Oh so busy revising and writing and driving
Well, the Handy Small Child has started preschool, and I’ve started working through the Matchbox Girls edit notes in earnest. The lazy days of summer, when all I had to do was write a Nightlights scene a day and do chores, have drifted away like autumn leaves.
Of course, it’s the hottest weather we’ve had all summer right now. I mean, my tomatoes don’t care, they’re still stubbornly staying green, because they’re conspiring against me. But still, hot weather.
Anyhow, this weekly post is supposed to be about Matchbox Girls. It’s my novel! It’s coming out in February! I’m going through it closely for the first time in at least six months. It hasn’t faded as much as I thought it might, but I did spend three years weeping tears of blood over it. Maybe it takes more than six months for those to fade.
Yes, okay, hyperbole. I don’t think I even cried salt tears over it. I did, however, reach the 3/4th point in the original draft, then decide it was All Crap and wrote it all over again from scratch. And it took a long time. Three+ years from start to finish, as I said (and for comparison, I’ve written 111,000 words since starting Nightlights in April).
A few scenes from the initial draft made it into the second draft mostly unmodified, but there were huge, huge changes, too. Characters cut, characters added, sub-plots expanded, sub-plots removed. Sometimes I run into brainstorming from before I even started the initial draft and it’s barely recognizable.
One thing I’ve noticed I do in the process of refining a story idea is that I strip information from the protagonist. In early iterations of an idea, the protagonist is often well-informed, with clear instructions and knowledgeable mentors. This makes maintaining tension harder, which affects pacing. So I throw out most of the information and make acquiring it part of the plot. What I do is probably a bit of a cheat, and I’m sure many excellent authors are able to provide a well-paced story without throwing characters in over their heads.
But it seems to be an effective cheat.
Okay, going through editorial comments and changes probably adds a lot of tension to the reading process for me. But while every scene is still laser-engraved in my memory, I still picked up this sense of growing anxiety and dread from the story, an awful sense of ‘Oh God, what’s going to happen next?’ Ridiculous, because I know. I wrote it. Ridiculous and weird. A couple of beta readers mentioned that they’d read most of the story in one sitting, which I dismissed at the time as ‘they were trying to get through it fast’. (Sorry, beta readers! Please forgive me!) Now, I’m wondering if I maybe did something right.
Posts like this are hard for me. The idea that saying something good about myself or my work will backfire on me is deeply, deeply ingrained. But I also need to do lots of self-promotion to succeed in this new publishing world. Or at least– I need to do some self-promotion. I still firmly believe that quality should rise to the top, but I’ve grudgingly come to admit that it can’t happen if it’s hidden in a closet. It’s easier for introverted me to work on quality improvement over selling myself, but I’ve got to work on both.
So, Matchbox Girls. Every sixty pages or so, it changes gears, always going faster. I think people will like it. And you’ll probably be hearing more from me about it.
Nightlights Soundtrack
OK, the post I was planning to write has been postponed due to a lovely and wonderful houseguest. But! I’ve been planning for a while to make a post about the music I listen to while writing Nightlights, along with the process of building a soundtrack and the way I use it.
I like silence when I write, often.
Unfortunately, I have a few problems.
- I don’t live alone
- I have (actual, professionally-diagnosed) ADHD.
- I’m not always in the mood to write when I need to write.
Music helps me with all of these problems. Music I’m extremely familiar with becomes a kind of white noise, serving the dual purpose of obscuring other sounds and eating up a distraction track in my brain. And if I turn it on when I’m not in my writing headspace, the strong habitual association and imagery associated with the music tows me where I need to be.
For Nightlights, I started with a song or two I vaguely associated with characters or events in Nightlights, and fed them into Pandora. Then I listened to the station created while outlining Nightlights, and grabbed other songs it suggested. Pandora is a lot better than relying on broadcast radio stations, which is how I used to do this. I’ll choose songs based on similar musical elements, or the lyrics, or even just a few lines in the lyrics that really feel perfect for a theme or concept. Then I listen to the soundtrack a lot until I know it like the back of my hand.
