have to do.

And yes, I'm whining. I'll get over myself soon.

One person who read my novel, Shivery Bones, said the title made her think of pirates. Ar! I could live with that—if it was the Johnny Depp type of pirate.

Unfortunately, the novel has nothing to do with pirates. It has to do with channeling gods and goddesses; the birth and death cycle of the Great Goddess; love, sacrifice, and redemption; the meaning of lif(e); and good and evil vampires. Oh yes, it's also about the Spanish Inquisition, but nobody expects that.

I'd planned on writing another type of novel after that one. I was writing a series of contemporary fantasy stories about a small, mythological county in Southern California called Dos Lunas and the very strange people who live there. I had a nice superstructure worked out that would allow me to use much of that material in a novel, but somehow that didn't jell and this old novel, Night Warrior, sunk it's fangs into me. I'm closing in on 60k words now on a novel centering around one of the "support players" in Shivery.

And just this morning my subconscious delivered of me a solution as to why the Dos Lunas novel didn't jell. That's the way these breakthroughs happen for me. Distract myself with something else and let the lower end of my brain work on the other stuff and then pop! A squawling mass of new ideas comes forth.

And the conclusion I came to about using the Dos Lunas stories for a novel: those stories are...stories. They were written novelistically (which is why I'm not a great short story writer), but I don't really think they are part of a novel. The superstructure is fine, but the journey my hero, JK, needs to make has to be told in a different way. It has to be a part of this universe and this novel, not those stories. They have turned out to be a very elaborate backstory.

I may still be able to make them work as stories some day, but it isn't a priority for me anymore. I'm a novelist. That's the way my creative mind works; that's the creative muscles that have developed. And JK will have his day. Just not in the way I originally thought.

Of course, my lower brain didn't have any good ideas about what to do with the minor character who wanted to hijack the entire novel. I plan to slip her some sedatives once I start writing that novel again.

I usually don't post progress notes because it's always the same story with me: I grind it out day to day, averaging between 500-850 words. Not a blistering pace, but steady and cumulative. Sometimes I write 1000, 1200, even 2-3000, but mostly it's just grinding it out. But I thought it worthy to note that I have just completed seven chapters of my new novel, Night Warrior. Okay, most of that was rewriting and editing old text to make it come up to my present standards, but it does mean that I am well and thoroughly launched on this new novel. I'm in the zone with it, can feel it spinning out ahead of me and delving deep inside me.

Pam's lessons learned.

Recurrent themes emerge from the darkness. Scenes involving transformative experiences, for one. In my novel Shivery Bones I had a scene where a wounded and desperate man crawls through a gap in a hedge and emerges into a place that will thoroughly change him. Apparently, my Backbrain liked that scene so much it copied it from this older work, ten years before. I'd completely forgotten I had a scene with a boy who crawls through a gap in a briar patch and has a transformative experience until I read it again. Too bad. I think the metaphor works even better in this one. Are metaphors like rivers, I wonder? Can you wade in the same metaphor twice or must they constantly be changing? I suppose it's failure of imagination to reuse such a distinctive one, but *sigh.*

But the positive thing about revisiting this old work after a flood of water under the bridge is that even the things that made me despair and abandon it all those years ago are just not that big of a deal to me this go round. Perspective. Learning more about the craft. Water under the bridge.

Having completed three novels now (and countless stories) I think it's finally sunk in to my creative spirit (and not just my brain) that first drafts are not a life and death proposition. You don't have to get it right the first time—in fact, that's virtually impossible. The job of the first draft is just to be there, a repository for the things inside yearning to get out. Writers have the great luxury of revisions and levels of approach. Here are my hard won (and not profound) lessons learned:

● First draft—just get it done.

● Second draft—fix those plot holes and character inconsistencies and pacing issues—the big ticket items.

● Third draft—maybe concentrate on the language this time around, make it pretty and bright.

● Fourth draft—no, don't go there, you'll get stuck in the never ending revision cycle.

Send the damned thing out and move on to the next thing. If it comes back to you rejected, you always have the option of doing that fourth draft, but if you have well and truly moved on to something else, your perspective will be so much better when the old thing returns—and you can do a much better job at revising it. And anyway, all your eggs won't be in one basket and it won't hurt as much if one of them breaks. Only like wrenching off one of your fingers instead of the whole limb. (And now I'm mixing my metaphors which has got to be as bad as reusing them.)

Your order of dealing with revisions may be substantially different from mine, but this is what's working for me now. As W. Somerset Maugham said in the blog of matociquala (as well as elsewhere):

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

Of course, the immortal words of Han Solo are also coming back to me at this moment, too: "Don't get cocky, kid."

On another note: You may recall that the last we heard from Boyfriend and Girlfriend who live upstairs, Boyfriend had filled the back of his truck with dirt which then turned to mud when he drove home in a rain storm and drained all over the garage when he parked it in Girlfriend's parking space. The truck's been there ever since, round about a week and a half I guess, and the mud has dried and turned to stone (lots of clay in local soil). But sometime between 6:45 last night when I got home and 8:30 when I left this morning, someone had moved the truck out of the garage and onto the street. By Imperial order of Yuri? I don't know. And after they moved it, the City of Los Angeles came along and put a boot on the wheel for unpaid parking tickets...

I tried not to laugh too much because that would have been wrong, wouldn't it? I don't need the bad karma. But sometimes, ya know, life is just very funny.

Okay, so I'll probably natter on about Shivery Bones again sometime, but this is my final report on: The Rewrite That Would Not Die 2: The Winnowing.

Chapters completed: All of them!

Revised page count: 586

Revised manual word count: 144,058 (net words cut 983)

Revised Word line count with a zero stuck on the end word count: 143,590 (net words cut 1170)


So, I don't recommend doing two intense rewrites in less than three months, but I kind of wanted to prove to myself I could do it. So I did it. I'm happy I was able to cut 12,000 words. The first draft came in at around 156k, the second around 153k. 144k is still too long but I am done for the moment. Yay for me!

As often happens with me when I've been stressing for a long time (and it wasn't the ms. so much as many other factors in my life right now), I got nailed by a nasty virus last night and am currently dealing with the flu. That sort of scotches my plan to work on the synopsis and first 60 today, but it's probably just my body saying, "It's time to take a break." So I'm going to do a serious veg thing for a couple of days at least.