Tag: revision

Book Ten Progress Report

I’ve been so busy writing the next book that I’ve neglected to write any blog posts. So, what have I accomplished?

I finished the first draft of Mae Martin Book 10 and have completed the first stage of revision—reading without making changes yet, taking notes as if I were critiquing for another writer. This is challenging. I see things I want to change right away, but why fix it if I might end up cutting it?

I grasped the importance of a theme I had doubts about I while I was writing, a theme relating to Mae, to Jamie, and non-ordinary spiritual experiences. It’s funny, but writing a paranormal mystery series, I sometimes pull back and ask myself, “Was that too paranormal?” But then I read through the work in progress and think, “That’s the best part.”

The book doesn’t have a title yet, but I’m leaning toward Wounded Healer. Here’s my first draft of the blurb:

Birdwatching, blackmail, and out-of-body travel.

A letter from Nashville gives Mae Martin hope that it’s safe to recover her psychic gift. The healing process is precarious and strange, but it’s also urgent. A friend’s two elderly dogs are lost, and another friend’s former lover has vanished. Spirit medium Azure Skye hasn’t seen her son’s father for twenty-one years. Then she hears his voice. Only the dead speak to her that way.

To learn his fate, Mae pushes her limits as a healer and seer, entering aspects of the spirit world she never knew existed—some beautiful, some dangerous. Will she find the missing man alive? What will his enemies do to stop her? And what will the effort cost?

*****

Prices on the whole series remain low on all e-book retailers. The Calling and Gifts and Thefts are $2.99 each, and the other books $3.99.

Inspired by Learning

Every two years, I have to renew all my certifications as a fitness professional. I enjoy the classes, including the tests, and feel refreshed as an instructor. I also take weekly classes with a yoga teacher whose skill I aspire to emulating. There’s no required continuing ed for writers, though. I could go years without learning anything new, if I wanted. But since I don’t know everything and can forget to apply what I do know, I took a class on revision and self-editing.

It made me look at my work in progress with fresh eyes and gave me an improved sequence for my revision tasks as well as new tools for analyzing problems in a book. It’s more challenging than analyzing movement but equally fascinating.

I’m now so excited about working on the next Mae Martin mystery, I had a hard time making myself pause to write a blog post. Recent encounters and experiences have made me think “blog post.” Bluebirds in the desert. Daytime coyote songs. A new gallery’s grand opening with dance performances accompanied by gongs and didgeridoo—it was so T or C.

But … I have to work on the book!

*****

If you’re new to following me, you may have missed some of my older posts. Small Awakenings is a collection of reflective essays from this blog.

Spinning Off

I’m letting the ninth Mae Martin Mystery rest a while, though I’ll be back to work on it soon. I’m taking an intensive course on revision and self-editing. Even after ten years as a published author, I can learn and improve. Meanwhile, I’ve begun the first draft of the first book in a spin-off series featuring Azure Skye, the Santa Fe medium who plays an important role in Soul Loss and in Shadow Family.

The creative challenges are exciting. The kind of mystery Azure will solve is different from the ones Mae is asked to handle as a psychic. Azure’s gift is communication with the dead. I’m disinclined to have her solve murders, but the question of how someone died has already come up. So far, it looks like Azure and Mae will need to collaborate to find the answer. Of course, I’m only on chapter two, and I don’t plot. I put the characters in a difficult situation and see how they react. Azure is in a situation only Mae can help her out of, and Mae has a problem she hopes Azure can solve.

The biggest challenge for me is that Azure wants to speak in the first person. I didn’t plan that she would, but that’s how she’s coming through.

Three of my novels use only Mae’s point of view, but I still had certain freedoms. I used prologues and epilogues in other points of view in two of those books. Mae’s visions as a psychic revealed events in in the restricted point of view of a silent witness. First person is the opposite of that. It gives me too much information to work with. I have to hold back some of what Azure knows, thinks, feels, and recalls about her past, her work, and the people close to her, in order to keep the story flowing. But I can share her inner life at the right moments more easily, since I never get outside her head.

Will I stick with first person or change to close third? I don’t know. For now, I’m getting to know Azure this way, like an actor exploring a role. Then I’ll have to set her story aside for about six weeks while I work on Mae’s most recent story in the revision class. Once that’s polished enough to send to my critique partners, I’ll plunge back into the spin-off.

