Search results for: ghost

Down The Rabbit-Hole Again Some More

We’ve found ourselves doing more research than usual for the Ghost Novel(s). Wouldn’t want to allow any inaccuracies in our depiction of ghosts, which of course explains why we felt the need to take a deep look into:

  • lava tubes
  • sex magic
  • acorns, culinary uses thereof

…And many other topics besides. Like, it’s a long list. Whenever we spend any significant energy on looking something up, we make a note of it. We’re fascinated by the variety of stuff that winds up on the list. We’re fascinated by how hard it would be to predict what is going to show up on the list, especially considering that we really did have a solid idea of the story before we even started prose composition on it.

A writing partner is the only other person who wouldn’t think your research list was evidence of a diseased mind.

Our Wide-Ranging Interests

Research is an important part of writing, even when you’re writing novels about ghosts. And it’s fun to absorb new knowledge. Beware, though: in this age of instant access, falling down a rabbit-hole and spending the whole day on “research” is a constant risk. That’s why it’s important that you develop the discipline to stay focused and only devote time to topics with legitimate relevance to your project.

It’s hard to imagine our list getting much zanier if we gave up all pretense of discipline. Believe it or not, legitimate research topics for the Ghost Series include all of the following:

  • blue roses
  • ice cream shops in Copenhagen
  • Jonestown

That’s not output from our prompt generator. That’s an actual sampling of what we’ve looked up so far.

A writing partner will be there for you, sometimes to pull you out of the rabbit-hole and sometimes to join you in taking the plunge.

Making Ourselves Believe the Make-Believe

A hallmark of well-crafted fiction is when readers effortlessly suspend their disbelief. Creating good fiction calls for writers to suspend their disbelief as well.

For instance, to write our ghost story we need to convincingly portray a world in which ghosts exist, so we have to embrace that alternate reality. In our Divided Man series, it was extra-terrestrials, nanotech, and psychic powers. In the Music series, it was something else (which you will not be able to guess, ever, we guarantee that), and in the Science series it was immortality. Each story we tell gives consensus reality its own unique twist, which on a certain level becomes “true” for us also. That immersion is crucial for us to bring richness to the setting, and to keep its physical laws consistent.

And that’s the easy part. Writing a novel calls for the author to see the world through potentially disturbing eyes. Could be a cult leader, a mad scientist, a serial killer, or a televangelist. If you’re a nice person — which we’re sure you are — the behavior of such characters seems unthinkable to you. Then again, you’d probably make a rather dull bad guy. Every villain is the hero of their story. They believe in what they’re doing. So the writer must be able to believe in it too, at least while they’re writing. This is still true even if the villain isn’t a POV character! Like an evil marionette, it’s relying on you to pull its strings.

A writing partner is someone who encourages delusional ideation, but only when you’re on the clock.

Tune in Next Week

Ever have one of those weeks?

We here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises LLC know that you count on us for your twice-weekly dose of thrilling suspense, swoon-worthy romance, and uncomfortable sexual situations, and we know that you are disappointed in us for failing to deliver this week. But not half as disappointed as we are in ourselves!

Our chain story, ridiculous and sprawling as it is, is like family to us. It’s the third leg of the triangle that is our writing partnership. (Better than the third rail, amiright?) And this week our beloved chain story needed a vacation. It’s been trapped on that damned zeppelin for about 5 months now!

Rest assured that all (else) is well at SkelleyCo. We’re beavering away in the Writing Cave, adding scenes to As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #2, and we’ve used our dog-walking time to talk through some minor snags. Apart from the chain story, it’s all going swimmingly.

So, tune in next week to see whether these writing partners get their act together. Same bat time, same bat channel.

no bonus points :(

Specter-Vision

Our WIP is a ghost story (perhaps we’ve mentioned that) and as it happens some of the scenes are ghost-character POV. Our take on being a ghost is that it has a definite effect on one’s outlook, and indeed upon the physical reality of one’s surroundings. Dying changes a person’s entire take on life.

