Tagged: Sibling of Music Novel

How We Know We’re Doing It Right

Our work sessions of late have swung back into a lot of research about New York City’s landmarks and culture in prior decades. It’s fun research. That’s part of how we know we’re doing it right, although admittedly it’s also a dire threat to any notion of a schedule. Falling down a bottomless image search is all too easy to do.

Naturally, the reason for all this research is so we can invent deeper torment for our characters to endure. They were already pretty pissed off at us about what we have in store for them, and the stuff we’ve come up with this week makes it so much worse. Which is the other way we can tell we’re doing it right: it makes our characters hate us.

There appears to be a link between our enjoyment and the intensification of enmity from certain members of our cast. The more fun we’re having, the more they want to blind us with a hot screwdriver.

Which is our biggest reason for working as a team: to make it harder for our characters to sneak up on us.

 

The Only Reason for Time

Now that our steno pad is 3/4 full and our plot rainbow is a mile long, we feel like we’re almost ready to write up an outline for Sibling of Music Novel. Before we do that, though, we want to make sure we have as many holes filled in as possible. There will always be corners we haven’t seen around, cans of worms we haven’t opened, right up until it’s time to write any given scene, but we like to get as much of that as possible out of the way in the planning stages. The writing goes a lot more smoothly (especially with two of us doing it) when we minimize the number of unknowns.

While Kent’s off at the day job, bringing home the bacon, Jen has spent her afternoons combing through our notes and typing them up in something resembling chronological order. Our brainstorming process is pretty loose, as it should be, and that results in a notebook that is wildly disorganized. Big plot points intermingle with character quirks and setting details. We don’t want to lose any of that little stuff, even if we can hold the broad strokes of the plot in our heads.

Eventually there will be a master document that incorporates everything coherently, no matter how large or small. For now there’s a prose outline for each of the main storylines, and separate documents for setting details and random notes. Each page of the steno pad requires Jen to flit around among these documents, inserting a line or two where appropriate.

Once she’s gotten through all the notes and gives everything a quick spit shine, these documents will give us a good overview of the project and will help us see where we are light on detail.

Our prewriting routine is quite involved, but it’s key to allowing us to write together as a team with minimal headache. What does your process look like?

Jack and Jill of All Trades

The plotting of our latest novel continues apace. We know the basic story line, have known it for months. But who wants a basic story line? The parts we’re working on fleshing out are all the fun side trips and frustrating (for our characters) detours. Lately this requires us each to wear many hats.

We’ve been steadily working to fill in the plot rainbow, but we’ve also dipped our toes into a few prose character studies to get to know our new cast members better. Jen’s gotten to go wading through her vast collection of baby name books to give them proper monikers. Kent’s done some deep dives into new research topics in order to flesh out their jobs and give them interesting hobbies. All in all we’re swimming in this project.

Instead of many hats, maybe, given the aquatic nature of the metaphors in that last paragraph, we’re each wearing many bathing suits.

Once More, With Feeling

After several weeks (and several road trips) of brainstorming and discussion related to Sibling of Music Novel, we came to a natural lull. It was the perfect time to read through the two other books set in the same story universe to both refresh our memories about the characters and plot details, and to look for inspiration.

The two existing books, Music Novel and Son of Music Novel, are both quite hefty, so this read through is taking a while. It would go quicker if we each read silently by ourselves, but Jen reads faster than Kent and she’d finish up first and then sit around being bored. Can’t have that. Plus we like to stay synched up so that we can discuss things more easily. This all means that Kent’s voice has been getting a workout. He’s already finished reading the first book out loud, and he’s halfway through the second. It’s sort of like an audio book and a director’s commentary rolled into one, and we’re quite enjoying it. Maybe Jen a little more than Kent (who is a very good sport about all of this).

We might finish up story time this weekend. Or we might not, because Son of Music Novel is freakin’ huge. Whenever we do finish, we’ll jump back into brainstorming, fully immersed in our story world.

Since We’re Too Lazy to Invent a Time Machine

It had been literally years since we bought anything from eBay, but we broke our streak this week. The world building for Sibling of Music Novel necessitates a lot of oddly specific research and we had to gather materials. The internet makes most research really easy, or at least possible with some digging, and we’ve been taking full advantage. But eventually you run out of ways to rephrase your search query, you know?

Countless youtube videos have been watched, web sites perused, images searched. Both of us can picture the sort of site that would answer all of our questions. Unfortunately that site doesn’t seem to exist. We’re forced to piece our knowledge together from myriad sources and hope that there will be few readers who will know what we get wrong.

But we don’t like to get things wrong, which is why we’ve turned our eye to eBay. You see, we’ve been to Manhattan, but we haven’t been to Manhattan in the 1940s, and that’s what we need information about. Not that the novel will be set in the 40s. Nor will it involve time travel. It’s just that we need a whole lot of detail about that specific time in that specific place. For reasons. So we bought a few vintage guide books and maps to get us started, and we’re planning to watch some movies filmed in the proper era and try to pay attention to the background details more than the plot.

Other areas of research so far: luxury resort hotels (if only we could justify a “research trip”), the floor plan of the Empire State Building, noble gasses, rooftop cisterns, and the earliest days of television.

On the upside, very few of our searches this time are likely to get us added to any watch lists. So there’s that.

Forecasting 2018 (In Which Jen Tries to Keep Her Expectations Realistic)

Dire warnings of Bomb Cyclones and blizzards have been echoing around the writing cave, and while we aren’t in the path of any of the really nasty stuff, we’ve been locked in a deep freeze since before Christmas and it’s showing no signs of lifting. Today’s high is supposed to be 7º!

Since the weather forecast blows (both literally and figuratively), let’s see if things look sunnier in the fiction mines.

