POVs and Trunking

shlomi on November 10, 2018

Steamer trunk (for novels)I’ve been wrestling with getting my next novel started before getting a full-time, paying gig. And score is trunk novels: 5, Shlomi manuscripts: 0. It kept coming across lifeless, a narration of facts and events that even extensive external and internal dialog didn’t help. I’m a pantser, so I wasn’t worried about “where the book was going.” But the main character motivations, their plate tectonics… that I was winging.

So I went back and did what I’ve done in the past: write a preface. Only every time I wrote something, it was in the Q&A style of an interview. engaging, casual dialog, casual narrator… first person. I’ve done almost that with 3rd person limited. And 1st person with a fourth wall intact. I’ve stuck to a single person’s POV as well.

Meh. Who needs walls. If John Scalzi can do it, if William Goldman can do it with The Princess Bride, then I, unpublished unjeered at, can make a go of it.

Hopes, Dashed

shlomi on October 25, 2018

Novella "Stardance" coverI’m already several thousand words into my latest, but had to stop for some research. More research. Interviewing dancers research. (Okay, my daughter, but still…) And then I remembered Jeanne and Spider Robinson’s book “Stardance.” Well, I actually remember the original novella. It was a bit odd delving that far back into SF writings. Winced at casual misogyny in cover, in character descriptions. (The blog featured image is the cover of the original novella and it’s the least “Astounding Gran Tetons” cover of all the editions.)

And I’m gonna have to retool this baby from scratch. Zero-gee and low-grav dancing is possible—read said novella, which left me a little wetter-eyed than I expected at the story’s hook. But I’ve a new appreciation for the challenges that mooners—first generation moon-born people—will face.

We earthborn can scamper across the surface, glibly bouncing around in 1/6th earth gravity. And we have the musculature and bone density and tensile strength to torque and shove masses we’d never be able to heft on terra firma. But for people on the moon for five years, or ten, it’d be a different story. It’s a better tale than the same time in zero-gee, but the body does adapt to the “new norm.” And the Robinsons had astute visions of long-term zero-gee.

By my research the moonborn would have thinner bones, much thinner muscles. These aren’t zero-gee-adapted quaddies as described in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Falling Free. These are frail beings without the force necessary to create torque with their hands, their bodies.

Dancing would be interesting for the muscled earthers, as they’d have to learn how to tread more lightly, spin more softly. But yet another lethal barrier for those born under 1G in a 1G world.

An Author Moment

shlomi on October 17, 2018

Just finished hand edits of Last Run, a monster novel (originally 185k or closing on 800 pages). I’ll have a much lower word count when I’m done, if for no other reason than most post-apoc manuscripts are best salable when they’re under 120k. Or so I’m told. This month, at least.

I find the act of writing on paper validating, as I immediately see what I’m changing. In Word, or Scrivener, old words disappear, and are seamlessly replaced. (Yes, edit tracking in Word. Also yes, it makes it really hard to read.) It also gave me some more practice at writing in cursive. Because we all know that’s the next New Thing.

What I didn’t expect was the emotional impact reading the book. I hadn’t picked it up in a year, so while I knew what was happening, I was rediscovering the phraseology and tension. (Especially after pruning all those extraneous words…) So I had the tear-jerker moments, the tension-filled suspenseful ones. The chuckle at the narrator’s subtle wit. It was fun, damn it! I enjoyed it. And after re-reading it, I’m sure an audience will as well.

Unlike my Shmuley Myers books, this one’s going to go to a professional editor for cleanup, then straight to alpha (beta? gamma?) readers.

Hope my agent doesn’t mind hawking two manuscripts at once…

Leonard Cohen: Yahrzeit

shlomi on September 21, 2018

Photo courtesy University of Toronto. Click to see full article.

Leonard Cohen’s music and lyrics have been my life’s soundtrack. Not the theme, just as background, mind you. I sang it out loud in an empty room while waiting in hospital after one of my father’s aneurysms. It was playing on loop in my head after he died, sitting shiva in New York City.
 
And it was a friend, a mentor even, as I wrote the first two novels (so far) of a series starring a religious homicide detective. “Who by fire,” indeed.

Accountability Report: Needing Brightly

shlomi on September 20, 2018

Snapshot of empty progress graph for "Needing Brightly"First, old business

A Day at the Zoo is being shopped with editors. Most are based in New York, which is in its yearly Jewish High Holiday convulsions. Which means it might not get the attention it’d have if, say, it gets pitched in two weeks. But… I’ve already cast that dice.

Zepps, my “I’ve tied myself into knots” manuscript, is done. At least, in the draft form. There’s a slew of corrections, but I’ve got the mss in the right shape in terms of plot lines. Yeesh. Don’t want to go through that again. Lesson: If I’m gonna “pants” a novel, I’m going to need the plot laid out better before I start, just so it doesn’t spiral out of control. (Damn characters and their agency!)