Sometimes songs show up in multiple soundtracks if I really like them or they touch on multiple concepts.
My favorite part of having soundtracks is that I feel like if I pick them early enough, they actually influence the story, because they’ve wormed their way so deeply inside my head.
Below, find my soundtrack, as currently ordered by my player! I’ve tried to include a few lines that capture why I picked the song, as well as a link to a performance of the song.
Now or Later
I’m not as good of a writer as I’d like to be.
I’m really, really not. There’s all these stories I’d like to tell. There’s techniques I’d like to incorporate. And I can’t do it. Sometimes I don’t even know where to start.
It feels a little like trying to sing well. I know how I want my voice to sound, and the notes I’d like to reach but I just don’t have the control to do it.
This is not, I’m convinced, a matter of ‘gift’ or ‘talent’. I just haven’t trained the skills. I haven’t practiced enough.
Sometimes the knowledge that I haven’t practiced enough haunts me– usually when a scene I’m writing is falling short of my goals. Then I want to give up, tuck the story away and do something else: read a book on technique, or start a new project that won’t be so difficult, or take a nap and hope I wake up feeling better.
But books on technique don’t make up for practice and repetition, and one thing I know I need to practice is finishing works, and I can take a nap later. I have to sacrifice some of my ideas on the altar of self-improvement. If I don’t write, I’m not going to get better. And if I don’t get better I won’t ever be able to tell those other stories I want to tell, the ones that dance in my head out of reach because I haven’t climbed high enough yet.
If I want to write all the stories I dream of writing, I have to write. Now or later. Better to suck it up now, yes?
As somebody wise told me about the handy small child’s first attempt at making a peanut butter sandwich: good jobs often follow terrible ones.
PS: I don’t think NIGHTLIGHTS is terrible. But it could be. It’s probably not the astonishing work of unexpected brilliance I’d like it to be, either. You’ll have to let me know in July.
Gotta watch my big mouth
[Huh. I wrote this post and I clicked 'Publish' but it did not publish. Odd. Sorry!]
I have several draft posts unwritten. I have one half-written but I really shouldn’t post it, at least until I can defend my position. I’m busily testing that position out right now and man, it’s distracting.
Er, that may have come out wrong.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about when I haven’t been writing:
- Psychic distance: A neat little concept– one I think about a lot while writing but never had a term for. Whenever I write, I tend toward the least amount of psychic distance– which can be wordy and slow down the story. So whenever I edit (which is often right after I’ve written a sentence) I end up evaluating whether the degree of psychic distance I’ve chosen is necessary.
- Book trailers! I’ve been watching and thinking about book trailers. I have no idea how useful they are as a marketing tool. But I’ve been interested in both trailers and credit sequences as a specialized art form for a long time. And I’ve been thinking about trailers for non-video-media for longer than there’s been a YouTube. I have a lot of thoughts about how to construct a video teaser for a book or other piece of textual entertainment. I’m working on putting some of those into practice. If I reach a point I’m pleased by, maybe I’ll share them. Or maybe I’ll just turn to brutally critiquing the trailers I find on the internet. Last night I watched at least a dozen and found only two that didn’t make me want to yawn. These were professional trailers, too!
- Having fun! It’s been a long time since I’ve done something creative without any intent to sell or otherwise use it to market myself. A long time since I’ve made art just for myself. It’s weird!
- The weather: It is terrible awful no-good weather. I’m in mourning for the previous climate. Hopefully I can adjust to the new one without going insane, but some days I wonder.
- Nightlights: Thinking about moving up the launch date of Nightlights a month. My alpha reader has started having Strong Reactions, which kind of makes me want to show it to other people. And since the mid-August date was basically drawn out of a hat, I could change it, right? But what if it messes up my flow?
- Reader request scenes: One thing I’m planning on doing with Nightlights is, once the main story is done, writing a few scenes as reader requests. Readers can pick the characters and the subject matter (within limits) and I’ll write that scene. Sort of like DVD extras, except constructed after the main production is done.
And that’s pretty much it. Well, I’m sure it’s not. But that’s all I have in my head right now.