Grandson of Science Novel is moseying along toward the finish line, and finishing it up is our first order of business. In her secret heart Jen is dying for a deadline, but she’s terrified of missing another one. For now we’re winging it without. She’ll probably declare a deadline when we’re close enough to the end to touch it, and claim that she’s had it in mind all along. And Kent will humor her.

Once Grandson is done, the whole Science Trilogy will be in the can. Our major goal for the year is to publish the first one. It’s been edited a couple of times already, but there are many steps before it will be ready for its debut, and those will eat up a lot more time than Jen expects them to.

While the Science Novels rest between edits, we will devote our time to outlining the novel we are currently calling Sibling of Music Novel. As you may recall, we have the Music Novel, and Son of, written in full, but now we’ve decided that Son is really the third book in the series and we need to plug that hole in the middle.

If, after polishing Science Novels and writing Music Novels, we have any extra time, we’ll get started on brainstorming our Ghost Series.

We currently have no release dates to announce, but when we do, you’ll be the first to know. Check this space for updates!

And Happy New Year to you!

A Couple of Hours at IHOP

Another big storm rolled through our area earlier this week and knocked out our power. Again. This time it was only out for about four hours, so it was a lot less of an inconvenience than last time. We didn’t even lose our DuoLingo streaks this time!

For some reason the fact that we’re going to want to eat every day takes us continuously by surprise and we often waste a good half-hour taking an inventory of our pantry and debating the merits of various take-out options. Just as we were getting warmed up for our daily dinner negotiations, the lights went out and the battery backups all started chirping, and thus our decision was easy. We shut down all of the electronics, grabbed our trusty steno pad, and absconded to IHOP.

After stuffing our faces, we got down to business. It was our waitress’s birthday, so we tried to be easy customers, demanding only endless coffee (for Kent) and water (because Jen actually has tastebuds) refills. We spent the next few hours reviewing the notes we’d already made about Sibling of Music Novel. There were some points that are already moot, and some sidetracks we’ll probably ignore. We thought of a few things that had been discussed but never written down, so we added those. Some characters have already been renamed. It was interesting to find so much progress on a project that’s still really in its infancy. And it felt really good to see how much material we already have.

Eventually our electricity came back on and we were able to go home, but even so, progress was slow this week. Kent had a business trip, and instead of writing in his absence, Jen used the time to binge a whole bunch of stuff he’s not interested in watching.

And speaking of binging, we finished up the program we mentioned last time, and are happy to say that we don’t have to replot anything. We’re sure you’re as relieved as we are.

Hit the Road, Jack

There’s a lot of music in our lives. We listen to it when we’re writing, editing, and plotting. Our sons are both omnivorous musicians, which means we’ve spent more than our fair share of time attending drum, guitar, bass, and piano lessons, marching band parades and football games, piano recitals, jazz band, concert band, symphonic band, and orchestra concerts, and battle of the bands. One son was in a metal band that had gigs at a local bar before he was 21, the other plays highly esoteric and experimental stuff, in addition to straight-up classical and jazz.

For as much as we like music, though, there unfortunately aren’t many local shows that interest us, which means that when there’s a band we want to see, we have to hit the road.

That’s just what we did earlier this week. We like to use the time in the car to brainstorm ideas, and this time we worked on fleshing out Sibling of Music Novel. It felt fitting to talk about music on the way to the concert, and on the way home we were flush with energy and insight. The drive was about six hours each way, so we had plenty of time to dig in on some details of world building and theme. Since this one is a sequel, you’d expect a lot of the world building to be done already, but we’re adding a new wrinkle which requires us to start from scratch for one of the settings. We’re talking “are the laws of physics the same here?” level stuff. There’s a lot to talk about.

Kent did all the driving, while Jen navigated, which is how we like to run things. It also means that it was up to Jen to take notes on our conversation. She used the voice recognition dealy on her phone, to quite amusing results. Our main character has a non-standard name, and in the notes it ended up being spelled at least four different ways. When we got to our hotel we had a good laugh over all the other kre8ive word choices as we transcribed the notes and expanded them.

We’ve been pretty deep into editing Elsewhere’s Twin, while also doing some writing on Grandson of Science Novel. It had been a long time since we devoted a lot of brainpower to plotting out a new story, and it felt really good. We came up with a lot of really fun stuff. Well, we think it’s fun. Our characters definitely won’t.

But back to the important thing, our concert experience: the venue was small and stuffy, there was unexpected moshing and crowd-surfing, the opening act was pretty good, and the headliners — Royal Blood — were phenomenal. We were only about 10 feet from the stage. We both got caught up totally in the music, which is just how it should be, and which is a feeling we want to be able to capture in our Music novels. The sweat, the flailing limbs, the thump and roar, the smell of the smoke machine, all of it will hopefully make it onto the page.

The evening was topped off with the surreal discovery that the building across the street from our hotel burned down while we were at the show. That unsettling feeling might make it into the novel, too, but mostly we want to just relive the excitement of a really good rock show.

It Was The Middle One

We went out to dinner again.

Loyal readers probably see where this is going — we dined out in character so we could debug some of the world-building that’s happening for the third music novel. A lot of the conversation revolved around whether or not we might be actively trying to kill each other.

As we mentioned last week, it’s a different trilogy that’s been keeping us quite busy in the writing cave. So what do we do on date night? We work. (And chow down on moussaka and kolokythokeftedes of course. Yum!)

It hasn’t been easy to lock down the plot of the next music novel. What enabled things to start flowing was a decision about the chronology. It turns out we’ve written volumes one and three. By putting this one in between, several obstacles were cleared away and a strong thematic connection back to book one presented itself. Now we have a pretty clear image of our new cast members and a basic framework of the incidents that get the plot rolling.

Sometimes a writing partner is someone to go out to dinner with, and then pretend they’re someone else.