Boo

Well...

It's not going well. Every time I realize how energetically I wrote the book (7 months start to final rough draft) and how much time has gone by without much change (4 months) I feel very sick and depressed about the whole thing.

I know I can't make it come. I know (now) that setting a bar like I did for this month was not conducive to my creative process. I know The Wide and Burning World is 90% there, and that most of the changes are just icing on the cake.

But I was quite proud of my progress until now and with my ego deflated, I'm reduced to a puddle. Lots of other stuff in the works, of course: New writing for TRO, especially, and I've been working harder at my job than ever before. The "it will happen when it happens" idea leaves me a bit hollow, knowing that once I am finally satisfied, the real work of finding a publisher begins. I toil on.

...but maybe not today.

The Curious Man/ Arlo's first three

Not much to add or change here, just packing in a little more description. First person creates some pitfalls in describing other characters. Normally people don't stare at and mentally describe the individuals they encounter. if this sort of description isn't handled with care, it can come off as a meet-cute, which gets awkward when it's guy on guy, or you're wrestling with not making "love at first sight" happen because it can seem like weak writing if not done purposefully (or, in this case, both). That being said, I love describing my characters, so perfecting this skill was a must.
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In Arlo's first three chapters, by contrast, my conceited little hog farmer can go on at leisure about how he looks, which given the above-mentioned obstacles not only lets me avoid the usual problems, but comes as a characterful rarity (You wouldn't see Larkin standing around looking in the mirror). I keep referring to these chapters as a lump because I have lumped them. In total, they came to ~3600 words, and I think the simple change of grouping them together cuts down on the it's-another-Arlo-chapter phenomenon. They were written well after the rest of the book was (basically) set, since I decided to include Arlo in the first book only after I came up fairly short on my word count. I started writing them in little chunks to keep it modular enough to be placed in the already-arranged book, but they ended up all going in a row. No matter, the only real loss here are the original chapter titles, Cream, Trough and Axe. I decided to call them all Farm, the counterpoint to Home, his final chapter. Which no one will notice, but I don't care.

The Librarian

It's Larkin's first chapter, woo hoo! Yes! And, I know I didn't update yesterday. I'm okay with that, and I hope you are too.

This one was a snap. I had some world detail to sprinkle in, and while that took some careful crafting, it was quite rewarding. I made my first name change, as well. I tend to pick names out of the air as "placeholders." Sometimes I get attached (hence the similarity between Daniel Larkin and Davidson Lasche remains) and other times I thank my lucky stars for find-and-replace. Amusingly enough, this was supposed to be all of Larkin's POV in the book, but that was back when there was only going to be one book, Lasche was going to be the main character and well...admittedly, I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

A Red Road

I was not looking forward to working on this chapter. There's a lot of expositional prose in here and as with much of my early work, it is both a little weaker and a little less correct than the rest of the book. I thought I needed to explain more than I did. Sometimes I exposit in ass-covering fashion, so when people are like "When is that mentioned?" I can say well, Lasche referes to it briefly here. But putting in one sentence thousands of words earlier than ideas come into the story-proper really isn't useful to casual readers. Usually it represents insecurity in my storytelling, lack of faith in my readers or the desire to display that yes-I-had thought-of-that. I was envisioning lots of chopping of lots of writing that I was embarrassed to admit to having written. Dread!

It didn't go as badly as I expected. I was able to delete most of the patches that were awkward, even if it took me trying to rewrite a few of them before deciding they just couldn't be saved. Best of all, I decided to surrender a little on the issue of tense continuity. I'm getting TWaBW proofread professionally before I start shopping the manuscript around, so someone else can ref the "this versus that" battle royale. It was getting in the way of my creative process, and that's what professional helpers are for: Fixing what they are great at fixing, so you can do what you're supposed to be doing. I am the peanut butter, they are my jelly.

One dead darling: I can’t even recall if I was in my right mind or not on that given day; I was drunk a lot back then.

Man, I loved that sentence. What an achy little punch. But the person he's telling the story to doesn't need to hear it because, well, that's for Book 2. Out it goes.

And a chunk that's a little riskier to remove: There were four other places like it back in those days: the ones out east in Haman and Hoen, the one down the way in Suthy and the one up north in that armpit, Greengate. I’d been working out of the capital for seven or eight months, as it was the biggest. They knew me there, by then, which was the best way to get paid quick.

I like seeing Haman and Hoen set next to each other like this, but that's beside the point. This was in the description so that I could name all the major cities in the first chapter of the book. But, I really don't like how dispersed this makes the Talent collection program. I need it to be more localized and tighter; knowledge is power, and power is a big deal. Gone.

Tomorrow is Friday and I'm into Larkin's first chapter, much revised already. I've got targeting reticules locked on removing some bloated darlings (I'm looking at  you, descriptions of food) and smooth sailing the rest of the... oh, wait... there's my first-ever attempt at world-building in this chapter, isn't there? Damn. I might need to kick-and-punch this, now that I have some golden perspective on which details matter. Onward!

Sun and Clouds

Today is the first day of my month-long editing marathon. Woo! The compulsion to jump all over the book is fairly staggering, but I've resisted successfully, and begun with the Prologue.

The prologue is, rather uniquely, considering the non-linear way I tend to come up with stories, the true starting point of the book. It was a short story I wrote in reaction to some really obnoxiously predictable character/narrative development in (siiiiiigh) the Privateer Press fluff for Warmachine. I wanted to make it mo' bettah--and I wanted to make it have gay sex in it, because, hey, why not? (In all seriousness, erotic fiction is a standpoint from which a lot of my ideas come. I think sex is more key to understanding ourselves and our world than more literature is willing to display) I was also concepting an RPG setting at the time with the ludicrous working title of Special Forces. Then Sun and Clouds came out really good, and was the longest thing I'd ever really created. It was also a big enough departure (written intentionally with very few setting-specific details) that when I started building a larger story around it, I decided to "put my hands together" as it were. Soon, A Barber of Great Renown The Wide and Burning World was born.

All that was left to do here, editing-wise, was to remove a few niggling sentences and the very last vestiges of the original reason I wrote the story. There was nothing crucial to take out, the details being blown out enough that they were neither story-important nor not my own, but I knew there were a few word choices and phrases that I just didn't want as they were. All fixed. No major additions.

The best nugget to come out of the edit: When we were alone together, he shared his lore with me, taught me the ballads, the sagas and songs, and limned the necessity of quiet thought in the grim thrill of war.

I'm nervous about my next chapter, though. Find out why and what I do about it tomorrow!