Tagged: bandit lord

All Aboard!

We’re quite fond of our plot rainbow process, as regular readers of this blog will have no doubt noticed. We do tend to go on about it.

Despite its many shining advantages, there is one not-insignificant downside: it takes up a lot of room. A whole lot. And when you have members on your writing team as eager to help as Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord, it can be a problem. Our furry coauthors have learned that we don’t like it when they scamper around on the rainbow, scattering all the colorful squares willy-nilly, and they do a pretty good job of staying off it. But we can tell they resent it. They like to lay down riiiiight beside it and then casually streeeeetch their legs or shift their snouts into the danger zone. Lady Marzipan’s tail presents a whole other set of challenges. Plus, the two of them shed like they’re being paid to do it, and when the rainbow is spread out on the floor we can’t easily sweep or vacuum.

Terrible Beasties

So instead of wallowing in filth with resentful dogs, we took action. We bought a whiteboard. It’s magnetic, double-sided, and on casters. It’s also freakin’ huge. We’re talking 4 x 8 feet (which is a lot more impressive in person than it looked online). We were going to include a picture of it here, but, I mean. It’s a whiteboard. You know what those look like. It will look a little more exciting once we get the grid drawn on it to keep the rainbow neat and organized.

Our Writing Cave redecoration project is coming along nicely. Jen finally found her inspiration. It’s going to be very cool. We’re just waiting for some samples to arrive before we really dive in. The funny thing is that this amazing new whiteboard is not going to be part of that redesign. We do the vast majority of rainbow-related work in the Auxiliary Writing Cave, which is on an entirely different floor of the SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises HQ than the main Writing Cave, and have no interest in carting this beast up and down the stairs. It will live in the Aux Cave, and spend its off-season tucked beside the elliptical machine in the adjoining exercise room. We have other exciting ideas in store for the main Writing Cave. You’ll hear all about them, we’re sure, as we finalize our plans and do the actual work. And that project *will* be photo-worthy. We guarantee!

A writing partner is sometimes someone who will help assemble your new white elephant. Without complaint.

The colors are out of order? You’re out of order!

 

Life Imitates Art That We Haven’t Even Made Yet

As loyal readers know, we are ably assisted in our fiction by Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord, for it is they who demand nightly treks around the fiefdom, and those excursions give us much opportunity to converse about our various projects.

 

We do these walks rather late, mostly. After dark. We take flashlights with us, but unless a car is coming or there’s some other reason, we don’t turn them on. To really set the mood, people in our neighborhood have begun decorating for Halloween, and this year they’ve really brought their A-game. And, the project that’s occupied our attention on these night-time promenades of late is the Ghost Story, in all its otherworldly splendor.

A few nights ago we had an unexpectedly stimulating ghost-talk walk. About halfway around the neighborhood, as we chatted about ways in which beings from other dimensions could make their presence known, a blinding white light suddenly appeared fifty feet ahead of us. It floated about six feet above the ground, and held us for a few seconds before turning red and then moving laterally, crossing to the opposite side of the street. Still eerily hovering several feet up. There was no sound.

Then came the bark of a small dog. A gentle human voice told the dog everything was alright. It was our neighbor, wearing a headlamp as he engaged in his own canid-equipped nocturnal peregrinations.

A writing partner is someone to share a briefly terrifying but inspiring encounter.

Naming Follies

The Ghost Story is beginning to materialize as we discuss it during walks with our loyal assistants, pictured below: Lady Marzipan and The Bandit Lord. (They should form a band, that’s the best band name evah!)

Speaking of names, we ran into a bit of a problem with the Ghost Story’s dramatis personae. A new cast member showed up, who is really cool, and we gave her a really cool name. But the more we explored her arc, the more it became clear that she was going to have a lot of shared page-time with a certain other character and that their names were too similar. So, something’s gotta give.

The new character’s name was cool for assorted reasons. It just sounded cool, plus it gave us a desireable, subtle association to a relevant historical person. But in the end, that wasn’t enough to save it and we picked something else.

