Tagged: As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1

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.

Walk the Talk

We used to be really good about taking daily walks. As we stretched our legs we would discuss whatever writing project we were in the middle of. Brainstorming, plotting, troubleshooting, we did it all. And then for some reason — possibly weather-related, possibly laziness — we stopped. Our collaboration talks took place in the car or one of the Writing Caves. Kent got his exercise playing soccer. Jen went to the pool.

But now there’s a pandemic, and unless we wanted our asses to fuse to our office chairs, we had to get ourselves moving. Luckily we have two furry overlords to provide our motivation. The daily walks are back. Have been for a couple of months now. And, just recently, the writing talks are back.

When we’re not talking to our neighbors from opposite sides of the street, we’re talking about our Ghost Novels. So far we haven’t read through the notes we already have. We find it helpful sometimes to see what we remember without prompting, as those are usually the most important elements. We’re happy to announce that we remembered pretty much everyone’s names, as well as the majority of the plot and a lot of cool little details. We’ve been talking about the setting, fleshing out some ideas. Kent is getting itchy to draw up some maps. We even came up with a really nifty bit of world-building.

Soon, possibly even this weekend, we need to read through the existing notes. It’ll be good to make sure our new ideas aren’t veering wildly off the path, and if they are, we’ll need to decide which direction to pursue.

A good coauthor is someone you never get tired of talking to, even during quarantine.

2020 Vision

As we sit here in the Writing Cave, planning out our next writing moves, it’s becoming clear that 2020 might be a year that very little actual writing gets done.

We set January 31 as the deadline for Sibling of Music Novel, a target which seems easily reachable. There are two scenes in progress, and five more after that waiting to be written. Easy peasy. After a small champagne toast, the rest of the month will be spent going back through the manuscript and filling in the placeholders, fixing things we changed our minds about halfway through, and addressing all the other little fiddly things that we know need attention. It will still technically be a first draft, but it will be a pretty clean one. That’s how we like ’em.

To celebrate the completion of the Music Trilogy we’ll pop open the BIG bottle of champagne.

As of February 1 (assuming all goes according to plan) we will have four completed novels that are in need of major edits. For the past few years we’ve concentrated heavily on the writing side of the equation, and now it’s time to turn that around and get some things polished up and gorgeous.

We have two Music Novels and two Science Novels to edit, and we have yet to decide what order we’re going to do them in. On the one hand, we’re pretty immersed in the Music story world at the moment, so it makes sense to stick with that. On the other hand, Sibling needs some time to rest before we can effectively edit it, so it makes sense to switch our attention to the Science story world. Plus that’s the one that our critique group is looking at right now. But the Music Novel is the one our agent is shopping around, so maybe we should stay focused on that?

Around and around we go.

Wherever we decide to start, each novel will go through several stages of editing, and will rest in between.

And in the background we’ll still be tinkering with ideas for the Ghost Series. Jen is a little concerned about what our workflow will look like if we finish up everything else before we start on the ghosts. At various stages of our process we find it helpful to switch our attention to a different project to let our batteries recharge. What will happen if we don’t have anything else to turn our attention to? Kent is a little concerned about having an ever-increasing pile of first drafts that never get readied for publication, and he points out that there will inevitably be projects after the Ghost Series, so when we need a break we can figure out what the next one will be and work on that.

These best laid plans might all fly out the window when our agent sells Music Novel, because then we’ll have plenty of distractions, what with selling the movie rights, and going on all the talk shows, and hobnobbing with celebrities, and buying yachts and all that.

Happy 2020 to all of you!

Deadlines Are Spooky — Sp•°ky!

Late October might seem like a fine time to talk about ghosts a whole bunch, but here in the Writing Cave it’s time for us to lay aside the Ghost Story and resume our focus on the current WIP, aka Sibling of Music Novel.

We really do need to knuckle down and get this draft completed. We recently took stock of how much of the outline remains, and determined that we’re about 75% of the way done with the writing. This was happy news, because from down in the trenches (what, your writing cave doesn’t have trenches?) it was hard to tell exactly what point we had reached. It’s felt like we’ve been “about halfway” for a long time now. Getting a better handle on our progress has also made it easier not to be stressed out over the burgeoning word count. It’s a big’un, sure, but probably not destined to be as outsized as we feared.

