Project N, Rambling Along

The project I began on November 1 has turned into a decent piece of work. I'd say it's half done as of today. I've begun NaNoWriMo several times and have not "succeeded" at it yet, but I always gain something from the experience. It may be that I'm not a person who benefits from the "messy draft" method, although my drafts are indeed messy. Driving along with only a bit illuminated before me is not my favorite method, but maybe it's useful: it forces me to juggle more in my head, and that strengthens muscles I didn't realize were becoming weak.

Carpal tunnel forced me to write the November stuff longhand, and that has also been surprisingly useful. It's the way I used to write all the time, before I fell for the technological bells and whistles. I think I'll keep to the longhand a bit longer. Brain to hand to paper.

So Project N. Three viewpoint characters, all children. I do love me an unreliable narrator, but I probably will have to make at least one of them ... reliable. It's a science fantasy, or at least that's my intention, so I sort of need an adult viewpoint, at the very least so that I can make sure the science part is clear without resorting to idiotic scenes involving professors explaining things to young children. (As you know, Bobby.) I hate that kind of thing. That's my biggest hurdle at the moment with this project.

Back to productivity

Week two, still very productive. I'm not sure I can put my finger on all the reasons for this sudden return to full-time creativity, but I do know some of them.

1. Reduction in limbo. There have been a lot of uncertainties resolved in the last couple of months, not least of which is the purchase of this house. I think I tend to spend a lot of brain circuitry on if-thens, and the more limbo there is, the more circuitry I use. That is barely a factor these days.

2. I returned to writing first drafts longhand. Wow, this has made a really big difference! I was telling John that some of it is probably an increase in left-brain right-brain cohesion, but I really think another factor is that I handwrite far more slowly than I type. So as I'm going along I never catch up with my thoughts. I have to jot ideas in the margins and scribble things for later. This prevents me staring at the screen and thinking, uh, now what?

3. Scheduling. I took my schedule and made it ironclad. There's time for woolgathering and listmaking and household puttering, and there's time for everyone shutting up and not talking to me or asking me to take them out to pee. Some people don't need this kind of rigidity. I do.

4. I made my binder, the one I wanted to do electronically. I printed out my works in progress and put them in a three-hole binder with notebook paper between each project. I was miffed that I couldn't find a software solution, but I'm so pleased with the return to handwriting that I couldn't find a program.

It's a really good place to be in.

Ahh

So I think part of my problem this week is that I'm quite stalled on a big rewrite project. There's only a very tenuous path between the section I've been working on and the section I still need to do, and I'm stumbling around in the dark in the fog in bare feet...

I've decided (and this seemed to alarm John!) to counter this stall by dragging out an even bigger rewrite project until the first path becomes more illuminated. This decision and a nice long bath with the third book of Robin Hobb's Soldier Son trilogy has eased some of my fuzziness. My office smells like dusty pages and baby powder, and I have 700 terrible, terrible pages of old novel to go through.

No more excuses, part 79

We have tried a lot of arrangements in this house. (I think I have this notion that if we could just find THE arrangement, all of my unproductive moments would magically vanish.) But this one, this newest arrangement, it actually might work. I actually might work!

Em is coming home from a long visit with Dave in Missouri. When she gets here, we will -- hopefully -- have the basement studio apartment (sort of) all set up for her. Her bedroom set, her computer area, her piano keyboard, a tv area. Daniel and Christina had a good setup down there, and she is only half their size.

And John and I will each have a work office upstairs in what have been bedrooms.

I'm typing this from my desk upstairs. It's very exciting.

The house with two writers, chapter 119

J: i started dune. the pov stuff is interesting to track.
J: the book seems to lie at a certain point on a historio-literary axis, between the 'old days' of omniscient-pov, and the nouveau age of limited or close 3rd-person pov. he does it very very well, and it's quite appealing. Just a bit unusual to a "modern" ear
Marsh: i really enjoy it
Marsh: it's a fast adjustment
J: yeah
J: WAY more as-u-know-bob than heinlein. but than, which of us is not?
Marsh: i'm not
J: i know YOU'RE not
Marsh: i always err on the side of leaving out every important detail instead
J: my only question is: 'balance it out' doesn't quite connote causal
Marsh: "wtf, her main character is a staple gun??"
J: "is this a space opera-mystery-romance? or a COOKBOOK?"
Marsh: i'm cutting and pasting this into listeme, minus frivolous smooches
J: don't you dare excise my frivol

The most important thing is to remember that everyone -- everyone -- has a story. It's probably a long story. Life is terribly and wonderfully complicated, and if I can just remember that everyone is in the moments of their own life, I can have mercy and patience. Or at least I try to.

