[writing] Progris riport, day 18, The Heart of the Beast
5,500 words net over three hours, to 95,500 words on The Heart of the Beast. 74.5 hours on the project as a whole. This evening I quite literally have felt as if I could finish the book if I could only type all night. I doubt that’s actually true, but it confirms to me that Fred has the shape of things pretty much nailed down and is ready to commit them to the page.
I continue to be fascinated by my own experience with this project. The whole process of outlining is acquiring a different meaning for me through this effort, one which I’ll explore more fully when I get back to Sunspin in April or May. At the same time, Jeff and his Beast have also unlocked a stylistic door for me.
I’ve been experimenting for a long time with POV in short fiction. If you’ve read “America, Such as She Is” or “In the Forests of the Night” you’ve seen how this can work for me. Even more radical POV-wise is my extreme steampunk novella “The Baby Killers”, which will be out in 2010 from PS Publishing as a single-title book. But I’ve remained almost oddly conservative in how I handle POVs in novels, relying on very tight, regular structures, strict transitions and so forth.
The Heart of the Beast has me using my recently expanded short fiction toolkit in ways I’ve never applied them before at this length. Very liberating, a little bit frightening, and a hell of a lot of fun.
As usual, a WIP:
So their beach hikes were an irregular progression, a drunkard’s walk between the tinkle of metal and the sheen of buried devices on the one hand, and flocks of corbies and blackflies on the other, marking their biologic treasures much as a column of smoke indicated a distant fire. Commons thought Bayless a bit strange, but tolerated him for friendship’s sake. He knew that Bayless thought the same of him, fixated on worthless metal bits when the true machinery of the universe was ready to be exposed in the stretch of sinew and the winding of intestines.
Between them, like a bridge, Galendrace. Her own ambitions were pointed in a direction which led to no beach, unless a trunk full of books or scrolls were to have washed ashore; but she came because the two men she loved were there. At least, that was how Commons put it to himself when he could manage to overlook her extended sidelong glances at Bayless bent over some ravaged cuttlefish or waterlogged ship’s rat washed to its final port of call.
He knew she would be better with him than with Bayless, who would always be flighty and a bit of a fool and furthermore have his arms dirty to the elbow with the most questionable stains. It was just a matter of time until she saw this too, though Commons was sure that Galendrace already understood there was a more solid future in things, in possessions of value, than in the handling of the dead who, whatever their estate in life, were universally paupered by the grave.
Tags: Beast, Books, Process, Sunspin, Writing
Posted: 8:05 pm Sun February 08 2009 | Comments(0) |
[writing] Progris riport, day 17, The Heart of the Beast
9,400 words net over four and half hours, to 89,500 words on The Heart of the Beast. Some very strong words today, at least speaking from my subjective impressions of my own work. That’s always hard to tell — famously so, a writer is the worst judge of their own work. Still, I’m feeling very good about it.
As usual, a WIP:
With great land came great creatures, Erebus and Abaia and their kin, chthonic, titanic, each with legs larger than the highest cliffs and skulls that could cover mountain ranges and terrible, slow intelligences whose thoughts were writ with the writhing fires that marked those days. Just as men now are wrought of dust, so these ancients were wrought of magma and ash and the energies of worlds.
In time, all things breed; even time itself, spawning minutes and seconds like the milt of salmon in some high stream. So it is that mountains breed valleys and hills; valleys and hills give way to rocks and soil; and those descend to alluvial plains and fields filled with grasses and trees and the unquiet humming of insects; but still in each shining pebble by the bank of a stream there dwells a sliver of memory of what it once meant to be a great rocky claw riving the sky and drawing the horizon down to earth, to block out even the sun with your shadow. The least stone knows this of itself, just as the smallest acorn remembers the spreading oak, and a man’s seed spilled upon a woman’s thighs knows the pleasures of sword and sex that it might grow into, given the chance and a time alone in the warm darkness behind her sweetpocket.
So the creatures of old, with their thoughts of fire and their breath like earthquakes, begat smaller similars, fetches and avatars who could roam the earth with more active will, for they were not so tied to sea beds and mountain ranges. Still, these children of enormity were yet great by the measure of today, when we are reduced to field mice and arsinotheres and the cold, wriggling intelligence of the merely ship-sized squid which haunt the pelagic deeps. Their eyes were not the size of moons, but merely the width of duchies. Their appetites did not swallow continents, but only made meals of island paradises where lost revelation did once bloom among the orchids.
Of this generation only one survived the churning of the world into the face we know of it today – the Beast. For the Beast had wandered, leaving deep, quiet lakes in its footsteps, tearing new vales in the raw ridges of mountains thrown up like wounds from the bowels of the earth, dragging its tail in the sea, until it laid down to sleep on a new-baked plain of lava and hot mud. The warmth eased its aching bones, the rumbling of the world’s belly beneath its subcontinental ears was as a lullaby to an uneasy child, and so it rested with the long sleep of æons.
