Hi, all! I hope you had a great New Years Eve and managed to sleep in a little this morning. My wife and youngest daughter crashed out about 10:30, and I was ready to go to bed at 11:00. But when I said “Good-night” to my oldest, who had built up a good head of steam at the Young Men/Young Women party earlier in the evening, she burst into tears and locked her sobbing self in the bathroom. I coaxed her out and agreed to stay up until midnight with her.

We did a puzzle. Well, half a puzzle – it was hard.

I didn’t quite reach my goal of finishing this revision yesterday, but I managed to put in the time needed to wrap up today. Woo Hoo! This rewrite has taken nearly three months (!) and I still have at least two weeks worth of editing – probably more like a month – but there were many significant changes, so the time is understandable. And hopefully within the editor’s acceptable timeframe. We’ll see.

When I started with this rewrite back in October, the story was 79,000 words. Today, the manuscript weighs in at a hefty 99,000+. I’m thinking I may need to trim that a bit. I’m excited to print this thing, read it with fresh eyes, and see how I like it.

But listen to me ramble. You didn’t come here to find out how my book is going. All you want to know is who will be drinking hot cocoa from their new cocoa maker next week. That would be – Annette Lyon! Congratulations, Annette! Send your snail mail address to dcarey68 (at) sbcglobal (dot) net.

And thanks to everyone for playing!

This week has been one of the most unique in my admittedly short writing career. As I’ve mentioned over and over already, I’m changing the main plot of the story. I’m strengthening and adding to what was already a significant conflict, and making it the central conflict.

As a result, the writing I’ve done this week can best be described as Strategic Drafting. I’m adding new scenes and new conflict points, so in a way it’s been like doing a rough draft.

And yet I’m adding these scenes to what I once considered a complete, polished manuscript. As a result, I have to make the new stuff fit nicely into an existing framework. It’s challenging. It’s even fun. But most of all, it’s s l o w.

It’s all of the hassles of drafting, but without the freedom.

I guess I shouldn’t really complain too loudly, though. I’ve managed to go through some 55 pages this week, although I really wanted to do more – not only because I want to be finished, but because I actually am enjoying the writing, and wish I weren’t so restricted in my time.

During the summer, I managed to carve out as many as two hours every day for writing. Life was good.

By contrast, now that school is in session, there are kids to get ready for school, homework to help with, after school activities to drive to, and one child who’s moved from every-other-week Activity Days to every-week Young Women. I’m lucky to get in 60 minutes, and it’s usually closer to 45. There is just so much going on.

But I’m able to make time to write, so I guess that’s the important thing. Little steps still contribute towards progress.

I am grateful for the writing time I have. I just wish there were a way to get, you know, more!

(Bonus points for whoever can identify the source of today’s title.)

Organization and I have a fairly dysfunctional relationship. I seem to both crave and shun it. One look at my office would provide ample evidence: boxes of file folders sitting under piles of papers on top of file cabinets. The desire and preparation for a tidy, orderly workspace are present, but the execution is sorely lacking.

Something similar happened when writing my story. I followed the “seat of the pants” writing style, and ended up with a book that could most generously be called “character-driven.”

In other words, it needs more plot.

So that has been the focus of my writing work this week. I believe I can change the relationship of a few main characters, and suddenly I have a plot that is big enough and strong enough to carry the book while keeping the main story points intact.

It’s as if I wrote the original story with this plot in my subconscious mind, but wasn’t brave enough to consciously use it.

I’m feeling brave now, though, and have gone through two different plotting methods (Snowflake and Story Structure) to help me understand what changes the book will need.

I’ll admit – some of the things I discovered during this process scare me. We’re talking a lot of work, and a giant leap out of my comfort zone. But then I guess that’s what this writer’s journey is really all about.

To wrap up this post, I thought I’d share this picture that shows someone else who could use a unifying plot line. Happy Wednesday!

I got an email yesterday. It was good news. It was bad news. It made me both happy and sad at the same time, and I wasn’t sure which emotion would win out at the end of the day.

Either way, I knew the situation called for ice cream. The good stuff, too – Wal-Mart’s Great Value All Natural Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. (Yes, for my money it really is the good stuff. Compare the ingredients before you judge.)

