Dream Journal: Building houses (or worlds)

I think it must be all my friends who are in the middle of buying houses, but I had a homeowner anxiety dream this morning. My house was an enormous rambling place with lots of "owner-built" additions and modifications. I had just gotten a housemate who brought a vibrant and spontaneous social life with her (consisting mostly--for some inexplicable reason--of people hanging out on the Making Light blog). I was in the middle if introducing myself to the sudden crowd and laying down some house rules (like: "knock before you walk in the front door" and similar) when a massive rainstorm hit and pieces of the house started crumbling and exposing structural flaws. Which the crowd of strangers began eagerly pointing out to me and explaining how I could have fixed or prevented them. And then a leak started pouring through the roof and I started to cry.

When I posted this over on fb, it was pointed out to me in comments (and I had come to the same conclusion independently) that this may not actually be a homeowner anxiety dream -- although it borrows the symbolic language -- but an about-to-have-my-novel-published anxiety dream. A vast horde of complete strangers (as well as people I already know and respect) are about to "walk in" to my world without knocking and (at least implicitly) start critiquing the architecture, the furniture, the wallpaper, and the dinner menu. But dammitall I built that roof and I know for certain that it will not leak. So take that, you insecure subconscious!

Alpennia: geeking my way through my editor's requested revisions

I'd been waiting in some trepidation for the feedback from my editor at Bella Books. (I didn't know who it would be until I actually received the feedback.) You hear depressing stories about how nobody has the budget to do actual editing any more and you're lucky if they even get some intern to do a proofreading pass. Well, I have to say I'm much relieved and heartened to find that Daughter of Mystery was the subject of serious critical review ... but also a bit chuffed at the relatively small amount of "corrective" editing I received. The feedback pretty much came in three parts: minor changes and suggestions red-lined in the file; more nebulous but still focussed recommendations regarding specific scenes; and a couple of big-picture items that apply to the whole story. The first category was easily dealt with. I'd say I just hit "accept change" on about 80% of them and took most of the rest as an indication that some fix was needed, but I fixed it in a slightly different way. There were only two items worthy of a stet and those were both cases where I was doing something fairly subtle and below-the-radar with word choice, but it was important both that it be there and that it not be made more overt.

The scene-specific suggestions are all ones I agree with, now that they've been pointed out. (This character's conflict with the protagonists needs to be resolved more explicitly, that scene needs to be on- rather than off-stage and with a different viewpoint, etc.) But the suggestions that I could tell would be the most work -- yet I couldn't argue against their validity -- were that I add more explicit description of my main characters' appearance, and that I give my readers more reminders of just who people are if they've been out of the story for a while.

OK, fair cop. I'm not a visual person. I know these characters very thoroughly, like the back of my ... eyelids. But I honestly didn't really know what they looked like. There's a reason why I have trouble recognizing people -- even ones I see regularly. I simply don't think in visuals. (This is probably also part of why I tend to get weird around compliments to my appearance. For me, visual appearance is ... unimportant. It's not "real".) But my editor wasn't the first reader who had commented about wanting a better idea of what my characters looked like. So ... fair cop. Now how do I do it? Hey, I'm a geek. So the first thing I do is pull out my spreadsheet.

Well of course I have a spreadsheet with all my characters (and place names, and specialized terminology, and invented authors and their works, and ... well you get the picture), cross-referenced by the place of residence, class, and which social circles they hang out in. Once I started working on my second piece of fiction set in Alpennia, I also added columns for which characters appear in which works. But if I need to keep track of which characters are prominent enough to need description, and where that description would best be introduced (especially if it relies on being presented through a particular point of view), and especially if I need to keep track of when a character has been offscreen for long enough that I need to remind the reader who they are ... well, for that I need to expand things a little.

So now the spreadsheet includes columns for every chapter in Daughter of Mystery, for the short story (a pre-quel) Three Nights at the Opera, and for what I've written so far of The Mystic Marriage. And each character that appears in any given chapter is so noted, with an "n" if they are named and an "r" if they are referred to in some way not including a name or title. I then went in and highlighted red for the first appearance where a visual description would be appropriate (the character has to be physically on-screen and the POV character has to have a rational reason for ruminating on their appearance). A pink highlight is added for opportunities for further description (either by the other viewpoint character or in a particular circumstance where a consideration of appearance would make sense). A yellow highlight marks the reappearance of a character after 4 to 8 chapters off-screen where a casual reminder of the character's identity and/or relationships might not go amiss.

So now I know where I'm going to put the descriptions ... but what am I going to describe? What it comes down to is that I don't have to know exactly what my characters look like ... any more than I need to know the complete geographic layout of the city of Rotenek. I just need enough scaffolding that my readers can easily fill in the specifics, and I need to not contradict myself. So along with noting what description I've already included (which -- when I started cataloging it -- really is pitifully little), I started casting about for images to use ... not so much as references, but as anchors. As a way to describe a consistent whole, without necessarily describing all the specifics. The vast majority of my reference images I snagged from portraiture of the era. (Sometimes I strayed a little earlier and pick images that were "the character as a young woman/man" simply because it can be hard to find portraits of older people.) But for a few of my characters I wanted to start from a very specific physical type. So, for example, for Barbara I started browsing pictures of Olympic fencers and stumbled across what I now consider the definitive inspirational image:Italian fencer Valentina Vezzali. (Please note that I'm not saying this is what Barbara looks like. I'm saying that when the reader develops a picture of Barbara from my description, I want it to feel like the energy I get from Vezzali. Also, Barbara wears more clothes.) There are a couple of other characters where, once I started thinking about it, there was a particular actor or screen character who had the "feel" that I wanted to achieve, and therefore where I could use that character as an anchor. But for the most part I find that Hollywood faces -- especially women -- are much too same-same and far too modern to give me the right sort of inspiration.

At any rate, I now have at least one visual anchor for every character who will get a physical description at some point in Daughter of Mystery. And I have my chapter-by-chapter schedule of where to consider inserting those descriptions. The only logistical problem is that during the week I normally do my writing work on the iPad (easier to whip out on BART than the laptop -- especially if I don't get a seat), but since I'm tracking changes for the current revisions, I have to do it in the full version of Word. So I may end up just writing fragments of descriptive prose in my Evernote files (yes, this project finally tipped me over into getting an Evernote account) to be inserted when I can work at home.

Maybe the whole spreadsheet thing is overkill. All I know is that when I hit the parts of the writing process that aren't natural to me, a good spreadsheet can make up the deficit.