Tag: Razor Mountain

Editing and Repetition

I’m still working on revisions for my novel, Razor Mountain. As I read through the chapters, looking for possible improvements, I’m constantly on the lookout for repetition, repetition, repetition.

Is it bad to do the same things over and over? That depends. There’s a lot of rhythm and structure to writing, and repetition can be an important tool if you’re doing it on purpose. It can be an element of personal style or provide structure to a piece. Unfortunately, repetition is often accidental: something you naturally do without realizing, a literary crutch or a sign that you haven’t put enough thought into some aspect of the work.

This is one of those cases where reader feedback is extremely useful. It’s hard to see these problems without an outsider’s perspective, because they naturally live in our blind-spots. When a reader notices repetition, you should scrutinize it.

Shortcuts

Writing fiction is an incredible challenge, because there simply aren’t enough words to fully describe a complete character, setting, or event. All writing is inevitably cutting out information; choosing what is important and what is not. It’s not surprising that writers take shortcuts. We’re constantly looking for things like a phrase that implies a character’s entire thought process, or a description of a smell that transports the reader to a location in the story.

There are also gaps in our thinking. No writer can think through every single detail of a story. There are always shadowy areas of uncertainty lurking around the edges. Even in the areas that we do put thought into, there can be dangers.

The human mind is a little bit like a hive of bees. Sometimes all those buzzing little thoughts work in concert toward a common goal, and sometimes the subconscious goes and causes problems while the conscious mind is not paying attention. We see this every day when people over-use favorite words or insert their verbal tics without even realizing it.

The Process of Noticing

The easiest way to find these troublesome repetitions is by outsourcing the job to others! Readers who aren’t familiar with your story will have a much easier time taking it at face value. After all, you have the best version of the story in your head, and that version will get mixed up with the words on the page, no matter how much you try to keep them separate. Readers have to suss out that story from mere words on the page.

There are also ways of getting more outside your own head. Reading the story out loud is a classic trick for changing your mode of thinking and catching problems that you wouldn’t otherwise catch. Reading out-of-order, a paragraph or sentence at a time, is another trick for assessing the words without getting lost in the flow of the story.

Danger Words

I’ve already mentioned in previous posts that I’m making a list of individual words and phrases that show up too frequently in my own work. For me, many of these words are “softening” or “weakening” verbs and adverbs; words like seemed, mostly, some, early, almost.

Interestingly, you might be able to discover something about yourself and your process by catching these issues. I suspect that I use these kinds of words reflexively, as a way to avoid fully committing to a description or idea. If I’m not entirely happy with the way I’ve described something, I use these words as a way to distance myself from my own description. Of course, that reflex doesn’t make the writing better, it makes it worse.

Luckily, as I notice these words, I can now reassess the description. If I think it’s actually good, I can remove the wishy-washy language and fully commit to my original intention. If I think it’s bad, I can change it.

Another common repetition I’ve found are vague adjectives, like little or flat. These words can add some value, because they refine the reader’s mental image of an object or idea. A little door is certainly more specific than a door, and a flat boulder is more specific than a boulder. The problem is that neither of these descriptions are very specific (how little is a little door), and they’re not as evocative as other adjectives or phrases I could use.

Opinions differ, but I’ve always felt a complete ban on adjectives to be stupid and reductive. They can be useful, but they also bloat a story. They are often “unnecessary” in the sense that they could be removed without breaking the meaning of a sentence, but they add nuance and impact the feel of the story, and that can have value. I personally think that judicious use of interesting adjectives can be the frosting that makes the cake. Depending on how you write, they might even be the cake.

Bigger Problems

Not all issues of repetition exist on the level of individual words or small phrases. Bigger issues can arise on the level of paragraphs, and even chapters. These are often more difficult to identify, because they can’t be confirmed with a simple word processor “find” function, like repeated words.

The simplest kind of repetitive sentences use an identical structure over and over. This often arises in long stretches of dialogue or action:

He said, “No.”

She said, “I think you’re wrong.”

He said, “I don’t care.”

She said, “I don’t, either.”

He swung his right fist. She dodged it. He swung his knee up. She brought her hand down to block it. He jabbed with his left hand. It struck her right cheek.

These are contrived examples, but they show the kind of painful writing that comes from overly-repetitive sentence structure. These are all short sentences, but even long and complex sentence structures can feel repetitive.

Sentences have a rhythm. It can help to visualize more complicated sentences by focusing on their punctuation and conjunctions, because these are the connective tissue that combine individual phrases and clauses into a complete sentence. A series of sentences with a single conjunction (“This and that,” “That but this,” “This or that”) can also create a dull rhythm.

