gregoryclifford

I'm still pecking away at The Softer Side of Evil. The word count has ballooned from 13,000 to 25,000 words. Not bad. That puts it in novella territory. But I'd still like to make it a novel to give it greater marketability, and that means coming up with an additional 15,000 words. At this point I'm not sure where I'm going to find those words. I could expand some existing scenes, but that will only add another thousand words or so. What I'll probably end up doing is expanding the subplot involving Zuria, my hero's love interest, but I haven't thought up any new scenes for her yet. I think I'll put the story on ice for a while while ideas ferment in my brain.

Last night I tinkered with Cookie Brainchild: The Naked Eye. I stopped working on it for a while when I realized I didn't have a structure for the climactic chapter. This is the chapter where Cookie finally exposes and captures the killer, or thinks she does. This is a very complex and madcap scene, and after writing the first few pages, I wasn't sure where I was going to take it. I now have a more solid idea of how to finish the chapter, although it's going to take some of my best plotting.

Has it really been six months since I last posted? Not only does time fly, it has jet wings.

The truth is I really haven't had much to report. I sort of took a break from writing. What have I been doing? Well, reading a lot mostly. I got a part-time job working at my neighborhood Circle K back in May, and the extra money has enabled me to buy books. I finished George R.R. Martin's latest tome, and have been digging into Terry Pratchett's novels. I also read the Hunger Games books, which were very, very good. Currently, I'm reading Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. There are some wonderfully dysfunctional characters in it.

I didn't completely abandon writing. I've been pecking away at Hero on the Run and Cookie Brainchild: The Naked Eye. I've actually made some progress on the latter. The novel now stands at 50,000 words, with a goal of 60,000. There are only two chapters left to go, the climax and the resolution. The climax is quite involved and alone will probably eat up that last 10,000 words. But even when I do finish the chapters I won't be done. I have a massive rewriting job ahead of me.

As we speak I'm working on a third draft of the Softer Side of Evil (working title). Yes, I've dusted off that old thing. Even at 13,000 words, it always felt too short to me. That's because I left out much of the second act stuff I had planned to do in order to keep it short. Well, shorter. It received mixed reviews when I posted it on OWW. Well, now I've started to add scenes to plug those holes in the plot. I've already written one new scene and am working on another. I'm not sure what the final word count will be. Maybe 20,000-25,000. But if I can stretch it to 40,000 and turn it into a novella, that would be cool, too.

Anyways, back to work.

I forgot to mention I received the proof for Super Agent Man yesterday. This is the story that is going to appear in the Spring issue of Golden Visions Magazine. Normally, editors publish my work pretty much as is. This time, however, I noticed a lot of changes.

Most of the changes the copy editor made I felt were unnecessary. He/she broke up many paragraphs that I felt should have stayed together. And the copy editor italicized some text that was not italicized in my manuscript.

To be perfectly fair, however, some of the paragraphs breaks I agreed with. They highlighted portions of the action that deserved highlighting, and thus improved the perceived pace of the story.

The formatting changes I disagreed with I decided not to raise a stick about. They don't really harm the story in any way.

The copy editor did make one error. He/she forgot to convert two back-to-back hyphens into an em dash. I e-mailed the chief editor and told her the copy editor deserved 1 demerit.

If you rip 9,000 words from your novel, do you consider that making progress?

That's what I did today, and the answer to that question remains to be seen. Cookie Brainchild: The Naked Eye now stands at 35,000 words--down from 43,000 words. (I added 1,000 words writing today.) I even ripped out one whole scene I worked hard on and was proud of.

Yes, that hurt.

The cuts, however, were necessary. I finally figured out what has been blocking me on this novel. I was adding characters that were superfluous to the plot. They had no connection to either of the murders, and thus were not new suspects. The deleted portions showed what happened to Cookie after she was captured by one of the bad guys and thrown into a dog kennel with other girls. She was bought by a modern day Arabian prince and added to his secret harem. While there she meets new characters, plots and executes her escape, but learns nothing new about the case she's working on. Can you say, "Waste of time?"

I think I added the harem to create a "Perils of Pauline" moment for Cookie. You know, another obstacle stopping her from reaching her goal. I also figured a harem would be a really good place for a few sex scenes. But without any connection to the plot, these scenes were just treading words, going nowhere. I finally figured out that Cookie's "Perils of Pauline" moment could occur in the kennel; she will escape from that instead of the harem. This way I only need to add one minor character, and I can keep my subplots to a minimum.

Sometimes I think that writer's block is simply my subconscious trying to tell me something.

Add another victim to the earthquake in Japan: my productivity. I had intended to do some writing today, maybe even finish a short story I started earlier in the week, but instead I spent all day watching the news.

Last night, I did a final polish of "All the King's Gold" and submitted it to Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, which is one of the few professional markets for speculation fiction left. I think in terms of plot and dialogue, I have a winner, but it will be interesting to see if they like the milieu. The story is set in a rather generic fantasy environment, and the Big Pubs normally hold their noses at that. They like fresh world-building.

I know exactly what sort of stories the Big Pubs want. They want new ideas and new worlds. They'll take a boring, badly-written story over better-written traditional fare as long as it has something they've never seen before. I do have ideas for these types of original stories. I call them my Big Three Ideas. (They used to be my Big Two, but I came up with a new idea over the weekend for making an old story idea even better.) They're set in mysterious new worlds (or the old world with a radical twist) that present the main character with novel problems to overcome.

