Graveyard Wednesday

Graveyard Friday kinda failed, so I'm changing the rule to Graveyard Whenever.

I wrote this really sweet scene today, but I have to take it out because it's filler and filler is bad, so I'm putting it here, because it's sweet. Maybe someday when someone cares, people will find this section and a couple of the details will become fringe canon. Huzzah

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They stopped briefly back at the Fiammetta's inn for supplies. The town gate sat wide in the wake of the mob who'd ransacked the barn and busted open the front door. Sharon and Kindle went in to pack and assess the damage. Cat and the Curses waited in the garage. Ildri sat with her head bowed and Aiden's arm around her back. Cat approached with a heavy heart, "Hey."

Ildri glanced up. Aiden eyed her steely, "Hey."

"Um," Cat cleared her throat. "I wanted to thank you both for being so brave. I know it's not easy..."

"It's not," Ildri said. "But you guys are right. The rest of the world is afraid of the truth but you're facing it. My mother has never been able to cope like that."

"It's a lot to ask of someone," Cat agreed. "We'll make the best of it. You'll see. It won't be too bad."

"Hey Cat," Peter called. He was standing near the broken stable door staring out at the ruined sculpture. "Take a look."

The square was covered in evidence of the fight, but was no longer burning. She checked the rooftops briefly for strangers but saw no one. Instead her eye was drawn to the plume of fire in the Goddess's amputated hand. The base was covered in red jewels invisible from the ground until it fell; a mournfully poetic detail meant only for God. "I still don't think I can do this."

"You can." Peter said. "You were meant to."

"Was I meant to leave a trail of hate and destruction in my wake?"

"Don't blame yourself for that," Peter said. "You're the messenger. People always try to kill the messenger."

"That pretty much sums up Fire Town." She griped.

"Yeah and look how well that worked out!" Peter nudged her encouragingly, "You asked for one Fire Curse and got two. We'll ask for a Water Curse and get a dozen. By the time we get to Wind Town you'll be beating them off with a stick."

"The Brushcasters will try and stop us." She said.

"We'll beat them off with a stick too."

Cat smirked up at him. "You're faith is unshakable."

"Of course it is," Peter answered. "I believe in you."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fire Town update: 2

The hard work continues. I'm knee deep in a third drafting of this sequence of events. It's a complicated mess, but I know it's required. The hard part is making it interesting.

Some of the decisions I'm making seem like a stretch to the canon. I'm making excuses and coming up with awkward solutions to make the events fall in line. At what point does logic become lazy? When does watching people argue turn boring? At what point does "okay we'll do it" seem like a logical solution?

I'm at kaldi's right now. I plan to keep going. I'll report back when I can.

Fire Town update: 1

Update on attempted rewrite:

Changes aren't as dramatic as I first thought.  I'm moving the focus from two minor characters who were bogging everything down just to prove a point.

I introduce this little Fire Curse girl: (seen here): to show how tragic it is for kids to be abandoned to different element towns. In previous drafts, Edana was more an adult than a child - forced to grow up and be the parent to her grief-stricken mother who is coping with loss in an unhealthy way. This was very interesting but stretched the time before we get to our first Curse Town out really wide when I needed the plot to start rolling on.

Intermediate plan was to make her cheerful and curious so as to give her the secondary roll of explaining both hers and Peter's symptoms in a colorful way. Her friendship then helps us get to places we couldn't before ... which was all well and good except I found myself stretching for ways to include her.In the end there was far too much emphasis on this tiny character we already know isn't coming along with us for the long haul. It was causing me a lot of stress so I decided to take it out.

New and updated plan is to make Edana very timid. Her mother is a force to be reckoned with... she's a conflicted person who needs to be developed far more than her daughter. I will use Edana to describe how Fire Curses degrade, but Isolde is the one who'll be doing all the talking and making all the decisions. I feel much better about this. It'll take some rewrites, but it'll put the emphasis in the story in a more adult place and keep stuff from getting too cute or confusing overall.

I'll report in again when rewrite on this section is finished. I'm salvaging most of it, I hope to report great success by the end of the day.

Possible rewrite: the trouble with Fire Town

The trouble with Fire Town is that it's a lot of talking and a lot of rehash. I'm wondering if I need to change it... all of it... and very dramatically at that.

