davidgillon | Entries tagged with graveyard shift

Currently Writing

Things have been a bit complicated, with trying to both rewrite the first chapter of Graveyard Shift in different PoV for submission to Disabled People Destroy Fantasy as a short story, while keeping up my momentum on Disruptive Technology. In practise I stalled out on both, but then managed to restart myself. Graveyard Shift came together in two sessions, with a week in between them, and progress got much faster when I realized that switching PoV means switching a lot of things the story focuses on, because even if the characters are friends and partners, what they're immediately concerned with differs. That's currently in final editing, having been cut from 6800 words to 5750.

Disruptive Technology I set aside until I had a complete draft of Graveyard Shift, but I'm now back at it, with the manuscript standing at 23700 words. I had a breakthrough yesterday and realised what my mid-point of the novel has to be, which helps a lot with balance and structure. I was worried earlier in the week that it was getting too talky, so I took a look at what was going on and managed to shift some scenes around, which has helped. I may need to look at some police procedurals to see how they balance this kind of thing, where the investigation is just getting started and people are feeling their way without strong leads to follow. Unfortunately it's not the kind of investigation where you can wander quaint villages encountering interesting witnesses.

Things researched since last time: Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, C-RAM systems - that's Counter Rockets, Artillery and Mortars, who has them post Iraq/Afghanistan, how many major airports there are in the US, layout of LAX, flight times to LAX from both SeaTac and DC, where my characters could fly into if LAX is shut.

Currently Reading

I stalled on the Bujold novella, wanted something light and readable, so went back to C E Murphy's Urban Shaman/Walker Papers series, which I've previously read the first two of.

Urban Shaman, C E Murphy.

Joanne Walker is flying back into Seattle after spending the past three months with her dying, estranged mother. Looking out of the window on final approach, she sees a woman on the point of being attacked, so hares out of the airport, grabbing the first taxi she finds, and Gary, its driver, who's 73, bored, and built like a linebacker. They find the woman, Marie, hiding from her attacker, and take her to a diner to hear her story, at which point the Wild Hunt turn up outside, and Marie reveals 1) she's a banshee, and 2) Jo's about to die. This does in fact happen, though not without Jo managing to walk up the sword that's impaling her and stick a knife in Cernunnos, head of the Hunt. This is when things turn really strange, with Jo, who has been denying her half-Cherokee heritage since she was 18, meeting Coyote, and being talked through healing herself, using the metaphor that she's a car, as she's a mechanic.

And she's not just a mechanic, she's a mechanic for Seattle PD. Or at least she was until she went AWOL for three months. And as Precinct Captain Michael Morrison delights in pointing out, he hired her replacement 10 weeks ago. But that doesn't mean she's out of a job, because a blatantly contrived set of circumstances mean she was sent through Police Academy when she took the mechanic's job, so Morrison is busting her from being a mechanic to being a police officer. HQ won't let him sack her directly, because she's good for their diversity stats, but he's convinced she'll quit.

Unfortunately for his plans (and their mutual sexual tension), Jo doesn't have much quit in her, so the first thing she does is hook up with Gary and head over to Marie's. Only to find her dead, latest victim of a serial killer stalking Seattle. The last thing the thoroughly rational Morrison wants to accept is that there's a supernatural serial killer on the loose, but Jo's death and revival was caught on CCTV, and his best hope of stopping an escalating murder spree may be his least qualified patrol officer, who's equally unqualified as the shaman people now keep insisting she obviously is.

It's thoroughly enjoyable, Jo's a strong, flawed character and Gary's a delight, but there are a few areas where the author seems to be pressing a little heavily on the scales of probability, particularly the whoops, now you're a cop, here's your badge thing. The feel of Seattle is also a bit iffy, strong at the end, but absent a lot in the middle.

