Plodding as writing

So. I am currently technically editing Boy & Fox (I've been stuck on ~page 15 for a bit now...) and working on The Empty Book (Horror) and Rites of Exorcism (Urban Fantasy) slowly but surely. Both are at about the same word count, but the TEB comes far slower. Strangely, it's also the only project I've worked on the past year that has involved no 'kill and start over' in its writing. Oh, scenes have been deleted and there's a few I know I need to move about later on but 'add a bit, go away, add a bit more' seems to work for it, somewhat to my surprise. It probably helps that the story is dark enough that I can only write about it for short periods anyway.

Rites of Exorcism is pretty much moving slowly as I try to get the scenes I write to even remotely match the ones in my head. I suspect I need to re-read the previous draft entirely and figure out what scenes from it will be kept at all in order to have some sense of real progress. As for Boy & Fox, I'm still running into the tonal shift: the first 8 pages are quite different from the rest of the novel and I'm still working on meshing them together better so that Bess's arrival in the story is less like a live grenade and more a movement forward for Boy.

In other writing news, I'm giving serious thought to doing scifi for nanowrimo this year. I have a story that's been rummaging about my head in various forms for years now and it would be nice to try having a first draft of substantial length for a change. I just need to figure out which of the various iterations of it make the most sense, and am certain the version involving incestuous census takers is pretty much off the board.

Small progress is small

Slowly but surely progressing on The Book of Going Forth by Night along with The Empty Book. Current word counts are ~18K and 14K, respectively. Hoping to spend a good chunk of the weekend on BOGF alone. Jumping from project to project isn't a bad idea, but when they work in different tenses it becomes a little trickier.

(Effectively, I went to work on BOGF again to finish a scene and had trouble not writing in present tense, which is what TEB is in.)

And, to keep this post from being boring, the latest lines in TEB:

"I screwed up. I didn't die, and now," I lick dry lips, "and now it's hard to see how those reasons made sense."

"So you won't try and kill yourself again."

"No," I say, a little surprised to find it's true.

... which goes to show why I only work on it in short spurts.

the slow crawl of writing

Sometimes things come fast, sometimes they don't. When you're writing bits and pieces of three projects at the same time, nothing comes fast at all. Not that I haven't been writing, but the end result has been 2-300 words added every day or three to one story or another, which seldom feels like progress. That each story is a very different beast in tone probably doesn't help either. Currently, the following are being worked on:

Boy and Fox, under the title of Falling Toward the Sky, a story about a boy and a fox. Also a werewolf on the run from a prince, a kingdom whose king is going mad, foxes, self and memory. At heart, it's about a Boy who perhaps does a very terrible thing and gets to start his life over, wiping away memories of what came before it, only to discover it's never quite that easy. I consider it YA, but I could be wrong.

The Empty Book is about a failed suicide attempt and the insanity that results once Brodie begins to see more of the world than humans are meant to. It's about gods and religion, madness and family and is very, very dark. I tend to add to it in fits and starts, half when the weather is crappy more than anything else, and take breaks from it simply because it's not all that fun a mindset to immerse oneself in.

The Book of Going Forth by Night is the first book in a quadrology* of stories centred around an exorcist, his friends and allies, and the various situations he gets himself into via being hired by dubious people over the internet in a world where most people don't believe ghosts really exist because the servants of the gods alter their memories. It's very much urban fantasy and the story I'm planning to focus on for the next month or so in an effort to get a working first draft of it done. Again.**

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* Meaning that 20K exist toward a draft of the second novel and the third and fourth exist as one-line notes in a file somewhere.

** In the space of about six months I've redone this story from scratch over 4 times. The fact that I have not burned out on it surprises me, to say the least.

Where the writing is at ...

Currently I'm working on two projects. The Book of Going Forth by Night is the modern urban horror story that had a draft finished during nano. I wrote about 20K of the sequel to get a feel for it and then jumped back into this to redo it. I'm only 5 pages into but it's at least taking form again, albeit in present tense. I'm having fun fleshing out the character of Cindi and working on making the MC even more of a jerk since he basically is one at this point in his life.

Boy and Fox (aka Falling Toward The Sky) is on 11 pages and going a bit quicker, mostly because I am keeping a lot of description from previous drafts to use in it and I also have 60 handwritten pages done during travelling that shall be worked into it. (Or, realistically, about 10 of those pages.) I'm having fun fixing and keeping things and looking forward to reaching the point of New Plots vs. reorganizing old plots and concepts and meshing that together as the start. The other project is more fixing up plot and streamlining it; I'm not adding anything new in that sense so I figure it will be slower to write overall.

