Finding a proofreader

Despite the visiting relative (who went home yesterday), I actually have been making progress. That's the benefit of realizing I have many small things to do along with the really big things--when I found myself with some random spare time, I was able to get things done.

Specifically, I was able to hook up with a proofreader! A friend who I used to work with in publishing recommended him--he mostly works for a mainstream book publisher, which I think is a good sign, because in my experience they take proofreading quite seriously. So I mailed the Trang layout to him.

I felt that his proposed fee was quite reasonable, but when I mentioned it to someone I know from writers' group, they were astounded at how cheap it was. Maybe I'm being naive, but it seems to me that this proofreader has set up his business the same way I did when I was a freelance writer--if you're fast (which I was back in the day--fast and efficient, if you can believe it), you can charge a high-enough hourly rate to make a good living, but since any given job doesn't take that many hours, you're still not expensive to your clients. That way you offer a good value, and you build a solid client base because people will come back to you and recommend you to others. This is one of the reasons I'm so skeptical of people offering really expensive services to writers--I don't look at the price tag and think, "Gee, you must be really good!" I think, "Gee, you must have to make money fast before the suckers wise up!"

Trang is up on Indie Spotlight!

So, Trang's here on Indie Spotlight--note the placeholder cover art. I sent it in to them back in March, which gives you an idea of the waiting time on these things. All sorts of things have changed since then--the pricing, the blog address--but at least it's got the revised description. (Although, why is "diplomat" italicized?)

I guess we'll see if it drives any interest. When Trang was listed on Spalding's Racket, there was basically zero response, so now I'm skeptical of the marketing value of sites that just list title after title without providing actual reviews. On the other hand, I got to write a bit about the process of writing the book, so maybe that will spark interest. Who knows?

Progress report; or, why it's good to have a writing blog

Yes! It's a miracle, but I have progress to report!

I'd say this is a great example of why it's useful to have something like a blog, where you have to trot out in public and say, "Sorry, I didn't get anything done." You do that enough, and eventually you get shamed into doing something.

I've still got the basic problem that my time is all chopped up, which makes it hard to focus on something big, like editing Trust. But after writing yesterday's (humiliating) post, I realized that I do have a lot of smaller production-related projects that need to be done. Not only that, but it's probably better to do these things now, rather than wait until I've laid out and formatted Trust, and am completely burnt out on production.

So, today I tweaked the hard-copy layout of Trang and started poking around for a proofreader. I also noodled with Trang's cover--I like the art, but I think the font is just sort of there. It's legible, which is important (a lot of fonts make the word TRANG look like IRANC, so it looks like I've written a very, very poorly-researched book about Iran and Iraq), but it doesn't really suggest anything about the kind of book Trang is. I also started the cover for Trust (when I decided on the Trang cover, I sketched out how I want all four covers to look)--I've narrowed down the cover fonts to a few finalists, and I'm going to try them on both covers before I make a final selection.

Bowing to reality

I realized last night that, hey, we're almost in October, there's no way I'm going to have Trust totally done by the end of 2011. So I bumped all the book dates forward a year--they were only guesstimates anyway. Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but we've got another houseguest coming this week (a relative who last visited in July and who we'll see again at Thanksgiving--there's been a lot of stressful change in my family lately, and this person is feeling a bit needy), so that blows this editing round straight to hell, again. Plus, after I finish this (eternal!) edit, I want to give it to some beta readers, and of course they all have jobs and lives, so they're not going to react to well to some insane deadline. And THEN I will have to do more editing, proofing, layout, formatting, cover....yeah, it's going to be 2012.

But I think what I'll do when I finish this edit (which hopefully will happen BEFORE I DIE) is to start the next book. Also, while I'm waiting on the beta reads, I can do the cover of Trust, which should be less of a conceptual marathon than Trang was. I actually want to add a little polish to Trang as well by revising some things on the cover and poking around to see if I can't find a proofreader.

Oh, and this is making the rounds, and is funny: https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/s720x720/309470_217207405007555_100001548917930_604086_764865006_n.jpg I would only add that, even when you're being successful, you never really feel like you're out of the scramble!

