It turns out that The Song of Arbonne was exactly the right book for me to read right now, well worth the effort of having to order it from my Borders. The book, combined with obsessive listening to The Lord of the Rings soundtracks (particularly The Two Towers — I adore the “Riders of Rohan” theme), has created in me the perfect state of mind for developing the story bud to which I committed myself a mere 10 days ago.

Has it only been 10 days? I feel like I’ve come so far already, so much further than any other time I’ve tried to go anywhere with this idea. The story is building into something wonderful (I hope), the process something like the opposite of peeling an onion, because I keep adding layers instead of taking them away. Perhaps I should liken it instead to piece of mixed media artwork, with its layers of paint and paper, color and image and text. This is what the book and the music have done for me, reminded me that I need these layers to create the story and make it live. The layers I work with are not paint and paper, though, but history, myth, geography, theme and character. Especially character. Every time I run into a knot in my plot, where something doesn’t make sense or I don’t know what is going to happen to my main character next, I find the answer I need in those other layers. Focused only on the journey of the protagonist — first he does this, and then this, and then this — I would get frustrated and give up because I couldn’t see my way through. Now I understand, and I wonder at how long it took me to come to that understanding.

I can feel it in me, this story, almost like a physical presence at times, trying to push its way out. There are moments — especially right after one of those “ahah” moments when some aspect of the tale has suddenly revealed itself to me — that my arms and fingers tingle with the urge to start writing. I can see some of the early scenes of the narrative in my head so clearly already, and I want to put them down. But my instincts and experience are telling me to wait until the development process is done, till all my little cards are filled out and I know the full breadth and length of the story. Things could change, after all, as more layers are put in place, and if I give in to the desire to write I might not only end up wasting time writing material that will later be discarded, but I could completely derail the whole development process all together. Besides, the only time I have ever completed a whole novel, I had a basic outline of the whole thing in hand beforehand, and it’s hard to argue with success.

Right now, my biggest know is the protagonist’s love interest. Well, the presence of women in the story as a whole. They seem, so far, to have only traditional “womanly” roles, which is a hard pattern to break when you’re working in a historical milieu. While the second book (ha ha…yes, I’m already thinking “second book”) will deal more directly with the role of women (the protagonist of that will be a woman), it’s not something I anticipate being a major issue in this first volume. I need to find a way to make the love interest more than just that, without turning her into an action hero (though I think she will pick up a weapon at one point). She has no real status or wealth in the society she lives in, so she can’t wield any political or economic influence, power often given in fiction to women characters who live in male-dominated settings. So I’m looking for a way to let her contribute to the action of the story, and not just be an inspiration to action for the hero.

The other problem is names. I have characters jumping out of the walls at me, and no decent names to give them. In my notes the newest batch all have tags like “the priest guy” or “the rebel” or “the crazy author lady” (I just made that last one up). I’m pretty good at coming up with medieval sounding names, but this setting is not medieval, so I’m running out of steam coming up with new things that work. I think I have to make a date a name generator.

Last night, I dreamt that my younger daughter was scheduled to perform in a sort of national showcase of creative talent: this event was huge, Live At the Lincoln Center huge, with presidential attendance anticipated and everything. There was dancing and singing and acting going on, and I don’t recall exactly what she was going to do, but I was worried that her face was going to be dirty when she got up on stage. She’s six — her face is frequently dirty.

At nearly the last minute — less than an hour before showtime — I realized that I, too, was supposed to be performing, as one of a number of writers who would be reading a short section of their work aloud. The program had the name of the work I’d be reading from (a short story title I don’t actually recognize but fuzzily recall to be an amalgamation of several things I’ve written over the years), though I had no idea which two pages I should share with the audience. I was anxious about getting up in front of the audience completely unprepared and making a fool of myself.

But my biggest problem was that my daughter and I were still a good way from the theater, stuck in heavy traffic with curtain-time fast approaching…and her face was still dirty.

