Juggling Plots

I have another reader question on writing, this time about juggling multiple plot threads and making them all come out at the same time.

I'm going to have to address this from the perspective of a plotter because I'm not sure how a "seat of the pants" writer would handle this, other than in revisions. Then again, even as a plotter I end up doing a lot of revisions to make everything come out right. Most novels are going to have more than one plot thread, even if some of the subplots are mostly just character arcs -- there's the thing that must be done or achieved, but then there's the personal growth the hero has to go through in order to be able to achieve the goal. A more complex novel with a larger cast of characters, particularly multiple point-of-view characters, may have more than one story goal, even if all the story goals ultimately thread together for the climax. Not every plot has to come out at the same time, though. Some subplots may rise and fall at a different rate and resolve before the main story climax, and resolving that conflict may even help lead into the big climax. Some subplots may have to wait to come out until after the main story climax. For instance, a romantic subplot may not resolve until the main story is wrapped up -- the hero saves the day, and then has the nerve (and the time) to express his love for the heroine.

I find that it's easiest to juggle multiple plot threads by making it visual in some way. Here are some techniques to try:
Storyboarding -- lay out the story beats using sticky notes on a big board, with different colored notes for each plot thread. That way you can see how the events of the book are coming together, and you can rearrange them until they flow properly.

Mind mapping -- branch out the various story elements, starting from the central plot, using different colored markers as each element branches off into its own subplot. This is a good way to see how the various plot lines relate to the main plot.

Flow chart -- Another way to see how the various plot threads diverge and connect and what has to happen first before the next thing can happen.

Parallel outline -- this is kind of a verbal way of storyboarding. Make columns for each plot thread or POV character, then list the major steps in each plot. With another ink color, connect the various threads at the point where they should intersect in the book. I've also done this with separate sheets of paper for each plot line, working each plot out separately as though it's the only story in the book, and then I create a master timeline in which I slot all those events together.

A rising/falling action chart -- make a graph showing low and high points, using different colors for each plot line. This is good for using multiple plot lines to keep the tension and action in a book going, so that you've got one plot hitting a high point while another plot is in a lull.

I think a timeline of some sort is essential for making sure everything works out the way you need it to. You may need to reverse engineer it from the outcome you want. Start with the climax where everything comes together, and work backward from there to get in all the events that need to happen in order for the climax to work, and then make sure the timing lines up. It's a lot like planning a meal, where you start with the time you want to eat and work backward to figure out how long each step in each recipe will take and determine which step you need to do, when.

You may need to use more than one of these methods to really work things out.

And then you'll probably need to tinker with it in revisions, moving events around and changing their order so that it flows better. You can use these various charts after you've written a draft to figure out how to revise. I suppose that's what "pantsers" might have to do -- do the plotting retroactively.

Enchanted, Inc. -- The End

Wow, the Enchanted, Inc. reread has finally come to an end, with the last chapter.

I'm pretty sure the final chapter in the published book is different from what I initially wrote, but I don't think I could tell you exactly how. I think there might have been more wrap-up and a bit more dithering.

I did get some complaints about Katie not ending up with Owen at the end, but I'm a big fan of the slow build, and I didn't want to move too quickly. I wanted to give just enough of a hint of possibility, but I wanted her to explore other options first so we'd have a basis for comparison and know Owen was the right guy. Besides, he's kind of a chicken socially, so it would take a lot for him to be able to openly ask her out. In my mental backstory, he's the one who first noticed her when he saw her in a bookstore and was attracted to her, and then in watching her from afar he noticed signs that might indicate she was immune to magic, and so they set up the test that morning on the subway. If you're really shy, it's harder to talk to someone who really matters to you, so it's going to take him a while to work up the nerve and the comfort level to ask her out.

I actually think I got them together too soon and I might have done things differently if I'd known how many more books there would be, but at the time I had a two-book contract with no real guarantee of more, so I didn't want to leave that thread hanging.

I know the very last scene, of her heading to the office on the subway and noticing the magical things but not being shocked, wasn't my first draft, but now I can't think of any other way I could have ended it. It's a full-circle kind of thing, going back to where she was at the beginning and showing how much she's already changed.

It's been fun re-reading this because it's finally been so long since I wrote it that I can almost read it as a reader and not as the writer who still wants to tinker with it. I wrote this book largely because it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to read, and I couldn't find anything quite like it. I think that I'd have loved this book and become a huge fan if I'd just been a reader who found it -- which seems rather obvious, since as the writer I was able to customize it to my personal tastes.

Incidentally, the book is set in 2005. I wrote it in 2003 and planned it to take place in 2005 because I figured that was when it was most likely to be published if it sold, so I used a 2005 calendar to figure out days of the week and dates. This doesn't really show in this book, but the later books are still set in 2005-2006 even though they were published later, so I had to keep checking technology levels. That's why there's not so much texting and people aren't yet widely using smartphones. That sort of thing was more ubiquitous when the later books were published, but it was only just barely getting started at the time when the books were set. The first book actually takes place in the near future after the publication date (published in late May 2005, set in September-November 2005), but the rest happen after the time period in which they're set. I don't put any date stamps in the book, so they're more or less timeless, aside from any trends, entertainment, and technology, but I tried to mentally keep everything in period.

I may take a little break before diving into book 2.

The Writers Guild Suicide Pact

I had a nice couple of days with my parents and then realized when I got home just how messy I'd let my house get. It's funny how you get used to things until you leave and come back to see it with fresh eyes. So I guess I'll be getting busy this week. That'll be easier because almost everything I watch on TV is over for the summer (though I have a slight backlog of OnDemand stuff to get through).

And I have to say, that Writers Guild Suicide Pact idea is looking more and more valid. Very little improved, most got worse, and just about everything got dark. So, starting on Monday nights:
Sleepy Hollow was a big "huh?" for the year, getting into that trend I've noted that the wife/girlfriend of the main character is generally the most-hated character on a show (including the villain), and too often the writers pick up on that from the fans and put it in the show. I didn't have strong feelings about the wife, either way. I think I just mostly rooted for her because of resistance to the hating the wife trend. And then they made that impossible, to the point that destroying her was the only way out. I loved the pilot of this series, but it's never really lived up to that and I'm 50/50 about whether I'll watch it again.

Gotham had great casting and interesting world building, but I reached the point a few weeks ago where I turned off the TV in mid-episode because I realized I wasn't enjoying it and I only cared about a few of the characters. Plus, a demonizing the girlfriend plot. It was very liberating to let go of it.

NCIS is my comfort food television -- not earthshattering, but I like the characters and they usually don't go too very dark for very long. They did go dark in the cliffhanger, but I'm fairly certain they won't stay there, which is why this one stays in my rotation even when it's fairly bland.

Person of Interest is a rare case where going dark actually was a good thing for the storytelling and quality, just because in order to deal honestly with the subject matter, it had to get pretty bleak. It was edge-of-the seat stuff, but it was sometimes difficult to watch. Still, the characters remained true to themselves and their principles, and there's always that dash of hope.

Forever was my bright spot of the season, so of course it was cancelled.

I didn't even try watching Chicago Fire this season. It was never a great show, but it could be fun. But they got a bad case of Mary Sue and I reached the point where I just didn't care. It's one I watched OnDemand, and I just never got around to watching it this season and didn't miss it.

Elementary is another one that falls into the "TV comfort food" category -- I like the characters and the plots are generally interesting. But it took a last-second dive into the really, really dark.

Then there was Grimm, which had what looked like it would be an interesting plot/character twist -- until they went off the deep end with it and we got yet another case of demonizing the girlfriend in a total characterization reversal and a huge plunge into darkness. I'm curious to see where they go from here, and that will determine whether I go along. This was one of my favorite shows, but I'm not sure I'll even buy the DVD of this season.

Even the Sunday PBS stuff took a downward turn. Call the Midwife got preachy in a very anachronistic way. Downton Abbey got ridiculous, plus there were some cast turnover issues that affected the plot. I turned off Mr. Selfridge in the middle of an episode this season because I just wasn't enjoying it and most of the characters I liked were gone. The bright spot was Wolf Hall, but I don't think I would enjoy that as anything other than a miniseries.

The winner of my Most Frustrating Show award goes to Once Upon a Time. When it's good, it's wonderful. There are moments that are pure gold, one of the few romantic relationships on TV that actually works for me, and some characters I love. But when it's bad, it's utterly awful. This season's overall arc made so little sense that I can't believe it came from a team of so-called professional writers. It contradicted itself all over the place and made most of the main characters look like raving idiots. They've got a really bad Mary Sue problem with a character who gets all the shinies handed to her and who has everyone fighting on her behalf for no good reason, and yet she's portrayed as the biggest victim ever who even the writers say "gets the short end of the stick." There must be a massive case of groupthink going on in that writers room so that no one has played devil's advocate or challenged any of these assumptions that fly in the face of all logic. Plus, there's some seriously screwed up morality and a bad case of the villain/hero double standard. And yeah, we got another massive dive into darkness as the cliffhanger. Unfortunately, I do love some of the characters enough that it's hard to just walk away, even if I would love to be locked in a room with their writing staff for about an hour so I could tell them where they went wrong. Preferably with shock collars. I could easily fix this show and make it amazing, which is why it's so frustrating to me that they keep making horrible decisions and never really delve into the character and world elements that they set up. There's so much potential, and they take the easy and shallow route almost every single time. And yet the premise and characters are so distinctive that there's no way to file off the serial numbers and write my own thing that fixes it.

