Category: Bumps & Bruises

Things don’t always go as planned.

The Land-Speed Record Is Safe

Our recent output has been nil.

We got off a roaring start on Ghost Book 2, making good headway because we were doing a good job of sticking to our schedule. And then, well, stuff came up. Life intruded, which it does all the time, but for a couple of weeks now it’s been downright pushy. We’re fine, in fact it was mostly good news! It’s just a lot.

Not that we can claim that we were straining in the traces to put in more of those solid multi-hour work sessions that keep a project on track. Nah, we got a little lazy and took advantage of having some legitimate excuses.

This week we’re recommitting to the schedule, the lifestyle, the dream. Well, that first one mainly. That’s the key: having a schedule. We’re also dabbling with some ideas about carrots and sticks, and maybe shifting back to composing on the laptops for a change of scene. We have humongous desktop monitors, which can be a tremendous boon to productivity in a lot of ways but can also backfire. It’s too easy to leave scads of distractions open all the time.

A bit of archeology in the files for the previous manuscript suggests that these ups and downs are pretty normal for us, and that our net progress is basically right on track. Which is… good to know. Bit disappointing, though. Now that Kent’s retired, our pace was supposed to increase substantially. That hasn’t happened so far. But we’ll figure it out.

A writing partner is still your partner even when you’re not doing a lot of writing.

It Happens to The Best of Us

Chalk it up to staying holed up in the Writing Cave all the time… It took Covid about four years to track Rune Skelley down, but it found us right after New Year’s. We both had very minor cases (and we’re both better now!) but even so it was far from pleasant.

We did our best to keep working through it, but we were so tired. Productivity was very low. Guess we have to admit we’re human after all.

As of Monday we both tested negative. Kent even did a “disappointing” workout. So, it’s back to the grindstone for us.

A writing partner is someone whose major symptoms don’t come on until yours have started to fade, so you can take care of each other.

Getting Things Off the Ground

We’re pleased to report that productivity in the Writing Cave has seen an uptick lately.

As Kent’s retirement date drew near, we envisioned our novels flying to completion. All that writing time during the day! Plus an added bonus of getting to have evenings and weekends again!

The one part of the above that we achieved right away was the evenings and weekends. But, novels’ wings don’t flap on their own. Regular readers already know that we’ve struggled to stick to a schedule, and that we had some ideas as to why that is. Well, now things appear to be on track, and we don’t really have much of a theory about why. Perhaps there’s a natural ebb and flow to our motivational energies. Perhaps we just needed this long to adapt to the new normal. Maybe we got brain frostbite in the Arctic and now we’re finally thawing out.

Whatever the reason, we like how it feels to be accomplishing stuff as a team.

A writing partner is the wind under your wings.

In The Arctic, No One Can Hear You Not Writing

We decided that we wouldn’t do any work during our arctic adventure, because we were on vacation. Some of it counted as research anyway.

Our intention was to get right into serious writing upon our return home, putting the new post-retirement schedule into full effect. It was a good intention, enough to fill a few potholes on that proverbial road. Sigh.

It was probably too long a break. It went beyond resting up and feeling refreshed, to the point of getting a little too comfortable with being lazy.

Another thing that set us up badly is that we’re at a transitional stage in our process. If we’d been in the middle of writing prose, it probably would’ve been pretty easy to pick it back up and knock the rust off. But we’re in a sort of workflow limbo. There’s no breeze to fill our sails.

Of course, what we’d like to blame for all our problems is the clutter of day-to-day life that accumulated in our absence, especially the stack of crossword puzzles. That certainly didn’t help… but we’re caught up on crosswords now and need to stop making excuses.

A writing partner is someone who’ll help you get back on the horse, even if that means first figuring out where said horse wandered off to.

The Perils of Disorganization

As part of Jen’s Outlining the Whole Damn Series project, she went back through the steno pad where we made our original notes and found some hidden gems that never made it into the typed record. We really need to learn to be more organized.

Nothing was uncovered that required us to make changes in Book 1, which is lucky because we’re alllllllmost done fucking with it. Books 2 and 3, on the other hand, will need some adjustments. It’s not “rethink the plot” level stuff, but there are nuances we’d like to include which impact the motivations for a couple of characters. Better to find out now than after we’ve written any more!

And while we’re on the topic of (dis)organization — if there’s something that has broad application for your whole story, maybe don’t hide the note about it in the depths of Book 4’s documentation. Just sayin’.

A writing partner is someone who is happy to share the blame when things are suboptimal.

Pro Tip: Don’t Make Your Notes Cryptic

You know how you and your bestie have inside jokes that no one else gets? Or how you and your spouse have your own private language? Maybe don’t lean too heavily into those sorts of things when you’re writing up your notes. Ask us how we know!

Before Jen started writing the synopses for the rest of the books in the ghost series, we  read through their plot rainbows together. Unfortunately, in several places there were phrases that were clearly meant to be cute, quippy references, but the context is lost to time. The plot rainbow is particularly prone to this sort of thing because each square in it is small. There’s not a lot of room for detail, so we often resort to shorthand. To our occasional detriment.

