0
Revisit, re-assess
I just looked at the date of the last post I made here, and I’m fairly embarrassed. I’d love to say I’ve been wonderfully busy and productive and just haven’t had the time to update… Read more…
Like!The dreaded second act, and other business
This week I started shopping Hands, Like Secrets around to some agents, and believe it or not, I’ve already had a request for a partial! I actually heard from this agent the day after I queried them. In case you aren’t familiar with the publishing business, such a response is jaw-droppingly fast. Of course, I’ve also already received my first “form” rejection from a difference agency, so I guess it all balances out. But again, fast.
Interestingly, the agent who requested the partial was one who requires a writing sample with a query. The agency I got a rejection from only wanted the query itself. This means that the one who was interested saw some of the writing itself, and the one that wasn’t, didn’t. If this pattern keeps up, that will tell me that my writing is compelling and my query is not…meaning I’ll need to revise the query letter. But I’ll climb that ladder when I get there, I guess. I’m cautiously optimistic at this point.
Meanwhile, I’ve begun the process of revisiting the first draft of the second and third books. The first thing I noticed was that the writing isn’t as bad as I was afraid it was. Having said that, yeah…it needs a whole lot of work. Second realization was, man, how this story has evolved since I wrote this draft. Still using mage and cleric as terms, still third person, still working out kinks in Raphel’s character, for instance. Most of my scenes don’t have nearly enough conflict. Stakes don’t feel high enough. Motivation feel very contrived in places. Things work out too neatly.
Having said that, general pacing is okay. Secondary characters are believable and generally deep enough…no major tweaks needed. Scenes are more or less in the right order. My main tasks are going to be raising stakes, revising Naeth’s character, and revising the Keeper’s character. I will also need to weave bits of Caosgi in when my characters are on Dheu, and bits of Dheu in when they are on Caosgi…otherwise, it’s going to feel like two smaller books smashed together. I need to weave some flashbacks or dreams about Saeli’s Aschamon days in there, too, so the second book will connect back to the first. Tie Saeli’s feelings about Brendan to her feelings about Naeth.
It feels like a lot of work, but I think once I really get going, it won’t be so bad. Been working on this story long enough that I have a pretty good handle on where it needs to go.
I’m also going to start brainstorming and plotting The Waters, so I have something else in the works if the trilogy doesn’t get picked up right away. I chose that one because of the ones I’m really itching to do next, it’s the most straightforward. I love Raphel to death, but he makes me want to write an awesome “bad boy” who actually is the hero…not just masquerading as one. Alex Merrett is that character. Then I’ll do Windwaker, or maybe by that time I’ll be ready to work on Mask of Eldarmarch again. Dragon Singer is so complex and will require so much research that this is not the time to tackle it. Like Briar Rose, it needs to percolate for a while longer.
Again, apologies for the sparseness of posts. I’m going to make an effort to post something at least once a week, but I’m not promising anything. I’m not one for “check-in” posts…I only post when I have something to blather about.
Now…back to work. 
Abusive personality
This is something, thankfully, that I know nothing about firsthand. I don’t think I’ve ever spent a significant amount of time with anyone who would fall under that category (if I have, they hid it really well). But alas, that means everything I know is going to come from reading the experiences of others, and reading the sort of official literature on the subject. Which, on one hand, is by far the closest I want to get to dealing with an abuser…but on the other hand, there will always be that voice in the back of my head saying, “You aren’t qualified to write this…you don’t really know what it’s like to be taken in by someone like that.”
I say all this because Raphel has what I’d call an abusive personality. In this, the first book, he’s very, very subtle about it. But in a way, that means this is the book where I have to walk the finest line between dark hero and villain. I don’t want Saeli to know she’s dealing with an abuser, but I do want the reader to start wondering. One of the things I find myself pulling out of this edit is the tendency of abusers to blame their actions on the victim. “Look what you made me do.” “It’s your fault I had to do this.” Raphel does this to Saeli a lot in “justifying” his kills. “I wouldn’t have had to kill this person if you had done *this*…” I haven’t even had to bring it out except in one scene…I was putting it in there all along without realizing it. He doesn’t outright blame her; she wouldn’t stand for that, not yet. But the implication is clear.
Raphel does it for control. If Saeli is too busy blaming herself for all the bad stuff that happens, she won’t think to blame Raphel and she won’t question him. Late in the second book, things will probably get to a point where Raphel doesn’t even have to make excuses for himself anymore; Saeli will just automatically cast Raphel as the victim of her own incompetence. She’ll start seeing herself as directly responsible for Raphel’s morality; she’ll start thinking in terms of being good enough and pure enough to save him from his own dark side. Thus, when he “fails” and kills someone, or whatnot, Saeli fails. Bad mental place to be. Especially since Raphel is the one who orchestrated that mindset in the first place, and will actively use it to his advantage.