*****

 Book two in the Mae Martin series, Shaman’s Blues, is on sale for 99 cents in all eBook stores though the end of January.

 

Smashing Clichés

Movies featuring things blowing up are popular. People like to watch demolitions, from buildings to demolition derbies. And then there is art-to-be burned, such as Burning Man and Zozobra. When I lived in Virginia, I used to clean the park where I ran and sometimes enlisted the help of several boys who played there. One day, they found a large toy firetruck in the stream and pulled it out—and proceeded to smash it to pieces with rocks. This was obviously more fun than playing with it.

Someone has been making faces on the trail where I run in the desert. Not walking along being silly, but arranging pebbles in smiley-faces on top of the rocks that mark the edge of the trail. The first one didn’t annoy me, but then they multiplied. I don’t mind intriguing, meaningful art made among the desert rocks. A labyrinth. A miniature Stonehenge-like creation. A rounded lava rock that looks like a fertility goddess surrounded by a little maze and an altar. A small rock nestled in a hollow in a large rock just because it fits so perfectly. Such arrangements fall over gradually or get covered with sand, and nature looks natural again. Someone left a small painted rock near the trail, red white and blue with the Texas flag’s star, the name of a soldier who died in combat, and few words of love and honor. It means something. No one moves it. Perhaps he used to love this trail and used to hike it with the person who left the rock. But smiley-faces? Twenty or more of them? That’s nineteen clichés too many.

On a lovely, sunny, seventy-degree winter day, I got tired of them and gave a swipe at one as I passed. No effect. The pebbles had been glued to the trail-marker rock. What the heck? Did the face-maker think this stuff should be permanent? I soon found that a quick kick could dislodge most features of the glued-on smiley-faces, and it felt good. Can I justify it? Maybe not, but to me, gluing all those faces along the trail was arrogant. If they’d been arranged lightly, without attachment, I might have knocked one aside and been content, had my fun like the boys smashing the toy firetruck, and forgotten about it. Nature would have blown them away eventually.

Writers are regularly advised to “kill your darlings,” those scenes we love that weigh down the pace, or those wonderful (to us) witty lines that don’t serve the story. We have to weed out clichés and our favorite over-used words. They can have an effect on readers like seeing twenty-plus smiley faces, an intrusion on the flow of enjoyment. Today I noticed that someone else had destroyed smiley-faces. There were face-pattern glue marks on some rocks with branches laid over them, as if my fellow self-appointed curator of trail art was saying, “Don’t even think about putting that back.”

Sometimes I store my cut scenes and lines for a while, in case I want to put them back, but ninety-percent of those darlings never return. Nothing in the first draft is glued in place. I have to destroy in order to create. Fortunately, I enjoy revision. It’s a lesson in non-attachment, and almost as much fun as smashing a smiley.

Continuing Education

I just finished a two-week intensive course on plot arcs. Writers aren’t required to get CECs the way health and fitness professionals are. I don’t have to renew a certification or have to take a certain number of courses per two-year period to prove to anyone that I’m keeping up my skills. But I have to keep learning.

People sometimes ask me why I go all the way to Albuquerque to take yoga classes every couple of weeks, classes I don’t get CECs for. The other teachers in T or C are good, after all. But they’re my peers. We’re equals. While I enjoy their classes, I also want to study with someone more advanced than I’ll ever be. I get excellent critiques from other writers, my peers, but I took a class with my editor’s editor.

It forced me to outline my work in progress before I completed the first draft, which I don’t usually do until I’ve improvised the whole plot, so it was challenging. I’m not sure my outlines made sense. But the ideas the instructor brought to the course did. Her structure for pacing and tension, for weaving in secondary storylines, and the key elements that need to take place in various portions of a book, will help me when I revise. She said she admired my bravery in staying with my “pantsing” (writer-talk for flying by the seat of your pants through the first draft) style while being required to outline. Maybe that was a diplomatic word for stubbornness. I don’t think I was brave. It’s just how I create. When I make plans, my characters seldom go along with them. I look forward to applying what I learned in the course when I do the major revisions in the second draft—once I know what everyone is up to.