Christmas Past and Writing News

Sunday morning in Cornwall and it's snowing lightly.  I'm here on the last of my holiday vacation, visiting my parents as I do a couple times a month .  The Christmas decorations are put away and we disassembled the tree and packed it in storage for another year.

Christmas Past

The tree we've used for the last fifteen years is a six foot artificial fir.  It's a fine, thick, robust tree decorated with multi-coloured lights strung up and down the branches, but it's a heavy beast and awkward to haul up and down the basement steps and we almost didn't use it this year.  My parents are getting older and, as autumn turned into winter, they started thinking a smaller tree would be more practical so they bought a three-foot table-top tree that they would display in the corner of the living room on my grandmother's old claw-foot end table.

When I heard about this change to our family's Christmas tradition, I kept my thoughts to myself.  I always loved that tree, but if they wanted a smaller tree that would be easier to manage then I was behind it.  (Fortunately,) They ran into a problem as soon as they started trying to decorate it.

Many of the decorations that they had collected over the decades, including heirlooms from my mother and father's childhood, didn't fit on the little tree.  There was no room for my father's white cathedral or his little bluebird.  My Aunt Norma's 12 Days of Christmas ornaments, cast in pewter, were too big for the branches.  And you could forget about trying to hang my sister's "Baby's First Christmas" ball.  They conferred and it went straight back to the store where it came from.  A few days later, I arrived for one of my regular visits and the old fir was hauled out and decorated to much fanfare and deep appreciation. :)

Writing News

"Conservation": Initial Success?

"Conservation" seems to be faring much better on Feedbooks.com than it ever did on Smashwords.com.  If FB's analytics are correct, as of this writing "Conservation" has been downloaded 38 times in just under 24 hours.  That may not sound like a lot, but let me put things in perspective: "Conservation" was live on Smashwords for nearly a month and got no more than seven downloads, despite being admitted to the Premium Catalogue.  

I think I may have blogged about using Feedbooks to build a readership in previous entries.  I know that that had been the plan in my head, but the siren call of the dollar lured me away.  The amazing performance I'm seeing now confirms that it was a mistake to use Smashwords at this time.  I say "at this time" because I still think Smashwords has value for independent authors, but authors who have established themselves.  In a year or two, after I have more stories to offer, I may try my hand at it again, either with Smashwords or Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing Program.

"Cool Water": Outlined and In Progress
"Cool Water" is now fully outlined in my Feedbooks interface, all five parts.  The only change from my previous post about this is that I have opted to drop the prologue, everything else remains the same.  I'm excited about this story.  After long weeks of struggling with the plot, letting it lie while working on detective fiction, then struggling with it some more, the story feels like it holds together well.  It feels like a story I would enjoy reading.  In the end that's what a storyteller should aim for, right?  Write to entertain your toughest critic: yourself.

Sunder: Day 52

After a longer than expected Christmas-slash-New Year's break, I am back at the laptop and writing.  I started last night, actually, but I can't count it since I got absolutely nothing done.  Tonight got off to a slowish start, but the pace picked up considerably once I had a cup of coffee in me and the cleaning crew left the office.  It was a stressful work day so I am grateful for the chance to have produced something somewhere in the orbit of "creative".

I was looking at the notes I made for the first part of Sunder's prologue, but I wasn't satisfied with them at all looking at them next to the second part.  The first segment was just too passive and didn't build any of the mystery surrounding the main characters or any of the major events that start the ball rolling in the first movement so I reworked them and came up with something different.  Definitely an improvement, but I'll have to see how the thing works in the whole before I decide if I'm going to keep it or make further changes.

"You have to write down what you're going to throw away.  You know you have to go through at least ten versions before you can see how it works in the whole." (Leonard Cohen)

It's 11 PM now and I'm tired.  This is enough for one night.

Sunder: Day 39

I love it and I hate it when revising something over and over reveals flaws in the logic.  On one hand, it feels great to have caught it yourself and not by someone else (who enjoys that?), but on the other hand, the error is sometimes a big one and it means a lot of material that you produced has to be changed.  That's what happened tonight.  Found a few wrinkles in some background material and even though correcting them led to plot points that were more believable, fixing things took up most of the night and I had wanted to write all new stuff.  Progress on Sunder is agonizingly slow, but it is progress.

As Mick Jagger once said, "You cain't...ahlwees git...wotchu wah-ount...you git wotchu nee-eed."

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 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 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.

Sunder: Day 17

Much work done on the overall framework for "Sunder". I spent the night jotting down notes about alternating storylines for Charlotte Hudson and Colbrit Niemeier.  Until now I had been winging it improv-style with a general idea about where I wanted the story to go, but the major events broke loose tonight and have unfolded for me.  This is very exciting in ways that only a writer can understand.

I have never been one to make plans for the stories I write and that's probably why most of them lose their way and fail.  It's not that I disagree on principal with planning them because I can see the worth of doing that kind of work, it's just that I've always gotten impatient and just started writing the story.  I don't know what happened tonight to make this sudden leap forward, but I appreciate it (if you're listening, Writing Gods). 

Essentially what I'm writing is a synopsis.  Each paragraph describes a major chunk or movement of the story and the movements alternate between Charlotte and Colbrit.  I'm going to try to finish the synopsis tomorrow then I'll let it sit for a couple days and work on a few other things (more notes about the settings, the characters, etc.) then return to it and try to refine it a bit. 

After that I will try to plan out each movement into at least 2-3 chapters with the aim of fleshing out the sections into more detail.  I will try to write at least one healthy paragraph describing the action in each chapter.  The goal of this is to zoom in on parts of the story at closer and closer magnification.  That part of the work might take longer to do but I think it will be worth it as a planning exercise.