I finished the book and I didn’t. I mean, I finally typed The End. The villains of the piece are dead, the victims avenged as far as possible, short of resurrection and giving them back the lives that were stolen from them. Even my world where magic works far more overtly than it does in ours does not stretch that far. Justice has been served, or at least the public at large is safe from the killers. The mystery is solved. There are a few loose ends that I forgot to tidy up, but there always are in a book this large. Tidying up is what second drafts are for, and therein lies the problem.
Parts of Crimson Death are done, so very done. I got stuck a couple of times in this book, forgetting my own rules of writing and started rewriting before I had a first draft. Some writers can do that, I cannot. If I start rewriting before I have a finished draft perfectionism sets in and I stall. My creative ship gets trapped in the doldrums of perfectionism which leads to doubt, which leads to me second-guessing myself and that is death to a first draft of a novel, at least for me. My first instinct is usually right, after writing over forty books I know this, but still there is that temptation to get caught in making things – perfect.
When I finally got a room of my own as an office, I put a sign above my desk that read, “Perfectionism is an Unattainable Goal.” But I purposefully spelled perfectionism wrong. I believe I spelled it, “Perfactinisom”, or something like that so that everyday as I sat down to write I would be forced to look at the word that represented all my desire and frustration spelled so terribly imperfectly. It drove me mad to have to stare at that sign spelled so badly. But it forced me to stare one of my worst issues in the face everyday, and to begin to let it go. It was hard to get caught up in that perfectionistic cycle when I was staring at that damn sign every day, so it did its job. When I moved from that house after ten years I never had to put the same sign above my desk again, because the lesson had sunk in deep and hard. Though after Crimson Death I may have to revisit the lesson, because I have never fallen into the perfectionism trap so often in a book since those early days.
I’m not sure why that kept catching me again after all this time, but I know one of the other reasons that Crimson Death was such a hard write – research. Now, I’m a stickler for research, so much so that I’ve been told by editors and publishers in New York that I do more research for my fiction than most writers do for their nonfiction. Now, first of all that thought sort of frightened me, because I can’t image how crazy pants I’d go on research if I was doing a nonfiction book, since I go to such lengths for my fiction. I write mysteries but there’s always some supernatural element in my stories, so I write about vampires, zombies, ghouls, werewolves, and shapeshifters of all kinds. Some people think that because I write fantasy, horror, and science fiction that I can do less research, because magic, hand-wavyum, it’s fantasy after all so just making things up is all right, right? No, absolutely not, at least to me. One of my rules is that the more fantastical your storyline, the more solid your real world facts have to be because you have to help the reader believe in your monsters by making sure the real facts are right. The more unreal your world, or plot, the more solid your real world has to be, because if the reader catches you wrong on a fact that they know, then they won’t believe in your zombies or vampires. This is especially true if they are an expert on guns, police work, the military, voodoo as a religion, which are just some of the topics that I’ve used in my books. I’ve had high praise from gun experts and police at the accuracy of my research, which makes it all worth it. Because trust me, someone that will read your book is an expert in any real world fact that you use. If you get it wrong, they will let you know.
The problem with Crimson Death was that a majority of the book is set in Ireland which I’d never visited. So first we went to Ireland this summer, which was amazing and cool and totally not what I expected. In fact, Ireland and its gun laws, its difference in attitude between American police and Irish police, totally threw my plot for Crimson Death into the wind.
I never really recovered from the comparison of reality to my fictional world. Or rather, I didn’t figure out how to balance the two until late in the writing of the book. I’ve never had a book jell so late in the process before, and jell in such a way that I had to add so many new scenes. It’s not like me at all as a writer, so what happened? I messed with my process, my writing process. One of your jobs as an artist is to figure out how you work best, what your muse needs to feel comfortable and happy to play with you. I think I broke nearly every part of my writing process on this book, because I kept saying, that’s silly, I know how to write a book, I don’t need to do that anymore. Yeah, maybe needing an entire wall of my office so I can storyboard the book with sticky notes is silly, but it works for me and has worked for me for over twenty years, but for this book I took down my sticky notes and tried to do it without them. Never again, because it’s part of my process. It helps me think, helps me organize and plot. It works for me, and if it works for me as a writer I need to honor that and use it.
I know I’m a morning writer, but I kept not getting to my desk first thing. I know that when I first get up and head for my desk that it is deadly for me to talk to anyone about anything but the book. I can’t text, call, check email, nothing until I have at least a start on the day’s writing. But I tried to have breakfast before I wrote for the day. It’s healthier, right? Maybe, but it’s killing my muse and me. I don’t know a solution between healthy eating and my art, but I do know that if I take time to eat breakfast with my lovely family that my page count for the day goes down or doesn’t happen at all.
I actually learned something new about my process on the last book I wrote, Dead Ice, and had it reconfirmed with Crimson Death. Where I am writing when the book takes off, and for me that means hitting multiple days when I do twenty pages at a sitting in two to five hours, then I need to stay there until the book is done. Furthermore whatever tea I am drinking, stock up because the taste of it will help me stay in the book and write faster. If there was a scented candle burning early on then I need to keep burning that kind of candle until I’m done. I am a very sensual writer, so taste, touch, temperature, everything about my surroundings gets melded into the writing of a novel. It may not be on the page people read, but it’s in my head and in my muse. Whatever divine spark helps me write, once I hit a certain point in a a book I need to take note of everything I’m doing and just keep doing it. I’ll even eat the same thing over and over towards the end of a book especially. Everything feeds into me staying in the world, the voice, the flow of that book.