Beyond these, I'm trying to ignore other novel and story ideas wandering into my head so I can focus on this. How long that'll work is anyone's guess.

Writing output..

For the day has been delete two pages.

Write one page.

Also delete it.

On the plus side, most of the first page of the second draft of The Book of Going Forth remains. For now.

....

(Make that half a page.)

Bloody hell (a post about writing)

So .... the folder containing Rites of Exorcism stuff contains the current finished first drat (70K, nanowrimo of this year). I'm 20K into the sequel. The rest of the folders within it contain another 151,768 words. Various novel drafts, setting notes, character notes, write-ups on creatures, other attempts at the setting and so forth.

This is damn depressing on a number of levels :p

The worst part is that I have one other novel that, in various iterations totals 201,227 words. The actual novel that resulted from all that -- Monsters & Miracles -- was 67,000 of those words and is entirely impossible  to compare to the first draft of the story, which is kind of cool in its own way. Almost nothing from the first drafts survived at all, which is at least proof of a kind of progress even if it, too, can be seen as depressing.

I also have a trilogy in progress whose accumulated word count is 137,000 words which seems reasonable enough as it includes one finished draft of the first novel, 4K of the second novel, partial revised draft of the first and notes for the entire series.

(For the curious few, Boy & Fox is over 80K, not including 50+ handwritten pages I've yet to type up. Which isn't surprising given there are entire chapters of the first draft that no one else ever saw. It was very strange to be submitting a story to a writing group and editing entire chapters of the future story out of it in the process, which is one clue why it stalled so very badly.)

OTOH, the accumulated word count of some of the projects in some way forces a finished draft, as it did with M&M and has in many ways with the Rites series. I tend to be the sort of writer who leaps from idea to idea and concept to concept, seldom bothering to ever really go back and edit/revise novels since the new is always luring me on. However, thanks(?) to the writing group I tend to stop novels mid-stride, revise it as a new draft and what emerges at the end of an absurdly large word count is at least a more functional finished first draft.

Or so I am telling myself right now :)

On using vampires

As a rule, I've never used vampires. Oh, creatures called that and mistaken for it, yes -- I have one novel series of sorts based around voodoo, Sumerian mythology and entities that became the basis of the vampire and were-creature myths.  I figure if you're going to have a world with supernatural things, having something as basis for some of the myths makes sense. The problem I have is that of horror: vampires aren't scary anymore. They haven't been for some time.

All monsters tend to be a reflection of the era they're in, echoes and statements about man and humanity. But it's harder to have a dark mirror when what we as humans do is generally plenty dark enough. So vampires -- like angels -- mutated into something closer to superheroes, to beings with powers and Kewl Stuff that, in the case of vampires, they had to not want. So, angst. Because living forever and never seeing the sun again is such a burden that vampires could never find it awesome or decide to fight crime or at least get a life. Or unlife.

As a side note, I have this theory that the transformation to a werewolf can easily be bracketed onto being a teenager: it would be interesting to take vampire and fit it into mid-life crisis, say. Stories about vampires endure because they are flexible in this manner: we choose what kind of story we tell with them, we shape the myth to fit the story that gets told. And not all stories with vampires in them are about vampires at all. (It is hard to write about vampires these days and not include a Twilight reference. This was that.)

In my case, I wanted to do horror. I have the setting, the idea of the vampire fits it. In this case, the vampire is a stand-in for a viral plague at the level of metaphor. But that doesn't stop the vampires from believing they are vampires or, in some cases, becoming movie/novel kinds of vampires thanks to using magic that comes with no instruction manual at all. I have posited the vampires as the origin of the black death and had one character claim a single vampire could exterminate the planet of human life in about 2 months. Whether this will be enough, in terms of narrative or craft, will be an exercise for the beta readers to hash over.

An update on writing....

Nanowrimo is an odd event: historically if I pause a project to do nano said project dies. The story I was working on before my first nano languishes in a file somewhere, having been added to in fits and starts since when guilt set in but otherwise doomed. There is simply not enough time to get out all the ideas rummaging for space in my head -- a lot of them are abortive notes on files that I only do something with if the idea and characters nag at me enough to demand to be written. Many of these end up as nanos rather than anything serious.


