Yesterday, started gathering snippets from old versions of the former GN--snippets that could belong in the new character's sections. I put them all in one document so I can work on them separately from the main ms. This should help me focus because there's less danger of getting sidetracked as I see pieces of the larger story and start wondering how to fit it all together.

I found a lot of pieces that I'd loved but had to cut because they weren't working in the single viewpoint story. It's gratifying to see them again. I hope some of them can be of use in this new context.

Despite the lightened workload of between-semesters life, I am still behind. I'm supposed to be--I want to be--writing like a bat out of h#ll right now, but my thyroid has conked out again (second time in as many months) and that means my ability to process the larger picture of scenes and novels has shut down. It's like I'm trying to think through mud. So not only am I unable to do much but sit and stare at my own WIP, I'm also unable to do much but sit and stare at the VT-related replies I still need/want to make for the semester--more than a week after the semester is over.

There are no words to describe my level of annoyance and frustration. Well, there are, but they would be overly dramatic and scare people. For example: "If I had a dog I would kick it. No, wait--I have two dogs. Lemme go get my boots on."

The weird thing is, the back of my writing mind is unaffected--I can tell, because a couple of times I've had one of those unexpected flashes, the kind where your writing subconscious is a container of simmering water, and a bubble suddenly rises and pops. Both of my flashes had to do with structure/format, which has been on my mind a lot this term.

And oddly, one was a sudden epiphany about the former GN, of all things. I haven't even thought about that in ages. But suddenly I know what I want to do with it, structure-wise.

Hmm, let me see if I can explain this.


First of all, it's all in third person present.

It's in my voice, from my POV rather than that of any of the characters, because my burning drive is the engine for the story, rather than the characters' particular desires.

It's going to start with wee centered boxes of prose set in present day, in "Sparta."

Then there's going to be a reader cue in the form of a heading that flat out says something like: "Nine years earlier," or however long it is.

From there the format shifts to regular margins as the story jumps back in time--but is still in "Sparta."

Then it's going to stay in the past time frame and in regular margins, but another heading will cue the reader to a, er, continent change. In other words, the setting moves across an ocean, but takes place at the same general time in the past.

Then it switches back to present day, cued by the format going back to the wee centered boxes of prose.

Repeat, repeat, repeat. Three revolving stories: Helen in the present, Helen in the past, "Paris" in the past. And the past will gradually move close to the future with each set.


Now, later this will pose a problem as the three sections start to meet up. But the immediate problem at hand is this: I've done a ton of research on the details of domestic home and palace life in the Mycenaean age--and almost none on daily life for regular people or outside the house. Bringing in the second character ("Paris") is going to be a royal pain in the @ss, because he goes through a whole gamut of roles in Bronze Age Turkey: a village peasant, a shepherd...

Hmm. As I write this, I think I can skip the towns, fairs, and cattle-judging, and take him straight to the royal city ("Troy"--which I have a lot of detailed books on, thank goodness), and then on to war.

Okay, now I'm working this out as I type. What I need to do is get the peasant-thing set and grounded, then move him to the city so he can experience life with his royal family, and I think he does need to go to Bronze-Age battle--which might be fun, if I can find time to reread all the good parts of the Iliad. He also needs to be on a ship, which will be hard to write because I know squat about being on a Bronze-Age ship, or any ship for that matter.

Now I've lost my thyroid-deficient train of thought. I'm like Dory from Finding Nemo.

But I've actually talked myself into a less annoyed state, because the nature of this ms is that it's in snippets. It always has been. That is what it wants to be. So the trick of it isn't to build one long snowballing plot, but to weave snippets and storylines together.

So...since it's snippets, for now, if I work on this new part, I don't need to be able to follow a long train of thought. I can just focus on snippet grounding and immersion.

None of this helps my dystopian WIP (which my agent is waiting for, and which my bankbook is waiting for) or the people whose stuff is sitting on my desk ready to be answered. But it does help Hobo and Tyson, who may now avoid a kicking.*




*That's a joke. A JOKE!

