Category: Bumps & Bruises

Things don’t always go as planned.

The Descent Into (Holiday) Madness

r-avatarThe baking. The shopping. The wrapping. The cleaning.

The visiting. The cookies! The feasting. (And more cookies!)

Work stress. Travel stress. Gift anxiety.

New card games. Nonpariels. Caramels. And more feasting.

See what’s missing? The writing. Things in the cave haven’t stopped completely, we promise, but the apparatus available for our use isn’t sensitive enough to register any movement. So, yeah. It’s gotten pretty challenging to keep up with our goals.

We wish joy upon all our readers, now and throughout the year.

Captain’s Log

r-avatarThanksgiving can’t possibly be next week, can it?

It can? Oh. Well. In that case, it must be time for a progress report.

Here in SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fictions’ world famous Writing Cave we recently passed the 20,000 word mark on Son of Science Novel. 20,000 words is a great start, but we feel a little guilty over not being further along. With two of us writing we should have reached this milestone a while ago, but we do have a fine array of excuses. Between contracting the plague, suffering through election angst, spending time with visitors, and the occasional surprise trip to Philadelphia, we haven’t been able to spend as many evenings in the prose mines as swift progress demands.

Jen has been lamenting the way our writing schedule worked out this year, which precludes curling up in the Auxiliary Writing Cave during the dreary winter months to brainstorm and plot our next project. We still have to write most of the first and all of the second novels we planned out that way last year. It would be technically possible, though foolhardy, to pause the writing and spend the dark months detailing our future exploits. Instead we’ve devised a scheme that should allow us to relocate our compositional endeavors to our cozy annex at least part of the time. We have one laptop, and with the kids away at school we can co-opt one of the desktop machines left behind. A little bit of creative furniture arrangement, et voila! As long as we can get Kent to spend at least as much time focused on the keyboard as on poking the fire with a metal stick, we’ll be golden.

Time Flies Like An Arrow

r-avatarWoof.

Everything. Takes. Forever.

Maybe we have unrealistic expectations. Okay, that’s probably it. After all, we’ve done this several times, so of course it’ll just go faster and smoother each time from now on, right?

Jen continues to hammer away at the outlining for Son of Science Novel. It’s taking (spoiler alert!) longer than she budgeted. But it really is coming together, and now she’s nearly done incorporating all the mysterious scratches left by mysterious chickens in our various steno pads, from back when we were brainstorming the story. The process might be going faster, except she finds herself distracted by the art project happening on Kent’s side of the writing cave.

Kent continues to refine the illustration for the cover of our trilogy’s first book. It’s getting very close too, in fact, but there’s always one more tweak, one more font to try, one more configuration of the title and other text in relation to the artwork… Kent claims that he’d be making better time if not for the constant distraction of the outline being crafted on the other side of the writing cave. (Jen rolls her eyes.)

It’s worth giving your projects the time they need in order to create work that you’re proud of. With a partner sharing the load, you’ll get through the slow patches in half the time and have energy left for the fun stuff.

Cave of Rainbows

r-avatarAs much as we tout the benefits of our rainbow-based approach to story development, we must also admit that the system has its drawbacks. Laying the whole thing out takes up a hallway, or most of a room. Laying out multiple rainbows concurrently (backstory + sequel + another sequel) takes up our entire auxiliary writing cave.

Studying the whole thing is a bit laborious, too. It can involve some stooping, and playing a sort of anti-Twister to keep from ruining the layout with one’s feet. (The other night, Kent had to sneeze while standing astride the whole construct. That could have been disastrous!)

Maybe we kid ourselves, but we feel like the inconveniences are all offset by the system’s merits. In fact, the strengths and weaknesses are all due to the same thing — the physical nature of the cards, which allows them to be shifted around and makes their representation of the story more tangible and spatial. There are software tools that do similar things, some of which we also make use of. Scrivener’s cork board is nice, and Jen is an expert with Aeon Timeline.

But sometimes you need to crawl around in your dusty auxiliary writing cave, and sneeze a few times, to really internalize a project.

Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a Pair of Scissors Can’t Fix!

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One of the things you need to do when you write with a partner is divvy up the work, and here in the writing cave we often end up each adopting part of the cast. Kent does the POV scenes for his adoptees, and Jen likewise for the other characters. It’s nothing formalized, but we do like it because it helps each characters’ scenes feel more consistent as a set.

So. On our read-through of Son of Music Novel, we agreed that the scenes from one particular POV felt longwinded and over-explainy. And this character happened to be someone Kent had adopted. It was a good fit, because this character’s personality and intellect are similar in some respects to Kent’s, so he felt comfortable with the voice. Maybe a little too comfortable.

There’s no rule against having boorish characters, even boorish POV characters. The trick is to convey them while avoiding boorish writing. We now have to address some issues because this character brought out some of the worst in Kent.* Rather, because when that happened he let it contaminate the prose.

Will we send Kent back to fix the mess he made? Will we bench him and put Jen in for a fresh take on it? We don’t know. But having two of us means we have options.

*note that we are not actually accusing Kent of being longwinded and over-explainy

The Name Game

r-avatarOn any team, different players have different strengths. In the case of Rune Skelley, one of Jen’s main strengths is naming — things, people, places, you name it (but not if she sees it first). This is good because Kent tends to be less than awesome at coming up with names.

This doesn’t prevent him from having opinions, though. So, once in a while, Jen will deliver a name that just doesn’t work for Kent. And it does matter if both writing partners aren’t on the same page about a name. After all, characters’ names are perhaps the most important things about them. No other aspect gets such heavy use, or is called on to signify everything else the reader knows in such a compact, almost invisible way.

