Today's To-do List

Pens?

Check.

Post-its?

Check.

Bane of my existence manuscript printed out?

Check and check.



Will be editing today. Then off to beta-readers/crit partners for read-thru and finally (FINALLY!!) re-submission.

I've been thinking of my next couple. Just the individual characters, not the story yet. That will come, but I think Hunter of the Heart has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that starting and running with the plot without sufficient depth given to the H/h is an approach to writing that is fraught with frustration for *me*. :-P

Will check in later.

Oh wait! I've been meaning to do this for awhile. I had the original ms on my laptop, but was working on my revisions on the netbook and could just never be arsed enough to take the necessary steps to post the following examples.

One of the many (many, many) things *I wanted* to tackle with this revision was word craft. The first rough (half finished) draft of this ms was written back in 2002, after which I put it aside and it languished on the hard drive. Fast forward 6-7 years and my writing has changed/improved.

Now i did clean up the writing when I first submitted it to my (then) editor last year, but when she passed on it with a list of reasons why--none of which were the writing, btw--and the invitation to resubmit if I decided to do the revisions, well, I took the opportunity to further reworked/polish the wordage as well.

To wit, let's compare the first paragraphs. The 2002 original:

Death, piercing and sharp ripped through the night. Frenzied howls that called to the blood.
Belinda!
He raced deeper into the dark embrace of the forest, his passage sending the other creatures of the natural world and of the night, scurrying for safety. The lover scrabbled down the steep gully wall, claws scratching through the debris of life that carpeted the ground. Paws sliding over the decaying leaves that covered, in a final lullaby, the bones of the forgotten and the weak.
Cal! Where are you? Again the agonized howl of his beloved rent the air.
Belinda, I am here. His mind reach out to hers, entwined her pain in his love and strength, shielding her from his desperation. He should have never left her alone.
With muscles coiled he bounded over the rotting cadaver of a fallen oak, and powered his way up the opposite slope.

Ugh. (I picked purple font for a reason... )

That was not the version I sent to my editor!! Neither is the one that follows, but what I sent her was closer to this current version:

The wolf paused on his way back to camp, ears pricked, snout raised. A solitary owl repeated its query, while small rodent rustled through the undergrowth in quick darts and stops.

At first he parsed out the usual forest scents, the various prey and their spore, the sweet damp musk of rotting vegetation and the bitter green tang of the new, but there was something else here… something faint and unfamiliar that almost blended with the rest—

A sudden string of howls destroyed his musing.

Nate sprang forward, racing deeper into the forest. He scrabbled down a steep ravine, claws gouging the earth, paws sliding over the bones of the weak and forgotten.

Again the agonized howls tore through the air, each one more frantic till the sudden break-ending of the last ratcheted the terror strumming though his veins. He reached out telepathically—

‘Beth, hold on! I’m coming.’

Still needs some work but miles better. There's 147 words in the first version excerpt and 148 words in the current excerpted version, but the current feels less dense/easier to read than the first version. Now multiply what I did with those few paragraphs by 140 pages, nevermind the editor suggested revisions, etc. Fun times.

I'm off to edit. Will check in later with my progress.

Aaaaahhhhhhhhhh

I got this video in an email earlier this week, but I was soo crazy busy at work, i just forwarded to a bunch of peeps and to myself at home so I could watch it when I had the time.

Now I know why a bunch of peeps replied to the email with 'aaahhhhh'. See for yourself:

Two of the most beloved words in a writer’s repertoire

Royalties cheque.

Heheee.

Seriously though:



Yeah, that's right. I finally finished the damn revisions to the werewolf story!

Only took me [exact time redacted due to shame] long.

It came in just shy of 50K words. I ended up scrapping the ending I'd been working on all week because at some point it struck me that there was a whiff of similarity between that scene and a scene close to the ending in Felicity Stripped Bare.

A little early in the game to be repeating myself already, doncha think? I really like the new scene I settled on, though.


ps: Now I'm sitting here thinking that there is a secondary character in the beginning of the scene who just seemed to vanish. I know there'll be some readers who will wonder where he is/what he's doing if I don't clearly state he made an exit. But where will I insert that without breaking the emotional tension/momentum between the H/h? It's almost 1am. I'll have to think about it tomorrow.


ETA: Eeep! reposting to fix the typo in the title. My excuse is I wrote the post at 1am.

ThisClose

Checking in as promised. In between the usual weekend errands/running around, I figured out where to cut and delete a bunch of scenes.

Well, I didn't actually delete the pages, I cut and saved them in another file.

Anywho, I tweeked/revised the scenes left so they'd fit the (planned) new ending and found out something surprising about a secondary character. Love when that happens.

Anydeux, I'm a couple of paragraphs away from the last scene(!!)

I'll be so glad to see the back of this wip, and if it doesn't sell, I'll load it to Kindle 'cause I'll be damned if after all this, it's left to rot on my hard drive.

Figured it'd be a twee bit optimistic to tap out The End this weekend, but feeling pretty confident this draft will be done next weekend and I'll finally be able to start something brand new from scratch. (yaaaay!)

Listening to that little voice.

You don't want to hear me whine about the job situation again, do you? We (finally) hired new 3 people, so what does the PTB do? Throw even more work at us!

Between training the newbies and the increased workload I've got no juice left at the end of the day. In fact my manager is angling to get another body on board but in order to justify (ahem) that, she needs to offer up some stats which means... yeah, you guess it, more work in the form of keeping record of (extra) hours put in daily and amount of work done.

