Over a year to write a chapter

I’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE AND THE WRITING AND I SURVIVED

I’m digging out some of my unfinished blog posts – to either finish or delete – and I find this one which is entirely appropriate, because I’m basically at the same place, but in LIMBO, not NETHERWORLD, and the Chapter is 41, not 26.

And, of course, the date is Mon., May 29 – 2023 – and Memorial Day.

Must add: I ended up quite pleased with Chapter 26!

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March 19, 2018 at 1:52 PM
I have been mentally putting off getting started on Chapter 26 for plenty of good reasons having to do with time, selling the house, giving stuff away, health (the Valsartan [heart drug I couldn’t tolerate] loss of ten days crippled me), worry…
And one bad reason: I’m scared of it.

Friday August 16, 2019 at 2:33 PM
Finished. Cut out a bunch of words. Left it cleaner.
Andrew is back to thinking only about himself as he heads back toward his rooms. Considered professional, and personal by implication. His way – fast easy travel at the drop of a hat implied – is contrasted with what he knows about her ability to travel. It is quite clear for the reader.

I have a bunch of time: this is the end of the chapter.
How can I best use the state of being more or less awake.
Unfortunately, I’m also hungry.

But Chapter 26 is over – down to She’ll be fine ’til I get back.
Which is my foreshadowing.

Saved time by not running scenes through AC as I finished them because, in all honesty, I didn’t think my brain capable of the fine decisions AND I was worried about the chapter as a whole still being in my ‘voice’ and the characters’ voices and my style…

Then the editing went stupendously well – I’m getting better at correcting a couple faults I have as a writer, from the very beginning – and it took less than a day to get the whole chapter – around 11,500 words, not untypical for me – edited, polished, and proofread.

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Be wary of accepting help from bots/algorithms/autocorrect

The rest of the original 2018 post is toast, because I accepted WordPress’ offer to turn the original Classic format into the current Blocks format – and it took all the statistics I quoted, from AutoCrit, and me writing Chapter 26 – and turned them into some kind of weird ‘Your Statistics’ in the block format because it recognized some patterns (such as the word ‘statistics’) and MISREAD them, and now won’t let me go back to the previous version.

Sigh.

I will have to delete all of them from here to the bottom.

Basically, the statistics from AutoCrit (which they no longer provide) said I had analyzed over 4 MILLION words up to that point in my use of AC: “On average, each scene went through Autocrit (online editing software) and my process about ten times after I finished writing it. I constantly edit and rewrite as I go, so this isn’t unusual for me either.”

So why bother quoting statistics from 2018?

Because, due to 1) publishing NETHERWORLD (which took until September 2022), and then 2) the aftereffects of two major problems, surgery and a big tax/paperwork project, I haven’t finished a Chapter in the new book, LIMBO, yet.

I HAVE written the first scene (which will not be shared for a while because I don’t have the whole of Book 3 organized the way I need to, and the scene MAY be missing a few key pieces), so I can’t move on yet.

And it was over a YEAR since writing the last scene in NETHERWORLD (March 2022?) and getting to the first scene in LIMBO, and I would rather not dwell on that year!

But the PATTERN – much time may go by between writing one scene and the next – is not unfamiliar for me, so it doesn’t alarm me, and I just get to work as soon as I have a usable brain and the ability to put that time to my preferred use, writing fiction.

To be clear: I’m not HAPPY about this way of writing, but it happens, doesn’t freak me out TOO much, and I’m like a police dog which has acquired a scent: I go right back to following it.

My style of writing, my ‘process’, copes fine with the breaks

Because I do everything in writing, using the many Journals and Scrivener files to keep track of minutiae (if I do anything remotely new or different, I start and date a new file in the appropriate Scrivener folder), EVERYTHING is there when I need to reload my brain.

I don’t even try to remember what I need (will, spontaneously, sometimes, but I don’t RELY on it), but I KNOW I wrote it down somewhere.

It wouldn’t work if I were writing many or shorter books; but for my complex novel trilogy about Andrew, Kary, and Bianca – characters who love and work in the movie/writer universe – this kind of compulsive tracking of details has come in handy time and again, rescuing me from having to remember any more than vague concepts, and leading me to where I can reload the pieces I currently need with relative efficiency.

I thought the organization of LIMBO was more complete

But now that I’m finally going through the spreadsheets I created in Excel and the reports from Dramatica, I find that I did NOT really finish it.

Not surprising: when I spent those three weeks at LaSalle as chaperone for our teenage homeschooling chemistry interns in 2007 (?), I was still working on PURGATORY!

Back then, I did the fully-fleshed encoded storyform for Book 1, and did a great deal with the enrobing of Book 2, somewhat less for Book 3.

When, years later, I had finished and published PURGATORY (Oct. – Dec. 2015), and plunged into writing NETHERWORLD, I found myself at the same stage I’m at now for LIMBO, where I hadn’t done as much work on NETHERWORLD as I thought I had, and it was NOT ready to ‘just write’. It took several months to get it to that state.

Well, it turns out that LIMBO is pretty skimpily encoded. I can’t write it from this state – because I don’t have each individual scene and its requirements planned.

So, after another year+ of not writing, I have to go back to planning and organizing, which means RE-READING most of the notes I wrote myself in 2016 as I put Book 2 through its paces. And finding that they help – a lot – except that the final details of the end of the whole trilogy are sketched in much less than I thought they were, so I’m having to repeat the whole process, AND the third book is actually a leveling up of a bunch of concepts, rather than a duplication of the same concepts from the previous two books.

Complicated enough yet?

All this means is that I have work to do.

With all my written notes, I can figure out what the work is, and have a scaffolding for escalating the parts of the structure that will need it.

I THINK I’ve learned enough now that this part of the process won’t take me months this time. It is OBVIOUS where I’m going with it, and I know what it needs to produce, the list of scenes with every important detail assigned to the appropriate one of them.

The auxiliary files – spreadsheets and calendar – will take a bit of time, but I know how much it helps to have them, and have models from Books 1 & 2.

YESTERDAY the pre-learning tantrum occurred

If you haven’t heard the concept, it comes from Dr. Karen Pryor’s Don’t shoot the dog, and expresses the frustration at a key point in the learning process:

The old ways don’t work, and the new ways don’t make sense. Yet.

My brain HURT, physically, as I struggled to make sense of how to apply my process for the third time, BUT to a more complicated book.

But YESTERDAY I had a brain for a while, a stubborn one, and I didn’t quit, didn’t put it off, didn’t flee at the pain, but broke it down into the tiniest of steps.

And voilà! We broke through.

