It’s been several months after I got my kick in the gut critique and after some time of mulling the story over, I went ahead and opened a new Scrivener project, saved it as Julius 2012 and started to outline.

I kept the prologue, but changed the voice to the second person. I was inspired by Chris Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers. It’s a little off-putting at first when you write it, but once you get the hang of this voice, it’s fun. At least, I think so.

Other changes to the story include ditching a good chunk of the first 70 pages, but I also salvaged a few scenes here and there. I cut a lot of the slapstick and now it’s more serious in tone. The big change is that Chapter 10 is now the first chapter and it’s written in the third person.

I hesitated writing in the third person because of my past experience of switching voices too often, but now that I know how to handle the mechanics of the various viewpoints, I like getting in the head of these characters to see what motivates them and how they think.

I’ve changed  a lot personality traits. Jake’s character is no longer impulsive or happy-go-lucky as he was before. He’s serious about his work and he has his goals for both the magazine and with Corinne.

As for Corinne, I’ve made her less sarcastic and more ingenuous. The standout feature with Corinne is that she’s at a crossroads and needs to find what will make her happy, especially with a person like Jake who wants to be in control and the center of attention.

The two other male characters seem to share the similar traits as Jake so that leads to think that Corinne attracts a certain type of man into her life.

I’m still stumbling about as I create the outline, but I’m seeing the power of Scrivener with all it’s handy features that help the process of outlining and writing that first draft. And I think it’s fair to say that with the exception of a handful of scenes that I pulled out from previous version, this is a first draft.

Thanks to the outlining, and I outline in chunks, about 12 chapters at a time, I suspect  because of the speed the writing that I might be done with this first draft by the end of next month. I was planning to rejoin the Novels-list at IWW, but I’ll wait until the manuscript is complete. Then it’s back to critiquing, and hopefully, I won’t be eviscerated with this version. In the meantime, I’ve offered it to two trusty readers so that they can get a feel for this new version.

So that’s where things stand with Julius and my not-so-merry Marxists.

I’ve been writing about my trials and tribulations with Julius for over a year and I’ve tweaked, revised, cut, added, and scrapped a lot of it. The only section that seems to have stayed the same is the prologue.  So I thought I would offer a sneak peak. Some of my online writing critters have seen it. I have made some minor changes, but this section sets up the entire story.

So here it is. If you leave a comment, please be constructive and kind. I already do a good job of beating myself up.

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Julius

Westchester County, 1978

I first saw Sing-Sing on a cold, gray-white February Sunday. I was only ten years-old.

My father and I were heading back home to Chappaqua when we drove through the Hudson River town of Ossining. From the passenger side of the car, I admired the old and spooky stone buildings.

“It’s pretty here,” I said.

“If you like prison towns,” he said and pulled at his graying beard.

We continued on and passed the train station. My father pointed to a concrete wall with rolled barbed wire on top and to a pair of tall watchtowers that loomed on the other side. “Remember the film we saw the other night, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing with Spencer Tracy?  This is it.”

I unbuckled my seat belt and twisted turned around for a better view. A moment later he added, “Miserable town, and its electric chair.”

My head snapped around and I gaped at him. Electric chair? A few weeks earlier in our study at home, I had discovered Dear Dead Days, a macabre picture book by Charles Addams that held my attention for hours. Among the odd collection of photographs and drawings, one stood out. It was an illustration of a man in dark prison garb with a black hood over his head; he was strapped in an early model of the electric chair; his legs rested on a high, narrow ottoman; his ankles were clamped down. From the tip of  the black hood an attached wire snaked its way to a box with a gauge that was mounted on the wall and meandered along to large hand switch. The executioner sported a bushy mustache and wore an old-fashioned, black boxy suit. His hand grasped the over-sized handle and his face registered no emotion. Beneath the image it said: “Execution by Electricity—the Chair and Apparatus Used in Producing Death. 1889.”

I had memorized the image and I could see all the details from the insipid expression on the executioner’s face to the prisoner’s heavy-heeled boots, his turned out ankles and his knotted and fisted hand resting on his belly.  The image clouded over and faded to black when my father tugged at my down jacket’s sleeve and said, “Corinne, honey, turn around and put on your seatbelt.”

I obeyed him and pulled at the belt. “Do they still use it?”

