Off his Face

day gentle reader, 

Finally, the dread rewrite of Book 2: The Face of the Goddess  is done … well almost, now it needs a good edit. That's the trouble with a rewrite - it’s really a new draft, the 4th for this book.  As posted earlier, the cumulative word cut I did at the start left me lost for words: 60,000 of them. The rewrite added a few words, quite a few, but not enough, which in and of itself created more problems. 

Face took 10 years to write 2001 (2000-2010), during which the original start slipped to chapter 29.  Chapters 1-28 were the first, deepest cut. The new starting point is the old starting point, with a major rework of the new chapter 1. From there story proceeds as a reader might expect towards the climax predicted in the opening, except it now reaches that point too soon, and leaves the novel too short for a good read. 

 As also mooted in my last post I had the rethink I had to have. 

The ending had to change, so I gave the original climax a twist. (much like killing a hero expected to live.) I had to rewrite everything after that, and make a couple of tweaks leading into it, which made the rewrite longer, (over the allocated year) The extended finale allowed me to further clarify aspects of my imagined world, and set the storyline up for what I know is coming in the already written Book 3: The Arch of Restoration. The new climatic ending brought Face back over 180,000, in line with Break and Arch. 

All good so far? Well no. This rewrite, 25-15 years, and a couple of million words after the first draft amply demonstrate, I write differently now, (better I believe :>) But that concerns me. Given today's preoccupation with AI, some might attribute style differences to artificial enhancements.

I'm now in a quandary whether to edit Bk 2 Face or Bk 3 Arch. I’m tempted to move on to the final book, (which means I will), however the wholesale changes to the storyline made after the original climax, may turn what should have been a simple edit, into another massive rewrite.

 I’m about to find out.

ooroo until my next post, Rob

PS - I often question why I want to write (which is easy), because to get published  the edit/rewrite process (which is hard) is unavoidable, and reminds me of this quote.

"If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass." ~ Lawrence Block

 

 

 

    

 

Revised Standard Edition

g'day gentle readers 

On the day of my last post I reached the first of the two milestone (perhaps millstones) highlighted below .

If only I understood 
what it all meant. 
The red bits not highlighted are my attempts to clarify what I think I meant. 

To understand how this happened I must plunge into history for a salutary lesson in how not to write a novel - not slow.

Book 2: FACE  (The Face of the Goddess) started well, with the exhilaration of finishing Book 1: BREAK, which took only a year to write, still fresh in my mind. I had six chapters approx 30K words done when we decided to move back from to Adelaide from Sydney.

We started a 7-day business and the writing slowed to a dribble. At the same time a health issue I'd had since age 10 reared up so I had an operation, we closed the business and my condition steadily worsened but That's Life (my other blog). What I did not understand at the time however was the illness was slowing my mind, not just my body. 

A bookshop on weekends and
a postal agency Monday-Friday
a writer's studio not ever 

The shop had made the writing stop-start but by the time I was free of that my mind was on the blink and the story boldly went where no story should go. I didn't like it,  I chopped and changed, inserted 50K words before the original 6 chapters. 
Several times I stopped altogether to edit and submit BREAK or edit parts of FACE, drew up timelines, character sheets, glossaries, outlines and even managed a few very short stories (published by AntipodeanSF) 

Then I made one of those pebble-in-the-pond authorial decisions, which ripple throughout a manuscript - I changed the nature and direction of several POV character such that the entirety of the finale, Book 3: ARCH shifts a generation.(my original plan)

I restarted the edit with that in mind, changing as required. Problem was that half the time (due to the earlier edits) I didn't have a clue if a change was required. Try reading a novel at one sentence per fortnight and you'll get the idea. One tends to lose track of who's doing what with whom.

I was working at glacial speed. (pre globally-warmed glaciers of course)

Writing/Editing FACE stretched over a decade. 

Some individual scenes are good, an occasional chapter is not bad but the separate parts do fit together well and the edit of it got bogged trying to reconcile the mismatches. 