It also helps my fiction when I keep this in mind. People are not furniture. (Except mannequins, kind of, but that's a long story.)

Dangerous skins

Pulling on the skin of a new book, a new author -- I adore that feeling, but right now, with the pile of things I have on my desk and life, I am relying on the safety of familiar books instead. Sometimes it's better to know how the story ends, especially when you have a ton of dangling threads in real life. (Why do I sound defensive?? I reread books. Why else would one own them?)

So a few, in no particular order -- heh, speaking of no particular order, I picked up Harry Potter 5, in anticipation of the movie coming out, to lead up to 6. I got about a chapter in and grabbed the wrong volume when dashing out to do some chauffeuring and car waiting. So I read 7 instead. Of course, then I was at the "beginning" of reading the series backwards and decided to go ahead with that.

What a different look at a well-known (to me) series. For one thing, the flaws JUMP out at me. Especially the time-turner. Mainly the time-turner. Ugh, the time-turner. Little detail things like calling the dementors guards until partway through volume 3 and then not really again. For another, it doesn't matter. They are familiar to me because I have read them multiple times, and this is because I enjoy them. But I do recommend sometime reading a series backwards for a different take on the author's plotting. It's very instructive. I am going to do this with GRRM's next, in anticipation of the upcoming release, whenever the heck that will be.

The current top of the stack in the bathroom is Bisson's Bears Discover Fire. I can't remember which story I brought along to Odyssey as my "favorite", but this story (the title story) would be really high on my list, and there are several in this collection that are recommendable, as well. I feel, dimly, that old stirring of inspiration. Those bears can do that for me. So can Atwood and Oates. They make me want to add to the world, something, something new and different and dangerous, something that someone will want to call familiar.

What I'm working on

What's on my desktop

It's fun and creepy to research mannequins. I love the sites that have used ones for sale: "Just one crack on this toddler's skull," like that's a real plus. Considering that other descriptive phrases include "headless" and "hangable", perhaps it is.

I am using the word research to make it clear that I'm not just googling broken naked dolls. At least it is not puppets, although I dread the day that my brain will decide that puppets are in the next story. Marionettes = nightmarish. They collapse in a buglike way, a jerky centipede/spider way, and lie there with painted garish human faces and strings and sticks, like they have been smacked with a supersized magazine.

The so-called writing business

Got a slightly personal rejection for Putty Brother, which is both encouraging and a rejection.

I have now sent the enrollment form for TNEO, as well. I have no earthly idea how we will manage to coordinate things this summer, but I'm going ahead with it anyway.

Fewer daisies today

More Daleks.

Travel... in time!

To 1978, or thereabouts, when Marsh was starting to mix a few Daleks in with the daisies.

I know what I want

listeme (9:08:05 PM): ok, so here is a farfetched and ridiculous question
SISTER (9:08:11 PM): k
listeme (9:08:24 PM): is the meatball recipe by any chance handwritten?
SISTER (9:08:41 PM): party meatball recipe?
listeme (9:08:43 PM): yeah
SISTER (9:09:07 PM): frozen meatballs, jar of grape jelly, jar of heinz 57 chili sauce, jar of banana peppers
listeme (9:09:10 PM): no, no
SISTER (9:09:10 PM): heat
listeme (9:09:12 PM): HANDWRITTEN
SISTER (9:09:19 PM): that is handtyped!
SISTER (9:09:21 PM): :-D
listeme (9:09:22 PM): i need a handwritten version
listeme (9:09:27 PM): you are NO HELP
SISTER (9:09:30 PM): whut
SISTER (9:09:46 PM): you want me to email it to you...?
listeme (9:10:45 PM): gah

(I was looking for a specific physical/graphical thing. I'm really not a maniac.)

Upcoming titles

1. On being the mother of children who also have a stepmother: Turning small blobs of biology into good human grownups

2. My neighbor puts his trash out a day early: Sharing an ecological niche

3. Apocalypse Tomorrow!

4. What should we do with the newspapers? The ones stacked by the fire and the ones perching precariously on the edge of yesterday's technology

5. "Does this one have gentoo?" What bogglers could teach the NSA about dictionary compartmentalization


AND MORE!

