Meanwhile, back on the hippo ranch... (aka doing November backwards)
Last week, I got a response from an agent I queried last year. This, in and of itself, was sort of spiffy, since I was batting at about 60% cricket-chirping silence in response to Boralos queries. As a (big) bonus, it was a "I really like your writing voice, but..." response. I've been getting quite a few of those. But I can't sell single-volume fantasy in Australia. But my list is full. But there's no action in the first chapter (being the last one that stymied me in conflicted inaction on the book). This one was "But it's too long at 180,000 words. Could you cut out 55-65k words?"
I considered that Actually, no, first I said, "HOLY SHIT!" (in the office; no one noticed) and then spent two minutes trading exclamation marks on the phone with my husband. During which I calmed down enough to say, "Well, I don't know. Can I?"
It's a writing challenge. Anyone who knows me in any sort of writing capacity knows how much I like those.
And so I am back on the horse hippo!
I'm actually quite bubbling with energy on this, which is something I sort of despaired about ever feeling about Boralos ever again. After the no-action rejection, I had no real idea of what I could do to solve that while still maintaining my artistic vision (you have no idea how wanky I feel writing that, but it's a good short-form of the stuff I said at the time). This is a solid, mechanical fix: reduce the wordcount. Can I do that? Yes! It's just a matter of judiciously hitting the delete key! Of course, it isn't, not even slightly. I'm only four chapters into my first trim-down, and already I've substantially rewritten two major sections, but man, they were easy. Especially in contrast to how teeth-pulling work on Truth and Lies has been recently.
The rewriting hasn't just been to condense, contract and conflate either, and here is the true beauty of this kickstart: in shortening the book by up to a third, I have a golden opportunity to consider and solve possible issues of pace, while still attempting to maintain a certain graceful felicity of style and substance. (Not to mention dealing with the possibility that Alon's boring, and killing every adverb I find.)
I am not expecting this to continue to be easy. I am expecting this to get really fucking hard. I am expecting to hit murderous dilemmas and pitch tantrums. And I am certainly expecting to get to the end of my first trimming run through the novel and find I've only reduced it by 30k words and I have to perform major surgery. But I have a visible path forward on this novel for the first time in a year, and I'm pretty happy about that.
As a technical aside to all that: how I'm doing this. I've been messing about with Scrivener recently, dabbling with using it for Truth and Lies and keeping my notes for other writing projects in it, just generally getting a feel for it and how it might be useful to me. I started out feeling very "No, this isn't me" about it, because I tend to write in straightforward linear style, so the ability to jump around and move things and see things alongside each other wasn't really in my zone. And I've actually never had an issue with having multiple Word docs open during a session, though admittedly that was easier before Windows 7, when they all stacked along the status bar and I could pick and choose. (There's probably a way to make Windows 7 do this; I can't be arsed.)
However, as soon as I opened up my folder for Boralos to consider the technicalities of the edit, and looked at the 60 individual chapter files in there, I instantly went, "...I'm using Scrivener for this."
It's working extremely well so far. I've imported all the chapter files - this has resulted in some stray glitch-characters, mostly because I was using Open Office when writing the majority of the novel, and I've noticed that (possibly only when working in .doc format) OO tends to insert odd invisible characters around style changes and smart characters (such as curly quotes and converted ellipses). But that doesn't matter, since I'm editing the whole thing line-by-line as my first trimming pass.
The best thing about having them all in the one project is that Scrivener then gives me a whole-project wordcount without me having to maintain the spreadsheet I have of chapters and lengths. Handy! The next amusing thing I noticed about the wordcount feature is that there's a session-wordcount as well. And it counts backwards. I wonder if I'm the only writer working this November who's cheering when her session wordcount reaches -500. :D
Scrivener also allows me to tweak the uses of various organisation sets ("Labels" and "Status" originally, but I can name them whatever I want) which enables me to set it up so that I can see at a colour-coded glance who the POV for a chapter is. (Replacing another thing I used to do in a different format, in this case BY HAND, colouring in squares of graph paper for every page in a certain POV. Very pretty. Very unwieldy.) This is going to come in extremely handy when I start moving chapters together. As will the ability to physically move scenes. I haven't yet chunked the chapters into scenes - they're still all one document per chapter - but I plan to do this as part of the second wave of Operation Kill, when I get juggling and smooshing.
Plus, when I'm finished, Scrivener will export the project into a document containing whichever material I select, which is infinitely easier than manually compiling the whole-novel file, which I did to start this process so I could print out the novel for handy on-the-train scribbling and post-it-tabbing.
In short, I am very impressed with the usefulness of Scrivener for the task I have in hand. I have, in fact, bought it (especially since with the pre-order discount it was coming it at US$36 which, I pointed out to Mr Dee, is hardly a steel guitar). Will I use it for working on new projects once the Boralos-edit is over? Yes, probably. It will save me having to import the novel when I get to the editing process!
The only problem I'm finding is that I can't store the Scrivener files in Dropbox, because Dropbox is grabby about its syncing and that can be not-great with the working-in-progress of Scrivener. I was being extremely careful in switching from desktop to laptop and making sure I gave plenty of time to close, save and sync before opening anything on the other computer, and I still got a mis-sync versioning. This is a problem for me, since I like to switch computers at the drop of a hat (specifically the "Mr Dee's current saved game of FreeCiv is on the computer you're working on" hat). This has prompted me to finally set up proper networking between the computers (though not, amusingly enough, Windows 7 Homegrouping, which promised to be the answer to every question I'd never thought I had, and then completely failed to work) which fixes the problem between those computers, but doesn't help me get stuff done while at work. Oh well, there's always the old-school manual syncing via USB, I suppose!
