Odds Bodds

Arrrrgh! I have been overtaken by ornithopthers. I knew I was in trouble when James started talking about this scene he'd written for the ending of his story. It was clicking into place for him! Soon all engines would be firing and he'd be off writing at his fearsome inspired-James pace.

And so it proved. Since last report, ICARUS DOWN has gone from less than 5000 words at last report -- it's been a month; I've been neglectful!!!! -- to more than 20,000.

And meanwhile in Zombie Land I've hit a dense patch -- not a bad patch, but a hard one to write. I'm working (as previously reported) on the climax to act one of SORROW'S KNOT. I spent all day today at the library, which is a luxurious stretch of time for me. It was the sort of writing where you do one paragraph, get up and walk around, do another -- not because I couldn't get the momentum going but because I couldn't bear the intensity.

This book is (among other things) about what happens after and because of a death. It used to open with said death. Now it's page 80 or something and my doomed character is still hanging on. But only just. Today may be her last day. Or tomorrow. After that I will need to be shipped off to a sunny, quiet place and fed rice pudding and lemon sorbets.

Word count at the moment is 17,020, plus some twenty or thirty hand-written pages to be typed up. So I am not far behind. But the Zombies are going to need some kind of anti-ornithopter shoulder mounted artillery.

I'm approaching the end of the first act of SORROW'S KNOT (an act in this case being a structural third or so, with its own rising action and climax; all in all about 20,000 words).

I know exactly how it ends -- indeed I have good sections of the last scene written in my head. So know I just have to do the bit between here and the last scene, the bit where Bad Things Happen to Good Characters.

And do you know what? I don't wanna. I felt like I was slogging through the word swamps yesterday, but on re-reading I see there is quite a bit of writing and it is strong and solid. But today I really struggled, and didn't get on a roll until I hit a digression/flashback piece, which flowed trippingly off the pen. I did about five pages. And I think I will have to throw all of them out. The climax is no place for a flashback. I am simply avoiding.

But I get myself all worked up sometimes, when I'm about to write real tragedy. There was a piece in PLAIN KATE that I avoided for weeks, just about had a nervous breakdown over. I finally wrote it when I was killing time before doing a radio interview; I was nervous with the usual stage-fright; I sat down at a Tim Hortons and just pounded through the crucial scene, shaking with the adrenaline. I don't in general know where this bit or that bit of my book was written, but that scene I will never forget. I was having cranberry cocktail.

I think I need cranberry cocktail now.

But first, more sleep.

This Friday night found my family, to our surprise, in a hotel in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Our quick errand over the border to Niagara Falls New York too longer than expected, and as we finished up dinner with two getting-grumpy kids we decided it would more fun to stay over and see the sights the next day than drive two hours to get home. So we hit the Zellers (Americans, read: K-Mart) and bought some bare essentials, basically diapers and swim suits. (What's a hotel without swimsuits!?)

We had a wonderful time, though, it's funny.... we saw the great falls, which deserve to be known as the wonder of the world; we saw the world's largest indoor free-flying aviary. But what will the kids remember? That the hotel had a jacuzzi bath and after Vivi used too much shampoo we had bubbles to our chins. And that we feed then chased seagulls a patch of grass outside a strip mall while waiting for daddy to get gas. (We did this several times. In between, Vivian shouted encouragement to the seagulls, who wised up pretty fast: "Here seagulls! We have more bread! You guys on the roof! There's nothing to worry about!")

But we all have our own ideas of excitement, and they don't line up with the Michelin Guide. Here is mine: We came home from Niagara Falls to find a big padded envelope from Arthur A. Levine books waiting for me. It was the first pass pages for PLAIN KATE!

Now, up till last week I didn’t know what first pass pages were, so in case you are in the same boat I'll explain: after a manuscript is copy edited and all the corrections that the author, the copy editor, and the editor agree on are made, the resulting cleaned-up text goes to a type setter. And the book is -- ta da! -- set in type. Of course the days of lead type in racks are gone, but there's still an art to it: making sure pages don't break mid-word, etc, etc. It is not a job for a computer. Font and other page design choices are made at this stage. In the end each page looks like a book page -- except with hash marks where the page will be trimmed, line reference numbers outside the hashes, and the like.



