Six Sentence Sunday, 28 August 2011 (The Lost Pissarro)

Posted on August 28, 2011 by epbeaumont

She shook her head, to clear the dream: she’d slipped, momentarily, into the person of a raven soaring over a line of knights on horseback. Clearly not her real self.

The unicorn foal not twenty paces away shook its head in imitation and stared at her with its wide golden eyes. She would have frozen… but she didn’t. Somewhere, some horse-borne ancestor woke and smiled, smiled with her whole body, and extended a hand for the foal to sniff. It came forward, on its young white legs, and nuzzled her gently, just as the library lions had done, only here it was feathery-soft lips rather than sun-warmed stone.

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The ten-percent solution: a tale of literary liposuction

Posted on August 27, 2011 by epbeaumont

I’ve heard this advice from multiple sources: Write, and then cut 10%.

I’m here to say it works. No, I’m here to say how it works. Between 5 August and 19 August, I banged out the draft of my superhero romance novella (for the 1 September submission deadline), fast and loose. All the stuff in the cookpot went in there, and I wrote the scenes as they came to me. It came to 33,000 words, because I wanted room to cut.

Once I was done, I made a spreadsheet with the time, place, actors and action for each of the scenes. I stared at it for a while, and then made like a film editor and spliced them into a rough cut that made sense, more or less. Along the way, I removed approximately 1,500 words of stuff that was just plain redundant.

I sent the resulting manuscript to my Brain Sister and beta-reader, in the usual fear and trembling.

A month-long timeline doesn’t leave a lot of time for angst. I stared at my manuscript and started picking away, a paragraph here and a paragraph there, to see if there were any more chunks that could be cut. I found about 300 words’ worth, and I wasn’t even sure about cutting them.

So I did the math: how many pages, how many words I needed to cut, how many words per page, how many words per line. And today, for eight hours, I went through my 147-page, double-spaced, 31,500-word manuscript and cut every superfluous word. I vacuumed out every particle of bloaty word-fat: call it literary liposuction. I even got into character by wearing my favorite set of brightly colored scrubs.

At the end, I even had a working title: Annie Brown and the Superhero Blues. The Works in Progress page has been updated accordingly.

Now I have to write the synopsis (out comes the scenes spreadsheet) and the cover letter. But that’s tomorrow morning. Tonight, we kick back, relax, and read somebody else’s final draft by way of relaxation.

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Lessons from National Novel Writing Month: a charter for your novel

Posted on August 25, 2011 by epbeaumont

One of the really valuable lessons of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is thinking out what you love and what you hate in a novel. In Chris Baty’s classic manual for the event, No Plot? No Problem!, this is called the Magna Carta, for the good reason that it’s a practical, specific constitution or manifesto for the kind of novelist you are.

There are two Magna Cartas (or Magnae Cartae, if you’re going to get fussy about the Latin), and they’re simple to write. They’re just lists.

Magna Carta 1: List everything you love in a novel. For myself: characters with eccentric skill sets (e.g. soldier of fortune and CPA, art forger and shaman); drama involving social issues; elegant three-act structure; inventive language; funny dialogue; hackers, nerds, and artists; family drama; ghosts, time-slips, and crossing of worlds; stream-of-consciousness; references to deep history; characters from many different ethnic groups and social classes; realistic tradecraft (including: anatomically accurate sex scenes and fight scenes, clinical correctness wherever possible, details of how given work is actually done).

Magna Carta 2: List everything you hate in a novel. For myself: flip, anti-intellectual POV characters; excessive product placement; narrow economic perspective; sex scenes with stupid euphemisms for body parts (you know the ones I mean); unthinking replication of the official version; stereotypical characters who are treated as props (e.g. the stoic Indian, the Negro maid, the throwaway Femme Fatale), etc.

Magna Carta 1 has been the inspiration of many a novelist; Toni Morrison and the detective fiction writer Amanda Cross both cite “writing the stories I wanted to read” as a major motivation to their entire writing careers. Baty’s version of “write what you want to read” is unique in that he includes the Dark Side.

Together with the Pleasure Principle (do what feels good and avoid what doesn’t), the two lists are your guide to really fast draft. What’s hard about that?

