It's just that, a draft, and I think it'll need a lot of work (including expansion) before it's ready for an editor's eyes, but nevertheless I have an entire draft of Fiona's part of the story, printed and ready to be read by my poor houseboy. It settled out at about 36,000 words, and 16K of that was the new stuff, the backstory. I read a little bit of it last night, from Chapter 1 (present) to Chapter 2 (past) and I think the two stories go together okay. We'll see. I did as little editing as I could get away with on the present-tense stuff, and I suspect I'll pay for that laziness later.

I've got a lot of problems on my plate with this one, not the least of which is that it's too damn short, but I have at least one idea for another scene and I'm generally optimistic. The problem is that the publisher I think is right for the book isn't taking work under 80K right now, and I can't possibly expand it that much. I'm hoping that a well-written query will change their minds. 

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The biggest problem I'm having is that this project really really matters to me, but I'm not sure that it's going to be interesting to anyone but me when it's finished. I'm very troubled about this. I've become so used to the material that I can no longer judge what's interesting. Everything seems to be part of the package, and the only parts that remain really compelling are the scenes that involve Emily. And have I written those correctly, with enough mystery to pique the reader but not so much that they get annoyed? Jeez, I don't know.

Nevertheless, when I'm finished, I'm going to have a novel. My second novel. Crikey! I'm hoping that Snowbooks will want to look at it, even if they turn down Falling Leaves. That Bayeux Tapestry book they published makes me think they might like this one. I'm also looking at Juno Books, although Ghosts might not be genre-oriented enough for them.

I'm still going to keep up with this mini-blog separately from the main authoring blog I've started on Blogger. It's useful for me to think about this project separately from the rest of the work I'm doing, and the mundane writerly stuff I have to deal with in terms of submissions and rejections. 

My goal for Ghosts is to have it finished, ready to be put in the hands of an editor, by the end of this year. I think I'll make it, if editing the end-of-humanity project takes as short a time as I hope it will. I hope I'll beat that deadline by a few months.

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Next up is two years of Fiona in her own place, and at the close of this section Peter will die. This event will go a long way toward keeping her isolated from the world around her. I'm not sure what else will go on in this section, other than a deepening of her understanding of what's in the furniture she works on, and more Emily, and maybe a lot of family drama. OK, so that's a good amount of stuff. I just don't have that many real-world events to prop up the emotional events.

A reader is working on the first three stories. I'm eagerly awaiting her verdict.

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March 12

The past chapter/present chapter seems to be the way the story wants to be told, and I really don't care for it, but I don't know if there's much I can do about it. I might have to delete the first half-page of the story, which is breaking my heart, because as an opening I find it difficult to beat. But other than as a preface, I can't think of any way to make it work, and even as a preface it doesn't lead well into the chapter that I've just written about Fiona at 18. So, fuck. I most passionately do not want to kill that particular darling.

I'm still spellbound by Fiona's character, though, and by the things that happen to her. The story has as much magic for me as it had when I thought of it, and that gives me an indescribably wonderful feeling.

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March 9

A couple of weeks ago I was working on a story called In Her Place, and it wasn't going well. I had the characters sketched out OK, and I knew what was going to happen to them, and I had a mediocre ending in mind (none of my endings are all that good), and I had written a lot of pages. The story didn't seem to have any direction, though, and it felt like I was spending a lot of paragraphs talking about the same thing over and over, instead of exploring an idea thoroughly (as was my intention). In exasperation, I made a list. This was not an outline, just a list of things that happened to Melissa, my main character: "1. She wakes up. 2. She goes to work. 3. She's forced to talk to Maurice." Etc. I listed out all the things that I wanted to happen in the story in chronological order. From this I figured out where the monotony lay, and I figured out new things to happen to Melissa to break up that monotony. I worked them in to the story, and while I am still not sure it's a particularly good story (it's very long, and I suspect it's, well, boring), the list saved me from abandoning it entirely.

Okay, hold this thought for a few more paragraphs. We'll get back to it, I promise.

Yesterday I opened up Those Ghosts of Time and took a look at it. I deleted all the thumbnails about Oliver and Amanda, about Robbie and his mother, about awful Grant McKinnon. All those stories are being told elsewhere. I skimmed through the pages and looked at the way I'd constructed the story (more on that in the third paragraph of the October 16 entry, below), and discovered all over again that I have a LOT more work to do on this fucker. I need more backstory for the characters around Fiona: more on her brother, more on Tyler, more on Whiting, maybe a little less on Ernest.

And the way I've set it up, with frequent flashbacks told in different tense & perspective, is less enjoyable to me than it once was. I still think that the mechanical changes are a worthwhile way to break up the story, but there's a lot more story in the spaces between the flashbacks than I thought there was. So what am I thinking? Well, I'm thinking that it should be a more or less straight, chronological story. It's a lot harder to tell it that way, because the secrets I'm not revealing until the end become much more challenging to keep, but I'm frustrated by how much more I want to tell, and how little the flashbacks are helping me to tell it.

