To write a novel with lots of subplots and arcs that need to intertwine, a writer needs to 1) keep track of what’s going on offstage in all the threads that aren’t currently at the front and in focus, and 2) make sure he/she doesn’t focus on only one plot thread at a time for too long (because that makes for lumpy, uneven pacing, and in extreme cases, for readers who’ve forgotten half of the important things going on).

Basically, keeping track means taking notes and updating them regularly. There’s no other way to do it, really, unless you have an eidetic memory. Notes can be done in advance or after-the-fact, or both at once (if you check in at the end of every scene, you’re also checking in before the beginning of every scene that comes next). I’m a check-in-after/before-every-scene writer; before I start in on a scene, I want to have some idea what’s going on in each of my subplots. And since my scenes rarely go quite the way I’d planned, I need to look at them as soon as I’m done writing them and figure out how what did happen onstage is going to affect the way all the offstage plots are developing, which in turn will affect what the next scene is and what happens in it.

One of the ways I keep track is with a calendar, because most of my stories are told in chronological order over a period of weeks or longer. I usually set up a one-month template in Excel (because it gives me more control than a real-life calendar program) and as I write each scene, I log in what happened, time and viewpoint (if those are relevant or not obvious), place, and any important events (e.g. “G and J picnic in Central Park; Uncle W interrupts; J loses necklace”). This gives me a picture of what my characters actually have done (as opposed to what I’d planned) and when, and whether it’s plausible to have G foil the villain’s bank robbery in Paris at 3 p.m. when he was picnicing in New York with J at 11 a.m.

For the Frontier Magic books, I had a list of what-happened by year and how old the main character was (because those three books cover nearly twenty years). I also had a chapter summary at the start of each draft chapter that said something like “1843 – Eff is four/five; family leaves for Mill City late summer” so that if I had to move scenes or bits of narrative around, I’d have some idea whether I’d have to check all the age and date references or not (if they went in the next chapter, “1843 – Eff is five; arrival and settling in to new house” then no; if the bits moved three chapters forward to “1849 – Eff is 10; Eff is 11; McNeil Expedition leaves town,” then definitely yes.)

Making sure you don’t focus on just one plot thread at a time again requires awareness, first of all. Once you know it’s something you need to do, there are two basic techniques for doing it: first, you balance the scenes, interleaving the various plot threads so you don’t have eight action scenes in a row and then eight romantic ones; second, you incorporate more than one plot thread into the same scene as often as possible.

One technique for balancing the focus is making a color-coded scene list. Again, you can do this before you start writing, build it as you write, or use it as a tool for analyzing your first draft once it’s complete. List the scenes in the order that they appear in your manuscript (“G and J picnic” “L kidnapped” “Q steals secret bomb plans”) and then color code them according to whether they’re part of the main action plot, the sidekick’s romance, the annoying little brother’s subplot, etc. If things are well interwoven, the list will end up looking like a rainbow, with colors changing quickly; if not, it’ll look like large blocks of color stacked one on top of another with little overlap.

When I do this, I get a zillion different colors of Post-It-Notes and assign them to the different plotlines, then lay them out in order on the dining room table. This lets me move scenes around easily once I’ve noticed that I have six bright green Post-Its in a row and then no green ones at all for the next 20 scenes. Using Post-Its also means they stick to the table so the cats can’t scatter them all over. Also, I can stick two different-colored Post-Its together when I realize that I can have the kidnapping happen during the romantic picnic and get a scene that’s a two-fer. I also look for scenes that I can delete entirely. You don’t actually have to dramatize everything, just because you can; it’s OK sometimes to say “After three hours of shopping, they finally had all the parts for the bomb” instead of writing three scenes where they stop at different hardware stores to buy what they need.

Incorporating more than one plot thread into the same scene uses exactly the same sort of skills that writers use to put plot, characterization, and background into the same scene, or dialog, action, and summary. There will be some scenes that can only do one thing – it doesn’t make sense for the hero to stop in the middle of the crucial fight with the villain to worry about his grandmother’s illness, for instance – but a lot of the time, you can work two or more subplots together (as in the action-kidnapping interrupting the romantic-picnic mentioned above).