(Incidentally the first time I read this I ended up having to rename a character in Graveyard Shift because Jo's birth name was actually Siobhan, and I had a character called Siobhan Murphy, based out of SPD's North Precinct, just like Jo is in the Walker Papers, which was taking annoying coincidence a bit far).

Next Up: Thunderbird Falls (Walker Papers Book 2), C E Murphy

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: Duplicated

If I seem a bit quiet, it's a lack of spoons. I'm mostly keeping up with posts, but I've been seriously lacking in cope for the last week.

I'm not sure quite what's going on, and sleeping has been even more to pot than usual, but the average might be as high as 9 hours sleep/day* and I'm still struggling to be really awake for hours after that. There's a little evidence I might have a sinus bug, but the normal symptoms of that are almost totally absent, so the lack of energy for degree of bug seems unreasonable.

Friday I perked up enough to spend most of the day prodding twitter, but that might have been the extra annoyance of our Chancellor (number three in the government) being unspeakably ableist in parliament (he blamed falling UK productivity on disabled workers). I've needed to make a phonecall all week - nothing mind-boggling, just arranging passenger assistance for Thursday's train trip North, but didn't feel competent to do it until Saturday.

The notion of actually doing any writing is rather ha ha, yeah, right at the moment. I'm still hoping to finish the reworking of Graveyard Shift by the end of the year, but that's looking decidedly iffy if this fatigue doesn't clear up.

*Note per day, not per night - like I said, all to pot.

Current Mood: Yawn
Current Location: The Sleep Quest of Unknown Kadath
Current Music: To Dream, Perchance to Sleep

So last night was really productive. I overcame the don't wannas and knuckled down with the scene that needed writing.

That was when my characters decided "We know you want us to discuss the immediate conspiracy, but actually you need to know where the whole vendetta thing came from in the first place."

That was a little after midnight. 3000 words later, dawn was lighting the sky and I now know the details of what happened 25 years ago. And yes, the Heart of Darkness placeholder was right. In fact Heart of Darkness with Zombies, and "I love the smell of white phosphorus grenades in the morning."

Today's job:

1) Save that all in a separate file, because...
2) Take it all out of the main narrative, because I need to know the details, but the reader only needs a precis.
3) Write the scene I actually meant to write.

Current Mood: Productive-ish
Current Location: The Revision Cave

I did say I was planning on noting down writing progress, and then crickets... tumbleweed... crickets....

That was partly through some unavoidable distractions which ended up with me effectively spring cleaning the entire house and reorganising the entire upstairs layout. I'm not sure how much of this was genuine need to clear potential access for the phone guy (which he ended up not needing), and how much was avoidance behaviour. Plus I also got swallowed up for most of last week in trying to decide on a new desktop PC, which is important for the long term, but a short term distraction.

However, I have been writing since I completed the reorganisation and I'm 7 chapters/90 pages into the rewrite of Graveyard Shift from Yoon's notes (somewhere between 25 and 33% done). The existing document (which Word labelled 'repaired') was falling over regularly, every other time I deleted a comment as dealt with, so I've been copying it chapter by chapter into a new document, which is irritating, but not as irritating as wondering if you just lost the last half-hour's work as Word crashes yet again. I've been aiming for about 15 pages a day, though 30 every two days is probably closer to the reality.

One major change is largely complete, the rebranding of my villain as Russian rather than Haitian. I realised I needed a new name for him (no, really!), both a mundane one (Petrov), and a work name, so Baron is now Zmei, which is Russian for Dragon (sorry Yoon!). I also managed to finesse his transition from Russian spy to Haitian drug dealer by writing a back story that has him starting first as a necromancer worshipping Chernebog, then sliding over to Voudoun and Kalfu as he does further study, the propensity of non-Abrahamic religions across the world to have dark and light pairings of gods/powers proved very useful. It makes sense he would home in on the figure holding the same place in the new pantheon. And this all ties in very well with the existing backstory of my protagonist's father, who is also ex-KGB/FSB. The whole conflict becomes a vendetta between two spies (with an implied Heart of Darkness origin) that has been ongoing for 30 years, and is now reaching out to target the next generation, which works much better than the previous conflict which relied too much on chance.