Rites of Exorcism is different: for good or ill I have not been able to get it out out of my head even after writing it as a nanowrimo story. Short stories and novel ideas for the world keep coming to me, and as such I completed the first actually finished draft of the Book of Going Forth during nano, waited two days, and began work in the sequel. It is tentatively titled The Book of the Never-Dead ^*  and I figure writing it will also make editing the first book -- which I plan to do after writing this story -- more interesting. I've never tried this method of writing/editing before and never written a true sequel, so shall see how it goes.

This story also has vampires. Which will be the subject of another post.

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* I very much doubt the novel titles will remain come later drafts; as echos of the Egyptian cosmology they do work but as actual titles they're pretty clunky. 

And the end....

of Nanowrimo for this year. The novel ended at 70,000 words on the nose, since I added in three words in one line to get it. In some respects, this was the hardest nanowrimo I've ever done since, unlike all the others, this was a non-nano project -- aka one my brain says 'this could be a good novel' vs my normal idea of trying a new genre or just getting an idea out of my head, which is my normal fun with nano. As such, the story stalled a few times and was almost redone from a different POV once. Interestingly, the last 10K took almost a week to write since it was the last part of the nano and a lot of plot and story elements had to be resolved and come together.

Did they? Well, no. By that point I was too aware of stuff I'd be changing in the next draft and wanting to have this draft reflect that. Which is probably a sure route to madness, so I finished this draft as was and had fun with  it. It did manage to surprise me in some small parts, a few of the people in it turning darker or tougher than I'd thought and I discovered the big change for the next draft is to shorten the timeline a lot. Aiden is an exorcist, and very good at that: this novel was him dealing with non-ghost stuff mostly and being out of his comfort and knowledge zone. As such, taking four days to figure out the major plot stuff going on made him seem drastically more incompetent, and possibly stupid.

Things I learned this year:

1) Plotting worked. Less plotting would have worked better. I write to find out what is going to happen as much as anything else and this draft left little room for me to be surprised which led to some sections being rather slow to write since I had, at least in point form plot notes, 'done' them already and the plot didn't deviate much from them.

2) I think I may use nano for something I plan to Do More with again in the future. It does limit me to one nanowrimo a year, but that's just fine; I could do more, and I have, but I have no need or desire to. 

3) I don't think I'll use nano to rewrite a concept from scratch and such again, however: using it for something new is more to the point and a better break from other projects. (And yes, this may violate #2 but what the hell. I'll still limit myself to the one nanowrimo, however long or short it turns out to be.) 

 4) Trying to write one story that's over 80K should definitely be a challenge to myself; very few of my first drafts are that long. 

5) I had fun, even if sometimes the story didn't feel fun at all. Working on one project off and on for over two years is not my cup of tea: I tend to get idea, write, move on to next idea, write, and so forth: I think this story and Boy and Fox are the only two projects I've stuck with for a long period of time, and the latter is missing some indefinable something to make it work.

Also, my collective nano wordcount for 8 years is now:  862,374 words. Daaaamn.

The evolution of a novel

Over the past few years my writing style has changed in weird ways: I tend to write part of a novel, set it aside, come back to it, redo it from scratch at least once and see where it goes. It's probably wasteful on a lot of levels, but I find it gives me a better grasp of the characters and what works and doesn't work in the story. 

In the case of what is now going to be nanowrimo 2011, it began life as Rites of Exorcism, which took place over 2 drafts of Aiden Nel, an exorcist in high school and his attempt to cope with the deaths of his parents, graduation, his own future and some entity that had begun murdering cheerleaders. Eventually I realized I didn't have a workable ending for it and rather than force something realized the entire story actually worked better as a backstory. I began another draft, dropping it because it didn't fit and eventually began work on another project involving a man named Zeth who had done something utterly terrible in his past and gained power for it: an examination of what happens to someone who hits rock bottom and then starts digging deeper. 

Eventually the two concepts congealed in my head along with an old idea about a world where the egyptian gods were real that I'd first done up as a quick rpg game. I began work on what was by then The Book of Going Forth by Night, with the stated goal of sequels, and while busy travelling I realized that one of the major characters in it should really be in the sequel instead. Which meant redoing it from scratch as well, so my old nano idea was scrapped in favour of bloody well finishing a draft OF this story, since it's been about four years now. 

