Have I mentioned lately

[rolanni]

...that I Really Hate to Write Proposals? Honest to ghod, I would rather write a whole book on spec; it's less trouble and more fun. And I feel like monster, kinda sorta maybe promising the characters that maybe they might get to actually live in this book someday and could they, y'know, work for me just a little, on condition (and not enough to actually wake up, because if they wake up we're in Very Big Trouble), and if somebody buys the proposal, I'll get back to them.

So, anyway.

The proposal's done, or as done as I can make it, given my general squeamishness regarding the process.

And tomorrow I'll reward myself by working on The Nameless Novella.

Comments

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I never really thought of proposals that way, though now that I look at it through that lens it sounds really, really disturbing!

Usually I think of the characters as having already having things happen to them and inviting me along as a war photographer or embedded journalist or something. Then if I get called back on some other assignment, I still think of them as doing whatever it was I left them doing, just without me to record it.

Of course, this is the kind of thinking about character realities that so many other authors call precious and artificial. :P

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Hmm.

I think the characters have their own lives once the book's in process. For me, though, there's a Meeting and Discovery period that happens just when the characters wake up, and which is part of the ...magic of writing. I don't want to take a chance of waking the characters up too early and losing that magical discovery time.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Fascinating. I'd never considered the actually meeting of the characters as an event tied to the books they inspire. That's a fascinating perspective.

I think my biggest irritation with character foibles, when it comes to chronicling their adventures, is the whole quantum uncertainty about exactly -what- all goes in the middle. I know the end and the beginning and the high points, but all the bits that join them that give the story so much of its context and life are in flux until I write them down in a finalized form. Drafts aren't good enough to nail these events.

I complain about this to the more meta-aware characters, who just pat me and say, "You know how sometimes you plan to have a conversation with someone, and you imagine how it goes and you even script what you say, and then you walk in and start the conversation and it rarely goes the way you planned?" And I say, "Yeah," with a sinking feeling... *chuckle* So I guess they don't know either, though they know. Frustrating. :)