Right Angles to Faeryland

I finished revising ANGLES yesterday. The result is a sentimental slobbery blog entry, which I will put behind the cut to spare you all my starry-eyed self. :)

This is a book I’ve been trying to write since I was twelve years old. In 2002 I woke up in the middle of an early October night with the first sentence in my head, and rushed to the computer and wrote the first chapter. Then I set it aside and went back in November and wrote ANGLES for my one and only successful Nanowrimo project.

It was the fourth book I’d written. It was unquestionably the best thing I had ever written. It’s the story of five children from our world who are drawn to Faeryland, where their decisions and actions change the shape of that land forever: a classic children’s fantasy novel. I drew on Narnia, I drew on Prydain, I drew on Will Stanton, I drew on The Secret Country, and I drew most of all on my own childhood. The four people to whom ANGLES is dedicated know that it’s a true story, and that, beyond anything else, is my triumph in writing it.

But there are a hell of a lot of other triumphs in it as well.

In 2003, pretty much on a lark, I sent the first twenty pages in to the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Colorado Gold Writing Contest, a contest I recommend to burgeoning writers wholeheartedly. To my utter surprise, ANGLES won the SF/F category of the contest. The judge was Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who later told me she had had a terribly, terribly difficult time choosing between ANGLES and Mario Acevedo‘s hysterical NYMPHOS OF ROCKY FLATS. Her choice, she said, was between Mario’s completely original idea done very well, and my traditional tropes done perfectly.

I will carry that compliment to my grave.

By about that time, I’d sold URBAN SHAMAN and had gotten an agent, who shopped ANGLES around. We got the same feedback everywhere: great structure, good story, characterization needs work. After enough people said that, I started to think that maybe, y’know, the characterization needed work.

I did not, however, have the skill to deal with it. I had gone so far beyond my presupposed capabilities with the book already that I couldn’t even see the problem, much less fix it. After a while, ANGLES got put to bed and I spent the next six years writing three and four books a year and wishing, wishing, wishing, that I could go back and revise the book I loved best. Earlier this year I suddenly realized I could do a crowdfunding project for revisions on it, and ran it up the flagpole, giving myself a delivery deadline of June 30th.

Two weeks ago I moved the file from “Inactive Projects” into the top-level directory, and started working on it. I can’t even tell you what doing just that little bit, moving it to the active files directory, meant to me. I spent four days re-reading a book I hadn’t looked at in at least five years. I fixed really basic sentence-level problems: things like using a dialog tag instead of attaching dialog to an action. Things like cutting adverbs. Oh lord, the adverbs. :) I still over-use them, especially in rough drafts, but OMG, the adverbs. :) Really small stuff like that. Things I could do without worrying about how it might affect the overall structure.

I got to chapter twelve, which I had been so very, very proud of ten years ago. And I am still, and always will be proud of it, because it tells one story from four different points of view in such a way that the reader gets to understand what really happened without any of the characters getting to. I remember holding my breath while I was writing it. I held my breath re-reading it. I finished the book and was honestly astonished at the structural craftsmanship. I’d forgotten the graceful unbraiding of five storylines and how neatly they wound back together. I thought, as I did a decade ago, that the last quarter of the book was a triumph.

I discovered everyone was right. The characterization needed work. The first chapter, particularly, needed rewriting. There were scenes early on that, in re-reading, I feared were boring, but thought I could fix by addressing the characterization issues. There were scenes I hated (yes, even in this book I love so much) that I finally knew how to fix. These were things I could not have done ten years ago.

I did them now, and I am no longer afraid there are boring scenes (a belief which will be tested shortly when I give the manuscript to my 8 year old nephew to read). The characterization is much improved. The weak scenes have been rewritten entirely.

And it is unquestionably the best book I have ever written.

Is it done? No, of course not. My agent will have comments. The editor who eventually buys it will have comments. I, in formatting the book differently for its patrons, could see places to fix more details. But it is certainly the very best I can do right now, and it’s so much better than it was ten years ago. I’m proud of myself and I’m so, so happy to have finally come back to this project. I can only hope other people like it half as much as I do.