Bleed (aka the novella formerly known as Cold Cases)

16 Days

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , ,

On Friday night, during the Write Club recently documented over on Angela Slatter’s website, I finished the first draft of Cold Cases. Afterwards, I looked at the messy first draft state that’s so familiar after years of first draft, and immediately started fretting. There were sixteen days until the deadline.

My usual rewriting process, particularly for something this long, winds out over the course of a year or more. I do a little rewriting, let it sit for a while, then do a little more. I tinker with scenes, do little bits here and there. I show it to a critique group, get some feedback, then show the revision to a different writer-buddy or two in order to see if it works yet.  I sort through what other people think works, what I think works, and I fine-tune. I can’t replicate that process in sixteen days, especially with a work that’s sitting at 24,000 words.

So I spent most of Saturday freaking out, reading through the manuscript and making notes, hoping I could do something to salvage the story in time. I even let myself have a brief moment of “it can’t be done, I should ask for more time.” That may even have worked, although given how tight the timeline was when I discussed the schedule with the publisher I’m pretty sure it would only have earned another two or three days at most. Since Alisa reads this blog, I shall point out that  everything is fine – it was only a momentary laspe into writerly weakness.

After that moment, I kicked my own arse and went back to work. I spent most of Sunday redrafting the story with a focused and detailed plan rather than my traditional tinkering . It’s different an alien process for me, yes, but it works and it’ll get the story done in the timeframe. At this point, meeting the deadline is more important than preserving a familiar writing process that isn’t really viable in the long term.

Because one of the things that occured me to me on Saturday night is this: deadlines are a fact of life. All going well, I’d like there to be more of them in my future. Getting out of my comfort zone and figuring out how to rewrite faster makes much more sense than blowing the deadline, especially given the fact that I’ve been telling myself I wanted to be a professional author since I was sixteen. Being a towering icon of literary genius would be nice, sure, but I’m generally more interested in getting writing to work like a career and be someone who is easy to work with than anything else (besides, given the state of my PhD, towering icon of literary genius status is certainly *not* in my future).

So Things may still go wrong, but I’m okay with turning in a book the publisher doesn’t want to publish as long as it’s still the best damn book I could make it when the submission goes in. There’s thirteen days to go before the due date and a third of the MS is rewritten already. There’s two thirds of a manuscript that needs large-scale redrafting and 24,000 words of line-editing in my future. That’s doable in thirteen days. Hell, it’s doable in less than that if I’m willing to work.

So in the words of my good friend, Jason Fischer, it’s time to unleash the Fists of Steel!

Project Update: Cold Cases

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , , ,

There’s usually a point in a project where I stumble over it’s identity. Not a theme or a plot or a character conflict, but a moment where I can suddenly look at the piece and realise why I’m writing. Sometimes it’s easy – Horn got defined as as the book about unicorns for people who hate books about unicorns right from the very beginning, before I even came up with the characters. Most of the time it isn’t, and it takes a good deal of noodling around before I have moment of realisation and everything falls into place. The noodling is actually kind of painful and aimless, because even if I’ve got a plot in mind and the story is travelling okay, it always feels a bit listless without getting to know the reason for the book.

Cold Cases spent a really long time without that sense of identity. That thing that makes it a specific book I want to write, rather than just a thing I’m writing. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I’ve completed short stories without ever having that moment, and people seemed to like them regardless – but it slows things down a lot.

Then, at some point during the Friday write-club, I wrote a scene and went “oh, that’s what this book is about.” And in the days that followed I went from having 10% of a finished draft to about 60%. Because it’s so much easier to write a book once you know it’s identity, if only because it tells you how to make narrative choices that work.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the weekend, because originally I thought it was going to be easy to write a follow-up to horn. Claw was going to be the talking cat book for people who hate talking cats, only identity is rarely that easy and it quickly became apparent that I wasn’t really excited about rehashing the identity of Horn with a different trope. I wanted to work in the world again, and use the characters, and I still wanted to have a talking cat in there somewhere, but it needed to have its own thing. The thing that made me want to write it, even if it didn’t get published, because it had it’s own reason*.

I’m still not sure I can articulate it properly, since the closest summary I’ve got is the book where I torture Miriam Aster with the possibility of happiness and that’s really just a summary of every conflict, everywhere, but it’s somewhere in that ballpark.

And at this point the draft is 60% done and I’m happy enough with what’s happening that I can finally stop freaking out about the fact that it’s got a deadline 🙂

 

*This is not always about the story as a whole. On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War Machines of the Merfolk exists in my head as “the story where I make fun of the little mermaid statue.” For some reason I tend to hinge an books identity on one or two scenes, then everything else tends to grow around it and justify the scenes existence.