Wednesday, December 26, 2018

New Novel Progress: Into Chapter 18. Target remains 20.

Nothing more to say on that. Grinding. Hope you had a Merry Christmas or other Winter holiday.

However, here's a little belated present for you. An excerpt from Chapter 8:


The view out the airliner’s window was a tunnel’s mouth, looking across the taxiways at Sal as the TAP Air Portugal flight rolled toward one last takeoff on the way to Bissau. The other Cape Verde islands were more mountainous and occasionally greener; Sal was a flat spot, seven miles wide by eighteen north to south, with a couple of respectable bumps of high ground in the north. The rest of it was arid flatlands and the salt pans that gave the island its modern name. That, and a geographic location near halfway between Iberia and Brazil, made it an ideal place to build a sprawling airport from the earliest days of transoceanic air service. This wasn’t a destination, really; it was a stopover. Get fuel, maybe transfer between flights, that sort of place. But everyone and their brother headed for a destination along the routes radiating outwards seemed to stop here. South African Airlines hopped through going on to London; Cubana connected Havana to Luanda through here. Everyone coming or going between Europe and Brazil came through, even if they were flying the Aluminum Cloud, that wonder of civil aviation called the Boeing 747. Too bad TAP’s service to Bissau was still in 1960’s era ‘07s, or Drake and Oliveira might actually have been comfortable on this flight.

Into the final lap of First Draft. Will post more soon.

Saturday, December 22, 2018

A Writer's Device: Balancing the desire to describe.

One thing that I keep coming back to, confronting, is that writing in the novella format encouraged the use of very few and very focused passages of detailed description. It really rewarded me there to use sweeping descriptions up to specific moments, and to return to doing so thereafter.

In writing the new novel, there is so much "room" to write in, there is no inherent limit on how much description is appropriate. Only things that seems to matter are:

Does it further the story to tell more?

Does it impede the flow of the story to tell more?

Does it provide introspection, thoughts, or considerations that the reader would otherwise have to glean by guessing, by working backwards from outcomes or decisions?

and,

Is there some "cool factor" in explicitly stating some consideration or nuance in the terms that the character perceived the situation?

The last one is the hardest to get right. Sometimes it is important to be clear that someone like a trained espionage agent sees very different things when they look at a scene than a person who only lived an ordinary life would see. Sometimes explaining leads to over-explaining.

I am taking those questions above, and looking for "yes" as answers to them, before writing entire pages of internal thoughts or stealthy movements.

Oh well... it keeps my Editor busy at least. (( grin))

Right then; back to grinding. Have the goal line in sight now. Just need to get the words on the page.



Monday, December 17, 2018

Isn't that bizarre...

Wrapping the 1st draft of Chapter 16 for the new novel. It's great fun but holy crap novels are big bulky clumsy things to have to work with. Here's hoping the extra details and digressions are worth it. (example: Chapter 16 has a reduction of options, a single character's thoughts as to how to deal with a situation, that is more than a page in length to explain all the things that are part of that thought process.)

Will advise here as I make more progress.


Meanwhile...

Anna likes her talented pretty boys, at least when it comes to music. Yes, she's smart enough to know what these lyrics mean. No, she's not going to explain them to you.

Duran Duran. The Reflex. (link to the official video on YT)

Monday, December 10, 2018

New Novel Progress: Keep digging...

Excerpt from Ch. 7:


“¡ Bienvenidos, camaradas!” boomed Lieutenant Colonel Rivera in welcome to the newly arrived comrades. “This is the posting you both said you desired. Why the tired faces? You should be glad for the opportunity.”

***

Heh. Rivera was talking to new Cuban officers assigned to Guinea-Bissau, but it seemed appropriate for today's 'blog post.

Progress is being made. I am several pages into Chapter 15 as of yesterday. Will write more during today's shift. Editing has had a first pass through the end of Chapter 13. It would be fair to say that I am 3/4 of the way to a full 1st Draft manuscript. That's not too shabby, yeah?

For those of you keeping track:

Yes, the actual mission part of the operation is going on. All the infiltration and scene-setting and travelogue and... and... preliminary stuff has been written.

Yes, all the characters have been introduced. The late arrival showed up in Ch. 13.

Yes, somebody gets whacked this chapter.

Yes, this a ton of fun to write this!

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Things I'm doing, and a bit about Evocation.

It seems I needed to carve out some dive time to get through Chapter 12 of the new novel... which I did, and have rolled solidly into Chapter 13 now. It's going fast and 14 may continue the trend. The first pass of editing is following my progress closely, and there may be an additional effort to go back and do a second pass through the early chapters. I'd really like to get Chapter 1 as a stand-alone sort of "prequel" in the hands of a few select readers, and not too long after that I might post it here as a promotional read. We'll see.

One thing that has come out in discussions has been how certain phrasing and certain references in the text of the manuscript are evocative far more than a lengthy description of a moment or a mood would have been. That's a known thing as a goal in writing, but I've been interested in what works, and what doesn't work, when I try it.

Music references are apparently a mainstay of what I write. They have been part of my inspiration, and are a solid way to evoke a sense of the era of the story... if the reader knows the song. Which is a bit of a problem when I'm writing about things in a fictionalized version of 35 years ago. It was notable in Remember When, but the song references there were all fairly strongly alluded to in the text describing why they mattered.

In my new-novel writing, they are much more a thing stated in passing, and depend on the reader actually knowing the lyrics to get the full effect of the reference. It is a notable enough weakness that I may actually include a playlist of songs and artists in the End Notes of the novel, just so readers who don't know the era can find them and listen to them. But that's asking a lot of a reader to do, so I may need to expand upon the references in context in the actual telling as well.

Here's a (fabricated for this post) example: If I mention a song like "All She Wants to Do is Dance" by Don Henley, recorded in 1985, as a reference to a scene set in 1986 Honduras, that's probably going to very evocative of the time and place to anyone who knows the song. Anyone who doesn't know it, but reads the song title, might get some sense of a female character ignoring something about her life or surroundings in the pursuit of her own enjoyment, however...

... they'd miss out on the Molotov Cocktail being the local drink. Yeah, it's a song about a dude trying to do something in a 3rd World country in the midst of a civil war. The girl is just part of why and how he is there. The reader would have to know the song to get that.

Music isn't the only evocative reference, of course. The more common sort of those are all based on things you would sense, and then project a context on. Sight, smell, sound, all the senses are superb evocation tools. Here's an example from a bar scene in the new novel, describing in one line some of the patrons of the bar:

Everyone else in the place smelled of cigarette smoke and attitude.

Right then, that's pretty straightforward. There are some want-to-be or actual bad-asses of the scruffy kind hanging out in this joint besides the characters of note. Someday, when cigarettes are as rare as cocaine in cola drinks, that won't work. For now, though, it's a lock as a one line evocation.

Here's hoping you find this interesting. I sure found it interesting to consider.