Now I'm up against a slightly tougher writing target. The next chapter needs to be rewritten from my cop protagonist's perspective. Only she's not in the room where it's happening, she's on a plane. I'm literally going to have to phone this one in! Additional problems are this is where another character got introduced, so I'm going to have to work her introduction in somewhere earlier, and try not to undermine her part in the narrative, while delibrately reducing the original viewpoint character's part - I think I know what I'm going to do, but rebalancing is going to be an utter pain. Ultimately the rebalancing may work for me, I'll end up with cop protagonist having one partner for daytime work, and one for night-time, which makes sense within the story, and with both being substantial secondary characters, rather than one a half-used viewpoint character whose chapters were difficult to justify.

Current Mood: Avoidant
Current Location: Staring at the wrong scene

"Please find the enclosed cheque"

I can't believe you're sending me a cheque rather than doing an electronic funds transfer.

Pages through all four sheets of paper.

Examines envelope.

Rifles through sheets of paper,

Shakes envelope upside down.

*Headdesk*

A certain company's customer helpdesk is getting a bollocking in the morning!

On the writing front, I've started in on Yoon's markups of 'Graveyard Shift', but Word has crashed several times so I haven't gotten far as yet. If it does it again I'm going to conclude the document is damaged and work from another copy, which is going to be a pain for copying markups over. Plus I'm still noodling the revised background to the viillain, which is a chapter 1 reveal, so really not something I can easily ignore. Checking my Excel timeline I've confirmed I have essentially 5 segments in Bobby's PoV. Three need changing to Aleks, one I may drop entirely or leave as is, it depends on how I'm handling the other characters in that scene - it's the climactic action sequence and done as rapidly shifting PoV. The epilogue I'll see how I feel when I get to it (and what Yoon's markups say), I could leave it, switch it to Aleks, or move it to Laura's.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: Unbalanced

It occurred to me last night I should check my junk mail folder. Actually it occurred to me on Tuesday as well, but I fell asleep before I got the executive function to manage it.

But last night I did, and there may well have been a scream as I found myself looking at not one, not two, but three agent responses from #DVpit.

The oldest was a nope, fortunately. But the other two, both from last Thursday, were a partial from Tricia Skinner at Fuse Literary and a full from Rena Rossner at the Deborah Harris Agency. (Because I've been taking things very slowly these are also the first real follow-on requests I've had).

Very rapid, and very apologetic responses followed. Glad I had the long weekend to blame for part of the delay.

But Aaaiiieee!!! I need to go back in there later and confirm that everything else was junk.

Current Mood: embarrassed
Current Location: In the junk pile, mining gold

So yesterday was taken up with ‪#‎DVpit‬. I squeezed 13 pitches into the 12 hours of the event, last one squeaking in seconds ahead of the 'And we're done', and got 4 likes from agents, which for the purposes of #DVpit meant 'I'm interested, send me your initial query'. It finished at 1AM UK time, so I hit the sack almost straight afterwards, I wanted to finish the chapter I was writing, and slept for pretty much 12 hours. And woke up to find a 5th like from that 13th pitch :)

That final pitch was thrown together on the spot when I noticed quite a few people were using comparison-based pitches, I've got quite a strong comparison in "Rivers of London meets Hill Street Blues" so I switched it in for the weakest of my planned pitches and got a like both times I used it. I'm glad I decided to make the pitches live, rather than scheduling them in advance.

All my Pitchwars peers who were participating seemed to get a decent response, including two in the high teens with likes, though Beth Phelan, the agent who organised #DVpit, reports there were three pitches with over 50 likes, which is just astounding.