The problem is, the story takes place over a period of sixteen years, and only a few of those years have incidents that are worth talking about. How do I skip all those years elegantly, making sense of it to the reader?

Here is where we return to the list I made for In Her Place. I made one for Ghosts, and it helped immensely. I found gaps, places where I could insert more action, and even though it was obvious, it became still clearer that the final part of the story is where my real interest lies. This is why it seems so backward to me to tell it from the beginning.

The problem of how to tell it still remains. I'm thinking about doing a present chapter/past chapter construction, like so many novels have, but some of those novels really annoy me. And besides, how do we tell what year we're in if we're flipping back to a past that encompasses 16 years?

Maybe Emily is the solution to that. Begin each flashback chapter with how old she is, or what she looks like, or something. I did this a little bit in the existing work, but it's too subtle. And I can't think of a way to do it that isn't really dumb: "Twelve Candles on Emily's Cake"? "Now We Are Fourteen"? "Emily: Year 16"? Just a number? I have no idea. Also, the flashbacks are less backstory than they are an integral part of the plot, which makes me think I should just put em in one by one, year by year. The problem is that I have both too much and not enough: too many events to flash back to them, not enough events to tell them in a traditional fashion.

The good news about all this is that if I tell it well enough, explaining instead of implying as the original work has, I'll definitely have enough material for a novel instead of a novella. That elates me. But the rest is really depressing, and I'm not sure where to begin.

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February 27

The more I put off the work involved in this story, the more important it feels to my oeuvre (or what passes for it). I feel like I must, must get to this, get it rewritten, get it in shape for publishing, and start sending it out there. It seems to matter. But I also get to feeling like I didn't write it particularly well. There's a scene between Ernest and Fiona in the car that I cringe to think of, and the scene between herself and Whiting in which she explains what restoration means to her--an exceptionally important scene to the themes of the book--is really awkward and no-good. I'll have to go at it from another angle, but I'm just not looking forward to it at all. And I keep going on to new writing instead of working on the old stuff. Do lots of writers have this problem?

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December 9

I also wrote the story regarding little Robbie Leeman. I told the story in his voice. I don't have children and don't have much experience with them, so I'm afraid that it may be inauthentic; would a seven-year-old child in the forties still call his parents Mommy and Daddy? I hope so.

I plan to submit Robbie's story (R-P-L) to markets when I decide which ones would be good for it. I've had very little time at home to spend on my writing lately. But nevertheless, this project is going well; two brand-new pieces of content created and only the Celia/Mark story to go...of course, sooner or later I'll have to start editing the existing novella. Hopefully it'll be later.

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October 30

Probably the best thing to do would be to leave Oliver and Amanda for now, and move on to the Leemans. But I haven't figured out a plot for them yet! The next story, about Grant McKinnon and poor Celia, is a hell of a lot easier to write. But fighting my instinct to do the easy parts first has always led me to better writing in the end...and more practice...so I know I should slog on through until I get to the good stuff. At the moment I'm just putting the whole thing off. Shame on me.

Should I maybe lead off with Fiona's story, and then tell the older ones, leading back further into the past? Fiona's is the best story, of course, but I thought it would make more sense if the stories were chronological. On the other hand, if I tell the essence but not the details of each previous owner of the desk in the Fiona version, and the details but not the essence in the rest of the stories, it might make for a more interesting read to go backwards.

Hmm. Interesting.

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October 16

The center of the story is a rolltop desk being restored by my furniture-restorer heroine, Fiona. She has a secret that has to do with a baby girl she put up for adoption when she was 16. She puts all her emotional attention toward restoring these pieces of furniture in her workshop, and none toward herself. The storyline that belongs to her is really just half of the tale, because the thing that drives the story is the rolltop desk. It's haunted (as Fiona herself is haunted by Emily, her lost daughter), and Fiona decides to trace the history of the rolltop to see what exactly haunts it.

When I wrote this, I'd told the story of the desk by telling little mini-stories at the opening of each section of the work about the previous owners of the desk. These would run only about a page. I told Fiona's story by switching up the verbs and the perspective--Fiona's flashbacks were told in first-person past, while the current events were told in third-person present. These techniques of rock-tumbling the story to allow the reader to pull the story together like a patchwork quilt (I'd been inspired by Atwood's The Blind Assassin) backfired, and made it into a disjointed, confusing work.

I was pretty despondent about this; before I reread it and saw this for what it was, I'd been incredibly proud of Ghosts. I still think it's one of the best ideas I've ever had. But on my commute last week, I figured it out--a book of short stories. All I had to do was flesh out the characters I'd created who had owned the desk before Fiona got her hands on it, write short stories about them, and put them all together with a much longer story about Fiona, and I'd have a book. A coherent book. It made me pretty happy to figure this out, but I haven't done anything except outline as of yet.