Val Neil

Dark Fantasy Author

blog

Writing Pains

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Last year I had pain in my hip and legs, to the point I was developing a limp. Sitting anywhere but the couch was painful. I spent several months in physical therapy and figured it was a combination of me sitting too much, being overweight and hitting middle age. I did the exercises and tried to stay away from my desk as much as I could (difficult, given how much I use the computer). Eventually it stopped, in part because I spent more time away from my desk.

Shortly after all this, I decided to create a new writing area for myself upstairs. Downstairs I have a desk and PC. The problem is that I get constant interruptions from the kids (and birds) when I work there. Since the PC is faster than my laptop and only has a single screen, it’s also 99% more likely that I’ll goof off and multitask on my PC. It was also getting annoying to constantly switch files from PC to laptop and back whenever I went to a cafe to write (I do back up, but don’t use the cloud to synchronize Scrivener).

So I created a second work area in my bedroom consisting of a folding table and chair, and my laptop. It’s helped reduce some of my aforementioned frustrations. A couple of weeks ago I sprung for a proper chair to use upstairs. I got the same $99 model I had downstairs from Costco:

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I’m short. Not ridiculously short, but enough that it makes a difference. As soon as I assembled the chair and sat down, I realized my mistake. The chair is too high. Even on the lowest setting, I can’t put my feet flat on the floor. You’d think I’d remember this, having a second model downstairs, but I’d been using the folding table upstairs for months, and when I used by PC downstairs I got used to propping my feed up on the subwoofer. I hate making returns, so I stuck a box under my table to prop up my feet and called it adequate.

Two weeks later, the pain in my leg/hip came back with a vengeance and I finally put two and two together. My pain last year began after I got a new office chair downstairs, vanished when I stopped using the desk and switched to a folding chair upstairs, then returned when I got a duplicate desk chair upstairs. Ergonomics!

Now, I’m not slamming this particular model. It’s a good chair. It’s just too damned high for short little me to put my feet flat on the floor, and apparently that’s enough to really screw up my hip.

Looks like I’ll have to bite the bullet and try to return my new chair.

Muddle in the Middle

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Oh boy. It’s been a hellava month. As you can see here and here, I’ve been struggling to get through chapter 21. I finally did it, but then chapter 22 didn’t flow and I was right back where I started.

One of my struggles has been whether or not to include Medea’s POV. When I wrote the story, it was incredibly entertaining watching two very different personalities clash on the page. The problem was that I needed to make a plot out of what was essentially banter and training montage.

I succeeded, taking Nikolai’s little problem, which was originally solved immediately, and stretching it out over the course of the novel. What’s happening to him and why? Is it Medea? If not her, then who? It’s a mystery he has to solve.

Yay! I had a plot! Problem solved, right? Not exactly. This particular plot meant the reader couldn’t know Medea’s intentions. At all. It turned a character driven story into a plot driven one, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, this story works better when you can see both sides.

Still, I didn’t see how I could add Medea and have it work. In the original drafts, she’s a static character. There’s nothing for her to do. She’s just trying to train Nikolai the same way she’s trained a bunch of other wannabe dark wizards. Later in the series she has more to do, but she didn’t here. Also, it would kill a big reveal of her motivations at the end.

I toyed with adding her. I even wrote inserts for her, and rewrote a few scenes from her perspective. All of it sat in my Scrivener notes. I kept agonizing over it but didn’t want to mess with my main draft.

Then two things happened.

1. I got stuck in the middle. Part of the issue was that some chapters were falling flat. They felt boring. They were boring, because even though I knew everything going on behind the scenes, Nikolai and the reader didn’t. So it felt like “why is this scene even here?” Knowing Medea’s motivations make them work because the reader gets dramatic irony.

2. A friend of mine beta read the first few chapters and said with absolute conviction, “put her in.” This particular friend writes romance, a genre that is all about character-driven plots.

So I put her in, and suddenly my mess of “Where do I put this scene? Argh I can’t get this cause-effect chain to work!” was gone. I went from this to this:

[First image of multiple chapters with duplicate numbers, all out of order. Second image is clean chapters 20 through 26.]

Not only that, I’ve been able to dramatically up the tension in the middle of my book. I got to let Nikolai do something incredibly stupid that I’ve been dying for him to do, but couldn’t because it didn’t work in the old draft without him going off on a tangent. The way it’s written now, his behavior makes absolute sense within the context of the scene.

