author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Not dead. Novel's not dead. But I put my first couple hours in on the beast today since, well, last blog entry. In rereading what I had in Chapters 1 through 6 (just to refresh my memory) I managed to spend some time trying to line-level perfect bits of Chapters 5 and 6. Not as much as I'd like to do, considering the brand new Chapter 7 really needs to get written. But more will come. Oh yes. More will come. And soon.

For the record, WOTC haven't responded one way or another. They say responses probably won't be forthcoming until August. Hope yet remains!

Wow, nothing like a deadline shouted out to the four corners of the Internet to make me completely come to a standstill.

Well, either that, or it was attempting to get by on five hours of sleep a night. Wednesday morning I felt great; Thursday morning I felt great but I needed a nap in the afternoorn; and Friday morning I woke up with a sore throat. The problem with sick is, it may keep you home, but it keeps you from doing all the things you'd like to stay home from work to do. Dammit.

So I'm just wrapping up Chapter 6 Mk II, which contains nowhere near as much original NaNoDraft material as I thought it would, but whose almost-but-not-quite sex scene is a whole lot less clumsy than it was first time around. Plus there's more assholey Russ goodness. You may send me mocking emails if you wish, but I'll have you know that Russ can mock your lights out. (I have this secret but unlikely hope that the real-life person upon whom Russ is modeled will someday read this book, recognize himself, and send me nasty letters about it. But then I have lots of little vengeance fantasies running around in my sick little head. Oh yes. Locked up in my head where it's safe.)

There shall be more over the course of the morning, and then in the afternoon I'll have to hit the other projects for a few hours. I took all weekend off from the official manuscript of NaNoEdMo 2005, the better to work on this puppy right here (for all the good that did me), which means I'm no longer ahead of schedule. And then there's this short story I want to put in the mail by the tenth. Excuses, excuses. Yes indeed.

In case anyone's been paying attention to such things: Yes, my word count is somewhat lower than 50K. Have faith; all shall be as before, and better! Or at least that's what I keep telling myself. Remember what I said about having to generate more first draft as part of the rewrite? Yeah. Only, thankfully, it's sort of draft one-and-a-half, because this new material is being written by someone who actually knows where she's going. Joy!

Today's a home-all-day-writing day, so this afternoon after a couple hours on the other novel I should be able to whip out Chapters 6 and 7. Those'll be a mix of old material and new--there's still Brian's reunion at the house with Amy and what that reveals, only without the "just testing you" trip to the airport since Brian instead spent the evening getting reacquainted with his brother; and there'll be a bit more time, character development, and believable events between now and the end of the first half of the book.

I'm kicking myself for how many days I let go by without working on this poor beastie, but with any luck I'll make up the time and get it done by the end of the weekend--only a week later than my original plan--at which time I'm estimating the word count'll be closer to 75K and the chapter count'll be a nice round 20. If that doesn't happen, you have my permission to send me mocking emails on Monday.

Did I mention that I mailed the book proposal off Wednesday? I mailed the book proposal off Wednesday. I imagine it's in a towering stack of book proposals, manilla envelopes weighing a pound and a half each, early birds with first class stamps lording it over late-comers with their electronic priority mail postage stickers. I imagine a room filled with the smell of coffee, the slowly hystericizing giggles of overworked slush readers punctuated by the rip of envelopes and the flip of pages.

Well, no, it's probably a little early for slush readers to get slush drunk. At 8:00 AM Pacific Time, it might even be too early for slush at all. I have no idea what a WOTC slush reader's schedule is like.

And how's the book coming, you ask? You just keep right on asking that. You go right ahead. While you're at it, ask me how much sleep I'm going to get tonight. Uh-huh. That's right.

In better news, NaNoEdMo 2005 is coming along nicely.

And let's close this morning's entry with product placement: Have you looked through your share of keyholes today? Well, why not? Look at the kind of stuff you get to see! For instance, this blog entry features a lovely composite satellite image of Gasworks Park, in Seattle, where several important scenes in this story take place. Look! You can see the sundial!

