Ordinary Day

Chapter 21 remains the longest chapter in the current draft of Lament of the Dove, even after I’ve reached the end of it tonight in the Word Count Reduction pass. Not too many words taken out of it at all, but that doesn’t strike me as a bad thing; a lot happens in it, and nothing in it feels extraneous to me at this point. I think I did well to find a couple hundred words I could trim at all.

This leaves Chapter 22 and Chapter 23 to get through, since I’ve already touched on Chapter 24 by removing Nine-Fingered Rab’s last scene. If I get ambitious, I could maybe finish off this draft by the end of the week, and that would give me most of the month of February for the hardcore final changes before I fling the manuscript back at Carina Press.

Meanwhile, I’m already mulling a couple of changes of notable nouns: the name of the former nation of Alendar, as well as Celoren’s horse. I’ve been told “Alendar” is too close to “Adalonia” as a nation name, so I want something shorter and starting with a consonant, ideally no more than two syllables. That, however, will come in in the sixth draft.

This feels like a good plan. Let’s see if I can implement it. Wish me luck, folks.

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

I’ve finally pulled through the end of Chapter 19, and now I’m in Chapter 20! I’ve noticed that Chapter 19′s the only one in this draft of Lament thus far to have actually gained a couple hundred words, but that’s okay–I’d actually pulled in content from Chapter 17, after all. Given how much I’ve edited out of the chapter to make up for that, winding up with only a couple hundred extra words works for me.

Chapter 20 is one of the smaller ones in the last stretch of the book, so I’m not sure yet how much I’ll edit out of it yet. But it’s good to get the momentum going again.

Meanwhile, I’ve pinged my editor serasempre to start the official conversation about what Drollerie and I will be doing next. We do not have official details nailed down by any means. However, interest has been expressed both in Bone Walker and in the shorter pieces set in the Faerie Blood universe.

Which leads me into thinking that Oscar’s story may well wind up in the FB universe now, and and that it could wind up being a novella. That’d work quite a bit for me. I’m thinking that Oscar’s story, Elizabeth and Ross’s story, and Millicent’s origin story would be a lovely trio of things to have in one book.

More on this to come!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Small progress through Chapter 19 of Lament, pretty much, since most of my day had to go to other activities. I’m on page 19 of 23 at this point, though, so if I apply myself I should be able to finish the word count reduction for this chapter tomorrow!

I’ve been continuing to mull Oscar’s story in the back of my brain, and while I don’t have a real core plot idea for it yet, I do have a couple of beginning ideas. One, it’s possible this story may be non-urban fantasy, by which I mean, contemporary fantasy NOT in an urban setting. It may be rural/small town, and specifically, coastal. Two, I’m keying off a remark solarbird made to me that has stuck with me: “tuba is piccolo for whales”. The idea here being that a tuba is one of the few mortal instruments that can dip down into the range of the deep, primal music I want to be part of the plot of this story. This implies that there will be Big Creatures involved with this story.

Possibly whales. Possibly dragons.

More on this as it happens, y’all!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Two days in a row getting writing-related things done! So far, so good.

Today’s effort, scattered across several hours through the course of the day, was editing about eight pages in Chapter 19 of Lament. This puts me just shy of halfway through the chapter, and so far I haven’t lost much significant word count. We’ll see what the rest of the chapter does for me, though it may just be that I don’t need to whittle this one down all that much.

Which’d be nice, since it has some of my favorite Julian and Faanshi mileage in it:

Before Julian could say more, Faanshi stirred and whimpered, horror flickering across her countenance. All at once he grew conscious of the shape of her, of the press of her slight form against his own, and that at some point during their headlong rush her hat had gone missing. Her hair, uncovered, smelled of sweat and leather and pine needles.

“Carefully, girl,” he warned when her eyes opened.

“Julian?” Her voice was small and broken, and as her gaze shot up to his face she said his name again, with prayerful relief. “Julian!” Then she threw her arms around him, buried her face against his shoulder, and sobbed.

In consternation he froze, aware of something going loose and tender within him. After a moment his arms eased their grasp and shifted, as if of their own accord, to better hold her. “Tykhe,” he muttered. “Don’t cry.”

“I don’t mean to be a burden! Please don’t leave me!”

Hadn’t he promised to do just that on the run past Tolton, if she slowed him and Rab down or proved a danger? “I won’t,” said Julian nonetheless, that loose place within him broadening, threatening to rise into his throat, to cut off his speech. “I won’t leave you, Faanshi. It’s all right.”

When had he changed his mind?

That’s me, a sucker for making life difficult for the Rook!

Edited today and tonight: -91 (but that’s across eight pages)
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,724
Lament of the Dove revised total (fifth draft): 105,692

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Because I’m in crunch mode at work and that’s likely to overlap at least a little into the beginning of the month, and also, because beating Lament of the Dove into proper shape for re-submission to Carina Press is of highest priority for me and the writings right now.

‘Sides, you guys wouldn’t want me to disappoint Julian and Kestar and Faanshi. Especially Kestar. I mean geez, the man’s got a face as earnest as the day is long. I couldn’t possibly make that face unhappy. And given what I’m doing to poor Julian at the end of the book, he’s going to be really cranky at me if I don’t get him to the beginning of Book 2 as quickly as possible. ;>

Good luck to all who will be doing Nano, though! I’m likely to be going just as spare as you guys during the month of November, so I’m with you in spirit!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Y’all know how I mentioned the scene at the beginning of Chapter 15 was destined to die? Well, I killed it–and added in a bit of extra content in the new first scene of the chapter, tying a bit more in to how the previous one closed. This means that all told I’ve killed nearly 2,000 words from this one chapter alone.

And that’ll do me for now with this chapter, I think. I’ll be moving on to Chapter 16 as of tomorrow night to see what I can do to it. Now I’m moving out of the rough middle stretch into where the editor was saying the pacing started working better for her, but I’m still on the Word Count Reduction mission. So we’ll see how many more words I can kill in the remaining chapters. (Of which there are nine, since I’ll also be punting the epilogue over into the second book.)

As of tonight’s efforts I’ve killed 7,346 words total from the draft, and of the words killed, big chunks of them were in that one scene in this very chapter. (As well as shorter interstitial sorts of scenes in the last couple ones as well.) The total word count is down to 111,012. I think I’m on good track to kill 10K total out of this draft, which is smack dab in the target range.

This does not suck.

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Three of you have checked in with me, but I haven’t heard from the other five…? (Many thanks to cow and gerimaple and mamishka for keeping me apprised of your various levels of ability to deal with the reading, I much appreciate the updates!)

As an FYI to y’all reading, I’m currently in chapter 9 of the word count reduction pass so you have a bit of buffer time still before I really need the feedback. It’ll be at least another week or so depending on how fast I can charge through the rest of the manuscript. As of Chapter 9 I’m now into the main area that the editor at Carina advised me about, so it may take me longer to get through on the grounds of needing to think about what I want to do to implement her requests.

Do check in with me if you can, if nothing else just to let me know if you’re still up for finishing the reading? (“No” is a perfectly acceptable answer, I just need to know if I’m going to get feedback from you.) Thanks again!

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

It is ON. Oh my yes. Well, not too impressively quite yet given that I’ve been smacked upside the head with a cold all weekend, but in the state of mind I’ve been in, it’s oddly easier to do a word count reduction pass than it is to write actual new content.

Which means of course that I’ve officially decided to go ahead and do a word count reduction draft while I’m waiting for the beta readers (all eight of you, like, WOW) to get back to me. This will also be doubling as an opportunity for me to review the manuscript in depth and lay down the game plan for what I want to change to tighten it up for Carina Press.

I found a couple hundred words or so to remove in both Chapters 1 and 2, and I’m leaving off tonight in the middle of Chapter 3, with about 300 words removed. So far it’s about 800 words down, and closing in on the first K. Given that the target range is between 6 and 12K, this is a promising start. I’m going to try to avoid making any big changes on this pass, but I may tweak a few smaller things as I go.

Beta readers, when I send out the editor’s feedback to those of you who haven’t gotten it yet as well as the overall gameplan, I’ll note the stuff I’ve already changed. But don’t let that stop you from reporting anything you think is worth reporting, even if I might have already tweaked it on this fifth draft pass. And, again, many many thanks!

Edited this weekend: -818
Chapter 1 revised total: 3,163
Chapter 2 revised total: 3,040
Chapter 3 revised total: 4,181
Lament of the Dove revised total (fifth draft): 117,540

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

Ha, glancing back at the big revise and resubmit post, I realized I actually didn’t say what the editor’s big issue with the story structure was. Oops. Clearly, the post needed an edit pass.

Anyway, I’d said that the structure of the The Dove, the Rook, and the Hawk is supposed to be “one big story in three parts”, akin to Lord of the Rings. However, what the editor said about this was that she’d prefer to see less setup for Book 2 and more of a sense of resolution for this book.

I get that. Certainly in Fellowship of the Ring, the biggest plot questions are of course not resolved, but there is a local resolution of sorts with the dissolution of the Fellowship. With my story, the idea here is that Book 1 is supposed to be Faanshi’s local arc, Book 2 is Julian’s, and Book 3 is Kestar’s. But clearly, I need better closure for Faanshi’s local arc.

The editor has given me several thoughts about how to tackle this, and I’m already thinking about which bits at the very end of Book 1 may be shifted over into the beginning of Book 2. This would serve nicely for giving Book 1 a less open ending while at the same time opening Book 2 with a sense of “okay, things are darker now, get ready”.

I’m also thinking that perhaps, structure-wise, I should think less “Lord of the Rings” and perhaps more “Star Wars”. (Which is kinda lulzy, given that I’ve got a bit of a Han-Luke-Leia dynamic going on with Julian, Kestar, and Faanshi, only without the Wookiee. Because Nine-Fingered Rab would take issues with being compared to Chewie, I fear!) The ultimate defeat of the Empire of course doesn’t happen until the third movie, but in ANH, you do have the nice big local resolution of “YAY the Death Star is asploded!”

Much thinking to do. And I’ve already had five, count ‘em, five people volunteer to beta read; many thanks in advance to mamishka, jennygriffee, gerimaple, joelysue, and mari_mac1109! Thanks as well to apel who signal boosted me over on Twitter.

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.

I finally heard back from Carina Press today about my submission of Lament of the Dove to them, and I gotta say, folks, this is hands down the best not-an-acceptance response I’ve had to a story to date.

One of Carina’s editors sent me a very long and detailed feedback letter not only calling out the various problems she had with the story but also the bits she very much liked. Just about everything she had to say I think can be chalked up to the fact that it took me so long to write and then edit this thing–long enough that I of course had my rounds with the breast cancer in between, and long enough that my writing style changed in the meantime. I’d already felt that the latter half of the story had better pacing and tighter prose, and from what this editor is saying, she seems to agree with that.

The biggest thing she’s calling out as a problem point has to do with the overall story structure. Lament is of course intended to be Book 1 of a three-part story, but the thing is, most people hear that and they think “trilogy”. The structure of The Dove, the Rook, and the Hawk is intended to be less “trilogy” and more “one big story in three parts”, similar to The Lord of the Rings. (That, along with how I also have elves in my story, being the only comparison I will ever make of my work to Tolkien!)

She’s also suggesting I yank 6-12K of words out of various places. My gut reaction to this: CAN DO SPORT. As y’all know I’ve already yoinked half a book’s worth of words out of this thing already, so I’m pretty sure this’ll be cake by comparison.

Here are a couple of awesome money quotes, though:

“I love your writing, your vivid descriptions and your world-building. Your characters are well-drawn and larger-than-life, and the conflict is strong enough to sustain the story.”

And:

“Julian is my favorite character, and his developing relationship with Faanshi is nicely drawn. Even your minor characters shine from the page. I particularly like Ulima.”

No offense to Faerie Blood, which is of course the Book of My Heart with all the things I love in it, but I’ve always felt that Lament of the Dove is a much more complex work. To get this kind of feedback on it gratifies me immensely.

This does of course mean a sudden huge shift in my writing priorities for the rest of the year. I’ll keep doing new words as I can, but the emphasis now is going to have to go on the new fifth draft of Lament! The editor was very, very clear that even if I do revise and resubmit, this won’t necessarily guarantee an offer from Carina–but that’s okay. The important thing here is to make my book MORE AWESOME. And this is the kind of feedback that’ll help me do it.

Okay, Julian, Faanshi, and Kes, you guys ready? Let’s get back to it.

Mirrored from angelakorrati.com.