When we left our heroes ...

[truepenny]

The thing about page proofs is that for me, at least, they constitute an enforced leave of absence from actual writing. My supply of virtue is finite.

This is both bad and good.

Bad, because it completely disrupts my rhythm, and because I find proofreading something as long as a novel (never mind two in a row) exhausting all out of proportion (you would think) to the actual work involved. I want a vacation, and with my deadline now slightly less than four months away, I can't have one.

This is the sound of me not panicking.

But it's also good, and it's good because, even though I haven't been working on Summerdown, I've been thinking about it. In fact, I've been thinking about it in a way that I couldn't if I were working on it.

I'm detail-oriented. I build my forests one tree at a time, and obsess over making every tree perfect. This means that I rarely have much of a sense of what the forest looks like and sometimes look up to discover that my individually beautiful trees haven't come together into a forest at all.

Or, to kick out of the metaphor, structure is not my strong point.

I'm finding Summerdown both difficult and rewarding on that front, because it is the last book of a four-book series, and there's a lot of baggage from the first three books that still has to be dealt with. But at the same time, the book has a story and an arc of its own. Balancing the new arc with the old baggage is hellishly tricky and is making me think about the advisability of never writing a series ever again.

So the past couple weeks, while fighting the page proofs of The Mirador and A Companion to Wolves, I've been thinking about the structure of Summerdown and about the timing of the various plot strands. And coming to the realization that the current state of the novel is seriously out of whack. The baggage is not going to wait around until my heroes have time to deal with it, because that's not how baggage works.

Thus today, I am retconning. The fraughtness of Chapter Three increases!

Comments

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Well, they wouldn't be your boys if they weren't living insanely complicated lives, usually as the result of Old Shit they thought they'd managed to put behind them. Silly things! EVERYTHING will come back and bite them in the butt. You'd think they'd know by now, and wear iron underpants.

Also, I'd like a vacation too. Instead I get to go to Kansas City and see my mother.

[ex-paulskem.livejournal.com]

"But it's also good, and it's good because, even though I haven't been working on Summerdown, I've been thinking about it. In fact, I've been thinking about it in a way that I couldn't if I were working on it."

I try with each novel to designate a day here and there in which I consciously choose not to write and instead merely think about the book. I've always found it helpful and have come up with some of my best scenes/twists/ideas during the downtime. I think it works because I'm well into the narrative structure of the book, have a good sense of the characters' heads, and then remove the pressure to tap at the keys for a day and lo! Heretofore unknown ideas flow.

Sounds like an "enforced" period worked well for you here. :-)

And hello, btw. I pick up your blog through The Monkey King's fl.

[gardensoil.livejournal.com]

Wow! All that progress! I love what you wrote at the end, about baggage not waiting around for the appropriate moment. *g*. How true! I suddenly have this vision of (for instance) your three protagonists trying to walk carefully through a mine field of baggage triggers. And that what explodes in their faces actually *is* part of the story itself whether they like it or not:)