Magical Words

Letters from the Battlefield, Part VI

Huh. I have to tell you, doing these Letters is enlightening for me, even if it’s not for anybody else. For example, I feel like I haven’t done a lot this week. However, looking at last week’s letter, I was at 39.2K on the book (thanks to going back and revising), with my eye on a goal of getting back up to 55K, which is where I’d stopped and had to go back and fix things.

I’m at 70K now, which includes a bunch of material I could more or less fit right back in, and a bunch of new material I’ve written over the past week. So, in fact, despite not feeling like I’ve accomplished much, I’ve actually done a pretty good job.

Now, however, we face a bit of a parting of the ways. I’m going to San Diego Comic Con next week, and I have a bunch of stuff I need to do before then. Realistically, the next week is not going to involve any more work on this book. *Obviously* SDCC week isn’t going to be productive in a word-count sense. So my goal of finishing this by July 18 isn’t gonna happen. I’ve got about two weeks of work left on this thing, probably, so it looks like I’ll be turning it in around mid-August instead of mid-July. All things told, I think that’s not bad.

Anyway, so there might be a Letter next week, but it’ll be “what I’m doing when I’ve got a zillion small writing tasks to take care of”, and since I fly back from San Diego on the 28th/29th, I can’t guarantee anything for a Battlefield post on the 29th except maybe a snapshot of Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki (look, *somebody* here’s gotta appreciate that, right…?)

All right, enough of that. This week’s actual Letter starts out with a humiliating discovery of an early-stage URBAN SHAMAN draft….

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This one’s long, and represents a lot of the flutter that goes on in my head while trying to write. My stats this week are all screwed up thanks to stuff explained in the Letter, so I’ll just forego them and let you read what’s been up…

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Sorry for the late update. I don’t have internet access at home right now.

Letters? What letters? This week has … not been a successful writing week. It’s nobody’s fault, just a matter of moving house, and that’s one of those things that no matter what your best intentions are, the reality is you’re probably not going to get much work done. And I haven’t.

So my stats since Tuesday last are:

words written this week: 4117
pages written this week: 19
total wordcount: 45569/100,000
total pagecount: 186/440

Pipe-dream goal for Tuesday next? To have reached 300 pages/75K. That’s 30K away. I’m probably not going to quite make it, but I’ll hang it out there as my target, just in case.

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Man, I almost forgot to post today. This week has been way less writeful, I’m afraid. We’ve been moving, and that’s eaten 5 days, turning them into basically no words days (I did 1200 words on Monday, but that was it). Tomorrow’s going to be a loss, too, but as of Thursday I’m *hoping* I’ll get myself back on track and really start to pound some words out. Got a lot of ground to cover still…

words written this week: 13,142
pages written this week: 51

41,413 / 110,000 (37.6%)

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I’m actually writing bits of notes through the week for this blog, so these really *are* letters from the battlefield, rather than a Tuesday-morning summary.

words written this week: 21,472
pages written this week: 85

28,271 / 110,000 (25.7%)

Next week is going to be slower. I’m going to Cork for the weekend (to see Eric Clapton perform!), and the house-movers will theoretically be delivering out stuff on Monday, so I’m figuring if I get 2K done a day Friday-Monday I’ll be doing very well indeed. Fingers crossed, and meantime, here’s the week’s Letter:

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I’d meant to really get started on my current book a week ago Monday, but with one thing and another it’s really only getting underway today. All I’ve managed in the last week is revising the 2.5 chapters I’d written as a proposal for this book.

Now, this is the fourth book in the Walker Papers series, and I wrote the proposal for it just a smidge under two years ago. Since then, I’ve written *well* over half a million words in five books and two major revisions. Going back is…somewhat painful. Not going back to Joanne, whose style of speech is easy to write, but going back to a proposal that I was (more than) a little brain-dead when I wrote in the first place, and which involves a character who’s grown up a lot more in the last two years since I’ve written her than she had in the couple weeks (at most) between finishing COYOTE DREAMS and writing this proposal.

