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March 23, 2006
What Is This I See Before Me?
There is a new icon on my computer desktop this evening. It says
NEW FAR UPTIME NOTES 1.doc
Right now there's 1600 words of fresh material, both extracting stuff I liked from previous failed versions, and adding new material to, one hopes, make the final product suck less. Will keep adding new material, see where it goes.
Oooooh. Tingles. Tingles are good. Frankly, considering how I've been feeling, tingles are freaking bloody miraculous!
Posted by adrian at 06:22 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
March 22, 2006
Inspiring Story of True Writerly Grit
Today I got Jeanne Cavelos' annual newsletter in amongst the day's email. I was reading along, finding it all very interesting indeed--but then I got to this passage, which made me sit up and take serious notice:
Many people have been asking when they are ever going to be able to read my next novel, FATAL SPIRAL. In the last issue of the newsletter, which came out over a year ago, I reported that I was about six months away from finishing a draft. After throwing out everything four times, I thought I was finally on the right track.Since then, I have thrown away everything two more times. Characters have been killed, plotlines slashed, scenes re-imagined. I threw out my 80-page outline and wrote a new, 3-page outline. I've thrown away approximately 1200 pages of manuscript at this point--an entire trilogy worth of text!
I started my most recent draft on February 1, and am now up to p. 170. This is probably about one-third of the book. It is so much better than the previous versions, I feel really good about throwing all those pages away. Each draft has taught me something valuable about the story I'm trying to tell. I wish I could have gotten to this point faster and more efficiently, but unfortunately, writing doesn't always work like that. Sometimes it happens quickly--you're struck by a bolt of inspiration that lays the whole story out in front of you in perfect clarity, and your fingers can barely type fast enough to get it down. Sometimes it happens slowly, a compelling idea or mysterious figure drawing you into a maze, your fingers, with each stumbling word, revealing a bit more of the maze, a dead end, a wrong turn, until at last you find your way to the center and discover what the story is all about, so you can go back to the beginning and follow the right path.
I immediately flashed back to the Epic and Very Bitter Struggle I went through with my )(&*^%##@*) ANTIMATTER VOODOO project, with all the failures (having to junk 82,000 words of MS, etc) and the dud rewrites and ultimately even suspecting I'd lost my authorly mojo, etc. Ms Cavelos here has been there, done that, and in fact had it so much worse than I did, and still she persevered, and is now getting her problem novel sorted out.
Now that's a damned inspiring story! I am so impressed. Even, dare I say, thinking maybe about taking AV for another spin, see where it might go.
Wow!
PS: feeling quite a bit better. I think dumping all my worries into the blog post yesterday seems to have helped.
Posted by adrian at 06:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 21, 2006
Little Known Author in Wretched Post-Book Season of Glums
I just got a blog comment from the esteemed Pastamasta--who's recently been in hospital with alarming health woes--who comments that I must be feeling pretty good about things now that I've finished the new book. To say nothing, of course, of the recent shiny award. You would think a guy in such circumstances would be feeling pretty chipper about things.
Sadly, this is not so. I feel dismal. Ergh.
The headaches persist, now on pretty much a daily basis, only varying in when during the course of the day they appear. I'm not sleeping well, and I'm not hungry most of the time, so I'm not eating much.
The new book, UMBRA, is just about all I think about, from the moment I wake up far too early to go to the loo to when I finally fall unconscious sometime round 3am. I'm thinking, does it need rewriting? If so, from which point? Does it need a complete rewrite, like I did with HYDROGEN STEEL, when the first version proved to suck like a chest wound? Is the idea any good even as a basic premise? I remember, what feels like years and years ago, sometime in my mischievous, prodigious boyhood, perhaps, when I got the idea for the book, how it felt, in my head, like a fresh, whizzy idea that would work up nicely into a pretty whizzy book. Now, I'm going, hmm. Not sure. Of course, I haven't started actually, you know, re-reading the MS yet. So I really don't know what I'm talking about. This is all just free-floating abstract gloom and confusion, fairly typical of the funk that sets in post-finishing a book. It's just that this time it feels considerably worse than the usual attack. This one's lasted for days and days, and is the major reason I haven't posted. It's hard to convince myself that this kind of thing is good blog fodder.
