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

by any other name (revised)

g'day gentle readers 

By any other name a rose would smell as a sweet - Shakespeare is both more verbose,

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet."

and wrong in one respect: character names; they come with baggage. Imagine if the bard had called Romeo some other Italian name, like Caligula. 

I've had this problem before. In book 2 "Face", Blade (derived from his home town Blades Point) was too kitsch so I moved him to Roden Crossing and he became Roden. Moving him became a plot line in its own right with endless repercussions. Then at the start of the work in progress book 3 "Arch". For various reasons (dealt with in earlier blogs - see "what the story needs" and "The writing comes first") a POV character named Lee became Ashford.

130,000 words - 25 chapters done.

As I approach the end of  "Arch" and review the earlier tomes in light of current invention I can see where changes need to be made. For example, I noted yesterday I need to upscale the size of the Arch from 75 feet to 2700 feet but I digress.

While I was inventing and adding new names, (for all the sleepers) I was again reviewed those I had. It struck me that I don't particular like Willard the name of the hero in book 1 "Break" who remains an important figure to the end of the trilogy. At the time of choosing, I was desperate to get on with the writing.

When you're at the start of what could be 600,000 words it is good to get a few thousand on the page - at times like that any name will do, just so you can keep writing - you know it can always be changed later.

One reason for my initial displeasure was the 1971 horror movie Willard. Hard to create a memorable character out of a name that is already memorable for a different reason - try giving your hero the name Romeo or Hitler or Jesus.

The other is that his short name Will is an annoyingly frequent real word. Since I write with a computer, the change will (there he is) be easy. A global search and replace will (and again) fix him up with a new name. (a careful one, of course - find whole words - case sensitive) but it won't fix his short name. Any sentence beginning with Will, will (strike three) be cobbled. "Will this do for example?" might become "Romeo this do for example?"

Track 7

But can I, me personally, do this. I have lived with his name as Willard for over ten years. (He was called Forrestar) Future readers will (there he is again) never know, they might come to know and love him as Fred or Purvis or Sir Bodsworth Rugglesby III.(love that name Klaatu)

One advantage is, if I change his name now, I will have multiple revisions (in three vols) to get used to the  new one. (Any suggestions in keeping with my convention welcome - i.e. old English. Of my current characters, the names I like are: Kezia, Rowena and Hyatt - they sound science fictiony)
 

Of course the name change may not happen, it depends what works for me on the day which brings me to the prompt for this post about change.

A member of my writer's group said of my last post that I gave too much away. I think he means this bit:

The latest and biggest change has been a re-evaluation of the original plot. The AI made a mistake - bad data

the asteroid will miss

Methinks this maybe because in books 1 and  2 which he and the Blackwood Writers Group have already suffered through, the asteroid strike is the main plot driver. So as is fashionable these days - mea culpa - revealing all was not my intention. I was interested in blogging the process of writing the third book of a trilogy but I felt a little story background was necessary to make sense of the process. I admit, I got carried away - a bit.

However as the first part of this post shows, everything and I mean everything, the hero's name or the asteroid missing, is 

subject to change without notice.

The asteroid not striking does radically change the ending I had in mind but at this point of the story, this is what the characters (and hence the reader) believe, and that means their entire lives have been purposeless, (this is not a bad thing - story wise. It's the deep crisis point )


But I'm still about ten chapters from then end. If I get to there and it doesn't work I'll throw that idea an work in something else. It's probably harder to write this way but a lot more fun.

'ooroo

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

And so begins Book 3 in theTrilogy

g'day dear reader

The six words below are the culmination of 10 years work ( on and off - in reality, a fair bit off ) That, I would suggest, is part of the writing life - the life part goes on whether you write or not.

Needless to say I went out an celebrated last night and began thinking about how to start book three.

A digression  on working practice and targets.  I work from home as a part time contract web developer. My time is is mine to allocate, so I write in the mornings and, when there is work, develop in the afternoons. I write 6 days a week and have Sunday's off provided I reach my target word count.

