Progress report, and prologue
Apr. 11th, 2008 05:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stillsostrangeVirtupitude is mine! I started revising TDC today, and crossed off two items from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
arcaedia's notes. (There were 12 specific scene-level type things, and some overall story concerns that boil down to something like "more roller derby sooner".) I also killed some survivors of the Great Comma Pogrom and an instance of word-rep that snuck through at least 3 drafts. :P
And sincejaylake and maryrobinette and others have been discussing first novels, I'll throw in my two cents. (For the new people who haven't suffered through this all before.)
Novel 0: The Dread Juvenilia. I started this in high school. It was a completely hideous crossover fantasy starring thinly disguised stand-ins for me and my best friends. If I could rip off Andre Norton, Jennifer Roberson, or Mercedes Lackey for any given scene, by god I did. This evolved over the years, eventually ditching the crossover elements in favor of Generic European Fantasy. I started ripping off George Martin along the way, too. By 2002 I'd joined the OWW and had 100k of nearly coherent (yet bad) book. I was maybe three scenes away from finishing it. (Not the story, of course, only the first book of it.) I stopped there and went back to start revising, and the whole thing crumbled under the weight of suck, so I never actually finished a draft. (I'm not sure if I started this my junior or senior year of HS, but I worked on it for at least 7 years.)
Novel 1: Dreams of Shreds and Tatters. Sick unto death of TDJ, I decided to write something completely different. (I had my BA in English by then, and was taking grad classes--this did not equate to quality of prose in any way.) So I started a Lovecraftian urban fantasy based on...yes, a CoC game I was in. Between 2003 and 2005 I screamed, wailed, gnashed my teeth and tore my hair, and finished a draft*. I revised it. I revised it again. I submitted it to agents.
No one wanted it. Possibly this has to do with the prose and scene-structure sucking the chrome off a trailer hitch. So I trunked it and went looking for the next project**. I still love the story, though, and one day I'll white-paper the damn thing and find a draft that sucks less.
Novel 2: The Drowning City. I wanted something with spies and jungles and monsoons. Several characters from the last incarnation of TDJ lobbied for a new lease on life. It wasn't their fault, they insisted, that I couldn't write my way out of a wet paper bag before. So I cut them out of the GEF setting and adolescent angst and gave them a new world to play in. They gave me a book that didn't suck. I finished a draft. I revised it. I submitted it to agents.arcaedia liked it. There was much rejoicing.
So, yeah, no first-novel brilliance here. I think the moral is, if you've worked on a novel for seven years (and you aren't George Martin), for the love of god stop! Go do something else for a while.
* I also started writing short fiction in those three years. Short stories improved my sentence-level writing like nothing else in the world.
**Between Dreams and TDC, I also started three other novels: Prayers to Broken Stone (20k), The Bone Palace (15k), and Pinion (20k). I'm a little flighty when it comes to picking the next project. :P
arcaedia's notes. (There were 12 specific scene-level type things, and some overall story concerns that boil down to something like "more roller derby sooner".) I also killed some survivors of the Great Comma Pogrom and an instance of word-rep that snuck through at least 3 drafts. :PAnd since
jaylake and maryrobinette and others have been discussing first novels, I'll throw in my two cents. (For the new people who haven't suffered through this all before.)Novel 0: The Dread Juvenilia. I started this in high school. It was a completely hideous crossover fantasy starring thinly disguised stand-ins for me and my best friends. If I could rip off Andre Norton, Jennifer Roberson, or Mercedes Lackey for any given scene, by god I did. This evolved over the years, eventually ditching the crossover elements in favor of Generic European Fantasy. I started ripping off George Martin along the way, too. By 2002 I'd joined the OWW and had 100k of nearly coherent (yet bad) book. I was maybe three scenes away from finishing it. (Not the story, of course, only the first book of it.) I stopped there and went back to start revising, and the whole thing crumbled under the weight of suck, so I never actually finished a draft. (I'm not sure if I started this my junior or senior year of HS, but I worked on it for at least 7 years.)
Novel 1: Dreams of Shreds and Tatters. Sick unto death of TDJ, I decided to write something completely different. (I had my BA in English by then, and was taking grad classes--this did not equate to quality of prose in any way.) So I started a Lovecraftian urban fantasy based on...yes, a CoC game I was in. Between 2003 and 2005 I screamed, wailed, gnashed my teeth and tore my hair, and finished a draft*. I revised it. I revised it again. I submitted it to agents.
No one wanted it. Possibly this has to do with the prose and scene-structure sucking the chrome off a trailer hitch. So I trunked it and went looking for the next project**. I still love the story, though, and one day I'll white-paper the damn thing and find a draft that sucks less.
Novel 2: The Drowning City. I wanted something with spies and jungles and monsoons. Several characters from the last incarnation of TDJ lobbied for a new lease on life. It wasn't their fault, they insisted, that I couldn't write my way out of a wet paper bag before. So I cut them out of the GEF setting and adolescent angst and gave them a new world to play in. They gave me a book that didn't suck. I finished a draft. I revised it. I submitted it to agents.
arcaedia liked it. There was much rejoicing.So, yeah, no first-novel brilliance here. I think the moral is, if you've worked on a novel for seven years (and you aren't George Martin), for the love of god stop! Go do something else for a while.
* I also started writing short fiction in those three years. Short stories improved my sentence-level writing like nothing else in the world.
**Between Dreams and TDC, I also started three other novels: Prayers to Broken Stone (20k), The Bone Palace (15k), and Pinion (20k). I'm a little flighty when it comes to picking the next project. :P