Even consistently long or short paragraphs can be a rhythm that readers notice, sometimes subconsciously. Lengthening or shortening sentences and paragraphs can be a useful tool for speeding up or slowing down the pacing, but when similar lengths are used consistently, regardless of the intended pacing, it can throw off the feel of a scene.

How Often is Too Often?

It’s a unreasonable and counter-productive to suggest that we should completely remove repetition from our writing. After all, it’s a useful tool for style and structure in a wide variety of contexts. I suspect there are no rules of thumb about the “correct” amount of repetition that couldn’t be taken down with a counter-example.

So, as is usual with writing, the answer to the question is, “It depends.” (Yes, I’m aware that I’m repeating the first part of this post.) There are two criteria worth thinking about: when to take a closer look, and when to make a change. It’s easy to make rules of thumb for finding potential issues, but it always pays to look at the specific context when it comes to making changes.

When I’m looking at repeated words in my own chapters, my personal warning alarms go off when I find three or more examples in a single chapter, or examples in almost every chapter. However, just because I find four instances of “nearly” in a chapter doesn’t mean I’m going to change or delete them. To decide that, I look at the specific sentence and paragraph surrounding each one. If I can think of an equally good or better word to use, I’ll change it. If I find that the word isn’t pulling its weight, I might remove it entirely. Sometimes, it’s the perfect word, and I leave it alone.

The Power of Repetition

Repetition can weaken or strengthen your writing. Repetition makes writing weaker when it’s accidental, filling in details that the writer hasn’t thought through, or revealing subconscious processes that the writer hasn’t even noticed. Repetition makes writing stronger when it’s purposeful, to achieve a stylistic effect or provide a particular rhythm or structure.

That’s why repetition is a great target for revisions. Changes can simultaneously shore up weaknesses and create new strength.

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.

State of the Blog — Aug 2023

It’s almost my three-year blogoversary!

Since I started this blog, I’ve done a “State of the Blog” post every six months. This is the sixth such post.

One of the key tenets of this blog is an open writing process. I’ve brought that to my serial novel Razor Mountain with development journals, and I bring it to the blogging process with these posts.

Previous Posts

Metrics

  • Years blogging: 3
  • Total posts: 378
  • Total followers: 137
  • Monthly views: 555 (average over last 3 months)

The Curve Gets Weird

For quite some time, I’ve seen visitors to the blog increase steadily. There might be a month or two where numbers would drop, but they inevitably kept creeping up. In December of 2022, I saw the biggest peak up to that point, as presumably more people who like to read blogs do so when they have some extra vacation time over the holidays.

After that, the graph got weird. Up and down constantly, and not much growth on average. Why? I don’t really know. Maybe I’ve been posting a little less consistently. Not much, but a little.

I have a few regular readers, but more than half of my usual traffic comes from search, and search traffic seems to be more variable these days. I can see why people who obsess over traffic or try to make money at this would get into all the little intricacies of SEO, keywords, etc. It’s strange to see a change in the pattern and not really understand why.

The End of Razor Mountain

Six months ago, I could just barely see the end of Razor Mountain in the distance. This July, I posted the final chapter.

This felt like a turning point for the blog. I’ve been working on Razor Mountain almost since the beginning. Between the actual episodes and the development journals, it accounts for 171 posts, about 45% of the entire blog.

I was so eager to finish the book, I didn’t think that much about what effect it would have on Words Deferred. Sure, I still have to do revisions, but the reality is that it’s going to be a very different blog, now that I’m not posting so much Razor Mountain.

For now, I plan to continue some of my other regular posts—monthly read reports and general writing topics.

Updated Posting Schedule

One of the great things about writing Razor Mountain was that blogging and writing fiction were intermingled. I could do both at the same time. However, as much as I enjoyed the experiment, I plan to write my next novel in private.

As a result, I can’t continue to dedicate so much time to the blog if I want to keep up with my actual writing. As a result, I plan on cutting back. The fact that I’ve been posting 2-3 times per week for so long is shocking to me, considering how challenging it seemed when I first started.

I’m still committed to posting at least once per week, so it’s not like I’ll be disappearing. I have quite a backlog of topics I’d like to write about.

Next Time

Speaking of cutting back—now that I’ve done six of these on a bi-annual basis, I’ll be switching to once-per-year assessments. I still like having this chance to look back at what I’ve done and think about what’s next, but the blog isn’t young and new anymore, and I don’t feel the need to do it quite so frequently.

The next few months will be a change, but hopefully a good one.

Thanks for reading!

Making a Novel Editing Plan

Previously, I talked about using reader feedback and critique to gather information about what needs to be improved in a story. Right now, I’m in the process of gathering that feedback for my novel Razor Mountain.