I’d figured the break after COYOTE was as good a time as any to stop writing Jo for a while, ’cause there’s a certain amount of resolution to the end of book 3, and it would give me time to do something else and stretch my wings a bit, but I had *no idea* how good it would be for the character to give her some time to mature.

The problem with this, of course, is it means totally rewriting most of these first three chapters. I’ve gone over the first chapter more times than I can count now, tightening, editing, polishing–cat-waxing, perhaps, but on the other hand, it’s been *so long* since I’ve written her that I feel that doing this is good for me–and the second chapter did…all the wrong things, really. It always did (which is why it’s a 2.5 chapter proposal instead of a proper 3 chapter proposal), or at least mostly: the first scene in it is good, and the last sentence is good. The rest of it had to go, and the last sentence became a mid-chapter scene break or punctuation point instead of the end of the chapter. And the third chapter, well, pfft. All wrong. Out the window. Except the scene that’s good, of course, which ended up finishing the second chapter and leaving me with somewhere, I hope, to start with chapter three.

With this stuff resolved I’m hoping for a couple weeks of incredibly high wordcount; this is a 110K book due in mid-July, and I’m going to be busting my brain to get it done. Probably the next six weeks of blogging here for me will be more letters from the battlefield, just me and the headspace I’m in right at that moment while writing a book. I hope somebody’ll get something out of it.

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Thank heavens! It’s my day to post on Magical Words! That means I have an excuse to not go back to working on my short story just yet. Hm, maybe next week I’ll talk about writing short stories. This week I’m going to talk about royalties, or Why It’s Hard To Make A Living As A Writer.

People are forever saying to me, “You’re so disciplined,” when it comes to matters of writing regularly. Hah. Discipline is living on a writer’s income. I’ve been paid 4 times in the last 12 months, in amounts ranging from about $3600 up to about $17K, for a total of about $32K. I happen to live in Ireland, which means between my agent’ commission and the dollar being weak against the euro, you can basically cut that amount in half and you’re looking at what I’m making to live on. (If I was living in America, you could cut it in half anyway, because ZOMG are taxes a beetch if you’re self-employed. I’ll talk about that more further down.) Let me break down what those payments were for:

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I FINISHED THE BOOK!

THE PRETENDER’S CROWN, Book Two of the Inheritors’ Cycle, was turned in last Friday. It came in at a whopping 180,000 words, by *far* the longest book I’ve ever written, and I am very very glad to have it done. That was not by any stretch the most difficult book I’ve written, but it was so long that man, wow. It felt like it took a long time. (It didn’t, really. Even including the time I spent unable to write because my hand was smashed (it still isn’t totally healed, btw. I probably cracked a bone.), it took 4.5 months, and if you count the days I actually wrote, it’s probably more like 3 months. Which isn’t all that long at all.)

So what do you do when you’re done with a book? How does it feel?

…I gotta say that for me, it’s mostly a sense of relief more than triumph. This was my 16th manuscript. I guess I’m pretty confident at this point that I can do it, so when I get done, well, *fwoomp*, good, it’s done, time to move on. I’ve been insanely busy writing the last several years, and I haven’t taken enough time to ever really sit down and breathe and be pleased with myself.

So this time I’m celebrating by taking a two-week holiday. In my book (er, so to speak) “holiday” means “I only have to write one short story, and if I get ambitious I might write a couple comic scripts”, not actually “time totally off from work”.

I think there’s some degree of this being a problem with being a writer/artist/self-employed. You only get paid when you produce (something I’ll talk more about next week!), and for me, at least, there’s an awful lot of (self-induced) pressure to keep busy, keep moving, keep new projects in the hopper. Some of that is, as David discussed, purely the shiny of a new project, but a lot of it is just the fact that this is a job like any other, except more erratic in many aspects. There is, however, *definitely* a part of it that’s just Catie The Overachiever, who is not good at taking a break.

Which makes me curious: what do people do to get out of their writing heads for a while? More than just other past-times, I mean, but time where you’re not actually going *on vacation*, like, leaving where you are, but when you’re on break at home and taking time off?

