writing

The Book in my Head

We dodged a bullet, weather-wise, yesterday. They were forecasting severe storms with baseball-sized hail, with one wave of it hitting during choir practice and the big wave hitting right at the time we’d be coming home from choir. They moved rehearsal earlier to try to avoid the big wave, and we just had to hope that the earlier wave would be more scattered. I only had two kids show up for children’s choir. We ended up not getting any of the earlier wave where I was, so I got home before there was any bad weather. The big wave seemed to be a lot slower than they expected and it wasn’t too severe by the time it hit us. Still, it was enough to wake me up when it hit just after midnight.

But that gave me a chance to think about the book. I’m currently struggling with a big disparity between the book that was in my head and the book I’m actually writing. The book I’m writing is probably better than what was in my head in a lot of respects. It has more conflict and more nuance and detail. But none of the scenes I had planned fit the story I’m writing. The big-picture plot is still good, but the scenes to carry out the plot no longer work.

I realized that when I was nearing the end of the scene I was writing and I didn’t know what would happen next, so I didn’t know how to end the scene. I went to look at my outline for the next few scenes, and none of them worked. I’d already dealt with some of the planned story beats, which eliminated some of the scenes, and there’s other stuff going on that I don’t have scenes planned for.

So that means I need to do a little regrouping today. I did figure out some things that can happen with the next scenes while I was being kept awake by thunder, but there’s some fine tuning to do.

Crunch Time

I’m coming up to a really busy phase. This weekend is Easter weekend, and I’ve got a lot of singing to do.

Meanwhile, I’m working on communications for the Nebula Awards weekend for SFWA, so I’m doing a lot of admin-type work, relaying info to people and coordinating things.

And I’m trying to get some writing done, making slow progress on the book as I try to figure things out. The book that comes into being once you start writing is often very different from the book that exists in your head before you start writing, and reconciling those two books is often a challenge. I’ve found that I have vivid scenes in my head that no longer fit into the book that develops once I’ve started writing. It takes some effort to find out how those scenes could fit. Sometimes, they have to go. They may be lovely, but they no longer have anything to do with the story.

I’m also still gradually working on clearing out and organizing my office. I’ve found actual floor area. It’s very exciting. I’ve also realized just how many books I have. I got my bookcases organized and even had some extra space — and then I found the boxes of books in my closet. Most of those books fall into the “to be read” category, so I need to start reading from the TBR pile more often. But at the same time, I’m trying to read more current books to stay on top of what’s being published. It’s a real dilemma. I think I’m going to ruthlessly cull the TBR books down to only those I have any interest in ever reading.

So, that’s my life until late May. The choir stuff will ease up after this weekend, and then I’ll finish children’s choir on May 1. I guess it’s just the next couple of weeks that are going to be super crazy. The office organization may have to move more slowly until things ease up. I just want to keep making progress.

Losing Beautiful Things

I had a really hard time concentrating yesterday after we got news of the Notre Dame fire. I kept checking the news to see what the status was. I’m so glad it wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed it might be. They’d already removed a lot of the sculptures on the roof and spire because of the renovations, the spire was from the Victorian era and not original, and they seem to have saved the main structure, the rose windows, and the bell towers, along with the organ and the art and relics. But still, the damage is heartbreaking and distressing.

I feel a little guilty that one of my first thoughts upon hearing the news was to be glad that I’d seen the cathedral for myself already, but I suspect I’d have felt worse if I’d never seen it and I knew I’d never get to see it.

When we lived in Germany, we took a day trip to Paris one Valentine’s Day. We caught a tour bus around midnight, drove through the night, arrived in Paris in time for an early breakfast, spent the day there, left after dinner, and got home around midnight. Our first stop after breakfast was the cathedral. It was daylight, but the disc of the sun hadn’t really come over the horizon yet, so it was that gray, flat kind of light. Then the sun came up fully while we were inside the cathedral, and it was like all those windows exploded with light and color. That was the memory that kept coming back to me yesterday while we were awaiting the news about how bad the loss might be.

