I know that some authors find rewriting easier (in some ways) than the initial creative process. Me, I can whip something out of nothing without breaking a sweat. But whenever I try to approach the highly necessary rewrite of my recent novella, I get almost immediately overwhelmed by the minutiae of things that need tending to. I am pulled this way and that, trying to keep track of the myriad of details that need to hover simultaneously in my forebrain–and I end up just fiddling with the niggling little grammar nits, polishing word choice, questioning whether that adverb is really necessary, and reassuring myself that all the independent clauses are safely sequestered within their parenthetical commas.

Consequently, the real work–that is, deleting scenes and rewriting the whole cloth of large sections–goes undone because of these distractions of questionable value. Sometimes, I think I might be better off deleting the damned thing and starting over from scratch.

So, my question: In your subsequent drafts, how do you keep the story from getting in the way of your rewriting?

Answer behind the cut.

I know writers who do, in fact, just start their second draft from scratch. I don’t personally, but sometimes I can see the appeal. I also am not one of those writers who finds the revision process vastly more rewarding than the initial writing process, although I do like the end result of all that flipping work. But the actual revision work is exhausting, because I’m trying to hold three different versions of the story in my head at once: the story as it was, the story as it is in process of being revised, and the story as it needs to be.

From the lead-in to the question, it sounds like it’s the second stage where it’s falling apart for the writer, which makes sense to me, because it’s the second part *I* find really headache-inducing. Knowing what you have to do, knowing what the story should look like on the other end, is a hell of a lot easier than figuring out how to do it. And I hate to say it, but on some level, it’s just a matter of practice. It’s also a hell of a lot easier if a third party (like an editor) has said, “This is a part that doesn’t work. Make it work,” or, “I need to see some motivation for this action,” or “I need more sense of setting here,” because that gives me something to work off of.

Okay. *rubs brain* This is hard to think about, actually, or at least hard to explain, because so much of it for me is just grim damned determination to get it done. But one thing I do is start with a hard copy. I _have_ to start with a hard copy. If I just try to work on screen my brain dribbles out my ear and I lose all will to live. More importantly, my brain is extremely consistent: if I start doing revisions on screen, what happens is I think, “Oh! This is a place to insert a clever line!” and I revise to insert it, then discover that a page and a half later, I already had that clever line in place. Hard copy prevents me from doing that, and believe me, after about the fifteenth time *of* doing it, I’m very happy to have read the bloody book all the way through and made myself aware of where my brain is likely to come up with clevernesses that it has already come up with. :)

Having a hard copy also means I can physically strike sections out, even if all I leave myself with beyond that is a note in big letters saying “MAKE THIS MORE BETTER” (which, yes, is usually exactly what I write). It is, one way or another, a visual cue that this part needs *work*.

I usually start at the beginning of the story, but I don’t think there’s any compelling reason to do it that way. Another advantage of hard copy for me is that when I’m further into the book and I’ve found something that needs setup earlier on, I can go back and leave myself a note on the paper that says “Joanne’s facing Wile E. Coyote on page 235, there needs to be some kind of foreshadowing *here*, in this scene where I can stuff in a Looney Toons reference without it being too gratuitous.” Then when I get to that in the on-screen revisions I can go “oh yeah” and take care of it immediately instead of having to flip back and forth.

Trust yourself–and when I say ‘trust yourself’, I also mean ‘forbid yourself to nitpick’–on the sentence structure level, by and large. There will, yes, be times and places where the sentences need work, but put that into a different mental space. That’s copy-editing, not revising. It comes *after* revisions.

I will very frequently cut and paste the sections that need work out of the manuscript. So if I need to strike seven pages out of chapter three and just rewrite them wholesale, I’ll take a version of chapter 3, save it into the Second Draft folder, and then delete everything that needs to go in one big chunk. It’s completely psychological for me: somehow it’s less awful to gut chapter three by itself than it is to take it out of the manuscript and watch the whole page count of the manuscript collapse by eight pages. It also gives me a place (or usually more than one) where the original version of the chapter or scene is saved, so if I need to go back and rescue a sentence, I can snag it out of the original.

I use a lot of white space when I’m working on screen. If I’m working on a specific part of a scene and I know there’s still shitloads to do further down, I just hit carriage return until I can’t see the later material. Again, it’s pure psychology. It’s a matter of being able to *face* one page of revisions at a time, but having new text that needs work continually scrolling up to face me is just disenheartening.

