I sat down with an open novel file and my new Touch last night. Download app, write paragraph. Download app, write paragraph. Right now, I'm sticking with free apps until I figure out what is actually worth purchasing.

The problem struck when I realized No, I really, really, really need an end goal for the last third of the novel. Like. A structure. A plot. A map. I know I had this realization before, but I was kind of writing it all out and planning to go back and structure then, but I am mired. So I can't do that. To move forward, I have to go backward. And basically rewrite this section all over. Not bigly, but somely... Just, need to make sure events happen in the right order, threads don't get lost.

Anyway, as I was settling down with my Brainstormin' Paper, I got mugged by a short story: "Five Rules and One Exception for Commuting to the Underworld."

So I stayed up until 2 AM working on that. And I have absolutely no plot for it, but it is delightful to write. And short. So maybe it can survive without a plot. Or just be literary.

I want to finish this book. Maybe tonight.

I just Twittered that I had one more scene to add to the book, but I don't quite know what to do with said scene. Then I hit on the brill idea of considering a scene goal.

But not tonight. No, today, we squared away Chapter 35 and most of Chapter 36, and wrote a whole new scene and a couple of scenelets and moved a whole bunch of stuff around. Unfortunately, the end of the book is feeling a bit disjointed to me, and I think I'm going to have to chart out the action and see if it rises enough, or whatever it's supposed to do.

And, in fact, if it doesn't rise enough, I'm probably going to have to add some more to the book. I mean, I'm not sure what, but I suspect that there are enough mysteries lying fallow for book 2 that I could waken a few of those.

Ugh.

Have I ever told you that one of my "other duties as assigned" at my day job has been space planning for the past three years? It started with reorganizing the mail area, and morphed from there. Every time we add new staff, I start measuring things, then hop onto Visio and draw up a new plan. Thus, we have managed to improve workflow and fit three additional people into about a thousand less square feet, or something ridiculous like that. (That's not even one of my insane hyperboles.) This has actually been a rewarding bit of my job, and considering I have no training in it other than having rearranged my childhood bedroom about eight times a year, a little bit amazing--I didn't actually know I had spatial organization skills.

Anyway, the point is, whenever I get down to the end of a new space plan, I always end up with what I call a "mushy area." Where my ideas haven't quite coalesced, and my brain is going to have to go through a number of REM cycles before I figure out how to actually make the last section fit together better. It almost always comes down to a mushy area, too, unless I'm working on just four desks or something small.

I'm really hoping the end of my book is just a temporary mushy area, right now, and that I'll be able to get all the furniture in place soon. Like. Tomorrow. Wednesday at the latest.

But, I'm almost there. Mushy or not, here I come.

I am so-very-close to finishing my rewrite. I have a couple more concrete things to do, and then I need to go through and make sure I didn't lose my narrative voice during my edits, drop in some more jokes (or at least, put in some where I took others out), and so forth.

But one note from my agent in particular has been giving me some grief. To the point where I had almost sorta decided to ignore it, if I couldn't figure it out. And that was "to show more of a sense of awe and wonder" during my main character's early explorations of the underworld.

Well. How in heck do you show more of a sense of awe and wonder? I mean, I went through the draft a second time, putting in character reactions.

Like so:

"It was amazing."

"I was hornswoggled! ABSOLUTELY hornswoggled!"

"OMG! WTF! BBQ! ELEVENTY!"

And then went back to "It was amazing." And decided to come back to it later.

The usual tactic (think of when you've experienced awe and wonder; extrapolate) only semi-applies. I mean--okay, I remember standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, and thinking, "I can no longer tell which way is up." I was staggeringly overwhelmed there for a good 5 minutes. But I've got a character who needs to be thinking and doing, not standing there. I suppose I could put a little of that in.

But the other problem is--when do we experience awe and wonder on that kind of scale? On the scale of "Holy f*ck, are those jeweled apples?" Awe and wonder, for me, goes hand in hand with being overwhelmed and vertiginous (Grand Canyon), dazed (Brighton Pavilion, maybe?), and repulsed/annoyed/horrified (THAT DID NOT JUST HAPPEN, where "that" = appalling personal behavior). Awe and wonder are, in fact, pretty far outside of my personal repertoire, and I can literally only think of the examples I just cited.