I figured out what the heck I was doing (and for a bonus, WHY it was giving me such a hard time), and calmly took the first tiny step – in this case, assigning the major plot steps to the list of chapters and scenes. Starting from those fragmentary bits from 2007, I started putting up the scaffolding and bolting it into place.

So that today, when I ran into the first wall, I recognized it and started the process of getting over it. WITHOUT freaking out.

I think I’m okay now. The tantrum was painful, but it is already receding, another one conquered by method and patience.

There are plenty of missing bits, so I have plenty of WORK to do, but I also have the memory that twice before, when the blueprint was finished I could move on to the construction phase, and I am actually EAGER to tackle the project.

Then go back and revise 41.1 (LIMBO’s first chapter’s first scene if you count from the beginning of PURGATORY, 1.1 if you start numbering in LIMBO) IF necessary, and then confidently grab the next one and write IT, over and over until the words are out.

Even though there are always MORE walls.

Maybe this time it will be done in fewer years.

Is this elaborate process worth it to me?

Yes, because, with my damaged brain, I can’t write anything with any level of complexity otherwise.

And also yes, because, once the rigging is finished and I start raising sails, we fly over the water (okay, I’m slow at that, too), and I have hopes of finishing a book.

And this one IS the biggie, the third one which tests/proves the rule, the solution/end/completion to the trilogy – and I can’t wait to read it.

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To celebrate, here is the very beginning of LIMBO over at prideschildren.com, the tiny prologue/Prothalamion which is the continuation of the New Yorker article that is the frame around the trilogy, purportedly written by someone interested in ‘telling’ The Great American Love Story, years after and with all the missing pieces.

And readers of the whole will enjoy knowing a LOT more than that journalist – and knowing which pieces in that article are truth.

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Learn to teach yourself to edit yourself

SELF-EDITING IS A LEARNED SKILL

We’ll assume for the sake of principle that there are people who want to edit others, and people who want to be edited by others, and that they WILL FIND EACH OTHER, make commercial or other arrangements, and live happily ever after.

This post is not for them.

Good luck to those who use editors – but MAKE SURE you learn how to do every single thing they point out is ‘wrong,’ so you wean yourself off external advice as early as possible.

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NO ONE is born knowing how to edit OR self-edit

It’s regular CLICKBAIT, and I’ll get in trouble with the Writing Police for pointing it out: if you’re going to be a writer, especially one who writes fiction, an editor is inimical to your process of discovering YOUR writing VOICE.

Someone else can’t sound like you. They can only drag your words closer to some idealized medium value that everyone thinks is ‘best.’

Editing and self-editing are LEARNED SKILLS. Writing is much harder, but if you’ve read this far, it’s because you, for your own writing ONLY, think that using someone else, at great expense and time commitment, to clean up your own work because it doesn’t yet meet YOUR standards seems somehow economically and morally wrong.

Don’t argue with me – and this may apply only to me: don’t pay anyone to trample around in your word garden.

When I see manuscripts Editors have marked-up in red, my stomach does very unpleasant things.

Self-editing is a learned skill. If you learn to edit yourself, you will only need to learn to edit ONE person – editing for fun or profit requires that you be flexible enough to, and interested enough to change someone else’s words, into “better” words; I have no objection to that – for those who want it and can afford it and don’t mind what it does to their words.

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LEARN to do all the individual editing tasks yourself

Become a mature writer. DO the WORK of learning. You’re a professional now; this is your job.

You’ll thank me in the long run. Editors have to learn – they are not born.

Never trust software – always use it with extreme caution, and only for counting things (my pet peeve – Business English). Software, even that which claims to be ‘trained’ on fiction, is a regression to the mean. Think about it: who is their target audience? The small percentage of people who write fiction – or the masses of office workers who produce ‘content’ daily in huge amounts?

LEARN to plot. Lay your story out in steps from beginning to end. With or without detail.

LEARN to spell, and to recognize when you’re iffy about a word – meaning or spelling – and go look it up.

Be aware of the first time you write any kind of scene – and go read a couple of books with advice about that kind of scene, and then find your own path.

Read books which teach YOU. If you’re a pantser, don’t read books about plotting and outlining. If you’re an extreme plotter (like me), don’t follow pantsers for advice. LEARN to tell the difference, and figure out where you are on the spectrum between the two. It is the biggest contribution I can make to happiness in the newbie writing world.

It will all save you time, money, and angst in the long run.

If you’re me, of course.

Also, never let anything out until at least one trusted pair of eyes and a brain have read it carefully for you.

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LEARN to sound like your models, the writers you admire

Your own sense of right and wrong and written should have been previously developed in fine detail from extensive READING, the books YOU like to read, for PLEASURE.

For writers like me, who want to write complex novels, it helps to read a lot of them, especially the classics.

And you can get the robot software on your devices to read things out loud to you, including your own writing: close your eyes and listen to the cadences, the awkward phrasings, the confusing bits – and the good stuff.

I don’t know if audiobooks would help – they are professional performances, and don’t show the mistakes in getting there. But a robot voice on my Mac, getting something absurdly wrong, has been quite helpful (after I stop laughing).

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GO DO your own thing

Only you can write your books. Only you can make them sound like you. Only you can care enough to put in the effort.

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POST SCRIPT:

Don’t bother trying to use this post of mine to tell people (and me) we need editors. Instead, kindly go write your own posts about why you think everyone always needs an editor, and supply your rates.

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Surviving an extraordinary month in one piece

So many places you can be!

WHERE HAVE I BEEN AND WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING?

I am just coming out of a period that started, really, far before Sep. 26 when I went to Stanford U. hospitals for a badly needed surgical repair.

It involved taking care of myself in ways I had to learn, going through all kinds of medical tests to make sure that someone with ME/CFS (me) would be a suitable candidate for surgery at all, and then getting there at the right time without the coronavirus putting a stop to the whole parade: I literally had a covid PCR test on Sunday Sep. 25 in a parking lot in Redwood City – all ready for the hospital the next morning – and being fairly sure I was not sick, but knowing that the juggernaut would come to a shuddering halt if I happened to be and be asymptomatic.

And it would take months to get another surgical date, months I did not want to have to face.

Husband and I had isolated in our apartment in the retirement community for over two weeks, going out for doctor’s appointments, and husband going down to dining to retrieve takeout every night for dinner so we wouldn’t be exposed to the cases that seem to randomly infect this place now that people are being so less careful with masks and gatherings.

I had literally been waiting 2.5 years for this surgery date, since I needed it just as the pandemic was getting going in 2020, and anyone who could avoid going to a hospital did so.