There didn't seem to be much for me to get excited about in next season's new shows, so that should give me more writing and reading time, which is a good thing.

Redesigning

Since it looks like we're having a rare day without a lot of rain, I'm going to head over to visit my parents before they forget what I look like. I'm not sure whether to take my car or rent a boat. It doesn't look like the major roads where I'm heading are flooded, but you never know these days. We've gone from drought to flood in a few weeks. Two weeks ago, most of the lakes around here were below normal levels. Now most of them are at flood stage. The lake nearest me will look very different for summer fireworks.

I think I've found a fun new concept for my web site. It's really different from the more cartoony, bright look I had for the Enchanted, Inc. books, but it's more of a fit for the Fairy Tale books and the Steampunk book and for most of the other story ideas I've got in mind. I'm also going to have to change my tagline. I was using "Fairy tales for modern times," and while I meant that in terms of audience, it sounds like it's about contemporary fiction, which doesn't fit so well with the steampunk book. And while I think I used a few fairy tale tropes in the steampunk story, it's not so obviously a fairy tale kind of book.

One line that came to me last night was "All Manner of Magic" which I think covers a broad range of fantasy. What would that say to you as a reader?

I'm planning to use part of a photo I took as a header because to me that image says "fantasy" but it also has a Victorian esthetic.

Yeah, I know, I should be writing, but in the state I've been in, words weren't coming, but playing around with fiddly bits in my web software was working, and it's something that needs to be done. I didn't realize just how much the newer version of this software could do, so I'm having fun with the toys. I promise not to go overboard, though. I keep going back and forth on whether I should use a background color on the page. I like things clean and white and easy to read. I also prefer white walls in my house. But I don't know how appealing that will be. It's odd that I keep ending up with color schemes that don't fit my personal taste, but that do fit my books. There was the pink/purple range from the Enchanted, Inc. books, and my current plan is using greens and golds. I like the black, gray, white, and red on the steampunk cover, but I don't think it fits everything else. I may do an entirely different style/color scheme for the pages relating to that book.

But now I suppose I should get packed and head out for the weekend.

3:22 a.m.

I've had allergies/a cold/something else for the past few days, and what had been a sore throat has become a cough with the annoying tendency to wake me up at 3:22 in the morning (yes, that precisely). I thought it was maybe that this was the time the cold medicine I took before I went to bed wore off, so last night, desperate to get some rest, I broke out The Good Stuff, the prescription cough syrup that renders me useless for about 15 hours but that allows me to sleep through the night even when I've got bronchitis (this is much milder than my usual bronchitis). But while it made me groggy, it had a very different effect on me this time. I was sort of asleep in that I wasn't really awake and wouldn't have been able to do anything but lie there, but I was conscious pretty much the whole night. It was like an entire night of daydreaming, with only a few short bursts of real sleep. And I still woke up coughing at 3:22.

During the night, while I was conscious but not really awake, I did some brainstorming that might have led to an idea for a web site redesign, though I haven't quite yet figured out how to make it work in reality with the software I've got. I may still play with it some and see what I can get it to do. My hope was to be able to just redo the main page and otherwise adjust the colors and header through the master page, so I can essentially redo the way the site looks without redoing the entire site. I have some ideas on how I can make my concept work

Since I "worked" through the night, I'm now in need of some real sleep. I may not be very useful today.

At least the cough seems to be a lot better. I wonder if I take a nap, will I wake up coughing at 3:22 in the afternoon?

Enchanted, Inc. -- Nearing the End

We're getting close to the end in the Enchanted, Inc. reread, with chapters 17 and 18.

We start with the conclusion of the crazy magic immunity testing scheme and another appearance by the guy who thought he was turned into a frog. Looking back at it, I had way too much fun with that thread. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that it's never the men I find interesting who get interested in me. If someone is going to be following me around, serenading me, giving me flowers, etc., it's most likely someone who just makes me uncomfortable. Romantic interest is so seldom symmetrical, alas.

Then we set up for our final showdown. The setting at the amusement park in New Jersey actually stemmed from a practical matter. When I'd finally decided I had to write this book after more than a year of thinking about it, I felt like I needed a research trip to New York before I could really write it. I'd been there for a conference the previous summer, and I'd done some wandering around at the time, but not really enough because I didn't know enough about the story to know what I needed to look into. But a group of people I'd met online through Firefly fandom were planning a get-together in the fall at Wildwood, New Jersey. I figured I could get a ride from there to Philadelphia to catch a train to New York, so I could kill two birds with one stone and spend a couple of days in New York after the event. I guess it was kind of a leap of faith that I booked my return flight and hotel without having totally firmed up travel plans (though I'd already found one person willing to get me to the train station in Philadelphia). I ended up just getting a ride straight to New York, so it worked out. But then I was being scrupulous about which part of the expenses counted as a tax deduction. I knew my hotel in New York would count, but could I write off all my airfare, even if only half the time was devoted to work-related activity?

Then I figured that if I used the setting of the other place I'd gone, I could write off all the airfare in good conscience. And the moment I had that thought, ideas started flowing. One of the mornings we were in New Jersey, it was really foggy. We were at an old-timey motel, the kind where all the rooms open onto a balcony/walkway overlooking a courtyard, a couple of blocks from the beach, where we could see all the rides on the boardwalk. A group of us sat out on the balcony, drinking tea and looking at the eerie way the top of the roller coaster emerged from the fog. That seemed like a really evocative image that would be a great setting for a fight, and I also like the idea of juxtaposing something so seemingly normal and wholesome like an amusement park with a magical battle. Now it seems like there's no other place I could have set that scene, even though it stemmed from me being practical.

Next week, the end of the book!

Untangling

After a rainy weekend, it looks like I get one day to dry out before it starts again. We've gone from drought to flooding. I was thinking about buying a bicycle, but I think maybe a kayak would be a better idea.

I'm trying to remember what I did this weekend. I was sick, so a lot of it went by in a blur. I walked over to the rec center to vote in the city council election, then came home by way of the library, where I found a book I've been wanting, but somehow I never got around to reading it this weekend. I then came home from the library by walking down one of my "target" streets, where there's a house currently on the market. It's pretty small -- not that much bigger than my current house -- but I like the layout, from what I can tell in the online photos. Instead of a bunch of tiny living rooms, all cut up, most of the living area part of it seems to be an open floorplan, with the bedrooms opening off it. And it's been beautifully remodeled. But it's still not ideal, and I still don't want to try to move right now. I wasn't crazy about the particular location, and I'm not sure there was enough potential bookcase space. When I do start really house hunting, I'll need to make a list of reasons I want to move and make sure any new house meets those reasons. High on that list would be room for not only the bookcases I currently have, but more of them. Also a kitchen with both workspace and storage space.

Otherwise, I spent most of the weekend doing bits of reading, bits of knitting, catching up on some OnDemand TV watching, watching WWII documentaries on the Smithsonian channel, knitting, and untangling the skein of yarn that somehow got totally out of control. I mean, it took a couple of hours of carefully unraveling a massive knot to get enough additional yarn to be able to knit. And doing that was strangely soothing and satisfying. I'm not even knitting anything in particular. I'm just playing with a pattern to decide if I want to try to do it in this kind of yarn, and I'm testing two different borders to see which one I like best.

Then there were the season finales of Once Upon a Time and Wolf Hall -- talk about a contrast! There was a lot that was fun about the Once Upon a Time finale, but it also exposed a lot of the writing weaknesses in this show. Some of it, I think they were poking fun, but there also seemed to be a lot of unintentional irony that hit their blind spots. I really just want to strangle the writers of that show sometimes because they've got a great premise and cast, but the execution is almost always disappointing.

But the sun is out temporarily and the week has begun. I need to make a tea run, so there will be a walk to the India Bazaar at some point today, and then I need to do some writing and some housework.

Officially a "Novel"

The new book is now long enough to be a category romance, so it's officially a novel rather than a novella or novelette. But I still probably have another 20-30,000 words to go. And then a lot of revising/rewriting because it feels like it's short on action.

It's funny how much the plot and structure have changed since I started. On the first stab, I wrote a scene as the first turning point. Then I went back and changed a lot of stuff, and that scene just kept moving further and further out in the book. I've finally reached that scene, which now is more the big turning point that leads into the final act -- the "now things are getting serious" part.

I'm actually probably not as far along as I'd hoped because I discovered that in addition to this scene, there's another scene after it still in the manuscript that will have to go, as I dropped that plot thread. So there are maybe 2,000 words that will end up going.

But I can see the end from here, and I have a good idea of what's going to happen between now and the end, and I have a sense of what the final showdown will be.

Then I may let it rest a little while and deal with some other stuff. Like my web site. It's been built around the rather girly contemporary fantasy stuff, but the steampunk book has a totally different look. I think it still reads very much like something written by me, but you don't get "steampunk" when you look at my current web site. I probably need to migrate/evolve my logo, and then I think maybe an overall feminine Victorian style would work to bridge the two styles of books. I may not worry about matching the color scheme to anything in any of my book covers and just go with something I like. Which means blue will be involved. Maybe. I need to find a graphic designer.

Crazy Houses

I am now totally done with children's choir for this school year. They were pushing the limits up to the very last second, too. We couldn't even meet in our classroom for five minutes to practice the song we were doing for the assembly without them standing on the chairs and jumping off (against one of the class rules we have to talk about every single week) and then running around and refusing to participate. But now I get a break for the summer. I think I'll be back next year, unless things get really crazy between now and then, though I may end up with preschool next year because the preschool people want to move up with the class they had this year.