So, what was in this email? I’ll tell you.

But first, my work in progress, since it is WIP Wednesday. 2772 words added to Space Corp General this week. Modest, yes. But it’s still progress. I’ll take it.

Now, back to the email.

This email came from a publisher. It was a rejection letter. That’s the bad news.

The good news is it also contained nearly two pages of suggested changes, with an invitation to revise and resubmit.

I’ve been told that, despite being a rejection, this email was really a good thing. After studying it out in my mind, I believe that it is.

I can’t argue with the suggested changes. The letter really hits the story’s weaknesses and “issues.” Many are easy to fix, like dropping the anthurium joke. (To be honest, I’m surprised none of my beta readers called me on that one.) Others I fear will be a little more difficult to pull off.

Unfortunately, the changes I agree with most strongly go all the way to the heart of the plot, and I’m not exactly sure how to fix them without completely gutting the work and starting over. I’ll need to give it some thought. Maybe a complete “reboot” is what the story needs, although I’m not quite ready to go that drastic yet. Perhaps I won’t need to. At this point, I just don’t know.

So I’m proceeding with a muted, contemplative celebration. The letter contained a fair chunk of validation, which is always nice to get. Now I just need to wrap my brain around the things that need to change, and decide where I go from here.

Before I took up writing, my creative outlet of choice was music. I’ve had formal instruction on instruments in all five categories – keyboard, string, woodwind, percussion, and brass – and have been in a number of musical groups over the years.

During high school, I played both the saxophone and the xylophone. I wasn’t able to find a picture of myself with my sax, but here I am with my xylophone in the 1983 Aloha Week parade.

However, it was while playing my tenor sax that I learned a lesson I have applied to my writing these many years later.

The jazz band had already played our formal concert several weeks before, but for some reason we’d been invited to play at another school somewhere else on the island. It was my senior year, and graduation was just around the corner. A ton of homework and class projects had worn me down, and I was not particularly happy about what was to be the final concert of my high school career.

School was stressing me out – probably my pending AP exams – and I was tired from all of the studying. There was also some tension between myself and the baritone sax player – we had dated earlier in the year, and things had ended badly.

I was really not in the mood for this concert, especially since we’d be playing Help Me, Rhonda, and I didn’t want to do the solo again. Although I had practiced it to perfection and executed flawlessly during the regular concert, my solo still fell flat. I could tell the band director was disappointed, as he usually was with my solos. I just didn’t get it, whatever “it” was.

So the concert came, and I went through the motions, playing everything the way I had practiced. Then it was time for my solo.

In my bad mood, I didn’t bother to play the solo the way it was written. I just blew. The notes were close, I stayed in the right key, but all I was really doing was venting my frustrations through my horn. It was the worst solo I’d ever played, but it was strangely therapeutic.

After the concert, the band director approached me. “What was that up there?” he asked. I braced for a good chewing out. “That was the best I ever heard you play. It reminded me of my days back with the [whatever his sixties rock band was called].”

I was shocked; here I thought I’d completely messed up the whole thing, when in fact I’d done what he’d been trying to get me to do for four years – play with feeling.

All the time I’d been working on executing the notes exactly, what I’d really done is scrubbed away all of the emotion. Precision and conformity is exactly what’s needed when playing as part of the band, but during a solo, it’s the passion that counts.

Now that I’ve traded a mouthpiece for a word processor, I notice I tend to be the same way with my writing. I edit and edit until the voice is thoroughly sanitized.

This would be fine for a newspaper article or users manual, but I’m writing fiction. And in fiction, it’s the voice that counts.

Can I help it if my favorite flower has a name that sounds like a disease? No, probably not. The best I can do is keep from using that name in the title of my book.

Delivering Tuberoses is out.

I need a title that relates to the story, somehow implies Hawai’i, is easy to pronounce, and doesn’t turn off potential readers with potentially icky connotations. Like tuberose. Or pu pu.

It’s probably a lot of wasted worry, especially since the name might never be seen by anyone but a few Acquisition Editors. But those editors will see it, and for them I want a good title.

