Last night was rough. I expected us to be better. Smarter. Stronger. Instead we chose hate over love, exclusion over inclusion, bullying over cooperation.
I am glad that my daughter is too young to understand elections or politics. I don’t know if I am equal to the task of explaining this to her. Continue reading “Standing on the Side of Love, Redux”
1. A and I are now the proud owners of a bedroom set. In the almost nine years we’ve been together, we’ve had night boxes, night speakers, night crates, and, once, a night fishtank, but never night stands. All that changed last Monday, and let me tell you, it is a life altering experience.
2. WTF X-Files? On a scale of 1-Dexter, the last episode in the mini series was about a 7, but that’s only because I refuse to believe it was unintentionally that bad. Memorable quote “He’s too sick for the vaccine! He needs STEM CELLS.” Will Sculley save Mulder? Will Fox commission more episodes? Did Einstein survive? By the time the closing credits rolled, I was laughing too hard to care.
3. Do you have a toddler? Are you watching Masha and the Bear? No? You’re welcome.
4. Bronwyn is kicking my ass. Revisions are always much slower for me than the zero draft, but this is bordering on the ridiculous. It’s why you don’t see much in the way of novel updates from me… Chapter 6, days 7-15: still struggling through the squirrel killing scene.
5. Things I miss about New York: the subway, good pizza, and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. The wine bar I’m writing this in hits two of the three: it’s a blink-and-you-miss-it set of stairs that I’ve walked by dozens of times, and they serve a proper thin-crust, crushed tomato sauce pizza. There’s also a Christmas story leg lamp behind the bar and a random stained glass mural of an owl and a raven in a tree. You just can’t get this in Vallejo.
Closing Tabs
I’ve always wanted to live in a house with a conservatory. As that’s not likely to happen any time soon, I’ll settle for an indoor fruit tree or four.
I totally got tripped up by this guy when I was working restaurants, and it amazes me that, despite the fact that she’s writing about the STEM fields and I was a cocktail waitress, the MO was almost identical – down to the inappropriate use of “shiny.”
On a much lighter note, I came across this list of places to hike with a toddler in the East Bay and I can’t wait to go out with A and Z.
Unfortunately, said hikes are probably going to have to wait a month or so, as it appears that the reprieve from the rain is over with a vengeance.
The revisions have been going slowly. So slowly that I’d begun to think I’d set an impossible deadline for myself, that there was no way I was going to have the second draft of this ready by the beginning of August. It was really starting to make me crazy. After all, when I was doing revisions to Pomegranate House in January, I was blowing through pages and pages of material in each sitting. I didn’t get why I was having such a difficult time here.
Then, about a week ago, I finally figured out what was going on. I’m not revising, I’m rewriting.* There’s a few parts, like the opening, that I’ve left largely intact, but almost everything else has gone straight to the chopping block. Truth is, it’s been so long (over 6 years!) since I’ve worked on the second draft of a novel that I forgot what it was like. And because this first draft was good — not great, but good — I somehow thought that would translate to less rewriting.
This new draft? It’s really good. Still not great, but it’s starting to sing. It’s also falling into place plot-wise. There’s a big chunk near the end that I’ve been worrying over, because I knew I would need to cut out or completely re-write most of it. It’s that chunk, in fact, that put me off revising for so long, because I simply had no idea what to do with it. Now? I’m not so worried by the fact that most of it is going to hit the cutting room floor and stay there. In fact, I think the book will be better for it.
What does all this mean for my deadline? Well, after seven weeks I’m about a third of the way through the original novel, but I’ve written an extra 10,000 words. I also think my pace is going to pick up a bit, now that I’ve made my peace with the fact that this is a rewrite. There’s no way I’ll have a completed draft in two weeks, but mid-end August might not be too far outside the realm of possibility.
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* I see rewriting as the thing that happens when you take your original scenes and rewrite them completely, adding or subtracting characters, text, dialogue, plot points, etc. I see revising as the thing that happens when you tweak a word here or there, or maybe sprinkle in a few additional scenes, but otherwise leave the thing mostly intact. I’m sure different people call these different things, or the same things, but it’s what I mean here, for purposes of this post.
Plot is not my strong point.
If you’re looking for beautifully written language, for characters with depth and knowledge and humanity, for a voice that’s all it’s own, I’m your girl. But plot? I’m terrible at twisting the threads of my character’s fates, at telling them where and when and how to move. I can give them motivation, but I stink at placing obstacles in their way.
You remember how, in Sim City, you could chose to subject your city to earthquakes or fires or alien invasions? I was the kid who always disabled that option. I liked all my Sims. I didn’t want to see them destroyed.
It’s the same with my characters. I don’t want to make them go through the Fire Swamp, falling into the quicksand and battling Rodents of Unusual Size. I don’t want to put them into situations they can’t get out of themselves.
The result tends to be that scenes which should be filled with tension end too early. In my current WIP, one of the characters goes into the forest, gets a little lost, but comes back half an hour later, unscathed, and with strawberries. In the next draft, she’s going to disappear for more than thirty minutes, and there will definitely be Consequences. Problem solved.
The harder thing to fix is that feeling of drag around the 2/3 point, right about when the bad guys should be starting to close in. This happens in my current WIP. Where there should be several chapters of nail-biting, page-turning, edge-of-the-seat tension, I end up with several chapters of world building instead. My notes to myself, after I read back through this, were something along the lines of “WTF??”
Fear not, though. I have a plan. I’m going to create a page in my Scrivener for the novel titled “Very Bad Things.” And I’m going to write down all the bad things that can happen to my characters. All of them. Everything from death to dismemberment to imprisonment to torture. When I’m done, I should have enough disasters to keep the plot moving and the pages turning.
Whether my characters forgive me for it is another matter entirely.
One of the questions I’ve seen floating around blogs and #askagent sessions is how you know when it’s time to put a manuscript on hold. The answer, it turns out, is rather like Justice Stewart’s definition of pornography: you’ll know it when you see it.
After 3 contests, several requests for fulls, and a little bit over a year of querying, with no offers of representation, I’ve decided to put Pomegranate House on hold. The fact that this doesn’t seem like a tough decision at all is part of what’s convinced me it’s time to do so.
The feedback I’ve gotten has been remarkably uniform, almost always along the lines of “I love your writing, but I’m not connecting with this piece.” Several agents have mentioned they’d like to see my next novel, once it’s ready. My takeaway is that I could keep trying working on this one, keep trying to coax it into something the market finds palatable – or I can work on the next thing.
I’m choosing the next thing.
I’ve got a novel in progress that I’m super excited about. It’s set in the near future. Bronwyn, the heroine, used to be the First Lady, but now operates a stop on the Railroad, an underground network that smuggles dissidents and members of the Resistance out of the former U.S. Then there’s the coming-of-age story I want to write, the one that chronicles three generations – son, mother, and grandmother – as each one leaves home and sets off across the country. I also have a story tickling the back of my mind about a teenager who goes to visit an uncle on a dig in northern Iraq and gets pulled into the Persian empire. (That one’s going to take some serious research.) And if I ever get time, there’s a summer camp novel I’ve been wanting to write…
And who knows. Maybe, after I’ve written a few more books, I’ll take Stephanie out again and find her a home.