27 June 2007

What! Another blog post!

Yeah, actually.

So this afternoon I disgruntledly (?!) went back to my Symphonians MS to start whipping it into shape. I had to shut off the computer that had internet access because I kept messing around on the internet instead of writing. Cripes.

And I'm looking at the first chapter, thinking, "You know, those two stories -- that is, the Kay story and the Symphonians bit -- actually went together pretty well right there." And so I took a bit of the Symph story from the other document I'd saved, and I dropped it into the first chapter. It nestled in all nice and tidy. I said, "Hm!"

So I went looking around in the book for another place where I could put a chunk of story, and what do you know, Wyatt and Kay were playing the same part in band (they play tuba and bass clarinet, respectively), and hey, in this Symph bit, Roderick and Violet were playing a song together on tuba and regular clarinet, so I dropped that chunk in right about there. And it looked nice there, too.

So NOW I have figured out how to fix the problem!

The Symph bits are big enough to give the reader a good idea of what's going on in their narrative, and they're right in Kay's text so she can comment on them. But their narrative is being kept to a bare minimum at this time so Kay can take center stage. But hey, I'm fine with that.

So I guess that sometimes you have to bring the world to an end to make something work. Though in the end it's actually a beginning.

Typical!

Just this afternoon I got an e-mail from an agent who wants to see Symphonians.

Is my timing great, or what! I'd say "or what."

I told her I cut the story-within-the-story, so she had two options:

1) I put the whole story-within-a-story back and send it to herimmediately with a smile.

2) I take a month to revise the novel and then send it to her with a belated smile.

So we'll see how that goes.

So ... maybe I should get off here and start fixing the novelistic hash so it's, like, readable and stuff? Yeah, I guess I will.

26 June 2007

People, I've reached a decision.

To do the dishes!

As if. No, the other day I got a very nice personal rejection from an agent. She liked the Symphonians, but the Symphonians' novel and Kay's novel seemed, to the agent, to be at odds with each other.

I keep telling myself that I'm going to make these two novels live harmoniously within the same book, but then every time I prepare to sit down and work on this, I end up springing from my chair and running into the street.

This is not a good use of my time and energy.

So last night I made a copy of my Symphonians document. Then I went through and took the whole Symphonians novel and COMPLETELY CUT IT OUT.

Alas, I loved that novel. But those days are gone.

Then I went back and started reading through the MS. It seems to flow better, the pacing's better. And of course the whole document is about 75 pages lighter.

I'm planning on going back and inserting bits of the novel and have Kay actually dealing with her text, instead of setting out these two texts side-by-side and hoping the reader will catch on.

I had such high hopes for intertextuality! But alas, I was not pulling it off. So I'm a little bummed. But not as much as I thought I'd be, because now I feel like I can work with the novel again. I got rid of the brick wall, or radioactive force field, that kept me running away, and now I'm like, "Well, okay, I can manage this."

Not the end of the world after all. Not today, anyway.