I have to plant the seeds in this first book, or no one will believe it when Raphel gets worse later on. I’m working to make those seeds as subtle as I can, because I know from hearing people’s stories that abusers are really difficult to spot early on in the relationship. Raphel has to be particularly careful with Saeli, because she could at any moment hide herself inside Aschamon and be out of his reach forever. (Which is why one of the first things he does is start undermining her faith in Aschamon’s defenses. Part of the reason she decides to hear him out at all is because she’s afraid the school can’t protect her if she refuses.) He can’t afford to scare her off, so he’s cautious and gentle with her. But if a guy slaps you across the face within five minutes of first meeting you, he is not a nice person. (If he later confirms that he’s not a nice person, you might want to listen.) If he starts making you responsible for the deaths he could cause, unless you do what he says, he is manipulating you. If he kills people and then tries to make it sound like he wouldn’t have had to if you had done something different, he is manipulating you. If I can get readers to recognize the signs in this story, I hope it will help them recognize those signs in real life.
I imagine there will still be readers who will be upset with me for not redeeming Raphel in the end, but I don’t want that to be because the clues weren’t in place for them to see his downfall coming. Part of the overall theme of Shades is the inherent tragedy one faces in cutting oneself loose from someone you love who is abusing you. (And recognizing the fact that they are, in fact, abusing you.) You cannot help a person who refuses to be helped, and staying with them does not help them. It enables them to keep abusing. You have to get yourself out, even if that means abandoning them to their own darkness. That’s what Saeli essentially has to do.
I’m a little more than halfway through this second pass of this edit. My word count is essentially unchanged…I guess I’ve been taking out more or less the same amount of words I’ve been adding. The next edit will be a line edit, which will be loads of unfun, I imagine.
Edit update
Well, the editing has begun. The bird edit is going to take two passes, I realize. The first will involve going back and putting in the birds, lizards, ambiance, etc, and also marking passages that I think could be deleted or need to be changed. Some, I’m just going ahead and fixing. I’m already about 3/4 of the way through that first pass, as I’m mostly adding, and not reading every word.
The second pass will be in more detail. I’m actually going to go through and look at my verb and adjective choices, and see where those can be tweaked to suggest a culture where birds are so common that people actually think in terms of them. I’ll also be checking the consistency of all the idioms and phrases unique to that world, and making sure I haven’t used any cliches from this world. I’ll also fix and/or delete my highlighted spots, and do another word count to see where I’m at.
Then I’ll start the line edit as a new save.
This is not taking me as long as I feared. Of course this is a third draft, and I have this tendency to edit as I go, so a lot of what I’ve written is pretty polished already. I’m setting my completion goal for the end of December. I don’t know that it will take me that long, but with the holidays and everything I have to do for that, it very well might. Then I can take January and work on deciding who to submit to, and the dreaded query letter.
My blogging may be sparse for a while.
Two changes
Both to Shades, and both of which I thought of while trying to sleep last night. You’ll notice this blog is a place where I take notes that probably aren’t very interesting to anyone but myself. I think better when I’m thinking at somebody else, even if it’s for a sometimes imaginary cyber audience.
One, I realized something about the first three paragraphs of Hands, Like Secrets. I was trying to decide, yet again, whether they were enough of a hook to get people into the story. I’ve never been sure about them, and I finally figured out why. They do not introduce the story at hand, but rather they kick off the entire trilogy. Thus, I am moving them into a prologue by themselves, and starting the actual first chapter with Saeli’s walk to the HP’s office.
Two, I was thinking about the scene where Saeli visits Raphel’s room after learning he’s going to sack her school. It was one of those discovery scenes where a character does something completely unexpected and unplanned. It’s a good partial scene, but I realized that it’s paired wrong. Her emotional state would be a better fit for after the attack on the school, after he’s made her an enemy of her own people, after she realizes how badly he manipulated her. I always said she went to his room knowing that he was either going to kill her or seduce her, and she’s at a point where she doesn’t care. Finding him sleeping dismantles that emotion, and now I find I’m not happy with that. It’s is THE darkest moment of the story, and thus it needs to happen right before Raphel convinces her, for the last time, that he needs her.
That will take some rearranging. If I move Saeli walking into Raphel’s room, she has to find him sleeping or gone some other way. He has to be out of it or elsewhere before Saeli can escape, because she won’t risk it otherwise. I decided that perhaps Mora could actually be the instigator here; she could be the one to take Saeli to where Raphel is sleeping. “You should see this, Gray Robe.” Main reason: because Raphel commanded her to nudge Saeli into escaping. She’s following orders. But Raphel doesn’t specify how Mora is to accomplish this. Second reason: Mora is still trying to warn Saeli away from Raphel, both because she’s jealous, and because she knows how treacherous Raphel can be. Having Mora be the one to reveal the sleeping Raphel also makes the whole thing feel a little more contrived…which it is. Foreshadowing, and maybe dropping a hint to the readers behind Saeli’s back.
