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Because I moved from POV chapters to one central file a bit early (in order to make keeping word count easier, and thus checking against daily goals easier), the book began to grow in ways that ran counter to temporal sequence.
Or, more simply, it was/is a mess.
What I needed was a printout. By this week, I desperately needed a printout. Usually I start doing a printout earlier, but for reasons A – R, that didn’t work for me this time. And printing out 780+ pages takes a) time, b) lots of paper, c) lots of printer cartridge, and d) even more time to punch holes in the sheets so they’ll go in the two big fat 3-ring binders that I use to move chapters around.
Time I didn’t have, not and get the first draft done and through first-ordering before the start of rehearsals for the Duruflé “Requiem”, which start a week from Saturday. Rehearsing Duruflé means having to listen to it, over and over, and Duruflé is not first-drafting music for me. Learned that last time we did it. Tried a little on the trip to Dragon*Con, and sure enough–Duruflé shuts down the Plot Daemon.
So I remembered that way last spring, I had Kinko’s/FedEx make me a copy of the copy-edited ms (with my marks) for later reference. I looked online. Sure enough…they can print from an emailed file. I called for a price, gulped, and shipped off the file (shorter this morning than this afternoon) to be printed and hole-punched. Then I kept writing, and more story appeared.
This afternoon, on the way to the city for a) fencing lesson and b) diagnostic consult on what was wrong with Serendipity (one of the new external hard drives), I stopped by the FedEx store and picked up 784 neatly printed and hole-punched pages, waved plastic at the little plastic-reader. Sometimes technology is wonderful (emailing a very rough first draft and having it magically reappear as paper ready for the binders) and sometimes technology is a PITA (Serendipity went blank for no apparent reason. Another trial is warranted.)
I’ve now made a note of four rough temporal divisions into which all chapters will be stuffed tomorrow. It will then be time to look at the wordage left, the temporal gaps to be filled, and make decisions about the divisions in which there is Too Much Stuff.
Though it’s after midnight now, with a lot to be accomplished tomorrow, it’s still hard to leave the printout in its box, and not start re-ordering chapters right this minute. When I get them reordered in print, and mark the obvious fixes (square brackets with [findaname] inside being among those), then I can move things in the computer, and THEN I’ll have a sequence that should make some sense for alpha readers, while I tackle the end game for this volume. (No, we can’t stop here, because that’s a very unsatisfying place to stop!)
Comment by Adam Baker — October 1, 2010 @ 6:33 am
Ah, the joys & sorrows of modern technology. Cant live with it, and cant survive with out it, haha.
Comment by genko — October 1, 2010 @ 11:02 am
I know exactly what you mean about not being able to leave the printout in its box. Whenever I get something new in, I have to begin to work with it RIGHT NOW — it just makes me crazy to leave it alone. I had a roommate once who got a new desk, and didn’t touch it for TWO DAYS, or maybe even longer. I couldn’t imagine such a thing — I would have been putting things in it, making it mine, immediately, no matter what time it was.
But when it’s after midnight, yes, it makes sense to leave it for the morning.
Comment by elizabeth — October 1, 2010 @ 6:07 pm
So I sat up reading about 60 pages of it, enough to fall into my ordinary middle-book-of-group funk (“You’ve started off completely wrong, and the reason the thing felt muddled now and then writing is that you continued all wrong and now you’re going to have to write a completely new book…”) and switching to a chapter of a Diana Wynne Jones book to calm my fevered brain did not work.
And yet last night, instead of actually fencing with the fencing group (who didn’t show up, though DRW and I were prodding each other in a desultory way in the living room) I ended up reading a chunk from later (but it may not be later) in the book and he and C- (who doesn’t fence but is a mutual friend) listened with apparent approval.
I’ve divided the story-time into 45 day chunks and am now assigning chapters to the respective chunks. Parts I like a lot. Unfortunately, there’s a little voice telling me that those are the parts to jettison because they’re not (for the most part) in one of the three primary POVs. And yet I know a lot of readers want more Arvid and more Stammel and will want (once they meet him), more Ummm.
Comment by Jonathan D. Schor — October 7, 2010 @ 9:12 am
When you finish, please save the massive file for either sale or archive. There are many who would like to read your writing even if it just involves many varied, out of sequence, or disjointed portions.
Comment by Jan J — October 9, 2010 @ 6:34 pm
Just FYI, a few years ago a friend introduced me to pre-punched paper for my printer – most office supply stores have it. It has three holes already punched in the sheets – you only need to figure out which way to put it into the printer, and then just keep refilling it that direction, and presto – punched pages and no need to do it by hand. I’m enjoying reading the blog and snips as you go along – Deed is one of my favorite books that I only read about three times a year. Oath of Fealty was wonderful – am waiting impatiently for Kings!
Comment by elizabeth — October 10, 2010 @ 4:48 pm
A friend showed me 3-hole paper a few years ago too…the real logjam for me is the actual printing on a printer that requires supervision. I considered a trip to get the 3-hole paper and do it myself, but that trip was a farther than the FedEx store where I had it printed–and would’ve been twice as long (to fetch the paper back.) the way I did it, emailing the file in and picking it up on the way to the city where I was headed anyway later that day, meant no time (well, very little) lost in writing.