Development Journal – Page 4

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 6

Writing Time: 01:50
Session Word Count: 1676
Total Word Count: 10868 (10000 par)

Tonight was a rough one. I didn’t feel like writing, and it felt slow, even if it did end up being pretty on-pace compared to my previous sessions.

On the upside, I crossed 10,000 words. On the downside, I updated my count on the website one minute after midnight. Now I don’t think I’m going to get that “Daily Par Every Day” badge. And…sure, it’s just a stupid graphic on a website. It doesn’t really matter. But, assuming all goes well, I’m going to get to the end of the month and all those badges will light up like a Christmas tree. Except that one. Because I was one minute late. Oh well.

The actual book is going fine. Thanks to the 10,000 words I already had done before November, I’m approaching the end of Act I.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 5

Writing Time: 01:45
Session Word Count: 2117
Total Word Count: 9192 (8333 par)

My strategy so far has been to write a paragraph or two beyond my “par” word count each day. This doesn’t feel like much, but I’m now about 850 words ahead. At this rate, I’ll have a spare day of wiggle room around Day 9. I also have some vacation later in the month, and I may use that to pad my word count a little further. That way if something comes up or I just feel burned out, I can afford to take a day off, or write a little less.

I wrote in two sessions today. The first was a bit of a slog. It was a lot of physical action as one character pursues another in a crowded building. I had to figure out exactly what each of them was doing, as well as the layout of the building. The second session was about twice as productive, and was mostly dialogue after the chase.

If I have anything like a hack for getting your NaNoWriMo word count, it’s this: use lots of dialogue. Dialogue is such a fast way to write a lot, and it’s a great way to develop characters, especially if you’re still trying to figure those characters out as you’re writing.

In my experience, most of the difficulties with dialogue come with editing it, once you realize you have unnecessary bits or need to rearrange things. Since dialogue has a natural flow to it, changing one thing can have a lot of knock-on effects. Luckily, that’s not a concern during NaNoWriMo. That’s a problem for future me!

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 4

Writing Time: 01:40
Session Word Count: 1797
Total Word Count: 7075 (6667 par)

I’m going to say something that probably seems obvious to writers who call themselves “pantsers” or “gardeners”—those who don’t plan/outline/prep extensively before starting a big writing project like a novel.

Having a very loose outline for this project has been…fun? I have more flexibility to just discover new ideas or characters and immediately weave them in. I have a few plot points I want to hit, and I can meander between them as much as I want.

The other thing I’ve noticed, not slavishly following a detailed outline, is that I’m writing faster. My recent point of comparison, of course, is Razor Mountain.

I spent something like a year and a half writing the “first draft” of Razor Mountain. I put “first draft” in quotes, because I was working from the most detailed outline I’ve ever made, and each chapter went through at least one round of edits (and often several) before I posted it. I wanted the story to be coherent and relatively free of plot holes, because I knew people would be reading it while I was writing it.

The downside is that I am now finished with that “first draft,” and I still need to edit and revise. I’m still going to end up cutting some things out and adding new things, along with lots of smaller edits. A better first draft is still a first draft, and some of the effort that went into making it better will be thrown away when those sections are cut or modified.

My weekly output during Razor Mountain was about equal to my daily par for NaNoWriMo. I will be writing the equivalent of 45% of Razor Mountain in November. Call it half of a first draft. But it’s going to be a much messier first draft. How much more will need to be rewritten or thrown away to make it good? I don’t know. Is it better to blast through that first draft as quickly as possible, knowing that it means more editing later?

The other aspect that I’ve been thinking about is sustainability. I accepted my slow cadence of two chapters per month on Razor Mountain because I decided I could keep it up indefinitely. My past experience with NaNoWriMo is that I’m usually pretty worn out at the end of November.

On the other hand, at this pace I could finish the first draft of a novel in two or three months. Even if I had quite a bit of revising to do, I could spend a year doing that and still finish faster than my Razor Mountain pace.