Now the question is, should I work on any of these Big Three stories now that "All the King's Gold" is done? Up until now I've resisted because I wanted the ideas to simmer in my brain a while longer. I don't want any of these stories to become another original but boring story you find on the pages of the Big Pubs. Also, I have all these other writing projects to finish first, like three novels I work on in fits and starts. But a short story will take less time to finish than a novel. Well, supposedly.

Decisions, decisions ...

Chapter 12 of Hero on the run is now done. I finished it only minutes ago. Although the writing is very rough, and there is not much humor in the scene, I am rather proud of my accomplishment. There's lots of emotion it in. I further explore the complex relationship between Colan and Gunther. Even I had no idea when I started this novel how closely their lives are entangled with each other.

I also completed chapter 6 last week. It used to be chapter 5, but I reordered it and other chapters. And I added more scenes to chapter 10 to show how Nicolle gets kidnapped. The total word count now stands at nearly 25k. If I can adhere to my goal of keeping this novel short, then I am almost halfway done.

I already have ideas for chapter 13. I think I'll revisit Marlek again.

Yesterday I surprised myself. I finished two chapters of my comic fantasy Hero on the Run. I had not meant to work on this book, but I awoke with a head suddenly brimming with ideas for it.

I had stopped working on this novel months ago when my supply of inspiration ran out. I found myself treading words while trying to finish chapters 5, 10, and 11. (I often work on chapters out of order when writing.) The problem was I didn't know where to take these chapters. Or maybe I knew where to take them but not how to get there. This is a comic story, so the situations my characters find themselves in must be interesting, and the dialogue between them has to sparkle, or there is no sense in clicking the save button.

So yesterday I discovered the right way to approach these chapters, and I finished 10 and 11 and started on 5. What's more, I now know how to write chapter 12. And all this stemmed from just a few ideas that fell into my brain while I was lying in bed.

Finally, I am done with "All the King's Gold." Well, I still have some polishing and minor revising to do, but all major work on the manuscript is done. I have a climax I am satisfied with. I posted the final scene on OWW yesterday and already Raymond Walshe, one of my regular reviewers, has given it the thumbs up. He agrees it is stronger than my previous version. He did offer a few tweaks, most of which I have incorporated.

Now the question is, which market do I submit it to? I was thinking about F&SF, which used to be my first choice back in the old days, but they still don't accept electronic submissions. I not sure I remember how to mail things. There is also IGMS. They accept electronic submissions and pay almost as much as F&SF, but their wait times are reportedly longer. I always did get a fast response from F&SF. Any suggestions from the peanut gallery?

Not in the can, but getting closer, is my erotic P.I. novel. I've been working on chapter 14, as well as bits and pieces of later chapters. The word count now stands at 43,000. The pace of writing has slowed down because the situations I'm creating just don't seem as interesting to me. So I either wait for inspiration, which is my normal way of writing, or bull through and fix things later. I've been trying to do the latter, but just end up scrapping what I've written and starting over again.

I've read the two scenes of chapter 2 to CPWW's Wednesday group, each on a different night. Both scenes were well-received, although reviewers were generally pickier with the second scene, which has graphic sex in it. Oana felt I didn't quite nail the feminine perspective, which I suppose is not surprising considering that I am male.

Sometimes I forget I have a blog. More often I feel that I have nothing worthwhile worth reporting. My writing has been in the dumps for most of the month. The fact is that, until a few days ago, I haven't been feeling well. I'd wake up to a headache that just wouldn't go away, and I'd feel tired and dizzy for the rest of the day as well. No amount of sleep or aspirin would cure my blahness.

Under such conditions I didn't want to strain my aching brain any further by writing. (I've been playing Eve a lot, and started playing Age of Kings: The Conquerors again.) But even if I did feel well I might not have gotten much done. I've been in sort of a creative funk lately. Sometimes I feel like I'm God at the keypad.  Just as often I feel like a lowly worm, one that's been stomped on and is bleeding its guts onto the pavement. I still haven't finished All the King's Gold. Yes, I wrote a first draft that was generally well-received on OWW. But I wasn't happy with my speedily-written ending. My reviewers were more positive about it than me, but I could tell they wanted better.

There's a particular paragraph in the last scene that's been giving me a lot of trouble. It marks the dividing line between the first three-quarters of the scene that I like, and the last quarter that I don't like. I've never been happy with the way I've written this paragraph. Oh, the words are all properly spelled. The punctuation and grammar are correct. But the sentences just don't seem to mesh together well. Or, at least, they didn't. The paragraph describes the scene inside the queen's bedchamber when Marcellus enters it in pursuit of the Mercy Brothers. I was overly complicating things by describing exactly what happened to Marcellus's manservant and the midwife, how they died and what their attitude in death was. That took four or more sentences and was giving too much weight in the paragraph to both. I finally took a look at that paragraph again today and figured out all I needed to do was write they lay on the floor dead. One sentence. So simple I'm kicking myself for not seeing it earlier. I still have some tinkering to do with the paragraph, but at least now I feel like I'm over the hump.

Maybe the break did me good. I find myself more enthused about tackling the remaining problems in the scene.