Historical Romance Writer
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "writerjob" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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10:44 pm
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Eight down
A long, hard productive day working on Chapter Eight revision.
Is it good? Parts of it are excellent, I think.
On the next runthrough, I need to add some internals to show Sebastian getting angrier and angrier and finally exploding.
The dialog does its part, but I need the physical signs and the internals as well.
I'll come back. I'm too close to look at it objectively.
on the JESSAMYN final draft
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10:00 am
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Hail
Hail this morning.
(No, this is not a greeting to the dawn but a meteorological observation.)
It had barely started when the cat yowled at the window and came racing in.
Cat: What IS this stuff? What are you DOING to me?
Me: Sorry.
Cat: Snow was bad enough. This is just stupid. Stop it.
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06:01 pm
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Still in Chapter Eight of Jess
Finished the first chapter of Maggie in rough draft. Inching forward on Chapter Eight final draft.
A day with much forward progress.
| 1,600 / 115,000
(1.4%)
Maggie rough draft
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| 31,600 / 115,000
(27.5%)
Jess final draft
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08:43 pm
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Jess Synopsis
Jo worked on the synopsis of JESSAMYN today. Jo has a nice final draft of the synopsis. Good Jo.
I used as my template the synopsis I submitted to Miss Snark way back when the story was still a series of 'this scene introduces so-and-so who does such-and-such'.
I had to modify matters in the last half of the synopsis because it turned out so-and-so not only didn't do such-and-such – sometimes so-and-so didn't even make it to the next draft.
I have set the synopsis aside to cool for a day. I'll come back for a new read which will tell me if it is (a) comprehensible, (b) logical and (c) if the weak attempts at humor should be removed.
(They probably should.)
Oh goody. I just remembered I will be seeing friends on Wednesday. I can ask them for an opinion.
Lucky friends.
I will warn them.
I have four or five days before I'm supposed to send this synopsis and Chapters One to Three to Superagent.
Are we cutting this close?
Yes.
In other news ... have hacked my way through the first third of Chapter Eight, leaving the topiary of a final draft behind me. Have established Sebastian's attitude towards Jess nicely.
The chapter, unfortunately, is talking heads to some extent. I better revv up the Adrian-Sebastian conflict.
(Is that too many –ians? Am I going to have to rename Sebastian?)
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03:28 am
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In Chapter Eight
For the novel-in-90, I have to leave JESS and drop into MAGGIE and add new words there to make the day's number. The redrafting and revision of JESS is all pickypicky nit-by-nit stuff that just doesn't add words fast enough.
It's interesting working the two mss at once.
I don't think putting the revision to bed and zipping over to a new work impedes the revision any. But involvement with the mid-draft ms does interfere with the development of the new male voices in that early draft.
The need to get 750 words done every day really gives a depth and commitment to the Jess ms. I just feel thick with it. I never really crawl out ...
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08:18 pm
[Link] | I have opened up MAGGIE's rough draft.
This is a byproduct of novel-in-90, actually.
I'm finding it difficult to generate a word count for the challenge even after hours of solid, honorable work. Revision work just doesn't rac up the word count.
So I'm putting some draft down for Maggie. Fast words.
I haven't messed with the JESS synopsis yet.
So unprofessional of me.
I feel so guilty.
I must get to that tomorrow.
This business of counting words during revision that I'm doing for novel-in-90 ... it's so hard to know what to count as forward progress. One tenth of the progress of revision is creating new words. All the rest is chopping out old stuff and fiddling, fiddling, fiddling with one single word for ten minutes.
Quite apart from novel-in-90 ... I will eventually need a way to measure forward progress during revision. Eventually, I'll need to be able to estimate how long revisions will take.
I have only one gauge so far – I did 16 long intense days of polishing moved ANNEKA (115K) from submission ms to better submission ms. I have that estimate – 16 days – for how long it takes to do a polish on a good submission draft.