::cue hysterical laughter::

So let's finally talk about the wip. I used to hold sacrosanct the morning commute for writing but that went by the wayside.

Partly because of exhaustion, but also because I was extremely frustrated. Just too many false starts and deleted scenes in this last bit (the new expanded/extended ending).

I could never get the pacing or the feel for the characters right. And every time I threw my hands up(figuratively) and hit Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V on the last batch of pages I managed to squeeze out, a little voice in the back of my head would say '..you're having trouble because the story is finished.'



And I'd say, 'No it's not! I know what I want to do with this last act! It has meaning and reason!'

And I'd try again, even though I was getting a bit uncomfortable with the increasing word count because, let's face it, this story is a novella. That's the way it was planned and originally written. Now the word count was getting up in the category length and to be honest, even with the revisions I'm not convinced that the depth justifies the growing length.

So, last night on the way home, while I was scheming yet another way to find the sweet spot into this last act, when the little voice piped up again - '...that's because the story is done. You've done the big dramatic moments, you've had the emotional show down. All the tension is over. The story is done.'

This time I listened.

The ending of this story is not necessarily 'and they are so in love and live happily ever after'. but more about it being the point where the H/h acknowledge that they have something special, they care deeply for each other, they want to take the relationship to the next step with the long-term view being an HEA.

And more importantly, the reader believing that the HEA will come.

This is no HFN (Happy for Now) but more of an HFNAWOF (Happy for Now and working on Forever - the acronym police can shoot me now).

To that end, I feel optimistic about this story for the first time in a couple of months. I've got some cutting to do, some tweaking to do, and some writing to do on scenes that feel more organic to the story. It might be a little too optimistic to think I’ll finish this week-end, but who knows….

I'll check in with my progress.

Jane would not be amused

But I am.

From Hark, A Vagrant

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

I loved the book—and that’s saying a lot from the girl who avoids books over 400 pages long. Stupid I know, but no matter how good the book is, just around 400 pages is when I start getting antsy and want the book to end. I think with few exceptions most stories wading into the 500 pages and up level tend to have a pacing problem, could use a strong(er) editorial intervention re length and feel (to me) that they could have ended 50 pages ago.

TGWTDT was no different. It needed more editorial input, but the author’s strength--same as Dan Browne--is in the storytelling. Aside from a slow start, the story kept my attention right up to the last page. (This isn’t going to be a review per se, you can find a ton of those over at Amazon).

And I felt sad when I was done. I wanted more. To that end, I went to the bookstore two days later and picked up The Girl Who Played With Fire. I haven’t started it yet because I have some library books to tackle.


The bookstore clerk also recommended a couple other popular Swedish crime writers: Camilla Läckberg and Henning Mankell. I picked Läckberg’s The Ice Princess and Mankell’s The Pyramid ( a collection of stories that fill in the backstory of the main protagonists of his Kurt Wallander series. If it works for me, I'll start the series).

The store manager also encouraged me to see the Swedish original movie in the theatres now before Hollywood released their version. So, yesterday we went to see TGWTDT movie. My friend thought it was awesome, (as did several audience members by the snippets of commentary overheard as we left the theatre). I thought it was just okay.

To be honest, if I hadn’t read the book I might have been a little bored, and even then the movie totally gutted the book, giving subplots short-shift, losing some characters, fleshing out others. Given the rambling nature of the book I partly can’t blame the screenwriter, but a lot of characterization/nuances were lost in translation. On the other hand, it did give those who had read the book a few surprises because the movie didn’t goose step the exact plot revelation of the book. And, of course, the romance reader/writer/lover in me liked that the romance between Mikael and Lisabeth was portray in a more promising light in the movie than it was by the end of the book.

At the moment, I’m reading Harem by Dora Levy Mossanen. So far so good. It has that touch of magical realism that I really enjoyed in books like Like Water For Chocolate. Depending on how Harems turns out, I might buy a copy for my keeper shelf.


From Publisher's Weekly:

Lush and erotic, this first novel overflows with the magic and sensuality of Arabian Nights tales, 19th-century orientalist paintings and languorous, silken-pantalooned harem beauties. Set in 14th-century Persia, the tale moves easily between the crowded, garbage-strewn alleys of the Jewish quarter and the magnificent palace of the shah. The shah's palace harem is concealed behind a tracery of delicately carved stone panels, where his 365 wives and their many attendant eunuchs lounge, and the queen mother, Bibi Sultana, rules.

In the Jewish quarter, the characters are Rebekah, the indomitable heroine; the ancient Zoroastrian, a seeress; the one-eyed rabbi; the merchant Rouh'Allah, who realizes nearly too late he loves Rebekah; and Moses, fated to be gelded and become a lover to the shah. Rebekah is only 10 when she's married to Jacob the Fatherless, a brutal blacksmith, and branded by him with a hot iron bar between her breasts, a mark that will assume nearly supernatural importance. After Jacob commits suicide, Rebekah becomes a prostitute to support her child, Gold Dust.

Determined to place her daughter within the harem, she sells her charms to Narcissus, the chief eunuch, even though he carries "his manhood pickled in a jar." Gold Dust becomes the shah's favorite, but provides the sonless ruler with another daughter, Raven, who will eventually be as implacable as her grandmother. The multifaceted story involves an invasion by the Mongol hordes under Teymour the Lame (Tamerlane) and daring escapes by Rebekah and Gold Dust. Shamelessly exotic, it's a delightful read and a grandly romantic escapade.

That's prettymuch it in terms of catch up for me. Work is still a grind, I've still got insomnia, and I'll admit to avoiding my wip lately. :-/