Writing Thursday: My “Eureka!” Moment; or, To Make A Long Story Short

I posted a couple of weeks ago that I had finished editing the first book of my “Daughters of August Winterbourne” series.

Turns out I was wrong about that.

See, something was still bothering me about the book, and that was…the length.  Granted, I’d done heroic work getting it down from the original 185,000 word count (yes, I know) to a mere 145,000.  But I’d really like to get it down to around 125,000, if I can.  (I’m not sure it’s entirely possible without excising a sub-plot, and I don’t really have any more that I consider expendable.)

Then I decided to look at it from a purely mathematical point of view: If I want my book to be around 125K, and it’s around 150K (rounding up to make the math easier), then essentially, what I need to do is to get rid of one word out of every six.

So I copied the first scene from the story into a blank document and started playing with it.  First, I took a stab at it at the sentence level.  If a sentence had six or more words, eliminate one.

Yeah.  That didn’t really work.  Too many sentences with fewer than six words.

Next, I attacked it at the paragraph level, starting with the first paragraph, which, at that point, looked like this:

The airship Sophie’s Lightning gleamed golden in the late afternoon sun as it hung over a grassy meadow just outside Windmill Hill.  The errant ocean breezes would have made landing the craft a challenge for a lesser pilot, but Celia Winterbourne had flown this particular ship since its maiden voyage five years earlier and knew its every nuance.  Her fingers danced over the control panel, making minute adjustments to the rudder and the steering propellers.

Not the worst first paragraph ever written, by any means.  But, I’ll also admit, not the best, either.

Okay, doing the math, it’s 75 words.  1/6th of that is 13 words (rounding up).  Subtract that from the starting total means that our target for this paragraph is 62 words.

So, which words can go?  I copied the paragraph and had at it with the delete key, and ended up with this:

The airship Sophie’s Lightning gleamed in the afternoon sun as it hung low over a grassy meadow near Windmill Hill.  Errant breezes buffeted the ship, complicating the landing, but Celia Winterbourne had piloted the Lightning since its maiden voyage five years earlier and knew its every nuance.  Her fingers danced over the control panel, adjusting the rudder and steering propellers.

Hey, that’s actually not too bad.  And it’s exactly 62 words.  Bingo! Though…wait.  Something’s not quite right….

I stared at it for a few minutes, and then I realized:  The rest of the first chapter is from the point of view of my main character, Celia Winterbourne.  And while she’s mentioned in the paragraph, she doesn’t really own the first paragraph the way she should if this is going to be her story.  (Which it is.)

I’ll be the first to admit that the first draft of this story struggled with POV in a few places.  So I decided to employ a trick a member of my critique group shared with me:  If you’re having trouble getting a scene or paragraph into a tight third POV, re-write it as a first-person POV.  When you do that, the snags will pop right out at you.

Ah-hah.  Yes.  Because Celia’s in the airship, she can’t actually tell us what it looks like in the light of the setting sun.  So what can she see?  What’s important to her at this moment?  Landing the airship.  So now the paragraph focuses more directly on that.  And with the focus, it becomes a better, tighter paragraph, thus:

I checked the landing markers chalked on the grassy meadow below as I prepared to set down my father’s airship.  Errant breezes buffeted the ship, but I’d flown Sophie’s Lightning since her maiden voyage five years earlier, and I knew her every nuance.  I touched the controls for the rudder and steering propellers, making minute adjustments to both.

Yes.  I think that’s got it.

So the next thing to do would be to convert it back into a third-person POV.  That’s pretty easily done:

Celia Winterbourne checked the landing markers in the grassy meadow below as she prepared to set down her father’s airship.  Errant breezes buffeted the ship, but Celia’d flown Sophie’s Lightning since the ship’s maiden voyage five years earlier and knew her every nuance.  She touched the controls for the rudder and the steering propellers, making minute adjustments to both.

YES!  That’s much better, AND, at 58 words, it not only makes but beats my word count target.  Yay!

Okay, next task:  Do this for the rest of the scene.  Only, some paragraphs, it turns out, were short dialogue pieces that really can’t be trimmed.  All right.  I’ll settle for trimming this at the scene level, rather than at the paragraph level.