The other thing I found myself thinking about, oddly enough, was the time travel books by Connie Willis. There’s a short story, “Firewatch,” about a time traveler trying to help save St. Paul’s during the Blitz, and then that comes up again in the novels Blackout and All Clear, which are also about the Blitz. The time travelers are from a future in which St. Paul’s was destroyed in a terrorist attack, so getting to see the cathedral still standing is meaningful to them when they travel in time. I was thinking about that yesterday, that there might be people in the future who wish they’d had a chance to see Notre Dame as it was.

Then there was all the stuff about the destruction of Coventry Cathedral in To Say Nothing of the Dog, with the time travelers realizing they could save the artworks and relics since they were lost to history. Now the future has them, and they’re rebuilding a replica of the cathedral, based on observations by time travelers. The book mentions the theory that it was actually the Victorian-era renovations that caused the cathedral to fall, that if it had been left alone it might not have been totally destroyed. I don’t know how accurate that is, but since a lot of the destruction at Notre Dame involved things rebuilt during the 19th century, I had to wonder.

But the cathedral has been rebuilt before, many times. It may have been started in the 12th century, but it’s been added to, damaged, and rebuilt over and over again over the years. I just hate to see beautiful things damaged and destroyed.

music

The Joy of Mix Tapes

When I wasn’t in choir rehearsals over the weekend, I continued my ongoing organization project, and I’ve found another big stash of things I hadn’t thought about: cassette tapes.

I’m old enough to have had a fairly big music collection from before the CD era, and even after I got a CD player, I had a car with a cassette player until 2008, so I have a collection that includes things I bought on cassette, a bunch of recordings of CDs (so I could listen to them in the car or on my Walkman), and then tons of mix tapes.

For those too young for the pre-digital music era, a mix tape was basically a playlist in physical form. It was a way of putting together a variety of music for listening to in the car, a way of sharing a sampling of things you liked with your friends, or a way of showing someone you were getting to know just who you were musically. I have playlists curated specifically for certain drives or moods or events. There’s the tape I used to play in when I was driving home from Austin when I was in college. I put it in at a certain point on the trip, and just hearing the first song takes me to a particular time and place. There’s a mix tape of movie love themes that I used when I was sick and having trouble falling asleep because of coughing fits. Somehow, listening to the music distracted me from the coughing reflex, and the tape would cut off on its own after I was asleep. There were tapes I made when I was depressed after a breakup, full of angry songs, and tapes I made when I had a crush, full of love songs.

It’s funny how much music on the go has evolved. At one time, a big part of packing for a road trip involved carefully selecting (and finding) the tapes that would go in my carrying case. Then I got the current car, which has a CD player that plays MP3 CDs, and I started burning playlists to CDs. It was kind of like making a mix tape, but I could fit about 11 hours of music on it instead of about 90 minutes. Now, I just bring my iPhone, and it has far more than ever would have fit in my case. I estimate that my packing time for road trips has decreased by at least half an hour, an hour if I don’t make a new playlist for the trip.

I still have some cassette players and do use them occasionally. I’m narrowing down what I’m keeping to things I only have on cassette — especially things that don’t exist on CD — and some mix tapes. I have a few cassette carrying cases that I got when a writing organization I was in got rid of their library of workshop tapes, so I’m only keeping what fits in those cases. Now begins the process of narrowing them down, which is turning into quite the nostalgia fest. I’m going to end up just sitting there, listening to 80s music, at some point, I’m sure. It doesn’t help that there are a lot of “orphaned” tapes separated from their cases, and many of them are unlabeled. It’s like playing a game of Concentration to match tapes with their cases.

Past the Block

I finally got past the tricky scene and not only have moved forward but have gone back to seeing the movie of upcoming scenes in my head, so I seem to have broken my block. I’m not sure why that one scene was so hard. It was what I was working on when I had my little meltdown last month, so maybe I associated it with that. Or it was just that I’d done so much planning for the beginning and got past the part I’d planned. Plus, I’d planned something else, realized that was wrong, and I wasn’t sure how to get back on track once the plans changed.

