I started this as a note to myself on November 25, but it morphed into something else.

I have been writing Dreamsinger since July, following my usual foolish technique of jumping in with both feet and stomping around until things start to take shape. I knew the basic outline of the novel, but finding secondary characters to carry it on and portraying the culture without narrative dumps has been a bit difficult.

At this point, Dreamsinger is something of a tangle. There are about 25-30 thousand words of good writing, but things are misarranged (deranged?). It doesn’t properly hang together yet.

Richeal is part of the problem. I know you don’t know who she is, but let that stand; explaining her would force this into two posts, and I’m not ready for that yet.

I have avoided Richeal and pushed her into the background, despite the fact that she is a main character. She could be the big time villain; better still she could be the well-meaning and ruthless seeker after the wrong star, somewhat like Curran. I have finally chosen the latter, and that means I need much more of her, much earlier.

Dreamsinger now begins with the prolog and Antrim’s initial response to a suicide. That much works well. We still need to see and come to value Antrim before anybody else takes the stage, because we will see the story primarily through his eyes. However, Richeal is his primary adversary and should be present and a major force by the very next scene. I will do that, but it will require rearranging the sequence of a dozen smaller scenes.

My underlying error is the failed idea that the culture of the spacebounds is of small interest, and the culture of the planetbounds should be the novel’s main focus. I have been trying to present the spacebounds in as few words as possible in order to get on to the meat of the story. It turns out, that is the wrong way to go about it.

The reason Dreamsinger has gone adrift is the same reason that I’m living in the foothills today.  I hate crowding and I hate cities. I want to get down onto the planet Stormking where I will feel comfortable as quickly as I can. That would make the act of writing more pleasant for me, but the story would suffer.

The hyper-city, Home Station, is the culmination of an escape from Earth and the starting point for everything else. If I want to write this novel, instead of an Andre Norton style struggle in the wilderness, I have to follow its internal reality and suppress my distaste. Otherwise I need to write a different novel.

I have to write about a place I would hate, from the viewpoint of a character who finds it quite normal, and who has no real idea of how artificial it is.

Antrim needs to eventually be able to see the plight of the exiles on Stormking from an understanding and sympathetic viewpoint. To build that character, I have to build the history, culture, and physical layout of Home Station, along with the personalities of those who formed him and those who are trying to turn him into something else. Thirty thousand words hasn’t done it yet, because they aren’t quite the right words. Yet.

Close, but not close enough. Yet.

This all comes down to the author’s experiences and values. I say the author’s experiences instead of my experiences because it is also true of you, you authors and would-be authors out there in the blogosphere reading these words.

Home Station, like the overcrowded Earth in the middle section of Cyan, comes from the nine months I spent on the south side of Chicago. You may live there and love it for all I know, but for me it was a hell of claustrophobic fear, trapped inside a tiny apartment, cut off from the nature that I love, and surrounded by a place where bodies showed up on the streets every night. The University of Chicago itself was a joy; everything else was horrid. I got the MA I went for and couldn’t leave fast enough.

On the other hand I find Stormking relatively easy for me to portray. I grew up in a land of powerful winds, extended droughts, dust, heat, cold, and tornadoes. I worked outside every winter in sub-zero cold and every summer in sweltering, humid heat, all before anyone had air conditioning and central furnaces. I loved it, except sometimes in the worst of winter, and it all seemed perfectly natural.

Now I have to live inside the mind of Antrim, for whom the claustrophobic Home Station seems right and natural, and for whom Stormking will be a near-killing shock to mind and body. I have to create, then live with, someone whose reactions are the complete opposite of my own.

Weird how things work out. Oh well, no one ever said writing would be easy.