Rewrite Update

I'm currently rewriting the MC's death scene.

It's a weird experience. I first wrote this novel, this scene, in November 2014. Even then, I was no stranger to writing death scenes, but that's not what's weird.

What's weird is all the losses, the deaths that happened to me in real life -- all happened after I wrote that rough draft. This character dies of asthma. I wrote this scene in November and lost my best friend to lung failure three months later. My cousin died of asthma five months after I first wrote this scene. I didn't even know she had asthma until the night she died.

It's also weird that this doesn't really trigger me or raise my anxiety levels (I don't have an anxiety disorder -- one of the few mental illnesses I've managed to dodge so far. My fear levels are normal, but my sadness and self-hatred levels are off the charts). Maybe I've accepted defeat and am just assuming bad things will always happen no matter what and there are absolutely zero ways to get out of it. Maybe I've been successful as separating fact from fiction. Maybe not really remembering writing the initial scenes in the first place is helping me be more objective -- there's not much emotional connection as far as 'I wrote this scene on this day while sitting in this place at this time of day' so I haven't had the 'I wrote this and then it happened' thought. Maybe the writing and the real life happened far enough apart that I was able to keep them separate.

Maybe I just knew that this is what had to happen for this book to work, and I have to do what I have to do. This book has no point if she survives. She's already had a near-death experience and the character's lives just continued on for the most part (as it does at college -- if you're not actively dead, you aren't sick enough. At least not at my college). For the MMC to learn what he needs to learn, he has to lose her. And it has to be severe and sudden, with absolutely no recourse. She's not the type of person to willy-nilly end a friendship, especially not one as precious as what they have.

Honestly, her leaving this particular friend character was the initial seed of the idea. At first the scene in my head was her driving away, never to return, but somewhere between initial idea and NaNoWriMo that year it morphed into what it is now, and I think that's a much stronger climax with more interesting repercussions. If she doesn't die, he never gets mad enough to stand up to the villain character -- at the cost of everything he's worked for. If she doesn't die, he never learns to live, really live, and to value people and experiences over money and 'proving people wrong.'

I guess this novel is kind of a synthesis of what was going in my own life at the time -- I was still very much dealing with implications of my own near-death experience several years before and I was in the beginning stages of learning those very same lessons. The main character was who I was striving to become, and the MMC was me in that moment, trying to figure out how to get from here to there.

In some ways I think I've regressed in my goals there. And that's what making this rewrite in general so hard -- because I shut down hard when my cousin died. Suddenly life was not beautiful and life was not worth living. I never fully had the chance to learn those lessons. They have never taken root in my own life. And because this character doesn't die until very near the end of book, that means I spend 97% of the book building her up into this Mary Poppins sort of magical figure (while somehow not being a Mary Sue) with which I am very unfamiliar, and only the final 3% of the book is MMC consciously learning the lessons (which I actually am familiar with). Since the novel is 'written' by him after her death, there are elements of him picking up threads that he missed while he was living them... but that's a tough line to toe, though, because I very much want a 'no spoilers' approach. He, our narrator, doesn't mention that she dies until she does, right in front of him, barely a year after he meets her.

I do intend to send this draft out to a couple of beta readers, though I can think of a couple of things I might need to rewrite after this. This time I did a straight-through, top to bottom rewrite with absolutely no jumping around (partly so I wouldn't forget to write 'smaller' scenes, partly so I wouldn't have to completely reassemble the book potentially multiple times only to find parts still missing -- in short, to stave off mind-melting, brain-burning overwhelm). I started in April 2022 and I am on pace to finish this month. I'm currently at 77,000 words. I've never written anything this long before (you'd better believe I'm backing this thing up on an external drive every other day).

I'm just so proud that I've gotten this far. Even if nobody pays money for this book, I'm proud that I have given it a fair shot at life.

NaNoWriMo Eve Resolutions

On this, the eve of my 15th National Novel Writing Month (I'm counting Camp in these numbers), I decided to make a few resolutions in order to ensure my novel can be the best version of itself.

- None of my characters will have a lung disease. None. ZERO.

- I will remember that Daniel Amos did not exist in 1957 and therefore I will refrain from having my characters quote the entirety of their discography in this novel when I get stuck.

- (The above resolution also applies to Prodigal, David Meece, and Crumbächer.)

- I will remember to eat more than once a day.

- None of my characters will develop even a temporary lung issue. No pneumonia. No infections. Not even a cold.

- My secondary character is allowed to have an interest other than the performing arts. Just let her be a scientist.
(Besides, it's necessary for the novel's plot.)

- I will not give my characters names starting with 'E.'

