Things don’t always go as planned.
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.
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.
Last week we extolled the virtues of stubs. Everything we said about them is true, but they aren’t magic. So this week we’ll talk about how sometimes it’s challenging to apply the stub system in practice.
Some stories seem more resistant than others to having their parts written out of sequence, and Untitled Ghost Novel Number One is such a story. The stubs themselves are not unduly difficult to create, but during our conversations about how to assign them, we got stuck a few times. It felt a bit like trying to assemble a piece of furniture without the instructions. We wondered why that might be happening this time around.
One possibility is that there are fewer parallel plot threads in this one than in many of our previous projects. It’s pretty much all one thread geared around the main locale. So, we can’t have Jen take care of the scenes on Bespin while Kent deals with the action in the Dagobah system.
Another potential explanation is that so much about it is new. It’s the first time in long while that we’re creating a new story universe for ourselves, and it’s a pivot into a new genre for us. Whole new cast, new plot, and new world-building with new constraints. So, it feels like asking for one thing too many to also jump ahead in the timeline.
As noted in a recent installment, we’ve had some trouble keeping to our writing schedule. Apparently sometimes writing at all is kinda hard, so perhaps it’s not the story. Maybe it’s us.
It’s quite possible that we just occasionally get a little precious about things, and blow momentary setbacks out of proportion. The good news is, we got over ourselves and got on with the job. Stubs really do work. Even if they’re not magic.
A writing partner is someone to help you line up the pieces when your Pröze-Eppik seems like it came from the meatballs-and-furniture emporium.
Back in the day, Rune Skelley could be found hard at work in the prose mines nearly every single evening. We toiled behind our keyboards night after night, weekdays and weekends, only taking time off for real emergencies. We got a lot done, but we also burned out. We didn’t want it to be as catastrophic as the time we remodeled our master bathroom and got so burned out we abandoned the project for six months and just used the bathroom in the hall, so we modified our schedule.
It started with taking Friday evenings off. We allowed ourselves some time to relax. Most of the Go! Go! Go! attitude came from Jen, so to ease her into the “weekends aren’t the enemy” mindset, we started by watching movies that could count as research. When she saw that we were able to take an evening off once a week and not lose our momentum, that rule relaxed and we now watch whatever the hell we want.
Things started to slip a little bit during the early days of the pandemic. We had dinner with Jen’s mom once a week, but at the same time we stopped having weekly writer’s group meetings so we told ourselves it all balanced out. Even though in the good old days, the only reason we didn’t have to work on Writer’s Group night is that Group counted as work. Visiting Jen’s mom, not so much.
And then we spent a solid year outlining the Ghost Series. One of the best things about brainstorming is that you can do it anywhere. Another of the best things about it is that it doesn’t take long to get into the right gear to do it. Work sessions can be short and still be quite productive.
All this slipperiness on the slopes started to turn into an avalanche when we were hit with a double whammy: we started having regular (though virtual) group meetings again, and we started actually writing Untitled Ghost Novel #1. Suddenly we couldn’t work in the car on the way to and from our family dinners, and we had another evening commitment on our schedule, and the short work sessions we’d learned to sneak in between episodes of Supernatural and Ted Lasso weren’t cutting it. Sad to say, instead of knuckling down we are now more likely to come up with excuses to skip writing sessions. “Would you look at that? It’s so late. There’s no point in trying to get the fiction engines spooled up now! Better just go watch Severance.” “We’ll get in a good long work session on Saturday (as long as the weather prevents Kent from doing yard work).” “It’s my birthday, and I want to just chill and eat cheesecake.” “It’s the dog’s birthday and I just want to chill and eat cheesecake while the dog wears a funny hat.” etc.
Untitled Ghost Novel #1 is coming along, but not as quickly as it ought to. We had a Very Serious Talk about it today and vowed to do better. But we did not pinkie-swear. When we pinkie-swear you’ll know we really mean it.
A writing partner is someone who values your pinkies as much as their own.
Here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises we value secrecy, which is why we use placeholder titles for our novels and series on this blog. Rest assured that the Science Novels and the Music Novels have actual real titles. Pretty kickass titles, if we’re being honest, and when they’re published, you’ll get a chance to witness their majesty for yourself.
Alas, the Ghost Novels do not, as yet, have any sort of titles at all. They don’t even have cute little nicknames. When we talk about them between ourselves it’s just “The First Book” or “Ghost Book 4” or whatever. We don’t even have a name for the series.
Some of this is because we’re still so early in the writing process. Sometimes you have to meet the baby before you can name it. Also, it turns out that naming ghost stories is kind of tricky. It’s very easy to wind up with a title that sounds like a Nancy Drew book: The Haunted Placename, The Secret of the Thingy, The Ghosts of Blankety Blank. It would be a lot easier if no one else had ever written a ghost story before. Another factor is that we like for the titles in a series to sound like they go together. We’ve done that most elegantly with the Science Novels, which you’ll one day be blown away by. Trust. Meanwhile, we do have a few ideas for possible Ghost Book titles, but not any so far that lend themselves to a coordinated set of four.
“Writing Partner” is a great title for someone who is your partner in all things writing. Including coming up with titles.
Book 4 of the Ghost Series keeps expanding. Regular readers of the blog know that there are so many characters we had to modify our plot rainbow to accommodate them all. And since these characters insist on interacting with one another, having so many of them causes an exponential increase in the number of plot events. In practically no time we outgrew the acreage on the front of our new whiteboard. Lucky for us, the back is also magnetic.
