I had a long cafe session this morning, planning what I was going to do with the 10 days weekend or holiday due me in the next 16. Figured that if I wrote 2 000 words a day, I’d add another 20 000 to a ms that is already pushing 120 000 and for which the end is in sight: ie, I might actually finish the thing by January 5 if not January 1.

5:45 pm wordcount: 41 740
9:45 pm wordcount: 39 681

Sigh.

I was going to go for a swim.
I wrote.
I was going to go running.
I wrote.
I was going to buy Christmas presents.
I wrote.
I was going to wrap Christmas presents.
I wrote.
I was going to put together an invoice.
I wrote.
I was going to put together a course application.
I wrote.
I did make a phone call, receive a phone call, and find some Javascript to place random pictures on the blog (thanks to Cameron Gregory for his random image selector). I ate chocolate (shouldn’t have), spent some time in the used bookstore (likewise, shouldn’t have). But mostly what I did was continue a tear-apart, put-together revision on Graveyards which I was going to defer until I’d finished the list of missing scenes prepared at my last cafe session. But I started tinkering with some details that were niggling at me, and the next thing I knew I was running amuck. I was in that gratifyingly ruthless frame of mind that enables me to say: If there’s no point to it, it goes. If I can do it more simply, it goes. If I can’t figure out how to fix it, it goes. Repetitive scenes go; useful parts are plucked out of scenes that go nowhere and tucked into scenes that already work; dialogue that says nothing goes. I’ve got half a book that mostly stands up, though major caulking is still required before I’d put to sea in it (!) and t’other half is a bunch of strong looking planks untidily propped against each other. Pity tomorrow’s Monday, eh, or I’d just go on until I dropped.

I do believe, that after about 18 months, I have finally got the balance of this novel. I was unhappily aware that it is one thing for a character to take over the writer, and another thing for the character to be allowed to take over the NOVEL. As a writer you can immerse yourself in a character and – hopefully – it adds to their persuasiveness, their seductiveness. But a character taking over the novel is an embarrassment to the mature writer, who should know better than to be seduced by the products of their own imagination! I was having trouble that way with Creon. Now, after having listened to Aeron talk for the better part of 5000 words, Aeron is finally emerging as the strong counterbalance that the novel needed. She is telling me (and another character, but right now, mainly me) who she is, why she does what she does, why she does not give up, does not give in, and what created her cunning desperation. She is turning into a very different, and in some ways more authoritative and more admirable person than Creon. But she does not know how to stop, any more than he does. I don’t know how much of the monologue will last, but I must remember it as a technique, because being in someone’s voice lets me work on the metre and tone of their speech, as well as their language. Aeron’s is surprisingly quirky; I must remember on my rewrite to make Creon solid … not solid like rock, but solid like soapstone, or ivory … The balance is also better because she’s speaking directly to Val, one of my other leads, so now I have four dyads working among those four principals, two manoevering/manipulating/exploring/discovering, one mortal enemies, one long close friendship and working partnership – complexities of the latter I will have to explore at another time, since I don’t strain it to breaking point this time out.
I hope I can sustain this … The whole thing is so nearly whole in my head (I have a sinking feeling I said that a year ago) and the balance is so much closer, though the feeling shape in my head has a five-point tension … ugh. Too much for one book that’s supposed to have more action and less character. But character interaction is action.

Haven’t done this for a while: writing from 11 pm to 1 am. In my so far unending quest for an agreeable time and place to swim, I went to the late swim, which ended at 10:30. Then I came home and tackled one of the 4 key scenes from the first part of Graveyards, that I either don’t have or don’t have in the form I’d like. 2100 words of monologue later, I’m part way into one character’s story, feeling my way around inside her mood and her machinations. Any time any character of mine tells someone else something, whether it’s information or their story, there’s an agenda at work. They want something, to make sure what the other person knows is shaped by them, or to engage the other person’s sympathies; they want the other person to take action on their behalf, or not to take action on someone else’s behalf. So many different types of struggle can be waged in words. (I’ve mentioned elsewhere my liking for drama). This monologue will need massive cuts, or it will be 10 000 words long by the time she has covered all the strategic terrain she intends to, but first I must write out everything that comes, and then I will pare it to the essentials, move some parts of it to fill out other scenes. I like the kind of looseness that comes when I stay up until my eyes practically close on their own. Though I will not like the consequences in the morrow. I used to write a lot like this in my 20s; I’m not sure that I had more stamina, maybe I was simply less responsible about maintaining quality of mind for my day-work.

Working on a scene in which a ruler-in-exile meets a man from off-planet she hopes will help restore her to her rightful place. I’m describing what they’re wearing, with in my ears David Gerrold’s plaint (made last year at Rustycon), about women writers who insist on stopping the scene to describe what people are wearing. This he found irrelevant and tedious. Though I piped up that it makes a difference who your viewpoint is: a tailor, for instance, would notice what people are wearing. But I have been rereading some of Baen books free library on my Palm: military SF, and some of those writers go into great detail about military ordnance, its history, its provenance, and its effect on tactics, because it’s all relevant to the story, part of the world building (I like it, but then I like information in a story). I don’t see why clothing should not be viewed in the same way, as a technology, and as world building. I wonder if women writers treat it differently than men. Or whether the divide is between people who have studied history and other cultures and learned to analyse the social languages of clothes. It may be you have to step outside your own culture to be able to understand the language of your own clothes – I know we have one – or several – they seem muted and muddled. And if you haven’t had that perspective, you don’t know just how much clothes say.