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Today is a perigee full moon, which is very exciting if you are a moon-buff like me.  My primary wall calendar is a lunar calendar, and I have a utility in my Google Calendar that shows all the phases of the moon, too.

Project 1: scuppered

Project 2: by

Project 3: migraine

Bugger that with a sharp stick.

Today must be devoted to errands, both the running-about sort and the digital sort.  I've got three e-mail interviews stacked up that simply must be answered.

In the meantime I shall leave whatever readers I might have here with a question: why is it that Americans are most prone to say something "tastes like" some other thing regardless of the relationship between Thing A and Thing B, whereas Britons use two different constructions, "tastes of" and "tastes like," yet do not always use them consistently?  Surely there ought to be some specificity and consistency in usage here, where "tastes like" is the appropriate phrase where Thing A is similar to but not identical to or made of Thing B (e.g. "this cheese tastes like feet" or "guinea hen tastes like chicken") and "tastes of" is the logical locution when Thing A is made of, or includes, Thing B, as in "Mexican chocolate tastes of cinnamon and almonds" or "Bernadette's tears tasted of mascara."

Yes?  No?

I don't know whether the 500 words daily on each of 3 projects is going to prove viable.  There are a few factors that made yesterday difficult, the primary one being that my usual pattern with regard to writing is to write in chunks that are around 1000-1300 words.  It just seems to be how my brain works, whether writing scenes in fiction or topical sections in nonfiction, is to parse them into chunks of around a thousand words.

So it may end up making more sense to shoot for a chunk (at least 500 words, assuming it'll be more) on the main project, and 500 words on one or the other of the secondary projects.  We'll see.  That was what felt useful to me yesterday.  The last 500-word push was very hard, and I don't think produced as much that was worthwhile.

Project 1: 527

Project 2: 602

Project 3: n/a

I'm working on three different nonfiction projects right now. (No, I'm not discussing what they are right now.)  It's hard to juggle that many projects, and I have a very real and present need to get some wordcount down on all three of them so that I can do some further planning in terms of what other work (research, especially) I need to do to get them fleshed out and finished in a timely fashion.   Thus I have set myself the task of doing 500 words per workday minimum on each of the 3 projects for a month, at which point I can look at what I've got and reevaluate.

Project 1: 848

Project 2:  525

Project 3: 528

Last night I sent the newest book off to my agent.  On time, too, and I would say "under budget" except that I didn't have one to work with.  This morning, I'm printing out a file copy for myself, plus two more hard copies, one for my grandmother (who adores reading my YA) and one for a friend who, I think, will specially enjoy this particular book.

The line-edits weren't too bad.  I learned a few more things about my writing in the process, although none of them are particularly earthshaking.  Every writer has his or her own foibles, things that tend to get overwritten or underdescribed, turns of phrase that become overused, particular facial expressions or reaction shots that we lean on too much.  One of the things you learn how to do as you become a better writer is to spot them on your own and get rid of them before your editor has to suffer them.  Optimally, you keep the lesson in mind for the next time, and if all goes well, you don't make those precise and specific errors again -- but there are always plenty more where they came from, so it's not like you'll ever be at a shortage.  The goal isn't to stop making mistakes, it's to constantly be acquainting yourself with a better class of error.

This is one of the reasons I'm able to look at my earlier books without too much cringing.  Flatly put, I did the best I could with the tools I had at the time.  The tools weren't very good.  I never set out to be a writer, and there were a lot of things I didn't know about writing, from organization to style and back again.  Also, my first couple of books didn't get much in terms of editorial oversight, at least in terms of having editors who were particularly invested in trying to help me be (or at least look like) a better writer. 

An Aside: That's okay, it's not necessarily an editor's job to teach you how to write, but rather to take whatever sow's ear you hand them and make it into as marketable a silk purse as they can manage. The occasional editors who do coach their writers on issues pertaining to the actual writing and work with them on improving their work are (assuming their advice is good) exceptions to the rule, in my experience. Generally, if you're writing a book, they're going to assume--quite reasonably, from where they sit--that you're able to take care of business in the writing department

But the upshot is that my earliest books are, from the perspective of the actual writing, a bit of an embarrassment to me now. (Note: they're not in terms of content, just insofar as the writing itself.)  They're light-years away from what I would do if I were writing those books today.  But there they are, published and on the shelf and, indeed, still selling on the backlist.  When you're a writer you rarely have the luxury of just forgetting something you did years ago that wasn't very good: I suspect there is a minor demigod whose responsibility it is to seek out writers who are attempting to do this and see to it that the next time they go into a used bookstore they come across at least two copies of every title for which they'd like to disavow responsibility.