My experience so far with BookRooster

As I've mentioned, I'm kind of blowing off marketing (well, I guess right now I'm kind of blowing off everything, but at least I'm starting to feel better), but a couple of months ago I did pony up $49 to give BookRooster a shot. What they do is to distribute review copies to their subscriber base. I used to be a reporter, and I am very sensitive about how unethical it is to pay for reviews (a sensitivity that is clearly not shared by many, many, many Internet review sites). But BookRooster passed the smell test--all they are giving people is a review copy of your book, which of course is exactly what you give any reviewer. 

Of course, the downside of not participating in an unethical fee-for-service arrangement is that you cannot be guaranteed the service. BookRooster will offer your book to its subscribers for free until you get 10 reviews, but they don't hold a gun to their subscribers' heads and force them to review it.

My book went on offer there a month ago, and so far I've gotten...one review. Now, that review is a wonder--five stars, and the person wrote me a lovely e-mail (they even found a broken link on my Web site). I really, really appreciate that reviewer. A lot.

But one review is not ten. This paucity of reviews was not a shock to me: I found out about BookRooster through Joe Konrath's blog. He used it to promote Flee, and when I looked at the reviews I noticed that an awful lot of them began something like, "I love Konrath's books and couldn't wait to read this one!" If you've got an established fan base (or, I would assume, if you're writing in a really popular genre), you're going to get a lot of reviews very quickly. If you don't, then BookRooster isn't going to be a panacea.

Still, I figured the service would be worth it to me even if I didn't get a ton of reviews. For so long I've had all of one review on Amazon. (NO, I have not begged my friends and family to review my book--have I mentioned that I really don't like marketing?) Although that review was useful in that it did make me rethink my positioning of the book, it was really annoying to have the most-visible review of Trang be one written by someone who was not ever going to like or understand the book, especially knowing that there were better reviewers out there.

Book too hard

I was feeling much better this morning, a-leaping out of bed with great ambitions to do things, maybe even to edit Trust! That lasted until I had to do difficult things like stand upright and eat breakfast. But even then I, ever the optimist, was thinking I might be able to engage in a demanding mental task (like editing Trust!). To test this, I picked up Marcel Proust. Five pages later, I acknowledged defeat.

Yes, I am reading Proust--I'm up to the third volume of Remembrance of Things Past (now more accurately translated as In Search for Lost Time). Rargh! I fear no Serious Literature!

I've been on a quest over the past few years to read works of literature that are so well-known that they've affected the culture I live in. Mainly that's led to my reading a lot of pop books that are merely OK (Valley of the Dolls, Mommie Dearest). I've also had to force my way through some real stinkers, like Flowers in the Attic and The Fountainhead. Seriously, if you are tempted to read Ayn Rand, I would suggest you read Starship Troopers first. They're both simple-minded political screeds masquerading as novels (so if you like the one you'll like the other), but Starship Troopers is several hundred pages shorter and somewhat less offensive. (I do not consider Heinlein's enthusiasm for, say, child abuse to be any less offensive than Rand's enthusiasm for rape. However, Heinlein spares the reader lovingly-detailed scenes of violent abuse, followed by the victim falling in love with her abuser, because being beaten and not experiencing any sensual pleasure was the best thing that ever happened to her. Honestly, I feel incredibly sorry for Rand.)

Anyway, after reading all these books that are famous but not very good, I decided to reward myself by reading Proust's massive novel, which is famous for being good. And difficult, although The New York Times makes the case that a good chunk of that difficulty is due to the fact that the first widely-available translation into English was simply not that great.