Originally posted on Dreamwidth
I considered that Actually, no, first I said, "HOLY SHIT!" (in the office; no one noticed) and then spent two minutes trading exclamation marks on the phone with my husband. During which I calmed down enough to say, "Well, I don't know. Can I?"
It's a writing challenge. Anyone who knows me in any sort of writing capacity knows how much I like those.
And so I am back on the horse hippo!
I'm actually quite bubbling with energy on this, which is something I sort of despaired about ever feeling about Boralos ever again. After the no-action rejection, I had no real idea of what I could do to solve that while still maintaining my artistic vision (you have no idea how wanky I feel writing that, but it's a good short-form of the stuff I said at the time). This is a solid, mechanical fix: reduce the wordcount. Can I do that? Yes! It's just a matter of judiciously hitting the delete key! Of course, it isn't, not even slightly. I'm only four chapters into my first trim-down, and already I've substantially rewritten two major sections, but man, they were easy. Especially in contrast to how teeth-pulling work on Truth and Lies has been recently.
The rewriting hasn't just been to condense, contract and conflate either, and here is the true beauty of this kickstart: in shortening the book by up to a third, I have a golden opportunity to consider and solve possible issues of pace, while still attempting to maintain a certain graceful felicity of style and substance. (Not to mention dealing with the possibility that Alon's boring, and killing every adverb I find.)
I am not expecting this to continue to be easy. I am expecting this to get really fucking hard. I am expecting to hit murderous dilemmas and pitch tantrums. And I am certainly expecting to get to the end of my first trimming run through the novel and find I've only reduced it by 30k words and I have to perform major surgery. But I have a visible path forward on this novel for the first time in a year, and I'm pretty happy about that.
As a technical aside to all that: how I'm doing this. I've been messing about with Scrivener recently, dabbling with using it for Truth and Lies and keeping my notes for other writing projects in it, just generally getting a feel for it and how it might be useful to me. I started out feeling very "No, this isn't me" about it, because I tend to write in straightforward linear style, so the ability to jump around and move things and see things alongside each other wasn't really in my zone. And I've actually never had an issue with having multiple Word docs open during a session, though admittedly that was easier before Windows 7, when they all stacked along the status bar and I could pick and choose. (There's probably a way to make Windows 7 do this; I can't be arsed.)
However, as soon as I opened up my folder for Boralos to consider the technicalities of the edit, and looked at the 60 individual chapter files in there, I instantly went, "...I'm using Scrivener for this."
It's working extremely well so far. I've imported all the chapter files - this has resulted in some stray glitch-characters, mostly because I was using Open Office when writing the majority of the novel, and I've noticed that (possibly only when working in .doc format) OO tends to insert odd invisible characters around style changes and smart characters (such as curly quotes and converted ellipses). But that doesn't matter, since I'm editing the whole thing line-by-line as my first trimming pass.
The best thing about having them all in the one project is that Scrivener then gives me a whole-project wordcount without me having to maintain the spreadsheet I have of chapters and lengths. Handy! The next amusing thing I noticed about the wordcount feature is that there's a session-wordcount as well. And it counts backwards. I wonder if I'm the only writer working this November who's cheering when her session wordcount reaches -500. :D
Scrivener also allows me to tweak the uses of various organisation sets ("Labels" and "Status" originally, but I can name them whatever I want) which enables me to set it up so that I can see at a colour-coded glance who the POV for a chapter is. (Replacing another thing I used to do in a different format, in this case BY HAND, colouring in squares of graph paper for every page in a certain POV. Very pretty. Very unwieldy.) This is going to come in extremely handy when I start moving chapters together. As will the ability to physically move scenes. I haven't yet chunked the chapters into scenes - they're still all one document per chapter - but I plan to do this as part of the second wave of Operation Kill, when I get juggling and smooshing.
Plus, when I'm finished, Scrivener will export the project into a document containing whichever material I select, which is infinitely easier than manually compiling the whole-novel file, which I did to start this process so I could print out the novel for handy on-the-train scribbling and post-it-tabbing.
In short, I am very impressed with the usefulness of Scrivener for the task I have in hand. I have, in fact, bought it (especially since with the pre-order discount it was coming it at US$36 which, I pointed out to Mr Dee, is hardly a steel guitar). Will I use it for working on new projects once the Boralos-edit is over? Yes, probably. It will save me having to import the novel when I get to the editing process!
The only problem I'm finding is that I can't store the Scrivener files in Dropbox, because Dropbox is grabby about its syncing and that can be not-great with the working-in-progress of Scrivener. I was being extremely careful in switching from desktop to laptop and making sure I gave plenty of time to close, save and sync before opening anything on the other computer, and I still got a mis-sync versioning. This is a problem for me, since I like to switch computers at the drop of a hat (specifically the "Mr Dee's current saved game of FreeCiv is on the computer you're working on" hat). This has prompted me to finally set up proper networking between the computers (though not, amusingly enough, Windows 7 Homegrouping, which promised to be the answer to every question I'd never thought I had, and then completely failed to work) which fixes the problem between those computers, but doesn't help me get stuff done while at work. Oh well, there's always the old-school manual syncing via USB, I suppose!
Originally posted on Dreamwidth