My First Reading

"TUESDAY" production sign (Photo credit: Vaguely Artistic)A few months ago, my friend Andi invited me to drive up to Goin' Coastal in Canton for $20 lobster night and have dinner with her and three of her friends. Andi is a neuropsychologist and my consultant on head injuries and neurological disorders not only in my day job, but also for the novel and an unrelated short story I'm working on. Andi is the only woman I know who can discourse on decorticate Confederate soldiers and lobsters (something to do with humanely killing the latter without destroying the taste, right before they go into the pot) almost in the same breath.

Perhaps taking her consultant role a bit too seriously, she told everybody I'm writing a book (she's almost worse than Mr. Wood in that regard) and so of course the ladies all wanted to know all about it. Seems they've tried their hands at writing, too. I am practicing taking myself seriously as a writer, and so I was able to say a bit about it in an organized fashion and to make clear that it is little more than an idea at present without disrespecting it or myself. One of the women offered to be a beta reader, when it gets to that stage. I was thrilled. People have said they can't wait to read it, or would buy it when it's out, but I get few serious offers to read it. This was clearly a serious offer. So. Now I won't have to beg for readers. The lobsters arrived (presumably decorticated--none of us wanted to believe they'd been boiled alive), the conversation moved on to other things, and that was that.

Or so I thought.

This afternoon I got an e-mail from Andi saying they all wanted to do the dinner thing again, same place, same menu. And that her friend the beta reader suggested that we all bring some of our writing. I immediately began thinking of excuses to be on the west coast come Tuesday night (which would take some doing as I could, hypothetically speaking, barely manage bus fare to Atlanta). I rationalized my visceral reaction by reminding myself that better writers than me have advised against letting friends and family or writing groups see your work "too soon". Of course, I have no idea exactly when "too soon" is, or is not, but it was convenient to interpret it for my purposes as easily encompassing Tuesday.

But then I got to thinking about it. Maybe it's not such a bad idea. Maybe a scene or two, a snippet of dialogue, is ready for prime time. Hell, this could even be fun!

NaNoWriMo

So I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year. I'd gotten to where I believed all I had was little scraps and piles and lists of research notes and facts and dates, and no story. I thought if I could force myself to pound out a first draft, however thin, however awful, it would ground me in my story again. The first day (yesterday) I wrote a bit on a couple of scenes and hit my target and it was ok.

I'd had some advice from Diana Gabaldon on the Books and Writers Community boards about what was important and what wasn't, and she told me about how to write with brackets. The short version is that it's the characters and the story that are important, not the ticky historical details (at this stage, anyway) and whenever you come to something you haven't covered in your research yet (like what street Bill walks down--or up, I don't know the answer to that yet, either--to get to Fannie's house) you use brackets. Doing that, I wrote some very rough first-draft stuff. It comes with lots of brackets, but I wrote it.

Today, I got up thinking I would write on thus and such a scene tonight, but somehow over the course of the day managed to convince myself again that I don't have anything to say. Which is exactly where I was this past weekend before Diana wrote me that post, God bless her. She is so generous with her time over there, and talks to ridiculously inexperienced newbies like myself as kindly and respectfully as she does anyone else on the boards.

But I digress.

By the time I got home, I had come to the conclusion that there was one thing that I knew positively, absolutely had to get into the book sooner or later. I can dither over what battles to put in and which ones to tell as flashbacks or to have Bill rehash in conversation versus which ones to tell in 'real time' and never write a word. But Fannie has to get pregnant: It's the core event of the whole book. In order for that to happen, obviously, she and Bill have to have sex. Once that's happened, she'll have to realize it, and then she will have to tell Bill about it. So there's three scenes I could work on tonight, no need to dither about whether or where they go in, and I told myself that I could use the bracket trick ("He began undoing her [ ]") to fill in all my vast areas of ignorance, like exactly what women wore back then and how they fastened.

And I did! Before I knew it, I'd overshot my day's target by 319 words.

Goals

Cover via AmazonNo goals set for August, because I hadn't figured out how to set any yet. But I did accomplish some things:

(1) I finished reading An Uncommon Soldier

(2) I read Persia Woolley's book on how to write historical fiction.

(3) I went to the relic show.

(4) I started this blog, opened a Twitter account, and set up a Facebook page--none of which is actual work on the book, of course, but it's part of building a sense of myself as a writer, which in turn obligates me to start acting like one. Or so I hope.

(5) I found an on-line re-enactors' group which is an awesome gold mine of research material, and I joined it. I've already learned so much!

(6) I solved the mystery of where/when my main character surrendered--which, unfortunately, means ditching (or at the least, re-locating) one of the few complete scenes I'd written. Oh, well. Such is the life of a historical novelist.

As for September, I hope to

1. bring my notebook current (get hard copies of stuff I revised last month printed)
2. track the pages I read for research so I can set a goal for October that's measurable and achievable (there's the psychologist in me talking!)
3. finish reading Plot & Structure and Writing Historical Fiction
4. organize the unholy mess that is OneNote on my laptop
5. finish processing my photos of the Resaca re-enactment (yeah, yeah, I know--that was last May!)
6. write up the physical description of my female horse soldier and her mount (from photos I got in May of a female re-enactor)