We completed a read-through on Wednesday, including the discussion and collation of our copious notes from the various copies we had going. The book feels good. Actually, it feels great! (Our bias is duly acknowledged.)
To everyone, we hope you enjoy safe travels and harmonious companionship this holiday.
uses it for a cellphone adTune In Next Time Part 29 Click Here for Earlier Installments
Jorgensen threw a net over me and ordered his crew to drag me below and throw me in the brig. Sliding over the planks on my back, I had to wonder if the alliance was in financial trouble. What other explanation for a buccaneer who takes the skull and bones off his mainsail and instead uses it for a cellphone ad?
Another hint of monetary woes was the crewmen themselves. Their soundless approach was no surprise, but the white face paint was. Ninjas and pirates had powerful unions, but mimes would scab for practically nothing, and, obviously, you never hear them complain about their work conditions. I thought I saw an angle that might lead to my escape.
But the next moment I was flung down an open hatch into the hold. My startled scream turned to a puzzled grunt as I fell into the cotton candy pit. Ever wondered how much cotton candy a frigate can carry? Well, it’s a lot. In fact it’s a whole lotta whole lot. The salt water saturating my clothes and hair dissolved the fuzzy cargo like acid, and I sank through a shaft shaped like a cutout of a man who should have cut his losses long ago.
Aphrodite Hunter peered down on me with her one good eye and the remarkably lifelike glass one. She cackled, then said, “You won’t starve, but your dentist might have some stern words for you at your next checkup! Just wanted you to know, this is not about my ambition to rule the pirate ninja alliance. Your friend John is up to something with Heinrich, something shady with a company they helped politically, which makes you my insurance policy.”
I wanted to tell her she had it all wrong, that holding me wouldn’t give her any leverage over John. But the lid slammed down over the hatch and I was left in sticky darkness.
they get angry.Tune In Next Time Part 28 Click Here for Earlier Installments
The woman with the glass eye and the bikini clamped her hand onto my shoulder as the ship approached. How could I get out of this? I couldn’t offer her a big bag of money because Tessa had run off with it all. Perhaps I could seduce her. She’d seemed unimpressed by my physique a few moments ago, but it was worth a shot. No matter my failings, I was pretty sure I was more appealing than Jorgensen.
I tried to channel James Bond at his suavest as I wrapped my arm around her waist.
“You’re kidding, right?” she sneered.
Next thing I knew she dragged me into the surf. Her arm around my throat immobilized me, and she swam with me out to meet the ship. Jorgensen himself hauled us aboard with his own skillful hands.
“He tried to make a pass,” the bikini woman said.
“It’s perfectly shameful to take advantage of Mrs Hunter’s good nature,” Jorgensen snarled.
Mrs Hunter? Oh shit. That could only mean my tormentress and kidnapper was the estranged wife of Heinrich Hunter. I’d heard rumors. From day one theirs was the very portrait of a marriage in trouble. Things got so bad it nearly destroyed the pirate ninja alliance. The glass eye really should have tipped me off. It was a souvenir of the Hunters’ tempestuous honeymoon. And now Aphrodite Hunter was keeping company with Captain Jorgensen.
The biggest problem with pirates and ninjas is that they lose all honor when they get angry. This would not end well.
So hey! Guess what! The first draft is complete!
Kent wrapped up the last of the scenes that needed to be written, not to be confused with the last scene in the story, which Jen had already done by then. The book’s a beast and a half, and it’s done. We feel really good about it, very proud of what we’ve accomplished. Rune Skelley isn’t anybody’s idea of a fast writer, but the books are taking us less time to create as we get more practice and our process becomes second nature.
Okay, okay. It’s not done done. As with its predecessor, this book has a meta-narrative running throughout, and that’s not all done. And it doesn’t make sense to push onward with that part until we’ve done a read-through, so that’s the next step. Normally we like to let manuscripts rest before the first read-through, but in this case we don’t want to spin up any new projects yet. So, right back in.
Which means maybe that cork should stay in the bottle just a little longer. No point doing the reading if we won’t remember it tomorrow.
we now must say goodbyeTune In Next Time Part 27 Click Here for Earlier Installments
The bikini-clad woman’s eyes forgot me the moment they strayed to more appealing scenery. Mine, meanwhile, forgot to stop staring at her. She didn’t seem to mind, because it seemed she didn’t notice. She cocked her head to one side, her gaze riveted to the horizon far out to sea.
