Historical Romance Writer
[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]
[Books and Writers Community]
Below are the 10 most recent journal entries recorded in the "writerjob" journal:[<< Previous 10 entries]
|
09:27 pm
[Link] |
Plot plot plot
Plotting drives me mad.
Plotting is like designing the piece of cabinetry. Mess up your design, and all your careful craftsmanship is for naught.
The problem I'm having selling MS1 may arise from just that cause. Lovely workmanship. Poor plotting.
In MS2, do I have a Mary Sue, a heroine too smart to live?
I want the heroine to look at disparate clues and figure out who the traitor is. I want her to be brilliant about it. I want her to have a unique talent. (Well, I also want her to be wrong, but that's another thing.)
How do I make her believable and human?
Mull, mull, mull ...
Give her faults. Show the process of problem solving so I'm not just saying 'she's brilliant', I'm showing it..
I'll use the ferret as a Dr. Watson. Yes. She talks to him ...
|
|
09:02 am
[Link] |
Old Slang
I've been mulling over a problem I have.
So much of our useful vocabulary related to crime comes from America and was coined (or written down) in the early twentieth century. We owe our modern crime vocabulary to Dashiell Hammett and the noir movies with all those hard-boiled private detectives.
'On the lam', 'snoop' (meaning an informer,) 'tail' (to follow,) 'frame', 'plant' (as in plant false evidence,) 'case'(to reconnoiter,) 'tart' and 'tramp' (slut,) 'cathouse'. All of them lovely technical terms, too late for my period.
The ones I miss the most, (I should not use them in 1810,) are 'frame', 'planted' and 'tail', because they are perfect and specific and have no early C19 equivalent. Especially 'frame'. I don't know the date in this usage, but I'm virtually certain it's early C20 vintage. Long after my time, anyway. But I need it in a plot that involves the forging of incriminating evidence.
I like 'caper'. I can use 'rig' or 'lay', which I know are period. But I like 'caper'. How far is it out of my era?
I wish the OED referenced slang.
I'm going to admit, shamefaced, that I've put 'framed', 'caper' and 'planted' in the ms. I've used them in dialog. I just don't know a contemporary cant substitute for 'framed'. The circumlocutions – 'rigged up evidence against', 'incriminated', 'placed a false trail' -- do not 'sound' like my Cockney character.
Am I going to leave this glaring error in the submitted draft? Nobody but me will know 'frame' and 'plant' are out of period. Even 'caper' might pass cursory inspection. Nobody will care.
Who knows ... maybe they are in my era and I just haven't come across the references. Slang is poorly accounted for.
I could add an endnote admitting my guilt.
I could say nothing and just do it.
Guilt, guilt, guilt.
It feels like I'm planning to shoplift or something.
|
|
01:54 pm
[Link] |
Cells
A couple weeks back, preparatory to going to the beach I finally pulled out the cell phone I bought back in January and turned it on and read the book on how to make it work.
That is to say, I read it again, for the fourth or fifth time. Much of it remains incomprehensible. I do not speak here of the Spanish version.
This time I just skipped all the stuff about putting in exciting ring tones and new backgrounds and retrieving messages from – well --- I never did figure out from where. And text messaging. Why the devil would someone want to text message?
I figured out how to (a) turn it on. (b) Call somebody. (c) Hang up. (d) Answer it if somebody called me.
I have the phone number written down someplace or other.
If anybody wants to do something more complicated than that they will have to call somebody else.
So far I've called my sister once and received three wrong numbers calling me.
Sometimes the phone in my purse lights up and beeps and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it. Change it? Give it a bottle?
Mostly it just sits there. I just know that if I need it it will turn out to be dead or expired or something.
Technology is wonderful.
|
|
10:08 pm
[Link] |
Back from the beach
I'm back from the beach. Exhausted. Didn't get anything done but breathe deep for the day and a half after I drove in. But I'm back. This bloody bronchitis thingum just hangs on and hangs on and makes me miserable. Even my sweat smells of medicine. Grisly. But the kids had a great time and I saw my sisters and the nieces. Utterly wonderful.
I was smart enough not to go into the water. I guess I looked pretty silly sitting under a beach umbrella all wrapped up in towels, watching everyone else sport in the waves.
The Kid is off to Camp. I understand the field where they will be camping is a vast sea of mud. The enterprise of packing included exchanges like
...
