Progress report and pet peeve randomocity

I'm almost through the first rewrite of The Sorcerer's Daughter.


What I'm doing at this point is changing the stuff I changed my mind about during the first draft, correcting typos, tweaking a few places where I thought the language was awkward or unclear, that sort of thing. I need to insert a scene, too, which I will do in the next couple of days, as soon as I find a good spot for it. The new scene would resolve an issue that keeps bugging me. Basically, it takes care of an issue that is always lurking in the background, and really needs to be cleared up.


What do I plan to do after that? Read it again, this time looking for issues with pacing, plot, story-telling . . . I won't actually make any changes during that pass, just focusing on how it reads. Pacing, mostly, is what concerns me. Nothing makes a story seem more amateurish to me than a story where the pacing is not considered and the story seems hurried, or seems to be really slow. It should have a faster tempo in some places, a slower one in others, a medium tempo in others. Like a piece of music.


This something that seems to be a lost art to many of today's writers, and it drives me nuts. I suspect a lot of novels get rushed into publication so what you actually read isn't what would be considered a final draft a few years ago--the writer would have been asked to make another couple of passes through the manuscript in the days before everyone got to be in such a hurry to have something published.


So, that's where I am with that.


As for the pet peeve, it involves lazy writing, especially on TV shows, and in crime dramas in particular.


It goes like this: "The victim was stabbed. Angle of the wound suggests the suspect is left-handed." So, we spend the rest of the show looking at who among the suspect pool is left-handed. Finally, we see someone writing something and see that he or she is using---dum dum dummmmm . . . his or her left hand! Gotcha!


Here's my problem. I write left-handed. If I ever stabbed somebody, it'd probably be with my left hand. I also fire rifles and shotguns left-handed.


However, I play guitar, golf, and tennis right handed. I bat right-handed. I throw with my right hand. My right hand is my shooting hand when I play basketball--though, oddly enough, I score more baskets when I use my left-hand, though that feels awkward to me. But I suck at basketball, just like I do most sports.


I had a friend who threw a baseball with his right hand and a football with his left. My dad was right-handed with almost everything, except golf.


What I'm saying is, just because you write with your left hand, doesn't mean you do everything with your left hand. There is a distinct possibility that someone who is inclined to stab people would write with his or her right hand and prefer to use the left for stabbing folks. Or, maybe he or she deliberately used the left hand to throw idiot television detectives off the trail.


It's just lazy writing. It's a quick way to resolve a story without having to work too hard at it.


Drives me nuts.

Rewriting randomocity

So, I'm about halfway through my first pass through the first draft of The Sorcerer's Daughter.


I actually enjoyed rereading it, even though, as a first draft, there are a lot of things that actually don't make any sense because I changed my mind about some plot points along the way. That's one of the things I'm fixing through this pass.


There are a couple of things I need to add to it, a couple of beats I need to add. Maybe one or two that need to be deleted or at least moved around. On the whole, though, I think it tells the story I want to tell.


In other words, so far, so good. Still got a lot of work to do on it, but it's coming together.


Now that I'm at this point I feel like I can allow myself to entertain other projects, so I've been revisiting my idea for a TV series. I still don't want to give away too many details, except to say that it involves a series of stories and novels written by a science fiction icon that debuted in the 1950s. I've got some technical details I need to research, and I may as well go ahead and do that now. Normally, research is something I do later, after a first draft is completed--I try to tell the story first, and worry about the details later. However, in this case, since an important plot point revolves around some science that I'm sort of foggy on, I'll need to have a better understanding of it before I even get started.


Bummer. But I will have learned something. That's never a bad thing.


I'll probably spend some time putting together some stuff for that, too, over the next little while, just to give myself something to occupy my mind when I'm not obsessing over the novel. I've even sketched a  few ideas I had for certain characters who would appear in the thing, along with a motif that will become critical down the road.


So, that's my weekend--rewriting, researching, relaxing. My three "Rs".

First draft is done!

