Tagged: As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1

We’re Up!

Our critique group’s most recent meeting (which we hosted at our house) took us up to the finale of the other member’s manuscript that we’ve been discussing. So, now it’s our turn in the hot seat once again.

Critique sessions are a whole separate animal from having beta readers (which we do, also). There are lots of different ways to run a group, but here’s what works well for us.

  1. choose one manuscript to focus on
  2. the author provides a chunk of pages in advance, and whatever guidance they wish regarding the kind of feedback they’re looking for
  3. at the meeting, each member shares input and suggestions, asks questions, etc. about those pages
  4. avoid spending a lot of time on typos and other picky things

Note that this means no one can read ahead, so the author can gauge how well the clues are working, how readers feel about the protagonist at each stage, etc. It’s up to the author how much to reveal, which questions to answer, and so on. Rune Skelley tends to be very tight-lipped. We enjoy getting the rest of the group trying to guess what we’re up to.

Another thing that’s up to each author is whether to bring stuff in before the whole book is written. We’ve done it both ways, and found reasons not to share works-in-progress for critique anymore. For us, the feedback only muddied things at that stage. But some folks thrive on it, and use the requirement of handing out pages by the next meeting as a motivational tool. Do what works for you.

The best part of any critique group meeting is when members start debating what the pages mean and basically forget that the author is there. As the author, that provides a ton of insight into what’s working and why. It’s also nice when your fellow writers come right out and tell you what they thought was effective, or where they felt something needed more work. Just be sure not to settle for “it was good” — these are your colleagues, so they should be able to articulate their reasons for responding a certain way.

A writing partner is someone who kicks Kent under the table when he’s about to blurt out a major spoiler.

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.

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

With Both Hands, And…

A map is a very handy thing for a writer. It can help you gauge how long someone’s journey would take, or remind you of the river between points A and B. If you’re using a real-world locale, then you’ll want to keep your depiction in line with reality. If your locale is your own invention, then you’ll want to keep your depiction internally consistent.

Way back at the start of things for As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1, we created a map of the main setting, which is a place we made up. Over the course of actually writing that book, we annotated the map with a great many pencil marks showing adjustments and additions. It’s become sort of a mess.

So, as part of our preparations for diving into prose on As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #2, Kent is updating the map so we have a clean version to work from. The more we write about the place, the more we learn about it ourselves, so we assume we’ll need to do more map updates when we get to books 3 and 4 as well.

A writing partner is someone who helps you keep your bearings.

Boo!

We’ve been immersing ourselves in the supernatural as we work on our ghost story, but perhaps we took things a bit too far. Netherwordly manifestations sprang up at the HQ of Skelleyco Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises. But the creepiest part? Every child in the vicinity seemed impelled to approach. Impelled by a hunger, a hunger for… candy.

Last year we missed trick-or-treating because we were in freakin’ Transylvania on Halloween. So this year we brought our A game. Not that we merited anything better than honorable mention in our neighborhood. The bar is set crazy high. We did have a great time, as did Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord.

decorative tombstones

front door flanked by skeletal bats

a corgi and a golden retriever in bony costumes

What we did not do was get much writing done. Doorbell was kept pretty busy.

A writing partner is someone who holds your hand when things get scary.

Ghostly Progress: Book Two

As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1 is in the hands of our beta readers. We have turned our attention to Also-Untitled Ghost Novel #2.

Book One had rested for a few weeks, so we began with another read-thru of that installment. It was even better than we expected (not that we’re trying to influence our beta readers). Kent had been fretting over possible pacing issues in the first part, but it flowed very nicely. There are a few pages of heavier-than-necessary exposition here and there, but those will be easy to deal with. (To be clear, such infodumps are always Kent’s doing.) So, having made some notes, we moved on to the next step.

Utilizing both whiteboards, we set up the rainbow for Book Two. Perusing it was quite entertaining, because Jen’s got quite a wit, but also a little surprising. There were some placeholder character names, and some plot beats that have been superseded now that we actually wrote Book One.

We also have a long-form synopsis, which we usually refer to as the prose outline. That was created later, in parallel with the manuscript for Book One, so it should be up-to-date. Guess we’ll find out.

