How I Wrote My Novel - (The Last House in the Sky)

This is a follow-up to the journal of how I wrote The House That Nobody Built. Many people found the day-by-day transparency refreshing or useful, so I'm pulling back the curtain on how I wrote the follow-up novel this year, The Last House in the Sky. I'm still afraid this sort of thing appears self-indulgent. If there’s anything you’d like clarified about the below, please hit me up in the Comments.

The Last House in the Sky was a much choppier trek. I knew it would get interrupted. Production would run into the summer when I had many travels planned, and my grandfather’s health was poor, which might necessitate emergency visits. I was still waiting on beta readers for my previous novel to get back to me, I had a new idea that I loved, and increasingly felt like a vacation was a waste of time. Thus, off I went.

May 21: 2,554 words (counting the outline I made that morning; am deleting bits from outline as they are written)

May 22 4,307 words

May 23 5,624 words
May 24 7,568 words
May 25 9,564 words (this may be the most productive five days I’ve ever had)
May 26 11,429 words
May 27 13,024 words

13,000 words in seven days was about as fast fiction production as I’ve ever had in my adult life. It was exciting, but towards the end of the week I found it very taxing. My syndrome started kicking back around May 25. This got worse daily, and by May 28^th, the syndrome pain was much worse than usual and interfered in my ability to focus on anything. Bitterly ironic, then, that I was constantly desiring to exceed my 1,000-word minimum. Perhaps if I just stopped at 1,000 it wouldn’t be as bad.

May 28 14,325 words
May 29 16,413 words
May 30 Decide Wednesdays will resume as the weekly day off

On my first “day off” I found it difficult to shake wanting to write notes and dialogue in the morning, but quickly found enough errands that my whole day was consumed until about 10:00 at night.

May 31 18,000 words

June 1 19,334 words

June 2 21,395 words (high anxiety mid-afternoon; returned on a whim at 9 that night to double the day’s word count; considered leveraging it to take tomorrow off)
June 3 22,522 words
June 4 24,110 words
June 5 26,235 (high anxiety returns, is 4:30 PM before word minimum is hit, lots of shaking; broke, got a pizza, wound up finishing a scene and blew through the word count)
June 6 27,554 (Wednesday, but have company coming this weekend, and at 9:30 that night had nothing pressing to do; banged out a short chapter from the perspective of a minor but funny character, exploring prosthetic tentacles)

June 7 Family and friends visit, no progress
June 8 Family and friends visit, no progress

June 9 Get free at 9:00 that night; write a little, and reorganize the novel into individual chapter .docs so it will be easier to navigate.

June 10 29,608 words

June 11 31,118 words

June 12 32,396 words

June 13 35,377 words

June 14 36,539 words (Ahead of schedule, but skipped the Wednesday off because of previous weekend; agreed if I hit 40,000 words by Saturday, I could take Sunday off)

June 15 38,036 words

June 16 40,099 words

June 17 Sunday - Day off, as planned

June 18 41,728 words

June 19 43,024 words

June 20 Wednesday, typical day off. Also the week when it became apparent my cousin Will was in fatal need of a liver transplant and I began organizing a donor drive online. Used most of my free time on that this day.

June 21 45,075 words (begin hammering out unusually long chapter I’d avoided for a few days)

June 22 46,426 words (hopped to a concurrent, shorter chapter; wrote whole thing in one day; still takes excruciatingly long)

June 23 48,304 (past three days have been very slow processes; today I could not get a flow before 3:00 PM; questioning if this is the first stretch of days where my foggy head and dragging the work out is actually hurting the material, as this period’s stuff doesn’t feel as punchy and the chapter-in-progress is the longest to date; counter-arguments are that a lot happens in the chapter, including setting changes)

June 24 50,016 words

June 25 51,695 words (thought it went well, but found my limbs shaking for hours afterward; neuromuscular syndrome worsening?)

Normally I’d question if I was bound for Writer’s Exhaustion at this point. However, I was two chapters away from the end of an arc in the novel, and expected the last of my test-readers to return her copy of my previous novel by July 1^st. Mid-July was the point at which ChiCon7/WorldCon was rumbling their submissions for novel workshops would open, so I wanted a final draft by then. I decided to aim to finish the two chapters, then break from all writing-based work until July 1^st, at which point I’d start the final draft of the other novel. It had always been my plan to pause or postpone this work-in-progress, though I felt particular angst giving the characters up just as something tremendous was about to land on them.