Because of novel-in-90 I can eventually go back and see how many days it took to move a chunk of plotting draft to final working draft. Another useful benchmark.
| 529 / 115,000
(0.4%)
Maggie Rough Draft
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| 28,400 / 115,000
(24.7%))
Jess Final Working Draft
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10:41 pm
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Finishing up Chapter Seven
I'm a bit behind in the novel-in-90
after two zip/zero/zilch days.
I'l catch back up, little by little.
I did good writing today, honing the end of Chapter Seven to a hot, sexy edge.
Unfortunately, having done that, I may have to turn around tomorrow and discard a good bit of the scene. There's some plot logic that needs recasting.
Sebastian ... What does he think? What does he feel?
I gotta do this right.
I'll mull this over when I come back fresh tomorrow.
AND ... I have to work on that synopsis for Jess, don't I?
Synopsis and three should be in submission form by next week.
The Three are ok.
But the synopsis needs some work.
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12:44 pm
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Polishing Seven
Where I am right now ...
I have 24, 600 words put into final working draft form. This 25K just needs a final polish -- spelling, looking up factoids, and so on. It's essentially done.
I have a further 94,400 words in plotting draft form.
Broad sections of this is good to go. Some needs work. Some needs to be rewritten.
But the form and the shape are locked down.
There shouldn't be any major plotting changes from this point on.
I'm holding just short of 120,000 words in the ms at the moment. It'll probably end up at 115,000 words.
24,600 words in final draft form out of a ms that's going to come in at about 115,000 words.
119,000 total words written on the 115,000 ms.
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10:00 am
[Link] | Cold.
Not cold for Green Bay, maybe, but frigid for a place where folks talk with So'thrn accents.
I get up every morning in the winter and make sure there's liquid water in the dog's dish outside.
I keep water out there for the generality of animals, wild and tame. It's not so much for the dog; she doesn't sit outside on the porch because that would interfere with her canine goal of keeping within paws' reach of me all day long and tripping me every time I get up.
Anyhow, when it's freezing, my first act of the day is to beat the solid ice out of the dish ... whomp ... and pour in hot water from an IKEA plastic pitcher.
Did it this morning.
Steamy water.
Good.
Looked out at 9 o'clock and the dish had frozen over solid. Bunch of disconsolate chickadees peering down at it.
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12:46 am
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Five Moves Out of the Rough
I was going to leave the meeting with Eunice
and forge onward to the confrontation with Sebastian
(Yes. We're still at the breakfast table.)
I was going to leave fixing any problems in the Eunice meeting
to the next draft.
But I woke up and read over Chapter Five,
and then spent the day messing with the Jess-Eunice meeting.
It's good now.
Ok.
Got it.
We're in Chapter Six and Sebastian has walked in.
This next little bit should just speed along.
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12:08 am
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Replotting grumbles
Next ms I am going to spend weeks on the plotting draft.
I'm going to get it right.
Rationalizing my original haphazard plotting leaves me tangled in irritating, insoluble problems, one after the other.
Fr'instance.
My meeting-Eunice scene is now hopelessly involuted.
The mood of warmth and reassurance I wanted to create is jeopardized.
I have to shove the subtheme of my villain under the reader's nose.
I'm about done messing with it for now.
I have the good rough draft of that meeting (Chapter Five) down.
I'll come back in a month and see if it works.
I don't think what I have is complex and interesting.
I think it's choppy and inconsistent.
We shall see.
Rats.
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11:18 pm
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Back at that breakfast table, this time with Quentin
Working speedily away at the plotting draft.
Doyle, poor peripatetic Doyle, has been firmly put into Chapter One. No more messing around. All the surrounding continuity is in place. This means I'm now in final draft up to about 21K words.
This brings us (again) to the dreaded breakfast table conversation which is now Chapter Five.
Four issues in Chapter Five.
– Jess' meeting with Eunice. Does Jess emote, or not? Once I decide I can either skip it or make a fast little two paragraph fix.
– Jess thinks us some backstory on Quentin's guilt. Some of this is in the early part of the chapter before she meets him, some while she's meeting him.