I think it's probably healthy, as you move into mid-list-dom, to feel a little weird about your first books.  It's a function of growth and perspective.  I find that I have a certain fondness for the clumsiness and stridency of my first book, particularly, because I was trying so hard to do things right and had no real idea what I was about writing a book.  I just kept writing until it turned into a book, and bang!, it was, a classic Little Engine That Could sort of affair.

Now I'm going to have a little bit of a hiatus.  I have a couple of proposals out making the rounds for nonfiction stuff, and a couple of completed novels out making the rounds for fiction stuff, and an anthology contract to finish negotiating, so I have things in motion.  I also have the sequel to the novel I just finished to write, a half-written novel to rewrite and finish, and two other novels that want writing and keep kicking me every so often to make sure I haven't forgotten about them.

Before I start any of that, however, I have a keynote speech to write for the Femme 2006 conference, then the travel and whatnot for the conference itself, and I'd also like to spend some time doing some of the long-postponed projects around the house that have taken a back seat to finishing things related to Virgin and novelwriting these past few months.

It's as close as I get to taking an actual vacation, I think.  So it seems likely that there may be some posts about speechwriting as opposed to book writing in the future, as I work on the talk for the Femme 2006 conference.

(And hey, if you're going to be at the Femme 2006 conference, come say hi!)

I finished the draft last night.  It was a very long last day of drafting, and honestly I probably should have broken it up into two days' work.  Seven-thousand-word days, no matter how much momentum you have going and no matter how fast you type, are pretty punishing ones. (3500-word days are pretty long ones usually.  My average is usually more along the lines of 1500-2500 words in a day, along with the inevitable non-writing work and administrative detail that all working writers need to do.)

But momentum there was, so I kept hauling away at it until I got to the end... about a twelve-hour work day, and when I say work, I mean exactly that. (See, what'd I tell you about my old history of writing in hyoog marathon sessions?  Old habits, baby, die hard.  'Cause I'll do that marathon writing jag thing if I'm at the end of a book, inspiration or no inspiration, and let's face it, Edison was right about the ratio of inspiration to perspiration in creative endeavours. This means I end up doing things like being so desperate for a break that I decide to get up in the middle of a sentence to wash the dishes because I just can't stand sitting there typing for one more second, and then when I'm done, I having to force myself back to the keyboard because I'm just so damn close to being done and I know I can finish if I just go back and do it.  I actually got up last night when I was four paragraphs from the end of the book and cleaned the catfood dishes in order to zap my frontal lobes back into action.  I was that close to crispy-fried and I just needed the few minutes away so that I could go back and be done with it.)  You want to read about The Glamorous Writing Life?  Believe you me, you so aren't going to get it here. 

Some of the bits of the final chapter will want substantial tweaking, certainly.  The segue at the beginning of the chapter is weak and must be strengthened.  But once it gets itself rolling, it's a bit of a juggernaut.  That's exactly as it shold be: the model I had in mind, for the ending of this particular book, was the last act finale of Mozart's Don Giovanni.  Should this book see the light of day (it wasn't written under contract, but I'm hoping it'll find a loving home, of course) the attentive adult reader ought to get a chuckle out of  the character who is the structural analogue of il Commendatore.  He has quite an entrance, I'm very pleased with it.  The collateral damage to the voles can't really be helped.

Right now, as I type, I'm printing out a copy of the draft.  I can't edit worth beans on screen, particularly not my own stuff.  If I can't hold the Purple Pen of Editorial Doom and scribble all over the page, it just doesn't work out well.  I also realized rather belatedly that I had been spelling a few characters' names differently depending on my mood when I used them, so I think that a thorough stylesheet is in order as I go through the ms. so that I don't miss anything embarrassing.  I would hate to send this off to my agent, and potentially as far as an editor, with those kinds of errors in it.  At least not if I could avoid doing so, which one can't always, even if one is conscientious and brave and reverent and thrifty and helps little old ladies across the street, because those are precisely the kinds of tiny glitches that love to creep into manuscripts when your back is turned.