So… new business. After going through my “ooh, write this next pile” (current population: too many), I came across a little snippet called “Shave the Moon.” Long story short, and mostly riffing off that title, I’m starting a hard-SF, character-driven novel. Should be fun—if I can just stop stopping to do research on which the plot dangles. Tech and background have already gone through my wonderful writers group, the White Gold Wielders. (They tell me this means something in the gaming world.)

And I know I’ve been using titles for these unpublished manuscripts. I just want to say I have no expectations any of them will see the light of page. Just see what Marshall’s written on the subject.

The beat goes on. Itchy fingers to start writing. Must. Plot. A. Little. First!

Reading at Malvern Books

shlomi on September 13, 2018

Austin is awesome for reasons many. Malvern Books is one of them. Like a micro, pocket-sized Strand Books. They host a number of events, and Austin Writers Roulette is one of those that drifts from place to place in the area. Enjoy the story!

 

Motivations

shlomi on September 11, 2018

I’m juggling too many books that aren’t finished. “Last Run” needs a 40% diet, and I’ve been plowing away at edits. “Zepps” has a hit list of dozens of changes (see my previous post: Knotted!) I’m wandering around, like a Shakespearean actor in a Dr. Seuss play, shouting “what’s my motivation” in the various voice of my characters.

Oh, and I’m sending, via agent mine, the first salvo of agent queries to editors. So I’m writing up tip sheets in additional to customized queries, to make life faster for her.

That’s not to say I’m done with the final flourishes on the novel I’m pitching (“A Day at the Zoo.”) Aside from my awesome writers group, Chris Brown (author of Kansastan and ArmadilloCon #40 had a few suggestions.

Baby Novelist Issues: Writing Myself Into a Knot

shlomi on August 23, 2018

I’m 116,000 words into a SF novel. It’s got great tech, interesting characters, action and thrills… and no motivation for bad guy actions. Well, it did, when I started. But the pitfall of pantsing is getting pulled off course, one degree at at time. (And when writing about matters aeronautical, there’s three dimensions to those degrees. But I diverge from the point.)

Part of how I got here is because of the aforementioned fun aspects. It takes time to tell those complicated battle scenes, the points where relationships change, key threads weave a novel together. And writing little notes to myself on the virtual margins on what to change on the first draft edits kept up my velocity. I just needed to remember all the facts and events changing in their later retelling from their initial description earlier in the book.

For instance, I realize in scene thirty that Maura’s got to have combat experience. She’s already written in with anger issues, but when her background was discussed in scene five, that big deal didn’t come up. No problem: write a note to rewrite history.

However, when “change requests” for the manuscript get past a certain point, the rewrite gets uglier and uglier. Which brings me to a pile of actions and plot twists now blowing in the breeze of a torn zeppelin at forty thousand feet, as the gore of two shootouts and two bombings dry in the thin air. What was worth their conflict, their deaths? What drives them to continue, at so high a human cost?

Oh, you don’t know either? Some fourth wall you all are!

I need to bite the bullet, put in all the noted changes (84, from trivial word or location replacements to “why’d they do it” types of changes), and then take a look at character motivations and see how it all fits together. {picks up chainsaw, chisel, flamethrower, and flyswatter and heads back in…}

A Progress Tool

shlomi on August 12, 2018

Recently I posted a graphic showing words per day. (I’ve used it before: you can see posts here and here.) It’s part of my musings about writing velocity and general “feeling like an author.” I’ll tee up a few posts on that in the future, but for now I wanted to provide a Google Sheet, called Writing Progress, open for anyone can copy, then modify on their own account as they see fit. Once you’ve got it you can try exporting it to Excel (see pix at end of post.) The Microsoft version needed tweaking, especially on the timeline sheet, with might not be worth fixing vs. recreating, provided you have basic pivot table skills.

The goal for the sheet is twofold. First, to share something folks have asked about, because that’s what some authors do.

Second, it does for free, and with little grief, that thing that I paid Aeon Timeline $ome $illy $um of $50 to have and then to puzzle over. It integrates with Scrivener, which I (very reluctantly, see here, here, and here) use, but has been too much trouble to set up and keep linked. And if you don’t use Scrivener, I don’t see much reason in buying Aeon.

So head out to the Writing Progress sheet and see it for yourself. (No login required to check it out, but I’m guessing you need Google Drive to copy it.)

Screen Shots of Writing Progress Sheets

Novel Progress page

Timeline Entry Page

Screen shot of Excel Export

Progress page as an excel export

Heads up on posts

shlomi on August 12, 2018

Item the first

Facebook has cut a publishing connection between wordpress.com’s JetPack tool and sites that use it (mine included, even though I self-host my site). I’m not sure this’ll be going out, and if it’s not, and I can’t (I can’t believe I’m saying this) find one myself, I’ll need to write one. Anyone have plugins that work without JetPack as an intermediary?

Item the second

Between ArmadilloCon and events during/since, I’m putting together a big post (set of posts?) about it and my work since. Let’s see if I can’t get it to work on my page without having to tussle with TB/T too much.

Item the last

Between on that, I’m putting together a post for today providing a copy of my writing progress Google Sheet. Look out for it!