Act 3 of the novel now lives on the back of the board, where it has plenty of space to stretch its legs. We thought this was the perfect solution, and it is pretty great. The problem is, no matter which side of the board we’re looking at we want to reference something on the other side. This entails a lot of flipping the board back and forth. And back and forth. And back and forth. Jen keeps joking about buying a second enormous whiteboard, and Kent keeps hoping that she really is joking. “But just imagine,” she says, “how complicated a plot we could devise if we had twice as much space to work!”
A writing partner is someone who will go along with some — but not all — of your mad schemes.
Sorry to mislead you last week. The Writing Cave is still under construction. But! the worst of it is behind us and half of our computers are back in service. Fingers crossed that regular service will return next week.
The Writing Cave is undergoing renovations. This means all the stuff from that one, single room has been displaced, and now more or less completely fills three rooms and the hallway. Painting has commenced, but there’s a lot to be done after that.
We’re still working on the Ghost Series, but things are a bit chaotic and we utterly spaced on getting our prompts done this week. Sorry!
Normal schedule should resume next week, although the reno will be ongoing.
The thing about quadrilogies (or tetralogies if you prefer) is that they’re longer than trilogies. Like, an entire book longer. And in our case, that extra book is shaping up to be the longest of the series. That’s nothing unusual. You’ve probably noticed in other series you read that the books tend to get longer as their roman numeral suffixes get higher. We were expecting Book 4 to be a bit of a beast. Were, in fact, braced and ready to flip our new whiteboard over and continue our plot rainbow on the back. The damn thing could be 16 feet long if it needed to be! We were prepared. Or so we thought.
When you’re writing a ghost story, you can’t count on death to prune your cast the way you can with other genres. Characters have a way of piling up as we discovered when we tried to set up the rainbow for Book 4. We had nearly twice as many characters as places to put them. The snazzy grid on the whiteboard has room for 11 rows. We needed 18. Not all of these people will have Point of View, but we need to keep track of their comings and goings and dastardly deeds.
We tried looking for ways to lump characters together into a shared row, but there weren’t enough we could do that with to solve the problem. We tried arranging them in columns instead, but that gave us too few rows for the plot. We scratched our collective head and joked about buying a second board.
In the end we dusted off our paper cutter and chopped all our beautiful squares in half, allowing two people to share a row while maintaining their individuality. We have embraced the rectangle lifestyle. The main difference is that Jen has to write smaller to fit all the important info in half the space, but she’s up for the challenge. We just hope we have enough magnets. We bought 400 of the little suckers, and for most plots that would be more than sufficient. Depending on how dense this rainbow ends up being, we might need more, which is truly kind of terrifying.
A good writing partner is someone who isn’t afraid of all the neodymium.
Ideas are not something we struggle with, usually. That’s one of the advantages to being a writing team. Between the two of us we’re almost always able to come up with fun complications for our plots, and, after letting our characters struggle with them for a bit, fun solutions to those complications. It’s pretty awesome.
We’ve encountered a snag, though, in something tangentially related to the writing: redecorating the Writing Cave. Jen says it’s time. The Writing Cave is the first room we did anything to after buying our house. Back then we just called it the office. Writing wasn’t something we were as dedicated to, and we just needed a good place to set up our computer desks where the kids couldn’t casually smear peanut butter all over the keyboards. They do that less often now, what with one of them being in grad school and the other the proud owner of a shiny new PhD.
When we bought the place, the office was carpeted in plush, vibrant blue — a wall-to-wall Cookie Monster pelt. The rest of the house had hardwood, and we knew there was hardwood under all that Muppet fur, but we worried about what shape it might be in. It must be pretty bad for the previous owners to have kept it covered, right?
Wrong. When we pulled it up we discovered that the underpadding was pieced together from a million little scraps, all stapled into place. But other than that the floor was fine.
We stripped off the mattress-ticking wallpaper and put up a nice rich blue, speckled with whimsical stars and moons. It looks a lot less Lucky Charms than that sounds, but it is perhaps a little too whimsical and there are a few spots where we tore it a little moving furniture. When we had new windows installed, the paint we got to do touch-up doesn’t quite match the original.
The ceiling fixture doesn’t give as much light as we need, and is constructed in such a way that it’s hard to find bulbs that fit inside it with the cover on.
So — we’re all agreed, then. It’s time to redo this room. (Well, we’re not *all* agreed. Kent is indifferent. But he’s willing to follow Jen’s lead.) We know we want to make a change, we just don’t know what we want to change it to. It’s a strange place for us to be. We’ve done a lot of home improvement, and we usually have no shortage of ideas there either. But this time we (read: Jen) are kind of floundering. We’re most likely going to get new desks that can convert to standing desks with the touch of a button. Other than that we’re happy with the furniture. That’s good for our budget, but doesn’t leave a lot of room for creativity.
All we know for sure is that we don’t want the walls to be white. And we want a new light fixture and window covering. What those will look like, we have no idea. Oh – and we’re going to clear out the closet and install some sort of organization system, once we sort through all the junk and see what we actually want to keep.
If we get it figured out while we’re still outlining the Ghost Books, we can talk through plot points while we paint. Otherwise we’ll have to divide our time between writing and acting out our HGTV dreams.
The best writing partner is the one who supports you, even when it means applying liberal helpings of elbow grease.