And now I have them for PLAIN KATE. 308 pages of text, plus front and back matter. And can I express my geeky nooby love for this stack of paper? I love the font. I love the fancy do-dad they've chosen to replace the *** mark I use for my scene breaks. I even love the page numbers. Look: they have small swirlies!




Best of all, the whole thing looks suspiciously book-like! I think they are going to have to publish this. It's getting to be too late for them to come to their senses.

 Here's my quote for the day:

"Writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decorations. But no
tree. You're going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a
tree, but we'll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon."
				--Carolyn Chute

something that  came up in another online forum made me dig up the very first poem I ever "translated" -- working from someone else's literal, because I don't speak Italian.  I don't know that it is any good, but I'll put it here anyway.  Maybe I should do something with these pieces someday.
 

I am uncovering/discovering/growing the arc for the first chunk of Sorrow's Knot.   (What to call this thing.  An act?  -- something like a third of a book.)  I began this section knowing only what happened first and where I needed it to end, plus perhaps an image here and there.  But in writing it I have found it there waiting for me.  Well, it's there waiting for me and I'm also creating it as I go along. 

This process is deeply mysterious to me.  My MIL asks me how I do this without an outline, and I'm torn between saying "I have no idea; I'm so lost all the time" and "It's easy; it's a gift."

James and I ventured from the home on Saturday, a rare thing:  we had a dinner out for our anniversary.  My other lungfish and I have been married 11 years.  Hurrah!  About our adventure, two things.

Vivian watched James putting on his tie and commented "President Obama wears one of those!"    She's got two writer parents who get news from the radio (and a grandmother who  watches the president on the computer) so she lives a gently sheltered life:  she's sheltered from ties.  

Nora meanwhile was watching me ready.  I have a new black-and-white faux wrap dress that makes me look, shall we say, curvy.   "Mama!" says Nora, pointing to my chest:   "Mama's NaNa!"   

Ornithopters have gone to the dark side!   Would you believe that James has an old friend who did his thesis on ornithopters?  And that he went into Toronto to spend the afternoon with said friend designing his setting for ICARUS DOWN?   Yes, that's right:  he brought in a ringer!  I ask you, is this fair play? 

Zombies, meanwhile, are moaning and shuffling.  I, their humble word slave, caught Vivian's flu on Thursday and spent two days in bed.  I still feel as if I've been living on vinegar and long-dead mice.  So I have added no new words to SORROW'S KNOT since Tuesday.   But at least I can claim the moral high ground.  (This will be small comfort if I loose my shoes!)  

Still, momentum did carry me through Monday and Tuesday, and I added 1,600 words or thereabouts, and broke the 10,000 word barrier.  Official word count:  10,432.   ICARUS DOWN has reached about 5,000 words.  Is the race shifting?  Only time will tell!  Pull, team Zombie!  Pull!

Help me, I'm buried.

We took out the kitchen cupboards on Sunday.  (I say we; I mean James and his dad.  It was meant to be James and me but I picked up a 450' skillet by the handle on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning was still sitting around with my hand in a bowl of tepid water.)   The kitchen installation guy was meant to come on Monday -- but guess who had to reschedule?  He's coming tomorrow (one hopes), but in the meantime, the lower levels of my house are totally swamped in things that somehow fit into kitchen cupboards.  I had no idea we had so much stuff.  

The upper levels of the house are for some reason also swamped, mostly in laundry, but partly also in dishes that have to be done in the bathroom sink, toys that had to be moved from the livingroom, etc. 

The house looks like a shipwreck and I feel I'm sinking fast. 

And, speaking of, Vivian is sick.  The first thing she said this morning was:  "I can catch my coughs in my elbow when I go to school!"  Hacking pitifully as she spoke.  Well, that gave the game away; I touched her and found her feverish.  I told her she had to stay home and she began to weep.  Oh well.  At least she likes school.  She is at that awkward stage:  too sick to do much, but well enough to get pretty bored.  We are watching videos. 

James meanwhile is in Toronto for the day.  Probably writing, curse him!   If ornithopters pull ahead of zombies this week you'll know why.  

