#3 Tara's Writer Diary: Hitler Invades, Good People Doing Bad Things, and Carl Gets a Makeover
Monday, June 24, 2019
I realized yesterday that I had made the temperatures uniform in Campfyre, even though there are four different locations, one in PA, one in D.C., one in NYC, and one in Hartford. I have just finished going through what I’ve printed out so far and updated/altered the temperatures one to three degrees depending on time of night and where the scene takes place. The idea is that I will continue to make these alterations as I do this first read-thru.
The read-thru itself is going well. I had been wondering if I should make the edits I discover as I go along, or if I should wait until I’ve finished the read-thru and THEN make the edits. I have found some fairly big edit-needs, such as Carl’s character is flat, boring, and he doesn’t do much, nor are his motivations to do anything sufficient. Well, I was talking to a friend who, apparently, edits and loves editing science fiction! I asked what she thought of my conundrum, and she suggested it was better to do the read thru first in order to get the proper flow of the what I’d written so far. I might also find answers to my questions later in the script that if I stopped to edit as I go, I’d miss out on. So, problem solved!
On another note, I am nearing the ends of both V.W.’s diary and Vita’s “Saint Joan of Arc”. It is so inspiring, and awesome, filled with strong feelings to be reading two books, both of which the heroin dies at the end. Woolf kills herself a few days after her last entry. Meanwhile, Vita, Woolf’s girlfriend, writes of Joan of Arc who will meet the stake at the end of her book. I don’t know what this means for me, but I find it cool and it feels right to read both together. Also, V. is talking about Hitler in 1936 and all the political talk that is going on in her circle. She is hoping it will all blow over. I sigh and think that she died before getting to know that Hitler was eventually taken out, but not before he exterminated 6.6 million adults and children. I also didn’t realize, nor ever thought about the fact that, she lived during that time. So of course, it got into her diary, but here is a different perspective I have never seen. It is surprising, and quite interesting to see her opinion.
Thoughts on what’s happening with the children being separated from their parents and subsequently imprisoned:
Milgram’s experiments showed that people follow orders from authority when they can’t
explain why something is wrong. This is how the Holocaust was allowed to happen. . .the
dumbing down of America. . . . people did not like Milgram’s results and verbally attacked
him and his results. . . .the degradation of our school system. . . .class battles . .the same
education is NOT available to everyone. . .We are being dumbed down so that we can’t
explain why something is wrong, so we just listen to authority. I believe that is why
ordinarily decent human beings will choose to be ICE. The uneducated ones will just go
along with it. The educated ones got out of ICE once they saw what was happening and
they could not in good conscience carry out such abominable orders. I am left to believe
that any person who stays and carries out the inhuman orders of this administration does
not have higher education, but if they do, they are likely to be highly racist. This makes
them unreasonable (from a logic standpoint). How do you reason with the unreasonable?
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
I am steadily going through the first reread of Campfyre. In June, I wrote only 23.25 total hours, and that is deplorable. So, after a rough first few days of July, I got back on endeavoring to write 2 hours a day. Using the excel worksheet as my writing accountability is helpful in that I am able to look back over the month and see how well I did or didn’t do, just in my “butt in the seat” writing, not the quality of the writing.
As to the quality, I feel good about my progress through editing Campfyre. I’m still trying out that name, by the way, because I have known it as Vampyre for decades. As for the editing, I am finding the best way to do this is to keep reading, and making the adjustments in the script that are simple rewrites/edits on punctuation/spelling/grammar, etc. Anything that is complicated, even a little, is being held over until after the first reread. I’m also updating Questions for Reread so that the document can continue to be helpful, although there are now so many notes attached to many of the bullet items that I fear the document becoming confusing. So far, though, I feel it is not confusing. We shall see as I continue. My plan is to go through all of the notes in Questions for Reread AND Reread Notes, making the edits as noted. THEN, I can do a second reread.
Thursday, July 11, 2019
Doing good with consistently writing two hours a day. I feel like I can see the progress and that it might not take as long as I was afraid it would take to wrangle this beast into something coherent and good. I “thought” up this book and so many of its details long before I was ready to write it, and now I realize that I have been unpacking the details. The details were not “given” to me in a linear fashion, so unpacking has been slow, and I realize that this story cannot be contained in a single volume, so it is a three-book series.
I am up to 1938 in Virginia Woolf’s diary, and she went through hell to write The Years. It took so much out of her that she vowed never to write another novel again. I can relate. Writing a novel is an emotional journey, and worrying if it is all incoherent rubbish is the awful bat we beat ourselves over the head with. Will I go through all this struggle only to find that no one reads it or takes it serious? It is the gamble we take as writers. For me, I know that if I don’t write this book, see it through to the agonizing end, it will never stop harassing me.