I turned to find out what had her so preoccupied. It was a tall ship, a three-masted frigate. It was too distant to make out the colors it flew, but in light of all else that had happened I knew it could mean only one thing.
“I’m afraid we now must say goodbye to the ocean,” I told the woman in the two-piece. The ship was approaching fast, making me more certain every second that I knew what vessel it was. If Heinrich had kept his word this wouldn’t be happening, or if Jorgensen hadn’t kept his.
She crossed her arms beneath her large, surgically enhanced breasts and raised one eyebrow at me. The skin around her eye was unnaturally thin, and stretched across a cartilaginous scaffolding. The eye itself was glass. “But then I’d miss my ride,” she lilted. “I hope Captain Jorgensen warmed my bunk for me, or at least fluffed the pillow.”
Dammit. As if things weren’t complicated enough, I was about to be shanghaied by the pirate-ninja alliance.
bonus points for using them in order!
explosives placed insideTune In Next Time Part 26 Click Here for Earlier Installments
Listening in vain for ninjas, I thought about the explosives placed inside some of the rolls of cash Tessa had run off with. The thought of her blowing up was troubling, but not as troubling as the thought of her discovering what was hidden in the remaining rolls of cash.
I was there the day John’s sister Lyudmila made all of those tight, fancy cash bundles. She’d been a sushi chef before John dragged her into his life of danger. She had a real flair for creating dramatic presentations of both raw fish and cold hard cash. Lyudmila made a show of tucking one of the wads of currency, done up like an ebi nigiri, into her bra. Her smile turned into a blush as she realized she was exposing a great deal more of her breast than she had intended.
Looking back I don’t think it was an accident. That was the night Lyudmila and I became lovers, the night Tessa and I had our first fight. I think John put Lyudmila up to it. He’d always had his eye on Tessa.
Thoughts of irate sushi chefs and their unhinged brothers made me think that Tessa may have picked up a knife before she left the movie set. The craft services table was littered with cutlery. If she had armed herself I could fear less for her safety and more for my own.
Alert for John’s return, or attacking ninjas, or Tessa waiting in ambush, I scuffled my way across the sand, following Tessa’s footprints.
“Hey,” called a female voice. “Are you the personal trainer?”
I turned and saw a gorgeous woman in a bikini coming out of one of the dressing trailers. She took one look at me and said, “I guess not.” She wrinkled her nose. “You should hire one.” Her blue eyes danced over my body in my soaking wet clothes. “In the meantime, suck it in.”
Ouch.
bonus points for using them in order!
Man, we are closing in on the conclusion — make that the action-packed conclusion — of Son Of Music Novel. We’re so close. The scene Kent is working on is that last big chunk of writing, although we have stubs for a few more scenes that are mostly denouement. (Also, there’s a feature of the Music Novel that recurs here, and for which we need a significant amount of text. Jen’s made an excellent start on that.)
All this adds up to a strong likelihood that our manuscript’s completion will fall during NaNoWriMo. Ah well, if our baby’s a Scorpio we’ll love it anyway.
Kent’s working from a stub that turned out to be a little light on details. It was fine up to a point, and then it got vague. The way we chose to deal with that issue (once we figured it out) was to have Kent beef things up in the stub first, rather than just winging it and going straight to prose. Either way could work, and our way we knew there was a small amount of extra writing to be done. It was tempting to see that as nonproductive and skip it, but experience has taught us that we’d end up with more rewriting if we succumbed to that temptation. Better to do a few hundred words up front, knowing they’ll never be read by anyone outside of the writing cave, than to write thousands of words thinking that they’re counting toward completion only to find that they don’t work, and then do another batch.
You might be wondering how we ran into this problem, given our fervor for a stub-based methodology. It was kind of a perfect storm. The later in the story we get, the less need for worry over derailing things. This lack of worry is great from a stress-management perspective, but it can lead to cutting corners. And as it turns out, there is a second edge to that “close to done” sword: things need to start coming together, not keep ramifying. You’re on final approach, and you have to make sure you won’t run out of runway. Another factor here is that the vague area of the stub was mostly kinetic, which makes it easily glossed over. But the action in question incorporates thematic elements and needs to cover specific beats for the character arcs. It’s not just, “make up something exciting and interesting,” it’s “do that, within all these nuanced constraints.”
It seems glaring in hindsight, but until the prose was well underway we thought the stub was pretty solid. Fortunately our work style involves lots of conversation and we figured out the issues without losing any ground. Kent does seem to have a Zeno’s Paradox thing going on, where each evening he manages to write half of the remaining words in his scene. Jen’s not the kind of co-author who’ll sit back and let that run its course, so one way or another that cycle will break pretty soon.
