'Tis Nyte! by Elizabeth Watasin

#amwriting and thankfully, Scrivener makes it go faster. The key to it all is Organisation.

And a British language dictionary that *lets* me type in British English!! (Because I'm Californian American). ;)

Thanks to my spending most of 2014 trying to get my old comic book series, Charm School into digital and print ( A TASK THAT'S NOT DONE---WHYYYY ), I am still behind on writing the third Dark Victorian book, EVERLIFE. Elle Black's POISON GARDEN manuscript that I started last winter is still in holding pattern. Charm School's BODY CHASE: THE FALL OF FAIRER THAN was edited last spring by me editor and still needs me to fix it.

So what do I decide to do? Write a short story novelette called Dark Victorian: ICE DEMON for the occasion of holiday release. Because holiday stories are important!

Actually, I'm writing it because it's darn fun to have a story based on holiday occasions (despite my Gothic tendencies, I still miss marking a story to celebrate Samhain/All Hollow's/Halloween). And ICE DEMON is helping me cope psychologically with the 100+F heat we're dealing with in Los Angeles. Glacial Victorian London, take me away!

But back to Scrivener. I've mentioned before that Word is exasperating for me to work in, it's too linear. I nearly wanted to hang myself writing a 400+ page manuscript (which was BONES) in Word. Scrivener has the versatility I need to move around *quickly* in a manuscript, and to 'see' the entirety of it. The screenshot doesn't show how I would divide a manuscript into parts/Chapters. That's because I *thought* ICE DEMON was going to be a short. :-p But I can still hop around in the script, tackling all story points with my reference open until I've covered that information.

ICE DEMON has a huge amount of reference links and pics because it's all stuff I'm not familiar with: Victorian ships, sails, engine rooms, navigation rooms, seamen, polar exploration, the Pool of the London, quays, hoar frost, glaze ice, ice fog, hypothermia, ice rescue, DIY ice claws, the operation of (antique) blow lamps, all the elements belonging in a Frost Fair, and so on. Despite such dilettantism in all such aspects, I think I've been a week on this manuscript and may have hit the halfway point at (currently) 12,000 words +. :)

And perhaps that's another point I'd like to make with Scrivener. I know some writers are down on keeping word count---quality vs quantity, and all that. But I keep word count because for me, it is essential to take physical measure of my script. Every story is different, but there is a beginning, middle, and end, and when I've hit all those parts I need to know how much I'm putting in between. All those good, meaty bits, those reveals, understandings, sense of place, and moments of hilarity/horror/grief/ascension. At least I hope those get put in. All parts of a story have a sense of timing and of how long they may be. And they need their time to be cut out if they're not working out. By hopping around in the manuscript I can do that, and word count is the measure, I would argue, of maintaining a story of quality.

The above screenshot of ICE DEMON in progress is the *raw* manuscript, before my editor has even seen the thing. The bit where Jim refers to Aldosia Stropp's 'malady of the mouth to the brain' is just a Victorian way of saying 'Tourette's syndrome'. ;)

I dropped the freelance (non-profit) animation from my responsibilities. Since the beginning of summer I've also been spec writing. So I'm trying to write something of my own as quickly as possible before I'm asked (we would hope) to adapt someone else's property. Until then, I'm wintering in a glacial London with a Monster afoot. :)

all the best,

~eee