Echoes in a Hollow Space

Not the WIP.  I think I fixed that.  Only time will tell.

No, it’s one of my short stories that’s broken in the middle.  And I don’t know how to fix it.  I’ve rewritten it ever so many times and every time I think, “Okay, I think that’s got it.”  I let it go, send it out into the world again to garner more rejections.  Then after many months (sometimes many, many months) I read it again and I think, “Dang.  It’s still broken in the middle.”

The beginning is good, the ending is good, I’m very fond of this story, but I know in my heart of hearts why it keeps garnering rejections.  There’s a clear drop off point in the middle where the opening momentum collapses and the oomph doesn’t pick up again until the closing pages.

But I don’t know how to fix it.  And it makes me very sad.

I seem to always have trouble with middles.  I can grab with openings, I can satisfy with endings (if anyone reads past the middle to find out about the endings), but middles slay me every time.  Sometimes I can figure out how to make them work, and sometimes I can’t.

Dang.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

No, I'm not talking about the current state of my belly, although I am actually off work today with belly troubles.

I'm actually referring to the middle portion of my WIP. Some serious carnage is in its future, but for now I'm pushing onwards. I've been down this road enough to know that I won't know what to slash and burn until I've got a completed draft on my hands. I've reworked a lot of this from the 90k unfinished draft I had, but I still haven't written that final 25k or so that makes the crucial difference. You know, the actual climax. Once that's in the can, I'll have a better sense of The Real and Truly What of my novel.

I realize this isn't particularly efficient or something I would recommend to anyone else, but it is what it is.

I just posted chapter 13 to the workshop yesterday and was horrified to see that it was over the 7500 word limit. I could break it into two chunks which would make it more palatable to critters, but that would require deleting one of the other chapters I've got posted (there's a three post limit). I'm hoping for at least one more crit on the other chapters (11 and 12) already there, so I'm just going to let it ride. It's difficult to acquire new critters when you get to the saggy middle point of a novel, anyway. I've been through that enough times to not be overly concerned about it. It is what it is, too. Not every novel finds its audience on the workshop. Or, as one disgruntled critter noted, "Good luck with editing this."

I'm actually much better at editing drafts then generating first drafts. Sometimes my books go through amazing transformations in the editing process. Sometimes not. Such is life.

Perhaps I'll go back to cold querying the novels I already have finished and polished while I stumble forward with this one. I haven't done that in awhile due to various life circumstances and brain circumstances. I think it's time to get off my duff.

The current status:




The stage of the unfinished draft:

Not a lot of forward progress on the latest novel in the last few weeks. I took some time off to work on a short story and to do some research reading because I'd started to get that Middle of the Novel and All Adrift feeling. I was hoping the reading would help me focus. Some, not much. So I kicked the novel around a bit more, but my subconscious still resisted setting a course. It's a good thing I've been through this several times before because instead of feeling panicked, I just felt irritated.

So today I started asking myself the hard questions, like:

◆ How do you see the rest of this novel going?
◆ What kind of a lame-brained plot element is that?
◆ Have you considered switching genres?
◆ Hey wait a minute, are you really writing the middle book of a trilogy?
◆ What is that deep, dark character element you've been hinting at for 60k words but never quite made up your mind about?
◆ How can you possibly fit 1180k worth of novel into a 100k space?
◆ What about the tutu-wearing ponies? They've been waiting in the wings all this time...
◆ Who are you kidding?
◆ You must be kidding me. I don't see anyone else here. Are you kidding me?
◆ Have you considered a career in the Foreign Legion?

While I was at it, I sat down and did a proto-outline of what's left to get through. It clarified things wonderfully. Maybe I can start rowing again. Chances are, I won't follow the outline, but at least it got me headed towards the end once more. No doubt I'll have to plot the course again at some future point.

I still don't know what to do with the ponies. Maybe next novel...

In other news, I have been cleaning up the language on the last novel and I now officially hate it. Perhaps it would be enlivened with some ponies in tutus?




Venus In Transit

62,250 / 100,000 (62.3%)

I did better this week than last, but still not the dizzying speed as when I first got my Neo. As I said before, I don't perceive of this as a saggy middle, but it's got saggy middleistic aspects to it. Still, if I can roughly keep up a chapter a week that's still twice as fast as the days before the Neo. And that's a good thing.


This week:

62,000 / 100,000 (62.0%)

Last week:

59,000 / 100,000 (59.0%)

(These colors are both pretty ugly, especially together. I may not try them again.)

So, bummer about Zokutou.

This week I finished off chapter 13 and got six pages into chapter 14. A good writing week. Though slightly short of my 5500 words goal, I'll take it. The 5k I got were good words, I think.

I'm grateful that I seem to have gotten my saggy middle out of the way in the front end of the novel, although I may be fooling myself. This saggy middle isn't sagging, exactly, as I'm writing with good energy and enthusiasm, but I think I'm taking too long to pivot the novel into the next phase. As they say...that's what rewrites are for. And as I said before, I hope I don't hit another saggy middle at the end of this novel.


This week:



Last week:

Oh. My. God. I looked at chapter 18 today after not going near it since April. In one part of the chapter, the clichés were flying as fast as sparks from a grease fire. Once again, I am convinced that someone has snuck into my ms. and substituted bilge for my deathless prose. Or is that undead prose? At any rate, it stinks like a corpse. Although I think I cleaned up the worst of it, I'm not going to do a heavy fix on this--just post it to the 'shop, clichés and all, then move on.

The last two chapters have shown clear evidence, I think, of saggy middle fatigue.

Guilt of the day: I owe a ton of crits on OWW. Very sorry. I'm trying to rectify that.

Surreality of the day: Someone went over to the old building, the one we moved out of in October that they're just starting to knock down, and took pictures on the inside. It was disorienting--they'd knocked down walls, taken down doors and bulletin boards. Every once in a while I'd see something I recognized, but in a highly unrecognizable state. It was like looking at pictures of the Titanic wreck, hard to tell what was what.

By sheer accident, this person took pictures of the office suite I used to work in. It was a rather unusual configuration and there was a decal on one of the windows someone had stuck on in the misty days of yore. So amidst the carnage of collapsed walls and ceiling tiles, I recognized exactly where my desk used to be. Only it was one cavernous suite now, four offices with walls knocked down from one load-bearing wall to the next. Incredibly strange to think I'd spent so many years there and now it no longer existed. Talk about palimpsests...

That seems to be the metaphor that's gripped me hard this summer.

Over the weekend I was thinking about the strange little house I grew up in. I'll have to write about that one of these days. It no longer exists, either--but so much of my taste, my values, and personal metaphors came out of that space that as long as I'm here, as long as my writing exists, that place will never quite be gone.

I suppose that's true of all of us and the spaces we used to occupy.

Nay, never ask this week, fair lord,
Where they are gone, nor yet this year,
Except with this for an overword,--
But where are the snows of yester-year?

—from Dante Gabriel Rosetti's The Ballad of the Dead Ladies (after François Villon)