Category: Composition & Progress

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.

With Both Hands, And…

A map is a very handy thing for a writer. It can help you gauge how long someone’s journey would take, or remind you of the river between points A and B. If you’re using a real-world locale, then you’ll want to keep your depiction in line with reality. If your locale is your own invention, then you’ll want to keep your depiction internally consistent.

Way back at the start of things for As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1, we created a map of the main setting, which is a place we made up. Over the course of actually writing that book, we annotated the map with a great many pencil marks showing adjustments and additions. It’s become sort of a mess.

So, as part of our preparations for diving into prose on As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #2, Kent is updating the map so we have a clean version to work from. The more we write about the place, the more we learn about it ourselves, so we assume we’ll need to do more map updates when we get to books 3 and 4 as well.

A writing partner is someone who helps you keep your bearings.

The Stubulator Has Been Activated

Progress report: Jen has stubbed out the first six scenes for As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #2. Typically we aim to have about a dozen stubs ready before writing any of the actual scenes, so we should reach that stage very soon!

Each phase of our process (brainstorming, rainbowing, the prose outline, the actual outline, the stubs, and then finally actual prose) requires a different kind of writing. And there’s always a little hill to climb when we revisit any of those phases after being away from it for a while, to relearn how to do that kind of writing.

Still, we trust the process. Each of those phases helps us understand our story from another angle, making things go a lot smoother during the prose phase and leading to an overall superior end result.

Also, we’ve learned the hard way that staying in any one phase for too long can lead to burnout. We ended up writing the prose for two entire novels back-to-back once. But only once. It’s nice being able to shift gears, use different muscles now and then. Keeps us sane.

A writing partner is someone who shares your faith in the process.

Boo!

We’ve been immersing ourselves in the supernatural as we work on our ghost story, but perhaps we took things a bit too far. Netherwordly manifestations sprang up at the HQ of Skelleyco Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises. But the creepiest part? Every child in the vicinity seemed impelled to approach. Impelled by a hunger, a hunger for… candy.

Last year we missed trick-or-treating because we were in freakin’ Transylvania on Halloween. So this year we brought our A game. Not that we merited anything better than honorable mention in our neighborhood. The bar is set crazy high. We did have a great time, as did Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord.

decorative tombstones

front door flanked by skeletal bats

a corgi and a golden retriever in bony costumes

What we did not do was get much writing done. Doorbell was kept pretty busy.

A writing partner is someone who holds your hand when things get scary.

Rereading The Rainbow

The past couple of weeks have seen a happy uptick in our productivity. We got into a bit of a rhythm with our work sessions and had some very fruitful discussions.

Revisiting the rainbow for As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #2 gave us a chance to peek around a whole bunch of plot corners. Jen was very interested in avoiding surprises as we work on prose, which have tripped us up a bit in past projects. So, looking around the corners was the whole mission here. We were able to flesh out the through-lines for a couple of characters and unkink the timeline. Those conversations really jumpstarted things as far as being able to focus on the project, which made it much easier to (mostly) stick to a schedule from one day to the next.

Did we see around all the corners? Probably not! But we know we’re a lot better prepared than we were before.

A writing partner is someone who helps you avoid getting ambushed by your own plot.

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.

Ghostly Progress: Book Two

As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1 is in the hands of our beta readers. We have turned our attention to Also-Untitled Ghost Novel #2.

Book One had rested for a few weeks, so we began with another read-thru of that installment. It was even better than we expected (not that we’re trying to influence our beta readers). Kent had been fretting over possible pacing issues in the first part, but it flowed very nicely. There are a few pages of heavier-than-necessary exposition here and there, but those will be easy to deal with. (To be clear, such infodumps are always Kent’s doing.) So, having made some notes, we moved on to the next step.

Utilizing both whiteboards, we set up the rainbow for Book Two. Perusing it was quite entertaining, because Jen’s got quite a wit, but also a little surprising. There were some placeholder character names, and some plot beats that have been superseded now that we actually wrote Book One.

We also have a long-form synopsis, which we usually refer to as the prose outline. That was created later, in parallel with the manuscript for Book One, so it should be up-to-date. Guess we’ll find out.

A writing partner is someone to accompany you on a journey of (re)discovery.

Ghost Saga Progress Update

After completing the read-through on the freshly completed first draft of As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1, we jumped right in on edits. The first step was to go through it together and deal with all the easiest issues. These were mostly things like missing “the”s and other typos that were discovered during the read-through. After that, Jen started at the top of the comments list and Kent started at the bottom, and we hunted down other low-hanging fruit. Now that we’ve had several work sessions devoted to this, the lower branches have been plucked clean and we’re tackling slightly thornier stuff.

Not that any of it counts as “thorny.” We haven’t found anything that throws the whole plot into question or makes us wish our vocation was something easier like yacht-racing. But there are minor continuity things that are spread throughout the manuscript, for example. And there are minor continuity things that only affect a few places, but we need to establish how the story physics do actually work before we can settle on the preferred version and get everything aligned to it. Some of it will take a little discussion, but even the biggest issues that we marked aren’t all that large.

Meanwhile, Jen has also been sneaking in some sessions while Kent day-jobs (can we call it moonlighting if she does it while the sun is out?), and she just completed the 20-page prose outline for Book 2! Then she made Kent read the whole thing aloud in one sitting, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong.

A writing partner is someone to divvy up the chores list with.

Read-Through Completed!

Last night we finished our first read-through of As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1!

Rather than popping the champagne again some more, we devoted the rest of the evening to planning our next moves. There is still a huge amount of work to do on this series. It’s a bit of a learning process because this is the first time we knew going in that we were writing a series. First time we admitted it to ourselves, anyway.

We discussed the possibility of moving on to Ghost Novel #2 right now, leaving the revisions of this manuscript until later. Maybe even getting first drafts done of all four books before circling back, so that we’re not devoting energy to polishing something that might end up changing anyway due to developments in the later books. Of course, by the time we returned to them, our notes about Novel #1 might no longer make any sense to us.

We also discussed the possibility of diving right back in on Novel #1, while it’s fresh, and addressing all those notes we keep complaining about. The worry there is we could be getting farther off-course relative to our original ideas for later books.

What we decided on is a middle path. We will review all our rainbows and partially written synopses and other notes for books 2-4, update those notes based on what we learned while writing book 1, and then tackle the book 1 revisions before we turn our focus to actually writing prose for the next manuscript. That strikes a nice balance of reminding ourselves about series-spanning story features without letting the read-through we just did get too stale.

A writing partner is someone who’d let you drink champagne if you really wanted it.

Hauntingly Familiar

As soon as we put the finishing touches on the first draft, we started our read-through. That’s a bit of a lie, because we gave ourselves time to pop some champers first.

Reading what you’ve just finished writing is always an interesting experience. You have a set of hopes for how it will come across, and you’re a little nervous about whether it will match them.

In the case of As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, it’s holding up great! We find it enjoyable, and while we’ll admit that we’re biased about it we both agree that it really is flowing along well and that the characters and narrative are very strong. There have been moments that made us laugh out loud, and moments that made at least one of us tear up a little.

We are, of course, collecting a sizable list of stuff to fix, but almost all of it is minor continuity bobbles. The name of the made-up country seems to be in dispute, but it should be possible to resolve it without bloodshed or ceding of any lands.

A writing partner is someone who shares pleasure in the results of your combined labors.