I’ve basically been doing Revision 3.5 on the first half of the book, so there isn’t really “progress” to report.
Because I write with continuity (threads of a scene weave through scenes before and after it, and some of those threads extend far), I can’t just pluck out a scene and be done with it. While searching for artifacts, I took the opportunity to firm up other weak spots, as well.
We’ve now returned to single POV (Heroine’s). Hero has the same tragic backstory but is pissed off about it rather than helplessly sad, and his quest (which is the same) is more about destroying the wrongdoer at any cost than a noble pursuit of justice he doesn’t believe in.
Since he’s not going to monologue this to Heroine until well beyond the halfway point, we’re going to infer his anger and vengeful motivation via Heroine’s observations. Accordingly, Hero has been made less agreeable and biddable. He is also less inhibited by pretensions of honor, which makes him much more comfortable performing many tasks I previously had to force him to do.
He’s not an abusive asshole. He’s just no longer a self-righteous weenie and has risen immensely in my esteem. I should have done this years ago.
We stride into the second half armed with our new guiding principle and both our main action figures removed from the box, scuffed, dirty, and disreputable.
Sit-up-from-a-dead-sleep-with-my-heart-racing thought: If this book is no longer romance-forward, I should change the title, which existed to signal “This is a Romance Novel™.”
I do like when things say what they are on the tin and don’t make promises they have no intention of keeping. On the other hand, a title is a name, and we all know how I feel about coming up with names.
KotSQ is the only name this book has had subsequent to my standard pre-title placeholder of The Adventures of [two character names that have changed numerous times]. Given how I feel about names, it endeared itself by sticking, if not for its staggering inventiveness. The thought of coming up with a new-and-improved title is sucking the life out of me.
While reading through the first half, I stumbled across some lovely multi-sentence details that had the effect of speed bumps in the flow of text. Each time, I thought perhaps I could move them elsewhere. Each time, they became speed bumps elsewhere. They had to go.
This is what’s meant by “kill your darlings.” Those details may be great on an individual basis, but if they don’t work well with the team, bye.
I keep a dump file for every book, as a precaution. I’ve been saying for 20 years I should commit to the delete key because I never read the dump file, much less restore anything pasted into it. This time, I periodically scroll through the file in search of something usable, acknowledge there’s some good writing in it, and… leave it there because it doesn’t play well with others.
Acknowledging some of it’s good has not helped me commit to the delete key.
A hand “hashed with scars”—hashtags have lines, so readers would probably get the gist, but it wasn’t the word I meant. I was thinking the lines you scratch in a wall to mark days of imprisonment, uneven and hard won. TV Tropes has the prison wall phenomenon but calls them “tally” marks up top while 2 entries below err with “hash.”
Ah, the rush of triumph of having the correct word “spontaneously” surface after half an hour of impotent searching.
Hatch marks, supported by multiple dictionaries, used in the “incise with fine lines” sense since the 15th century. (As many drawing tutorials as I’ve followed, it should be carved into my memory that hatching is a method of shading, but no.)
The bane of my spelling existence is “hypocrisy.” I already had five variants in autocorrect and had to add a sixth because my brain cannot make sense of the component parts of that word, and the etymology is unhelpful, to put it charitably. “Hypo-crisis” has no relation to the meaning of the word, so that can’t be how it’s spelled!
Added “flag diminutives and gendered roles” to my copy editing sheet. I don’t want them changed by someone else because worldbuilding schematics are involved.
“King” and “queen” are different jobs, the titles of which remain the same regardless of who’s doing them. All hosts, no hostesses. All spouses are spouses.
Familial relationships break the system, though. If one has multiple parents, children, or siblings, “my parent/child/sibling” is vague, possibly indicating any of several people. The obvious solution is to always refer to people by name rather than “my XYZ,” but that feels like a stretch readers won’t go along with. The real-world custom is to define people by relationship to self. If you refer to your mother by name, negative assumptions will be made about the nature of your relationship because you’re deviating from the “norm,” regardless of your actual reasons for doing so. There’s no opportunity early in the book to establish “it’s customary in this world to refer to everyone by name rather than by ownership” to acclimate readers to the custom before a major character has occasion to do so at length.
Another solution would be to invent new terms for relationships. Primary, secondary, tertiary parent roles. Firstborn, secondborn, thirdborn child. Et cetera. But a) that’s a lot of vocabulary that has to be clunkily defined in the text and b) we all know how I feel about making up names.
Creativity: Doing whatever you want! Craft: Considering the reader experience. “Remember all these plot threads and who these characters are and carry all these clues you’ll need later” is a lot to ask, but readers come willing to do all that for the sake of entertainment. If you also hand them a 50-word vocabulary list to memorize because there will be a test later, that’s not fun, and they’ll have to drop some of the fun things in order to hold trivial made-up synonyms for common words they already know.
If there’s a blue fruit that turns your hair rainbow colored and makes you poop teeny tiny unicorns, that needs a name. If a fruit is indistinguishable from an apple other than being blue, that’s just a blue apple. (And if its blueness is irrelevant to the story, “apple” would probably suffice.) Needless complications are barriers to enjoyment, not enhancements.
Which is to say, I’ll probably stick with familiar familial roles with additions beyond the binary where relevant, but I still want a fresh eye calling them out so I can reconsider.
Me: I used a form of “test” twice on the same page. I’m ashamed of myself. I should be arrested. I should be purged. I should be flogged. I shouldn’t walk among good people. I’m a swine. I’m a wretch. I don’t deserve to live like others.*
Mega Best-Selling Romance Author: “The sun topped the tops of the clouds.” Damn, I’m good. Time to do the backstroke in my vault of gold coins.
My trad pub career was mostly writing to order whatever someone would pay me to write, which was never what I wanted to write. My day job is writing corporate IP with a team of multiple writers, which is rigidly structured. When I ghost memoirs, I’m constrained by what the subject and publisher want.
All of this falls under the heading of Writing by Committee.
Yay, self-publishing. I can write whatever I want! Or so I thought.
I almost left a comment on another writer’s blog (ultimately did not because the comment section is not a substitute for therapy) in support of a post about writing what you want and need to read. When I brought up what I’m going through with this book, I had a lightbulb moment:
I got rid of the committee, but with every single thing I’ve self-published, I have still tried to satisfy the demands in the baggage the committee left behind, which I’ve been dutifully lugging around in case they come back for it. Every single thing I’ve self-published contains some amount of “ugh, I don’t want to include this, but it’s obligatory.”
Nothing is obligatory! No one can force me to commit crimes against my story. I’m the only one in the room. Editor Angie is an outside consultant. If I disagree with her recommendations (theoretically possible, I suppose), I don’t have to obey under duress in order to make it to publication so the next penny of my advance will be dropped into my beggar’s cup. I alone own this endeavor, with all the powers and responsibilities that position conveys.
Now that I’m aware I’ve been sniveling for approval in an empty room, I can consciously correct my attitude from “ugh, but it’s obligatory” to “gtfo with that rancid trash.”
Fingers crossed I can implement that adjustment during the writing stage of the next book so its revision is less arduous than this one.
Actual progress reports should resume soon.
*Self-flagellation courtesy of the extremely quotable The Golden Child (1986), written by Dennis Feldman, which, much like Big Trouble in Little China (also 1986), is not perfect but maintains its entertainment value amazingly well for an action-comedy 4 decades later. (go back)