Before going to my medical destiny, I published NETHERWORLD:

The Pride and Joy – NETHERWORLD

It was finished in March, but the complications of the health stuff kept me from focusing on cover and formatting, and I finally got help from friends, Bill and Teresa Peschel of Peschel Press in Hershey, PA. Bill kindly and accurately produced the cover from my notes and comments (patient man!), and responded to many rounds of requests for corrections to the interior formatting of the paperback – and I did the final touches to the ebook cover and interior produced by Scrivener on Sep. 18 and 19 and uploaded the files, which Amazon accepted with relative alacrity, making me no longer a one-book author.

And then came the surgery and its aftermath – the HORROR

The operation went fine, and the results have been stellar and relatively painless, and most everything now works properly, and all of it as well as possible.

But pain management went flooey – starting with side effects of medication changes the week before, and then continuing for the most pain I’ve ever had, for weeks, accompanied by side effects from other new medications designed to help, to finally me getting off EVERY NEW MED, and back to my long-time stable pain medications from before – and them slowly being enough.

I tried to tell them I’m a non-standard patient; I thought they had listened.

Nope.

Don’t know what I’ll do if I ever need to do something like this again, but there will be some very interesting and thorough conversations somewhere along the line: ME/CFS patients are NOT normal patients.

It’s over, I will be released from restrictions in a week

and I will be able to use our warm therapy pool, and then work up to riding my tricycle, and longer trips that the bare minimum rides on Maggie, my Airwheel S8 (a bicycle seat on a hoverboard).

And after getting my brain back these last few days, and catching up enough on sleep to be coherent (pain makes it IMPOSSIBLE to get rest), I have a big paperwork task to finish and send to the accountants.

And I will then be able to start up my new Macbook (I got the midnight blue one), and plug away at organizing the upgraded software I bought it for, and get going to finish the trilogy by writing volume 3, working title LIMBO.

I will be back to whatever passes for normal in this body and this household.

Nothing has yet changed on the research horizons

Rather, it seems that every day some scientist group has a new theory about what may be going wrong in the aftermath of viral infections such as Covid-19 and ME/CFS, and they want research money to find out if they’re right.

One of them will figure it out – the economic impact of millions of people coming down with Long Covid cannot be tolerated.

Except for the diehard holdouts, most doctors are starting to believe that post-viral illnesses are real and not psychological, or hysterical. They have no clue how to help us that gets down to basics and CURES us yet, but they are starting to treat the symptoms and minimize some of the miseries.

There is where HOPE lies: enough scientists committed to figuring it out, supported by research funds. Whether it is too late for people like me who’ve been ill for decades won’t be known for a while, and indeed the research horizon, my husband cautions, is more likely to be five to ten years than anything much faster: the coronavirus does an incredible amount of damage.

Some of it may not be fixable. I may not be fixable. Which would be a bitter conclusion I’m not ready to face yet.

All us post-viral illness folk still have to make it through the days

If you have it, my sympathies. If you have managed to avoid long covid, please be careful – if you get covid, your chances are estimated at 10-30% to not get better.

Have sympathy if you are not ill or have not lost someone dear – the tragedies are endless.

And send good vibes, pray, or cross your fingers – because I can’t wait to get back to spending my daily tiny allotment of energy FINISHING Pride’s Children.

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If you read mainstream fiction, or psychological literary fiction, and haven’t read NETHERWORLD, it’s on Amazon in ebook and print. And in KU.

I would love to hear what you think – especially about whether it ends suitably.

And you can sign up to be informed about matters connected with the books at prideschildren.com.

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Where have all the bloggers gone?

Inspired by Where have all the flowers gone? Popular folk song

WANTED: INTERESTING BLOG POSTS ABOUT LIFE AND WRITING

If you’re of a certain age, or ever went to Scout camp, you may already been humming along.

I’m having to sign up to follow and receive via email more and more blogs, because the bloggers I’ve been following for years are publishing fewer and fewer posts, and I need reading material to keep myself centered in the writer-support blogosphere I inhabit.

I write fewer posts because most of my posts have had something to do with the skills I acquired while learning to write – and I’m not actively working on those right now unless I find something I need to learn to get through a current scene.

Because I’m getting to the end of Netherworld – and know exactly where I’m going.

And there aren’t any tricky or new scenes – just the kind of wrapping up I’m hoping will put smiles on readers’ faces, followed by worried frowns about the implications!

I use writers’ blogs to stay up-to-date

I haven’t done marketing in a while (and it shows) because I have two brain cells, and one is needed for breathing, while the other takes an occasional turn at writing a few more words.

But one of these days someone will post something which will trigger something else, and I’ll be off and running.

There are lots of beginner ‘How to’ posts, fewer post on marketing, and almost none on marketing a very small output. At least not successfully.

So I take on new blogs

when I find one which has something a little less basic to say, or is in an area I probably won’t write – hoping to steal the genesis of an idea I can tweak into the book-selling campaign of the century.

I’d appreciate suggestions of blogs to follow, especially if you wouldn’t mind telling me what you like about them.

New platforms may be the problem

I don’t think I’m going to try Instagram or Tik Tok or Book Tok or even Twitter – mostly because I don’t think that’s where my kind of writer finds readers and followers.

Certainly not Youtube – not now! The competition must be fierce.

Trying a Patreon was a waste of time for me (this time) because you have to bring your own followers – and then generate extra material for them. The latter I like – I have lots of words about process and writing – but I don’t have yet the critical mass of followers, and, with very little energy, can’t afford to try.

But a lot of people ARE moving to the new platforms – the young ‘uns don’t use FB much any more.

Where are the readers?

To be more specific for me, where are the readers of mainstream/literary/contemporary fiction, but only those who are not hiding behind the wall of ‘I only read traditionally published and vetted fiction.’

And that, my dear readers, I have not solved yet.

But then I spend most of my time writing lately, and ultimately that will have to yield the answer.

So I try each new blog I find through blogs I already read or people who somehow find me, and participate for a while to see if we are a good fit. There are tens of thousands of my words out there contributing to these fun conversations.

Eventually we will reach critical mass, right?

I’d hate to think the indie experiment is doomed.

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Send me your recommended blogs.

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Is labeling mainstream novels literary counterproductive?

A REVOLUTION HAPPENED AND NOBODY NOTICED

Amazon tries; it really does.

To satisfy its customers, to make searching for what they want easy (easier), to supply it efficiently.

By revolution I mean both also that things turned around – 180° – from where they were, sort of, before.

Because before this all happened, ‘literary’ was a separate category in bookstores.

