Tagged: As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1

Eerily Close To The Conclusion…

…of the first draft of As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel Number One.

Jen is working on the final batch of stubs, which will take us through the climax and then out the other side to the denouement. Kent meanwhile has been writing the scenes that lead right up to the climax. We’re probably around 75% of the way through, which maybe doesn’t qualify as “eerily close” but it does feel like we’ve hit the home stretch.

The manuscript’s word count is just shy of 112,000. Our list of things that we need to punch up and/or mention more often stands at about two dozen, so it’ll be interesting to see how big the second draft ends up being. We expected these books to be smaller than our usual, in fact we worried about them coming out too small on account of the series being broken up into four rather than three novels. It’s looking like we had nothing to worry about!

A writing partner is someone to make the journey with, however long it turns out to be.

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Travelog…

We know you’re all desperate to see more of our vacation snaps, but you’ll have to wait one more week because we have an exciting announcement: As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1 has passed the 100,000 word milestone! (101,313 to be exact.) We plan to pop the champagne tonight since we don’t generally work on Fridays. The advice is to write drunk and edit sober, but why waste the fun on a work session?

It Was… Soap Poisoning

Turning our outlines into manuscripts requires an intermediate step (which we’ve talked about a lot in the past) – stubs. Stubs can be seen as super rough first drafts or as scene synopses. They take the story’s skeleton and fatten it up a bit, to give an idea of how the dots will look when they’re all connected. (Who doesn’t love a mixed metaphor?) When Jen was working on the latest batch of stubs for As-Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, she made an uncomfortable discovery. We’d reached a part of the plot where a lot of interpersonal shenanigans happen, and if she wasn’t careful, things would take quite a turn into the soap-operatic.

All of the relationship stuff needs to happen so that folks will be in their correct positions later on to keep the plot rolling as planned. We just didn’t want anyone — readers or characters — to forget that this is a ghost story. Spooky stuff needs to happen from time to time to maintain the eerie tone.

It wasn’t obvious from the outline just how long this stretch of non-spectral stuff would be. It looked like only a bullet point or two, until Jen started to unpack it all. “Lady Marzipan and the Bandit Lord get married” doesn’t seem like it will necessarily need multiple scenes until you remember that they first have to book a venue and hire a DJ, and that those activities are very challenging for them because they are dogs.

By the time it was all sketched out, it came to something like 10 scenes where the ghosts just had no jobs, and that’s too many scenes in a row. Jen sat with the problem for several work sessions, moving the pieces around on the board and folding ingredients in from adjacent sections until the batter was smooth and had a pleasingly marbled appearance. (We use a standmixer to process our metaphors. Saves time.) The weird and eerie elements of the story wouldn’t get lost while the humans dealt with their assorted interpersonal crises.

A writing partner is someone who’s a strategizing chef in the Writing Cave and an osteopathic artist in, well, also the Writing Cave.

The No-Look High-Five of Writing With a Partner

Speaking of Sssssynergy!

Jen needed to create the next batch of stubs, so meanwhile Kent was still writing prose and using up the leftovers from the previous batch. This is a normal mode that comes up from time to time in our workflow. Depending on how many new stubs Jen decides to make, and how fast each of us is going, and whether there’s a comet or an eclipse viewable from Earth, there’s usually a bit of a fudge factor. Sometimes Kent runs off the end of the existing stubs, and sometimes Jen rejoins him in the prose-generating hamster wheel sooner than that.

But once in a while we time it perfectly, which is what just happened. Jen completed the final new stub during the same work session that Kent wrapped up prosification of the last of the old ones!

Go team!

Where Do You See Yourselves in 12 Months?

Welcome to 2023, Rune Skelley! What do you plan to do with your time?

Thanks for having us, Rune. It’s great to be here. To the surprise of, probably, no one, we plan to continue writing As Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1. Last winter when we started it we expected to finish the first draft within the year, but since that didn’t happen it needs to be our top priority.

How long will it take?

