Doing The Double-Pass

I was sitting at work today, trying (and failing) to concentrate on work stuff.  The first day back from vacation is always like this for me.  I think the problem is that my brain is refusing to come back from vacationland.  I think it’ll show up tomorrow though.  All that said, I ended up thinking about writing for some of the day, like any other moment in my life that’s not filled by something that isn’t writing.  Particularly, I was thinking about Dark Mirror and editing.

As I said yesterday, I’m now editing Dark Mirror.  The book is 20 chapters long, I’m doing one chapter at a time for this.  Not like going nuts and insisting the chapter has to be perfect, nothing crazy like that, if I even believed that “perfect” has ever existed in reality.  No, I’m just trying to avoid racing through this, so that I can take the time to do this right, to really think about what I’m trying to say and how I say it.  Writing first draft is about speed for me, if for no other reason than to stay ahead of my inner editor (nya nya, you can’t catch me!).  Editing should be more leisurely and thoughtful, in my only somewhat humble opinion.

Normally I edit by printing out a copy of the manuscript, grabbing a red pen or two and turning into a mark-up fiend.  I then enter my changes from the now messy, crossed out, chewed up dead-tree version into the electronic version.  All this while, I’m praying that I can read my own handwriting (not ever guaranteed, I have one of the world’s worst scribbles, really).

This time, I’m doing something a little different.  Among other things, I don’t really want to print up 300 pages just so I can essentially crayon all over it and then either box it up or shred and recycle it.  I really don’t.  Also, I thought I’d try to be a little green.  Hug the planet, all that stuff.  So I made a pdf of my manuscript, tossed it on my iPad and grabbed a neat little pdf mark-up app called pdf-notes.  So far, it’s been going well.  I’ve gone through 4 chapters with it and, after a little bit of learning, I like it.  I like being able to undo my marks, change my mind, etc, things I can’t do on dead tree.  Once pen hits paper, you’re stuck with that mark.  It’s got a bunch of different tools for mark-up, but I’m sticking with the traditional red pen, with sticky notes for adding text/changing words.  When I’m done, I follow the rest of the usual path, entering changes in the electronic file.  I’ll probably keep the final marked-up pdf for archival purposes, since that’s easier than keeping 300 pages on hand.

Generally, as I enter my changes from the dead-tree/electronic mark-up, I end up changing a lot more.  It’s like I’ve had more time to think and digest by the time I get to the entering stage. It’s always seemed like my method turns it from a single edit to a double-pass.  Two edits for the price of one, such a deal.   By now, I’m used to this approach and I rather like it.  But it feels like I’d doing much more of the extra changes than usual this time.  I don’t think it’s that I’m marking up less with the pdf than I would with the dead-tree either.  I’m not even sure if this is anything more than a correlation, a coincidence of circumstance and timing.  The thing is that a lot of things have changed for me since the last time I edited any of my own fiction.  We can start with the fact that it’s been a while.  It’s been many months since I even tried, in fact.  Then we can move our tour of Julie’s Editing Mind (no sniggering at the back) to the fact that it’s the first time I’ve edited a finished novel.  Ever.  Remember, I had never finished a novel before DM, and I didn’t so much edit the first draft as completely toss it out and start fresh again (not without good reason, but that’s not the point).  I’m in somewhat uncharted waters here, and it’s making me think more about how I’m shaping this piece.  The next stop on this tour is the amount that I’ve learned about the craft and myself as a writer/storyteller in the many moons since I last did try to edit my own work.  I think a lot of that is going into the greater volume of edits, come to think of it.

Also, and I definitely don’t want to skip over this, but I think it deserves it’s own paragraph, I wrote this draft in fifteen days.  That’s it, start to finish.  There’s no polish at all when you work that quickly, none.  And now I get to do all that polishing I didn’t do while writing before I can even think about sending it to test readers, because polish can change a lot, including plot elements on occasion, and there’s no point in wasting your test readers’ time with something you’re already changing before they even finish reading it.  No, I’ll polish it now and then put it aside while the test readers have their say.

My plan is to work on something else (like maybe first draft of Possession) while I wait for DM to come back from the test readers, just so I won’t be tempted to go back and tweak some more while they have it.  Most writers I’ve ever known will tweak a piece forever, never quite happy with it, if nothing intervenes to force them out of that pattern.  I’m actually planning on not doing that.  There will almost certainly be edits, massages, work to be done when it comes back, but I refuse to be one of those writers who never submits or publishes because they’re waiting for it to be perfect.  You can try that forever and never reach it.  I think I’d rather publish something, even if it’s the more normal state of imperfect than nothing at all.  You have to publish, after all, to get it in front of the audience’s eyes.

