Process Notes

The Jams? I have kicked them. Yes, finally.

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , ,

There has been actual progress on the Claw draft over the last twenty-four hours, alongside more mundane acts of not-sucking such as finishing short stories (two!) and doing the washing up. Hell, I even walked over to the local Indian take-away to pick up dinner in the interests of getting some exercise.

Claw Draft
Projected Total: 25000
Total Words to Date: 2893
Words Done in Prior 24-hour Period: 1,432 (not to shabby, considering this mostly came together around 8 PM last night and I’ve done other stuff today)
Deadline: April 30th
Reasons to Squee*: Chapter one is done, after a good nine or ten weeks of being unable to figure out who to move from the set-up I wanted to the story I wanted. Plus the fix makes for a logical reason to keep the possessed Russian Blue feline in the narrative for all ten chapters.
Reasons to Wail: Still got nine chapters to go, and I seem to have put in a car chase. Why in hell is there a car chase? I’m so not a car chase kind of guy…
Reasons to go hmmm: Miriam Aster is apparently okay with the existence of fairies, and psychics, and possessed cats, but still a bit iffy on the concept of gods.

That last point’s actually been something of a sticking point for me in coming at this draft, since I’m largely feeling my way through the writing-of-a-sequel idea and wondering how far I can push the world that’s set up in book one.  Horn is all about fey with very little suggestion of what the world’s like outside that, and all the big events in the protagonist’s life revolve around the fey because I never really expect the first book to get published, let alone think about what happens after that. Claw is proving to be a little more human in tone, and I seem to be letting my love of B-grade television shows and pulp-style Egyptian mythology filter in along with the psychic cat.

(*Incidently, how freaking cool is it that the spellcheck on wordpress actually has Squee pre-loaded into it?)

The stories, they are not working today

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , ,

I’m spending a lot of time with old stories this week, and I’ve noticed that towards the end of last year I’d broken out this alarming tendency towards using framing stories. I’m not sure why I did that – as a general rule I’m not a fan – but I think I’d talked myself into believing that they were merely examples of discontinuous or contrasting narrative rather than a frame. I’ve cut the opening and final scenes of the last two stories I’ve opened and felt pretty good about it both times. That said, the bulking up of the story that remains is proving a frustrating thing. This isn’t unexpected – I’m so rusty at the writing thing that I practically creak when I sit down at the keyboard – but it is frustrating and it’s proving difficult to force myself to stay in the chair and keep working. Discipline is an easy thing when you’re in practice, but there’s a big part of my subconscious that doesn’t like being forced to do things it’s not good at and I constantly find myself giving into distraction (coffee, futzing about with CD’s, etc).

Claw Draft
Projected Total: 25000
Total Words to Date: 1744
Words Needed Today: 500 (+ continued revising)
Deadline:April 30th
Reasons to Like the MS: Hardboiled interrogatory dialogue between Miriam Aster and a possessed Russian Blue cat.
Reasons to Dislike the MS: Transition issues in the middle of the first scene due to not having the plot sufficiently in place.

Because this is all my brain is up for today…

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , ,

The good thing about trying to hit a deadline and being behind: you start to figure out ways to fix stories and ideas that are broken, potentially unsaleable and not on deadline.

Yesterday I took an hour away from the books to write up a plan of what I could do to transform all my second-person-present-tense-vaguely-cyberpunk vignettes into a solid-ish mosiac novella. I just spent the last half-hour writing notes about the way to expand and fix the problems on the zombie novella I wrote as part of the AHWA mentorship in 2007. It’s all distraction to draw me away from the work that really needs doing, but at least the notes will be waiting for me once I get the thesis draft down.