A Month of Sundays

Sadly, my time of being a stay-at-home mommy is drawing swiftly to a close (for now). I am due to go back to work at the beginning of August, and I have about another week before the first family member comes in for an extended stay to nanny my son. Eventually we’ll run out of family, and he will have to go into daycare, but we are trying to get him to about 6 months so he has had all his shots, is beginning to explore food, and is more able to communicate to us if there is a problem with the care provider than he would be at a younger age.

And it will be good to not have to pay 25% of my salary in order for me to earn the salary for at least a few months while we recover financially from his birth and my time off. I wish I could say home with him, period, but it’s not realistic for us right now. If I had no personal debts, we could scrape by on my husband’s income – so the goal is for me to be debt-free by the time baby #2 comes along, since 50% of my salary just for me to work begins to look prohibitive if the working is not in and of itself a reward. Our ultimate goal is for me to homeschool the children, anyway, so me being able to not work 2-3 years from now is much more important (whatever my feelings about it) than me staying home now. I confess, the notion of a $10,000 advance from a publisher sort of looks like life-changing money right now, and isn’t the common advice to only sell a book for life-changing money? But I don’t have a book to sell, and I am, in all honesty, not sure I really could give up on one of my stories, which is what selling it for current contract terms would feel like. If I wrote faster, perhaps each one would matter less.

Anyway, July has felt to me like a month of Sundays. May was the shellshocked immersion into parenthood, and June was the halycon days when I had it figured out and my time with baby stretched endless before me. Since the first of July, though, I’ve had in the back of my mind that it’s drawing to a close – the way, as Calvin so aptly pointed out, you can’t truly enjoy Sunday the way you can Saturday because there isn’t another day off after it. Sunday isn’t over yet, but it’s waning fast, the shadows of tomorrow looming long on the periphery.

At least I’ve got him sleeping through the night. And at least we’re on a good schedule for me to just stay up after his pre-dawn feed, and write while he sleeps in his wrap against me. It might hurt to get only 6 or 7 hours of sleep each night, but I will get both a precious couple hours more with him each day and time to let the words out.

But for now, it’s still Sunday.

A Thought

Writing in this piecemeal way is turning this novel into a play: dialogue, free of all encumbrance of description, and the barest of stage directions.

“Your talk of postscripts makes me sad. Let us dance, if we aim to.”
[they dance]

Literally how I just wrote (“wrote”) that scene. Clearly everything composed in this between-computers and between-drafts period will have to be rewritten later. What joy is mine.

At least slogging through all the narrative signals is easier when I know exactly what needs to be there and am not trying to envision the scene as I go….

The Progression of a Scene

Since my original post of this excerpt was a true rough draft – which for me means basically dialogue, void of physical grounding, blocking, and character thoughts – I thought it would be fun or at least informative to show what I do in editing* to make it an actual narrative scene and also how I tweak it to make it that 3% better. (*I say editing…in reality it’s what I do when writing. I have mentioned before that I have two modes of writing, compositional and inspirational. This scene was written in the inspirational mode, so primarily what the changes will be are what I add when I integrate it into the narrative in compositional mode. I also tend to tweak wording as I go along, rather than only in a formal editing pass, so most of these word swaps would naturally occur in the drafting phase rather than the editing phase.)

I will copy this post and publish a new version as the scene changes, so that each layer of tinkering can be viewed discreetly.

LEGEND:

[bracketed comments] = editorial aside explaining what I did if it’s not a textual change that can be noted by changing the color of the words involved

black = original words

blue = compositional mode additions

red = editorial change

To recap the scenario: a masquerade. Their Lord and Lady Winter costumes match; hers, intentionally, because she wanted to match a man from her past and thinks the hero is he. He’s not. He takes her for a courtesan he’s supposed to meet there. She’s not.

“Blow, blow, thou winter wind,” he said, reaching for the one bit of poetry he knew that might suit her attire. “Thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude.”

“Do you not think yourself unkind [line break – trying out a means to emphasize the poetry. Not sure I will keep it]
to speak to me of your ingratitude?”

Her question took him aback. Had she been inconvenienced to come tonight? Had he been hard to find? While he parsed the meaning of her words, their cadence struck him. She’d replied in the same meter his verse  quotation employed, with a slight pause to emphasize her phrasing – she meant to speak in verse. It was a parlor game he knew well from his sister. She always won. He wondered how he’d fare against a lady of the night. Dismally, most like, if she were an actress.

“Then should I simply note that you’re well met,
my lady fair?”

“Well met, indeed, my lord.” [increased indent, again to emphasize verse…all or none will be kept in the end]

“Am I your lord?”

“Tonight it doth appear you are.”

“Then how shall I best please my love?”

“A kiss to shame all lovers here; but first a dance
to cast all dancers in despair at their incompetence.”

“A feather to your cap, my dear, for I
cannot compete with prose so fine.”

“A sorry piece of prose, good sir,
for by my count we doth converse in verse.”

“My lady has a clever mind, to match her dex’trous tongue.”

“And know you this because you dream about my tongue?”

“For cert, my love: the fairest of its kind I have I encounteréd.”