Very busy. Have been thinking about the dystopian, and realizing it's time to print out and do a readthrough. I have no sense of how the story ideas flow into each other, or whether the action I've got is rising action. And I can't hone any of the scenes that need to be honed until I'm sure they're in the right places.

That will have to wait till I have time to actually read my own ms.

For now, I'm suddenly thinking about the former GN re. format and structure. I've had to do a lot of thinking lately about how format and structure can be used to bind a story together. One big idea is that providing an outside viewpoint can create tension if it shows conflicts and dangers the main character is unaware of.

I already knew I needed that outside context in the former GN, and have been trying to shoehorn it in mostly via my MC's pov. Also, some time back, I tried putting framing devices around chapters. They weren't working because they weren't cohesive enough. It was like slamming the reader into a wall every time a new chapter started.

So now I'm thinking I'll look around at other characters and see how many might have something to say. I've had to do double backbends to get the world-building context-y information into my MC's pov, so I'm interested to see exactly how many places there are where it can come out and happen in real time. I may look to see if there's a potential pattern for outside viewpoints, something that would keep the story flowing while also keeping tension up.

It's not going to be simple, no matter what. This ms is a real puzzle.

Note to self: think about book X

Forgot to say, I finally made myself start reading a book I've been assuring people I was going to read for 2-3 years now. Recently I even had to fork over a self-imposed fine of five bucks to a fellow writer for yet again failing to read it as promised.

So I finally started it, this book everybody's read and praised, and boy, does it suck. However, the more I think about it, the more I'm absolutely fascinated by it. Because the writer makes it work. Through sheer force of plot and structure, the story moves along pretty grippingly, even though if you look very closely, you can see that nothing's actually there. There isn't anything going on but people moving around from here to there, and some mysteries that aren't very interesting because who cares if they're solved or not?

But, wow. The structure completely hides all that; it misdirects the reader's attention and gives the impression of being a gripping, excitingly wild ride. I can see that it partly does so through the way it uses hooks, and also by the way it uses alternating narrators.

This is exactly what I need to figure out how to do for my former GN.

What's really got me super-zeroed in on it now, though, is realizing that one of the two POV characters has a negative goal. I think part of what covers that up is the structure and the constant updating and adding of hooks, but there's also an announced strategy. And here's where it gets even more interesting: the announced strategy makes no sense. But it doesn't matter, because it works anyway. You don't even notice it has no reason to be either a strategy or announced.*

The only reason I noticed any of this is because I have a plotting disability and was bored, reading. I can see how gripping the story is, but I'm not at all gripped. It's sort of like the little kid who can't enjoy a great magician's trick because he isn't sophisticated enough to understand that he's supposed to be following the hand gestures. Sometimes there are advantages to having humongous blind spots.

Sometime when I have a chance, I want to really dig into this, maybe even go through and make a list of every scene. I bet I will find that it's extremely screenplay-worthy, with every scene carefully designed and set like a stage, and with actors hitting their marks right as the curtains go up. I also bet that nearly every chapter will have a deliberately imposed ramp-up of a ticking clock, and there's something intriguing about the hooks, too--like, maybe there's at least one new one introduced in the body of the chapter, and then another, different hook hits hard at the end?

Also need to look at:

• Which hooks are external stuff happening and which are internally-driven emotional cliffhangers.

• How the chapters cut in and out to hide the relative passivity of one of the storylines.

• How a passive character is given the appearance of being an active one.

• Beginnings and ends of chapters, making note of transitions.

• Beginnings and ends of chapter, for cliffhangers (I think some are actually dropped and never followed up on. But I'm not even sure! This is great!).

• Beginnings and ends of chapters, as read sequentially rather than alternately. I'm interested to know what the author has chosen to skip as not-ramp-up-able enough. Because, you know, I think s/he was probably right, since the book works so well.

Forcing myself to finish this thing is going to be a chore. But I think I can learn a ton of stuff when I go back to it once it's read.