Along the way, I will be making some other little decisions.  Some are about vocabulary: if I use the word "slut" in its original context and meaning, to indicate a low-class, slovenly woman menial, will it be completely lost on the young adult audience for which this book is intended?  Others are about characterization, for example, how a specific character talks and the idioms she uses, and being careful about how those are either consistently used or consistently removed throughout the book. 

Inevitably, there are also going to be a few choices to make about which of my darlings I am going to need to kill.  By that I don't mean killing off characters.  That work is done, and in point of fact there's only one death in the book (and it isn't even a human being).  I mean yanking out some scenes, or at least parts of scenes, that I adore to pieces, but which don't necessarily serve quite as much purpose storywise as they need to do.  Such scenes are rarely completely wasted, I've found, because I so often find a way to rewrite them into some other piece later on in what the inimitable bard of Reading Gaol referred to as "the labour-saving device of self-quotation."  But there's still always a pang when I have to make the decision to highlight that block of text in the submittal draft file and toss it in the bit bucket.

I'm feeling pretty good about this book.  It's not perfect, no book is.  But it's a juicier and thicker and more ambitious book than my last novel was, which tells me that I'm still riding the learning curve in the right direction.  I think I did more things right in this one than in the last one, too.  Most of all, I went to bed last night not thinking about it, and when I woke up this morning, it wasn't in my head either.  To me, this tells me that I scraped the bowl hard and got all the dough into the pan, and there are no little scraps left clinging to the side of the bowl to nag at me for failing to make certain they made it in.  It also tells me that I didn't forget the eggs, or the nutmeg, and I don' t need to go to the store for anything and then come home and try desperately to knead it in smoothly. (Pardon the baking metaphor, but it works.) So if nothing else, I know that the book is what it wanted to be, which is to say, it is the story I had in me to tell about these characters and these events, nothing more, nothing less.

Another good sign is that for the moment, I can't even get my brain to think about the sequel. Normally when I'm writing a novel, I get little glimpses into the characters' thoughts and interactions as I go along, many of which never actually become part of what I write down about them.  They're just bits of information I need to know about them, bits of backstory, a sense of how they would handle things.  Even as late as yesterday evening as I was cruising through the last five pages or so, I was still getting dribs and drabs of data that apply to the sequel, which has almost all of the same characters.  This morning?  Not a peep.  I'm sure the chatter will start up again in a few days or a week, and when it does I'll scribble down the bits that I need to scribble down.  For right now, though, it seems my characters need a break as badly as I do.

Fortunately for them and for me, editing through my own work uses different muscles than drafting it does.  The characters can have a nice nap, and so can the story-generation parts of my brain, and the picky-details-mind can pick up its purple pen and have a field day.

Which I ought, I suppose, to be getting on with.  Or at least I ought to be getting on with making myself a whacking big pot of tea, because ain't nothin' gonna get done around here unless this tired little scribbler gets her caffiene tanks filled tout suite.

I'm beginning this blog as I write my way to the end of a draft of a novel, and I have this to say about drafting endings: the whole process makes me twitchy and grumpy and predisposed to a certain irritability that has nothing whatsoever to do with how well the book or the writing is going.

In this particular case, the writing and the book are going well.  They've gone pretty smoothly all the way through, with a few minor hiccoughs that got themselves sorted fairly rapidly.  I'll have a bit of fix-it work to do once the draft is done, but that's invariably the case.  None of them really worry me, and they will involve at best a few days of splicing and segue work, and possibly the tightening and shortening of one particular subplot that may not really deserve as much ink as it's gotten.

It's just that I'm reaching the end, and endings and I have a categorically difficult time coexisting.  In a nutshell, the problem is that I can hold the entire ending in my head, I know exactly what's going to happen, I don't really need to sit down and figure anything out, all the threads are there and ready to be tied into a nice neat knot... and I can't do it all in one sitting.  It feels to me rather like getting to the end of a Mozart or Beethoven piano sonata, getting all the way to the last three or four bars, and then stopping and playing one chord per day until you get to the end.  A classic case of what Tim Curry enunciated as "antici... " (audience: "SAY IT!") "...pation."

When I was a baby writer and first starting to write fiction, it was mostly erotica short stories.  And most of them happened all in one swell foop, single-sitting sessions of writing where I would go from idea to ##30## in the course of a long day's writing.  It was feverish, and I felt inspired and happy as long as the flow of words held out. 