A writing partner is someone to accompany you on a journey of (re)discovery.

Ghost Saga Progress Update

After completing the read-through on the freshly completed first draft of As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1, we jumped right in on edits. The first step was to go through it together and deal with all the easiest issues. These were mostly things like missing “the”s and other typos that were discovered during the read-through. After that, Jen started at the top of the comments list and Kent started at the bottom, and we hunted down other low-hanging fruit. Now that we’ve had several work sessions devoted to this, the lower branches have been plucked clean and we’re tackling slightly thornier stuff.

Not that any of it counts as “thorny.” We haven’t found anything that throws the whole plot into question or makes us wish our vocation was something easier like yacht-racing. But there are minor continuity things that are spread throughout the manuscript, for example. And there are minor continuity things that only affect a few places, but we need to establish how the story physics do actually work before we can settle on the preferred version and get everything aligned to it. Some of it will take a little discussion, but even the biggest issues that we marked aren’t all that large.

Meanwhile, Jen has also been sneaking in some sessions while Kent day-jobs (can we call it moonlighting if she does it while the sun is out?), and she just completed the 20-page prose outline for Book 2! Then she made Kent read the whole thing aloud in one sitting, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong.

A writing partner is someone to divvy up the chores list with.

Read-Through Completed!

Last night we finished our first read-through of As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1!

Rather than popping the champagne again some more, we devoted the rest of the evening to planning our next moves. There is still a huge amount of work to do on this series. It’s a bit of a learning process because this is the first time we knew going in that we were writing a series. First time we admitted it to ourselves, anyway.

We discussed the possibility of moving on to Ghost Novel #2 right now, leaving the revisions of this manuscript until later. Maybe even getting first drafts done of all four books before circling back, so that we’re not devoting energy to polishing something that might end up changing anyway due to developments in the later books. Of course, by the time we returned to them, our notes about Novel #1 might no longer make any sense to us.

We also discussed the possibility of diving right back in on Novel #1, while it’s fresh, and addressing all those notes we keep complaining about. The worry there is we could be getting farther off-course relative to our original ideas for later books.

What we decided on is a middle path. We will review all our rainbows and partially written synopses and other notes for books 2-4, update those notes based on what we learned while writing book 1, and then tackle the book 1 revisions before we turn our focus to actually writing prose for the next manuscript. That strikes a nice balance of reminding ourselves about series-spanning story features without letting the read-through we just did get too stale.

A writing partner is someone who’d let you drink champagne if you really wanted it.

Hauntingly Familiar

As soon as we put the finishing touches on the first draft, we started our read-through. That’s a bit of a lie, because we gave ourselves time to pop some champers first.

Reading what you’ve just finished writing is always an interesting experience. You have a set of hopes for how it will come across, and you’re a little nervous about whether it will match them.

In the case of As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, it’s holding up great! We find it enjoyable, and while we’ll admit that we’re biased about it we both agree that it really is flowing along well and that the characters and narrative are very strong. There have been moments that made us laugh out loud, and moments that made at least one of us tear up a little.

We are, of course, collecting a sizable list of stuff to fix, but almost all of it is minor continuity bobbles. The name of the made-up country seems to be in dispute, but it should be possible to resolve it without bloodshed or ceding of any lands.

A writing partner is someone who shares pleasure in the results of your combined labors.

Mic Drop

Late last night, Kent finished the final scene of As Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, bringing an end to our first draft. Sort of.

While we have technically reached the end of the prose portion of the program (after something like 15 months), there are some decorative flourishes we still need to add. Jen made a good start on the epigraphs we like to put at the beginning of each chapter, but we probably don’t have enough of those yet. We won’t know exactly how many we need until we actually smoosh the scenes together into chapters. So that’s something else we have to do. And as we wrote, we marked a few places that we know need attention, so now we also need to go back and attend to those. But that’s more of a second draft thing.

Let’s not lose sight of the important part: the first draft is complete! Celebratory beverages all around!

A writing partner is someone with whom to bask in your accomplishments (and savor your victory meal).