Our Little Secret

The End is Near

I will finish typing the rough draft of Drowned City tonight. I will finally have a stack of printed pages to prove I was actually working all this time. It's almost surreal.

In exploring the story, I have made a couple of discoveries about the nature of the whole thing—one involving the relationship between the two main characters, which I am really excited about. That one tweak will fix a lot of the minor issues throughout the novel, making the choices of one character in particular more believable. It’s very exciting.

Now that the big push is done, I’m going to take a breather before diving into the revisions. I won’t be writing at all this weekend, but I will be recording. Look for a new Dread of Night story on Monday.

It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

This morning at around 6:30, after eight and a half months, I completed the rough draft of Drowned City (formerly called Steep). This first draft ran 111,208 words, and I expect to cut about 35,000 of those. I can see the story more clearly now, and there is a lot of fat -- especially in the opening sections -- that can be trimmed without taking anything away from the main narrative. Now my objective is to get the thing typed (whose idea was it to write out an entire novel by hand? seems shortsighted ... ), then take a short break from thinking about it. Then we'll launch into the revision process, which I'm really looking forward to. I can kind of see the entire story, and I know where it needs to be tweaked. It's going to be a welcome change of pace to be fixing things up instead of just laying down the rough draft.

On a personal note, this is the first time I've finished a big project since 2006. That seems like forever ago now. I'm older, obviously. Wiser, possibly. More patient, for sure. That last one is going to help me a lot when I start re-drafting Drowned City. I feel like I've given myself enough time. I just hope I recognize when the book is ready to be pushed out into the world.

The plan is to be actively marketing the book to agents in November. If nothing happens, then I will be shopping it around to smaller publishers in 2012.

I will probably also begin working on my next project, Camilla Greene Was Dead, sometime in fall. That's going to be a much shorter finished product -- no more than sixty thousand words -- and unfortunately it's a much less marketable idea than Drowned City. But it's going to be a blast to write, and that's what matters right now.

Crawlers

And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence

I'm keeping the status as quo as possible here. I'm still working on the rough draft of my novel, though progress has not been what it should be. (The recurring theme of this blog, if not my life: Intense disappointment with my ability to stay on track. It's like my attention span has atrophied. How do I build that back up?) The rough draft is at almost 75,000 words now, and I feel like I'm about two-thirds of the way through the story. The final third marks a drastic change in tone and pacing, though, and I'm right in the middle of that tonal shift right now. Maybe the combination of a change of pace and the fact that I'm nearing the finish line ("nearing," ha!) will get me to sit in the chair for longer stretches.

This third-act shift has been on my mind for a while. I'm not quite learned enough to know if it's a recognized trait of a certain kind of literature, but I have certainly noticed it in a couple of my favorite books: Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. It's pretty common in movies, too. One of the things I dislike about romantic comedies (even great ones, even non-traditional ones, even bromantic comedies) is that inevitable slowdown in the third act. This is the point where the two lead characters aren't talking anymore. It's there so you feel something when they get together in the end. If it was just a slow, steady build, without that predictable stretch of "will they, won't they," the ending would have less impact. Anyway, I'm getting off track. The romantic comedy thing doesn't necessarily apply to my novel. A better comparison would be to a Danny Boyle movie, in which the third act apparently devolves into a straight-up monster movie. (I haven't seen the film yet, but I've heard this complaint about the movie quite a few times.) Is there a name for the third-act tonal shift? I can't imagine it would be frowned upon, given the pedigree of the writers who have employed it, but (at least in the case of the Danny Boyle film) the device has sparked pretty passionate negative rants.

It's not something I'm worried about, where my own work is concerned, but it is something to which I have given some thought.

One last thing: Some very kind bloggers have posted reviews of Dread of Night. You should check them out:

Coma Calm's Corner

Seeing Night Reviews

Birdy Books

Blog It Out, Bitch

Handsome little creatures

The books are now available for download through the Amazon Kindle store. In fact, you can follow the link on the left side of the blog to go directly to the Amazon page for Dread of Night or Beautiful Artifacts, Heartbreaking Relics.

If you don't want to spend the money, but you have enjoyed listening to the stories, you could help us out by popping over to the Dread of Night page and writing a review. Reviews are free, and it only takes a minute.

Thanks for your support!

April