Killing the Darlings

It is difficult to let go of a phrase you love, but your love for it might be the proof that you should. This comes home to me as I review comments from my editor.

As with many great quotes, the attribution for “You must kill your darlings” is in dispute. Faulkner, maybe, or Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Regardless, the sentiment is the same when it comes to writing: you must sometimes murder your favorite child.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King says, “kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”    

That’s why a writer is both eager and full of dread when she gets a manuscript back from an editor.

I’m re-reading my latest draft but, for the first time, with notes from my editor. When I spot a comment, all dressed up in a blue box, further down the page, it’s all I can do to keep from scrolling to it. Instead, I carefully read through the lines, accepting or (rarely) rejecting the minor punctuation suggestions she has made, all the time distracted by what might lie in wait.

More often than not, the comment is about a minor change she is suggesting, but occasionally she thinks I should rewrite a sentence or throw away a paragraph all together. The first image that comes to mind when I think of ripping out a paragraph is seeing it there on the floor, connecting tissue and arteries severed, quivering in the throes of death.

But they are only words. I can make more of them. Better, I can say the same thing with fewer words.

So, today (and the next few days) are for darling killing. Your condolences are appreciated.

A Brain with a Mind of its Own

My brain won’t leave me alone. In past posts I’ve commented on the power of that magical land between wakefulness and dreams. I travel it a lot and get my best ideas there.

Last night, at something past three, my brain started exploring the landscape there and came back with idea after idea, this time in the arena of art, not writing. Stay tuned for some encaustic mashups that will be brilliant, or something less.

I appreciate these musing moments. I depend on them. But, sleep has its virtues, too. When my brain really gets revved up, it won’t stop. It wants to tackle other problems I didn’t know I had, mostly dealing with shop organization or how to keep the dog from jumping up on strangers. I wrestle it back toward the artistic, hoping that will be more productive, at least, if not sleep-inducing.

And now, it’s fully daylight and I can actually pursue the activities I worked through in my head last night. But I’m too damn sleepy!

Live

...and, we’re live.

If you are reading this on my Tumblr feed, you may have gathered from a scattering of date references in previous posts that this blog was not live. Now it is. My blog appears on Blogspot, Goodreads, Facebook, Amazon and Tumblr. In order to sync all those, I took a few weeks off and replayed the blog from the beginning on Tumblr.

This is a bit like time travel for me, taking a leap forward from the last post. For many of you there won’t be a break in the continuity at all.

So, what has happened in the weeks (or no time at all) since yesterday’s post? For Blood of Anjels, my editor has now finished a couple of reads on the book and has gotten it back to me. I’ll be concentrating on the edits she has suggested and working on continuity issues she found. A second editor has given me some help on the opening sequence of the book. I’ll incorporate some of those suggestions into the final draft, too. Once that’s done, we’ll be nearly ready to publish.

I am looking for an artist to work with, first on the cover of this book and perhaps on the covers of my previous young adult books in the Wizards Trilogy. If I can find the right artist, I may work with them to create graphic novel versions of the trilogy.

Meanwhile, I have a good start on the first draft of The Crappy, Used Diary.

While I was taking a break from blogging, I wrote a short story that I’m pretty happy with and that my wife hates. It’s called Hitch, and its about a pair of best friends who wake up after a night of drinking in Vegas to find that they’re married. Yeah, that seemed like a good idea the night before.

Quick Update

Time for a quick update. Blood of Anjels is still with the editor. I'm continuing to do research for the Crappy Used Diary.

Meanwhile, I have completed a major redesign of my website. Please take a look at it.

www.rickjust.com

Research

The Crappy Used Diary will require some research. I need to know what was happening day-by-day 100 years ago on certain dates. That isn’t particularly difficult now that we have that magical device, the Internet. Understanding how events might impact the life of a 12-year-old girl is a little more challenging.

Perhaps the most challenging thing is to capture the idiom of pre-teens then and now. Again, having the Internet at my disposal will help me better understand the way girls today talk, but what about the girls of a century ago?

For contemporary entries, http://teenagediarycollective.tumblr.com/archive will offer some help.

For entries from the teens (girls and years) from that other century, I will need to locate a diary or two. I’m fortunate to have a family diary from about that time, although the journalist was elderly.

And, as I write this, I realized that the “diary” will only be such for the first three or four entries. After that it will be much more like letters from one girl to another and from one century to another. They will be much like pen pals who slowly learn about each other. Telling about their surface lives will come easily enough for them, but it will take some time to open up about their interior lives, their fears, their dreams.

Repeating History

The Crappy Used Diary is a story about a 12-year-old girl who gets an antique leather diary for her birthday from her father. He has found it while doing restoration work on a house of historic interest to his family. The daughter is bummed. She wanted a new iPod, and all she got was this stupid diary.


A few days after her birthday, she is bored and picks it up to thumb through it. That’s when she notices it is used! There are three or four entries. In spite of her pique she decides to read the entries. She notices that the dates correspond to recent days, but from one hundred years ago. There is already an entry for “today,” but she decides to do just what her dad wanted and make an entry in the diary herself. Her entry is all about how what she really wanted was an iPod and all she got was a crappy used diary.


The girl leaves her pen in the diary and closes it, never intending to write in it again. The next day, she’s looking for her pen and remembers where she’d left it. To her surprise (but probably not yours, at this point) there is another hundred-year-old entry below the one she had written the day before.


Intrigue and complications ensue.

This will give me an opportunity to explore several areas of interest. As I said yesterday, I will be able to write about friendships of adolescent girls. More important, it will allow me to compare and contrast the lives of girls of that age one hundred years apart. And, didn’t someone once say something about repeating history if you ignore it?

A Shiny New Vehicle

Authors over the years have used many vehicles to take their characters--and their readers--into other worlds. Think rabbit holes, mirrors, tornadoes and wardrobes.


In my books, so far, the vehicles have been a lava tube, a backpack and dog urine. Yeah, you’ll have to stand by for that last one. It’s still only about half written.


I bring this up because I’m about to step into a shiny new vehicle of the literary type: A diary.


Blood of Anjels is out to readers in draft form (let me know if you’d like to be a reader), so I’m effectively setting that aside and starting some preliminary work on the next one.


The working title of this book is likely the one I’ll keep: The Crappy Used Diary. It will be a young adult novel with--there I go again--mostly female characters. I’ve written three coming of age novels, two of them about girls. I’m particularly drawn to stories about the friendships between girls. Maybe it is because passionate friendships between females is more socially accepted than passionate friendships between boys. And see, there your mind goes barking off in the wrong direction. When I said passionate your first thought was sexual. Just slap yourself. I mean deep and enduring. Also, poised on the dramatic.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss the options on the vehicle I’ve chosen to take us back and forth between worlds. Yes, it has air conditioning, Internet and electric windows. Except for when it doesn’t have indoor plumbing. Stay tuned.