Tag: revision

Keeping deadlines and rethinking priorities

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It’s not Theadia I’m worried about, actually. It’s A Division of Souls. Against my better judgement, I’m going to try to get the “remastered” version of my first novel ready for an early September release for its tenth anniversary. That gives me about nine months to get my butt in gear and get it done. Can I do it?

Well, I’m reasonably sure I can do it, at any rate. It’s not as if I’m completely rewriting the whole thing! As I’ve mentioned before, this revision that I’m calling a ‘remaster’ is merely updating a story I’ve spent several years on, and want to update it so it fits my current level of quality. I’m not embarrassed by it, but I can definitely see places where I could have done a lot better work on it.

At the same time, I worry that Theadia will fall by the wayside again. That won’t happen if I don’t let it, of course. I just have to shift priorities. Besides, I want to do that novel justice, and right now it still feels like it still contains a lot of gaps that need filling. [I mean, aside from its still being unfinished at this time.] The two projects are very similar in scope, I think. Both are Big Stories with an extended cast, featuring events that affect not just the main characters but everyone around them.

Both are also stories where I wanted to make some kind of statement. The Bridgetown Trilogy is about listening to and trusting the true spirit within — in short, trusting yourself, your instincts, and your emotions. Theadia is about wanting to do the right thing not only for your own benefit but for others — in short, understanding the consequences of your actions. And I feel that for both statements, I can’t really allow the stories to be half-assed.

This is definitely going to stress me out a bit in the next few months, but if I take it day by day, keep to my deadlines and stay focused, I shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

Reading at night

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I was doing pretty good there for a while. I was going through a number of books on my TBR pile (or alternately catching up on my shopping list by reading library copies on Hoopla), but that seems to have fallen by the wayside again. I’m back to rereading my WIP again, and I think that’s doing more harm than good right now. I did this before with Queen Ophelia’s War…I was revision-reading so often that I kind of burnt myself out with the story for a little bit and had to distance myself for a while before picking it up again.

Mind you, I find revision-reading one of the best tools I have when it comes to writing novels and prepping them for self-publication, but I sometimes need to learn that overdoing it leads to hyperfocusing on the problems and rarely getting any further. There has to be a balance.

Not that I’m burnt out on Theadia yet, thankfully. Just that I need to put it aside for a time at night. I need to read things that aren’t my own work. How else would I happen to discover new things that might inspire newer ideas? And not even that, sometimes it’s fun just to sit down and do a bit of enjoyable reading at the end of a long day! It’s a perfect wind-down activity!

So maybe what I need to do is dust off those books in the TBR pile and start cracking them open!

Knowing enough to fake it

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Working on this go-round of Theadia, I still feel the occasional worry that readers are going to see certain scenes and think oh dear lord, he has no idea what he’s going on about, does he? In particular, it comes up whenever I have a scene with our two goofballs Althea and Claudia doing their magic as programmers.

I mean, I’ll totally cop to the fact that I know enough about certain kinds of programming. I get what coding is supposed to do. And because of my years working e-payables at the bank, I definitely know enough about what happens if that coding is screwed up, and how a code that runs perfectly fine in test mode can just as easily fail spectacularly in live mode. [Oh, BOY do I know how that is. Reading about BofA’s recent systems kerflooey a few days ago gave me some not so fun flashbacks.]

And that’s what I lean on in this story. I have no reason to get into the nitty-gritty and explain in Doctorow-level detail what the characters are trying to do, because that’s not an important part of the story. What is important is why they’re doing what they’re doing, and knowing full well how it’ll end up because of that. There are a few moments of handwavium, sure, but it’s never a plot point that will disintegrate because of that.

What’s important here is not showing off the two women’s mad skillz, but that they know how to navigate the grey area between compliance and hacking. What these moments do hinge on is them not bringing attention to themselves while tweaking a few things here and there while everyone’s distracted.

As long as I make it believable enough, that’s good enough for me.

Okay, moving on…

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I’ve spent way too long trying to make that chapter work and I’ve been getting nowhere. I know something needs to go there but it’s just not coming to me, so I’ve called it, placed a WRITE THIS LATER on the page, and moved on. Maybe I’ll come back to it, or maybe I’ll come up with something altogether different. Or maybe I won’t need it after all? Who knows?

