Vacation

"Vacation all I ever wanted..." The Go-Gos, Vacation

I had an interesting moment the other day. I'm in Austria, visiting a friend of mine who has been teaching English here for the past two years, and as we were sitting around in his apartment (which we often do, being as it is cold and rainy here and mein deutsch ist nicht so gut) I realized I couldn't remember the last time I had gone more than about two days in a row without writing.

This realization occurred at the same time I was really, really struggling to move forward on Book Three of Soulwoven, and discovering that Book Two was going to require a lot more revision than I had hoped.

I wondered if the two were related.

So I have taken some time off. Damn near two weeks of it, actually. And I feel good. Very good. Some of the knots that seemed so undisentanglable seem looser. The difficulties of structure and plotting in Book Two that were daunting me no longer seem so daunting. I'm excited to get back to it. The other day I was in the midst of reading a chapter of Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind and had the sudden urge to put it down and go back to work on Soulwoven instead.

This is a good thing. I return to the United States on May 4. Shortly thereafter, I shall declare my vacation over and go back to work.

But I'm glad I took one. Really, I am.

Subtitles

"Hang on to me and I'll hang onto you..." -Carbon Leaf, Deep Blue Sea

No, not the kind you're thinking of. They kind that come after a colon in a book title, preferably to help delineate the chunks a longer-than-one-book story has been broken into. Like Dragonlance: Dragons of Spring Dawning. Or Somethingvaguelyhauntingandprofound: A novel. Depending on your genre preferences.

Anyway, awhile ago (months, really. I should have posted this long before. Mea culpa.) I came up with working subtitles for the four parts of Soulwoven. I'll share them in a moment, but the interesting thing that came out of the subtitles is that they are helping me immensely in focusing the books. The more I tell of Soulwoven the more it tries to do what epic fantasy inevitably does---sprawl out and out and out, and the more picky I have to be about choosing which stories to tell and which to leave untold. The subtitles remind me of the themes I'm working with. They help me decide which episodes should begin and end the book-length chunks of the story I'm writing. This is not a development I predicted. I simply decided one day that if I wanted to maintain any sort of control over the titling of what would eventually be four or more books, I ought to make a real attempt to title them. The focus was just a happy side effect.

I share this in the hope that somewhere out there someone will read it and think "Aha! That's what I need!"

It may not be true. Or it may. But either way it's worth noodling.

And oh yes, the (working) subtitles are:
Soulwoven: Exodus
Soulwoven: Exile
Soulwoven: Redemption
Soulwoven: Brotherhood

I like 'em. Someday it will prove interesting to see if a marketing department does too. :-)

A Few Brief Thoughts...

"I remember black skies, the lightning all around me..."- Linkin Park, New Divide

on cross-genre pollination. I've been climbing a lot of tall mountains lately. It started in Ecuador with some 19,000 ft. peaks, and now that I'm in Colorado again, surrounded by oodles of gorgeous 14,000+ ft. mountains, I've found myself inexorably drawn to them.

I'm also living with like-minded folks, and, well, it's led me to begin pilfering their libraries. I began with Into Thin Air, last week. Say what you will about Jon Krakauer as a journalist, or about the ethics of writing a book like he did, about what he did (for those who don't know, one day on Everest during which a lot of poor decisions were made that led to the deaths of a number of people), but as a writer it was fascinating to read.

One thing Krakauer does better than most is break down the decision processes of people under stress, in crisis. I know a thing or two about the subject--I've been trained for it as a trip guide myself, and gone through exercises that forced me to make decisions regarding the lives of others, and I've chosen poorly in them. I've also made decisions in the field that had strong reprecussions on the safety of those I was responsible for.

Which brings me to Chapter 18 of Soulwoven, in which some characters in a very difficult situation are forced to make some rather difficult decisions. I don't know if it was serendipity that brought me Into Thin Air as I was working on this section of the novel, but it did work out well for me, both in showing me how one writer had done the decision thing well and in bringing to the surface all of the other knowledge I had about decisions made under duress at the time I needed it most.

So yeah, pollination is the right word for this cross-genre stuff, I think, because it's sure as hell helped pieces of my experience leap-frog from the place they usually live into the place where I write.