pjthompson | Entries tagged with shivery bones

The books I’m reading (I pick these up and put them down, but all of these are currently inching forward):

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness (the book du jour)
Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Jung
Trickster: An Anthropological Memoir by Eileen Kane
Legends of the Fire Spirits by Robert W. Lebling
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch by Henry Miller
The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture by Walter L. Williams
When Ghosts Speak: Understanding the World of Earthbound Spirits by Mary Ann Winkowski
and my own book Shivery Bones, doing one last bloody read-through.

Books I’m writing: If you count worldbuilding and creative noodling, then I’m writing Carmina and The Numberless Stars. If you’re talking about actual words getting written, then I ain’t currently writting nothin’.

The book I love the most: Couldn’t possibly choose. I usually love the one I’m with.

The last book I received as a gift: I made a killing on book gift certificates. I’ve included all the books I bought this way—not really to brag, but because I wouldn’t want any of these books to have their feelings hurt because I left them off the list. (I anthropomorphize everything.) (Hi, Lisa!):

Caveat Emptor by Ruth Downie
Holy Ghosts: Or, How a (Not So) Good Catholic Boy Became a Believer in Things That Go Bump in the Night by Gary Jansen
Spooky California: Tales of Hauntings, Strange Happenings, and Other Local Lore by S. E. Schlosser, Paul G. Hoffman (Illustrator)
Lover Unleashed by J. R. Ward
Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James
Red-Robed Priestess: A Novel (The Maeve Chronicles) by Elizabeth Cunningham
Untie the Strong Woman: Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Love for the Wild Soul by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Meditations with Meister Eckhart by Matthew Fox
Tarot for Writers by Corrine Kenner
Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Everyday Tarot by Gail Fairfield

The last book I gave as a gift: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

You know that thing where you’ve edited a book so often you’ve cut all the life out of it? Yeah, that.

I’ve been reading the last hardcore edit I did on Shivery Bones with an eye towards e-booking it in some future when I magically have the time and wherewithal. I haven’t read it in a year and a half. This is the first reread where I think the edit has actually damaged the book. I went from 122k to 109k and that seems to have stripped some of the flow and life. Understand, we’re talking about a first draft that came in around 150k, which was definitely bloated and in need of cutting. But I think now that 122k version may actually have been pretty tight. The last edit cut into bone.

Certain parts of the manuscript are better for that cutting, but other parts have a disjointed, lifeless feel. I’m considering going back to the the non-eviscerated versions of those scenes/chapters.

Some books can be cut down to bone and still retain life, but not all. I recently read a novel by an author I love. Her series tend to be magically imaginative and inventive, and her books are usually big. It doesn’t matter. I love being in them no matter how long they take to read. But she’s not on the bestseller lists, not quite, and I’ll bet you anything her publisher started blanching at those big manuscripts. I say that because the current book, part of a series I’ve loved as much as the author’s other books, is much shorter than previous ones. Throughout the reading, it felt incomplete to me, missing beats, wanting something that kept slipping through the fingers–cut to the bone and unable to quite articulate itself as those bones clattered along. A large part of the life had been taken away. I intuited that it had once been there, but no more.

In the current publishing climate, this is happening quite a lot to midlist writers. Even to some bestsellers, I hear. It’s a dirty, crying shame. These are half-books, not allowed to be what they naturally are. E-books, in the other hand, don’t have to be as skinny as paper books to “turn a profit.” (Though, don’t get me started on shaky publishing accounting. Better you should read this post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.) (Thanks, safewrite, for the link.)

E-books don’t care if you go a little long. Which is not to say they shouldn’t be edited and made as tight and crisp as possible, but you don’t have to kill them in the process. They don’t have to rattle along like a defleshed skeleton struggling to keep itself in one piece.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

For a long time I’ve wanted to write a novel centering around Annia Sabina, the Überbitch antagonist from my novel, Shivery Bones. I’ve always adored her, the unrepentant bad girl who sees absolutely no reason why she should be fair and democratic and decent. I figured she needed a proper coda after the way things were left with her at the end of Bones, and yesterday the plot for her novel blossomed in my mind like the lovely black rose she is.