Tags: Beast, Books, Process, Writing
Posted: 12:15 pm Sat February 07 2009 | Comments(0) |
[writing] Progris riport, day 16, The Heart of the Beast
2.5 hours tonight, 4,000 words net. The Heart of the Beast is to 67 hours and 80,100 words.
Had an interesting conversation over lunch with today about the way I have been approaching this novel. She asked how it was that Fred seemed to have so thoroughly seized on Jeff VanderMeer’s work and internalized it as my own. I made the observation that for me, writing has always been like performing improv comedy (which I have also been known to do) — you leap in screaming and follow where the wit takes you. Except that my journey as a writer has been from those improvisational roots toward a more careful and deliberate species of craft. This is just the latest, very major step on that road.
I believe that line of thought will unpack to a far more extensive commentary in some none-too-distant blog post. For now, I find myself slightly stunned by it. Once more, Jeff is teaching me something, just as he has before, just as Jim Van Pelt and some of my other secret and not-so-secret mentors have.
And because I can, some more WIP:
The catacombs served to remind the Can Man of what drew him to the city of Black in the first instance, all those years gone by. Underground, the very history of this place is elastic, the years distorting as vision fails and the past, stuttering, repeats itself, so the most fleeting moments seem eternal, while the rise and fall of kings is as the buzzing of flies. He walked among stones laid down before his father’s father’s fathers had left their wooded homeland for a world of metal tools and open horizons.
The Can Man’s feet knew the way home, and his eyes darted as the ever did for some overlooked evidence of Galendrace and her ultimate fate. He had always believed that some day he would stumble upon her, have it given to him to explain himself and beg her forgiveness, lay bare his tortured heart to her cool gaze.
Now, though, he noticed a shadow out of place and pauses. Something large slid nearby. Song, following him to complete the murder almost begun?
Tags: Beast, Books, Process, Writing
Posted: 8:43 pm Fri February 06 2009 | Comments(0) |
[writing] Progris riport, day 15, The Heart of the Beast
Two and a half hours’ work today. The first ninety minutes was on Hawthorne, waiting for to get out of her Do-Jump class. joined me there. Then, another hour when I got home.
Net new words today, 4,300, to 76,100. I suspect by gross was closer to 4,600. The story continues, carrying me with it.
As usual, the WIP:
The Can Man had never held any illusions about Bayless’ jealousies, either. That he should spend hours alone with Galendrace had been too much for the mortician to bear.
So they remained an uneasy triumvirate, the glossy sheen of friendship hollowed to a shell by the quiet, bitter competition which had gone on since the day of Bayless’ near-drowning on the Iphagenian shore. That, as much as anything, was the reason for their hard trek to Black. The Can Man, under the name he’d used back then, could have pursued a plentiful trade in antiquities both genuine and freshly manufactured quite successfully among the coastal cities. But Bayless had grown to fear the water with unreasoning passion; and Galendrace had grown to love her nervous mortician with an equally unreasoning passion; while the Can Man had kept his unreasoning passions to himself, unspoken but hardly well hidden from those who knew him best.
Tags: Beast, Books, Process, Writing
Posted: 7:53 pm Thu February 05 2009 | Comments(0) |
[writing] Progris riport, day 14, The Heart of the Beast
Three hours’ work on The Heart of the Beast tonight, netting 4,200 words, about 4,500 words of new text. That’s the whole of one chapter and the beginning of the next.
Project is at 62 hours and 71,800 words. A bit more than halfway done, methinks. (Mehopes, in fact.) Assuming I stay on track, I’ll be done with this draft by the end of February, which I’ll then hand back over to Jeff VanderMeer, warts and all.
Here’s your WIP for today:
Even before he was done speaking she had started to trace to the leather texture of his brows, where a scaled serpent writhed in the textured language of scars writ large upon his body.
Song began to make a reply, his lips just parting, when she stole the first kiss.
The taste of him is the distilled liquor of which his scent had only been a vapor. She could climb onto him and lock herself upon his mouth, breathe his air, suck his tongue into herself until she was saturated.
Something in the way he stirred told Moot that the Scarred Man was feeling much the same.
“I will trade you an orphan’s tale for your song of fire,” she whispered. “But not here where the priests look down from their tower.”
Tags: Beast, Books, Process, Writing
Posted: 8:25 pm Wed February 04 2009 | Comments(0) |
[writing] Progris riport, day 13, The Heart of the Beast
3,700 words today, to 67,600. That’s all of chapter 13, plus a coda scene at the end of chapter 12. Probably a bit more than 4,000 words of actual draft, due to outline material being overwritten or deleted. Rocking along.
As usual, some WIP:
Sorrow: The crocodile moves through tunnels lined with coffins lost to dry rot. The catacombs are not damp enough to soothe his skin, but already he has found pools deeper down to rest in the dark, to heal, to hunt pale fish and blind frogs.