And literary meant a number of things:

• Difficult to read, requiring great attention
• Small in scope – One DAY in the life of Ivan Denisovich
• Elitist
• Using difficult flowery language
• Very detailed – a navel closely observed and described
• Slow and languid
• Somehow not for everyone
• Requiring a large SAT vocabulary
• For people with an MA in English or Literature
• Suitable proof for a doctorate
• A credential for teaching English or Literature
• With a limited audience
• Special
• Art
• Cliched
• Maybe French or translated from Italian or Russian
• Not commercial
• Often not ending anywhere near happily

Add or subtract from my list what comes into your head when you hear ‘literary novel.’ Please feel free to mention them in a comment.

What’s the revolution, you ask?

That ‘literary’ now means ‘traditionally published good stuff’ on Amazon, and is seen as almost the exclusive purview of, you guessed it, the traditional publishers large and small.

The books that are vetted by agents and editors at publishing companies (excluding the celebrity stuff), and are therefore both ‘better’ and ‘not for the hoi polloi.’

The other similar term is ‘historical,’ which is a little fuzzier and often about WWII, sometimes about WWI or the American Civil War.

Because the term ‘mainstream’ disappeared, and is not the same as ‘contemporary,’ which can be attached to, say, a Romance and a worldview: ‘Contemporary Christian Romance’ is a searchable thing.

It is considered presumptuous to label your own work ‘classic.’

And ‘General Fiction’ is not a category, but a garbage can.

‘Psychological’ is filling the empty slot somewhat – almost all novels for grownups are psychological, but is confounded by ‘thriller,’ ‘horror’, and ‘women’s fiction.’ With, of course, nothing actually labeled ‘fiction for men.’

It used to be possible to find mainstream fiction by looking for ‘a novel’ on the cover. No more. It now means only ‘book of at least 50 pages.’

It doesn’t matter for mainstream because

I’m convinced readers of mainstream fiction who use Amazon come there to find a good price on something they’ve already decided to buy.

I don’t think they search on Amazon. Not beyond maybe being attracted by something similar being offered by the ‘also read’ bots. There is just too much stuff.

They get their recommendations elsewhere – book critics (who rarely do SPAs*), reviews in the few places which still have book sections (print journalism has taken a lot of hits lately, too), and the publicity material put out for their best-selling authors by the traditional publishers (other authors get bupkis from traditional publishers – return on investment isn’t worth it).

So the market is saturated and sopped up by the same few titles which keep those offices in Manhattan open for the publishers (and their unpaid interns).

I’m hoping for virality. It can make the huge difference to a start – and then the writing must maintain the quality so that future books, even if widely spaces, are eagerly awaited.

Feel free to help kick that off – if you like mainstream fiction.

Don’t let ‘the system’ keep producing same old, same old – and then complain you can’t find anything you like to read.

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Thank you for listening to the daily rant. Now, if I could just manage to do it daily! 🙂

Oh, and the answer to the title question is yes: ‘Literary’ has too many negative and restrictive connotations in the minds of too many readers.

‘Literary’ is not a good substitute for such terms as mainstream, ‘big book’, epic, blockbuster, or commercial novel. It isn’t the same. Even when the intent is to make it a synonym with ‘well written.’

IMNVHO (In my not very humble opinion,)

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Final note: Pride’s Children: PURGATORY is taking part today and for the next few days at a promotion at HelloBooks – which has many other wonderful bargains for serious readers of General Fiction (its category) and many other genres.

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*SPAs = self-published authors, sometimes known as indies or independent authors

Loving scenes where the villain wins

HOW TO FEEL RIGHT ABOUT LETTING THE VILLAIN WIN

Some lights are seen better in contrast with dark.

NOT necessarily permanently – I don’t write downers or tragedies – but so you have done a good job when writing something that, in the long run, enhances the story.

A hero is a hero ONLY in comparison to the obstacle overcome.

The DIFFERENCE between the hero’s HIGH and the villain’s LOW is the STAKES of your story.

The answer to every objection is: Does it make the story better?

Even in a long book, you have only so much space to use the whole palette of emotions that go with your story. You don’t get to waffle about – you have to use what you have, and make it squeal.

This means that you have to be confident enough to do what the STORY needs, even when it hurts – or at least feels odd – when you get to the place where you have to write that the wrong character is winning.

For a while, you tell yourself.

Not permanently.

So the ‘winning’ characters have something to overcome that is worth writing about.

But plotting it to happen and writing the scene are different

I knew what I was going into when I chose to start writing this novel trilogy. It is in many ways a fairytale for grownups, something that is highly improbable in the real world.

But I figured out a way to make it come out the way I wanted.

I found a way to make the ending POSSIBLE.

And, as you might expect, it required some finagling to make it interesting and not trivial.

It required making ‘highly improbable’ ALMOST ‘impossible.’

And then doing the writing to make it happen.

Believably.

To me. Who am picky about plausibility.

Because the characters need to change

Some of them do.

And change of direction requires the application of force.

Nobody changes unless they have to.

And these characters had no reason to go looking for change, except that I wanted them to.

The bigger the change, the bigger the applied force needs to be

The applied force is the stakes, and I needed to make the stakes big enough to make a couple of very stubborn characters change, so it’s really their fault.

But then I got to the actual writing

And I found I had to make the reasons for change credible because the characters had turned into people I cared about.

So the actual writing of the lowest scenes not just in the middle novel, but in the whole trilogy, was hard.

Even though I knew it was coming and exactly what was going to happen.

I had to admit that there was no way around the difficulties I plotted in in the first place. Duh!

So I went ahead and wrote the first of these scenes, and it was as hard as I imagined it would be, and harder because I write linearly, and couldn’t postpone doing it now.

I am proud to say I survived

The story survived.

Some version of the characters survived.

The villain got to win.

At least for the time being, but mostly because it is necessary.

If you aren’t writing stakes you care about, I can’t see the point of putting in the kind of work this is taking. Because it is very hard to let the villain get away with things, even temporarily, because it is necessary to create that leverage for change.

And I had to give it the very best writing I could create – and make every tiny step in the win justified – because otherwise the villain is a straw villain, easy to overturn.

I hope it works for my readers after it works for me.

Or you guys are really going to hate me.

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How do you feel about this kind of story – as a reader?

If you’re a writer, have you ever had to do the same?

I’ve earned some kind of reward.

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When to restart a scene from scratch

Yup, blank.

SOMETIMES YOU CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE

I gather a lot of pre-written material when I start a scene.

I also have a lot of lists of prompts I fill out which remind me to think of various aspects of a scene, from the internal twist to the various beats to the emotions I wish to invoke in Readers, so I’ve created a lot of new material now that I’m about to write this scene.