*Something that's come up in discussion with writer friends is this theory: An announced strategy doesn't have to really do anything in the story; as soon as the actual story gets started, the announced strategy can just disappear, and be naturally swallowed up in the bigger, stronger, "real" story without you having to deal with it. But here, it seems to me, the possibility presents itself that the announced strategy doesn't even necessarily have to arise from story. Which poses the question: exactly how far can you go with the artificial pasting on of stuff to keep your story moving?

Thinking about the Hobby Formerly Known as the Former GN. Glanced through it, feeling very dissatisfied. It's got a lot of purty writin'. To which I say: So what? I'll bet my dog could write purty, if I trained it to type.

I thought about why I want to write this ms--obviously I do, because I keep sticking with it even though it's just purty and nothing more. The reason I want to write it is because I'm annoyed and angry--but not super angry, just sort of smolderingly angry.

Then I thought about where the ms picks up and gets interesting--the places where it gets more than just "purty." It perks up and gets a spurt of energy in the places where my snarky smoldering annoyance slips into the third person narrative.

This story is set 3,000 years ago. The points I want to make are from today's perspective. I've tried to make those points staying in a 3,000 year-old POV, but every time I go through the usual process of getting the reader to come to their own conclusions by experiencing a sequence of events along with the MC, it clearly warps the ms. There's too big a gap between today's world and the world of the book.

If I look at what I have, I've got a ms where I've consistently taken my own snarky conclusions out and tried to make the reader "get" the same conclusions on their own. It's clear that this process is not working.

I think a big part of this is getting the right third person voice and understanding how present I need to be in this ms.

A big part is also figuring out how to transition from piece to piece. I like the floating-around thing, and it's fun--but it's not satisfying me as far as actually getting something said. If I wasn't annoyed or smolderingly angry, I could probably float around the story forever and be content. But you can't float around a ms and be angry; the two just don't mix. Anger has purpose and direction.

Sigh.

I've got at least three different types of story going on here, and I don't know how to transition between them. They take place at different times and on different continents. In some the same people have different names. I don't see that I can just label the transitions by place and time, because it's so confusing that labels would be meaningless. On top of which sometimes the people in the sections are the same and sometimes they're not, and sometimes they're the same but the reader might not know it yet.

I pulled out my Scott McCloud, as an aid to thinking about transitions and spaces between. He lists five choices about visual storytelling: choice of moment, choice of frame, choice of image, choice of word, choice of flow. They also apply to textual storytelling, IMO.

Choice of moment: which moments to include and which to leave out.
Choice of frame: distance and angle.
Choice of image: Characters, objects, environment within the frame (scene).
Choice of word: the actual writing part.
Choice of flow: guiding readers from scene to scene.

More things to think about:

Choice of frame affects reading flow.
Choice of flow includes clearing the readers' path of obstacles.

Also, the types of transitions are: moment to moment, action to action, subject to subject, scene to scene, aspect to aspect, and the non-sequitur. The ones I'm having trouble with are scene-to-scene, taking the reader across space and time. McCloud points out that deductive reasoning is often required in reading scene-to-scene transitions.

Hmm. I need to look at what I have (which is about 250 pages worth of stuff) and see what idea storyline A could end on, that would echo or pick up on an idea in the first scene of the next section, which may be storyline C, but it may be B, I dunno yet. I don't know if storyline B and C need to go one at a time, or intercut.

I also need to get storyline B, the main storyline, carved to a bare minimum.

I also need to write out storyline C, because I only have some of it.

It also occurs to me that you can remove all obstacles by repeating a sentence or paragraph that opened or ended a scene earlier in the book. If you repeat it again later, the exact same way, that puts the reader right back in the same scene, at the same place where s/he first heard it. That would be a strong and effective way to transition the three storylines back together near the end: repeat the exact same words from storyline A--carry the reader straight back into A, only now knowing everybody's baggage and being fully invested in the stakes.