On a practical level, this means I've written over 120K of words that are either backstory or possibly plot stuff for the second novel in a series without a first novel. Because that seems to be what I do. 

songs for exorcists

I don't listen to that much music, as a rule. Most of it tends to be folk, and my only real requirement is that if the song has music, I can hear the words. (Given hearing loss, this pretty much disqualifies most rock and such.) However, when stumbling across a song by chance today, I realized it fit one  character for theBook of Going Forth and that I had a few others lurking in a playlist that worked, so without further ado:

The series itself fits with Empire by Super8 & Tab.
Aiden is, for various reasons, Secret by Heart
while Damien, naturally is I Am (The Doppelganger's Song) by Seanan McGuire
Vita fits with Windmills of Your Mind.

I have nothing for other characters at present, and some -- okay, most -- of the songs are ones I come across while working on a novel and think they fit into it on some level, so I lob them into a playlist I often entirely forget about.

There are a few for Boy and Fox but listing those would constitute plot spoilers. Really.

All of which leads me to wonder ... do you have songs fitting your characters? Do you even bother to try? Or, like me, does it mostly happen by accident?

September Writing

It seems my latest method for novels is to combine things from other stories that have stalled or failed and see what works. As a result, what is now 'The Book of Going Forth By Night' was once, in no particular order, the Rites of Exorcism novel [now a backstory], the BOGF rpg idea that sprung out of Rites and a story I'd only called 'zeth story' about what happens to a man after he's lost everything.

The end result has been pretty fun and odd so far, so I'll see where it goes.

Things one should not read while doing up notes for a novel on exorcism

Sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are proof that that "the Devil is at work inside the Vatican", according to the Holy See's chief exorcist.

Father Gabriele Amorth stated that the consequences of satanic infiltration included power struggles at the Vatican as well as "cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon." The devil is also apparently pure spirit and "At times he makes fun of me."

[Amorth] was among Vatican officials who warned that J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels made a "false distinction between black and white magic". He approves, however, of the 1973 film The Exorcist, which although "exaggerated" offered a "substantially exact" picture of possession.

And the devil makes fun of him. Colour me not surprised.

Rites of exorcism 3.0

Or something like that. I did one version to 20 pages, redid from scratch to 80 pages (35K and change) and realized I'd have to change a fair bit to get some characters feeling believable. Shelved it for current project, but it's nagging me again. This time with a solution: take the Rites 2.0, finish it in my head. And make it the back story to another novel. The only thing I need to keep, really, is the stuff with Aiden's grandmother. A lot of other things will make more sense, Brooke and Sal attempt to deal with their odd relationship as twenty-something's and I'll see where it goes from there.