Beyond that, I've been cultivating unflappability, skepticism, and satirical calm for so long, I'm sort of afraid I lost my ability to feel awe along the way--am I supposed to feel it more than I do? Do I know how to properly express this stuff? And--the other side of it--having had to feign enthusiasm for a myriad of mundanities throughout my life (the "you pooped in the potty!" variety, I guess; sure, it causes awe once, but you have to cheer about it for like MONTHS), I'm not really sure what I'm feeling when I wax effusive about things anymore.

So, obviously, I'm of no help to myself anymore...

I did re-read most of Karl Iglesias's Writing for Emotional Impact, but the paragraphs on wonder and awe were kinda skimpy, and the wonder he talks most about is the "I wonder why the character how the character will get out of the forest of jeweled apples" variety. It's not an SF book, and it's not a novelist's book. And it's certainly not a book to address my specific problems. It's done a bunch of other stuff for me, so I can't complain.

So... now we go to Google. And two hits in particular were very good for me:

1) HP Lovecraft's Notes on Writing Weird Fiction:

Inconceivable events and conditions have a special handicap to over come, and this can be accomplished only through the maintenance of a careful realism in every phase of the story except that touching on the one given marvel. This marvel must be treated very impressively and deliberately - with a careful emotional "build-up" - else it will seem flat and unconvincing...

In relation to the central wonder, the characters should shew the same overwhelming emotion which similar characters would shew toward such a wonder in real life. Never have a wonder taken for granted. Even when the characters are supposed to be accustomed to the wonder I try to weave an air of awe and impressiveness corresponding to what the reader should feel. A casual style ruins any serious fantasy.

Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood. The moment it tries to be anything else it becomes cheap, puerile, and unconvincing.

Okay. So, maybe I wasn't totally off with my correlations with my personal experiences. I need to relate the character's wonder to the character's mood. To completely distill Lovecraft's thought to its most literal, journeyman-minded, writing-as-a-craft essence. Also, the "careful realism" thing rings true to me...

2) And... NOT a note on writing, but a bio entry on a woman who works with the aesthetics of astronomical images, that I think works very well when you consider writing is a similar kind of interpretation:

She considers the methods astronomers use to translate the telescope's data into aesthetically pleasing scenes that communicate with non-scientists and ultimately argues that the images rely on the visual language of Romantic landscapes to convey a sense of wonder and awe as well as propose the possibility of conquering another frontier.

I read that, and started scribbling notes. Wonder needs to open up possibilities. A-duh.

And then, everything clicked into place. And by everything, I mean a bunch of other things entirely.

And it was good. For now.

Actually, the title is a lie. There are no other puns.

Things which have been saving my soul lately: My husband. We just had a long(ish) conversation about "novels are haaaard." Of course, what I was unable to convey is that it's not hard, it's just difficult.

Do you know what I mean? No, you probably don't, since my brain is wired funny on this topic. "Hard" is like, well, things where the learning curve is prohibitive. Where I'm not given all the information and making the leaps is problematic. Like my ninth-grade geometry class, where the teacher didn't actually understand geometry, let alone how to teach it, and I didn't realize that I could cheat and solve the problems algebraically and reverse engineer the learning of geometry. Where the super-difficult stuff was (somehow) intuitive for me, but the basic concepts left me in the dust, so that when I took the state proofs test, I got a 0 out of 4 on the basic question and a 4 out of 4 on the impossible question. Geometry is HARD (all caps). Reading Robert Graves is Hard (speaking of funny-wired brains) (one cap). Reading Tartuffe in French is hard (no caps, as long as one has a dictionary, but good luck getting all the jokes). That's my scale of hardness.

Novels aren't hard, by this definition. Not anymore, anyway, praise be. My first novel was HARD. My first novel was like figuring out the importance of f-stops and ISO in the first week of photography class.

This novel isn't hard. This novel is like hand-tinting a perfectly exposed print. I have to do it right, and it takes a lot of concentration and precision and a good eye for color and the right tools and some patience and about 45 minutes (which is 40 minutes longer than anyone else is going to spend post-enlarger on their print for this week's critique).

Only. It's like hand-tinting a book of prints.

Which, you know. Time-wise? Concentration-wise? Is hard. But it's not really on the Mer Haskell scale of hardness, when it comes down to it.

Things which have been saving my soul lately, part the second: Karl Iglesias.

