And then I ended up 4,000+ words over the top limit. Almost all of that lovely history and description was left on the cutting-room floor. Oh, the agony! But thank heavens for my two fantastic beta readers, who helped me make the cuts and strengthen the story — I couldn’t have done it by myself.

So now I’m tackling the edits on The Harrow Press‘s Day Terrors, which was in abeyance while I finished the C&C story — sorry! But I’m back on it now.

And I’m also contemplating participation in National Novel Writing Month. I missed it the last two years because I was working on other projects (a novel, Boys’ Love Manga), but other than DT, I have no pressing projects at the moment. So … maybe Clockwork Heart 3? I kick-started CH and its sequel during NaNoWriMo, and An Agreement with Hell. I find it a great way to get started on a novel. But it’s more stress and deadline pressure again. Hmmm…..

This is the Clockwork Heart sequel in the paper edit; chapter one. It’s going to take me the rest of the week to finish the editing process, I suspect, unless I can really power through on one of the days I don’t have to teach.

My newswriting students get their articles back looking like this and freak out. They don’t realize I’m just as strict with myself!

This was the evening (pre-fireworks) view from our balcony at the suite at the Grand Californian, next to Disney’s California Adventures, where I spent New Year’s Eve with some college/gaming friends and their kids.

Now I am sitting in bed waiting for said friends to rouse and/or for the Rose Parade to begin and working out one of those wake-up-in-the-middle-of-the-night story edits. “Wait,” my prosecco-fueled mind decided to remind me at some truly abhorrent post-midnight hour of the morning, “the Law of Conservation of Characters dictates that that scene in Chapter 21 should reuse Character X instead of introducing a new Character Z.”

Turns out there really is a law like that, “The Law of Economy of Characters” coined by Roger Ebert. His law of economy differs a little from the law of conservation as I’ve absorbed it over the years, but the general idea is the same — if you can possibly use the same character more than once, do so. It’s better to keep re-using characters that have already been introduced than to continue introducing new ones.

So, back to Chapter 21 and a few other scenes later in the novel to replace Character Z with Character X. To be honest, it strikes me as a perfectly good way to start the new year!

Gulp.

Happy holidays to everybody! It’s time for me to push myself away from the keyboard for the rest of the year….

This year I was torn between writing an 1800s-type novel inspired by my recent trip to Death Valley and rebooting a tall ship fantasy novel that I’ve been playing around with for a year or two. But then, at last, I reluctantly decided that what I really needed to keep working on was the Clockwork Heart sequel, instead. It’s complete but still rough.

So, that’s what I’m doing instead of NaNo this year. (Although those two novel ideas will, eventually, be addressed!) However, if you’re participating or thinking about participating in NaNoWriMo, go for it, and good luck! I think it’s a fantastic way to get a jump-start on any novel you’ve ever thought about writing!

Whew!

So there it is — THE END — along with scribbled notes all over my chalkboard desk. The other side of the computer has sketches on it from my trying to figure out what certain objects needed to look like, but that photo would provide spoilers if I published it, so I’ll keep it off the blog for now….

If anyone knows a respectable, fantasy-steampunk-loving agent, let me know!

Which is why I’m struggling really, really hard to figure out how to write this next scene without a character’s ineptitude kicking off the pivotal events. So far, I’m at a standstill, but eventually I’ll think my way around it. Which is why I’m writing this, of course — to kill time while my subconscious grinds on the problem a little longer.

… So … ah … in the meantime, I’ll throw out a list of miscellaneous interesting websites I’ve run across while hunting down various factoids on the web.

Airships: A Zeppelin History Site —  Lots of neat deck plans and cross-sections here. If I were still running a steampunk RPG, I’d be all over these.

Instruction Manual to Operate and Maintain Charles Babbage’s 2nd Difference Engine — I have it bookmarked, but I’m not sure what I’ll ever do with it. It’s just one of those things I’m glad exists on the web.

Causes of Death in the Late 19th Century — I always wondered what symptoms “apoplexy” was really describing.

Driving a Steam Locomotive — “If, like me, you’re a big fan of explosions…” Is that a trick question?