My intention for Book 3 (given that it will be about 180,000 words and that I wish to finish in 1 year rather than 10) is to write an average of 500 words a day for 360 days of the year - about 3500 words week ( 6 days of 600 words )  Below is part of the simple spreadsheet I keep to track my progress.

This is the last two weeks i.e. weeks 32 and 33 of 2010, the green figure next to the week,  is the number of words in excess of my target  (only 1700 words a week post recovery - I'm about to double it)  Under target would be highlighted red.  Next is the daily word count and piece worked on. The words of this blog will slot into the empty hole for Saturday,  21 august 2010.   The highlighted day is the three month anniversary of my kidney transplant - this is the life part that often interrupts the intention to write - hospital visits blood test tissue samples etc - and nothing written. 

And so book 3 begins....

Like the previous volumes book 3 ( Arch / The arch of Restoration )  will be divided into two parts. I have specific climatic events planned for each, and a specific end goal but the journey, the actually events and the characters we will meet along the way are as yet a mystery. My biggest problem at the moment is how to start,  much the same problem I had finishing book 2 - in my mind the story line is continuous and yet conventional wisdom and common sense says each volume should stand alone.

Which means book 3 needs a hook and storyline that points to goal but that does not rely on the events in the preceding volumes. What I've decided to do is worry about it later. My need to write to myself imposed deadline/target is paramount and I have plenty to be going on with. What this means in practice is I'll start with  chapter 2 of  book 3 as a continuation of last events in book 2 and insert Chapter 1 and/or a prologue later when I have a grip on the new characters I develop to  populate book 3.

Next the storyline itself  - next post that is.



'ooroo

Trilogy History Book 2

G'day

I went straight  into Book 2 the day after finishing Book 1.   We were still in a flat in Sydney, Felicity at work and me home - what else was I going to do?  Taking a break in the circumstances (where my wife Felicity is working to support my writing habit) did not seem politic besides my reading of the many tomes on "How to write ..." almost universally suggested letting a newly completed manuscript gestate a week or two before revising. Who am I to argue?

October 2000 we returned to our Ironbank home in the Adelaide hills and me to the the Blackwood Writers Group  - hereinafter BWG, not that I ever left in spirit thanks to the internet.   I came back with six chapters of Book 2 which started with the daughter of main protagonists - a generational change - 20 odd years after the closing event of Book 1   (incidentally book 1 covered a single year)

Koala Ridge Ironbank design by built by me, home for 20 years

About now I ran out of steam - not writers block so much as I didn't like where the story was going , it was on a side track heading away from the goal I had in mind and getting bogged down.

I decide to quit and revise book one for insights but that's a whole other story of which this is a quick summary  Revision 2 finished Dec 2000 at 196,000 words -  It went to 9 revisions  topping at 210,000, was broken into two books (hence later the 2 parts to each book), reassembled, culled and  revised endlessly with the object of sending it out while I worked on book 2.

However Book 1: The Break of Civilization  (Break) still needs work ( it's on the net if you want to help) but  I have decided to finish the whole trilogy then revise bearing mind what's to come. Still there is something to said for the naivety of the characters when I and they didn't know what was to come.  Too much editing is often worse than not enough.
 

Back in book The Face of the Goddess ( Face) two I started working backwards from the opening to fill in the years between Bk1 and Bk2. Several attempts, prologues and opening chapters were written and thrown away.  I felt, quite literally, like I had lost the plot. To cut a long story short.  It has taken from  2001 to 2010 (9 years)  to get book 2 from 6 chapters to near completion as it is now.   The original start is now chapter 14.  60,000 words have been inserted.   

