Tagged: Sibling of Music Novel

“As They Head Into the Final Turn…”

Recently, Jen completed the stubs that will take us all the way out to the end of the book. Being done stubbing meant she was able to rejoin Kent in the prose trenches. And, having both of us working in parallel increases our output, of course.

This time, the speed boost has felt particularly dramatic. Kent’s nightly word count is up compared to normal, and we’re both knocking out scenes at a great clip. Jen observed that, “Having the finish line in view seems to have lit a fire under us.”

Indeed. While we were somewhere in the middle, it felt like we weren’t gaining on it. For a really long time it seemed as if we were halfway done, and it was a bit demoralizing to add pages to it and still be halfway done, over and over. It was just an illusion, like when you go to New York and decide to walk to the Empire State Building. “It’s right over there,” you think. So you hike for blocks and blocks and still it’s right over there. And you start to wish you had taken a cab. But you do get there eventually! You were gaining on it the whole time, even though it didn’t look that way.

The completion of the stubs gave us perspective. It felt like we suddenly jumped from 50% complete to 85% complete. And that’s been quite energizing.

Our Days are Numbered

Counting today there are 40 days left in this year.

Thanks to Jen’s diligent work on stubs, we now know we have to write 30 scenes to complete Sibling of Music Novel.

With two of us writing, that’s 15 each.

December 31 makes an enticing deadline, but for our purposes it’s totally arbitrary. Choosing that date just because it’s at the end of the calendar is like deciding on your vacation destination because it’s precisely 100 miles from your house. In a perfect world we’d knuckle down and finish this bad boy before the end of 2019, but we’ve already accepted that this is an imperfect world and that’s not likely to happen. While it’s a bit disappointing to know we’re going to miss such a nice big obvious date, there’s a lot of satisfaction in knowing how much work is left.

In between painting the bedroom and wrangling the contractors we hired to do the projects involving finish carpentry and explosive gases, we kept plugging away at the novel. Kent concentrated on prose composition, and completed several scenes. Jen devoted herself to crafting stubs, and carried that project through to the end of the outline. The other night at quitting time, Kent had just finished his scene and was ready to decompress with a little TV. Jen only had one more stub to go. Since she had momentum, Kent just got out of her way and she finished in record time.

15 scenes each. It’s tempting to try to hit that arbitrary deadline.

A writing partner is someone who helps you find the right balance between writing and real life. And who will clean all the bathrooms before the guests arrive for Thanksgiving.

Gizmos And The Writers Who Design Them

Something we’ve known would be part of our story ever since the pre-outlining stage with our color-coded paper squares is a high-tech device (we like those) built by one of our main characters. Suddenly, now that the word count is over 120k, we discover that we never discussed what this gadget looks like.

So, the other night we did just that.

Such conversations are among the greatest joys of writing together. We can spend hours brainstorming, and frequently do, especially on long drives. But most of the time it’s about the broader shape of the plot. This was a lot of fun particularly because we were more or less engineering this trans-dimensional machine on the fly. Focusing on the details rather than the high-altitude view.

Kent can now proceed with the scenes featuring this apparatus, because we know what it looks like (more or less). There’s still somewhat of a range of options, but we have a shared image of what those possibilities encompass, now that we’ve agreed on how the thing goes about bending reality.

Sometimes “writing partner” is just a synonym for “fellow mad scientist.”

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.

On The Mean Streets

Our recent trip to NYC was great, as we’ve already mentioned, and we learned several things about our story’s locations that will help us enrich (and sometimes correct) the descriptions. Some details might even impact the action.

We’re decidedly not going to start rewriting stuff that’s already done, though. We have our notes, and we’ll take the new info into account going forward, but that’s just the thing — we will keep going forward. There will be a second draft.

It’s inspiring to stand where our characters stand. It’s wonderful to be able to do it together.

We Can Be Taught

The purpose of our recent trip to New York wasn’t to spend a lovely afternoon with our agent — that was an immensely enjoyable bonus. The true purpose of our visit was to scope out locales that figure in some of what we’re writing. What we’re currently writing, no less. Yes, we can learn — this time we didn’t wait until the draft was all the way done before heading out to do recon. This time we’re in the middle. Perhaps someday in the future we’ll be organized enough to conduct our location scouting before we start writing at all.

The need for this research took us by surprise. We’ve been to New York before — more than once! — plus, there are a million pictures online to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. We thought we were all good, but once we set fingers to keyboards we discovered more and more details that were a little too fuzzy for comfort. Details that our google-fu was inadequate to turn up.