And I have one bugaboo, what I call the Old Text (OT), the original polished-but-primitive draft that I wrote when I had the three books in the trilogy plotted out, and wanted to see that I could make it logically from the first line to the last.

The Old Text can be missing, a few paragraphs, a scene in the wrong point of view (pov), or even, in the worst case, a

PERFECT FINISHED COMPLETE SCENE IN THE CORRECT CHARACTER’S POINT OF VIEW.

Except it’s not right.

And every attempt to take what you have and rework it, rearrange it, change it, edit it, tweak it

doesn’t work.

It’s still wrong.

Worse, it’s throwing you off and keeping you from getting into the character’s pov so you can fix things.

For those times you have a secret weapon:

You can choose not to keep ANY of what you wrote before.

Or only a couple of tiny new pieces you just wrote that you know are in the right pov.

Or an image or two, reworded of course.

Or the time/day/date.

Or even the idea of the scene.

But you don’t have to because there is no Scene Police Division

down at writing headquarters.

No one who can make you, encourage you, or even try to persuade you.

Just because you wrote it gives it no rights.

Just because it was finished, complete, polished, and has impeccable grammar and spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, and you worked for days on it way back when you wrote that particular version, it has no integrity or separate solidity: it is just as friable as your grocery list.

With me, it means I am really stuck.

All the journaling in the world can’t fix something that needs to be plowed under and redesigned from the bottom up.

I just redid a scene like this – from a blank page. After getting fairly close to…something.

I had so much new stuff to put into the scene, and such a solid Old Text version, I thought it might be one of the few things that survived from that draft.

Nuh uh.

Maybe if I had published the scene as a story fifteen or twenty years ago when I wrote this particular little gem, and spent days or weeks getting it to be the best I could do back then. It might have been a book I removed from my backlist after getting much better with the newer books.

I’m glad I didn’t publish that older draft.

Even I had the sense to realize it needed a lot of work.

The new version is so much better.

But I hadn’t realized that the OT had so much power.

I didn’t want to start from scratch. I didn’t want to dump everything.

I wasn’t sure I could write something better, or come up with an entirely different version of the original idea.

That’s just the FEAR talking. Trying to protect me from wasted effort (old and new).

So I labeled the old contents ‘draft version’, and left it where I could get to it easily if I needed to swipe something from it.

And I started a blank file with the words: ‘just putting this here so the page isn’t blank’

And I started all over again, paying special attention to how that character operated, felt, saw, listened and wrote it again from the top.

Then I deleted ‘just putting this here so the page isn’t blank’, proceeded with my other steps to get a scene into final usable state, and didn’t insist it contain any of that old but good stuff, and …

It’s finished. It came out far better. I wrote the new version in a day or two, edited and polished it, and it doesn’t look at all like the OT.

I still can’t imagine any amount of tweaking that would have turned the previous grammatically-correct-but-completely-wrong and progress-blocking scene into what I signed off on today.

It hurt. A lot. All that nice clean text!

But sometimes you have no choice but to start from scratch.

**********

The writer’s Kindergarten: cut and paste

WHEN STUCK I GO BACK TO BASICS

And I’m writing this post now for two reasons:

1. I just had to go through this – again – and other writers might need the same trick
2. When I woke up this morning and reached for something on my desk, I disturbed the page I used (photo above), scattered all the little pieces of paper, and realized I don’t need to keep them around forever, even if they did rescue me.

I’m an extreme plotter by nature and by practice and by brain damage.

Things have to be organized so I know what goes in each scene, because I can only work with the content of ONE scene at a time (and yes, if you’re wondering, I have used this trick on paragraphs, beats, and scenes as well, when my brain refused to do the organizing internally).

When I got to the current piece in the middle of the WIP, I realized that, inexplicably when I stared at it, the next scene was NOT ready for my ‘process.’

I came to a standstill

For several days.

Abortive attempts to write the next scene failed to make that scene gel, despite having a title and the usual nubs I use to attach words.

Since I was worrying about politics, and in the middle of getting vaccinated for the coronavirus, it took me a while to track down the reason: when I was doing the Great Reorganization of 2007 (GR07), I had had the same reluctance, created something that sort of worked at the time (a list of scenes covering what would happen in this part of the story), and decided to DEAL WITH IT LATER.

Unusual for me, but I was trying to get to the end of GR07, we had half the way to go, and I only had a few more days of the concentrated time I had been saving for the reorganization.

I believe in football American style they cause it punting.

In 2007 I moved on

Never thinking that it would be 2021 when I got to this point in the writing.

I was young(er). Naive(er).

Trying desperately to take that original rough (very rough) first draft of the whole story to the next level – which required the complete reorganization AND a committed devotion to upping the quality of my writing (no, you are never going to see that draft).

and it worked

I moved on. GR07 became the reality.

By dint of work, the writing problems got solved one by one.

Pride’s Children PURGATORY was written and published in 2015 (yeah, I’m slow), and I immediately moved on to NETHERWORLD.

I believe they call it a poison pill

Maybe not so bad.

But a buried little landmine all the same.

Because there was a reason. I know it now and I knew it then: this piece was going to be very hard to write.

And, as is usual with such, incredibly important.

I couldn’t handle it in 2000, when the story came to me.

I couldn’t handle it in 2007, except to realize there was no way around it, and I would have to deal with it during the writing of the second book (nameless at that point).

And I couldn’t handle it at first when it got to be late 2020 and I hit the red flag marking the mine.

I couldn’t even have written this post.

You can’t skimp on the hard parts when you write

The hard parts are WHY you, and not someone else, is telling this story.

The hard parts are where your writing should shine, and, given enough work and time, where they will.

If your story doesn’t have hard parts well executed in it, it’s not going to be the best book you can write.

Because you shirked.

I don’t shirk.

I kick and scream and complain and try to find ways around the roadblock and hope some insight will just remove it.

And then I admit it needs the work, and I do it.

On this one I had to go back to Kindergarten

Yup. Basics. Writing things on single lines. And cutting the sheet into real-life strips of paper.

And rearranging those strips, edited as necessary (in pencil), into the RIGHT order, with the right words, plus any surrounding fill text, until the whole emerged.

Somehow.

That’s the level I have to go back to when things get really bolloxed up for whatever reason.

Eventually, it works, and I find it all amusing. Sometimes I blog about it.

But you’d think that by now I’d be out of Kindergarten, wouldn’t you?

**********

Nothing stays resolved long enough to write

I KEEP STARTING POSTS THAT GO NOWHERE

My apologies for being lost – missing in non-action.

Every time I start settling into a topic something happens.