As usual, I’m probably over-thinking everything. After all, it’s only Day 4.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 3

Writing Time: 01:05
Session Word Count: 1708
Total Word Count: 5278 (5000 par)

The words continue to come pretty quickly. Along with my main character, I’ve gotten to introduce a couple of interesting secondary characters. The second major character will enter the story in my Day 4 writing session. I initially thought that these two would be very buddy-buddy, but now I’m thinking that some tension between them would give me more opportunities to keep things interesting.

I am starting to enjoy and feel more comfortable with peeling back the layers of the world. I’m not terribly familiar with steampunk or its various punky offshoots, and I’m still figuring out what real world time period(s) and place(s) to draw from. I began with the default: Victorian England, but now I’m thinking about adding some more Eastern European elements into the mix. For now, I’m happy to pull in a mish-mash, even if they’re a bit anachronistic together, and see how it works out.

I’m also delighted to make it to Friday and catch up on some sleep.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 1

Writing Time: 01:50
Session Word Count: 1717
Total Word Count: 1717 (1667 par)

As is pretty normal for me, I was not as prepared as I had hoped to be. Life has been busy lately. I went into November with something more like a story summary than a scene-by-scene outline. But that’s fine.

Unfortunately, November 1 was a Wednesday this year, which might just be the worst day to start NaNoWriMo. Much better when it lands on a weekend. Ideally, Halloween would fall on a Friday or Saturday, and I could stay up late and do a little bit of midnight writing to kick things off.

As it was, I had to work all day and save my writing for the evening. I didn’t actually start writing until kids were in bed. Still, I started this year with the advantage of jumping into a story 10,000 words in. I already have a main character that I know something about, and some pre-existing tone and setting to build from.

The last time I participated in NaNoWriMo was before I had started this blog, and before I had started Razor Mountain. Before that, I was…inconsistent. I can definitely feel the difference, now that I’m in the habit of writing on a regular basis. 6-7 pages in a day is still a lot for me, but by not worrying too much about quality, I was able to bang it out in less than two hours.

In short, Day 1 went well, and I’m already tired and looking forward to the weekend.

Razor Mountain Revisions — #2

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

The book is complete, but there’s still one more thing to do: revise and edit! This final set of journals will follow the editing process.

Slow Going

When this post goes up, Razor Mountain will have been “in revision” for over a month. Unfortunately, I don’t have a whole lot to show for it. I’ve worked through the first few chapters, made some changes, and made notes for later.

In the past, I would probably have chalked that up to laziness and lack of a proper writerly work ethic. More recently, I’ve come to the understanding that if I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the writing, but not actually getting much done, it’s because I have some sort of mental block, and I need to work it out to move forward.

I suspect the problem here was a lack of accountability, or at least the lack of an audience. When I was writing chapters and posting them, there were reasons to keep up a steady pace. If I was slow with a chapter, my wife would often ask when the next one was coming. I would notice the longer-than-usual gap in my blog schedule. I had some feeling that the work was for someone.

Now that I’m revising, that dynamic has changed. I’m not reposting updated chapters, because it seems like a huge mess to track, and because they’re likely to get updated again in subsequent passes.

Luckily, since I came to this realization, I’ve gotten some new reasons to stay motivated and productive.

Progress

Let’s start with what I did get done. I spent some time reworking Chapter 2. This is the chapter that introduces God-Speaker. He has a very bad day when his mentor is unexpectedly killed by a stranger. This stranger is barely a character, and really has no clear explanation or bearing on the rest of the story. He’s just there to jump-start the plot.

No only is this not great storytelling, but it doesn’t really fit with what we know about paleolithic humans, which is that they generally worked together. War and infighting aren’t so much of a thing when everyone has to spend most of their energy just trying to survive for another season.

So, I did the obvious thing. I removed the stranger from the story, and I replaced him with a giant bear: Arctodus simus. The bear still serves the same purpose in the story, it just makes more sense and hopefully doesn’t leave the reader saying “why the heck did that happen?”

Chapter Zero?

There’s an issue that I’ve noticed in both God-Speaker and Christopher’s plot. In both cases, I wanted to start with some action and an inciting incident to drive the story forward. However, the reader hasn’t had enough time to form any attachment to either of these characters. There can only be so much tension when the reader doesn’t really care about the POV character.

