Tagged: Sibling of Music Novel

The Art of Reading Through

In our big Music Series read-through, we’ve crossed the midpoint of book two, which pretty much means we’re halfway through the trilogy.

Something we chatted about recently is that there’s a balance we need to strike between getting done reading the damn thing and not missing important points that need discussion. This one hasn’t been edited at all yet, or even shown to any beta readers, so there are things that need work. But we’re not in revisions mode yet. We need to complete the read-through of all three books first.

The whole point of the exercise is to get the entirety of the trilogy into our minds in order to plan our edits holistically. Increasing the interconnection across the books, and strengthening the payoffs in book 3 by laying the right groundwork in books 1 & 2. As we look for ways to tighten up the narrative, we need to keep an eye on scenes in all three books so we don’t orphan anything. The big structural adjustments have to be made first, then we can work on polishing the prose.

A writing partner is someone who helps you stay on track when you’ve got roughly half a million words to wrangle.

Pace Yourself

As we were finishing up the read through of Music Novel (Verdict: Awesome!), we suddenly realized that the second book in the series, Sibling of Music Novel, hadn’t been broken up into chapter-sized bites yet. It wouldn’t be strictly necessary, since it’s just the two of us reading it, but we wanted to take a crack at it to make it a little more like reading a real book.

It’s still a first draft, so it’s bloatier than it needs to be. It won’t read just like a real book, even with the chapter breaks, but it helps us assess the pacing.

Other writers that we talk to say they write their novels in chapter-long chunks. The concept seems foreign to us. We plan our novels scene by scene, and then later combine the scenes into chapters. Each scene could technically be its own chapter, but that would give us a crazy high number of chapters, and their lengths would vary wildly. We (especially Jen) don’t like that.

Jen took a stab at breaking this bad boy down into reasonable chunks. At this early stage she worked mainly by word count, with an eye toward ending each chapter with a hook. It mostly worked pretty smoothly. There were a few places where a two scenes in a row ended with particularly juicy, propulsive events, and she had a hard time choosing where the breaks would go.

That’s the point of the read through, though. We’ll see how the pacing feels. Where things are awkward, we’ll make a note of it. Perhaps on the second draft, certain scenes will need to be presented in a different order. Some might get cut altogether. Right now it seems impossible to think we’ll need to add anything, but never say never.

Writing with a partner, working in scenes rather than chapters makes more sense (at least to us). How do you approach things?

Braiding Them Ever More Intricately Together

We’re still working on our epic read-through of the entire Music Series, which will help prepare us to do edits on books two and three. But, even though Book One has already had a lot of editorial attention, we are also on the lookout for a certain breed of change that we might entertain there as well.

Now that all three of the books are written, we have the ability to enrich the foreshadowing for key events and strengthen the themes running through the whole series. So-and-so ended up being a more important character in the later books? We can tweak how the early appearances are handled. These crackpots hanging out in the margins are just a random rabble, except, hey, maybe… Wait, is that a granite countertop, or stainless steel? (Oops.)

We have no intention of doing anything drastic. We have enough work ahead of us as it is, thanks. But small changes can sometimes go a long way to unifying the members of a series. The big attraction for us is that it makes us look smarter, but there really is a payoff for the reader as well. The story world feels that much more real, that much easier to fall into. And on a reread, clues will jump out that you didn’t know were clues at all the first time through.

A writing partner is someone who helps you do sneaky, crafty things for your readers’ benefit.

The Rereadening Commenceth

Now that the draft of Sibling of Music Novel is complete, we have begun our read-through of the entire Music Series, starting of course with Book One. We wrote and revised that one first, then Book Three, and then did a bunch of stuff for the Science Series, and then wrote Book Two (aka Sibling). We didn’t really do it all in that order on purpose, but the upshot is that it’s been a good long while since we really delved into that first book.

And you know what? It’s good!

Okay, we are a bit biased about that. But seriously, it feels so good to be reading that one again. As mentioned above, this book has already been through some pretty heavy editing, so it’s in a nice polished state. And the story is just a lot of fun! (Although, the point where last night’s reading session left off was decidedly tense. Our characters would not say there was anything fun going on at that particular moment. We tell them “Just doing our job,” but they still hate us.)

We’re really looking forward to the day when all of you can read this book, too. That day gets closer all the time!

Nothing But Net

Last night we checked off the last few items on the To Do list for the first draft of Sibling of Music Novel. We’d given ourselves to the end of January to complete it, so we finished early, with an entire day to spare. The last word was typed quite late in the evening, which means we’re saving the champagne for tonight. (Some of us had to work today.)

With all the extra material we added to flesh out the story world, this draft of Sibling came it at a hair over 179,000. Once it has a good long rest we’ll whittle that down to a more manageable size.

Pop your own bottle of bubbly tonight and celebrate along with us!

Show Your Work

As January runs out of days, we’re running out of items on Sibling of Music Novel’s To Do list. We’ve already checked off all of weird little oddball things we’d left dangling, and filled in the placeholders with actual prose. And we decided that there’s a certain level of punching up that will wait for the second draft, and we agree on where the cutoff is for that. Which leaves just one more bit of business we need to accomplish before this novel officially goes into hibernation.