And, on that note, I’m including another picture for you.  Perhaps I’ll make a habit of doing this, just to make me get some of that work out there too.  After all, new year, time to push myself out there a bit more, right?

I Think I Found My Brevity

So, this is the official announcement.  I did it, the second draft of Dark Mirror is finished.  It’s a lot shorter than I expected.  And by a lot, I mean it’s 73,264 words, while I had thought it would be at least 100k.  I didn’t know I could write a whole story in less than 100k.

For years I’ve known that I tend to, shall we say, over-write a bit on my stories, which tends to bloat word counts beyond what they should be.  This time I tried something different.  I didn’t describe everything down to the last fold of cloth or breath.  It finally occurred to me that it might be unnecessary.  The average reader has a fairly vivid imagination and so I can leave some of the basic stuff to that imagination.  Describing just what was significant or different from normal is a new thing for me, but somewhat liberating.  We’ll have to see what my test readers say when I get this to them.  That said, it gave me more room to write the story.  As much as I’d like to just let a story run as many words as it needs, I never stop being aware that I would like to sell my stories at some point, that this is a business and with that comes certain expectations.

I’m still pondering how I want to go about publishing this, when it’s ready at least, and I’m very torn.  Part of me very much wants to go with traditional publishing, for the support system you’re supposed to get, for the physical object you eventually get, the broader distribution, all that.  And (this is going to sound perhaps really bad) for that stamp of approval that is implied with traditional publishing, that unspoken message to potential readers that it can’t be that bad because an agent and editor(s) have read through it already and were willing to spend money to bring it to you.  And then there’s the costs I don’t have to spend money for up front (money I don’t really have at the moment, to be honest).  But it’s a very uphill battle for someone entirely unpublished for me, and I’m not long on confidence generally.  In fact, I rarely give myself the credit that some of my friends argue I deserve.

There is a definite historical stigma to self-publishing.  I find it in my own attitude, even.  In my opinion, it’s lessening now in this the age of e-publication, but I think it’s still there to at least some extent.  Perhaps it is because you do find plenty of books out there among the self-published that were written by someone clearly delusional about the level of their own talents.  You know the ones I’m talking about, the ones that come across as someone’s first draft, with spelling and grammar errors and confused narrative.  And I don’t want to be mistaken for one of those, but I’m aware that there’s a growing tide of those who write very well jumping on this train.

There are several advantages that are definitely starting to make the traditional publishing route look less attractive.  The biggest is control.  I would have control over my work, how long it’s available, where and at what price.  I decide how often I publish a new book.  I can have the cover I want.  It would happen sooner than trying to fight that uphill battle of traditional publishing.  And more of the money is mine (so is the financial risk, but nothing worth doing is without risk), with fewer people being paid a percentage of the book’s sales.  I have to agree with Dean Wesley Smith on this.  He’s talked about it in his blog before.  Actually, he talks about a lot of important business stuff in his blog.  But the salient point here is that I did the work of writing this, inventing it in the first place in fact, spent my time and effort to make it a reality.  They did their job once.  They don’t keep working on the book after it’s published in some cases.  Why should they get a percentage paid to them for however long the book is available?  If I’m willing to learn that business side and find people to do the work for a flat fee, to spend the time dealing with the business end of things, there’s no reason I shouldn’t do it that way.  Actually, the more I write this post, the more I think I’m going to end up going self-publish, e-publish.  I may or may not get rich that way, I may never realize the dream of writing full time, but at least I would get to do it my way.  Besides, even in traditional publishing, being able to afford to write full time is unlikely, as I understand it.  I think it’s time for me to get down to researching and learning when not actively writing.  I have a lot to learn before I get this in people’s hands (e-readers).  And I may change my mind on this.  It wouldn’t be the first time.

In the meantime, as I go through all of this and think about all of the above, what will I be doing?  Digging into another project.  I’m more than a little torn on that.  I want to work on The Ailing Tree, but I don’t think I’m ready.  There’s still a bunch of stuff I’m letting simmer with that one.  I want to work on the second book in the Mirrors trilogy, currently going under the working title Possession, while I’m still very much in the vein of that world, and I’m leaning toward that, working on and finishing the trilogy before moving on to another world.  I don’t expect major story or world reworking to come out of the feedback process for DM (though you never really know), so I could at least start ordering my notes and working on an outline.  I’m also throwing around possible new titles for DM, but not really sure about any of them yet, so I won’t be sharing them at this point.

I’d like to close this post by saying that I’m amazed how much better writing The End feels this time.  It might be because this time I didn’t do it knowing I’d have to do significant rewrites, so it really feels like The End.  There’s still work to do on it, and I don’t yet know how much, but this time it feels like so much more of an achievement.  I like that