Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Picked up from rushthatspeaks.

The book I am currently reading: Ambrose Bierce, Shadows of Blue and Grey. From Grandpa's collection. Wrenching stuff.

The books I am currently writing: Um. Polish revisions on What We Did to Save the Kingdom. Deeper revisions on The True Tale of Carter Hall. And poking around the edges of the Aesir noir book, which doesn't have a title yet, because I really should get The True Tale out to beta readers before I start anything else, but...y'know...I like writing books...and it's been a long time since I started on a new book...and there is so much shiny....

The book I love most: Seriously. Seriously? No one who likes books enough to answer this meme is going to have their One True Book Love. It is virtually impossible. It may have been virtually impossible since the early 19th century, because how many serious book people are like that? Book I love most, uff da. What a question.

The last book I received as a gift: Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk.
The last book I gave as a gift: Bagthorpes Unlimited by Helen Cresswell. Although I have some ready to give very soon.

The nearest book on my desk: the Bierce. Also my Kindle, which doesn't have someone else's book in progress on it at the moment: I finished the Kindle book I was reading at timprov's appointment yesterday, and I haven't started another. I am in the middle of using that to read my own book for revisions, though, so What We Did is apparently equally close.

I should know by now that "I am up to my elbows in dishwater" is not a good reason to fail to write something down. There was an insight into The True Tale of Carter Hall, and now it's gone. Fee. Come back, little insight! Join your friends!

The other insight, which is not gone, can be summed up in an index card reading, "Earlier Wild Hunt snowmobile deaths." So there's that at least.

The impulse to restructure the entire book is such a seductive one. I should remember that next time it hits. It nearly allows a reset to the beginning of the process, when all things seem possible, and also it means that the wibbling I'm doing is productive, creative wibbling, except when it totally isn't. This happened with What We Did to Save the Kingdom, too: "Maybe I need a second POV character!" No, you don't. "Maybe I need extensive flashback structure so that each chapter comes with a bit of the protag's past!" No. No, you don't. Write the book. Don't think, meat, just pitch. And stop breathing out the wrong eyelid. I mean William Blake.

I have no idea how people who don't have Bull Durham and Galaxy Quest in their brain write books, truly I don't. It's not that I don't believe there's a way, because of course there's a way. I did it myself, when I was 11 and again when I was 14. It's just that I don't remember how it goes any more. What gets you through revisions when you get to the middle of the book and spontaneously rant, "This scene was badly written," and then you don't think of Sigourney Weaver and grin? I'm not sure. I'm just glad to have it to hug to myself and move on.

Okay okay okay.

So last night's entry about titles is almost certainly the result of me a) wanting distraction and b) being nearly ready to send this thing out. I don't actually want to stall on sending it out. But sending out novels is frankly kind of scary. You have to blow your hair out of your eyes and set your jaw and decide that, no, really, you shouldn't try to make it better, you should just send it out, and no, it's probably not perfect, but removing and replacing that comma on page 58 is probably not going to make or break the agent's desire to represent you or the editor's desire to publish you so send the book out already.

But the title is bigger than a comma, and poking around at it before sending the thing out is not completely unreasonable. Especially as some of you are giving me lovely titles. For sequels. Sigh.

This one feels particularly large and looming as I prepare to send it out because I've never taken this long to revise a book I knew how to revise before. I don't want to make excuses for myself, but I also don't want to ignore reasons. The vertigo is a reason. And this is a weird combination of still dealing that and getting past it. I am still struggling through this. It's better than it was. And the book has been holding still and letting me wipe the dirt off its cheek and the frosting off its nose, and...here we are. Getting there.

Eeeek.

I am doing revisions on a printout, because I need to revise on printouts mostly, and when I try not to, I bang my head repeatedly against the wall and then feel stupid when it turns out all I needed was a printout. So. Printout! I need to remind myself of this in future, because I am unlikely to come admit to you-all that revisions have stalled out and give you the chance to remind me that I need a printout.

