Tagged: Sibling of Music Novel

The (Too) Many-Worlds Hypothesis

Lately, we’re dividing our time between three fictional worlds (four if you count consensus reality). We’re brainstorming about the Ghost Novels, editing one of the Science Novels, and getting critique feedback about one of the Music Novels.

Back when we started this writing partnership, one of our policies was to avoid splitting our focus like this. We would dwell in one fictional universe at a time. Of course, that was a lot easier to stick to when we only had the one. Our concern, theoretical as it might have been, was that we’d waste too much mental energy switching between worlds. But you know what? It’s not been that hard, really.

A couple of years ago, we felt we had to bend our rules in order to accomplish our goals. It made us nervous, and there was a little bit of a learning curve. But like playing an instrument, or speaking a language, or anything else, it’s a trainable skill. We can do, now, exactly what we assumed wouldn’t work: hold three story worlds in our heads at the same time, and keep them straight.

As we flit about our various universes, we stay together. The critique notes about the Music Novel, we look at together and discuss. When it’s time to do Science Novel edits, we both knuckle down for that. Brainstorming about ghosties is a team sport. We find we can do just about anything as long as we’re doing it together. Probably the only time we’ve sent Kent off to one universe while Jen visited another is when there was cover artwork involved. (And, that worked just fine too. But we prefer to stay in sync.)

A writing partner is someone who’ll straddle three icebergs with you and help you not fall in.

Here’s the Plan (2021 Edition)

Ah, the smell of a fresh new year. So crisp, so clean, so innocent!

Over the course of several recent dog-walking excursions, Kent and Jen developed their master plan for 2021. The first item on the agenda is finishing the edits on Grandson of Science Novel. We had originally hoped to wrap it up in 2020, but that didn’t quite happen, so we’ll take a couple of weeks now and knock it out.

As the dust settles from that, we’ll decamp to the Auxiliary Writing Cave and dig in on plotting our new Ghost Series. We have a bazillion notes — some in longhand, some electronic. Once those have been wrangled into order, we’ll start at the beginning and flesh the whole thing out. This will likely take quite some time, since it’s looking like it’s going to be a 4-book series (quadrilogy? tetralogy?). Somehow, this is the first time we’ve planned an entire series at once and we want to make sure we do it right. The Auxiliary Writing Cave has comfy furniture and a fireplace (and a hidden bookcase), and is the perfect place to enjoy a hot beverage, with or without alcohol, so we’re quite excited about it.

After the plotting we have a split in the flowchart. If we’re feeling excited and energized about all things ghostly, we’ll jump in and start writing the first book in the series. On the other hand, if we feel a little wrung out, and like the batteries need some time to recharge, we’ll switch gears and edit Sibling of Music Novel.

If there’s still time left in the year after that, we’ll do whichever task we skipped in the last step.

And in our copious free time, we’ll start to figure out the next big concept to fill the void when the Ghost Series is done.

That plan should keep us quite happily occupied all year, but it could all go out the window. Our agent is shopping two novels for us, and when a publisher bites there will probably be one or two things they’d like us to do. A little upheaval for a good cause? Sign us up!

Hindsight is 2020

Every January we like to make a writing plan for the year, and when December rolls around we reread it and laugh. Except not this year. Somehow our 2020 prediction was pretty spot-on. We planned to quickly finish up the first draft of Sibling of Music Novel, and we did. We planned to spend the rest of the year editing our various other first drafts, and we did. We perhaps didn’t get quite as far as we expected, but we’re close. I guess the pandemic was good for something.

The other thing we hoped to do was get a good start on brainstorming our Ghost Series, and we even managed to do that despite a near total lack of road trips. Generally we use car time for lengthy conversations about our works-in-progress (it’s not like there’s much else to do), but this year lockdown kept us home. Lucky for us we have a couple of fuzzy roommates who insist on daily walks, and don’t care what we talk about while we’re doing it. We logged many many miles on the streets of our neighborhood, and have many many notes about ghosts and the humans who love them. Or is it fear?

As this year limps to a close we’ve started talking about our goals for next year. We’ll share our plans with you in January when they’re more solidified.

So many people struggled this year with loneliness and boredom. We’re so thankful that we have each other and this all-consuming pastime we can share. Our writing projects kept us sane and busy and fulfilled, and they brought us a lot of joy in a really shitty time. Things are finally looking promising for the world. The vaccine is coming. The new administration is coming. Just a few more months until the world starts to get back to normal. We might not mind too much being cooped up in our Writing Cave, but we’re really looking forward to that.

Looking Back at 2020 aka The Darkest Timeline

We here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises are ready for 2020 to be over. So ready, in fact, that we’re starting our year-end review now, a couple of weeks early. Who’s with us?

Remember the Beforetimes? When there were things worth celebrating? We started 2020 on quite a high note. Renovations wrapped up on the Auxiliary Writing Cave, complete with hidden bookshelf. We wrapped up the first draft of Sibling of Music Novel. We were planning a trip to Romania and Hungary. Things were looking so rosy.