Nothing, and everything.

  • It makes you stand up for what you like, and name what you don’t.
  • It makes you admit that you like stories, and there are worlds you prefer the the one you live in. A successful storyteller is an inveterate and highly skilled daydreamer, and we’re already in violation of a major tenet of the industrial world there: what are you doing in the dreamtime, when you could (and should) be in the Real World So-Called, nose to grindstone and making money for somebody else?
  • It makes you question authority. We all have lists of books that are ‘classics’ but that we loathe with a pure and abiding hatred. It can feel really scary to write them out, and say why you hate them.
  • It makes you name your kinfolk, and call out your enemies. What’s your personal canon, the books you love with an abiding passion? What specific things do you love in those books? What makes those characters or places show up in your dreams? And on the flip side, what’s wrong with the novels you hate, and what novel should have been written instead? As writers, we do have the power to write our own version, and if it’s sufficiently powerful, it can supersede the previously accepted one.
  • It’s subversive, because it might just lead to action. What kind of a novel do I love? What kind of novel am I going to write this November, or maybe start writing right now?

And if you’re a bookish blogger, these two questions can keep you supplied with topics for the next month of Sundays.

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Novel soup, or how to cook a superhero romance

Posted on August 22, 2011 by epbeaumont

Novel pre-writing is a lot like making soup. Here’s the stuff I threw in the cookpot for my Superhero Romance project, currently in raw draft and being beta-read:

  • Superhero romance. OK, for some reason I liked the setup. I read superhero comics when I was a kid and I associate them with serious fun. And of course there’s all the built-in drama of Secret Identities and such. Since the call said I could do M/M, F/F, or M/F couples, I decided to do one of each. The call also specified ‘no fanfiction’ which perversely inspired me to create this story out of nothing but borrowed ingredients. I went to our pals at Wikipedia and looked up Shakespearean comedy, because Bill the Bard did a fair bit of fanfiction himself, and knew how to do a remix on a classic and make it sing new songs.
  • I’d been talking with my Brain Sister about the current (dubious) notion that we’re living in “post-racial” America, so it seemed obvious to make my heroine a second-generation African-American superhero.
  • Bill the Bard, of course, gave me the idea of star-crossed lovers, and a small cast with lots of family conflict.
  • Again inspired by the ‘no fanfiction’ rule, I decided to introduce lots of popular culture references, so our heroine, Annie Brown, wears glasses that are “the standard Clark Kents” and another character refers to “Lois Lane Syndrome” (having a romantic or sexual fetish for superheroes).
  • Oh yes, and I saw the first Star Wars movie when I was a kid, and I loved the beat-up interiors and especially the interplanetary bar where just about everybody showed up. I turned it into a café, gave us Bertie the Barista (his mom named him after P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster). I had more fun writing the signage for the café than probably should be legal.
  • Since the café signage mentioned extraterrestrials, zombies and wizards, I decided they had to be on stage. Thus we got the steampunk wizard kids from another dimension, who think that the films of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are documentaries. (And that notion is itself a borrowing, from the film comedy Galaxy Quest) I borrowed one of my own characters, Rhonda the Hired Gun (Registered Intergalactic Soldier of Fortune and Certified Public Accountant) from a spoof comic book (Stella Starling, Space Cadet) that I created when I was 17. The zombies… well, are zombies, so they didn’t require much in the way of characterization, but are distinguished by being vegetarian zombies.
  • The story has no babies or cats in it, so there was a power vacuum for cute, and this place was promptly occupied by the steampunk wizard kids, who are magical tinkerers. Their costuming was inspired by images in Jeff Vandermeer’s Steampunk Bible, and their names… Tristan, Gunnhild and Griselda, come straight out of the Western Canon. I like names with lots of classic resonance.

I threw all of these ingredients in the cookpot, along with the idea that some superheroes might like their day jobs better than their Secret Identities, and that among themselves, superheroes probably had their own notions of glamor and nerdiness.

I gave it some time to cook down (most of July) and then I wrote 33,000 words of draft in 15 days. My nineteenth-century pulp-writer foremothers-and-fathers would be proud.