A reader of this blog (though my livejournal) commented that she hoped I would share some of the personal side of the novel writing process, but it wasn’t until after I’d answered her expressing some of my reservations (because I don’t want to look like a babbling fool, and because I know I have a tendency to “talk” an idea to death) that I realized there was another big, big reason not to throw a detailed process exposition up here for all to read:

If I post about the questions and problems I’m having with the story, then on some level I’m going to expecting an answer from the people who read it. I already pester a couple of people too much with “so what do you think about…?” questions, hoping they’ll provide the answer to what I’m supposed to be figuring out for myself. It’s akin, I think, to endlessly searching the How to Write section of the bookstore in hopes of finding The Perfect Manual of Writing Fiction, which of course doesn’t exist. It can be hard work, pulling the answers out of yourself, and tempting to turn to whatever outside sources might be available. Of course, no one else can ever provide the answers.

On the other hand, I do want to be responsive to what the audience here wants to read about. So if you’ll tell me what it is you want to know, I’ll try to give some answers about my creative process that won’t actually impinge upon that process. You see, if it’s you asking the questions, instead of me…yeah, that just might work.

I’m curious about the other writers reading this: how to you manage the need, or compulsion even, to talk about whatever it is you’re working on?

Artwork: Moondrops. Original sketch inked and colored with watercolor pencils. It’s all wrinkly because it’s only sketch paper, not decent watercolor paper. I’ve noticed that I tend to make art like I write, with lots of rough drafts…only with art you can’t just revise, you have to completely redo. So I like to save the more expensive supplies for when I have a better feeling for the quality of the final product.

My modus operandi so far as my writing goes the past few years — or just maybe always — has been to work on whatever WIP happens to have my highest interest until such time as my enthusiasm begins to wane, and then to move on to whatever else seems intriguing at the moment.

Clearly, given the number of completed projects on the record, that is not such an effective method for me.

Sometime last week (probably while listening to the podcast published by the 2008 World Fantasy Convention and thinking I wouldn’t mind going) I decided that it would be a good idea to set a deadline for myself by 1) buying a membership for the convention and 2) committing myself to having a completed novel to bring with me when I go. I have always worked best under the pressure of a deadline (magazine publishing is probably a good line of work for me in that regard), and I think a year plus a couple months gives just the right amount of time to put together a decent, saleable manuscript, especially if I have some intermediary milestones established to keep things on track. I’ve done the novel-in-a-month thing, and it wasn’t pretty.

This was a fairly easy decision to arrive at. More difficult was choosing among the four novel projects that I’ve got on the drawing board right now. I’m not going to go into details (Nin got the rundown of all that the other day), but I’ll just say that they each have their strengths and weaknesses, but my decision was based most significantly on the project that I thought most likely to hold my attention for an entire year. A year is a long time to spend with one storyline and set of characters, after all, and I don’t know how much time I will have to break myself with other, smaller writing projects. I’ll be working full time, starting in just a few weeks, and there’s my family to tend to. What writing time I will need to be very focused on the WIP to make sure I get it done — and done right — by the deadline I’ve set.

It felt very good when I finally made my choice, and I’ve started prep work that has already led me to resolve some of the issues that have kept me from progressing very far on this project previously. It’s the commitment, I’m sure, the knowledge that I can’t put off the decisions I kept putting off before or I’ll never finish. I’m encouraged by the shape my previously amorphous plot has started to take, and by the secondary characters that have started to pop up, adding additional material for subplots and scenes. I’m keeping track of all these things on index cards, which I think will help keep me organized and focused through the writing process. At least, I hope it will. It seems to have worked for lots of other writers and I know the “make it up as you go along” method is fraught with perils, at least for me.

I don’t know how much progress-reporting I’ll do here. Word counts are right out, because I intend to do the first draft longhand. It’s possible that from time to time Novel Fever will overcome my sensibilities, and I’ll submit those of you who read this blog to the torture of having to read about what I’m writing, and I apologize for that beforehand. Just consider yourself warned.

In October 2002, when I was starting to ramp up for my participation in that year’s Nanowrimo, I developed a twitch in my eye that lasted halfway through November. I pretty much figured it was stress from the novel writing. It happened again two years ago when I attempted Nano for the second time (and quit 12 days in). And, I kid you not, as I sat down to start writing this entry, my right eyelid started twitching away — slow, ponderous, shut-the-whole-eye twitches that are not easily ignored. Fortunately, it didn’t last long, but it doesn’t bode well. Eye twitching does not seem like the most attractive writer’s quirk…

The Doomsday Book
by Connie Willis

For Kivrin, preparing for on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity’s history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be retrieved.

But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin — barely of age herself — finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history’s darkest hours.

This is one of those books that I’ve meant to read for a long time (it was published in 1992) but never quite got around to before. I just recently listened to a podcast interview with Willis, though, so I thought I’d give it a try. As a Medieval Studies major myself, I can really sympathize with the protagonist’s desire to visit the period, to experience what life was really like even fully aware of the harsh realities of existence in the 14th century. And Willis does not hold back in her depiction of those harsh realities, though she balances the grimness with an intimate portrait of family life that keeps this book from turning into simply a fictionalized historical report.

I’m not wholly enthusiastic about this book. It’s a heavy read with very little in the way of consolation at the end, just a weary sort of relief. The first part is weighted with lots of procedural, medical “drama” that just keeps wearing away at you — I was, in fact, bored with the whole tracking-the-epidemic thing at several points and just wanted Willis to get on with the story, though ultimately I think the emotional numbness created by the early part of the book is the only thing that made it possible to get through the true horrors later on. It’s really hard to be enthusiastic about a book where so many people die. But I do recommend it, just not when you’re having a bad week already.

Naturally, I’ve been thinking about blogging a lot lately.

I wrote this as the original opening paragraph for the “from the editor” letter in Artful Blogging:

Blog is an ugly word, even before you consider all the unpleasant connotations they’ve collected over the past few years. Blogs have been painted as platforms of vanity, pomposity and self-obsession, preoccupied with trivia and gossip, often with an overload of advertising disguised as useful information.

But give something ugly to an artist, and a remarkable transformation will take place.

True, but not very pleasant sounding. It was cut from the final version.

I started blogging nearly five years ago, when I left the position of Lead StoryPlotter at Castle Marrach (it surprises me how much of my life still requires reference to that watershed experience). Consciously, I was looking for two things: something to fill the free time I’d have, and a new community of which to be a part. My first blog was at Diary-X (now defunct); I started a second blog soon after, at LiveJournal. The first was a place for longer, more thoughtful reflections on my life, my children and (sometimes) my writing. The second was a place for all the little things I didn’t want to clutter up my “real” blog with — memes and gripes and silly chatter — and the place where I found the community I was missing (though, ironically, many of that community were also CM folk).

This blog, Artifacts, was begun just over three years ago, on my own domain, with an eye towards creating a more “professional” blog to showcase my writing and (someday) publications, and to create a depository for the random thoughts and ideas I had about two subjects that still hold the bulk of my interest: storytelling and mythopoeia.

I’ve never been a particularly faithful blogger. You can look back in the archives of this site and see months-long stretches without any updates whatsoever. Even my LiveJournal has intermittent stretches with nothing more than a random link or quote. I look back on these periods and wonder why I was so silent. Did I have nothing to say? Was my life such a wasteland of disinterest that I couldn’t come up with some something worth writing about?

Or maybe, just maybe, it was because I didn’t think anyone was paying attention, so why bother? I won’t lie to you — it matters to me that people take the time to read what I write here. If it didn’t, there’d be no point in putting it on the web.

But it’s not just a case of simple vanity, of needing people to praise my words and ideas. And it’s not about generating hits to my site and getting lots of traffic. And, really, it isn’t even about community and dialog and conversation.

What it’s really about the conscious act of creation, of setting out with deliberate intent to create something that will be seen by someone else. The expectation of an audience, of display, of public performance, changes the mindset with which we approach any undertaking. We become mindful of our efforts and begin to pay attention to what it is we’re doing. We strive to create order and beauty, to transmit not just thoughts, but experience.

