As we know, Bob, a synopsis/outline is not the story as the story would be told, but condensed and de-secreted.

Perhaps it is useful to think of the synopsis/outline as if I were telling someone else how to write the story?

---

That might not work for you, but I think it works for me.

This thread on this entry of sartorias's journal...

Just reminded me to articulate something I've been feeling lately.

( gets a little dull and navel-gazey. MORE dull and navel-gazey. )

What with starting a pretty diligent writing habit pretty much concurrent with the onset of puberty, that's... a lot of years of practice. It's not all been to the good, I'm sure; I resisted instruction at many points, for a while feeling that if I couldn't get it by intuition, it wasn't worth getting. Maybe five years ago, I started to diligently suss out techniques and to consider my craft. To the point that, you know, I couldn't look at a piece without book-reporting it, per sartorias's entry linked above. I also, for a while, couldn't look at anyone else's work without book-reporting it--critiquing it on the fly, and thinking, "That's not how I'd do it!"

Various folks assured me that this can (and does) go away, and it has. In fact, I can turn off book-report-head at will, most days; that's why I could enjoy Twilight, frex. And turning it off is how I get that energetic first draft down on paper, and theoretically, turn it back on to examine structure and character and rising action and all the rest and attempt to make sure I've written a satisfying story.

Lately, though, I've not had to think as hard about things, even in the rewrite. I can do more and more of it intuitively. Every leap forward is a leap backward. There was a joy in learning the craft, of course, but there is far more joy in having long, immersive moments of writing by intuition.

To the point where my general feeling is "Oh, THANK GOD."

Anyway. Just wanted to document that. I'm sure I'll forget all about this moment in a few years.

I have an offer from Nature to buy "Fine-tuning the Universe," and a contract in hand, and that means... my third pro sale.

Well, at least the gaps between them are getting shorter...

When I started thinking about this endeavor, back in my twenties, sometime around 2002, SFWA eligibility seemed impossible and yet so simple. Surely, getting the first pro acceptance must be hard. But equally sure, getting the second and third must be easy. Momentum, eh? It's a thing. Or so I hear.

Or, not so much.

Back when I threw my shoulder into novels and gave up on short stories--last June, so about a year ago--I had pretty much figured that I was going to have to sell a novel to become eligible to join SFWA. Any short stories I've written since then, I've written for funsies. (Granted, submitting them isn't so much fun, but I have a near-Pavlovian response to typing "The End" anymore. I start salivating in order to lick the envelope.) And in writing for funsies, I have the highest acceptance rate of my career.

Anyway, it's not like I thought (much past the first few months, anyway) that SFWA was the end-all, be-all of this shindig. It was just... that's how you knew you were There.

Interestingly, I'd pretty much decided earlier this year, for good or for ill, that I was as Here as I'm going to get. I decided I couldn't really call myself a Neopro anymore, if only because of the passage of time, and not so much due to credentials. But a funny thing happened on the way to accepting that I might never be more than a name one occasionally saw in the table of contents (I had even painted myself into the scenario where I was That Convention Panelist who talks about writing Scads o' Things You've Never Heard Of): I kept writing.

I think I mentioned pretty recently how much patience figures into this writing career thing... like how long it was between first draft and publication for one particular story (five years). That, I would call specific patience, and is not applicable to the story of this story. (I finished "Fine-tuning the Universe" in mid-April. I sent it out. It is now accepted, twenty-four days later. This is no Scalzian thirteen minutes, but at least I don't have whiplash.) But general patience is also very important.

My general patience is what allowed me to stop firing so many blanks with my short stories. I realized that being in it for the long haul meant that I could continue to be Nobody in Particular at conventions (as long as I kept writing), that I could write novels and not worry about the gratification short stories provide--yes, even rejections provide a kind of gratification--(as long as I kept writing), that I could accept that my career seems to have a long fuse that may very well never ignite anything (as long as I kept writing).