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Six Sentence Sunday, 21 August 2011 (The Lost Pissarro)

Posted on August 21, 2011 by epbeaumont

The world had shifted around them, and Angie Stavros took a sort of grim satisfaction in it, that now most of the world felt as dislocated as she did. Welcome to my world, she thought as she caught a glimpse into Central Park, a flash of unicorns in the grottoes. Ironically it was a lot safer to go jogging in Central Park now, at least if one feared human predators. She picked up her pace. The wind brought a sense of restlessness and trouble, a wind with no name but very like its cousins who blew out of the emptiness of the Sahara or the ocean voids of the Antarctic. The wind blew her hair into her eyes and tugged at her broad-brimmed hat, and prickled on the exposed forearms under the rolled sleeves of her sensible shirt with its many pockets and its epaulets.

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Goals check-in (September 1 goal): we have a draft!

Posted on August 20, 2011 by epbeaumont

Well, I’ve met part of my goal for September 1 (see last post): the superhero romance is in raw draft, at 33,000 words. I took off some vacation days from Ye Olde Day Jobbe to do that (what better use for vacation?) and banged out 4000 words a day the last two days for the “last finishing bits” and then assembled all of the scenes into a more-or-less finished draft, took out the worst of the typos and removed the date-stamps, and sent it off to my generous Brain Sister and Writing Buddy who has offered to beta-read it for me as well close in on the final deadline.

Meanwhile, I’m writing this on a break from marking the scenes and figuring out the arc so I can find where another 1500-3000 words can be cut. The call was for a 25,000-30,000 word manuscript, and my raw draft weighed in at 33,000 words, which gives me room to cut 10% and remove any loose trailing bits that I decide aren’t relevant to the story.

It’s also a nice moment in which to take a pause and consider what I just did, and how.

The timeline:

I got the notion to follow up on the romance call sometime in early July, but I had two other projects going at that time, so I decided to cut it close and make this my August MiniNaNo project.

Let me correct. It’s really cutting it close. I set myself the original plan of doing a “lost weekend” MiniNaNo and producing 30,000 words in three days. I’ve had 10,000-word days before; unfortunately, that only happens when I have a story chomping at the bit. I got something of a running start, and then had to slow down to give my dreaming brain time to catch up.

Starting on August 5, I pledged to write as much as possible every day, and made time for it. I generally got in a good half an hour in the morning, an hour at lunch and an hour in the evening. When I got completely stuck, I sat down and free-wrote about plotting, specifically what sorts of scenes might be cool or funny. I definitely set out to write something that was comic, with a serious edge (after all, we’re talking race, class, the nerds versus the cool kids, not to mention the nature of heroism). In the spirit of NaNoWriMo, I pushed onward whether it seemed to make any sense or not.

To my amazement, when I stuck the pieces together late last night and then read the result this morning, it actually did make sense.

I’m glad I sent it off to my beta reader before I lost my nerve. I promised it to her by midnight last night, and delivered it at 1:50 a.m. While she’s reading it (and hopefully having a good time), I’m going to get out the Big Knife and start carving like it’s holiday time.

Next post after Six Sentence Sunday: the Secret Family Recipe for this novel, or how to make soup out of random leftovers.

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Writing goals for the next six months

Posted on August 16, 2011 by epbeaumont

It’s better to start small than to promise big things and fall short. I’ve been modest in updating this blog, doing Six Sentence Sunday and the occasional during-the-week update.

Nonetheless, I know myself for a “real writer” now (you know, the kind that really writes). I counted just now and I have eight live projects. The Lost Pissarro has just graduated from “Coming Attraction” to “Work in Progress,” as has the still-untitled superhero romance. So now we have three genuine works in progress, four manuscripts being revised, and a Coming Attraction in the planning stage for November.

My goal for the immediate future (as in, this week) is to finish the superhero romance in first draft for my beta-reader. My Brain Sister and generous Writing Buddy has offered to read it over the weekend and get it back to me with comments. Positive Peer Pressure (owing stuff to my friends) keeps me going. So the progression is as follows:

By September 1: submit the synopsis, blurb, and manuscript for the still-untitled superhero romance. Very scary, but the deadline reminds me to write, dammit, and forget that this is the first time I’m submitting something for publication. It’s not the first time I’ve written in public. The call for manuscripts says that they’ll get back to us by October 1. I know I’m cutting it close, but that’s life.