Focus on one major problem/storyline/thread/whatever at a time. This year an editor asked me to do a major revision on a book. M.A.J.O.R. revision. What ended up happening was I rewrote the first half of the book heavily and the second half less so, and then in the second round of revisions, ended up rewriting the second half of the book heavily. I *knew*, when I submitted it the second time, that there were still problems facing the manuscript, but I had just run out of steam. I needed someone else’s feedback to say “these are the things that can be punched up”. Basically what I did was face one set of problems the first time through, and an almost completely different set the second time around (they had been touched on in the first revision, but it was sort of an emotional storyline revision vs an action storyline revision, and I didn’t have the mental capacity to manage both at once to the degree they both needed work).

All right. If I have any more thoughts I’ll add them later, but right now this is all I can come up with. I hope it’s at least of a little use.

Seattle’s a great place to live…if it weren’t for the undead.

No one’s getting out of there alive.

To go along with WALKING DEAD’s release, my web guru, Laura Denson, recently did a recording of “Rabbit Tricks”, the Walker Papers short story that fits chronologically between COYOTE DREAMS and WALKING DEAD.

My longtime friend and writing partner Sarah Palmero did a two-minute voice recording from THE QUEEN’S BASTARD. I think both of these are pretty damned cool (if utterly bizarre, because wow, really weird to hear someone else reading my words!), and would like to thank them both profusely for doing these and letting me post them publicly!

Fifth, I’m terribly smug to show off the (tiny–if you want to see it full sized you’ll have to buy the story) cover for “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”, which was painted by manga artist Lanny Liu.

Along those same lines, “Hot Time” has debuted amongst its patrons today. (I wasn’t thinking, when I changed its due date to September 1st, that that was also the release date for WALKING DEAD. Oh well, everybody got WD early anyway, so “Hot Time” still gets to be a little bit special.) For those who didn’t join the fundable commission the first time through, the novella will be available to purchase in February 2010, after which it’ll go off the market permanently until it finds a traditional publisher.

And I just noticed several of my books have been nominated as contenders for 101 Best Fantasy novels. I have to admit that given some of the company (which ranges from Lloyd Alexander to Diana Wynne Jones with all points between), I feel my presence there is a bit ludicrous, but also quite wonderful and I wouldn’t mind making it onto somebody’s top 100 list, so if you wanted, you could go vote. :) And my thanks to whomever nominated me, how cool of you. :)

Several people have emailed to ask when the next Walker Papers will be out. I’m delighted to let you know that book four, WALKING DEAD, will be out in September 2009.

It is, in fact, going to be a busy year for releases. This is what this year’s publication schedule looks like:

March: A FANTASY MEDLEY (anthology featuring a story of the Old Races)

May: THE PRETENDER’S CROWN (book two of the Inheritors’ Cycle)

June: mass market paperback re-releases of URBAN SHAMAN, THUNDERBIRD FALLS, & COYOTE DREAMS (books 1-3 of the Walker Papers)

September: WALKING DEAD (book four of the Walker Papers)

October: mass market paperback re-release of WINTER MOON (anthology featuring “Banshee Cries”, a Walker Papers novella); also, THE PHANTOM QUEEN AWAKES, a mass market anthology with an original short story about the Morrigan

November: TAKE A CHANCE graphic novel, compiling issues 1-5 of TAKE A CHANCE, my new superhero comic currently being released as monthly issues

Frankly, I’m exhausted. :)

It’s high time, too, that I showed off the cover for THE PRETENDER’S CROWN, and along with it, a teaser excerpt from the book. The scene is from chapter one, and Belinda has been summoned to discuss recent political developments with her mother the queen…
Read the teaser!

In “Zen and the Art of Vampirism,” Zoe Takano, the only vampire in Toronto, a city filled with supernatural creatures of Kelley Armstrong’s Otherworld, finds her place in the hierarchy threatened by two interlopers.

“Riding the Shore of the River of Death” returns us to the world of Kate Elliott’s Crown of Stars. Kareka, daughter of the begh of the Kirshat, hunts to take a man’s head. It is her last opportunity to prove herself as a man or else she will find herself restricted to the role of woman and wife in the clan forever.

