The good news is that I got Valentine's Night polished up, printed out, and sent off to Eleanor today. This is the second spec manuscript I've written in as many years, in addition to finishing off Prophets for DAW. Here's hoping it does as well as Lilly's Song. This means, now that I got the rewrites done on three novels, I get to start on the next book in the Apotheosis Trilogy sometime before the end of the month. This means the counters will finally start moving again.Now, the reason I'm not starting the new book right now leads me to the bad news. . .You see, my mother-in-law has dementia and has moved into assisted living. This is a good thing, as she is, to put it kindly, obstinate and difficult to deal with. As in there was no way we would ever get her to agree to move, we had to check her into the ER after she wandered off and have her shipped directly from the hospital to the assisted living facility the following Monday. She's royally pissed at my wife, when she's coherent, but she now gets three meals a day, social interaction, and the occasional shower.The bad news is her house. I get to spend this weekend cleaning out a house that hasn't been vacuumed, dusted, tidied or otherwise cleaned out in nearly a decade. Parts of it are near collapse. There's mold, bugs, rats and things I don't even want to think about. I'm afraid I'm about to run out of dumpster. I'm exhausted, and I've barely started on what promises to be a very long weekend.The way I get through crap like this? I promise myself that it will make it into a story someday.
I turned in the editorial revisions for Prophets today, which means that I am officially done with it. It got a bit longer which is why all the counters moved around. Next task, is a second round of editorial edits on Lilly's Song, which are relatively minor and should only take a couple of days. Then I need to do a revision of Valentine's Night before I give it to Eleanor to shop around.Then I'll be writing new stuff. . .
No I didn't forget about them, it's just this little old thing called revision. See, when I finish a novel and turn it into an editor, it isn't really finished. Since you all saw those counters grind to a halt I've been stuck revising Lilly's Song for Bantam, and I'm currenly revising Prophets for DAW. I will also be spending the rest of this month revising Valentine's Night before I finally hand it off to Eleanor. Then I'll be doing new stuff, working on the second Apotheosis book.
The first line is always a bitch. Every story needs a hook to draw the reader into it, and your primary tool is those first few words on the first page. Intimidating to think that the entire weight of thousands and thousands of words can be sitting on the shoulders of, at most, a few dozen. Now there are no rues about openings, and there are as many ways to begin as there are novels. My own personal impulse is to compress as many story elements as I can into the first couple of sentences. I want a character doing something, a setting, a sense of conflict or some problem the character is dealing with, some emotion, and a feeling of the tone of the piece. Yes, that's asking a lot of a sentence or two, but it can be done. Here's the first paragraph of Valentine's Night:
“Happy birthday to me,” Toni muttered, toasting the empty chair across from her. She drained the remnants of her cosmopolitan and set the cocktail glass clinking next to a pair of its older, deceased siblings.
A couple of woo-hoos:First off, Anne at Bantam has given the ok to the outline I submitted for Wolfbreed #2 (titles, I need titles.) which means that I can go ahead with it as soon as I get the next DAW book out of the way. Second off, we are retiring the Valentine's Night counter, since I've just wrapped up the first draft.This is shaping up to be my most productive year writing since 1992, when I started doing this professionally. About exactly a year ago, I started writing Wolfbreed #1. I've since finished the novel, landed one helluva agent, found a new publisher, finished the first volume of the Apotheosis Trilogy for DAW, and now I've wrapped up the first draft of a third novel outside of any contractual commitments.Busy as I seem to be, my goal of finishing volume 2 for both Wolfbreed and the Apotheosis Trilogy in the next 12 months doesn't seem particularly daunting. Yea me.
Like I mentioned with Wolfbreed #1 some time ago, there's a point in every novel I've written where I feel like, "OMG what kind of garbage am I writing here?" It always happens in the last third of the book. I hit a wall where I feel everything I've written is total shit and I have to slog my way through the next few scenes no matter how excited I am about the project. However, I must still be growing as a writer, because I've just made two discoveries about this phenomenon.First, this did not happen with Prophets, and I think it must be related to the fact that it is the first book in a trilogy, and really is only the first third of a narrative and not a stand-alone book.Second, and more important, in today's "slog," I discovered a way to short-circuit the process. I skipped back into the first third of Valentine's Night and added a new scene retroconning a plot point I realized I needed for the ending. Turns out that, while it wasn't my intent, adding the scene (where my vampire RN heroine gets to set her own compound fracture in a wrecked police car) managed to re-ignite the enthusiasm that made me launch the project in the first place. Now I'm back to being excited about attacking it this weekend. Got to remember this for the next novel, it'd save me some angst.On an unrelated note, I got notes back from Anne for Wolfbreed #1 (still need titles), and with them I have the first word on when it will see print. As of right now, we're looking at Summer 2009. Mark your calender.
Blogging is taking a back seat to the new novel (30K+ yea me!) And yes, I bumped up the total wordage of Valentine's Night, the spec novel I'm working on while waiting to hear back from Anne. Two reasons.
Well my latest spec project is still rolling along quickly, quickly enough that if Anne continues being overworked at Bantam, I might get the whole thing done before I have to do any editorial revisions on Wolfbreed #1 (titles, I need titles). I started it a week and a half ago, and I have 23K words. The good news is, unlike Wolfbreed I do not anticipate going back and completely revising everything halfway in. (Of course, I just jinxed myself, as I didn't have any plans like that for Wolfbreed at this point.)For those curious, I have returned to vampires. However this is going to be unrelated to the pair of Blood & Rust novels. I'm trying my hand at an intentional paranormal romance. One that kicks most of the late 20th Century's contribution to the vampire mythos to the curb. No blood-drinking cabals conspiring in the darkness, no angsty goth heroes, and no supernatural vampire hunters of whatever dynasty.
So I finished and turned in the Prophets draft. My next project is Wolfbreed #2 (Still need titles for those) but I can't really start until Anne at Bantam gets back to me, approving the outline for the next book. Since I didn't want to jump into the next Apotheosis book and have to interrupt it, I was just taking a short break. . .My Muse didn't like that. Like the attack that resulted in Wolfbreed #1, I was sitting, minding my own business, and my muse bitch-slapped me with an idea I just had to start on. As of right now, after about four days, I have nearly 10K words. It's deja vu all over again.I even went and added a counter for it.
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