Category: writing

Book Three

“Deep breath,” I told myself, and scoff, mocking myself with, “Why?” Editing and revising the first two books in the Incomplete States series had gone well. The weeks of editing and revising had flown past. This is fun and rewarding. Yes, there are challenges, but no deep breaths are required, just time, space, and coffee. Fortunately, I have all three.

Word can tell a lot about a document. In this instance, Word tells me that I began this novel on March 3, 2017. I edited it for sixteen hundred twenty-two minutes. It’s two hundred fifty-five KB. At seventy-two thousand, nine hundred seventy-nine words, it’s over twenty-five thousand words smaller than each of the first two books in the series, Four On Kyrios and Entangled LEREs. The series’ final book, An Undying Quest, is largest at one hundred fifty thousand words.

The third book’s working title is Six (with Seven). I’m ambivalent about that title. I’m not certain that’s this is the final title. I’ll find out while I’m editing it.

Doubt about the series still assails me. Have I told enough for it to make sense, or did I tell too much and bog it down? Is it too chaotic for people, becoming too challenging for them to read? The reader in me felt it read well, but I won’t have a better sense of it all until I finish all four books. That stream of thought amuses me because readers all bring and find their own meanings. Even as I’m doubtful, I’m also optimistic. I think that if readers find the series, they’ll enjoy it. I’m reminded, too, of people I know who read the first book of a series, enjoy and recommend it, but never read another book of the series.

Thinking about the four books, I’ve come across several places where I recall thinking while I was editing, there’s another book there. It seems like another book is always possible.

Meanwhile, the muses are becoming pensive. Novel ideas are erupting. Besides these new ideas, old concepts exist that I want to pursue. Part of this is because, while I’m not writing but focused on editing and revising this series, I’m reading several books a week, which fires up the muses.

While walking yesterday, I thought, this series is a science-fiction infused fictionalized history of the future. That gave me a good laugh.

Okay, time to write edit like crazy, at least one more time.

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Suddenly —

Suddenly, it seems, I’ve completed editing and revising the second book, Entangled States. Suddenly, it’s time to begin editing and revising the third book of the Incomplete States series, Six (with Seven). 

You’d think it wouldn’t seem sudden. I work in MS Word. I have the navigation panel open. I always knew what chapter and page I was on, and how much remained. It all seems sudden because I was underwater in the process. Finding no more to edit and revise, I surface and suddenly, there I am, done with another, ready to begin the next.

It’s an amazing feeling of joy and satisfaction. Suddenly, the sunshine seems brighter, the sky is bluer, and the future seems brighter.

Time to end another day of writing editing like crazy.

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Findings

Editing and revising the second book, Entangled LEREs, is about ninety percent completed. I’ve come to a challenging chicane where the disparate stories and characters are brought together to race into a new direction, which is where the third book, Six (with Seven) begins.

I find that as I edit the beta draft, creating the first draft — something other humans can read and comprehend, rather than streaks of coherency marred by stretches of babble — that I refine my quest about what I want from the story. In the beginning was a concept. Characters jumped out. Ideas jumped in. Arcs were spun. Lives and plots were developed and explored.

Now I’ve sharpened my understanding of what I wrote from the morass of thoughts, energy, and application that we call fiction writing, and I crystallize goals about what I’m exploring, and think, this is what I want to do with this book, and this is what I want to do with this series. As I’m just reaching the series midpoint, that might change again. Unlike other times that I thought things about the series and books and documented them in Epiphany.doc to help me understand, I understand enough that I’m not impelled to write this up. Incomplete States is moving from imagination-ware to a concrete state. Its becoming tangible. Recording isn’t required.

Time to write edit like crazy, at least one more time.

 

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Open House

You ever get into that zone where almost everything you see, hear, or read seems to trigger a novel concept and, or, title?

I love it. It’s like my mind has declared an open house for the muses, and they all come in to share.

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The Ascendancy

Once again, none of my novels were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Naturally, I was distraught. It almost put me off of my coffee. Almost, but not really. It’s their loss.

Despite that oversight, my spirits are rising. Nothing to do with anything tangible; it’s just that time of my cycle. It’s beautiful weather, and seems like a wonderful to day write and edit.

As part of my lazing about this AM, I read a 2011 Paris Review article, “Catch-18”,  by Erica Heller about her father, Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22. Several passages interested me, but I want to highlight two.

At one point when Dad was writing Catch-22 (he wrote it for nine years, which turned out to be something of an average gestation period for his books), only once and quite late in the game do I remember him becoming discouraged, fed up with the writing process and how long it was taking to finish. This brief, uncharacteristic bit of self-doubt caused him to actually set the book aside and try to find distractions. I recall seeing him watching television in the evenings, but his boredom and exasperation was immediate. Within a week, he’d become so sullen that soon he was scurrying exultantly back into the waiting arms of Catch, telling my mother that he honestly couldn’t imagine how anyone survived who didn’t have a novel to write.

It is hard to imagine not having a novel to write. That’s my primary survival/coping mechanism. Computer games help, along with coffee, wine, and beer.

When Catch was finally taking off, about a year after publication, my parents, who had now moved us to a much larger, far grander apartment, would often jump into a cab late at night and ride around to the city’s leading bookstores in order to see the jaunty riot of red, white, and blue and the crooked little man—the covers of “the book,” piled up in towers and pyramids, stacked in so many store windows. Was anything ever again as much fun, I wonder, for either of them? They would come home giddy and very late and go to sleep with their heads still full of the potent magic of a dream poised right on the cusp of becoming true.

That sounds fun and real, and is the kind of thing that I dream of doing, cruising places looking for copies of my books and evidence that my dream is becoming true.

Time to write edit like crazy, at least one more time.

 

 

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