I’m going into a really busy week, so I’m not going to push myself too hard. I’ve got a big choir rehearsal tomorrow to get ready for all our Good Friday music, my kids are singing Sunday morning, there’s more rehearsing Wednesday, then we’re doing the Faure Requiem Friday night, more rehearsing Saturday, then three services Sunday. And then I will collapse.

This will probably be the week when I get editorial revision notes on my book for Audible.

I’m also gearing up for the Nebula Awards Conference next month. I’m helping with some of the preparation, and it looks like this will be the time when all the proofreading begins.

Meanwhile, I started tackling the upstairs in my ongoing organization project. It has become the place where I stash things as I organize the downstairs. When I got wi-fi, I started moving around the house to work and quit using my office so much, so the office got out of control. I aim to take the office back. I’d like to go back to working up there because I think it will help me stay more focused. I also want to have things organized because that will save me a lot of time in looking for things.

Yesterday, I got through one of the closets, and guess what I found? More candles. Seriously, it’s an issue. I also found some Christmas stuff I forgot I had. I’m putting all the holiday decor together in one spot, all the sewing/knitting stuff together, etc., which should make life easier in the future. It may take me a couple of weeks of half-hour daily sessions, but if I do this thoroughly and deliberately instead of just stashing things elsewhere, it may actually stick.

The Bookstore of My Dreams

Thinking about those (mostly British) “my life fell apart, so I moved to a picturesque village and opened a bookstore/cafe/bakery” books, I was pondering what I’d do in that situation, assuming that hiding in a house somewhere and writing books wasn’t an option. I don’t think it would work in a village, but in a decent-sized city, I think I’d want to open a female-oriented science fiction/fantasy bookstore.

My experience with specialty bookstores, or even general bookstores leaning toward genre, in that area hasn’t been all that great. They tend to be very “guy” spaces. They smell kind of nasty and are fully of creepy customers, and sometimes creepy owners/employees. They can be hostile to girls and women, either playing the “you’re a fake geek girl if you can’t answer my obscure trivia questions” game or drooling all over themselves at the thought of a girl who reads fantasy, so you get treated like a unicorn.

So, do a sf/f bookshop along the lines of some of those romance bookshops, focusing on fantasy, science fiction, paranormal romance, and maybe mysteries. It would be decorated nicely and smell good. There would be a tea shop, so you could hang out and drink tea and read the books you just bought. There might be special themed tea events, as well. Host book discussion groups, maybe some “girls’ night out” game nights. Story times with children’s books (to hook new fans). Maybe throw in some other girl geek type activities, like knitting/crocheting groups, possibly sell yarn on commission from local fiber artists who spin/dye.

Men would be welcome, since you can’t discriminate, but the idea would be to create a comfort zone for women where they don’t have to worry about being hit on, creeped on, challenged for their geek credentials, patronized, or any of the other stuff we have to deal with in geeky spaces. Anyone behaving like that would be asked to leave.

This is highly unlikely to ever happen because it would involve dealing with people on a daily basis, and that’s just not me, plus it would require large amounts of money to start something like this, but if someone wants to run with the idea, feel free and invite me to do a signing.

writing

Transitions

The other day, I was talking about how tricky beginnings are, but what I’ve been struggling with this week is transitions, the parts that come after the big turning points. Particularly, what comes after the first major turning point. The heroine has achieved her initial goal, and the scene after that is the hard part because it has to establish her new situation plus set up what’s going to happen next. She may have achieved what she wanted, but now she’s starting to realize what she’s gotten herself into.

I think I’m on my third version of this scene, and I can’t just leave it and go on, with plans to come back and fix it later. The things established in this scene will play a big role in how the rest of the book works, so it needs to be right. Maybe not the exact words, but the events and the information that’s conveyed.

One problem I had was figuring out the characters. It’s a school-like situation, and my initial number of people involved was really too big to get a handle on, so I cut back. Then I had to develop all the characters who would appear, which also meant figuring out where they stood. Would they be enemies or allies? Who was going to do what as the story moved forward?

But then that made me figure out something new about the plot once I knew where everyone stood. There’s been a lot of going back and forth.

And still I don’t know that I’m quite ready to write it yet. Yesterday, I reached that scene and couldn’t seem to make myself do it. I told myself that I either had to write or clean.

