The first draft of TOO DEAD is finished…and banished to a drawer until later this year. Tomorrow: back to the ROT rewrite (and coming up with a better name for that damned thing).
In the meantime…off to make burgers and crack open the celebratory wine.
Totally bringing TOO DEAD to an end this week. Five days? I can do it. One day to get them back to the mill with trouble hot on their heels, two days for the final showdown, one day for the resolution, and one day for the final touches on the ending and popping a bottle of wine to celebrate the end of the first draft.
What else to blog about today? I have some links sitting around in my “to blog” file, so here’s looking at those, kid:
The coolest-sounding MMORPG ever (because I omg love the thought of a virtual world overlaid on the real one) that I’m not going to get to participate in anytime in the near future (more on that over the weekend, with photos maybe!).
And this video of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club doing “Spread Your Love” at a club—sound’s not great, but the video is the closest I’ve seen to the actual experience of being at a show. (My favorite bit happens around 2:30—that’s what I’m talking about!) Seventy-five days till I see them next (at a festival—so not the same as a small club, but I’ll take it. Plus I get to see NIN the same day. Dream come true y/y?).
Plus: 21 days till the new season of Weeds.
Anyone have any idea when we’re getting a new season of Big Love?
“You write because you go out and look for something and don’t find it. Somebody has to write it. Why not you?” - Kameron Hurley
I found those lines earlier this week and pasted them into a text editor with the intention of blogging about them, but I didn’t have anything more to say than ‘QFT!’, so I held off. (But QFT!)
I’m pushing to get TOO DEAD wrapped up by the end of the month. Half of me says “totally doable!” and the other half says “what planet are you living on?!” My characters are heading through the door that’ll take them to the final conflict. Eet ees coming!
I made good progress today, then had a lie down for a few minutes (even though I have a Beth Massie book I really want to get into; my eyes were too tired to tackle the small print¹). While I was lying down I thought to myself—not for the first time—“this book is so unsalable.” And I thought what a shame it was, because I love the setup, the characters, their relationships and the ending. The middle, admittedly, has a lot of muddle in it. And the relationships…it’s not like anyone else (except Reesa) would find them attractive. Everyone’s dead, and not in that cool vampire or The Crow way.
These are not the kind of guys who could make you swoon…unless you have a weak stomach.
After a few minutes I was up and jotting down notes about the changes that’ll have to be made when I get to work on the second draft of this thing later this year—changes to tighten up the story and straighten out the muddled middle. And I think I’m going to have to cut one relationship out entirely. It’s not the end of the world—I got to enjoy the relationship in the first draft, the other relationships will be more poignant² for it, and readers will roll their eyes less—but it’s sad-making to admit it has to go.
…so it’s like what Kameron Hurley was saying. I’m writing it because I want to read it, and nobody else is writing it…so it’s gotta be me.
And I do love this story.
(It’s way too early in the game to decide this thing isn’t marketable anyway.)
¹ Is there a crazy high pollen count this weekend? In addition to the burny eyes, my stupid dry allergy cough has been irritating me since yesterday.
² Zombies can too be poignant!!!
June is coming up quick, and I need to be done with the first draft of TOO DEAD by then. I HAS OTHER PROJECKS YOU KNOW! So, an ultimatum: this book will wrap itself up by 120,000 words, and in aid of that I will glue my butt to the chair and churn out 1,850 words each day for the rest of this month. (I’ve already done today’s writing. Go me! I have a list of events that have to happen between now and the end, and I just tick them off as I finish them.)
On June 1st I can then shove TOO DEAD in a drawer for a while (not that I don’t love it, but we’re heading towards three months of immersion in it, you know?), and get serious again about ROT, so that I can get the rewrite of that done and get serious again about MERCY, which I’m dying to work on (but ROT comes first ’cause I’m going on a research trip for MERCY in late June—no writing on that till the research is done. I’ll be researching for this year’s NaNoWriMo novel, POSSESSION, at the same time. I’m excited about that one, too!).
Meanwhile on the graphic novel front: I’ve set a limit of eight “issues” on that as well, by which point the story has to manage to reach some sort of closure. I won’t get to everything I have in mind for it in just eight parts but I can revisit the storyline with a volume 2 down the road. (And a volume 3, volume 4….). (I should be set for Script Frenzy projects for the next three years.) So, that means I’m halfway done with that, too! Also: I’m not calling it GROWL anymore—that wasn’t working for me. Now it’s FRENZY. Issues 1 - 4 are titled, respectively, “Freak in the Night,” “Last Resort,” “Bloody Rockstars” and “Negative Chug.”
I was having the hardest time with TOO DEAD this past week—couldn’t focus, was deathly bored with everything, managed only the most lackluster word counts (and had a day or two where the word count was null). Today I finally worked out that I’d made a wrong turn—and where I’d made the wrong turn—so I noted that in the text, skipped a few lines and starting writing as if I hadn’t made that pointless foray THAT NEARLY KILLED MY STORY DEAD.
Then I pounded out 1,706 words in an hour. So nice to be enjoying the story again.
Now I’ve gotta try to get the graphic novel script page count done before midnight, so I can get some much needed freaking sleep.
Passed the 60K mark on Too Dead today. Still really enjoying working on this story!
I also made it to 40 pages on the (still ohmyfuckinggod untitled) graphic novel script, which I’m also really enjoying, though in a different way. I have no idea how long this thing is going to end up being, but I still have enough material in my head to keep it going to the 100 page mark and beyond. Eventually I’m going to have to figure out what the end of that story is, so I can start working toward it, but for now I’m good, I think. I’m not writing completely blindly; I have a direction. I have what I want to explore with it. I just need to follow it through to its logical conclusion. …whatever that is.
