Spider: Revision and Other Stuff

[jacey]

Huge thanks to brownnicky  for being the first to read Spider on the Web and giving me some great feedback, It's keeping me busy hence I've not been posting much over the last couple of days. I'm one of those writers who actually likes the process of revision and - given the opportunity - I will polish and polish and never call a piece finished. I'm going through it now to check each one of brownnicky 's comments, doing a quick revision pass and then it's going to three volunteer beta-readers for comments. I was worried about a few squick factors but I may have been over-sensitive. So far, so good.

I sent my deposit cheque off this week for the Milford SF writers' week which this year is the end of October. It's still a long way off, but I'm really looking forward to it. mevennen  is the current Milford secretary and bluehairsue  the chair.

Other than that it's been a weird week on TV starting with Saturday and the return of Robin the Hoodie on BBC TV shown against Primeval on ITV. Bad planning, guys, but at least Primeval is repeated on Sunday. I'm only watching Robin the Hoodie to see if it improves. Yeah, right. I've been saying that for two seasons already. It hasn't yet, but Richard Armitage is still great eye-candy. Heroes (Mondays) is improving since its dire Season Two, though. Sadly I keep forgetting to switch on for Smallville on Tuesdays. It has its good moments but they are fewer and further between these days. And I've gone past caring about what happens to Sam and Dean in Supernatural. Sorry, guys. When's the first of the Doctor Who specials? Easter, I hope.

The car went in dock for a service and its MOT check. It passed, but on the way home the new joint on one of the steering thingies started clunking. Turned out it was faulty so we were without it for another day.

BB tried to take the end of his finger off with a hammer on Tuesday resulting in a nasty spell of him almost passing out and me doing the instant first aid thing with him laid out on the kitchen floor in recovery position. Oh joy. I still think it needed a once-over by someone with more knowledge than me, but - unusually - there was no doctor, nurse or first aider available at our local surgery that day, and a ten mile trip in a car (presuming I'd been able to borrow one - see above paragraph) when he already has a tendency to car sickness at the best of times (as a passenger) and is feeling woozy, faint and sick from the accident was something that didn't seem to be in his best interests. But I spent the rest of Tuesday watching him like a hawk. He seems fine now, but he's changed the dressing himself so I haven't seen the finger. Any sign of infection and he gets no choice about that trip to the doctor's.

He's working out in the garden again, so he can't be feeling that bad. The first raised bed is almost ready to plant.

I went to see 'Knowing' on Wednesday with H. It's one of those movies you don't want to know too much about before you go and see it. Also it reminded me how good Nicholas Cage is. As for the movie itself - well - it's not a laugh a minute and I had issues with the ending, but parts of it were spectacular and the tension really cranks up. On balance I'm glad I went. The first 3/4 of the movie gets five stars.

I finished reading Kari Sperring's Living With Ghosts but I haven't digested it enough to write a Book Log on it yet. It deserves more than a quick recap of the story - if indeed you could recap it quickly! Must do that tomorrow or Saturday. I picked up China Mieville's Un Lon Don for my next read, but then got sidetracked by a historical that someone (one of my visiting musos) had left in the house. I ordered brownnicky 's 'Shadow Web' from the local bookseller in Denby Dale and must remember to collect it tomorrow or Saturday.

It's such a long time since I've read a Regency romance that I decided I should read some Georgette Heyer... just to remind myself of the specific genre and because I'd like to compare and contrast with some of the SF novels heavily influenced by her - such as Bujold's 'A Civil Campaign'. The local bookshop has none, Waterstones in Wakefield only had three and they were expensive (eight pounds for a skinny paperback). I figured a charity shop or used department of the local bookshop might be my best bet - but not a Heyer in sight. Is she going / has she gone out of fashion?

I spent part of yesterday pricking out seedlings and potting on cuttings. The tomatoes (2 varieties) have all sprouted. Some are nearly six inches tall while others have only just thrown up their first pair of leaves, but they're all viable. The lettuce is rampant. The purple sprouting broccoli has grown, but doesn't look very well. The fuchsia cuttings are brilliant

Other than that I have a touch of toothache (which considering I only had a dental check last week (all clear) seems a bit unfair) and an entirely self-inflicted stiff neck from falling asleep in a chair compounded by bad typing posture. Will I never learn?

Oh, and I did some day job work, too.

Comments

[julesjones]

I've got a couple of spare copies of Heyer from a road trip where I hit several second-hand bookshops and didn't stop to check for duplicates at the price they were selling the Heyers in the second one. Remind me this weekend to look for them.

[brownnicky.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed reading it. Glad my commets helped.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Oh that would be fantastic. Happy to cover costs. Let me know.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. A huge help. Thank you.

You know what it's like. You write the damn thing in total isolation and then you have to let someone read it. The last thing you want is for someone to tell you it's good because they are your friend and want to please you. You have to be confident that if it's total bollox your first reader will say so.

I know you're not going to do that.
:-)
So when you say it's an overall decent first draft then I'm happy, but when you say this or that clunks, I listen very hard and do something about it.

I'm about halfway though checking your notes and I think, so far, there's only one place where I've thought about it and let it stand. All the others have warranted a tweak - some more than others.

And I was very interested in what you considered to be the similarity of voice between the characters so I'm working on that in the longer term. They didn't feel all that similar to me, but I was listening to what I thought I'd written (complete with vocal timbre and accents) and you were reading the words on the page. If they felt too close to you in voice, then I missed my mark somewhere and I need to check it again. I particularly need to make Mirza very different because her background is so far from the background of the other two. Marek and Lind probably started out in a similar place - i.e. 'poor but honest' peasant families. They both got a bit of basic education and had a fair bit of native intelligence, but their adolescent and adult experiences were so different - and I need to show that. Marek coarse and physical, but refined and educated further by climbing up through the ranks of the army. Lind reserved, cold and uncommunicative, but needing to move invisibly within society as an assassin, so therefore forced to learn how to play the game.