He smells his enemy, his tormentor, his twin. He is confused. A mind optimized for dark water and gliding menace isn’t made for the politics of catastrophic theophany. Still, Sorrow did not reach his great bulk through intemperance or thoughtless action. Even a slow lizard king must consider the import of his acts.
Thoughts shifting with the speed of a stump rotting draw him forward. Sorrow glides on great-clawed legs, dragging his belly over holy ground, following the sounds of people and the scent of the one whose back he will break first.
This place is nothing but a enormous, stone swamp; and he knows well how to terrorize a swamp.
Tags: Beast, Books, Process, Writing
Posted: 6:21 pm Tue February 03 2009 | Comments(1) |
[writing] Progris riport, day 12, The Heart of the Beast
Finally back to new text today. Three and a half hours of effort, got the last of Jeff’s notes wrestled down and hog-tied to the manuscript, then jammed in about 2,400 all-new words. Manuscript now stands at 63,900 words, and 56.5 hours of effort on my part.
After this, I’ll be doing nothing but new text. The word counts will be a tad wonky as I’m working with about 5,700 words of embedded outline and text fragments. (Ie, the length of the readable draft right now is 58,200 words, the balance being the material ahead.) But still, I should be pulling a good, solid 2,500+ words a day going forward.
Since I’m back to new production, a WIP:
Imagine a cult dwelling at the edge of the desert. Mad-eyed prophets spring from the sere, heat-raddled ground like onions in a swamp, to wander goggling into the well-watered shade of civilization where they declaim their revelations found written on the underside of a locust wing or inscribed on a fossilized plastron which was later stolen away by a fire-winged angel with seven breasts. Somewhere on the boundary between sunlight and sanity is a fertile breeding ground for such men – and they are almost always men, even the feyest of women having better sense than to trek naked for months across the ground glass sand of such places – for such men and their divine ideation.
Still, even amid dross may gold be found, and a pile of straw may yet beget a stand of wheat. And when the very land beneath the bunioned feet of these prophets contains a sleeping secret larger than most countries, a very mountain dreaming great, slow, tectonic dreams of water and time’s inexorable decay, some souls are bound to stumble upon truth.
Tags: Beast, Books, Process, Writing
Posted: 8:53 pm Mon February 02 2009 | Comments(0) |
[writing] Progris riport, day 11, The Heart of the Beast
Two and half hours on The Heart of the Beast today. The notes work is all but done, and I pushed 6,600 words into the manuscript file, which has the book now at 61,200, but the significant majority of this wordage is actually detailed outline which will be overwritten. I added some new material, but it was primarily bridging text. So, lots of progress but no WIP today.
Maybe one more hour of note-fiddling tomorrow, then I’ll be rolling through new wordcount inside the outline I’ve built from the multiple layers of notes and palimpsest text.
Tags: Beast, Books, Process, Writing
Posted: 8:27 pm Sun February 01 2009 | Comments(0) |
[personal] Little bit of this, little bit of that
Busy weekend. As previously mentioned, I spent six and a half hours doing work around the house yesterday — cleaning, but also things like hanging miniblinds. Then I put a couple of hours into The Heart of the Beast before I went out last last night to ‘s birthday party, along with . A good time was had by all, but I was up freaky late by my standards.
A combination of late hours and hard work had me oversleep my usual hour of rising by four and half hours (!), so this morning was a rush to get out in time for the Chinese New Year festivities down at the Portland Classical Chinese Garden. It was very cold, annoyingly so, but fun nonetheless. We followed up with a nice Chinese lunch at the Republic Cafe.
Since then I’ve been working on Beast again, doing some fairly extensive writing related program activities, and now watching a couple more episodes of Battlestar Galactica season 4.0.
How was your weekend?
Tags: Beast, Books, Personal, Portland, Writing
Posted: 8:19 pm Sun February 01 2009 | Comments(0) |
[writing] Progris riport, day 10, The Heart of the Beast
Slightly over two hours’ work, again with no net wordcount gain. More work on the handwritten notes (though I am almost done).
The next step, commencing tomorrow, will be to fold the notes, which run to thirty or so pages in a text file, into the outline at the appropriate points. That will be a complex and novel challenge for me. Should be a lot of fun, too.
Writing time was a bit tough today because I spent the morning doing housework and home maintenance, with an assist from and That both took a lot of time and wore me out. A bit from now I’m off to ‘s birthday party, which pretty much wipes out the evening writing time.
Likewise tomorrow, due to taking to Chinese New Year festivities with various portions of the extended family. Still, I’ll find my two hours at least.
No WIP again, since there were no new words to speak of today.
Tags: Beast, Books, Process, Writing
Posted: 5:24 pm Sat January 31 2009 | Comments(0) |
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