But I shouldn't complain:  I did eight good pages (and two bad ones) on Monday:  it came to about 870 words when typed up, one solid scene. (I am beginning to write mostly in 800 - 1000 word scenes.  800 to 1000 words is I can get done in the 90 minutes I spend with my notebook every day.  I think of William Carlos Williams, who was a doctor, and his prescription pad sized poem.)  And I struggled through about four pages yesterday.  Not sure what happens next in the story, but I know what happens after what happens next, so maybe I can get from here to there.  

Also!  a poem (or is it a picturebook manuscript?) I've been working on for a long time finally deigned to come alive for me.  Thank you, poem.  I am happy about you.   

Yesterday (before we lost the entire kitchen) I was making coffee while Nora sat in her highchair destroying some toast.  She spotted the coffee grinder, the noise of which always scares her a little.  "Uh-oh," she remarked.  Then, seeing Vivi nearby, she caught her sister's attention, pointed to the coffee grinder and repeated, more urgently:  "Uh-oh!" 

Vivian, as Vivian would put it, sprang into action.  (She really does say that.)  "Don't worry, Nora!  I'll protect you!"  She turned to me.  "Mommy!  Don't turn on the coffee noise until I stand near Nora!" 

And then she came and stood between Nora and the coffee grinder, braced herself (for she too is scared of the grinder, or at least finds it a convenient figure of dramatic terror), and said:  "Okay, Mommy.  Okay, Nora.  We're ready to go!" 

(Catch up on zombies vs. ornithopters here.)

It's been a week since I announced the race between my husband James and I to finish our respective novels ICARUS DOWN and SORROW'S KNOT.  If you missed it, the two novels started at 3000 words apiece.  Icarus Down has the steampunk ornithopters on a human colony on a mysterious planet, and Sorrow's Knot has metaphorical ghosts in a world of somewhat tangible -- and wholly hungry -- literal ghosts. 

So far?  Zombies are kicking ornithopter butt!   I've finished chapter two and written a good scene to start chapter three.  AND I did it while also doing the copy edits for PLAIN KATE.   Current score:  9570 words to 4328 words. 

Hey, James, these are the shoes I want!

You must forgive me this temporary gloat.  I added 6500 words in two weeks by working my tail to the tailbone.  (Assuming I had a tail, and that it were somehow involved in writing.  Possibly I chew on it.)  James added 1300 by hardly trying. 

Today, I finished the copy edit for PLAIN KATE. A lot of tiny clean up issues and a last chance for a major tinker or two. I've asked my super proofer to look over one new page (so as not to embarrass myself with typos) and when she does I'm going to cut and paste it in and hit send.

You always want to make a book perfect, and you never can. There comes a time when it's just got to be finished. And since PK is due tomorrow, I guess that time is today.

I need cookies.

Nora woke up at 5AM yesterday.  It's not unusual to see her little sweet face at ungodly hours -- she likes her wee hour nurse, she does -- but yesterday she wasn't smiling.  She was cheesed.  Yelling, bucking, slapping at me.  Tummy ache?  Tooth ache?  I tried rubbing and humming; I tried everything. 

Finally I asked James to "take her, see if you can calm her down."  I figured he'd snuggle her up and walk the floor with her a little: maybe she had a nightmare, and she always feels safe with him. 

But he didn't snuggle her.  He hoisted her up under both armpits and held her at arm's length.  "Now look," he said, as she hung stiffly in the air.  "It's five in the morning and your mother is trying to nurse you.  Either calm down and nurse or you're going back to your crib." 

And he put her down, and she snuggled in and nursed. 

"How did you do that?" I asked him.

"I'm the bad cop," he said, and rolled over and went back to sleep. 

It's not as bad as the impossible yarn -- how could it be?!? -- but I'm also struggling with time-keeping in the world of SORROW'S KNOT.  

As a story teller I feel as if I need words like "minute" and "hour" and "week."  They seem basic to guiding the reader through the "and then, and then, and then" of the story.  And yet I know that this view of time as sliced into little bits is distinctively European.  I don't actually know much (yet) about how the various cultures of the Great Plains viewed and kept time, but I'm willing to bet it wasn't with a stop-watch.  I'm using heartbeats and breaths to indicate small spaces.  Days of course.  And moons.  Cheaply-exotic as "moon" can sound, it is universal as the basis of calendars.  

