Where Personal and Professional Life Collide...

After much hair-pulling and coffee-drinking, Book 2 of The Devil's West and I seem to be writing the same story again, just in time to bring things to a close....

Seriously, this would be SO much easier if the lizard brain would talk to the mammal brain during the FIRST pass of the draft, not the THIRD. But nooooooo, the damned lizard has to go and leave all these juicy bits, and force the mammal brain to slowly figure out how they all tie together, and what the characters are supposed to do with them.

Grrr.

And I'm pretty sure a fourth pass is going to be needed before I'm satisfied enough to let m'editor see it, so he can tell me what is needed in the fifth pass....

"Writing's easy," they said.  "You can just whammy out a story every month, two books  a year," they said.  "Easy money," they said!

Where's the damned money and my cosplaying fandom, is what I want to know.

(or, failing that, whisky and a wedge of pont l'eveque.)


((cosplayers for the Devil's West would be so awesome, I don't even know how to say it. Except it would be so awesome and if anyone ever does I DEMAND pics. Um, please?))

Sometimes the right word, historically, is the wrong word for modern comprehension. This never fails to frustrate. *glares at vocabulary* Also, having the perfect line, and realizing that it requires the reader to remember a worldbuilding fact that was given to them about 40,000 words prior (and once in the previous book), without a trigger to recall said context.

I am able to accept that I'm being too subtle/expecting too much of 98% of readers. But perfect line was still perfect and I shall mourn it.

I have also realized that some of my characters are written so certain actors will be the right age to play them in 5-10 years. Wise - and ever-hopeful - lizard brain!

Meanwhile, it is June, and I am informed that Tourist Season is about to hit the wine tourism industry. Which means that my (relatively) quiet weekday shifts will likely be less quiet. This is all to the good (slow shifts are boring) but also means that - between adjusting to that and the book being due in a month, plus the fact-checking road trip coming up - the next 4-6 weeks are going to be.... well, exhausting on all fronts. I apologize in advance for any incoherence.

Original opening line of Book 2: "They’d left nothing alive.“

After an entire day of word-wrangling, the new opening line:

"Isobel had been riding for three days, two to her destination and then a turnaround, when she found the bodies."

Yeah, that works. But dogdamn it, it took me HOURS and BRAIN BLOOD (and at least one walk around the neighborhood) to get the opening pages to finally do what I wanted them to do.

On the plus side, it should get easier today.

Should.

Right?

Except we had a local market fail: they have semi-sweet chocolate-covered graham crackers, but no dark chocolate-covered graham crackers. How am I supposed to work under these conditions?!

THUD.

Pending my secondary research backup getting back to me with feedback on the Latin, and with the knowledge that I'll need to go over it one more time to make sure certain capitalizations and usages are consistent throughout....

Copyedits for SILVER ON THE ROAD are deflagged and done. All 452 pages of 'em.

My brain may be a grey leaky mess at this point. Please don't ask me anything more complicated than "would you like some chocolate?"

However, I fond myself thinking "yeah, I done good here."  This is damned rare among hypercritical writer-types, where "well, it don't suck" is the much more common high praise: take note.



(of course, now the pressure to go back to the draft of #2 and make it EVEN BETTER may become paralyzing....)

Huh. Yeah, that's that, then. A little short and a lot messy, nothing anyone gets to see but me, but that's Draft 0 of Devil's West #2.

~Woo.~

[I'm actually really really excited about Draft 0, but right now I feel like I've been beaten with bamboo rods, so 'woo' is all I got]

Now I have a month to do the second pass, and get it into shape I'm willing to let someone else read....



And, of course, I check email and hey! There's the CEM for Book 1 (aka SILVER ON THE ROAD) landing! Nice timing. Cruel, but nice.

On Monday I realized I'd written myself down the wrong path. Not far, maybe a thousands words or so, but I was coming off the high of an amazing scene, and I let the lizard brain jump to the next amazing thing and it wasn't until several pages later that I thought - no. This doesn't work, this won't lead us to where we need to be.

So I stopped, and put it aside, let the high fade so I could look at the two scenes with a clearer eye.

Tuesday, I threw many of those words out, and tried to find the right path. It wasn't  happy-making, but my gut is never wrong when it says "pull over, you took the wrong turn."

Today, I had lunch with a fellow writer, wherein we talked about the fact that our WiPs are similar in tone, style, and approach, and determined that yes, there is a term for that sort of book, and a history, and even someone we can sort of flail at as a "founder"  (and there may be more of that later, as things gel).  And then I went off, fully intending to tear apart the first hundred or so pages of the WiP to see where I'd gone wrong, and instead found myself tearing apart the existing outline for the second half of the book (for the third time) and...

huh.   Stuff fell out of my brain and into the story, and suddenly everything I've done up to now makes sense, and the reason I'd stumbled so hard on Monday was to lead to this...