Anyway: I am doing these revisions with the purple pen of mystery. It's the oddest thing. (Where by "the oddest thing," I mean "a fairly ordinary household object.") It's a disposable fountain pen. There is absolutely no way to refill this fountain pen. It's nice, though. It's a pilot, and I wouldn't say the nib is any worse in smoothness than my refillable Pilot fountain pens, though it's lighter. I found this pen cleaning out a box of things that got stuck on the corner of the hearth when we moved in and stayed there. And yet the ink has not dried out and the nib isn't clogging. It is a good little pen.

The thing is, we cannot figure out where this pen came from. Mark doesn't use fountain pens. Timprov and I know all of our fountain pens personally and have no recollection of this pen ever joining their number. And we can't think who would have left this pen with us. Most of our guests are definitively non-users of fountain pens or else Dave obsessive enough about their fountain pens to know what kind they use and keep track of where they've gone.

It's too bad, too, because after five years I would not offer to give this pen back, at least not until after I'd finished revising this book with it, but I would want to know where the heck they got such a thing, and where I could get another, or ideally a whole pack of them. Wait! I know! The magic of the internets has told me where to get more. Well, all right then. It is a Pilot Varsity. If this might be your pen left at my house for five years, I'm dreadfully sorry, but at least I know replacements are only $3.25, so you won't be too bereft. And neither will I when the thing runs out.

Yikes, I'm sorry. I posted the synopsis I was working on without a filter, when I meant to filter it to people who had volunteered to help me remove suckage from it. If you were one of the people who kindly commented and were not included on the filter (under which I have now stashed the post), and you wish to continue helping me with it, please let me know; it's an opt-in filter, and I'm glad to opt you in. I just didn't want to subject the whole world to it.

Anyway: I stayed up late last night completely rewriting the synop, which you would think would have given my brain less time for nightmares. Now I am pretty tired. Hoping that a nap makes its way into my light cone sometime today, but I'm not betting on it. Stupid light cone anyway.

Tomorrow is the book discussion day for The Kestrel, so please do remember to stop by and revel in Ruritanian revolutionary goodness.

For whatever reason I am plagued with They Might Be Giants songs today. I cannot get rid of one without getting another. As I have been reading The Kestrel and the last of the Simon Schama series, I can't come up with any reason why this should be.

Also I cannot get it through my head that today is Wednesday. In my head today is Thursday, which gives me less time to do some of the things I want to get done, but also makes it time to do the things I'm supposed to do Thursday, so at least they can come off the list. But they can't. I am, as my grandmother would say, more mixed up than Hogan's goat. Who is Hogan? Why is his goat more mixed up than other goats? Does this have something to do with really bad fake German accents? This and other clear indications that I am really tired: next on livejournal.

I don't know why I have this happen every time I write a book: every time I write a beginning, and every time I have to rewrite the beginning to remove the colossal suck from it. Why is this? I could not say. I can begin short stories without the Suckitude That Ate Golden Valley coming and rearing its head every time. But novels, no. Never. Evereverever. Why not? I could not say. I write out of sequence, so you'd think maybe just once. But no.

I fear that this one owes a bit too much in structure/cadence to a certain formative book of my youth, but there aren't any sea serpents, so it has to spill out somewhere.

At any rate, I have been trying for, no kidding, months to get this right--the vertigo slows the process, and I've been working on other things--and now I have one sentence. Just one. But I think it'll get all the rest. I think it'll do.

And now there will be ice cream.

The problem with not being sure of a title for something you've finished is that when you go bouncing titles around, some of them stick to other things. This is not so bad when you come up with What Kingdom Remains and think, "Yes, good, that's the last one in the series." Or when you squint sideways at Flight and think, "No, no, gives away too much and leaves out too much." But what's bad is the crazy ones that come pouring out when you do this. Especially when you do this with the aid of a timprov.

Which is how I came to be writing a short story called "How Descartes Became a Horse on Tuesdays."

Which is also how I ended up ordering biographical works about Descartes and also some of his own works to reread, all from the library.