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This isn’t, I’m afraid, going to be much of a post. I’m in the home stretch of THE PRETENDER’S CROWN, which has just crested 175K in length (ai!), and which has, oh, somewhere between one and seven thousand words left. I’m hoping it’s around 4K, and then all I’ve got left to do is rewrite the prologue and fix all my NOTES and do a spell check and turn it in.

You would think this would be cause for great celebration. Realistically, it’s cause for an extremely heavy sigh of relief more than delight, and maybe an evening off, and then I have to go directly into doing what Luna calls “author alterations” and most other houses call “galleys” for HANDS OF FLAME, because they were due yesterday and my editor’s assistant managed to get me an extension til Friday, so, yeah, basically no rest for the wicked.

But next week I get to take the week off before starting the fourth Walker Papers novel! Where “take the week off” means “write a short story, and possibly as many as three comic book scripts”. Though if it turns out to be 3 scripts, then I probably won’t start WP #4 until June, and will take *two* weeks “off” to write those other things.

Yes, folks, this is the life of a working writer. Ah, the glamour.

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I don’t typically do my research–hm. I’d better start this again.

I’d been about to say, I don’t typically do my research until after the fact, except that’s wildly untrue. Before I started the Walker Papers, I read every book about shamanism I could get my hands on (and I’m really looking forward to an excuse to buy a few more when I start that series up again in a few weeks! ahahah!). I’ve been an Elizabethan-era buff since I was a little kid, though I’ve got nothing on many of my friends in enthusiasm for the topic. So I do groundwork research before I start, but when I get down to the details…

Well, my manuscripts have a lot of notes in them. Literally: when I’m writing and I can’t, for example, remember what the proper word for the back of a ship is, my manuscript reads, “toward the NOTE: NAME FOR THE BACK OF THE BOAT O.O they went”. Injured a character in a modern-world story? NOTE: LOOK UP HARLEM HOSPITALS. Can’t remember a character’s name? NOTE: FIND OUT HIS NAME AND FOR GOD’S SAKE, CATIE, YOU SHOULD WRITE THIS $#!7 DOWN! I only stop to go find out that it’s called the stern if there’s some reason I can’t continue forward without actually knowing that. There usually isn’t.

I have a friend who–when I’m not working quite as close to the wire as I am now–plays unpaid research assistant. She’ll read my rough drafts and I get emails back full of answers to my NOTES. I’m *desperately* grateful to her for this, and have dreams that someday I’ll be rich enough to make her a paid research assistant. But with my last few books I’ve been tapping into another research resource, which I like to call Livejournal knows all.

It’s amazing what you can ask the internet and get back instantaneous answers on. For HOUSE OF CARDS, I needed, oh, a handful of legal terms that I just didn’t even know enough words about to know where to /start/ looking, much less get the right ones. Turned out there were lawyers and legal aides on my friends list. I needed a high-end fountain pen, the kind that runs to silly expensive. *Lots* of pen buffs on my friends list. I just now needed a couple of translations to Italian and French, and a Latin declamation, and lookit that, one of my friends has a PhD in Latin, which I had no idea until now.

I swear it feels like cheating. I don’t know why (probably because I’m of the last generation to grow up using libraries for research instead of Google, actually, now that I think about it). I mean, it is not in fact cheating to go to people and say, “Hey, you know more than I do about this, can you tell me about it?” That’s precisely what research is. But somehow flinging it out to five hundred people to see if any of them *happen* to know seems like a shortcut somehow.

I *love* it. Usually what I get back is a barrage of information that I sift through and … gosh. Use what’s appropriate. Kind of like real research. Or a barrage that at least gives me the right language to use to find what I /am/ looking for.

So today I’ve been running back and forth from my work computer to my ‘net computer, asking questions and getting answers while I’ve been doing revisions on my manuscript. It’s not the most efficient way to do this–usually I don’t address the NOTES until the very last thing before the spell check–but I’m in the revision stages and have been looking things up anyway, so why not. All part of the process.

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