So now my entryway coat closet has been purged, cleaned, and organized. It’s a thing of beauty. I keep opening it to admire it. It had become sort of the “junk drawer” of the house because there’s so little storage in this house. It’s a combination coat closet and broom closet. And, for some reason, it became the place where the candle supply lives. I have no idea how I ended up with so many candles. I think I’m going to have to start doing more things by candlelight to use them all. I like candles, but it looks like I was given a number as gifts, had a weakness for any kind of sale on candles, and then they might have bred in the darkness of the closet.

But today I will write that scene.

Books

Different Kinds of Fantasies

When I gave up on reading the book I posted about yesterday, I decided to switch to something completely different as a palate cleanser and found an old “chick lit” type women’s fiction book by a favorite author on my to-be-read bookcase (it looks like I found a British publication at a used bookstore, and I must have been hoarding it because that genre had become scarce in the US). This one wasn’t so much the shopping and dating in the city kind of book, but rather fits into that subgenre that I think of as “my husband/boyfriend dumped me, so now I’m moving somewhere else to start over, and I’ll finally carry out my lifelong dream of opening a bookstore/bakery/cafe.” (Or restoring old houses, restoring antiques, becoming an artist/photographer, gardening, etc.)

It seems like a huge switch from fantasy, but I suspect the “I’ll just open a business” thing is as much of a fantasy as “I’ll become a wizard,” at least, the way it tends to happen in these books, where the heroines seldom have any money to start with and they just happen to fall into finding exactly the things and people they need, and the village where they’ve moved totally embraces the new business so that it becomes a success (funny, the books usually don’t cover the months later when the new has worn off, the new business is no longer a novelty, and the people go back to their old habits). Still, it’s a fun fantasy to read, to think about starting fresh and making a business out of a talent or interest you’ve always had.

In these books, the heroines always find new love along the way, of course. It may be my current phase of life or my particular interests, but I tend to groan when the guy shows up because it distracts from the interesting part of the book, the setting up the business and meeting the townspeople. Fortunately, most of these don’t follow the romance genre formula in which the main conflict has to be between the hero and heroine. There may or may not be any actual conflict with the guy, other than her having to decide if she’s ready for another relationship or willing to trust another man after the way the last one treated her. There’s not a lot of bickering, and she doesn’t have to choose whether to pursue love or her new business. But I’m still more interested in the baking and the other interactions.

I have at times thought it would be fun to run a bakery, restaurant, or bookshop, but I know there’s so much that goes into anything dealing with food, and a bookshop would be a real challenge in the era of Amazon. It’s fun to read about, but I don’t think I’d want to dive in. Still, reading about people going after their dreams is rather inspiring. I guess it might be fun to be paid to bake. I just don’t want to open an actual bakery.

Then again, there are bookstores with coffee shops. Why not one with a bakery? Or a tea shop with baked goods (I think tea goes better with books, but bookstores always seem to have coffee shops instead).

writing

Tricky Beginnings

Beginnings are such a tricky phase of a book, especially in fantasy. You’ve got to introduce characters, possibly a whole world, and set up the story, and do it in a way that draws people right into the book. I think the most critical thing about a beginning is making readers care about the characters. If they care about the characters, then readers will want to know more about their lives, including their world and the history that affects them.

I got a case study in that last week when I tried to read a relatively recent book that shall remain nameless. This was a YA fantasy release from a major publisher, by a debut author. I haven’t seen a lot of buzz about it other than it being on a list of fantasy releases (I’m trying to be better about reading newish books), so I don’t think it was a “big” book given any kind of lead title treatment, probably the same kind of release I’ve had. And it had one of the worst openings I think I’ve seen in a long time.

There would be a paragraph or so about the current action — what the characters are doing now. Then a few paragraphs of backstory about their world. Then a paragraph of action and another paragraph or two about the world. Another paragraph of action, then some backstory about the characters and their history. And so forth. Very little of the backstory applied directly to what was happening in the present, and I didn’t yet care enough about the characters to care about their history and their world. It wasn’t the sort of thing the viewpoint character would really have been thinking about under those circumstances. The present action was the sort of thing that would have taken all her focus.

