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lenora_roseI've been fighting a cold the last week, mostly just coughs and explosively runny nose and not being much able to sing. And extra care for Joseph, who has all of the same but less comprehension that this is a temporary state, and has needed a few more middle of the night snuggles than usual.
How a mom, or at least this mom, feels about mid-night child cuddles is probably the definition of ambivalent. When I drag myself from the bed, and he's howling and won't stop, or wriggling and flailing and refusing to settle, it's all bad, some of the worst mom-stuff that doesn't involve diapers at *their* worst. But when he settles and is lying on you because it's the one thing that makes all the sickness feel okay, and he's dropping off to sleep, warm and trusting... well. There's times you want it to linger just a bit more after he's sound asleep before tucking him back in his bed and sneaking off to get your own desperately needed sleep.
This is complicated by the fact that he can get out of his crib entirely, and has at least once found a way over the baby gate (We now have a knob cover on the door, so the latter part is solved. That it's almost the only door in the house that can *use* a knob cover was lucky, though.)
Dealing with the colds in the daytime is helped somewhat by the fact that my mother in law is here visiting her grandson (Oh, and the rest of us). Though I feel badly, because when we were at their place in November, we arrived with colds, too. The timing is coincidence, but we really didn't invite her to come to be a nurse.
Dealing with not being able to sing has complicated a second project of mine, though, which is my current pledge to practice mandolin at least 1/2 hour for every day for 55 days (Ends March 28th. As I explained, it's a purely arbitrary number based on a vaguely remembered and probably equally wrong thing about 55 days being what it takes in ingrain a daily habit (And 3 months for a habit that is not purely daily). But hey, pledging to do NaNoWriMo is arbitrary. And pledging to have to write 5000 words to allow myself a coffee flavoured drink until such time as my draft of Labyrinth was done was also successful in producing a finished draft. As of yesterday.
My last three days therefore, have been me being up past midnight to respectively:
- Finish the whole of the book besides the epilogue.
- write what I thought was the full epilogue, though I had a nagging feeling some loose end of the dissatisfying kind was straggling
- write the piece of Epilogue that I had figured out I needed to add.
AFTER which i finally scrambled to get in the mandolin practice. (I kept telling myself to get the mandolin work in firs,t and kept going, "But I just need a few more words...". I actually the think the chosen order might have got me to bed marginally sooner, because doing the mandolin practice last, I tended to stay much closer to the 1/2 hour minimum, where I might have lingered if I'd done it the other way. I'm still regaining practice and callusses both, and I'm not making my elbow explode, so I think I'm not doing the mandolin wrong by it.)
____________________
SO. I have a complete draft.
It's 150,272 words. It's much more drafty than a lot of finished drafts of mine, and oddly, most of the bits that I already know need the most revision are prior to the NaNoWriMo rush.
What the NaNo rush did on that front is prevent me from going back to do the small revisions I always do during a draft when I hit a later point that makes me change my mind about a previous one. Or where I realise there's a plot hole. Instead I just inserted notes for the most part. (There were monsters in the way a few minutes ago. What happened to them?).
There's also a LOT of dross wordage. Partly due to those not-revisions, but also when I was failing for the key plot or figuring out world-building on paper through the NaNo and post NaNo bits. (These characters stand around and TALK so damn much, and a lot of it is "As you know Bob"s I needed to write but nobody but me should ever be forced to suffer through reading.)
AND there are some plot twists on paper I'm debating dropping and possible others I'm considering slipping in. (One ends up fucking with gender. Also making one character more consistently reliable in spite of having their brain played with, and another much more bitchy and antagonistic even though they're decidedly a victim not an antagonist. Whether these are plusses remains to be seen, but it's all in character for the villain's fondness for mind games.)
I anticipate being able to make this a 120k book.
Final verdict? I think it's a solid story under all the first draft baggage. I mean, I would and should think so. But I have done a bit more attempt to pick apart the viability than just "Well, I liked it or I wouldn't have wrote it." I liked and wrote books whose immediate commercial viability I doubt, after all (Looks sadly at Raising the Storm).