Often it makes what I was going to write pointless.

The pandemic is a rollercoaster

Over 250,000 dead – and we’re pretending it’s not happening, led from the top?

Over 11,000,000 cases – and that’s only ones that are caught and tallied?

We’re heading into the winter flu season – conditions will be ripe for passing on ALL kinds of viruses and germs – so the numbers that are already horrifying me are going to get much, much worse.

And people (!?!) are still planning to get together for Thanksgiving in the USA after the reports from the Canadian Thanksgiving which showed surges from people getting together and spending time in interior spaces without masks.

Do we really have to repeat or exceed the 50,000,000 worldwide deaths from the 1918 flu?

It’s bad enough that we’re repeating the behavior from 1918.

Oh, and they’re starting to talk of triage in hospitals, and letting the weak and old and disabled and ill die first again. People like me.

Election results are a rollercoaster

I don’t even want to go there.

I avoid even the reputable news sources closer to neutral and accurate reporting because they are telling us everything, because we need to be able to find out, but I can’t take it any more.

It took me forever to figure out the ‘Opinion’ pieces on The Washington Post are only that, someone’s opinion.

They aren’t news or truth or even remotely accurate just because other part of the newpaper are supposed to be unbiased reporting.

Their headlines sit there and jangle me.

Every previous (well, in my memory – since about 1969 when I moved to the States) ex-president or failing candidate conceded, called and congratulated the winner of the election, and made plans – for the good of the nation. Power alternated between parties, and legislatures were not necessarily of the same party.

And it will be months of this wrangling, while we hold our breath and the departing administration tries to lock in its failures or perceived gains, instead of moving on.

The lockdown at our little CCRC is a rollercoaster

We have lost and gained and lost again:

• the outdoor pool
• the indoor pool
• the gym
• meetings of a certain size
• dining in the dining room with friends
• use of public rooms, the arts room, and the various lounges
• singing

and every other resident activity that makes living in this kind of retirement community a pleasure.

Some have returned via TV or zoom; others will have to wait.

And people still have not mastered the simple requirement of wearing a mask that covers NOSE AND MOUTH, ALL the time, and not handling things like the microphone.

We have had relatively few cases – but we have had some, and we go in fear that something will change or get worse.

My personal life is a rollercoaster

Some of it is probably stress, and continued stress, and never really being able to relax from stress.

My pain meds – which I always used to toss down the hatch with some water without thinking much about it – have been giving me major trouble. I think it’s finally become impossible for me to take them on an empty stomach (I would often remember to take the night ones right before bed).

With all the time I have, I can’t count on myself to be functional, and it seems to take huge amounts of attention to find myself with a couple of hours during which I can focus. I hope that gets better.

But we’re heading into WINTER, and I know I am highly affected by the shortening of the days. It is worse because I am already a night owl, insomnia seems to be part of the package, and, if I go to bed at 6am, and sleep until 11 or 12, and then need an afternoon nap or two, I have precious few hours exposed to daylight.

I should be arranging for a couple of surgeries, one relatively minor (but nothing is minor when you’re a slow healer), one significant – and I don’t want to go anywhere near a hospital right now.

There is some POSSIBILITY that research into post-covid long-haulers MIGHT deliver some results for those of us with ME/CFS – but nothing much has appeared yet, and it’s a long-odds hope. More likely: the new sick people with symptoms like mine will overwhelm the available medical systems – which have nothing to offer them because they’ve never developed it for people like me.

All that is hard to manage on a day to day basis

And I can’t plan, and I can’t count on myself, and I can’t see my kids, and I can’t help anyone.

But I am managing to write a few words when I’m not oscillating like a tuning fork.

And after 31 years, I at least have the ability to know that if it’s a while yet, I’ll survive, and not go completely off the rails because of ‘pandemic fatigue.’

And that is why I haven’t blogged much.

I’ll get there. We’ll all get there, those of us who survive, but it’s a rollercoaster.

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Sparing your characters pain that’s necessary

IT’S UP TO THE WRITER TO FORCE GROWTH

Characters you create become like children: you worry about them, you care what happens to them, you’re concerned when they come home late from some unsavory place.

But the hardest thing you do for them is to force them to grow – because without change in at least some of the characters, nothing much is happening, and there is no story worth telling.

Characters grow like all people:

By confronting and dealing with problems.

By coming across situations that force them to think.

By finding themselves in situations where they have to make a decision.

What they don’t tell you is that the writer is responsible for planning and guiding and forcing change.

For building the obstacles that are so hard to overcome.

And for making them almost impossible to survive.

When you start a story

You have a general idea of who your characters are and will become – you create them to tell a particular story.

You ask, ‘What if…?’

And you make up people, based on what you know about humanity in general, and maybe some models in particular.

But even though you realize in general that you will be putting them through Hell, it’s not personal yet.

While writing a story

You flesh out the people who are acting in it, and, to be able to write them, you become them, you let them use your body and your mind to tell their part of the story.

You channel the character.

And then you observe very carefully what they actually do, and put it in the best words you can come up with.

And you come to that old saw, ‘This hurts me more than it hurts you,’ and you do it anyway, you hurt them – and you feel like a cad for doing it, but it has to be done.

Knowing you’re only hurting yourself, and that maybe, for this once, more than in life, it actually does matter. It is necessary to get to where you’re taking them.

And at the end

If you’ve done your job properly.

If every step is motivated.

If every step is not optional.

Your readers will forgive you.

And maybe agree with you: it had to be done.

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Target reader emotions when you plot

WHAT DOES THE READER REALLY WANT?

I just had a tough decision to make in a scene.

I waffled – there were two ways to write the thing, and there were pros and cons for each of the ways.

Until I hit the right question.

The two ways were:

for a character to stew all day hoping she could achieve her goal that night

-or-

to be confident all day that she would achieve the goal, and spend the time planning how she would enjoy it.

The first way is more dramatic – for the character.

The question?

What is worse – for the READER?

The actual plot will go to the same place: either she will or she will not get what she wants; that was predetermined in 2000 when I started this.

But now that I’m writing the scenes, I need to shift a bit from ‘what happens’ to ‘how do I PRESENT what happens’?

I know where it’s going – the reader does not.

I created the rollercoaster – the reader wants a good ride and a thrill.

My virtual teachers (writing books) teach me that the reader can handle the centrifugal force from being thrown around curves in the plot.

More than they can handle being on a nice calm piece of exposition which is BORING.

Once I asked the right question

the answer was obvious.

The ride for the reader is MEH if they see her seethe all day – they can hope she won’t achieve her goal, assume something will come along, again, to defeat her.