Between mirror and shadow, the moon slips.
Moon, moon -- from you
measure, meter, memory, month.
The first calendar,
the first loss we saw coming.

Hours can be dispensed with by referring to the time of day.  But minutes, now.  Minutes have got me stumped. 

The biggest problem facing SORROW'S KNOT at the moment?  Goats.

So I have somehow managed to construct a plot that depends on yarn in a setting that had no yarn -- historically speaking, it seems the various cultures of the Great Plains used no spinnable fibers of any kind.   This is the sort of dilemma that only a person of my peculiar plotting genius could come up with, I'm sure.    (See "miniature French poodle, plotting ability of.")

It's hard to explain why I just don't want to take the off-screen culture in this story (who the Shadowed People of the forest call the Sunlit People) and give them a few herds of goats.   The Shadowed People trade with the Sunlit People for lots of things, and I had hoped spinnable fiber, or finished but undyed yarn, could be one of them.  And sure, in my head I know that the Sunlit People roughly correspond to the Sioux or one of the other nomadic buffalo-people tribes.  But that's never stated.  And they're never on-screen.  So why not just give them goats? 

But I can't.  It feels utterly wrong.

Bother. 

On the bright side, I've learned that skin cordage can hold dyes.  That might be my out. 

Darn facts.  They get me every time.  

There are many joys in my married life, and many things to be grateful for.  My James cooks and cleans, stays home with the girls, and notices my haircut (albeit only after coding the expense on our spreadsheet a week later).  One of the best bits, though, is that we both write.  He understands my passions and my quirky obsessions, and he cheers on my successes without reserve.  And though we both write YA, we're truly without rivalry.

Let's see if we can ruin that, shall we?

By coincidence we're both starting novels just now.  I have finally found a workable way to open my long-stalled SORROW'S KNOT, which required me to scrap -- joyfully! -- most of the existing scribbles.  It's about a world hanging by a thread: beset by hungry ghosts and protected by women called binders, whose knots are the only thing that can baffle the dead.  The young hero Otter is the proud daughter of a powerful binder, and is about to learn that power is not necessarily a good thing to have.  It's sort of a quiet, reflective zombie story.  (But not moaning and decaying zombies.  The quiet reflective kind.) 

James, meanwhile, has a hot new idea for a novel called ICARUS DOWN, about a human colony that ends up (accidentally) on the less habitable of two sister planets, where life again hangs by -- well, a cable, in cities suspended in canyons between the deadly fog forest below and the scorching sunlight above.  If the first chapter is anything to go by, buckles shall be swashed and vast conspiracies shall be intrepidly unravelled and punk shall be at least slightly steamed. There's already an ornithopter that goes down in flames.  

At the beginning of the week, we were both about three thousand words -- one dramatic opening chapter -- in.  And we thought:  hey, we could race!  We could announce our race publically!  We could ask our followers (who are legion, I assure you) to throw breadrolls at the rival authors.  We could vaguely do something which sort of has to do with buzz. 

So this is that: a public announcement of the race between SORROW'S KNOT and ICARUS DOWN.  I have a slight edge because I've been working on SORROW'S KNOT for (approximately) ever, and have a pretty good idea of how the opening half-or-so of the book goes, whereas ICARUS DOWN is just an inkling of an idea and still the subject of more diner-table give and take than actual writing.  But, on the other hand, James is historically a much faster writer than I am.  You could say he's a swooper and I'm a basher, but that really doesn't do either of us justice.  It's more accurate to say he's a born storyteller with a transparent prose style and I'm a poet with a genius for language and the plotting ability of a miniature French poodle.  So call it even.      

If I win I get shoes!   (And other privedges of marriage.)  If he wins he gets an iPod, which I assure you he does not need.   If you cheer us on, you get ....  I'll think of something. 

I have picked the shoes already, so you should root for me. 

Tuesday words:  about 1200 on SORROW'S KNOT. 
Random good line from Tuesday:  So they stood inside the red ward: the girl in red and the woman in red, the knots of women with tear-streaked silent faces and feathers in their hair.  The drums beat. And Otter saw that she was standing in bones. 

