I was doing something boringly mundane just now when I realized, Hey, if I have time to do this boringly mundane thing, I have time to write a blog entry for the first time in ages. And so I will.
I haven't slowed down on the blog because I've slowed down on the project. I've slowed down on the blog because I've been on a regular schedule of 4-8 hours a day of writing and it's pretty exhausting. Or that's what I've told myself. Really I've just gotten out of the habit of blogging.
One thing I've noticed is that the work is going much more slowly these days, but I'm pretty sure it's getting that much better. I haven't been very good at following one of the guidelines you're supposedly supposed to follow, namely, just bang out the first draft and clean it up later. Like with all other types of writing that I've done in large amounts, like email, documentation, and nonfiction, I've gotten into a habit of putting it out fairly clean on the first go, like what you'd probably call second-draft level. This is because I'm one of those grammar-fixated people who can't stand an improperly placed apostrophe (let alone a spelling error) and that attitude has crept into other aspects of writing like varying sentence structure through a paragraph and avoiding using the same word twice in a paragraph.
This is part of what slows me down, and there are other things, like life's distractions. I cultivated a habit early on which involved doing the bulk of the writing at Starbucks, and it's gotten me this far. But despite the fact that I keep my earplug headphones in and blasting for most of the time I'm there, distractions creep through. For example, I've been there often enough to know as many regulars there as I do in the rest of my day-to-day life. So they want to talk, and this isn't bad, because it's a social life, or something like it. It is what it is; and it's better to get the work done between distractions than not at all.
It's also better than trying to get it done at home, because with workmen prepping the house for sale at the pace of a pack of snails, a 5.5 lb. cat with no impulse control, and other people making noise and crawling all over me (the cat, not the people), it would be worse. In any case, this is the habit I built, and as I've covered before, habits are key. To change this one would require about a month of effort, and I don't really have another option for where to write in this town. The other coffee house has less roomy armchairs and their coffee actually tastes like coffee, which I hate, instead of chocolate, which I can tolerate in small amounts.
I've said before that I thought the book would take months longer to finish, and that's clearly the case. On the plus side, a few early alpha readers seem to have enjoyed it, and when I go back to read the parts of the draft that they read, I cringe from how badly written some of it was. So that must mean improvement is under way. Or is that under weigh? I think it's the latter.
This is not a typical genre novel, anyway, in several ways, notably in terms of its length. It's over a thousand pages so far, and will get longer before it gets any shorter. It follows the stories of three main characters, essentially different types of anti-hero, as events drive them together and in opposition to one another. I didn't want a two-dimensional or simplistically "evil" villain, so I chose this much more difficult approach instead. There are also a number approaching 100 other characters, maybe thirty of which have significant roles. Let's just say this book isn't designed to be filmed, although I suppose LOTR proves that anything can be.
Due to the length and complexity, I have often bitten my nails (figuratively) over a number of fears, including "is the damn book too long?" and "is this scenario (my term for a multi-scene or multi-chapter arc) too long for its purpose in the story?" and "is anyone going to be interested in this anyway?" I can't do any more than I'm already doing about the last one, but as for the length issues, I have put a great deal of thinking into the others, beyond just worrying, and here are some of my thoughts:
Clearly this book and its internal segments would be too long for traditional publishing, so if I choose to attempt that route, I know I'll end up with major cuts. That idea doesn't bother me philosophically, just practically, for the following reason: as a reader, I like long books if I like the material in the first place. While I don't like excessive detail in description or unnaturally protracted expository segments, I like to follow the characters through a lot of events and changes. And as a video game player (high-end RPG/action-adventure games like Skyrim and Metro: Last Light), I like long games with a lot of side quests and internal lore. So that's what I've been doing here: building a story world with a lot of features, notably many competing world views represented by characters and factions. And I'm setting the stage for a longer series, which means a lot of space that would otherwise be dedicated to story has to go to introduction and setup, plus the story has to be there.
The balance is hell to find, and I haven't, but I'll have to in the third draft. For now, I'm in what Jim Butcher has referred to as the GSW, or Great Swampy Middle, of my own writer's journey on this book: grimly focused on cranking out a second draft that I can be reasonably pleased with.
Another thing I've kept in mind while writing, as a possible solution to the length issue, is serialization. Initially the book had four parts, now five: natural breaks in the story, and (I haven't really analyzed it) but maybe even analagous to a five-act structure, which is more popular in older plays than in anything modern, where everything is either shoehorned into or labeled as three acts no matter what. What I've been thinking, though, is that serialization could work well as a way of breaking up the material into digestible chunks: to release each part, or perhaps two-part combo, as what amounts to as an episode. I've been planning a blog entry on this for a while, so I won't go into detail now, but it's something that's directed my organization of the material for a while now. If I don't end up doing it, it won't hurt anything to have the parts better organized.
Regardless, unlike more practiced authors of fiction, I won't be releasing any of it until the whole thing is complete. Although I will be looking for beta readers in a few months, and I plan to harass readers of this blog hard to volunteer.
Until then, back to the grind. And yes, the cat's still hungry for better food, yada yada. The premise of the blog still holds. But she's a survivor. She'll make it to the end.
Probably I will, too.
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