Also nervous to see how productivity on the novel works after what would be at least a two-week break, and quite possibly a lot longer given family obligations over the summer. Quite possible that I’d only have a spare week here or there to compose on it.

June 26 52,722 words

June 27 53,963 words Wednesday, allegedly my day off, and I was on the run until 3:00 PM. Came home utterly exhausted. But with only one chapter to go, and it seeming like a fun one, I took a crack at it. Nailed the chapter, finished the existing work, and moved to finishing the previous novel.

This break stunk. It hurt to be away from this book for so long. Many days I wanted to abandon the old nearly-perfected novel to complete a crappy rough draft of this one. Would only get back to it for a few days, though, before Otakon in late July and several more trips for family/business/health.

July 17 57,174 words (was incredibly excited to get back to it today; wrote two full chapters before 5:00)

July 18 59,446 words (another chapter in one sitting; then a second, very short one late that night – have actually finished the entire block of chapters I’d intended to write before Otakon in another week)

July 19 61,507 words (completed a longer chapter midday; have now completed the arc in the novel I’d desired to finish before Otakon in Maryland, which is a week from today)

Notes from self: “I’m not sure why the last three days have been so good. I’ve been overwhelmingly preoccupied with writing the events, the plot points, and most specifically, the little character moments in these chapters, seldom checking word count while intensely aware that I was producing a lot. While I’ve always been immersed in the novel, there’s something unique about this mindset. It is a genuine focus on narrative and character progression rather than getting the words down that you’d think would be easy to achieve, but for whatever reason, has simply not been. It certainly helps that this chunk of chapters is the most dire in the book. Greatly prefer this mindset over the word-count mindset.”

July 20 Impromptu day off; family invaded the house for the weekend. Saw Dark Knight Rises, recorded podcast and spent day helping sister move. With the house overrun and interruptions frequent, I’m falling back on diagramming and setting up how the rest of the book goes rather than writing the scenes; everything after this point is the rush to the climax, which I don’t want interrupted by family or a trip to a convention. Also using this time to apply copious notes for editing to the existing 60,000+ words.

July 21 62,297 – the word count now including outlines for the final 15 chapters

July 22 63,103 words; organized remaining notes once family left; feeling sicker and with family emergencies, decide to cave in and break until I return from Maryland August 3^rd. Feeling supremely lazy despite rational thought. This is the summer I signed up for, I say.

After this break, I come back feeling emotionally and mentally exhausted, and it’s harder to pick up the project. Feels reasonable; any time I put down a work it’s a roll of the dice on how the return works. My hope is to hit a certain chapter-benchmark between August 4-14, after which I’m hosting a reunion that will halt any progress for about a week.

August 4 64,117 words (had interim chapter sketch from train ride home; wrote the chapter in one sitting today)

August 5 65,444 (all work on a new chapter; unfinished)

August 6 66,724 (was inspired, skipped to a new chapter, wrote in one sitting)

August 7 67,653 (finished August 5 chapter; sketched some of the next)

August 8 Wednesday – day off to do errands and dig the rain ditch in front of the house

August 9 69,265 (wrote first thousand words early, then broke, then wrote the rest across the afternoon and evening; coming up on plot precipice that might be a good pausing point)

August 10 70,421 words (very shaky health; wrote short chapter from heroine’s perspective; decided to write heroine’s chapters up to the plot threshold, then will break for travel/reunion on the 15^th)

August 11 71,446 words (short chapter; set up tomorrow’s)

August 12 73,034 (last heroine chapter completed; shaky or busy all day, wrote it at 2:00 AM)

On August 15^th people began arriving for my college reunion. Hosting it, I had little privacy and knew I’d get no writing done. Unfortunately family emergencies cropped up as soon as the reunion ended, sapping my time and energy, and soon I had no free days before ChiCon. Critiquing other manuscripts for the conference and reading up for panels consumed the time I had, along with my brother stopping in out of nowhere. Post-convention, I had publishing offers I had to follow-up on, making the break from the novel stretch through early September.