I'm enjoying it (in the new translation), but it is still a difficult book. It's not difficult the way the High Modernists (Pound, Eliot, Joyce) are difficult--Proust doesn't spend all his time making allusions to other works, and God help you if you haven't read them. The length is massive, and it's all one novel, so Proust will refer to a character you haven't seen for 900 pages (and, since he actually wasn't very good with details, the character's name or some other identifying feature has probably been changed), but that's not the main reason it's difficult. Mainly it's difficult because Proust was so damned smart. The book is largely about things like how we experience art and how we perceive reality, so it's like a million little philosophical and artistic essays crammed into one storyline. The essays are really good, and (unlike Rand and Heinlein) it's not just the same essay over and over, but it's taxing to read and process all those deep thoughts. Even when I'm not sick and dumb, Proust makes me wish I was more intelligent. Still, they are very insightful, and the rest of the book is funny and really well-written.

Buying behavior

This is a Washington Post article that starts out as a standard, "Self-Published Author Gets Rich!" story (they even use the phrase "gold rush" in the title, gah, despite a long disclaimer in the article that, no, sorry, most authors don't get rich by writing). Eventually, however, the article gets more interesting, because it attempts to analyze how e-book consumers behave, which is kind of an unknown at this point.

The article points out that romance readers tend also to be insatiable readers. As a result:

New marketing patterns of lower online prices and impulse buying created a perfect dynamic for authors like [romance author Nyree] Belleville: Genre authors who were prolific but who had not been too successful. This peculiar level of accomplishment meant they had written books for print publishers, seen sales vanish and had the rights revert back to them, and even had completed manuscripts that publishers had rejected.

This left with the writers with just the right recipe: a small but devout core audience; a readily available backlist for new readers to discover; a knack for writing fast; and an inherent appeal to a fan base that read voraciously.

 

Joe Konrath is a big believer in having a lot of titles out, and Bellevue's experience certainly supports his argument: Because of her speed and stash of completed books, she put out 12 books in 18 months. I will probably put out 12 books by the time I die. But you know, something? I'm OK with that.

Speak out with your geek out; or, in defense of science fiction

As I've mentioned, I'm totally sick, and I should probably hold off on attempting any writing until I have the energy to, you know, go outside and that sort of thing. But nay! I foolishly persevere! In particular, I'm going to do a Speak Out With Your Geek Out post about science fiction (I was alerted Speak Out by Sporkchop). I'm doing this because I am generally opposed to bullying, narrow-mindedness, and unethical "journalism."

When it comes to judging the quality of literature, narrow-mindedness is nothing new. My father was extremely defensive about his love for short stories, because when he was growing up, it was believed that short stories were for people who who were too dumb to read all the way through a novel. Eudora Welty is believed to have been robbed of the Nobel Prize for Literature because she wrote about the American South, and at that time it was thought that regional literature was for people who were too dumb to understand universal themes (you know--universal themes like what it's like to live in the Left Bank or Greenwich Village).

There's plenty of bad sci-fi out there, but there's plenty of bad everything out there. Refusing to read something because it's science fiction makes about as much sense as refusing to read short stories or regional writers--you're really, really just hurting yourself.

So, here's what I like about science fiction:

It's about the larger questions. Science fiction tends to be about either 1. society or 2. spirituality.

People often don't realize that. They think science fiction is either about 1. technology or 2. aliens. But at least the stuff I like isn't about technology or aliens in some kind of vacuum--it's about how these things affect humanity. If we had intelligent robots, how would people interact with them? If aliens landed, what would we do to them? How is technology used by governments to control people? If we had some kind of superhuman power, what would it do to us? Do we own our machines or do they own us? What is the purpose of humanity? How does the past affect the present and future? Is reality the here and now, or is it something somewhere else? What will become of us?

Even adventure sci-fi asks these kinds of questions, if it is good. You don't get this claustrophobic focus on the individual that seems to be the mark of Serious Literature these days. That individual focus can be done well, but it can also result in books that are entirely about the author's genitals and/or need for approval. Cracking open a sci-fi book after reading a book like that is like leaving a hermetically-sealed room and taking your first deep breath of fresh, clean air.

Unless you're reading Philip K. Dick, in which case it's like leaving a hermetically-sealed room and taking your first deep breath of hallucinogenic gas. But it's still pretty awesome.

On being slow to adjust

Oh, hi there! So, it's been over a week since the kids went home, and you might think that I've been hard at work! So very hard at work that I haven't even had time to post about it!