One solution I’ve considered is adding earlier chapters to better show the lives of these characters before they’re knocked off-course by a cruel and uncaring universe. The challenge would be to create a new beginning to the book, still pulling the reader into the story without the benefit of all the big events that will happen in the current chapters 1 and 2.

I don’t know what I would put in those chapters yet, but I’m keeping it in mind as I work through the rest of the book.

Critiques

I got a lot of good feedback from Critters for Chapter 1, and after I was done with my bear business in Chapter 2, I submitted that as well. It takes a while to work through the queue, but the feedback came in this past week.

Additionally, I got a bite on my “request for dedicated readers,” which means I’ll have someone who can go through the whole book and provide feedback. This is much more appealing to me than slowly sending it through the standard process chapter-by-chapter, with no guarantee that anyone will follow the whole thing from beginning to end.

Along with that Critters volunteer, I’ve enlisted a handful of friends and family to serve as readers too.

Lighting a Fire

That’s all for now. Having more readers lined up lit a fire under me to do a quick read-through of the whole book and look for any high-level changes I want to make before getting that feedback. I expect that to keep me busy for the next week or two. After that, I’m sure I’ll have my hands full processing the feedback.

Razor Mountain Revisions — #1

After taking a couple weeks off, I’m jumping into revisions on Razor Mountain.

Having done my best to forget everything about the book, I now have to identify all the parts that suck and make them better.

Critique

To get in the editing mindset, I reactivated my account on critters.org, and I’ve been doing critiques on other people’s stories. This is great practice for editing, because I want to approach my own stories in the same way that I’d approach someone else’s: as an objective reader.

The other reason that I’ve been critiquing is because I sent in the first chapter of Razor Mountain for critique. Critters keeps the whole system running by requiring everyone to submit a critique in 3 out of every 4 weeks if they want to send out their own work for feedback.

Critters also has an option to request “dedicated readers,” which flags your submission to say that you’re interested in having people read the whole novel. Unfortunately, about six submissions in a given week are novels, and I don’t think these requests tend to get much traction. It’s a lot to ask of semi-random strangers, even if they do get a bunch of reading credits for it. I haven’t gotten any takers so far.

I’ll be sending the second chapter through in the next couple days, but I haven’t decided how many more chapters to put in the queue. I suspect I’ll see diminishing returns on later chapters. Novel chapters don’t get as much feedback as short stories, and not all the readers will be following chapter by chapter, so the feedback is less useful.

The other problem is that it takes a couple weeks for a submission to reach the top of the queue, and each user only gets one submission at a time. At that rate, it’d take a year or more to get through the whole book.

The Editing Plan

I posted recently about making a novel editing plan, and I’m now doing that for Razor Mountain. I’m looking for big structural changes I might want to make, and trying not to get bogged down in small changes. This is always hard for me, because tweaking words and sentences is easy and satisfying right away. It’s much harder to see possible improvements at the chapter or multi-chapter level, and it’s harder to let the ego go and try a bigger rewrite when the story feels “finished” and set in stone. Even if it will result in a better story.

The only place where I have been purposely doing smaller edits is in the first couple of chapters, because I know I’ll be submitting those to Critters, and I want them presented in as much of a polished state as possible. I’m working under the assumption that better chapters will garner more useful feedback. Of course, the Critters feedback includes plenty of suggestions for low-level improvements, but I’m mostly tucking those away for use in later revisions.

Once I’ve made the big, structural edits, I’ll pass the book to a couple of real-life readers for more feedback. I’ll give them the guidance I outlined in my post about asking for critique. Then I can finally start looking at the smaller edits, cleanup and polishing. At which point I should be on my millionth read-through and ready to never look at the book again.