These name-disagreement situations are uncommon, but we’re in the midst of one right now. They’re terribly awkward. There’s a sense of “Jen is the one who’s good at this, so she wins,” which we both know isn’t a solution. Kent is at a disadvantage to produce viable alternatives, so he feels stuck. We really don’t have a formal process for coping with them, other than trying to keep communications open and give each other time to adjust. So far it’s never led to arson.

Partnership is about trust and compromise. Working with the right partner, compromise can be a creative exercise.

Careful With That Axe Eugene

r-avatarEdits on the Music Novel were completed last night, to great fanfare and celebration. The kind of fanfare that sounds a lot like a satisfied sigh, and the kind of celebration that greatly resembles going to sleep. We finished up late, is what we’re saying.

Throughout the editing process, Jen went first, with Kent following along behind to neaten things up. If it were yard work, Jen would be on the riding mower and Kent would have the tiny little nail scissors to trim the stragglers. Except when we got to Chapter 17. When we got to Chapter 17, Kent was feeling feisty. He set his nail scissors carefully aside and got out the weedwacker and the flame thrower. Instead of one word here, one word there, he started yanking out clauses, sentences, and in a couple of cases, entire paragraphs. Several darlings gave their lives to the cause.

The carnage was a shock to Jen’s delicate system. She thought she understood how things worked (i.e., she was the vicious one), and to have the tables turned was painful. We took our time and worked through Kent’s reasoning (and he asked several times if a break would be a good idea), and made the necessary edits. And Jen can (almost) admit that he was right and the work is (probably) stronger now.

It’s important to have strong communication skills when you’re writing with a partner so that when you come across your own Chapter 17 you’re able to work through it as a team. And so that you want to keep working together. Respect and compromise are invaluable.

In the end we surpassed our arbitrary goal, removing 12.5% of the words we had so carefully written. Our next step will be to read through the finished manuscript and make sure we weren’t overzealous. That’s the other danger of swinging the sharp editing tools around — you might remove something that was better left in place.

Close But No Cigar

r-avatarWe talked last time about our workflow for this revision pass, and the benefits of all the extra conversation. This time we’re going to come clean about a downside to this approach.

Stuff doesn’t always match up the way we want it to.

At least half the time our wordcounts or character counts don’t agree after we finish getting “synced up,” which leads to a rather laborious process of tracking down the discrepancy, which isn’t the most effective use of our time. And time is a very important commodity for us, so things that waste it are a major concern.

The silver lining, if there is one, is that this way we’re catching little errors that much sooner. If Kent handed over a file with “He went the store” in it, importing that would infect Jen’s copy of the manuscript with the mistake. Sure, it would get spotted on  a future read-through, but we sleep better knowing we’re on top of that stuff.

Having two people working on a project makes certain things more complex, and sometimes that makes them less efficient. We look at it as a cost of doing business, and we think the negatives are tiny compared to the positives.

What’s the biggest challenge you face in working with a co-author? If you’ve never done it, what’s the thing you’re most worried about?

Archeology

r-avatarThe spring cleaning bug bit Jen this year. We’ve both known for a long time that the writing cave was way overdue (yes, it was way overdue a long time ago; we were verging on eligibility for a depressing reality show appearance). The excavation is well underway and has led to some very interesting finds.

In addition to the kids’ old school papers and mementos, manuals for appliances we junked years ago, and other miscellany, Jen uncovered some primitive forms of writing from many eons ago when Rune Skelley first formed. Deciphering these ancient inscriptions taught us much about the way of life as it was practiced back then.

We used to do our first drafts longhand, on lined paper. We’d use the process of typing them up as a chance to do minor edits.

We used to print out each draft and do all our revisions on paper. Any lengthy new or altered passages, we wrote out longhand, just like with a first draft.

We used to dive in and make up the story as we went. There would be a premise, and some notion of the inciting incident, and a shadowy impression of where it should all lead. Then we’d just go for it, and when it wasn’t quite right we redid it. Then we redid it again. (And again.)

As we moved away from so much handwritten output, we had a stage where we would write scenes, dozens of scenes, and then print them out and fan them on the floor to decide what order to put them in to form a story. Then we’d write whatever new material was needed to spackle over the seams.

We found a binder that Jen created for the Music Novel, containing notes about the whole cast and the band’s discography. Several characters’ names are out of date, as is the whole plot, but the inspiration is still there, still resonating.

We’ve come a long way, from such primordial techniques to our current state of rainbows and wrenches. It’s good to be reminded of how things once were, if only to be glad you don’t operate under such conditions anymore.

Did We Say “Geniuses”?

r-avatarWork progresses slowly on the outline for Grandson of Science Novel. It’s probably no more sluggish than the corresponding stage of things for the book that precedes it, but the headwind is kind of killing our morale.

Coming off the wrap-up of Son of Science Novel’s outline, we had a lot of momentum. Also, we were brimming with ideas for the third book because there was stuff — lots of stuff! — that was left deliciously untidy at the end of the second one. Thus we were counting on maintaining our momentum and having half the work already done.

Er, yeah. No.

The ideas are great, but what we’re discovering is they’re not the hard part. The stuff in between them, the connective tissue, that’s the challenge. We got ourselves persuaded that it wouldn’t feel like starting all over, but it does. Dammit.

The advantages of having both books in a state of high plasticity are still valid. We’re still confident that working on them in tandem is the smart move. What we’re learning is that “time savings” probably isn’t among those advantages.