I thought of this book when I was 18 years old. I worked on it back then, and got as far as I could, and then set it aside. I am now 46 years old and this book NEVER left my thoughts. It may have waited patiently in the back, quietly biding its time, but no matter how many short stories and plays and essays I wrote, this story waited. I finally picked it up again a couple years ago and have been struggling to first get an outline written, and then to write a first draft. Where I stand now is the first draft written with no climax, and a mountain of notes that need to be attended to: subplots to be weaved throughout the story, maps of the fictitious futuristic Earth, characters notes, form notes, etc. With the climax, I get to three or four chapters from the end and the notes get very thin and general. . .skeletal, if you will. Lots of bolded notes about what I’m trying to say and things I need to figure out, with no clue how to navigate my characters through the final pages.
Another note about V.’s diary in 1938. War is imminent and Hitler makes his way into her pages. She sounds scared, rightly so, about Hitler and his army and what war will mean to her. The biography she is writing about her artist friend who died, Roger Fry, is a wonderful distraction for her. “I’m thinking of Roger not of Hitler—how I bless Roger and wish I could tell him so, for giving me himself to think of—what a help he remains in this welter of unreality” (Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, p. 292).
Monday, July 15, 2019
In this first reread, I have discovered that one of my antagonists has a boring role, so I am working on his character and what he does in this book. Here are some notes:
Carl is to be a likeable character, even though he has deplorable ethics. We need to be mad at him for much of the book, but not hate him.
Carl’s likeable attributes:
· He is respectful of women. . . sees them as they are, not as he thinks they should be. He
has had a strong female presence all his life, and surrounds himself with strong women.
· He is broken by the death of his sister, Tandy, whom he tried to save using science, and
failed.
· He is heartbroken by the murder of his first wife, Phoebe.
What can Carl do that makes him sympathetic to reader?
· In the first water cooler scene, he can stand up for an employee who is being picked on.
This would require a rewrite for that scene, but could make it stronger.
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Ugh, I open this after a week and find an important note on my Carl character that I had forgotten about because I couldn’t think of where to put it that it wouldn’t get buried under mountains of notes. I get left with that feeling where I remember doing it, but no idea where I left it. Now I don’t remember what I wanted to write in this diary.
I am a few chapters from the end of the book, and the end of this first reread. Still no clue how to write the climax. I suppose I need more details about the technology. Perhaps if I figure out HOW the technology works, i.e. the Grid and seals, then I can see how it goes wrong, and who plays what part in making it go wrong.
Sunday, July 28, 2019
I am in the midst of one of my irritating moods where I’m not happy with anything; makes it very difficult to get any writing done. Rather than do no work on Campfyre, I am doing cleanup on Questions for Reread notes, and then will begin to go through the notes I made and make the changes/rewrites in the script. Part of the problem is that I don’t know which is the best order to do all of the many things that need to be done for this book.
I have finished the first reread and, as expected, it was very light on details and the science. My goal was to get a skeleton of the story arc, and I believe I have accomplished that much as least. I flushed out the dull characters and though I’m not sure yet how to fix Carl’s dullness (I do have ideas (10/8/19 Update: I’m wondering what those ideas were. Didn’t write them down, or if I did, I lost them.)), I was “reminded” of Art’s intended character profile. While writing the first draft, I let Art become a lazy, unfocused, neurotic mess. I made one or two notes on his character and suddenly the skeletal arc I wrote has promise for Art’s character and direction for the Less Five rebels. Now I just have to make sure I don’t lose the notes, as I am wont to do.
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
I got two hours writing done today, good editing/writing plus maintenance stuff. I was six and a half hours short of my 50 hour writing goal for July. I had a good block of two hours a day, and 1.5 hour days, but then there were half hour days, no writing days, and one hour days. However, that means I had 18 days of serious writing to 13 days of not as much as I’d like. Only 4 of those days were no writing, 2 half-hour writing days, and the remaining 7 days were an hour writing each day. I’ll take an hour writing, because that is a good enough chunk of time to get some serious work done. So all in all, I think I did pretty good. In order to make an attainable goal, however, I am going to lower my writing goal for August to 40 hours. I’m going on vacation, so I assume I will not write every day.
As for what I’m working on, I realized why I am having so much confusion. There are many elements of this story that require some amount of research, character work, system work, map building, etc. I’ve been in a circular pattern: I think I need to work on the Civil War, but then I realize the Grid hasn’t been worked out yet, for instance. I realized that I need the Grid work in order to put together a logical sequence of events for the Civil War. So I need to go through all which needs to be written and/or researched, and figure out the best order it needs to be done in. For things that do not need anything written or researched to do them, then I just need to do them. I may be babbling right now, but I think I understand what I mean.