Solace and Camouflage

Roaring lioness
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The nights are finally cool enough to leave a window open and sleep through. Trees are burning their summer leaves, letting them drop, and emerging naked from the fire. Rain lingers though the afternoons warm; the ground is damp. The Great Pumpkin approaches.

I can’t wait. My favorite time of the entire year-wheel is upon us. I hate raking leaves, but the joy of being forty-plus is that I don’t have to. There’s always neighborhood kids or landscapers looking for an extra buck, and I will gladly pay for a little peace of mind. The scars on my palms from childhood raking have stretched and whitened, submerging until I can only feel them when I spread my fingers and stay tense for a little while. I’m sure they’ll pain me as I grow older, but that’s fine.

I don’t understand people who fear getting older. Sure, there’s facing your own mortality, but one can die by misadventure, violence, or sickness at the drop of a hat at any age. The further I am from my helpless childhood, the better. I have my own car, my own money, my own home full of things I love. I don’t have to speak to my past tormenters or allow them any of my mental real estate.

And, frankly, the longer I endure the more chance I’ll outlive them, and be granted the real freedom of knowing they’re permanently barred from harming me.

Perhaps that’s why fall is my favorite. It reminds me that I’ve survived so far by hiding under ice and bare branches when necessary, conserving my strength and fire until needed. In the rain, tears can’t be seen, and the blurring of falling water gives me both solace and camouflage.

I write, I run, I care for those under my aegis. But sometimes I stop and take a breath, feeling a bone-deep gladness that I have seen many autumns now and each one takes me further from a horrifying pit of bleak despair.

It’s good to survive. Many don’t, and we who do carry them curled inside us. We carry those who cannot crawl any further, and those who were subsumed in the darkness. Each day we are granted, each day we fight through, is a victory for the forever silent as well as for ourselves.

If you’re carrying, today, try to take a deep breath.

I’m with you. We’re gonna make it.

False Summer

They’re saying it will reach 80F several days this week; false summer has arrived. At least it’ll cool off rapidly at night. I am completely done with sweating from every inch. Some of the trees, heat-stressed and sensing the plummeting temperatures when the sun falls, have already finished turning. I am not sure the dogwood in the back corner will survive to next year; even with the sprinklers it doesn’t get enough water to get it through those hideous days of above 90F.

Thank goodness those are gone. At least until next year.

Sir Boxnoggin has been with us for two months now, give or take a few days, and nobody here can imagine life without him. He’s begun to show even more of his goofy, gooberish self–he was upside-down on my bed last night, twisting to look up at me while I scratched his belly, and I began to laugh. Shy, they said. Low-energy, they said.

They also said he’s three years old, but if this dog is older than two I will eat both my running shoes, without ketchup. He’s still growing, for God’s sake. His paws have mushroomed and that’s a sure sign he’s got more expanding to do. Right now he’s pretty leggy, and I’m hoping he’ll fill out with exercise and plenty of food.

Miss B has found herself acting younger lately too. All the exercise from herding Lord van der Sploot and wrestling with his puppyish self has done her no end of good. She still looks for Odd Trundles sometimes, nosing in corners and uttering her particular motherly bark for him, but all in all Sir Boxnoggin keeps her busy and distracted. A younger dog who treats her just as she treated older dogs when she was much bouncier and chewier is karma, and hilarious to see. They play constantly, and the only break is when someone is in the kitchen and I’m in the office, or when they’re both asleep. Or when one or the other of them takes shelter between my ankles. A few sessions with the spray bottle while they were attempting to wrestle underfoot took care of that.

In short, the canine contingent here at Chez Saintcrow is quite pleased with itself in every degree. They’re ready for fall. Winter running with Lord Boxnoggin may necessitate a jacket to keep him from getting too cold, since he doesn’t have Miss B’s lovely undercoat. I have never dressed a dog before, but I’ll do it for this goober.

I mean, just look at that face.

Off we go, then. Have a good Tuesday, my friends. Mine will include a great deal of barking and wrestling.

Action Bits

I walked away from social media last week after finishing the revisions, and it was…pretty nice. The Maiden’s Blade is now back with the editor, and I thought I’d give it a couple days before diving into the next huge task.

Instead, I spent a few days watching documentaries, cleaning the house, and spending long dinner hours with the kids. I kept glaring at my to-do list, hoping that something on it would begin to sound vaguely do-able, but I was so drained and exhausted the thought of starting another round of revisions–or pushing to complete a zero draft–made me want to spill out of my chair and rest, weeping aimlessly, on the office floor.