And I did.  I pared, and pared, and snipped and trimmed and cut, until I had turned the 1,690 word scene into a 1,399 word scene.  Success!

Or so it seemed, until…

I went back and read it.

And wanted to throw up.

All of the flow was gone.  The scene was choppy, uneven.  It lurched badly from one sentence to the next.  There was no joy, no grace, no life left in it.  I’d killed it.  It was, in a word, horrible.

Okay, self.  Don’t panic.  Deep breath.  Let’s go back and put in some of those apparently-not-so-extra words.

I eked them back in, a few at a time, keeping a nervous eye on the word count.  After several passes, I finally breathed life back into the scene.  1,477 words.  69 more than it was supposed to be, but still better than the original 1,690 words.

I took a short break, came back, and read the scene one last time from the start.

Holy crap.  It wasn’t just passable, it was stronger, better than it had ever been.  When I read my own stories, to me, they often seem…I don’t know, not quite “finished”, if that makes any sense.  But when I re-read this scene, it suddenly seemed to me that this bit, at least, had been transformed.  It was now Finished.

Yes, I actually got goosebumps.

Which is not to say that I won’t still go back and tweak a word here or there after I’ve had a chance to let it sit for a little while.  But dang.  This is actually starting to feel “good” instead of just “good enough.”

In the week and a half since that “eureka!” moment, I’ve gone through about 30% of the book, and eliminated about 5000 words.  Which means that I’m on track to get it down to about 130,000 words, give or take.  (Some bits compress better than others; there are a few key scenes that had already been edited several times, and it’s hard to take many more words out of those.  Other scenes really haven’t changed that much since the first draft, and I seem to be able to pull excess words out of those more easily.)

Oh, and an aside for people who’ve read the earlier drafts:  I’ve finally bitten the bullet and cut the cricket-playing scene (which was amusing, but once I’d eliminated the excess verbiage around it, it suddenly became clear that it didn’t fit the tone of that section of the story at all).  It was a darling that had to die. {Sniff.}  I’ll save it to post on the website once the book gets published (she said, optimistically).

130K isn’t quite 125K.  But it’s in the ball park and it may be close enough to get me in the door with an agent.  Here’s hoping, anyway.

What editing tricks have other people used?

Recipe Wednesday: Once Upon A Meatball…

First, apologies for not posting last week.  Beloved Husband and I were off celebrating our 26th wedding anniversary.  Next time, I’ll try to plan ahead a little better.

This week, I thought I would share three of my favorite meatball recipes with you.

Once upon a time, there were meatballs.  You usually found them in your spaghetti.  There was even a whole song about it.

And that was fine and all, but a bit limiting.

So one day, folks figured out that you could have meatballs *without* the spaghetti.  Like this:

————————————————–

Italian Meatballs
Mom (Terry Vandenberg)

1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef
1 1/2 pounds Italian sausage, hot or regular
2 eggs
1 cup cracker crumbs
1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 – 2 large jars spaghetti sauce

Mix all ingredients (except sauce) together and form into meatballs.  If you have a microwave bacon tray, put meatballs on this and microwave until done.  Otherwise, fry in a pan.

Transfer cooked meatballs to crock pot.  Pour spaghetti sauce over meatballs; season with a little additional Italian seasoning and garlic powder.  If possible, let set overnight to allow flavors to blend.  Then heat and serve.

————————————————–

I remember my mom making up a crock pot full of these to serve at my wedding.  They were really good.  And really popular.

And then we discovered that other people had been messing with their meatballs, too.  They’d even been combining really unlikely ingredients to make a sauce for them:

————————————————–

Grape Jelly Meatballs
- Sheila McClune, based on a recipe from the Holy Chow Cookbook

1 pound ground beef
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 10-ounce jar chili sauce
1 8-ounce jar grape jelly

Mix together the meat and spices and form into balls about the size of a walnut.  Place in skillet over medium heat and cover, allowing to cook for five minutes before turning.  Cook another one to two minutes or until just cooked through.  Drain on paper towels to remove excess grease.

Meanwhile, pour chili sauce and grape jelly into a crock pot and stir to blend.  Turn crock pot to high; add cooked meatballs and stir to coat.  Cook for 1-2 hours, stirring occasionally.  Serve warm.  Makes 25-30 meatballs.