Anyway, lessons learned: it doesn't come fast to most of us. It always looks like it's happening faster for other people. And momentum is a tricky thing.

I'm reading The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel by Edward Gorey.

Have the other writers out there read this? It's so. Apt.

...there is rewriting. This is worse than merely writing, because not only does he have to think up new things just the same, but at the same time try not to remember the old ones.

I am theorizing that this book should be funny, but it instills merely bleak recognition in me.

Okay, a few chuckles.

Especially this part:

The night before returning home to Mortshire Mr Earbrass allows himself to be taken to a literary dinner... The talk deals with disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, worse than inadequate royalties, idiotic or criminal reviews, others' declining talent, and the unspeakable horror of literary life.

Written well over fifty years ago, I might add. The more things change...

Email I didn't just send, only slightly gussied up for purposes of self-satire:

"Dear Lovely Agent,

I think I just figured out a way to address three of your major concerns over the novel in one fell swoop, but I think that's going to require me to add a couple more pages within the first three chapters of the novel (i.e., increasing the amount of time before my Rilly Cool Antagonist is introduced). But it's going to ratchet up the tension pretty good, so I was wondering, is that quote-unquote padding going to be okay?"

At least I realized how stupid the question was before I sent it.

Of course, then I went and posted it on the internet.

The first draft I have for "Sun's East, Moon's West" is dated April 2004.

It's coming out from Electric Velocipede--this month or the next, I'm not entirely sure.

Five years, folks. Though, it only took three and a half to sell it, I think. (Only.) (Checks: Yep, I sold it on November 1, 2007.) I'm not sure I have an easy way to track how many markets it went through, and certainly, I have no clue on how many rewrites I did. (I did take the story to Milford '05, but sat on the rewrites for about a year while it languished at very slow market.)

No, ma'am, selling your writing is not for the impatient, nor for the faithless, nor for the weak-willed.

---

ETA: There are 18 versions saved in the Drafts folder for this story. I rewrote it to keep it current with my craft level, though in the year and a half since I sold it... anyway. The good news is, I now sell things on the second draft. I've come a long way.

All this refreshing of LiveJournal does not make pages in your novel suddenly appear.

You seem to think it does. So I thought you ought to know.

When my office is clean, I will write more, faster and better.

I meant to write today. Today was going to be the writing day. But by the time I sat down to do this thing, it was noon, and by the time I actually opened a file, the doorbell rang and I had to go talk to a neighbor today about our blue spruce trees they're going to cut down. (The property line runs right through the trunks, so they're just as much their blue spruce trees as ours, and neither Dann nor I want to quibble, plus this would do good things for the veggie garden boxes, and they're only going to take one down.)

(Oh, yay! I finally heard a cicada! Yay, yay, yay! I'm disappointed that it's not been raucous cicada nightmare, after all the anticipation about Brood X. I like markers to the years, particularly non-harmful-just-annoying markers, like raucous cicada nightmare could have been.)

Anyway, it's 1:30. We have to leave at 3:30 for ah, uhm, a thing I can't report on just in case there's more journal readership than I think. It's a good two hours to work, and that's not anything to sneer at, but it's not enough time to get into the intensive novel work I was thinking of today. The novel work I was thinking of today will involve at least 20 minutes of scrubbing in order to provide the proper sterile operating environment before I open her up. The liver is in the wrong place, you see. So, I'm going to have to dig up something less intensive to work on, like maybe, "The Paradise Covenant." Which is a much less bad story than I remembered it being, and I don't need to rewrite it from the ground up. I have some lovely So-Fic (Social Fiction, as opposed to Science Fiction, mwaha, watch me *not* coin words right there) in it, including a backlash against psychiatry. Woo. I'd totally forgotten that.

But, still. Grumpy, because my plan has been derailed. Do you think if I tried to write for eight hours a day on my vacation, anyone would let me? I don't think so, either. Oh, they'd say they'd let me, but they wouldn't, really. Dann's not as bad as my mom was when I was growing up, who in turn wasn't as bad as my grandparents...

