Speaking strictly commercially, I did everything wrong with my writing. I don’t have an identifiable genre or sub-genre. It’s a literary noir-styled fantasy thriller romance and an allegory about globalization and growing up. There’s no shelf for that. Crossing genres and styles is gaining popularity, but it’s still a hard sell to make cold.
Perhaps I could have written odd short stories and gained a following, but my novel had too strong a pull. And of course I had to write it five times over. And it’s still a big book.
So. There it is. Nothing to do about it now but change course. (more…)
Category: novel
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The Autumn 2013 Plan
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Progress Report – Beard Crumbs & Contests
I had vowed that this would be the month I would get back on track; after a winter of “life getting in the way” I have to start sending queries to agents. I am finding ways to avoid that. Or at least that’s one interpretation, that I am fiddling with the novel as a stalling tactic to avoid the big bad commercial world. Another interpretation is that I am listening to the responses I am getting from friends and professionals.
Whatever. Let’s just say I feel there are still crumbs in my beard.
I only received one comment about my idea to move a late passage in the book to the beginning as a sort of prologue, but it came from the excellent and commercially-savvy crime novelist Oliver Tidy which gives it vastly more weight than most, so I’ve done that. We’ll see if it helps.
This also led to my realizing that the whole chapter this passage came from stands alone as a short story, and I thought I might send it out as such. (more…) -
Old Fart, of my Time
So, I am an old fart. I have always been one. By feel and intuition I cobbled myself a classical education in high school, reading Shakespeare long before it was assigned, learning mythology from academic dictionaries and old minor epics, studying Latin, using French. My love of punk music (old fart chronologically, too) and my knack for the tech and culture of computer networking (which got me hired at AOL way back before a phone could go in a pocket, much less go online) hid my mustiness pretty well, so long as I kept my vocabulary in check. But my way of being has a sense of the past about it. I live larger by living across time.
This is not the most comfortable perch when one has a new book to sell, when one tries on glittering adjectives to catch the eyes of agents.
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Lost, Discouraged, Sisyphean
Four months since I did any work worth the mention. Five days since my beloved dog T__ died, his death too sudden. He lived 13 years, long enough to see his work completed: my first novel, written and rewritten while his snoring bulk warmed my toes, finally finished; my firstborn son, born to the wife he found for me, now just old enough to remember him always.
We go on. But not comfortably.
I am a privileged man. I live well in a rich country, my few problems good ones to have. As a young man I made public light of our universal predicament, joking that I was an ephemeral being floating through life, leaving no vestige of my passing. In middle-age it is truer and less funny. I am the defiant cry of my parents, exiled by wars both hot and cold from the land of their birth. But I fear I am merely the echo that starts some avalanche. I want something more.
I want to write memorably but I don’t know who is looking for that.
Last year my friend A___ sent an excerpt of Rudy Rucker’s autobiography. Rucker in turn cites Camus to explain the depressing experience of writing as well as you can only to have no one notice. It is what I return to as motivation, a reminder that the world is hard to move. (more…) -
Progress Report
I’m sorry to have gone dark the whole summer but I was busy. We’re building a house, my dad had heart surgery, we even had a vacation — but mostly, I’ve been working.
With the huge help of star editor Kathryn Johnson I finished the third draft of my novel, retitled it (another post to come on that alone), and got some marketing pitches ready for the amazing grueling AgentFest, a speed-date of three-minute pitches hosted by ThrillerFest in New York City.
ThrillerFest was somewhere between a game change and a Hail Mary for me. I wrote a literary fantasy about globalization, not the most natural fit for a thriller convention, but it worked.
As a science-fiction fan, I know and respect genre writing, for the devotion of its fans and for the energy of its writers. It makes for a powerful combination. Genre is the farm-team of literature, where what the literary-minded will read in a decade is going on right-right-now. See Cormac McCarthy for Westerns, Neil Gaiman for fantasy, William Gibson for increasingly less fictional fiction, just to name three. (We already live in Philip K Dick’s world, of course.)