Robin Hobb revisits her Farseer world in “Words Like Coins.” Mirrifen, a failed hedge-witch’s apprentice who has married to find security finds that threatened by a severe drought and the appearance of a pregnant female pecksie.

C.E. Murphy takes us to frozen Moscow in “From Russia, with Love.” Baba Yaga’s daughter is a barmaid at a dive when Janx and Eliseo Daisani walk in. They discover, as they compete for the girl’s affections, that Baba Yaga has plans for Janx and that her beautiful daughter had merely been the bait.

Limited: 200 numbered copies signed by the authors and editor
Trade: 3000 fully clothbound hardcover edition

Supplies are quite literally limited, so pre-order it now!

A new Tale from Gryphon Beach, my collection of short stories for children

Glasslands, a prequel to an unwritten science fiction saga

A Compendium of Kitlings, a very silly story written for an anthology that never happened, in which, in turn-of-the-century Chicago, Mrs. O’Leary discovered that aliens (the sort from outer space) tended to pay their boarding fees more promptly than human boarders, and also in gold. This, then, is the story of one of her boarders….

Previously, on Take A Chance…, a prequel to my comic book TAKE A CHANCE, and also an audition script for any artist who’d like to try their hand at Chance

New York Hold ‘em, a story of the Old Races, and

Rabbit Tricks, a Walker Papers short story to tide you over until the release of book four, WALKING DEAD in September 2009.

My short story Ill Met by Moonlight–the story of a Hollywood starlet trapped on the wrong side of a mirror–is also once more being featured at eharlequin.com. I don’t know how long this one will be available, so if the URL isn’t working, sorry.

As it is (with apologies to Jane Austen) a truth universally acknowledged that a mid-list author in possession of good reviews must be in want of an income, if you enjoy the stories and have it to spare, I would be delighted if you wanted to send a few quid (as they say here) my way. You can use the button below, or if for some reason it doesn’t work, use the email address open AT mizkit DOT com. Thanks!

And it’s the mark of a couple pretty freaking significant landmark for me. First, it’s my first non-Harlequin book. Second, it’s my TENTH FREAKING NOVEL! ZOH. MY. GOD.

And third, I now have one million words in print.

Not too damned bad for somebody whose first book came out in June 2005, eh?

*beams like a fool*

P-Con starts tomorrow! I am GoH! I think it will be fun! …I’ll be an utter *zombie* on Monday, mind you, but it’ll be fun. And Ted is on a panel about what it’s like being married to a full-time writer, which I’m quite looking forward to attending. :)

Iiiii…am closing in on 100K on THE PRETENDER’S CROWN. About…well, 2K more, technically, because I’ve got a 2000 word scene that fits in later that’s not part of the actual current build-up of words and pages. 4K in straight beginning-to-end terms. I think I’ll go write for a while longer today, and maybe I’ll get up early enough to do some work before catching the train to Dublin tomorrow. (*Maybe* I’ll actually do some work over the weekend, but mostly that thought inspired a “bahahahahah!” in me, so probably not. So it’d be nice to hit 100K by tomorrow afternoon, don’t you think?)

I have blatantly stolen the Synopsis Q&A Joshua posted in the post that inspired all of this.

Please note that there are SPOILERS for URBAN SHAMAN behind this cut. The book synopsis is replicated in its entirety. As it happens, because of how this particular synopsis is written, it’s not *very* spoilery, but it is spoilery! So be warned, and now you can, if you wish,

How did you sell your first book–agent, slush pile, alien intervention? Slush pile–Luna was the third house I’d sent URBAN SHAMAN to. I dashed out and got myself an agent (the incomparable Jennifer Jackson) that weekend. Luna, at the time, was looking for traditional fantasy with a strong female protagonist and a strong romantic subplot. I sent them a contemporary fantasy with a strong female protagonist and almost no romantic subplot. They bought it. This is my way of saying “Let them tell you no.” I mean, don’t send a romance novel to Baen Books, let’s be reasonable, but also don’t assume that because your book doesn’t exactly fit what a publisher say they’re looking for that they’re going to reject you.

Was a synopsis involved, and if so what did it look like? (seriously: page length, spacing, font, straight up story or broken down by character/setting/plot, etc.) There was. It was a 2 page, 25pt spaced, .3″ tabbed, 12pt Courier New font, *extremely basic* synopsis that incorporated the entire story at once, without breaking things down into character/setting/plot. I can’t even imagine how you’d do that, in fact. Here’s the URBAN SHAMAN synopsis:

Joanne Walker is a Seattle cop with no use for the mystical. When she sees a woman running for her life, she has to get involved–even when the woman, Marie, claims to be hunted by Cernunnos, an ancient Celtic god who leads the Wild Hunt.

