Musings of the Lorekeeper

swankivy sent me another song that she thought would fit my story, and it fits even better than she could have known! Thanks, Ivy!

I already knew this song and have the MP3 on my computer, but I hadn't even thought of it yet. But it fits REALLY well.


"Only If" by Enya

When there's a shadow, you follow the sun.
When there is love, then you look for the one.
And for the promises, there is the sky.
And for the heavens are those who can fly.

If you really want to, you can hear me say
Only if you want to will you find a way.
If you really want to you can seize the day.
Only if you want to will you fly away.
When there's a journey, you follow a star.
When there's an ocean, you sail from afar.
And for the broken heart, there is the sky.
And for tomorrow are those who can fly.

Pretty much everything gets bolded for being directly relevant. :D (Though not all in the first book.)

And I just realized that the drawing I'm almost done with now is a total spoiler pic so I REALLY NEED TO FINISH MY BOOK SOON so you can read it and I can show you the picture. :D

Also, I need more markers. (Seriously, I just spent how much on a set of 72 of them and I STILL don't have every color I need? Hahaha, craziness. But it came with only warm greys and I need cool! There's just no getting around that! Well, I'm going back to Otsu/Kyoto this Saturday so I'll pick some up in either of those places. ;)

I REALLY WANT TO GET BACK TO WRITING. I'm excited about finishing this story, and REALLY excited about starting either the next Azilie story or about doing TS (because, uh, that's a rather political story, truth be told...I think that's already starting to be evident in the parts that some of you guys have read already). The problem is that my thoughts are totally tangled up in my grad school situation. It's kind of like how the only time I played video games at college was during final exams, when I just couldn't do anything else with my free time because of mental exhaustion. But I'm going to try anyway. Or at least vow to have my grad school stuff as done as possible by Election Day, so both my political geekery and my grad school dilemma can be wrapped up and I can finish this stupid draft before the end of the year. Why has it taken a year to do draft 2 when I did draft 1 in a little over 90 days? Grrr.

It really is bedtime now, but I just had to add this next song to my soundtrack. I have quite a list of songs about flying people now. :D And other things that fit the story! I should make a list but that will have to wait until it's not so late at night.

しっかり meaning something like "Getting it together!" or "Getting a firm grip on the task at hand!"

So, I've kind of been dragging on the last 40 pages of my novel. (I know, I know, I'm so embarrassed that I've been editing it for so long now and still have 40 of 110 pages to go.) This is the hardest part, 'cause I basically have to rewrite the whole ending, and this is the big climax and punchline and point and end-all be-all. (Well, no, actually I have more I want to say in sequels, but still.) So I've overwhelmed myself with my inability to make it perfect and sparkling right now. I need people's help.

But I can't get people's help until I've made it perfect and sparkling because it has to be perfect and sparkling before I can show it to anyone.

Hmmmmm.

Yeah, so, I'm hereby resigning myself to just finishing it and sort of taking a shot in the general direction I want the ending to go, and then once people help me and tell me what they're thinking and feeling about all of it, then I can recalibrate and take better aim in the next draft.

That is to say, JUST FINISH THE BLASTED THING, JESSIE!!!!

Okay. Off to edit now. Chiharrie is still yelling at Azilie.

(Gahhhhhhh, there are crickets outside and they are loud. Be quiet crickets! You sound like my shower fan creaking! There, I closed the window so now I don't have to kill them. *sweet smile*)

Show, don't tell. How often are we told that as writers? But I think this advice is simplistic. Showing is much more interesting than telling, but you can't -- and don't want to -- show everything. Some things are better summarized because they are only of background importance and attempting to show them would bore and lose readers. Don't you agree?

Orson Scott Card wrote up a very nice article for writers on this subject which I read about a year ago; unfortunately, I can't link it because it was (whoa) on paper, and I can't even quote it because the book is on a shelf over 6,000 miles away. But it was a very good book. It helped me feel less like a dangerous rebel in my belief that you shouldn't always try to show everything.

So, if I can presume we are in agreement on this point (but if we are not, or if you simply want to discuss the topic further, please do! I find it interesting and important), I will go on to say that sometimes it's hard to tell whether you should show or tell.

I currently need to convey to the reader that a certain character is uncomfortable with Azilie. I can do this by having long scenes that are of shallow (though not non-existant) value, hoping people pick up on the signs, or I can just sum it all up saying "But [Character] was acting weird." It's not as interesting as gathering that yourself, but I'm not sure the scenes that would be necessary for the information gathering are interesting either.

This is not my favorite part of the book. It's proving very difficult and I don't expect I'll make my deadline because of how much I'm stuck on this part. (I'm even getting bored with it myself by trying to write it out in an interesting "showing" way, which is what makes me think maybe it can't be done. Or at least not by someone of my skill level.) I thin I am going to just go ahead and write the "telling" scene but save the "showing" stuff in case readers complain about this later on. Maybe I can fix it later when I'm not sick of the scene.

Any thoughts, however winding and indefinite, would be appreciated! Have you faced this in your writing? How did you resolve it?

Chapter Eight is proving a lot of work, mostly because it was just a bunch of notes mingling with paragraphs only loosely tied together, and now I have to make a real chapter out of it.

