Nikki M. Pill

DONE! DONE! THE DRAFT IS DONE!

Of course, there’s a lot still to do. But I typed the last words of the novel. The first draft is officially done.

Words written: 2,465

Total words: 36,497.  Enjoy your celebratory beer while you can, O Little Writing Meter Bean. We’re still short 23K words or so before this is officially a novel.

Pages: 148

Reason for stopping:   Fini!

Darling du Jour:  “[Spoiler redacted], I really like you,” I began.

He winced. “Ouch,” he whispered. 

Fail du Jour: No dance practice this morning, and I have a gig tomorrow — yikes! I will have to have some coffee and practice tonight. I was going to just write for an hour, but I was so excited about seeing the finish line, I powered through. So that’s only sort of a fail.

Mean Things:  She had to make the Terrible Choice.

Jury-rigging:    Emotional roulette — they’re reacting to feelings I haven’t mentioned yet. In the Magic of Editing, I’ll need to tweak the immediate reactions and then draw the pathways.

Inspiration du Jour:  Elizabeth Bear

Celebratory music as I type this post: “Halleluja” by Nick Cave

Words written: 1716

Total words: 36497

Pages: 138

Reason for stopping: Finished the climax, and the carpet cleaners can show up any time after 9. I gotta get this place in order!

Darling du Jour:  I shuddered. Had. “Lisa,” I whispered.

Fail du Jour: Steve had to feed the cats this morning. I was so wrapped up in the scene that 50 minutes past Pill Time (rather than the usual 15) poor Milo was starting to really complain.

Mean Things: She says she believes him.

Jury-rigging:   I’m pretty sure I got the muscles around the carotid right. Pretty sure. Also, I tabled Lynne’s Helpful Text Message for the next book, where it can lead to Something Truly Awful rather than just Extra Suspense that Doesn’t Pan Out.

Inspiration du Jour:  Siri

Misc:  Wonderful flow day. I tweaked what I’d written yesterday to make a scene less awkward, and the words just poured through the keyboard. Also, I freaking LOVE Siri. As I drove to and from work yesterday, I kept having to turn off my audiobooks (Sorry, Jim Butcher — still love ya!) because I was distracted with ideas for The Tease… so I would pull out my iPhone and ask Siri to record my voice memos. Yay for being able to record your ideas and still drive safely. Tomorrow: denoument or bust!

Words written: 1,854

Total words: 34,000

Pages: 129

Reason for stopping:   Hit an even 34,000. Was debating finishing Draft 1 today, but I already totally played hooky yesterday, plus losing an entire week of productivity due to LaptopFail on 4-29. Even though I had almost everything backed up, it’s very challenging to get a new computer, get everything restored from backup, discover the stuff that didn’t back up properly, etc.

Anyway. I’m at the very beginning of the Scene That Will Become the Climax, and it’s the first easy writing I’ve had in WEEKS, so I’m pretty stoked.

Darling du Jour:  The surreal tension between exhaustion and anxiety thrummed through my body, as though I were wide awake underwater.

Fail du Jour: #schedulefail

Mean Things:  A very awkward moment by the linen closet.

Jury-rigging:    I made the bacon crispy instead of burning it. I think most guys would forget about the bacon in that situation.

Inspiration du Jour:  My husband.

I’m finally done adding the plot points I missed earlier, and I am now forging ahead into new territory! Granted, several of the mid-scene books are pretty skeletal, but the entire frame is there.  Now I’m about to write the climax and then the ending!

Words written: 554

Total words: 32,146

Pages: 120

Fail du Jour: For the novel length I need, I really should be at 50K words, which means means I’m missing roughly 18K words of development, description, and subplot from the rest of the text. I did say skeletal, didn’t I?

Tyop du Jour: “why she chsed kissed [spoiler redacted]”

Mean Things:  They found evidence in his coat pocket.

Jury-rigging:    Santiago has a box of Kleenex for her, and important news. He’s very kind.

Inspiration du Jour:   Man Man and Jon Kabat Zinn

Words written: 1,045

Total words:  31,592

Pages: 120

Fail du Jour: Spent 18 minutes pacing the apartment and made my husband a hot cocoa while struggling to figure out why she would stop the car.

Tyop du Jour: waited a fifteen minutes

Mean Things:  He kisses someone else.

Jury-rigging:    I gloss over a lot of rehearsal. In some ways, the book is realistic, because you have to rehears a LOT before you hit the stage — and there’s a lot of action around rehearsal. I also need more things to distinguish Kevin and Jeremy from each other. They talk the same.

Inspiration du Jour:   August Hoerr

Misc: It feels great to be past the halfway point, and great to crank out more than 1K words in a day… except this book feels like a bad rehearsal too! Oh, Awful First Draft. Why can’t you just pour out like the first two novels did?

Well. Because they were crap and I didn’t have the filters I do now. Still, so much of my creative work this month is just pulling teeth! I suppose that’s par for the course at semester’s end, especially when that semester involved three dance intensive weekends. I’m hoping that the 95 issues of The Walking Dead I’ve read since Sunday are going to help replenish the well.

Words written:  792

Total words: 30,123

Pages: 85 of 114

Fail du Jour: We’re still a little in cliche-land. I like the New Boyfriend, but it’s a challenge not to let this get all cliched.

Mean Things:  None. He’s a good guy.

