Tag Archives: The Test

Changing gears

Posted on by
2

Two days ago I decided to turn my full attention to Novel #2, The Test, setting aside Novel #1 (again), putting short stories on the back burner, and biting the bullet for a major rewrite. There is a lot of Novel #2, and as it stands it’s not terribly well-constructed — although it does have some mighty fine bits. Jane, the protagonist, is a finely-crafted girl, if I do say so myself. The first draft was written without a solid plan, however, and it shows. The plot is intricate, with many overlapping things happening, but the threads are born and fade away rather haphazardly. So, reading over the 600 untamed pages, I came up with a plan of attack.

“This would be a lot easier,” I thought, “if Jer’s Novel Writer could…” and off I went into software design. Now is not the time to be making major upgrades to the software, however. Now is the time to be fixing bugs and getting a good release out, now that hundreds of people are using it anyway. I looked back at the story. Threads. The ability to view the story from different points of view. Those changes sure would make fixing the novel simpler.

Faced with that dilemma, I did what any rational writer/coder would do. I set Novel #2 aside to work on Novel #3 instead. No new JNW features required, just prose that goes beyond storytelling into the realm of literature. Yes, Novel #3 is my Great American Road Novel. I’ve been looking forward to diving in to it for a long time.

While I was in this intensive review process, I had my phone turned off. Some of you may have the impression that I spend my days locked away in my room, writing, never emerging. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Most days I make it to the kitchen and beyond. On this day, however, I declined invitations from Graybeard, from my czech tutor, and from Belladonna. Pretty soon they’re all going to give up on me, and that would suck. So today I’m going to try to not quite spend so much time writing. When I woke I was going to try to go the whole day without writing anything except this, but that was just plain crazy. I am, however, going to try to catch up with people.

As soon as I finish the Las Vegas chapter…

1

Thanks!

NaNoWriMo Kerplop!

Posted on by
14

Normally December for me is a time of hectic productivity for me. Each NaNoWriMo leaves me with tremendous momentum and a story in the vault that likely would never have been written otherwise. I am reminded to write without fear, to get the ideas down and worry about the niceties later. I’ve been away from my main projects for a month and there are things I been looking forward to fixing in them, or new ideas on how to give a particular bit of dialog some extra wallop.

Not this year. I’ll make the word count goal again for the fifth straight year, but given my current lifestyle, that’s no big deal at all. I expect there are very few months in which I don’t write 50,000 words.

There are several reasons for this, I suppose. for one thing, this will be the last time I write anything I dare call a novel without planning it carefully first. I can see the germ of a really fun story in what I did this November, with some true Douglas Adams-style blink-blink moments of complete cultural disorientation that power forward what really is a funny story. Or at least it would be funny if there weren’t vast sections of it that just don’t fit together, and lots and lots of filler, and a few spots that just plain suck.

Another, bigger, reason is that with one novel complete, and another approaching completion (um… sort of…), I am forced to recognize that in the long run adding another unpublished work in the hopper isn’t moving me forward professionally. So as a significant annual milestone I have to look back on the year and take stock of my progress. I finished a novel. The whole damn thing. On the way I deleted and rewrote hundreds of pages, honing the language while (hopefully) not eradicating the soul. So that’s a good thing.

It is far less than I had set for myself to accomplish in the last year, however. According to the timetable I set out at the end of last November, I am supposed to be finished with The Test, and well under way with my American Road Novel, tentatively titled The Fish. The Test has some brilliant moments (if I do say so myself), but lacks structure. It’s taken longer than I expected to get it under control, but that’s all right. It’s big, and one of my challenges right now is to split it into two satisfying stories. (I will not put out of these so-called “series” which is really just a single, rambling story. I hate getting to the end of a book only to discover that when I shelled out my money for a story, I only got a fraction of a tale. Or, worse, buying a book and finding myself in the middle of a story with no clue what’s going on and who the hell all these people are. But I digress.) So, okay, writing a novel (at least one that doesn’t suck) takes a long time.