Yes! I just typed "END". The first draft of The Sorcerer's Daughter is done!


Yes, it needs some major editing. There are a lot of places in it I'm not happy with. But I now know where the road is going to wind up, and that makes telling the story so much easier.


So, please forgive my exuberance. Other writers will understand, I think.


Now, I'm going to take a little time off from it--the rest of today, at least--and then reread it. I won't touch it, other than to look it over, until I've read through the entire manuscript.


Then, it's getting out the hammer, chisels, the sanding paper, and all the other tools to start knocking this thing into some semblance of a coherent, interesting, readable work of fiction.


That, my friends, is the fun part!

Fourth of July randomocity

I apologize in advance for any excessive surliness. It's been one of those weeks.


I guess it would be appropriate for me to write about my thoughts as to the state of our democracy---that it appears to be dying on the vine, that every day it seems the voices of greed, hatred, ignorance, and religious lunacy seem to be getting louder and the voices of tolerance, fairness, and reason seem to be growing quieter. I could go on and on about how the wealthy now own this country and have mastered the art of getting the ignorant to do their dirty work for them. I could say that behind almost all of the problems in this country lies one single cause--greed. I could go on and on and on about how I just don't see our society surviving much longer without something dramatic and traumatic happening to force things to change.


I could do say all that, but I won't. Instead, I'll just say, have a happy Fourth, everyone, regardless of your ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion (or lack thereof), citizenship status, or economic station. We need you. We need everyone. We just need to realize that. Our country is not just white picket fences, two kids and a dog in a yard, a white house with a Chevy in the driveway. Our country is also Chinatown. It's Little Italy. It's the ghetto. It's all those places where people may not speak English, and where most people don't have white skin. Those people aren't African American or Asian American or Italian American or Hispanic American or whatever American. They're just American.


Anyways, I won't say any of that. That's what would be expected of me. I try not to be predictable.


So, my own plans are to write as much as I can. I'm inching closer and closer to the end of the first draft of The Sorcerer's Daughter. I may actually be done with it by the end of next week.


The weather here is supposed to be beautiful, which is fortunate, since the driver's side window of my truck is stuck half-way down. I'll be calling someone to have it fixed tomorrow--since it's not expected to be raining anytime soon, it can wait one day. But I'll at least be out walking around in the mild, sunny day. I may take some pictures of some lovely little flowers I saw on the property, to use as inspiration for a painting or something.


That's what's on my mind today. What's on yours?

I can see the ending . . .

15,000 more words to go before I reach my minimum word count for The Sorcerer's Daughter.


For a first draft a word count doesn't mean all that much, I know. But it gives me a good idea how long the finished draft will be--it'll probably be a tad shorter than the first draft. And no, I'm not shooting for 75,000 words, per se, it's just that is the minimum length before a lot of publishers will consider it a novel.


I should get there with no trouble. I'm getting near the end but I'm not that near. Still got lots of plot left to write about.


And I'm coming up on the really juicy stuff, too. What I'm going to start on next is what has kept me plugging away on this thing for months now. The really good stuff.


I mean, it's all good stuff, but this is the payoff. This is why I started writing this thing in the first place.


So, why I'm I sitting here, writing this, instead of writing the thing?


I don't know. I think I'm just kind of catching my breath. What I'm about to do involves a lot of action, a lot of running around, that sort of thing, and it actually wears me out, writing about that stuff, almost as much as if I were doing it. Weird, huh?


Part of it, though, is fear.


Fear of what, though? I guess, fear that I won't be strong enough as a writer to do justice to the story and these characters. Sounds kind of pretentious, doesn't it?


But I believe I'm telling a powerful story that people will get into, I have a central character that people will relate to, and, if I pull this off, the part I'm about to start on will probably be considered the best part, by the millions and millions of people who will be reading it once it gets published.


Kind of intimidating. What to do?


Easy, actually. I'm just reminding myself that the only person I really need to please, at the end of the day, is me. As long as I like it, anybody else liking it will be gravy.


Okay. Let's dive back in.