I feel like my decision to put off selling my house and buying a new one has been validated, as there was an article in the newspaper this morning about how home prices in this area are currently inflated and there's some worry about a bubble. That would benefit me as a seller, but could be a longer-term issue as a buyer. I bought my house during a kind of "bust," so I got it at probably below value, and as long as I can sell it at all, I'm sure to come out ahead. I'd rather not overpay for the next house. This house may not be everything I want it to be, but I've survived this long here, and the only reason for moving is a whim and a changed financial situation.

The crazy house I looked at on Sunday has already sold -- the one with wacky stuff like a built-in aquarium, three tiny living areas instead of one decent-sized one, and a weird built-in dinette. Plus it had a backyard so narrow that I don't think my patio umbrella would have fit on the patio that filled the entire space between the back door and the back fence, and the rest of the backyard was Astroturf.

And that makes me really wonder about another house I've been watching. It went on the market in December and still hasn't sold. It's in one of the subdivisions I'm targeting, and the house itself seems very much what I'd like, but it isn't in a great spot for what I want. I don't think it's the specific location that's a problem, as a house a few doors down sold within two days of going on the market. The listing mentions that it probably needs a new roof, which might be part of the problem. Oddly, the price for the house keeps going up the longer it's been on the market. I suspect it's one of those where the sellers won't drop the price and the mortgage company appraisers won't approve a mortgage for that price because they don't think it's worth that much. Still, in a market in which crazy oddball houses are being snatched up before the Realtor finishes putting the sign out, a house being on the market since December would practically require holes in the roof, a couple of murder scenes where the blood can't be scrubbed away no matter how hard you try, and an endangered species nesting in the walls.

Hmm, sounds like a story idea ...

Characters Taking Over

As I struggle with a book that's proving to be difficult, I've been talking about characters doing unexpected things, and that's led to some questions about how characters can take over a story, so I thought that would be something interesting to address in a writing post.

I'm sure it works differently for every author. I know there are some who use the "the characters just took over" line as a cop-out for anything that happens in a book that readers don't like, but for most of us, I suspect it has more to do with having to get out of the way of our own work. In my experience, it's not so much that characters just start doing things as it is that as I'm writing, ideas will suddenly pop into my head that aren't quite what I had planned but that I realize are more true to the characters than my original plans. This is more likely to happen when you know your characters from the inside out, and you've internalized the kind of people they are, and I tend to notice it more when I'm trying to impose my will on them -- when I'm trying to make something happen for plot purposes that is actually not quite right for these characters. When I'm doing that, either I'll end up blocked on a scene and unable to move forward, or ideas will start popping up that send things in a different direction.

So how do you make this kind of thing happen? First, you really need to know your characters, deep down inside. What makes them tick? This isn't about their hobbies, favorite colors or favorite subject in elementary school. It's about their deepest inner needs, their real selves, their fears and hopes. That inner need is always going to be there unless the character fundamentally transforms, even if the character achieves the story goal. Inner needs or drives are things like power, a cause, security, freedom, harmony, novelty, belonging, etc. In most cases, this need is going to drive the character's decisions, unless there's something in a specific situation that momentarily makes the character act against that need. So if you're trying to make a character driven by a need for security do something risky, you may find that it's not working, and every idea that pops into your head will involve the character doing the exact opposite. You'll either need to rethink the action or find a motivation strong enough to overcome that drive. If you force it to happen anyway without providing the motivation, it won't ring true to your readers.

You also need to remember that you're writing about your characters, not about yourself. You can't make them act the way you would. I'm finding this a lot in the secondary heroine of my current Fairy Tale series. Emily is pretty much a polar opposite from me. She leaps before looking, takes risks just because they're fun, has little fear, and doesn't worry about long-term consequences. I'm a very cautious person who overthinks things before I act, and my tendency is to hold Emily back. This is when I'll find that the thoughts that pop into my head when writing her tend to be about her being impulsive, skipping the thinking stage entirely. I often resist that, but I've learned that I need to go with it, even though she's not doing what I would do.

A lot of this stuff comes from what I guess you might call the subconscious. Some writers refer to it as "the muse." I know some who refer to "the girls in the basement." This is the part of you that knows the characters and the story and is pure creativity, without the restraints your conscious mind might put on it. There are some things you can do to learn to listen to this part of yourself. One is physical activity -- exercise is great for freeing your mind. A lot of writers swear by water -- the best ideas come in the shower. Mindless tasks can help -- washing dishes, gardening, housework, etc. Freewriting, where you write non-stop, putting out whatever pops into your head, for a certain amount of time, is a good way to tap into your creativity without your internal editor coming out. Other forms of creativity, like drawing, painting, music, or dance, can help, as can play. Get out the Legos or dolls for a while. Distracting yourself while you write can sometimes help -- listen to music, write in a public place, turn on the TV. While you're distracted by other things, you may be surprised by what ends up happening on the page.

This is all going to work differently for different people, so it's hard to describe exactly how it works or exactly how to use it. Your characters can take on a life of their own when you're outlining, when you're writing, or when you're revising. It may happen when you're at the keyboard or when you're daydreaming elsewhere. The main thing is to learn when those impulses that strike you make for a better story and when they're just whims.

Killing Restaurants

I'm up to chapters fifteen and sixteen in the Enchanted, Inc. re-read/commentary.

We pick up with the attack after the bad blind date, kind of an adding insult to injury situation. I was trying to give Katie some personal stakes of feeling endangered because of her activities. This was one last chance for her to turn back, and at this point she's fully committed to the cause.

When I was initially planning this series, I'd kind of planned for there to be several viable guys, so it wasn't so much a romantic triangle as her having multiple options and there being some suspense as to which one she'd eventually pick as the series progressed. I envisioned 'shipper wars breaking out, with each guy having a faction. That all went pretty much straight to hell the moment I started writing Owen, but I was still valiantly trying in this book. The scene in which Rod takes Katie home to help her recover from the attack was meant to be a chance to see him outside his usual persona so that he became a viable relationship possibility. Now it just looks to me like him being a good friend, probably because in my mental canon, at this point Rod already knows that Owen is into Katie, so he's actually playing wingman here.

And then we get into one of the elements that was in the concept almost from the beginning: using some of the real world's most fearsome creatures against the enemy: lawyers! And that brings us to potential suitor number 3, Ethan, the lawyer who may be a magical immune. I had a lot of fun writing the testing scene, startling subtly and then getting so over the top that he'd have to notice.

Incidentally, this was one of my "restaurant killer" scenes. I have a really weird track record when it comes to incorporating restaurants from the real world into my books, going back to my early romance novels. If I set a scene in a restaurant that's directly based on a real one, that particular restaurant will soon close or go out of business. In this case, I used a cafe near Washington Square I'd been to a couple of times. I had breakfast there with a friend once when I was there on a business trip, then I had dinner with a group a year or so later when I was there for a conference. It was exactly the kind of place I wanted for this scene, so I set it there. I don't think I was really specific about what it was, but if you knew the area, you probably knew what I meant. On a later trip, I saw that it was closed. I suspect there's a restaurant (or something) there again because space doesn't remain vacant for long in that city. I have such a bad track record with this that I've started making up restaurants that aren't based at all on actual places. But if there's a restaurant you really hate, I could probably kill it for you by writing about it.

Smaller on the Inside

First, I suppose it's obligatory to wish you Happy Star Wars Day -- May the Fourth Be With You.

After I'd decided to wait on any house selling/buying decisions until after the new book comes out, I got a letter from someone who wants to buy my house. I've been hearing from Realtors who want to sell it, but this was a cash offer from someone who wants this house. Of course, there's that tricky issue that I'd need to find a place to buy, and I'd really rather avoid moving to an apartment and then moving again. But there were a couple of open houses very close by, on streets I'd identified as places I liked, so that's what I did on Sunday afternoon.

And that was when I learned that online real estate listings LIE. Or at least use photography tricks.

One house had what looked like a large front living room and a great room in the back, with an open kitchen, breakfast nook and den. I was figuring that the front room would be good for meetings for a group I'm in because it would fit a lot of folding chairs. Maybe one day I could get a piano, and it would fit in there, and I could put my current sofa there and get a cozy sectional for the den.

I walked into the house and immediately had a bout of claustrophobia. That large front room probably wouldn't have held my sofa and had any room to walk around it. An upright piano would have been a squeeze. Forget about even a teeny baby grand. My sofa also wouldn't have fit in the den. I'm going to have to measure my furniture and bring a tape measure when I do look at houses. That house had some weird features, like the table for the breakfast nook was built in, and it had a built-in aquarium on the wall between the den and master bedroom, with a huge cabinet in the master bedroom that I guess held all the machinery for the aquarium. But that meant there was little wall space for actual furniture in the bedroom. I cleared out of that house right away. This house was next door to the one I was eyeing a few weeks ago, and it's about 400 square feet bigger than that one, so I know that one must have been microscopic inside, considering that it looked small even in the photos.

The other house I looked at might have worked. It wasn't my ideal, but I think it would have been okay, and I was in love with the back yard. However, it went on the market Friday and there were already about five offers on it. The Realtor said it would probably be sold by the end of the day. The rooms, though, were still tiny. I'm not entirely sure my sofa would have fit in the den. The front "living" room would possibly have worked as a library to hold some bookcases and my chaise. I'm not sure either of the potential guest rooms would have held a double bed.

