Tagged: Son of Music Novel

Hindsight is 2020

Every January we like to make a writing plan for the year, and when December rolls around we reread it and laugh. Except not this year. Somehow our 2020 prediction was pretty spot-on. We planned to quickly finish up the first draft of Sibling of Music Novel, and we did. We planned to spend the rest of the year editing our various other first drafts, and we did. We perhaps didn’t get quite as far as we expected, but we’re close. I guess the pandemic was good for something.

The other thing we hoped to do was get a good start on brainstorming our Ghost Series, and we even managed to do that despite a near total lack of road trips. Generally we use car time for lengthy conversations about our works-in-progress (it’s not like there’s much else to do), but this year lockdown kept us home. Lucky for us we have a couple of fuzzy roommates who insist on daily walks, and don’t care what we talk about while we’re doing it. We logged many many miles on the streets of our neighborhood, and have many many notes about ghosts and the humans who love them. Or is it fear?

As this year limps to a close we’ve started talking about our goals for next year. We’ll share our plans with you in January when they’re more solidified.

So many people struggled this year with loneliness and boredom. We’re so thankful that we have each other and this all-consuming pastime we can share. Our writing projects kept us sane and busy and fulfilled, and they brought us a lot of joy in a really shitty time. Things are finally looking promising for the world. The vaccine is coming. The new administration is coming. Just a few more months until the world starts to get back to normal. We might not mind too much being cooped up in our Writing Cave, but we’re really looking forward to that.

Looking Back at 2020 aka The Darkest Timeline

We here at SkelleyCo Amalgamated Fiction Enterprises are ready for 2020 to be over. So ready, in fact, that we’re starting our year-end review now, a couple of weeks early. Who’s with us?

Remember the Beforetimes? When there were things worth celebrating? We started 2020 on quite a high note. Renovations wrapped up on the Auxiliary Writing Cave, complete with hidden bookshelf. We wrapped up the first draft of Sibling of Music Novel. We were planning a trip to Romania and Hungary. Things were looking so rosy.

We spent February rereading our Music Series, and practicing the mystical art of placing chapter breaks and perfecting pacing.

In March we lamented our missed vacation (spoiler alert: still on hold), explored how many reminders readers need versus how many they appreciate, and debated the difference between villains and monsters. In 2020, Covid is the main monster. There are many, many villains.

By April we’d started actually editing the third Music Novel, the biggest bad boy who ever bad-boyed. First we made it bigger, then we made it smaller. It was a whole thing, and we got quite philosophical about the whole process.

May brought more editing, and a cryptically described disagreement between the two of us. So cryptic that we don’t actually recall what we were at loggerheads over. Which is a good sign for our partnership, both marriage-wise and coauthor-wise.

No summer vacation for us! In June we just took innumerable walks around the neighborhood with the dogs, using the time to dig into our next project. It has the incredibly creative working title “Ghost Series.” You’ll never guess what it’s about.

By July, we were done with both Son of Music Novel, and the minor touchups we wanted to give Sibling of Music Novel. And we watched Hamilton.

The rereading and editing of the Science Novels started in August. Kent’s voice got quite a workout, because when we wasn’t reading the trilogy aloud, we were still talking about the Ghost Series on our daily walks. We wrapped up the month discussing how much of a character’s backstory an author should know.

It seems we didn’t have a lot to say about editing the second Science Novel in September, because all of our posts are about how excited we are about brainstorming the Ghost Series. We did spare a few minutes to talk about the joys and wonders of a good Goose Wrench.

Fittingly, October was also a time to talk about our ghosts. We even had a spooky encounter on one of our nighttime walks. We updated our writing prompt generator, and dealt with a minor case of burnout.

November had Jen finishing her edits on Son of Science Novel and starting in on Grandson. Kent followed not too far behind. We had Quarantine Thanksgiving without our kids, and engaged in a little bit of self-promotion.

Which brings us up to the present day. Kent is getting his geek on, drawing a cutaway view of a major setting in Son of Science Novel (standard floor plans are for chumps!), while he lets Jen get a little further ahead in her edits of Grandson. He’ll soon have to put his shiny toys away and pick up his flensing tools.

Looking back over this past year, we were surprised to see nary an update to our chain story’s Dramatis Personae, so look for that sometime soonish.

2020 was certainly not the year we wanted it to be, but it wasn’t all bad. Even spending all day together every day since mid-February, Kent and Jen still actively enjoy each other’s company. May you be as lucky in your choice of spouse and/or writing partner.

Keeping Busy, Keeping Sane

A little too busy, sometimes. Not too sane, though. What would be the fun in that?

Now that we’re done with edits on Son of Music Novel, we’re taking a quick swing through Sibling of Music Novel to take care of a few odds and ends. And in fact, there’s only one odd (or end?) remaining, which is to punch up the sensorium of the piece by adding smells. And that’s nearly done!