“A pretty piece of flattery, if true.”

“Can you doubt me?”

“I have done nothing else since took you leave to speak.”

“But why? I’ faith, my lady, I have only ever spoke spake my heart’s confession – pax! I concede.  oh, damn all! Pax; I concede. You have mastered me.”

“’Twas ever thus, if I recall.”

“No one likes a braggart.”

“In a woman, you mean. Men may talk all night of their exploits without receiving censure.”

“Mayhap. But I prefer to spend tonight in exploits, not in talk.”

“Ever a Always the man of action.”

“Better a man mere master of action than a king of unmet dreams….”

A Parlor Game in Iambic

I don’t normally post exerpts from a work in progress. It seems dangerous to assume any of it will remain the same between the writing and the publishing…arrogant, perhaps, like I could jinx myself. But this one tickled my nerdy bone, and the amusement of it does not rely on context but simply on the text. Also this started entirely by accident…I knew he initiated a conversation with that particular quotation, because I knew she replied about ingratitude, and I just let them talk from there and scribbled down what I “heard.” After about two exchanges, I noticed they were both speaking in iambic, or damn near it. Always fun when characters do something cool without your intention! So I ran with it. You can see below the point where I stopped writing in full prose style and just started transcribing their conversation. The main point of the scene is them having two different conversations via subtext, hers about what happened between them in the past (well, between her and the man she thinks he is), and him about what he assumes will happen between them in the imminent future. Pray, enjoy my deathless prose verse!

The scene: a masquerade. Their Lord and Lady Winter costumes match; hers, intentionally, because she wanted to match a man from her past and thinks the hero is he. He’s not. He takes her for a courtesan he’s supposed to meet there. She’s not.

“Blow, blow, thou winter wind,” he said, reaching for the one bit of poetry he knew that might suit her attire. “Thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude.”

“Do you not think yourself unkind to speak to me of your ingratitude?”

Her question took him aback. Had she been inconvenienced to come tonight? Had he been hard to find? While he parsed the meaning of her words, their cadence struck him. She’d replied in the same meter his verse employed – a parlor game he knew well from his sister. She always won. He wondered how he’d fare against a lady of the night. Dismally, most like, if she were an actress.

“Then should I simply note that you’re well met, my lady fair?”

“Well met, indeed, my lord.”

“Am I your lord?”

“Tonight it doth appear you are.”

“Then how shall I best please my love?”

“A kiss to shame all lovers here; but first a dance to cast all dancers in despair at their incompetence.”

“A feather to your cap, my dear, for I cannot compete with prose so fine.”

“A sorry piece of prose, good sir, for by my count we doth converse in verse.”

“My lady has a clever mind, to match her dex’trous tongue.”

“And know you this because you dream about my tongue?”

“For cert, my love: the fairest of its kind I have encounteréd.”

“A pretty piece of flattery, if true.”

“Can you doubt me?”

“I have done nothing else since took you leave to speak.”

“But why? I’ faith, my lady, I have only ever spoke my heart’s confession – pax! I concede. You have mastered me.”

“’Twas ever thus, if I recall.”

“No one likes a braggart.”

“In a woman, you mean. Men may talk all night of their exploits without receiving censure.”

“Mayhap. But I prefer to spend tonight in exploits, not in talk.”

“Ever a man of action.”

“Better a man of action than a king of unmet dreams….”

How To Not Sell Me Your Free Book

One might think making a book free will net oneself as many readers as encounter said book. Not so! Below are a few ways to convince Lily not to download your free book and waste her precious time attempting to read it.

Put any of the following plot elements in your novel:

• Time travel (certain SF scenarios excepted)
• Love triangle*
• Real historical persons
• Famous fictional persons (e.g., Holmes, Darcy, King Arthur, etc.)
• Deities or their divine representatives (such as angels) as essentially human characters
• Unrealistic gaps in station in a setting where such things matter
• Patently anachronistic behavior or attitudes for no clear reason
• A do-gooder hero or heroine, or one whose attitude feels politically correct
• Any sort of secret society responsible for keeping order in secret (historical spy societies and paranormal hero councils equally despised!)**

*I don’t consider obviously false love interests to be triangles. But actual triangles are a deal-breaker.

**One of my friends is convinced I am destined to get propositioned by just such an order because I find them so insufferable in fiction.

Alternatively, you can present your story in one of these ways:

• Spell a character’s name two different ways in the description
• In fact, have any sort of typo or grammatical faux pas in your description
• Have a description longer than 300 words
• Use so many generalities in your description that I have no real notion what the conflict is
• Use so many details in your description that I have no idea what the real conflict is (or feel like I have now read your entire book)
• Fail to clarify by cover and summary when your novel is set
• Give your characters ridiculous names vis a vis their time period
• Employ gratuitous diacritical marks (especially random apostrophes!) in the names of people and places – looking at you, epic fantasy

I suppose this is also a list of deal-breakers for books NOT listed for free, as well, but the more salient point is that I don’t make exceptions to my taste just because a book is free. I make exceptions only when a book sounds truly extraordinary.