First, an FYI: I’m redoing the categories and tags for the site, trying to neaten them up. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Now, for the Deep Thoughts:

When I’m writing a first draft, I prefer to write it straight through rather than skip around in the timeline. I look on a first draft as a draft of discovery: this is where the characters tell you what’s going on with them, and I usually have good luck with this. I’ll discover things or think of things that I never would if I were following a strictly rigid outline. (All of my outlines, when I make them, always have a portion that says “some stuff happens here.” There’ll be plot before and plot after, but there’s always a nebulous space where I have to figure out how the characters get from Point A to Point C.)

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My current project is a screenplay, and it’s not coming very easily. This is due to a lot of factors, I think, the two biggest being subject matter and form.

Subject matter: it’s a biopic, about a solider named Bill Aalto, who grew up in the Bronx, fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and knew poets and writers like Alan Ginsberg, Truman Capote and Ernest Hemingway. He was gay and a communist at a time when being either would make life difficult, and he paid a high price for being both. However, I find him heroic for the simple reason that he never took the easy road. Of all the things he could have done, all the compromises he could have made, he never did: he chose integrity instead. That’s powerful to me: that’s a life worth celebrating, even if in the end it was not triumphant in any traditional Hollywood sense.

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• July: movie rough draft: seven pages. It’s been seven pages since last week. But at least that’s seven more than I had in June.
• August: the Four of Cups finished and sent! Which means August will be more movie and working on the Leo-Stuart story.
• September: More of the same. Polish the movie to a fine sheen.
• October: possibly a Christmas-themed novella for Torquere, and I want to start a few things for a Livejournal-based project in February called 14 Valentines, and starting the story for the wedding anthology.
• November: NANOWRIMO.
• December: finish the wedding anthology story, and more 14 Valentines.
• January: finish stories for 14 Valentines, start the next Arcana. I get the Queen of Wands, I think.

I know, not particularly exciting and I haven’t had any Really Deep Thoughts lately . . . but sometimes there just isn’t energy for Really Deep Thoughts, you know?

I realized yesterday morning that I have nothing else scheduled to come out this year. Alas, alas.

• July: movie rough draft, which I know I’ve been saying for months but this time I mean it. My partner wants to take it to a production company in October. I need to stop flailing about it and just write.
• August: the Four of Cups is due to the editor. It’ll be ready. It’s at about 11,000 words right now and just needs one more once-over by the First Reader Brigade for clarity and cohesion. And then movie-polishing.
• September: the Leo-Stuart story. FOR REALS, YO. Finish movie-polishing.
• October: possibly a Christmas-themed novella for Torquere, and I want to start a few things for a Livejournal-based project in February called 14 Valentines, and starting the story for the wedding anthology.
• November: NANOWRIMO.
• December: finish the wedding anthology story, and more 14 Valentines.

March: Cartography for Beginners rough draft. STATUS: Well . . . I got about 10,000 words into the rough draft and then it all petered out.

April-May: the movie rough draft. STATUS: Still planning on this. I’ve decided to participate in Script Frenzy for inspiration. I have a file box full of primary and secondary sources and more that I need to print out. I have an outline broken down sequences and scenes. I even have some freeware screenwriting software that’s actually quite nifty and helpful.

. . . I’m utterly terrified. BUT. We carry on.

June-July: Arcana rough and editing. STATUS: Will probably start this in May . . .

August-Sept-October: Editing Cartography for Beginners STATUS: if I’m not attempting to keep writing this instead.

Either way, the Arcana is due in August, so writing of it will take place before then.

November: Nanowrimo (next SF ‘verse story) STATUS: Well, I know which story I want to to do . . .

December: REST!!! maybe write some fic. STATUS: YES.

. . . is what I’ve been calling my plans for the year. The big list of next looks like this:

March: Cartography for Beginners rough draft.
April-May: the movie rough draft
June-July: Arcana rough and editing
August-Sept-October: Editing Cartography for Beginners
November: Nanowrimo (next SF ‘verse story)
December: REST!!! maybe write some fic.

Though I’m considering writing the Arcana in March and saving the next novel for the summer, but I’m not sure at the moment. What project I will begin tomorrow will depend on which one feels the most ready, and I may surprise myself entirely and decide to start the movie instead. (Unlikely, really, though I got some more material and a good idea from my partner this morning that makes me itch to get this thing going.)

And between all of this there’s editing to be done for the new releases, and maybe some shorts, too. (And the day job and what passes for a social life and all the household things . . .)

I am starting something tomorrow. Don’t know what yet, at the moment. But there will be something.

This entry at Smart Bitches about why happy endings are considered inferior has reminded me of the struggle I’m having with The Movie, and I thought I’d repost something I wrote in another blog here.

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Sometime in the next year, I’m going to be writing a spec script for a biopic. I’m very excited to do this: the subject is fascinating, the time period is interesting, and the story is worth telling. This wasn’t my idea: I was approached to collaborate by someone who specializes in this subject. (My specialization in college was the Romantics. I have a bookcase full of books on Jane Austen and the Brontes. And yet I’ve never wanted to write Regencies. Hm.) But my partner’s an historian and didn’t feel she could write a story, while I’m a storyteller and worry about how to write history.

Writing a biography is a new challenge. Lives don’t wrap up neatly like novels do. My first question when I get down to serious plotting is what’s the throughline, what’s the arc, what’s the journey this character goes on? But people’s lives don’t work like that, generally. I mean, if you were to map your life according to the hero’s journey model, would it work out? (Maybe if you stretched . . .) So when I tell this man’s story, when I fit his life into history . . . I’m not quite sure how.

I’m not quite sure how to structure it, either. Does the story start with his parents, with his birth, or later? Do I frame it within flashbacks or just go straight through chronologically? Do I end it with his death, or earlier? (Or even later?)

One of my favorite books is Slaughterhouse-Five—”Billy Pilgrim has come unstruck from time” is one of my favorite opening lines ever—and something my teacher pointed out when we read it in high school is that while Billy jumps around to various points in his life, his experience in World War II is strictly chronological. I’m thinking that might be a structure to follow, that his experience in war time is what his life built towards before and changed everything afterwards.

I’m nervous about this, but excited. I’m not looking to even start writing until February or so but I’ve already got this man under my skin. (I’m trying to keep some professional detachment, though it’s not easy: he’s exactly the personality type I find irresistible. But I read something this morning in a film review that I’m going to hang over my desk when I’m writing: “Biography should challenge, not sanctify.”)

Wish me luck.