Brief boring update

Ugh. Half a year, basically, since I’ve properly posted here, and my novel basically hasn’t been touched in that time.

The trials of pursuing a university degree.

Seriously, though, enough of my brain space is required for novel-y stuff (especially at this stage) that I haven’t even bothered to try working on it: I need to be able to sit down quietly and work on it for a few hours, and with my mind not preoccupied with anything but the story. As long as I have assignments to do, not gonna happen. It’s been depressing me for months.

I’m looking forward to the holidays.

Random note on novel progress

At this point, I still haven’t managed to finish the prologue or edit the first chapter to my satisfaction, so it is to my slight dismay, but greater delight, that I have found myself writing an entirely new novel. It’s a YA supernatural romance, which as a subgenre seems to be remarkably popular with teenage girls at the moment, although in some particulars it’s quite different from the rest of that subgenre.

As the protagonist is a seventeen year old girl in high school, this story is a lot more grounded in reality than the other one.

Another quick update

Something I didn’t mention earlier is that I’ve been looking for Australian agents who take manuscripts for YA fantasy, and so far I’ve basically found one. So, you know, that’s nice that I’ve got one, but I’ll keep looking for others. I know the book writing/publishing/etc industry isn’t that big here, but yeah. You’d think there would be more around, taking YA manuscripts at this time, even taking into account that we just lost 25% of our bookstores, thanks to the collapse of the company behind Angus & Robertson and Borders Australia (thank God for independent bookstores and QBD, that’s all I’m saying). So, I’ll keep looking.

This novel I’m writing is actually unlike my usual writing style – normally I write completely cracked-out, humorous fantasy, but this story is earnest and (a little) sad and thoughtful, and doesn’t really aim for humour.  It just felt like it had to be written, and I was just pouring out something that was already there in my subconscious - and I could tell if I’d written what was supposed to be there because it felt right, whereas if it wasn’t the right thing it felt blocky and obstructive and wrong.

Some authors say that stories write themselves, while other authors say that this is rubbish and they’re in complete control of the story the entire time. I suspect that this is – to use Myer-Briggs Typology Index terminology – a P vs J thing. I know that my writing process is very P – my story changes and evolves the whole time according to what feels right – although maybe that aspect is more of an intuitive thing, now I think about it – but for me, the story is not a construction in which I fill in the bones of the narrative with something more fleshed out; for me the story is more like a winding river, whose path changes as there’s heavy rains or dry seasons.  In summary, it changes, and the story might know where it’s going but I don’t. I can start out with one thing and end up with something that’s gone in a totally different direction. I don’t write properly in order, either – I’ll get flashes of inspiration and write pivotal scenes, and then fill in the story space around it in order until I get more inspiration and write more vital scenes, and as I get to the parts where the scenes make sense I just slot them in. Half the scenes in chapter six, for example, were written, like, six months or more before I got to actually writing chapter six – I’d have to check my notebook for a more accurate idea of exactly when.

Anyway, I’ve got to go, so I’ll cut these musings short and end this here.

Just a general update

I’m still working on my manuscript, despite the fact that it’s been a few weeks since I last posted. The approach of Christmas has gotten in the way, I’m afraid. I’ve been trying to write the prologue when I have the time, which is a bitch, honestly. It’s the introduction to my novel, the part that tells readers whether to put it down or keep on reading, and it has to reflect the rest of the book. Hard. And once I’ve done that, I need to rewrite the beginning of the first chapter to fit with the prologue, as well as do some rewriting of some other parts of the novel that I’ve tagged for rewriting. Sigh.

 

I had a moment of absolute hilarity the other day Christmas shopping, I have to say. I was in the bookstore, specifically in the YA fantasy section, and found myself staring at the newest book in the Mortal Instruments series (which I have not actually read, despire the fact that someone I know loves the books and keeps recommending them to me.) My eyes came to rest on the name of the author, Cassandra Clare, and I suddenly had this moment where I thought, wait. Wasn’t Cassandra Claire the somewhat notorious author of that Harry Potter fanfiction series that started the whole Draco In Leather Pants trope?

So I went home and used my friend Google, and yes. Cassandra Clare is the Cassandra Claire, although I’m not sure what purpose removing the i from her name serves.  I found this spectacularly funny, somehow; the fact that this popular fanfiction author who started all those terrible Harry Potter fics where Draco is the cool, misunderstood bad boy with the witty remarks and so on (note: I’m not saying Cassandra Clare’s fics are bad; just that she started a trend that produced some horrible, horrible writing) is now a Big Name bestselling author.

I was laughing so hard that the person who owns the Mortal Instruments books wanted to know what was so hilarious, and all I could do was point helplessly at the screen.

“Oh my God,” they said, appalled. “She started that?” 

I just laughed even harder.