I gave up at FACE chapter 105 where it says Full edit to here 

I now ditched the arbitrary chapter divisions, called each POV change a scene, renumbered the lot and started editing from scratch - Book 1 Chapter 1 - tweaking events to produce the new story arc/thread I wanted through FACE and ARCH.  This time I got to scene 99 in FACE where it says Revised edit to here ... and life again got in the way. 

Forward to the Past: Post transplant and life back to normal. 

I wrote Book 3: ARCH in one year. The trilogy was done and now to edit. BREAK took a month. But FACE ah, there's the rub  

So back in the now after a long break and needing to come to grips with the sour tale FACE had become I resorted to a desperate measure * outlining * to integrate FACE into a revised standard edition.

As to said outlining, I'm at scene 23 of Book 3: ARCH past the trilogy's dread sagging middle called FACE. Only in outline mind, the edit is still to come.  I'll try to keep you posted.  

ooroo until next time 
Rob

Out of the Starting Gate

gday gentle readers 

As I indicated last time 2014 has begun and I can now say with confidence begun well. 

When I left off way back in May last year to do other things like web work and travel I had edited 90% of Face (book 2 a.k.a. "The Face of the Goddess") and I was struggling. When I say left off in May, that was the end point, the dummy spit, after the effort had dribbled off from a weekly edit 15,000-20,000 words to only 1000. 

It's hard now to remember exactly why but it was something like this: despite all my spreadsheets, glossaries and maps I had quite literally lost the plot. I had no idea what the story was about, and remember I was editing a finished work, I had no right to be lost.

So how do I cram the essence of my sprawling epic back into my tiny brain after a long break. I have 382 POV changes over the 3 books, call them chapters: Break 152, Face 120, Arch 110.
  
Last time I tried to summarise the events of each chapter in a spreadsheet but it was too slow, too unwieldy I needed both the spreadsheet and the novel open and synchronised. Read and digest the chapter, transfer the gist of it to the sheet. The problem is me, I get carried away with spreadsheets. I divided the chapters into mini scenes, put in columns for 'characters mentioned' and for 'new concepts introduced'. Filling the columns required research; too slow, too hard, too damn stupid for words.      

I'm trialling a new approach. I saved a copy of the trilogy as at 1/1/2014, set it up in outline using 3 levels of headings for book, part and chapter.(Face has 3 parts - the others have 2) Now I simply delete each paragraph that isn't essential 

to the story line 

as I go.  What's left, I cull of needless words and re-arrange as the summary.  This will also serve as an outline for my publishers :^)

The old method took me two weeks to do 24 Kwords. At that rate to summarise the trilogy would take a year, not editing mind just summarising to guide the edit.   

With the method I'm trialling, I did more (27 Kwords) in the first 4 hours.  It's about as fast as I can read and I can already see where changes need to made. Read like this, with an eye for the essence of each chapter, inconsistencies pop out.

addendum

As of this post 20 days later the trial is over I'm using it and have summarised 60% of the trilogy. Book 1 was a breeze, book 2 to date a slog. I've come to the conclusion that little of book 2 is salvageable. (not unexpected all things considered) Cant wait to deconstruct Book 3.       
     
'ooroo until my next post
Rob

   
                 
                 

And so it begins ...

Forgive me gentle readers, for I have lapsed. It has been nine months since my last post.


My trilogy of new year's resolutions, as posted on Facebook to ensure people will remind me, is to write, write  & write.  

(There's 50 words already 52 now 53.)  Sorry about that, I don't intend the writing to be trivial but as always I will count and record progress. I find simply counting and recording what I actually do is reward enough.   

This year however, I won't set word targets. For me Word targets encourage padding, as has happened in all three of my books where I set a target length for each scene, each scene being a new POV, 3 POV scenes to a chapter. Some scenes end up nothing but padding because the scenes POV character had nothing to say or do that made any difference to the story. Word targets were useful when I started but they have outlived their usefulness.

That said I have set a few specific goals for 2014. 

   1. Editing the trilogy will be finished this year - I'm aiming for the 30th June 2014 so I can spend the next 6 months promoting it. 

