Sunder: Day 29

Spent the night drawing maps of The Wheel for "Sunder".  Need to make some detailed maps of the areas where major plot points occur as well as the neighbourhoods where Callum, Niemeier, and Celia Morente live.  Tonight I managed to rework the districts within The Wheel.  There were far too many small ones before; things are a bit less busy now.  I will have to spend a couple hours jotting down some info points for particular districts where the story occurs so that I can start to build some sense of detail for those locations. 

Tired now, though.  Off to bed...

Sunder: Day 28

Not much to report tonight.  I'm (mostly) happy with the elaborations I made to the first three chapters. 

As I was making notes, I kept forgetting place names in The Wheel, which speaks to a larger need to pin down its interior layout (district names, transit line names, agricultural areas, business districts, public buildings, etc.) so that the story will have a sense of place as Colbrit and Charlotte move around.  I can work on some of that tomorrow night.

Sunder: Day 27

I got started late tonight so I didn't get much done aside from jotting down a few ideas about the trajectories that Charlotte and Colbrit take in Sunder. One goes up; one goes down. One rebuilds; one destroys.  I would have liked to have gotten a chance to revise the synopsis a bit more, but it's getting late and I haven't been sleeping well lately.  I'm happy with getting the ideas down, though.  All too often I've let it go for later and ended up forgetting the idea.  Not this one.

Sunder: Day 26

Synopsis (1st revision): Much work done to improve the prologue; will let it sit for now and work on fleshing out events in the early chapters of Sunder's First Movement.

In Other News
Not a good day today.  First, I hit a dog on the way to work.  A yellow lab.  It was running around in the middle of Walkley Rd, scared to death and trying to get across.  It started to leave my lane, and I accelerated, but a big red truck coming up in the other lane scared it and it darted back in front of me.  I hit the brakes but I slid into it.  What an awful crunch it made.  I thought I killed it, but the poor thing got up and took off across the road.  I felt pretty awful most of the morning and one person made a joke about it in what I'm sure was an attempt to try and lift my spirits.

What upset me the most about that little exchange was this person owns not just one, but two yellow labs like the one I very nearly killed this morning. 

The other bit of news that made today just fabulous was finding out someone I know committed suicide sometime Thursday morning.  I heard the news from K.M. who knows this person quite well.  The victim owns a parcel of land next to K's place, but lives in a nearby city.  Early reports indicate that he hung himself in his apartment.  From what K told me, his mother had died quite recently and he had had a fight with his ex-girlfriend on Wednesday night after the funeral. 

I knew this man.  I've had beers with him on K's back porch.  He was a small Frenchman, always smiling and telling jokes.  I didn't know him as well as K, but it still bothers me that he did this to himself, that he did this to his little boy.  I don't want to judge him, but what else was going on in his life that the last 48 hours drove him to this desperate, senseless, cruel solution? 

Today really sucked.  I mean, it really sucked. 

Sunder: Day 25

More work. Not quite so productive tonight though--wheels are spinning in the muck and I'm not getting anywhere. Think I'll quit early and get some rest.

Did manage to get one thing accomplished, though not anything literary.  I've had a concept for the cover rattling around in my head for the cover art for Sunder.  I found an image tonight that captures it perfectly.  Rather striking, I think.

"Shattered Head" (image by "morkeman")
Downloaded from www.istockphoto.com.

Sunder: Day 25

Accomplished a lot tonight. Jotted down a few pages worth of new notes to fill in some of the gaps I mentioned last night--some were rather obvious and mundane, some others were a revelation.  One of them was an idea that reaches to the very root of the cause of the Saturnalian war that rages in the background as Sunder unfolds.  "Wheels within wheels" as Frank Herbert once wrote.

Things are continuing to go well. 

Sunder: Day 24

Tonight I finished the synopsis for Sunder, but after reading through it from start to finish there are gaps and mistakes that need fixing (as I suspected).  When I started the synopsis I knew I would have to approach it in stages like most planning projects.  On this pass I wanted to get the basics out of my head and down on paper.  Second pass starts tomorrow when I will read through what I wrote to identify where things need to be added and ideas need to be tightened or reworked (or abandonned if they just don't work at all).  Depending on how the second-reading process goes, I may put the synopsis through a third reading.  Kind of like a bill in Parliament.

Someone that I care about very much and almost lost sent me an email tonight.  Does she know how much I miss her?  Inspite of everything that happened, even now, I still miss her.

Sunder: Day 23

Put an hour in at the gym tonight and discovered just how miserably out of shape I am.  Sweated like a can of Coke at a summer BBQ after about twenty minutes on the treadmill.  Need to work on that.


Also put a few hours in on Sunder tonight.  I worked on the synopsis, but as I was piecing together one of the final segments, I got an idea for some background that can link Celia Morente's phobia back to Charlotte.  It's only quarter to ten, but I'm tired now so I'm heading off to bed.  More work tomorrow night.

Sunder: Day 22

Worked on the details of the novel's setting--The Leviathan Station.  Worked out its general size and drew a basic diagram of its interior layout, especially the train lines that are going to be part of Colbrit Niemeier's new "beat".  I may redraw some of the ward boundaries because looking at them now, there seem to be too many of them.  That is, the interior living spaces seem to be parcelled out too small.  Will look at that tonight.  It bears out what The Prophet has said, "You need to write down what you're going to abandon.  You need to see how it works in the whole before you throw it away."


It sounds obvious when I say it out loud, but having something like a diagram to refer to for the physical setting seems to fuel my ideas, especially for things like context and backstory.  I found myself imagining the history of specific sections, why they were given their names, the types of people that lived in those areas and the culture they are trying to create.  It seems I'm weaving some clothes for my naked emperor.

Sunder: Day 21

Found an error in last night's notes so I spent some time correct that tonight.  Spent about two hours writing up some new material.

Sunder: Day 20

Closing in hard and fast on the ending of the synopsis for Sunder.  I can see a glimmer of light at the end of this particular tunnel.  There are longer and longer tunnels ahead, but when this is over I'll know how long they are.  I've never written a synopsis for a major piece of writing and so, by extension, I've never been this close to an ending before.  I'm really excited.

Made a big push tonight and some amazing ideas that I did not expect came to the surface.  I am thorougly exhausted from the late nights that this project is demanding of me.  My eyes are scratchy and I have a mild headache from concentrating so hard.  I feel fuzzy and slightly out of phase, like a signal on the radio that you can't quite tune in.  It's going to be a long day tomorrow and an even longer day on Friday.  I can see that I am going to have to pay much closer attention to rest and nutrition if I expect to keep up this pace (37.5 hr/week at my job and 15-20 hr/week at writing).  It might even do me some good to get back to exercising a bit.

As tired as I am, I have not felt this kind of vigour in years.  I was living with my parents and writing at night at the library the last time I was this energized about a project.  I didn't have a synopsis or any kind of writing plan to work to back then.  Even though I produced a lot, I always had the vague sense that the story was lost.  I did indeed get lost in that one, especially in the Time of Sorrow two and a half years ago.  It took me a long time to get clean again after that--still working on it, in fact, but this work and the energy I'm pouring into it have given me direction again. 

I am a Jeep that got stuck in a bog and I am winching my way out, slowly and carefully.  Days like these, the Jeep and I whisper the same prayer: "Please, God...let that tree be rooted deep."

Sunder: Day 19

Feeling very accomplished. Closing in on the last few sections of the overall framework for "Sunder". This was a very productive night.