Has It Been That Long?

Just because I haven't posted anything on this blog doesn't mean I haven't been writing. I finished my rewrite of Free Souls in early February, and in the process I scrapped the title and cut out over 65,000 words of the backstory I've already posted on this blog.  It's still part of my main character Sandy's history; I don't at all regret the time I put in writing it, but it held back the action and threw the book out of balance.

It had to go.

Most of the salient points I was able to work in here and there in the remainder of the text.  But there were some important aspects of Sandy's past that wouldn't yield to that treatment, foundational things underlying her motivations that she would not talk to others about, especially not the hero Eric.

So I--- (she looks around, to see if anyone is looking)--- wrote a prologue.  Yeah.  One of those.  I think it works.  I say the book would suffer without it.  In Chekhovian terms, it hangs the gun(s) on the wall so they'll be there to take down and fire later.

The two beta readers who've reported back to me apparently haven't been fazed by it at all.  Neither of them have refused to read the novel because it has a prologue.

But will I get the same reaction from someone in the publishing industry?  And would I be wasting my time pitching The Single Eye to someone in the industry, given that some of the first part of it has been published on this blog?

Yes, the new title is The Single Eye, after Christ's saying in Matthew 6 (King James Version).  It seemed to do the best job summing up the themes of the novel.  And unlike "Free Souls," it relates to the story, and isn't just an ironic reference to the real-life situation that gave me the idea.

As to why it's suddenly important that someone in the industry should be well-disposed towards my first novel . . . I'll save that for another post.

Back Again, with a Big Decision

Or maybe not so big.

It's about my work-in-revision, Free Souls, and its serial publication on this blog.

In my last post on the subject, I considered some improvements to the novel's plotting and characterization.  Well, I implemented those.  I also rewrote Chapters 19 and 20 so they'd have more action and less introspection, more showing and less telling.

Having rewritten them, I submitted them for critique on WritingForums.org.  And the tough love I got there has brought me to a decision.  No, I'm not going to cut the nested story of my MC's past out altogether as one critiquer suggested. Too much in her present is not intelligible without it (at least, I think it's not).  And I won't rewrite the whole thing chronologically starting with her high school or college years, as another urged.  That would mean ditching the thriller plot, which is necessary for Sandy and Eric to become the people they need to be so they can love each other as they should.

The advice I will take is to cut out all or most of the introspection, and the way I'm going to do that is by rewriting the nested story to set it entirely in the past and not coming out of it till it's done.  And making a distinct break between it and the parts set in "story present."

Book 1, Book 2, Book 3 . . . rather pretentious for my piece of fluff, but I think that's the only way to make it work.

I haven't started the work on the Big Rewrite.  Instead I've skipped ahead to a working on few chapters from Eric's point of view.  I wish they were getting themselves written faster, but with me putting in twelve to fourteen hours of (minimally) paid work a day my mind isn't always at top speed even when I do get a chance to write.

All this has an impact on this blog.  Posting this novel (as previously-conceived) was a way of generating content for it, right?

But not any more.

No, as much as I've enjoyed posting the book chapter by chapter, as much as it's been an incentive to stay hard at work and produce, as much as it galls me to give in to it, no more chapters of Free Souls will appear on this blog until it's reasonably done.  With the revisions I've made in the typescript, the ones that are up already need more alteration than I have time to do.  And I can't just tack the next chapter on and pretend those revisions don't exist.  That'd  be the same as assuming no one would bother to go back and read from Chapter 1.

Once the novel is completed, God willing, I'll put the whole thing up as a pdf on a separate page on the blog.  It'll be better for the readers that way.

Meanwhile, I've been experimenting with flash fiction.  And there's always the poetry.  I should be able to come up with something for regular posts.

Some Spinning of Wheels

Logically-speaking, I should have posted Chapter 19 of my novel Free Souls by now.

But I'm not happy with Chapter 19.  Or Chapter 20.  I don't want them on this blog till I am.

So the other day I posted them for a critique on a writers' forum website.  And boy, are they getting a reaction.  Yes, I've received some general suggestions for improving the presentation.  But most of it has been on subject matter and content.  And misinterpreting the content due to the absence of the chapters immediately preceding.  And going into the responders' personal experiences with the content.

Wow.

I'm spending more time untangling and responding to the responses than I am rewriting the chapters.

The responses have been helpful in showing me what's not working.  If what I'm saying is being misinterpreted, I have to convey it better.

I'll keep on it.  In the meantime, you might get some more poems.

Blogger vs. WordPress: Duelling Blog Platforms

Last November I started a new blog on WordPress with the same title and tagline as this one.  I've been with Blogspot/Blogger for the last seven years or so, and I've done fine on it.  But for various reasons I wanted to publish my writer's blog under a separate nom de plume than I use for the ones where I post about house renovations and my adorable cats and air my opinions on Things in General.  At the very least, I needed to post under a name that would look decent on a book cover should I ever-- miracle of miracles-- get my fiction into print.

But I couldn't figure out how to obtain a separate account on Blogger-Google.  So I said phooey on it, and for that one blog only, went to WordPress.

A lot of people migrate from Blogger to WordPress.  I think they must be people with money.  You have to pay over there in order to get more than the most minimal of templates-- which you can't tart up with your own pictures or choice of widgets.  Or individualize with your choice of colors.  Nor will it let you vary the style and size of the post type.

And I found WeirdPretzel's format to be full of obscurities and difficult to learn.  After four months I still don't know how to start a new post without needing three or four clicks to get to the writing form.  I have to write out the same labels every time and they don't appear on the sidebar.  The Categories feature is nice, but I can't figure out how to edit or delete one once it's created.

So I never gave up my intention to punch through the brick wall of getting a second Blogger-Google account. Meanwhile I've slogged through on what I can figure out about WordPress to post a few articles on the joys and pains of amateur fiction writing and a lot of chapters of a novel I wrote a few years ago and am now revising.

But I haven't been urgent about it, for WordPress does have something Blogger does not.  It has this cute little orange icon up in the bar at the top.  At least, it's orange when somebody Likes your post, or decides to follow your blog, or leaves you a comment.  And damn, it's addictive.  I'm so pathetic, I'll check five times a day to see if that gray icon has gone orange.

I think I'm up to twenty-three followers, and a very select and interesting group they are.  Some of them just collect other blogs for commercial purposes-- they're selling a service they want you to buy.  But a lot of them are struggling writers from all over the world.  This range of readership may be one of the coolest things about WordPress.

But maybe I decide to follow somebody who's following me.   I have no idea how to get to my WP Reader; no, correction, I think I tripped over it yesterday, but it involves clicking on my account button then clicking on the Reader link after that.  But why?  On Blogger I can just stick a feed in the sidebar and see who's got a new post up without leaving the main page!  So these fellow bloggers probably think I don't care.

Moreover, I have no idea who's dropping by.  Or if anyone is at all.  I'll get a Like from a visitor in India and the map says all my readers that day were from the US.  I'll get Likes and the stat counter says nobody's been on the blog at all.  I mean, really?  I feel like I'm working blind.

So, I finally did it.  This past weekend I worked out how to create a second Blogger-Google account and I've created a separate writer's blog with the same name over here.  But I don't think I'll simply import the WordPretzel content to Blogger and have done with it.  No, I'm going to copy in the posts I put up on WP until I get caught up, and see which platform gets the most traffic.  Should take till the end of April, maybe, and after that I'll do simultaneous posts.  I read that it can be done.

And if I find I can expand my readership traffic through Google and people like what I write, there might be some hope for the second novel I'm working on, which I hope I won't have to offer online for free.