So, how’s that book going?

Oh, I think pretty well. I’m on page 61. I don’t know if that’s sad or great for re-editing something you haven’t looked at in five years or so. I’m going at my pace.

I’m squashing semi-colons. Every book on writing I have ever read warns of the overuse of elipses (. . .) and em-dashes (–), but none of them ever specifically said “Beware of semi-colons!” So I loaded the prose with them. LOADED. Now I am removing them. As of page 61, I think I have found maybe six that needed to stay and have eliminated dozens. DOZENS! When they warn you about overusing punctuation, they mean everything but periods. Those are the only punctuation marks that are safe. The others only work where a period absolutely will not. If a period works, you MUST use one. Even if you think you mustn’t.

Also duplicates of ideas, which I didn’t realize I had a problem with until looking the book over again now. I frequently wrote something, thought of a better way to say it, wrote that, and left both. There’s only room for one o’ them in this here novel.

And of course adverbs and adjectives. DELETE.

I FINALLY have an intuitive grasp of passive/active sentence structure (yay me!) and am squashing that where I see it as well, though the main character is feeling a little acted upon through most of the book, so some of the passives work to emphasise that. It took me FOREVER to get passives and actives! One person told me it’s when the subject of a sentence is being acted upon. Um, okay. How do you know which noun is the subject? The one that’s acting. Um, okay, what if no nouns are acting? Who’s the subject in a sentence like “But the only other vampire in the bar besides me was Kent.”? Me, Kent, vampires or the bar? Well, it’s the noun the sentence is about. Okay, who’s that previous sentence about? Me, Kent, vampires or the bar? Another person told me it’s when you see the word “was”. Someone else said it’s when you see the word “by”. Another book suggested it’s when you end a verb in “ing”. These are not dead-on indicators.

I seriously struggled with that for like, a year. Got myself some grammar books and read them, over and over, dog-eared the rules I had trouble with, and now I know the subject in the example sentence is Kent. The sentence is, I believe, passive, but he’s being talked about and looked for, so he is being passive. It works.

I also decided to withhold a piece of information from the reader for a while longer. It’s not a huge plot point, but it is a biggish one, and I realized that I could have a bigger impact on the reader if I keep it back for longer than I originally did. I won’t share what here, so people who haven’t read and might want to don’t get that wrecked for them, but I think it will work nicely as a little “Oh!” moment.

I learned about swords. I learned that I might not have made such a terrible mistake by simply calling Sebastian’s sword a “sword”. According to some websites I found that seemed to know what they were talking about (and repeated the same info without being copy-and-pasted), back in the day a guy with a sword referred to it as his “sword”. Different places had different types, but that was mostly cultural. A smith didn’t set out to create a “broadsword” or a “short sword”. He just made a damn piece of metal with a pointy end and sharp sides. The classifications mainly came in the early part of the last century. It’s still good to know what kind of sword Sebastian would have, or rather, what we would call his sword today, but he would think of it and call it a sword.

I’m struggling a little bit with the main character’s name. I mean, I like it, but she’s a girl and her name’s Ian (don’t suggest I change it). I need to let the reader know right off that Ian is a girl. I tried to show gender by having her working on a self-protrait in the very first scene, but I worry people won’t get that. I know she’s a girl, and the self-portrait scene seems obvious to me, but will it be obvious to everyone? It’s not a gnawing worry, just a little one. (Don’t yell at me that I shouldn’t be worried about Ian’s gender. Most people want to know if they are reading about a gay/straight/bi man/woman/hermaphrodite, and they will get frustrated if they are not told. I read a short once in which everyone in the story referred to as “shim”, and I was very confused. Not offended, just confused. Indo-european is actually strange in that we only have he/she/they. Most other languages have cases that refer to the sex, age, marital status, AND reproductive status of a person.)

I’ve also decided to do away with chapters. They’re short, and each scene is titled by the name of the character narrating, so I figured just lose the “chapter 1, 2, 3, etc.” thing.  I’ve seen it elsewhere and liked it.

Also, Ian’s mind seems jumpy. Really jumpy. Like she has heavy-duty ADD. Now, my mind works much the same way I show hers working, starting at one point and arriving at another by a lot of jumping from subject to subject. But I confuse people when I explain how I arrived at a certain topic, so having my main character think that way will just confuse people. (For example: My husband said he heard about a huge Ferris Wheel in London. Which made me think about Ferris Wheels. Which made me think about amusement parks. Which reminded me of the time my grandma took me to Great America. Which made me think of Bugs Bunny. Which reminded me of a conversation I had with a teenage co-worker, who said he’d never seen a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Probably because they took them off the air after I was a kid because they were too violent. So I say to my husband, “Do you think our generation is more violent than later generations?” And then I get a funny look.) I can think that way, my characters can’t.

Also, there’s some stuff my characters do that just isn’t that important. It doesn’t even reveal character. It doesn’t move the story forward. They just do it, and it takes up time and space. I’m cutting as much of that as I notice. Some of it’s been pages of material of the characters just . . . doing stuff. Sitting. Drawing. Thinking. No one wants to read all that. They can certainly do those things, but I don’t need to spend time describing it. “I went to my room to draw until it was time for bed.” Okay. Done. One sentence.

And finally, I’m cutting some backstory that doesn’t actually do anything. Not much. Just a few things that Ian mentions happened to her that doesn’t really mean anything or do anything for the plot. I think those things still happened to her, and if I find a spot where it’s really relevant to mention them, I will. So far, she just brings them up as a non-sequiter. I can’t even believe I thought it was okay to jam them in.

So, that’s my process. That’s where I’m at so far.

Still need to research cover art, how to upload the finished product to e-book format, which formats to use or not, and promotion.

I’m getting there.

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