I've just finished researching everyone's requirements and sending out my submissions, minor panic because one agent chose today to change her twitter account, but I'd noted her agency and traced her through their web page. Requirements ranged from just a query letter, to the first 5, 10, or 50 pages. Fortunately both pages 5 and 50 finish on fantastic cliffhangers for provoking further interest and I squeezed in the first line from page 11 so that page 10 did too (it's in the body of the email so it doesn't show).

So now it's fingers crossed!

Current Mood: Exhilarated
Current Location: In the slush-pile

So I completely failed at prepping in case of needing to talk with agents.

And then couldn't face looking at how the Agent Round was progressing (it ran 3rd through 5th, so is just about done as I write). OTOH several 'Are you okay, we knew it was a tough sell' tweets from lovely mentors made it pretty clear I wasn't getting the love (their other two mentees have had a couple of requests - and all four of them were talking up my submission on twitter, which was really nice).

I surfaced today to say hi to the other mentees, cheer on the ones getting the agent love (23 requests and 2 offers of representation!?! - damn, we knew that one was a real prospect, but still) and commiserate with the others stuck on the zero requests thread - turns out I'm by no means the only one in a bit of a funk.

While I was doing that I decided to post about how neurodiversity and needing to deal with new people in pseudo-authority roles weren't a good mix, and said I'd be back later to answer anyone else finding that agent-stress and not-needing-to-talk-to-agents-because-no-requests-stress actually feed on each other rather than cancelling each other out.

Except when I did check in again there was lovely mentor KT saying "OMG you got a request!"

It's just a request, she may not get any further through than the synopsis, but damn, that makes me feel a lot less stressed about zero requests. OTOH that not prepping for talking to agents may be about to come home to roost....

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: Summarily Ejected from the Zero Request Thread

Best spelling mistake ever!

Unfortunately it's mine, and the second last line of Graveyard Shift (bar the epilogues). Fortunately I have an irritatingly good line-editor.

I got the line-edits late Saturday, the house has been echoing to cries of "How did I miss that?" ever since.

The answer for the handful of spelling mistakes is probably I really do need bifocals. The answer for the logical problems isn't so simple, but it's an interesting exercise in how ingenious a fix can you dream up on short notice.

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: Almost at the finish line

Got my feedback on rewritten chapters 1 and 2, and a deep line-edit taking out about a thousand words, mostly one or two at a time.

The good news is the rewrite was on target, the bad news, if you can call it bad news, is not being the author lets Katie be a ruthless editor, and she wants me to throw out my babies.

Oh, most of the times (75%-ish) I agree with her, and the rest of the time it's usually flagging that she isn't reading things the way I intended, which means it needs rewriting to be clearer. There were one or two points I disagreed with, mostly around some weird holes in her English (she's Australian, with an English mother, but living in America, so actually quite a handy halfway house to pick out pure English-isms), I sort of expected 'played merry hob' not to work, and easy enough to change it to 'merry hell', but she didn't know 'sea change', which I thought was in pretty universal use (and wiki confirms it is in US use). I'm sticking with that one.

But - wah! - she wants me to lose 'don't poke the evil demigod' which is one of my favourite lines. And, damnit, I can see it makes sense for the pacing of the paragraph as a whole. So it's going, but only as far as the start of chapter 2, where there's a 'next time, don't poke the evil demigod' shaped hole.

I'm about two thirds of the way through integrating these, so should be finished today, and back to applying the process to the rest of the novel, but I'm worried about pacing, she wants the draft rewrite by end of the month, which is less than a fortnight, and, while we've only been at this a week, I'm going to need to kick up the pace if I want to meet that deadline.

So back to the grindstone!

ETA: dammit, I just decided I have to lose the werewolf saying "I screwed the pooch" as well :(

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Nose to the grindstone

I had my first chat session with KT Hanna, one of my two Pitchwar mentors today.

Apparently I have a voice.

Apparently it says things, interesting things, but says them repetitively.

Apparently I also have a problem with the passive voice and a tendency to overtag speech.