So, yeah. It was time to do some cleaning. All the loose paper is off my desk and filed, I hoovered twice, plants have been watered and the kitchen scrubbed, the windowsills have been dusted and polished, I drank a LOT of coffee, and the dogs got twice-daily walkies.

Which all means I’m ready for something new on a Monday. The next thing on my list is Steelflower 3 revisions–at least that bloody zero is done–but I might spent the day working on Incorruptible instead. I’m in the mood for writing romance, and I’ve got the main characters in a truck heading west. It’s about time to start getting them into trouble, and maybe I can stage a shootout in a nice hotel or two today. Or a falling elevator, that would be swell. Add in a car accident and there will be lots of room for love to flower, right?

…I may have to just write the action bits, I’m not sure it’s in me to write any smexxors today. Though, as I’ve said before, the two are very close–you want tension rising to a crescendo1 and a short curve downward after. Tension, explosion, falling action.

Regardless, it’s time for another jolt of coffee, some deep breathing, and getting my running shoes laced. Sir Boxnoggin needs some fidgets burned off, and Miss B might even get to come along if she promises to behave reasonably.

She probably won’t, but that’s a problem for later. Right now I’m off for more coffee.

Over and out, Monday.

Bridging

The season has turned; it’s much cooler at night now and the crickets, cicadas, and frogs are taking notice. There’s a frenzy of insects eating and mating before it gets even colder, and the spiders are well placed to take advantage. A spiderweb is math and engineering made flesh, and it delights me. (Though I really hate math, and have since myself second-grade teacher used to shake kids who got the wrong answer.)

Between the two pillars of birth and death, we weave. Fall is a time to remember that, and look up from our work before winter’s long nights arrive.

Very Little Brain

On Monday, I added net 8k words to The Maiden’s Blade in the process of getting the last third revised. Yesterday morning I finished a few small detail bits and sent the whole shebang off to my editor, who was no doubt relieved that I hadn’t run away with the manuscript clenched firmly in my jaws never to return.

I mean, I thought about it, but the prospect of carrying that 180k motherfucker for even a mile makes me tired. I spent the rest of yesterday doing errands and staring at a Resident Evil movie or two.

Today I am a bear of exceeding little brain, and will be folding laundry or doing other chores that don’t require much in the way of decision-making. I am all decided out, my friends. And tomorrow I move to the next thing on my list–revisions on the next Steelflower book.

No rest for the wicked or the weary, but there might be a day of little brain to perform all the minutiae of daily life that adds up when you spend weeks buried inside an epic fantasy. Things need to be dusted, hoovered, washed, dried, put away instead of just in a pile. The dogs, no doubt, will be very interested in the process, and Sir Boxnoggin in particular will want to help.

He is a dog of Very Much Help. If his nose isn’t in whatever you’re doing, just wait thirty seconds. Miss B, today, is a Dog of Very Much Herding, and she is nipping at Boxnoggin’s heels to induce him to be Even More Helpful.

…I’m already tired. Maybe I should go back to bed. Except then the dogs would pile on, and any rest I achieved short-lived indeed.

Onward and upward, my friends. Onward and upward, over and out.

Scene of the Crime

Ouch.

So yesterday while I was blogging the dogs took it upon themselves to show this rabbit–and its belly-squeaker–who was boss. They worked together in true pack fashion and stuffing-guts were strewn in multiple locations. Forensics would have a hell of a time piecing it together, but we think the attack started in the living room, moved to my bedroom, and finished in the office, where you see the corpse’s final positioning here along with some splatter.

We still haven’t found the squeaker. And neither dog shows any evidence of contrition. In fact, this morning they’ve moved on to a tiny stuffed bear…

Zero to First

Yesterday afternoon the east grew dark, and the first rumble of thunder drove both dogs under my desk. Apparently the safest space in the world is between my ankles–Odd always thought so, Miss B is continuing the tradition and furthermore teaching Sir Boxnoggin its ways.

Which means both my feet had largish doggos resting upon them, and turned into numb bits of meat by the time the sky cleared. It also meant I had to coax both of them outside to pee.

The things we do for love, right?

I should tell you guys about how BattleJay discovered Batgirl’s theft of his ill-gotten peanut gains, but that can wait for a different day. Instead, let’s talk about revision.

I’m currently in the wilds of The Maiden’s Blade, going sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, to make it better. The first draft was okay, and when the edit letter landed it was full of ways to make the entire book better, stronger, faster, deeper. You can’t fix problems you can’t see, and that’s the purpose of edit letters: to show you the holes and the thin-paper bits.

