Sheila Rambles

If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act. --Anton Chekhov The term Chekhov's Gun has its own Wikipedia entry, as I discovered as I was trying to track down the exact quote. (As it turns out, there is no exact quote, since Chekhov reiterated the point in a number of places--I used the quote from the footnotes to the entry.) The point being, if you introduce an element into a story, then you need to follow up on it. I just changed two lines in the novel, simply because they hinted at something that ended up not happening. At the time I wrote it, things were still in an open-ended state of flux and it was a distinct possibility, but ultimately there was no need for it to happen and it didn't. So I cut the line, replaced it with something that emphasized what did end up happening and I could feel the whole thing weaving together a little more tightly. There are still a lot of loose spots that need to be tightened (or cut!) but I...

I just removed an extended scene from the manuscript that dropped the wordcount by some five thousand words. And you know what?  The two points between fit together seamlessly . There are some lovely bits in there, and I'll miss them, but I can always go back to the raw draft and revisit them if I really feel the need to.  But when I read over the pages, I realized that as much fun as it was to write and as clever as some of the lines were, the entire sequence served no purpose except to kill time.  Which is great when you're trying to hit the 50,000 mark by the end of November, but not so great when you're trying to shape it into something compelling. There's one bit I may have to extract and insert elsewhere.  I haven't decided yet. Right now, a lot of my energies are being taken up with some other projects of mine, but it felt good to sneak in and do that one simple thing.

I just spent two hours with my manuscript and a pink pen, marking inconsistencies and designating entire scenes for the writerly equivalent of the cutting room floor. It felt great .

I've decided that what I really need to do is print this baby out so I can see it tangibly and scribble on it where I need to.  So I figured I'd get a bloggy posty thing in while I'm waiting for the pages to grind out of my little ink-jet printer. The critique group at Orbital was extremely helpful and quite encouraging.  And it gave me a certain insight into how to take constructive criticism that I wish to all heaven I had figured out ages ago. In my younger days as a writer, I dutifully took the short stories I wrote and ran them past a certain circle of writerly types in my acquaintance.  Some of them had actually been published and I made the fundamental error of assuming that since they had ascended to the ranks of the published, they knew more than I did about how I needed to be writing. I think part of the problem was, they were perfectly good writers, but not terribly good critiquers.  One in particular (won't name names) had a tendency to suggest things that w...

So I'm here at Orbital 2008 , which is this year's Eastercon. The Eastercon is apparently a long-running thing in the UK--it's a science fiction convention of a more literary bent, a bit like WorldCon, only not quite as enormous. It's held on Easter weekend, because that tends to be a slow weekend in the hotel industry, so it's easier to find a place to hold it for a reasonable rate. (Interestingly, there's a convention in Atlanta called Frolicon that likewise is held Easter weekend for much the same reason. A rather, um, different kind of convention, though.) I am here because one of the guests is a writer named Tanith Lee. There's also a writer named Neil Gaiman in attendance, and it's been groovy to see him, but I honestly wouldn't have come if it had just been him, since he actually shows up in America more often than not. Tanith Lee hasn't been to America in some time, so if I wanted to see her, the mountain had to come to Mohammed. My...

Not everybody asked that, of course, when I mentioned I just finished my draft, but quite a few people did.  Somebody even asked me that when I was still in the midst of burrowing through the tense-shifting rewrite. The answer is, at this point, "not yet." When I crossed the finish line in 2006, I did send out copies of the result for people to read.  Only one person managed to read it all the way through and tell me what he thought of it.  (He liked it, which was quite encouraging.)  That's sort of reason number one--I don't really feel like hanging on the edge of the "what did you think of it?" seat until the next step is figuring out what literary agents might be interested in it. When I crossed the finish line in 2007, I was even more reluctant to show the world the result, because there was a lot I put in there in haste that I feel downright embarrassed by.  So that's the other part of it--I need to clean up those bits so I'm not cringing when I...

It's a start.  I have now officially fused my past two NaNoWriMo efforts into a unified manuscript. For those of you wondering how 50,000-odd words plus another 50,000-odd words adds up to less than 100,000 words, allow me to clarify.  My NaNo 2006 effort ( Soft Places ) was written in the form of diary entries by the narrator.  (I even dated the entries contemporaneously, and threw in things that were happening at the time.)  The 2007 NaNo ( The Things Behind the Sun ) was written in first person present tense (though I did include references to the narrator continuing to write things down in her diary.) I decided, ultimately, to do the entire thing in first person present tense.  This meant I had to take the diary entries and rewrite them accordingly.  At first, I was trying too hard to rewrite and perfect everything as I go, then I decided it would be faster and more effective to just cut, paste, redo the verbs and do a little rewriting here and there to smooth the transitions. ...