I also engaged the publishing world on its own tough terms and not in some fantasy of gilt-edged pages and brandy. You get that later but only if you get yourself out now. Agents have narrow specializations but they are not capillaries; if they can work a paranormal thriller, they can sometimes work a meta-paranormal-thriller — if it’s worth the reading.
And, I learned my book was still too long. I had already trimmed a lot of fat and rearranging the chapters got rid of some scaffolding. But the writers who generously shared their time, both at and away from the lectern — big thanks especially to Steven James — made it clear that publishing can be as brutal about size, as modeling. There’s no one piece of writing in my novel I valued more than getting published.
For the last six weeks of summer I cut a minimum of thirty words a page. It added up to 19,000 words.
Sometimes it was easy, albeit humbling. A robot needs to know that opening the door requires turning the knob first, but a person doesn’t. The This of the That became the That’s This more than I care to admit. Sometimes there was just some fine metaphor that alas wouldn’t get a character to the next moment worth tweeting. Once in a lucky while, I found some bits that were still confused or plot-holed, and the work was no longer shaving but sculpting.
It’s done now, and another post will detail the surprising post-partum depression behind those three words. Of course it won’t be “done” til it’s on a shelf or an e-reader following a transfer of funds, but I’m now finally at the point where the only reason agents won’t like it is because they don’t think they can sell it.
For the next month I am finally making this blog into a thing of substance, and sending out a whole lot of queries. Wish me luck and come back tomorrow! -
Interleaving
In a marathon session a week ago I interleaved the chapters of the manuscript. As I posted earlier it was Kathryn Johnson’s idea. Until now the points of view alternated in long chapters of 8,000-10,000 words. By alternating individual scenes from these chapters I now change viewpoints every thousand words or so. A few chapters resisted interleaving but most folded into each other neatly. I am excited to try a new structure this late in the process.
The work of interleaving was programmatic: copy and paste, merge scenes for pacing. My weird obsessive ordering with numbers for each part helped hugely. The work had its own rhythm, in great part repetitive, so there was a benefit to sticking with it all afternoon. Still I am surprised. Clearly its structure was compatible, without my ever once making it so. I had been noodling with it for several days and here it just came together.
One help was to realize I didn’t need to renumber the chapters. Modern editing tools map heading lines but keeping the chapter number is extra information that people can use. There is even a hypertext element. My wife suggested having two different tables of contents, one where the reader follows the alternating scenes, the other where the reader alternates large chapters. -
2nd draft editing, part 1
I am taking a class on revising manuscript from Kathryn Johnson, a novelist and writing mentor. Unlike other workshops there is no group critique and little discussion. Johnson has read pages from each of us but it’s about helping us do it ourselves.
She holds us to account at the start of each class on how much work we did. She talks about writing in the abstract, mixing example and anecdote. It’s a Buddhist form of instruction, like a yoga teacher’s suggestions for meditation. Discourses on wordiness, poor writing, fuzzy characters, unhelpful explanations. She raises points gently because they are powerful. Using her techniques I am losing an average of 11% words with no loss of art. (I keep totals on a spreadsheet).
With practice I am getting better at liposuction. Words kink and clog in consistent ways. Now I find their knots faster and correct them semi-automatically. I can probably wring a couple more percent out of the start.
The numbers provide concrete evidence as a tonic to the humbling process. I was sad and cranky about it for a while but I have begun to get over myself. It helps to think of the initial pages as a wall supported by scaffolding. Eventually the wall is strong itself and connected with other walls. What was needed to hold it up may be confidently discarded.
Last week Johnson suggested I break the chapters up and interleave them, alternating my characters every thousand words instead of every ten thousand. (1000 words ~ 4 pages)
It’s an exciting idea but demanding this late in the process. I don’t think the entire book need be interleaved – there are times when the drama will improve by spending a few thousand words in the same setting – but in spots it could free the book. What I thought was spine may have only been a brace.