I may be able to leave this in so-so, move-on-and-come-back form, which would be a time saver. It's nasty, tiresome, technical backstory.
– Quentin. I set him into motion in this chapter. Three problems with him.
(a) He needs a voice that doesn't sound like Adrian. That is to say, he does poorly what Adrian does well. A hard voice to write. A hard voice to differentiate.
(b) I need to be entirely quite clear what his motivation is in this scene.
(c) I just don't know him very well. Quentin needs some thinking. I may sketch in the breakfast table conversation and just move onward.
The villain has really been giving me problems. So much easier if he just lived outside the story.
– The final section of the chapter is Jess' confrontation with Bastian. Does Sebastian intend to take her to bed? Or what?
Decide, Jo. It's rather important.
I end the day with 441 words.
This is, again, far short of the 750 I need in the Novel-in-90.
I should do better tomorrow, (despite having much of the day consumed with real life activities,) because I will be generating new scene rather than shifting already composed segments and tightening up late draft work ... neither of which generates words.
What else ...?
Three or four days from now I must post the February Exercise in the Forum. Not sure what it will be.
I need a synopsis and three for JESSAMYN in less than two weeks.
I need a set of possible titles for ANNEKA by, I think, Thursday.
There will be much carting of The Kid back and forth. The D.H. is out of country again, but only for a week or so.
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01:42 am
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Chapter Six -- On the Ropes and Punchy
The dread breakfast table conversation with the villain scene
may be pinned down at last.
Our villain is not a woman, but a man.
Not Sebastian's half-sister, but his cousin.
Not Claudia but Quentin.
This is good.
I don't say the inability to create my villain has stopped the story dead in the water,
but it hasn't helped.
In other news ... Doyle is back in Chapter One.
The poor man has been in and out of that chapter so often he must be dizzy.
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09:40 pm
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Production Writing
I've been doing Elizabeth Bear's novel-in-90 challenge.
What this is ... it's getting down 750 words a day, every day.
For three weeks now, I've been doing it.
Here's why I'm doing it.
For five years or so, I've worked at writing fiction with fair seriousness.
I've written and written and fiddled with mss, which is how one learns to write. I've also thought and researched and pondered and critted other folk's work, which is also how one learns to write.
In this preliminary process, when there's no contract, you're kinda doing 'boutique' writing.
You can make it perfect, no matter how long it takes.
The next step, with a contract, is what I think of as 'production' writing.
Writing to deadline.
Producing mss fast enough that the readers remember you and look for you.
This is what a career writer does.
So. Lets see how I do in the 750-words-a-day challenge. Lets keep it up.
This is the next step ...
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12:24 am
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Snow
Snow.
At last.
I don't want to hear a out how the snow in your front yard is six feet deep and you've been without power since December and you are drawing lots which of the kids you're going to eat fiirst.
That's your snow.
This is my snow.
The cat has never seen snow before. She patted at it, amazed and appalled. Then tried to attack it. Then ran in circles, trying to escape it. Then she sat between the back porch flower pots, glaring at it.
Finally she came in, looking disheveled and cross.
Cat: This is your fault, isn't it?
Me: Yes.
Cat: I thought so. (stomp stomp stomp)
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08:22 pm
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Contract
Sold both Anneka and Jessamyn in a two-book deal to Berkley.
Yeah!
This is so cool.
Superagent has been unceasingly supportive.
"It's just a matter of finding an editor who will love it as much as I do."
Well ... yes.
In case there is someone in the outer reaches of Alaska who hasn't heard me mewling about this ...
Once upon a time, I got myself an agent and she began the submission process for ANNEKA.
Every once in a while she'd send me another encouraging rejection of the
'great voice, but ...',
'exciting, character-driven story, but ...',
school of manuscript rejection.
And I'd file the rejection and try not to think about it and mostly fail.
We did this five or six times.
So I'd keep writing on the next ms -- JESSAMYN -- and try not to think about the business of selling.
