Echoes in a Hollow Space

It's been awhile since I've lived in the dream of a story. I'm not sure why. Or maybe I can think of a lot of reasons, each too boring to go into. But I miss it. The phantom limb of my imagination throbs, but I can't scratch it.

And yet, things seem to be moving again. Slowly, the phantom limb solidifies. Last week an old high fantasy novel that I abandoned long ago started whispering to me again. "I've got a new title for you, dearie. Much better than the tawdry old one."

Ice In My Bones

I'd done quite a lot of work on that one without actually writing it. So much outlining, in fact, that it killed the dream of the story, which effectively killed the possibility of me writing it. The main character of that one has never quite left me alone, though, popping his head up now and again like a toadstool on the lawn. I think he'd like his shot at a fairy ring or some such. Maybe now that I've forgotten many of the nuts and bolts of the story I can go back to dreaming it and write the damned thing down. Maybe not.

Pressing a lot harder last week was the sequel to A Rain of Angels. I've done quite bit of work on that one, too. I still don't have a solid enough ending, but most of the main characters have names now. Still one crucial person left unnamed. I'm sure she'll whisper her name to me one of these days soon, though. Carsten and Rye and the others will return, but there are a new batch of New Batchers, too.

And still no title for that one: An Intermittent Flurry of Angels perhaps? A Blitzkrieg of Angels? Even More Barfing Angels?

It remains a mystery. But one that will probably be solved.

And I'm doing the "reader's read through" of A Rain of Angels right now. I'm not allowing myself to make major changes, just reading several chapters a day as a reader would (minor fixes allowable). I'm glad I am. Many more typos than I would have expected and odd bits of formatting and left out things. I'm up to chapter 16 and it reads pretty good. Not perfect, but yanno, I'm done with it.

And Venus in Transit? Still working it's way slowly through the workshop to much general ambivalence. I've inched closer to a solution to the problems on that one, too, as well as some major revisions to what's already done—which I'll probably do before posting it to (hopefully) get reactions on the new material. But some crucial things still elude me.

I imagine my imagination will come up with something there, too. Where there's life there's hope, after all.

Or: why characters must seem like real people but not be like real people.

People are messy, composed of conflicting bits, composites of everything they've heard, seen, and experienced—plus the miasma of DNA. That's why you'll have a conservative minister strong on family values preaching on the defense of marriage one day, then turning around and hiring a male prostitute the next. Or, in less inflammatory terms, why you'll have a writer who's cynical about the world but at her core a diehard romantic. People can be mean and kind-hearted in the same package. There are no pure people with purely one side to their personal equation.

More than one reviewer has told me that my main character in the current novel is inconsistent. This goes back beyond the current reviews from my betas, back into workshopland. I wanted to make Carsten contradictory, did it intentionally, but I do think my execution must be off if more than one person is saying it. I haven't conveyed that particular aspect of her character with sufficient clarity, so much so that some people thought she was unlikable. I don't necessarily have a problem with an MC being unlikable, but in this case I think it's a matter of miscommunication and it works against the story.

Other things are easier to deal with: some critters want me to be more romantic, others want all romance removed from the novel. That's an individual taste thing and tells me that I have to go with my own heart where that's concerned. One tells me that I should get rid of some characters, merge two into one. I think that assessment is correct overall and I've been eliminating superfluous named characters. I'm also combining two significant secondary characters into one later in the book.

But there's a core triumvirate of secondary characters that I'm resisting melding into one or two. In my mind, they are distinct people, but, again, I think my execution is off. They're not coming off the page as distinct, at least not to this critter, and since she's echoing a concern of my own, I'm thinking hard about it. I've been putting in "distinction" clues: reemphasizing physical differences, changing speech patterns to make them stand out from each other, playing up their quirks (really, it feels like I'm sledgehammering it at this point, but whatevs).

Still, a niggling worm inside tells me I need to let go. Maybe Albatross and Orpheus should be merged, even if Loreo still stands on his own. As it is, Albatross has already lost his name. He's Shackle now. I realized after all this time that I had no birds in my alternate Earth. Duh.

Maybe on the next pass I'll realize that Resistance Is Futile and my two friends will have their separate existences ripped from them and be forced into one body in some horrible literary transporter malfunction. Right now I'm too close to know if that would be a good thing, or some heartbreaking monster.