Which was all fine and well, as long as the stories managed to get themselves written in a single sitting (or very rarely, in two).  The stories that didn't get written that quickly generally just got trunked.  I would tell myself that I would go back and finish them, and occasionally I tried, but it rarely worked out.

This approach, I would like to point out, is that of a total dillettante.  I don't mind admitting that, I never set out to be a writer and I certainly didn't think of myself as a professional writer at that point.  Nor did I have any sense that I needed to have anything remotely resembling discipline or process, and in fact would've rejected the idea out of hand, since I managed to get things written and managed to get things published without having any real sense of either one.  In all honesty, it worked out just fine for me.

For a while.

But it was also what was to blame for the utter dead-in-the-water brokenness of the first couple of attempts I made at novelwriting.  I'd get about 50-75 pages in and realize in a fit of accurate self-assessment that what I had written was nothing more than a bunch of characters wandering randomly about, vaguely hoping that a plot would fall out of the sky and hit them all on the heads and put them out of their misery.  It is noteworthy that this never, ever happened.

I assumed that this was proof that just as Schubert was a songwriter, not an opera composer, I was a short story writer, not a novelist, and that novelists were simply wired differently than I was.  They could get inspired and stay inspired for as long as it took them to write a novel, they could hold the whole book in their heads at once.  I could not.  Ergo I could not be a novelist.

What it was really proof of was that I had some fundamentally wrong ideas about what one did when one wrote novels, and that I had rather romanticized the whole process of fictionwriting in a way that was profoundly unhelpful in making it possible for me to, er, write fiction.

It took me several books and quite a lot of work to learn different.  It also took me getting bored of writing erotica short stories, yet still feeling the pull to write fiction.  It became abundantly clear that if I was going to successfully write more interesting and substantive (to me--I hasten to note that I do not necessarily consider erotica either uninteresting or nonsubstantive, including my own erotica, but that as a genre, it has a lot of limitations) fiction I was going to have to learn how. When I got to the point where I would sit down to write erotica stories and they'd come out as historical fiction, or science fiction, or fantasy, or magical realism, I realized that I'd outgrown my familiar smutty sandbox and needed a bigger place to play.

I also had to learn how to work on a larger scale than I ever had before.  My first book, Big Big Love, was a lengthy book but it was made up of small sections which could, for the most part, stand alone.  Writing on a very large scale was something I had to learn while writing Virgin: The Untouched History, and when I say "writing on a very large scale" I mean not only the writerly processes of working on a large scale, with its attendant problems of continuity and scale and pacing and so on, but also the human processes of learning how to pace yourself, and how to maintain your stamina, and how to just keep going back and bashing away at something gigantic until it's finally done.

To my pleasure, and somewhat to my surprise, I discovered that somewhere during the process of writing Virgin I had also figured out how to write novels.  I wrote 2/3 of two different novels while I was writing the early parts of Virgin, then another one and a half novels during the later stages of work on Virgin.  The one completed novel was immediately trunked for egregious MarySueism and lack of clue on the issue of worldbuilding.  But the other half novel wasn't bad at all, and I finished it up in a matter of a few weeks after I completed the first soup-to-nuts ms. of Virgin.

That one's out making the rounds now.  And I realized when I was finishing it that the end made me wooly, and now that I'm getting to the end of this one, the end of this one is making me wooly too.  The last chapter of Virgin likewise made me wooly, although there were so many iterations of that one that the wooliness turned into felt after a while.

The reason it makes me wooly?  Because it feels so much like what short-story writing used to feel like ages ago when I'd sit down with my laptop on the bed at 10 o'clock on a Saturday morning and by suppertime, I'd have a draft.  When I can hold the whole thing in my head, I feel compelled to enact a literary Blitzkrieg and get it all out onto the page as quickly as humanly possible before I lose it... because part of me still feels like I will lose it if I don't get it down immediately, like it'll never get done if it doesn't get done right now.

But.

There's also the other part of me, the part that knows I've learned how to sustain the effort, that knows that I can just keep holding the story in my head and spin it out, just like a spider, until I'm done with the web.  I know it'll be better if I do, too.

I figure I'm about 3 more days from done.  Maybe 4.  I just have to cope with the itchy, irritable urge that I should be (need to be!  must be! now now now!) getting it all written right this minute.