   2. I will also complete the 4 short stories I had in mind that are set in the universe of the trilogy and precede the events in the novels. They are as much to help me solidify the background to the trilogy.  One is in first draft, another started and the other two mentally planned.  

   3. I will blog the progress - monthly at the very least - I have already reduced my attendance to the writers group to once a month (It's a 45 mins drive both ways -  costly in time and tires). The other Monday nights will reserved for writing / blogging / editing - whichever is top of the to-do list at the time.  
           
Anyhow that's the dream. 

"You gotta have a dream, if you don't have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?"  

            South Pacific - Happy Talk 

and so it begins ... another year, another story.

'ooroo until my next post 
RoB

The story so far

gday gentle readers 

A short end-of-week-14 progress report

   
   I'm now behind editing book 2 and cant see any way of catching up as I'm about to make radical changes to the last quarter of it (about 50,000 words) 

   I will post later about what, when, where, how and why the changes will be made.

   Suffice to say most of it was written just before my transplant when my kidney function was down to 17% and my toxic mind was poisoning my pen  ( er .. keyboard )

   but progress there has been

1. 109% of Break (finished with 9% more than I started )
2. 72% of Face (the current task)
3. 6% of Arch (as I edit what I read to my writers group )

  Trilogy overall 58% 

ooroo until my next post 
RoB

The tyranny of distances

gday gentle readers

I've moved glacially onward from ch2 to ch3 and struck exactly the same problem. 

They say write what you know. Well I've lived in Adelaide, Woomera, Darwin, Sydney and Bruny Island (south-west of Tasmania) and I wanted to include my experience of that diverse geography in my made-up world. Hence the mud map made a decade ago resembles and has the rough dimensions of Australia. I set the protagonists home town of Deep Creek in the foothills and the capital Grundston on the coast then set Deep Creek at Adelaide's latitude - where I have lived most and live now.

The first thing to note is my careless positioning of the main range in my quick sketch - much further inland (MISTAKE #1) than its Australian template and thereby hangs this tale, quite literally; like that little blue circle on your PC screen that says "I'm thinking I'll get back to you". I wrote book one, the one I'm trying to edit, using this map as a guide, guessing the distances (MISTAKE #2) and then as I wrote, mentally substituting the Adelaide hills for the Great Dividing Range (MISTAKE #3). 

The tale hanging tyranny of distances are those between the Mountains and Coast.

Adelaide 10 miles. 

Sydney 40 miles  
and according to my map
Grundston 250 miles 

So in ch3 when Averil, one of my heroines, sits on rock comparing the roof styles of the town below and the capital she's got damn good eyesight. Locally that's like picking out Adelaide's rooves from Woomera (in the US try seeing Washington's rooves from New York) 

Which brings me full circle. In my last post I figured I had to delay Averil 12 days so she couldnt catch the contingent before they reached the pass 500 miles away. I'd only just measured that distance and calculated the relatives speeds. Now my dividers have wandered further over my map.

During the original writing I imagined Averil was only a days journey from the contingent's starting point - Grundston. I wrote imaging the distance from the mountains to the coast was about 10 miles not 250 miles. At 250 miles its going to take her 12 days anyway. The one-day delay I already had is enough for her to need a horse or a short cut.

The problem resolved itself. 

If only I had read ahead I wouldn't have had to write an extra scene (600 words) or wonder how to get her story back on track after it.

Unwittingly (me being witless) I also have her sister Kezia, in the first scene of Ch3, make the same 500 mile return journey in a single day. That I fixed by having her go only to the next town not to the capital Grundston. But even with my godlike authorial powers I can't move these mountains. The story returns to this area in the last book using the later, detailed, upside-down and carefully measured map. 

until my next post problem

ooroo

RoB

The Never-Ending Edit

gday gentle readers  

I'm still only in chapter 2 (scene 11 of 1302) of the trilogy and still finding non trivial problems about a rate of one per scene.

The latest is a distance/time problem.  My heroine must catch a marching army before it reaches a certain point some 500 miles away. She has been delayed and I put this though into her head.
 