Making a List, Checking it Quite a Lot, Actually

To quiet down the part of my mind that wants to do little line edits, I’ve been compiling a running list of smaller things to go back and improve when the big edits are done. It’s going to be a long list by the time I finish rereading the entire book. So far, it’s things like this:

Danger Words: I tend to overuse words like felt, seemed, mostly, some, nearly, almost, a bit, like, might
Overused Punctuation: em-dash, colons, semicolons, parentheticals
Overused Names: Don’t use a proper name when a pronoun would be just as clear
References to “artifacts”: I originally thought God-Speaker would get his power from some objects that he found in the mountain, but then they morphed into the voices. I’m not certain all the references got updated.
Adjectives and adverbs: They’re not strictly poison, as some writers would claim, but they had better pull their weight if they don’t want to get cut.

More to Come

I’m still not exactly sure how to structure these posts. It’s a lot harder for me to talk constructively about editing than it is to talk about coming up with ideas or writing the first draft. But I think editing is probably not discussed as often as it should be, since most first drafts tend to be pretty flawed, and it’s the revising that makes those mediocre drafts into excellent books.

For now, I’ll continue editing, and post again when something comes up that’s worth talking about.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 34

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

The End Is The Beginning Is The End

This final chapter comes full-circle in a lot of ways. First, it was an experiment where I wrote the first chapter and the last chapter before writing the rest of the book. To do that, I obviously had to know the ending I was aiming toward. Luckily I am a planner, and I outlined this story in more detail than I ever have before.

The benefit I saw, which I didn’t expect when I originally wrote the ending, was that it gave me an emotional and tonal target to aim for, along with an end to the plot. Because I had this ending chapter, I had a good idea of how the chapters leading up to it should feel.

I also assumed that I would have to make major revisions to this chapter when I actually reached the end of the book. When I arrived, I didn’t end up making very many changes at all.

Since there were really no downsides and multiple upsides, the experiment was a clear success. I am planning to do this for every book going forward.

Tragedy or Comedy?

The classic definitions of tragedy and comedy hinge on whether the ending of the story is sad or happy, whether the protagonist gets what they ultimately want. If I had to pick, I am more drawn to tragedy. I don’t think anyone will accuse me of a happy ending here.

Like most dichotomies though, it’s a false one. I believe that the best stories have to incorporate both elements into their conclusion to feel satisfying. Life is never purely happy or sad, and going too far one way or the other makes a story feel artificial. Life is tragicomedy.

In Razor Mountain, the protagonist and the villain end up being the same person, and the tension comes from having multiple goals that are in conflict with one another. Christopher has all the power, but he still has to choose, and no matter what he chooses he will lose something significant.

What Comes Next?

The story is finished! You can read it from cover to cover. But it’s not done yet.

I started this project of blogging through the process of writing an entire novel because I wanted to document everything. That process won’t be complete until we dive into editing.

I’m going to take a couple weeks away from Razor Mountain to give myself some editorial distance. I’ll to try to forget everything and come back in the mindset of a reader and editor. I’m also going to bring in other readers to get feedback and critique. I’ll build a list of things that need to be changed and improved, and then I’ll do the actual fixing and polishing.

Thank you to all of my regular readers, whether you followed Razor Mountain from the beginning or only found it partway through. I do recognize those names that pop up in the Likes every week. I hope you’ll stick around for this last part of the process, and whatever comes next.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 33

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

No More Mysteries

There once was a show called LOST. This show was designed around a firehose of mysteries that were blasted at its rabid fanbase in a technique that its creator, J. J. Abrams, called the “mystery box.” Then he went off to become the king of the nerds by directing films in the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, irritating fans from both. Meanwhile, the remaining writers continued creating mysteries at breakneck pace until the entire show collapsed under the weight of them. The ending of LOST held the title for most unsatisfying finale of a popular TV show for several years, until Game of Thrones came along.

Which is all to say that when I first began this book, I knew I wanted to create a mystery box that started with nothing but questions and ended by fully resolving every last one. Here in the penultimate chapter, we’ve reached that point. Christopher’s childhood trauma and the nature of the oracles were the last two things on my checklist. Now all the cards are on the table.

I’m under no delusions. I know that it was dangerous to save the most science-fictiony elements of the story for the very end. I hope it feels right after everything that led up to this point. I hope they’re fun, and not irritating. The last thing I want to do is pull a LOST.

