Tagged: Ghost Series

The Haunted Writing Cave

Dear reader, we haven’t been completely honest with you. On the blog, we regularly refer to the first book in our ghost series as As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1, and, well, that’s a bit inaccurate. It’s had a working title for quite a while, which we use in file names, and amongst our beta readers. It’s a pretty cool name, and it doesn’t fall into the “Sounds like a Nancy Drew Book” trap. But it also doesn’t fit nicely into a set of like-minded titles for the remainder of the series.

As we’ve mentioned in the past, we like for our series titles to coordinate. This bad boy is quite singular. We’ve batted ideas around, and came up with a matching bookend for the last in the series, but the two dudes in the middle are still waiting (im)patiently.

Naming our three earlier series was much easier. Maybe we should blame this very focused and specific form of writer’s block on the vengeful spirits of our less-fortunate characters.

A writing partner is someone who will hold your hand when things get scary. Or when you’re just unwinding and watching movies.

Our Wide-Ranging Interests

Research is an important part of writing, even when you’re writing novels about ghosts. And it’s fun to absorb new knowledge. Beware, though: in this age of instant access, falling down a rabbit-hole and spending the whole day on “research” is a constant risk. That’s why it’s important that you develop the discipline to stay focused and only devote time to topics with legitimate relevance to your project.

It’s hard to imagine our list getting much zanier if we gave up all pretense of discipline. Believe it or not, legitimate research topics for the Ghost Series include all of the following:

  • blue roses
  • ice cream shops in Copenhagen
  • Jonestown

That’s not output from our prompt generator. That’s an actual sampling of what we’ve looked up so far.

A writing partner will be there for you, sometimes to pull you out of the rabbit-hole and sometimes to join you in taking the plunge.

Mostly Not Failing to Plan

We did it! Or rather, Jen did it! The fourth and final book in the Ghost Series is fully synopsized (mostly). It has a beginning, a whole lotta middle, and an end that almost completely holds together if you don’t look at it too closely. We know the broad strokes, and that’s good enough for now.

You know how the weather forecast for tomorrow is a lot more reliable than the forecast for next Friday? It’s kind of like that. Some of the details toward the end are fuzzy, but it’s so far away it doesn’t really matter. By the time we get there we’ll have plenty of time to sharpen it up.

Vague as some of the details are, As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #4 is shaping up to be a beast. The synopsis is 27 pages long, nearly twice what #3 came in at. We’ve started to wonder if maybe we’re dealing with a pentalogy instead of a quadrilogy. It could be that it’s too much story for one book, or it could just be that we gave a lot of thought to the ending, so we know more about it. Time will tell.

All together the 4 synopses are 40,000 words. That’s 75 single-spaced pages. It’s tempting to slap it into one file and call it a novella.

A writing partner is someone who doesn’t let you take the easy way out.

The Perils of Disorganization

As part of Jen’s Outlining the Whole Damn Series project, she went back through the steno pad where we made our original notes and found some hidden gems that never made it into the typed record. We really need to learn to be more organized.

Nothing was uncovered that required us to make changes in Book 1, which is lucky because we’re alllllllmost done fucking with it. Books 2 and 3, on the other hand, will need some adjustments. It’s not “rethink the plot” level stuff, but there are nuances we’d like to include which impact the motivations for a couple of characters. Better to find out now than after we’ve written any more!

And while we’re on the topic of (dis)organization — if there’s something that has broad application for your whole story, maybe don’t hide the note about it in the depths of Book 4’s documentation. Just sayin’.

A writing partner is someone who is happy to share the blame when things are suboptimal.

Outline Outlier?

The prose outline for Book 3 is complete, moving us one step closer to world domination.

If Jen thought the notes for Book 2 were disorganized, she had no idea what was in store! At least for that one we had about half of a synopsis already written. For Book 3 there was no such handholding. Jen started with only a plot rainbow, a blinking cursor, and twenty-odd pages of jumbled notes. Combing through old emails uncovered a few more details and highlighted the one really smart thing we did for this project: set up an email address just for our brainstorming notes. They might be hella disorganized, but at least they’re all in one place without anything off-topic.

Out came the hammer and tongs, and over the course of about 2 weeks Jen whipped Book 3 into shape. The synopsis is a bit shorter than the one for Book 2, even though there’s a ton of story. This implies that there’s a lot of detail yet to be fleshed out. Most of it should appear naturally as we write Book 2, so the next time we pick this up we should be able to en-hugen it significantly.

Which will be good, because looking ahead to Book 4, we’re expecting a whopper. We (read: Jen) strongly STRONGLY prefer it when all the books in a series are approximately the same size. If Book 3 turns out to be the runt of the litter by a significant amount, there’s no telling what might happen.

A writing partner is someone who humors you about your silly hangups.

Pro Tip: Don’t Make Your Notes Cryptic

You know how you and your bestie have inside jokes that no one else gets? Or how you and your spouse have your own private language? Maybe don’t lean too heavily into those sorts of things when you’re writing up your notes. Ask us how we know!

Before Jen started writing the synopses for the rest of the books in the ghost series, we  read through their plot rainbows together. Unfortunately, in several places there were phrases that were clearly meant to be cute, quippy references, but the context is lost to time. The plot rainbow is particularly prone to this sort of thing because each square in it is small. There’s not a lot of room for detail, so we often resort to shorthand. To our occasional detriment.

We’ve immersed ourselves in those plots again, and that’s allowed us to decode (most of) what we were talking about. There are no giant question marks. It’s a good reminder, though, that thorough notes are important, and pop culture references don’t always stand the test of time.

A writing partner is someone who can let you know when you’re being too clever, unless they’re caught up in it with you.

We’ll Stop Procrastinating Someday

As-Yet-Untitled Ghost Novel #1’s first draft is nearly in the can. Or maybe it’s technically the second draft — we’re filling in the holes and smoothing out the inconsistencies, making it presentable for test readers. Very soon we’ll have to set it aside and start working on Book 2 in the series.

Jen wrapped up the lengthy prose outline for Book 2, a process made more complicated than it should have been through procrastination. During our year-long planning of the whole series, we took a ton of notes. We just didn’t organize them very well. Why should we? We planned to jump right in and write the synopses for all four books while the whole thing was fresh in our minds, but then we didn’t. Neither of us can exactly remember why. The upshot is that Jen had to do a lot of digging, and we had to have a lot of conversations where we tried to jog each other’s memories about story details we couldn’t quite remember but didn’t want to lose.

To prevent that from happening again when it’s time for Book 3, we decided to be smart this time and get the whole rest of the series organized and summarized and synopsized before we start writing any of Book 2. Jen’s been working on that while Kent day-jobs, presenting him with a page or two to review after he clocks out. It’s been quite interesting to review these later events now that we’ve gotten to know some of the characters. We’ve written a whole book about them, really gotten inside their skin. Now that they’re fleshed out (or maybe not “fleshed” out, since it’s a ghost story), it makes their actions that much more real, their story arcs that much more fulfilling.

In some cases, though, it makes our planned story beats feel like missteps. Our characters are like real people now, and we’ve noticed a few things that feel, well, out of character. So far they’re fairly minor details, nothing that will break the story. We’ve talked through them and found solutions. But uncovering these hiccups uncovers another reason for us to follow through and get the whole series thoroughly written up — we need to have a firm grip on the whole thing so that we don’t unknowingly steer ourselves into an untenable position.

A writing partner is someone who’ll tame the jungle of your old notes to make a garden of well-laid plans.