Meat and Bones

I think I figured out what my problem is writing-wise right now: I'm worried about the meat when there is no skeleton.

Sounds ominous, no? Well, allow me to explain, and this has nothing to do with my love of horror fiction.

My whole process is built generally around the idea that what I'll do first is build a skeleton, then I'll worry about fleshing out the meat. This generally goes for any idea, scene, chapter, what have you. What I've been doing is worrying about the meat before there is even a skeleton. Too much known of what I want to tell, too many ideas and scenes *planned* where I should be allowing the story to flow and move freely.

If there is anything I learned from editing the first novel, it is that one of the kindest things you can do to a story is cut it. You really cannot be married to any sentence, to a certain wording, because inevitably the perfect words have not yet been found. I'm not saying this for every sentence--my, one would go mad! But there are things one will think they can never part with, until they realize the reader will get the gist of it and, frankly, that's all they'll need. The same has to go for ideas, I'm sure, where I'm also well acquainted with the fact that the characters often grow a will of their own and the story will mold with their motivations and how they react to the circumstances presented them. I have to give them the opportunity to do that. I have to be willing to bend. There has to be some compromise, and I'm being far too rigid in my treatment of this, especially in these early stages where just getting things going is hardest.

A few chapters in, however shaky they may be to start, I'll have a good flow, and there will be days I can't get sat in front of the computer soon enough and that I will have to practically be pried away from it. And, yes, it's frustrating now but forcing it isn't working. I just have to relax and keep telling myself, 'soon'. Soon, I will reach that easier, more pleasant stage. Soon, scenes will come with ease and Reinbert can have us all laughing again. :)

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

As a little reward for being nearly finished reading The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All I went ahead and bought North American Lake Monsters. I couldn't figure out for a while why I kept seeing it among my recommended reading from Amazon, but more than a passing glance revealed it was a collection of short stories to do with all manner of horrors, at their root mostly human. That is the tie that binds all those stories into a collection, or so some of the reviews boast. Either way, it appeals to me.

I wasn't so sure when I first cracked open Laird Barron's $13 Kindle book that my money had been well spent. The first story was slow to start but managed to grip me a few pages in. Still, not a promising start, especially where it seemed much of the second story fell flat. I realized this is not necessarily due to his story-telling but his golly-gee-whiz characterization of most of the female protagonists. When he's writing from a man's perspective, there is a fluidity I never question. The moment he jumps into a woman's head and starts driving or gets a gaggle of them together, it feels far too contrived and stilted. It gets better, though.

About midway through, the book's impressions of evil and the dark take a turn from the menace of what might lurk beneath in our traditional sense of the devil and hell to the cosmic Lovecraftian horror the human mind can barely conceive of. Barron gives it form and movement and more than enough reason to leave a little light on at night. Not that that would save you.

I actually still have another book I meant to dig into before I even purchased Lake Monsters, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies. I believe it was also recommended to me based on the purchase I had made of another Lovecraft collection. I swear my brain will be mush unfit for Cthulhu by the time I am done. ^_^

Hrrrmm...

I read a blog recently that said if you don't get your work professionally edited, you're practically insulting your readers with the low quality and [lack of] attention to detail in your work. This goes for self-publishing, by the way, where you'd have to hire someone yourself. I hope none of you feel that I may have supplied you with a sub-par draft. I promise I worked very hard to get it where it is, and honestly it never felt like hiring an editor was an option. There are still places I look at a bit sideways and kinda wish I had someone's professional eye, but it's a little late now. For the Kindle edition, anyway. Print editions, even through CreateSpace, are gonna cost me a little money anyway, I think, so...

In the meantime, I did lower the price to a reasonable enough $0.99. ^_^