Notes:  If you don’t have time to make meatballs from scratch, look for frozen meatballs at the supermarket.  Go for the “homestyle” ones, rather than the ones with Italian seasoning in them.

————————————————–

For years, this was my “go-to” dish for potlucks.  People would say, “This sauce is great!  What’s in it?”  And I’d smile and say, “Grape jelly and chili sauce” and watch their jaws drop.  But the secret’s pretty much out, now.

Then, when Beloved Husband and I were in the supermarket sometime around Thanksgiving, we found a cranberry sauce display with cards for this recipe on it:

————————————————–

Ultimate Party Meatballs
Ocean Spray

1 14-ounce can Ocean Spray® Jellied Cranberry Sauce
1 12-ounce bottle Heinz® Chili Sauce
1 2-pound bag frozen, pre-cooked, cocktail-size meatballs

Combine sauces in a large saucepan. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring until smooth. Add meatballs. Cover and cook for 15 minutes or until meatballs are heated through, stirring occasionally.

Slow cooker Preparation: Place meatballs in a slow cooker. Combine sauces and pour over meatballs. Cover and cook 4 hours on HIGH.

Makes 30 appetizer servings.

Notes:  Look for “homestyle” meatballs rather than Italian-spiced ones.

————————————————–

We were thrilled to find this variation on an old favorite.  I might like these just a little better than the grape jelly ones.  The sauce is slightly tangier, and not as overly-sweet as the grape jelly recipe can be.

Of course, these are all great dishes for a potluck.  But they also make a good main course for an informal meal (serve with veggies and pasta, rice, or potatoes), or line them up on a hoagie bun for a yummy sandwich.

What meatball recipes have other people used?

Writing Thursday: Help Wanted; or, Would You Like To Read A Story?

My big news this week is that I’ve finally, finally finished my second draft of The Daughters Of August Winterbourne, Book 1.  (And yes, I know I need a snazzier title than that.  Working on it.  Really.)

So now I’ve reached the point where I need some help.

And by “help”, I mean beta readers.

See, I’ve been staring at this story for so long–and made so many changes–that I’m not even sure whether it makes any sense anymore.  I can guarantee you that it’s a lot cleaner and less rambly than the first draft.  It’s also about 40K words shorter.

Here’s what I’m looking for from a beta reader:

Overall impressions:

• Did the story catch and hold your interest?
• How did the pacing feel?
• Were there parts that bogged you down?
• Were there plot points that were totally incomprehensible?
• Were the characters interesting, consistent with themselves, and easily distinguishable from one another?
• Was the setting clear?
• Did you at any point wish the story was in hardcopy format so you could fling it against the nearest wall?

What I’m not looking for at this point are line edits (spelling, grammar, word choice, etc.) — unless they keep you from being able to evaluate the story based on the above criteria.

Here’s my quick (and rather rough) synopsis of the story:

Celia Winterbourne wants nothing more than to follow in her airship-designer father’s footsteps.  So when she hears that the Royal Academy of Science at Oxford, home of the most prestigious Aeronautics program in England, has finally decided to open their doors to four select young women, her delight knows no bounds.  She applies for the program and is accepted, and it seems as though her dreams are all about to come true.

Celia soon finds that life at the Academy is full of obstacles, from fellow students unhappy with the presence of women on campus, to agents of the evil Tarmanian Empire bent on abducting Celia and stealing her inventions, to three half-sisters she never knew she had.  Handsome Nicholas Fletcher provides a different kind of distraction, singling Celia out for his attentions.  But when he starts acting strangely, she wonders:  Is it her love he’s after…or something else?

Then something happens that throws Celia’s whole world into a spin.  She and her half-sisters are forced to work together to undertake a daring rescue.  Can they succeed, and if so, at what cost?

If you’re interested in being a beta reader, please leave a note in the comments.  Thanks!

Recipe Wednesday: Sympathetic Cookery

So on Monday, I got out of work early and hustled myself over to the dentist’s office for my check-up…only to learn that my appointment was for Tuesday at 4:00, not Monday.

Well, dang.  I guess it’s better to show up a day early than a day late, but it was still annoying.