I really have no time for writing beyond the occasional blog entry and fun games on other peoples’ blogs, but I guess I’m still a writer somewhere underneath it all. I haven’t got the full plot, but it’s bubbling, and I’m enjoying it. (The bubbling is always the funnest part.) I really think the world needs a novel about a righteous, unapologetic Überbitch who will never, no no never again, be subject to the dictates of any man, and will never, never ever, be the bottom. Unless it amuses her to assume that position.

Yeah, I’ll be doing this one for fun if I ever get around to putting words on paper or screen. Many big ifs here. There is also that whole thing about man planning and God laughing. And if I do find the time to write it I’m not sure anyone will be interested in taking a chance on Sabina “in the current marketplace.” But I really don’t care about that. Fun is a valuable reason to write a novel, I think. Maybe the most valuable of all. Trust me on this.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Jim Van Pelt wrote an interesting post today. Take a paragraph of writing—your own or a master like Fitzgerald—and arrange it like a poem. Immediately, the vibrancy (or lack thereof) of the writing pops out in ways it doesn’t when arranged as a paragraph.

I decided to try this with the opening of my novel Shivery Bones. Here’s the original, which I’d previously thought decent-enough:

Jolene’s earthquake passed through her midsection, rolled along her limbs, then off into the grass beneath her toes to make the ground shake. She fell, gasping with pain and surprise as the temblor radiated out from her and across the yard, the ground splitting like an overripe peach. The leaves of the trees along the high wall shook as if attacked by nerves, swaying and groaning. The wave crested inside Jolene, her personal shaking stopped. The earth and trees stilled a moment later, and the ground healed itself, closing as if no trembling had ever occurred.

However, when I arranged it as a poem, the dead parts really jumped out at me. It didn’t have life or flow, I thought:

Jolene’s earthquake
passed through her midsection,
rolled along her limbs,
then off into the grass
beneath her toes to make
the ground shake. She fell,
gasping with pain and surprise
as the temblor radiated out
from her and across the yard,
the ground splitting
like an overripe peach.
The leaves of the trees
along the high wall shook
as if attacked by nerves,
swaying and groaning.
The wave crested inside Jolene,
her personal shaking stopped.
The earth and trees stilled
a moment later, and the ground
healed itself, closing as if
no trembling had ever occurred.

******************************

Immediately, the tweaking began:

Jolene’s earthquake
rolled through her midsection,
vibrated along her limbs,
sloughing off into the grass
beneath her toes, the ground
beneath an echo of her own shaking.
She fell, gasping with pain
and surprise as the temblor
radiated from her and
across the yard, the earth
splitting like an overripe peach.
The leaves of the trees along
the high wall quivered as from an attack
of nerves, swaying and groaning.
The wave crested inside Jolene,
her personal quaking done.
The earth and trees stilled,
the ground healed itself,
closing as if no trembling
had ever occurred.

I don’t think this is a perfect paragraph by any means, but I do think it’s an improved one. It might be worth trying this techniques for openings and other troublesome passages:

Jolene’s earthquake rolled through her midsection, vibrated along her limbs, sloughing off into the grass beneath her toes, the ground beneath an echo of her own shaking. She fell, gasping with pain and surprise as the temblor radiated from her and across the yard, the earth splitting like an overripe peach. The leaves of the trees along the high wall quivered as from an attack of nerves, swaying and groaning. The wave crested inside Jolene, her personal quaking done. The earth and trees stilled, the ground healed itself, closing as if no trembling had ever occurred.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

If by chance you missed this over at Nathan Bransford's blog, Valerie Kemp has written an excellent guest blog on the subject of first chapters.

It's got me thinking of my own first chapters from my finished novels and analyzing why they succeeded or failed. Ms. Kemp makes the excellent point that a first chapter is a promise to the reader about what the rest of the book is going to be like. If it's a high-action chapter, the reader probably expects the rest of the book to be high-action. If it's leisurely and contemplative, then that projects into the reader's mind a much different book.

