I…really didn’t intend to write twelve posts about this. I may have gotten a little carried away.

But here we are, twelve posts later, at the end of it.

Remember how I told you how gutted I was over the rejection, since I clearly care a lot about this story?

I read through everything again before starting this blog series. The novel, the scattered notes. I read the short story.

And you know what? I think it’s not bad. It’s simple. It reads like a fairytale, a little like an Eleanor Farjeon story, or maybe King’s Shadow.

But I realize why it got rejected.

There’s not nearly enough magic.

In case you aren’t aware–spec fic publishers have to have magic like most writers have to have a heavy dose of caffeine available at all hours of the day. They can get very cranky if we fail to deliver.

And that’s exactly what I did. There’s magic hinted at in the story, but it’s not some explosive moment bursting onto the page, present from the first letter to the last. And that, very likely, is what got me tossed in the bin.

I’m not so upset about it. There’s plenty of room in the world for low fantasy stories. But now that I know–I’m pretty sure I want to go back and make sure the novel really qualifies as a high fantasy.

Spoonwood for perseverance, right?

Who knows. Maybe I’ll get far enough to post another update sometime in the future. I’ve been toying with the idea of setting a goal for the July Camp NaNoWriMo–but what it would be and if I could keep myself from shredding and restitching the manuscript back together again until then are both questions for which I offer no conclusive answer.

Maybe. Maybe.

Until then,

happy reading.

So you’ve had two prologues and the story of my novel-writing, an Act in Three Posts.

Perhaps now you’d like to know what the story is actually like?

Welcome to the world of the novel!

Taken from the NaNoWriMo back cover mock-up, I present The Blurb:

Meet the wandering players–two friends in a troupe of tumblers, jugglers, musicians, and mischief-makers. On the open road, in her motley skirts and jingling bracelets, R is at home, and D is only too happy to learn to follow in her steps.

But happy days are not certain any more than a sun that always shines, not even when you are a child of the road and have music like birdsong on your lips. And for this troupe, deep trouble is always within reach.

R is magic. The crystal sword-wielding, crow-befriending, wing-sprouting kind of magic. And although he sees no sign of it, R says D is magic, too. It’s their secret, safe in a world of warm sunshine and sweet melodies.

Not a bad back cover blurb, eh? Names can be…pretty distinctive in fantasy, so I’ve redacted them. Sorry if that’s distracting.

That, in a nutshell, is the setup. We have a class of very good bards, scattered kingdoms most loosely based on the British Isles before 1066, and magic. What more could we want, right?

This is probably the point that makes my regular readers (clears throat) uh, have discussions with me.

It’s when I switch gears from a fluff piece to hard fantasy, the sun is covered with clouds, it starts pouring cold rain, you’re raven-shadowed, knife time, all your friends are gone, ooh, and you might not even be able to trust your own body/senses/morals!

Every time. I can’t be trusted with nice things.

Back to the cover blurb:

When R is accused of being a wolf’s head, the most infamous of outlaws, it’s up to D to keep her secret safe while she is on the run, feeling all too alone and doubting if he really has any magic.

Voilà! The turn! Your bestie might die, so get your character arc together!

I especially like this bit because it drives the two characters apart–you have to keep going and just keep hoping that the person you care about is going to be okay, is still out there somewhere, is alive.

Not knowing is horrific. Naturally we use that. Writers being cruel people and all that.

Cue the comp titles:

Adam of the Road meets A Wizard of Earthsea in this novel about music and magic–and times when the two seem almost the same.

Yes, I am aware neither of these titles meet the “was it published at least in the last five years” preference for good comp titles. I don’t really care. It was the middle of NaNo and I had to think of something, and it was my back cover blurb, not a cover letter to a publisher.

Besides. I like them.

I’m still in the midst of reading Adam of the Road. Had to stop when I read about a Norman I recognized from the 1066 battle. Kind of knocked the wind out of me for a bit. I’ll be back.

On to the end of the blurb:

Part adventure, part love story, and part quest, “Red” invites you to take a breath before you act, because one world still has some magic, and sometimes wishing really does some good after all.

Ta-da!

This–is not really a perfect representation of what happens in the novel. But it’s pretty. Blurbs are notoriously hard to write, and I wrote this one without too much head-banging against the keyboard. It has to change as the novel does, but fixing the novel is first on my priorities list.

In more detail?

So about those comp titles…

I only used two for the back cover mock-up, but I have more.

Adam of the Road and Earthsea were my first picks, but it’s maybe not a perfect combination to explain what I’m trying to do.