Like any form of expression, there’s no right way to blog. There are conventions, though, established by those who first blazed the paths into this virtual wilderness, and we all start by emulating what we see around us. We begin with a preconception, a model, of what we think our blogs should be and attempt to fit ourselves into that mold. Because the first blogs I read regularly were thoughtful, expressive journals about life experiences and particularly motherhood, that’s what I wrote in my first blog. LiveJournal is more conversational, a place to chatter with friends and share random bits of life, without any particular care for presentation because, you know, you’re just talking, to friends. I still value the relationships I maintain through LiveJournal, but keeping a blog there never challenged me to think about what I was doing. Which led, ultimately, to the creation of Artifacts, with its more scholarly, informational tilt. A thinking blog, but so constrained by what I thought I should be posting in it that I rarely felt impelled to post at all.

It wasn’t until I started looking at artists’ blog for the magazine that I began to sense that my own blog could be something more than what I had previously imagined. I first identified it as a way to unify the compartmentilized areas of my life, a path towards creating a more wholistic sense of self. Too, I wanted to emulate the beauty of the blogs I had become immersed in, to portray the nascent, visually creative side of myself that has been slowly growing over the past year and more. I’ve been fumbling along the past few months, trying to find the balance that works for me in my blog, just as I must constantly look for balance in my life.

This may be a love song, but to who?

Why do I blog? It’s a question most bloggers ask themselves at one time or another, and probably has a thousand different answers. I realize now that the answer for me, at least, is the same as the answer for a much more universal question: Why do we tell stories?

It’s been a slow dawning, this realization, that this blog — nominally about stories — is actually a story itself. It’s not a diary, it’s not a record of how many words I’ve written or what my kids did today, or even a picture of what’s inside my head. Yes, at times, it’s each of these things, but it’s more than that too. Like stories translate human experience into something that makes sense, so am I, in this blog, trying to make sense of my own experiences. I order the diverse pieces of my life by date and title, give them category labels and thus define them, and most importantly, I craft each post — from the words I choose to where images appear — so that it conveys the experience in the way I want it to be understood and felt.

I do this, this crafting, for the audience, the blog reader, the unknown visitors who come and visit this site to see what I have written. If they weren’t there — if you weren’t there — my thoughts would come out in a tangle of careless questions and suppositions and half-formed statements, just like in my paper journal (which I have not, I confess, touched in over a year, except to dust it). A paper journal is good for dumping thoughts, it’s true, but I find being forced to organize those thoughts on the chance that someone else will read them is actually a more effective tool for making sense out of my life. Each blog post is a a little journey through my head, and as when I write a poem, I rarely know the ending before I reach it.

You see, when I craft the story of my life, I am really crafting my life itself. When I choose what thoughts and feelings and experiences to preserve and relate, I am establishing a model for what I’d like my life to be. I could choose to bitch and moan and groan about all the bad things that happen, or I might immerse myself in trivial details of day-to-day life — but where would that get me? I’d rather focus on the me I’m trying to be, the life I’d like to lead, not in a wishful thinking sort of way, but more in the mode of “practice makes perfect.”

“Give something ugly to an artist, and a remarkable transformation will take place.”

I am that transformation.

So, who is this a love song to, after all? I think I know…

I’ve been grooving to this song by Brandi Carlile ever since I first heard it on the radio a few months ago (and I only just found out a few minutes ago that it was, apparently, used on Grey’s Anatomy…I still like the song, anyway). In fact, the whole album, The Story, has been the most frequently played on my iPod. Sometimes, a tune just speaks to you, you know?

I don’t generally post about music, but this post was actually begun before Michelle Ward posted this months Crusade at the Green Pepper Press Street Team blog. Synchronicity at work. Hello to everyone who may stop by because of the challenge, and to my regular readers, go investigate what some other artful bloggers are listening to on the GPP Street Team site.

In deep, the story goes, where sunlight’s kiss
Is rarely felt and shadows forever fall
On pools of liquid silence, there exists,
Beyond the edges of belief, a small
And secret place where silver dreams recall
Another age, and unicorns. Asleep
The maid, too pure in her desire, the thrall
Of lover’s manly sin is heard to weep;
She’s borne by tears into the forest keep
To make a relic of the fabled prize
That once she wore. Nearby the hunters creep
But here upon her knee her virtue lies
In worship, safe until the story’s done.
The maiden and the unicorn are one.

– Stace Dumoski, August 2007