I've started seeing a new specalist about the headaches. Unfortunately, after I listed all the things I've tried, and various other specialists I've been to see about it, and everything they suggested, he told me he really doesn't have too many ideas of what to do because all the things I listed are the things he would have suggested, too. He is working on the idea that my headaches are somehow migraines in disguise, but freely admits he's not doing much more than guessing. The first drug he suggested, a migraine preventive called Propranolol, was a bust. Headaches every day. Plus bonus extra-sleepiness! I'm now waiting for that drug to finish flushing out of my system before starting another one. He tells me that in his experience he's found patients get sick of trying different drugs after about the fourth suggestion.
I explained that, many years ago, when my psychiatrist at the time was trying to find a new combination of antidepressants that agreed with me well and actually did their job, it took ages to find the right combo. We must have been through practically everything in the MIMS handbook under "antidepressant"--even the weird stuff like monoamine oxidase inhibitors! Weird side-effects were plentiful during this time (this was the pre-Prozac era, btw), everything from explosive diarrhoea to dry mouth to hyper-alertness to horrifically vivid apocalyptic dreams, and many many more! So I plan to stick with this guy for the long term. It's not like I have a lot of choice.
It hasn't been all bad. The weekend after I finished the book, before the post-book gloom really set in, I was the "Local Author Guest" at Swancon 31 (sorry, no link; the site has already moved to next year's Swancon), the local annual sf/f festival. It was very nice, despite the intolerable heat, which was nobody's fault. The launch for Eclipse, went pretty well, and resulted in actual sales. Conditions for doing a launch were, on one hand, really not optimal--too much background noise to do anything more than shout, not much room
for potential punters to sit and watch--but on the other hand, surprisingly okay--putting the launches in the corner of a very busy room meant lots more people showed up out of curiosity than, I think, would have bothered going to a separate room. Overall, considering some of the rooms I had to face during the Great Big Trip of 2004, it went really well! It seems to me that nothing in all of the writing life is better than signing copies of your books for folks who've chosen to spend their hard-earned cash on your meagre effort. It's a humbling and deeply satisfying experience.
So. Anyway. I'll be fine eventually. The glums, that is. The headaches, I'm starting to think, are quite possibly going to be a constant feature of my life for the forseeable future. As for UMBRA: I'm not deleting it. It needs a good read-through, and right now is too soon: I'm still, to borrow a phrase, "too close to the elephant". The battle right now is to just ignore all those niggling anxieties about the thing telling me it should be more X, or more Y, or whatever.
Change of subject: how are you going? What's new in your life?
Posted by adrian at 06:02 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
March 03, 2006
UMBRA All Finished--Author Boy Knackered
It weighs in at a hefty 106,500 words, which is within the target length I was aiming for, and it's taken me six and a bit months, and there were plenty of times I never thought I'd get to this point, but this book is done!
Yes, I still have to go through it later to fix bits up, and make the beginning jibe with the ending, and all those little continuity things that make for a decent book. And yes I'm not sure if it's as good as ECLIPSE (remembering that UMBRA is a sequel), but it could be a good middle volume for a trilogy. The way UMBRA finishes leaves the way cleared for a third volume. Whether I eventually write that third volume I do not know. At the moment I just hope I can sell this one, once it's been up on the hoist and fixed up.
Last year I had the catastrophic failure of the ANTIMATTER VOODOO project. 82,000 words, going fairly well, and had to junk the whole damn thing because I screwed up the research on a key bit of the premise. Egad, but that sucked like a chest wound, and I never recovered, or at least not for a long, long time. I remember going to see my psychiatrist one day when in the midst of the many failed attempts to rewrite the thing (which, thinking about it, feels a lot like trying un-bog a bogged car), and he asked me how I was, and I said, "Well, I can't write worth crap, but otherwise doing pretty well." I'm lucky he didn't hit me with a dead squid for my self-pity, but at the time that's how it felt, like Austin Powers when he's lost his Mojo.
So this week has been pretty interesting, writing-wise. First the big award on Saturday, and now a nice finished novel manuscript to show off. I saw my doctor again today. He asked how I was. I told him I was doing pretty well, and why. It was a nice moment.
Now if I could just shake the bloody headaches!
* * *
PS: Thank you to my friends out there who've stopped by to congratulate me on the Aurealis Award win. It's been a wonderful thing to share with you guys.
Posted by adrian at 03:23 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack