As of Today

Christmas, an impending move, and the demands of the day job have all been impeding progress on the novel of late, but all that seems to have ended yesterday. I made myself a Christmas present of some time at work on Chapter 21 and found it going in a direction I had not anticipated. I don't know whether what I wrote was any good or not at this point, but at least it was coherent. Sometimes that's about all you can ask for.

What I was working on was a letter from the deceased that I had no idea he had written until Drayton opened the file it was in. Part of the fun was that I got to write in a voice different from Drayton's and could work in different rhythms and with different word choices. My concern in all this is that, since the letter gives a precis of Briarbrook's biography, that I might descend into mawkishness or sentimentality. Neither of those are typical ailments for me artistically, so I'd hate to start up at this late date. The prose, however, is spare and lean, and that helps keep the melodrama under wraps.

All I can do now is to write it and come back at some later date to see whether I want to burn those pages or not. That's the process.

The Forest

I am getting to the point where the previous version won't be much help at all. As I'm working the entire ending of the book is changing and morphing, perhaps leading me to an entirely different conclusion than what I had before. It's a strange thing to be writing a mystery without being sure of what the denouement is, but that is exactly the fix I find myself in.

To some extent, it is a blessing. It is putting me more in Drayton's shoes than ever before, and I am getting the distinct sense of discovering the book rather than writing it. And that's a good thing.

There's so much to think through. Where will Drayton go next? Why will he go there and what will happen? I haven't the vaguest frickin' idea.

This ought to be fun.

A New Chapter

I started work on Chapter 21 a few of days ago and it is coming along. I struggled along at first, rewriting a section of what had been Chapter 19 in the previous version. I'm still sawing away at that section.

I made some changes yesterday that seemed to help. All I can do is blunder forward.

The Story of Chapter 20

Okay, so I've been rewriting and writing Chapter 20, and I pulled it up on Google Docs on Wednesday with an eye toward finishing it up. Anyway, I pull it up and scroll down to the last line line and think to myself, "What comes next? What comes next?" And then I looked at that line again and realized that it was finished.

Except that it isn't. It's still just a draft. It's a decent draft, but it needs polishing. It is also a tiny thing, barely more than a thousand words, and I suspect that the polishing will mostly involve spinning out some of the notions already extant in it at greater lengths. (This is something that is often true of my initial drafts. Most writers spend their time cutting. I end up expanding.)

The problem that I find myself faced with now is one of deciding whether to start this revision right away or perhaps soldiering on through the rest of the new ending first and going back to revise the whole section once that's done. I'm not sure. Both approaches have their plusses, and I have to assess which method will serve the book better. My guess would be that pressing on is the most likely winner, but I never know until I find myself at work on something.

Part of the fun is in the surprises.

I'd Rather Be a Percolator Than a Drip

Chapter 19 is done. It took a little over a month. It came out a decent size and accomplished what I wanted to accomplish.

Now, on to Chapter 20, which is such a substantial rewrite of a portion of the previous draft that it will be like starting from scratch. I doubt I'll have time to start it until Monday, which gives me the weekend to ponder it and let it percolate.

My only regret in all of this is that I have to write on the sly, in moments both stolen and cribbed. It would be nice to be able to concentrate on it and to enjoy each small victory to its fullest. Writing well is difficult. This has become a truism among its practitioners. However, the counterbalance to that, the thing that encourages you to pull yourself off the mat after each time you've been decked, is the sublime satisfaction that comes from getting any part of it--a sentence, a phrase, a word--absolutely right.

I don't get much chance to savor the victories right now. Each one comes amidst a blizzard of other obligations and priorities. The satisfaction is still there, but it is truncated and worried. There's always one eye turned toward the next step, the next challenge.

And the only way to deal with that is to, from time-to-time, stop and ponder and let it percolate.

Westward Leading Still Proceeding

Actually, I'm not headed westward at all. No, we're all headed east, spinning like a screwball across the strike zone of space. Or maybe not.

The point is that I am still making progress on Chapter 19. Patches of it come blurting out every few days, and I spend the days in between fixing that which gets blurted out. In other words, I'm rewriting as I go along.

It seems to me (and I haven't made too close a study of this) that I'm finishing chapters at about one per month. Given that trajectory, I should have a draft ready by Groundhogs Day, although such a deadline is not mandatory. The closest thing I have to a deadline is April, when the ten finalists for the contest sponsored by the Creative Writing Department at the university at which I work will be announced. Part of that step would be to submit a complete manuscript, which would mean having it done by then. Assuming that mine was one of the final ten.

In the meantime, all I can do is to continuing spinning eastward, always chasing the next morning.

You Gotta Have Faith

The rewrite of Chapter 19 has been proceeding apace. This is not one that has gone ahead at a gallop, but instead vacillates between a cantor and a crawl. That's all well-and-fine, and just part of the game.

The writing itself, I think, is going well. There is a kind of music to the words and a literary quality as well. The endless refining--Google Docs has tracked 303 changes--are making it, slowly but surely, better.

A large portion of the chapter takes place in a Catholic cathedral during a funeral. The problem that this has raised is that I want it to be authentic, but only remember so much off the top of my head. Research on the Internet has provided some info, but not everything, so I'm left to guess most of the time.

So now I'm put in the position of either doing direct research by attending a funeral or two somewhere in the Atlanta archdiocese, which seems a little creepy, or contacting a priest or two that I knew back in a former life. The second option might seem like the better one on its face, but that would involve explaining why I've lapsed and getting into a whole going-back-to-church-it's-never-gonna-happen-my-friend kind of thing.

Damn research.

The First Step

I came up with the first sentence to Chapter 19 12 minutes ago. I've been so productive that I am now up to six sentences. I may have to lie down soon.

The great thing to me is that this first paragraph is a clue to the reader about the solution, but is not overt in any way, shape, or form. It also links it to the end of the previous chapter and is just overall a pretty keen piece of work. I'll probably end up deleting it at some point.

Such is the life of a writer.

But First--

Well, not only did I not getting any new sentences written yesterday, I actually deleted the one I had. It's time for some fresh thinking and a fresh start.

The first sentence of any piece of writing is important, whether it's the first sentence in a chapter, a story, an essay, or a confession. You want to entice the reader and lure them deeper into the chapter, story, essay, or confession until they reach the point of no return. (For great writers, that point is usually right up front. For the rest of us, it varies, with a large number never establishing such a point anywhere at any time.)

So that's my current assignment: Come up with the right opening sentence. Who knows? Maybe I'll come up with one or two more. Just another hundred or two after that, I'll move on to Chapter 20. I'll shoot up a flare when I get to it.

Occam's Razor™

I got stuck on Chapter 19 for a number of days. I wasn't even writing any of it. I had down the grand sum of one sentence. Thirteen whole words. It was dead in the water, and I wasn't sure why.

I was being stopped by a feeling, a sense that I was about to make a wrong turn down a dark and dangerous street. I switched over to writing a non-Drayton short story to pass the time. Was this the end of zombie Shakespeare? Not quite.

In a time-tested tradition, this morning I came up with the answer to my problem while showering. It was, of course, the simplest answer possible.

You know, if Roger of Ockham had trademarked Occam's Razor™, he'd be a rich man today.

One Step Closer

I finished Chapter 18 around lunchtime today and think it came out fairly well. This was a chapter that seemed to write itself, several times going in directions that I hadn't it considered going in. In fact, it actually ended differently than I had expected and put forward an important clue without coming across like an installment of Murder She Wrote.

Most surprisingly for me, it came out in a way that is going to mean that I can salvage great chunks of the next couple of chapters, at least in terms of the action and progress of the plot. The words you never know about until you're actually faced with the task of retyping them.

This is all encouraging, and while I doubt that I will be able to finish this draft by Halloween, I think there's some chance that I'll have it finished by some time in November. I doubt that it will be "done" done by then, but it should be good enough to shop around. Of course, it will never be completely done until some publisher forces me to stop with the revisions just so that they can get it to press.

Redirect

I started work on Chapter 18 a few days ago and worked like a galley slave to come up with 200 words that I wasn't satisfied with. Late yesterday, I had to admit to myself that the chapter wasn't working and that I needed to reevaluate.

I realized that the scene I was writing was completely unnecessary and just needed to be jettisoned. So, late yesterday afternoon, I started fresh with a scene I'd never had a version of before and watched in astonishment as about 250 words poured out with seeming ease.

There are sometimes when you fight with the writing, when it is terribly hard and discouraging, but you keep on and persevere because something in you knows that what you're working on is the right thing. Sometimes not so much. Sometimes the words just seem to fall out of you, like sugar out of a punctured bag. Those are the good days. And it's kind of like golf, where you can play miserably except for one good shot and that one good shot hooks you and encourages you to try it again.

Now, we'll see how today goes.

Chapter 17 Done

Okay, Chapter 17, another really short one, is done, and I think it's a distinct improvement over its antecedent. The funny thing is that it turned out to be an easier job of rewriting than Chapter 16, which started out in better shape but was torture to revise. You never know. You just never know.

The other thing that's come up is that the entire ending is changing shape on me as I revise it. New scenes, new approaches, new settings. It's exciting and disconcerting all at the same time. What I'm really doing is removing all the vestiges of the original TV movie version of it. It's still comic in spirit, but not a comedy anymore.

Rounding Up

The chapter I am currently at work on what was originally the last half of Chapter 16. Chapter 16 1/2, really. As a practical matter, I decided to round it up to Chapter 17. Easier for the bookkeeping aspect of things.

After I got a cool three sentences down yesterday, I started to rethink the entire scene. It just wasn't convincing. It wasn't working. Drayton would have had to have been nearly psychic for the action to unfold as I had it. The set up is that he realizes that Federal agents are staking out his apartment, so he engages in a bit of misdirection as a way of avoiding them.

I turned over several possibilities in my mind before stumbling on the simplest: His pal Lt. Sidwell can tip him off via a phone call. Occam's razor, I think they call it.

And now the rewriting of the rewriting begins.

Plus ça Change

Last night, I decided to look over the final chapter even though I am still some way from reaching it for revision. I'm glad I did.

I think it wasn't much of an ending, one more suited to a broad comedy than to the book it has become. I've got a few weeks to turn it over before I need to really deal with it, which is a plus, but the revision will ultimately be substantial enough that I think I might have to put that rewrite on hold for a while even then.

In the meantime, I have four chapter to rewrite, one of which (I think Chapter 17, which I am starting work on today) will include an entire scene that never existed before. That's a lot of work and all the while I'll be thinking about the damn ending.

It would be so much easier to do a crap job and probably more profitable, too. Unfortunately, I am stuck with the desire to write something worth writing and, with any luck, worth reading.

But that's the way it goes.

Chapter 16 Update

Well, so far, I spent pretty much this entire month rewriting the part of the original Chapter 16 that I had thought was decent. Now I'm getting to the part that I thought was crap. Odds are that that will turn out to be somewhat easier.

One of the things I've noticed is that I want to put a chapter break between these two sections. That will make Chapter 16 a short one, but there is no dishonor in writing a short chapter. The only dishonor is in writing a bad one.

I'd really like to put Drayton to bed by the end of October so that it doesn't make it to a fourth National Novel Writing Month, but I don't know that I'll make it. It does give me a loose goal to shoot for, though, and anything I can do to keep myself focused is worth it.

Just to Clarify

On my other blog, Next in the Series: The Blog, I mentioned that I had started work on a second novel, Such Is Life. This does not mean that I am putting Drayton aside even temporarily. Drayton is my first writing priority, and will be until this draft is done.

I'm just getting the ball rolling on Such Is Life so that I can really have some momentum going on it when I done with Drayton. I'm also going to be revising some short stories in my copious free time.

And let's not forget these fascinating blog posts. It's a full life.

The Process

The following are the revisions I talked about yesterday, from Revision 3 (which was when I actually started to write something) to 86:


It ain't easy. Just worth it.

You Don't Call, You Don't Write

Okay. I know I haven't added much to this blog since reviving it, but there is a simple reason for that: I haven't made much progress.

Except, of course, that I have. It's just that the writer often makes progress in the way that a stream makes progress on a rock or valley. You wear away at it bit-by-bit, always looking to improve it, always looking to strengthen it.

And that's what's been going on with the novel. I've been working on Chapter Sixteen and have, over the course of the last week or so, completed three paragraphs. Now, that accumulation involves a lot of backing up and reworking and rethinking and rewriting. Google documents has cataloged some 86 revisions so far, ranging from additions of text to complete reworkings of words, phrases, and sentences.

There have been more than a few deletions, as well.

And this is all on the part of Chapter 16 I thought was in good shape. It doesn't always come easily.

Like a Phoenix, Rising from the Ashes--Yech!

In a lame attempt to conform to the social strictures currently expected of those of us in the writing game, I am reviving this blog. I am doing so in lieu of registering the domain name and building a real website. The time is not quite right for that. Yet.

I am getting there, though.

Since last I posted on the Next in the Series blog about the novel, I have completed the rewrite of Chapter 14. It is slightly shorter than it had been and much more to the point. I've also introduced another character who will recur in subsequent Drayton adventures, an attorney named John Dingle. (He is a principal in the law firm of Dingle & Berry.)

It was hard work, but the chapter came out much improved.

I then marked up a copy of Chapter 15 and was delighted to find that it was actually already in decent shape and only required minor touches. Those have been completed.

I started reading Chapter 16, and was beginning to think that I would be basically off the hook for Chapters 17 through 20, when the quality sloped off sharply. As I recall, the point at which the quality went directly into the sewage system was right about at the time that I decided to enter that contest. I worked more quickly than I usually do, and it showed. Everything after about halfway through Chapter 16 can only be considered rough drafts. Very rough drafts.

And now, thanks to information that came out in Chapters 13 and 14, I have to write a whole new chapter anyway. It just never ends with these novels.