This multiple-plotlines-per-scene technique is particularly painless when two or more characters are in a position to talk for a while. Whether it’s a tea party scene or two characters talking on the bus or at the water cooler, conversations can be full of gossip that covers several other characters’ romances or financial problems (and their associated plotlines) in addition to whatever planning/plotting/clues the scene was originally thought up to provide. The trick here is usually to pick one main subject of conversation (presumably whatever the point/plotline the scene is supposed to focus on), and then look for places where the characters would naturally get off course and talk a bit about seeing George at the bar with a shady-looking character last night, or just how Jin is supporting her shopping addiction. One can also occasionally have such a scene interrupted by a phone call, letter, or the arrival of someone new with a message, which gives the illusion of bringing some of the offstage developments onstage temporarily.

Also, do remember that for a lot of writers, doing this kind of in-depth scene-balancing analysis is something that’s only necessary when they’re stuck or when there’s a problem that they can’t put their finger on. I don’t haul out the Post-Its for every book I write, and even when I do, I don’t always haul them out in advance.

Which means I am now looking at my huge list of Possible Things To Write and contemplating which idea(s) to start poking at. My agent has weighed in, and so have several of my friends; they’re all pretty much in agreement, so unless my publisher gets really demanding about some other possibility (and does so pretty soon, before I’m totally committed to this project), I probably have settled on The Next Thing.

And what it started with was this:

No shit, there I was –

What, you don’t like the opening?  Listen, it’s fairy tales that start “once upon a time.”  War stories are supposed to start “No shit, there I was.”

So, no shit, there I was, thread in one hand, needle in the other, and a silk bolt worth four thousand isiri spread over my lap, when -

Now what?  Oh, you think this doesn’t sound much like a war story?

In the last few weeks of thinking about this rather minimal story-seed, I added a McGuffin (although I have no idea yet why it’s significant), a notion of what happens in the first half of the opening scene, and the barest hint of a plot thread. Oh, and two, count them, two secondary characters, one of whom probably won’t be around for more than two chapters, tops.

This is not much to start writing a novel with.

I could just take what I have and keep writing for a while, to see what happens and what I come up with. I already know, however, that this seldom works well for me, so I’m not going to start by trying that. I need to develop what I have a bit more, until it gets past the Critical Mass point and really starts rolling, and that means poking at what I have until new things show up and start to gel.

The question always is, where and how to poke. Up until last weekend, the obvious point to poke at this story was the characters. The story needs more of them, and I need to know more about the few that I already have (well, about two of them, anyway. I don’t think I really need to know much more about the one who’s disappearing within two or three chapters). And characters and what they want or need (but can’t have…yet) are the heart of most stories.

So I’ve been thinking about these people off and on: who they are, where they come from, what they’re each trying to do and why. I was thinking about the second character, the one who’s not the protagonist but who will be a major player, and why that was happening…and I figured out something about the McGuffin. And suddenly, I had a structure for my plot.

As soon as this happened, where I need to poke at this idea changed. See, structure is fundamental for me. It’s what goes under the plot, to hold it up. What I need to know next, for me to be able to finish that first scene, is what I’m going to build on that structure and why. Once I know that, I’ll know who the rest of the characters have to be and what they’ll have to do. Undoubtedly, that will change the plot – once I have characters and they start acting and interacting, they always end up changing the plot details. That’s what makes it all work, for me.

But the characters and incidents won’t change the structure. That’s solid. I know how many incidents I need, and the effect they have on the McGuffin; now I need to figure out what they are and why the villain set things up this way and how they’re going to affect my characters. (I’m not too worried about how my heroine is going to mess up the villain’s plans; after that opening, I have no doubt she’ll think of something.) Oh, and I need a villain…the structure requires one.

If this were going to be a different book, or if it had started with a different set of bits – say, a well-developed setting and a bunch of characters, but no plot or structure – I’d probably have started by poking at the characters. The point isn’t how I’m doing this, or that anyone else ought to work the same way. The point here is: 1) The basic idea needs a lot more development before I can make much forward progress; 2) The development doesn’t just happen; it requires poking; 3) Where I poke keeps changing, depending on how much I’ve already figured out.

Changing where I poke at ideas is part of the process of developing them. I don’t make up a list of characters, then figure out everything about their backgrounds and personalities and desires before I ever start thinking about plot or setting. I think about a character for a bit, then about the McGuffin for a bit, then about a different character, then maybe about the setting/history/culture.