Instead, if I write it right, the reader will see her confident – and reviewing all the reasons she is sure to get – what they don’t want her to get!

And that will torture the reader more than the feeling of ‘she has failed before, she will fail again’ READER certainty.

Can’t have the reader comfortable, now, can we?

Process

This is why I spend the time arguing with myself, in writing, and asking myself why my brain isn’t letting me go ahead with the writing – because it needs to know which plan we’re following here before it will set out the tea lights in their little tin holders and illuminate the path we’ll walk.

I never get much lighting beyond what I need strictly not to tumble over roots and rocks. Then I pick my way along.

It works better for me to know – and the reader to have to guess – where we’re going. I already discard great gobs of ideas and executions which are not what I need. I can’t afford to make decisions on the fly.

I like my shiny new toy. I’ve been using an intuitive version of it for a long time, but I love having the tool be something I am conscious about, in the top tray of the toolbox. Makes it more likely that I’ll pick it up.

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If you’re a writer, do you do this?

If you’re a reader, admit it – you want drama, not a smooth ride. You want that ending EARNED.

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There is only one way to the ending

DO YOU TRUST YOUR AUTHOR?

And it goes THROUGH the plot, through the characters, through the planning that an extreme plotter like me goes into great detail to connect.

Novels start with ‘WHAT IF?”

And must continue to the bitter end, or their promise is compromised by the very one who created them, because of FEAR.

I admit it. It’s going to get rough, very rough, for my characters – as I’ve known since this story came to me.

There is no way this ‘WHAT IF?’ works – except my way. The way I designed to answer that question TWENTY YEARS AGO.

A great portion of that time has been spent making sure it is the ONLY way I can write THIS story.

The Resistance Journal tells the story

Saturday July 25, 2020 at 6:02 PM

…

All I need to do is in front of me: finish this scene, finish the next, … – get on with it.
Nothing is going to change in the plot.
I can’t make it sweeter or more palatable – and it is NECESSARY.

…
And then … steps up and decides to fight for what … wants.
This is what I’m writing.
This is what I designed.
This is what’s foretold in the …
Nothing has changed.

I have removed (…) the pieces that would give away too much of the plot.

The angst is real. Writers bleed with their characters.

We don’t LIKE causing pain: it is NECESSARY.

Our characters have to grow, change, evolve, show us the consequences of their decisions in their lives – because this is the entire purpose of fiction: showing readers what happens when different life choices are made.

Have readers ever thought about this?

I know I never did, as a reader. When Agatha Christie killed someone off, I never wondered if it caused her personal pain.

When Dorothy L. Sayers denied her detective the woman he loved, I cried (metaphorically) into my (metaphorical) hanky – but I never wondered much what it cost Sayers.

Now I understand – because I WRITE

No mother ever reared a child without that child crying. Not successfully, anyway.

Not with a child who grew up with the tools to become an adult (they still have to do so much work after we leave them be).

Writers get to be judge, jury, and executioner.

We also get to commit the crime, and be the detective, and work in the hospital where the crushed bodies come in to be healed.

This is what we do:

We torture characters after we make readers care for them.

To show their humanity.

It’s getting harder.

My beta reader tells me she gets what I’m doing.

She calls me a horrible person, too. Which is fine.

You don’t get to have an influence without challenging the status quo.

And it’s going to get a lot worse before it’s better.

I promise: eventually it will be better.

But it has to be EARNED.

Thanks for listening

It’s particularly hard right now.

And I worry about whether readers will decide this is the place where they stop reading.

But then I remember they sat through The Silence of the Lambs.

I’m not THAT bad.

And I mean well. Really.

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Seniors beginning the covid-19 hard part

THE CONSEQUENCES OF SMALL MISTAKES MIGHT BE DEATH

That’s what makes it so scary.

We have now had one staff case of covid-19.

Management sent a memo, said this staff person is not in direct contact with Residents of our retirement community, and that they had done contact tracing with whoever might have been in contact with the staff person. They were waiting for the results.

Today, at our weekly half-hour QuaranTV closed-circuit broadcast, I asked, and was told the tests on the contacts have come back negative. We have not been told how the staff person is – they were home self-isolating a week ago or so, and we have not had any more information.

And a couple in Independent Living

is under their doctor’s care, and self-isolating in their apartment.

Word is they brought the virus in from somewhere they went, which could have been anything: a doctor’s appointment, a trip to the grocery store, dinner in town during the recent reopening (now canceled), or a trip to their Lake Tahoe home for a weekend or a month.

I understand privacy laws.

We will be told only what we need to know.

Which begs one important question in a facility which also has Assisted Living, Skilled Nursing, and Memory Support: can the person(s) whose contacts were traced be trusted to remember everyone they came in contact with?

A major facility rehab is ongoing

Painting, new carpeting, woodwork – the whine of tools is omnipresent.

The workers are doing their best – and need the work.

But I keep seeing people – Residents, staff, workers – who seem to not realize that the mask they are wearing MUST cover the NOSE as well as the mouth. Or is basically useless.

Why so many people are incompetent at that basic task baffles me.

They don’t seem to realize. I’ve seen someone when reminded put the mask up over the nose – only to have it fall off IMMEDIATELY – and then they do nothing.

How do we protect ourselves?

I personally treat the entire world outside our apartment as contaminated with a layer of a fine dust. The dust is invisible. The dust is like the radioactive dust from Chernobyl: invisible but deadly.

“If you could SEE the virus, would you go out?” asks a Facebook post.

Of course not. And if we did, we’d take it more seriously.

But that only includes those who listen to the scientists, and understand the concept that whatever you pick up needs to be delivered, at some time, to your eyes, nose, or mouth – the mucous membranes are their target.

Even just putting on my gear – nametag, mask, phone into plastic sandwich bag into pocket, keys into other pocket, backpack – is the start of the whole ‘you might be contaminated.’ I wash my hands at least twice when I come back: once immediately, and again once I have removed my outer gear, nametag, etc., etc. – just in case.

I don’t know if those who have gotten ill here – staff and Resident – were careless

I’m assuming they were unlucky.

Since we don’t know, AND THERE ARE NO PRECAUTIONS WE AREN’T ALREADY TAKING, it doesn’t really matter.

I won’t worry – I will just continue to do EVERYTHING, because I don’t know what people are thinking out there.

Wash hands. Don’t touch face. Wear mask. Do not give the virus, which you may assume you have picked up somewhere, A RIDE TO YOUR EYES, NOSE, OR MOUTH.

THIS IS STILL THE FIRST WAVE OF THE PANDEMIC

We in the States never defeated the First Wave.

The Reopeners are living in a fairyland.