We’ve immersed ourselves in those plots again, and that’s allowed us to decode (most of) what we were talking about. There are no giant question marks. It’s a good reminder, though, that thorough notes are important, and pop culture references don’t always stand the test of time.

A writing partner is someone who can let you know when you’re being too clever, unless they’re caught up in it with you.

We Have Big Plans… And They’ll Have to Get Bigger

If a little planning is good, then a lot of planning should be great, right? And you know what would be best of all? All. The. Planning.

Except, no. There is such a thing as too much planning. It’s not a catastrophe if it happens, but it can create some headaches. As we recently discovered. (Spoiler: we’d say the problems you get with overplanning are better ones to have than what you get with underplanning.)

As regular blog readers know, we outlined all four Ghost Books at once. We wanted to know where the plot is going, and be able to do nifty thematic stuff and foreshadowing. Great. In the process, we did end up creating a problem for ourselves, which we’ve discovered now that we’re closing in on the end of book one.

There’s a very fancy prop — think priceless magical heirloom — that gets used prominently in the first book and then is never mentioned at all in the outlines of the later volumes. We think we’ve figured out how it happened. During the outlining, we thought of this item as more of an aesthetic element, something that added spice to a few early scenes but wouldn’t really be missed later on. During the creation of the actual prose, it became nifty-keen in ways we hadn’t anticipated, becoming something that we couldn’t just stop mentioning. Anyway, we caught it and we can easily (we hope) tweak the future outlines to factor it in.

Given that what we’re saying is we missed some stuff, it might not be obvious how this  represents overplanning. But it was. We just planned out a few too many books all at once. We didn’t apply to the outlining process the lessons we’ve learned about stubs. There’s a reason we do our stubs in batches, which is so that we can course-correct as we go. So, now we’ll have to course-correct anyway. No big deal. Much easier to fix outlines than completed manuscripts!

The take-away is this: there’s an optimal amount of planning, and it’s probably better to do a little too much than not enough.

Hard To Believe, But It’s True

Hey! We’re getting really close to done with the first draft of As Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1. This fact sort of snuck up on us.

Even though we’ve surpassed 92,000 words, and even though we’re definitely on final approach for the climax, and we know these things and talk about them daily, still it feels to us like we’re trying to get started working on this book.

Why do we play these mind-games on ourselves? There could be a couple of reasons.

For one thing, we have struggled to establish a good work rhythm this year. In theory, we write every day except Friday (that’s our night off) but in practice it hasn’t turned out that way a lot of weeks. We did some traveling, and we did some pet-sitting so our kids could travel, and there just seems to always be something coming up to interfere. Plus, we took a pretty lengthy break from writing prose while we planned out this new series. We were still working, but most of it took the form of conversations. We could do it on long drives, and we could do it during dog walks. So we got out of practice with the “butt in chair, fingers on keys” mode of composition.

Anyway, the lack of momentum means needing to get back on the horse, which feels like starting over and contributes to that distorted sense of still being at the beginning of the journey.

Also, and probably related, is the fact that we did indeed plan out the entire tetralogy. There’s a ton of story that we know about but haven’t begun to write yet, because this is only the first book! But on some level, it probably skews our perspective on our progress because all that additional narrative for the remaining books is looming in the back of our minds. We should focus on the fact that we’re 80 or 90 percent of the way done writing this draft. Instead we feel like we’re about 20% of the way through because we’re using the whole series as our yardstick.

A writing partner is someone who occasionally taps you on the shoulder and points out how far you’ve come together.

Not A Keyboard Was Stirring, Nor Even A Mouse

Recently, we posted about our ambitious plans for holiday-season productivity. And we’re sure you’ve been holding your collective breath awaiting news about how it’s going.

Well. We have made some progress, but not like we were hoping. Our weekends and evenings just seem to evaporate lately. Weird.

A writing partner is someone to keep you company in a turkey-coma.

You’re Only As Old As The Author Thinks You Are

The other night Kent worked on a scene in which the POV character happens to state his own age. But the rainbow showed a different age for that character. It was only a matter of a couple of years, but which was right? This led to both Kent and Jen digging through notes and coming up with yet another number (!) before eventually tracking down the character’s date of birth and confirming that what Kent put in the scene (based on what Jen had put in the stub) was correct all along.

Having done such exhaustive pre-work for all four Ghost Books means we’re very well prepared, and it also means we’ve given ourselves a bit too much to keep track of sometimes. Maybe the note on the whiteboard was the result of faulty arithmetic, or perhaps this person’s birth year got shifted later, while we were working on one of the other rainbows for this project. Anyway, it’s a pitfall of creating tons and tons of notes: some of them are bound to contradict each other.

It wouldn’t have been the end of the world if we’d put in the “wrong” number, but it’s worth getting it right. Creating a world that draws people in relies on logical consistency. Even though age is a less tangible trait than things like height and eye color, it’s still an important physical detail. Characters’ ages give readers a way to reckon the passing of time in the story. And if a fuss has just been made over some other character having aged ten years, well, we would need a damn good reason to say that meanwhile this character had grown fifteen years older. Or, to suggest that he didn’t know his own age!

A writing partner is someone who helps you keep it all straight.