Daydreaming Cover Art

While thinking of putting together a wish list of cover photo and art for KINDRED, I stumbled across a particular photo on Flickr yesterday, and have finally pulled myself away from staring at it to post a link to it here.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thebottlebellphotography/2093453353/

If you're so inclined, go take a look. I'm going back to stare at it some more. The girl needs a bit more clothes on, and curlier hair. Otherwise she is SO Seona. I won't even go into the whole "rivers as boundaries," and "crossing rivers" symbolism that permeates the story.

Yes I will. Here's a brief snip, one of many:

KINDRED
Copyright 2009 Lori Benton

“Da’s Highland-born, from a place called Glendessary, but he went to Inverness to be a bookbinder. That’s where one of my Lindsay uncles met him. My uncle brought Da home to their croft in Aberdeen. I suppose the family thought an acquaintance with a fellow hailing from the wild Highlands fine and good, but when that fellow took a fancy to their sister…. Well, Mam was old enough to marry, but they insisted she was needed at home.” He shrugged. “True enough, but so was their wanting to wed.”

“She liked him back?” I felt foolish in asking, like a child caught up in a story. Inverness… Glendessary… Aberdeen. Here we stood, hands bound and clasping, yet I felt like Ian stood across some wide river, trying to tell me what was over on his side. A leaf fell between us, landing on my hand, a splash of yellow. Ian turned our palms so it dropped into the cup of our fingers.

“Aye, she liked him back,” he said, with a look I felt down to my toes. Just that quick, he’d crossed back over that river to me.

[end snip]

On A Saturday

What I did today, between bouts of editing......

And then I made happy frog cookies.....

Getting there with the decorating. These were a trial batch. I'm attempting to perfect a winter scarf. I love baking, and find it another fun creative outlet, especially when I'm listening to a good audio book.

Today's book, THE LOST ART OF GRATITUDE, an Isabel Dalhousie novel, by Alexander McCall Smith. Set in Scotland and read by Davina Porter, one of my favorite readers.

Mostly about editing

My ideas for a post today are all over the place, so I'll just jump and in and maybe they will tie together.

I'm happy with my progress in editing Kindred. Anyone notice that word count over in the side bar? From an original word count of 325,000+ it's fallen to 162,000 and change. I know that's still long for a novel these days, debut or otherwise, but considering where I started from, it's edging into the realm of the possible now, right? I'm only halfway through the current edit, so I have hopes of getting it deep down into the 150s. How lovely it would be to drop below 150K.....

Yesterday evening I read a post by agent Wendy Lawton, about overwriting, and showing vs. telling, and when is it too much showing. I tend to show too much, which means on the macro level some things are rendered as scenes that really could be dealt with using narrative summary, and on the micro level, there's too much stage business and body language. Anyone else have this tendency? Then I urge you not to miss Wendy's post this week Following The Rules: Fiction, over at Between The Lines. She strongly reinforced what I've been trying to put into practice on this edit. It's all about pace, and focus, and not giving the reader literary whip-lash (her phrase, and I like it).

I woke up this morning at 3:30am, thinking about her advice, and mentally editing Kindred, and obviously not falling back to sleep, so I got up and put in an extra hour of work before my day officially started.

Now I'm very sleepy....

Progress Report

Taking stock on this Monday morning of where I am with my projects.

KINDRED: still waiting to hear from three agents, while I edit that word count down. Once the edit is complete, I plan to query more agents. But I'd like that wc to be as low as possible before I do. I didn't think another line-by-line edit would accomplish much, but a couple of months with my mind completely on another project has given some objectivity.

WILLA: I completed Chapter 5 this morning, and did a word count on the ms. It's already 16,500K. That's too many words! Where did they all come from? I'm still in Act 1. Steady breath.... I need a few days to let the possibilities for Chapter 6 stew around in my brain, so I've printed out the five chapters and will do a hard copy edit (the best method I've found when it comes to cutting; I see things on the page that I'm blind to on the screen). By the time the edit's done I should have a clear direction about what needs to happen in Chapter 6.

After a stretch of writing first draft, editing in hard copy is like being let out for recess! It's work too, but on an entirely different level. Sort of like the difference between, say, applying paint to a masonite board already gessoed and sanded smooth... and cutting down the tree and feeding it through a shredder and gathering the bits and soaking them in water and stuffing them in a press and creating the board.

Or however masonite is made. I could take the time to research it, but there's a stack of chapters waiting for me and my blue pen.

A Time and Place

Editing of Kindred is going well, and I'm excited to see the amount of words I can still shave off of the story. Here's a short snippet of the scene I worked on last night and this morning, along with photos taken October of 2006 of the area where Kindred is set, a set of hills and ridges once called the Carraways, near present-day Asheboro, NC. It's the Uwharrie National Forest* now, but way-back-when, before the village that was Asheboro was even named, there were homesteads here, and later gold mines, and always lots and lots of trees and streams and rivers. I chose this area as a setting for a couple of reasons. I didn't want the story set on the frontier, which was deep into the Blue Ridge Mountains by the 1790s, but I do love a steep, hilly, difficult terrain. I needed ridges and draws and waterfalls, and secret places for my characters to stumble upon.