(It should be noted that Google--who bought the software, incorporated it into their Maps Beta, and renamed it "Google Earth"--did not pay me to say that. But I wouldn't turn down payment for having said it. Should Google feel moved to grant me a free subscription for plugging this delightful piece of software, I won't complain.)

Yes I do. I'm-a gonna edit this novel into submission. I plan to clock two hours per day, with rare 1-hour exception days, until the 50-hour goal is reached and then keep it up until I like the shape the novel is in enough to give it to a beta reader.

We'll see how well that sticks. Considering that I'm still trying to get the 2003 novel ready to go out the door should someone ask for it, and that I've also got a short story that needs to hit the mail by mid-March, it'll be a crunch. Either it'll be quick-start tough-love lesson in Treating Writing Like A Real Nine-To-Five Job, or I'll end up sleeping a lot. We Shall See.

Meanwhile, after an initial attempt at applying Holly Lisle's One-Pass Manuscript Revision Technique to a NaNoWriMo draft, I have a better idea how to proceed. It goes something like this:

1. Print out and reread the manuscript in its entirety. Flinch if you must, but read. Don't write on the manuscript at this time.
2. Do what Holly says in the "Discovery" bit. Define what the story is about, who the characters are, how they develop. Get a rock-solid grok on the desired finished product.
3. Restructure as needed. Write a chapter-by-chapter outline. Go through your hard copy making marks as needed to bring the manuscript into line with the new structure. Figure out how stuff is foreshadowed. Plant the trees that need to grow; grow the trees that got planted. Lay on a patina of literary allusion and symbolism according to your preference. Think "macro."
4. Now, make a copy of the document file and get to work rearranging the manuscript to reflict this revised structure. Write new scenes where needed. Cut old ones. Be vicious. When you're done with this, you are done with this and you will not be allowed to revisit it except by editorial fiat (that is, if the book is accepted and the editor wants changes; or if the rejection letter says "do this stuff and then resubmit.").
5. Print out a new hard-copy and do some fine-tuning. Find oft-repeated words or phrases and apply thesaurus. Fix the sentences that clunk. Smooth out paragraph segues. Think "micro" and make that prose sing.
6. Print out a new copy and hand it to a trusted beta-reader. Forget all about this novel and work on something else until your beta reader gets back to you. Incorporate beta reader's suggestions, as appropriate. Repeat as necessary.
7. You're done. Now go out there and find someone to publish the beast.

In other news, I got my 10-year-old Canon BJ-10sx talking to my brand new, parallel-port-free Averatec laptop, by way of a USB-to-Parallel-Port adapter. They said it would be iffy! They said it would be expensive! They were right! But I got lucky. And the thing works beautifully. Installed the printer to port USB003, shared the printer on the network, did a NET USE alias using LPT3 to refer to the share drive, and told WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS) to print to LPT3. Whoo-hoo! Direct printing from my word processor of choice!

I can now say this: For an effective ego-boost, try printing to an ancient, slooooow bubble-jet. The hours it'll take to print a 237-page manuscript will impress on you that, Almighty Gods in Alphabetical Order, dude, you wrote a huge honkin' book! And isn't that a nice feeling?

This will not be news to you, for the subset of "you" that's defined as "folks what've already been through the novel-submitting process." But I thought I'd just mention it, for the benefit of y'all what haven't.

Synopsis-writing sucks.

Thank you.

Oft-heard advice to writers new to the novel-writing scene: "Do not send in your 3+synop to an agent or publisher until the entire novel is finished!" I agree. Until you've written a few of these beasts and determined for yourself how long it takes you to finish—hell, until you've determined that you can finish—it's sheer madness to send out the first three chapters of an unfinished novel. Not only do you risk getting a request for the full manuscript before the full manuscript is actually ready; you risk those first three chapters developing changes as you finish the rest of the novel, causing your original submission to become inconsistent with the full manuscript. Both of these problems are bound to cause you to lose reputation points.

Well, hey. Madness. Fine place to visit. I'm headed there Monday.