This morning, in conversation with Beth-my-walking-buddy, I got a handle on the villain, and the whole plot changed. So did one of my two supposedly-known secondary characters. The structure’s still the same, though, and so’s the McGuffin; a little more background, and I’ll be ready to start writing my first totally-wrong outline.

(Julie D, I’ll put up the post on agents on Sunday, when I’ve had a chance to think about it a bit more.)

Second, one of my cousins is taking a marketing class and needs a variety of people from all over to answer a survey. It’s only two questions, so if you have a minute to pop over, it would be much appreciated.

And speaking of the book, I thought maybe folks would like an update. I’m supposed to be finished by next Monday. I’m not completely sure I’ll make it; it took me 17 chapters to get them out of town this time, and the outbound leg of their trip is taking a lot longer than I expected, mainly because it has suddenly dawned on me that I have a trilogy’s worth of plot lines to bring together in the last ten or so chapters, and I’d better get started.

For those who are interested: there will be quite a bit more of the mammoth in The Far West than there was in either Thirteenth Child or Across the Great Barrier, and I apologize for making you wait so long for it. Also, I finally talked my Cathayan Master Adept character into paying a visit to Mill City (she was supposed to show up in Across the Great Barrier, but she absolutely refused to waste her time that way). It’s a very short visit, unfortunately, but it means that there will be at least a little more about Hijero-Cathayan style magic and the Cathayan Confederacy.

Once the first draft is done and turned in, I get to take a short break (emphasis on “short”). I’m planning to be at Wiscon this year, though I’m not on any programming, and Elizabeth Bear, Lois Bujold, and I will be giving a pre-convention writing workshop for Fourth Street Fantasy convention in June. Somewhere in there, I’ll have to have a talk with my agent about the perennial What To Write Next question. I’ll probably get the editorial revision requests in July or early August, which means odds are good that they’ll overlap with the release of Across the Great Barrier, and since I really don’t want to wait until September to start Whatever The Next Book Is, I’ll probably be too busy to think straight for a couple of weeks.

Minor miscellaneous jobs include the aforementioned update of the web page, reviewing the spring royalty statements (which are due at the end of April and May) and finishing the update to the royalty tracking database, a long skull session with my agent regarding all sorts of subrights, and swapping out the research materials for the last three books from the shelves near my computer to the main reference shelves (which are farther away). I also will probably need to do a fair amount of research for Whatever The Next Book Is, one way or another. Oh, and updating my Quicken categories to make next year’s taxes easier, because they changed some of the lines again.

And that’s just the writing stuff. There are dust T. Rexes under the bed, I have about eight loads of laundry stacked up, and there are still at least four large boxes of my mother’s fabric stash to sort through and perhaps turn into something wearable. I have ongoing paperwork to do for my mother’s estate, and I really ought to plan something for my Dad’s 91st birthday besides a phone call! If I’m going to plant basil this year, I need to get the seeds started now, and dig over the garden as soon as it stops raining. The cats need vet appointments for their annual shots. I am at least 400 books behind on my To Read shelf. And let’s not even talk about the UFOs (UnFinished Objects) that are my knitting and cross-stitch projects.

In other words, my life is pretty much like everyone else’s – full to bursting with Stuff To Do, and unlikely to change any time soon. But right now, I have a hot cup of tea, one cat on my lap (who is purring loudly because she is making me sit sideways to type, which always pleases her greatly) and another cat perched on top of the computer pillar in Standard Cat Meatloaf Position #3, and I’m going back to finish up Chapter 22. Life is good.

It came out six and a half pages long.

What I had initially thought was going to be a brief reminder of several bits of backstory with maybe a tiny bit of foreshadowing that could be useful in the future, all in tight summary form, became six pages of action and conversation involving nine named characters (old and new) and several unnamed spear-carriers. The dialog is, I hope, colored by the different attitudes the various characters have toward each other, the varying positions of authority they occupy, the differing sorts of magic they have, and a couple of things that are going on so far off stage that I’m not sure they’ll even end up getting into the book.

I like the scene very much, but it’s certainly not what I had planned when I sat down to write.

This is why I have to keep revising my plot outlines, even when I’m supposed to be three-quarters done with something. It’s also why I can never use the sort of plot-planning worksheets and programs that seem to be beloved by so many, not even to work things out that are only a chapter away. Because I can’t actually predict which of my events and plot-points are going to be scenes or chapters and which are going to end up being a two-paragraph summary.

