Tagged: Science Novel

2015 – That Was The Year That Was

r-avatarIn January of 2015 we wrote up a schedule for our year in writing, and then promptly did not look at it again until just now. Imagine our shock and delight when we discovered that we pretty much stuck to the plan!

  • Novel #5 (aka The Science Novel) is in the hands of an extremely capable agent, and we’re reminding ourselves to be patient as we await a reply
  • Novel #6 (aka Son of Music Novel) is in the can
  • and we have indeed begun brainstorming for Novel #7 (aka Son of Science Novel)

But how did we get here? Let us cuddle up with warm beverages and take a look back at 2015.

January was all about getting to know our new characters.

February saw us chugging through the outlining of Novel #6, and extolling the virtues of writing partnerships.

By March we had most of the kinks worked out of the rough outline we call the Plot Rainbow, and were preparing to move to the next step in our process.

In April we were still in the preparatory phase for the new novel, honing the characters’ voices, and dealing with a (gasp!) disagreement in the Writing Cave.

May brought the actual start of composition. Finally.

In June we were patting ourselves on the back for our deft theme incorporation and thorough world-building.

We spent much of July talking about music. This is Son of Music Novel, so it makes sense. Also, we were 43,000 words in!

By the first week of August that word count had leapt to 72,000 words. Yikes! We talked about our marketing efforts, and also went on a field trip.

Our schedule disruptions continued in September when we attended a writing conference and visited with our good friend and fellow author Reggie Lutz.

In October we were still chugging away on the first draft, encountering only a few minor problems.

November saw completion of the main narrative. We even had time to read through the whole damn thing over Thanksgiving break.

Which brings us up to the present day, December 2015. Son of Music Novel’s first draft is completely complete, ancillary material and all. Sure it’s long, but we’ll worry about that later. For now we’re making plans to see Star Wars again before Kent heads back to work.

Next week we’ll talk about our plans for the upcoming year.

Happy New Year!

When the Time is Right

r-avatarThe first draft of Son of Music Novel is 99% done. (Amazing how the last couple of percentage points take so much  longer to complete!) Soon we’ll be ready to start taking it to critique group, which is very exciting. We’re really looking forward to getting input from a bunch of very smart fellow writers.

This time out we’re following the same policy we had great success with on the Science Novel: waiting until the draft is entirely written and the known issues are dealt with before taking it in. That allows us to keep input in perspective because we can weigh comments against what we know about how the various arcs ultimately play out. Sometimes it’s a good thing if readers get pissed off! The fun is in watching them take the ride.

Certainly, there are other ways to manage critique. Past experience has taught us to prefer this method. The Music Novel itself is a case in point. With that one, we started taking it to group when we hit approximately the halfway mark. That was intended to give us time to reach the end before our critiquers caught up, and in that regard it worked fine. Thing is, we then did a major restructuring that rendered much of the original input moot. Fortunately, by the time the second version was ready we had new critique group members available, meaning there were unspoiled readers by whom we could gauge the success of our changes. It’s very hard to look at successive drafts as if for the first time.

In the primordial phase of our fictive endeavors, when crude stick-figure drawings of mammoth hunters first appeared on the walls of the writing cave, we used to take stuff in whenever we had stuff. Often this meant a new chapter would go through group before we’d even written the next one. The drive to produce something so you can take it in is a plus, but we ran into some serious downsides. Premature input can be very distracting. Even with an outline telling you, broadly, where things end up, it’s easy to fall into trying to “fix” your critiquers’ attitudes about particular characters or events. You might even be talked into departing from your carefully planned outline.

Talking to your critique group about a work in progress can lead to inspiration. Critique’s a collaborative process, after all. Knowing that other people are taking your story to heart, investing energy in understanding it, is very motivating. Depending on your process, you might thrive on the in-the-moment feedback, or even depend on the influx of ideas that arise in discussion.

Are you in a critique group? (You should be.) How do you get the most out of it? What works best with your style?

Writing Cave Status Report

r-avatarRune Skelley’s habitat has been a rather hectic place of late. In addition to the recent travel and interviews that we mentioned the past couple of Fridays:

  • We heard back from two more Science Novel beta readers with much positive input
  • Yesterday’s #PitMad kept us nicely distracted on the twitters for a while, pitching the Trilogy and the Music Novel
  • Jen analyzed the outline of Son of Music Novel and terrified Kent with the number of words we should expect to write by the end of the year to meet our deadline
  • We allocated the next handful of stubs — we will be able to work in parallel for the foreseeable future so our productivity should take an uptick (unless this jinxed it)
  • We’re shortly off to a conference, our first in a while

All the schedule disruptions, while they slow down our prose generation, are also positive things in their own right. So we have mixed feelings about them. Maybe if they didn’t travel in packs…

Keeping With Tradition(al Marketing)

r-avatarThe frustrations of sending query letters do sometimes have their compensations, such as when an agent asks for a full. That happened to us this week, which (a) makes us both extremely happy, and (b) feels a little spooky considering that just last week we vented about marketing.