 9 years - LIFE got in the way - Health issues,  a house move  and new bookshop - a 7-day coffee-shop/post-office/bookshop  as below. (those three years devoid of writing)  an operation,  a world trip 2004 (recuperation), two house moves, another world trip 2007 just in case  (during which I plotted in broad strokes the rest of the trilogy) Another house move 2009 and another operation 2010 (see my blog "That's Life" )

My second bookshop ~ the BookPost, Charleston, Sth. Aust.

Funny how I used to think a book shop the perfect business for a writer.  I tried it twice; the first failed because I wrote - the second thrived but I wrote almost nothing. There's a moral there somewhere.

Next post will be as I start book 3,  sometime next week -  Yaye!

'Ooroo

Trilogy History Book 1

G'day

As I've said elsewhere the second book in the trilogy is racing towards its end, health issues as blogged on That's Life (http://eyeoftherobot.blogspot.com/) have settled, and left me feeling better than I have in years.

So I have decide to Blog the whole damn process of writing the next novel; the third in the "legends" trilogy ~ working title "The Arch of Restoration" ~ hereinafter referred to by its short title "Arch"

First some background: The trilogy began in Sept 1995 in Fort Collins, Colorado: as they say in the classics - it was long ago and far away.

I was there on holiday and to save a failing relationship; It didn't work out but the novel stuck and on my return, grew and grew and gradually morphed from a love triangle into fantasy trilogy. But it didn't happen overnight. I was then in the middle of  decade of crisis, alone, jobless and with a recently deceased mother. So I opened a secondhand bookshop.

In 1966 when I started the Blackwood Writers Group  my father had also passed on,  the bookshop was failing and the few odd scribblings that became book one of the trilogy, languished in the bottom draw.

The group mostly SF writers reinvigorated me  as they followed the well worn track to publication by writing short stories and 1997 saw some early success for almost all group members; enough by 1998 for a anthology to showcase our work. http://www.blackwoodwritersgroup.com/Tessellations/index.htm

By then my short stories were getting longer and longer and I decided  to again tackle the novel.  I like the space a novel gives to explore.  It was about now that the story began morphing into the trilogy using a short piece that couldn't find a market as the prologue. This changed the Fantasy into SF.

I was about 10,000 thousand words in by 1999 when I met and married Felicity and we moved to Sydney  for her work.in September of that year. My decade of disquiet was over. I worked full time on the novel. The first draft finished up at 163,000 thousand words.   Here' a clip from the end of that draft.

The trails and trials of  book two next post
'Ooroo

The Trilogy

G'day

The whole box and die as writ thus far and tentatively titled "The Restoration Legends" is now up on my site under my author tab, through the labyrinth portal to http://www.rob.bleckly.com/Legends/index.html.

Each book has two parts as follows:-

Book 1 "Break" (was 'The Break of Civilization')

• part 1 "Reason" (was 'The Test of Reason")
• part 2 "Faith" (was 'The Test of Faith")

Book 2 "Face" (was 'The Face of the Goddess')

• part 1 "Guilt" (was 'The Guilt of Sanctuary')
• part 2 "Innocence" (was 'The Innocence of Face')

Book 3 "Arch" (was 'The Arch of Restoration')

• part 1 "Love" (was 'The Design of Ancients')
• part 2 "Hate" (was 'The Waking of Sleepers')

home-made covers - book 3's is deliberately blurry -it's not your eyes
I like symmetry. The shortening to one word titles is just the latest in a long line of changes stretching back years. The reasons for the changes I'll leave for another post. Suffice to say it's a work in progress, a long work and and slow progress. I'm not happy with the last two parts - the long titles better reflect where the story has to go but then again none of book 3 is written.

On the site each book has a page listing chapters available and roughly when they where last updated (the dates will become more accurate as I progressive upload new and edited chapters)

The .pdf format chapters, especially in Book 2 "Face", are writing in the raw, unedited first draft straight of the top of the head via the fingertips to the keyboard. I'm a two finger typist and my brain is often well ahead of my fingers. The spelling and grammar checker's do a reasonable job but don't pick up everything.

Enjoy

'Ooroo