Category Archives: Writing

Il Maestro Update

The tide has turned. A tiny bit of information I read recently solved my ending dilemma: one of the two endings I envisioned simply cannot happen, for my protagonist would never make the sacrifice required for the associated unknown payoff. Now I know how it ends. And today I wrote the pivotal moment where she chooses her path and confirms the end of the novel.

Total word count, Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro: 50,260
New words today: 1,354

Mousme came over to write with me, and brought milk because I twisted my knee coming up the front stairs after waving goodbye to the HRH and the boy on their way out this morning and couldn’t safely walk to the depanneur to get a litre of milk for her tea. We had plain but comfortable fare for lunch — tuna casserole, because I forgot that I was also going to walk to the bakery to get a loaf of bread for sandwiches — and lots of tea.

I didn’t realise how much those two possible endings were weighing on me. I’m looking forward to writing on.

Il Maestro Update, Etc

I had a lovely surprise visit from Mousme this morning, which shouldn’t have been a surprise because I’d invited her. She arrived with her laptop and I made a pot of tea and we sat down and actually wrote stuff. You know, that thing I do for a living, and have been trying to do for the past couple of weeks and have been getting pretty much nowhere because I keep getting sidetracked by shiny research that really doesn’t need to be done this very second? Yes, that. I fed her leftovers and she asked for seconds, wonderful girl.

Total word count, Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro: 48,906
New words today: 1,777

We’re inching towards an end of the first draft. I still don’t know which ending is going to happen. We’ll find out as things develop, I suppose. Once the first draft is complete (how confident I sound) I have a feeling I should go right back to the beginning to polish and expand and fill in the gaps, and attack it with a metaphorical offset spatula to smooth out the continuity. I’m mildly concerned that if I put it away I’ll lose momentum on it. (Momentum? What momentum? The theoretical momentum I’ll have achieved once it’s been finished.) Remember, I put this away last December and only took it out three weeks ago; I don’t want to have to go through all the rereading and reacquainting myself yet again.

Mousme and I now have a casual regular writing date. If it works, don’t mess with it. It’s been ages since we’ve just chatted so we did a lot of that too, catching up and talking about books. Imagine how productive we will be when we don’t have to do as much catching up.

I know I wrote on Friday, but for some reason I didn’t record it. The day’s total was around eight hundred words, I know that, and there was an extra three-hundred-word character file that I finally had to draw up because I could no longer remember the specifics of the dozen or so orphans and several adults I’d created a hundred pages and ten months ago.

This post launches the new Il Maestro-associated icon, from one of Chris Van Allsburg’s breathtaking illustrations for Swan Lake. (No, there are no swans in this novel. Swans elsewhere in my other novels and novellas, yes, but not this one. Are there swans in Venice at all? Other than on crests?)

Saturday we postponed an Ecomuseum trip we’d planned with the Preston-Leblancs due to inclement weather, and had brunch out instead. Then we took the kids to an indoor playcentre and the boy had a rip-roaring time in the three-and-under room of slides and lookouts and big foam blocks. We will absolutely return, and return often, I think. On our way out I spied a kitchen supply shop that had Bundt pans in the windows, and suddenly I was coveting Bundt pans I’d never seen but only heard tell of: cathedral pans! castle pans! rose pans! And not only in the regular large size, but miniature fantasy Bundt pans too!

Sunday we wandered about shops doing errands, and after the boy’s nap we had a birthday visit with HRH’s mother. All in all a lovely weekend.

Today I also applied for a posted freelance job, doing the whole tweaking of CV and creating the perfect cover letter thing — only to have an automated return reply to my email saying that the employer receives so many applications that they’d get back to me in four weeks. Ah well; all that angst, gone in an instantaneous email poof.

Score!

Some day my postman is going to ask me what the heck I do for a living, that I have so many padded envelopes of books coming to my door, some of them quite bulky. And I will say that I am a writer, and I research a lot, and nine times out of ten the perfect book I need is out of print or unavailable at an easily-reached library or too damned expensive to buy new, and so I order them secondhand on-line. I prefer to have my own copy of something I’m likely to use extensively for research, as it eliminates the renewal issue and the losing-the-book-to-a-reserve possibility, and I can plaster it with sticky-notes to my heart’s content.