Voices in the flame
People in publishing talk a lot about voice.
Here’s my secret confession: if I have a voice in my formal writing, I can’t see it. Sometimes I get a glimpse of it, and I don’t like it. It’s too… me. Pedantic, labored, overachieving.
But I DO have a different voice– and I think quite a strong one– in my casual writing. I write for Play By Email games, and there, where I don’t worry about vulgarity, or proper sentence structure, or narrative flow from one paragraph to the next, my voice is strong. Sometimes I’ll write small snippets in response to a challenge on a blog– usually in a comment thread, nowhere that will be seen. Then my voice comes out, too.
I quite like my writing voice, when it shows up. But I can’t seem to summon it on demand. When I try, it hides.
Back when I used to draw regularly, the same thing happened with my art. All the work I’d do carefully would have a flavor to it I just didn’t like. The strokes of the pencil, the careful lines and the elegant shading would make me frustrated and miserable. But when I’d pick up a pen and sketch something quickly, to show somebody a thought or to make a tool for myself– those quick little ink sketches I’d love. They were imperfect, tangled, messy– but I always felt like the true spirit of what I was trying to draw shone through.
That could have just been me, I suppose. But it meant a lot that I was happy with those little pictures.
I keep thinking: oh, I should just write a paragraph right now, in my casual voice. Right now! Maybe nobody else will see a difference, but I will and I’ll like it! And then I think: but what will I write? And then I freeze up. After all, a lot of people don’t like swearing. And it will come off sounding too contrived! And I use way too many exclamation points– even more than I do when I’m being all formal and focused. Yes, that’s the truth.
I think I have to be in a hurry to release my voice. And I’m far too nervous a writer to write blog posts and whole novels in a hurry. I have to do my best if I want to succeed!
All right, though. If anybody wants to give me a prompt, I’ll try to write at least 300 words in a comment, or a whole post, in five minutes, to see if I can unleash my voice.
Spring On Fire
After a few months of querying agents for Matchbox Girls, I decided to switch my focus to publishers. I was still interested in agents, but despite having a query that seemed reasonably functional, I was getting very few requests. I’d already realized that MG wasn’t as commercial as many other urban fantasies (and by ‘commercial’, I mean, focused on using the factors known to sell a lot- I don’t know if that’s what publishing professionals mean when they use that term) so I couldn’t blame an agent for not being interested in something that they probably wouldn’t be able to sell for very much. After all, they only get a percentage of what I would!
Still, I was pretty sure that there were people out there who would enjoy Matchbox Girls. Not everybody enjoys what’s considered commercial, after all. So I started looking at small presses as well as doing my weekly agent submissions.
A few weeks ago, the editor of Candlemark and Gleam asked to see the full manuscript of Matchbox Girls. And a week after that, she sent me an extremely nice email telling me how much she’d enjoyed Matchbox Girls, and how she’d like to send me a contract.
This made me jump up from my seat, pick up a handy child, and twirl him around in a circle. Then I sat back down sedately, asked her for the contract and started doing research.
I did a lot of research, on Candlemark and Gleam, on small presses in general, and on contracts. I thought about what I wanted for Matchbox Girls. Then, I signed the contract!
Matchbox Girls is scheduled to come out in February 2012! It’s with an editor now and I’ve already contributed my cover suggestions. I’m pretty excited, but also pretty busy: I’m still planning on launching my serial novel Nightlights in August, and I’d like to get a draft of the sequel to Matchbox Girls done by February. I’ll also have to find time for the MG revisions and proofing.
I’ve been accelerating my schedule for Nightlights. It still won’t be complete when I launch it– which is by design and part of the experiment– but it will probably be more than half done. I’ve also been playing around with this website, since my current plan is to launch Nightlights in this blog. Some lucky invisible reader might even have seen the first scene of Nightlights when I started testing out some options!
So, yeah. I’ve suddenly got a lot going on, and I’ve been working harder than ever. But don’t worry, invisible audience! I’m still going to be posting here at least weekly. And I’m still hoping to have a contest later this summer.