We spent February rereading our Music Series, and practicing the mystical art of placing chapter breaks and perfecting pacing.

In March we lamented our missed vacation (spoiler alert: still on hold), explored how many reminders readers need versus how many they appreciate, and debated the difference between villains and monsters. In 2020, Covid is the main monster. There are many, many villains.

By April we’d started actually editing the third Music Novel, the biggest bad boy who ever bad-boyed. First we made it bigger, then we made it smaller. It was a whole thing, and we got quite philosophical about the whole process.

May brought more editing, and a cryptically described disagreement between the two of us. So cryptic that we don’t actually recall what we were at loggerheads over. Which is a good sign for our partnership, both marriage-wise and coauthor-wise.

No summer vacation for us! In June we just took innumerable walks around the neighborhood with the dogs, using the time to dig into our next project. It has the incredibly creative working title “Ghost Series.” You’ll never guess what it’s about.

By July, we were done with both Son of Music Novel, and the minor touchups we wanted to give Sibling of Music Novel. And we watched Hamilton.

The rereading and editing of the Science Novels started in August. Kent’s voice got quite a workout, because when we wasn’t reading the trilogy aloud, we were still talking about the Ghost Series on our daily walks. We wrapped up the month discussing how much of a character’s backstory an author should know.

It seems we didn’t have a lot to say about editing the second Science Novel in September, because all of our posts are about how excited we are about brainstorming the Ghost Series. We did spare a few minutes to talk about the joys and wonders of a good Goose Wrench.

Fittingly, October was also a time to talk about our ghosts. We even had a spooky encounter on one of our nighttime walks. We updated our writing prompt generator, and dealt with a minor case of burnout.

November had Jen finishing her edits on Son of Science Novel and starting in on Grandson. Kent followed not too far behind. We had Quarantine Thanksgiving without our kids, and engaged in a little bit of self-promotion.

Which brings us up to the present day. Kent is getting his geek on, drawing a cutaway view of a major setting in Son of Science Novel (standard floor plans are for chumps!), while he lets Jen get a little further ahead in her edits of Grandson. He’ll soon have to put his shiny toys away and pick up his flensing tools.

Looking back over this past year, we were surprised to see nary an update to our chain story’s Dramatis Personae, so look for that sometime soonish.

2020 was certainly not the year we wanted it to be, but it wasn’t all bad. Even spending all day together every day since mid-February, Kent and Jen still actively enjoy each other’s company. May you be as lucky in your choice of spouse and/or writing partner.

Beta Testing

It really didn’t take us long at all to put the finishing touches on the first draft of Sibling of Music Novel. We were done by last Saturday. Perhaps we should call it a first-ish draft. It hasn’t had a full edit, or even major rewrites, but it did get a little bit of extra attention in a couple of places. We knew a few items were lacking, so we dealt with those, and now the manuscript is in the hands of some trusted beta readers.

In a move that was somewhat controversial in the Writing Cave, we opted to not reread the book before handing it off. It’s technically resting before we edit it, and Kent was concerned that if we read the whole thing, instead of just poking at it here and there, that we’d refamiliarize ourselves with it too much. The whole point of letting the work rest is to forget how it’s supposed to go, forget what you were trying to accomplish with each scene and sentence. It’s the closest an author can come to experiencing their own work the way a reader will, and is a great way to spot parts that aren’t working. Jen saw the wisdom of Kent’s argument: she just really wanted to read the book because it’s good.

Every place we poked our noses in to make the small adjustments and additions drew us in and made us want to keep reading. That’s a good sign. It’s a good book, and it will still be good a couple of months from now when we come back to it with fresh eyes.

Keeping Busy, Keeping Sane

A little too busy, sometimes. Not too sane, though. What would be the fun in that?

Now that we’re done with edits on Son of Music Novel, we’re taking a quick swing through Sibling of Music Novel to take care of a few odds and ends. And in fact, there’s only one odd (or end?) remaining, which is to punch up the sensorium of the piece by adding smells. And that’s nearly done!

Still using our nightly dog walks to develop the ideas for the Ghost story. World-building conversations in the dark in our quiet neighborhood, as Kent tries to keep his voice from carrying overmuch when he uses phrases containing words like “aphrodisiac.” So, yeah. That’s coming along nicely!

Because it’s been forever since our writing group met, we’ve recently begun trying to round everybody up for a Zoom call. The cats are proving as difficult to herd as ever… Maybe the gang’s all burned out from too many online meetings already.

We hope you’re keeping safe. (And not too busy, nor too sane.)

The Patient is Resting Comfortably

Over the holiday weekend we finished up this round of edits on Son of Music Novel. Son is now over 18,000 words shorter. For those of you who prefer page counts, that’s approximately 50. We removed about 4 chapters worth of words. (!)

As threatened, Jen swung back around to give the beginning a second look. But even with all the cutting blades nicely sharpened, and her critical eye honed, she found fewer than 20 words to cut from each of the first two chapters. That’s about a tenfold drop from what was getting cut during the first pass. So, we’re calling it done (for now). That pace would lead to a not insignificant total over the course of the book. And we will take another trip through, just not right now.