But let's face it, the problem with living with non-writers is that they don't realize how the process works. That yes, you-the-writer are allowed to get up, leave the quiet area, initiate conversation, rant, wring hands, call someone on the phone, eat snacks, dramatically beat the keyboard, demand that anyone around illustrate some fine point of wrestling, knife-fighting or kissing (depending on appropriateness), beg for help on word-choice and discard all their suggestions as too banal, and otherwise be an apparently interactive (and yet irritating) member of society/the family while writing. Because, in-between, you're dashing back to the computer and typing furiously, headphones on and head down and not talking to anyone. It might not look like working, but it is; that's how it is when I'm writing fast. That's a 10k day, right there.

Inevitably, the not-writers come up to you and demand that you take out the garbage, because it's apparent that you're not really working, or interrupt you in the middle of the typing-furiously-time to ask if you want snacks--because clearly, you're interruptable, look at the crazy stuff you just did in the last half-hour--or just want to know where they left the hairbrush/remote control/car keys... Or even better, little nine-year-old non-writers come in and want to "watch you work." Uhm... And boom, you're out of crazy writer world. "Gaugh!"

And that's the best-case scenario--that's if anyone even respects the quiet area. Often times, the quiet area becomes the TV-watching area, or the loud conversation area, or the sleeping area. Or the brushing teeth area. (That one I still don't get.) And you get told that you were crazy to expect the quiet area to remain the quiet area, and don't you have an office?. Well, I do, as it happens, and it's full of guestbed, and it gets hot, and some days, you just can't work in the same place. Even so, I don't have an office at the lake. And I believe the nearest Starbucks or Borders to the lake might be in Grand Rapids, which is a bit of a haul. And if you do retreat to an office or even a bedroom, you get lambasted for being anti-social.

Am I going to offend everyone in my family with this one? Probably. Please keep in mind I'm basing this on years and years of experience, from age 11 on up to now. And that I wasted 40 minutes of completely interrupt-free time while Dann sleeps in the other room to complain about how my time is devalued. Because I'm hilariously hypocritical like that.

I'm kind of feeling wifty in my soul today. That's a Mom word. I don't know if the rest of the world uses it. The dictionary sure doesn't have it. And I'm not even sure if I know what it means, but it's like "thin enough the wind could carry you away." (wind + lift + adj. tag -y?)

I started out sad, and got sadder in between, and gee, this has only happened four times in the last week (or so), and no matter what I do, my usual de-saddeners don't quite work. Today, I just went through the motions, trying to feel better: gardening, eating, watching lots and lots of BBCAmerica, taking a bath. Ultimately, not until I came upstairs and whipped out the end of "Sticks and Stones" did I start to perk up again.

It had been a while since I finished a short story that I felt could go out to market. I mean, it's not ready for it yet, but the last couple of shorts I did are just not anything I could sell.

I'm experimenting with writing more linear stories. With clear problems and clear resolutions, and maybe only one thing really happening. You know, like short stories should be.

We'll see how that goes. I'm not sure I've succeeded just yet. "Sticks and Stones," the thing I finished tonight, feels a bit wifty itself, and I don't know, maybe there's no plot, because the conflict isn't clearly defined. (Girl has hard task to accomplish. Girl's only real opposition is herself. Girl eventually gets out of her own way. Is that actually conflict?)

It's a time travel story, too. Which would make it about the fifth one in my current repertoire. Is there anything really new to say about time travel? someone asked somewhere on-line a few months ago. I guess my subconscious saw it as a personal challenge. I'm not certain I've succeeded; "Reparations" seemed to strike a few people. None of the others have struck anyone enough that they've been purchased.

Of course, the point to me is not if I've said anything new about time travel. The point is whether or not I've said anything new about people. I use speculative fiction to provide a convenient way to dispose of the way things are and to concentrate on the way things could be. An important loophole, if you want to get beyond a world where, as mrissa said, some "real people are two-dimensional and inadequately motivated".