Another novel fragment

“You got a tattoo.”
       “There was also demons, the police, a fae --” I tried.
       “You got a tattoo.” She raised a hand, and for half a moment I thought she was going to slap me before she reached across the kitchen table and brushed some hair from my face, staring into my eyes. I tried not to squirm. “Show me.”
       I sighed and unwrapped the bandage on my left hand and showed her both palms. “They’re visible only if I want them to be.”
       “Because they're magical tattoos?” she said, but there was a tightness in her voice when she stared at my left hand.
       “How did you --?” I drew back and grandma blinked a few times.
       “I was joking. Or I thought I was,” she amended, then frowned and turned my left hand over, staring at my palm. “This?”
       I looked down and saw the faint outline of the tattoo glowing red. “Weird.” I concentrated and it faded away almost to nothing. “There. I guess using fire soon after getting this wasn’t the best idea.”
       “And it is?”
       “The new moon, the Eye of Horus -- closed -- and a phoenix reversed. It should basically make a framework for binding the angel and save me time and energy. It knows what I am, about the knife, and can probably seen the fire in me. I need another edge, or at least a moment of surprise.”
       She ran her fingers lightly over both palms, tickling my right a little in the process. “And it was worth it?”
       “Don’t know yet.” I pulled my hands away. “Probably not: it hurt a lot.”
       “You knew that going in.”
       It wasn’t a question but I nodded anyway. “I thought anything on my left hand would hurt a lot by default.”
       “You could have asked me.”
       “Would you have said yes?”
       Grandma was quiet for a few minutes, staring at my hands, then looked up and smiled wanly. “Probably not. But despite what you may have heard, it isn’t easier to get forgiveness than permission.”
       “Huh?”
       “It may seem easier, but you break a trust in doing so.”
       “Oh.”
       “And,” she added with a gentle smile, “sometimes when adults say no, it is for a good reason.”
       “‘People only grow to the extent they aren’t protected. Not by closing their hearts, but by the pieces they leave open.’” I quoted.
       She snorted. “Your father always was too poetic for his own good.”
       “You don’t grow if you’re sheltered. That’s what he meant. It’s not a bad thing to want to, but only for so long.”
       “Aiden. You’re only fifteen. You’re young enough to be wounded, yes, but are you old enough to heal?”
       Neither of us looked at my left hand. I smiled, or at least tried to. “I don’t know.”
       “I was young once, too. I took risks, did foolish things. All parents were children once, Aiden; as difficult as you might find it to believe, all grandparents were, too. I don’t know many things in this life, but I do know that we only grow by scar tissue, and most of us, if we had a choice, wouldn’t choose to grow at all.”
       “But --.”
       “Hush.” She took my hands in hers, lightly. “To be content in life, you need ignorance, Aiden. The world is full of evil and good, and I doubt either is stronger than the other, but it’s all too easy to see the evil. One act can make someone evil, but good is so many little things, all adding up in amounts so small we almost never measure them.”
       “Demons, grandma. They’re real, and they hate us. You want me to be ignorant of them and have the world end?”
       “No. But I think it would be better by far to be happy when the world ends than to be sad over your own life. Your parents had each other. They knew love. But you -- if you save the world and end up bitter, or sad, or lonely, what have you saved that was worth it?” She let go of my hands. “I don’t want your life to be like that, no matter the choices you make.”
       “But I’d save the world.”
       “I think it is generally better if our lives have meaning than that our deaths do,” she said dryly. “I’d rather you lived a full life, Aiden, and died in some random accident, than died a death in the cold and dark with no one to mourn, no one to attend your funeral.”
       “How many will attend yours?” slipped out before I could stop it.
       I stiffened, prepared for her to strike me this time, but to my surprise my grandmother laughed. “Oh, Aiden. Thank you.”
       “For what?”
       “Your parents would never have said that, never dreamed of it.”
       “I’m sorry --.”
       “Hush.” She raised a finger to my lips. “It was true. I am scared you will make the choice I made, Aiden. I’m an old lady who doesn’t even keep cats for company, who had no lover who remained, who made no friends I wasn’t too quick to renounce. But you are your parent’s son, too. And they could use people without hesitation if they had to, friend or not.” Son or not remained unspoken.
       “I don’t plan to.”
       “Of course you don’t. You’ll just let it happen, and pretend surprise when it’s over.”
       I scowled. “I’m not you. And I’m not them!”
       “I wish I could believe that.” She stood. “You don’t know how hard I wish that.”
       “I stood as well. “So, I’m being grounded or something?”
       “I think you’ve punished yourself enough. This time. But you can’t keep doing things like this. There are limits to how much a body can endure.”
       I said nothing.
       She began walking to the kitchen stairs, and turned and looked back. “You need to learn to bend, Aiden.”
       “I am an exorcist,” I said, holding her gaze. “We break before we bend.”
       And my grandmother stared at me for a long moment, mouth opening, but she closed it on whatever words she was going to say and turned out the light.
       I stood in the dark alone until she went upstairs so I could pretend I never heard her crying.

Fragment from novel.

      “Angels are not demons. We have no issue with killing, or bodies, or gore. But it is hard to tempt with virtues as angel do when people are scared and terrified. So they shunt people, as you called it. No mess, no fuss, no body to find ... at least not in their lifetime.”
      “But Nicole was murdered. And Daniel. So whoever is doing this told the angel to kill, and it put both Tammi-Anne and Jennifer somewhen else. But they’re after some kind of revenge, enough to have demanded it leave bodies.”
      Mr. Peterson nodded. “The angels do not pay attention to this world as we do. They just toss people through time, finish what they were present for, and leave. We often find uses for those put out of time.”
      “So they’re both dead, then?”
      “Quite likely. Or famous, rich, reviled. It would depend on the kind of skills they had, what they could truly bring of the the present to the past.”
      “Cellphones?” I said dryly.
      “How cute. No. They have many uses that do not involve the destruction of this world. Ringtones, on the other hand.” Mr. Peterson smiled. “We convinced one person put out of time to invent them.”
      “Okay, now I know you’re just trying to pull my leg.”
      “1993,” the demon said calmly. “We also caused the actual Noika Tune to be invented in 1903 to ensure ringtones would exist. Tárrega ran away three times during his childhood, and no one truly knows why. Even with impaired vision he saw what his father really was, though never what was planned for his music.”
      “This is, seriously, how demons try and destroy the world?”
      “We use the angels cast-offs for other methods as well. The black death was caused by nanotech from a boy in 2112.”