Archive for the Category »Kingdom of Raydin «
I’ve rewritten the first chapter of Diamond Crier and I love it. I finally love my Sabina, the action hits right there. It’s great, aside from the fact that it’s a first draft. But now I can’t carry on any further without re-reading the draft I trunked in order to remember my own world. At the end of the first chapter, Sabina’s entered the world. Thanks to my memory, I can’t remember a lot of it. And now I have 80,000 words of work to read to refresh my memory.
It’s funny because as I’m rereading this I’m looking at my writing and damn, I do write some good lines. If you remember (which you probably don’t but that’s okay, I barely do) I ended up with a major voice shift about 5 chapters or so into the original first draft. I felt that what I was writing originally was too showy, too uppity and not what I felt the story was about.
I’ve read through those those original original chapters already and I’ve just come upon the chapter where the shift happens and I have to say, it worked a hell of a lot better before the shift. It looks like I tried to insert this almost slapstick type of humor that just killed the story. Very strange. And it’s funny because I expected to cringe a lot reading this. I really wasn’t so much to start. I kind of liked what I was writing, I like the history that I wrote although the execution wasn’t too great. But it sure was a hell of a lot better than what it became and damn, am I cringing now.
Obviously I need a medium between the two. DC isn’t going to be like Earth Shatterer in that kind of snarky type of humor. While it’s not that I don’t like ES, I’m not in love with it. DC, if I end up nailing it, I’m going to love and it’s going to show. I’ve gotten nothing but form rejections with ES with no requests. I’m going to try one more tier of agents and if I get the same thing, it’s getting trunked. While I love me my snark, I don’t think sustaining it for a novel (or two) is really my strong suit. It feels like I’m still trying to find my footing in my own writing and while I’m close, I’m still not there yet. Hopefully I’ll find it with DC.
So does this make my third novel? My first was completing the original DC albeit trunking it 3/4 of the way through the first edit. But I finished it. The second was ES that’s on sub now. This DC I’m basically working on from scratch. The only basis I have are a few elements from the original world I created. Everything else is new. Because if this is my third, the third tends to be a lucky number for many a debut author. Pleasepleasepleaseplease.
So the beginning will be totally unrecognizable.
So it’s now turned into a slight portal story. Just slight.
And Sabina totally doesn’t know that the DC world even exists because her parents escaped during the take-over and took her to ours, ending up in New York City in the Alphabet.
Yeah.
I had this beginning swimming around in my head for a few weeks now and I really like it. Originally she was a suburbanite with parents that totally acclimated to the suburban lifestyle but meh. This one . . .
The original usurping of the big guy (how bad is it that I have to consult my own notes to remember the world I created?) stays in, the Sickness is probably going to be eliminated altogether or at minimum grossly altered because the entire world would be destroyed if it stayed as it functions currently. At the usurping Sabina (now called Sabi) was very young (a year or two at most) and since he’s a diamond crier, her parents took her and ran. They end up in our world (haven’t figured out how yet), dead broke, homeless and destitute. Mata, Sabina’s younger sister, is born in our world not too long afterwards. Her parents end up with mediocre jobs and like in a crap apartment in Alphabet City. At least they’re not in Raydin.
Until it comes to get them. Surprise!
Sabina has personality! Yay! And not author-induced! Woohoo! I’m excited.
At this point it’s not so much editing but total rewriting. I’m at half the pages in the second draft than I was in the first and I’m deleting entire chapters instead of just adding bits and pieces or tweaking. This is what happens when you realize as you read back over your work that the timing of your story is all wrong and needs to be shifted. It’s a lot easier to shift, say, Legos, than it is to shift a storyline. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m bringing Sabina much more into the story than she was (and she’s the MC, yeah, I know), making more events current than passive, extending the timeline so the relationships can be substantiated and moving the entire story back six months so the ending coincides with a major holiday in the kingdom.
I’m realizing, though, that I’m having some trouble with the characters’ interactions, especially the relationship development. I’m finding it hard to build it up slowly (the romantic relationships) and have the nuances be subtle, or what I see as subtle, like it would be in real life. But Ketin, Mic, Cab, Talem and Pyle are coming into their own as characters. I’m struggling a little bit with Lania. She showed me an awesome part of herself at the beginning of the story but how she’s acting now doesn’t really fit that first part. She could be screwing with me or she could be saying I’m this and that. I have no idea. She’s a difficult one. Bettis isn’t really even in the picture yet but I’m thinking she will be, just not as her normal self.
I can’t remember if I mentioned these characters (other than Sabina and Cab) in prior posts but they’re all sort of central to the Diamond Crier plot. Sabina’s the MC, Mic’s her love interest (subtle love interest), Cab and Lania come in a pretty close second, Ketin is the catalyst and Pyle and Bettis are acting as sort of fillers but their changes in character will be needed for the plot. There’s also Fash, Barloh, Gorvish, Mein, Torle and Jaen (not to mention Jeviar and his wife, Lana) but I don’t need to get into them right now. They’re a lot easier for me to work with.
Holy crap weasels! Talk about a surge! I’ve doubled my hit count in the last 24 hours. I guess a fair number of people are just as shocked as I am about Meyer being author of the year. That was the most popular post by a long shot. So, yay for stats!
And yay for me! I think. It would appear I’ve won a copy of Jessica’s Guide to Dating on the Dark Side from the IB Teen Blog but I’m not 100% sure. The comments section of Beth’s interview on that site was the entry ballot and there are two Donnas on there, including myself. If she’s going by handle, then it’s me but I wanted to confirm to her before I got all excited. How embarrassing would that be? So, it looks like I won but I’m not really celebrating yet until I know for sure. I haven’t been contacted yet or anything so we’ll see.
Now onto the editing oi. I knew DC would need some serious editing but I didn’t think it was going to be this bad. Well, not bad, really, just a lot more than what I imagined. My situational timing is off and I’m focusing on the wrong events, and on the wrong characters, in some parts so that needs to be fixed, on top of a total rewrite for the first four and a half chapters, not to mention I still don’t know where this story is actually going to start but the idea is becoming clearer the deeper into editing I get.
I’ve figured out that reading this particular manuscript is like reading (or feebly attempting) to read Old English through to Middle English. I’ve said about the tone before that it’s a drastic shift at the four and a half chapter point. With hindsight I thought the shift was much more drastic than what it actually is. It is drastic, but the language I was trying to get away from is more tapered.