She makes a number of excellent points which I won't reiterate here—go read the original. But that concept up there in my previous paragraph is one of those should-be-obvious things that often gets overlooked. I know I've overlooked it many times. Sometimes I catch it in the rewrites and make good on that promise to the reader, sometimes not.

I'm thinking in particular of my third novel, Shivery Bones. The first chapter was an action-filled chase scene involving the hero, Ezra. Very in media res, and at the end a burst of unexpected magic. Which was gripping, but not reflective of the story as a whole. Oh yeah, there were actiony bits, more fights and chases, and throughout the book I like to think there were bursts of unexpected magic, but the bulk of the story was much more about the internal journeys of the hero and the heroine, Jolene. She has to learn to love and trust again after terrible tragedy and to accept the natural cycle of life, and Ezra...well, pretty much the same thing, with the added twist of realizing that true love is sometimes about sacrificing your own best interests for the sake of someone else.

None of that was in my first chapter. An early critter said something of the sort to me. "If I didn't know you wrote more contemplative books, I probably wouldn't have read on since this chapter has a lot of adrenaline going on." I ignored that criticism, thinking it beside the point. Very late in the game with this novel, after I'd sent it out many times, I realized the truth of this insight. But it took a rejection from an agent to drive that nail home: "The rest of this book wasn't what I expected from the first chapter."

I wrote a new first chapter which at least had a more contemplative and mysterious vibe to it—centering on Jolene this time rather than Ezra, then transitioning into the action chapter. I think it makes a stronger novel. Unfortunately, during the years I tried selling it with its original first chapter, the market has become saturated with certain tropes used in the story, making it a hard sell, with diminishing chances it would sell. I'd moved on to novels four, five, and six so reluctantly trunked this one.

Would it have fared any better in the market if I'd taken my early betas advice and written a new chapter one back then? Absolutely impossible to say. There are probably other flaw bombs in there that haven't yet exploded in my consciousness. But I do know that writing a new first chapter was the right thing for this book, and the right thing in terms of that implied promise to the reader.

Current Music: Here's the Tender Coming - The Unthanks

I had me the nicest wish fulfillment dream last night. I dreamed I got an email from an agent named Anna Scott in the office of some BN agent I’d sent my ms. of Shivery Bones to. (I marketed the hell out of Shivery Bones and decided it was time to give that one a rest and move on to something else, but apparently, the old submariner part of my brain hasn’t given up flogging it.)

Not only did Anna of my dreams love the book and want to represent me, she’d even done preliminary checking with an editor at one of the big houses and they wanted to offer me $100,000(!). I met with her and we hit it off and I said, “Yes, I want you to represent me and I will sell this book to them for $100,000.” The End and everyone lived HEA.

Yes, I know. That would never happen in RL. Wish fulfillment! Straight from the land of the Happy Fairies of Nod!

I’d been awake a couple of hours before I remembered that Anna Scott was the name of the Julia Roberts character in Notting Hill (a wish fulfillment fantasy if there ever was one) (one that I happen to love, being a wish fulfillment fantasy kinda gal). I googled the name and there is a talent agent named Anna Scott, but no literary agents that I could see.

It would have been nice if it had been a wish fulfillment fantasy with precognitive overtones, but alas…

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

So, the funky voice problems continue in the first part of chapter 14 of Angels. I'm wondering now if it's just funky voice or if my problem may also involve a funky frame to hang this part of the plot on? I also suspect there may be at least one superfluous character. (Loreo, for those of you reading along at home.) Mostly he just sits around nodding sagely, listening to people talk, issuing the occasional command. I could probably cut him, but then I'd have to shift the job description of someone else around to fill the void, and...

The problem there is that he'll be much more relevant in books two and three of the trilogy.

Aye me. I'm at that stage of pre-submission suppressed panic and nothing seems right. I can't tell if it's because it really isn't right or because I'm looking for an excuse not to send it out. I'll push on with the rewrite and see how I feel about a restructure when I reach the end. I really like the first eleven chapters, anyway, and the ending kicks butt, if I do say so myself.

