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Apr. 13th, 2012 01:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
leahbobetApril 12, 2012 Progress Notes:
On Roadstead Farm
Words today: 800.
Words total: 20,750.
Reason for stopping: The hour grows late. Wolves! Ghosts!
Darling du Jour: "Good morning, Miss," he said. A docile rumble. Thunder that'd promised just this once to behave.
Words Hallie Won't Admit to Knowing: N/A. She's getting better about this, actually.
Mean Things: Quite explicitly losing your privacy. Also, I finally found out what's at the root of Hallie's terrible prickly perfectionism, and it makes perfect sense. And I plan to use it against her. But also then it made me cry a bit, so I guess we're even.
Research Roundup: N/A.
Books in progress: Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl; Gina Damico, Croak
One of those days where it goes crack! like an egg and what you need to do flows right out your fingers. Today -- both this afternoon at the coffeeshop and tonight, past one in the morning, stretched out on the couch under a flowered fleece blanket, drinking tea and typing carefully while my nailpolish dries -- has been about looking at the chapters I had, and systematically cutting them open to add in explicit explanations, demonstrations, for everything. Bringing the subtext up into the text. Explaining why a thing makes Hallie feel how she feels. Putting all this stuff on the page, to make it real and not just oblique. It's reading miles better. I'm getting a suspicion my natural length really is short fiction, and that's why my early drafts of novels have that same dense, compressed, zip-file prose.
I can't take entire credit: I had good notes on this to identify the problem. But I can also see quite clearly how the editorial process for Above taught me the things I needed to figure this thing out, and that's a cool little feeling. Don't do drugs! Stay in writer school! and all that.
Ad Astra tomorrow. No idea if I'll get wordcount in the afternoon, beforehand. Or on the bus, perhaps, on the way up to the hotel. I've found some of the heartwood of this book, and I'm in a way where I want to try.
On Roadstead Farm
Words today: 800.
Words total: 20,750.
Reason for stopping: The hour grows late. Wolves! Ghosts!
Darling du Jour: "Good morning, Miss," he said. A docile rumble. Thunder that'd promised just this once to behave.
Words Hallie Won't Admit to Knowing: N/A. She's getting better about this, actually.
Mean Things: Quite explicitly losing your privacy. Also, I finally found out what's at the root of Hallie's terrible prickly perfectionism, and it makes perfect sense. And I plan to use it against her. But also then it made me cry a bit, so I guess we're even.
Research Roundup: N/A.
Books in progress: Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl; Gina Damico, Croak
One of those days where it goes crack! like an egg and what you need to do flows right out your fingers. Today -- both this afternoon at the coffeeshop and tonight, past one in the morning, stretched out on the couch under a flowered fleece blanket, drinking tea and typing carefully while my nailpolish dries -- has been about looking at the chapters I had, and systematically cutting them open to add in explicit explanations, demonstrations, for everything. Bringing the subtext up into the text. Explaining why a thing makes Hallie feel how she feels. Putting all this stuff on the page, to make it real and not just oblique. It's reading miles better. I'm getting a suspicion my natural length really is short fiction, and that's why my early drafts of novels have that same dense, compressed, zip-file prose.
I can't take entire credit: I had good notes on this to identify the problem. But I can also see quite clearly how the editorial process for Above taught me the things I needed to figure this thing out, and that's a cool little feeling. Don't do drugs! Stay in writer school! and all that.
Ad Astra tomorrow. No idea if I'll get wordcount in the afternoon, beforehand. Or on the bus, perhaps, on the way up to the hotel. I've found some of the heartwood of this book, and I'm in a way where I want to try.