My outrageously bad case of writing-fraught is over. Thank goodness.

I'd say I think it was a necessary part of the process, but it's not. If anything, it distracts from the process. And it highlights that I'm not a fully healthy writer, to my way of thinking. Of course, my definition of a fully healthy writer is probably too stringent for anyone to adhere to, least of all myself: my theory is that writing flows like a river, and whenever dammed, seeks outlets and ways around the dam.

And, maybe... maybe that's what happened. The writing just built up inside me and swept those damn (pardon the pun) beavers downstream. It just took longer to break through than I wanted.

Please don't report me to the metaphor abuse hotline.

All of it meant that I had no time to really think about the rest of the world. (I was too busy thinking of myself, after all, and that's the real problem with being that fraught and unable to write: it means I'm stuck inside my over-crowded and poorly mapped head.) But now I'm going back and seeing that sartorias wrote stuff I want to think about, and I missed a few other things like that about not-writing, too, and... bleah!

Sometimes, having a supportive parent who tells you how talented you are all the time is just not helpful. Granted, my mom hasn't liked anything I've written in years, nor read much of what I've written in about as long, but there's the spectre of all my early efforts... And Mom, dear Mom, and Aunt Carol too, are utterly convinced all it takes is talent. Perhaps (perhaps) it's their Dutch and German inner workhorses that can't imagine that I wouldn't work hard enough. Perhaps to them, hard work is a given. If anything, they've always told me that I spent too much time on writing. "If it doesn't come out, it's not time. Go burn some branches and release your trauma/karma/dead soul parts/etc." So, that actually leads me to suspect that they've no idea how much work there is in being a writer.

If it's not like when I was a kid, if I don't sit down and pour out something astonishing, I feel like I've failed. It's almost never like that, though. Not because of talent or lack thereof. Talent, schmalent. When I was 12, and talented for my age, I couldn't understand rewriting. Hell, I think I only started to understand rewriting, and the full potential therein, just this year. After all, prior to the full-on, full-frontal examination of what it actually takes to get published-- (that is, by getting to know Real Writers, in person or through their journals, or what have you)-- I thought you kind of just wished hard enough on your Talent Rock and behold the Angel of the Lord appeared with a writing contract. I prodded a few short stories towards editors, without rewrites, and recoiled from rejection and never submitted those stories again. Clearly, talent doesn't go very far. Talent's the car, but without the gas, you're just walking up and down the highway with the gas-can banging your knees and looking pitiful. (I should list the skill "Butchery of Metaphors" on my resume.)

Hm. What was my point?

Oh, I don't know that I had one.

I think I was feeling vaguely sorry for myself earlier this month. I just sat down with my list of submissions today. I'm not going to count the ones I got from sporadic wishes on the Talent Rock back in the day... three rejections a year for even a half-dozen years makes a cute little pile, but that kind of irregularity, that lack of persistence, well it's laughable, right now I'm laughing at myself. I put forth some efforts late last year and all, but really, I think my submission list speaks for itself: the regular submissions started in April of this year. 2003. I barely had a stable of stories, then. In fact, I had only 2, but I was faithful to them, and I've gotten more faithful as the year has progressed. I've been trying since April, and I only have 9 rejections. NINE.

To be whining, right now, is just like wishing on the Talent Rock. So, I'm not. In fact, this is my pep-talk for me. We've gassed up the car, and there are miles to go before we sleep.

I need a program, like word count, that says: "Hey, did you know that there are 4 instances of "murmur" in just ten thousand words? Get a new word, Writer!"

I should make a list. Today's list includes: the aforementioned "murmur"; "sigh". Constructions I should be aware of: doing x "as" I do y.

I need to stop editing and write.

And go out and kick the satellite dish, since the digital music stations just all crapped out on me-- but for sound only. "Temptation Island" has sound. But does the Light Classical station? No.