We will leave this project in the recovery room for a while and turn our attention to its littermate, Sibling of Music Novel. That one’s earlier along in its lifecycle. Even though it’s the second in the series, we wrote it last, and there are half-a-dozen brief items we know we want to punch up before we consider it truly complete. Back in January we said 2020 was going to be the year where not much writing got done in the Writing Cave. We’re about to tackle the one little bit on the schedule. It will feel good to stretch different muscles.

Writing Cave Progress Report

Update on the Music Series: After completing the read-through for the whole trilogy, we made a few tiny little adjustments to Book One. We then collated all the input from our critique group and beta readers for Book Three, and all the stuff we wanted to take action on has been transferred into the live Scrivener project. It was a few dozen items, mostly pretty small. We say it was a few dozen because Jen has been knocking things off the list at a truly impressive pace. Meanwhile, Kent dug in on a couple of the not-so-small issues and has made great progress on them. Fewer items getting checked off the list, but a comparable degree of progress.

We did discuss working on Book Two after we got Book One tidied up. Because, you know, they go in order that way. Here’s the thing. Book Two is the one we wrote third. Thus, it hasn’t had as much time to rest, and we haven’t had a chance to circulate it for feedback. Therefore, we’re still doing this series inside-out.

“I’m Not a Monster”

The conventional definitions of the words show us what distinguishes a monster from a villain. A monster is a frightening and destructive creature, while a villain is a person who commits evil deeds.

They both have their place in fiction. Just don’t mix them up. If your hero really needs a villain to oppose, but you provide a monster and call it a villain, there will be imbalance. Remember, the villain is the hero of their own story. Another way to think of it is that a villain is an actual character, with a complex interior state. Good villains have a powerful drive, and are capable of emotions besides inchoate rage and savage glee. But, let’s give the monsters their due. A powerful and relentless foe, something that doesn’t need a reason to want the hero dead, can create a lot of tension if properly cast.

Enough with the theoretical stuff. Why bring any of this up right now? So happy you asked!

Our read-through of the Music Series is getting close to done. We just passed the middle of book three, and there are exactly three books in the series, so. Getting close!

As we might have mentioned, we’re really pleased with the state of all of these books. One of the points of pride is that the adversaries take a variety of forms. There are villains, and there are monsters. There’s even a villain who repeatedly denies being a monster. (While demonstrating so eloquently that sometimes people can be both.)

What type of adversary does your protagonist need? What kind of tension will keep your readers turning pages?

Reminders For The Reader

We have a lot on our mind (the single, shared Skelley hive-mind) as we do our read-through. Among the many things we’re keeping an eye on is whether we succeed in keeping the setting and the characters vivid and lively for the reader the whole time.

How much description is too much, and how many reminders should there be about certain details, is a challenge every author has to deal with. Description is a fundamental element of prose, but it can slow down the story. What you’re really seeking is balance. That search is a place where beta readers and critique groups can provide really useful feedback, but ultimately it’s the writer’s call to make.

There are no straightforward rules for this. The right answer depends on the type of story, what part of that story you’re looking at, and what your readers really want out of the book. Sure, if you figure out the right search terms, you’d surely land on someone’s list of rules for exactly this, but they’d be of dubious value. (Whereas if you keep reading our blog, you’ll get pure gold, of course. Anyway.) Rune Skelley keeps these two guidelines in mind:

  1. the less ordinary the details, the more reminders are warranted
  2. prevalence in the text should line up with what’s significant for the characters
  3. (bonus guideline) remember that you’re never going to please everybody

Point number one relates to world building. It’s not just important to say, somewhere, “oh by the way the sky has polka dots.” You have to keep the place and its denizens feeling real for the reader.

Point number two is one we pay careful attention to here in the Writing Cave. Just because something is a fact doesn’t mean it needs to be brought up. Focusing on which details the characters care about helps the reader really get inside their skin. This is also a way to bring a sense of wonder into a familiar or ordinary setting, by helping the reader see it through someone else’s eyes.

Point three simply acknowledges that this is all subjective. You collect your feedback, and Reader A tells you the recurrent descriptions are like a pleasant leitmotif running through the prose, while Reader B says he started skimming whenever it felt like things were sliding toward reminder-town. Meanwhile Reader C asks why you waited until page 200 to mention the sky having polka-dots, when actually by then it’s been described seven times. However, if multiple sources agree that something’s either too heavy or too sparse, then you should probably make adjustments.

All through the writing of the first drafts of these books, we fretted about this ongoing description issue. Kent was pretty convinced that we were going to need to add tons of reminders. But at this stage, almost three-quarters of the way through our reading of the trilogy? We’re both quite happy with the overall state. Editing will most likely involve sprinkling in a few more mentions of certain things, but it’s in a good place already.

A writing partner is someone who helps you get a feel for how to help readers inhabit the story’s world.