Worked on the former GN yesterday. I like the way it's going. It's clear, however, that this is just a personal pet project that can't be allowed to take time away from projects that somebody might actually want to read someday. Right now the ms is dividing itself into three chains of thought that are different in ways I can't succinctly describe. And there's no story, really. I can see that the three chains of thought will come together near the end, then, together, lead to the ending I want, the ending that's always been there. I keep trying to find a pattern to all this so that the whole big picture of the piece will suddenly fall into place and make sense, but I haven't been able to find one. If I could find the correct title, that would probably help it come into focus--but I've never been able to locate just the right name for the ms. The story and characters are fun to think about and play around with, but I can't let this take over my time. It must remain a hobby.

Today I took time to work on the dystopian ms, feeling out the backstory and writing down the current story of the main secondary character--in other words, going through the story from his POV. Nothing big about the plot has revealed itself. I was a little surprised to realize some of his motivations and desires, but they line up with what I already know happens, so I'll have to keep thinking my way through the ms.

It may be that, for once, everything is going to hover in midair until a certain plot reveal gets settled, and that once that happens, the ms will start rolling again. I don't know how to decide on something plotty like that, though--usually I let the emotional story dictate what happens plotwise, and when. It'll be interesting if for once the emotional story can't fall into place until part of the plot is set. Lots to think about, here. Definitely a learning process.

Further thoughts re. Heian diaries and former GN...

I was thinking about all the things the diaries don't mention--like names, and sometimes big chunks of the authors' lives, like, er, their own families. Many times the things the books don't mention are the very things that defined the roles and borders of the authors' lives in the real world, in their society and culture. That's one reason so many of the books have such an ethereal feel to them.

In the former GN, I've got a similar situation, where the MC is completely defined by other people and by her role in her culture/society. I've been trying to create her story...when it's not there. What I need to do--what I've actually already semi-done without noticing--is to create the stuff that's going on around her, and let the blank spaces that are left over define who she is. That's what the book is supposed to be, I think.

I'd already figured out that this is what's going on format-wise--white space helps define the character and tell the story. But I haven't carried that over to the actual choices I'm making about the written part. The written part needs to be like--well, okay, it's like the MC is an empty outline, but the reader won't be able to see that outline until I've filled in everything around her, by telling what's going on with all the other characters. She's a peripheral character in her own story, and the point is that we don't get her for herself. That was truly the point all along, and I've always known it was--I just never thought of being able to come at the writing part in that way.

In fact, I actually have been doing this all along in the writing, only I've been fighting it. All along the ms has kept going off to include everybody else's POV, while I never could quite nail the MC herself. I have continually assumed that this was a failure on my part. Creating sympathetic female characters has never been one of my strong points, so I've been pushing and pushing myself to overcome my weakness, to get this story down in a typical way, to figure out the MC's POV even though she doesn't really want anything because she's never had a chance to understand that it's okay to want something. I think I've been so busy reminding myself what I can't do well that I haven't noticed what the story's been trying to tell me.

I'm even thinking that all the saggy parts may fall out if I can handle this correctly, because I know what everybody else is doing during those times and what they want and need, and how it affects the MC.

It's going to be tough to write, but I've got 200+ pages to go over and "unforce"--to convert to however it's really wanted to be all along--and as I do so maybe I can see how it fits together to make a book. It's all in third person, and some of the formating choices are clear already, but the switches in time and POV will need some serious consideration. It'll be interesting to see how this develops. Essentially I need to try to write a book where the main character is continually a secondary character in her own story, but somehow it works anyway. Yeah, interesting challenge.

Finally was able to start reading another Heian "diary" I got at Xmas, this one translated by Ivan Morris.* It's been a while since I've read any Heian stuff, and so far I just keep rereading Morris' introduction, enjoying what he says, and being reminded down to my bones that everything doesn't have to be written or even thought of the same damn way all the time.

"...sense of genre has always been fluid in Japanese literature...the lines of demarcation between novels, romance, story collection, autobiography, journal, memoir, notebook, and poetry collection were most tenuous...."

"...no daily record of events but a book in which the material has been deliberately selected and shaped to reveal certain significant aspects of a women's life...dates are rarely provided...there are often large gaps between the events described."