I probably need to go through and tweak all of the chapters by Marek, then Lind, then Mirza, so I see the story three times from three different viewpoints. I haven't done that yet, but it's the next thing on my list.

I also have a friend who's a sex therapist and he's offered to read Lind's chapters for me to check for anything really obvious in the psychology of what he goes through.

The good thing is that I'm enjoying working on it. I love this stage, when most of the elements are in place and you can polish and refine and move round until it's right (or as right as you can make it).

[julesjones]

Right, I have a spare copy of Cousin Kate (which I haven't read myself yet, so can't say if good or bad). I though I had at least one other duplicate title, but most of the Heyers are amongst the missing batches of books which are presumed to be in boxes in the storage locker. The one we rented assuming we'd buy a house within six months of moving back...

66p postage if it's thin enough to go second class rather than packet, which I think it is. For that amount you can buy me a drink when we're at the same con. :-) If you'd like it, send me your snail mail address at jules.jones@gmail.com.

[hairmonger.livejournal.com]

Cousin Kate is probably her weakest Regency. I've only read it twice.

If only postage across the ocean were not so expensive! I am in the process of sorting out what duplicates there are in my mother's books and mine that aren't too falling apart too be considered real books. Venetia is one, I remember. (One of my favorites.)

Mary Anne in Kentucky

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Hmm, Cousin Kate may be a weak one if you're read the others, but my memory of readin any of hers at all is so diluted by time that I'm happy to start anywhere.

Yes, transatlantic postage is quite expensive but there are basic surface postage services that are cheaper than airmail.

I was horrified to be charged nearly $30 for postage on 2 specialist books I bought from a website (research for the work in progress). Amazon charges £2.75 (roughly $5) even on books shipped from the US. I queried it and was told that was the cheapest available postage for the weight of the book. I was expecting a massive heavy hardback, but when it came it was a slim paperback and a pamphlet and the silly woman had used a priority air mail service. The postage was more than the value of the items. I'm sure it could have been sent for much less.

[brownnicky.livejournal.com]

It's great that you enjoy it. I'd be lying if I said I liked revision much. I like the white hot stage and then I lose interest a little, which is fantastically unprofessional of me. I have to really give myself a stern talking to before I can do it at all.

I think the degree to which indvidual character's voices should be distinctive is always an issue, particularly when writing characters with a more limited vocab than your own.
I usually restrict vocab, but I didn't with my last one because I wanted to be able to describe what my protag experienced in words we both might use as it was weird enough to need a broad vocabulary.
It is always a bit of a compromise between telling the story well and allowing the character to dominate. If you write lit fiction perhaps you should go for the latter (though lit writers often don't)even at the expense of the former. For the rest of us I suppose the story is paramount. In other words, I'm not sure you should beat yourself up about it : )
Quite a lot of published writers make no distinction at all between protags and it doesn't seem to cause them any problems.

I think the sex therapist is a good idea and maybe you could give more hints as to the attitude to sexuality in the societies from which the protag's originated? I felt that they wouldn't be the same and that Marek's slightly surprising liberality may not be predominant in the Christian community even if it was taken for granted elsewhere?

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Re the liking revision: I've read two of your first drafts, now, and you're much more careful with them than I am. Neither seemed to need a lot of revision. They seemed to spring forth fully formed. My first drafts are much sloppier.

Re the voicing: I think it won't take much tweaking. I don't intend to completely rewrite chunks of it. I already had palettes for curse-words etc, so I probably need to extend that a bit to cover other things.

Re the sex: Marek is a bit of a one-off. He's never had a bad experience of sex because he's never given one. I have it in the back of my mind that somewhere around the age of fifteen he had a fling with an older, much more experienced woman - someone twice his age, maybe, who taught him a lot. A kind of benevolent Mrs Robinson. He's a 'love the one you're with' type so even casual sex is always less than casual for him - even if it's only temporary.

Re the attitudes: The rest of society isn't anywhere near as enlightened - though it's pre-Victorian, of course, so folks aren't hung up about it. Bodily functions weren't as taboo until the Victorian age. Hell the results of most bodily functions were floating down the open drains in the middle of the street. The liberal attitude towards sex is is probably due to the fact that they'll ignore most things if it's not flung in their faces. We are, of course, mostly moving amongst lower classes of commonners in the book (soldiers and whores) who tend not to get a fit of the vapours over something a little out of the ordinary. Maybe the more hidebound middle classes who attend church regularly and read their scriptures at night miight be a little less easy. But we're not seeing anything from their viewpoint.

Also, the country - well the capital at any rate - is (as Poland was) remarkably cosmopolitan and has a liberal attitude towards religions. I'm figuring that since the church doesn't have the capital in a death-grip that there will be a little more leeway fro tolerance in all sorts of matters. Being a (fictional) Eastern European country there are all sorts of ideas imported from the Arabic world too. Homosexuality may not be spoken about freely on a regular basis, but it's not totally taboo. The Imquisition hasn't been given a free hand here.

What is frowned upon, however, is miscegenation. hence when the old King fathers a child on the daughter of a wealthy Jewish Merchant that child is not recognised as a King's Bastard - as would normally be his right - which is, of course, what starts all the trouble once Kazimir (brought up as an orphan in a Catholic household) discovers his true parentage.

Ha - anyway - I'm intending to spend most of today on it. Just going to make a big cup of coffee and thenm I'll get started.

[brownnicky.livejournal.com]

Great!!!