There is no vaccine.

There is no cure.

The treatments are symptomatic – and don’t fix much.

If you end up in a hospital, you’re already in bad shape.

If you end up on a ventilator, your chances of making it out are abysmal.

An estimated 10% are NOT RECOVERING – still sick after months.

And we’ve now had several cases in our little enclave.

And Yolo County – and most of California – are finally paying attention and closing down, because there are more cases and more deaths – AGAIN.

I’d hate to be one of the unnecessary deaths.

One of the people who were refused treatment.

One who got the virus from someone acting irresponsibly.

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It sounds self-centered, but the time will go by, regardless of how I use it. I’m writing. NETHERWORLD continues to get written, polished, and sent out to my lovely beta reader.

Me NOT writing will help no one.

If I’m still around, I will have made progress.

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Which reminds me: I promised to leave a summary of the rest of the trilogy – so you know what happens – where it will be made available to anyone who started reading.

In case I don’t make it.

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To the lovely person who bought a paperback: thank you! Hope you leave a review.

Some people prefer paper.

I set my ebook and paperback prices so I make around $5 when someone buys either; it seems about right.

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Love you all. Drop by and tell me you’re okay.

Alicia

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The point in writing with care

EVERY WRITER ANSWERS THIS QUESTION

It has become common for writers to tell other writers how to write.

Unless they are discouraging other writers deliberately to keep the competition down!

And every writer who has any control (beginners can often see only one way to do things) constantly makes choices:

• Is this word the best word for this use?
• Will MY readers think this is pretentious – or the reason they read ME?
• If I use a sentence fragment as part of my style, or this particular character’s mental processes, or [select reason] – will MY readers get their panties in a twist?
• Can my intended readers follow plot complexities?
• And – most importantly – am I limiting myself by the way I prefer to write?

All of these are valid questions, all have to be answered regularly, all have many answers.

How to choose?

I’m asking myself these questions, as usual, because I just finished the last two scenes in a chapter, and it took me two whole days of using AutoCrit (my online editing program) to get the text the way I wanted it.

Two whole days of whatever brainpower I could muster is still a lot of hours.

And they are hard work. Choices come down to nuance, nuance to familiarity, familiarity to everything I’ve ever read – and processed.

For an example, I’ll put up a section of these scenes, and show the differences:

There are hundreds of little changes between when I’m finished with the story and when I’m finished with the language.

Why change?

The original was fine, with nothing hugely wrong.

But I’ll find I overused a particular word or phrase.

Or a piece of dialogue doesn’t sound like the character (Cecily, like Andrew, is Irish).

In fact, just as I finished checking the above comparison, I realized I’m missing two places where my tiny intimation of the speaker being Irish is incorrect (I use ye’re – but still have you’re) – and that will be checked several more times before publication.

This section comes from Scrivener – and is missing italics. I’ll have to check to make sure those are as I want them, as discussed in a post on my stylistic choices.

I do my own editing

This is a statement of fact, not a battle-cry.

I found early that my brain is too damaged to do the negotiating, arguing, back and forth, discussing – that goes with having someone else edit your work.

And that it was easier for me to take on the task, plus it forced me to improve my bad habits immediately.

I like the control. I accept the responsibility. And the mistakes I make will get corrected asap if egregious, with the next major revision if minor.

And there isn’t an ant’s chance with an anteater that I’ll have to defend my own choices: nobody can possibly know my style better than I can.

I have the sense to use an excellent beta reader – and always pay attention to what she catches or notices (she’s usually right).

For someone like me, it even saves a lot of time (a relatively expensive commodity for me). Because I handle a single scene (up to maybe 3k) at a time, and it’s familiar to me because I just wrote it, so I don’t have to reload anything into my memory.

The pitfalls of that are obvious: the mistakes will get overlooked because they are so familiar. So I have many passes for just one thing. I have checklists. I keep a list of the things I haven’t mastered.

Nothing’s perfect, but that does get a lot of the little typo buggers.

Is it ‘good enough’?

Yes – after I put the hours, the work in.

Is it getting easier? Yes – if I still put the hours in, and the work, and don’t try to shorten the editing phase by getting impatient to finish.

I think it matters.

It does make me very slow.

I think it’s worth the effort.

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Does lack of editing in published work irritate you? Do you notice it?

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Thanks again to Stencil for the ability to create graphics – and their free account. If I ever need more than ten a month, I’ll get their paid subscription!

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Creating and maintaining tension below the surface

BOOKS ARE NOT WRITTEN FOR THE WRITER

You’d think by now this would be obvious: the writer is the FIRST reader, but not the INTENDED reader.

Because writing is a split-brain activity, it is easy to forget that what bothers the writer may not bother the READER, by design.

And you don’t want to go to where things bother the reader.

Annoy, make uncomfortable, show up, irritate – all good words of what the writer should do to the reader – which is SHAKE THE READER UP.

Get under the reader’s skin. Make the reader think. Create a discombobulated feeling in the reader that can only be fixed by the reader changing.

All those are good – but bothering the reader means the writer did something wrong.

And this is where the split personality is required:

I have just written the final two scenes in a chapter.

They were hard to write. There is a lot going on sub rosa. By the end of the book, these two characters will loathe each other.

And right now they are thrown together in an unexpected way, with no warning to either.

But the rules of polite society apply, and they must be civil, even cordial, to each other for a period of time that may be up to two days long.

And one would very much like to get something the other has.

So the scenes are currently driving me a little batty

because the surface must be unruffled – at this point in the story there is no basis for which one person can truly dislike the other.

Which bring me back to the title of this post: Creating and maintaining tension BELOW THE SURFACE.

And the words I put on the graphic:

Books are written

for the READER

To remind myself that, when it’s all over, I have to do better than the street repair team in my previous township. I need the surface to look like the original street, not the repaired street.

A repaired street has a visible patch of asphalt or concrete – of a different color.

A repaired street patch may create a dip in the road as the subsoil settles.

A repaired street show where the damage was.

But a book can’t show where the choices were made

A novel must be seamless.

The scenes must flow.

The reader must be able to know a great deal of why the scene is happening now – as she reads it.

And the writer is not allowed (not by my standards) to stuff description and exposition into a scene just because there is space.

It is work to get it right – it would be much easier to just relax the standards and throw something the reader might need later into the present scene.

But here’s the rub: readers know. And when they run into chunks of exposition, they skip or skim.

And then they don’t find out what the writer was supposedly trying to tell them anyway.

I really, really hope I didn’t do that

I’ll find out when my first reader lets me know; I’ll find out when reviewers speak their minds.

I think I managed it.

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