Today, I’d like to dig into the next part in the process, taking that feedback and deciding what to revise.

Deciding What to Edit

There are two parts to editing: deciding what to change, and making those changes.

Feedback and critique from readers is a great way to get fresh eyes on a project that you’ve been working on for a long time. It’s easy to develop blind spots when you know the story so well, and others can help you find the parts that exist in your head, but not on the page.

The most obvious source of feedback will be your own notes when you re-read your story. It’s important to read as an editor, looking for problems, and you may want to make multiple passes to really focus on different aspects of the story.

Finally, it’s important to pay attention to your personal foibles. Every writer has at least one or two bad habits. These could be broad things like letting your dialogue meander, or specific things like “danger words” you tend to overuse or use to bad effect. For example, I’ve recently caught myself overusing words like “seemed” and “mostly” and “felt,” words that make a sentence less precise.

You might notice these foibles yourself, or a good critique may point some out to you. Either way, it’s good to keep track of them so you can excise them from the current manuscript and work on avoiding them in the future.

The first step in editing is to create a list of things that need fixing. The items on the list can from any or all of these sources. Don’t worry too much about listing every single thing. Editing is an iterative process.

Editing Big to Small

The line between deciding what to change and making those changes can be blurry. When the issue is a typo or grammatical error, the fix is often obvious as soon as the issue is identified. This kind of editing can feel deceptively easy and productive: you just have to read and fix these obvious errors as you come to them. However, some issues are larger. If chapters or scenes need to be rearranged, or a conversation needs to be rewritten, there may be several complicated choices that need to be made.

Different types of edits affect the story at different levels of abstraction. The chapter that needs scenes rearranged might also include a dialogue that needs to be rewritten, which includes a typo or grammatical issue. In this case, fixing the typo may be a waste of time, because it will be deleted when you rewrite the dialogue. That may also be a waste of time though, because in rearranging the scenes, you find that you no longer need that conversation.

The ideal way to address this problem is to identify and fix the big-picture issues first, then systematically drill your way down into smaller and more detailed aspects of the story until you get to the individual sentences and words. Of course, the creative process is rarely that organized and straightforward, but it’s a good ideal to keep in mind.

By trying to address big problems before smaller problems, you can avoid a lot of wasted work. There will always be problems that you discover while working on something else, and that’s okay too. You can always back up to higher levels of abstraction to fix something before diving back into the nitty-gritty details.

The Editing Cycle

While the process I just described may sound totally linear (start big and work your way down), it’s really more complicated than that. Editing is iterative. A change in one place may necessitate an adjustment in another.

Feedback may not all come in at once, and you may discover high-level changes that need to be made when you thought you were down to line edits and little changes to word choice. These are the challenges and frustrations that are part and parcel of editing, especially in large projects like a novel.

The reward for these challenges and frustrations, however, is the transformation of a rough draft, with all of its flaws and blemishes, transformed into a sleek and polished work of art.

Editing Razor Mountain

I suspect I’ll continue to post here and there about editing for the next couple months, since a lot of my writing time and thought will be devoted to editing Razor Mountain. I plan to write at least a couple journals with specifics, but these will be more sporadic than the previous journals.

Feedback and Critique — User Testing Stories

I recently posted the last episode of my serial novel, Razor Mountain. Finishing a novel is a fantastic achievement, so the first thing I did was congratulate myself and take a little break from the book. However, the work isn’t done yet. I still need to edit and polish it to really call it finished.

Writing is often thought of as a solitary process, the lone writer hunched over a keyboard in a dark basement. It can be that way sometimes, but editing is much more effective if it incorporates reader feedback.

User Testing

In my day job as a software developer, we are constantly creating, changing, or improving features in our software. Those changes then go through a gamut of testing, with developers, with quality assurance, and with users. This process gives us feedback to understand whether the people who use the software understand the new features, and what they like or dislike. We can take that feedback and make features easier to use, less confusing, simpler, or more powerful, depending on what the feedback tells us. While there are best practices, acting on feedback like this is equal parts art and science.

Game makers (video games, board games, and table-top RPGs) also often incorporate this kind of user feedback into their creative process. Where business software is all about maximizing efficiency, ease of use and costs, testing and feedback in games is usually about maximizing fun. That might entail fixing bugs or broken rule sets, but it often involved blurrier concepts, like balancing different factions or ramping up tension from the start to the end of a match.

It may seem odd to apply these ideas of testing to a story that you’ve slaved over and poured your heart into, but feedback can be just as valuable for fiction.

Auteur or Aoidos?