It has seemed for some time now that the voice I use in Angels doesn't really feel like my own. In parts it does, but in other places it's like I'm borrowing someone else's voice. I ran this by my friend who I've known since I was twelve, who's read...let's see...most of what I've written. "Rereading Shivery Bones has really pointed out how different the voice is between that, Angels, and Venus," I told her. "I think Bones and Venus are more representative of my true voice."

"And I think," she said, "that Bones is more representative of the voice of a younger you. Venus is more representative of who you are now."

She is brilliant and she is correct. That's the dissonance I'm feeling. Angels is pulling between the old and the new and that works fine in places. Others, not so much. I don't quite know what to do with that since I was hoping to start marketing Angels. I was going to push through and start marketing anyway, and I probably will do that, because I just can't trust my objectivity here, but this dreaded middle makes me wonder.

It also occurred to me that I didn't "dream" that book as much as I did the others—and that kind of creative daydreaming, for me anyway, seems to be intimately connected with voice. The voice is a direct result of being intensely inside the idea for awhile before it starts coming out of me.

On a positive note, I've begun posting things to the Online Writing Workshop again. The first three chapters of Shivery Bones because I've thought of a couple of more places to try that book and I wanted to be sure the new prologue/chapter beginning worked with the rest of the opening. I was so burned out from crits when I gave up posting to OWW (going on two years ago) that I wasn't sure if I'd ever post again. But I've enjoyed being back, doing crits. I might even post the opening to Venus In Transit to see if I can poke myself into finishing up there.

But first, the rest of the Angels rewrite. For better or worse.

A Rain of Angels

61,750 / 111,500
(55.4%)

Reading over later chapters of Venus In Transit to get back into the story I realize that once again I'm suffering from Stick Figure Villain syndrome. My first drafts often have this problem, and I have to work extra hard to give some dimension to my baddies. Either that, or I go too far in the other way: I give them so much backstory and motivation that I fall in love with them and want to make them the hero of their own story.

Some Famous Writer (who I can't remember at the moment) once said, "Every villain is the hero of their own story." Or maybe it was a Famous Actor. (Anyone know who this is?) Regardless, it's true. The villain, in order to be truly dimensional, has to feel perfectly justified in their actions.

I think my most successful villains to date were three novels ago in Shivery Bones. I fell so in love with Annia Sabina from that novel that I've got to write a novel from her POV. I already wrote a key scene as a novella from her eyes and loved every second of it. One of the great things about her was that she walked on stage fully formed, declared herself bad and completely unrepentant. How can you not love that? Even Duke Chavez, the ultimate bad guy of that novel, turned sympathetic in key scenes, but I had to work extra hard to get him there. He was the stickiest of stick villains at first.

It required me asking the question, "What made him so bad?" and diving in there to rut around. It's too easy to say, "He's crazy." He was crazy, but how did he get there? It's too easy to say, "He was born that way." Some bad people are—bad seeds from the start. But most bad people are made, I think, either through social factors or family factors, or both. How was Duke made bad? Once you put yourself into the six-year-old incarnation of your bad guy, allow yourself to see, experience, feel what he did when he was too young to defend himself, how can you ever despise him again? If you're doing it right, I don't think you can. You can despise what they've become, despise the things they do, but I think you should still retain some sympathy for that little kid who was so badly bent. Then, I believe, you're on the cusp of creating a true villain, one with shadings and hidden nooks in which they are the hero of their own story.

I imagine I'll whip the current stick villains into a better place in subsequent drafts. The villain from novel before last still needs some work, is still doing too much mustache-twirling and foot stamping. I've gone a little ways into the shady nooks of that character, but not far enough. It's a murky pool to dive into, full of unpleasant weeds that cling to my legs, and at the bottom it's possible I'll find a shiny rock that—if it had been formed under different kinds of pressure—might have turned into a diamond.