*looks at list of three main characters*

*FMC's name is Elisabeth*

(...)
(Everyone calls her Bette though, okay?)

- I will not get sucked into the abyss of baby name websites for two hours as I try to find the perfect name for a secondary character that DOES NOT start with 'E.'

- I will not spend my writing (or practice) time looking at 1950s decor on Pinterest.

- I will learn to type FMC's name without typing 'Beete' first and having to delete and retype every single time she says something.

- I will not spend more hours making writing playlists than actually writing.

- I will not write the death scene in the first ten thousand words and then have to filibuster for the next 40k because I'm out of plot.

- The director is not the bad guy in this novel. This is not Kyrie. Or Angel Falls.

- None of my characters will die suddenly at a young age... oh, wait, that's literally the entire centrepiece of my plot.
(Hey, they say write what you know...)

- Seriously. No lung diseases.


Onward to literary greatness!

Summer of Artistic Maintenance

It's been quiet on here lately. It's not that I don't want to post, it's just that I'm exhausted -- I've been falling asleep around 11.30 every night (a far cry from the days of three and four am just a few months ago).

Things are happening though. I've been back to working full-time in Alberta (which is the reason for being exhausted), in an attempt to somehow pull the money together for college again this fall. My course load will be significantly smaller, hopefully allowing time for work (assuming anybody actually hires me this year -- they sure as heck didn't last year).

Despite work eating most of my days and bringing night to me early, I'm actually feeling like I'm making (some) creative headway. For the past two weeks, work has been taking us a forty-minute (one-way) drive away. Because I'm not the one driving, I've been bringing Lila (my portable word processor), and writing missing scenes from Kyrie during the commute. At night I transfer the scenes to my Scrivener document and make a list of two or three scenes to work on the next day.

I'm beginning to develop some of the characters more and I may have even managed to introduce a subplot or two. I'm still writing these scenes in a fairly NaNoWriMo-ish style (put your head down and type like the wind), but having a structure to fit these scenes in is actually helping a lot. It's like building a puzzle (only this one is actually kind of fun... I hate real jigsaw puzzles). One thing I'm really noticing is that there's more conflict in these scenes -- more actual tension. Usually my books severely lack conflict because my characters are all far too nice and everyone always tells the truth right away. Over the past school year I had done a lot of character development work, and I can definitely see the difference in the new scenes.

In addition, I've (more or less) managed to keep my five-day-a-week dance practice routine up. I made a playlist called Tap Shuffle (what can I say? I'm just that clever), made of songs that are good tap songs in terms of rhythm, and almost every day I've been putting on my headphones, setting the playlist to shuffle, and doing improv for five songs. This has multiple benefits:
1. Improves my stamina (you try tap dancing for five songs in a row without stopping),
2. Works my improv/transition skills (which are nil),
3. Ensures that I don't wimp out/get distracted before about twenty minutes (the rule is I can't pause the music),
4. It maintains my skills (if not growing them... see below).

I haven't been working on any tap choreography this summer, as I don't have enough space to really dream anything out, so this summer I've been focusing on cleaning my basic, Grade 1 technique. I realised recently that my shuffles -- the foundation of basically everything else in tap -- are crap, so I've basically devoted the summer to getting my shuffles decent. (They're still not.)

I also sort-of-accidentally started doing a stretching routine after practice sessions. For years I have been trying and failing to get splits. Despite being a dancer since age six, I have never in my life had splits down, ever, in any form. I'm also doing a lot of rises to keep my calf muscles in shape. I haven't done any actual pointe work since Beauty and the Beast ended in June, so I'm trying to make sure I don't lose too much muscle before I can really get back into the studio in September.

So there's an update on my creative life. I'm hoping I can be back in Saskatchewan for school again this year. The college was a real place of refuge for me last year, and due to everything I'm working through now from my past, it would be lovely to be there in that place of refuge again this year. My support network in Alberta has almost entirely disintegrated, so I might as well be in Saskatchewan where people still care about me anyway.

On Losing Childhood and Imaginary Worlds

Over the past week or so I've started realising something. That despite all my vehement protests to the contrary, all the promises made to myself that it wouldn't happen, I grew up.

The other night -- my birthday -- I was watching my younger siblings play in the front yard. They were fully invested in their imaginary world, their story. And suddenly I realised that to them, I was not a playmate. I was not one of them. I was more like a second mother figure, constantly throwing cold water on their imaginations.

When was last time I was so fully invested in a story that everything around me served the story? My next-youngest sister and I had a fictional family living in darn near every tree on our yard, not to mention the trampoline and the playhouse our dad built and in every row of the garden and in the ditch... We could enter that world at the drop of a hat. It would take one second.