Of course we always remember that when we’re doing their scenes. (Eye-roll)

Okay, there’ve only been a couple of times that we actually had to go back into the text and account for that. It tends to happen when the locale has been previous rendered in ordinary human terms, which would make another detailed description feel redundant (if the current POV character had ordinary human perceptions). It’s just one more aspect of “wearing the right head” to tackle a given character. Likewise if one member of the cast were a dog, meaning they can’t see what’s on the kitchen counters but they can smell and hear lots of stuff that the human characters can’t. So even though it’s the same house everyone’s living in, it can feel like a whole different world for certain characters. (Spoiler: the ghost POV character is not a dog.)

We don’t do real spoilers around here, so we can’t say anything too specific about what it’s like to be a ghost in our story. We asked one of the specters to sum it up for us, and here’s what we got back: “There’s some interesting scenery, but overall it’s kind of a hassle.”

A writing partner is someone whose point of view helps you express your characters’ POV.

The Saga of Gigi and Pierre

It’s amazing that, no matter how conscientious you try to be about looking around all the corners during the outlining phase, stuff always finds places to lurk so it can ambush you during prose.

Naturally, we’ve known all along that Gigi and Pierre will become a couple, and that their bond will be tested. We talked about how things look from each of their perspectives, what’s different about Pierre’s attitude toward the relationship, etc. And we identified the moment when the first test will crop up. What we didn’t do was spec in a scene to show the fallout of that event. Then the prose draft had caught up to that point in the narrative, and this felt like an omission.

We had to discuss what to do about it. The default stance here in the Writing Cave is that we don’t like scenes that exist solely for depicting Relationship Drama. Words like “soapy” get tossed around sometimes. Scenes need to earn their keep, and we love it when they accomplish more than one job. So, we tried to talk ourselves into sticking with the blueprint, i.e., not adding a unitasker relationship scene and thus keeping the Gigi/Pierre breakup implicit.

Thing is, our original concern was that not making the couple fight explicit leaves a gap in the story. And that’s because the real rule about scenes earning their keep is that you include the ones that carry the story. Ask, “what’s this story about?” and, “what is this scene about?” When they line up, you have a winner. (NB, stay alert for too much of a good thing; if you showed it already, you probably don’t have to show it again.)

The story can be “about” multiple things. In our case, it’s about ghosts and it’s also about this Gigi/Pierre thing. Their romance and its ups and downs shape the choices they will be making later on. So, while we don’t want to give anybody soap poisoning, we need to give readers a decoder ring for why those two behave the way they do. So, this instance of Relationship Drama merits a scene, even if that’s the only job it does.

A good writing partner is someone you work well with, so that the soap operatics are confined to the page.

A Small Leap In Productivity

It was fortuitous to get an extra day last month in which to do some writing, because it at least partially offset the multiple days when stuff came up and we got no writing done at all.

Let us take this moment to pause and wish a Happy Leap Day to all who celebrate.

Leap Day William

We’re making headway on As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #2 once again. Not as rapidly as we were hoping (it never is) but tangible, empirical progress all the same. Kent just wrapped up a scene and got a nice start on the next one, and Jen shipped another couple of stubs.

To help us keep up this momentum — hopefully even build on it — we’re instituting a revolutionary positive-reinforcement technology: sticker charts! Henceforth, our access to ice cream will be regulated by how many stickers we earn. That’ll definitely keep us motivated (at least until we find a black market for frozen dairy treats). So we look forward to cranking up our output!

One thing that we need to remind ourselves about is how much work we get done that’s not reflected in metrics like word count. We talk things out, which is real work but has no measurable substance. Recently, Jen detected a possible issue with repetition across several stubs, and now because of some productive conversations we no longer have that issue. The affected stubs haven’t all been completed, but what would have been the point of plowing through them only to end up scrapping and redoing half those scenes later? It’s unclear how the new stickers-and-ice-cream economy of the Writing Cave will take such scenarios into account.

A writing partner is someone who sticks by you 366 days of the year.