This is a horrible time to come to this conclusion. I'm past Fire Town, I'm just putting the spit polish on it... but I'm discontent because It's boring. Its a lot of talking and exposition. The more I think about it the more I don't like it. This is bad.

So this is my new strategy. I'm going to dissect Fire Town out. I'm going to remap replan and rewrite all of Dire Lonato. I'm going to do it tonight and if I don't come up with something promising from the cobbled bits I've built then I wont continue tomorrow and I'll go back to my previous plan. I hope it works. I hope it'll work. I hope it'll work fast.

Author out.... see you all in the morning.

Elegant Solutions

I'm knee deep in the revising process. I've bounced the 30 off beta readers and I've got an editor lined up to do a serious once-over before I query. Color me terrified.

In other news I'm on page 50 in the draft as far as revising goes. I need to give it the read-aloud test to my faithful read-aloud betas, but overall I'm happy with what I've done. I wanted to give you all a taste of my latest victory! Because even though good news is sometimes boring, it's always welcome.

There's been a splinter in the back of my mind since I began this rewrite... it has to do with my villains. About halfway through the draft I realized that the Brushcasters have a reputation to keep in the Valley - they are revered as religious leaders and present themselves as the upstanding moral right. Some of the things they did at the beginning of the book for plot purposes didn't make a whole lot of sense in that context. One scene in specific is when the cast is on their way to Fire Town. Previously Cat was actively attacked by the Brushcasters in broad daylight resulting in the destruction of property and livelihood for tons of innocent people. Doesn't fit with the 'avatar of god' persona does it?

So to avoid attempted murder and vandalism, I tried to change the circumstances to make them attack her in secret. They set a house on fire to prove a point then leave her to take the blame - but even that felt out of character for these people who are used to having the whole world fawn over them and take their side in all things. This leads to the current rewrite and the elegant solution I titled this blog for.

First I'll set the requirements. This scene must accomplish three things - 1, We need to see that Trace can paint golems and what shape his golems take. 2, We need to prove that Cat is pretty powerless against a golem of any size, and that her magic - while useful - is not going to save her. and 3, Introduce Joshua and nurture the mystery that surrounds his character.

The attack did all these things in a clunky ill-conceived, plot-contrived kind of way. We see Trace paint a golem to attack/threaten Cat with. We see her struggle against it and Joshua saves her. It hits the bullets but leaves so many gaping holes. There had to be a better solution. The recesses of my mind have toiled on this for many months.


So obviously there can't be an attack... that's out of character. And probably there will be a crowd of people because Brushcasters can't go anywhere without a crowd of people assembling around them - so how am I going to hit my major points? Maybe Trace paints a golem as an example to impress or frighten Cat? That would work except she's already seen a golem painted in chapter 2... not only that but it was crafted by the most talented and skillful Calligrapher in the Valley, making it far more impressive than anything Trace can hope to make. Plus she's pretty pissed off right now and wouldn't stand by tapping her foot waiting for Trace to finish showing off. Plus its likely anything he makes as an example would stand there and not do anything which is does not an exciting chapter make...

So the golem is going to need to go berserk so Cat can use magic and Joshua can save her. Thankfully I've programmed a way for that to happen, but it relies heavily on people either messing with the actual paint (which is on the ground directly beneath the ten-foot fire monster) or someone actively attacking it. So what if Cat attacks it? She's pissed off that Trace is parading around like a know-it-all and flips out her magic to prove she's hot stuff too.

That solution sucks. Her motivation is to get she and her extremely fragile friend out of danger as soon as possible - yes she has no patience for Brushcasters, but she's not stupid. She knows her measly little water spouts aren't going to kill a fire gorilla and she knows that messing with them turns them into God's wrath incarnate. Not an elegant solution. Bad form.

So how do I mess up the paint? Maybe a child runs in? Another character we haven't met yet? A character we've already met? A wayward dog? An accident with the paint bucket? No. None of these are good ideas. No one is going to come near this golem, it's a wall of pure fire. No one is going to mess with the brushcasters' paint because they are holy and introducing some random child or pet into the mix just to screw with the spell is probably the most hackneyed idea I've ever had. No. Bad. Bad all around.

So at this point it was about 2am and I decided to sleep on it. The best ideas come to you after a good nights' rest. I turned out the lights and lay in bed when suddenly inspiration strikes like a prod to my brain.

