And the easy part is done....

Edited the first 8 pages (until Bess shows up); removed and clarified a few things, got rid of some words. From here on in it is going to be much harder .... Also working on notes for the Story That Died early in June; planning for 2-3 pov characters but plan to let it ferment in my mind while I work on editing Boy & Fox into a proper shape.

I think most of the extraneous characters will be removed to try and pare the secondary characters down, but shall see how it all goes ....

In which my brain refuses to leave me alone

Way back at the start of June I began Bird & Jester, intended to be a YA story about two twins born to different parents dealing with a renegade member of their own family, fairies, and sasquatches living in a trailer park. Unfortunately, the MCs voice just never came together properly and the project died on the page. It happens.

Unfortunately earlier this week my brain began revising the setting, altering characters, shoving their ages up a decade and giving thought to using 2-3 POVs for the story instead. The vague plot running through my head in involves a town's Christmas In July idea gone horribly wrong and will also involve using a character from a short story begun at least 10 years ago and never finished. 

Naturally, the entire thing needs a  new title -- not that I much liked the Bird/Jester one anyway -- so I shall have to work on that and figure out how much of the setting and my notes I can salvage from the last iteration of the matrix. 

The terrible silence

And so, on Day 5, the Author scowled and tossed 7,700 words aside to the waste bin of his mind and looked anew at the story of a Boy and a Fox and thought: this will be more fun. I will do this. And on day 6, approaching 5000 words, he knew his choice to be Right and Just .

Or: Bird & Jester died. Redoing/fixing the first chapter was a Hint. Getting rid of all the back-story chapters was a bigger hint. The final one was that I just wasn't getting a proper voice for the MC: she just didn't feel distinct enough, and Wren wasn't working at all. In retrospect, some of the built-in parts of the setting too away more narrative tension than they should have; I should have left healing magic in, for one thing. Ah well. We live. We learn. 

As for Boy & Fox, it no longer bears the 'Falling Toward Sky' moniker at all, as the real world main plot/goal no longer exists at all. When the story first began, it was about a Boy from our world entering another, and trying to follow his dead grandmother into the land of the dead: he doesn't find her, loses his memory, and tries to find out who and what he was with the help of a fox and a werewolf. 

Both Boy, Reynard Fox and Bess remain. Nothing else of that plot does. The story has altered itself, plots have shifted and it's less directly a fairy tale and not an allegory for this world at all now. In some ways it's a pity, in other ways I'm looking forward to finding out where this story takes me and if Boy can finally meet the King. 

Day the third

Closing in on 6K words, slowly. Have decided to drop the alternating chapters idea as the past stuff just breaks up the flow and urgency of the plot too much. Which means half of what I've plotted out this far won't be used. Granted, 'plot' is really 2-3 sentence summaries of chapters. Hell, the notes of was  chapter 11 are: 'Chapter 11: Snag Mishi, head to Otherworld.' I prefer plotting in broad terms since it allows for more deviance and juggling of things if it becomes necessary. Scrapping half my plotted pieces will make things interesting, if only in figuring ways to incorporate some of the actually useful info. into the story.

And, thanks to writing group, I am currently trying -- as best I can -- to ignore the urge to do up a new notes file for Boy & Fox. I may give into it .... now, in fact.

Signs one is not doing a nano correctly ...

Include re-writing most of the first chapter already. On the plus side, it's now 2400 words. On the downside, my output for this morning is technically 300 words :)

Story-wise I'm still getting a feel for Jess's voice as I poke at the second chapter.

We can has plotz?

Sooo .... plotted until chapter 14, and have written two whole sentences to encapsulate the end of the novel further down the road. I am uncertain how long it will end up being at this point as my chapter plots are often limited to 1-2 sentences. As the current layout consists of one chapter set in the present (aka Finding Rhod) and the alternating chapters are past events that led to this point I may end up writing the entire story out of order and definitely re-organizing chapters later on, to say nothing of removing the 'past' alternating chapters entirely as the story reaches the climax.  

 

Ah, plotting....

In the space of 24 hours I have plotted out a grand total of four chapters. Which has led to research and notes on the town, jot notes on what the characters do for jobs, altering some names and a complete revision of the system of magic used in the setting. Said revision helps explain why magic exists but there are so few magicians.

Long story short: it takes over 10 years to learn magick, ~5 more more to learn anything of real power and, being an alien language, is inherently damaging to the sanity to use. Add in the fact that there are, at best, 100 true magicians in the world and many uses of magic require more than one magician to work successfully (i.e. without the caster dying) and you have a system of power that worked a long time ago and has fallen into disuse.

There are also broad hints that the Gathering have an unofficial job of hiding weird shit from the world and that at least one government agency is involved in that as well. It pretty much exists to answer my major pet peeve with stories that go: "Oh, wait, all these monsters exist but people just don't know. You know? Because ... uh ... they hide really well. Only they somehow don't during this series of stories, but ignore that okay?"

Bird & Jester at least addresses this on some level and there are various plot-secretive reasons why magic faded away that are linked to the families that make up the Gathering. It's not perfect by any stretch, but it's at least not quite as absurd as just hand-waving monsters and such away with disbelief.

Ah, research ....

Writing up notes for june campnowrimo.

Research findings of the day include the fact that "do Sasquatches whistle" is apparently an important search on the subject of Sasquatches and "In traditional Balinese culture, it was common for a set of twins of the opposite sex to marry each other, since it was assumed that they had sex in utero."

This says much about research subjects. And also, I feel, much about the internet.

prepping a novel....

The downside of working on multiple projects is that progress across the board is insanely slow. As such, I figured I should have 'fun' for campnanowrimo and at least do the June entry with a completely different project. It drags a few threads together from uncompleted stuff or ideas without homes for them. The title is, at present, Bird & Jester and it is very much a YA fantasy.

It's about twins born to different parents and the high cost of expectations. The actual backstory was written out as a fake report to class by the MC, but my computer ate it twice. Boiled down to basics it's about what happens when you and your best friend fall in love with the same guy and then he goes and tries to do something Really Bad and you feel you have to stop him.

Spoiler: the MCs name is Jess, and she does die in it. (This is a joke very few people will get.)