It's much less bog-standard fantasy than the Serpent Prince books but in a way that might be pitchable as "fresh" not "Look, it's weird". (It's a portal fantasy - though one in which the word "Unsustainable" is directly relevant) It's MUCH less depressing than Bird of Dusk, but has some of the same urban fantasy audience accessibility with the modern world protagonists. It has a non standard heroine (or two). I think it can become a less unwieldy and unsalable length than Raising the Storm. Unlike Bird and RtS, some of the ways it's less traditional feel like things I can point to as selling points, not forces working against it. It's easier to sum up the gist of the story for a blurb, which always helps. (The fact that the heroines are lesbian and bi of course can count against it for some publishers and readers, but for it for others.)
It's also at least one significant revision from even a beta reader call, which probably means a year or even two to sales pitch time, especially as I need some time to clear my head of it (And do some relevant research) before I dive into revisions. So I'm not stopping shopping around Bird (or Serpent Prince if I get the rewrite of THAT down pat). But I think it's more likely than either to get more positive attention.
I could be wrong, but I'm content with it until the betas destroy it.
_______________
So... what's the next project? Well, #1 is actually a beta reading for a friend with a relatively short deadline. So, not writing per se, but analysis of someone else's writing is always good for the editorial muscles.
#2 is some of the research I need for Labyrinth itself. (It's all character background stuff, and I could probably leave it as fudged as I have. But could and should aren't the same.) That can be relatively ongoing until i decide it's time to do the revision though.
#3 is that I have a small hope of scraping together a working short story for one of the Eggplant anthologies, but the deadline being in March, it's a slim hope.
#4: I don't know. Back to revising Serpent Prince. Back to writing The Poisoned Tongue. Off to try another of my various partly finished projects. I was after all looking at the old OLD OLD draft of the Allerleirauh screenplay, and thinking how to make it A) a stage play rather than screen play, B) less cringe-worthy when it comes to a few racial tropes I was doing my then-best on but are horrid now C) More selkie-y, if that can even be a word and D) both better and finished. And I was thinking about Meri's tale because a story about a girl saving a god from the Fae has to have some appeal. And there's the apocalyptic one. Or ones.
#5: After whatever I choose comes the revision of the Labyrinth story.
How a mom, or at least this mom, feels about mid-night child cuddles is probably the definition of ambivalent. When I drag myself from the bed, and he's howling and won't stop, or wriggling and flailing and refusing to settle, it's all bad, some of the worst mom-stuff that doesn't involve diapers at *their* worst. But when he settles and is lying on you because it's the one thing that makes all the sickness feel okay, and he's dropping off to sleep, warm and trusting... well. There's times you want it to linger just a bit more after he's sound asleep before tucking him back in his bed and sneaking off to get your own desperately needed sleep.
This is complicated by the fact that he can get out of his crib entirely, and has at least once found a way over the baby gate (We now have a knob cover on the door, so the latter part is solved. That it's almost the only door in the house that can *use* a knob cover was lucky, though.)
Dealing with the colds in the daytime is helped somewhat by the fact that my mother in law is here visiting her grandson (Oh, and the rest of us). Though I feel badly, because when we were at their place in November, we arrived with colds, too. The timing is coincidence, but we really didn't invite her to come to be a nurse.
Dealing with not being able to sing has complicated a second project of mine, though, which is my current pledge to practice mandolin at least 1/2 hour for every day for 55 days (Ends March 28th. As I explained, it's a purely arbitrary number based on a vaguely remembered and probably equally wrong thing about 55 days being what it takes in ingrain a daily habit (And 3 months for a habit that is not purely daily). But hey, pledging to do NaNoWriMo is arbitrary. And pledging to have to write 5000 words to allow myself a coffee flavoured drink until such time as my draft of Labyrinth was done was also successful in producing a finished draft. As of yesterday.
My last three days therefore, have been me being up past midnight to respectively:
- Finish the whole of the book besides the epilogue.
- write what I thought was the full epilogue, though I had a nagging feeling some loose end of the dissatisfying kind was straggling
- write the piece of Epilogue that I had figured out I needed to add.