Jury-rigging:   Notes about what they had for dinner and what he’ll tell her tomorrow

Inspiration du Jour:  J.A. Konrath. When I struggle to keep going, I remember his obnoxious encouragement, and keep myself moving.

Mammalian assistance: Grimmy had an existential crisis in the bathroom and cried piteously until I came to pet him. Milo is curiously absent this morning.

Words written: 810

Total words: 20,151 — Hooray! Broke from the 10′s into 20′s!

Pages: 75

Darling du Jour:  He grinned at me and then transitioned into a new song – something that started gently in the upper registers and then brought in a sweeping deep element, stirring and orchestral. The lower registers softened, moved to the middle range, and Jeremy began singing – something in a language I didn’t know, something intense and yearning. I opened my eyes and saw that his were closed as he sang. Wisps of his dark brown hair had escaped the ponytail, brushing his jaw. 

Fail du Jour: Forgot all the troupe member’s names. Didn’t stop to look them up. Revisions will be hell.

Tyop du Jour: I peened opened my eyes

Mean Things:  The troupe leader has stormed off in a huff, and it was Anna’s dad on the phone.

Jury-rigging:      Lots of ____s in the dialogue today….

I think I figured it out.

The Muse insisted that I deal with Anna at home the morning after the first murder. She’s traumatized so she can’t sleep. She gets and responds to emails from the Love Interest and the Annoyance. She does yoga to relax.

I chewed this all over, and in some ways, it’s important. You need to see that she’s traumatized by the events of the night before. You need to see her reaction to the Love Interest asking her out so soon after the murder, and then see the poor guy falling all over himself to apologize when he finds out about the murder (he didn’t know when he sent the email at 12:18 am). You need to see her deal with The Annoyance. However, she’s at home and outside forces are acting on her. She’s thinking.

A scene in which a character thinks about things isn’t always the best — it’s not moving the story forward. Something needs to happen or change. I recognized that her attempts to relax and think clearly after the murder would be valuable, but I didn’t feel like internal struggle would be quite enough in this situation.

So… I need some sort of interruption. If Anna is working hard to calm down, finally starts to relax, and something interrupts her to jangle her nerves further, then we have actual tension and complication. I’m learning the value of “character faces problem, character acts to solve problem, and their action has consequences.”

So instead of

Cat wakes Anna up

Anna goes back to bed but is plagued by the Traumatic Events of Last Night

Anna checks her email and experiences inner turmoil about the contents

Anna does a yoga warmup and then some burlesque practice

Anna checks her email again and sees the apology from Love Interest

ZZzzz….

We now have:

Cat wakes Anna up

Anna goes back to bed but is plagued by the Traumatic Events of Last Night

Anna checks her email and experiences inner turmoil about the contents

Anna does a yoga warmup and then some burlesque practice. Just as she’s starting to loosen up and really clear her head, the phone rings and it’s the Boss.

Boss has questions about a case. Anna, who loves her job and genuinely likes her boss, feels guilty about something involving the client he calls about (Client also witnessed the Traumatic Events of Last Night). Boss asks what’s bugging her and she lies. This lie will bite her in the ass later.

Anna is now sufficiently jangled that only a bucket-sized martini will un-jangle her. She goes to see if the Traumatic Events are on the news websites yet, and there’s the apologetic email from the Love Interest. With no small amount of ambivalence, she accepts the date.

Better.

Not perfect yet, but better.

No metrics today, folks — this weekend and today have been a lot of preliminary revisions on The Mythos Story, some Holly lessons, and some create-complicate-resolve exercises. Let’s see what I can crank out on this tomorrow.

Words written:  637
Total words: 6469
Pages: 24
Reason for stopping:   Homework to do before I leave… short of the day’s goal, but I can make up for it next week.
Darling du Jour:  We got to the stage door and he reached in to turn on the lights. I drew in a breath to ask him point-blank – And you? Because even though I wasn’t ready, the tension was killing me. And he was nice. Wasn’t nice good?
Fail du Jour: Apparently, this story happens in a Land Without Scenery. 
Tyop du Jour:  merrywiddow
Mean Things:  She left her purse backstage.
Jury-rigging: He asked her if she had an idea for her next piece, and she answered him, and he asked about a wig, and then I realized that this conversation needs to happen with another dancer, not the conflicted-about-piano-player. So I changed it to a conversation rife with sexual tension and bracketed the costume conversation to happen later with her BFF.
Milestones: Ladies and gentlemen, we have our first body! But can the audience really wait til page 23 for it? Donald Maas says he hates books that open with the killer murdering a victim, because if he wants to see some anonymous psycho killing an anonymous stranger off, he can turn on the TV.  I’m worried about the level of tension at the beginning of the book, because in some ways, it reads more like chick-lit than mystery-suspense. Ah, well. I don’t have to get everything right in the Awful First Draft.

The boss and love interest have names — Jeff and Kevin, respectively — thanks to this web site. It’s a great tool for writers who want names to sound real for the time.

I also have most of the girls in the burlesque troupe named — Gin Fizzy, Tish, Polly Wanna, Scarlet Let Her, and our protagonist Velvet Crush (aka Anna). I’m stuck for 3, but I can get going with what I have… because at least I have their street names! I also know the names of some burlesque characters who will come in the next book when some things… change.

Onward! Monday, you will see the end of her set in the theater… and Horrible Realization #2.