That’s anyone’s guess, but we are 99% sure we’ll reach the end this year. It would be nice to say 100%, but it’s smart to leave a little wiggle room.

And, assuming you do finish Book 1, what then? Will you write Book 2?

Potentially, but it’s unlikely. We’ll probably need to recharge our composition batteries. Writing a novel takes a lot out of you, even when you have a coauthor. It helps a lot to look away and do something else.

Something related, perhaps, to the rest of the series?

Perhaps. We were talking about this recently. One of the main advantages to plotting the entire four book series at once is that it allows us to make adjustments to the big picture as we go. When Book 1 is done, we’ll go through the outlines for the remaining books and see if there are any adjustments we need to make. That can mean adding or subtracting things from the future books, or it can mean going back into #1 and making tweaks to introduce or highlight things that will pay off later. It’s a lot to keep track of, but we really feel that it enhances the story world.

Are your other series completely done?

The Science Novels are as done as any writing project ever is, but we do have a Music Novel that needs to be edited. Feedback from our critique group is awaiting our attention, so that will be what we turn to if we need a bigger break before writing Ghosty Book 2.

What about the new story world you occasionally tease about?

We haven’t talked about that much recently, but it’s simmering away on the back burner.

Any exciting trips this year?

Yes! We have a very cool trip planned for later in the year, right after Kent retires from his day job.

Wait, what?

We saved the biggest announcement for last. After too many years chained to his desk at Corporate-DayJob Incorporated, Kent will be retiring in 2023, so he can be chained to his desk at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises, LLC! We’re very excited to see what that does for our productivity. 2023 will be a year of big changes around the Writing Cave!

Performance Review

At the beginning of each year we try to map out what we hope to accomplish with our writing in the following 12 months, and in December we look back and see how we did. And, seeing as how it’s mid-December, it’s that time again.

Way back in January we set two main goals for 2022: writing As Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1, and taking a trip to Europe. Break out the champagne, because we did both of those things!

We didn’t finish Book 1, but we got a lot accomplished. Nearly 85,000 words! For a lot of stories that would be enough to tell the whole tale, but not for good old As Yet Untitled Ghost Novel #1. This bad boy is going to be quite hefty. As for the sub-prediction that most of our work would take place in the Primary Writing Cave, we totally blew that one. The lure of the Auxiliary Cave’s fireplace was too strong. We worked downstairs almost exclusively, well into spring, and started up again as soon as the air got crisp. Call us spoiled.

So spoiled that we managed to sneak in a quick trip to Bermuda in addition to our long-delayed European escape. See, the Europe trip was originally scheduled for March of 2020, and we all remember what happened in March of 2020. We postponed our big getaway several times before it finally happened. It was totally worth the wait. We had a fabulous, exhausting time. And we didn’t even get covid! Thanks omicron booster! We’ll post more about it later, but here’s a taste to whet your appetite.

Belogradchik Fortress, Bulgaria

In summary, we would rate our performance as Meets Expectations. We’re chugging along, not sailing. A good writing partner is one who likes to enjoy the view with you, no matter what speed you’re going.

A Time of Miracles

The holidays are upon us, and — truly — what better time could there be to try to get back on track with our writing schedule?

We do have a plan. It’s time for Jen to fry up another stack of stubs, whilst Kent cranks out the final few scenes from the previous batch. If he wraps that up before the new ones are ready, then he can pick up where he left off on the prose outline for Book 2. Once the fresh stubs come off the griddle, we’ll both lean back into wrting those scenes, moving Book 1 closer and closer to completion.

All of that while simultaneously keeping up with all the preparation and cleaning and shopping and halls-decking and visiting for the assorted high feasts and celebrations of the season. Plus, you know, adulting just like during any other month.

Our hope is to build up a bit of momentum and hit the ground running in the new year. It’s an audacious dream, but if it doesn’t quite work out then we’ll just resolve to knuckle down and get with the program in 2023.

A writing partner is a gift that gives all year round.