The first version I did was, frankly, boring. It was boring me even as I wrote it. The action was too subtle; there were too many small conflicts spread across too many characters, leading to a situation where I had to "tell, not show" to keep any individual thread from seeming to be more important than the others. Really, it's just a big mess in the intermediate school social world and Azilie is painfully naive about it...and it's just tedious to write. I had it all figured out what needed to happen, but it was tiresome writing it. But I DID write a lot of it, and made moderate progress last week.)

Then today I was struck by a much better way to have the events unfold -- and one that suits Azilie's character even better, since she does enjoy being at the center of attention -- and now I am rewriting all I did last week. It's frustrating to have spent all that time writing and outlining so much only to scrap all that and go back to where I was a week ago, but then, that's how this sort of writing goes. You don't settle with the boring version just for the sake of having it done; you go back and rewrite it as much as it needs so you have the best possible story, no matter how much time and effort it takes!

I hope it doesn't take TOO much time, though. I don't know if I will make my August 31 deadline, but I'm going to try! After that I have to start grad school applications, so I'd really like to have a complete second draft by then.

Still, it takes the time it takes. Just so long as I am not loafing, I will have to be okay with that.

The trouble now is trying to save the parts I did like about the old version. And also figuring out when the blow-up with a certain few other characters should happen. And I have to go back and figure out when gymnastics tryouts would be, because right now Questri and her fellow gymnasts seem a little obsessed. Argh, there are still going to be so many loose ends in this thing even when I finish the second draft. How frustrating!

But I have made progress today, too! Tomorrow at work I have to do lesson plans, but I also hope I can get a good amount of New Chapter Eight written.



Oh, and on the title dilemma -- this actually caused me to lose sleep, I was so frustrated about it, and am giving it so much thought. I will have more to say about that in a few days, probably.

...it's probably better if I don't describe the electric crackles Azilie is seeing in this scene as "just like the sparks that had flickered in the microwave that time when Chiharrie microwaved a bowl with a metal spoon in it."

Right? ^^; Heh.

(I know about this because when I was about seven and my sister was four, we turned on a bunch of microwaves in an electronics boutique that had spare parts in them and watched the crackling in awe. Oooooh. And don't blame our parents; blame the store for leaving parts in the microwaves even while plugging them in and putting them down at levels where small children can turn them on! I don't recall the store burning down in any case. ^_~)


Meanwhile, I feel like I've made myself too stupid to write by jostling my brain around trying to get water out of my ear. I think I've had water in my ear for a week now. That's bad, right? But then I made it worse today by going to the pool.


But through almost two hours of struggling with my story, just when I'm about to give up and go make dinner, NOW it seems to be working! This is a pretty important scene and yet one I can mess up pretty badly scientifically (and also suspension-of-disbeliefilly). It should be fun to write but it hasn't been because I've been agonizing over it so much. But I think I might have it now to a point that is passable for giving out in the first public draft! Yay! So I can move on and consult scientists later. ;)

Back now to writing!

Wow, it's been over a month since I updated this journal. Well, I took some time off to get ready for Australia, and then to go to Australia, and then to write pages and pages of a travelogue about Australia. And now I'm back (and have only one day left to go in the travelogue) and it's time to hang out in the southern hemisphere in my writing once again.

As a matter of fact, Coralians are very much like Aussies in that they love their water sports! And now I find myself at an impasse. I like how I wrote something before, but in the revision I ended up changing it for various reasons and I like the first part of it, but that means I have to remove something I like from the original version to make it consistent. And I can't decide which way I'd prefer to have it!

Maybe you guys can help me without having even read the draft. Azilie is swimming with her family in some deep water. Actually, she's scared of deep water, so she doesn't want to go in at first. In the new version, I don't have her go in at all. Her being outside of the water affects what happens later on. If she's out of the water, she might be able to see people water-skiing some distance away more easily, but it would also take out some ambiguity that is a nice complicating factor. Hmmm.

But more importantly, I think it affects her character. I want her to be scared of the water, but I guess it doesn't really add much to the story. And if she's scared but does it anyway because she can't stand to be called a scaredy-cat, that would build her character later on, I suppose. But then AGAIN, maybe rather than being someone who takes a dare, maybe she's someone who knows what she's afraid of and doesn't do it. Then, when she does other things that look crazy, it's because she just wasn't afraid of them. She has good instincts on what to be afraid of. Yeah, that's probably important for making her not appear too crazy.

So I'm not sure if she should go in the water or not.

Pros:
1. It would add ambiguity to what she sees, if she sees it while trapped on the surface of the water.
2. It shows that she can overcome her fears -- and that her dad is egging her on to do something that she's scared of, which might explain how she becomes so daring later on?
3. We can see her compare the feeling of floating in water to floating in air.
4. The scene where she splashes around all flustered after what she sees is a lot of fun.

Cons:
1. It makes the scene a lot longer if she goes in the water. Maybe people will just want me to get on with it.
2. It shows that she does something just because she's egged on to do it, even if it's by a trusted authority figure.
3. I have to rewrite the part where she's scared to make her a little less scared, to show her willingly going into the water at all.



Hmmm. There are more pros than cons, but they feel a little weaker than the cons. I really don't know what to do. I guess this is where I should stop for the night, then, and think about it more. I know you guys haven't read it, but if you read this post and have any thoughts at all, I would appreciate hearing them! Something you say might set off just the right line of thought in my brain. :)