So I’m going to bounce one off of you before I hand it in. The title du jour is:

The Flight of Na Pua Lei

What do you think? Does it work? Would you read the cover copy of a book with this title, or run from the bookstore screaming and set your hair on fire?

I know it fits the first three criteria; I need to make sure it fits the fourth.

And in case you were wondering, Na Pua Lei literally means The Flower Lei. It just sounds better in the title, making it all mysterious and exotic-like.

Okay. Moving on. I did do more this week than worry about my title.

It’s last-minute revision time. I incorporated the feedback from my last two readers, printed the whole thing out and read it over the weekend, red pen in hand.

Does it make me a narcissist to say I still really like this story? I hope not, because I do.

However, during this edit I had to accept there’s a problem in a couple of the chapters. A great, glaring problem that wasn’t my fault. In fact the passages were perfectly fine when I wrote them. But because of a change in the real world, I now have to overhaul a couple of small but very important scenes.

I’ll give you the whole story once I’ve figured it out – hopefully by next Monday. And maybe by then I’ll have some submission news, too.

So I did a word count this morning, and found that during the last week or so I’ve shed over 3,000 words.

Yay, me?

This has been a very good week for my book – educational, insightful, and inspirational.

A while back, I followed a link from Bookmom Musings (thanks, Jamie!) to a series on Story Structures by Larry Brooks. The tab sat open for a long time before I finally got around to reading it this past week. Very good stuff.

As I read this series, I decided to compare these principles to my WIP, just to see how I had done on my own. The results surprised, encouraged, and enlightened me.

I have all four plot points he said I should have, plus the two “pinch points,” and it happened without my consciously placing them there. Through years and years of reading, I must have picked up the concept of structure well enough to subconsciously recreate it.

Cool.

However, my implementation is not without its problems. Most glaring is the fact that my first plot point occurs early, at the 15% mark rather than the theoretical ideal of 25%, and my first pinch point, which should happen at around 38%, doesn’t show up until almost the middle of the book – at 45%. So rather than 13% of the story happening between these two points, it’s more like 30% – twice as much as theory suggests.

Now, I realize that these are just numbers. But it’s interesting to note that nearly every beta reader has commented that the story was great until the first plot point, then seemed to drag until the second.

Coincidence? I think not.

So this week I’ve focused on cleaning, tightening, and pruning that section of the book, trying to keep the plot moving between those two points. I think I’ve made some good changes, but I’m sure there’s more I can do, and I’ll be working on that during this next week as well.

I need to stay focused, though. I’m on the final push towards my next round of submissions – hopefully by the end of next week.

This week, I also got some positive feedback from a reader, and that really made me feel good. Now, this reader is a friend of a friend – a virtual stranger to me – so, unlike my mom, she has no ulterior motive for saying nice things about my book. She’s well versed in the LDS market, so I like to think she knows what she’s talking about. She told me, among other things, that my MS compares very favorably to other LDS books she’s read.

Given the quality of the LDS fiction I’ve been reading lately, I’ll take that as high praise indeed.

A year ago (almost to the day) I took a business trip to California and packed along a hard copy of my MS first draft. It was rough, to say the least. But it was the first time I had read through my story from beginning to end.

Today, as I return from a business trip to California, I finished reading a hard copy of the fourth draft of this MS, in preparation of submitting it. I must say, it’s a much better read this time.

Last time I hacked out entire multi-chapter sections. This time I’ve trimmed a bunch of individual words, several sentences, and a couple of paragraphs. There are also a few typos, but not as many as I had feared.

What’s better, I still like the story.

So now I need to take those red marks and apply them to the soft copy, come up with a new name for one of the villains, cross my fingers and attach this thing to an email.

Then I’ll set up a folder to hold my rejection letters.

And a folder to hold my contracts. Just in case.

It’s one of the first rules of writing I learned – “Show, don’t tell.” I’ve worked hard at this, and felt I was doing pretty good.

Then I got to chapter 30 of this current edit, and realized (through some very good feedback) that nearly the entire chapter is one big long example of expository writing. Yikes!

I guess I need a new scene (or two) to show what I’m trying to get across in this chapter.

At least it was chapter 30, and not chapter 1…