I read Writing for Emotional Impact a while back, but honestly, it's a journeyman writer's book, and most of it went over my head. I knew it was good, but a lot of it seemed irrelevant. But on Friday, I got it into my head that this book would save me a great deal of trouble. And probably had the character stuff in it that I've been looking for, to the depth that I needed it. Like a beacon in my brain (or something) the memory of this book returned.

Well, it's not stocked at any of the local stores of course, and it's not at my library, so I was a bit vexed. I was pretty sure I needed it, like, a week ago. (Which is true.) I wondered if the author had posted any snippets or essays on-line, and when I found his website, I hit the jackpot: e-book of Writing for Emotional Impact, cheaper than the book, in a useful format.

Angels sang.

I read through a few chapters of the book that night, furiously scribbling notes, solidifying helpful things like my freakin' theme ("Can compassion change the world?") and good character moments that I needed to hit. Between that and my giant Post-It calendar? I'm feeling pretty good.

And this, in spite of two power outages. (Thank goodness for my diligent daily back ups; they aren't fancy--I email my nightly changes to my Gmail account from my Exchange account, save daily to my thumbdrive, my netbook and my laptop--but they are effective enough.)

Back to the hand coloring.

Cutting a bit that goes nowhere and does nothing in my book. I'm not even sure what my original subtext was, and it seems that any character illustration I'd be doing with it doesn't help much. Plus, I'm shoe-horning my Romanian folk-tale research in.

So, guess what, little bit? You gotta go! I'll immortalize you here in LJ, though.

( Reveka and Frumos, the first meeting in the forest. )

Listened to this week's Writing Excuses this morning. Brandon Sanderson mentioned that the only piece of writing advice given by a well-respected agent that he's tossed out summarily is the advice "you want to train yourself how to get it right on the first try." Sanderson is (wisely) a proponent of revising and second drafts. Most writers I know are.

But I disagreed with Sanderson right off.

Now, this was remembered advice, spoken impromptu on a podcast, so the fact that I'm about to pick nits with the wording is very much a, uhm, whatsit. A strawman? I'm just setting up the argument the way I want so I can go "BOO! Ya ain't nothing but moldy straw!" (Isn't that what a strawman argument is?)

Because I think, "Yes. It's about training yourself to get it right on the first try. Because if you don't enter the training, faithfully, and with the dedication of a triathlete, you will lose your freaking mind."

You, in this case, being me.

Mostly, that's because I'm slogging through this rewrite, trying to figure out the motivations of secondary characters and things like that--things I probably should have known when I was in the outlining stage. Today, I think I just figured out the purpose of the Underworld. It's not like the Underworld isn't the second most important thing in the book, and the impetus for the whole plot. It's not like the King of the Underworld isn't the antagonist. It's not like the last third of the book takes place in the Underworld.

These are things that make writing much easier, you! (You--still meaning me.) You don't have to go back and layer in all the meaning if you know these things from the beginning, you! You should probably get that right the first time, next time, you.

God knows, if I don't get that right the first time from now on, I'm probably going to have a conniption.

So, IMHO, (I told the iPod), Reknowned Agent is SO RIGHT.

Of course, by the time I'd gotten done with this argument in my head, Sanderson pointed out exactly what I just said, but in his own words, and more eloquently.

But I never said I was a solitary genius.

I have:

1) Become relatively adept at using Minnow's tiny keyboard, to the point that when I tried to check my mail on Dann's laptop, my fingers couldn't adequately reach to all the keys the first time I typed my password. I am slightly concerned about going home to the desktop tomorrow, but I guess if I'm back to laptop usage as my main writing computer, that's no real hardship--I'm more likely to get out to the coffeeshop some weekends, this way.

Mostly, I'd just like to be fluent with both keyboards, all the time. I have this vision that someday I'll be able to come home with my Great Ideas, and when I start dinner, I'll sit down at the dining room table in between frying things. I'll let you know how that goes.

2) Gone for a run. I did 5 of 7 60-second jogs/90 second walks in the Couch to 5K running plan. Naturally, I'd like to have done 7 of 7, but I decided that I'd give myself a chance to get up to speed before cracking any whips. The goal is to get two more in of at least 5/7 in the next week. Weds or Thurs, and Sat or Sun. We shall see. The wind was just perfect off the lake for the first/last chunks of my run, drying all my sweat before it appeared. I didn't start sweating noticeably until I went inside. Running would be a hell of a lot easier if it was always like this.

