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[dr_pretentious]

I've been back long enough now to run laundry, figure out which of my tutoring clients are still on hiatus next week for vacation or the 1st week of school, and settle back into domestic harmony with the spouse. I even made a bit more progress on the Writer's Weekend program correspondence. The one thing I'm absolutely certain I won't be able to catch up on is the 4 days of my friends list that got away from me. If anything miraculous, disastrous, or hilarious has happened to you since Thursday, please let me know in comments here.

Just when I was wondering whether my writing rituals still worked, today I finished the Rildis chapter in one sitting. Well, sort of. It still has one of those little placeholders left to fill. This particular [VERSES HERE] marker requires that I come up with one or two short verses of a bellicose sea chantey. So here I am with a battered secondhand collection of sea songs (Burl Ives, 1956), trying to get the verse structure into the backbrain. With any luck, I'll compose it in my sleep and write it down in the morning. Or not. It used to work for sonnets. Anyhow, the hard part is done. I think the causal links all make sense, the characters do things and stuff happens on almost every page, and the girl cooties are suitably contagious.

Now there's just one more Haldur chapter left to fix, and Vol 1 Part 2 will be in good working order, at which point the first half of the book will be sufficiently revised.

The second half will, goddammit, be done by the end of October, because I plan to use Nanowrimo to crank out a zero draft of the prequel. The trick won't be to get up to the word count goal; the trick will be to come up with a version of the story I want to tell that's short enough to fit in a 50,000 word zero draft and a 90,000 word fourth draft. My brain is so weird. I can write kickass sonnets and pretty good sestinas, but once I get past 39 lines of verse, I skip straight to 400+ pages. Do I have all-or-nothing-thinking issues? Oh, just ask the spouse.

Comments

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Hurray! Sounds like my addiction may be fed again soonish :D

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Yes, and you can soon have seventy-some pages of Rildis sneaking into riots in disguise, climbing up and down the palace dumbwaiter shaft, sparring, getting betrothed, and putting the entire Servants' Association into potentially deadly political peril.

All for the small price of...

um...

Are you available for catsitting this weekend?

[smacks own forehead, chagrined]

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

You have one character doing all of that in only 70 pages? My, my, what a precosious person this Rildis is...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Well, she's been building up to doing all those things for many, many more pages than that. This is a payoff chapter.

what shall we do with the newbie writer?

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

verse structure? you're working too hard at this. :)

most chanties were work songs, so the only thing that matters is the rhythm. of those, there were two main flavors, "hauling" chanties for pulling on ropes that played with the sails, and "capstan" chanties for longer, steadier work, like weighing anchor or tightening rope to make the ship fast to the dock. many hauling chanties are simple call-and-response songs. capstan chanties were more complex, but the goal was still getting everybody to push in sync.

there's a good rca recording with robert shaw and his chorale. since chanties are a dead form, i didn't stick any examples on the cd of all cultural things.

whenever you've got either part of volume one done, you know where to send it. :)

significant news? just more pictures in my journal.

Re: what shall we do with the newbie writer?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Since I've never hauled on ropes (unless you count putting up a 1940s vintage canvas tent), weighed anchor, pumped bilge, etc., I actually need to look at models of the form to figure out how to write a chantey that won't look obviously fake on the page. They're heavy on repetition, fine, but prefer certain kinds of repetition over others. Most of the old work songs I know are grain threshing songs, which don't hang together quite the same way. Also, it was useful to see the pirate-hunting songs, to see just how at least a few actual sailors have sung about their enemies.

The real test of my chantey-faking prowess will be Meagan the Mariner, who worked on tall ships for some years. If the chantey disrupts the waking dream of the story by making her think, "Nobody would haul rope with a song like that!" then I didn't soak up enough models.

I'm not sure there's any such thing as working too hard on a book. Susanna Clarke and Donna Tartt might be said to have worked too long on their books, but since the results sold like gangbusters and appear to have smooth paths before them into their respective canons, maybe there's no such thing as working too long on a book, either. If there were an editor or an agent waiting by her mailbox for the manuscript, I'd be singing a different tune, but the industry is in no hurry to see my work, so there's no harm in doing it well.

tie her up in knots with a page-count limit! tie her up in knots...

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

looking fake isn't too much a problem, ima readerly opinion.

ot1h, you could simply write new lyrics for an existing chanty; so long as it scans, it'll sound good. (and iirc, that was done a lot anyway.)

otoh, beltressin fleet chanties probly should be different than ours. life aboard ship is very different than during the real age of sail. not only is there simply a lot less heavy work per person (simpler rigs and large military crews), but the conditions are much less miserable. the sea is not nearly as much of a threat to them, nor do the men seem to be subject to the sort of casual brutality found in either hm royal navy or most merchant fleets.

the fleet crews are probably still struggling with hasilra's reforms -- an entire musical tradition that dealt with the old fighting styles either was junked, or is sung with nostalgia for the Good Ole Days. not to mention the mess of the crown house conquest of old beltressa should have made to the fleet's even older musical tradition. it's hard to sing of the joys of raiding when you're sposed to be in charge of Your Very Own Empire.

really, close enuf will do; it's a tiny, throw-away detail. we wants draftses to reads, they are precious to usss. :)

Re: tie her up in knots with a page-count limit! tie her up in knots...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Yes, but one reason the draftses are preciousss is that I am a master of the throwaway detail.

Re: tie her up in knots with a page-count limit! tie her up in knots...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that did come out wrong, didn't it? What I meant was, the throwaway details are important to me, and when I get them right, I get them right because I sweat over them. If I stopped sweating, the book would start sucking. If I didn't give a full day's work to things like the sea chantey, nobody would want to read the drafts, not even my most patient friends, because the story would be dead on the page. There are lots of things I know I'm not that good at, but it's not in me to let go of the parts of the task I know I can do right.

Re: what shall we do with the newbie writer?

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

while i can't say much about what meagan's sailed, most modern large sailing vessels have power winches. nobody can afford the labor to do things the bad old ways.

[paganpilgrim.livejournal.com]

i would love to play some cd's for you

or loan you some

any time for a venture down the shore

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I definitely want to get down to the shore at least one more time before the weather turns cold. Are you in Seabright for the foreseeable future?

[calene.livejournal.com]

Woohoo! Congrats on finally pushing through that chapter!

[shakti-lemaris.livejournal.com]

Woo hoo! Go, go, go!

Um...what's a zero draft?

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

A zero draft is a draft whose first priority is to help the writer wrap her mind around the project, and if it's intelligible to anybody else or has even one sentence that survives to the final draft, that's gravy. In my process, a first draft represents some kind of attempt on my part to put something on the page/screen that resembles the final product I want, even though I know there'll be a lot of revision and the final product I want now may be superseded by some completely different, improved plan later.

The zero drafts for my dissertation chapters consisted entirely of quotations from my sources, typed up so I wouldn't have to find them later and would be able to run a search function on them in my word processor, interspersed with telegraphic notes to myself about why I thought I wanted them.