I'm especially interested in Morris' observations that a) the introductions to the poems become so involved and so long that they become narrative flow and include characterization, so that the poems themselves almost become secondary to their own introductions; and b) the poems tend to occur at moments of heightened emotion "as if mere prose were unable to bear the weight."

He also quotes Arthur Waley's idea that you can't translate Japanese poetry, really--all you can do is take the works out of it, like a watch, then spread them on a sheet of paper and hope the reader gets the "possibility" of the poem, the way a watchmaker would see the taken-apart gears and pieces and understand the "possibility" of a watch.

Morris also remarks that in Japanese, some of the sentences he's trying to translate run on for three or four pages, but so smoothly and easily that you're not at all confused or burdened, but feel that you're seeing a scroll being unrolled in front of you.

The trick, I suppose, is figuring out ways to do this kind of thing in American writing without confusing or losing or boring the reader. I'm kind of thinking in terms of the former GN, which I haven't at all figured out yet. I actually like the new beginning I have, but it's only a few pages and it starts with events near the end of the book, and it's only one very tiny block of text per page. I have no idea what to do after that, but I like the idea of not being bound by time, place, names, etc. It's just, you know, I would like other people to want to read it, so it can't just wander around Heian-ly forever. At least, I don't think it can. Hmm.




*As I Crossed A Bridge of Dreams, Translated by Ivan Morris, Penguin 1971

Around 2800 words over three days. Oh dear. I do feel like I'm getting a grip on the background material, though. The background is very complicated and a little intimidating, and requires a lot of reading.

Worked on former GN a little, but the voice keeps lapsing back into default, which is isn't helpful because that's the same old rut I've been in for several years now. Today's theory is that if I write this ms every single way it can possibly be written, eventually all that's left will be the one way I haven't written it, which will be the way. Eventually I'll use up all the other combinations of words in the universe, till all that's left will be a hole in the shape of my ms. Then I can plug the hole with the last exact combination of words I haven't tried, and it will be perfect.

Only 28,995,430,511 combinations of words to go.

Writer friend came up with an interesting approach to a problematic tangle of a ms. Said WF used sticky notes on a poster board to lay out the entire ms visually in order to see it all at once. The stickies are different colors depending on who is in the scene.

Another writer friend said that a third writer friend used a method like this, except the colors were about settings rather than characters--and that this helped WF3 to see the big picture and proceed. Sometimes with a novel you just have to step back and try to get a bead what it is you're doing. I'm thinking I need to do something like this with the dystopian ms--except I'm not sure I can really do stickies because I don't have my scenes in order yet. Those two WFs had complete or nearly complete mss. But I do feel the need to make a stab at getting some kind of mental order to the many threads of the dystopian ms, because I think doing so might possibly help me stick to something that moves forward at a brisk clip rather than going off on boring tangents. No time to try this out at the moment, though. The former GN is so chopped-up in format, it lends itself more to being worked on at the same time as other full-steam-ahead projects. Not so with dystopian, which is all of a piece.

Added 3300+ words to ms yesterday. Most of them involved copying, pasting, and typing stuff from the bible/outline and other reference materials, to help me stay on track. But I counted them as my own words so that I could reward myself with a little work on the former GN.

I kind of like where this new tack is taking me with the former GN. I think it has potential. If nothing else, it's shaking me out of the mental rut I was in. I'm having to restructure the beginning* and make it more grabby and think in terms of tension and in terms of planting at least a grain of a seed of a question in the reader's mind, for g*d's sake, instead of drifting over 250 pages in a namby-pamby lyrical cloud of a non-story.



*Or rather, the old beginning, which now comes after what used to be the ending section. I'm cutting up the old ending section and interspersing it as a framework for the whole story. However, I think at some point framework and story will meet and the ending will just continue on as the ending in real time.

This all sounds very complicated. I guess it is. Still, it's right up my alley because it means playing around with various permutations of voice, style, and especially format. For now I'm just writing for myself, for fun, to see what I can get the words to do on the page. And what places where there aren't any words can do.

