If you're brave enough to fly

I have spent this week scribbling with red pen on my manuscript.  Ten chapters down, and I am at a crossroads.

I have made one discovery: the title The White Raven is all wrong for this book.  The previous title I had used – Thought and Memory – is the right title after all.

And I seem to have several superfluous characters.  They worked for the previous version of the book, and while I really love them, I think I may need to excise them.  It’s going to make for a lot more work and rewriting, but I think this version of the book will be better for it.  It also pretty much means that most of the second half of the book will be thrown in the trash.

And I still don’t know if this is going to result in something that I’m going to be able to send to agents or publishers.  But I guess even if it doesn’t, I’ll have learned something.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

This morning it is raining.  Good, proper rain (though it seems to have stopped for now), which we haven’t experienced in Perth for a very long time.  There’s a chance of a thunderstorm today, too, which I hope pans out.

(And we pause for a moment while my kid decides that the back of my laptop is tasty.  Well, Mummy, it has an apple on it!)

I got actual proper sleep last night – seven solid hours.  Here’s hoping that the current bout of teething is over, so I can catch up on sleep a little.  The kid woke up earlyish at 6:30am, but that’s entirely doable when I’ve had actual sleep.

Yesterday, as you will have seen, I spent a lot of time printing out the last draft of The White Raven, along with my character sketches and story outline.  I started working on inputting my character sketches into a fresh Scrivener document yesterday and will continue to keep working on that today.  Then, I read through the last draft and see if I can get a working outline.  I’m going to be ripping out the guts of this draft, which is something I really enjoy.  If I could employ someone else to write my first drafts, I’d be happy, I think.  But we all have stages of writing that we don’t like.

Reading yesterday: I finished Sue Isle’s Nightsiders, the first of Twelfth Planet Press’s Twelve Planets books.  Enjoyed it thoroughly, and now I also want to work on my dystopic Perth book.  I’ll be starting Tansy Rayner Roberts’ Love and Romanpunk today, which I am looking forward to greatly.

More Game of Thrones last night, which I am still enjoying enormously.  Giving serious thought to reading the books at the same pace as the show.  I have read the first two books in the series, but it was long enough ago that I’ve forgotten the details now.  And I have to give mention to the latest episode of Doctor Who, which is up there with my favourite episodes of all time.  How can you go wrong with Neil Gaiman and Doctor Who.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

Since I seem to be working primarily on The White Raven right now, I started another Tumblr account, this one devoted to inspiration for this book.

Things like this:

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

I’ve been working on The White Raven, and, along with writing a very detailed outline (in which the book is becoming very, very different from its last incarnation), I’m also putting together a new playlist.

This is Alanna’s song:

I’m not sure what I’m looking for anymore
I just know that I’m harder to console
I don’t see who I’m trying to be instead of me

All this running around, well it’s getting me down
Just give me a pain that I’m used to
I don’t need to believe all the dreams you conceive
You just need to achieve something that rings true

There’s a hole in your soul like an animal
With no conscience, repentance unknown
Close your eyes, pay the price for your paradise
Devils feed on the seeds that are sown

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

Today’s progress:

Project: White Raven draft one.

New words: 2,021

Total words: 51,829

Goal: 100k

Writing:

I started late today, thanks to my own procrastination (I really need to cut down on blogs and rss feeds again), and honestly expected a kind of crap writing day.  I should know that usually heralds a fairly decent day

Got into a section of the book that’s tough to write.  I’m actively torturing pretty much every one of my characters emotionally now.  Which hopefully makes for some interesting reading.

Real life:

Went for a walk this morning.  Grocery shopping.

The human suit is having a bit of a complain this morning.  Back’s randomly sore, which has made it a bit hard to concentrate.  Sometimes my default writing place (on the couch, with legs up and laptop on lap) is a really good thing.  Today it just made my back hurt more.  And yet I still sit here.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

Last week was pretty much completely useless for writing.  I found myself completely stuck - not blocked, but stuck, not wanting to go any further with the current draft of The White Raven.

Over the weekend, amidst much pondering and wondering, I figured out why I was stuck.

And I think I’ve figured out how to fix it.

Unfortunately for me, it’s going to require a complete rethinking of this novel.  As in, I’m going to chuck out about half of what’s there right now and rework it.  Which means that I’m going back, essentially, to a first draft.  One with some good bones in place already, but with a lot of fleshing out between those bones required.

This book actually has a very long history with me.  The original concept came to me somewhere around age 20, and I’ve tooled around with it on and off for years.  Which shows in how bloated the plot has become.  I’m streamlining it, and hopefully it’s all going to work better this way.  As it is, I’m looking forward to working on it now, which says a lot to me.

I’ve decided that I’m going to try to update once a week as to how the edits of The White Raven are going.

This week, I’ve managed to get the first two and a half chapters edited.  I’d really like to get the last half of chapter three done, but the brain’s begging for a rest right now.  Maybe I’ll get enthused over the weekend and get it done.

It’s surprising me how much I’m liking this book.  The hard part is that I really want to write the companion novel, which occurs parallel to this one.  Argh.  I really should plot it out as I’m going.  Hm, actually that’s a good idea.  I’ll do that.

I also have all kinds of mad plans to make forays into a YA book, since they seem to be a pretty hot commodity at the moment.  But can I write YA?  I guess I try it and see what happens.

I’m really wishing for more useful hours in a day right now.  I’d love to be able to sit down and write for at least 5-6 hours (or more) and be productive.  You’ve all heard this from me before, though, and there’s no real sign that it’s magically going to happen.  For now, I’ll just have to be content with the good hours that I have, and the room I have to work in.  Things could be far, far worse.

All I have to do is keep on writing.