Happy Friday the Thirteenth to all our triskaidekaphobe friends! And all you triskaidekaphiles, too.
swim in his bloodTune In Next Time Part 25 Click Here for Earlier Installments
I limped away from the feast on the craft services table, back to where the sand was darkened by my blood. Tessa’s tracks led away to the right, John’s to the left. Good. Now I had to hope fate hadn’t arranged a reunion for them somewhere in the city.
And I had to hope Tessa wouldn’t start spending the money from the box. If she unrolled the bills, she might find the real treasure. Someone had to be there with her when she saw it. Even after all her shady dealings with me, she didn’t deserve to confront that alone.
The blood-drenched patch of sand drew my attention. Not because it was my blood, but because of the NSFW insignia (a human hand with two severed fingers clutched in its palm) that someone had crudely etched there. They must have done it after I got up, and I’d been standing only a few feet away ever since.
Ninjas. I hate those guys.
It appeared that my ruse with John might turn out to be true after all. Warning Tessa would be so simple, but my phone had been ruined and she did not have a telephone herself. She adamantly refused to carry one, because she said someone being fixated on a screen held in her hand makes her look tired and crazy at the same time.
With a little luck, it would be John that the ninjas were really after. “Go get him,” I muttered, knowing it was only too likely that one of them could hear me. “Swim in his blood.”
bonus points for using them in reverse order
between forkfuls of pieTune In Next Time Part 24 Click Here for Earlier Installments
My nemesis pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his greasy blue jacket and mopped his forehead with it. It did absolutely no good because it was as soaked with seawater as the rest of him.
“Those evil pricks from NSFW took Tessa and you’re just laying there, bleeding?”
“It wasn’t NSFW,” I lied. “It was Ninja Vision.”
In reality it wasn’t ninjas at all. Tessa had run off on her own, but I didn’t want John to know that. I laid there and winced at John rubbing his hands all over me in what I can only assume was an attempt to frisk me. He should brush up on his technique. I could even recommend a good elementary textbook on the topic if there wasn’t so much bad blood between us.
John erroneously concluded I was unarmed and left me laying in the sand to rescue Tessa from the Ninjas that didn’t have her. I pulled myself to my feet and leaned against the craft services table, watching him run slowly across the beach.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten, and there was a whole delicious spread right there on the table that was holding me up, so between forkfuls of pie I dug the bullet out of my thigh with a pair of chopsticks. I used the sterno flame from the chafing dish to cauterize the wound, and then I was ready to find Tessa and the treasure.
The end is in sight!
Son of Music Novel is nearing completion. We only have to write 5.5 more scenes before we reach the finale. That means that we really need to figure out the ending now.
Gasp! You say you don’t have an ending? That’s not entirely accurate. Months ago when we were brainstorming and outlining this beast we had a vision of the ending. We knew in broad strokes what would happen, and that vision has not changed. But now it’s time to fill in the details.
We’ve talked in the past about the importance of having pretty much every detail planned before you start writing, which is especially important when you are writing with a partner. Endings are a little bit different for us, though. We like to leave a little wiggle room so that as we develop the characters throughout the novel we can tailor the ending to them.
Well, now it’s tailoring time. Kent was finishing up a scene and Jen had just filled in all the stubs leading up to the grand finale. Since Kent was occupied, Jen got out her measuring tape and her pin cushion and scissors and took a stab at brainstorming the ending. Alone. It did not go well. She was coming up with brilliant insights like “When the disaster strikes, the characters can be inside or outside.” She was not wrong.
By the time Kent finished his scene, Jen had found a different little project with which to occupy herself, so Kent took his own stab at storyboarding the ending. Alone. Like an animal. His contributions were something like “The disaster could be a fire. Or a flood. Or a tornado. Or a volcano. Or a giant squid attack.” All exciting scenarios to be sure, but he wasn’t really getting anywhere with his list.
So then we started talking to each other. We’ve said a million times that communication is the key to a successful writing collaboration, that two heads are better than one, and we’ve just proven ourselves right. Go Team Skelley!
As soon as we started talking, the ideas started flowing. In less than half an hour we’d devised something brilliant. And it still looks brilliant a few days later! At the end of August we set ourselves a goal of having the first draft done by the end of the year, and it looks like we’ll actually be done much sooner than that (if this didn’t just jinx us). Either of us on our own would be screwed, but together we can work miracles!