Maybe it’s more like The Name of the Wind, if we just happily ran off with a luckier troupe of the Edema Ruh instead of following the adventures of Kvothe, or if Cyrano had magic and was placed in a slightly different era.

It’s got the story-within-story style of the Thousand and One Nights and the style of sudden verse from The Hobbit.

And maybe it’s not like any of those things at all.

The genre

I guess it’s technically sword and sorcery? I hesitate over that because it sort of implies things like the Shannara series–and that’s the last thing I want.

Let’s go with “bardcore medieval fantasy.” There’s also a touch of “coming of age” in D’s character arc, but that’s not really enough to be worth mentioning. The novel is high fantasy and the short story version is low.

I am aware that I am not supposed to be this specific because I am describing genres and not blending perfumes. I am not responsible for the flaws of the genre classification system.

The world

This was honestly a little writing vacation for me. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of magical realism and urban fantasy, cross-world stuff, feeding my monster WIP that eats all the other stories that I write and still says it wants more–so I wanted to come home to a nice, traditional medievalesque fantasy.

That does not mean that you’ve seen it before. I’ve been reading Robin Hobb. Just because it’s medieval doesn’t mean it has to be from a history textbook.

And even if it is, there’s a lot between the lines that writers often ignore in favor of saying it was a stone castle, a dirty stable, and we ate bread and cheese.

For example, I don’t think anyone currently alive has a satisfactory recipe for frumenty.

A tragedy, to be sure.

The Back Cover Quote

Obviously I don’t have accolades from New York Times Bestseller List, but we’ll make do.

Here’s a few snippets taken from the NaNo back cover:

She wore the motley, skirts torn apart and stitched together in a chaos of dragon’s blue, harvest gold, rose, earth-brown, and red. The world sang for her as she walked, in the jingling of charms at her ankles and wrists, glass bead necklaces, tagged laces from her belt. She walked like a queen. She moved like a dance.

D could remember…days when she went barefoot in the green grass hills, taught him to pick pockets and drink from the icy cold stream.

Back when she had found him, walking in his dreams.

And that’s probably more than enough for now.

Let me know what you think of the project in the comments. Sound like something you’d read? Sound like nothing sane you’ve ever heard of before?

Yeah. I get that sometimes.

Cheers.

There’s a difference between writing 50,000 words and writing a novel.

For me, writing 50,000 words in a month, that’s easy. Saying I’ve written a complete novel?

That’s where I hesitate.

Maybe it’s the musician influence. When you perform a piece, yes, the concert has a beginning an and end, but the music doesn’t. We’ve played our parts so, so many times in the practice rooms, and they’re going to be echoing in our heads for hours afterward. Why should that be the definitive version, just because people are there to listen? And to say it’s finished! I can play a piece for myself, and it will be an entirely different thing if I play it for someone else–especially depending on who you are (are we friends? do I know you? where did you come from? are you judgy? how did you get in the garrett? are those snacks?).

I’ve started thinking of telling stories the same way. Maybe I’ll only sing out a few bars of this story for a friend, because we only have a minute. If I have the crew’s attention (in a good way), then I can spin it as long as their interest lasts. It’s the same story, yes? But it takes a different shape. Different details, different style, different inflection. It’s still there, at heart.

It’s not that I don’t want to write “The End.” It’s just that I have trouble getting there.

Especially with a draft. It’s hard to get things to come out right the first time, to include everything I wanted to, and then, to call something so clearly just beginning, finished.

I wrote my 50,000. Usually I write more.

Alighting at 58,000 made it a middle year. Not the 52,000 of my first wild NaNo, not the 94K that frankly, I am terrified to go back and read because what even happened back there?

It wasn’t finished.

Sometimes I skip ahead to write the ending. If I can imagine it clearly, I’m enough of a plantser that it’s okay to do. I don’t have to do things in order. I can write briefer scenes in the middle, get the gist of it down, and leave it for Future Me to flesh out later.

Future Me has filed enough complaints with the system that I am trying to be a little more careful and complete with my work.

I wrote for another week before I completely collapsed.

Last count for NaNo22 Extended Edition was 63,951 words.

It’s still not done. I know how it ends. I just–didn’t make it there.

63,000 words of something. Not quite a novel. The ending exists in its complete form only in my head.

I know the reason. I didn’t finish because I wasn’t done.

I really wanted to see it to the end. But end-of-quarter was coming, and the only story I could think about was NaNo22, even though I needed a short story if I wanted to get out a submission by the 31st.

The conclusion to this you already know.

I started from scratch and rewrote it as a 7,000-word short story.