3) Added 2000 words of necessary material to my novel. Connective tissue, explanatory tissue, character development, tension-building stuff. Booyah.

I know that at least half of what has made this novel work is that I didn't shy away from writing longer works for a while, as unsaleable as they are. This novel, frex, developed out of a 12k word story. At the same time, I know that simply finishing loads of short stories helped me with the comprehension of overall story structure. And I'm sure that all my false starts to the six other novels I've written helped me, too, in spite of the fact that they were not completed. But. The single biggest thing that contributed to finishing this novel was the threat of library school that I held over my head. I could be content being a librarian. But I wouldn't be content like I am right now--even now, book half-rewritten, unpublished...

It's the difference between marrying a good guy and the right guy for you, I suspect.

4) Did a jack tonne of more research for this book. Every time I think I'm getting somewhere, I scratch something and uncover a billion more things I didn't know or think to know about 1489 Romania. Like, it didn't really hit me until recently that jannissaries were relevant to this setting. Ah, DUH. So, last night, read up on devshirme and figured out that, no, that doesn't play a huge role in the book, but it's a factor--in the culture, and in at least one character's background.

5) Stuck to Phase 1 of the South Beach Rewrite Your Eating Life Plan. Being at the lake and NOT eating cheetos, ice cream, cookies and red licorice at whim? BLASPHEMY. But I did it. Just eating like a normal person at the lake is hard--actually, maybe harder, in some ways, because you don't have the diet to fall back on. But we're about an hour from leaving, and I haven't even opened the bag of Twizzlers sitting on the counter. The hardest part was not getting any potato at dinner, and not getting chips with lunch. But I lived to tell about it. That would make tomorrow one week in on my low-glycemic index carbs and no refined anything effort, and I could already tell by Friday that some of my pants were fitting looser. Lunch today was Brussels sprouts and buffalo burger, which I rather enjoyed. About three days ago, I thought I might kill for a piece of fruit. Today--eh. We'll see what I think at the end of the week. Interestingly, the dairy at this phase has not set off my lactose intolerance...

Home from the workshop, and busted. I got more than adequate sleep every night but I'm still tired. Of course, in spite of the fact that it may not seem true, I do test as an introvert, and the experience was pretty intense in that regard--even though (I think) I stayed very rational and pragmatic and did not take the burden of everyone's good time on my shoulders or anything silly like that. My little introvert brain was taxed nonetheless.

Right now, I seem to have the ability to comb through sheets of manuscript pages and pull out the ones with marks. Seriously. That's all I got. Oh, and I can pet the cat, too.

*pulls out MS pages with Red Markings On Them*

*peers*

steve_buchheit is apparently from some elvish race. He writes in runes.

Anyway, back to our story of Workshop Recovery.

I was making time a little too well on the drive home, so I decided to stop at the Leila Arboretum. I've been looking for a labyrinth to walk for a few years, but only recently discovered the World-Wide Labyrinth Locator--which tells me that there are something like 38 labyrinths within a reasonable drive of my house, and at least three that are as close as the nearest Whole Foods. And yet, I've still not managed to get out to one since discovering this pertinent set of facts. But! The Leila Arboretum has a labyrinth, so I walked it.

I was at low ebb after I dropped Amy and Larry off at the airport. There's something about any big event that, once it has passed, sort of glumifies me for a bit. So, the labyrinth was an attempt to de-glum, and it largely worked. I was back in reasonable spirits by the time I hit the highway.

And, of course, now I'm home, and I'm staring at this novel rewrite and wondering where to start.

Back to sorting MS pages... And petting the cat.

setting

We are on Hastings Point, workshopping novels. The weather the first day was great, and we all went on a nature walk (except for steve_buccheit, who was still en route when we went) down around Elmwood Beach, saw wild ladyslippers, unfurling ferns, trillium, dogwood, and skunk cabbage. And lilies of the valley, which were the whole goal. Mayflies and gnats are everywhere, but at least it was very windy a few days.... and rained a lot... anyway, we got a nice afternoon yesterday, but we were trapped inside critting. Today looks good. The lake is blue, and the sun is bright.


plot

Critiques are done, and life is good. We crammed four crits in yesterday, rather than leaving one isolated on its own for this morning. Should we do this format of critique again (which I'm still debating), or even really any other format, I don't think I'll plan in an iso-crit again. Maybe leave Sunday as a buffer zone for spillage? Or just leave it open for the travelers. We'll see.

