Back Again

It's been two months and more since I resolved to step back from the keyboard, and a lot has happened--- and has not.

First, what hasn't happened.

As promised, I did not touch my draft of The Single Eye.  In fact, I didn't open it till the 20th of this month of March.

The other thing that hasn't happened is that I didn't hear from either of my Last Two Beta Readers.  That isn't to say I was never in touch with them; I just got nothing back on the novel.

Now, I could take that as a very bad sign.  Yes, the one has been through severe health issues involving herself and a close family member.  The other has a very full, not to say harried, schedule.  But there's a nagging voice that says, "If your book was any good, they'd be compelled to read it anyway.  They'd find it a solace in their affliction!"

But as much as The Single Eye involves themes that go to the heart of the human condition, as much as I hope the reader will come away having learned something about him or herself, as much as I'd love it to be the kind of book a reader will pick up again and again, it's still a novel.  It's entertainment.  And when your newborn has to be rushed to the ER because she can't clear her lungs, Mama ain't got time to beta read no novel.

So I'm going ahead and doing a last copy edit out of my own eye--- if that makes sense.  More on that later.

Step Away from the Keyboard!

This day and evening, by dint of neglecting ten other things I should have been taking care of, I finished the last of the major edits I've been sweating through on my novel The Single Eye.  In other words, this revised draft is done.

To mark the occasion I've sent it off to two beta readers.  Until I hear back from them, I solemnly swear to leave this manuscript the heck alone.  I'll pretend these readers have the only copies and I can't look at it or lay my hands on it at all.  I'll keep up that fiction for the next two months, after which I might be able to regard it with more objectivity.

If either of these readers uncovers some major structural issue no one else has caught before, that's another story.  But I'm hoping it will be just little things like typos that I can deal with when I do my final read-throughs in March.

We'll see.

In other news, it looks like I and two others from our Pennwriters area will be starting a new critique group on the 28th of this month.  Did that sound tentative?  Yeah.  That's because I've wanted to be part of a face to face writers' group for so long that it's hard to grasp that it's finally coming together.  I'll be workshopping my second novel, and it'll be an experiment in psychology to see how well I shift my head from the world of novel No. 1 to that of novel No. 2.  I mean, when the interaction between your protagonists is so much more fun than anything you're involved in in real life . . .

Home Stretch

I just may be in the home stretch of this last set of major revisions to The Single Eye.

I've done some minor rejiggering to make my female protagonist's motivations clearer as she convinces herself to do what she does at the novel's climax. A lot of that involved taking scenes out of the male protagonist's point of view and putting them into hers. All this is good for the book in general because it highlights her character arc. And I'd wondered if that was getting obscured.

One of my latest beta readers complained about the way I switch the POV back and forth between my two main characters in the course of a single chapter. She's pretty sure, she said, that that's not something an author should do. I paid no attention to this. Good and great authors do it all the time, and it's particularly kosher if you put a line/scene break between the POVs. Which I've done.

But as I communicated further with this beta, I learned the POV shifts that bothered her particularly came at the novel's climax. Far from speeding up the action, the switches between the female main character's point of view and that of the male MC only slowed things down. My reader kept having to stop and wonder, "Whose head are we in anyway?"

No other beta has mentioned that, but I think this one is right. So I've rewritten that bit so it's entirely in the FMC's point of view. This has enabled me to cut out a chunk of business from the MMC that wasn't really material, making the scene tighter and more dramatic. (Besides, the more I can cut out, the happier I am.)

I've also cut out a plot wrinkle I put in about a year ago. About that same time I got into listening to the Writing Excuses podcasts, and more than once they've emphasized that it doesn't really work to throw in one more challenge after the climax. Your reader's reached the big climactic high, they want to release their tension, and it's not fair to make them ratchet their emotions up yet again. More than that, it's hard to make them care enough to try. This point was reiterated in an episode I was playing this past week, and the penny finally dropped. I edited that plot wrinkle out today. I'd only put it in to keep knowledgeable readers from picking holes, but I'll deal with that another way.

The last challenge has to do with my FMC's character arc. To get that right involves rethinking the personality of a minor character, a county sheriff. I have to transform him from a generic intelligent nice guy into a by-the-book hardass who'll grudgingly concede a point when the facts tell him he has to. My FMC has to come out of the conversation struggling with herself over whether she did the right thing in the climactic scene or not--- and come to terms with the fact that everything in life is not cut-and-dried and under her control.

. . . Just writing that last line has got me clearer on what her arc is about. Which I hope makes this really long post worthwhile.