When was last time we entered that world? She and I hardly even speak to each other now -- our tastes are so different and it has divided us so deeply. It's a ridiculous thing, I know, but somehow our imaginary world was literally the only thing holding us together. When we stopped entering it -- and heaven knows why -- we stopped talking to each other. Could we find it again? Are either of us brave enough to try? Would we be able to get past the self-consciousness, the petty arguments, this silent gaping rift?

Suddenly I'm not a child anymore. I even made it through two years of college still sort of thinking that I was, or at the very least that the child in me wasn't that far away. That's how subtle it is. That's how slowly it happens. You don't notice it's gone until years after the last foray into the imaginary world. I think last time we were there I was fifteen -- admittedly, that's older than most are their last time -- and the only reason I remember that is because it was somehow a more conscious decision for me to enter that world that time. I pre-planned that day before it happened. I planned the night before that we would play our game. We got into it the same as we always had, but the preamble felt different to me. We didn't just jump in -- it was pre-meditated. It wasn't spontaneous.

What changed? I don't know. Certainly not self-consciousness -- at the time I had exactly zero friends and wasn't trying to impress anybody. I did get a job the next summer. I joined Facebook. I got my driver's license. I was diagnosed as severely anaemic. I went through the worst phase of my depression and nearly committed suicide. Was I really so wrapped up in numbing the pain I was feeling that I forgot about the most effective cure? Did I think it wouldn't work? Or did I truly forget it was available to me? Why did it never occur to me between then and now to try re-entering the story again?

I feel like I cheated her. She's younger than me, and so her last time entering the story was younger than mine.

Or maybe the reason I didn't notice was partly because I did keep connecting to characters -- but they were created by me, for me, not with her. I kept using different personas while writing, and now it's showing up as dancing and acting. Maybe that's why I cling so desperately to my performance dream -- because if I give that up, I have well and truly given up on the childhood I swore I would never completely lose.

If I were to try and join my siblings now, would they accept this new character? Would I accept their world? Do I still have the imagination to narrate myself out of a corner if need be?

Summer Update

We'll see if I can write a blog post without complaining (that's why I haven't been posting lately -- literally every post I try to write has been a huge gripefest and I'm pretty sure none of you want to read that). Life is still very difficult though. Now it's that endless parade of little things that make you go, 'really? Really? There just had to be one more thing, didn't there?'

Dance is over for the season now and it's killing me. I used to be either at work or at dance. Now I get to go to work, but I don't even get the reprieve of dance afterwards. There's another month and a half left before the season starts again (it only ended two and a half weeks ago...), but in dance years that's a long time (in deciding-to-do-with-my-autumn years, however... it equals about two OVERWHELMINGLY STRESSFUL seconds).

I've established a couple of personal goals for the summer though, mostly involving tap dancing. I'm still very uninspired on the ballet front. While my technique improved a lot this past dance season, my brain is still not really latching onto the choreographic possibilities. So I've been focusing on my tap dancing because it's still dancing, but it's different enough that my brain is still willing to work in it -- at least a tiny bit. Also, it takes much less space to practice tap than it does to practice ballet, and I have exactly zero practice space in my life right now. So I've worked out a daily tap practice plan and I'm already seeing improvement in some technical things I struggle with.

One other thing is I want to get another one of my dances staged and filmed, both for my own experience, but also so I can start building a bit of a portfolio. There was supposed to be another piece staged this summer, but the venue backed out (rather rudely and without explanation) well into the process. This venue had previously been very supportive and to be shut down like that without cause (at least not any cause they're willing to name) was completely unprecedented. It's left me floundering because without them, I actually have nowhere to stage my dances right now -- I haven't gotten in anywhere else yet. This was quite a severe blow and I'm still reeling from it. Practice space is again a huge issue though, as I have nowhere to rehearse my other dancers -- as longtime readers know, I don't typically choreograph solos.

On the writing front -- I'm actually sort of trying to revise Kyrie. I'm not sure how it's going. I'm doing character development right now on the secondary characters and it is actually flipping hard. I used to be the queen of character development, but apparently not anymore. My three main characters are fantastic, but everyone else feels like they're made of air and if you look at them too long they'll disappear like phantoms. I think part of my problem right now is that character development keeps bleeding into plot structure, but I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to keep them separate right now until I get the stupid characters figured out.

I've also found myself writing short stories, of all things. I never thought I could. My brain doesn't make stories short enough usually -- it's generally either novel-or-nothing around here (and lately it's just been nothing). But I've written two half-decent rough drafts of short stories in the past couple of weeks and have plotted a third. They're kind of fun actually.