Hopefully it keeps flowing. I have about seven chapters left in my developmental edit.

Copyright © 2019 Val Neil. All rights reserved.

New Rule

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Me two days ago: I made it work! That sounds terrible to say, like if I had to “make” it work, then it shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

Me today: New rule. If you have to force it to fit the plotline, it doesn’t belong there.

Did I make some of my tricky scenes fit? Hell yes I did. Do they belong? Eh…

Here’s the issue. My manuscript is currently sitting at around 123k words. That’s after cutting 5300 words yesterday. But it’s fantasy! Fantasy is supposed to be long (I tell myself). Well yes, but the beginning of my book swelled from five brief chapters to nine based on reader feedback. I was moving too fast, not bothering to immerse the reader or even really explain the magic system because I was in a rush to get to what I thought of as the meat of the story.

Now that my beginning itself is meatier, the bulky subplots make the rest of the text seem bloated. I mean I could pull a George R.R. Martin and do almost 300k words right out of the gate, but this isn’t high/epic fantasy and I really need to do a good job of capturing readers with this first book, which means pacing is extremely important. Readers going into book 2 should be more invested in the characters and I’m probably safe to meander a bit, though that didn’t help with Holy Sister, which did so much treading water that I moved on to something else despite my love of Nona.

So I’m going to cut out the whole telepathy plotline and a lot of other minor training sequences, for several reasons:

  • The first subplot I cut played heavily into this other subplot, and left gaping holes upon its exit.
  • These two plotlines really work better if kept together.
  • These subplots are so large that they’re taking time away from the core conflict, which is not only killing tension, it’s causing me to briefly mention things in narrative that really need their own scenes.

cuts2

Combined with the scenes I’ve already trimmed, if I cut these I’ll have roughly 28k of cool stuff going into the next novel, which makes me feel a lot better honestly. It also gives me wiggle room if I want to add Medea’s POV

Copyright © 2019 Val Neil. All rights reserved.

 

Finished revising Chapter 21!

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7/26/2019

I made it work! That sounds terrible to say, like if I had to “make” it work, then it shouldn’t have been there in the first place. But damnit, writing is pretty much nonstop making things work. As much as I hate editing, there’s a real beauty to it when you see how the story evolves and gets better. Like “hello good story! I knew you were in there somewhere!” Polish that turd, people.

I had to go back to Ch 20 and add a couple of paragraphs to head off the “Medea’s reading his mind” issue. Now Nikolai at least has the tools to block her. Although she did leave those tools where he can find them, so who’s to say how effective they are?

Approaching the midpoint in my revisions. I’m definitely considering moving the Predator/Prey chapters to book 2. When I wrote the sequence I had writer’s block, and I used the old trick “have your protagonist get attacked by monkeys/ninjas.” In my case, Nikolai gets jumped by witch hunters. It’s a fun sequence that shows his darker side as he has no real reason to hold back. The scene did indeed help me get over the block and provided a great segue for bullet training (which has since been punted to book 2).

The problem is it doesn’t fit the throughline for book 1, and would actually fit the story for book 2 a lot better. When I started writing this series I had a general idea of how many books it would take and what would be in each. But I hadn’t yet written a novel. I worried about having enough content for book one. As I started writing, I realized that book 1 had content for like three books. When all is said and done, my projected 8-book series may end up being longer. I hope I can streamline my writing/editing process over the next few years so I can get them out at a decent rate.

Copyright © 2019 Val Neil. All rights reserved.

Chapter 21- This Bitch Right Here

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Chapter 21 has been giving me so many problems. And I’m in the revising section I thought would be easy. Right now the struggle is “where do I go?” with this chapter.

It’s telepathy training. The scene was originally a humorous training sequence. Except now I’m weaving darker plot elements into it and it’s not working so well. Dialogue that was once comedic banter is now overshadowed by the possibility that Medea is reading Nikolai’s mind. So now when he asks leading questions, I have to account for “but if she was reading his mind here, then she’d know X and her response could be interpreted Y.”

Do I hold off telepathy training for book 2? If I do that, there’s not much training left. I need some motherfucking magic in my motherfucking book on magical training. I could technically yank the whole telepathy subplot and it would work, but it would remove a lot of novelty/fun.

Copyright © 2019 Val Neil. All rights reserved.