This is also why I can’t “write ahead,” the way some writers do. There are some upcoming scenes that are going to be affected by the fallout from this particular incident, if only because several of the characters who had not previously encountered each other have now met and formed opinions of each other. A now worries that B is going to undercut his authority, while C was favorably impressed by B and D, and E is having to suppress his jealousy a lot earlier than I’d expected.

As far as plot goes, at least two future incidents that I’d been considering are no longer possible at all unless sabotage is involved…hmm…. (What? Oh, sorry, distracted for a minute there.) And I’m not going to need the scenes I’d planned for later that establish all the various things I talked about in the last paragraph, because now they’ve already been established in this scene. They’ll need development, but that will happen differently from the way I’d planned, too, and therefore it will require different scenes. And so on.

If I’d gone ahead and written the scene at the river that’s coming up about three weeks in my character’s future (and that is supposed to go in the next chapter somewhere, though I’m beginning to doubt that I’ll get there that fast), I’d have to, at best, tear it apart to make all the relationships and reactions consistent with what just happened. At worst, I’d have to bin the whole thing and start over. If I’d written the heart-to-heart talk between D and E, I’d have had to pitch the whole scene, period – after this, it’s just not going to happen. And there are a couple of new possibilities for A and C and G that I hadn’t even thought about until I got to the end of this scene and saw how they were interacting.

My backbrain is a lot smarter than I am. Sometimes, this is depressing to contemplate, but at least it does interesting things to my books.

Not “wrong” in the sense that I’d gotten cause and effect reversed (you know, the sort of thing where someone’s suffering from a gunshot wound before the gun has actually been fired, or deducing information from a clue they haven’t found yet). Wrong in the sense that one subplot had taken over, resulting in a whole lot of too-similar scenes in a row. Also wrong in the sense that the order of the scenes, if closely examined, didn’t build up the way it needed too.

I ended up scraping the entire ms. back to paragraph 2 and starting over. I have now, finally, come nearly back to the end of the material I’d supposedly already covered, so I thought I’d update you on the situation.

The ms. is twice as long as it was in its original form, because there are scenes from several more subplots interspersed with the original scenes. The first-round material is now in a much more sensible order, has more logical reason behind it, and isn’t so repetetive. The characters are, as usual, filling up far more time than I expected with clearing up important loose ends – they were supposed to have been on the road long before this, but what can you do? Scenes that happened in midwinter now happen in midsummer, which meant keeping a careful eye on the descriptive bits and stage business so that I didn’t end up with people shaking snow off their coats in August.

I don’t call this kind of thing “revising,” though there’s really no reason not to except personal preference. I call it “rewriting” or “redrafting.” It’s a way of fooling my backbrain into considering the story from a completely new angle. I’m not just patching up gaping holes in the roof; I’m building a whole new roof, though I do get to reuse some of the old material, if it’s in good enough shape. It’s a matter of attitude.

The other thing about this kind of do-over is that this time, I didn’t end up wasting months agonizing about whether I really had to do it and looking for ways to salvage the work I’d done without going back to zero and rewriting the whole plot. I’ve done this twice before, and each time, it took me nearly a year to suck it up and ditch the chapters that had to be ditched. That’s a year of wasted time, because I wasn’t actually making forward progress on anything, just waffling and complaining and agonizing about how I wasn’t getting anywhere. Third time’s the charm, I guess.

I’m going through all this partly because I promised I’d keep people updated, but also because…well, because it’s one of the hard parts about being a writer. (Which is why it took nine to fourteen months to psych up to do it the first two times I did it.) I am hopeful that the fact that it only took me a week to recognize and admit the fundamental problem this time means that next time (and I’m sure that there will be a next time, though I hope it’s a few more books down the road) I will notice sooner and be able to fix it faster. Because the earlier you spot this kind of thing, the less you have to rewrite and the easier the whole process is.

Now all I have to do is finish the darned thing.

I should know better than to say things like that out loud where the Universe can hear me.

By noon on Wednesday, it was clear that my writing had hit what I refer to as “a sticky bit.” Things were not proceeding well, or, indeed, at all. I did not make my word quota on Wednesday, and I went to bed grumpy.

Thursday morning, while walking and talking with Beth-my-exercise-buddy, I had an unpleasant epiphany: the last couple of chapters are all wrong. One of the returning characters was working spells that were seriously overpowered for his supposed level of ability, among other things. That meant one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half chapters needed some serious rewriting.