AFTER which i finally scrambled to get in the mandolin practice. (I kept telling myself to get the mandolin work in firs,t and kept going, "But I just need a few more words...". I actually the think the chosen order might have got me to bed marginally sooner, because doing the mandolin practice last, I tended to stay much closer to the 1/2 hour minimum, where I might have lingered if I'd done it the other way. I'm still regaining practice and callusses both, and I'm not making my elbow explode, so I think I'm not doing the mandolin wrong by it.)
____________________
SO. I have a complete draft.
It's 150,272 words. It's much more drafty than a lot of finished drafts of mine, and oddly, most of the bits that I already know need the most revision are prior to the NaNoWriMo rush.
What the NaNo rush did on that front is prevent me from going back to do the small revisions I always do during a draft when I hit a later point that makes me change my mind about a previous one. Or where I realise there's a plot hole. Instead I just inserted notes for the most part. (There were monsters in the way a few minutes ago. What happened to them?).
There's also a LOT of dross wordage. Partly due to those not-revisions, but also when I was failing for the key plot or figuring out world-building on paper through the NaNo and post NaNo bits. (These characters stand around and TALK so damn much, and a lot of it is "As you know Bob"s I needed to write but nobody but me should ever be forced to suffer through reading.)
AND there are some plot twists on paper I'm debating dropping and possible others I'm considering slipping in. (One ends up fucking with gender. Also making one character more consistently reliable in spite of having their brain played with, and another much more bitchy and antagonistic even though they're decidedly a victim not an antagonist. Whether these are plusses remains to be seen, but it's all in character for the villain's fondness for mind games.)
I anticipate being able to make this a 120k book.
Final verdict? I think it's a solid story under all the first draft baggage. I mean, I would and should think so. But I have done a bit more attempt to pick apart the viability than just "Well, I liked it or I wouldn't have wrote it." I liked and wrote books whose immediate commercial viability I doubt, after all (Looks sadly at Raising the Storm).
It's much less bog-standard fantasy than the Serpent Prince books but in a way that might be pitchable as "fresh" not "Look, it's weird". (It's a portal fantasy - though one in which the word "Unsustainable" is directly relevant) It's MUCH less depressing than Bird of Dusk, but has some of the same urban fantasy audience accessibility with the modern world protagonists. It has a non standard heroine (or two). I think it can become a less unwieldy and unsalable length than Raising the Storm. Unlike Bird and RtS, some of the ways it's less traditional feel like things I can point to as selling points, not forces working against it. It's easier to sum up the gist of the story for a blurb, which always helps. (The fact that the heroines are lesbian and bi of course can count against it for some publishers and readers, but for it for others.)
It's also at least one significant revision from even a beta reader call, which probably means a year or even two to sales pitch time, especially as I need some time to clear my head of it (And do some relevant research) before I dive into revisions. So I'm not stopping shopping around Bird (or Serpent Prince if I get the rewrite of THAT down pat). But I think it's more likely than either to get more positive attention.
I could be wrong, but I'm content with it until the betas destroy it.
_______________
So... what's the next project? Well, #1 is actually a beta reading for a friend with a relatively short deadline. So, not writing per se, but analysis of someone else's writing is always good for the editorial muscles.
#2 is some of the research I need for Labyrinth itself. (It's all character background stuff, and I could probably leave it as fudged as I have. But could and should aren't the same.) That can be relatively ongoing until i decide it's time to do the revision though.
#3 is that I have a small hope of scraping together a working short story for one of the Eggplant anthologies, but the deadline being in March, it's a slim hope.
#4: I don't know. Back to revising Serpent Prince. Back to writing The Poisoned Tongue. Off to try another of my various partly finished projects. I was after all looking at the old OLD OLD draft of the Allerleirauh screenplay, and thinking how to make it A) a stage play rather than screen play, B) less cringe-worthy when it comes to a few racial tropes I was doing my then-best on but are horrid now C) More selkie-y, if that can even be a word and D) both better and finished. And I was thinking about Meri's tale because a story about a girl saving a god from the Fae has to have some appeal. And there's the apocalyptic one. Or ones.
#5: After whatever I choose comes the revision of the Labyrinth story.
