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Today Trinity is at a friend’s house for a play date. So today is the first day back to work for Jon and myself. And for the rest of the staff, too. Jon is back to work on the first draft of the script. We’re actually reversing the process that I do on the books. I do a draft, or several, of a book before anyone else looks at it. Of course, all I’m wanting is someone to tell me if it makes sense, or if my dyslexia has kicked in I’ve used the totally wrong word in a sentence. (Spell checkers won’t catch it, if the word is a real word.) For Jon and I, it will be a true collaboration on the script. Jon seems to have no trouble taking the already written book of GUILTY PLEASURES and turning into a script. I have terrible trouble seeing it as anything but a book. First draft of a script, which we experimented with for an afternoon, that, I’m faster on. I love creating something out of thin air. Jon seems much better at taking what is already in existence and turning it into a script. I’ll look at it once he’s got a draft, because all I can see is the book. I find that when Jon has it in script form, it looks like a script to me, but I could not have put it in that form. Funny that.
What am I doing today while Jon works on the script? I’m still clearing the decks for the next book. I went through a lot of the papers, old versions of scenes from DANSE MACABRE that will never be used in any book. Scenes that just didn’t fly. They have been shredded, or will be soon. The time intensive paperwork is the scenes that didn’t work for this book, but may work for the next one. Characters too, that will work better later. Those I’m saving, and I’m trying to find a way to file them that is actually useful. The story idea files work. When I don’t know exactly what to do next I use to go through the story idea file, full of bits of paper, sticky notes, and pages from old writer’s notebooks. When I was shopping for what to do next this system worked well. I tried to expand this system to Merry idea file, and an Anita idea file. It seemed like it should work, but it isn’t. At first, I thought it was because it was too disorganized, so I divided the Anita files into narrower and narrower topics, giving them each their own folder. It didn’t work, because writing a book is not that easily delineated. The scene with Meng Die overlapped with some of the Requiem scenes. The information we learn about some of the new vamps from London overlapped with a lot of scenes. I write entirely too organically to divide everything so cleanly. I also found the outline format they teach in most classes to be almost useless for me. Some writers swear by them, I’m more likely to swear at them. The character interaction is too complex to be divided up into neat bites.
I actually have purchased large, hard-sided, three ring binders. I hate three ring binders, never liked them at all, but due to the fact that the last Anita book was divided in it’s plot. The mystery that was supposed to be in DANSE MACABRE will actually be the entire plot for Anita book 14, untitled as of yet. So a lot of the notes are very pertinent. I can’t file them, because filing makes no sense to me as a way to construct a book. I can’t put dozens of type written pages up on the wall. It’s too bulky, and sticky notes are one thing, entire chapters another. So in a bid to find a method to help me organize that works for me, and how I write, I have the binders. I’m going to try and separate the notes in sections for different characters, or scenes, or maybe just first third, middle, last third, climax. Maybe that would work better than organizing by character or scene? Maybe? Maybe. Why am I changing how I work after nearly twenty years? Because I have never had a book plot that I knew so much about ahead of time. I have never had so many pages, and notes that are actually part of a book, and the next book at that. Well, the next Anita book. I will actually be doing the next Merry book next-next.
Because of the amount of paper, I actually kept redoing scenes that I already had written out, because I didn’t remember writing them. I would write a scene and find it in the files in a slightly different version, but not much different. The last Merry book took longer than I’d hoped, and Anita was chomping at the bit to be written, so I made notes. That took some of the pressure off and allowed me to concentrate on Merry. I find that when I have that pressure of another work in my head, that I need to take an afternoon and just write out the notes, or the chapter, because it frees me up to go back to the current book. The novellite MICAH was like that. The story interrupted DANSE MACABRE early in the process. I wrote it in like two weeks, two glorious weeks where the muse was driving me hard. I’ve never had anything that long come out so quickly. Of course, usually two hundred pages is like the bare beginnings of a book for me, so maybe I’ve had some two hundred chunks write this fast before, but because the book wasn’t done, I didn’t notice it.
So, I am drowning in notes, characters, and I have to organize it so I can clear the desk off and start on Merry number 5, untitled as of yet. So I’m giving myself the rest of this week to organize the notes; at the end of this week what isn’t organized goes in t he Anita drawer. I’ll sort it out later, because my deadline for Merry 5 is not getting further away. I also will finish the first chapter for the next Anita book, so that months from now I won’t sit down to a blank screen. I actually have entire chapters written in the next Merry book; scenes that just didn’t have time for in SEDUCED BY MOONLIGHT. But what I thought was the beginning scene is actually been pushed back a little, just from rereading the first few chapters of MOONLIGHT. Merry being a continuing story arc, much more than Anita, has had some of the same organizational problems for me as DANSE MACABRE and the untitled next Anita. So I’ll be trying the binder system with Merry, as well. We’ll see. I’m hoping the binder will allow me to go through and glance at my notes in a more user friendly way. Whatever the file system has failed me, so as my worlds and characters get more complex, I need a more flexible and visual system. The sticky notes work because I can look up and see them. How to do that with dozens of pages of typed notes? We’ll try the binders.