Jo’s solid, real world explodes when Cernunnos tramples through a local diner and calls her out. The fight ends with Jo’s near-death, and in a hazy experience between life and death, she’s greeted by the Native American trickster Coyote. He gives her a choice: death, or life as a shaman. Jo chooses the healer’s path, forced to acknowledged an aspect of the universe she’s never seen before.

Marie is murdered a few hours later. Jo, stunned, throws caution to the wind and seeks out guidance on a psychic plane. Half a dozen shamans, all of them dead in an apparently unconnected series of recent murders, respond. They charge her with finding the man who murdered them, unable to give her a greater clue than “he seeks the child.”

The next morning Jo wakes up to news that four children have been murdered at a local high school. She arrives at the school to discover a ritualized death scene. She speaks with the class teacher and, through a healing trance, learns the killer’s identity – Herne the Hunter, Cernunnos’ son.

Jo begins tracking Herne; Cernunnos, in turn, hunts Jo. Her newborn shamanic powers are the key to his ability to stay on Earth rather than be pulled back into shadow with the turn of the seasons. Their final confrontation takes place on an astral level, a very physical battle that leaves them both worn and battered, and binds Cernunnos to the cycle of time once more.

Another fight still remains, though: Jo tracks down Herne and with him, his daughter, whom Herne intends to sacrifice in a blood ritual that will permit him to take Cernunnos’ place as leader of the Hunt.

As she battles Herne, Jo comes to better understand the path she’s chosen, finally accepting her fate as a warrior and a healer in a world full of ignored mysticism. With her new understanding, she finds herself able to guide Herne to his own place in that mystical world, righting an error made centuries earlier.

When do you write a synopsis (before, during, after the novel)? Well, that synopsis I wrote after the book was written. I wrote the original synopses for THUNDERBIRD FALLS and HEART OF STONE while the books were in progress. These days I sell on proposal, so I write the synopses before I write the book.

Then I ignore it.

How do you go about doing it? With a great deal of pain and agony, usually.

Actually, I’ve found the best way to write a synopsis is to log onto a chat room, seize someone, and tell them what happens in the book. Then I take the log of the file and convert it into a synopsis. For some reason I get a huge mental block about having to Figure It Out in a formal fashion, but it’s a lot easier to just say, “Oh, yeah, and, crap, I forgot that back toward the beginning Jo did this which sets this up, ok?” and then keep going on.

The problem with doing this, of course, is it means whomever I’ve seized gets spoiled for the book I’m writing, at least in the general sense. I don’t write a lot of details into my synopses, so they remain a mystery until the book’s written (to me as well as to whomever I’ve blurted at).

I have still not learned to get enough emotional content into synopses, particularly in the form of motivation. I tend to focus on the plot, the whole plot, and nothing but the plot, which, to me, *is* the story, and leave out emotional ramifications and “er, why exactly did she do that?” (“Because I NEEDED HER TO.”) sorts of things. I’m more aware of it than I used to be, and I’m better than I was, but that’s still an area I fall down in.

Does this change depending on circumstances (genre, adult/YA, publisher, time of year, whether it’s raining, etc.)? Not really. Everything I’ve done a synopsis for has been the same amount of agony, except one synopsis that flowed in its creation and which I was proud of and liked a lot and which the publisher responded to with, “Well, ok, but what about these problems?” and made me have to reconsider the whole book. She was right, too, dammit. They usually are.

Did your approach, or the final product (the synopsis), change as you got publishing experience? Does your agent or editor want something different from you now than when they were pulling you out of the slush? My agent pretty much always says the same thing when I turn in a proposal: “Not bad, I think maybe you’ve put too much information in the first few chapters, a little too front-loaded maybe,” and I always have. One of my editors responds to the proposal with ideas for changing things around, for improving the story, etc; the other one does not, unless the synopsis I’ve turned in is absolute crap, in which case she says, in much nicer words, “This is crap. Do it again.” (That’s only happened once. And she was right. I knew it was crap when I turned it in, but I sort of hoped she wouldn’t notice. She did. :))

As for myself…I’m trying to learn to incorporate the things I’m not good at, and eventually they’ll become second nature. I hope. I’m better at them than I used to be; I’m better at considering long term ramifications and I’m better at seeing when I, for example, have forgotten to put a plot in. But it is still incredibly, incredibly helpful to have an editor respond, because even though it makes me sulk, the truth is that all writers have blind spots and having someone else illuminate those areas is critical.