I was bad on Wed. and only did 250 words. Yesterday I was good and did 400--that 400 was during an hour grabbed in the middle of a busy day, which is why it's good.

Now my word count is about to go out the window because I'm going to copy and paste huge pieces of the bible/outline in hopes that I can work faster by jumping around. I keep having to stop and look stuff up, but if I jump around I might be able to work on one story thread at various places in the ms and focus on following it through. Maybe.

Lunch at Chuck E. Cheese yesterday with non-writer friends, and discussed economic/social aspects of dystopian ms with them. If you have a high tolerance for kid noise--which I do--you can get a lot of discussing done at Chuck E. Cheese. Hmm, that sounds weird, but I'm serious. I realized I need to lean more toward a Dark/Middle Age European mindset for this dystopian project and try to forget the vestiges of Mycenaean background that have crept in from the former GN.

Will try to get a copy of Brunelleschi's Dome for sure.

Now I remember why I never do word counts. Yesterday it appears that I wrote 2000 words, but I'm sure it was more like 800 because I copied and pasted pieces from the story bible to keep me on track. Plus I rewrote parts, trimming them considerably to make them fit together more smoothly, so my word count went backwards sometimes. Word counts never mean squat, where my writing is concerned.

Still, will pretend they do mean something for now, because I will surely hit the keyboard daily to avoid having to man up and blog that I didn't do what I was supposed to do.

In more interesting (to me) news, I had a small epiphany while jogging. It's interesting--not just because I am now seemingly used enough to jogging that I can think about something besides how much I hate it and that I really ought to quit right this second because only crazy people do this to their joints and anyway I could go get a Milky Way or some Ruffles--but because I think I may see a way into the former GN. I'll keep the new experiment in structure (i.e. starting with the ending section and interspersing it throughout the story) and do some hardcore change-up with the voice. I'd like to stick with third person (I'm uncomfortable with the idea of first in this particular ms), but pull into a closer third that matches the protagonist's age and outlook.* In other words, the reader will grow with her, and realize things with her. This feels like a good idea to me, a good thing to try. It feels like it might be forward progress.

In fact, it sounds like a lot more fun today than trying to write 2000+ words of someone else's book. However, first things must come first.




*Now that I think about it, this is similar to what Karen Hesse did in Music of Dolphins, although that didn't have anything to do with age.

Have been tinkering with the former GN. Pulled the ending to the front...and am stuck there, not knowing how to lead into the old beginning.

I seem to keep running into the same problem of balance in all three of my current WIPs. All three require world-building and backstory, and I keep hitting the same wall, over and over again: at some point the story slows down too much.

And now that I think about it, this probably relates at least partially to my old nemesis, transitions. Either I'm leaping around from scene to scene, or I get immersed in the minutiae of the characters' daily lives and have trouble thinking outside that natural progression. There isn't much middle ground in my head, and that middle ground is where the transitions are. It's also where the world-building needs to be, I think.

Maybe the thing to do (with the former GN) is to keep tabs on what idea needs to come next. Usually every scene needs to carry one main idea. This ms is not a normal format with normal scenes, but maybe trying to think in big-picture terms of scenes would help.

Technically maybe this book shouldn't be possible, since the MC has no goals, positive or negative, and doesn't want anything at all until the very end. But now I'm thinking that surely there's a way to get the structure to carry the story forward, since the content apparently can't do it. That's what I'm looking at now. I'm thinking I might be able to use structure rather than content to pose the "questions" that keep the pages turning, if I mess around with this long enough--and if I can keep from falling into the same old mental rut.

Am second-guessing myself re. chapters 3, 4, and 5. I've looked at it too long and can't tell whether I'm shoehorning stuff in. Normally this would mean I need to lay off--but I can't, because people are waiting to see it. So I've been going over and over it, and when I see a spot that doesn't seem smooth, I zero in and think about whether it's going the way it would naturally go if left to its own devices. The unsmooth spots are getting smaller and smaller, but like I said I've lost all perspective, so it could be that as the ms gets more natural, it also loses conflict and tension. Because basically what this part of the ms needs to do is start shifting the reader's focus to new tensions, and it needs to do it pretty quickly. Hard to do that without losing steam.