Ha-ha-ha! No, of course you haven't thought that, and I haven't been. Part of it is that I've been catching up on other things, part of it is that my time has been kind of broken up (which tends to prejudice me to working on short-term projects rather than this HUGE one), but mostly it's because it always takes me a while to get back into the writing/editing mind-set after a break. I'm slow to get started, once I start I'm slow, and then I get faster and faster until the project ends. It's weird.

I'm not the only one with dysfunctional adjustment patterns. Today's Wall Street Journal contains a fascinating little breakdown of why e-books from traditional publishers are so expensive.

Basically, traditional booksellers are accustomed to making a certain amount of money per book, and they're set up so that they need to hit that revenue target. From the article:

a hardcover book priced at $26 and sold under the traditional wholesale model will return $13 to a publisher. Subtract 15% for the author royalty, or $3.90, and that leaves a gross of $9.10, says publishing executives. Mr. Shatzkin says that it's appropriate to then deduct about $3.25 per copy for shipping, warehousing and production, leaving a gross per unit sold of $5.85, from which publishers must pay for returns and inventory.

 

In other words, the industry's expecting to make a little less than $5.85 per copy sold. And they can get that from an e-book! From the article:

a back-of-the-envelope calculation of a new e-book priced at $12.99 on Amazon or through Barnes & Noble Inc. under the 70%-30% agency pricing model suggests a return of $9.09 to the publisher in the form of sales. The publisher then typically has to pay the author 25% of net sales in the form of a royalty, or $2.27. This leaves a gross of $6.82. Subtract 90 cents for digital rights management, digital warehousing, production, and distribution, and that leaves $5.92.

 

So they can get a similar return! Whoo-hoo!

Oh, but there's a catch--the e-book has to cost $12.99. That's...kinda pricey for an e-book, no? At least, judging from the article, a lot of readers seem to think so.

Meanwhile, Amazon is trying to set up a free e-book lending service. They would make money because you'd have to join Amazon Prime to get it.

Hmmm..... On the one hand is a business that can't make money off a book that costs less than $13. On the other hand is a business that can make money off a book that is free. Which do you think is going to make it?

Whew!

OK, the remaining child has left, and I am officially DONE with this three-week marathon of child care. Honest to Pete, I don't know how full-time parents do it. Actually, I suppose I do--part of the problem is that I'm not really set up for child care, and it's not like I can ask a six- and/or three-year-old to kick back and watch Weeds with me. I have some toys for the younger kid, but apparently the most exciting thing I have in my house is my two cats, who are entertaining in the extreme, especially the mellow one who won't bite or scratch even if you grab his tail and pull it as hard as you can. (I yell and scream, but when did I ever matter?)

Anyway, I will be watching the younger one during the school year, but just one day out of the week (Tuesdays), so that will be less disruptive (and she's small enough that I can forcibly carry her out to the car so that we can go someplace "educational" and she can stop torturing the poor cats). Right now, I feel like EVERYTHING has been neglected--the yard needs work, I need to pay bills, and oh yeah, I was working on a book, wasn't I? So it may be a few days (like after Tuesday) before I can get it together enough to resume editing.

So then he was, like, oh my God, and she was, like, no way.

The kids have eaten my brain, so I'm not going to really be able to come up with a proper post. Instead, when I saw someone else's post about really bad dialog and realized that I could cobble it together with a post from my old blog on the same topic, it struck me as a good idea. No, I haven't been getting much sleep.

Anyway, the post that attracted my attention was yet another take-down of Mark Trail dialog by the Comics Curmudgeon. The dialog in question reads:

TRAIL: Sergeant McQueen, how is he?

RANDOM EXPOSITOR: He's fine!

Oh, no, that wasn't his response--I'm sorry, my logic circuits kicked in there. No, he responds to the question, "how is he?" with:

RANDOM EXPOSITOR: He’s very popular in the community!

The Comics Curmudgeon (whose name is Josh) rightly adds this exchange to the "prodigiously long" list of "Questions And Responses In Mark Trail That Would Never, Ever Be Uttered By Humans."