Right now I’m sitting in a writing workshop…so I should probably stop tapping on my keyboard.
Update: Smell of November revisit
This month I’m making it a goal to revisit The Smell of November. I think that story always suffered from the word limit needed to enter it in the WD contest. So I’m lengthening it, and tweaking the storyline a bit. I’m making it more ambiguous, so that the reader never really knows if Alan Hunter is truly a wolf-faced escapee of Arcadia, or if he’s just plain crazy. Going to try and get it in shape to submit to the Realms of Fantasy magazine.
If they take it, I may turn it into a serial thing. Alan Hunter’s story makes a nice lead-in to the overall Grimms storyline, something I’ve wanted to get started on. One of the Grimms, on a rescue mission, meets Alan after he’s been recaptured. They all escape. The Alan/November romantic tragedy will be wrapped in as a subplot to the whole Grimm tale. I don’t think Alan will ever actually be a Grimm; he’ll function more as a solitary ally. He may not be the only one; the Grimms will probably acquire a network of allies as the story fleshes out. Rescued kids who make it back to their families, but still know. Faerie enthusiasts who are in on the truth. Maybe even a rogue Fae or two.
I’m still working on Shades. In the process of spreading out and raising stakes on an already tense scene. I think I’m approaching the point where I won’t have to change much more. I’m also pretty sure I’ve said that before. *sigh* On the upside, I get to burn some mansions down. What’s the point of having a cabal of Cowls in a Mantle city if they never wreak any havoc? Let’s just say it’s high time for some chaos.
Tea and seduction
So I’ve reached the point (again) where Raphel has convinced Saeli to help him overthrow the gods. I had to do it a little differently (again), because her internal struggles are a little different. On the first draft of the story, Saeli was very naive, so Raphel didn’t have to try all that hard to bring her in. In the second draft, she got a lot more shrewd, so Raphel actually had to get a little more scary. This time around, I’ve backed Raphel’s mean streak off a bit, although I think he’s still much harsher than the original version of him. Interestingly, being directly in Saeli’s head has allowed me to play Raphel’s mystery up more. I’m also playing up his seductive nature, and on this draft I’m trying to hold off Saeli feeling outright betrayed by him until the very end, when he goes after Aschamon. That way all the various small betrayals will pile on top of her at once, and she’ll realize just how badly he’s played her.
Shades continues
It will be so gratifying when I don’t have to say that anymore. Five years is a long time for a project, you know?
I think, I think, that the scene I’m currently working on will be one of the last to involve significant changes to the storyline itself. It’s the scene where Saeli meets Raphel in the Sari Cafe…only now she’s already been given her Mantle, she has to sneak off campus in order to meet him at all, she and Cara had to deceive Brendan in order to pull off the escape, and she’s got a two hour time limit to get back (before the school gates close for the night). Thus, the whole dialogue will have to unfold in a different order to accommodate the changes. Plus I’m bringing over a shortened version of the dedication discussion, since the first thing out of Saeli’s mouth is going to be something along the lines of “Uh, they kind of made me a Mantle”…which isn’t going to make Raphel happy.
Fortuitous coincidence
Go me, I even spelled fortuitous right on my first try.
So a month or two ago, there was this author that had been recommended to me, and I kept telling myself I should check her out. Then, at the Cassandra Claire and Holly Black event in Vero, that same author was recommended yet again, by those two no less. I said to myself, “I really do need to look into that.”
Then, of course, I completely forgot the author’s name. Read more…
Brendan surprised me again
Gotta give the guy some credit. He seems like such a simple character: classic Boy-Next-Door, the one who’s perfect for the heroine but she just doesn’t see it. (In Saeli’s defense, I’m not sure Brendan’s actually “better” for her, in terms of compatibility. I do think they could have made it work, and work well, if she’d been willing to give him that chance.) But there’s a lot going on with him on the inside. He’s actually a bit darker than most boy-next-doors; he has some anger management and depression problems, though they’re buried pretty deep. Throughout this story he’s going to be dealing with feelings he’s never had to face before, and it’s going to dredge some of that up. (Seriously. Making Brendan angry is like pissing off a volcano. Bad idea. Unless you’re Raphel. He seems to enjoy watching people blow up emotionally.)
Me, Briefly
Mariah Dennison, fantasy writer and artist. I have finished the first book in a trilogy, and am currently working on the second.
Find me!