Interestingly the problems differ between which character's POV the chapter is written from (rotating first person POV), apparently one character does more telling than the other.

KT talked a lot of sense, and the problems were ones I was aware of, I just haven't been as successful in dealing with them as I thought I had, but she seems really enthused by the story and convinced we can turn it into something stronger.

The repetition problem is one you can probably see in my writing here. I'll say something, then wonder if I've made it entirely clear, so add another clause, and then I'll take another look, and add another clause still, and end up with an incredibly complex sentence saying the thing four times over.

I have wondered if it's neurodiverse in nature, a problem with being unsure about understanding the way other people will parse and understand the sentence and trying to belt and braces a solution. I mentioned that to KT and she noted a friend of hers, both an author and possessed of an AS diagnosis, does have similar issues.

So basically the plan is I use the next three weeks to do a complete redraft taking into account what KT says, killing passive voice and repetition, retagging speech and adding in physical description where needed, then KT will go in and do a line edit. But first I rework chapters 1 and 2 as a prototype by Monday (I suspect it'll be by Friday).

I also had feedback from Julie Sondra Decker, one of the mentors who turned me down, which I wasn't expecting. Mostly overlapping with what KT said, but with some really good structural advice on my query. I even agreed with her reasons for turning me down (she doesn't read detective stuff).

Slightly nervously contemplating the new draft....

Current Mood: excited
Current Location: Hovering over my manuscript

Yes, minus.

I just finished all the work I had planned for the current draft of Graveyard Shift, my novel in progress, which ended up taking 5600 words out of the manuscript (though the actual changed wordcount is probably more like 15kwords, a couple of major chapters had very substantial rewrites). The structural changes, mainly deletion of a major character, worked pretty well, unfortunately it's still overlong (128kwords, target length 120kwords), so I need to look at a different approach. I've got some ideas, but it's a tough ask. On the plus side I'm writing regularly again after this year's health stuff got in the way for much longer than anticipated.

The other thing I'm thinking of doing is submitting it to Pitchwars, which may interest the other writerly types around here. Pitchwars is a sort of contest for people with unpublished manuscripts, where you pitch a query letter and first chapter to 5 out of (this time) 100 mentors (assorted published and due to be published writers and editors) and if your submission catches their interest they'll mentor you through a new draft, with the possibility of picking up an agent at the end of the process if any of the ones who come to watch decide they like your newly polished pitch (hence Pitchwars).

You can only pitch to five mentors, though, and there are restrictions, each mentor specifies an age range (MG, YA, NA - new adult, or Adult) and will only consider manuscripts aimed at that age range, while individually they can specify as many additional personal wants or restrictions as they wish (romances only, no romances, no magic, no kids in peril, etc) so that they end up with pitches they're comfortable handling, so you have to research your market (every mentor has a link to an appropriate web page). Unfortunately for me, Adult tends to be the category with fewest mentors, I've been through 25 so far, and only 1 will even consider Graveyard Shift.

And the other problem I have is timing. Submissions have to be made in a 24 hour window on the 17th, which isn't an issue, but over the next couple of weeks the mentors may then request synopsis, additional chapters or the full manuscript, and generally email you to see if they think you and they will work together. Which wouldn't be an issue most of the time, but just happens to cover the week and a half I'm in Greece sailing/visiting Athens. Getting online shouldn't be too much on an issue in Athens, but in little fishing villages might be more of an issue! Hopefully people will be flexible enough to work with me to get around that if they're interested.

If anyone is interested enough to want to look it up for themselves: Twitter hashtag #Pitchwars and explanatory web page here, with list of mentors here.

Minor content warning if you follow up and start going through mentor pages, there seems to be an internal competition amongst the mentors for who can include the flashiest, gaudiest embedded gifs. If you're at all photosensitive you probably want to disable loading images! I'm not and I still find some of the pages almost unreadable.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: 'The End'