 

I’ve also recently discovered a website called authonomy.com, where writers who want to be published can post their books to be read and rated, and the top-rated books of a given month will be read by HarperCollins editors. This is an interesting site with some good books (and, admittedly, some that need a lot of work – suddenly I don’t feel so bad about the state of my own novel, lol.) I’ve registered so that I can comment and so on, but at present I don’t plan to post anything; posting your writing online counts as publishing, and generally speaking, publishers do not want stuff that has already been published online. Sure, it makes finding manuscripts that are likely to be well-written and popular easier for HarperCollins, and gives writers a shot at being published if they’ve written good stuff, but it also adversely affects the chances of a different publisher taking on their work. Still, it’s an awesome site, and I will probably lurk there.

More chapters edited

So, I finished editing the first draft of my novel today. Chapter three was mostly fine, and four was pretty okay, I think, once I cleaned it up a little. I edited chapter five, but there’s still something wrong with it, I don’t even know, it just doesn’t feel right somehow but I can’t put my finger on it. I’ll have to leave it and go back and read it again later some other time, and probably with four as well, just to check that that’s okay. Six didn’t need much editing at all.

Probably the best bits in this are some scenes in chapter four, and most of chapter six. I’m not sure what that says, that none of the best bits really start until like 20,000 words in. Six, though, is pretty awesome. I remember the day that I wrote most of it; it was a rainy, pearly-grey day, and I was in the city to do some shopping. Down where I was, it was all wet and sludgy and miserable and slate-grey and unhappy and crowded by wet grumpy people trying to get out of the rain… but then you looked up, up past the shop fronts and up, up past the towering structures of sky-scrapers, to where the sky just opened up into something bright and shining through the blur of gentle rain like something out of Revelations. It was just beautiful, and I thought, I need to write. And then I sat down somewhere quiet, thinking of the beautiful way the pearly grey clouds cut away to this shining patch of light in the sky, and wrote the final chapter of my book, more or less. A big part of it I wrote later, in the middle of the night, but a big part of that chapter was written then, and the inspiration for all of it began with that sky.

Anyway, I’ll leave the draft for a while, come back to it in a day or so, read it with fresh eyes and try to work out what might be wrong with it or where it could be better. I probably need to try and sit down and read it all in one go, too. May end up needing to hand it over to somebody else to read, to find out what’s going wrong or weird or whatever with chapter five, but I hope not. I guess I’ll see. I think it might just be that I don’t like what the character does in that chapter, but I don’t know.

Editing chapters 1-3

Edited the first two and a half chapters the other day. This book is like a song in my heart. When I sat and read it, it was actually better than I thought it was. Not saying it’s brilliant and scintillating, or anything, just that away from it, my mental picture of my novel degrades into, like, grade-nine level writing.

The protagonist is kinda angsty and a bit emo, though, I’ll give you that. But then, they can be excused for that on the ground of circumstances, and anyway, that’s kind of in, in YA novels, right now.

There’s  a shout-out to a character from somewhere else in one of the chapters I’ve just edited; I wondered, editing that chapter, if it’s too blatant. It probably is.

There’s not much to do in these chapters so far, really, although depending on what I do with chapters 4 & 5 (the problem ones) I may need to come back and re-edit/re-write those chapters accordingly.

Beginning editing process

When I started writing this novel, I didn’t expect to end up with such a wealth of material that didn’t make it to the book.

I had to excise a number of scenes as I wrote, and the frustrating thing is that some of the deleted scenes are also some of the most interesting scenes.

Part of the problem was that on some level this book wanted – or part of my brain wanted it - to be a road trip movie. And it’s not. It’s really not. At this point, I think, in part, that it’s maybe trying to turn into an uneasy reflection on moral absolutism, which is really inconvenient. On the one hand, it would probably make the story deeper (and possibly better), but on the other hand it would require a heck of a lot of rewriting to accommodate the change in tone.

Circling back to the issue of deleted scenes again, I think in some ways the book would be better for re-incorporating some of them, but they were all deleted for a good reason. Some of the don’t fit with the completed plot, others don’t match the tone, and so on.

But then, since half the stuff in chapters 4 & 5 wil probably turn out like, totally inconsequential, maybe once I get to re-writing those chapters I’ll have room to fit some of the cut scenes back in without jarring the flow or tone of the narrative. Maybe.

To quote one of my favourite fictional authors for a moment: writing is hard.

 

 

I have a list of mental criticisms unspooling themselves slowly in my brain.

Your villains are 1-dimensional.  Your protagonist is boring and angsts a lot, and not in an identifiable way.  This/that scene is too rushed.  If the good guys are good, this seems like a strangely bad course of action, don’t you think?  Some of this doesn’t sit right.  Is this a collection of pop-culture shout-outs, or a a book? I think you need to re-frame this.

I suspect I may have the material for a much better book here. Can I achieve it?

Chapters one, two, and three are pretty much okay, probably. Chapter six is pretty good, too. (Actually, it’s probably the best.) But chatoers four and five? Damn, they need work, guys. I don’t even know.