The WOTC deadline is March 1. That leaves only, erm, 9 days between now and then. And here's where I'm at: I've got three chapters done and edited, all except for the final fine-tuning. What the hey. Let's ship 'em off on Monday and then write like a fiend, right?

Reason 1: If I don't submit until after I've edited the whole manuscript, I'm going to miss the deadline. So it's go mad, or just stay out of the pool.

Reason 2: I've mostly been stuck on the edit because I know the novel needs a lot more structure and interim crises than it has at the moment. If I prepare a submission for mailing on Monday, that means I'll have written up a synopsis and a well-organized, exciting chapter-by-chapter outline. Ta-da! Structure and crises. After that, the rest of the edit should go swimmingly.

Reason 3: Submitting on Monday puts me in the position of either hoping they don't pick my submission as one of the ten finalists, or working like a dog to get the manuscript ready in case they ask for it on March 2. I don't enter contests that I hope not to win, which leaves me only plan B. Tricking the external world into enforcing my internal deadlines is a nice way to make deadlines stick.

Reason 4: This is not the novel I want to work on for National Novel Editing Month. Nope. This is. Accordingly, I need to get the current novel the hell out of my way by the time March 1 rolls around.

So, there you go. Four reasons for the absolute madness of a first-time novelist submitting the first three chapters without having the rest of the manuscript in hand. If I manage to get caught with my literary pants down, you'll be the first to know. But I ain't planning on that happening. Just You Watch.

To all two or three of you who actually read this and might be wondering: No, I'm not dead, and the novel's not dead.

As to the blog, I'm trying to do a bit of rebuilding on it such that it accomodates other writing subjects besides those novels I've drafted as part of NaNoWriMo. I've been doing a bunch of work on short fiction these last few months, and I've also been hanging out in the AbsoluteWrite forums where the demise or the cleaning-up of PublishAmerica is being ardently hoped for. So many writing subjects to talk about! So many ways to organize blog entries! Plus I wanna try writing my own RSS feed, too.

And as to the novel, I confess to dragging my heels. But! I've written a Whole New Short Story! To submit here! Go me.

So. More later, as available. Kisses.

Yo. Novel's on hold for another few days, as other obligations require. Between one thing and another, I probably won't get back to it until this time next week. But I will get back to it. Oh yes.

Met up yesterday with the Greeley folks at the Borders Bookstore (in Greeley, of course), some of whom also didn't make their Jan 5 goals (but some of whom did, Gods bless 'em). Discovered that "that song with the states in alphabetical order" has an actual name ("Fifty Nifty United States") and was not in fact written by my grade school music director; it is actually quite widespread, like a successful virus, and I was not the only person at the Greeley meet-up who knew it. I was not even the person who brought it up. But I was not the person who forgot New Hampshire, thank you very much.

And then there was the point at which the conversation turned to State Farm's "like a good neighbor" jingle, to which it was revealed there is a whole song out there, written of course by Barry Manilow. We very nearly ended up singing Manilow's "Very Strange Medley" right there and then, which I fear would have got us kicked out on our collective ear.

We shall reconvene in Greeley on Feb 15. My hope for Jan 5 had been to complete a revision cycle; my new goal is to have the book ready to A) submit to WOTC, or B) start querying agents. Either way, I should be ready to hit NaNoEdMo proper and attempt the 50 hours thing with, I think, my 2002 manuscript.

One other thing came out of the trip to Greeley. Whilst driving up Diagonal Highway towards I-25 and using my laptop as an oversized MP3 player (wired into the car sound system via one of those cassette-tape sound converter thingies you can get at RadioShak), I remembered that I had this on my hard drive. *Bliss* If you wanna know more, go here.

It's such a nice surprise when you say, "I'm tired, I'm excrutiatingly tired, but fine, fifteen minutes of writing before I go to sleep," and then you start writing, and when you stop it's been, in fact, forty-five minutes.

Now if only this kind of multiplication worked on a larger scale. Say, nine hours when I meant to do three.