Since one of the reasons I want a new house is to have room to entertain, I may need to really up my budget to get something bigger. Really, if I could get my current house with a bigger kitchen and an extra bedroom, it would be lovely. Aside from the kitchen, I have nice, big, open rooms. Oh, and an attached garage and walk-in closets. So, yeah, I need a new house. But I want it to be the right house.

But then I really started thinking, and any delay isn't just for monetary reasons. The next few months will be critical for my career. I need to finish the book I'm working on. I need to get a proposal written for the next steampunk book. I need to do all the pre-launch PR. They've already told me they're booking a blog tour, so I'll have a lot of writing to do there to come up with content. I'll probably need to redesign my web site. There's no way I could do what I need to do for work and fit in buying a house and moving. The letter mentioned that they were flexible with timing, so I may e-mail them and say not now, but later in the year, in case they're still interested, and that I'll have my agent get in touch with them then (since there's no way I'd try to handle that kind of sale on my own).

This Could Be More Linear

I can't believe it's already May and that this week is over. I'm not sure where it all went.

I think I figured out how to handle the tricky scene I've been wrestling with, and I think I have a better sense of how the plot is laying out up to the next three or four scenes. I just have no idea what the last quarter of the book will be. Part of me thinks maybe I should re-read the whole book up to this point and then plot out the rest, but then part of me wants to just write what I know until I run out of ideas and need to hit the drawing board again. I suspect the second part is the right one because anything I plan now is likely to change.

This is what happens when a very linear, compulsive plotter and outliner gets stuck with a book that refuses to fall in line. I don't do well as a "pantser," but I can never see too far down the line with this series. Each scene seems to give me the idea for the next scene.

So I think I will be spending the afternoon on the patio, writing the next scene and see if that works to bridge to what I have planned next.

I also need to do some work on the patio because the recent rains have made the Evil Alien Vine grow like crazy. Apparently it's Naked Gardening Day, but I will not be observing that. I managed to get a mosquito bite on my thigh while wearing jeans yesterday. I can't imagine the condition I'd be in if I wore less. Not to mention the sunburn. That doesn't sound like a very practical holiday.

I have a somewhat busy Saturday, with a friend's vocal recital in the afternoon and another friend's birthday party in the evening. Sunday morning my children's choir sings in church, and then I have an afternoon of no plans at all, which is utterly divine. I've had a few busy Sundays in a row.

I'm Free!!!!

I have survived children's choir for the year! Well, almost. They're singing in church on Sunday, and then there's a sharing program next Wednesday, in which each group will do a song for the parents and other groups. And then there's a pizza party. And then I'll be done. But I don't need a lesson plan for next week, and I won't be in charge of them for anything other than the minute or so that we're singing. I had both kindergarten and preschool last night, and surprisingly, the four-year-olds were easier to manage than my group. They actually listened and paid attention and weren't openly defiant.

You'd think this would get easier each year as I know more of what I'm doing, but each group of kids seems to be more difficult. We're seeing the kids who grew up with iPads and smart phones their whole lives, and it does seem like they have much shorter attention spans and they expect the world to essentially be "On Demand." They have no concept of waiting for something they want to see and do. I think they've also learned that bad behavior leads to rewards, since so many parents will hand over the phone or tablet the moment a kid starts acting up in public, just to keep the kid quiet. So when they want something, they know to act up and be a brat.

Or maybe I'm just getting old. Get off my lawn!

In other news, the upcoming steampunk book got a nice review in Booklist, which bodes well. Wow, only a little more than two months before publication. After waiting so long, it's coming up fast.

Which means I really need to finish the current book. It's a nice day, so the plan is to go do some intense brainstorming elsewhere outdoors. I don't know if I want to go all the way to the river or just to the park across the street, or maybe to the lake on the edge of the neighborhood. Somewhere near water, for sure. And then there will be some quality patio time.

Mysterious Enemies

The current book continues to kill me. I thought I was making life easier on myself by not writing it in a mystery structure, so that we know who the villain is from the start and are just working to thwart the villain. But then I "discovered" that the villain has a co-conspirator in a different faction, and now I've reached a point where they're going to discover who that is … and I have no idea. I need to figure this out to move on.

This is the third Fairy Tale book, and this whole series has been this difficult for me. It refuses to be linear, and it refuses to be plotted. If I didn't already have a contract with Audible, I think I might be tempted at this point to backburner it and write the second Rebel Mechanics book, with hopes that my subconscious would work it all out in the meantime.

That's actually what I did with the first book in the series. I had a draft but wasn't happy with the resolution (and really the main plot leading to the resolution). I wasn't entirely sure how to fix it. So I backburnered it and wrote the first Rebel Mechanics book. And then the sixth Enchanted Inc. book. And then the seventh Enchanted Inc. book. And then I took another good look at it and worked it all out.

But I will persevere. I can't take five years to write this book, with three other books in between.

Today is going to be reasonably busy. I have errands to run and my final children's choir session, then choir rehearsal. But tomorrow and Friday I have nothing on the calendar, so I think I'm going to hunker down in a writing retreat and force myself to plow through it all. There may also possibly be some going to a remote location to brainstorm. Sometimes that helps. I just need some time to focus.

In the meantime, I need to decide who from that faction is most likely to be plotting and most likely to be deceived into teaming up with someone who should be the enemy.

After the Frogs

My reading lately has still been re-reading Terry Pratchett (once you start, nothing else will do), so I may as well continue the Enchanted, Inc. commentary.

In chapter thirteen, we're continuing the frog-kissing scene, where we get the guy who just thinks he's been turned into a frog. I'm pretty sure that was my idea. I know my agent suggested they actually go kiss frogs, but there weren't any details beyond that. It kind of spiraled outward from there, with ongoing ramifications.

One of those ramifications was that one of Katie's roommates ended up dating the guy who really had been turned into a frog. My agent and I had decided that we were going to market the book as chick lit rather than fantasy because of the way the market stood at the time (I'm still not sure if that was a great decision in retrospect, since chick lit tanked soon afterward and urban fantasy took off, but then again I'm not sure how well the book would have been received by fantasy houses. Even editors who loved these books have nixed everything else I've written). I needed to add a little more "real world" chick lit content by showing all the stuff with the friends, dating, etc. Having one of those dates be with a guy who'd been turned into a frog for nearly a century was a good way to add that content while keeping the fantasy element strong.

And then there was the effect of the fake frog spell. Of course he'd fall in love with the woman who broke the spell, because that's how it tends to go. But what if the woman isn't in love with him? The bad blind date was already in the book, with Ari and her friends interrupting things and making it go all wrong. Throwing in the fake frog guy just took it up a notch to make it a real disaster. I've had some miserable blind dates in my time, thanks to well-meaning people whose idea of "you're perfect for each other" boiled down to "you're both single," but this went well beyond anything I've experienced.

This was also a good way to show how Katie's life has changed. There was the setup early in the book that was normal bad blind date, with nothing to talk about. Now she has this magical life, and it's still not working out, but it's not working out in spectacular ways.

I'm getting all nostalgic over this section of the book because it was so much fun to write, and even if I wrote more books in the series, I'm not sure I could quite recapture this feeling because at that time it was so fresh for both me and the character.

A Weekend with the Doctor

I had the kind of weekend that might need a weekend to recover from it, but I have so much stuff I need to get done. A nap might be required to accomplish anything, though, so we'll see. I had two late nights that weren't very restful followed by rather early mornings, and then last night a big storm was coming through just as I needed to be getting to bed, and between the weather radio going off with warnings and all the thunder and lightning, there was no getting any sleep. We actually came off okay where I was, just the rain and lightning. South of here there were some tornados.

But the weekend was fun. I was at WhoFest DFW, a Doctor Who convention put on by a lot of the same people who put on FenCon (which is mostly my group of friends). The guest actors there were primarily from a phase of the "classic" era that I never saw, though we did also have Nicholas Briggs, who does the voices of the Daleks and Cybermen. But they were all lovely and charming people, and maybe it helped that I wasn't entirely starstruck because I ended up sharing a stage with them, and it was terrifying enough without the starstruck factor I'd have had if I'd seen their episodes.

As part of the big Saturday night show leading into the costume contest, they decided to put on a version of the Just a Minute game, which is apparently popular on British radio. It involves giving panelists a random topic that they have to talk about for a minute without any hesitation, without going off topic and without repeating a word (other than little words like "I" or words related to the topic). The other panelists have buzzers, and they get to buzz in to challenge if they think they detect hesitation, repetition, deviation, or just want to mess with you. You get points for successful challenges or for finishing the minute. I've had to play this before at a previous convention when former Doctor Who writer Paul Cornell (who is a friend of mine) made me play. And I'm terrible at it. I thought it would be easy because I'm a good speaker. Give me a topic and point me at the audience, and I'm fine. But I didn't realize how much thinking I put into the things I say, and it gets really hard to talk when you're conscious of every single word.

But they needed one more person on the panel because Colin Baker (the Sixth Doctor), Nicola Bryant (Peri), and Terry Malloy (Davros) were going to play, and as someone handy who is moderately known and who has played before, I got asked to join. I commented that it was a serious case of "one of these things doesn't belong," but I was willing to do it. Then we found out that Nicholas Briggs wanted to join in and I thought I would be off the hook, but it turned out that he wanted to host/moderate rather than play, so I was stuck, and he was impervious to any batting of the big green eyes and Southern drawl.