Critiques in general seemed to be successful/helpful/satisfying for people. I think blood was let, but it all seemed productive blood, and no one had to jump in the lake, which I believe people had to do at Milford the year I was there... I amused myself by guessing how kaiweilau writes novels, and being validated. (I guessed she was a non-sequential writer. She is. Though my guess was more lengthy and detailed than that.)

I, of course, did not have That Brilliant Revelation on my novel, but that probably wasn't going to happen anyway, and hey, I sort of had That Brilliant Revelation a few weeks ago, anyway. It's really a matter of putting it into action. Or words.

characters

toriw7 has been aiming cameras at us on the sly throughout the event, and kaiweilau has taken up residence as our chef. dendrophilous, who brought sylvrilyn up from IL with her, steve_buchheit, and Larry of No Known LJ, round out the group. kaiweilau is conducting an anthropological study of the Midwest, and we have taught her how to collect kindling, how to build a fire, and how to toast marshmallows. (This seems fair payment for her excellent culinary skills: last night she created a French/Italian cassoulet for us, and the night before we got a Thai/Indian curry. Both full of vegetables and served over brown rice, which allowed us to feel virtuous when we scarfed down s'mores later.)

For non-critique group events, we went with three rounds of Cranium, which resulted in some pretty good moments. Larry of No Known LJ, for example, did a stunning rendition of Dances with Wolves in charades. steve_buccheit and I proved to be an excellent team, so much so that they forcibly split us up later.

goals

We are about to hit up Sandy's for breakfast.

motivation

For we are hungry.

From the Packing Heat podcast:

Describe your main character(s) in one word. Demonstrate the word throughout the book, but never--not even from the mouth of another character--relate the word and the character.

( mine )

---

From learningtoread (at this post here):

Give your main character an assignment: Tell me 20 things you've learned about life by the beginning of this book.

( mine )

---

From Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass, Secondary Character Development.

Pick a secondary character who aids your protagonist. Write down the character's defining quality, and the opposite of that. Create a paragraph in which the character demonstrates the opposite of that. Then create an inner conflict: what does the character most want, and what's the opposite of that? How can this character want both things simultaneously? How can they be mutually exclusive?

( mine )

Taking down Strunk & White--but more importantly, taking down the passive voice hate:

"Use the active voice" is a typical section head. And the section in question opens with an attempt to discredit passive clauses that is either grammatically misguided or disingenuous.

Of course we love active, even aggressive, prose that sweeps us along. But passive voice is not usually at fault when writing gets passive. Too much was/wereing and passive protagonists are often at fault--not the passive voice. Passive voice itself is flavor, the marbling in the meat, and varies sentence construction pleasingly. Personally, I am happy when Word's "grammar" catcher bitches that I have used the passive voice 2% of the time in my work. 2% seems like a goodly amount to me.

Public Domain Curator at Anthology Builder

Okay, Nancy Fulda announced this yesterday, so I will share it here now, too: I'm the new (and first) Public Domain Curator for Anthology Builder.

I've loved Anthology Builder since the moment I first heard of the concept, and have been happily shuttling my stories over there in exchange for the glee of building custom anthologies (and, of course, for my share of the 10%(ish) author royalties that get split amongst each anthology's authors).

I'll be selecting public domain works to include on the site, and building anthologies, and generally having a good old time over there. And if there's an older story you've been hoping to find on the site, do let me know--I suspect Nancy will build me a suggestion form some day, but until then, I still have email and whatnot.

Have I finally found a hobby?

On a more mundane plane, I got my birthday present from my husband last night, which is a pretty sweet little photo scanner that also does negative and slide scanning. So, all my pre-digital photographic adventures will be coming to a Flickr account near you... slowly, of course. I scanned three strips o' negative last night, and only uploaded three pictures of Poitiers. I'm... pondering color correction and things like that. From a less useful angle, I'm also pondering the interesting textures from film that seem missing from digital--am I crazy? Am I sane? Who knows. And finally, I'm pondering the awesomeness that will be the uploading of all my college photography efforts. Oh, my secret artsyfartsyness, you will soon be revealed to all.