The specifics of where we went and why are on a need-to-know basis, but we’ll share a tidbit that’s not too spoilery: verifying certain facts entailed renting a rowboat in Central Park. In the process, we verified that working a set of oars brings out the creative side of many New Yorkers.

We really do hope to be able to stay put for a while now, and focus on the actual writing. A writing partner is someone to enjoy a romantic getaway with under the guise of research.

Every Word Counts in Word Counts

Our current WIP is going to be long. Very, very long. Like, probably too long.

We’ve come to this realization as we’re working. On the one hand, hey, a story is as many words long as it takes to tell. It’s not like some numbers are better than others for word count. On the other hand, we need to be reasonable. And because we really do want this book to fit in with the others in the series, there’s a practical upper limit which we’re almost certainly going to exceed.

So, having come to this realization, what did we change? Nothing. We’ve pressed onward, adding yet more words.

Are we demented? We are not. (Actually, we sorta might be, but not about this.) Our goal is to produce a complete draft at a consistent level of pacing and detail, which will put us in a good position for editing. Were we to make adjustments on the fly in hopes of dialing in the proper word density for the finished (edited) book, well, we’d be off by whatever amount anyway and now the remainder of this draft would be all second-guessy and have a different flavor from what we’ve already done.

There might not be one right number of words for books in general , but there’s an optimal length for each book individually. We know we’ll end up cutting this one down, which isn’t going to be fun sometimes. Thing is, it’s not just quantity. We want to make sure that all the right words go into that final number, and one of the best ways to do that is to let the words flow at this stage. Which means, we need to obsess a lot less about the word count. And boy, that is one thing we do enjoy obsessing over.

Having a writing partner means there’s someone to strategize with and help keep you on course when it counts.

Being In Tune

When we reached the end of a recent writing session and Kent read aloud what he had written, Jen said, “I like when you approach things from angles I never would have thought of.” The feeling is mutual, and that’s kind of the whole magic of writing with a partner: the synergy that comes from aiming two imaginations at a challenge.

Of course, in another recent Writing Cave conversation someone made a comment along the lines of, “Good to touch base before running too far ahead, in case your vision and mine turned out to be totally different.” There’s a famous song lyric about words having two meanings sometimes… the point is, just because you’ve talked it through and think you’ve agreed on how things should go doesn’t mean you’re really in sync.

There’s no magic pro tip for ensuring a perfect mind-meld between partners. You just have to practice. There will be misunderstandings and disagreements from time to time. Ironically, the better you are at processing disagreements, the fewer of them you’ll end up having.

Here are some non-magical tips that might help, though.

  • talk to each other about the story and the characters, a lot — what would take hours of rewriting to fix is often fluid and instantaneous in conversation
  • err on the side of more structure in your process, rather than less — spell things out thoroughly in the prewriting phase
  • maintain a win-win mindset — unexpected ideas from your partner are a good thing!

A writing partner is a source of frequent pleasant surprises.

Milestones

Despite all of the traveling we’ve been doing lately, and all of the switching back and forth between projects that that entails, we’ve managed to inch Sibling of Music Novel up over 100,000 words.

Crossing such a momentous threshold feels great, especially since not too long ago we had a first draft that came in mysteriously short (for a Rune Skelley first draft, anyway).

We have a hard time not trying to anticipate how long our drafts are going to be, and this one is no exception. The short answer is, we really have no idea. All we can say for certain is that we’re more than halfway done.

Lately we’ve been batting around the idea of setting a deadline. We’d like to have it done by the end of the year. That ought to be doable if we can keep our butts at our desks for a while.

A writing partner is the one who gently reminds you that there are still a couple more roadtrips on the horizon.

Retroactive Relativity

As we work on the middle book of our music trilogy, we need to refer to the other volumes from time to time, especially the first one. The bulk of the information flow is from the already-written books toward the in-progress book, but occasionally that gets swapped around. Which is the major advantage of working on a whole trilogy all at once — you can retrofit details that strengthen the thematic and plot links across the series.

An instance of that occurred recently in the Writing Cave. Naturally there’s plenty of pseudoscience in these books, but there’s some actual science as well. The other night, Kent came up with something of a you-got-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment regarding the pseudo and the legit science imagery. Although the idea arose while working on book two, the best place to incorporate it is in the first book. So we added a note about it for when we go back to do revisions and tweaks.

We love our surprises too much to spill details here, but Kent’s still sort of giddy about his brainwave, because (in our story universe, at least) it provides a solution to one of the major conundrums of modern physics. In lieu of a fictitious Nobel, he received an even greater honor — he got to write the sticky note for the project board!

A writing partner is someone who forgives you for getting peanut butter on their chocolate.