Being this close to the end of the book was alternately irritating and worrisome – worrisome because I feared I’d lose the passion and threads that had led me to such progress previously.

On September 10^th I sent out queries for the first novel. That was the cut-off for excuses in the new book – figuratively and literally. On the evening of the 10^h and afternoon of the 11^th, I dove back into The Last House in the Sky. Both days were efforts on the same chapter, so I only have the final word count for the 11^th.

September 10: 73,034?

September 11 74,962 words

September 12 Syndrome bad, long day of errands, body crashed when returned home; only got up to write at 10:00 at night; no log of word count

September 13 77,070 words (finished two chapters)

September 14 79,071 words (one chapter in one day; shuffled listing of events in remaining climactic chapters)

September 15 81,030 words (one chapter in one day; sets up climax)

September 16 Impromptu day off; personal emergencies

September 17 84,107 words (one big chapter in one day; climactic events rolling)

September 18 85,624 words (most of a chapter over the course of a day, kept falling apart, feeling very ill)

The 18^th was a very rough day for my syndrome, and I spent something like eight hours struggling to eke out 1,500 words, and left the chapter with many skeletal bits to fill in. I felt terribly guilt for not finishing it, particularly since company was coming the next day and I knew I wouldn’t be able to finish it immediately. This made me reflect on how shifting from words-per-day to chapters-per-day might affect my satisfaction levels. Will have to work on that.

September 19 Company

September 20 Company

September 21 Company

I think I remember the Sept. 10/11 resumption feeling much harder than the days that followed. Writing on Sept. 22, I know this resumption feels ridiculously hard to get into; by the 23^rd, it was much easier. Have memories, but no records, that most resumptions after breaks have been irksome.

September 22 86,265 words (finished the chapter from the 18^th and rewrote a few broken sections)

September 23 88,822 words (wrote first post-climax chapter; realized there was one pre-climax chapter had never written, from same perspective as post-climax, so wrote that too)

September 24 91,832 words (two chapters in one day; novel done)

And that’s how the beast was slain. It was awful on the 25^th when I had nothing to do. No one wanted me for anything. If they could only have waited until now.

Saturn, Disability, and the Hugo Awards at ChiCon 7 - The Wrap-Up

THE ADLER

Good view for a Thursday.

A beautiful building right on the river, across from Chicago’s unparalleled skyline, was the perfect place to spend Thursday night. I spent sunset chatting about Hugo nominees and waiting for Saturn to become visible. While it was tiny even in the most powerful telescope we had, it was striking. Even when its figure is smaller than the tip of your pinky finger, you can make out its rings. Until then, I’d honestly thought that was an invention of cartoons, but it really does look like one of the glowing stickers I used to have on my wall as a kid.

While you’ve probably heard some complaints against the con-runners (and are about to read some more), they handled the Adler very well. Admission was free if you had your convention badge, and they rented eight buses to shuttle everyone to and from the planetarium for hours into the night.

ACCESSIBILITY ISSUES

While everyone working at the Hyatt Regency Chicago was courteous to me, I couldn’t recommend using the site again. Giving the floors arbitrary color names rather than numbers, and even less sensible themed names for the rooms (good luck finding “The Gold Coast Room” on “The Bronze Level”) were one thing, but the hotel is split into two towers that can only be navigated by three means:

1) a skybridge on the second floor where no convention events took place, requiring you to take either an escalator or a second, much slower elevator downstairs.

2) crossing the street outside on the ground floor, between a floor with three panel rooms and a floor with none.

3) crossing an underground bridge on the Bronze Level, where there were many panel rooms, including at least one that was only accessible up a set of stairs.

Complicate that with some elevators going down only to this set of colored floors, and some stairwalls only going this high, and you had a lot of baffled attendees walking indoor miles per day just to get lost. I expect to hurt when I’m at a convention, and had to set aside an hour every day to be in private over body tremors, but that’s my issue and I can handle it.

If they ever want to make a WorldCon Risk...