The question after THAT, of course, is... what if I did make my own dark room and develop my own negatives again? I could (theoretically) avoid the expenses of paper and enlargers by skipping that and just developing film to scan, and thus live in some crazy hybrid film/digital world. I'm not sure what the value would be, but I do keep saying that I need a hobby. This would actually be less expensive than replacing my film SLRs with digital, and I could explore that texture stuff I've been pondering. And plus... Ansel Adams wrote a whole damn book about negatives. There's something there. ;)

Novel rewrite

I'm having some very circular thoughts. There is a tiny but important piece of story logic that is missing from my novel, and my agent has offered suggestions--good ones--to nudge me into the right direction, and she's certainly right that I need to address it, but my brain is just running full-tilt around the mulberry bush and never finding the damn weasel.

If this were my dayjob, I'd send Outlook invites to a meeting and make people brainstorm with me on large pieces of paper.

Are writers allowed to do that?

Actually, I sort of think I need to ask iuliamentis and vidensadastra to read the book and then get them very drunk and see what comes out of them. Unfortunately, they're not coming to Penguicon. Hrm. I may be jaunting off to Chicago sooner than I thought... Of course, the workshop is coming fast, and maybe I can pick the workshoppers' brains hard while I'm there.

The rest of the rewrite, I can handle easily. Most of it is very minor stuff that I have figured out how to solve with a sentence dropped in here, a paragraph there. There is one largeish (10,000 words) section that needs a thorough rewrite, pretty much ground up. But not bad, overall.

Agent hunt

I'm supposed to be done with agent hunting, right? And I technically am. Except that, while my first three queries yielded me an offer of representation--they also yielded two rejections. And hey, my response to my first rejection was to send out six more queries! And I've since gotten two rejections, and two requests for partials. And one of the partial requests came in the snail, and I have to snail back my regrets letter. And who knows what the last two responses will be? Anyway. I'm not done, in other words.

When I am fully, finally done--is there anyone out there agent-hunting (or about to be) who would find it useful for me to perform a post-mortem on the hunt? Or is that just... annoying?

Being Erica

Am I the only person watching this show? I really love it. I know it's already aired in Canada, and it's being aired on the semi-obscure Soap Network in the US, but for serious, it's a good show, it passes the Bechdel test all over the place, and to me, it reads like an excellent take down of chick lit. You have a quirky heroine who actually accepts that her choices have led her to where she is, and instead of Bridget Jonesing her way through life, tries to come to terms with her past, owns and apologizes for her mistakes, and otherwise recognizes that one's 30s are actually a pretty good time to grow the hell up. (Not that I don't love Bridget Jones; I'm just very weary of all that has come after it. Bigly weary.) Plus, there's a time travel component. Which is always going to sell me.

So. Yes? Am I the only one watching?

Plot used to be my bugaboo, and structure. And then I worked on those a lot. And I'm better. Not a genius or anything, but better. And I'd like to believe my sentence level work is better, too. And while I still have trouble with beginnings, they are better. And my middles are doing quite well, thank you. And I'm doing better with endings.

Which means the thing I was pretty confident about before I started working on all the stuff in the above paragraph has retreated in the rear-view mirror. And that thing is characters, and emotional depth.

So, dear writer friends, what, if anything, have you done to work on your craft in that area? Any books you've read? Any exercises you've done? Anything at all?

I just wrote "sore paw" for "sore hand." Why? Because I'm writing from a storytelling place in my brain that I think my grandfather installed when I was three or four, and "sore paw" is what he would've said.

Just thought I'd note that.

(I had to change it back to "hand." My character would say "hand.")

I have reached the magical conclusion that if I just finish the farting around with the rewrite on this novel, I can work on something else!

DUH

I've been really buckling down with The Herbalist's Apprentice rewrites, which I'm of course supposed to be done with, but.

But. It's always but.

But, in this case, is a matter of lack of confidence in a certain skill set. Mostly the "how to load in backstory in a non-boring way." And while I know that the secret to that is a certain amount of tension, plus also conflict, I am not always confident that I have used this knowledge. In other words, I've got some theory, but I do not have full control over practice.

But. I can't be sad. Because.

I'm super-excited. Because I've just run into another fantastic Coincidence of Romanian Folklore. Like when I first ran into my zmeu after I'd been writing about him for months.