Either way, I’m now working on another revision chapter — one I’ve already written and want to polish up — and I probably won’t return to this problem scene for quite some time. I’ll have it playing in the back of my head, sure, but I most likely won’t actually do any writing for it until I get the rest of the novel done. I actually did this with Diwa & Kaffi — chapter eleven, where Diwa is making rolls with his mother and talking about his dad, was the last thing I wrote for that novel before prepping it for publication. By the time I wrote it, I had a much better idea of what was needed and it came to me much quicker and easier.

It’s not a process I do all that often, but sometimes it’s necessary to move on instead of wasting so much time focusing on something that refuses to budge.

On creating new characters midstream

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Okay, so Captain Will Dewar in Theadia is definitely not Space Pirate Captain Harlock, but the gif was too good to pass up, heh.

Anyway, I’m kind of stuck on how to write Dewar, as he’s a relatively new character unlike nearly everyone else in the novel. But in the process, I’m reminded that this also happened back when I was writing A Division of Souls; originally Christine Gorecki was merely a name of an old friend that Poe mentioned during a tense moment to ease Caren’s distress. By The Persistence of Memories she’d acquired a major role.

So why Dewar, anyway? Again, he was originally a one-off, someone mentioned in passing during a conversation between a few flight captains, someone known as being gruff and not entirely friendly but someone who could be trusted. As it happens in this particular revision/rewrite, I need to expand his role as someone willing to take extremely dangerous chances in order to help the main characters achieve their goals.

But who is he when he’s not in uniform? What kind of civilian would he be? Well, I kind of see him a bit like Alan Ritchson’s take on the Jack Reacher character: ridiculously well-built, surprisingly intelligent, yet a bit of a quiet loner. He’s not all that easy to rile up, but you don’t want to be in the same area when he is. I wouldn’t say he has a strong sense of justice, but more like a strong drive to ensure the right thing is done, and done correctly the first time. He craves competence.

All this thought and brainstorming, just for a secondary character! Well, this is why I loved writing the Bridgetown trilogy so much: every character in that universe has a backstory and a reason for being there, and that’s exactly the kind of writing work I love doing. [Why yes, I’m definitely anti-AI when it comes to creativity, why do you ask?] While I do have some idea of who Dewar is and what he’s about, I’m still a bit vague on his reasons for being who he is and why he does what he does, and how he relates to the other characters.

Well, that’s something I’ll need to keep plugging away on, isn’t it?

Those little ‘aha!’ moments

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I’ll admit one of the things that’s been worrying me about the new version of Theadia is that with the new scenes, I sometimes feel like I’m putting in filler. I know I’m not; I’m putting these new scenes in for reasons that will become clear further into the story. Thing is, some of these reasons are a bit, er, vague at the moment because I don’t have a crystal clear idea of how to reveal these plot points.

Then there are the moments where I’m being super patient with the low word count and pushing through, and somehow a shining bit of plot clarity pops in. That aha! moment, so to speak. I’ve just had a few of them over the last couple of days, in which I somehow backed myself into the exact spot the scene needed to be in.

Those are some of my favorite moments in writing, to be honest. It’s the pay-off for all the hard work and the frustration, where I suddenly see all the threads being woven together at once. That happened a lot with the Bridgetown trilogy and is happening here as well.

So I just need to remind myself to remain patient and vigilant, and all will make sense eventually.

Prep Work

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(Image courtesy of Starship Operators, a fun and unique anime I recommend.)

Whenever I have a spare moment and I’m not focusing on the final preparation of Queen Ophelia’s War, I’ve been preparing for my eventual restart/rewrite of Theadia. Why am I doing this when I have most of the original version written, you ask? Good question, that.

The easy answer is that I’m doing it the same way I wrote the Bridgetown Trilogy. Whatever is about to unfold in this restart/rewrite won’t be exactly the same as that version, just as the trilogy takes what I’d started in The Phoenix Effect and pushed it in a different and much better direction.

The more convoluted answer is that I’ve chosen to expand on several plot points, characters and situations that I’d laid out in the original Theadia. I’ve been finding moments during lulls in my work shift, just like back in the day, to write down my thoughts on how to do this. Certain secondary characters will have a much deeper and richer background and even their own plot lines. While it will still focus on the two main characters — after all, they are not just the instigators of the story but what drives the rest of the main cast — I want to know more about the rest of this universe.