All this fills in the time between work. I'm considering going back to college, but in order for that to happen, I need minimum ten grand by the middle of August. The year I took off from schooling should have more than covered that, except the province's entire economy tanked and even now, jobs are hard to come by. I'm technically still employed (which is more than a lot of people have right now), but I'm getting very few hours. I don't know what will happen. I really don't know. And I hate not knowing. Tap practice is one of the very few things saving me right now.

And hey... I think I kind of managed to write an entire blog post without going on a rant! Now as long as nobody mentions Hillsong in the comments, we should be good.

Day Ten - Dancing In Character

My latest project for National Choreography Month is turning out to be more of a big musical theatre number than a tap piece. This didn't surprise me too much, based on my post-secondary education thus far, but then I started to realise that the few dances I have managed to choreograph over the past few months have had distinctive characters in them. They're no longer twelve more-or-less-the-same beautiful dancers without a personality. Even though all of the dancers in a piece might be following the exact same kind of character (or stereotype), at least they have a character. It's not just bodies flailing around in a stylised fashion anymore. It's bodies moving with purpose, at least setting a theme if not telling a story.

A quick perusal of my recent choreographic output finds a tired old man, being escorted to heaven by a child and a dozen angels. There's a young woman grieving the death of someone close to her -- to the point where she's hallucinating. There are three game-show girls in the sassiest piece I will probably ever dream of choreographing. There's a legion of angels surrounding and comforting a terrified child in the dead of night. There's the wind running through the prairies -- grass, grain, and water dancing in praise of their creator. There are the aforementioned couples at a party and the dangerous-but-attractive man leading the naive girl on in Surrender.

And maybe this is where I'm getting stuck. For so long I've choreographed beautiful-but-plotless pieces (Speechless, Early In The Morning, God's Promises, more recently Dancing On Light...). And I still sort of expect that of myself. I love watching huge dances with lovely choreography and it usually doesn't bother me (in fact I often prefer it) if there's no main characters/soloists, so I try to emulate it. And in some pieces, I think I've done a decent job. But I haven't been allowing my choreography to move in the direction it wants to go lately. Apparently right now the creative brain wants to make characters, to create a mood at least (though not necessarily a specific story). Are rules and restrictions on particular pieces necessary? Absolutely, or nothing worthwhile would get done -- everything would have too much variety to make sense and not enough repetition to hold it together in one cohesive whole (this previous sentence is brought to you by my music theory profs -- I knew that music degree would help my choreography).

Part of why I've been reluctant to move into a realm with more character(s) is that I don't really know how. The first time I'd ever really been asked to take on a character of any kind in a dance was in my first year of college. I had been dancing for over ten years and the idea of dancing in character had never even crossed my mind until that teacher asked it of us. I mean, I knew about all the big ballets -- Swan Lake and Giselle and Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty and so on -- but it had never occurred to me that they had to dance in character. I assumed the costumes, the sets, and the story written in the programme did all the work without really giving it any thought at all. It took me at least a full year to begin to wrap my head around it (and my head is still not completely around it -- how can you be in character non-verbally?). I always understood the concept of acting in character, but dancing...? I don't really even know where to begin. Dance is so codified... actors get to use the English (or whatever) language and street-level body language -- things that the average audience will understand, at least at a subconscious level. Dance, however, is so rare, so elite, so stylised, that the average person doesn't know how to watch it and as a result won't pick up on any of the subtleties that are supposed to be conveying character.

So how to choreograph a character clearly? Some of it is the responsibility of the performer, yes, but some of it is dependent on me, the choreographer. And to make it more difficult, I'm not even choreographing within my primary training -- I only started tap dancing when I was eighteen. I've still got a lot to learn about the dance form itself, never mind within the choreographic side of it.

Anyway, I'm getting off-topic. But I found the recent infusion of characters (or at least stereotypes) into my choreography interesting.

NaNoWriMo Day 14 - The Story

I suppose I should post about the actual content of my novel.

It's turning out to be a church drama (which is actually kind of fun): hundred-year-old small-town old-school Baptist church with secrets.

The main character is called Natalie. She hosts a TV show that basically goes around Canada and investigates/covers ghost stories. She and her co-host Matt are sent to film an episode in a small Bible-belt town. Things get weird when it turns out to be the town in which Natalie spent the first twelve years of her life. And she'd never heard anything about a ghost.

They go to the town and find that unlike most ghosts, this one has no firm identity or even a set legend around it. No-one's ever actually seen anything more than its shadow, and there are three possibilities as to whose spirit it might be.