Do any of you recall me wandering around, overthinking the presence of the River Lethe in my novel? And searching for its opposite, which doesn't seem to show up much in, say, all the mythologies I'm familiar with?

Romanian folklore has it. Apa Vie, the Water of Life.

It's only like, the third biggest plot point of the book.

I suppose when you're writing from archetypes, it's not so big a deal when you... find an archetype. But I'm struck by how I keep stumbling into the correct details.

This is so the right book.

Today, I would've liked to figure out how to interweave subplots in a way that doesn't drag down the pacing of my first ten chapters.

Instead, I figured out that sunset was around 10 PM and sunrise around 4:30 on the first day of my novel, and that the Julian calendar was probably in play, and that I should adjust my comprehension of dates by about nine days.

I also put Google Translator through a workout. The government post of Hatman was obscure to me. I liked many of the things that Google Translator suggested (Lord of the Sofa, Governor of Divan), but my favorite by far is "Great gig leader."

Those that can't rewrite, research.

*cuts scene with tunnel and gathering yew & santolina*

It wasn't that important of a scene, right? I mean. It didn't do anything that I don't do better later on, and it's clogging up my "getting to the good stuff" momentum.

*frets a little*

Also, I need to take a later pair of scenes and slot them in where the cut scene goes. No big deal, right?

It's just... I'M NOT A MASSIVE RESTRUCTURER.

It doesn't matter if it's the right thing to do, it just seems wrong to me. Someone told me the story in this order. (That someone was me, but still.) Putting it in that other order seems like a lie. This is where I have that moment where I go, "They're going to be able to tell you just made this all up." Because apparently my brain doesn't believe any of this is actually fiction. Or else, Brain doesn't know what fiction is. Probably the latter.

Also, restructuring on this level makes me feel like I wrote this non-sequentially.

And I don't do that. For god's sake, I'm not mrissa!

*pants a little*

Okay. Okay. I can do this. If I screw it up, it's okay. I have backups.

So, I dumped my whole (Word doc) novel into yWriter 5--or actually, I'm in the process of doing that. There's a lot of cut-paste involved.

It's amazing how the things I thought were okay become glaring when laid out in a different structure. Like... 40,000 words before we get to the REALLY GOOD STUFF. I mean, everything before that is enjoyable (I think), but it ends up being a somewhat long, not totally necessary build-up, the way the plot/structure currently lay there.

But... rather than cut a bunch of the first 40k, I'm planning to have them pay off more throughout and later. More foreshadowing. Bigger conflicts. Punchier dialogue. Stronger tension.

Oh, sure, when I put it like that, it sounds easy.

Ha.

The good news is, I think... it's vaguely possible that I sort of know what I'm doing.

It's probably illegal to be this confident, right? With no novels published, no agent, only my second completed novel, etc.? I mean, I'm no genius, but I know I can fix it.

If you had seen me during the (endless) rewrites on novel #1, this confidence probably makes even less sense.

*shrug* Well, it's not like I've been doing nothing for the past five six years, I guess.

Where did last week go? Where? And where will this one go? No idea, I just know that there's a ConFusion at the end of it. (I have blown past the point of being excited about cons for their own sake, and am now at that stage where I love them for their opportunities to connect with friends. I think this makes me some sort of curmudgeon? Or something?)

This weekend, I went to sunnydecho and mickshadeland's wedding, and it was easily the most low-key wedding ever. We sat around the living room and signed papers (I was the witness for the bride). Then we went out to the Blue Nile with about fifteen other people and ate until we burst at the seams. So, that was pretty much awesome, in spite of the weather. I need to upload the wedding pictures, like, yesterday, but it'll probably be staged throughout the week.

I just watched Lost in Austen. It was nice to have a Jane Austen fix of any sort. ( Spoilery bit )

The weather has continued to suck in new and more varied ways, though I guess today wasn't all that bad. It got up into the 20s and some things melted.

On the writing front, I've reached one of those points where nothing I do seems like enough, and yet I can't keep track of everything. It's not actually that different than usual, I guess, but it frustrates all the same.

On the reading front, I read:
4) The Shattered Rose by Jo Beverley

( Summarize )

Now, I need to go re-read everything I've forgotten about Lieschen the Bee-Maiden, and digest the comments I've gotten on my attempts at writing a query letter for The Herbalist's Apprentice. And sleep. Must sleep, too.