Forward and Back

Finally found time to finish my five-page synopsis for BURYING ZIMMERMAN yesterday.  It's pretty rough-edged.  But I think Anne Mini has me sold on the value of writing a synopsis before you start writing the novel.  Since you haven't conceived of all the secondary plotlines yet, they can't derail your effort to tell the main story succinctly.

For me a detailed outline is the real prerequisite, but writing a synopsis forces you to confront the flow of the plot in a continuous way.  And with BZ that's tough, because the entire plot unfolds as a series of stories and flashbacks during a face-to-face confrontation between the protagonist and antagonist, neither of whom are entirely sure who the other is.  So even though a synopsis is written in present tense, I found myself hopping into past tense during the storytelling, e.g. "Owen tells Zimmerman that he heard gunshots from the woods, and that he ran toward the cabin..."  It can get confusing, even for the author.

But after moving forward a step on BZ, I now feel compelled to go back through SWAIN'S LOCK to see if I can tighten its screws a bit.  The last time I did that was about two months ago, so at this point my eyes are relatively fresh.

first paragraphs

Last week literary agent Nathan Bransford staged his third annual "submit the first paragraph" of your novel contest.  I just started reading his blog a few months ago, so I hadn't seen the two prior contests.

By the time I stumbled on round 3, it was already in full swing, with something like 250 paragraphs submitted.  And that was only a few hours after the contest was launched.  Paragraphs were submitted through the Comments form, and Nathan's blog usually gets around 100-200 comments per entry.  So I was surprised at the enthusiastic response.

Shows how little I know about these things.  By the time the contest was over, he got 2,600 entries.

I wasn't going to bother entering since I don't gravitate toward writing contests.  And I knew SWAIN'S LOCK doesn't have a memorable or hooky opening paragraph.  It starts with a prologue about an attempted rape, and the characters are throwaway figures who set the plot in motion.  The opening paragraph just situates the characters and the action.  So I didn't see much point in entering it.

Then I thought, hey, what about that 50-page novella thing I wrote in 1985 and haven't pulled out a drawer in 20 years or so?  I dug it out and read the first paragraph, which consisted of two sentences.  While lots of novels begin with one- or two-sentence paragraphs, and for good reason, it's hard for a paragraph that short to make much of an impression in a contest.  (Evidently I wasn't alone in thinking this.  Some brave contestants entered 1 or 2-sentence paragraphs, but many more chose to submit paragraphs that consumed most or all of a page, and that I'm pretty sure would never be submitted that way as part of a query.)  So they did what I did -- bent the rules by combining several paragraphs into one.

Here's the opening of my 1985 novella:

Stensin stepped sideways, out of the sand flak.  In a broken ring the Malay boys watched, talking and laughing softly in the darkness.
"Habis."
"Tidak bisa."
This turtle wasn't getting there.  Fins sweeping wet sand with the ferocity of pinball flippers.  The sand flew, the seven-foot body swung, but the foot-high sand lip prevailed.  Stensin felt a twinge.  An hour's tireless flippering and only ten feet up the beach.  The beast rested briefly.  Stensin stared at the great dark mass silhouetted dimly on the sand, and its form dissolved away from him.  From the corners of his eyes it emerged again.  Stensin lit a cigarette as the flippering exploded.

Rather than submitting just the first two lines (which I still like, but don't really paint enough of a picture), I cut out the dialogue and jammed the rest of it together...

Stensin stepped sideways, out of the sand flak. In a broken ring the Malay boys watched, talking and laughing softly in the darkness.  This turtle wasn't getting there. Fins sweeping wet sand with the ferocity of pinball flippers. The sand flew, the seven-foot body swung, but the foot-high sand lip prevailed. Stensin felt a twinge. An hour's tireless flippering and only ten feet up the beach. The beast rested briefly. Stensin stared at the great dark mass silhouetted dimly on the sand, and its form dissolved away from him. From the corners of his eyes it emerged again. Stensin lit a cigarette as the flippering exploded.

... and (almost) convinced myself that it was a legitimate one-paragraph entry.  But I didn't like it much without the dialogue.  It doesn't do as well at placing Stensin in Malaysia.  And it made me feel like I was cheating a little.  At least I wasn't alone in that.

I submitted my entry on Monday, and by Wednesday nearly 2,000 paragraphs had been submitted.  I read most of the entries and really started to get into it.  There were lots of good ones, a few excellent ones, and plenty of crappy ones.  Like nothing else I've read, Nathan's contest really gave me a glimpse of what it must be like to be an agent who receives hundreds of queries a week.  I can see how you learn to reject in a heartbeat when something isn't right.  If you couldn't do that, you'd have no chance at keeping your head above the tide.

So back to my willingness to cheat.  I've been working on my plot outline for BURYING ZIMMERMAN on and off for a year or so.  I haven't written a word of the text.  But the contest was getting me excited about first paragraphs, and after reading so many others, I wanted to take a stab at an opening for BZ.  I've been planning from the start to write it in first-person, present-tense, with past-tense flashbacks.  I noted with interest last month that Per Petterson does this in OUT STEALING HORSES, and there are some similarities between what he did and what I want to do.

But the contest rules clearly limit entries to one per person, and I'd already entered.  Hey, in my mind I'd already broken the rules.  Why not keep going?  So I wrote an opening paragraph for BZ (a true paragraph this time) and submitted it as my dog Chase.  Here it is:

Even in the dark, my brother’s gravestone looks much older now, like it almost belongs here with the other rotting stones. When I kneel before it the flask in my coat pocket taps my ankle like a faithful dog. Without thinking I pull it out for a shot; it’s an old friend and will come with me tonight. I’m barely acquainted with the pistol in my other pocket, but it’s coming too. We’re going to meet Henry Zimmerman, who hasn’t seen me in twenty-two years and thinks I’m someone else. He’ll finally have to explain why he and Drew left without me that night, left me waiting by the canal before Henry sent my brother in alone to confront a killer in the woods.