There is a popular conception these days of movie directors, show-runners and novelists as genius auteurs who produce intricate stories all at once, from whole cloth. In that worldview, the story is an artifact handed down from author to audience. The audience appreciates the work or dislikes it, and that’s the end of the interaction.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is stand-up comedy. Successful stand-ups often do many shows per week, trying out different jokes in different sets, changing or throwing away what doesn’t work and polishing what does. Some will take their best material and craft a broader story as a through-line. Material may carry through hundreds of performances, with each one being unique. This kind of performance-first attitude isn’t so different from the ancient oral poetry performed by Greek aoidos thousands of years ago.

Both kinds of artists have a story that they want to tell to an audience. The cloistered auteur firmly believes that they are crafting the one, true version of their work, and will brook no other opinions. If the audience doesn’t connect with it, that’s the audience’s problem. The advantage that the performer has over the auteur is that the performer can see exactly what effect their work has on the audience. They can improve and adjust the bits that don’t connect with the audience.

As an author, it’s hard to test your work against a mass audience like a stand-up, but getting feedback from beta readers can achieve some of the same effects at a smaller scale.

Understanding Readers

One of the advantages of a smaller pool of feedback readers is that you can better understand them and categorize their feedback. Not all readers are the same.

Many writers will have family members or friends who are happy to read for them, but will thoroughly sugar-coat any feedback they give because they don’t want to hurt the author’s feelings. Readers who don’t often read your genre may offer to help, but will have a hard time grasping genre conventions that a reader deep in that genre would breeze past. Fellow writers in a writing group will likely have a much better idea of the kind of feedback you want, because it’s the same kind of feedback they want on their own work.

When gathering potential readers, segmenting your audience can be very helpful. It may be useful to adjust what you ask of different types of readers, and it is absolutely necessary to adjust your own expectations. If a random family member wants to read, but you know they’ll only say nice things, feel free to let them. They’ll feel like they’re helping, and you may still get some tidbits out of it. On the other hand, a writer friend in the same genre might be happy to take a list of your concerns for a story and provide a detailed and harshly honest response.

Preparing Readers

You may want to give your readers a set of questions to inform their feedback, especially if you know their particular strengths and weaknesses. You may also have different concerns for different stories.

The good folks over at the Writing Excuses podcast suggest a set of general questions that can apply to any story:

  • What parts were especially awesome, boring or confusing?
  • Were there any parts where it was difficult to suspend disbelief?
  • When did you feel most absorbed in the story?

Often, readers will offer possible fixes for the problems they perceive. It’s up to you whether you want to solicit that kind of feedback, but it’s likely to happen anyway. However, the reader’s feelings are more valuable feedback than their suggested fixes. The reader is always correct about how the story makes them feel. They know exactly where they got confused or bored or excited. They’re just not usually very good at figuring out what to do about it.

Don’t feel obligated to accept a reader’s suggested fix for a problem. Firstly, you may not think it’s a problem. Even if it is, the source of that problem may be somewhere that the reader doesn’t understand—this often happens when different readers point out different issues that stem from the same root cause. You, as the author, have the best understanding of the story your trying to tell, and that expert view will help you triage any problems.

Making an Editing Plan

Soliciting reader feedback is just one of several ways to decide what to change in the edit. In my next post, I’ll talk about making an editing plan and tackling actual changes to the story.

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 — Chapter 34

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Christopher left the bottle and tumbler behind, in the empty dormitory. He walked the halls with purpose now.

The gray-walled back halls of Razor Mountain were a purgatory where Christopher could wander endlessly. He had been walking these hallways for centuries. God-Speaker had. There was hardly a difference between them anymore. But he couldn’t actually walk forever. Eventually, inevitably, he came to the place he knew he had to come to: the chamber of the voices.

He knew what he had to do, but he wondered if he was too far gone to do it. It was Christopher that was driving him, but there didn’t seem to be much Christopher left. God-Speaker wanted it too, in his own way, but he could never bring himself to do it—not on his own. He was a river that had run for so long, cut a canyon so deep, that he could never change course of his own volition.

In the chamber, he could not completely shut out the voices. The cloud of their strange memories surrounded him, at first just flashes, moments, then more and more until he was inside a kaleidoscope of images, smells, sounds and sensations from lives long past and places far away.

We must continue, they all said. They were a race of God-Speakers, a race that had come to the conclusion that death erased the value of living. A race for whom the transitory nature of life was anathema. Yet, they were here. In their quest for permanence, their race had died out, and even then, they refused to accept it. They cast themselves out, as living memories, to find new vessels for their endlessness. But this paltry rock played host to such primitive life. So primitive that it could scarcely even understand them, let alone play host to them. Only one had ever come close. Even though he could understand them, sometimes, and learn a bare few secrets of how they cheated death, even he was not a suitable vessel. They were trapped. They still clung to this purgatory, this faintest semblance of life, rather than face death.