You know, it's about the tangibility right now. If I were in the scarf business, for example, I would be feeling more valuable as a scarf maker than as a scarf designer. I would have proof in my hands, warm fuzzy proof.

This turns my normal priorities upside-down, but I don't think this is a bad thing. On Monday at some point I proclaimed that I just needed to "make something, anything. Clay pots!"

There are very good clay pots in this world, and I am not a pot maker. So it was just rhetoric.

Which is the whole POINT.

Maybe some pieces are fitting together

Synopsis progress: I have no idea.

What I will say is that I have been working on jigsaw puzzles in the evenings here and there because it has been actually cold enough to have a fire in the fireplace and a jigsaw puzzle is a nice thing to work on for a few minutes while my toes warm up. When I was little, my sister and I would do jigsaw puzzles on the floor of the sanctuary after services while our parents yakked with parishioners. When we finished, we would flip them over and do them again only looking at the gray sides. Peeking at the pictures was forbidden. We were very quick and good at them. So I am fond of puzzles, although I usually don't like the pictures on them.

Now, puzzles are really not a hobby that I will ever "pursue". They are great for fireside tables and for rainy stretches during vacations, but they are not a goal themselves. However, because I'm a competitive person, I do like to do whatever I do as well as I can, and hopefully better than the next guy. Over the years, my process has evolved into a very unlinear process that is more like clumping algae than anything else. Eventually I end up with large chunks of together pieces -- pieces themselves, you could argue -- that must be fit together. It is a much faster method (for me) than working from the outside in.

Besides puzzles, I think of myself as a linear person. I don't really have a map in my head, for instance; I have a lot of routes. I make the bed with a particular order of motions. Every time. I do things in routes, recipes of tasks.

So now, with this synopsis problem, I'm discovering that my novel is really more algae aggregation than a series of events, and figuring that out is a major big deal.

Favorites and more favorites

The Doomsday Book, Connie Willis. If formula romances are analogous to ditties, Connie Willis books are symphonies. (Formula books are fine -- ditties are fine. It's just an analogy.) I just finished Doomsday for the nth time, and it is more rewarding on every reread. I mean, it really does hit a lot of hot spots for me -- plagues and british humor and medievality and time travel and competence...

P.S. I will never understand why people don't read books or watch movies over again. If the point were to find out what happens, a synopsis would do.

P.P.S. Plagues! Come on! You can't go wrong!

Mannequins are creepy. They're like clowns and puppets, and they are used to sell things.

Many of them are headless.

My brain busies itself in the night. I wake up in the morning and am confronted with absolute nonsense on the bedside table -- half words penciled on envelope backs that mean nothing. But I'm getting higher tech about it.

Last night I sent myself three messages, using my cell phone, to my instant messenger:

Lexemic (11:47:12 PM): dmz
Lexemic (12:33:11 AM): write about parliamentary procedures
Lexemic (7:53:42 AM): this wont hurt a bit

Saturday thinking in the rain

Four more critiques of One-Two, and I might be beginning to see the issues that I need to address... important, because addressing these issues will be vital to addressing the entire Manassas universe. The comments and suggestions and criticisms have all been spot-on and so very appreciated.

(Pause to discuss how many insects we should order. "We could handle 500 in that aquarium." Yeah, we are buying bugs again.)

Here are some of the hurdles I have with Manassas. 1. I love the universe. I think this makes me particularly blind to issues. 2. The time line is shifty. It could not be described as linear. 3. Neither could the plot. (Although, it is true that a line on a mobius strip is a real line, and so if this plot is an inside-out ouroboros, which is really interesting mathematically, the line itself exists. It's just bendy.)

4. The magic of Manassas really does represent the dark reality shifts in families. You can leave your house and get a clear head for a little while about toxic behavior patterns; you can even convince yourself that it doesn't exist, but when you step back over the threshold, the old patterns take hold yet again. There is no escaping the darkness of family dysfunction, and yet if you give it up, you give up the family. You give up life and everything important. This is a good and important subject, but it takes wrestling and great concentration to get "right". I'm nowhere near perfection yet. Believe me.

5. There are a lot of Manassas stories to tell.