Category Archives: Writing

After adding counts and counters to my 365 Challenge page, I could see that I'm actually right where I ought to be for January 20. I love the realities of word count cutoffs. I can now read Denny with a clean conscience.

There's a reason I call this story that, this story being "Dowse and Bleed." It's more than 9600 words right now and I've still got more than 6000 that need total rewriting.

The story arrived in twisted snatches. I started with the third scene wrote through to middle, then started at the end and worked my way back until I figured out I needed to back up the beginning two scenes and then finished the middle. It's safe to say I had no outline. It's also safe to say I had no idea where the case was going or how I was going to get there.

Rachelle is the main character and, typical to what she does to everyone she encounters with the one exception of her "brother," she was holding out on me.

This incident is smack in the middle of a period where Rachelle is ticked off at Justus for falling in love with her (thus not speaking to him), her health is in a perhaps permanent downward spiral due to the genetic tampering by the Department that made her into a special in the first place, and Jarod is annoying because he's passively aggressively hoping to start a relationship with her, so she's being even harsher than usual with him to get him to back off. And I'm trying to pack this into a story in a genre I've never written (detective) around a plot-type I've never done with an original situation I still don't quite understand. The first draft had several problems with it:

1. I didn't figure out what was going on inside Rachelle until the last two scenes of the story and then, not much.
2. I didn't know why I was telling this story and I don't imagine a reader knew why it mattered either.
3. Rachelle only figured things out after I did, which made her look like she didn't know prep, the initial debriefing, or how to do her work very well.
4. The story turned from a find kidnappee to arrest kidnapper without any real addressing of why kidnapping in the first place.
5. My most important clue went completely unaddressed.
6. The ending came out of nowhere even though I knew it grew from all that stuff Rachelle was iceberging.

I'd love to say the rewrite just wrung itself out of me quickly the way the first draft did, but it's not doing that. It's slow going, stopping and mulling, reworking, and sliding back under Rachelle's skin every time she kicks me out. It's weird because her world is so integrated and I have to convey it all to the reader without going overboard. And frankly, this story shouldn't even be happening. Rachelle's not supposed to be working!

Ah, well. That's why this is the story from inferno. It changes its mind and doesn't like me trying to nail it down.

How's your writing?

"Dowse and Bleed" came in at about 7600 words of first draft. It left me wrung out and ready to kick the whole thing into whatever promised to take it away—which, in this case, turned out to be my email. I sent it to my beta, who promptly told me to dig deeper, do more, let her see it from the inside out, not the outside in.

I've made a fine art of the outside in. Here we go again. Scrapped the whole lot, opened a fresh doc and am pulling from the old as needed, and I see her point.

Rachelle waited until the restless aches dancing through her upper body were outright pain before she finally forced herself to quit making endless cups of coffee and fished a mottled green star out of the embossed pink tin she kept on the granite kitchen countertop. She stripped off her overshirt and held the star to her left arm, braced herself, and pressed the needles on its back into her arm and into her main carrier fluid vein. A light twist—which hurt, but she didn't wince—secured the star. She could feel the space for her carrier fluid expanding, allowing the wash of genetic entries in her system to head for her central nervous system without making her want to scream.

She leaned back against the open dark wood shelves, which she had stuffed with spices, baking supplies, and potted vegetables. Dishes filled the shelves above the counters, and she kept an open cooler by the telephone. She picked up her coffee—the whole apartment smelled of it—and drank the rest slowly, shifting from one bare foot to the other on the heated tile floor.

Three years ago, cycling didn't hurt. She didn't want to think about that, didn't want to think about the fact that the Department never would go away for her or about the look in Sear's eyes six months ago when she gave her another box of stars, arms covered in blood from doing something they should never had had to do.

Rachelle set the coffee mug in the sink and washed it, ignoring the way the water irritated her skin as she scrubbed harder than was necessary. Over the splash of water and ceramic, she heard the phone ring and glanced up towards where it sat on the higher coffee bar counter. Only a handful of people could keep hold of her revolving number to call. She never answered.

The answering machine clicked on. "Rachelle Winslow. Leave a message."

Her birth name in her own voice jarred her. It wasn't her name. She drew the mug out of the sink, turned off the faucet, and set the mug in the sanitizer to dry.

"It's Ilsa."

Killinger.