Thus, I’m doing what I did with the trilogy: I’m doing a world building deep dive. Something I haven’t done for quite a number of years. It makes sense for me to do this, considering this is a subgenre I don’t have nearly as much experience writing. [It’s not that I’m a ‘never say no’ writer…I’m more of the ‘I wonder if I could pull this off, let’s try it’ kind.] And if I’m going to do it justice, I want to do my homework.

The current version does work…but there are worrying moments of Handwavium and This Happens Offscreen, and I’d rather not go that route. The best way to fix this, in my experience, is to do that deep dive. I’ll do a bit of research, sure, but I also want this story as believable as possible without getting lost in super-heavy hard-sf techspeak. While it exists, that’s not what the story is about; the project’s focus has always been about the people behind the tech, both the ones who create it and the ones who use it, who may not exactly understand all of it but might at least understand how it works to some degree. [I’ve often joked that this project is my anti-Cory Doctorow story, in which I try to avoid techspeak infodumps as much as I can and still get away with it.]

Will I pull it off? Well, I won’t know until I write it, will I?

Final revision: fix-it notes

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Yep. I’m in the final revision of Queen Ophelia’s War — about halfway through the novel, in fact. This is where I’m doing one last reread at the end of the day on my ereader in bed, a pen and pad at my side. I’ve learned that this is where I find most of the small-time errors that I might miss or skip over while working on the PC: use of the wrong word, confusing dialogue tags, missing words…or my worst enemy: word repetition. [I have the occasional bad habit of using the same word or phrase multiple times within the same paragraph. Easy to fix but embarrassing to discover.]

When I’m at this level of revision, I’ll go straight through the entire work from start to finish before I make any fixes. This will allow me the ability to insert notes out of order — if there’s an important moment near the end of the book that needs to be hinted at earlier on, for instance. That will also make the final final revision session that much easier: fixing those small problems and giving it a bit of shine.

Then I’ll be able to sign off on it and prep it for self-publishing!

here we go again

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So the other day while I was at work, I’d started playing around with ideas for Theadia, and I started thinking: well, as much as I love it, I still feel I’ve left a lot out. Too many moments where important things happen but only seen from one person’s oblique points of view. Conflict with muted payoff. Too many actions that lack the backstory other than “…then this happens but no one yet knows why” that deserve a much deeper examination. In other words, it’s great, but it certainly could be a whole lot better. And I want to put in that extra work to make it the best.

In other words, this is exactly what I’d done when I’d rewritten The Phoenix Effect as the Bridgetown Trilogy. It went from something that was good and I’d turned it into something great that I’m proud of.

In other words, Theadia may end up another large-scale, extended-cast trilogy if I play my cards right.

Sure, I still need to finish off Queen Ophelia’s War first — I think I’m about two thirds of the way there, so I’m on schedule for that one — but I’m already starting to do the pre-writing paperwork for Theadia now. Extended storylines and subplots for certain characters. I may not know how to successfully write a space opera, let alone write characters that serve part of a military role, but I already know that this one isn’t going to be a dense war-in-space story, and nor is it going to be a uber-savvy tech-nerd story either. It’s its own thing in its own reality, just like the Mendaihu Universe. And I think I’ve gotten pretty good at creating that kind of thing. And those are the things I love writing.

Will this end in tears? Who knows. But I’m willing to put in the work.

Catching Up

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I knew that aside from the expected family gatherings and whatnot over this past weekend, I’d have a lot of time to myself at the hotel I was staying at, so I brought my trusty Lenovo laptop with me. My plan was to hole up and get some serious editing and revision done on Queen Ophelia’s War during that time, and I did in fact get several chapters done in the span of just a few days! Not only that, I was able to bash out a few hundred words for my romcom idea. Hell, I even had a few hours to kill at Logan before my flight back west, so I got some revision work done there as well!

Allowing myself to spend an extended amount of time was something I’d needed, and something I hadn’t been able to do all that often since I started at the Current Day Job. I can do it on my days off, but even then I’m sharing that time with other non-writing things I need to catch up on so the time spent isn’t nearly as long. But hey, that’s something I’ve been trying to adjust! I feel like I’m back on schedule, and that’s where I needed to be in order to make that happen.

Life has returned back to normal now and it’s the start of a new month, so this is the perfect time for me to plan ahead — to do a bit of proactive time management for my creative outlets and life adjustment to get rid of unwanted distractions. I’m still on schedule to get Queen Ophelia’s War out within the next few months.