A few weeks ago we were struggling with getting the old fiction engine fired up. After a little bit of tinkering with various wrenches (both monkey and goose), and the jumpstart of realizing we already had 11,000 words, we’re happy to announce that Son of Music Novel is spluttering to life. Our hands will stay greasy for the next little while as we make fine adjustments, but soon enough the chapters will come chugging out.

Mechanic Jen finally remembered how this whole stub-manufacturing process works, and has begun cranking them out. A stub, as faithful readers know, is a sort of detailed scene synopsis, the step we use between the outline and the first draft. While Kent has been letting his imagination run free, composing prose like a boss, Jen has been wrestling with the outline. As we mentioned, it’s 26 pages long, and quite detailed. She needs to feed that, point by point, into the maw of the fiction machine, let it whir and grind for a few minutes, and catch the proto-first draft nuggets that emerge from the other end.

As with every step in the process, the output becomes more refined. While toiling away, Jen has discovered that some of the points in the outline don’t really require an entire scene (which is a good thing since we don’t want this novel to be a billion words long). She’s found ways to merge what were originally envisioned as multiple scenes into one über scene, and ways to distill the single pertinent fact or event from an otherwise superfluous scene for inclusion elsewhere. It’s really an extremely early form of editing, and it will save us hours of labor.

Now that the fiction machine is running more smoothly and the fumes are being cleared from the writing cave, we expect Son of Music Novel to progress quickly. We’ll keep you posted!