Still using our nightly dog walks to develop the ideas for the Ghost story. World-building conversations in the dark in our quiet neighborhood, as Kent tries to keep his voice from carrying overmuch when he uses phrases containing words like “aphrodisiac.” So, yeah. That’s coming along nicely!

Because it’s been forever since our writing group met, we’ve recently begun trying to round everybody up for a Zoom call. The cats are proving as difficult to herd as ever… Maybe the gang’s all burned out from too many online meetings already.

We hope you’re keeping safe. (And not too busy, nor too sane.)

Ouroboros

As the weather gets muggy and our neighbors ignore social-distancing recommendations to throw innumerable pool parties, we’ve been hiding in the writing cave, editing away. The cave is air conditioned, and we’re the only ones in it, so it’s quite pleasant.

We’re closing in on the end of Son of Music Novel. Jen only has two chapters left to edit, and Kent is (by design) about five chapters behind her. The plan is for Jen to loop back around to the beginning of the novel and take another crack at the first couple of chapters. It took a little while for us to get our various editing blades properly sharpened at the start of this project, so now that we have everything dialed in and calibrated it makes sense to take another pass. Or maybe we’ll discover that the opening of the novel is just more cleanly written than everything that follows. It could happen. If that’s the case, then Jen’s revisit should be quite perfunctory.

Whichever way it goes, Jen will be done by Independence Day (the deadline she set herself). Kent might not quite make that since he has a day job, but he shouldn’t need much extra time.

We don’t plan to run through the whole novel again right away, like a snake eating its own tail. It needs to rest, and so do we.

Wear your masks and stay healthy.

Pour One Out for Josh

As we stand athwart the midpoint of Son of Music Novel edits, we bow our heads in a moment of silence for Josh.

Josh was a minor character (so minor he never even had a last name) who has fallen prey to our ruthless editing knives. Don’t feel too bad for him, though. While he no longer has any lines, he still gets namedropped. And even though the only time he’s mentioned is on the worst day of his professional career, he gets off really light in the grand scheme of things.

Also removed from the novel? Over 9,000 words. The bit with old Josh up there accounts for a couple hundred of them, and is the biggest single cut so far. We already looked the whole novel over on a scene-by-scene level, and we’re pretty confident that what’s in there now is all stuff we need. But as we work our way through using the finer tools and the higher magnification, we’ll find a few things like Josh. He came to the Writing Cave with stars in his eyes, but unfortunately for him, his big break came at the end of a chapter, and he didn’t really contribute much. His dreams of stardom ended up on the cutting room floor in service to tighter prose and a better chapter hook.

So really, dear reader, it’s your fault. We did it all for you.

A writing partner is someone who helps you make the tough calls, even when they shatter an innocent character’s dreams.

Duck Season! Rabbit Season!

One of the great things about writing with a partner is that it gives you two ways to see everything.

One of the trickiest things about writing with a partner is that there are always two ways to see things.

We’re doing revisions on Son of Music Novel. The method we use has us each take a turn editing every page in tandem. Jen goes first, and at the end of every work session Kent approves her changes. We let her get about five chapters ahead before Kent started, so Jen’s fresh edits have faded a bit in his mind, and now every night she approves his changes, too. It’s a good setup for us. Two sets of eyes and all that. And, Jen can leave a note for Kent if there’s something she’d like him to fix when he reaches that point.

Of course, that works a little less well when he isn’t able to see the problem he’s meant to address. Language is ultimately subjective, and a phrasing that “strongly implies X” for one reader might feel utterly neutral about X vs Y for the next.

What happened in this case was Kent rolled his eyes a little (if he sighs, it resonates throughout the Writing Cave and breaks Jen’s concentration) and made his best effort at repairs. When Jen approved the new version, she stipulated that it hadn’t really made the issue go away. It seemed to be an impasse.

So, she used a colorful metafor to describe what she wished was on the page, to which Kent said “Why didn’t you say so?” And he promptly put the colorful metafor, verbatim, on the page. The duck-rabbit waveform collapsed and harmony again reigned in the Writing Cave.

Explain It Like You’re Five

Communicating complex ideas is hard. People want to understand what you’re telling them, but they don’t want a complicated lecture. This is where “explain it to me like I’m 5” comes from. Use simple language, and frame it in an everyday context.

However, the failure mode of this approach is condescension. The very premise is “talking down.” There’s a good chance some readers won’t care for how that makes them feel.

One way to adapt to this in fiction is by having a literal 5-year-old request the explanation. That way readers don’t feel that the simplified language is being aimed at them. We discovered it’s even more fun to turn that inside-out and make the 5-year-old the one explaining things. The main weird aspect of our story world is part of normal life for this kid’s family. He’s always known how it works, so to him it’s other people not getting it that feels weird. Looking at it through his eyes, and expressing it in the terms he would use, helped us check our own understanding of what we’ve created.