Anyway, the d*mn thing's going to be off my desk today. Period. Before midnight, it must be gone. I'm behind, behind, behind on everything else.

Also, decided maybe I don't have to kill that character. Also, made notes laying out the basic sequence of one of the plot threads that has eluded me, the one that brings about the climax and ending.

Also, am thinking about former GN, as far as POV--maybe the fact that it's in third person could be helpful, maybe there's some way to switch to serial close third and use the changing POVs to ramp up what the reader wants for the character vs. what she wants. Or maybe not. Just randomly musing.

Worked nearly all day yesterday on dystopian ms. Got a lot done; so much, in fact, that by the end I was utterly confused and lost, and thinking nobody in their right mind would ever be interested in any of it--which is probably a good sign. I hope. Actually, I can't remember if it's a good sign or not. Eh, doesn't matter; I shall proceed onward anyway.

But not today, probably. I've got to get some kind of schedule going, because I contracted to write a w-f-h novel by Sept. 1st, plus I told agent I'd make an attempt to have 6 chapters of this ms in before I leave for V. residency. Plus "lecture," plus getting family and house and animals ready for me to be gone. Egad.

Anyway. I was trying to describe the former GN to a fellow writer, and pulled it up out of curiosity to see how it looks now that I've laid off it for four or so months. Answer: not too good. It's a mess. Needs a total overhaul. It really is boring and, well, fruity. Am mulling over (again) the problem of the MC with no goal. The solution, you'd think, would be to make sure that the reader has a goal for the MC. However, I'm having trouble figuring out how to do that, here.

I suppose the thing to do would be to make the reader feel bad for the MC, make the reader root for her to be happy. But in order to do that, don't I have to make the MC really miserable? That's what makes a story work, is conflict and inflicting misery on your MC. But it's not what I want to do, not at first. I can't do that, really. It would go against the entire raison d'etre for the ms, which is that misery and giving oneself away in relationships is insidious and begins in small, almost unrecognizable increments. So...there must be another way to do it. I'll have to keep mulling it over. I was thinking that since it's in third person, maybe there's a way to sort of stifle and smush the MC by telling her story underneath the activities of other people, in the beginning. Don't know how to do that without giving the false implication that it's their story rather than hers, though.

Anyway, no time to think about it right now. All I know is, I seem to have lost not one ounce of determination to get that ms working, even if I have to stretch my feeble liver-spotted hand out of the coffin they've placed me in and type the last (correct) words of it before I finally expire.

Still zero time for my own writing.

Had to help son #3 study for a final on The Book Thief, which I haven't been reading like I was supposed to in case he needed help. So I read over the last 3/4 of a inch quickly, which added to the first chapter I read at the beginning of the semester and made me able to get the job done.

I had been terribly impressed, at the beginning of the semester, when I read this line about survivors:

"They have punctured hearts. They have beaten lungs."

There's some really strong stuff in the book. I don't know why I'm thinking that if an American female midlist author had written it, instead of a young Australian male, it might never have seen the light of day in this country.

I have to give my copy back to the teacher, but now I'm curious as to how Zusak decided what order to put everything in, and what to put in and what to leave out. I like the way he didn't mind breaking things up.

I'm thinking about the former GN, and what I want to do is get back to it, and look at each section and think how to make it a punch in and of itself. How to make the reader be feeling something strongly so that every time they turn over to the next title page, they hit that white space and they've still got a lingering sense of ka-WHAM! from what they just read. With every section, I want to try thinking not about the general scene and what the point is, but what about it can hit the bone--and how to do that. Is there a way to tie up each scene in the same way, to deliberately use the same pattern over and over that would help? Or would that be too much? It'd be like a picture book rhythm where you know what's coming because you know the pattern. But you don't know the exact form it's going to take this time.