What to do with myself now?

And then the answer hit me:  I could make spaghetti.

After a quick trip to the grocery store, I headed to my pantry shelves and loaded my arms up with cans of tomato paste and tomato sauce.  (Yes, it’s nice when I can start from tomatoes and go from there, but life doesn’t always work that way.)

And then I pulled out a couple of jars of Prego.

I know what you’re thinking:  Why not just open the jars and call it good?  But that’s not the way it works.

I learned to make spaghetti sauce from my mom, whose method was:  Brown a pound of ground beef in the electric skillet.  Drain off all of the fat.  Put the meat back in the skillet.  Take one envelope of “Spaghetti Sauce Mix,” one can (small) of tomato paste, and three cans of water.  Combine in skillet and simmer for the number of minutes directed on the sauce mix package.  Pour over cooked noodles (that have been broken into thirds before cooking because Dad likes his spaghetti tidy) and mix.

Yeah.  Not exactly inspirational, right?  You can tell there are no Italians in my family background.

Well, once I got married and moved out of my parents’ house (yes, I am that rare person in this day and age who did it in that order), I decided I didn’t have to be bound by “The Old Ways” any longer.

But I also had no clue as to how to go about making homemade sauce, either.

But I had watched my mom make chili, which she did using a method I think of as “Sympathetic Cooking”.  Which I define as, essentially, starting with a bit of what you’re trying to make.  (Kind of like sympathetic magic, right?)

So when Mom makes chili, she starts with…a can of chili.  From there, she’ll go on to add ground beef, and seasoning mixes (Mom was big on those little seasoning packets) and cans of tomato sauce, and beans, and who knows what-all.  And by the time she finishes, she ends up with something that, while still identifiable as chili, tastes nothing like that original can of chili.

And that’s how I make my spaghetti sauce.  I start with a jar of Prego and go from there.  I usually add tomato sauce and tomato paste and canned tomatoes (sometimes) and bunches of seasonings, and ground beef, and Italian sausage (note: the turkey sausage I tried this time out was, sadly, not a win), and gobs of garlic, and some bay leaves, and a spoonful of sugar.  I don’t add wine, as much as I’d like to, because Beloved Husband doesn’t care for it.  And I don’t add mushrooms, because mushrooms and I don’t get along anymore.

And when I finish up, the result is nothing like the Prego I started with…but it’s still pretty tasty.  Or at least, Beloved Husband and I think so.  And since no one else was invited to supper, I guess we’re the ones who count.  Right?

(For the record: I have made sauce without starting with the jar o’Prego.  Oddly, it tasted just the same as when I used the jar.  It also tastes the same if I use some other brand of jar sauce.  Oh, and after years of practice, I’ve finally managed to break myself of the habit of breaking the spaghetti into thirds before cooking.)

Does anyone else practice “Sympathetic Cooking?”  What dishes do you make?

 

Writing Thursday: The Death-March Continues; or, Editing Progress

It really is starting to feel like a death-march, this manuscript edit I’ve been working on.  Bits of the story have been fighting back, tooth-and-nail.  The epilogue, in particular, was bad-tempered and unruly.  And we won’t even talk about how many instances of the word “that” I’ve removed from the story.  (Well, we might, at some point.  After I’ve had a chance to tally them up.  But I bet the number is in the hundreds, and not necessarily the low hundreds.)

I’ve slaughtered adverbs with reckless abandon.  I’ve pared prose down to its barest essentials.  I’ve murdered darlings and excised sub-plots.  And still, the story weighs in at right around 144,000 words.  Aaugh!  I had visions of getting it down to 125,000, but I just don’t know what else to cut out.  There really isn’t much left that isn’t vital to the plot (at least to my mind).  No doubt a professional editor would be able to spot the excess bits right away, but I’m not a professional editor.  I’m just the person who has been staring at this manuscript for the last two months, until my eyes are ready to fall out of my head.

But I think I’m finally on the home stretch, for this edit of this story, at least.  I’ve no doubt that there are bits that could be polished a bit more, but right now, I can’t see what those might be.  So I’m taking one last skim through the whole story, sweeping up a few last “thats” as I go.  My goal is to get it out to beta readers by early next week.  And then…barring any major changes…it’ll be time to start agonizing over the synopsis.

