It has to hurt.. to get better...

I've been editing. The slow insanity driven hideous bone crushing pain of revision.
Words are good, but you want to make them better, a plot is beautiful, but you need to make it sing. You go along stabbing at every weak point just to see if it will give.
It reminds me of cows... There's an old story I heard about cattle. When you first introduce new cows to a new field, the cows will walk the entire fence line, and lean against the fence. They push at it, every step of the way, just to see if it will fall. If the fence doesn't fall, they accept the bounds, get off it, and leave it alone.
Building a story is similar to that process. You have to be willing to push at every weak spot, poke at every action, analyze every turn. It has to be strong enough to hold. If you leave a weak spot, a question that is never answered later in the tale, it becomes a hole, a void. Then, like cattle, your readers attention finds that hole and wanders through, leaving the world you've built.
Part of my struggle hasn't just been with the words themselves, but with the length. My tale is longer than most books should be. there are a half dozen ways to fix it, and I'm evaluating each one, but one thing I've learned, is that sometimes if you push on a story, the story pushes back.
I've considered deleting scenes, or changing the end to come together earlier, but sometimes deleting scenes is like pulling out whole chunks of a story. If the story doesn't need it, you can do that. But if the story needs the words and you remove too much, it's like yanking fence poles from your fence. The plot line gets weaker, you tear out too much, and it's too thin to hold. Or more appropriately, it's like pulling beams from a tower. A good story should hold up to scrutiny and most readers. You don't want a mid-game jenga tower of half-cobbled together ideas, lumpy in places, and barely staying upright.

I think the biggest question in my story is should I make it hurt less? Should I make the end come swifter and the fall less cutting? Should I spare the pain?
I know i'm going to get asked that, (and if my BETA readers are reading this I know they're getting nervous.) maybe by an agent, a publisher, or perhaps someday by a reader or in reviews.
The question will come... Why did you make it hurt? Why did it have to be so heartbreaking?

Because, my friends, anything less would have been a cheat. Anything less would have been a flaw. I believe in karma, and I believe in humanities ceaseless search for retribution. Right or wrong, bad things happen to good people. Right or wrong, good people become consumed with a desire to get back at those who wronged them. Right or wrong, forgiveness is an uncommon act that only comes with a sense of self sacrifice. You give up a part of yourself to let go of  a grudge.

What my character goes through is a trial by fire. All her flaws come back to haunt her in one guise or another and she has to overcome. She has to realize that the greatest enemy isn't the one outside, but the enemy within. The demons of rage and selfishness and yes, even blind loyalty, have consequence.
The hammer must fall. The curtain must close, and in the end we can't run from our choices.

This is still a redemption story... But the redemption doesn't happen right away. It wouldn't be a book series if everything happened right away. Like all things, spiritual growth takes time. Like life, spiritual growth takes pain.
You have to fall down, to get back up. You have to be sick to appreciate health.
And sometimes your petty choices drive you to the brink of ultimate loss and you find yourself at rock bottom.
But you know what the good news is about rock bottom?
There's nowhere to go but up.
I may need to make my story shorter, but the acts on the stage aren't going away. Hamlet still dies, and Macbeth still kills the king... Oh wait, that's not MY story. Regardless, these are constants. These are what make a story soar.
We see, through the pain of others, the uncomfortable truths about ourselves we might avoid.
And I aspire to tragedy.

The Floating and unhinged in the Middle

I'm still trying to figure this whole professional writing thing out. It might be just me, it might be just some floating sense of existentialism that fades in the morning when my alarm clock wakes me at ass o'clock ant the weekday begins with a screeching jolt that leaves my head pounding and my innards twisted with hate. Hell, if I feel like this tomorrow it'll be an improvement over most of my early mornings.