Josh is a little obsessed with Mark Trail's bad dialog, and if you're wondering why, you should watch his Mark Trail Theater video. Watching actual flesh-and-blood people interact via Mark Trail dialog is freaking hilarious, because it really brings home how unnatural it is. Mainly, I think the problem is that the writer is trying to shoehorn in information, and he doesn't bother to match the answer to the question--instead he creates a non sequitur. ("What do you think of Sergeant McQueen?"/"Oh, everybody here just loves him." would work a little better.)

[Random side note: When I was a reporter, I sometimes experienced the joys of interviewing people who had been told that the only way to deal with the media is to decide what their talking points are and to spout them off regardless of the question. The result was quite like Mark Trail dialog, and I would have to say things like, "What does your answer have to do with my question?" or I would have to repeat the same question over and over and over until the person decided to start being a human again.]

Dialog can certainly be used for exposition. For example, the Master and Commander books are filled with incomprehensible 18th-century British Navy lingo. So Patrick O'Brian has one of the two main characters be a landlubber who knows absolutely nothing about how ships work. Everybody has to explain everything to him, and in doing so, they explain it to the reader--how convenient!

But I think the most important thing about dialog is that it be something you can imagine somone actually saying under those particular circumstances. People don't answer different questions than the ones asked unless they are either being evasive or being rude. People don't spout off about their political beliefs for hours on end unless they are brutal dictators or total bores. People don't publicly humiliate other people unless they are assholes or very, very angry. The stuff that comes out of a character's mouth speaks to their, um, character, so think long and hard about how someone is going to say something. Don't just go for what makes the story easy, because then Josh will incessantly joke about how your main character is autistic.

And keep in mind the particular situation. When you ignore circumstances...well, I think I'll just cut-n-paste from my 2007 blog entry here:

 

...I started out on V.C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic today.

Dear God. I mean, it doesn't quite hit the wildly hysterical highs of the prose in The Bridges of Madison County, but it's pretty bad. Is there anything more inadvertently funny than purple prose?

The book starts out with these kids' dad getting killed in a car accident. And this is how a police officer breaks the news to the mom. Keep in mind, this is DIALOG--these words are supposed to be coming out of somebody's mouth:

"According to the accounts, which we've recorded, there was a motorist driving a blue Ford weaving in and out of the lefthand lane, apparently drunk, and he crashed head-on into your husband's car. But it seems your husband must have seen the accident coming, for he swerved to avoid a head-on collision, but a piece of machinery had fallen from another car, or truck, and this kept him from completing his correct defensive driving maneuver, which would have saved his life. But as it was, your husband's much heavier car turned over several times, and still he might have survived, but an oncoming truck, unable to stop, crashed into his car, and again the Cadillac spun over . . . and then . . . it caught on fire."

Of course, later the police officer says the father died "instantly." You know, instantly AFTER the crash, and the flipping over, and the second crash, and the second flipping over, and the fire. THAT'S when he died instantly.

Progress report

I was going to take advantage of today's peace and quiet by reading a book, and then I realized that, if I was going to be reading, I might as well read Trust. I went through five chapters, so I'm up to chapter 15. Those chapters include a long section that is basically exposition and needs to be slimmed down--I think all the information is necessary, but it's hard to provide it without creating an exposition dump. I'm going to compress to see if that does the trick; if it doesn't, I'll have to come up with something else.

The good news is that the funny parts made me laugh. So that's heartening. Also, some of the stuff is getting cut because the first few chapters are better focused--I already told the reader what the story is about earlier, so I don't need to repeat that information. That's a good sign, I think.

Plots and premises

So, I've got a couple of days before the kids descend again--I may edit, or I may just enjoy the novelty of peace and quiet. Anyway, I've been watching Battlestar Galactica--yes, yes, I know I'm behind the times with this one, but better late than never, right? Anyway, I'm most of the way through season 2, and it has given me food for thought on why plots are so important.