So, I was roadkill. I lost, big-time. I think I would have anyway because Colin and Terry were cut-throat and Nicola was very smart about it, and besides I got sidetracked listening to them and it didn't occur to me to buzz them. I did actually not say one of the things I was thinking, that my mama taught me not to interrupt my elders. But it was so much fun, a crazy experience, and I have now been hugged by a Doctor. I also need to track down some episodes from that era so I can do the "hey, I know those people!" thing. And I will never hear the Daleks again in the same way. There is allegedly video of this on YouTube, but I really, really don't want to see it.

Otherwise, I had a nice long chat with Terry Malloy at a party. He's doing a lot of audiobook narration, and so we were talking about that from the different perspective of narrator and author.

And I was on some other fun panels, got to spend time with friends and even signed an autograph. But now it is time to retreat to my cave and rest and write.

A TV Slump

This weekend is WhoFest DFW, a Doctor Who convention brought to you by a lot of the same people who do FenCon. I'll be one of the non-celebrity panelists. A lot of my panels aren't specifically about Doctor Who, but are more about other things you might like if you like Doctor Who.

And it seems that I have developed a convention anxiety nightmare. It's related to the standard school anxiety nightmare that I still have, more than twenty years after I graduated. You know the one -- you've realized that you have a final in a class you forgot you were taking. In my most common variation, I can't even remember where the class is, so I have to go back to my dorm room and tear it apart to find my class schedule, and then all kinds of crazy obstacles arise to keep me from getting to the class. In the convention version, I realize that there's a panel I was supposed to be on that I forgot about that's starting right that very minute, so I have to rush to get there before it ends. Crazy obstacles arise. Somehow it morphs from me being in the same hotel as the convention to having to get across town, crossing large bodies of water, etc. Supposedly, this kind of dream indicates a very responsible person because your greatest nightmare is failing in a responsibility.

I have to admit that I haven't been as keen on Doctor Who lately. I never warmed to Clara as a sidekick, and I don't know if that's why the new Doctor isn't really working for me. I still like it, but there's a different energy, and it's not really the energy I prefer. I enjoy it while it's on but barely think of it later, and I don't find myself anticipating new episodes.

This actually seems to be a slumping year for a lot of things I enjoy. They've done some interesting things on Grimm, but they've also done some big "huh?" things that haven't worked, and then they've bungled some of the potentially interesting things. This season of Downton Abbey got so ridiculous that I might actually be hate-watching more than I'm enjoying it. The jury's still out on whether the veering widely from the books is going to help or hurt A Game of Thrones. Once Upon a Time has just gone off a cliff to the point I'm not sure it can be salvaged (pro tip: it's a really, really bad idea to suggest that the characters in a fictional story don't actually have free will and have a predestined outcome. Why should we care what they do, then? Also, darkening the heroes doesn't make the villains look better in comparison, especially if the "darkening" makes no sense). They're exploring some interesting concepts on Person of Interest, but it's just getting so very bleak that it's not pleasant to watch. About the only light spot on TV for me right now, where I enjoy it while it's on and don't end up depressed, is Forever, which gives me all kinds of warm fuzzies, but I don't think it's long for this world. It's not likely to get another season.

I guess the upside is that if TV becomes too unpleasant to watch, that will free up a lot of time for me.

Now I need to figure out what to wear this weekend and double check my schedule so I don't realize at the last second that I'm missing a panel so I have to make a mad dash across town.

Reports and Reviews

I am now down to one more children's choir session, and then the final program for the parents, but I don't need a lesson plan for that. I had a parent helping last night because the other teacher had a sick kid, and she asked me at the end if they were always this way. I said that this was actually a pretty good night. She was horrified, apologized profusely for her kid, said I deserved a medal, and said I had permission to do whatever it took to make her kid behave. I noticed that she was asking the other kids their names and their parents' names. Kindergarteners aren't quite sophisticated enough to know that this is a danger sign. I have a feeling some parents may be notified of what their children are like. I'm not sure what good it will do with some of them.

But aside from them doing the usual stuff they know they're not supposed to do, like climbing into the window, climbing onto stacked chairs, and running into walls, they weren't bad. They were actually interested in what we were doing instead of ignoring me.

But I just need to get through one more session, and that will involve a rehearsal in the sanctuary, so that eats up a lot of time. We may play musical chairs the rest of the time.

Meanwhile, I have my first big review for the steampunk book, and I'm kind of afraid to look. My editor says it's mixed but mostly favorable, and it's at Kirkus, which tends toward the negative and nasty. I've become oddly more sensitive to reviews as my career has progressed. With my early books, I was eagerly seeking out reviews. Now I just don't want to know.

I think maybe that's because with the earlier books I was very optimistic. I knew I had something special and figured that it would just work out that these books would find their audience and be successful. The books were loved, and they're still going strong a decade later, but they weren't considered "successful" enough for the publisher to keep publishing them. The good reviews didn't really end up meaning much -- they didn't encourage the publisher to do more to push the books, they didn't encourage the publisher to continue the series, they didn't encourage more bookstores to stock the books. And there's a part of me that worries that if that was the outcome with good reviews, what might other reviews mean? So I end up just not reading any of them. It keeps my mind from playing tricks on me. I also don't read Amazon reviews.

Though it does get tricky when it comes time to do publicity and I don't have review blurbs handy, since you have to read reviews to collect quotes.

Surprise and Suspense

I was a little stumped about what to cover in a writing post today, and then I thought about something I've been considering in analyzing someone else's writing, and that's the issue of surprise and suspense.

Modern storytelling has become enamored of surprise. If a book, movie, or TV show has a big surprise in it, particularly a surprise twist, it will generally get a lot of praise for this. The surprise can elevate something that was pretty ho-hum. I suppose in our well-connected world full of spoilers and with us being fairly sophisticated consumers of story, so we know all the tropes, a genuine surprise that actually shocks us is rare and exciting.

But as a result of that, writers seem to be aiming for that surprise, with the idea that "surprise" is automatically the same as "good." You can write something pretty blah, and as long as there's a big surprise near the end, it will look like it's good. Also, anything that might keep something from being a surprise, like development, is to be avoided. Unfortunately, that robs us of something else that's valuable in storytelling: suspense.

Surprise is shock, while suspense is dread. There's an anecdote attributed to Alfred Hitchcock in which he said that if a family is eating at a picnic table and a bomb planted under the table suddenly goes off, that's surprise. If the audience sees the bomb and watches the picnic, dreading the bomb going off and desperately wanting the family to get out of there before it goes off, that's suspense. Each has its own place in storytelling. There are times when you need surprise, and there are times when you get more out of suspense. If everything has to be a surprise, you lose suspense because suspense requires knowing that there's a possibility of something happening.

The best surprises are actually set up. It just takes careful work to make sure all the clues are right there without them being so obvious that it ruins the surprise. One of the best ways is to give everything that happens two perfectly valid explanations. If you don't know the surprise twist, everything still makes sense in context. There's a reason for these things to have happened. After the surprise is revealed, you can see that there was a second reason for these things to happen, and they all paved the way toward the surprise. My favorite example of this might be in the movie The Shawshank Redemption. On the surface, it appears to be a "bloom where you're planted" story about an innocent man sent to prison on false charges who finds ways of coping with this new life that not only make it possible for him to survive and even thrive, but also help his fellow inmates improve their lot. And then -- SPOILER -- we learn that the whole time, all of this heartwarming stuff he was doing was actually a cover for a methodical escape plan that required years of patient work to carry off.

Everything he did along the way made sense as something a man trying to cope with his circumstances might do, but once we learned what was going on, we could see where it also helped him cover up his real activities. I think another key here is that the story still would have worked without the surprise. If it was just about the "bloom where you're planted" theme, it would have been a nice movie. The twist elevates it into something more complex, and it becomes a totally different movie the next time you watch it because you can see both stories playing out. The response to the surprise is "Oh, of course!"

On the other hand, even if you achieve surprise, your surprise fails if your audience looks back at the story and goes "huh?" because there's nothing to ground the surprise or pave the way for it. It also fails if the only good thing about the story is the surprise twist because the surprise only works the first time. That keeps your story from having re-read potential, and if you become known for your big twists, that means people will be expecting them and you lose the element of total surprise in future stories. A surprise can also be negative if it takes things in a direction the audience doesn't like. We generally don't want to find out that the hero we've come to care about was really the villain all along. We don't expect the hero to be helpless in the final confrontation while some random person saves the day, so while that happening would be a surprise, it would be a very unsatisfying story. That kind of twist requires some really clever writing and characterization to be palatable.

And then there's suspense. You need to decide if what's most valuable to your story is that sense of shock or if it would be better to build a sense of dread so that we know something big is coming. In prose, you have to do this with point of view, so that the audience knows something because of what one character discovered that the other character doesn't know yet. We don't have the benefit of the camera being able to show the audience things that none of the characters can see. You can also combine surprise and suspense if the outcome isn't what you were dreading. The bomb under the picnic table might just send a spray of confetti to kick off a surprise party rather than killing everyone. The monster we see lurking at the end of the alley might be there to help a character escape from the other monster we didn't know was in hot pursuit.

Satisfying readers requires a delicate balance of satisfying expectations and bringing surprises.