The main idea is the same. The characters are still there, minus a few who only filled up the background even in the novel. The plot is similar, if it has a few branches pruned off. It’s low fantasy, simple and sweet. A fairytale, just a little scary. It feels like home.

It’s gone out and come back again.

I took a deep breath after I got over the rejection and sat down to read everything again. Not just the novel, but the short story and all the notes I’d copied over to my computer–paragraphs of fragmented sentences fused together like confused stained glass, waiting for me to it all sort out.

To clarify–yes, I did fully intend to read a 175-page novel in one night, curled up in the garrett playing some music in the background. We’re all mad here, Alice, don’t judge.

I managed it in about 24 hours. The novel, the short story, and all my notes.

It’s amazing how much you forget, when you’re writing it. When you’re waist-deep in the drafting process, wading for all you’re worth through pages and pages, trying to keep the spark of inspiration alive, keep the style consistent, make it feel whole, well, it’s a different perspective than looking down on it all, now that it’s complete.

It’s galling how much we walk. Even as traveling musicians.

There’s so much I wanted to do that never made its way onto the page, so much more that I could do, now that the groundwork is there, now that I’ve built a world so beautiful, so familiar, so new.

There’s so much left to do.

I started writing it over again. From the beginning. Hazard of going through my old notes–I can’t leave them alone. I’ve no idea if it will be better than the last one, no idea if I’ve got the energy now to make it to the end again.

But I’m not finished.

Not yet.

You can check out the first installment of the blog series here, or read up on everything you’ve missed in the “NaNoWriMo” category.

You already know how this ends.

As the banner for the last three posts has proudly announced, framed with yellow spoonwood flowers, I sat down in the garrett and wrote 50,000 words.

But how it went?

How it’s going:

I am largely incapable of writing exactly 1,667 words a day. This is baffling to all parties involved. I can write, I can write a lot, and I can write almost every day.

But alas. That little mountain climbing badge has yet to be mine.

We take our badges very seriously in NaNoWriMo. Please don’t ask me about the velociraptors; I don’t know, and at this point, I don’t know how to ask.

What does my writing process look like during the race for the 50,000?

A caffeine-induced fever dream haze of late nights kept company only by the stars and a writing playlist.

Yeah, I don’t get the “I took care of myself,” badge either. Even the year I did something nice (don’t remember what it was) that wasn’t writing, I hovered my mouse over the badge and then didn’t click.

I knew I didn’t deserve it.

Got every other badge this year, though.

But this badge?

The Eureka Moment light bulb?

I owe this one entirely to the crows in my neighborhood.

Look, there are nine-to-five writers who get things done, people like L. Ron Hubbard and Jules Verne who pound out a ridiculous number of words and leave all of us staring.

But there are also writers who have to get away from the project.

I can’t sit at my laptop and type line after line after line if I don’t know where I’m going, because I’ll just have to delete all that uninspired wandering later. I’m actively making more work for myself.

I need a break.

bookmarkedone is required to point out this is not the same as procrastinating because you know that pirate character you really love has to die for the next battle scene to have any real emotional impact and you Do Not Want to Do It. Not having any brain juice and not wanting to use your brain juice are two very different problems.

The best break is a walk. I do not know why, but I was walking just days before drafting this post, violin case in one hand, dogwoods blooming pink, and I had enough ideas pop cheerfully unasked into my head that I was just hoping I could remember everything until I had a chance to write it down.

If you don’t believe me, go look up Neil Gaiman’s trampoline.

So there I was, well into November, out on a grocery run, and there were the big, beautiful, shiny crows that frequent the driveways and green grassy patches along the street.

And I had it. The crow. Of course. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I’d thought to include the bird originally (it already existed in the Greater Story-verse this novel is a part of…don’t ask), and then I’d done absolutely nothing with it. Now that I remembered, it fit two unconnected plot points snugly together.

A word of warning. If you space out in the middle of your “Eureka!” moment while other people are in your vicinity. They will notice and ask if you are okay and if they are not aware of the Race to 50,000–well, good luck explaining yourself.

I went home, wrote my crow, and gave myself my little badge. It was a new game now.

The rest–you can probably guess.

I’m–actually surprised by my little owl. I thought it would be a lot later than that. I’m still amused from the outrage another night owl had a year or two ago when they first installed this feature and it tried to claim that writer as a “mid-day flamingo.” NaNo only goes by when you update your wordcount, so–things happen.

No surprise here. I’m almost always in the garrett, with my books and my tea and my birds coming to the window to visit. Someday I’ll get the “noveled where I shouldn’t” badge, but not this year.

