Tagged: As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #2

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.

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.

Golden Oldies

To help set the mood for the era we’re writing about, the late 1960s, we’ve been listening to a bunch of music from that time. Or rather, Jen’s been listening to most of it, and Kent has been indulging her when she comes across something particularly cool or particularly weird that she just needs to share.

The music is a mix of incredibly familiar songs and total headscratchers. For every Beatles classic, there’s a Pigmeat Markham or a Peppermint Trolley Co. For every Beach Boys song we know, there are two we were completely unaware of (that, incidentally, sound nothing like the Beach Boys).

Kent has observed that once enough time passes, a decade becomes its own musical genre, and songs that never would have been played on the same station all get lumped together because they’re of a similar vintage. This experiment is like that on steroids. We’ve been listening to Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, Aretha Franklin, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Frank Sinatra, Englebert Humperdinck, Tom Jones, and a bunch of artists we’d never heard of. Did you know that Ray Charles had a cover of Eleanor Rigby? Or that The Tijuana Brass had a version of My Favorite Things? We didn’t! But we do now.

A writing partner will ride shotgun in your musical time machine.

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.

Sometimes We Can Have Nice Things

There is no shortage of story in As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #2, and no shortage of cast members either. That doesn’t stop us from coming up with more. We just need to keep it from getting out of hand.

One good way to control proliferation is by giving characters multiple jobs. Recently, we had a chance to apply this to our work-in-progress. We’ve known since pretty early on that one of our characters was going to need an accomplice. The plot doesn’t really work otherwise. Much more recently, we came up with some very colorful individuals that we wanted to put on the page because they’re a lot of fun. There’s no contradiction implied; we absolutely could have taken the “more is more” approach. As noted at the top, though, we already had probably more than we needed, so we had to be mindful about throwing in stuff that we just wanted.

Our way to have it all is that one of the colorful new people becomes the accomplice. It’s an elegant way to combine something that we need with something that we want.

A writing partner is someone who looks for ways to make the fun stuff work as an integral part of the story.

It Happens to The Best of Us

Chalk it up to staying holed up in the Writing Cave all the time… It took Covid about four years to track Rune Skelley down, but it found us right after New Year’s. We both had very minor cases (and we’re both better now!) but even so it was far from pleasant.

We did our best to keep working through it, but we were so tired. Productivity was very low. Guess we have to admit we’re human after all.

As of Monday we both tested negative. Kent even did a “disappointing” workout. So, it’s back to the grindstone for us.

A writing partner is someone whose major symptoms don’t come on until yours have started to fade, so you can take care of each other.

Gazing Into Our Crystal Ball

Our plan for our writing life in 2024 is simple: complete the first draft of As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #2, and if there’s time, get started on #3. We got a quick start on #2 at the tail end of 2023, and we have a work schedule that’s working. It should be very doable.

Except.

We have a couple of major challenges coming up this year. First of all, we’re building a house. Not us personally. We’ve hired some fine professionals to do all the hard stuff because we want the place to be amazing. Even though we won’t be swinging the hammers ourselves, we expect the project to be an enormous distraction. Almost as big a distraction as our other challenge for 2024: our first grandchild.

Jen’s degree is in Human Development, and she’s worked with young kids a ton, so we’ll be providing a lot of care for the little one while he’s fresh. We’re stupendously excited! But we’re also realists who acknowledge that infant care is going to disrupt our writing schedule quite significantly. We’ve started talking about how to stay on schedule. Maybe we’ll reinstate our evening work sessions. Maybe we’ll alternate days of childcare and writing time. Maybe the kiddo will be a good napper and we’ll work while he’s snoozing. A lot depends on him, and we haven’t met him yet. We shall see!

So, in between changing diapers and choosing cabinets and tiles and appliances (and everything else), we will: write Novel #2. When that’s done we’ll review it alongside #1 to make sure it all flows smoothly, preview #3 and #4 to update anything necessary, do a deep dive into the prep for #3, and then start writing #3. And if we need to look away from the ghosts, we still have a Music Novel in need of an editing pass.

A writing partner is someone who stands beside you when life comes at you fast.

Look Back in Awe

As we’re sure you’ve noticed, 2023 is nearing the finish line. That means it’s time for us here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, LLC to review what we accomplished throughout the year.

Our main goal for the year was to complete the first draft of As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1, and that gets a big ol’ checkmark. The first draft was in the can by late summer, and we managed to squeeze in a couple of read-throughs and a sort of mini-edit to address the issues we uncovered. It might not meet the technical definition of a second draft, but whatever you call it, we’re happy with where it stands right now.

Our second goal was for Kent to retire, and again we accomplished it! (Well, Kent did. Jen cheered from the sidelines.)

Our third goal was to travel, and holy shit did we do that. We got to within 800 miles of the North Pole!

We forecast that we might edit one of the Music Novels if we wanted a substantial break from writing about ghosts between As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novels #1 and #2. That was not necessary. The timing worked out nicely to put #1 to bed shortly before heading out on our Epic Arctic Exploration, and that adventure provided more than enough of a break.

It took longer than we liked for us to get our brains out of vacation-mode, and acclimate to all Kent’s new free time. We’d optimistically anticipated working 4-5 hours a day and having the productivity of the gods. It didn’t quite work out like that, but toward the end of the year we did settle into a pretty good daily schedule that we hope to expand on in the coming year. There will be some challenges to that, which we’ll talk about next week in our preview of the coming year.

Happy new year!

 

ETA: we finished the year with 7287 words in Book 2