I spent Thursday pondering options. I did not make my word count that day, either.

Friday morning, I had an even more unpleasant epiphany: not only was there a whole lot wrong with the particular returning character’s behavior and abilities, the series of events in the main plot thread were in the wrong order. The structure of the opening chapters was all wrong.

After another two days of pondering, I have realized that I have to scrape the ms. back to Chapter One, Paragraph Three, and essentially start over. This means that my word count for the week is into five figures, and not the low five figures, either, and I am not a happy camper. It also means that I get to spend tomorrow finishing up a redrawn plot outline, and November trying to catch up to where I’m supposed to be if I hadn’t gone so wrong in the first place.

Coincidentally, this is going to involve writing about 50,000 words in the month of November, houseguests notwithstanding.

I did not bring this up in order to whine about it (whining about it is merely a happy side effect, from my point of view). I brought it up so I could explain how I went wrong and maybe someone else can learn from my mistakes.

When I started work on this book, I had a magical critter which was new to my characters, and which they were trying to investigate (it poses a considerable threat). Lots of offstage characters came to help out, with varying degrees of success, but only three of them rated scenes actually showing them working on the critter in the lab. Call the outside helpers Jack, Sue, and Mary. Each of them has a different kind of magic; each of them has a different level of magical power and skill.

In the soon-to-be-dumped draft, Mary’s scene came first, then Sue’s, then Jack’s. This was plausible given the chronology and travel distances I’m working with, but there’s no deep structure behind it. Upon consideration it seems to me that I put them in that order because I was really looking forward to writing about Mary and Sue, so I did them first. It was fun, but the result just isn’t working the way I need it to.

The problem is that Jack is the least powerful and least skilled of the magicians; Sue is the most powerful. But because I had Jack’s scene come last, that was where certain vital information came out (see “character was overpowered,” above). This does not display Sue’s abilities to advantage; it also weakens her motivation for taking some plot-critical actions (because she doesn’t have that key information yet). In addition, it makes Jack look a whole lot more important to the central storyline than I expect him to be.

I’m still considering the most desireable fix for all this. This sequence of events needs to build to a point that will provide enough plot-energy (information, in this case) to launch the next stage of my story. That means stacking the most powerful magician (Sue) with the most critical information at the end of the sequence, in order to get the most bang from the scene. So Sue’s scene should come last.

I can make an argument either way for Mary and Jack, because they’re each important to a different subplot, and the subplots have different weights; also, they’re doing different types of magic. If I want to build the opening strictly on the basis of magical power and skill, then the order should be Jack-Mary-Sue; if I’m going more by the increasing relevance and importance of each character (and his/her subplot) to my central character, then Mary should come before Jack.

Either way I do it, I’m going to have to rework everything from Paragraph 3 on, because all the other scenes in those chapters are setting up for things, or reacting to things, in ways that will change significantly when the order of the Sue, Mary, and Jack scenes changes.

This is what comes of plunging in and tearing off without thinking things through (at least, this is what comes of it when I do it. Some people are quite successful at working like this on a regular basis. At the moment, I don’t want to hear about them, though).

This is one of those too-obvious-to-mention things that a lot of writers seem to forget on occasion. In at least some cases, I think the cause is related to the intensely media-heavy world we live in – when one is used to seeing what everything looks like, all at once, the way one does in a movie or a picture, it can be difficult to slow down and describe things one at a time, the way one must when one is working with words and sentences and paragraphs. In other cases, I suspect the problem is that the author is so familiar with the setting that, for them, one word or a short phrase is enough to evoke it: “Chicago,” “New York,” “D.C.” In still other cases, the author is so afraid of making a mistake that they leave out everything that is not absolutely essential, resulting in a story where they characters might as well be wandering around in a thick gray fog.  And sometimes, the author wants to use a setting that is imaginary, or at least unfamiliar to them, but they’re too busy or in too much of a hurry to do the work of making or looking it up in as much depth as they need.

Yet setting is something that affects nearly every aspect of a story, one way or another. Accurate portrayals of a real-life place will please or delight readers who are familiar with that place already, and often impress readers who haven’t yet been there. The first time I saw the movie “The Sting” (set in Chicago in the 1930s), I was utterly delighted by the fact that periodically there would be this loud rumbling and all of the characters would have to stop talking for a minute. I’d never seen anything set in Chicago that included the effect of the El on conversation (the El = elevated trains – that’s what made the rumbling). My first real job, the summer after high school, was a block from the El, and that’s exactly what happened.