If you were in a wheelchair, though, you routinely had to cross to the other tower just to get downstairs and cross back to the tower you’d just been in to reach a room. That’s no reasonable way to ask someone to get downstairs. There have been reports of handicapped con-goers only being able to attend every other panel due to travel times within the Hyatt. They were rightly furious to make such long treks only to find a room with its own private set of stairs and no other point of entry. 

Especially at this point, I don't think outrage at con-runners is constructive. You can't fix architecture; you can only avoid patronizing it. WorldCon sites should be accessible to all attendees. Right now there are bids for 2015 between Florida, Washington and Finland. At none of the room-parties for these respective bids did I hear anyone pitch accessibility services. I’m hoping the post-con furor raises awareness. When you have over a thousand attendees, your location needs to start with being accessible.

THE HUGOS, AND A LITTLE SOMETHING

I am a longstanding and publicly-admitted cynic about awards shows. They are generally artificial and reek of politics-over-product. I can’t say that about the 2012 Hugos; at least half of the nominees claimed not to have written speeches thinking they would lose, and that same number looked genuinely shaken, stunned or overwhelmed. Whoever screamed in surprise when E. Lily Yu was announced for the John Campbell for Best New Writer was perhaps the single loudest I’ve ever heard in my life, and I’m told it was Yu herself.

There were a lot of class acts. Jim Hines won for Best Fan Writer, mostly for his amusing series on how women are objectified on book covers, and excused himself from the category for every future Hugo to ensure that more new voices would be recognized. Ursula Vernon (Best Graphic Story) gave an endearing ramble on how she entrusted her boyfriend with the ending to Digger, just in case she ever died before it finished. John Picacio was the only figure to swagger up to the podium, and while he hadn’t prepared a speech, he remembered in the six times he’d previously failed to win Best Professional Artist the names of artists he’d grown up on and wished had been recognized with their own Hugos. He waited about a decade just to name them from that podium.

This is Jim Hines.
As far as I know, this is not a degrading pose,
but he sure has a grip on that thing.

And as coldhearted as I am, Jo Walton almost got me to choke up. She deserved the Best Novel Hugo that she won for Among Others, but still seemed to be processing merely getting nominated. She me by recounting something Ian Osmond told her: "Lots of people have said Among Others is a love letter to fandom. Didn't you expect to get a reply?"

It was well worth the half hour traffic jam leading to the sole escalator back upstairs.

It was also at the Hugos that I had my highest point. It was perhaps the only time of the year I’d wear a tie, and the last day that I shaved, but I couldn’t help being myself. I sat with an exceptionally good-spirited group of guys, and we quickly fell into joking about great novels and bad Adam Sandler movies. When they asked what I did, I described my upcoming novel and they showed keen interest, though I didn’t know how keen. I just enjoyed making them laugh, because that’s one of my favorite things to do for other people, even if it’s at the expense of Deadman and Jason Todd.

It was as Jo Walton finished her acceptance speech that one of them leaned over to me, writing on a scrap of paper. He asked how to spell my last name. I told him, then asked what was up.

“I can’t wait to read your novels,” he said. “You’ve got a fan for life.”

I shook all of their hands and probably failed to express how much that meant to me. Exhausted and pretty sick with the syndrome at that point, I couldn’t have felt better.

I still want a Hugo, though.

Reading and Writing at ChiCon 7

Day Two of Three from the ChiCon 7 diary. Tomorrow I want to touch on disability issues at the hotel, the Hugo Awards, and seeing Saturn for the first time. Today is devoted to the public readings and private writings that go on at these sorts of conventions.

THE READINGS

I went to my share of readings over the weekend, and saw some very talented writers. The one that rocked me back in my chair was Mary Robinette Kowal, sharing “Locked In” from Apex, at the Broad Reading meeting. It’s a piece of flash fiction that captures Science Fiction, Horror, Tragedy and the Medical Thriller without succumbing to nearly any niche’s expectations, and it’s a great reminder of why Apex Magazine is a top resource in the industry.

I managed to make a total ass out of myself afterward by congratulating Kowal on that story and not realizing she was the same Mary Robinette Kowal up for a Hugo for the superb “For Want of a Nail.” It’s great when you realize the two people you’re a fan of are the same person. Not so great when you realize you're an idiot.