If you look at Wikipedia's definition of an A plot, you'll see that it's job is to drive the story--and believe me, stories need to be driven. Battlestar Galactica's premise is what's contained in the opening credits: The remnants of humanity are hunted by the Cylons as they search for a new home called Earth.

That's a premise. That's not a plot. The A plot for the first 1-1/3 seasons of Battlestar Galactica is that the humans find Kobol, which points them toward Earth. This is not a simple process, because the whole Kobol-will-lead-to-Earth contingent is lead by a person who is actively hallucinating, and there's a whole other you-are-a-nutbar contingent, which is equally if not more powerful.

Now I'm, oh, about another third of the way through the second season, and we no longer have an A plot. We just have a premise. And if you're like me and you like novels as well as television shows that are novel-like, the drop-off in quality is just painful. It's not only that the episodes suddenly stand alone, it's the contrivance necessary to create the emotional resonance that came organically in the first 1-1/3 seasons. Did you know that Apollo had a pregnant girlfriend, who he betrayed? That there's this Cylon raider named Scar who has been devastating the Viper pilots? That there's a huge black market on the fleet, dominated by someone who has been with it less than a month? All these things are introduced in single episode, and a HUGE deal is made of them, despite the fact that we've never heard anything about them before. It reminds me of the bad old days of network television, where a major character would fall in love, get engaged, and break of the engagement/watch their fiance die all within 40 minutes. Then six months later they would do it all again with somebody else, because it was assumed that television viewers were too stupid to care.

The nice thing about having a single big A plot drive the action is that events have a built-in emotional resonance, because they are somehow associated with this big idea. Hopefully that idea is important enough to make the audience care, but at least you only have to puff up one plotline, instead of having the characters gnash their teeth and rend their garments over a brand-new idea every freaking episode.

On not caring about how things work

Between a bad stomach and too much Diet Coke yesterday (I was mindlessly guzzling it as I read that Sayers book--I'm sure Dorothy is getting tired of being blamed for all my problems), I didn't fall asleep until the not-so-wee hours of the morn. In fact, since I am looking after the kids tomorrow, I fell asleep this morning at roughly the same time I'm going to be expected to be up-and-at-them tomorrow morning. Won't that be fun.

This is obviously the sort of day where, if I am really lucky, I might be able to read through half a chapter of Trust before nodding off. So I'm going to prattle on here about a writing topic, namely the divide among science fiction readers between those who care how stuff works, and those who don't.

Not surprisingly, I'm in the latter group. In fact, I was a little surprised to discover the first group existed. I found that out when got very involved in the Firefly fandom. One day Joss Whedon mentioned in an interview that he didn't care how the ship's engine worked, and people were shocked--absolutely shocked. How can he not care? they asked. How is that possible? (And yet, they clearly liked a story written by a man who said, "If you start asking me science questions, I’m going to cry.")

I realized then that these people are mostly engineers, and are therefore rather out of touch with the fact that the vast majority of humanity doesn't care how any engine works, including the engines that they use every day. Seriously, what percentage of the population actually understands how the internal-combustion engine in their car works? And that's, you know, a real engine that causes real people real problems if it doesn't work.

Me, I read science fiction because it's fiction--there are some interesting stories there. I was an English major, I worked in publishing, and I read all kinds of fiction, all the time. But there are people out there who pretty much just read engineering manuals, and what they are looking for in their science fiction is a really interesting engineering manual.

I consider the books that read like engineering manuals to be an incredible waste of my time, in no small part because the science--the engineering, the physics, whatever--isn't real. So, for example, when the exciting chase at the thrilling conclusion of the otherwise fine On Basilisk Station is interrupted for page after page of explanation of that book's fake physics, I get very annoyed. This book is fiction, yes? The physics are also fiction, yes? Ergo, the fictional physics should serve the fictional story, not stop it dead in its tracks because someone is operating under the delusion that the reader actually needs to learn this stuff. (Because fake physics has so many useful applications in real life? Seriously, not since the dragon attack at the end of Beowulf was interrupted to give the reader the genealogy of Beowulf's assistant has a story gotten so far off track at so inopportune a moment.)