We’ve been debating the eternal question of how much to include or leave out–when *you* write a synopsis, how closely does the synopsis match the book? Oh, God. Well, the URBAN SHAMAN synopsis is practically just High Concept, because it was written after the book and I really just took all the high ideas and wrote them down.

One of the things I find synopses useful for is–I usually do ignore them, after I’ve written them. This is because I think I’ve got the basic shape of the book in my head. It usually does come out more or less like what I wrote in the synopsis, too, although never exactly. But what I find them useful for is when I get slowed down or stuck and don’t know what I should be doing next. I go look at the synopsis and go, “Oh! What a cool idea that is! Now how can I get my characters to that point so I can do it?” which certainly unsticks me.

The problem with doing that is that in re-reading the synopsis I sometimes find that I forgot something REALLY COOL that would now require rewriting half the book to work in. So I’ve begun at least keeping a copy of the synopsis open along with the other doc files I’m working on, so I can take a peek now and then and see if I’ve forgotten any cool ideas.

Um. I guess ideally my synopses cover the action thread, the emotional thread, hit a few scene highlights that I know or expect to be seeing, and resolve the book. This is easier with the Walker Papers, say, which have one POV character, than with the Inheritors’ Cycle, which has…one main POV character, but six or something minor ones. (I cannot imagine writing a synopsis for the GRRM books.) On a high story level the books almost alway do what the synopses say they will. It’s just that my details frequently change, and that, I don’t worry very much about.

And how do you introduce/explain a SF/F setting in the short space of a synopsis? Succinctly, I said, less than helpfully. :)

Um, looking at a synopsis I wrote for an unfinished SF novel, I took about a page (as described above with formatting) to set up the world. It’s a four page synopsis (I think it had to be 4 pages for some contest or something I submitted it to), so that’s a lot of space dedicated to the setup, but it was also the bare minimum I thought I could get away with.

Is writing a synopsis a difficult process for you? Enjoyable/detestable? Any tips for making it easier? The only person I know who likes writing synopses is Judith Tarr (dancinghorse, who says something like, “But it’s so easy, that’s just how it all has to go in order to make the story work!” This is probably why she can write books that leave me staggering around in awe of her skill, and wide-eyed with moments of, oh, *that’s* how you do that….

For those of us who are merely mortal, writing synopses generally seems to be a teeth-grinding, hair-pulling kind of experience. As I said above, the best way *I’ve* found to do it is to sit down and tell someone in a chat room how the story goes. (It doesn’t work out loud, because I need the text to build the actual synopsis from.) I don’t know if that would work for anybody else, but it helps me a bit.

But here’s something I haven’t mentioned: having the damned things helps. It helps me, anyway. It *does* give me something to go back and say, “Uh, what next?” to, and it gives me ideas of, well, what next. I’ve been writing…a lot, these last few years. My first book came out in June 2005; my 8th is out this month, my 9th will be out in May, and my 10th in September, with 2 more coming out in the first half of next year. Out of those, one (URBAN SHAMAN) was fully written before 2005. (HEART OF STONE was as well, but underwent such massive revisions that it may as well have been from scratch.)

There is no way I could have written ten books in three years without synopses. They help guide me away from false starts, they help get me back on track, they give me a *structure*. It might not be exactly right, but it’s something to at least lean on. Writing them forces me to consider where the story is going and how it’s going to get to the end scene I usually have in mind. Doing what I’ve done the last three years, that’s critical. Much as I hate writing them, I seriously doubt I’ll ever write another book *without* writing a synopsis for it: they are, in the end, too much use.

–

The URBAN SHAMAN synopsis, as it was said in the body of the post, was written after the book. If people would like to see a synopsis written *before* the book, let me know. (I’d probably use THE CARDINAL RULE, but I could potentially use one of the other Walker Papers, “Banshee Cries” or COYOTE DREAMS. Not gonna do the Negotiator books, they’re too new. Let me know if I should do that.