What if it comes with him? What if Trace PAINTS A GOLEM OFF CAMERA and FOLLOWS IT TO THE SQUARE. Therefore he already has it - maybe he painted it for show? Maybe he painted it to help him find Cat's location... whatever! Point is now he has it and the circle to cast it is way over on the other side of town. CHA-CHING

So who messes with the circle to set the fire golem off? Well that solution is obvious. Who is here to make sure things go by my plan? Who is my tool to enact "god"'s will in this world? Joshua of course. If the circle is out of sight and no one is paying any attention to it then there's no reason Joshua can't skip across the rooftops and draw a huge X through the middle of it behind a guard's back?

This is fantastic - Joshua's involved, the golem going berserk is a perfect time for Trace and Paige to assault Cat with a little dogma, the locals will assume the whole thing is Cat's fault because she's being belligerent and they're stupid, the brushcasters have to LEAVE THE AREA to fix it therefore freeing Joshua to show up and do his thing without being caught - Trace hits point 1, Cat hits point 2, Josh hits point 3 and no loose ends remain.

It is a supremely elegant solution... and it rose from the inside of my world to knock me on the side of my head. These moments are what makes revising my favorite part of the process - I've taken something broken and made it amazingly better. I've tightened a loose bolt in the Threadcaster machine and now it's like clockwork.

So there's my moment of victory. As parting words I bit you remember my editor's motto - now's your chance to do it again better. And keep instances! I went all the way back to my second draft of the scene to pull inspiration for this new one - instances and copies along the way are extremely helpful, but that's another entry.

FIRST 30 PAGES!!

I've got my first 30 packaged and ready as far as I know. It would help me scads if I could get some beta readers to look them over for me.

If anyone is interested in volunteering please email me at threadcaster@gmail.com. I'm not sending it to everyone so jump on board if you're interested!

Cunundrum

So I've hit the 30 page mark in my revision pass and now I face a quandry... to query or not to query.

Kristin Nelson back at the Missouri Writers' Guild "Just Write" conference told me that if I got the thing revised really well she'd love to read my first thirty pages. I really want to get them to her before she forgets who I am, but I don't know if sending them now is a good idea or if I should wait to finish the rest of the draft? Because there's always room for improvement and my darn prophecy keeps being rewritten over and over and over again. I want it to be as perfect as it can be, but I also want to start this process moving.

If I do query now, it moves my success anxiety to a whole other level. I have full confidence this thing will succeed, there is simply no doubt... but I want it to succeed with an agent and a publisher. Sending it now is frightening because I can always make things better and I want nothing but the best to be reviewed by my choice agent. This of course marks a difference between the quality of the writing and the details of the story.

The writing is at a level I'm proud of. It's been reviewed well by peers so far and reads decent out loud. There's always room to improve or at least change it, but barring another year of practice I don't know if it's going to improve too dramatically with another pass. Even if I change details of the events, the story and writing will be about the same. So what's to lose by querying now except some sleep maybe.

Plus querying now would put it on her desk for the expected six months I could then spend revising and editing the rest of the draft. Even if I go back and change details in the first thirty pages she'll probably have revisions to suggest anyway, right? I think that's how it goes. Maybe it's a good idea to send it off in it's juvenile state?

OH but I'm nervous! I'll have to start really really working on my query letter! I've never written a query letter before...and I have no idea how to write one for an agent I've already pitched to. Do I say "Dear Kristin (or Kristin's assistant), I'm Jennifer Stolzer, I pitched you a book about Brushcasters and Curses, you asked for my first thirty pages please find them attached?" or do I query the old fashioned way and make puppy eyes hoping she'll say "Hey I remember you! Send me your thirty, I'ma ready for them!"

And I know everyone's scared of rejection, but I know my book is a good one. I'm confident in it and I love it... I know if it gets rejected I'll grow some serious doubts. I don't want to make a million dollars, I only want people to read it! I'll be alright with an ebook I guess -_- I'm dreaming big on this one though, and I don't often dream big. If you keep your expectations low you're less likely to be disappointed.

So okay, I'll query now. Well soon. I'll query soon. First I'm going to tie a ribbon around these thirty, sent them to some strangers and ask them to read and review. If they like then I'll send them... if not then I'll give them another pass with the suggestions I receive. I think it's a good plan.

What's everyone's thoughts?