Remember when I said that Crimson Death was set in Ireland? I did research there, but I also started writing the book. In Dublin I hit multiple days of fifteen to twenty pages, but we were scheduled to go over to England and then home. I hadn’t budgeted time to sit for months in Ireland. I hadn’t planned on writing the book there, or dreamed that it would kick into high gear in the middle of the research, but it did. I know I am a sensual writer and very entwined with my environment, so it was logical that a book that would be largely set in Ireland would want to be written there, right? Well, yes, in retrospect it’s logical for the type of writer I am, but it caught me completely off guard when it happened. I had my first English convention to attend, and my first signing in England, and I was researching another book which would be set in that country. I was trying to research two different books at the same time, and that would have been fine if I hadn’t started writing the first one while I was still researching both of them. It was wrenching to stop writing on Crimson Death so I could do all the planned events in England. I had a great time doing them, but I never wrote in England on the book as well as I had in Dublin. I believe that if I could have stayed there and just kept writing that the book would have been finished in record time, or at least long before the deadline.
I’ve never tried to do this much research on a book that I was writing at the same time. If I could do it over again I would do the research, let myself think on it and make notes for a year, and I’d be publishing a different book this summer, one that was set in America in places I know very well and have written about before, but that was not what I’d planned or told my publisher. This was going to be the Damian book, the Irish book, and by the time I realized I’d bitten off more research than I knew how to digest in the time I had allowed to write the book, it was far too late to back out. I was committed, so I did the best I could, but I have more research than any one book can hold. I’m already making notes about another novel of some kind set in Ireland because I’ve learned so much and am still mulling over some of what I learned.
If I go to another country I can do research, but I can’t start writing the meat of the book unless I have planned my life so I can stay in that country until the book is complete. If I go to that country with a plot already in my head and the research doesn’t match it, then write a different book. One of the things that slowed me down was that I tried to do as much of the original plot as possible with the new research mingled in, which didn’t work at first. I was nearly done with the book before I figured out the mix of fiction to fact that worked for the plot, the characters, me, and my muse. Oddly, I wrote very well in Dublin, but I’ve never written well in London, or New York. I write very well by the ocean, or a large lake, or with a stream or river running by my office. My muse likes water. She also likes mountains, though I have yet to be in the mountains long enough to write an entire book. I hope to try someday. My muse also loves a view of trees, so forest works, too. I think an older style orchard would work just as well, but again I’ve never had a chance to write looking out at an orchard, so maybe wilder trees work better for her.
I know I write better with an office animal. I wrote my first novel with my cockatiel, Baby Bird, on my shoulder, and subsequent books with our pug, Pugsley. I have had at least one pug with me for over twenty years. We are between pugs having lost our last pug, Sasquatch, at age fourteen, but we have two Japanese chins and two mixed breed dogs that are much bigger than the chins. Three of the dogs are sleeping around my office as I type this and I write better with animals around me. This is the first book I’ve written without Sasquatch and I missed him terribly. I think it was actually one of the reasons Crimson Death wrote so slowly. I’d have to check, but I’m wondering if some of my past books that wrote slower than normal followed the death of a long time pet that came to work with me everyday.
I didn’t break my writing process apart on purpose, but I’m always a big believer in trying new things. Sometimes it works amazingly well and I can scale to new heights, but sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Sometimes trying the new thing makes me crash and burn, never pleasant, but I learn from the crash as much or more than I learn when I soar. For instance, I never want to write another book on a MAC computer, this was my first time attempting it, and I want my PC back! Though I love my iPad and wrote most of Dead Ice on it. But let me add that I haven’t enjoyed working on my iPad as much since they forced me to upgrade and I couldn’t find a protective cover for it that allowed me to orient it vertically and not horizontally while plugged in and charging. I hate working on the screen in the horizontal position and mourn my vertical screen, but the protective cover I got for it is not easy on and off, and the more often I skin my iPad the more chances I have to break it. Think I’m being overly cautious? I killed four iPhones before I got a LifeProof case for it. Now the cases break before my phone, which is fabulous! I’d get a LifeProof case for my iPad, but it doesn’t prop up for work easily enough for me. This is also the first book I’ve written without my big desk against the one wall. I’d stopped using it, and learned last year in the tropics that a very small desk did me just fine, but that was with a view of the ocean and a very different work space, here in St. Louis maybe I need that bigger desk? But now I have more shelves for research books in my office, which I needed. I’m beginning to wonder if we changed too much of my office around while I was trying to write this book. I like how open the room is now, but now I know to leave my physical environment absolutely static until a book is finished.
So, I’ve learned a lot of what not to do while I write a book. Some of it I already knew, but a type of arrogance, or boredom sets in if you do any job too long, and you begin to think I don’t need all these bells and whistles. I know my craft. I got this! I do, but writing is a mysterious job and once you find a process that works for you and your muse, you probably shouldn’t screw with it. I’ve learned it the hard way more than once, and now I’ve learned it again. I still have to rewrite/edit Crimson Death and make my deadline which is so close I can feel it’s hot breath on the back of my neck. I have made my job exponentially harder by trying to change so much of how my writing process works. I have not recovered from it, but the book is somehow limping towards the finish. Whether you call your muse a divine spark, inspiration, talent, genius, or you think that certain lover is what you need at your side – honor it. If you write better in a room with blue walls, paint your office blue. If a water view helps you create, find a place with that view. If you need a dark room with no windows because isolation feeds your muse, then find that dark corner and write. If you’re a morning writer get up and get going. If you write best late at night then stay up and do that. Whatever time works best for your muse figure it out and guard that time like it’s the secret formula to the secret sauce, because for you as a writer it absolutely is the secret to your productivity. Whatever feeds your muse and helps the words flow, own it, remember it, and once you get the process down stop fucking with it.