The Emotional Center

This chapter is also the final reckoning. Christopher has no more distractions. He’s dying (well, sort of) and he has to sit with that. All of the external conflicts have been resolved. Even when he does his best to pick a fight with Cain, he gets nowhere.

The tension that remains is internal. It’s not even between Christopher and God-Speaker. They share the same fear—the fear that most of us have, to some extent or another—the fear of death. This is the connecting thread throughout the book. God-Speaker is too far gone. He’s trapped by his fear in an endless cycle. Christopher might not be.

It’s Easy Again

A lot of writers seem to agree that the middle of a book is the hardest part to write. In the beginning, everything is new and exciting. It doesn’t matter if some things aren’t quite clear yet, because there’s the whole rest of the book to take care of them. Then the middle comes along, and all of those problems and plot holes and difficult connections between plot point A and Z become very apparent. Even with extensive outlining, I felt that in this book.

As I’ve approached the end though, those problems have slowly fallen away. I know what I have to do, and it’s just a matter of doing it to the best of my ability. I’ve got a clear mark to hit for the final chapter, and a wide-open path to get there.

Writing isn’t always fun. Sometimes it’s a slog. In these final chapters, it’s been easy and it’s been fun. I’ll be done soon, and have something I can call a book with a straight face. Sure, there will be editing, but that’s a whole new adventure. I can’t wait to go back and read the whole thing, to see what worked and what didn’t quite work, and figure out how to smooth it out and polish it.

In the past, I haven’t always been very good at enjoying the writing when it came easy. This time, I’m making sure to appreciate it.

Next Time

It’s hard to believe it, but Chapter 34 is the end. Join me next week for the conclusion of Razor Mountain.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 32

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

Writing With Thumbs

I use Scrivener for my novel writing. I generally write entirely my computer, but I also have Scrivener on mobile. Unfortunately, when I last upgraded my phone, the integration between Scrivener and Dropbox on mobile got messed up.

I finally got around to fixing that, so I can once again open my projects on my phone. Now, I wouldn’t say that a tiny touchscreen is a great writing environment, but it has the advantage of going everywhere with me. It’s the same reason I prefer reading physical books, but about half of what I read is e-books (again, mostly on my phone).

For some reason, being able to write in spare moments—as a car passenger, or during breaks at work, or sitting in bed—was very helpful for this chapter. I ended up writing almost all of it on my phone. I did notice some odd effects as a result, like shorter paragraphs and sentences. I still did my revisions on the computer, so I think most of the stylistic changes ended up getting edited out. I’d be curious if anyone notices a difference.

Revealing

The end of this chapter is structured like a classic mystery reveal, with the twist being that the reader has known for many chapters that Reed was the killer. Since that reveal was already…revealed, I hadn’t really put enough thought into Reed as a villain. He was more of a plot device than a character. While that can sometimes be a perfectly reasonable tactic with certain characters, in this case it was a definite deficiency.

After getting some reader feedback on my first draft, I realized that this is still an important reveal, but the revelation is Reed’s motive. My wife suggested that his motive didn’t feel personal enough. I hadn’t really thought through the details of his life before he arrived in his current position, so I had to go back and figure out what his childhood and early life were like. I won’t go into any of that here. Like most backstory, it will never come out in the book. It’s still valuable for the few lines of dialogue that it will inform.

I’m still not entirely sure I’m happy with how this turned out, but I think the real fix may require adjustments to other chapters as well.

Pyrrhic Victory

There are only two more chapters after this, and there is only one more open question still on my list to resolve. God-Speaker has overcome his enemy, and is once again in power, with the situation firmly under his control. After spending the entire book in constant danger, Christopher finally seems to be physically safe, but also on the verge of disappearing into God-Speaker.

Now that there are no more distractions, Christopher has to come to grips with his transformation. He’s “won,” but he’s also given up his original goal of ever getting home.

Next Time

In the penultimate chapter, Christopher has to decide if he’s happy giving in to God-Speaker. Is there anything he can even do about it? We’ll find out next time.