...
Me: Toothpaste, toothbrush, hairbrush ...?
TK: Yeah, Yeah.
Me: Did you pack a washrag?
TK: Don’t need one.
Me: Soap?
TK: Don't need it.
Me (desperately): Towel?
TK: Swim towel. Oh, and I'm putting in more books. Take the poncho out.
Me (weakly): OK.
To go on vacation, I turned off all the routine email messages I get from writers' groups and history groups. When I go to my mailbox, it's almost empty.
This is so restful I may just leave everything turned off for the next month or two.
|
|
05:39 pm
[Link] |
Chapter Fourteen Down
Good. Chapter Fourteen down.
Now I have to decide which of several possibilities will become Chapter Fifteen.
What does the pacing call for? We had the action of Jess on a roof followed by the tension of the H&H arguing. I think we can do a quiet interior if we need to.
What does the Romance story need? We've just had a good confrontation between H&H in Jess' POV. Maybe I can have Sebastian look at the relationship in his POV for a bit ...
What does the intrigue plot need? What's the next plodding step in the unrolling mystery? Assuming anyone is the least interested in this intrigue plot, what do they want to know next?
That intrigue plot's going to need a longlong think, that will.
Should I eliminate the entire subplot of Jess needing to get married to someone? Simplify. Simplify.
But it's useful in the party scene. Useful for galvanizing Sebastian into action.
Oh, I have lots of stuff to decide.
I may do just a short follow-up scene at Meeks Street -- with Adrian and Sebastian looking in at Josiah. That would be in Sebastian's POV, which is a switch out of Jess'. A lot of it is written already. I might could make this a second scene in Chapter Fourteen with a little hiatus.
JoB
|
|
07:06 pm
[Link] |
Back to Eleven
This is where I say -- 'I finished Chapter Eleven' –
and you scratch your head and say – "I thought you were on Chapter Fourteen that had turned into Chapter Thirteen when you threw out Chapter Twelve.
Why are you putzing around with Chapter Eleven?'
It's like this;
Chapter Eleven started out as a little scene-let with Claudia and her maid. I want to keep Claudia in the reader's mind and present her as menacing and so on. But it was a scene without much oomph. So yesterday I went back and expanded Chapter Eleven from 185 words (a really, really short chapter) to 783 words (a really short chapter.) Now I've given Claudia the emphasis she needs and we've sketched in the motivation for her villainy which led her to murder her brother and maybe her father too (I haven't decided.)
700 words doesn't sound like much, but it took me all the working day yesterday – about five hours – and an hour this morning – total six hours -- to get it down in electrons.
So that's done.
Yeah.
I spent the rest of morning at Java Java trying to get my chronology apparent. I spent three hours going through Chapters Ten, Eleven and Twelve, (which represent 24 hours in storytime,) tweaking and tweaking, till the chronology shines through.
Now I have to look at ALL the scenes that happened in those 24 hours for all my characters and decide which ones need to go into the story, to tell the story, and which ones stay out.
Maybe I'll put the scenes on Post-It notes and look at them and decide.
Maybe I'll sleep on it.
|
|
03:26 pm
[Link] |
off topic
Cute site. My dog loved the sounds.
http://www.honda.co.uk/civic/
JoB
|
|
04:13 pm
[Link] |
Absolute Write
Absolute Write is down ... pulled from the net by a hyena. A well-known scammer, one of P&E's top 20 scam agencies, made noises to the host. The host, panicked, pusillanimous or self-serving, pulled the plug.
I'm waiting to see where AW will re-emerge.
|
|
07:28 pm
[Link] |
Plugging away at Fourteen
... I have the rough draft of Chapter Fourteen done.
The first bit of it, the first thousand words, is in final draft. Now I have to tighten, tone, expand the rest of the chapter. But at least I know what is _happening_.
While the D.H. is in Yemen I have to mow the lawn. I have become very anti-grass.
JoB
|
|
12:10 am
[Link] |
Gearing up again
I've been in a long dry spell ... part of it because the D.H. is off in the far flungs again ... part heavy, lingering discouragement from that last rejection ... part pure laziness. But I got about five hundred words placed today. Let it be a sign of good things coming.
|
[<< Previous 10 entries] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small}
writerjob's journal