Technical Difficulties

Thank you to everyone who has commented on my last couple posts about being stuck with sympathy and support. I appreciate it very very much, and it does help--if not exactly with the problem at hand, then definitely with my attitude toward it.

A couple people have suggested externalizing the voices (which, I should add in case you are becoming concerned about my sanity, are not literal voices; they're sock puppets for the dialogues I have with myself, which is a pretty much constant feature of the inside of my head), and I thought I should point out, for those who are interested, that I already do that, from time to time. And it is helpful, if only because it lets me make fun of myself. But this suggestion also reminded me--as apparently I needed--that I do better as a writer with a certain amount of ongoing meta-dialogue, and that's been pretty much shut down for the past few months.

It feels like the punchline to a joke: "The good news is, I've started talking to myself again." But hey. Whatever works. And I may have figured out how to fix one of the stories that has been most frustrating for me, because I finally asked myself the right question about the split between the main character and the protagonist.

Socratic dialogue is not my favorite pedagogical technique, but sometimes it really is the only game in town.

Plus: New bread pans! One of my old ones has gone from non-stick to stick, so it was clearly time. And these are very pretty. And red! I'm very curious to find out what the loaves they produce are like.

Minus: I've figured out why I'm not getting any writing done. It's because every time I go to work on something, some part of my brain says, quietly but very emphatically, This is a stupid story.

Now, rationally, I know that's not true. The stories I'm trying to work on right now are neither more nor less stupid than any of the forty-some stories I've published--which is to say: No, they aren't stupid. But knowing that and feeling it are two different things. I'm not quite sure how to deal with this, because it's a really neat piece of self-sabotage: not only does it make working on stories seem pointless, but it makes asking anyone else for help seem equally pointless. What can they do except tell you it's stupid?

I suspect this is partly fallout from having Ace dump me last year--and although Tor was very careful and kind and explicit about the fact that they love my writing and want to publish me, it still hurts like a son-of-a-bitch to know that my career is so fucked up that the only way to do it is to give up my name. I know that it's not a judgment on me as a person, or on me as a writer, but I can't help the fact that it feels like one. And that, in turn, makes it hard to have any confidence in my stories.

So, yeah. If anybody needs me, I'll be over here fainting in coils.

Yesterday, my editor emailed me her editorial notes on Corambis. I need to sit down with my inner twelve year old, I think, and explain that, no, the edit letter is never going to be an affirmation that I am a beautiful, unique, talented, and sparkly snowflake. Especially the edit letter on something I already knew was severely flawed.

But it was still kind of ouch-like, reading her comments and seeing from them just how far the book I turned in was from the book I want it to be.

(I am having a really hard time not devolving into LOLcat:

I HAS EDIT LETTER

DO NOT WANT

Because not only is that factual, it also sums up pretty nicely the emotional register of my response. :P )

In the broadest terms, what's wrong with the book is two things:

1. The first half is not commensurate with the second half. It's like the front half of a pantomime horse yoked to the back half of a mortar. (No, THIS kind of mortar.)

2. As with The Mirador, the first time through this story I was patently thinking with my genre conventions, and that is wrong wrong wrong.

Oh, and one more:

3. There's a scene in the middle which is psychologically true, and which has been bumping around in my head since I started working on this sprawling monster of a story (I don't really see the four books of the series as four separate stories; that's why I can say decisively that book four is the last book, because I've known the arc, in vague and frequently obfuscated forms, all along), but which I did a fairly rotten job of making narratively inevitable. And I somehow forgot to think about aftermath and consequences and all the stuff that makes a scene part of a story instead of an isolated event.

In even broader terms, the book is a quagmire.

Unless I crack and beg for an extension, which will involve throwing off the production schedule, I have to have the damn thing cleaned up, complete with shining canals and habitats for rare species of waterfowl, by December first.

I may be a little tense and irritable for the foreseeable future.

Just so y'all know.

Chapter 12 finished, at 8897 words. I have NO IDEA what the next scene is.

My boring health problems, which are never anything if not inconvenient, have chosen this week to resurge. So let's not talk about how many words I wrote today, all right?

98,000 words of Summerdown written, and I think the rest of tonight had better go to the outright lies synopsis I need to send to my publisher.