I am a writer. I am the god in my own little world. I go out and I network with writers, we tweet and we blog and we share. We gladhand and we encourage. We send each other off to fight out own literary foes. In my mind, I want to believe they are my compatriots, not my competition. but essentially, down at the core of it, this is a lie. We are all struggling for the chance that our work will be seen, our work will be loved, and as much as I love my writer friends, there is a dark a jealous voice that makes me keep my SECRETS to myself. My Manuscript, my precious, might be hinted at, alluded to, even quoted... But I don't tell them all of it. I don't share the best bits and the deepest part. I've become so secretive that even those BETA reading don't know where the next turn might lead. This is probably good for them.

But it doesn't change the fact that sometimes you fall into that fugue, that transitory middle, you hover somewhere in space, and you see the person who just got signed, launching their book after X years of toil. Then you see another, still toiling, swearing that THIS WILL BE THE ONE. You see yet another, whose first and second books are out, and they juggle the same madness finishing a third, wishing their bills were paid and yet posing like a celebrity before their rabid fans at a book signing.

It's like an insane asylum filled with people left to roam free, all with the same disease. We talk to our imaginary friends, live their lives, make them suffer and make them triumph only to break them down again. We make friends with other writers and we encourage each others madness, all making noises of how exciting it all is, while deep down hoping our work does as well, does better, isn't sunk by them.

And here I sit, less than a year in, grinding on this book like maybe it'll be published tomorrow... And maybe it will. Yet I feel even giving voice to that hope will leave me torn asunder by the others with the same madness. I want my book to fly, to rise free and unfettered from the ashes and be glorious. Yet it seems everyone wants to burden down optimism with stones of 'sage advice'. This took YEARS to create. This took dozens of drafts. I didn't find an agent for a decade, and by then I'd resorted to eating shoes. I exaggerate, but it's sort of like telling a teenager they'll 'understand when they're older'.

My book isn't ready yet. But it's getting there. It already does-not-suck and it's on it's way to becoming exceptional.

I'll tell you a secret, here on my blog where no one else will hear us...

I hope to get it agent worthy in a year.
I hope to have an agent tell me how glorious it can be within a year after that.
And hopefully sometime after that, I'll have found someone to publish it.

I can hope for these things. Chances are, I will be waiting much longer. But I will not give up the path while I wait. I will not neglect my craft while my opus gets ready to fly.
Hell, if I work very hard, and nothing causes me to go into a coma...
I should have the first three books drafted and arranged in two years.

That at least is a goal I can achieve.
Failure may be a possibility.

...but quitting is NOT an option.

A day to remember...

This is a date that is important.
Today is a date I will remember and set my goals by.
Today is all encompassing and all glorious.
My first draft of my novel is done.

Boo yah.

Glory to the anti-hero

A long time ago in a basement far away...
this novel's original inception began. The brain child of friends talking over an idea that started as one thing, and turned into another and another, until finally only one person remained, still clinging to the kernels and threads of a wild fancy long since expired.

My tale is born of the ashes of another dream. My character, my favorite character is the anti-hero. Oh there is a hero in the tale, there has to be. A sentinel of good, that blazes boldly against the dark, and strikes down evil.
Yes, I have a hero... but my favorite character isn't him.

Its her. The jaded weapon, the fury to behold, the pragmatic warrior. She doesn't blame anyone for her sins, and they are many, she doesn't expect acceptance after her crimes. For they are numerous. She is too thick skinned and hard to even admit to anyone but herself that the faces of her victims still haunt her at night.
No, she's there to make sure things get done. She's there to keep the hero on track. Mostly... she's there to rip apart her foes with brutal efficiency.

She was broken a thousand times, cast in the heat and tempered in its flame. She was forced into being a weapon. And in the process she lost everything...

It's not a black and white world. The good guys might be better than the bad guys, but they're far from perfect. Some of the bad guys are almost better than the good guys. But this is war, and when imperfect people have to fight against impossible odds, we always have to choose a side.

So I save my love for the antihero. Broken but unbowed. She is not a nice person.
But she is glorious.