Echoes in a Hollow Space

This morning—or actually, I guess it's afternoon—I realized that I might not have dueling novels after all. I've been thinking of these as "part of JK's story" and "part of Sam's" story when, really, the answer has been staring me in the face all the time.

It's Ramona's story.

She won't be telling it herself and that's what's confused me. Ramona's story actually works better viewed from the observation of others, and that's a deeply unconventional way of telling a story, at least for me. But it's an ironic, twisty, humorous story—although I doubt Ramona would understand the irony of it all. She is, within her narrow confines, even more earnest than JK and deeply committed to her own P.O.V., and that view is often at odds with everyone else's perception of reality (including the reader's, I suspect). So the irony only works when told on the outside, and it's all about shaking up perception.

So I am both dismayed and energized by this revelation. The discovery process is what thrills me about writing, but now I have to refigure wherein square one lies so that I can mosey my way back to it. I suspect it starts with that damned story between JK and Ramona, but I'm not going to stop the flow of what's going on now in order to do that moseying. I'm pushing forward with this since it's flowing so well. If it dries up, or if it brings fresh revelations and ideas, I...may do something else.

In the meantime, onward.


I caught this morning morning's minion...

So I've been doing some new writing the last few days, for the first time in months, and it's felt really good. I decided to take some time off after finishing the first draft of my last novel, and that stretched into a much longer period than I anticipated. Then I busied myself with the rewrite, and in the weeks since finishing that I rewrote some older stories (again) and sent them back out.

I told myself it was time to start the new novel, but instead I've been working on a Dos Lunas Country novelette about Ramona the chicken wrangler. I abandoned this one some time back because I realized I didn't know, after all, how it ended. I thought I did, but I'm just the author. I'm not always in charge. Now that I do know how it ends, it called to me to finish up.

This story is crucial to understanding the story arc for my character, JK Montmorency. Even though he isn't the hero of the new novel, understanding his back story is important to it—to the whole Dos Lunas cycle, actually.

There's another story about JK and some moon maidens that I should probably finish, too. Also critical to his back story, but somehow I haven't been able to get it done. It needed some deep currents to resolve themselves inside me first, but I suspect they have now. At any rate, it's talking to me again. We'll see how things go with Ramona. Maybe then the moon maidens can have their turn at last.

Tempus fugit, ya'll. Do what you can when you can because you never know what's around the corner.

I got this one from sosostris2012. It's a different take on the first line meme. This is everything I worked on in 2006, finished or not. (So, I cheated a little with some of these and put the opening paragraph down—but only on a few.)

If this had been a list of everything I finished in 2006, it would be a short list indeed: Night Warrior, a novel. I did a lot of revising this year, some of it quite extensive (Shivery Bones) and started some stories, but the only thing I actually finished was NW. That novel just about killed me, which seemed to be a theme for the year.

( Behind a cut to reduce boredom. )

Quote of the day:

"I remember what somebody said about nostalgia, he said it's okay to look back, as long as you don't stare."

—Tom Paxton

Writing talk of the day:

After six days of not writing nuthin' I wrote 1000 words today. A very productive lunch hour. Yay me. I'm closing in for the kill. Night Warrior/Born to Darkness, for all its unmarketability, is closing in on Doneness. (Born to Doneness?)

I was still home sick yesterday, but not too sickish, so I worked on another Dos Lunas story, "Closes Within a Dream." This one involves JK at age nineteen when he first discovers his power. It's an ungainly 12k, and very stubborn about those 12k, too. It's too novelistic. If I'm determined to make it a short story and not a lead in to a novel, or a part of a novel, then I'm going to have to get ruthless about cutting out some colorful secondary characters. The thing is, for me that's the life of this story. I could be wrong.

I did think that I might string all these stories together into a novel-of-stories with some sort of framing device front, center, and back. I even came up with a decent framing device and a conflict/plot device that strung them together quite nicely. The trouble is, the voice is so different in each of these stories that it just didn't feel right. Hortensia's voice from "Hortensia's Man" is not the same as Eudora, who is not the same as Lunar Magnusson, who is not the same as nineteen-year-old JK. Or thirty-year-old JK, or Ramona.

I also thought of rewriting them all from the ground up, using one voice...but that didn't seem right either when I started to do it. Nobody has put me in this quandary but myself, but quandaryfied I am. I keep thinking that time will give me the answer, and maybe it will. Truth is the daughter of time, after all. But so far, she's keeping mum.

Bathos of the day: Yesterday, the mourning dove my mother has taken care of for the last twenty years (thanks to a kitty cat of our acquaintance mangling her wing too badly to fix), found her full wings again and took off into the Dreamtime. My mother buried her in the backyard (in a Mushrooms shoe box, as it happens), rather close to the grave of my cat, Mocha, the hunter who contributed the dove to mom's menagerie. The dove outlived her attacker by eighteen years. Which I guess makes this also the irony of the day.

I've been feverishly working away on the big fight scene and I realized part of the reason these folks have been yapping instead of doing, part of the reason I've been so reluctant to write this now. This is the 1968 climax, and the next section of the book that I'll go to is the 6th century part. But the part immediately following the '68 climax (as currently configured) would be the lead up to the 6th century climax. So, the pacing would be all fricky fracky—churn up, then slow down. I need to save this chapter until after the 6th century climax so I can have it line up as climax-climax-1976 climax. Bing bang bong instead of an anti-climactic hurdy gurdy movement.

I'm glad I realized this before anyone read this section of ms.

( Other characters of the day )

( Randomness of the day )

Here's my weekly report on The Rewrite That Will Not Die 2: The Winnowing:

Chapters completed: 21

Revised page count: 599

Revised manual word count: 147,254 (net words cut 1966)

Revised Word line count with a zero stuck on the end word count: 146,650 (net words cut 1640)


I spent most of the week battling with chapters 17 and 18. They needed more than just winnowing, they needed more rewriting. So I did. It was a hard slog. Some added text balanced out text cut and slowed the whole winnowing process down, but I feel better about these chapters now. I still don't think they're quite there, but I've gone as far as I can go with them at this juncture, from my current perspective. It's time to release them back into the wild and see if they can fly on their own.

But I feel real good about getting the page count below 600! Yowza! True, it's only 599, but the 600 mark was a real psychological barrier. Now getting this monster down to 145k seems eminently feasible, and getting it down to 140k is an outside possibility. I've got 11 chapters and an epilogue to go, so we'll see.

I didn't get any other writing work done, of course, but I did get some good creative noodling done. I thought through some problems with my Dos Lunas/JK novel (a contemporary fantasy), but still have to figure out some major elements there. (Like, for one, why did Ramona hijack the story, what does she want, and do I give in and let her have her say or tell her to shut up.)

A completely new story popped into my brain, tentatively titled, "The Mistress and the Loon." And a completely new voice started talking to me the other night. I'm not at all sure where she fits in, but she does have some interesting things to say. I also did some creative noodling on the story that refuses to let me change its working title. I suppose it would be wrong to write a story called "Barfing Angel"? Yeah, I thought so.

Now, what I really need is to finish this rewrite and the attendant synopsis, et al., and get it out the door so I can turn my energies back to other projects and crits. I'm beginning to loathe this novel—which means it's definitely time to let go.