Using this technique to get explanatory/expository passages into the text relies on having a qualified and suitably precocious youngster around. That does limit the viability of applying it in certain settings and to certain topics. (A know-it-all whippersnapper doling out sage strategy in the trenches of WWI might not be in keeping with your desired tone, for instance. Then again, feel free to use that.)

Meanwhile, we’ll be in the Writing Cave huddled around our edits on Son of Music Novel. Quarantine, you say?

Weasel Hunting

One particularly efficacious way to tighten prose is via the systematic removal of the so-called weasel words that tend to infest one’s writing. Digressions that add little to no new meaning should be avoided. Be clear and concise, rather than cluttering your page with rambling verbiage, and cut out extraneous and superfluous modifiers.

Every author has their own bad habits of wordiness. Could be stating and then restating ideas. Could be tacking on cliché figures of speech to puff things up with faux-authoritative air. Could be excess jargon. Could be lists that go on too long.

For us it’s qualifiers. It’s been a sickness, honestly. We made a list of specific crutch words, and we use the software’s search function to comb through looking at them. It used to be, in our first drafts, nothing ever quite actually was anything. It was “almost” or “seemingly” something. All. The. Damn. Time. Our other bad habit was redundant modifiers. “Crept slowly” was a favorite, as if there is any other way to creep.

We do a much better job these days of keeping that stuff out of the prose from the start. Not that we’re completely cured, just that we see it when it’s happening now and rein it in. But that doesn’t mean our first drafts are perfect. We still need to revise them and tighten things up, it’s just that there’s less low-hanging fruit to be harvested. It used to be we could count on about a 5% reduction in word count from weasels alone. But not these days.

It’s a good problem to have. We’re feeding a higher grade of ore into the smelter, so the purity of the metal coming out is that much greater. (On our planet, low-grade ore is that which contains too many weasels.) A writing partner is someone who’ll take a turn pumping the bellows on your weasel smelter.

Macro Level Editing

We like to edit from big to small. It would be silly to spend a lot of time polishing up a scene, only to decide later to remove that scene entirely. So, as we mentioned recently, the first editing pass is to determine if any scenes get cut from the first draft.

You might not be surprised to learn that we have a methodology for this process, or that it involves a spreadsheet. Making the decisions would be all but impossible if we tried to just wing it, especially with two of us who have to agree. It’s not a judgement of whether the scene is “good,” because if it’s “bad” it can always be fixed. The question is, does the scene earn its keep?

We name our scenes as we’re writing, which is handy for building the spreadsheet at this stage. Going down the line, we discuss each one and make notes. What you want to do is document what each scene does to move the story. What information is conveyed? What events take place? How is character developed? Are there other scenes that do exactly the same job? Ideally, most of your scenes will be contributing more than just one significant element. But it’s not a points system. Scenes that only do one job aren’t necessarily weak. And if you eliminate the moment where a vital clue is revealed, that’s not helping.

Look over your list. Be critical. You probably don’t want to be the writer who says, “I can’t cut that scene, it’s the one where the main character has breakfast!” Notwithstanding that it might be the most important meal of the day, most readers will find other events more captivating. Unless this breakfast is thematically charged, becomes a crucial moment of clarity for the protagonist, is attended by a vital ally, etc. In which case, those should be the things on the list.

You know what your story wants to be. The stuff that doesn’t help with that is what you should take out. Even if it’s good stuff, it might not be in the right story. (When you cut something, you don’t have to burn it. And you won’t hear us saying “kill your darlings.” Just, you know, lock them up in a folder or something until you find the right project for them.)

A writing partner is someone who helps you look at the big picture before you dive into the details.

Smallerizing

Last time we talked, we were in the midst of embiggening Son of Music Novel. As of last night we’re switching to the shrink ray. We already looked at the work on a macro level and decided that there were no entire scenes that were superfluous, so Jen started on page one, working line-by-line to tighten things up. Kent has a few pieces of side-work to finish up, then he’ll make his own pass through in Jen’s wake and see what further fat there is to trim.

With two of us working, this part of the process can be a bit tedious. Every change gets marked for approval, no matter how minor. That’s not how every writing team operates, but it’s how we like to work. We enjoy the discussions it sparks. At least usually.

We’ve set ourselves a target — we’d like to get this beast down to 150,000 words. Is that feasible? It’s hard to say at this stage. What we do know is that this editing pass won’t be the last one. After surgery the patient will rest while we turn our attention to a different project, then later we’ll come back for another attack, this time with finer tools.

A good writing partner is someone you like spending quarantine time with.