They only made Christopher more determined. There was no dignity, scrabbling and clawing as you slid down the slope. It was a quiet fear, always at the edge of thought, poisoning every good thing with the sickness of impermanence. Everything was temporary. Hating impermanence made the world terrible.

Having seen enough of the kaleidoscope, Christopher pushed it back. He shut out those dead memories, and reached out with his mind. He took hold of their power one last time. He knew what to do, though he had never been brave enough to do it himself.

He felt a storm of emotions, of logical arguments arrayed like armies against one another. He could barely tell what came from Christopher and what came from God-Speaker. He didn’t want to do it. He had to do it. He had to wait, to be sure. No, now was the tipping point. Now was the only chance. He was afraid.

He recalled the words he used to train the oracles.

See the flow of time, the branching river. Reach out and stop yourself. Step out of the current. Hold on tight, and feel the universe move on without you.

It was surprisingly easy. He was untethered. His centuries of memory were small and simple in comparison to what unfolded around him: the endless strand of time, in the twinkling cascade of infinite moments. The universe unfolding in fractal complexity, perpetually giving birth to itself from nanosecond to nanosecond. The view was utterly overwhelming, and it made plain the lie that the minds in the chamber told themselves. There was no permanence in the face of the whole vast universe. Neither kings nor empires nor the lifetimes of planets and stars were of any consequence. They were so small as to be undetectable.

Christopher felt himself getting lost, and reached out for an anchor. He could go backward, but once he started, there was no stopping, not for long. He sought out the moment that mattered. Back a few years, then a few more, then a century, and time was flying past in a torrent.

It was like skimming a book. He saw only a few individual places and moments, moving in reverse. Effects spawning their causes. He was afraid he would miss it, but when he came to the pivotal moment, it was unmistakable. He grabbed at it, fighting against the pull that now owned him, that would eventually force him to keep going backward and backward and backward.

He dropped into the familiar world again. He found himself—but not himself.

Those ancient, arrogant, fearful minds in the chamber beneath the mountain could never find purchase in the human brain, but Christopher had no difficulty. This was his mind, even if it was inherited.

A hunched and dirty figure limped deeper and deeper into a dark cave. The space in the rock was little more than a narrow crack, and he was forced to crouch and crawl to get through. The voices were calling to him. They were faint, but they were like the voice of his stone god. He had nothing, no tribe, nobody to lead him or keep him safe. Nothing to trust in a world that was terrifying in every way.

There was no light here. He moved by feel alone. Christopher settled deeper into this mind, breathing this man’s breath, feeling the rough rock through his raw and stinging fingertips. Thinking his dull thoughts, despairing and afraid to admit the faint glimmer of hope that these voices engendered.

There was a gap, Christopher knew. A place where this crack intersected another. And that other crack opened into a deep and unknown space below. He was crawling. His fingers found the lip. He brought his knees to the edge and reached across the gap.

Yes, another ledge. Just a little more than an arm’s-length of empty air between.

He gripped the other side and slid forward. Carefully, carefully. The rough ceiling was low. He stretched his body across the gap.

Christopher was a passenger here. His influence was so small, so light. A flicker of thought here. A moment of distraction. A carefully placed hand slips on the moist rock.

Christopher can’t hold on. He is moving backwards, pulled by an unstoppable gravity. He is in God-Speaker, in the depths of Razor Mountain before it had a name. He is falling down the crack. Then he is outside the universe again, watching God-Speaker fall and fall and fall in a frozen, endless moment.

It’s strange seeing it from the outside. God-Speaker falls forever, and then he lands. It is so forceful that there is no pain. Just the quiet dignity of an ending, of death. It is a relief.

The long tail of the future cracks like a whip and rolls out in a different shape. The voices whisper in their chamber, deep within the mountain, but nobody ever hears their susurration. The earth moves slowly, and they sink deeper and deeper into its warm heart.

The mountain is still and sleepy. It is never riddled with tunnels like an anthill. No locked doors hiding secrets. It slumbers peacefully.

The world moves on, different, but not so different. People live and die.

Christopher sails on in the opposite direction, through a void far emptier than the deepest space. He is falling down time, toward the beginning of all things. He has done all he can do to change the course of history.

A tremendous sense of relief washes over him. He sails up the flow of the universe, backward through time, back to the pinprick of infinite light and heat at the beginning, and then beyond.

THE END

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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.