Has anyone else ever had a manuscript edit that seemed to go on forever?  Got any survival tips to share?

 

Recipe Wednesday: The Joys Of A Well-Stocked Pantry

The forecast here for the next few days is for 6″-10″ of snow.  Which means we could get anything from a light dusting to three feet.  (Colorado weather can be exciting.)  And, as a local radio station observed, that probably means that by 5:00 pm tomorrow, grocery store shelves will be completely bare of bread and milk.

That has always puzzled me:  Why bread and milk?  Because the only thing I can think of that you can make with bread and milk is…soggy bread.  And really, who wants to live on that for a couple of days?

It’s odd, because while most people consider bread and milk to be staples, I rarely buy them unless I have a specific purpose in mind for them.  Milk usually goes sour and bread gets moldy before I can get around to using them.

On the other hand, there are certain things that I almost always have on hand.  So in the event of a freak snowstorm, I know I and my Beloved Husband won’t starve.

However, it was somewhat disturbing recently to finally get around to putting up the pantry shelves I’d been wanting, and to start stacking food on them.  See, we’d outgrown the cupboard where we’d been storing canned goods and pasta and such, so instead of dutifully putting things away when we brought it home, we ended up stacking up piles of plastic grocery bags on the counter, and the back porch, and pretty much everywhere.

But once the shelves went up, I decided that everything was going to get put away.  And while I was at it, I was going to take a rough inventory and see what we needed to stock up on.

Thirty-three cans of tuna and forty-odd packages of pasta later, I decided we had plenty of those things.  Which sounds like the makings for a lot of tuna casserole…except for the part where we were lacking any “cream of whatever” soups (which are essential for casserole-making, you know).

We also had five or six bottles of barbecue sauce (which was actually less than I expected, since Beloved Husband has a tendency to bring home anything saucy that catches his eye…oh, wait, that’s not quite what I meant….).

What we didn’t have were things like the makings for spaghetti sauce, or much in the way of canned vegetables (which are handy for snowed-in stews), or the above-mentioned cream-of soups.  Guess I’ll be doing a little stocking up over the next few weeks.

What’s in your pantry right now?  What should be in there, but isn’t?

Writing Thursday: Learning and Unlearning; or, Old Habits Do What?

I’ve been deep into editing the first book of my Winterbourne series these past few weeks (as I–ahem–may have mentioned once or twice).  But the other day, when I went to open my file, my mouse pointer slipped, and instead, I opened a file containing one of my older (and very much unfinished) works.

Because I’d been so intent on my editing, I decided to give myself a little break and read a bit of it.  I figured I’d find a lot of the same things I’m trying to edit out of the current piece–passive voice, rambling descriptions, overuse of “was”, intrusive dialogue tags–only more so, and that it would make me feel better to see that I had improved at least that much.

This particular piece is one I started in college, as a sequel to one I wrote in high school.  The plot is very juvenile, and a bit hackneyed.  But one thing I found surprised me.

All those things I expected to see?  I found almost none of them.  Oh, there were a couple of instances of passive voice, but really, far fewer than I’d expected.  And there were a few rambling passages.  But really, would it be my writing if there wasn’t at least a little rambling?  I also found very few intrusive dialogue tags.  (You know the kind:  She panted, he gasped, she admonished, he ejaculated–oh, wait, different kind of story, there.)  In fact, if I say so myself, the dialogue tags were handled quite smoothly.

The other thing I expected but didn’t see was a lot of “was”.  (I did a posting about that a few months ago, if you need to see an example.)  Since I’ve had to weed quite a bit of it out of the current volume, I’d expected to see a lot more in my older work.  But I didn’t find very much at all.

So somewhere along the way, I picked up a bad habit.  I’m not sure why or how that happened, though one possible explanation is that the older story was written in first person, while the current one is in fairly tight third person.  Because first person is limited to what the MC is directly experiencing, there are a lot fewer opportunities for overuse of “was”.  Which is interesting to note, given that I generally prefer first person: I find it more comfortable to write, which means it also comes out more smoothly.

What bad habits have you learned, and then had to unlearn?