There are two parts to writing a setting, whether it’s a real place or an imaginary one: 1) Putting in the key things that make this place different from any other, and 2) Not putting in anything that doesn’t fit. This applies to both on-stage and off-stage settings. (By “off-stage setting” I mean any places that affect the characters or story that aren’t actually shown. For instance, if your story takes place in San Diego, but one of the characters grew up in Wisconsin, that character had better have seen snow and know about tornado sirens and the wind chill factor. You don’t have to mention those details specifically unless they’re important to the story, but that Wisconsin-raised character had better not look ignorant or surprised if the subject of snow comes up.)

The key things that you put into your descriptions will differ from story to story. If a character works or shops in the Loop in downtown Chicago, the El and its effects are probably worth mentioning (especially if they’re working in an older building without modern sound-proofing). If they work four or five blocks from the train lines and shop in the suburban malls, not so much. It’s seldom worth making a point of the odd ways Chicagoans have of pronouncing certain street names (Devon as de-VOHN, for instance), but if one needs a quick way of showing that someone is from out-of-town, it could work.

Not putting in stuff that doesn’t fit is just as important, and this is where the writer has to really be aware of his/her assumptions. If all you know is the climate and geography of the mid-continental plains, and you’re writing about mountains or the coast, or in some cases even forests, you want to do a bunch of research and maybe even get some things checked out by friends who live in places like the ones you’re writing about. A San Diego native who does NOT have trouble adjusting to his first winter in Winnepeg isn’t going to be any more believable than the Wisconsin guy who has never heard of wind chill.

And all of this is strongly affected by the viewpoint and viewpoint character you’re using. An omniscient viewpoint can describe whatever the author wants, however he wants. In a tight-third-person or first-person viewpoint, it will break the viewpoint if the author describes things the viewpoint character can’t see, doesn’t know, or doesn’t care about. The Frontier Magic series I’m working on doesn’t have a lot of physical description of places or people, and it drives some of my readers crazy. But the memoir form I’m using for those books isn’t suited to much description, and Eff isn’t the sort to describe things she’s really familiar with (and the one time I did it, the editor very wisely cut that paragraph). The point is, I still have to know what all those things she doesn’t describe actually look like, so that when I get a chance to slip something in, I can slip in the right thing.

It was also my last chance to fix any of the problems my first-readers complained about (and there were a couple of glitches that I can only hope I got filed down to an appropriate level – there wasn’t time to give anyone yet another look at the final ms.)

This particular copy-edit was both easy and insanely difficult. Easy, in that there were really very few queries or fixes (which was reassuring), and most of the fixes were due to changes I made during the editorial revisions that didn’t get carried completely through all the later references (I sent one character off to Albion/England in the rewrite, but there he was, three chapters later, still hanging around in one of the transition paragraphs. Ooops.) Hard, because this ms. has been exhausting and difficult pretty much throughout, and there was an exceptionally short turn-around from when I finished the revisions to when the copy-edit showed up in my mailbox (meaning, I didn’t have as much down time before I had to tackle the copy-edit).

It was also difficult because it reminded me of all the things I didn’t manage to stuff into it that I really wanted. That Cathayan adept I’ve had in mind since the middle of Thirteenth Child, for instance – she just refused to be bothered coming all the way to a minor town in an undeveloped baby country without a good reason (and she was downright rude about every reason I came up with. She had more important things to do with her time.) I think I’ve finally gotten her to show up briefly for Book 3, but she’s still being stubborn about not sticking around. And there were all sorts of different settlements that didn’t make it in, and one of the subplots only got about half as far as I’d expected it to, so Book 3 may be a little crowded. And it’s much too late to fix any of it.

So I was grumpy and tired of making decisions, and especially tired of coming up with ways to rephrase sentences to remove word repetitions or clarify things the copyeditor obviously didn’t quite get. (Grumpy though I was, I have to admit that the copyeditor did a great job, despite my complaining, so if he/she didn’t get something, it probably needed clarifying. I’m just really tired of doing it.)

I do feel for the copyeditor on this one. They’re supposed to do fact-checking, but how do you fact-check a “history” that’s over half imaginary, or tell when something is supposed to be recognizable but twisted slightly (as opposed to being an outright mistake)? Not to mention the fact that about half of the animals and plants are real, while the other half are either real-but-extinct (like mammoths) or completely imaginary.