The business part of my chosen profession is a bigger problem, however. It is languishing. I have identified likely agents, identified their requirements and prioritized which ones to approach first. The shotgun method is not appreciated, so this will be a time-consumong process. Well, it would be time-consuming if I was spending any time on it. At the rate I’m going now, the ETA (estimated time of agentedness) is, um… (… carry the four, take the hypotenuse…) infinity.

So this December, rather than pick up my real writing projects, I think I’m going to take that energy and channel it where it needs to go. It is a measure of how much I like my “job” that I can use allowing myself to work as a reward when I make progress in other areas.

Thanks!

Shakespeare’s

Posted on by
Reply

I am in a gentle place. There are books all around. At the table next to me earlier was the editorial staff of a new literary magazine working out how to deal with a legal complaint because they have the same initials as another literary magazine here. I should have introduced myself, but they were all so earnest and young and passionate and shit and really I don’t have time for that right now. I’ll drop them an email.

The music here is gentle. There are electric guitars and stuff, but they don’t get too carried away. Right now they are playing a pop song that underneath is Pachelbel’s canon. That’s OK, the P-man laid down a good tune. It is being followed by one of U2’s less aggressive tracks (notably, not With Or Without You, which starts out a lot like Pachelbel’s canon). Mellow white American music. No, U2 is not Irish anymore. Just listen to their music. It’s good, but it ain’t no Bloody Sunday.

The people in this place are, at least on the surface, gentle. They read books, speak softly to one another, and shout into their mobile phones. The crowd is young and more than half are American. Moments ago I broke down and spoke english to the girls at the table next to mine. More on that later, if my battery holds up.

It is a gentle place, and I am editing The Test. By coincidence I am working on the most graphically violent bit of writing I have ever done. It’s a powerful scene, and there’s no getting around it, and to pull my punches would weaken the story, but there’s no denying that it’s ugly. I will be embarrassed when Mom reads it. I’m embarrassed the idea of it came out of my head.

But it did, and there’s no taking it back now. If you want to show the evil of slavery, you have to show what happens to the slaves. While technically slavery is an abomination in the depicted society, the enormous gap between rich and poor has created a de facto slavery that is just as bad. So here I am, contemplating violence and degradation, the crushing of the human spirit, while I sit in a very nice bar drinking very good beer.

OK, the girls at the next table. They are at the table the editorial staff held before, and one of those left a sweater. The presence of the unclaimed wool has chased people from the table even when the rest of the bar was pretty full. A girl came in, and hesitated by the table. I had the laptop closed, conserving electrons while I contemplated the worst things that one human could do to another. I glanced her way and she asked with gestures whether the table was taken. I gestured that it was not. I wondered if she was czech and took me for american or whether she was american and took me for a czech.

The answer came when the waiter approached. She’s American. She’s moving out of town, and she doesn’t know how to say ashtray in czech. I don’t know either, but I don’t smoke. When her friend showed up I broke my vow of Czech to offer sell them the sweater. They didn’t buy it.

There was another girl in here earlier, very pretty, with her German Shepherd and her American Boyfriend (in that order). I don’t know where she was from, because her voice didn’t ring out across the small room. Probably she was czech, then. The dog was a sweetheart. There are no dogs in the scenes of terrible violence I honed to a knife’s edge today. I have that to be thankful for.

Thanks!

The Test – progress report

Posted on by
3

I’ve spent the last few days neglecting my czech studies to work on editing The Test, to at least get it into some semblance of a first draft. That’s left me short on words for other purposes, another reason the ‘ol blog here hasn’t grown much lately. Yesterday, finally, I went down to the Cheap Beer Place and tossed off the Feeding the Eels episode below. Still no Internet here at home, which is how I’ve managed to be so productive with the writing.

There are parts of this story I really like, and some that are, well, not as good. Most of them I am just deleting, as the book is already very big. I have accepted that it is the first part of a (most likely) trilogy, but I insist that each volume has a beginning, middle, and end so they can be read individually. Nothing cheeses me more than picking up a book to read that, unbeknownst to me, has no end.

This book is definitely for grown-ups. The industrial revolution is not pretty when you’re at the bottom.

While I’m thinking about it, any feedback on The Monster Within?

Thanks!