I think it's very important that speculative fiction has rules, otherwise everything just falls into mush. But it's also easy to get caught up in explaining and explaining stuff that is simply bullshit, like faster-than-light drives or wormholes. Even the way real phenomenon, like time dilation, are used in fiction doesn't make much sense if you think about it--if you travel at, say, 90% of the speed of light, the time-dilation effects are way less than if you travel at 99% of the speed of light, so what's the rush? Plus, how do you speed up and slow down a ship that much without turning the people in it into goo? (I will just say for the record that the creators of the Alpha Drive really had to work really hard to solve that problem. No, I do not know how they did it. And unless it's important to my story, I don't care.)

Progress report

I input the edits through chapter 9. I realize that sounds like a lot, but as I thought, these later chapters are requiring less work, so actually I was pretty lazy today. I blame Dorothy Sayers: I started one of her mysteries today, and they are so nice and tight and laden with odd characters and juicy clues that I feel compelled to read them in one sitting, otherwise I forget who everyone and everything is.

This is just too funny

This is a compendium of authors insulting each other's works. It is hilarious. Of course I don't think all the criticisms are valid (and the fact that D.H. Lawrence, of all people, would criticize anyone else for being dirty-minded is astonishing), but the choice of language is just priceless. (Seriously, compare it to the insults by directors: It's “A great cow full of ink.” and "Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig [Austin] up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone." vs. "Shut up!" "You're boring!" "You're stupid!" "Fuck you!" "So's your momma!" "Booger head!" "Neener butt!")

Progress report (I think that's what I'll title all these sorts of posts)

Life interfered yesterday and the day before (and will again tomorrow!), but today I edited through chapter 5. I also went back over some of the earlier chapters and compressing some of the more extraneous stuff so that we get to the A plot faster. I'm realizing that between the earlier and the current efforts to include backstory, I've got some repetition and overlap, so I'm cutting that as well as doing a general compression. As a result, right now chapter 5 is way tinier, but I'll fix that later (or I'll just have a short chapter--there's no real harm in that). Unlike in Trang, this book has narration from different characters' points of views, so I also am strengthening that--not everyone sounds like Philippe.

Now I'm going to read over the next few chapters--hopefully there will be less editing required, since we're into the story at this point.

Editing away

Today I did some more editing of chapter 2 (including some background material that it was obvious was confusing the writers group) and edited chapter 3 and most of chapter 4. I'm now a little concerned that all the background material is delaying us from getting to the A plot, but we'll see--I've done some compressing and may do more. Feedback from people who have read Trang also may help, but it's also important for me to remember that this is all going to be a big compromise.

Yesterday I didn't do jack, because the night before last I didn't sleep. I have the occasional sleepless night, as well as the periods where I will switch off between not sleeping and sleeping, like, 14 hours at a stretch. That's always really annoying, because writing is not busy work--if I'm tired or sick or hungover, I just can't do it very well (although sometimes I'm actually better at copy editing if I'm tired and just a little cranky).

I wound up watching most of Samurai Champloo. Heh-heh-heh. I lovelovelove Cowboy Bebop (which is by the same director), and I had been warned that Samurai Champloo lacked the character depth of that show. And that's true--it's also much more R-rated, with, say, an entire episode taking place in a brothel and revolving a character's unsuccessful attempts to get laid by a geisha who is actually an undercover police officer. (The first time she beats him up, he's so horny/dumb that he thinks it's "the rough stuff"--and he likes it!) But I love it, I just love it--I have enough of a frat-boy sense of humor that the crudeness doesn't bother me, plus it just hits the right WTF? note for me. I don't mind anachronistic beatboxing any more than I minded The 1970s Blaxplotation Planet or how the crew was hunted down by some old leftovers in Cowboy Bebop. It's funny because I definitely have a tipping point on that kind of randomness--I really didn't enjoy FLCL because the whole thing was just, Hey, that doesn't make any sense! But if it makes emotional sense (which the beatboxing does) or is just a funny add-on to an otherwise coherent story, I don't mind it a bit.