It wasn't chosen either, and I don't know whether it was considered good, bad, or mediocre by anyone who might have read it.  But it works for me, for now anyway, and has kick-started me into writing a synopsis, so that feels something like a win.

tales and tails

Decided not to upload SWAIN'S LOCK to Smashwords, for now anyway.  That site's complete lack of DRM scares me a little.  Even if that's the way online publishing is headed.  For now, anyone can read the novel for free on Scribd.  It just can't be downloaded as an editable file.

On the kitten-fostering front, all seems well with the Cinders.  But after our experience with the Hellions (who as far as I know are still alive in the hospital, even though their Mom Lynxie succumbed to the virus), I'm half-expecting something to go wrong.  Black kittens Spike and Salem are probably past the scary stage, but the three brown tabbies are still small and vulnerable.  They need to gain weight.  pix at http://50kittens.com/

I need to fill some holes in the BURYING ZIMMERMAN plot.  And that probably means more research.  I still remember most of what I've read about the 1898 Yukon gold rush, but I don't know enough about New Mexico and Texas in the 1890s and early 1900s.  I'd almost rather just start writing, but you have to breathe in before you can breathe out.

to Smash or not to Smash?

Martha and I spent last weekend in NYC, catching up with college friends who convened from as far away as California and Maine.  The pretext was a milestone birthday for all the guys... one of those milestones that ends with a 0 and begins with a 5.  Yikes.  I swear that none of us look that old.  And I still have a few more weeks until the odometer clicks over.

This week I'm reformatting SWAIN'S LOCK based on the Smashwords style guide and pondering whether to upload it to the site and sell it for $3.  Smashwords lets readers download books in the electronic format of their choice, with zero DRM, which it claims unnecessarily frustrates and deters readers.  Yeah, maybe.  Some readers.

It also deters those who might choose on a whim to upload the novel as a .doc file to a panoply of pirate sites.  Once the cat is out of that bag, it's gone forever, right?  Anyone with a text editor could slice and dice or cherry-pick the novel however they please.  And with no control over its permutations in the ether, I'd have to forfeit any hope of selling it to a traditional publisher, no?  Or maybe that's just authorial vanity.

Part of me thinks I should stuff SL in a bottle and cast it out to sea, hoping it will generate interest in the sequel, or that maybe someone will want to buy adaptation rights someday.  Another part of me wants to keep querying agents, even though I realize that finding an agent and even a publisher guarantees nothing.  Given today's retail market, it's a relatively short three years for most debut novelists from launch to out-of-print.  A path which a few years from now leads right back to the Smashwords style guide...

hammer and tongs

I should have known something was up when a dumpster was dropped off in the driveway next door.  The old and small houses on our street are giving way, slowly but surely, to $900K mini-mansions.  Our neighborhood in Arlington is close to the city, so the lots are narrow and the new houses only have one way to go... up.  Some of the torn-down cottages have been replaced by houses that appear to have four full stories.  Not sure how they get away with that.  At least our 80-year-old willow oaks are still taller.

The neighbors are just putting on a first-floor addition in back, but with electrics saws, hammers, nail-guns, and jackhammers on concrete, it sounds like their crew is rebuilding the World Trade Center.  All within 50 feet of my desk.  Good thing I'm not writing today.

But now that I've cast novel #1 to its online fate, I need to dust off my outline for the sequel.  Or maybe it's a prequel, since most of the action takes place in the decades before 1924.  The only Swain's Lock character involved is Zimmerman, the aging heroin addict/dealer, who plays the antagonist in the sequel, which for now is called BURYING ZIMMERMAN.

Z's story unfolds along with that of the protagonist during an evening-long heroin-buying encounter they have in a stranded canal boat on the wrecked C&O Canal, after the 1924 flood.  I plan on writing BZ in first-person present tense from the protagonist's viewpoint.  He's stalking Zimmerman, who he considers an accomplice in the 1902 killing of his brother.  But Z is as slippery as a fish.

I wrote SWAIN'S LOCK in third-person viewpoint, with occasional cinematic perspective and zero authorial omniscience.  While doing that I thought writing in first person would be easy.  Now I feel the opposite.  In first person, you have license to jump around in time, but you can't fill the page with extraneous atmospherics.  Every observation from a first-person narrator has to really hit its mark.

I'll find out how difficult that proves, but not until I finish researching my eras and settings and then flesh out my outline.  And that will take a few more weeks or months, at least.

Anyone else out there consider first-person perspective challenging in a novel?

5-year incubation over

testing, one two three... is this thing on?

Five years with nary a post, so no one can possibly still be monitoring this blog.  As a reminder, here's who it's named for.  That's Khola on the left, Chase on the right, from back in the day.

Nine years later, he's a graying CrimeDog and she looks much the same.

Have been reading publishing-industry blogs while writing my foster-kitten blog at http://50kittens.com/ , but now that I'm experimenting with online publishing, I guess I'll have to plant an authorial flag in the blogosphere.  I hope to update this turf a little more frequently going forward.

As of today, my unpublished novel is posted online.  The link to Scribd is on the novel's website, at http://swainslock.com/ .

At the very least, I'll try to maintain and update the links at right to blogs that I consider unusually helpful, entertaining or both.

Back to driving the offending mollusk from the sea...