Wednesday words:  880 on SORROW'S KNOT
Random good line:  "... a weedy, sheep-eyed lad named -- and Otter thought this was overly optimistic -- Ram."

The year is turning:  Vivian is back in school (junior kindergarten!  my baby is in kindergarten!), I am back to my writing mornings, and the world of book publishing is picking up its fall steam.   I'm so happy to be writing again.  I got far too little done this summer, for somewhat complicated reasons, and by August I felt disconnected from my writing self as if I'd been to the moon.  It wasn't easy to pick it up again.  I spent a few weeks trying and getting nowhere.  Sherlock Holmes, faking deadly fever for reasons of his own, babbles on about a battery pouring its energy into a non-conductor.  Trying to write and not writing: like that. 

But last week I finally made the connection.  I found a place that works for the moment as my office (a table by the window in a student lounge at St. Jerome's University -- fireplace and tea!).  I found the rhythm of writing.  And I found a new way to open the novel.  I have had to scrap quite a bit of pre-existing work, but since it was non-conductor work -- lumpy solder, too much flux in the soder -- I do not feel bad.  So, SORROW'S KNOT is finally up and running.  

Of course, it got up and running exactly as my copy edits for PLAIN KATE came back, so now I am trying to do both at once.  (And also, I am feeling guilty about this blog.  And a certain picturebook project.  The more I do the more I want to get done....) I have never worked with a copy editor before and would like to declare that mine is a genius.  Holy cow, the things she's caught.  Did you know that the term "jumping jack"  was coined in 1883?  She did.

But what really won me over was when she brokes copy editor character long enough to jot an "OMG, what a chapter ending!" in the margin.  Bless you, dear copy goddess, you made my day with that!  I'm sorry for all the comma splices and paragraphs beginning with "and." 

Anyway, SORROW'S KNOT.  Here in Southwest Ontario we skipped October and have moved directly from September to November, and are shivering and scuttling under lashing cold rain.  I am writing about similar weather, though in the story it is early March.  Today after writing for two hours I was walking across the campus when a red-tailed hawk burst out of a tree in front of me, with a blackbird at its neck.  Breath taken, I watched it, thinking vaguely:  hawks are big; the blackbird must be nesting, she's so territorial; this wind is miserable, but at least it will be warmer soon, spring and nesting and -- No, wait.  

I am not a method writer, who writes about a character getting drunk and then finds herself staggering when she gets up.  I have heard people remark about that, but I privately think that a) they are showing off, and b) it is hooey.   But for a moment there, hawk swept, I was truly lost inside my own story.  

I think it's safe to say it's going well!

Today I am at the thesaurus -- the real thesaurus, the one with the listing of sweeping categories at the front and pages and pages of words. I have looked up "death" and "power" and "magic," but I'm spending most of my time with "habitation."

This is because I am again -- still -- struggling with the tone of the special vocabulary for SORROW'S KNOT. The book's setting is loosely based on the Black Hills of South Dakota, and the people in it (most of them) are from a bronze-age traditional society vaguely resembling the Mandan.

Now, I don't want to get caught up in cheap exoticism. (To wit: They have skin like caramel and hair like black silk (two things they've never heard of, by the way)! They are as one with nature!) In fact I want to slip lightly past describing the characters, for just that reason. But I don't want to default to the European, either.

Which leaves me struggling over particular words. The stronghold of Westmost: is it a "town"? The magical barrier that protects it: a "ward"? The warrior women who go out beyond the barrier to gather dye stock, medicinal plants, and the occasional bit of game: "rangers"? The process of subjecting oneself to the authority of one's elders in order to learn: an "apprenticeship"? (Surely not.) The timber-framed, earth-covered homes: "lodges"? "earth houses"?

See, even here you can see the taint of Generic High Fantasy butting up against the too-exotic nearly-patronizing words of a white chick from Omaha trying to write about the First Nations.

This probably seems minor, and to many writers it probably would be minor, something to fill in later. Probably there are writers who can change character names at a whim, too. But to obsessive people vulnerable to the magic of words, like myself, this seems the central thing. As my characters won't take life without their names, my setting won't take life until I figure this out.

How long this will take, only the Dried Ones know.