Current Music: Don't Wanna Grow Up - Holly Cole

My friend's coming over in a bit and we're going to my favorite Bistro for late lunch, early dinner. In the meantime, here's what I'm doing instead of watching the Bowl.

Late last night I decided to check out the satellite view of my 'hood. Found the house quite easily—and the roommate's car parked in the driveway. Creeped me the hell out. (So much so, apparently, that I'm having trouble writing in complete sentences.) But I also decided to check out the old 'hood in Venice in which I grew up. Yep, there is was.

It occurred to me, since I used part of my old neighborhood for the opening chase scene in Shivery Bones that I could trace the entire chase route from satellite and do screen captures. (Yes, I had better things to do, but I did this instead. It was that kind of night.) (Why? Because it was there. And maybe because I'm obsessive-compulsive?) (But that's another post for another day.)

And of course I had to share! So, here it is: the "exciting" opening pages of Shivery Bones in captioned pictures:

( 11 pictures. )

Current Music: I Te Fenua - Tahitian Choir

There are three things floating through the ol' creative noggin these days, things that are playing with my mind as I play with them.

The first is the one I've been playing with for at least a month now: the partially finished Dos Lunas novel which needs a makeover. I've been doing research reading for that for quite some time and have many new ideas.

The other is the rewrite of the novel I just finished. (Wow, in September. Has it really been that long? But that's the date on the most current file. Gosh, time flies when you're...too busy to breathe.) Actually, I'm thinking about the other novels in the series as well, thinking I need to do a formal outline of the larger story arc to set it straight in my mind. That would also help with the rewrite of A Rain of Angels. (For those brave souls who read the first draft, you should know that I'm well aware it needs a heap o' fixin'. I think overall it's a decent piece of work, but it was a first draft and has many flaws.)

The third thing, or rather, person, that's been tickling my mind is Sabina, the self-described "unrepentant Once and Future Whore" from my vampire novel, Shivery Bones. She's talking sequel, one centering on her, of course. She gave me a really good idea for one, too. She's something of a villain, completely self-centered, defiant, ruthless, cruel, down and dirty...and I love her so. Not everyone who read Shivery Bones feels the same. She's always wanted her own book. She tried to take over Shivery Bones, and I've been fighting to excise her tentacles in it ever since.

On the crud front: I continue to crud, though I'm feeling marginally better today. I still don't stray far from my easy chair and my bed, but I do feel better.

Current Music: Mystic's Dream - Loreena McKennitt

Outrage of the day?

We saw the Rude Man of Cerne Abbas when we were in England in 2004. Now he's got a friend. [broken link of Rude Man and Homer Simpson]

I don't know whether to be outraged at the desecration or laugh. Ah, I guess I'll laugh.

Writingness of the day:

I just figured out how to fix another novel from the trunk. This was another heartbreaker that stalled at around 60k.

I had a string of three that stalled between 1998-2000—my own particular millennium bug. Three years of writing like a demon, but not finishing anything. Much frustration. I finally finished a long novellette. Thereafter, I wrote story after story, and the novel bug bit me again the year after. I picked up one of those stalled novels, Shivery Bones, and finished it. And I've been writing novels ever since.

Random quote of the day:

"When in doubt, blow something up."

—J. Michael Straczynski, TV producer

Which holds true for one's psyche, too, I believe.

I said to my friend this week, "I'm quitting writing."
She said, "What, again?"

She's right, of course. I'm always quitting. It never sticks. I have no illusion it will stick this time, either. But there's always the possibility it will. Sometimes that panics me. I feel no particular panic right now.

I took the week off because I desperately needed to be doing something besides writing right now. After four days I already thought of a way I wanted to rewrite the ending to Shivery Bones to make it more consistent (and to allow me to steal part of it for the current WIP without having to do a total rethink on that). I'm not exactly yearning towards other ideas, but they're tickling. Late in the transmission of a novel, other ideas always start up with their own bandwagon. It's different this time, only I'm not sure how yet.