"I will have lost a whole day; the contingent will be gone, hard to catch even with a horse."
A bit of basic research however shows a marching army even with horse and carts can travel at 3mph.(18 miles per 6hr day)  My ultra fit well-trained heroine I let travel 5mph (about half the speed of an Olympic Walker over 30 miles) or 30 miles per 6hr day - as if she would only do 6 hours a day when she is desperate to catch them.

But that means she will catch them midday on the third day when they've only gone 45 miles nowhere near the 500 mile cut-off point. Even if I somehow delay her for 3 days she will still catch at the 135 mile point - still well short of the mark 

Did she just think, 'even with a horse' perhaps she isn't as well trained as I thought. To make it work I have to speed up the contingent, slow her down, delay her 12 days or rearrange the geography yet again. 


Let me add that this was not just a throw away thought, it was designed to show she couldn't catch them and hence was forced onto a dangerous less-well travelled path. I just didn't think it through: My map wasn't to scale, I didn't consider the relative speeds of the contingent and my heroine. 

It will have to be the delay, in the context of the remaining 500,000 words, the other solutions are no longer negotiable. It will still be a hefty rewrite because on her journey out she crosses paths with others in a critical sequence which precipitates the hero's journey.

This all came about because my map was upside down 

I'm Australian ergo southern hemisphere ergo if you go north it gets hotter. Naturally I wanted this for my world but my original map had the adjoining enemy continent south of my hero/heroines homelands.

The southern continent got so big during the telling of the later part of the tale it necessitated turning the entire map upside-down and that's when it all started going wrong. I've spent several days redrawing all the maps to fit the completed trilogy. It's a little more sophisticated (a.k.a. creeping elegance) than those drawn a decade ago. 

Created in a FractalMapper8 ~ http://www.nbos.com/

Oh well, back to plotting board.

until my next post ooroo

RoB

p.s. Later that same night. On thinking about it a 12 day delay will work nicely but it requires a brand new scene (#1303) in a story that hasn't had a radical change since last millennium.   

A rod for my back

gday gentle readers

Methinks I have unwittingly done just as my title suggests and made 'a rod for my back'. Let me explain. 

Somewhere in my world creating phase I decided my New Earth's civilisation, before it self-immolated should have made a couple of advances beyond old Earth. For this story I chose

1. Matter transmission
&

2. A tenfold extension of life expectancy

Nothing new or dramatic just a couple of well-worn SF tropes as backdrop. 

Now all this may seem straight forward until you think (even superficially as I did at the start) about someone living to be 700 to a 1000 years old. First I assumed that childhood is still about 20 years (Can't have our heroes not walking until 12 and still in nappies at 25) Next it occured to me that at the other end they are going to be old, as in their frail, pain-ridden, health challenged eighties and nineties,
for

two hundred years. 

Now the rod

but first a crock of ... (keep it clean)

Background

My story takes place a thousand years after New Earth's aforementioned planetary self-immolation called in the story "The Days of Fire." The planetary survivors are being helped by an AI they call the goddess who wants to breed a host for its consciousness to wake some orbiting survivors (Sleepers) in hibernation. The sleepers were about to journey forth and colonise another planet - New New Earth (only joking about the name)- when their existing civilisation went pear-shaped. 

 

Back to the future: To obtain said suitable host the AI goddess has been paddling around in the local gene pool.  

I decided (authors do that you know - a few taps on the keyboard and a whole planets disappear ) that longevity ought to be an inherited trait that has regressed on the demolished planet to the traditional three score and ten. Can't have non-contributing old people using resources - fine while the machines do all providing but The Days of Fire ended all that.

Cut to the rod: Again for reason of story I have POV colonists, POV locals of pure colonist stock, (who live to a 1000), POV locals with one colonist parent (live to 500) and POV locals with one colonist grandparent, (250) and a POV character of purely local stock (100) Arbitrary life spans decided by author and colour-coded for your convenience. (Willard, Averil, twins Sarah and Lisa and the heroine of book III Rowena (not shown in box) are locals of pure colonist stock - the other three are awakened colonists.) But that's not all: some of my characters pair up with people who are going age and die before their eyes if my story doesn't kill them first.