But there’s that spot between the zero draft–when the corpse is finally out of your head, whole and entire, lying on the table–and the first draft, which is the version you can finally let someone else (a writing partner, a long-suffering agent, or an editor) see. I tend to produce really clean first drafts and by the time I get them done I’m sick of the book and can’t see the forest for the trees, so I feel confident enough giving them to my agent. Your mileage may vary, of course, but there comes a time when you can’t chew the piece anymore and have to get it out of your teeth one way or another. Figuring out when that time is takes practice and finishing your pieces, however short, but that’s–say it with me–another blog post.

So, here are some things you can focus on to turn a zero draft into a respectable first.

Set it aside.

This is in many ways the most important step. You’ve finished a zero draft, a large and very intense expenditure of mental, physical, and emotional energy. Give the engine in your head some time to cool off and come down from redline. Give yourself a prize for sticking with it and crossing the finish line, and put the damn thing in a folder or a desk drawer for at least a week. (A short story or poem may take less time to recover from, but don’t bet on it.) The time away is necessary for recovery, a sense of proportion, and whatever sanity those afflicted by the Muse can lay claim to.

Kill “that” and dialogue tags.

When you do go back, there are simple things you can look for to tighten the draft immeasurably. “That” is unnecessary nine times out of ten, it is largely a weasel word and I despise its use. If you can delete it, do. And dialogue tags (he said, she whispered, they moaned) do very little to move the story along. A dialogue tag is almost always a missed opportunity for a descriptive or action tag, and since every sentence ideally must advance the action, show us something about the character, or provide us with information about the world the story inhabits, you do not have time or space for unnecessary “they said”s.

Two out of three ain’t bad.

Yes, ideally every sentence, no matter how small, fulfills all three requirements. But screws fall out, the world is an imperfect place, so on, so forth, so try to aim for getting two out of three as often as possible. This is far easier to do when you have the whole corpse of the story out so you can see the direction events are tending and have a structure already in place to work with.

Look for “crutch” words.

One of the things I’ve grown to like about Scrivener is the project statistics function, where I can look for crutch words–those words I’ve fallen in love with over the course of a story and use with improper abandon. They change with each piece, and only the Muse knows why this happens, but unless you’re deliberately playing with a word for artistic purposes, the repetition will be off-putting for your readers.

Crush passive voice.

This one has been covered extensively. Unless you’re deliberately slowing the pacing down or need passive voice for a defined, conscious reason–for example, to highlight that a character is abdicating responsibility, especially inside their own head–passive voice is weasel voice, and it will only slow you down and bore your reader.

Make conscious choices.

Writing takes different mental muscles than revising. When I’m in the heat of creation, I don’t care if I’m using passive voice or if I’m using a crutch to get along. Anything that gets the story out of my head is permissible. While revising I need to make sure that if I’m breaking rules of grammar, story, etc., I am doing it consciously instead of slapdash. Part of an editor’s function is to challenge a writer’s choices to make sure the imperfect ones are deliberately imperfect, so to speak, but between the zero and first draft the onus is on you-the-writer. You can certainly break the rules, but you need to know them in order to break them effectively, and the transition to zero to first is the best place to begin questioning every choice and making sure it’s the one you want.

Notice I don’t say the “right” choice; I say “the one you want.”

Say it out loud.

If it’s dialogue, does it honestly sound like something that particular character would say? Reading aloud is also good for combat or sex scenes (if you can overcome blushes at the latter) because it will show you where the pacing is off. Controlling how fast the reader moves through a paragraph during a combat or sex scene, where you want the rising tension and the payoff in specific places, is hard. Noticing where the natural breath-stops are in dialogue and in action will help you nudge the reader further into caring about what’s going on by making them hold their breath through a long sentence or chopping things up into short bits to achieve a strobe effect. Punctuation isn’t just a necessary evil, it’s a means of helping your reader extract the most from your story on a very basic level. Plus, if you have to do a reading, you’ll thank yourself for the practice.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but squeaky toys can only keep the dogs occupied for so long and I’ve got to get them out the door for a run before their fidgets drive both me and them crazy. The space between zero and first is fraught, but it’s also a chance to get the worst unconscious mistakes out of the way so the conscious ones aren’t lost and so your work has a shot of impressing someone who’ll pay you cash for it.

Because even writers have to eat, you know. Let alone a writer’s children, or their wonderful, maddening, energetic dogs.

Over and out.