Some of our characters are professional musicians. We’ve talked in the past about writing some of their lyrics. Now we’re working on other supplemental material that fleshes out the world: record reviews, fan chatter, things like that. Things written in the story world about or by our characters. It’s something we’ve done in every novel so far, and it’s a part of our process that we really enjoy. It’s really fun to try on other voices and to write in different styles.

The novel itself needs to have a consistent tone and voice. Even though there are two of us writing, we don’t want that to be obvious. But with this ancillary stuff we’re allowed — nay, encouraged! — to take sharp stylistic turns and explore idiosyncratic voices. We want these pieces to be distinct, both from the novel itself and from each other.

A writing partner is someone you can harmonize with, but who also lets you play a solo every now and then.

Pop The Sparkling Blackberry Mead!

Last Saturday afternoon, we finished writing the final scene of Sibling of Music Novel! Yay, it’s done! (And, Yay, we’re still tinkering around with it until the end of the month because there are a couple dozen notes sprinkled through it and that’s our official deadline!)

The action in the Writing Cave was a little spotty over the holidays, with lots of extra people around the house (not to mention renovations in the auxiliary writing cave). We surged back into it upon the newness of the year and cranked through the final portion of the outline, wrapping up with a word count just shy of 168k.

But as mentioned, we are still working on it for a little while yet. Whether or not we’ve knocked off all the outstanding comments, we will lay this book aside on Jan 31 so it can rest. Most of 2020 will probably be taken up with editing rather than writing more new stuff, because we now have four first drafts that require a trip to charm school (and in once case few lost weekends down on the docks) to bring out their full potential.

A writing partner is someone with whom to toast your achievements. (By the way, the mead was very interesting stuff and made us nicely squiffy, but when the official deadline comes there will be proper champagne. In case any of you were worried.)

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!

Toodles, 2019!

At the dawn of 2019, we predicted that we would write Sibling of Music Novel this year, and we did! Almost all of it! We also predicted that we would probably move on to work on another project after we finished, and that is where our prophetic faculties let us down. Even though we didn’t complete a novel this year, we’re very happy with where things stand. It was a busy year.

In January we were betwixt and between. Kent was putting the finishing touches on Grandson of Science Novel while Jen tackled the outline for Sibling of Music Novel. We didn’t start composing the new novel until almost the end of February.

Our time in March was divided between writing the Music book and discussing our next project, the Ghost Series.

We were steaming right along in April, writing song lyrics for inclusion in the novel, and researching many diverse topics to round out our characters.

The merry month of May on the blog was dedicated to a deep-dive recap of events in our chain story. In the background we were still writing the novel (when we weren’t visiting the Arctic Circle or The Village), and things ran smoothly until June. That’s when we started encountering bottlenecks. And of course the mandatory fretting about word count reared its head.

In July we talked in depth about Stubs, and shared our template. In August we drank Red Bull. For research. The effects have mostly worn off by now.

We crossed the 100,000 word line with Sibling in September, with no end in sight. So of course we fretted a little harder about what the final word count will be. Then we spent a little bit of early October in NYC for some hands-on research and to meet our agent, and we batted around the idea of setting a deadline.

In November we got a good idea of how much work is left, and admitted that we were unlikely to be done by the end of the year.

Now it’s December again. When our house isn’t full of guests we’re making great progress. Despite that, Sibling of Music Novel will not be done by the 31st. It was more important to us to spend time with our kids than to lock ourselves away in the writing cave and stress about a deadline. We don’t want to be totally laissez-faire about things, though, so we’ve set January 31 as our completion date.

Next week we’ll talk about our plans for the new year. And the new decade.

Happy New Year!

Beginnings and Endings

As we close in on the end of both our novel-in-progress and 2019, we’ve been thinking about endings. And beginnings. The opening and closing scenes of a novel are arguably the most important. With two of us writing, how do we divvy those up?

Fairly evenly as it turns out.

Of our nine novels, Jen has written three 1st scenes and six last scenes, while Kent has written six 1st scenes and two last. If he writes the last scene of Sibling of Music Novel when we get there, we’ll have a lovely sort of symmetry.

We didn’t consciously set out to divvy things up this way. Kent more often writes the opening scene due to logistics. After the plot rainbow, the prose outline, and the traditional outline, the next step in our highly structured method is for Jen to write the stubs. Once she gets a couple of those lined up, Kent can jump in and start the actual prose composition while Jen knocks out a bit more of the pre-writing.

As to the endings, Jen seems to be drawn to them. She’s better at wrapping things up (just ask Kent who’s better at wrapping presents), and since Kent’s shift started sooner, it makes sense for Jen to be the last one out the door.

Of course no scene is ever the property of just one of us. We both edit. We both poke and prod and add and clarify and remove. As our unpublished novels make their way through editing, it’s possible that the beginnings and endings will change and this whole beautiful symmetry we’ve got going on will fall apart. We’ll find out next year.

Happy Solstice!