I always joke that my daily word count tracker looks like a very dangerous heart monitor–nothing falls regularly, just erratic ups and downs, no consistency to be found here.

Don’t ask about the 3,000+ word day. I’d half forgotten that happened and I don’t know what caused it.

NaNo charts really are the best. It just feels good to watch the little lines grow as you write, to know you’re making progress, that you did that, even if all the greater worries of writing a book are far more difficult to tackle.

That’s what the middle is like. Don’t look forward, don’t look backward. You’re here, in the now. Just keep going.

And before you know it, a story comes tumbling out.

Welcome to Part III of the NaNoWriMo blog series (do we count the last two prologue posts as parts I and II? As two Part Is? As two part zeros? Doesn’t matter).

By this point, you know about the project and the titanic delay. 50,000 words for the month of November, a completely new novel, come what may.

How it Started:

This was NaNoWriMo 5 for me. Per usual, I go in with only a vague idea of where I’m going, hand the reins over to the characters, and hope we wind up with something good 30 days later.

So mid-October 2022, bookmarkedone is staring into space, contemplating what she’s going to do for all those late nights and gloriously long writing sessions.

And reading.

Picture the scene, if you will. Early autumn. The air just turning crisp. Linden trees. A hammock swing. Bookmarkedone, studiously ignoring her neighbors (the human ones, that is. The cat is a friend and the other creatures are entertaining), reading a book.

Heartless, by Marissa Meyer. Black cover. Glossy red lettered title framed by thorns, absent of any roses. Hardcover. Comfortably worn–a fall library sale acquisition.

This is important.

Why?

I have a bone to pick with fictional musicians. Typically, they aren’t like the ones I know–and I’ve known more than my fair share. So anytime a bard or piper or (oh, what trouble are they in then) a violinist pops up in fiction, I’m paying close attention.

Someday I may make a post about fictional bards. For now, have a short version:

• Cyrano (from the latest musical version)
  • Can compose verse in the moment, while you’re staring at him,
  • Will physically fight you over theater
  • hopeless romantic
  • = good bardic representation.
• 99% of D&D bards
  • Cheesy
  • Flirty
  • Not even good enough musicians for a halfway decent drinking song
  • Delicate as a twig
  • Generally regarded as useless by the rest of the party
  • = not good bardic representation (yes, this is an invitation for you to prove me wrong!)

Meyer has a character in Heartless that falls squarely into the “bardic” category. He’s a performer, a juggler, a riddle-weaver, a musician, a mischief-maker.

Not a bad fellow.

Heartless, if you don’t know, is an Alice in Wonderland retelling, sort of a prequel before the Red Queen, well, you know. Is the Red Queen. So there’s lots of things that you think you know, turned upside-down and tilted slightly to the left.

And fitted into the formula of a YA romance.

I have mixed feelings regarding Heartless. But that’s the business of a book review. Not this post.

What you need to pay attention to here is the crisp air, the gentle breeze, the rustle of leaves, the dappled sun. The combination of the familiar and the strange, and the idea of a bardic performer dressed in all black, going by the name of Jest.

I expect I’ll have to edit later to be 1000% certain I don’t infringe copyright, but I stole that. The name. The color. It reminded me of something, of someone, but it wasn’t quite right. It’s long enough ago that I almost forgot myself, but the start of this story happens there, under that tree, with me turning over in my mind the idea of a character named Jest.

With me putting my book away, going up to the garrett, and getting a notebook and pen.

With me sitting under that tree, writing. Not for anyone or anything, but because it felt right again. Like the sun was shining.

It isn’t Meyer’s Jest in my story, before you think that. Hers is broody and secretive and romantic. My character–well, they might share the same all-black costume and a general profession of mischief, but similarities in personality are few.

Nor is he the protagonist. Just a side character. A catalyst, to set me off down this road.

The real start to this story came–oh, nine years ago now? It was the first of many spiral notebooks I filled with bits and bobs, pieces of story that I didn’t have any plans for yet, but knew they would grow into something someday. One of the very first entries. A few paragraphs about a boy, and name, and a dream.

I rolled it around in my mind for years before finding a place for it. And now here it is, finding its way onto the page.

I wrote a lot before NaNo started. It was hard to make myself stop.

Other goals for the project?

As I said, I had bards on the brain. Nobody can seem to do them quite to my satisfaction (with a few very fine exceptions), so I decided it was time to take matters into my own hands.

I was going to write a story about musicians. A book for the bards. And–since it was the perfect opportunity–pack into it every bit of renfaire culture I could, because I’ve seen far more books about what we most certainly aren’t than what we are.