I do know (and have for some time) how Too Dead ends. And although I don’t think I’ll end up writing a sequel to it, I have (and have had for some time) one spooling in my head. What would most keep me from writing it (aside from the fact that I have other characters and stories I want to explore!¹) is that the first chunk of it is an ohmygodcrushingly depressing arc. I don’t know if I could stay motivated enough to face that on the computer screen day after day for a month. Daydreaming a story is a whole lot easier than writing it. (I, for one, am looking forward to the day that I can download movies straight from my head to YouTube and be done with this manual writing business once and for all. ;)) (Plus I haven’t actually gotten to the part of in the sequel where the oppressive mood starts to lift a little. (But it’s gotta, right? Eventually?)) Yeah, so, Too Dead is a lot of fun to write. Too Dead Two wouldn’t be….
¹Oh man, I remember 10, 15 years ago it was work coming up with an idea for a story. Hard work! To the point where it sucked to finish a story because it meant, shit, I needed to come up with another story idea! I want to go back in time to my younger self and yell “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.”
April starts tomorrow! What that means has just set into my brain—yikes! On top of it being a busy month at work, I am also: 1) not quite halfway through Too Dead, so writing will continue on that at a rate of 1,000+ words/day throughout the month, 2) going to six concerts, none of them local, and 3) doing Script Frenzy at a rate of 4+ pages a day (to make up for the days I may not have time to write because, hello! Six concerts!). (OMGYAY!)
(I don’t have a title for the Script Frenzy project yet, and it’s driving me nuts.)
Spent much of the afternoon researching for a clearer idea of the location much of Too Dead takes place in. The Internet is such a big help. Afterward, I went back and fixed up some bits in the last chapter based on what I’d found. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on that, just pulled out stuff that didn’t fit and stuck some stuff in that did.
Also poked around at graphic novel/comic book script formats and possible titles for the Script Frenzy project. Which I’m not ready for. Can someone hold off April for a few more days? Danke!
I feel like a fair chunk of the day was also wasted. It wasn’t; it was time spent offloading a project onto someone else, which means one less thing on my plate, but it’s been time consuming, and I’m not yet finished.
Early today, I thought, “Hey, I could hit 40K today.” Then I watched an hour and a half of Gene Simmons Family Jewels, read for a while, checked email and Google Reader and all the other usual places, chatted online…. When I finally got around to writing, I got 2,143 words done, bringing me oh so close! 39,535. Then I had to stop and get ready to go out to dinner with some friends of ours.
But then! Then! After dinner and after we said our goodbyes, Mark and I brought our MacBooks to a local coffee shop, and I pounded out another 1,263 words, taking me very neatly past 40,000 words. (I totally love writing in public, by the way.)
AND I STILL LOVE MY STORY. (Which I’m calling Too Dead these days. We’ll see how long that sticks.)
To say that I am loving writing The Underneath, or whatever I’m calling it this week! I’m finally done with the beginning, and rather than finding myself going “Oh shit. Middle….” I’m happy to be here!
(Don’t rub my face in these words when I come crying to you about the middle later on, okay? Ta!)
The novel I’ve been drafting this month (it was Beneath, but I’m thinking of it as The Underneath these days, and that may even change to The Underbelly) is up over 22,000 words. I think I’m closing in on the end of the beginning—I think I might be there by the time I hit 25K. The end will work out to about the same, probably—it’s got a similar sort of logistics—and if the end’s anything like the beginning, I’m going to need pruning shears for the rewrite.
So on the one hand it’s great to be closing in on the end of act one. On the other hand, OMG SO MUCH MIDDLE TO COME. I keep thinking, “I’m taking 25,000 words just to get to point A? I’m going to be writing middle for ages.” I may up my daily word count goal for the middle part—that or set daily story goals instead of word goals….
Yeah, that sounds like a plan.
I’m having fun with the story.
I need to research access hatches in tour coach floors.
Started reading No Country For Old Men tonight while waiting for the food to arrive at Asheville Pizza & Brewery.
OMG.
In another news, we’re a week into Biffno (Band Fiction Novel(la) Writing Month) over on Rockfic.com, for which I’m writing the temporarily titled “Beneath,” original bandfic with a post-apocalyptic feel. I’m averaging just under 1,000 words a day, and this is a big’un; I expect to be writing it through May.
I have yet another book percolating in the dark reaches of my backbrain, but there are so many things, story-world-believability-wise, that would need to be worked out to my before I could consider it as anything more than “that thing I amuse myself with at night as I wait for sleep.” Like wings. Have you thought about wings? Let’s say you had retractable wings. We won’t even get into how wings large enough to carry a human in flight could retract into that human’s back; I have even more basic concerns. For instance: people with the retractable wings, would they just go through a lot of shirts and jackets? Or do they have clothes with vents in the back that allow the wings to slide through? Or do they just walk around shirtless all the time?
And let’s say we get past the wardrobe problem…. Hips, ass and legs are heavy. Gravity is more than a vague theory. Two and two….
(I obviously don’t read enough books with flying humans in them; I’m sure other people have already worked these problems out.)
But the sound of those large, black, membranous wings, flapping slowly in the night—whoosh. whoosh.—heard only by a guitar player as he lies awake on a tour bus, knowing that what’s up there is cruising just above, just waiting to get at him…. It’s so tempting.
