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hrjAt the point at which I started setting up my "wall of post-its" with all the plot and character elements for Mother of Souls and Floodtide it felt like the official "start" of those books. I still haven't converted the post-its into concrete detailed outlines yet (though that's on the agenda for today) but it gave me a basis for starting on what I call "snippets": individual scenes, not necessarily written in strict order, but in the general part of the story that I should be working on. Snippets work well for dictation on my commute (and I've been driving more than BARTing lately for various reasons). They aren't anything close to a first draft yet. I don't yet have the knack of being able to dictate the same way I compose when I can see the text in front of me. It isn't just a matter of having lots of place-holders (that's normal even for a first draft), but the dictation is a lot closer to being just dialogue and stage directions. Descriptive passages typically are simply flagged ("insert lyrical description of countryside here"). I include more explicit speech tags than I will keep (because I don't have the physical formatting to indicate alternation). And I can't keep track of repeated words in the same way, so that's left for the clean-up.
At this point, I have bits and pieces from the first four chapters of Mother of Souls (Antuniet's chapter, Luzie's chapter, Barbara's chapter, and Serafina's chapter) and the first couple of Floodtide. In theory, I should wait to start on Floodtide until I get to that timepoint in Mother of Souls. Chronologically, it will be about a third of the way through MoS (maybe around chapter 12-15?). But I wanted to start exploring the "voice" of Rozild (Roz for short), my first-person protagonist in FT. Then today I sat down and wrote the first half of an episode in chapter 3 of MoS that I've had in mind ever since I introduced the character of Tavit in The Mystic Marriage and it may drive me crazy that I can't really talk about it because no one except the beta-readers have any idea who Tavit is. (He's Barbara's armin.)
I think this must be one of those "you are a real author" rites of passage when you find yourself suspended between the published books that the general readers know, the forthcoming books that "exist" but aren't available for general reading yet, and the work-in-progress that you yourself are all excited about because it's what you're working on, but that your readers don't have the background for yet.
Because Daughter of Mystery has some fairly significant spoilers embedded in it, I found it awkward to talk too much about The Mystic Marriage when I was in the process of writing it, because certain ordinary facts about the characters would have given away plot points for the earlier book. At this point, my attitude is that anybody who doesn't care for spoilers better just hurry up and read DoM because I'm not going to dance around that issue any more. But I still get this disconnect where I forget that most people reading this blog are a whole book behind where I am. Once I'm done with the two current books, there may be a chance for the readers to catch up a little because the next Alpennian project after that is my tangentially-related 15th century story. And I'm thinking of trying to work in one of my non-Alpennian book ideas around then, too, before getting back to finishing up the 19th c. Alpennian series with Mistress of Shadows and the one or two as-yet-untitled works after that. But sufficient unto the day are the drafts thereof.
One of the really fun things about my plots are all the secondary characters who clearly have Stories Of Their Own. Parts of those stories get mentioned; other parts are left to the imagination. I won't be writing all their stories (and if I did, it would just involve introducing even more intriguing secondary characters). I don't even know all their stories. I just know they have them. Tavit has evolved considerably from my original conception and there have been several points along the way where things that I "learned" about his story tied in other plot points rather neatly. I like that in a secondary character. I hope you all like it too -- even if you'll have to wait quite a while to see.
At this point, I have bits and pieces from the first four chapters of Mother of Souls (Antuniet's chapter, Luzie's chapter, Barbara's chapter, and Serafina's chapter) and the first couple of Floodtide. In theory, I should wait to start on Floodtide until I get to that timepoint in Mother of Souls. Chronologically, it will be about a third of the way through MoS (maybe around chapter 12-15?). But I wanted to start exploring the "voice" of Rozild (Roz for short), my first-person protagonist in FT. Then today I sat down and wrote the first half of an episode in chapter 3 of MoS that I've had in mind ever since I introduced the character of Tavit in The Mystic Marriage and it may drive me crazy that I can't really talk about it because no one except the beta-readers have any idea who Tavit is. (He's Barbara's armin.)
I think this must be one of those "you are a real author" rites of passage when you find yourself suspended between the published books that the general readers know, the forthcoming books that "exist" but aren't available for general reading yet, and the work-in-progress that you yourself are all excited about because it's what you're working on, but that your readers don't have the background for yet.
Because Daughter of Mystery has some fairly significant spoilers embedded in it, I found it awkward to talk too much about The Mystic Marriage when I was in the process of writing it, because certain ordinary facts about the characters would have given away plot points for the earlier book. At this point, my attitude is that anybody who doesn't care for spoilers better just hurry up and read DoM because I'm not going to dance around that issue any more. But I still get this disconnect where I forget that most people reading this blog are a whole book behind where I am. Once I'm done with the two current books, there may be a chance for the readers to catch up a little because the next Alpennian project after that is my tangentially-related 15th century story. And I'm thinking of trying to work in one of my non-Alpennian book ideas around then, too, before getting back to finishing up the 19th c. Alpennian series with Mistress of Shadows and the one or two as-yet-untitled works after that. But sufficient unto the day are the drafts thereof.
One of the really fun things about my plots are all the secondary characters who clearly have Stories Of Their Own. Parts of those stories get mentioned; other parts are left to the imagination. I won't be writing all their stories (and if I did, it would just involve introducing even more intriguing secondary characters). I don't even know all their stories. I just know they have them. Tavit has evolved considerably from my original conception and there have been several points along the way where things that I "learned" about his story tied in other plot points rather neatly. I like that in a secondary character. I hope you all like it too -- even if you'll have to wait quite a while to see.
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Date: 2014-10-12 11:04 pm (UTC)Mary Anne in Kentucky
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