My Characters

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I enter their world every day, and come back with new revelations. Sometimes those revelations tell me to stop, to breathe, and to let in what just happened in the writing. So, I take a break. And eat. Which means I have to wash the dishes first. Unless I make a smoothie. Then I’m good for a while. Today, instead of eating or washing dishes, I took my exhalation to a blog post. Hello.

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My novel is coming along—currently in the thick of chapter forty-five. I continually edit earlier chapters, too, via bi-monthly writers critique group zoom meetings. This week was chapter thirty-four. I am reasonably polished, with one-hundred-ten-thousand words and counting.

I’m not saying I’m Diana Gabaldon, but after reading all the books of her Outlander series, I do understand why her shortest was a mere 743 pages. I’m only at 400, and I figure I’ll be done before I reach 500. I’m close to the end… almost sure of it.

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My story travels through time, weaves in and out of realities, and is a mix of fantasy and 20th Century historical—1978 being the main thread. The lion’s share of backstory takes place in 1949, 1960, 1962 and 1968. So, yeah. Talk about research. I’m doing mine all the while. But the fantasy part is all in my imagination, which is wild and vivid, and full of grace.

This is my first novel, so maybe with my word count I haven’t given myself a fighting chance to be published. But it is what it is, and I can’t stop now. I have mulled over pages and pages, all over the damn pages, a perennial nature of chapter tweaking. I leave no stone unturned. As far as I can tell, there’s not much more I can cut—unfortunately or not.

With my main character—and his love opponent, plus two additional characters living a Montana otherworld orchestrating their reunion—divergent paths all lead to Totality, including all their backstories, which sometimes overlap and sometimes don’t. It’s a 10,000-piece puzzle. And there are only a few pieces left to insert—landscape and sky pieces, heretofore undetectable shadowy pieces, and the crowning-glory pieces.

I have always known where the story ends, but the long and winding road that gets me there has been the most incredible journey, traversing timelines and worlds, people and history, some of it earthbound, some of it out of this world.

And I’m in there every day just waiting for the miracles, not because I’m desperate, but because I know they’re somewhere down that inward highway. And I’m going to find them—inside my characters.

The Poet Boundary Dweller

Is it bad that I labor over sentences before I can move on in my writing? I don’t think so. My boundary dweller is the poet, not the painter. The painter pours out words. I labor. It has to sound right. Because, for me, somewhere in the midst of the quagmire, I find the flow and discover little gems, sometimes unbeknownst to me and only to my characters. These little gems are setups (or upsets), and happen through the efficiency of magic. And I desire to make them happen in no less than once every couple of paragraphs—gems that fuel mystery, or gems that are just plain awe-striking. Maybe this is why it has taken me over ten years to write twenty-eight chapters. But, there is light at the end of the tunnel: in my novel, and in my life.

I will write about the four boundary dwellers later. I just had to post this, along with a very cool photo I took back in 2004, when the idea for my novel was beginning to brew, and years of research initiated.

p.s. Be sure to read my previous essay about navigating self-doubt… … … if you’d like.