Note to Myself

Putting myself on notice:

It's good to pay attention to critique and feedback. But I have to watch out against changing my characters and their reactions according to some generic concept of "what people do." More than once in this editing process I've nearly tumbled into the pit of gutting my characters of their individuality, just to satisfy typical expectations. Yes, in a perfect, logical world people would do or not do certain things. But my world is not perfect, and my characters are not always logical, nor sensible, nor are they omniscient, nor do they always do what's in their best interests.

Two Steps Back, Three Steps Forward Equals Progress

Thinking how I wanted to get The Single Eye published last winter.  Then by the end of August.  You mind if I fall over myself laughing?

Boy, do I have a lot of rewriting left to do. As much as some of my latest beta reader's comments bug me, three or four of them make me go, "Hmmm, what about it?" Does my villain come on too strong at the beginning? Given that he behaves like a consistent jerk from the get-go, isn't my male protagonist sliding into Too-Stupid-to-Live territory by not immediately seeing through him?  I've gone through a period of insisting that I can't make him more than minimally proactive, given his position in life. But is that really true? Aren't there things he would do to deal with the trash the villain is throwing at him? Then at the end, after the female protag saves the day with her "heroics," would she still feel like an idiot after law enforcement praised her for her bravery?

I've come to the conclusion that all these things call for revision, not because I want the approval of my latest beta reader or because I feel I have to change my work to fit her views, but because I believe that once rewritten, my characters will be more true to who I already claim them to be.

I'm starting at the beginning and working my way through. This past Wednesday I got to the point in Chapter 5 (now Chapter 4) just short of the scene when the antagonist (soon to be villain) makes his pitch. This is progress.

On the Other Hand

I've had time to think, and I've remembered that I can't make my hero too proactive. There must be a time in the middle when he decides things have gone back to normal, even though the reader can pick up evidence that the villain is still active behind the scenes. Why? Because the hero's single-minded focus on his work, in this plot, will be his potential ruin. It has to end up putting him and those he most cares about in danger, because, as he admits at the end, "I just didn't want to know."

Actually, my heroine is the more proactive of the pair. So proactive, in fact, that my latest beta reader accused her of superheroics at the story's point of crisis. No, sorry, that's staying in. Her issue is wanting to be in control and thinking everything is up to her. Yeah, she'd do what I have her do . . . but it worries me that that beta didn't see it that way.

More rethinking, more rewriting!

Postponed

I really hoped and planned to get this novel onto Kindle and CreateSpace by the end of this month. It isn't going to happen, and not just because I've been too busy renovating my front room to design my cover and format my text.

It's not even that I've heard back from another beta reader, and it's clear that I'll have to make my main characters' basic motivations more convincing. And clean up some typos. And decide how much internal dialogue to put into third person indirect speech, or to cut altogether.

It's rather that, having allowed the manuscript to sit for several weeks, I'm seeing that the first part drags for sure and for real. My hero, especially, needs to be more proactive. It's true that at that stage his primary motivation is not to Defeat the Villain and Bring Down His Evil Plot for National Domination; he doesn't even know the villain has a plot for national domination.  He just wants the creep to go away and let him do his work (architecture) in peace. But as I've written him now, too many times he deliberately ignores acts that all my betas saw as the villain's dirty deeds, regarding them instead as accident or coincidence. I thought this was signalling how dedicated he is to his work. "See what he'll put up with if he can just go on designing!" But it's only making him look like a thickheaded fool.

I've been wrestling with this problem for awhile, and to some extent, this "Hear no evil, see no evil" attitude truly reflects who my MMC is.  For example, he'd definitely go out of his way to convince himself that the threatening note he receives isn't from the villain because he doesn't have time to deal with it. But after his apartment is burned out . . . is he really going to believe it was just a faulty space heater?  All logic dictates that he'll decide the bad guy is behind it after all, and he'll have to try to do something about it and fail.

This will mean some major rewriting in some places. I think I can do it without messing up my story's timeline or major plot points. But it will take more than the next nine days.

An Announcement: I Am Now a Publisher

Last January, I made a resolution to post at least once a week on this blog.  I have no shame about failing to do so during the school year: with three or four jobs demanding my time, I was lucky to get three or four hours of sleep per night, let alone do any blogging.

But now it's summer, and here's what I've accomplished:

No, my novel The Single Eye is not quite ready for publication.  I'm still waiting on my final two beta readers, and I have a one last editing pass to make, myself.

I also need to learn GIMP, so I can put together a cover.  Yes, it would be better if I could hire someone to design it.  But financially, that's out of the question.  I'm going to draw on my graphic arts background and do it myself, and if the cover's no good, that's my fault.