This is not two people.
Some people have a harder time learning this than others.

Broad Reading was a neat setup, housing over a dozen quick readings from individual members in an all-female writing group of all levels of expertise. Most official readings were for one person. Jo Walton, who won the Hugo for her touching tale of adolescence in Among Others, read from her work in progress about teens in space who want to party on the ship forever instead of land. George R.R. Martin’s reading room couldn’t have been packed any more hopelessly if he’d written it.

Friend and fellow #fridayflasher Emma Newman showed the chops she’s honed recording audiobooks in a fine reading from her short story collection and the upcoming Split Worlds. Probably the highlight for all readings for me was when she read of a curse being cast on our hero, and somewhere outside our walls, a pneumatic hiss went off and filled the room. You couldn’t pay for better publicity than that, though the hotel should check that elevator.

There’s a lot you can learn from a reading, even a bad one. Maybe especially a bad one, because you can study how authors psych themselves out. One author, who I won’t name, kept stumbling over her excerpt. At first I felt bad, but then I started constructing narration in my own head, and realized her errors were highlighting how strong the voice would be on the printed page. It was kind of uncanny, and reaffirmed a couple of things I suspect about how plot progression works. One of my recent hobbies is listening to readings or audiobooks and testing how it would sound in my head, as opposed to how it’s intended.

THE WORKSHOPS

These are an institution at WorldCons, and will hopefully be for the foreseeable future. Oz Drummond and Lou Berger organized at least eighteen different groups of three aspiring authors (“victims” is the official unofficial name). These trios were joined with two professionally published authors, forming critique groups of five, to hone the victims’ craft. I had the pleasure of working with Martha Wells and Gregory Wilson, who treated all three of us with total professionalism and consideration.

Typical writer reaction in workshops.

Our session lasted two hours, and we spent about forty on every victim, myself included. Your mileage will vary, but we were all serious about craft and I don’t think a minute was wasted. This workshop was a big test for my thoroughly peer-read The House That Nobody Built, as I thought it was near publishable an wanted to see how it would stand up to scrutiny. I left jubilant, having retained more of the positive feedback than the negative. But just as important, the negative feedback was all reasonable, like the desire for a few details, or how to streamline the synopsis. Reasonable, and addressable in just a few minutes of word processing.

So it was the positives I lingered on, which is rare for me. One of my pros asked if I’d already queried it, seeming to think it was ready. One of my pros also described it with what I wish to God will be a cover blurb: 

“This is like Dungeons & Dragons, except awesome!”

There were some other developments at the convention I can’t speak on yet, but cross your fingers for me. I’m doing everything I can with what luck I get. I can’t praise these workshops enough, if you have the fortune of attending a convention that runs anything like it. If I turn “pro,” I’d be happy to help operate one.

Gearing For ChiCon Workshops

Today I’m doing one of the hardest things I’ll do all year. I’m putting my current work-in-progress on the shelf at the 50,000-word mark in order to complete one more draft of my previous 110,000-word novel. Beyond the anxiety of abandoning some beloved characters right before something terrible happens to one of them, there’s the anxiety of having two weeks to return this book and turn out the new draft.

All the beta and theta readers have returned their copies, the family is out of the house, and in mid-July the ChiCon workshops open for submissions. If I’m lucky I’ll have this book in front of three incredible authors for a sit-down in September.

On the plus side, the feedback has been pretty glowing and I know how to accommodate just about everything. Every individual criticism, that is. In writing both of these novels I’ve found the biggest anxiety actually comes from an irrational sense of scope, of looking at the mountain of work rather than the individual bits. I know I can do all of this, I have done all of this before, and yet my lizard brain views it as impossible. It seems like the hardest thing in the world.

Of course, five minutes calling my cousin Will or looking up the latest from Syria disproves that notion. But it’s a notion.

I’ll apologize in advance of some Bathroom Monologues in the next few weeks are inspired by a book you can’t read yet, or if my Twitter feed turns into a stream of consciousness on the process. Feel free to jab me if I devolve too rapidly.

And thank you all, in earnest, for your support. I think I’m pretty close to rendering this the best thing I’ve ever written.