Why? Because it wasn’t just those two names. The new person’s name actually formed a bridge between two formerly unconnected names.

It was like we already had a Tina and a Will. That’s fine, nothing confusing about it. But then we dreamed up this new character, and discovered that her name should be: Willemina! And we blithely had numerous chats about Willemina, getting to know her better, meanwhile forgetting about Will and Tina. Until we noticed Tina glaring at us.

Willemina’s new name is also cool, and we’re getting used to it. (We still call her by the old one pretty often, though.) We’re glad we straightened this out early in the process.

Progress! To! Report!

We’ve cracked the 40 kiloword barrier on the current work in progress. That works out to about 150 pages.

It’s taken some late nights, but we’re continuing to make headway despite weeks like this one when there seems to be some time-consuming obligation to tend to every evening. Evenings and weekends are our writing time, so when they get yanked out from under us it can have a big impact. Jen would like us to be farther along, of course, but even she is pleased with both the quantity and the quality of our recent output.

The part of the book we’re currently writing doesn’t lend itself to being prosed in parallel, so we’re tag-teaming it. Kent writes a scene, then hands things off to Jen for the next one, and then back to Kent. Whoever’s turn it isn’t, meanwhile, doesn’t get to slack off. Nay, time in the Writing Cave is too precious, so that partner revisits the already completed scenes and takes care of comments that we left for ourselves. Or, does research, or writes a blog post. Or keeps the stub stockpile built up.

There’s so much going on! Even the Bandit Lord is tired.

Brainstorm Until It’s Not Fun Anymore

In our preliminary brainstorming sessions for the current work in progress, the ideas were coming out faster than we could jot them down. We couldn’t help but come up with tons of good ideas, like there simply were no other kinds of ideas. The recent brainstorming sessions, on the other hand, have been characterized by phrases like, “But I don’t think that will really work,” and “Not that we would actually want to do it that way.” The few ideas that we did feel good about were things we’d already come up with at least twice, according to our notes.

This is a signal that it’s time to stop brainstorming. Early on, everything is wide open and there’s lots of room for ideas. But the more you flesh things out, the more constraints are piling up. Any really new idea that you throw in will be the enemy of something else that you’ve already decided you like. If you aren’t sure if you like your story that way, then by all means keep storming your brains. But if you have a good basis for a story that you’re looking forward to telling, then move on to another step in the process.

For us, that means laying out a rainbow. So that’s what we’ve been doing, although we’ve broken with tradition by using the dining table for this one rather than doing it on the floor. (Our helpers are far too enthusiastic about rainbows, alas. Plus, floors lack much to recommend them, ergonomically.)

And — it worked! Being able to visualize the flow and structure of the story immediately shook loose a new set of good, usable ideas for us. They’re not only good, they’re compatible.

Working with a partner makes brainstorming much more fruitful and enjoyable, but don’t overuse it. Documenting and visualizing your progress is always helpful, and it becomes essential when you have a partner to communicate with.

 

Srsly, They’re Almost Done

Progress update on Son and Grandson of Science Novel: they’re still almost done.

All the outstanding comments in both projects have been cleared. The placeholders are filled in, and descriptions punched up and made consistent, and nearly all the new scenes have been written. It seems like for every scene we knock off the list, there are two more getting added. But this hydra will be slain ere the month is out! Forsooth!

Writing books two and three in tandem, and now simultaneously, certainly wasn’t the least stressful approach we could have taken. There were advantages, such as being able to get deeply enmeshed with the cast and the story world, and fine tune both books for thematic resonance and high-level plot development. But it made for a really long trip. We’ve got ourselves pretty well adapted to completing one first draft and then switching into a different mode for a while. Doubling the duration of that prose stretch — spoiler alert — made it twice as long! We’re jonesing pretty hard to focus on something else.

We’ll have the books done soon. Meanwhile, have a picture of the two best, craziest pooches we know.

Lady Marzipan and her consort, the Bandit Lord