In case you were wondering, I am still revising The Mirador. My editor, who is merciful, gave me an extension. (A thing I never had to ask for in my career as a student, and am I having over-achiever guilt about it? Three guesses and the first two don't count.) I've caught several embarrassing continuity glitches, rewritten several bad segues, and cut several clunky paragraphs.

I'm also so bored I can't stand myself.

If you'd like to tell me something good, something interesting, something fun or funny or even peculiar, I would be very grateful.

Chapter 7: 7,895 words

---

A lot of duct tape in this chapter.

On-freaking-wards.

The first four chapter of The Mirador weigh in at 44,668 words. This is 2k down from the previous draft, but not to worry! In Chapter 5, I get to introduce a character who gets to try to tie three different plot arcs together. Whee!

My deadline is three weeks away.

For it is Teh Evol and I hate it.

Yesterday, I completed the revision of "Thirdhop Scarp," bringing it down to a svelte 15,400 words from its original bloated 19,500.

My lesson from this: I ramble when I exposit. I circle, too.

(heresluck is laughing at me now.)

I also discovered that one of the thematic strands I didn't really have room to cope with in "Thirdhop Scarp" is the mirror image of the protagonist's arc in another story I'm working on. So those go together, and that story is accreting a hell of a lot of stuff. Which is good. Novels need a certain amount of baggage before they're ready to fly.

I also figured out--and for this I completely and totally blame David Bowie and "Jump They Say"--that most of what I have of Schrödinger's Parable of the Cat is in fact wrong. However, comma, this revelation is accompanied by many exceptionally shiny ideas about what I ought to be doing instead.

This would be cause for great rejoicing--and in fact is--except for the part where I have to immediately turn around and dive back into The Mirador. We kind of fell off the wagon with that 21.5 pages a day thing (::shakes feeble fist at "Thirdhop Scarp"::), so at the moment I'm just trying to figure out how to make one particular scene NOT SUCK.

I mentioned this to matociquala, and she very reasonably wanted to know why the scene sucked.

And it occured to me that perhaps it would be helpful if I unpacked what I mean when I say a scene sucks.

Because I say it kind of a lot, and I can mean any of several different things.

1. The personages are behaving grossly out of character because I'm forcing them into a plot that doesn't fit.

2. The dialogue looks like they're all very stoned.

3. The idea I had for the scene--back when the story was a Platonic ideal instead of grubby, sweaty, filthy material reality--while really cool, does not in fact work on the page.

4. The scene was written in service of a plot thread from three drafts ago, and is therefore more artifactual than actually utile in the current draft.

5. The scene is not doing enough work.

"Work" is another word that has a lot packed into it. Basically, what I mean is that if you yank a scene out of a story and push it under the klieg lights and shout at it, "JUSTIFY YOUR EXISTENCE!" it should be able to tell you why it's in the story and what it's doing.

And it had damn well better be doing more than one thing.

In this scene, Balthasar looks pretty while angsting is completely insufficient.

In this scene, Balthasar looks pretty while angsting about his abusive stepfather is better, but still insufficient.

In this scene, Balthasar looks pretty while angsting about his abusive stepfather in such a way that shows the reader EXACTLY why he's fallen for the creepy and domineering Percival is pretty good.

In this scene, Balthasar harvests deadly nightshade for a protective ritual for his friend Heloise while angsting about his abusive stepfather in such a way that shows the reader EXACTLY why he's fallen for the creepy and domineering Percival is doing some serious work. (This is assuming, of course, that the ritual for Heloise is a plot element, which--since I just make this whole scenelet up out of whole cloth--we can say, yeah. It is.) Because we get worldbuilding (protective rituals involving poisons) and setting (Where does Balthasar harvest deadly nightshade? Clearly in a cemetery: cue description and atmospherics); plot (why does Heloise need protection, and from what?); character development (Balthasar's abusive stepfather); and character/thematic arc (Balthasar's unfolding relationship with Percival).

Not bad for a pretty gothboy.

And every scene should be doing at least that much work in the service of the story. Yes, it is very much like juggling alligators.

So this particular scene sucks because it is not doing enough work. Now to see if I can fix it.

The revisions of The Mirador are due November first. Thirty-four days from now.

The current draft of The Mirador is seven hundred thirty-one pages long.

So to meet my deadline, I need to deal with

::wrangles with calculator::

a minimum of twenty-one and a half pages of draft a day. (Material which may be added does not affect this number.)

Okay.

This is me not panicking, and remembering to breathe.

... ... ... shit.