Kissing Frogs

Picking up where I left off on my Enchanted, Inc. reread, I think we're getting to the really fun part of the story. Not only has the plot kicked in, but this is the part where I got to do what Save the Cat author Blake Snyder called "the promise of the premise" or the "fun and games" part of the story. In Hero's Journey terms, we're in Tests, Enemies, and Allies. Our heroine is in a new world, and she's getting to experience what that entails. It's a book about a "normal" person working for a magical company, so we're getting to see more of what that's like.

So in chapter eleven we get to see how a spell might be tested, with the help of a magical immune who can read it without carrying it out. In my magical corporation metaphor, I was thinking of spells as being kind of like software. They're bits of code that allow things to happen. If I read raw code out loud, nothing would happen, but if you make a computer read it, it does something. So a magical person reading a spell might make something happen (depending on the spell), but someone with no magic is safe. This is why these people are so valuable to the company.

Then we get to one of my favorite parts of the book and the scene I usually read when I'm doing a reading at conventions: the girls' night out scene. I have to give my agent credit for how this worked out. In my original draft, the gang just went out for drinks and talked. I thought it was clever that the magical people thought that kissing frogs was actually a viable way of meeting men, because it would be in their world. When I first signed on with my agent and she gave me some revision suggestions before she submitted the book, she said they shouldn't just talk about it. They needed to actually go to the park and look for frogs. That kicked off a bunch of other things, including introducing some new characters who got woven into the story.

And now I think I can see the problem with what I'm writing now. They're talking about things, and I need to find a way for them to do them. Then again, that's what revision is for. You get the idea from the dialogue, then you mine your dialogue for things you can turn into action. But it's nice to be able to spot this as you write so you don't have to rewrite.

Back to the Cave

I had an unbelievably social weekend, with a concert Friday night, dinner with friends Saturday night, and another concert Sunday night, followed by yoga this morning and then a Starbucks trip with the yoga class. Now I need to crawl into my cave again for a while. But then there's a convention next weekend. And a concert and a party the following weekend. I'm getting the "busy schedule" twitches.

But in the meantime, there's that book I need to write.

Both concerts were wonderful, and rather different. The UNT Jazz singers are a vocal jazz choir, about 3-4 people on a part, and singing in really, really tight harmonies. I guess a good comparison to the style of music they do would be The Manhattan Transfer, but with more people. I'm pretty sure everyone in that group has to have perfect pitch because it's that tight, and they manage to sound like one person.

Then Sunday's concert was a 200-voice choir and orchestra. They performed Rutter's Requiem, and then they premiered a new Rutter piece, Gift of Life. And John Rutter himself was conducting. I've sung the Requiem before, and it was hard to keep myself from singing along. It's just so very beautiful. The new piece was also gorgeous, and the juxtaposition of death and life ended up being quite meaningful. Seeing Rutter conduct in person (and a world premiere, at that) was a bucket list kind of item.

I not entirely jokingly told our choir director (it was a choir field trip -- we loaded up the church bus to go) that if I make it big, I'll commission a Rutter piece for us. Maybe just an anthem rather than a major work, but something.

And that means I guess I need to work on a book, huh?

A Musical Weekend

I must have overestimated my recovery yesterday. Not that I was feeling bad, but I was really drained after a busy Wednesday and couldn't get myself in gear. It's funny, writing isn't physical labor, but it still seems to require some degree of physical stamina. I guess the emotional strength it requires has to come from somewhere. Plus, I think I'm somewhat blocked on a scene. If this works like it usually does, I'll spend days procrastinating about it and dreading it, and then when I get back to it, I'll be able to fix it by changing two words.

Except I know it's not going to work quite like that because the scene has to change entirely. Some characters will be in a different place, doing different things. I'm only just starting to be able to see that happening in my head.

I will be having a very musical weekend, with a University of North Texas Jazz Singers concert tonight and the John Rutter concert Sunday night. The Jazz Singers leave me in awe -- they're a (mostly) a capella jazz choir, so tight that they sound like one voice, even when they're singing in harmony, and it's the kind of a capella sound where you don't even realize there aren't instruments because the voices do it all. Tonight they're also teaming up with the famous One O'Clock Lab Band (a college band that gets nominated for the Grammy for Best Jazz Album almost every year). I know this concert will make me wish I'd followed a different path in life. And then I'll remember that performing requires being around people a lot. I do enjoy performing occasionally, but I'm not sure I could deal with it as a way of making my living. I prefer the balance I have now, which involves mostly hiding away alone and occasionally coming out for a few moments in the spotlight.

This summer's going to be a bit more spotlight-y than I've had in a long time. I might even need to go shopping for some new clothes. Most of my wardrobe dates back to the last time I had to do a lot of public appearances.

Caution: Choir Geekery

I made it through both children's choir and regular choir rehearsal last night, so I think I'm going to declare myself more or less well. I guess that means I now have to clean my house. It seems to have fallen into squalor while I was lying on the sofa with a tissue box.

And I need to get back to writing. I have that scene I need to fix before I can move forward.

Right now, I'm listening to John Rutter being interviewed on the radio. This weekend, he's conducting a world premiere of a new piece in Dallas, and our church choir is taking a field trip. He's one of my favorite composers, and definitely my favorite choral composer. This piece was commissioned by a local church choir, and I think if I'd known about this, I might have switched choirs for a while to sing with them for this. They're also doing his Requiem in this concert, and I love that Requiem. We sang that in a choir I was in about twenty years ago, and I still use the "Pie Jesu" from that piece as a way of working on my upper register.

But I'm not quite back to full strength for singing, as I'm finding singing along with the pieces they're playing in between bits of the interview a little challenging.

I now really want to listen to the entire Requiem, but it's hard to listen to that sort of thing while writing because I want to sing along.

Happy Tax Day!

I think I'm just about well. After not having an appetite for days, I woke up hungry this morning. There's still minor coughing, but it seems to be getting better rather than worse, which is a relief. Sometimes, my colds turn into bronchitis and the cough just keeps getting worse. Today I have to leave the house because I have to make a tax day trip to the post office, an emergency Target run (I ran out of so many things), and then there's children's choir and choir. I don't know how much singing will happen, but I need to be at rehearsal just to find out what's going on.

The taxes are done and just need to be printed. The forms you download online now allow you to put the numbers into the form, so instead of doing a draft and then a "real" version, I could do the draft version, check it, and print it. Strangely, only the main 1040 form doesn't work this way. The spaces pop up for inputting information, but the information doesn't stay there, so I will have to print and then fill out that final form. And then I will have to write some large checks because last year was very good for me, and that means my estimated payments for this year will be a lot higher. Let's just hope the income keeps up with that.

But based on all this, I've decided that it would be wise to put off the house hunting until later in the year. Last year was better than I realized, but the year before that, while not bad, wasn't as good as I remembered, and as far as I've heard, they base mortgage decisions on the past two years of tax returns (I'm not sure if the fact that I've already got a mortgage that I've been managing just fine during more than a decade of self employment makes a difference). Since the idea of this exercise is to end up with my (within reason) dream house, it makes sense to wait and see how this summer's book does and what effect all of it has on the way everything else sells, see if I get another contract, and meanwhile save more money for a bigger down payment (to get more house with less mortgage). It would be a shame to get what I can afford now and then soon afterward have a windfall that might have allowed me to get what I really wanted. And it would be a disaster to get what I can afford now and then have the bottom fall out.

In the meantime, my current house is better from the repairs I've made that were spurred by the house selling decision, and I was very grateful for the dishwasher while I was sick. When I ran out of mugs from all the hot tea, hot lemonade, etc., I was drinking, it was such a relief to stick them in the dishwasher and push a button rather than having to wash them all by hand. I've managed to keep my bedroom neat after the total decluttering, and it's so much more enjoyable. Now I just need to stay on track and continue the process in the rest of the house, so when I'm ready to pull the trigger, I can just go instead of getting frantic.

This all gives me added incentive to get back to writing and stay on top of the promoting.

Enchanted, Inc. Reread -- Getting Into the Plot

I'm very gradually getting better from my cold. Now I'm down to just an annoying cough. I probably won't be dancing tonight, but I might be able to sing tomorrow night. We'll see.

I realized when I did my Enchanted, Inc. reread last week that I actually got up to chapter eight. I was flipping through and missed the chapter break.

So, chapter nine is when the real plot really gets started after we get all the origin story stuff out of the way. Katie has learned that her big boss really is the Merlin. That was one of the ideas that had been swimming around in my head ever since I came up with the concept of a magical corporation. I was planning to do a spoof of corporate life -- in fact, one of my pitches for the concept was "Bridget Jones Meets Harry Potter and Goes to Work with Dilbert" -- and I'd just come from a workplace that loved all the various management fad things. If someone wrote a quirky business book about how some odd little premise could totally transform your company, you could bet we'd be having a corporate retreat based on it, complete with theme t-shirts or giveaways. This is why I have a koozie shaped like a fish (it had something to do with a book on how throwing fish like they do at the Seattle fish market could change the way your do business -- I don't think they meant it literally, but even after reading the book I wasn't sure quite how they meant it, and throwing foam "fish" koozies "improved" our business to the point that a huge chunk of the staff, including me, was laid off less than a year later). So I thought it would be a lot of fun for the boss to be an ancient wizard who's only recently discovered modern business practices and gets excited about every little fad because it's all new to him.