Don’t Double-Team

We tend to each “adopt” a certain subset of the cast. Then as we sort through the stubs, we know which of us is the default assignee based on whose viewpoint each stub is from. But that relies on one of two things: either one of us feels strongly drawn to that POV, or one of us has written several of that character’s scenes already to establish a pattern. Well, the current batch of stubs brings in someone new and it’s making our load distribution calculations rather interesting.

It’s sort of a perfect storm, because there’s a POV that’s new, and we both sort of vibe on it, and also it has several scenes. In the end, we did split them up between us.

But we gave ourselves one rule: we couldn’t both be working on the same new POV at the same time. We’d each be inventing this person’s voice, and they wouldn’t match up, and then we’d have the challenge of getting them synced. The restriction really only applies in these very early appearances for the new viewpoint.

So, as it happened Kent jumped on his new-POV scene first. Jen is working with one of the existing characters’ POV in the meantime.

It’s possible to imagine making the opposite strategy work — both writing partners could deliberately work on the same voice in parallel, and then use syncing them up as a chance to see the character from unexpected angles. We feel there are too many pitfalls lurking in that approach, but different things work for different people.

A writing partner is someone who harmonizes with your voice.

You’re Only As Old As The Author Thinks You Are

The other night Kent worked on a scene in which the POV character happens to state his own age. But the rainbow showed a different age for that character. It was only a matter of a couple of years, but which was right? This led to both Kent and Jen digging through notes and coming up with yet another number (!) before eventually tracking down the character’s date of birth and confirming that what Kent put in the scene (based on what Jen had put in the stub) was correct all along.

Having done such exhaustive pre-work for all four Ghost Books means we’re very well prepared, and it also means we’ve given ourselves a bit too much to keep track of sometimes. Maybe the note on the whiteboard was the result of faulty arithmetic, or perhaps this person’s birth year got shifted later, while we were working on one of the other rainbows for this project. Anyway, it’s a pitfall of creating tons and tons of notes: some of them are bound to contradict each other.

It wouldn’t have been the end of the world if we’d put in the “wrong” number, but it’s worth getting it right. Creating a world that draws people in relies on logical consistency. Even though age is a less tangible trait than things like height and eye color, it’s still an important physical detail. Characters’ ages give readers a way to reckon the passing of time in the story. And if a fuss has just been made over some other character having aged ten years, well, we would need a damn good reason to say that meanwhile this character had grown fifteen years older. Or, to suggest that he didn’t know his own age!

A writing partner is someone who helps you keep it all straight.

Stub Resistance

Last week we extolled the virtues of stubs. Everything we said about them is true, but they aren’t magic. So this week we’ll talk about how sometimes it’s challenging to apply the stub system in practice.

Some stories seem more resistant than others to having their parts written out of sequence, and Untitled Ghost Novel Number One is such a story. The stubs themselves are not unduly difficult to create, but during our conversations about how to assign them, we got stuck a few times. It felt a bit like trying to assemble a piece of furniture without the instructions. We wondered why that might be happening this time around.

One possibility is that there are fewer parallel plot threads in this one than in many of our previous projects. It’s pretty much all one thread geared around the main locale. So, we can’t have Jen take care of the scenes on Bespin while Kent deals with the action in the Dagobah system.

Another potential explanation is that so much about it is new. It’s the first time in long while that we’re creating a new story universe for ourselves, and it’s a pivot into a new genre for us. Whole new cast, new plot, and new world-building with new constraints. So, it feels like asking for one thing too many to also jump ahead in the timeline.

As noted in a recent installment, we’ve had some trouble keeping to our writing schedule. Apparently sometimes writing at all is kinda hard, so perhaps it’s not the story. Maybe it’s us.

It’s quite possible that we just occasionally get a little precious about things, and blow momentary setbacks out of proportion. The good news is, we got over ourselves and got on with the job. Stubs really do work. Even if they’re not magic.

A writing partner is someone to help you line up the pieces when your Pröze-Eppik seems like it came from the meatballs-and-furniture emporium.