Now we need to generate a properly formatted manuscript of the Science Novel and get it sent!

In related news, we’ve also registered to go to a conference next month. It’s been a while since we attended one, and we’re excited to do a little networking with industry types and our fellow wordsmiths.

Meanwhile, the first draft of Son-of-Music-Novel continues to move along. We’re at 80,000 words and into our fourth batch of stubs, which takes us more than halfway through the outline.

2014 Is In the Rear View Mirror

r-avatarOur look back in wonder at 2014 probably should have been posted last week, but this way it will stand out from all the other “year in review” posts around the internet. It’s not procrastination, it’s a feature!

We started off 2014 with a newly reorganized blog. I’m pleased to say we did such an excellent job with it that it was unnecessary to do it again this year! In other organizational news, we also launched our Stichomancy Writing Prompt Generator.

In February we were busily editing the Music Novel, and were rather obsessed with its high word count. That early in the process we were still adding new material, filling the holes our beta readers demanded we fill, so the count kept rising.

In March we introduced the newest member of Team Skelley, the very distracting Lady Marzipan. As you can see, she’s a bit bigger now, but is still quite a distraction.

ladymarzipan

Lady Marzipan makes sure we take frequent forays from the writing cave to walk around the neighborhood and sniff all the mailboxes. We use the time in between smells to discuss whatever’s going on in our fiction, which in March was a lot of editing of the Music Novel.

April brought posts about the other work we had in play, the Science Novel. Our critique group was working their way through it which meant that we had to switch gears once a week from being deep in the guts of the Music Novel to remembering what the hell we’d even written in the Science Novel. To escape the stress we ran away to Europe for a quick, frigid vacation.

In May we couldn’t stop talking about how much fun we had in Prague, and the various ways we were distracted.

June brought the startling realization that the Music Novel has swelled to a whopping 187,000 words. Yikes! Time to start winnowing it back down again.

So that’s just what we spent July doing.

On August 1 we were thrilled to announce that we were done with edits on the Music Novel! As of today, our critique group is just about done with it, which means that we’ll have another round of edits coming up soon.

September found us deep in contemplation about where our writing would go in the future. We lamented not being in “writing mode” for quite a while.

We spent October editing the last book in our Trilogy, which prompted much thought about writing advice, both good and bad.

November is National Novel Writing Month, of which we still do not approve.

Come December we were finishing up edits on the Trilogy, doing a final reading of the Science Novel, and warming up for (gasp!) marketing.

So, it was a year where not a whole lot of composition happened. We kept our writing muscles limber with writing prompts, but the majority of our time was spent editing. That’s the part of writing a lot of people don’t take into account. It’s not enough to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). Once the words exist, you have to poke them with sticks, gouge them with forks, and occasionally set them on fire.

Next week we’ll talk about our plans for 2015. Happy New Year (a week late) everyone!

It Was The Middle One

We’re out of practice with the whole marketing side of things and have been voraciously consuming webinars and agent blogs and all kinds of other resources to bring our knowledge up to date.

The happy news is that there’s so much more information out there now. (Too much, maybe.) We used to be stuck with hard-copy guidebooks, and just had to hope the address was still current for the agent we wanted to query. Now we can cyberstalk potential representatives, and they can do the same to us. The relentless march of progress!

The less-happy news is that we’re relying on advice again, which means we have to be wary. One authority tells us to write the synopsis in objective, straightforward language, while another says infuse it with the voice of our writing. Likewise with just about any aspect of marketing and publishing. Some common threads are apparent, but often we have to read between the lines.

And that’s what it comes down to — reading between the lines. None of these teachers are trying to sabotage anyone. They’re each telling it as they see it, based on their experience. Naturally, they’ve hit upon various approaches that have worked in various circumstances. Then they have to shape that information for our consumption. To second guess them just a little, they’re probably second guessing the students. “If I tell them to make it sound like the book, they won’t be able to construct a cogent and functional synopsis.” “If I tell them to stick to the facts, the result will be flat.”

So, at least as far as the synopsis is concerned, our takeaway was somewhere in between. Of course the style of the synopsis will influence requests. But it has to be an orderly and complete telling of the main arc, or it’s not a valid synopsis.

Not all advice is right for every occasion, or for every author. That doesn’t make it bad per se, but it might be bad for you. Don’t jump at the first tip that sorta makes sense. Seek a couple of takes, and if they contradict each other, think about the subtext. Rather than just looking for a tiebreaker, look for a way to synthesize meaning out of the conflicting ideas.

Update From The Trenches

r-avatarIt’s time to start marketing. We’re going to do a push for the Science Novel, and we’re actually really excited about it.

Except, ugh. Marketing.

The pitch is crafted, or at least 95% of the way there. Some really helpful material at Writer’s Digest University, and some excellent feedback from our critique-group cronies, and now it needs to simmer for a bit whilst we work on the synopsis.

Double ugh.

At least we do have an existing draft of a synopsis to work from. Two, actually, because after crafting something we liked at about 1200 words, we slashed it down to 500 and still liked it reasonably well.