But it’s done, and I can get back to work on The Far West now, at least until the galleys arrive. In theory, I got back to work when I dropped the copy-edit in the mail on Wednesday; in practice, I dropped it in the mail, ran around frantically packing and cleaning up, and took off for my monthly visit to Chicago to check on my Dad and clear up his paperwork.

So I’m now another four days behind schedule, which isn’t actually serious at this point unless I start letting it stretch out into weeks (or unless the book bloats up on me, such that my nice, reasonable schedule for getting 90,000 words finished on time turns into trying to get 200,000 words or more written and then boiled down to a reasonable length…but if it gets that extreme, the first line of defense is asking if they want it to be two books instead of one, and I only have to get panicky if they say No).

This is the kind of week I always waffle about when people come up and ask me if I really write every day. I did get a couple of paragraphs done while I was visiting Dad, but I didn’t come anywhere near my daily quota, and the two days where I was driving for 8 hours (down and back) got zero words done on the book. I also got zero new words on Book 3 for two of the days when I was working on the copy-edit, while adding approximately 20 new words to the ms. for Book 2. On the other hand, I got a couple of ideas for blog posts and got them at least partly written, so I have some bits and pieces stockpiled for emergencies. And I got a lot of thinking about the characters and the upcoming plot done during the drive.

What it boils down to is, I’m pretty happy with my overall progress, writing-wise, during the past week, even if some parts of it look more progress-like than other parts. It’ll even out next week, or the week after. As long as everything manages to get done by the time it needs to be done, I don’t have to obsess about the schedule. I do have to keep it in mind, and watch that things don’t creep up on me, or I’ll end up with two weeks to deadline and 50,000 words to write. But at this point, I can be relatively relaxed.

It’s a good feeling.

It didn’t arrive.

We didn’t realize this for a week, because I was being restrained and not asking “Where the $#%@& are the revisions requests you promised me on Monday?” and he was being restrained and giving me time to think about them because they were fairly substantial (we’ll get to that in a minute). By the time we got that sorted out, I was down to two and a half weeks of revision time instead of four.

This was important because those two and a half weeks included a) my turn making tea for the girls (six of us have been doing this every other month for…over twenty years, for sure. Between cooking and cleanup, it’s a big production and eats up at least three days, counting the day of the tea itself), and b) a drive down to Chicago and back to take care of Dad’s paperwork and bills for the month, which took about four days but only ate two because I took the laptop and worked while I was there.

Fortunately, I didn’t have much in the way of questions; David is an excellent editor, very clear in explaining what he wants and why, and he’s also usually on the same wavelength as I am (meaning, he doesn’t ask for totally off-the-wall things like “Why don’t you put in some explosions? I like explosions.” or “What this needs is a completely new plot twist that has nothing to do with anything else in the story…put it right here, where it will wreck the pacing and twist the main plot totally out of shape.”)

Unfortunately… Well, I did mention that these were substantial revisions, didn’t I? By my standards, anyway. Among other things, I ended up needing a whole new chapter (containing a whole new character, because it’s really hard to do very much dialog that’s only tagged “one of the men said.” I needed somebody for my characters to talk to).

And of course David put his finger right on every single place where I’d hoped I could avoid dealing with some bit or other, or where I knew it needed a bit more but I’d figured I could skate by with what I had. I couldn’t even really argue.

So after I’d read the letter and the comments through once, I sent him an email and we worked out the new title and discussed a few aspects of the story that hadn’t been clear. To him, anyway; I knew the answers, but they hadn’t gotten down on the page. (One of my besetting sins is that I either over- or under-explain; I can’t seem to get the hang of making things clear without actually saying them straight out, so they come out cryptic instead of…well, instead of that thing Megan Whelan Turner does, where the reader figures it all out for themselves and feels clever). While we were discussing, I mulled things over. And made tea.

Mulling is a necessary part of the process, and very important. It doesn’t look like writing; indeed, it usually happens when the writer is doing other things (baking scones and making chocolate silk pie, in this case). Anyway, once tea was over and cleared off, I got started on the actual writing part, with two weeks left and a trip to Chicago coming up.