None of this was by design. I made it up as I went along and only now when I want to edit the monster are the complexities of differentially aging relationships coming back to bite me.

Here's a 1000 word picture slice of a spreadsheet I spent days of good editing time creating to sort out what's when two or more POV Character gather. I need to know how old they are and how old they look.  

Why do I bother? Because no matter how good the story is, one wrong detail and suspension of disbelief collapses.

ooroo
RoB

First parse: the post

g'day gentle reader 

One of my characters, after a difficult encounter, sarcastically says "That went well." I feel the same way about my attempt to blog the process of writing book three in the trilogy.

I did warn - the blog might suffer to achieve my writing targets. It did. My last (delayed) post of cobbled together snips from my facebook page is a good example of "That went well - not."

Enough with the wailing & gnashing of teeth 

Where am I? The last couple of months since finishing (besides futzing) I've been sorting a decade of associated material

It's like the unseen bulk of an iceberg ~ the resulting trilogy is just the tip

Many directories shown have sub-directories. The names (obviously) reflect the contents

In the process I found I had multiple copies of nearly every file sometimes saved only minutes apart. I'm a hoarder and I don't trust computers; I save everything.

Even culled, sorted and assembled as at left, it's a lot of material. Why so much?

  I'm writing SF 

SF writer's start from scratch: size rotation, axial tilt, number of moons if any, ratio of land to ocean, age of planet, existing flora, fauna, and sentient life (Terra Nullius is a great concept but unlikely for any human colonisable planet) All these extra factors have to be taken into account while I edit.

For example: I have several maps of my world so that my distances and directions are accurate and I can develop realistic weather patterns based on its geography.  

For  'real world'  fiction, this is all done. 

It's called an Atlas. 

 

Hence the time spent sorting the plethora of collected material before serious editing. (I've also complied a heap of interesting stats on the work but that's another post.)

For those who've been following there have been several changes in story direction, characters, locations, props etc over the decade plus it took to write, though i have to admit a lot of them were done in the last year while writing book three. (post kidney transplant - brain function normalised) 

Most recently I've done the first full parse through the entire trilogy riping out the artificial chapter divisions in favour of a scenic route. [I work in Word and use outline extensively.] The results in parsing are: 

1. I've deleted all prologues and interludes. They were all from Hedley's POV. (An awakened colonist  managing the planet for the AI.) I've decide on a different approach for him and for the prologues.

2. Book Two is now in 3 parts which buggers the carefully designed pattern I started with but as always, the needs of the story trump the designs of the author.

I now have the 560,000 words spread over 1300 scenes. Time to justify the need for each scene then reorganise what's left.

until my next post 'ooroo  

RoB

The Threat of Completion

G'day dear reader/s

The Threat of Completion hangs over me, I dread reaching the end of book 3 because then I have to edit the whole trilogy, not that I mind editing, I find it is easier than composing but measuring my achievement as a word count is nigh on impossible.

 edit = less

I could write something new to keep my word count measure going then edit. My problem with that is, editing a long novel (or series of novels in my case) is matter of concentration similar to writing a computer program, you have to juggle a mass intertwined elements - changing any of which will have repercussions everywhere.

Trying to write 500 other words every day then do the editing is something I contemplated and rejected. That would give this writer the same problem I have when I don't write every day, I lose the thread. 

So I'll just have to let the stats suffer unless someone can come up with a reasonable editing yardstick.  e.g. a chapter a day. Now given my average 4k-5k words that sounds like reasonable task. 

But hark, my completed trilogy will have about 120-130 chapters, lets say 125 days of work, or 25 (5 day) weeks = 6 roughly months (It ain't rocket science, it's basic math) 

Now given I might I finish book 3 in July, the whole damn trilogy could be ready to submit to an agent/publisher by old year's eve 2011.  Now there is something to aim for. 

Lastly the current stats:

70,000 words, chapter 14, 
daily avg at day 10 of 2011 is 557. 
Estimated completion date July 2011.

ooroo