So the book itself is on a kind of tremulous hold.  But that doesn't mean I haven't been busy otherwise.  After months of research and consideration, I've decided to self-publish under my own imprint.  As of this past Thursday the 14th, when I heard from my state's Secretary of State's office, I am in business as a publisher under the name HENDRICK HILL BOOKS.

I'll only be doing my own work, of course.  But I've got my first block of ten ISBNs from Bowker, I've obtained my Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the federal government, I've purchased domain names associated with Hendrick Hill Books and with my pen name, Catrin Lewis, and--- well, it looks like I'm serious about this.

I''m planning to release The Single Eye for Kindle and as an POD paperback by the end of August.  At least, I was.  But I'm hearing that it's never good for a new self-publisher to put out only one book at a time.  Should I hurry up and finish the psychological horror novel I have half-done?  Ought I to make an effort and crank out a sequel to The Single Eye (I have an idea for one, but haven't yet found the key to make the plot work)?

We'll see.  Hendrick Hill Books exists, it's not going away, and I have plenty to do before school starts again.

Don't Want to Think Like My Villain

My erstwhile beta reader told me that for my novel properly to fit the Suspense genre, I need to have scenes from the villain’s point of view, so the reader can worry about the awful things he has in mind for the protags and feel all the delicious frustration of not being able to warn them against it. ("Delicious frustration" is how I sum it up, BTW.)

I don’t dispute that this can be a good way to proceed. But for this novel, it ain’t happening. A) Because the book’s too long as it is, b) because I don’t want to get my mind too deep and dirty into that racist SOB’s plans and schemes, and c) because said plans and schemes involve way more people than just my protags, and it’d really get off topic if I showed him masterminding the whole nefarious plot. Besides, I don’t want to reveal the scope of the whole nefarious plot to the reader until the last part of the book. I want him or her to be uneasy . . . even though he’s not sure what he's uneasy about.

However, I definitely want to keep the reader aware that the villain is still working away against the protags, even after they’ve come more or less safely through his initial campaign against them. To that end, I’ve added a few lines to a couple of otherwise-innocent scenes, that will make it obvious to the reader that the male protag, at least, is being watched, tracked, followed, and cased out— even if at this point he’s not actually being harmed. Hopefully that will keep the ominous note going underneath, even when the main theme of a scene may be cheerful.

Demoralized

Late last night I got first comments back from my newest beta reader, and the long and the short of it is, she doesn't like my novel and won't be reading it for me any more.

The most demoralizing thing about it?  She objects most to elements that are, from my perspective, essential to the plot. She refuses to believe that my characters would react to pivotal events as I have them do. So it's not like I can say, "Oops, you're right, I slipped up on POV there," or "Oh-oh, I took my MC out of character there," and fix it. For this beta, the flaws are structural.

Then there's the fact that certain aspects of my main characters' pasts influence how they're caught up in the central conflict of the plot, and I've shown some of that instead of merely mentioning it in the narrative. And my ex-beta is right--- if this is supposed to be a romantic suspense novel, all that slows it down. But do I just want to produce a "good read," to be consumed in a summer's afternoon? What if I want to say something more?

I'm trying to remind myself that previous betas have liked the story a lot. That even the other current beta who's charged me with using too advanced a vocabulary likes my characters very much and misses them when events in her own life keep her from reading. Still I worry, what if this latest beta is right? What if I've pushed the genre so much it's distorted out of recognition and no one will want to read the novel at all?

What I need is a good editor who will read the whole manuscript with an open, objective mind, then tell me what I can take out without watering down the plot or the character development. But in that case, what I would want is nearly another month's worth of income. That's what it would cost to hire a self-respecting editor to tackle this thing.

La

It Has to End

I've spent the last month and a half editing the dickens out of this thing. Or maybe I've been editing the Dickens into it, considering that it's getting longer, not shorter. I've done my best to eliminate typographical errors and inconsistent and excessive uses of em-dashes and ellipses. I've searched through the document to make sure my curly quotation marks close the right way, and expunged the extra spaces I keep tapping in after the last sentences of paragraphs. Then there's all the words and phrasings I've changed along the way, just because the new word or phrase is better.
And you know what? It's time to stop. I've got to send this latest, final version to my beta reader, and unless she comes up with some valid reason the text has to change, I have to say it's DONE.

Not that I can't improve it. Of course I can. But I have at least three other book projects to tackle. At my age I don't have the luxury of spending three or four years on a single novel, polishing it to death.