You think about rejections too much and you go mad.
This is widely known.
I was thinking maybe ANNEKA's inherent plotting choices,
(it's set in France, for instance,)
made it unpublishable, and that I'd need to finish and sell JESSAMYN and maybe another historical Romance ms before I could bring ANNEKA back into play.
Then I polished ANNEKA again and Superagent sent it out on December 16, to Berkley.
Christmas intervenes.*
January 11, I'm typing away in the hallowed halls of Panera, where I can work, as opposed to being at home where I keep doing things like walking the dog or washing the floor in the kitchen.
I get a message ... the agent called and left a message on the answering machine. She asked if you'd call her back.
So I headed home to call her back.
Hoping.
And I got better than I'd hoped for, by golly.
Not just ANNEKA sold.
The 'next book' sold. Not even on proposal. Just .... sold.
Gee.
We discussed stuff like the dates I would have to turn in revisions of ANNEKA, when the synopsis and three chapters for JESSAMYN would be due, when the completed ms of JESSAMYN could be ready.
(Oh my.)
The agent wanted dates I would be happy with that more or less matched what the publisher was likely to need.
I think agents must lead difficult lives.
We did a quick tour of advances and royalties. Advances are more and more coming to be paid in three parts. Less advance money comes up front on acceptance.
le sigh
Then she turned her charger and headed back into the fray, off to finish the negotiation, my favor streaming in the wind behind her.
Yesterday, I got a call from Superagent saying the deal is done. It'll be a while before the contract arrives, but basically, it's done.
The revision process begins.
(Exaltation and fear.)
So,
-- I have to do revisions on ANNEKA.
-- Write a synopsis for JESSAMYN.
-- Finish the bloody JESSAMYN ms.
-- And I need titles for ANNEKA and JESSAMYN.
If I could think up titles for manuscripts I wouldn't calling them after the female protagonist.
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09:43 am
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New Chapter Seven
Panera today.
I'm not sure whether the self-imposed, novel-in-90, 750-words-a-day, format is energizing or distracting. On the one hand, it's good practice for the real-world deadlines I must now meet. OTOH, it may pull my mind toward the generation of new words at the cost of a logical sequence of revision.
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10:50 pm
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The Novel in 90
I'm doing the 90 day write-a-thon. Novel in 90. 750 words a day.
I'll be keeping track of words. It's going to be the devil to assess word count when I'm doing revisions.
I did about 200 words today, spread out across the first five chapters. I've skipped right past that infamous breakfast table conversation. I will, like MacArthur, someday return.
Tomorrow I'll begin to create Chapter Six, presently empty. That chapter's going to hold an interior and domestic scene. My first step will be to assess just what I hope to get out of that scene. I'm too tired to do that tonight.
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11:33 pm
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back to work
I haven't done any work since before Christmas. In fact, I haven't sat down and done serious work since my laptop died (gick, yurbblle, plonk) somewhere around the 22 Dec.
I had to warm up a little bit today to get started.
Now have a new computer -- a pretty little Averatec that weighs four pounds even. Microsoft Word is loaded on, AND all my Word documents, AND my favorites list, and my normal.dot transferred over which contains most of the mods I make to Word.
With Word ... it's about five hours work to track down and kill all the Word 'features', starting with the ulcer generating animated paperclip and ending with the idiotic 'smart quotes' and 'smart cut and paste'.
Transferring my normal.dot preserved nine-tenths of my lengthy, careful mods. My custom tool bar up top of the screen contains the icons I've chosen for the functions I actually use. My custom keyboard preferences do only what I need doing. No more weirdo Word garbage infesting the keyboard. Yeah!
That 'custom keyboard' is largely a matter of deleting the 800 blankity-blank inherent keystrokes that come set as standard with Word. I erase them all ... and then I don't accidentally hit control H or Alt M and start doing a bloody hanging indent or some other incomprehensible weirdness that takes an hour to figure out what it is and another half hour to turn it off. Then I add the two dozen key shortcuts I actually need.