(not seen in photos: 6x9 notecards and post-its)

Typing is fine, but for serious replotting and rejiggering, you need paper and multicolored pens. So now, instead of a blank wall, a stubbed toe, and only a vague idea of what's on the other side, I have actual blueprints, and a tool kit. And a stubbed toe.

If there's a lesson here it's two-fold.  1)  if it feels wrong, it probably is.  2) if you don't panic, don't try to force things, the same gut instinct that told you it was wrong will give you the tools to figure out what's right.

And, as my twinling pointed out, this is exactly what happened with SILVER ON THE ROAD, in exactly the same spot.  So I guess I know what to look forward to (hah) in book 3?

Today's WiP darling: "She had grown up in proximity to the devil; power had been as present in the air she breathed as the sulphured smoke from the blacksmith’s forge."

I may kill it later. But for now, we're in love. :-)

2000 new words and I'm finally starting to feel, nearly 25,000 words in, that the plot's starting to come together. After a decade+ of writing reasonably tight-to-outline books, I swear, this series is going to kill me. But process, it sometimes changes, and ya gotta just roll with it...

The rest of the day was admin stuff, broken by my printer's new-found refusal to scan needed tax documents.  Wine was opened, and sacrifices were made, along with some impressive-even-to-me cursing....

Tomorrow, I need to put the final polish on a short story before the editors hunt me down and take it from my hands, and then I'm of to partake of a Viking Feast. I have no idea what to expect, other than my own offering (semi-traditionally roasted root veggies), but hopefully the mead will allow me to stagger home at a reasonable hour, because on Sunday I'm one third of

Novels/novellas: 

SILVER ON THE ROAD is copyeditor-bound. I hope to have ARCs soon, to maybe scatter among the deserving and talkative... (if you're a blogger or otherwise loudmouthed in the industry and want one, email me!) 

WORK OF HUNTERS (Sylvan Investigations #3) is with the proofreader and from there into backer-edition production, huzzah! 

CLAWED (Gin & Tonic #4 is in production and I expect to have finished copies RSN.  I'm not going to be doing much in-person support on this book because DEADLINES so again, if you're a blogger and want an early copy, email me!  (unless you're already on my publisher's List, in which case you should have a copy already!) 

AN INTERRUPTED CRY (Sylvan Investigations #4) is in the "I think I need to rework that section of plot because I'm  not satisfied with it yet" stage.    Grr.  Argh.

THE DEVIL'S WEST #2 just hit the 20,000 word mark (after I rewrote the first 15,000 words), and is back on schedule, stop looking at me like that. 

Short(er) stories:

There are two stories out on submission *crosses fingers* and one short in revisions, while I have another two  (requested, with deadlines) that I'm stirring in the think-pot even as I type this.  More on those as they happen. 

New Projects: Waiting on agent's feedback for one, still stirring the pot on the other... hopefully as soon as the short fiction  is well underway, the novel proposal will come out of hiding and tell itself to me... (I already know the setting, the main characters, and the basic plot, but they're not all talking to each other yet).

And yeah, then there's the Noir Cats project.  I'm still trying to figure out how to get that up in a way that's timely and allows people to tip generously as it amuses them. 

Is that everything?  That's everything I can think of, anyway....
 

This morning I dealt with a feline sugar crash (perfect timing cat, you couldn't have done that while at the vet's tomorrow?) and then delicately hammered out my daily dose of new words-

Brassy child, he muttered, not first the first time since she’d issued that threat.  His own fault for teaching her to tie knots, and to praise her for learning them so well.

- and then to Ikea to return a thing, and theb my twinling and I sat down, as we oft do - though now in the flesh rather than Skype! - and bemoaned the current state of our PiSS (projects in stalled stasis).  And in the bemoaning, as we oft do,  we able to fix each other - or at least give ourselves a new and more profitable direction in which to go.

So now I can toss the three failed attempts at an opening in this novella,  and start somewhere entirely new, in a different pinpoint of time. That should work, yes.

But right now, I need to put on my editor hat and knock other people into shape.  Cabana boy, where's my wine and lash?

taken w/ an iPad mini camera, so a little fuzzy on the edges....

but yeah.  This was the view from my balcony this morning.  Does. Not. Suck.



Meanwhile, there's been major breakthrough on plotting of The Devil's West #2, also a possible (working) title. And some days you look at your writing and think, "the seeds for that were planted when I was eight.." We use everything, eventually.