I have scored a copy of Barbier’s Vivaldi’s Venice, for which I paid $6 CDN. Huzzah!

(This means nothing to most of you, I know. It’s not like it’s a popular book. It just happens to be exactly what I needed.)

This book still has the original shipping slip inside the front cover. It was a comp copy for a Toronto newspaper editor in 2004. The book then somehow found its way down to Georgia to the secondhand retailer from whom I purchased it. I love finding notes or shopping lists or train tickets or boarding passes in secondhand books. It makes the person who owned them so real, and yet so mysterious. Who were they? Did the book make their trip from Oslo more enjoyable? What was their relationship to the Marie about whom they made a note on this scrap of paper, and what did they buy her for her birthday in the end? What did this journalist think of the book? Was it read for a review (unlikely, as the book doesn’t feel as if it’s ever been opened) or was it requested out of personal interest?

I like knowing that human beings still read, that books play a role in their lives. And I like to imagine the journeys that books have made.

Il Maestro Update

I give up. 471 new words; one new page. Mostly descriptive, and will very certainly be rewritten when the project reaches that stage, because it reads like a bad synopsis of something that should be (a) much longer, and (b) much more moving.

Bah. I will blame the humidity. (Also, perhaps I should have consumed more than an avocado dressed with balsamic vinegar for lunch, and a glass of white wine mid-afternoon. Lots of water, too, of course, that should go without saying.)

Il Maestro Update

Total word count, Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro: 45,794
New words today: 1,372
Carrots: a couple (emotionally, if not directly applicable to the work itself)

I didn’t remember the last time I’d actively worked on this book, but the date stamp on the file told me it was last December.

Let’s hear it for rummaging through notes to find suggestions for scenes, and going back to insert them between chapters! There is now part of a Chapter 6 1/2 covering what happens in December, which is a good thing because the existing narrative jumped from November to late January. This is also a good thing in that I get to warm up: it eases me back into the feel of this novel without forcing me to write the Big Thing That Comes Next.

When I opened the file this morning I panicked because it was so much smaller than I remembered it being. I’d forgotten that I cut about five thousand words out of this novel because they sent it in a direction I chose not to take after all. Now, of course, it’s four pages longer.

Some more research has been done, too. I’d like to see a couple of documentaries filmed in the past four years but I can’t find a listing for them anywhere. I don’t think they’re anywhere near crucial enough to write to the production companies to ask where I might obtain copies, though.

Reviving Vivaldi

I am so very glad I delivered the file yesterday; I am terribly sick today with a dreadful head cold. It’s the kind of sick where you’re shivery (I’m bundled in socks and a sweater today), achy and stiff, have zero strength in your limbs, and are generally out of it as well as having all the common oh-so-enjoyable cold bonuses like the sore throat and runny nose and miserable sinuses and the headache. I’m thirsty all the time no matter how much I drink, and when I swallow my ears pop.

I spent the morning reading through the 110 pages I’ve got of Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro, and it’s not bad. As I read through it though, I could see again what had to happen next, and I still don’t think I’m ready to write it. Come to that, after what comes next the story can go one of two ways, and I still don’t know which way it should go. As I read I tidied some things up, corrected punctuation and phrasing, and made notes to myself in the margins to add information or go back and check things.

Evidently last fall when I wrote this Vivaldi was on the brain of the collective consciousness, because when I did a bit of online research I found two new resources that hadn’t existed in November: the Schola Pietatis Antonio Vivaldi, who together with the BBC filmed a programme called ‘Vivaldi’s Women’ on life in the Ospedale della Pieta that aired in March of 2007, and a novel by Barbara Quick called Vivaldi’s Virgins, published a couple of months ago, which at first alarmed me as possibly being like this YA book I’m almost finished writing but it thankfully it really isn’t. (What is it with this trend of referring to the girls of the Ospedale as belonging to Vivaldi?)

And now somehow it’s one o’clock.

We’re doing a birthday dinner with HRH’s dad tonight when we go to pick up the boy. I hope I’m well enough to enjoy myself.