Signal Pistols — Victorian flare guns. I should have had icarii carrying these in Clockwork Heart, at least while they were searching for bodies after the wireferry explosion. Or would flare guns violate Ondinium’s “an icarus cannot carry a missile weapon” law? Hmm….

Okay. Hey, subconscious, figured it out yet?

Hello? Subconscious? Hello?

I’m still not quite sure how to get them to the gunshot scene, and I’ve had to sketch out the area they’re investigating across my blackboard desktop so I can keep the locations straight, but at least they’re doing something interesting while I mull over the necessary progression of events.

He says blood, yes; sprayback, no. Unless a main artery is hit, of course, in which case blood will be everywhere, but I don’t plan to go there with the scene.

Oh, well. It won’t be as dramatic, but there you go. We’re back that issue of realism again.

I won’t say who’s going to get shot at close range; I’m still mentally blocking the scene, and there’s a chance I won’t use it, if I decide it’ll cause too many problems later on in the novel, or make the novel, which has already had its fair share of violence, feel too grim.

I suppose there are writers who plan out their novels perfectly and know exactly what’s going to happen, but I’m not one of them. Maybe I will be, someday, with more practice, but right now I usually start writing with a general outline of where the story’s going and a few key scenes imagined, and that’s about it. Actually getting the story to those scenes doesn’t always go the way I’d planned! In fact, I’m already starting to think that a dramatic rescue scene I’d imagined from the beginning is going to have to be delayed, because the way the story’s working out, completing the rescue early would result in stalling the rescuer.

Not such a good idea, when there are other important plot goals to be achieved, as well.

Tomorrow, if I’m lucky, I’ll wrestle the story up to the shooting scene and make my decision. Today, however, I’m enjoying time with the family, celebrating my father’s and my sister’s birthdays. Happy birthday, you two!

***

(Note: The image I’ve used today is a Girandoni repeating air pistol, circa 1800, shamelessly ripped off of Dr. Beerman’s outstanding page on air guns, “Girandoni Style Air Rifles and Pistols – Preliminary Research Presentation.” I consulted his site when writing Clockwork Heart; the lictors’ air rifles in that novel are loosely based on the air rifles Beerman describes in his research, and like as not, the gun that’s used to shoot someone in this upcoming scene will be, as well.)

Yesterday I visited the library, promising myself that I’d only check out a few novels for the weekend, and ended up carrying home an armful, of course. This week my theme is “thinking,” with Why We Make Mistakes by Joseph T. Hallinan, How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, and Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions by Zachary Shore. I’ve read the first and am halfway through the second. The information in these first two books draws to a great extent on the same body of research, the same research I’ve read about in other books, like Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational — but I figure that re-reading that research will help embed it in my memory, and each book takes a slightly different slant on it.

What does this have to do with rail gauge changers?

One of the lessons in these books is that more information does not necessarily lead to better decision-making. In fact, a few pertinent data points lead to as good, if not better, decisions and predictions than a plethora of data. For example, Lehrer reports on stock investment experiments in which subjects who could only see share prices rise and fall made better investing decisions than subjects who could review all the financial information to which they could gain access; and on college counselors whose predictions of incoming students’ freshman grades were more accurate knowing only the students’ high-school GPAs and scores on one standardized test than college counselors who had access to student’s high-school transcripts, test scores, application essays, personality and vocational test scores, and personal interviews.

As Lehrer notes, quoting Herbert Simon: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” (p. 159).

I love the fact that I have the vast resources of the internet at my fingertips, and it’s a rush to find a real-life solution to my story problems, like the existence of rail gauge changers. However, sometimes I wonder if I wouldn’t have come up with that answer faster if I hadn’t stopped to research it. I spend an awful lot of time trying to find information online — how a Victorian-era airgun would work, how long it takes for steam engines to refuel, what doctors do about heavy blood loss when transfusions aren’t readily available — when it might be better for me just to write forward, making guesses or inventing things out of whole cloth, and save the fact-checking process for the second draft. After all, the first lesson in writing is to put words on the page.

Ah, well.  Now that my characters are where they need to be, I have a whole new area of research to conduct….