Winter                                                                Winter Moon

As you might have noticed, I’m doing an end of year summing up by quarters.  The method is to go through the list of posts for the quarter, check out what’s in them and try to come up with a thread, a throughline for that time period.  I’ve not done this before and it’s kind of fun, rolling back the days and months.  In fact, when Ancientrails reaches its 10th birthday on February 5th, 2015, I think I’ll do the decade.  That should be interesting.

The setting of a new year date encourages this sort of retrospective, a sort of see it, acknowledge it, set it in the past where it belongs and face forward moment.  This blog serves several purposes.   It’s an online journal, a weblog.  It’s a form of communication with a wide number of people.  Around 2,000 visits or so a month.  It’s a cultural relic. It also shows one of the many variants on human existence and in so doing allows others to either be affirmed or offended.  Both are important.

Anyhow, I’ll finish up the quarterly posts on Monday.  Then we’ll back to the usual.

Winter                                                       Winter Moon

Working in Dramatica this morning.  This software forces me consider aspects of story I’ve not paid attention to in the past, at least not intentionally.  Much of storytelling, of course, is a product of having read and listened to stories for a lifetime, but when creating one it’s natural to overemphasize certain aspects and neglect others.  Though Dramatica seems overly determined at times, it’s emphasis on structure and plot throughlines has me imagining different ways to get my story out to the reader.

Let me give you one example.  My main character, John, begins Loki’s Children with one book’s work behind him.  He spent that book working through landing on another planet, in another solar system and in the body of a different person.  He was missing and by the end he has been found.

In Loki’s Children, on the other hand, he will struggle with whether he is alien to Tailte (the new planet) or a citizen.  His answer matters because Tailte is about to undergo a series of shocks, tests of its resolve to maintain life as it is known.  John can be the key figure in Tailte’s struggle with these tests or, he can succumb to nostalgia and focus on trying to get back to Earth.

(Thor in Hymir’s boat battling the Midgard Serpent Johann_Heinrich_Füssli  1788)

Having this level of clarity about John in Loki’s Children, before I wrote my way into it, is very new for me.  And it feels positive.

Samhain                                                            Winter Moon

Put together a banker’s box of manuscripts used during the several revisions of Missing. That cleaned out a full shelf.  Back at Loki’s Children.  Listened to a fascinating BBC podcast on Norse mythology, organized my research.  There are these very different phases to writing a novel, for me at least.

The first involves the idea beginning to grow, like sugar crystal building a new shape on a suspended piece of string.  The shapes are not uniform and they can look sharp.  Then research begins to consume the development time.  The crystals have now begun to build one on another and the whole string has some small, sweet projection.  At some point the research seems done.  The string is pulled out of the water.

The second phase is more like a snake eating.  The research and the character ideas and the plot ideas somehow inform the fingers as they type, chewing up this piece of data, consuming that idea that seemed good, sliding the whole body around undigestable information.  This is the preliminary draft, perhaps the first draft or some less clear very early version.  It has to sit for awhile, like the snake in the sun, letting the warmth drive digestion.

After this phase or the next one, which ever produces first draft, after the drawer (shelf in my case) has made those words less familiar, more removed, a first revision can occur.  At this point the story begins to become clearer, the characters take on more life. Occasionally, there’s the happy moment.  Hey, I wrote that.  Or, more often, there’s the oh, god, I wrote that moment.  Most of it is in between.

After the rock crystal phase and the snake phase, comes the sculptural phase.  The first two phases are additive, like clay sculpture, where shape builds up on an armature or free form until the desired result.  This third phase, revision, is more like subtractive sculpture, where the artist removes wood or marble to, as Michelangelo’s cliche suggests, reveal the object already there.  It’s not exactly like subtractive sculpture because, unlike marble, a manuscript can take additions as well as subtractions, but the emphasis is usually on what’s not necessary.

This plot line doesn’t serve the story.  This character is unnecessary.  This whole chapter can go and nobody will be harmed.  Of course, there are, too, those additional descriptions, enhanced motivations, now needed scenes.  In the case of Missing I cut out 30,000 words and ended up with a word count roughly the same as the one I started with.

I’m now waiting for Bob Klein to finish and then there will be the work of assimilating his critiques and finishing a last draft before submission.  In January, Missing will start its journey into the world.

Samhain                                                    Thanksgiving Moon

Missing 5.0 is done.  I’ll compile it tomorrow, make it into a word doc and ship it by e-mail to Quickproofs.  I’ve arranged a payment mechanism with them.  When that’s done, I’ll review Bob’s work, make changes.

The next step is getting it out to agents and I already have a good list, though I plan to look at more in the coming week.  E-mail makes the whole process so much easier now.

If you can imagine me with two fists in the air, a slight smile on my face, well, that’s the way I feel right now.  This is not a perfect draft, it still has flaws, but it’s the best draft I’ve created by far.  All the beta readers, all the revising has made it stronger and more coherent.  This is the right time to let go of it and see how it does on its own.

That also means that I’ll crank up my Dramatica learning this week since I want to use it in writing Loki’s Children.  More Latin and research into the Norse myths.  Enough to keep me busy while Kate’s away.