The result was that I couldn’t really dive into the characters and come to care about them because I kept getting distracted by the backstory. Because I didn’t yet care, I didn’t care about the backstory and kept skimming over or even skipping it. All the skipping back and forth between the story and the backstory meant I wasn’t really following either. At least in those 1970s fantasy epics that tended to begin with the wizard showing up at the tavern and telling the entire history of the world it was one coherent story instead of skipping back and forth. I kept trying to read on in the book, but I don’t think I ever really attached, and after about page 80 (it took me nearly 5 days to get that far), I skipped ahead and skimmed a few bits, found that my guesses about what would happen were more or less accurate, and gave myself permission to put the book down.

It looked like a fairly common rookie mistake from someone who’d heard the advice not to just dump backstory in but who didn’t quite understand how that worked and didn’t get that splitting up the paragraphs didn’t make it not an infodump. I’m just surprised that the editor didn’t do something about it. I think I would have really been pulled into the book if we’d just had that opening scene, which on its own might have been very moving, and then learned exactly why that event was so significant. Instead, we were told the significance before we saw the event, but instead of making the event more meaningful, I think it took away from the emotion. I did notice that the initial Amazon reviews were fairly harsh on the infodumping, but then there was a wave of “how dare those mean reviewers say mean things about this awesome book” reviews (most of which mentioned receiving a free copy in exchange for an honest review).

I was particularly concerned because the book I’m working on now has a lot of similarities to this book (one of the reasons I was reading it, as it might come close to a “comp” title to compare mine to when marketing it to publishers). In my case, there’s an incident in the heroine’s past that’s utterly critical to understanding the inciting incident, but I didn’t want to put it as a prologue. The solution I came up with (which may or may not stick) was to have an opening scene in which she has to deal with a daily life situation that shows her strengths and weaknesses. She got into this difficult situation because she has a tendency to daydream and get sidetracked, and once she’s out of the difficult situation, she goes back into the daydream, which involves obsessing about a memory about this past event, so then I follow her daydream as a flashback, showing that past event as she remembers it. And then the inciting incident happens and we know why it happens and why it’s important to her. We still don’t know why it’s important to the world since the heroine doesn’t entirely know. There are bits and pieces of what she knows in both the present and in the flashback.

I think (hope!) this will work, so readers will care about her and be curious about what daydream is so distracting, then want to see how this past incident will affect her life going forward.

TV

Musicals on TV

Tonight’s the series finale of the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. In a way, I’ll be sad to see it go because it was fun having a musical on TV, but I think it’s run its course, so I’m ready for it to end.

They’ve done some fun things, starting out looking like it would be a standard romantic comedy — an unhappy New York lawyer runs into her boyfriend from theater camp when she was a teen and realizes that may have been the last time she was happy, so she quits her job and moves to his hometown in California, hoping to win him back, only to find that he already has a girlfriend, and maybe his best friend might be a better fit for her, if only she could see that. And then they kept undermining that expectation. The best friend was kind of a jerk with his own issues. She got into some serious stalking and trying to sabotage her target’s new relationship. She finally got the guy of her dreams, and then we learned that the “crazy” part was literal — this wasn’t the first time she’s done something like this.

There were wonderful celebrity cameos from the world of music and musical theater, like Lea Salonga as the aunt who manages to work karaoke into every family celebration so she can show off, or Josh Groban doing “the song at the end of the movie.” There were so many fun musical numbers from a variety of styles.

But I think they ran out of steam in later seasons, and I can’t think of a way they can resolve the story satisfactorily. There are three guys really into and wanting to be with this woman who’s stalked them, cheated on them and generally messed with their lives, which is a little hard to believe, and now the show is making it look like she has to choose one of them, even though she didn’t seem to be particularly into any of them before they made their big declarations of love. I guess to some extent that’s still a spoof of romantic comedies, where the couples manage to end up together in spite of them having been awful to each other before. They’ve been clever and creative in the past, so maybe they call pull this off.

But in the meantime, here’s probably my favorite song, from back in season one: