Echoes in a Hollow Space

The novel has been moving along since I allowed the POV shift. I knew Ramona, the character I shifted to late in the novel, would have a great deal to say, and she does. Getting her to shut up again so I can write the climax from the original narrators' points of view will be tough. As with everything she's ever been in, she wants to take over.

Which makes me worry that once again I'm writing two climaxes and dei ex machina are blooming all over the place. Because Ramona has escaped my leash and headed off across the landscape. I'm willing to let her run a bit because she might tell me something I need to know, but this novel already feels like a Mulligan stew. I don't need any more ingredients or it's going to wind up tasting vile.

At least I've reestablished regular, daily writing sessions. This block—or whatever I've been going through—has wreaked havoc with my routines. I used to be a regular writing machine, doing my daily count day after week after month after year. They were never huge word counts, an average of three pages a day, but they were steady. Brick by brick to git 'er done.

I recently came across an old journal (I'm slowly digitizing them as well as my old files). It happened to be the one I kept in the year following my dad's death, which was also (not coincidentally, I think) when my worst writers' block ended. That block went on for nearly five years and was excruciating, but there's nothing like a crisis to remind one of the shortness of life and need to get one off one's a**. Writing became my pressure value in that terrible year. My escape, too.

I began by dabbling in occult things: rune readings, tarot, etc., listening for answers that existed inside me but that I couldn't hear through the white noise of grief and confusion. Then I began writing poetry. Next came erratic spurts of writing fanfiction for X-Files and Forever Knight, which led to long discussions with fellow members of the X-Files and Forever Knight lists I belonged to regarding the nature of vampirism. And then came The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron which opened me up to a daily routine and to giving myself permission to be whatever I needed to be, artistically speaking. After that I began to apply the things I'd been learning and doing, and started making up my own characters and universes. Next came my first vampire novel, Blood Geek. I haven't had a bad case of writers' block since.

Well, until now. But this one wasn't nearly as severe as that and may have been fed by bad body chemistry. Whatever, it seems to be thawing. I see signs of spring. Although I'm a little superstitious about stating that openly, I think it's going to stick. No fanfiction or occult readings led me through this time, but there was poetry. It's either all uphill or downhill from there, depending on your perspective.

My three day total:


Venus In Transit

4,500 / 100,000 (4.5%)

This total isn't really as impressive as it looks. To some of you, I realize, 4.5k words in three days isn't impressive at all, but those who have read this blog for awhile will know that's quite a lot for me. They're probably saying, "Wow, PJ's got rockets on her fingers."

Alas, no. This total represents some rewriting, some rearranging and editing of stuff I wrote before. A sort of pastiche which will hopefully make a more pleasing whole.

Instead of a hole.

The thing is, I've got a bit of "Dueling Novels" going on right now. That whole Ramona story is part of some other, larger story, the long unrealized and miasmic JK Montmorency novel. It keeps rearing its head in this story, so lawd knows what I'm about to make of this mess.

Hopefully, not a mess.

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.

Quote of the day:

"He who follows frights will be followed by fright."

—Scottish proverb


Writingness of the day:

Today I wrote some more on my new Dos Lunas story, "Ramona! The Chickens!" I did some original writing, and was able to cut and paste some paragraphs from an earlier version into this story for a net gain of 1000 words. That makes the story just shy of 7k and heading south at a mighty fast clip. Somehow I suspicion it ain't going to be a short story.

Another Dos Lunas novelette, "Closes Within a Dream," is currently up on the OWW. I got some interesting reviews, rather mixed so far. It's probably the gentlest story in a rather gentle cycle and I'm well aware of the big objection most folks have to it. I don't necessarily disagree. I just can't decide if it's the kind of story they want it to be, or part of something else. My usual dither when it comes to Dos Lunas. So it's always good to get the objective opinion of others.

All this material means something but sometimes it takes a long while to figure out what. I think when an idea or a setting or whatever grips you in that way you've got to let it follow it's lead. Eventually, I think it will tell you what it really is. I'm not proposing to concentrate just on this idea while it makes up its mind, but I take it out and poke it, it tells me a little more, then goes quiet again. Something will come of it. I just have to have faith in the process. Sometimes that process is fast, sometimes it's treacle-slow. That's just the way it is.

I heard Louise Erdrich talking about her process once, and I must say, it was comforting. She has boxes scattered through the house with novels in various stages of production. One will talk to her for awhile, she'll write until it stops, then put everything back in the box. Some books hurry to be finished, others dawdle, sometimes for a decade or more. It sounded quite familiar.

Significantly, all these Dos Lunas stories are in a folder I keep in with my novels, not in the folder where I keep the stories. That's just where it felt like it belonged. Which tells me something about it's intentions, I guess.

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.

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.

Over the weekend I decided to go to Trader Joe's—a wonderful, mostly-West Coast alternative market chain. I've been hungering for real English cheddar, not the crappy bland version you get in the ol' USA. English cheddar has such a subtle range of flavor and having eaten quite a lot of it on my trip, the American stuff tastes a bit like cardboard to me these days. Anyway, Ann said I could get some of the real stuff at Trader Joe's, so off I hied me.

The particular TJ's I hied to is in a hyperthyroidized mini mall near LAX: not big enough to be a grown up mall, too big to be a baby mall, a middling mall. There used to be an interesting warehousey kind of store there called Westchester Faire which housed three floors of antiquers—shop after shop of purveyors of fine kitsch, mostly. Unfortunately, Westchester Faire tanked last year and all the kitsch had to find new homes in flea markets and swap meets elsewhere. But I noticed something else had taken over the building. There was no name out front, just "Giant Book Sale," but since the sign touting the sale was permanent, I guess that's the name of the joint.