It’s Standard Practice on Contrarian Airships

  • by jen“That’s a cute name.”
  • ghostly fingerprint
  • is nearly six foot five and describes himself as a “fairy from outer space”
  • almost six years in prison
  • wish not to be stabbed

Tune in next time part 881      Click Here for Earlier Installments

It’s standard practice on Contrarian airships to have bathroom fixtures made of styrofoam — it saves a lot of weight. What was unusual about these styrofoam potties is that they weren’t attached to the floor, the plumbing, or anything else. What could Fleur be up to with a room full of decoy commodes?

“Put down the toilet, Small Dennis,” I muttered.

“Small Dennis?” Fleur chuckled. “That’s a cute name.”

“I’m not actually all that small,” Small Dennis huffed. He’d been gripping the faux porcelain so hard that when he let go, he left behind ghostly fingerprints in the styrofoam. “Is it my fault my mom married a guy with his own son named Dennis who is nearly six foot five and describes himself as a ‘fairy from outer space’ and who had spent almost six years in prison for assault? He claimed the moniker Big Dennis, and as I wish not to be stabbed, I grudgingly accepted Small Dennis as mine.”

I’d never heard Small Dennis say so much, and I doubted the truth of almost all of what he’d said. If he was trying to prey on Fleur’s tender feminine nature, I wished him luck.

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The Land-Speed Record Is Safe

Our recent output has been nil.

We got off a roaring start on Ghost Book 2, making good headway because we were doing a good job of sticking to our schedule. And then, well, stuff came up. Life intruded, which it does all the time, but for a couple of weeks now it’s been downright pushy. We’re fine, in fact it was mostly good news! It’s just a lot.

Not that we can claim that we were straining in the traces to put in more of those solid multi-hour work sessions that keep a project on track. Nah, we got a little lazy and took advantage of having some legitimate excuses.

This week we’re recommitting to the schedule, the lifestyle, the dream. Well, that first one mainly. That’s the key: having a schedule. We’re also dabbling with some ideas about carrots and sticks, and maybe shifting back to composing on the laptops for a change of scene. We have humongous desktop monitors, which can be a tremendous boon to productivity in a lot of ways but can also backfire. It’s too easy to leave scads of distractions open all the time.

A bit of archeology in the files for the previous manuscript suggests that these ups and downs are pretty normal for us, and that our net progress is basically right on track. Which is… good to know. Bit disappointing, though. Now that Kent’s retired, our pace was supposed to increase substantially. That hasn’t happened so far. But we’ll figure it out.

A writing partner is still your partner even when you’re not doing a lot of writing.

System Is Working As Intended

For the Ghost Series, we made a very deliberate choice to get all four books figured out before writing any prose for the first one. Our approach is to consider the project as one big story. Ideas that arise later on in the process might necessitate laying some groundwork in earlier books, and we aimed to give ourselves the most flexibility to do that without getting stuck in an infinite loop of rewrites.

Without an over-arching plan, without making lots of decisions up front, what would happen is we’d wrap up Book 1 and send it out for feedback, and then meanwhile we’d be working on Book 2 and discover a bunch of shiny new ideas that don’t match what we’ve written already. Meaning when our beta readers send us their comments, half of them have been obviated upon arrival. And once we started in on Book 3, the same situation would replay — only twice as bad, because now we’re trying to retroactively account for stuff in two prior books.

Ask us how we know. (Never mind; we’re about to tell you anyway.)

Our previous series grew organically. We’d write a book, and then discover that there was more story to tell using that world and those characters. So we’d write another book, and then another. So far, that progression has always led to trilogies. In one case, we did actually plan out books 2 & 3 in tandem rather than separately. We were starting to get the message even then. With the Ghost Series being a tetralogy, the benefits of advance planning are multiplied because so are the impacts of doing it inadequately.

So, we did a lot of planning. Lots of writing sessions that produced no writing per se.

At this point, we are working on Book 2. And so far? No major revisions have come up for Book 1. Several minor changes, and we’ll surely have more tinkering to deal with. But it’s likely to all be small-scale stuff like which tarot card gets drawn, rather than anything huge like swapping which characters are living and which are ghosts.

A writing partner is someone who helps with all the pre-writing as much as with generating pages of manuscript.