And then I had a burst of inspiration in remembering that in a lot of the Arthurian mythology they say that Merlin was entombed in a crystal cave, to be brought back again when he was needed. And, duh, who else should be running a magical corporation? But that then ended the idea of him running off with every business fad because he should be smarter than that. I think I kept a few references to the idea that he was reading all this stuff and finding it fascinating, but he's not forcing the whole company to abide by this week's business reading. Anyway, I then read as much as I could find about Merlin in order to create my character, including how his name would actually translate (depending on which version you go with). And, of course, they had to be facing a threat severe enough to require him to be brought back.

Then we got to one of my other core ideas, using modern business practices like marketing to get an edge in the magical world. Since I was inverting the usual fantasy structure by having my heroine learn that she didn't have magical powers, I thought it would also be fun to have real-world things be the solution for people who are used to getting what they want with a wave of the hand.

I wasn't planning it at the time, but looking back at the series, one of the things I really like about how it shaped up was the relationship between Merlin and Katie. I like how open he is to her ideas, in spite of his great age, wisdom, power, and experience.

I started a short story once about his initial emergence from hibernation. Maybe I should get back to that.

Do Not Taunt the Cold Virus

My grand plans for a weekend writing marathon crumbled when I came down with a bad cold. It's my own fault. I brought it upon myself. During my organization frenzy, I designated a portion of a drawer in the bathroom for cold supplies and made sure it was fully stocked. And then I didn't get seriously sick all winter, just a few minor bouts of sniffles. Friday morning as I was getting dressed and doing some tidying in the bathroom, I noticed the cold supplies stash and thought to myself that I'd been very fortunate not to come down with a cold all winter.

Cue the sore throat, sneezing and runny nose later that afternoon. At first I thought it might be allergies, since pollen counts were high, but taking allergy medicine did no good, and the symptoms kept getting worse. Between the fogginess from the cold and the fogginess from the medicine (at least I was fully stocked), there was no writing going to happen. I could barely form words. So, I spent the weekend lying on the sofa, drinking fluids, sneezing my way through a box of tissues, and marathoning the previous season of A Game of Thrones.

I think the worst of it has passed now. I missed yoga this morning because I don't really feel safe driving in this state, there is no breathing through my nose, and bending over would be a very bad idea right now. I need to finish my taxes (I just need to put numbers in the boxes on the forms and do the final calculations, since I keep the accounting running all year as I go), but that's iffy in the state I'm in. I may do a draft version today and then check it when I'm clearer.

I'm not sure about trying to write today, as the first thing I need to write is a rewrite of the last scene I wrote. Just as I finished it, I realized it was yet another talky scene, and then I came up with a way of making it more action and less talk, and it was right then that the cold hit me like a brick.

I'm considering an afternoon nap because I think some rest might help knock it the rest of the way out.

Talk, Talk, Talk

Yesterday wasn't quite as "marathony" as I'd hoped, writing-wise, mostly because I had to work out a few scenes in the transition between where I was and where I knew I needed to be. I'm feeling like this book is light on action and heavy on talk, but right now I'm getting the plot down. I can do something about it in revisions. A lot of conversations tend to go away in the second draft because they're often me thinking on paper (well, screen), and once I've worked things out, the characters don't need to say these things. I can also turn some conversations into action -- instead of talking about things, they do things. And I can put conversations in the context of action or add conflict to the scenes with conversations (since there are times when people might just sit and talk, and that doesn't have to be boring).

But the book is coming to life for me, and that's fun. I keep making odd discoveries and having things go off in different tangents, so it's kind of like reading a book for the first time, only with more work.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to read from my To Be Read shelf to keep weeding it down. Last week I read a somewhat interesting historical novel that I probably wouldn't have chosen if it hadn't been a conference giveaway, and that got me in the mood for medieval-set stuff, so I grabbed a historical romance off the shelf. For a while I thought this one would be different because it was an unusual setting, the characters weren't the usual "types," and there was a strong plot aside from the romance aspect. We even got six chapters in before anything even remotely romancey happened. But then we got the scene in which the so-called hero grabbed the heroine, whom he barely knew, shoved her against a wall, stuck his tongue down her throat, shoved his hands up her skirt and grabbed her behind, all while she was protesting, and he only backed off when she slapped him silly. Of course, even though she did slap him, she couldn't stop thinking about his searing kiss and how it awoke parts of her she'd never been aware of before, blah, blah, blah. As a reader, I have a hard time pulling for a guy who'd act like that to get together with the heroine, and I know that if a man did that to me, he'd probably be walking funny for a few days and might have had sexual assault charges filed against him (though that wasn't really an option in the book's setting). I know good and well that it wouldn't make me dwell on how amazing it made me feel and make me long to feel it again, even if he infuriated me.

This is why I struggle with genre romance novels. I don't find that kind of junk romantic, and it's all over the place. A man who behaves like that isn't a hero, and I would never want a heroine to end up with him. So I think this book is going to have to go in the "donate to library book sale" bag because the book is ruined for me. It's hard to read a romance novel while actively wanting one member of the couple to die in a fire, since I know they'll end up together.

What I'm actually kind of in the mood for, and I'm afraid this is rather rare, is a historical magical realism type book -- a somewhat realistic medieval setting (not in a fantasy realm) with a hint of magic, like where the kinds of things people did believe in, like curses, charms, etc., really did work. I've read one or two, but it's hard to find them. I guess you could call it fantasy lite, the real world as a slightly more magical place. Romance is good, but not rape that gets called romantic.

Writing Moods and Social Media Experiments

I managed to get past my problem scene yesterday (yes, using the techniques in yesterday's post), and it ended up going in an unexpected direction. Well, maybe not entirely unexpected, as it was a direction I was planning on going eventually, but it was a development in that direction that I hadn't expected to get to so soon. It just popped into my head as a way to handle the situation, and it then made total sense. And it will make things a lot more interesting going forward.

I'm getting close to the halfway point on the book, and since we're in a stormy phase (I write better when it's rainy), I'm thinking of doing a sort of writing retreat/marathon for the next few days. I did have plans for Saturday, but they involved a long drive and a lot of time outdoors, and I don't really want to do either with a good chance of strong thunderstorms. So I may hole up in the house today, tomorrow and Saturday and see how much writing I can accomplish, just to get through and past the midpoint, which is generally a tough part that requires a lot of momentum. I also have a lot of business-type stuff (finishing my taxes) and work around the house to do, and the last few weekends have been so busy that I like the idea of an unscheduled one, even if it is busy at home. We'll see. The weather forecast may change. But I hate to waste the rare impulses when I desperately want to write and that seems more fun to me than anything else I could do. I was dreaming scenes from the book last night.

Meanwhile, I've been doing a bit of an experiment with social media, actually posting things related to my books, which I haven't ever done much of. I've been posting pictures from the trip I took to research A Fairy Tale to Facebook. And my Amazon rankings (the only immediate metric I have) have declined. Now, I know that just means that other books were bought more than mine were. It's not like people unbought my books based on my posts, and it's entirely possible that the decline would have been worse without my posts. I'll have a better sense early next week when I get this week's sales numbers. But it is discouraging to do something designed to make things better and have things get worse. I'm going to try to keep up with it, though, because I don't think it's the kind of thing where you can do it once and get results. I'm just terrible at this social media stuff because I tend to not say anything if I have nothing to say, so I'm not really commenting, retweeting, replying, etc. or posting as often as some people do. On the other hand, you can't accuse me of clogging your feed.

Fixing a Scene

It's writing post time, and this topic is taken from something I'm currently dealing with: how do you fix a scene that's just not working?

Unless you're a total genius (or entirely oblivious), you probably recognize the problem, either in a first draft or in editing. You just can't get a scene off the ground. It lies there, limp and lifeless. There's no momentum moving forward in the story. This may even be where writer's block sets in -- you can't make that scene happen, which means you can't move on.

Here are some things you can consider to get out of the bad scene doldrums:

Think about the scene's role in your story. Why does this scene need to be in the book? A scene needs to reveal a critical piece of information, reveal something important about the characters, change the status quo, and/or move the plot forward. Preferably more than one of these things. A scene that's just there to explore a cool setting or to make something interesting happen that isn't required to the plot is probably never going to work. Ask yourself how it would affect your overall story if you deleted this scene. If you can delete it, do so. If it only does one thing or if it involves an interesting event, maybe you could combine it with another scene and use the interesting event to further the plot.

The scene's protagonist/viewpoint character must have a goal. What does the viewpoint character want to achieve in this scene? This may or may not be the story goal, but it should probably be at least somewhat related to the story goal. It may be a minor subset of the story goal. For instance, in a mystery the detective's goal is to solve the murder. The goal for a particular scene might be to get the truth out of a witness. The scene doesn't necessarily have to be about the character getting that goal because sometimes other things get in the way, but the character should keep trying to get back to that goal.

There needs to be conflict. This usually comes from someone or something getting in the way of the scene protagonist's goal. It doesn't necessarily mean there has to be fighting or antagonism, just that things can't be smooth and straightforward for the hero. A scene in which the detective interviews a witness who just outright tells him the key information he needs isn't very interesting. Instead, the witness might lie or go off-topic, so it becomes a verbal chess match. Obstacles might arise to thwart or sidetrack the protagonist. The goal might be more challenging than the protagonist realized. I've seen some advice that the character should never actually achieve the scene goal, but if you stick to that advice the story will just end up going nowhere. It might be better to say that the character shouldn't get exactly what he wants or expects. He might get the information he needs from the witness, but it's not the information he expected to get, and that means he has to change plans going forward in the investigation.