But no matter how much closer to done we find ourselves to be, it’s not done done, and unless we do that knuckling down thing it never will be. So, without much further ado, we must get back to it.

A writing partner is someone who buys the Halloween candy ahead of time so you don’t end up handing out individual frozen peas to the kids on your doorstep.

Roadtrip Season

It’s roadtrip season, and faithful readers know what that means: brainstorming! Hours spent traveling hither and yon cut into our writing time, but we don’t let that kill our productivity. We find that extended car trips make a great time to have in-depth discussions about our works-in-progress.

Our current WIP (Sibling of Music Novel) is puttering along smoothly, and while we do need the occasional chat about the details of a scene, there’s nothing knotty enough to fill a couple of hours of straight discussion. That’s a great place to be as a writer. Or as a pair of writers.

So when we need a topic that can fill a few hours, we switch gears to a project that’s in an earlier state of development. And right now, that means the Ghost Story. It’s still fairly embryonic, with many of the kinds of Big Decisions left to be made that are ideally suited to lengthy conversations.

We recently dug out Ghost Story’s dedicated Steno o’ Notes and read through it, and we reviewed the folders of inspiration images we’ve been collecting. With our pumps primed, discussion came easily. Our conversations have already been quite fruitful, and roadtrip season isn’t over yet. We expect to make some real progress on this whole new story world so that it will be waiting for us to dive in once the Music Series is complete.

A writing partner is someone to help you tell ghost stories around the steering wheel.

Holy Ectoplasmic Residue!

Whilst chugging along on the final (which is to say, middle) installment planned for the Music Novels, we have also been making a lot of great progress developing the Ghost books.

We got to spend a bunch more hours in the Skelleymobile recently, which is not an environment conducive to typing but does lend itself nicely to brainstorming. There was also that time earlier this week when we had no choice but to dine out at Olive Garden (for, like, the third time ever), and while it’s a perfectly adequate restaurant in many ways, it too is a place that’s non-conducive to hammering out prose, yet works pretty well as a venue for a bizarre conversation about the roaming disembodied spirits of the no-longer alive. So we took advantage of that.

The last time we checked in about the Ghosts, everything was very preliminary. But now, the spectral apparition of a plot has begun to coalesce, plus a substantial portion of the cast actually have names! Really cool names, it must be said.

We work in trilogies, that’s just the rules, but this is the first time that we’re going to plot out the whole series before writing any of them. We’ve plotted two books in tandem before, but never three. It’s a little bit scary, even without considering the spooky subject matter.

A writing partner is someone to hold you when your novels go bump in the night.

Mystery Science Road Trip 3000

A little while ago Kent had a birthday, and Jen gave him the best present ever: VIP tickets to a Mystery Science Theater 3000 Live show. The date of the show finally rolled around, so we jumped in the Skelleymobile and headed off on a road trip.

Faithful blog readers will know that we like to use car trips as brainstorming time. Our open projects are dwindling in number as we complete novels and launch them into the world. In fact, out of our first three trilogies, we currently have only one book that’s unwritten, and it’s most of the way outlined already. The part of it that’s not nailed down yet involves a lot of moving parts that all need to mesh together just so, and “in a moving car while Kent pays attention to traffic” didn’t seem like the best environment for tackling it. Enter: the Ghost Novels!

Before this trip we had a few wisps of ideas for the way we want the supernatural to work in our newest story world. Now, after a couple of hours of discussion, we have a much clearer picture of the way our ghosts will work, and even the ghost of a plot (see what we did there?). At this point it’s more like two or three plotlings, some of which might work together and some of which contradict each other. A lot more conversation will be needed before we’re ready to start writing. But it felt good to explore a whole new universe, especially this one at Halloween time. We’re surrounded by spooky stories and it’s exciting to start to work on our own.

You know what else is exciting? Getting to have a conversation with Joel Hodgson (who is very nice! — he told Kent he asked a great question!), having our pictures taken on the Satellite of Love with Joel, Jonah, the Bots, and Pearl Forrester’s clone Synthia, and then watching a live riffing of a truly terrible movie.

Most exciting of all? Having a writing partner who shares your sense of humor.