How I do revisions is, I look at the big ones, and if any of them look easy, I start with those. None of the big ones looked easy, this time. So I did a first pass, knocking off the little changes to get rid of as many comment balloons as I could and feel like I’d made some progress. ”Little changes” are usually stuff like deleting unnecessary adjectives or changing a word choice. Every so often, I’d go back and write a few sentences or paragraphs of the new chapter. Then I hit the short scenes, again alternating with the new chapter. The nice thing about revising is that every time I get stuck, I can skip to some other part of the manuscript and work on that for a while. The unfortunate part of revising this way is that it leaves all the hardest bits for last.

On Thursday, I emailed my editor and asked whether Production was really going to be working on my book all weekend, or was the deadline actually Monday morning? David assured me that Monday would be fine, so Production was off the hook for the weekend, and I was on. Until 9:01 last night.

The manuscript is now 10,000 words longer than it was when it started. It has one entirely new chapter in the middle (I hope I didn’t miss anything when I renumbered all the rest of them), four or five completely new scenes, and a whole lot of new paragraphs scattered throughout. The last chapter got taken apart and totally rewritten; so did two of the mid-book chapters. This is all a lot harder than it sounds, because when you add a new chapter, you have to revise about half a chapter before and half a chapter after to make the transition into and out of it work properly. Same thing for new scenes, and even new paragraphs.

So it’s done (until the copy-edit comes, anyway), and I am going to take the day off and play computer games. And then get back to work on the next one.

After much emailing, the consensus is that, among many other things, it needs a title change. The editors felt that Circuit Magician was a good title…for a different book. I have to admit, they’re right. Eff is still the viewpoint character, and it’s still about her, but she’s not a circuit magician. Wash is a circuit magician (arguably the best one they have, but I’m biased), but while he has a large part in the book, it’s really not his story. So – new title.

The editors suggested The Far West. Which is the perfect title…for the third book. This is a good thing, a great thing, because I didn’t have a working title for Book 3 and I was beginning to worry about it. However, it still left us without a title for Book 2. I am generally totally terrible at titles; all I could think of was that it should maybe have something to do with magic. Between us, the editors and I came up with a bunch of things that just didn’t work: Dreams and Spells, Border Spells, [Total Spoiler Title], Magical Mammoths (which not only sounds silly but is totally inaccurate and misleading, as there are hardly any mammoths in this one at all, and none of them are magical in any way).

So I did what I usually do when I’m stuck for a title, and started asking friends. And, as frequently happens, I was in mid-conversation with one of them, explaining why The Far West had to be the title of the third book, when I heard myself say “…and while most of it takes place past the Great Barrier, it…OH. Past the Great Barrier?“  Beth, being Beth, thought for a moment and then said “Across the Great Barrier.” The editor liked it, so Book 2 is now officially Across the Great Barrier (unless Marketing hates it, in which case we’ll have another round).

Meanwhile, I have a ton of revisions to make, some of which have serious implications for Book 3. I have at least one full new chapter to insert (editor wants my viewpoint character along on something that originally happened offstage), and I may need a second one for a complication I summarized later on that he wants more details on. I get to take the ending apart and reconstitute it. I need to add some letters from offstage folks. And I have a week and a half to do it in, during which I also have to make my monthly trip to Chicago.

The funny thing is that while this is a lot of head-down-in-the-manuscript work (and tight timing on top of it, which is not all the editor’s fault – he meant to give me three weeks, but his original email got lost in cyberspace somewhere, so I lost a week), it’s also a lot easier than the death march to the deadline was. Because with revisions, I can skip around. I don’t have to work on each chapter in order; in fact, sometimes it works better if I don’t. I can look at something, decide to leave it for a while, and still get other stuff done while my backbrain is working out how to deal with whatever I skipped. I have a framework.

Sure, working like this does mean that I frequently have a whole collection of really hard bits to frantically finish up the night before it’s due in. But they’re just bits; if I don’t get to them, it can probably go to production without (well, not if I don’t finish the whole new chapter, but that’s not the sort of thing I’d put off til last, either). Sometimes, leaving the hard bits for last actually means I don’t have to do them at all, because the other changes I’ve made elsewhere make those last few things work perfectly as they are (I really like it when that happens, though I can’t count on it.) So even though there’s pressure and a deadline, it’s just not the same as that final trying-to-run-while-knee-deep-in-molasses slog to the end of the first draft. For me, anyway.

But you’re probably not going to get much in the way of blog updates for the next week.