"Hmm," I said and resolutely parked near TJ's. I got out of the car and headed towards TJ's, but...It's like I was programmed at birth. Any time anyone says or I see the secret code word "book" it activates the computer chip in my brain. Try as I might to keep my feet headed towards TJ's entrance I kept veering off, until I finally just groaned and said, "Maybe I'll peek in here first." I never did make it to Trader Joe's.

It turns out it was one of those stores selling nothing but remaindered books—hardcovers ranging from $4 to $8, high end paperbacks for $3-$5, and low end paperbacks for only a buck or two. A lot of big names represented in that place, but I didn't feel so bad for them. So they didn't sell out on the 3rd or 4th hardcover printing of their blockbuster. It isn't going to kill their career to be remaindered. But then, there were a lot of midlist people represented there, too, folks who hadn't done so well on initial sales, or folks whose older novels, published after a moderate success with some other book, didn't do well. I got an uneasy tingle up my spine when I crossed paths with those, thinking how hopes rise so high when we get a publishing deal, thinking about all the hopes and dreams those books represented, how the world tends to level hope off rather brutally—a psychic stripmining sometimes.

But the ones that made me feel really bad were the ones that hadn't even made it to midlist and the self-publishing remainders, all the painfully obscure stuff that looked like it had been sitting in somebody's garage in boxes for awhile. It was like being confronted with the ghost of Christmas Future, I tell you. Which is one reason I'll never seek self-flagellation—er, I mean, self-publication. I just have this uneasy feeling anything I self-publish would turn into a garage-filler.

I kept looking at these things and thinking, "Didn't anyone ever tell these people that plot had been used 15,000 times? Didn't anyone say, 'Ooo, that title's way unfortunate'?" Of course they didn't, or those books would never exist. All their well-meaning friends told them it was the greatest thing since folded tortillas. Or, alternately, someone did tell them and they just believed so hard they didn't listen. They had utter faith in their project and weren't going to change it for any naysayer.

Belief is a shiny, bright thing with a sharp edge.

So when I got to the sff self-published paperback called Death Wears The Emperor's New Clothes I knew it was time to get the hell out of there. I was just too creeped out. So I took my purchases up to the cash register...

Yeah, that's right. Despite my whinging and philosophizing, I bought books there: an Alice Hoffman novel, a Graham Joyce novel, the classic sff novel Flatland, and one by an OWW ML member. I felt bad about buying that particular remainder because it won't do this member any good, but I bought it anyway. Hypocrite! If I'm really, really, really, really lucky maybe that member will be able to turn the tables on me some day. Because for me that's the ultimate lesson of a trip to a remaindered book store: these folks at least took a shot and got some kind of prize, even if it did turn out to have a hidden booby trap in the middle.

And on the personal writing front: Ramona has probably gone on hiatus for the time being. She wanted to go somewhere I didn't want her to go and it's been a power struggle all week. I know the fault lies with me, not her. I have to get my head around what she's trying to say—or more correctly, my heart. And I have a deep suspicion that the lesson she's trying to give me here has more to do with the Dos Lunas novel, Venus In Transit, then it does with the short story cycle I've been trying to complete. But whatever, the Dos Lunas cycle is probably not going to get done at this juncture until I can work through the Ramona block.

Ramona was my very first inhabitant of Dos Lunas county. She just wants me to know she isn't going to play second fiddle anymore. So I'll let her go on hiatus while I process and probably...start the rewrites for Shivery Bones next week.

You see, I've got two novels set in Dos Lunas County. The first one I've talked about in this here blog—the one I'm thinking of stringing together from some stories I wrote a couple of years back, that I'm thinking of calling Son of A Wayward Moon. But Tara thinks I should call it Son of A Wanton Moon, right Tara? ;-) So I don't know what that one's eventually going to be called.

Anyway, the other novel which got about 230 pages done before it went on hiatus, is called Venus In Transit. This novel has a prominent secondary character named Ramona. Ramona's also got a short story called Ramona! The Chickens! which was the basis of the novel—really, the basis of the whole Dos Lunas cycle—that never quite got done, either. So Ramona is not an unimportant character, but she is a frustrated one because she's never really got to have her whole say about anything.

The thing is, she's now invaded Son of A Whatever-the-Hell. Big time. I was trying to finish a story which is central to the story arc of the novel's hero, JK. And in steps Ramona, just blabbing away—and she won't shut up. She insists she's got something important to say about this story when to me she's looking like a big tangent and distraction. And no matter what I try to work around her and get back to JK, she grabs me by the collar, points to herself and says, "Focus on me!"

Because I'm one of those cursed organic writers, I can never be sure if a tangent is a tangent or if the tangent is really my subconscious telling me something about the story I need to know. I can never be sure if finishing the tangent will help me see the story in a completely new light, or if it's just a hijacking in process. Whichever it is, I'm afraid Ramona is not going to shut up until I let her have her say.

Sometimes characters do not care a fig about my carefully laid out writerly plans. Sometimes they go on talking and hijacking and distracting until I finally give in and pay attention to them. Sometimes some of my best work has come out of these character strong arm tactics. Sometimes I wonder who's really writing whom in this great big wacky world.

It's a scary place inside my brain. At least that's what my mind elves tell me.