Fear of rejection is the classic stereotypical reason writers procrastinate about marketing their fiction (e.g., blogging about it when they should be doing it). Maybe for some that’s apt, but not for Jen and Kent. The bigger rub is that the query package entails writing of such a different type than the actual product we’re trying to sell. It’s easy to find contradictory advice about how to construct a synopsis. It’s hard as hell to condense a novel down to one page, which is what most agents seem to want.

At least here in the writing cave there are two of us, so we each get a shoulder to lean on while we trudge onward. Discussing potential edits in real time is especially helpful with the ultra-compact prose needed for a query.

How do you shift into Marketing Gear? What do you consider most annoying about it?

We Can Be Taught

r-avatarFor a while now we’ve been flirting with Novel #6, naming the characters, talking about their backgrounds, even brainstorming up some cool ideas for (gasp!) plot. We have a few more loose ends to tie up with Novels 4&5 before we can really immerse ourselves in the outlining of #6, but there’s one big step we were smart enough to take now.

As we mentioned, we took a field trip to the inspiration location for the Science Novel after we finished writing it, and that meant a certain amount of revision. We weren’t slavishly devoted to the real world location, but having visited it we had a better idea of how our version should feel. We could have saved ourselves a lot of rewriting if we’d been smart and taken the field trip early on.

So that’s what we did this time. Even though we don’t have the whole plot mapped out yet, we have a particular location in mind for a lot of the action. Last weekend we visited it, took a bunch of pictures, asked a bunch of questions. We went before the weather got gross and cold, and more importantly, we went before we wrote anything. Before we even plotted the whole thing out. That means that we have a clear picture of what we want to work with. We know what it’s like to move around in our location, what it smells like, how things are laid out. It should help immensely with outlining, and will probably inspire ideas we wouldn’t have had if we hadn’t visited.

And that means we can spend the gross, cold winter days in front of the fireplace, cozy with our slippers and hot buttered rum, brainstorming and working with our plot rainbow.

And if we’re really smart, we’ll set the next one in Prague so we have an excuse to go back.

Critically Distant

r-avatarNovels #4 and #5 are both in resting phases, which gives us a chance to circle back to the final volume of the trilogy. It’s been sitting patiently for quite a while, and this seems like a good opportunity to consolidate the feedback from our most recent critiquers. Of course, we want to know our own minds about the text before we try to make sense of what other people said about it, so we’re doing a read-through.

This wasn’t supposed to be a difficult thing. It wasn’t supposed to stir up disagreements.

A perennial challenge for authors is getting an “honest read” of their own stuff. Knowing what’s going to happen, and knowing what’s supposed to be symbolic, gets in the way of appreciating it the way a “real” reader would. That’s one reason it’s important to let work rest. What seems to have happened to Kent, in this instance, is that he failed to put aside his anticipation of certain later events in this book, but exceeded recommended dosages of forgetfulness about how the previous books led up to it. As a result, he raised awkward questions that baffled Jen, and the conversation wasn’t productive. But we pushed through, which is good because otherwise we might not have reached the point where Jen saw what was happening and steered Kent back on course.

Now everything seems to be going much better. There is a bit of a hangover though: Kent feels spooked. It’s a get-back-on-the-horse situation, and that’s what he’s doing, but his confidence isn’t yet fully restored.

Working solo, a writer might wreck a good manuscript trying to fix illusory problems. The chances that two of you will be having the same kind of off day are pretty slim (hopefully!) so you can be confident that anything you agree on is a valid concern.

In Fighting Trim

r-avatarIt’s been quite a while since Rune Skelley was in Writing Mode. For most of this year we’ve been editing various projects, and moving forward we’ll be doing more of the “not actually writing” parts of writing.

The music novel needed a lot of work, which did involve a fair amount of composing new material. It also involved a far greater amount of wrestling with the material we already had: rearranging, streamlining, repurposing, polishing.

The science novel was in much better shape. We’re practically done with the second draft already, and it required very little in the way of new material.

Once we get it wrapped up, we’ll knuckle down and start marketing it. That will require some writing, but not the usual sort. Not the sort we like. We’ll need to concoct the perfect query letter, as well other marketing materials like a synopsis and maybe an author bio.

Then, while the marketing machine chugs away in the background, we’ll move onto the next items on our To Do list, which involve a bit more editing, and then the brainstorming and outlining of the next novel. Again, not much actual writing.

We know that if we stay away from writing for very long at all, the fiction engines cool down and it takes an enormous effort to spool them back up again. That’s where our writing prompts come in.

All those brief and weird things we post on Mondays and Wednesdays are our way of keeping in practice. Sure, they’re often incoherent, but they’re fun and they don’t need to lead to anything bigger. Their only job is to keep the writing parts of our brains from atrophying. When we’re in the middle of writing a novel, they’re not really necessary, although we’ll sometimes use them as a warmup exercise. But in times like this, where there’s no composition of the horizon, they’re life savers.

How do writing prompts work best for you?