The only thing I'm not yearning towards is the current WIP—and I'm so close there, so damned close. It's stalled, and I don't know if it's just because I need a break, if this is another version of late-in-the-manuscript panic, or that I've gone off on a tangent that's leading me astray. Sometimes I stall when the gee-whiz-this-would-be-neato center of my brain takes over and pushes the story off in a new direction. Sometimes this is the correct direction, sometimes it isn't, and sometimes I have to pause until I figure out which. I don't mean figure it out in a brain sense, not think it through logically and plot it out, but figure it out in a gut sense. Let the gut catch up with where I've headed off to, let the gut digest whether this is where I really want to go. Sometimes no left brain analysis is involved whatsoever. All the processes takes place off screen, if you will. One of the perils of organic writing, at least the way I do it, is that there's a lot of gut action involved—and as we all know, sometimes the by-product of guts isn't, um, pleasant.

Or maybe it's a right brain action posing as gut action. This thing that guides my stories feels centered in the gut, but I suspect it's really north of there and hiding down dark alleyways where lurk unsavory characters: cutthroats, thieves, hoors, and other unscrupulous but fascinating types. They are the ones that know how this world works beneath the skin, beneath all the shining bright promises that turn out to be false. Typically, they love doing by subterfuge, pretending to be a gut when they are really denizens of the shadow synapses; the lonely, dark byways where writing hits the road.

It will all work itself out. Or won't. I have passed through this landscape before. I imagine I'll pass through it again. I'm just following the bread crumbs.

93,000 / 100,000
(93.0%)

93,000 / 120,000
(77.5%)

Current Music: Petit Pays - Césaria Évora

So, in my novel, Shivery Bones, Persephone and Hades figure prominently. And I ain't exactly kind to Hades.

Anyway, I bought some small statues from an online artisan shop and they said, "Congratulations! You qualify for a free gift." I'm thinking, "refrigerator magnet," but never one to turn down a freebie I said yes.

The package arrives early last week and the freebie turns out to be quite a nice wall plaque of a man and woman in profile seated on thrones. Nothing to tell me who they are, so I looked them up on the site, and you've probably guessed by now who they are.

"I got my eye on you," says Hades. Not a god you really want to be cheesing off, so I'm going to be real nice to him from now on.

This is my weekend for assembling stuff which I will mail out on Monday to various people to see if they like me, they really really like me. Or Shivery Bones, at any rate. It's been several months since the last batch, so it's well past time.

Undying and gargantuan thanks to

darkspires,

ilona_andrews,

kmkibble75,

mnfaure,

mrngglry98, and

raecarson for your great aid with the stuff and for helping me hold onto my sanity (or something like it).

And so I'll leave you with this cheerful little ditty which I originally wrote as a foreword to Shivery Bones, and abandoned for various reasons (and probably for the best). I found it while riffling through the SB folder. It does still capture the essence of the story, but I don't think you can dance to it.

Harrowed by the hounds of hell, you ask about love.
They snarl at the word and try to eat it whole;
they bay at the dark moon and call it singing;
they teach you to sing their darkest song,
and you find the darkness contains the kernel of light.
You will ask about love once more and ascend, finally.
The hellhounds lick your hand as you pass.

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. )

Final word count for Shivery Bones: 121,750 (SMF); 109,054 (Word)
Final page count for Shivery Bones: 487

Goal for words cut: 20,000
Actual words cut: 24,250

Yay me!

And yesterday, I couldn't resist working on Charged with Folly during my lunch hour writing break. Although the first chapter remains largely the same as the one I workshopped on OWW last year, I've been able to refine the emotional underpinnings and add in some subtle things pertaining to the larger story. It was nice to actually know what the larger story is. :-)

As if to support my new (re)found commitment to writing CWF I walked into Barnes and Noble last night and found Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions by Lisa Randall, a "popular science" book that deals with the complicated and fascinating physics that resides in the background of CWF. (That's Charged with Folly's dirty little secret--it's a fantasy novel with a scientific base.) (A lot more fantasy than science, though.)

And I've reconsidered redoing the first chapter of Shivery Bones. At this point, I'm going to let it stand or fall as is. I am thoroughly sick of it (although not the characters and story, if that makes sense).