However, I won't be looking at that ms any time soon. Too many things to do. And I'm probably going to take on another project that will last all summer and take many focused hours.

Probably what I'll need to do is create a daily schedule and stick to it. However, "need to" and "will do" are two different things.

Very busy. Zero time for my own writing. However, today I woke up having decided that when I go back to the former GN, I'm going to reslant it toward the idea of wanting something.

"Some say that the most beautiful thing on this dark earth is a host of horsemen; some say an army of infantry; others say a fleet of ships. But I say it is that which you desire."

I think I'm going to pull the whole thing around from not knowing what you want to not even being allowed to know what you want, to knowing, wanting, and taking it.

This ms has been niggling at the back of my mind, making me want to work on it, probably because I've been doing so much big-picture organizational thinking lately. The former GN is mostly about ultra tiny detail and it's not very practical.

No time right now, though. Off to other work.

Am getting opinions on first chapter (of dystopia ms) and a cr*ppy draft of the synopsis. I hate writing synopses. Bleh.

Started a new scene, a violent one, but I will have two scenes that are similarly constructed, one earlier in the ms and one later, and I need to think which one shows what. What does each one do in the story, what is its job? They're both about the MC hurting someone. I can't get a bead on whether he's mad or cold about it in this first scene, whether it's deliberate or in anger--because right now the big difference between the two scenes is going to be in how the MC is when he comes home after he beats the h*ll out of a guy (well, in the second one he'll kill the guy, probably). In one of the scenes, he suppresses and ignores his distress about what he's done. But which one?

Was also thinking about former GN. How do you show that something's at stake, when nothing external is at stake? When everything would be perfectly fine if the MC continued on in the same manner for the rest of her life? That's the problem: what I want to say is that it's not fine--not with me, anyway. It's fine in the eyes of the world, though. Hmm.

No work of my own; all w-f-h.

Was thinking about former GN. There's nothing driving the story, I'm just telling it. It's an interesting story, but not interesting enough. Missing: What does the MC want?

Well, she doesn't want anything. That's the point. By the end, she decides not only to want something, but to take it. So how does that make a book? Why should the reader care?

I suppose the thing to do--the thing that makes sense--is to show her wanting stuff but not getting it, to shut her down more and more harshly until she doesn't want anything anymore. That doesn't really interest me, though. I like the idea of being raised in an environment where you've absorbed the mindset that you don't matter, that you're not as important as other people. I like that half-formed want that can't even be allowed to take shape.

I'll have to keep considering, though. I know back when I started writing, I got annoyed because people told me I had to end each chapter with a question or hook, when the entire point of a chapter might be that the MC achieves a feeling of safety. Obviously a nice safe ending reflects the idea of that chapter and is right for it. The problem is, who wants to keep reading after that? The overall idea was to establish the feeling of safety, then take it away in the next chapter--but without that question or hook, there's no reason not to put the book down and walk away. I realized that if somebody was reading before bedtime, they wouldn't think, "Oh, I'm sure the feeling of safety will be taken away in the next chapter, so I must keep reading." They'd think, "Here's a good place to quit for the night," and put the book down, and who knows when or if they'd ever pick it up again. Really, they'd have no reason to.

So I know sometimes you have to do something that doesn't seem quite honest to the story, in order to make it a book and not a random slice of your character's life. But I don't want to betray my MC either, by simplifying things or prettying them up. So...will have to think about it.

I always think spring break (or fall break or Christmas break or summer break or any school holiday, for that matter) is going to be a gloriously long expanse of computer time. And then every single year--every single holiday--I get behind with my writing work; I get behind schedule deadline-wise. Blah.

Blah, blah, blah.

I also decided that the former GN has no chance at all in this publishing climate, and it's not right anyway, it's got serious problems that aren't going to be worth sorting out to anyone else, so I shall clutch it to my chest and not show anyone but just keep working on it for myself, indefinitely. It will be my J.D. Salinger ms.

Blah, etc.