Also I fear what happens if I am not careful, because if I push my brain for a visual image on "horse," I get the runestone drawing of Sleipnir.

Oh dear.

Please note that I am aware that most of you have not read this book, so you are not being asked to comment on whether the title works well for the specific book I've written. (Although if you have read it, feel free to e-mail me with opinions on how the title worked for you.)

[Poll #1294645]

Also, if you ran across a book called What We Did to Save the Kingdom, what, if any, preconceptions would you have about it? (Funny, serious, high fantasy, swashbuckling, sword-wielding protagonist, lots of boats, whatever.)

Me: When you get run over by a truck, does that come with nausea?
timprov: Ummm...I wouldn't think so.
Me: Then I definitely don't feel like I was run over by a truck.

But this was in pursuit of revision, and today was a record day since the vertigo/PT started: over 3K new words on stuff that had to happen but hadn't happened yet, in Chapter 10 and Chapter 32.

Tomorrow: more piano breaks. More not-piano breaks. More breaks. For sure.

Still, I can't really regret today.

So. I recently read a friend's novel, which is really good and probably not going to be published, because the said friend is not seeking publication for it, but I'm not actually posting this to say nyahhhhh. (As long as I'm here, though: nyahhhh.) And my friend's process involves each chapter being a separate file, which would drive me completely insane and lead to me never, ever writing anything ever again. But seems to result in novels for him.

And I said to myself, hmmm. My friend is not stupid. Possibly there are advantages to this system that might apply to my very own situation. Possibly I could make use of some aspect of it without having the complete crazy-making of trying to draft that way. Possibly?

And so I printed out the chapters of What We Did to Save the Kingdom with -- and you will probably find this completely radical -- page breaks between each chapter. (I know! The creativity just never stops around here.) And I paperclipped each chapter together. And then I went through the list of things that Really Truly Must Be Done Before Another Soul Can See This Book. (Filename: What We Did to Sort the Revisions. Other filenames in the same folder: What We Did to Sum It Up, What We Did to Write the Sequel, What We Did to Excise the Flashbacks, What We Did to Keep Track of the Details, and What We Did to Annoy the Readers. The last is a preemptive file. For later.) And I wrote each thing on a Post-It note, and I put it on the chapter it goes with, and if it goes in more than one chapter, I put it on more than one Post-It note.

And now when I want to work on the revisions, and I know I won't have much time before the vertigo starts to eat my brain, I can pick up a chapter and see discrete chunks of work that need doing in that chapter. So I don't have to look at what needs doing and think, "Does that go in Chapter 7? What if it's in Chapter 12? Did I check that it can happen that early? Or that late? What's going on here?" Also I could weigh the chapters in my hands and think thinky thoughts about them. How they flow and how it all balances.

(Also, the last quarter to a third of the book -- the bit that is Ending in my head -- is on bright blue paper instead of white. I would love to say that this is because I am brilliant about structure, but it's actually because we ran out of white paper. It is nevertheless extremely useful for pacing purposes. Go serendipity.)

And in fact I tried this tonight, and I got rid of all the notes on Chapter 6 and all the notes on Chapter 7. They are okay. They are ready to be seen by mortal eyes. I'm not going to subject some poor mortal to the book in this form ("Here you go! Here are Chapters 1-3, 6, 7, 19, 23, and 34, which is the last chapter!"), but still, concrete, verifiable progress was made. Even if this system comes to a screeching halt in a flurry of Post-Its and paper-clips tomorrow, there were things that needed doing to Chapters 6 and 7, and now they are done.

Eeeee. There is light after all, and it's not just that I've decided that there must be something bigger and better than a lamp and called it a sun. I've been spending the last few weeks as a Puddleglum Novelist*, and it's sort of nice to think that at least some of it is back to being Under Me.

*Puddleglum paraphrased for novelists: "That's why I'm going to stand by the play world...I'm going to live as like a novelist as I can even if there isn't any novel." Also: "Reshpectomrissale." All right, it's late, I'm ridiculous.