There was still a little work to do on the new machine. This morning I cleaned up everything that didn't transfer with normal.dot. I went into 'Tools' and unchecked roughly ALL the boxes, everywhere. My laptop and I both sighed in relief.
I am still troubled by the weirdness that my single and double quotes do not spring into existence unless they are followed by a space. If you don't do a space immediately following the quote, it follows you down the sentence till you do a space and THEN it appears.
So bizarre.
So anyhow -- Weird little glitch that I do not remember every encountering before. Help has naught to say aneunt this. It does not appear as an item in any of the 'Tools' choices. I cannot imagine why any default would be set to do this or where this preference exists in the vast irresponsible and garbage-y complexity that is Word.
I'll see if I can find a Word complaint forum that deals with this.
My extensive custom dictionary and my extensively customed autocorrect didn't make the transfer. I see if those old files can be found on my old computer. If not, they'll generate again. No big.
I'm not quite used to the placement of the keys on the Averatec yet. That too will come.
I generally pop the physical keys off CAPS LOCK and INSERT. I don't use these features, ever. And they are cuddled up close to, respectively, the SHIFT and DELETE keys, which I do use all the time. Haven't done my key poppin' yet, but I will. Will do.
In re writing ...played around, adding the internals to the suspense plot. Jess solves the problem ... step one ... step two ... and so on.
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07:06 pm
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Post Holiday
OK. Everybody is gone.
I've been cooking for eight or ten (or more) people for the last .... how long has it been? It seems endless. Since before Christmas, anyway.
Two vegetarians ... no. Wait. Sometimes there was another vegetarian who came by. And a sorta partial vegetarian. And a ballet dancer.
This was a hard crowd to please.
Did you know there are all these things you can't eat if you're preggers these days?
Not just alcohol and caffeine. Soft cheese. Raw fish. Aspartame.
It is entirely possible I will not cook anything for anybody till 2008.
So. Today. Cleaned out the refrigerator which was full of Thai food for some reason. Yum yum. Ate yellow curry leftovers for lunch. Gave two overlooked sushi to the cat who proved enthusiastic about the concept. Gave the last of the Ziti-and-mozzarella to the dog, equally enthused.
Refrigerator is now empty except for (1) a huge jug of cranberry juice, (2) the usual condiment suspects. (3)some lonely-looking yoghurt. The fruit-mixed-through-yoghurt group out-ate the fruit-on-the-bottom contingent, so that is what we have left, (4) a half-dozen corn muffins, and (5) a half bottle of very strange champagne from someplace like ... Oregon.
The tree has been stripped and pushed out into the cold of the back porch to await a hopeful, and probably futile, replanting. The creche has been packed away in bubble wrap and nestled into its plastic tool chest home. Christmas decorations and lights are stowed up in big plastic boxes in the attic. Ad inserted in Freecycle for some kind soul to come take away Christmas paper and etc. not worth storing till next year but too good to throw away. Air mattresses deflated and brushed relatively free of cat hair, bagged and stored in attic. Futon transformed to its couch avatar. Bedding ... truly unending amounts of sheets and comforters and duvets and towels ... washed and folded and put away ... (only one set yet to go when this load finishes.) Trash is sorted into its appropriate bin and wheeled down to the road.
Boxes and boxes have been addressed and packed into the car -- that's stuff to be mailed to folks who could not carry everything home on the airplane -- I'll do that tomorrow when the post office is open.
I also have to fast-mail a recharger that was left behind. I am inclined to UPS that one, recent experiences having given me a jaundiced view of the US Postal Service.
If I had sufficient energy left I would vacuum the carpets everywhere and sweep what wasn't vacuumed and mop everything else and wipe down all the kitchen cabinets which have become mysteriously covered with jelly fingerprints.
But I think I'm going to just collapse on the sofa.
Tomorrow ... back to work. I've become involved in the suspense plot a bit more. Looking forward to approaching it.
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