Something needs to change as a result of the events in the scene. The characters might learn something that changes the way they see the situation. They might end up in more trouble. They might end up a step ahead of where they were. The relationship between the characters might change. I've seen some writing teachers say that there needs to be a shift between positive and negative in a scene -- if the situation is positive at the beginning of a scene, it needs to be negative at the end, and vice versa. I've found it really hard to consciously make that happen, but it's something to think about if you're analyzing why a scene isn't working.

The scene needs to drive the story forward. The end of a scene should probably generate the goal for that character's next scene. The information the detective eventually gets out of the witness may lead him to develop the goal of finding the critical clue the witness mentioned, for instance. If the character ends up in worse trouble at the end of a scene, the next scene's goal is likely to involve getting out of that trouble.

One other thing to consider is how similar the scene is to other scenes in the story. This tends to happen in stories like quests or pursuits. Each scene in a quest is likely to be about a stage in the journey, while each scene in a pursuit kind of story is going to involve nearly catching the person or narrowly evading capture (depending on who the protagonist is). One scene after another of nearly being caught and narrowly escaping is going to get old, no matter how exciting each scene is, so there needs to be some variety.

In some respects, a scene is basically a really short story that requires a goal, conflict, rising action, a climax, and falling action. It probably won't stand alone as a story because it requires a lot of context, but the structure should work kind of like a story -- perhaps like an episode in a serial. Something needs to happen, and it should make you eager to find out what happens next.

Resuming the Enchanted, Inc. Reread

I have been somewhat remiss in that Enchanted, Inc. reread I started in the fall, and since my reading lately has been rereading Terry Pratchett and therefore haven't had a lot of books to discuss, I thought I might as well pick it up again.

In case you need to review (I did), Here's chapters one and two, chapters three and four, and chapters five and six.

Of course, there are spoilers here, but I'm not getting ahead of myself so if you're reading along for the first time, I won't spoil past chapter seven here.

So, in chapter six, Katie goes to work at the magical company and finds that her job is anything but magical. It's like being part of a secretarial pool, and she's working with a bunch of annoying people. I tried to imagine what effect being immune to magic would have on someone's personality, and I figured that if you were around magic a lot but didn't know it until adulthood you might end up being kind of flighty or really geeky. Then unless you were pretty grounded, being a rare commodity might make you full of yourself. I think I was having fun with expectations there, making the magical workplace be rather drab, but I think that's a common experience, even without the magic. When you're interviewing for a job, they make it look like this wonderful place, and then it seems like an entirely different place once you accept the job and show up to work.

The crazy boss Gregor, who turns into an ogre -- literally -- when he gets angry, was one of the earlier ideas I had when I first started mentally developing this world, and he was based on someone I used to work with. He could seem totally reasonable and even nice, and then suddenly he'd snap. He didn't turn green, but he did turn a scary purple color, and he didn't sprout fangs and horns, but the effect was similar. I knew the moment I started thinking about a magical workplace that a boss who's literally an ogre would be absolutely mandatory.

Chapter seven was a lot of me playing with the premise, showing what Katie's job was really like. I must admit that I'd forgotten about the use of magic carpets on business after this book, so that's why they come back in book six. Otherwise, I was trying to show the "normal" of Katie's new magical life before I upended it again. We had to see what the potential problems might be and what her normal work was like in order to set up what she's going to want to change or have to deal with.

This is also when I started dropping hints that there's more going on. That's when the main plot first arrives after our origin story of getting Katie into this world has finished.

I think one of my favorite scenes in the book was the one where Katie visits Owen's office and spots the fake book, then sees and tries to fight off the intruder. That whole segment was so vivid to me, from the setting to the people. Just skimming it how, it pops right back into my head.

And this is when things start getting interesting ...

My Easter Holiday

I had a wonderful long weekend, and now I'm actually looking forward to being back at work. On Friday, I went with a group of women from church to the Dallas Arboretum. This is a big garden that's what used to be a couple of estates on the shores of White Rock Lake, and in springtime they have a lot of tulips, wisteria and cherry blossoms. Tulips are very hard to grow here because we don't get the kind of cold you need during the winter (to get tulips to bloom here, you have to refrigerate the bulbs before planting), so this is one good place to see lots of tulips. This trip made me want a garden, and there were some great ideas with color schemes that I might be able to pull off with different flowers.

For instance, the combo of yellow and blue here is very cheery (I like this color scheme for a kitchen, too):


And the pink and purple here looks like a box of candy:


I can't believe I haven't been to this place before (other than once in the evening for a party) because it's the kind of place that makes my soul sing. It's rather expensive to go for a single visit, but a membership would pay for itself in three trips, so I'm contemplating doing that. I could even bring a notebook and work all day in that kind of setting. It would be very inspiring. The only down side is that getting there involves a tricky drive all the way across the city. Would I really drag myself out there more than three times a year?

Then there was a service Friday night with some wonderful music, and then a Saturday of mostly rest. I did replace some of the burnt-out lightbulbs in the bathroom vanity, and then I promptly remembered why I'd let them stay burnt-out because it's now really bright in there, and that required me to clean the mirror. Otherwise, I took a short walk and spent a lot of time sitting on the patio -- morning tea, lunch, and afternoon tea. I may have a new favorite indulgence. A few years ago, my parents gave me one of those foot spa tubs for Christmas, but I haven't used it often because the only uncarpeted spot in my house is the kitchen. But I got the bright idea of bringing it to the patio, and it was rather blissful sitting outside with a book and a glass of wine while my feet soaked and were massaged. I will have to do that more often.

Then there were three services on Sunday morning, after which I pretty much collapsed.

I may have to get back on track with the getting the house clean enough to show project, as well as finishing my taxes so I can apply for a mortgage, because there's currently a house for sale on a street I really like. The one big concern is that it's a bit smaller than I would like -- only about 600 square feet bigger than my current house and with an additional bedroom and bathroom, plus a dining room. That means the rooms are probably really, really small. The online photos made the back yard look huge, and it wasn't that big when I walked by. That makes me wonder how big the rooms are, since the photos make them look small. I don't necessarily want a massive house, but I would rather not have tiny rooms. On the other hand, the yard configuration is exactly what I would want, very shaded from the west with almost no front yard, eastern exposure and lots of light in back, so I could have flowers.

I suppose it wouldn't hurt to look at it, since it's very much in my price range.

Easter Holiday

I think I'm going to consider tomorrow a holiday for Good Friday, since I have a big service to sing for that evening and I think I'll be going to the Arboretum during the day (assuming I ever hear back from the person organizing the excursion to find out specific details, like exactly when and where we're meeting).

Then I have a free Saturday that I think I'm going to spend working around the house and on the patio. When I was a kid, I liked to play outside and get really grubby the day before Easter. That made it even nicer to get all cleaned up with my hair washed before going to bed that night. So I may do something along those lines now -- spend the day working, then get all cleaned up and spend the evening relaxing before going to bed extra early.

And it's ridiculous how much I'm looking forward to this.

Today, though, I have to pretend to be an adult and take my car for its 30,000 mile service. Yes, this is a 7-year-old car. I don't drive a lot.

And then I have to continue fixing the book to fit the backstory I discovered. Yesterday I realized that there is a slight flaw to this backstory in that it might contradict something in a previous book, so I have to work out how that was a loophole or how that was a possibility then but the current thing is still supposed to be impossible.

I'm rather looking forward to finishing with this book and writing another steampunk book because that series is so nicely linear. It requires a lot of research, but the story flows pretty easily. I don't know why this one series goes against all my usual writing habits. I have to have music while I'm writing it, while everything else I write does best in total silence, and no matter how much I plot, I still end up doing that seat-of-the-pants thing where I never know what's going to happen next and it keeps morphing and shifting. That means there's a lot of going back and forth. With everything else I write, I have a solid outline and generally stick to it, writing straight through from beginning to end.

When "Telling" Might Be Okay

The problem with making a huge mental shift in the background of a story is that it takes a while to let it permeate the way I think about the story. I did some of the tweaking yesterday, then realized I might need to write a new scene. I could just mention the events that would have happened in that scene in a later scene, but that would be "telling" not "showing." Then again, telling isn't always wrong if it conveys information in a quick and easy way rather than dragging it out when there isn't much drama in the actual scene. And it helps if the telling is going to be necessary anyway to not have to go through the actual scene and then talk about it.

And now I think I've talked myself out of writing the actual scene. I need to mentally go through it so I'll know exactly what happened, but I can adjust the next scene to show the character still dealing with the emotions as he tells others what happened. Yeah, that's it …

But I do think I'm back on track and hope to get some work done today. I have errands to run and music to practice, but I don't have to teach children's choir (yay!).

I'm still kind of exhausted from dance last night, but I realized at the end of the class that I could easily be the mother of the other people in the class -- without even being a particularly young mother. Just being there and more or less keeping up with it is something of a triumph. I may not be able to do all the things they do, but there aren't a lot of people my age who are still dancing regularly. At least, I keep telling myself that. I'm going to have to make a decision about dance this summer, since the class ends right as my book comes out (in fact, the last class is my release date) and my teacher is taking the summer off, so I get the "serious" dance teacher again. I liked him last summer and learned a lot, but it was stressful because I'm a perfectionist and a teacher's pet type, so I just about killed myself trying to be sure I could please him.

I can't believe I'm already thinking about summer plans. Where has this year gone?