And it was time to attack a trope head-on that I have long skulked away from.

Dreams.

I am a creature of National Novel Writing Month.

Unabashedly.

I did my first 50,000 run in November of 2018, got attached to the rush, the energy, the community, the madness that is writing a novel in 30 days as people all over the world are also writing a novel in 30 days, and they haven’t been able to get rid of me yet.

I’ve posted about it before, usually reminding non-writers that their resident scribblers could use a little extra care, cheering on my fellow madcap NaNo-ers, and writing updates about how my own project is going.

You may or may not have noticed that this November the bookmarkedone blog was almost dead silent.

One post for November 2022. It looks so lonely, doesn’t it?

I popped online long enough to shout about my favorite Renaissance festival and disappeared again.

(Before you get worried, I’m fine. It was an odd season of many chaotic responsibilities, getting ready for a concert, writing like mad, and being utterly zonked tired in the process.)

There’s no official schedule for the bookmarkedone blog, but I was a little disappointed not to be making my weekly check-in posts. I really like connecting with all the other NaNo/Wordpress bloggers, hearing what they’re up to, getting people excited about a project we all love.

Why am I rehashing this ancient history?

Well, I cheated you out of a blog for almost a month. In December, I made up my mind to do something I’d never done before.

I was going to post (albeit a month late) all the juicy behind-the-scenes details about my writing adventure, and even tease a little of what the novel is about.

The observant among you may now be in a state of utmost puzzlement wondering where all that lush content got to.

Yeah. It didn’t get posted.

Why?

Well, because even in the midst of drafting posts about it I broke the Sacred Rule.

I went back to my manuscript after NaNo was over.

This is something I almost never do. Probably should, but I don’t. I write like mad for a month, and then the manuscript is shelved while I work on other projects for the other 11 months of the year. Sometimes I go back to verify a fact or steal a thread of something (most of my stories have unfortunately chosen to morph together into one gigantic story-verse. Do Not Try At Home.), but mostly, they’re left alone.

NaNo is–really special. I can write whatever I want. Whatever I want. And it doesn’t matter if it’s good, because it’s just for me. I’m not so eager to break that spell.

I was really in love with my project this time.

And I needed a short story by the end of the quarter. December 31th.

Yes, that’s right. I had 31 days to hack a 175-page novel into 17,000 words or less.

I’ve probably done less sane things.

I got it down to a version I felt pretty satisfied with, a different adventure from the original, but with the same characters, the same feel to it, polished it, and sent it off.

Herein lies the snag.

It was a blind reading. I wasn’t associated with my work in any way to ensure the fairness of the final selection.

So yammering about my…somewhat distinctive world online when people associated with the publication are aware of bookmarkedone.blog–

Not the best idea.

I wasn’t about to have a perfectly good story chucked out because I’d failed to observe anonymity.

So that was a minimum three month wait. After I got the accept/reject notice, I could at least blog a cryptic update. And if I got the story published, honestly I thought I’d be too happy to care about anything else. Scrapping a few blog posts wasn’t too high a price to pay. Not when I’ve been aiming for this spot for–well, longer than I’d like.

Anyway, the story got officially rejected a couple of weeks ago, so now I’m free to talk about it.

(yes, there was some crushing of bookmarkedone’s irrepressible spirit because wasn’t this one The One? Apparently not.)

I was gutted for a while. Tried to think of all the angles why I’d gotten a flat rejection.

This is not a particularly fun game, if you haven’t played it.

Was it me? Was it really a bad story? Or was this just one of those things, a “missed it by that much,” sent it to the wrong market, sent it at the wrong time, to the wrong place, and I really did have a jewel and it was just that no one had realized it yet?

In the end–well, I won’t tell you what I thought in the end.

It was Camp NaNoWriMo that brought me around again. It’s a spring and summer challenge that I’ve never done myself, but it’s as good a time as any to write about NaNo and encourage other writers through your experiences (be they successful or…less so).

I did write over 50,000 words, whatever came after that. I have a story that wasn’t there before. And, as Gandalf would say, that is an encouraging thought.

I’ll tell you the story, from beginning to end, that was weaving this yarn out of nothing, and when it’s finished, you can decide for yourself if the rejection was right or not.

And when I say I’ve got behind-the-scenes goodies–I mean it. I’ve got a little of everything–snippets, NaNo stats, writing soundtrack–writing a novel (or at least a novel-length something-or-other) is nothing short of an adventure.

I’ve been to see another world and back. Now I get to tell you how I got there.