ETA: Arrr.

I sent out a story today and will probably send another tomorrow. The current crop of revised stories before the next novel comes on me and I stop making short stories.*

The next novel is heading my way. I feel the eruption bubbling in my gut, got all the necessary research ducks lined up and quacking. And the Universe keeps sending things my way, things that would make a very good addition to Charged with Folly.

Does that ever happen to you? It seems like whenever I draw close enough to an idea that writing is imminent I'm suddenly surrounded by things to feed the idea: some odd crag of reality I can carve to my purposes, strange factoids that deepen and enrich existing plot/worldbuilding ideas, bits of dialogue and images from the every day world that I can adapt. It seems the airwaves, the books and magazines I pick up, the 'Net are suddenly full of stuff I need and can use.

Now, I know part of that may be that I'm in the frame of mind to notice these things, but it's weird nonetheless. And I much prefer the romantic notion that the Universe (or my Right Brain or Subconscious or Higher Self) is saying, "Do this one!"

But first, I have to finish that last aching groan-and-cut rewrite of Shivery Bones. It's actually going pretty well. I'm dead on my word-cut schedule and I dropped below an important psychological point last week: the novel is now less than 130k (from 143k). In fact, it's down to 126k at this point, and I'm only halfway through. I need to give myself as much wiggle room as possible because I'll want to add a couple of pages at the front of the novel for the new prologue-short chapter one. (It's not a prologue, as it takes place just before the action portrayed in the old chapter one.)

And then I'm never rewriting SB again unless someone pays me to (or asks nicely). I said that before about SB, right before I sent it to Tor and they requested a full, but I mean it this time. Really!

Random quotes of the day:

"May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: 'Sleep hath its own world', and it is often as lifelike as the other."

—Charles Dodgson

"The wealthy are grouped together because it gives them a warm feeling to look upon others of their own kind. The poor are lumped together because they have no choice."

—Peter David, Sir Apropos of Nothing

*Not my choice. I just can't seem to concentrate on stories and novels at the same time. Wish I could.

Getting my life back in gear of the day: After my house move in November into a smaller space I was unpacking in a frenzy at first, searching for the necessities and getting them out of the garage and into my rooms. I was so happy to be out of the apartment from hell that I got downright giddy at first. The space restrictions caught up with me first, and I've had to make some decisions about just what were necessities and with the chaos left from that first frenzied unpacking. Large swatches of my life still remain unpacked in the garage.

One of the crucial things that are still packed are my art supplies. I've always been prone to making things, both in a art-for-art's-sake way and in a meditative/spiritual context. Since November that whole aspect of my life has been completely ignored. Not being able to make things makes the blues bluesier, makes me even more obsessive-compulsive than usual, deadens some of the senses of my creative animal. That nervous, self-devouring energy gets dissipated when I make things: it doesn't go into the object, it just ceases to exist. Nothing makes me feel more positive than when I successfully complete an art object and imbue it with a bit of my positive spirit. It's a whole other feeling from the warm, rich vibe I get from a good writing session. I need it as much as I need the writing, and I'd forgotten that.

So in recent weeks, I've been taking steps to get back that which has been lost. I still haven't found all my stuff, or have found it in random, frustrating bits—the jeweler's anvil and chasing hammer, but not the jewelry tools, for instance—but I've retrieved enough to make do and get creative with my hands again. And that's a peaceful, easy feeling. I'm moving in the right direction.

Quote of the day:

"Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise terrific people—if only they'd stop writing."

—Laura Miller, Salon.com review of "Finding Forrester"

To which I would answer, "Depends on the writer." Some of us would be much worse if we didn't write.

Writingness of the day: If I keep going at my present rate, I should be able to cut another 10k from Shivery Bones. Predicated on ifs, of course, but I'm amazed how many fat and wasteful phraselets I'm finding. In the case of the opening chapters, it's been downright embarrassing. I sent this out to people? Aiee. And in other even more boring news, the transfer of the ms. file to the new "purified" template seems to have worked: the word count and page count are consistent on both Macs and the PC and all versions of Word. Huzzah. Even better, the lowest word count is the one that's sticking. Huzzah, huzzah.