By October 1: assemble the raw materials for NaNoWriMo 2011. I’m throwing stuff into the cookpot and hoping that it will turn into something fabulous while I’m not looking. Sounds silly, but it’s always worked in the past. If my manuscript is accepted, I might also be doing revisions in October.

By November 1: figure out who the characters are for NaNo novel 2011, and (optionally) give them a fabulous plot in which to try their wings. In the absence of a plot, I trust my ornery and idiosyncratic characters to find trouble of their own.

By January 1: send NaNo 2011 to the fabulous folks who’ve already volunteered to beta-read it, and start the grungy work of dissecting it scene by scene. Last year, I did a spreadsheet of scenes, including who was in them, where they occurred, and what happened. Like a filmmaker, I treat the scene as the basic unit. Since I’m hoping to take some vacation from Ye Olde Day Jobbe at that time, let’s throw two more goals: (1) finish the revisions on The Shape-shifter’s Tale so that I have a finished second draft and (2) start reading about publication options, since the landscape is changing rapidly.

By February 1: Finish third-draft revisions on The Shape-shifter’s Tale, stripping the language down to bare essentials and removing all other fat. Sort through the beta-readers’ responses on NaNo 2011.

Now that I’ve said it in public, I’d better get to work.

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Six Sentence Sunday, 14 August 2011 (The Shape-shifter’s Tale)

Posted on August 14, 2011 by epbeaumont

I walk the colonnade of the vast stadium, its staircases rising past the locked gates. Along the top runs a frieze in which the counties are carved, all ninety-eight of them, geography in alphabetical order. The colonnade curves, outsize, all the more so when I’m four-legged: loping as a dog—once as a wolf, too dangerous a form—or a cat, sliding through the shadows as the roof looms overhead. No one notices me. The air is full of news: sex and territory, the tang of urine and hormones, the enticing odors of possible food, furry and live, or fried and redolent of grease, in the leavings by the trash-cans. Squirrels, mice, the occasional rat—no, I don’t tangle with the rats, I’ve been a rat and I know what they’re about.

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Six Sentence Sunday, 7 August 2011 (Erika and the Vampire)

Posted on August 7, 2011 by epbeaumont

Erika knew who they were, Zack’s band, as if they weren’t totally blatant about it, with a name like Vlad and the Impalers. Vampire rock, with a lead singer named Drakul aka Drake, who used to be Zack. The drummer, Carmilla, used to be a pale little nobody named Cathy. Then there was Igor, the keyboardist, whose acne had cleared up once he became a vamp. They were newly initiated so they could still (sort of) pass for human, with lots of sunscreen and dark glasses and heavy veils and long black coats, the look of drug addicts or the acutely sun-sensitive. They could hide among the crowds of wannabes, the kids who hated the Church of the New Day enough to defy it… or anyway to offend the bland grownups who mealymouthed their way around what really was going on.

Erika’s story takes place in the same universe as The Shape-shifter’s Tale.

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Six Sentence Sunday, 31 July 2011 (The Shape-shifter’s Tale)

Posted on July 31, 2011 by epbeaumont

My job was not a bad job, as my parents reminded me. It was quite a good job, actually, for someone who was not in college (could not be in college), and through one connection or another I had gotten it without having to go through the usual battery of tests: peeing in a cup, and then the cheek-scrape, and the secondary extraction of genetic material. No, I had gotten it roundabout, under the table, and I was the Underground Girl, all around. I got up before dawn, with a sliver of moon in the midnight-blue sky, and only as I was reaching the gates of the University was the sky lightening enough to show color: brass-yellow, metallic and colorless below the horizon, and green-blue and then electric blue and in the vault of the sky, ultramarine, midnight-blue at the zenith and utmost darkness behind me as I turned to the west. Land of the dead, I thought with a shiver.

It doesn’t do to think of the dead; they are my companions at work.

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