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The hard spring of discontent is over just in time for summer. I am writing again after a two month hiatus (if you don’t count a couple of days in early June) having completed about a thousand words a day this long 4th of July weekend. The reasons for my break from writing are multiple; including a rough spot at work (unlike some authors, I have difficulty transforming my negative emotions into the written word — I just tend to seize up instead), a rash of reading and listening to books on CD/MP3, and a (semi-)daunting task of re-writing a critical scene in “The Alchemist of Liberty”.  During the down period I never lost the “wanting to want to write” feeling, so I knew it was just a matter of time.  Like the reasons for not writing, the reasons for starting to write again were multiple, including listening to P. G. Wodehouse, which always has a beneficial effect on my mood, and an increasing pressure of new ideas.

This rewrite comes on the very cogent plotting advice of Howard, an editor who has been kind enough to look at AoL, as well as “The Shaper’s Daughter”, and has given me encouragement and much needed critical feedback. (Thanks Howard!) While I am quite pleased with the rewrite (so far) it has grown beyond the size of the original (*sigh*, but this seems to be SOP for me).  I did try to reduce the number of characters involved in the scene, but this was only temporary and I wound up finding a handful of new characters.  I did succeed in distributing the infodumps across the scene and making the action more in tune with the main characters.

Then there are the handful of ideas that I’ve had for new stories and/or worldbuilding in the Nexus that I came up with during this dark period.  Feels good to be writing again, even if the mountain of words that I must spew forth has grown even larger.

The other day I received an email that a friend and fellow writer sent out to the AAAWG email list. It was about how one handles pacing in a novel. Initially I didn’t have a cogent answer, and I still don’t think I have a satisfactory answer, but I ended up by responding with this:

I’m afraid I don’t really know how to answer this question as I have approached it primarily by gut feel. Perhaps a more honest answer is that I have really ignored the question of pacing and just wrote the novel (or short story) with the assumption that it would work out as I went. One (implied) concession to pacing is that as I near the end of a major draft I read the story through as fast as I can (no edits) and see how it hangs together. I think one of the things I am trying to determine when I do these quick reads is to see if I have achieved a good pace. One of my stock questions to my beta-readers is about pacing and I rely on their less-biased feedback. You can also tell a lot about pacing by asking your beta-readers when they put your story down (or just give up) to do other things.
Anyways, that’s my pre-published opinion.

Anyone want to share their insight into pacing a novel?

I’ve finished up my final (major) edit pass of “Death Rides for Free” and am busily putting the edits in to the doc. I normally do my edits on a hard copy so as to compartmentalize my working environments. I use the word processor primarily for the “barf” phase, then edit on hard copy in the “polish” phase in order to avoid the temptation to edit / wordsmith during the barf phase. After a slash-and-burn rampage with the red pen (which is misleading, as I tend to write bare-bones and then augment and add far more than I remove during an edit pass) I type it all in.

E. E. Knight posted a great quote on his blog, which I am going to re-post here. (more…)

“The Unmodified Man” is coming along.  I’ve written about 2.3K words so far and I think I’m about two thirds of the way through my first draft.  Since my last posting I’ve discovered a character who is far more talkative than I expected, an archaeological dig of unknown importance, and that the Phoenix has decided to get involved.

Today I actually got down to it and wrote a bit under a thousand words (which is quite good for me, as today included significant house cleaning and a visit to the library and book store with Merideth) to put “The Unmodified Man” up to about 1500 words in two writing sessions. So it is off to a good start. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep it under 4K words as I’m still in the opening scenes and have already discovered that one of the characters is rather loquacious.

I’m about half-way through my last major edit of “Death Rides for Free” and is currently at a little under 25K words. I have someone who hasn’t read any of the Chronicles from the Nexus before lined up to read it so I can find out how well it works as a standalone story (being the result of splitting “The Alchemist of Liberty” into two). Hopefully I’ll have a draft ready for copyediting in a couple of weeks.

In other writing news I’ve started a new short story “The Unmodified Man”, which, I think, will be fairly short. I’d like it to be less than 7K words in length, perhaps even 4K words or so. But my stories have a tendency to grow, so I don’t know how successful I’ll be in doing that.

“The Alchemist of Liberty” is complete (at 19,500 words) and was been sent off to a magazine editor (more or less on request) last night. Now on to finishing up its sequel, “Death Rides for Free”.

The copyedit of “The Alchemist of Liberty” is done and I will be picking it from Tracy this evening, which means I should be done with it by the end of the week. Beyond the copyedits, I’ve got a few tweaks I want to make with respect to some of the referenced names, but that won’t be a big deal.
I’ve been working away at the new opening scene for the sequel to AoL “Death Rides for Free”, and while it is taking a bit longer than I would like (I got distracted by writing a Java program to transform spreadsheet based term definitions into Wikipedia XML import file format, but more on that later). DRfF is coming along and I’ve been working out some interesting mechanics/implications for Monoliths and null space.

I was reading something Lyda Morehouse was blogging about at sfnovelists.com and, as she was making the point that manuscript formatting is important to writers seeking to become published, I thought I would revisit manuscript formatting.

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