Startling new study of the day: So, on the radio today I heard the findings of a new study conducted by S. Mark Young of USC and Dr. Drew Pinsky of...Dr. Drew's Loveline on Narcissism and Celebrity. This study comes to the shocking conclusion that celebrities...wait for it...tend to be more narcissistic than other people. Not only that, narcissists are attracted to showbiz! Wowie zowie and gee willikers! I wonder how much money they spent on that study?

Writingness of the day: I started the groan-and-cut rewrite of Shivery Bones yesterday, going through and cutting prepositional phrases and other kinds of unnecessary verbiage. I made every sentence and every word work for its living, and even cut a couple of more paragraphs I didn't think worked hard enough. I cut 3 pages from chapter one. Okay, so only about one and a half pages of that was actual cutting. I realized that the reason I was getting three different word counts on the same file, depending on which computer I used, was probably because the Word template was corrupted. I'd been using a heavy-duty research publication template--which was overkill. For my ms. I really only need three modified styles: Normal, Heading 1, and Indented text. So I created a new stripped-down template and as I finish the changes in the old ms., reassigned everything to Normal and moved it into the new template. That alone cut two pages. (This is, after all, part of what I do for a living, so I should have thought of this sooner.) I have faith in Word's ability to do something totally bizarre and mess this up again, especially in documents over fifty pages, but I'm hoping this makes a crucial difference.

Yeah, I know. All this is fascinating.

Quote of the day:

"It will yet be the proud boast of women that they never contributed a line to the Bible."

—George W. Foote, 1850-1915

I've also seen this as "the proud boast of woman that she," but I couldn't find a source I trusted (i.e., not a quotes page) that listed it, so I'm going to have to go on faith with this one.

Disclaimer for the Quote of the Day:

These quotes do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, The Universe or its subsidiaries, Leonard Maltin, Siegfried and Roy, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. However, they frequently reflect the views of the Cottingsley Fairies.

ETA: THIS JUST IN! New study shows that shelves hold things up!

Quote of the day:

"He who still sees the stars as 'up' does not perceive with the eye of truth."

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Writingness of the day: I've passed the 9k words cut mark, which is almost halfway to my goal of 20k. Unfortunately, I'm on the last third of the ms. So when I finish this read through, which is also integrating the three critiques I received, I'll let the whole mess sit for a week, then read through it again with a concentrated eye on killing words. Kill, kill, kill! Take no prisoners!

But here's an irritating thing: on three different computers with three different versions of Word I get different word counts in SMF--PC using Word 2000, work Mac using Word 98, home Mac using Word 2004. And I'm not talking about a few words difference, I'm talking about a 3-4000 word difference! It's the same file, with the same margins set, but a vastly different page count between the three platforms. I do not understand this at all. This difference pretty much disappears when I use the Word line count, so I may be forced to use that. It's higher than my lowest SMF count (on Word 98), whine, whine.

(And yeah, I did that 60 characters across the page, 25 double-spaced lines down the page to make sure I wasn't doing something dippy.)

So if the SMF word count for Night Warrior/The Making Blood on Word 98 was 187k, that means it's even longer than I thought and that means . . . I don't want to think about it.

In other fascinating writing news (because I know the above paragraphs were riveting), my final cut on "Eudora's Song" is 6,200 words. I've managed to bring it down from the bloated first draft of 10k words. It's a much better story for it. But I still don't think it hits the spot, exactly. It's just done for now and--out it goes.

You're getting sleepy...sleepy...

Here's something to wake up

merebrillante:

( Mesmerizing )

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Echoes in a Hollow Space

I'm here because I'm here because I'm here

Entries tagged with shivery bones

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Dem bones

Loving your antagonist

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First chapter fail

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As things float by

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I quit. Sort of.

The Universe is wicked funny

Harrowed by the hounds of hell

The year in writing review meme

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