But Natalie's not focused on the strangeness of the ghost story. While on location, she finds out that her closest childhood friend, a musical prodigy, vanished eighteen years ago, and nobody ever found out what happened to her.

In conducting an unofficial investigation into Sonora's disappearance, she dredges up all kinds of ancient history, stuff the church and the community would like to forget about. There's the shooting death of a nine-year-old, the church elder caught in an affair, the attempt on the previous pastor's life, the 'prodigal daughter'... At first it just seems like the town had a seriously messed up past, but as Natalie digs deeper, she finds that Sonora is the epicentre of everything that's happened there in the past 35 years. And even though Sonora's long gone, it's not all over.

Not only has Natalie been accused of causing Sonora's (unproven) death, she's digging into secrets that the town has spent 35 years trying to hide and she's got a camera crew with her. The silence surrounding Sonora's entire life needs to be broken and only Natalie can do it -- but the same gun that killed Sonora's sister is setting its sights on her...


So how is it actually going?

Awful, to be honest. The bulk of my word count is primarily made up of fictional deacon meeting minutes and annual reports (the fact that these bits are the most interesting parts of my novel is a testimony to how much the overall novel sucks). I started the contest writing 5k a day and am now having a hard time stringing three words together. My brain is completely tapped out. I try to think about my novel and there are literally no thoughts in my head. My main character should be fun to write, but she has no real internal thought process. She just kind of 'does things.' She doesn't really 'think' in words and sentences and flowery metaphors like most of my characters in other stories, she just kind of evaluates the situation and takes action without putting it into words, even mentally. I never realised before how much I depend on my characters' long-winded flowery internal monologues to eat up word count until this year. Basically, I have to write 50k of straight-up actual plot, which apparently I've never truly done before. I've never had a problem with the DoRD (Department of Redundancy Department) until this year, and the sudden change this year is entirely because I have literally no more words, so I have my characters repeat everything three times and just change the wording each time.

In short: I actually really hate my novel. Not even in a joking sense. I seriously hate this novel. It has so much potential, but no feeling.


Stats time!
Official NaNoWriMo Goal For Day 14: 23,338 words
Current Word Count: 40,727 words
Mary Poppins References: 1

Daniel Amos References: 2
Number Of Character Smoke Breaks: 1
Number Of Characters Who Actually Smoke: 0
Bags Of Doritos Consumed: like 5 (those miniscule 'fun size' ones that have like five chips each)

Camp NaNoWriMo - Day Two

Less than four thousand words into the novel and already White Heart is a major plot point (actually, as of right now they're pretty much the only plot point). My, ahem, characters really need to find a different band to obsess over already.

Brain: *helpful poke* Daniel --

Me: No. No. No. No. Not Daniel Amos. FIND SOMETHING OTHER THAN MUSIC. AAAAUGH.

So that's pretty much how my creative day went. Yours?

Unstuck! (Or The Novel, Day Sixteen)

I've finally figured it out!
After sixteen days of fighting and just barely staying only one day behind my word count, a whole new vein has opened up. I can't wait to start it (don't worry, I've written it down so I won't forget).
The problem here was that I wanted to focus almost exclusively on Rudy, but since he's stuck in his circumstances there isn't much for him to do. To get through Week Two, I simply got his friends high and had them play a four-person game of Mafia (one of players on the phone).
If you're not familiar with Mafia, it's kind of a role-playing game where you kill each other off in your imaginary little town, but it requires a group of at least eight to work well. Also, the killing is done by pointing and nonverbal signals while everyone else's eyes are closed -- having one of the players on the phone lets everyone know who's being killed by whom, meaning your game pretty much lasts one round instead of a dozen or so.

Anyway, I've discovered that while Rudy is the pivotal character -- all the action in the book is as a direct result of who he was and what happened to him -- the book is more about Preston than anyone else (at least right now).
I knew Clayton and Preston's reactions would be a big part of the book but I can't let Clayton recover too easily (after all, he was Rudy's best friend) and I was planning on Preston being the rock through the whole situation. My problem though was that I was trying to keep Preston too neutral about the whole thing... a little shocked maybe, but not much more than that.
But something like this would rock his world. It would take his faith and turn it on its head. It would bring him to question everything he's strived for.

So as of today I'm introducing a new character -- Preston's friend Jon. I think Jon is going to be more of the 'rock' character than Preston, since he's fairly removed from the whole situation... his only connection is Preston, who himself wasn't directly involved. (Also, Jon's a Lecrae fan... music in the story tends to help it along, I've found.)

My statistics so far (note that I haven't written anything today yet):
Goal for Day Sixteen: 25,806
Word count so far: 24,007
I'm not out of this contest yet!