KINDRED
Copyright 2009 Lori Benton
All Rights Reserved

Ian doused himself head to shoulders, letting the creek water trickle beneath his sweaty shirt, open at the neck, then shook his dripping hair and fingered it back from his face. He’d lost another ribbon. The bitty things were as shifty in his keeping as the Reynolds’ shoat.

Squinting through the boughs overhead, Ian judged he had time enough to make himself presentable before he showed his face at table. If he didn’t dawdle. He was a dozen yards along the path when he heard the raven.

It was a raven, he was sure, though its call differed from the usual harsh caws and kruks. He slowed to listen to the gulping, croaking warble. The sequence repeated several times, then a voice spoke.

“Och, will ye hark to her now.”

Ian halted on the path, shock pulsing through him. The raven was quiet now, startled to silence, no doubt. The voice had been a man’s. He scanned the stone-pocked ridge rising on his left, then gazed down-slope through the wood falling to more level land on his right. His hand fell to his knife. No matter that his uncle owned this land, much of it was virgin forest, with cover enough for bear or panther—or man—to pass unseen. Though not necessarily unheard.

“Come here to me, love.”

If the object of the speaker’s affection replied, it fell short of Ian’s hearing, but he was certain the man’s voice had issued from a point upstream, where the creek tumbled from the higher ridge through a slight declivity. He stepped off the trail. The land rose under him, rocky and brush-tangled. Intermittent comments from above drew him on.

“Will ye no’ gang wi’ me, lass?”

“Aye, she’ll gang,” Ian muttered. “The pair of you shall, once I ferret ye out.”

He ascended by handholds the last few yards, sweating again as he grasped a woody laurel shrub and hauled himself over a final rise. Before him the creek cut into the hillside for the distance of a stone’s throw. There the higher slopes of the ridge folded in to form a hollow where river birches clustered, knee-deep in ferns and mossy stones. Sunlight lanced through their mottled trunks. Through them he glimpsed lichen-speckled outcrops mounting the slope beyond, over which the stream spilled in a glassy fall.

It was completely unexpected, and yet he’d the oddest sense of having seen the place before. Then his roving gaze caught what he’d come seeking: a flash of faded blue, deep within the grove. He marked a path through the ferns, plotting his approach.

A harsh kruk rent the stillness.

“Hush, now. Let me finish.”

A woman’s voice this time. He stalked the unsuspecting pair, gaze fixed on the patch of blue. The birches thinned. The patch broadened into the curve of a shoulder, too slight for a man’s. Another step. The shoulder dipped to a slender waist, brushed by tumbled dark ringlets.

She sat on a rock, back turned nearly full to him. At her feet spread a pool that deepened over a stony basin, into which the fall emptied. A basket, nestled in the grass beside her, held a scattering of half-withered blueberries. But berries weren’t on her mind at present. She was hunched over slightly, focused on something in her lap. Grasping the last tree separating them, Ian leaned out for a better look.

Across her lap lay a yellowed scrap of paper, over which her hand moved in short, purposeful strokes. He took a step nearer, disbelieving his eyes.

Beneath his boot, a stick snapped.

[end snip]

Uphill... both ways

Aside from those rare instances like last week, when my characters spilled a flood of dialogue out to me in a single morning (and which I'm still making heads or tails of), first draft writing is excruciatingly slow for me.

I often wonder what it's like for writers who whip through their first drafts in the space of a few months (or those hikers who can hustle up a mountain without the frequent breathers us regular mortals take). The only time I accomplished anything resembling a fast first draft was in writing a piece of fan fiction (for the movie Ever After, with Drew Barrymore and Dougray Scott), which turned out to be about 50,000 words long. I wrote it for a group of friends who were also fans of the movie, from November 1998 through January or February 1999. But I wasn't being too concerned with things like historical accuracy, or research. It was a simple, straightforward story, a classic romance plot: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wises up and gets girl back. I was mostly concerned with echoing as many themes from the movie as I could, to capture that particular flavor. The only research required was repeated viewing of the movie.

Today was a slow writing day on WILLA, as I picked my way through a conversation in the wake of a violent action and some bad news delivered to my main characters. Someone has lots of 'splaining to do, but how much 'splaining at one go is too much? How much does the reader really need, this early on? How can I be sure I explain enough, so that the reader isn't left in confusion? Too, I need to make sure my characters aren't simply sitting around, stunned at what took place, and talking on and on (and on) about What It All Means. It's a slow process, feeling my way step by step, line by line, putting in words, taking them out, putting them back, trimming, cutting, pasting them away for safekeeping.

It'll get done. Just wish my pace didn't always put me at the back of the pack. A bit dusty back here!

To offset this tedious first draft work, and for some much needed brain rest, I've begun another edit on KINDRED, which feels a lot more to me like coming down a mountain than laboring up. It's surprising what a little objectivity and a lot of ruthlessness will still accomplish at this point. Based on my progress with the first 8-9 chapters, my goal is to see another 10-20K disappear, before I reach The End, again. I'm keeping track over in the side bar.

Wish me luck! Especially, pray for me.