My father shook his head.“Not anymore. And what seemed like an afterthought he added, “I came here to protest—a month  later I left for Paris.”

The car seemed to have gotten colder; I leaned closer to the vents and rubbed my mittened hands together to generate more heat. “Protest what?”

“An execution,” he said.

“Who got executed?”

He looked at me from the corner of his eye and said, “It was actually two people—a man and his wife.”

“What did they do?”

“The government said they gave secrets about the atom bomb to the Russians. The wife’s brother betrayed her.”

I mulled over this information, and stared at the red, yellow, and purple stripes of my mittens Secrets were supposed to be kept in a vault. It was bad to give up a secret, but tattling was worse–at least that’s what my mother said. She always told me, “Never, ever, point your finger at someone and name them.”

We were driving  up our street when I looked out the windshield. I saw our mailbox, the only one in the neighborhood painted with the stark, red star, daring to be different from all the conservative and ordinary tin gray mailboxes

“Why did the lady’s brother snitch on her?”

He stared straight ahead, twisting a section of his bristled beard. “It’s complicated. They were scapegoats . . . like so many others,” he sighed, and flicked on the turn signal.

“Did you know them?”

“No, but they were like your mother and me.”

We turned left and drove into the driveway; the sound of gravel crackled and popped beneath the tires. My father switched off the headlights and ignition. He stepped out of the car, and stared up at the sky. The gray-white afternoon was now a deep purple, velvet night.

I climbed out of our old, blue Peugeot and slammed the door. “What were their names?”

My father’s shoulders slumped. He didn’t say anything.

“I want to look them up in the encyclopedia. I won’t bug you about them any more. Cross my heart.” I motioned with my hand to make the sign.

“Rosenberg,”  he said.

“And their first names?”

“Ethel was the wife.” He looked up at the sky again. “Hey, you might get lucky. Looks like snow.”

The color shifted from deep purple to a lighter violet cast. My attention shifted away from the Rosenbergs. I clasped my mittened hands, pressing them hard against my chest, and crashed down to my knees. My eyes were squeezed shut. I prayed for no school, and chanted under my breath the “Snow, no school” mantra three times.

After a deep breath of cold air that caused a coughing fit, I dropped my hands to my sides. I opened my right eye first, then my left eye and saw plump snowflakes floating down from the heavens. It was as if God had gotten into a pillow fight with his angels. I pumped my small fist in the air and cheered “Yes!” I continued to celebrate with a clumsy pirouette and stumbled over the gravel while trying to catch the frozen fluff with my tongue.

My father climbed up the stairs to the front porch and shouted, “Come inside before your mother starts moaning about pneumonia.”

“Hey! You didn’t tell me the man’s name,” I yelled back.

He stood on the top step and leaned against the white wooden railing; his hands shoved deep inside his coat’s pockets. My father turned his face up to the violet, snow-filled sky and said, “His name was Julius.”

For the past few days I’ve been in editing mode. I’ve taken my sharp eye and sharp pencil and read through the first seven chapters of Julius, and cut, cut, cut.

A lot of what I’ve taken out is back story. I know. It’s surprising that I, lover of back story, decided that it should go out with the rest of the garbage. But I’ve seen the error of my ways, and I discovered in this past reading marathon that backstory, indeed, slows the narrative down. So one issue has been put to rest.

Unfortunately, however, Julius has many other issues and I have to tackle them all one by one. The first part of the book sets everything up for the second and third parts, so that means I really can’t move forward until Part One is perfect. It’s  frustrating, but it has to be done. In the meantime I can start outlining the second and third parts when I need a break from the editing.

Back to the salt mines…

Agents hate prologues. Yet I see them everywhere. So if they dislike them so much why are they popping up here, there, and everywhere? Makes you wonder who is coming up with these arbitrary rules and whether we as writers should listen to them or not.  Books that have prologues? Well, let’s see there’s Daniel Silva’s The Rembrandt Affair, The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch, The Likeness by Tama French, Blood Harvest, by S.J. Bolton,Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. I could mention more, but I’m not in the mood to page through my three thousand books–now you know why I went and bought a Kindle–no space!

Some of these books are from authors who have multiple books under their (Silva, French, and Bolton) the remaining three were first time authors. If prologues are so hated then why are writers including them in their novels?

Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency in Denver has an interesting and valid argument of why prologues for the most part don’t work. I won’t go into all the nitty-gritty details, but the bottom line is you’re going to add a prologue it has to have a clear purpose in the story. Makes a lot of sense. Nelson also notes that most agents skip the prologue and go straight to the first chapter. So you’re not off the hook if you have a terrific prologue, and an okay first chapter, especially if it gets ignored. That first, second, and the subsequent chapters all have to be top notch if you want representation. To read more of Kristin’s opinion visit her post titled, “Why Prologues Don’t Work.”

Of course this all leads to what I spent most of the morning working on: the prologue to Julius. Now Kirstin Nelson might say it’s unnecessary, but I think it’s relevant to the story because it introduces several elements that will crop up later in the novel.

The prologue has gone through several revisions, and I think this last one finally hits the mark. I’ve set the tone of a precocious ten year-old child who is going through a morbid curiosity phase where the ghoulish seems to grab her attention. In the past, I’ve had some people who critiqued it and told me that they weren’t convinced by some of her actions, but my one disclaimer is that this incident was based on an event that happened to me when I was that age. The premise of Julius all started with my own personal obsession with the Rosenbergs. How the hell did a little girl get interested in the Rosenbergs? Well, it’s in the prologue.

Now that I think I’ve nailed the prologue, it’s time to finesse that first chapter and the following twenty-nine. Off to do some work on Mr. TNT. . .

With NANOWRIMO over and taking last week off from writing fiction (but spending most of my week writing, editing, and proofing for HAND/EYE), it’s time I get back to Julius.

I’m  motivated to move forward. I have lots of ideas percolating in my head and how to get my characters out of the corner I wrote them into.  Some of the changes include scrapping a character whose purpose really makes no sense. Another character is going through a complete overhaul. And I finally figured out why Corinne dropped out of grad school.

One thing I’m fooling around with is changing the time setting of the story. Tea Party participants and those on the right screaming about the evil’s of socialism are great fodder, and it seems to make sense to change the setting to possibly to the current time period instead of making it 2007 time period. More fodder with conservatives and more timely.

That means more research,  more revisions and more references to the current and economic situation. Thanks to Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the tea party, I think Julius will be a much stronger story.

Off to revise Part One!

Although I’m in the middle of the NANOWRIMO insanity, I’m still working on Julius when I have a spare moment, and I thought I would take the time and share some brainstorming ideas, at least get them down and see if I can iron out this issue that’s been bugging me for a while.

So here goes. . .Julius is the name of the magazine, named after Julius Rosenberg, modeled somewhat after the New Masses with a Lower East Side focus. The problem I have is that LES focus  is too narrow, and after spending time researching the New Masses, I’m thinking that Julius should be a 21st version of the New Masses that reaches out to a very left-wing audience with 21st sensibilities and concerns. Marxist in thought, with reviews, art, essays, but dealing with the issues of post-terrorist America during a time that conservatism seemed at its peak (remember the story takes place before the Great Recession) and everyone seems to be rolling in the dough. So while many publications were writing about the boom, the Merry Marxists are the gloom team, raining on everyone’s parade and crying the sky is falling. So perhaps Julius is all about prescience or since it’s Marxist and it’s about history repeating itself. However, I still think that it should have concerns about the LES since that makes the magazine more personal to the characters.

That seems to make sense, and now I have to go back and change A LOT of the manuscript. Oy. That’s okay, though, it’s the ongoing tale of revision.

Another issue to deal with is Corinne’s secret of why she dropped out of her Ph.D. program. I think I have it worked out, but I need to weave more of that mystery/subplot within the story and interweave that with the whole movie obsession I have going for her. Double oy.

Lastly, the continuing saga of backstory. One of The Final Draft Workshop members made a very valid point. He wrote:

. . . you want the reader asking questions and curious.  If you are telling them something that they are curious about, of course they won’t complain.  And it will work.  But you might have to tease them at first.  Give them hints.  Get them wondering.

So, that’s the danger of early back-story.  If you give it on data that you know is important, but the reader doesn’t, you lose.  End of story.  They’ll stop reading- or at least, if they are an agent they will.

There are no real rules in writing.  The reason we harp on each other over “rules” shouldn’t be because we foolishly believe that all the “rules” must be followed.  If we think that, we’re silly.  But if you break a rule, you better know that you’re doing it.  And there better be a good reason.

Any time the story clock “stops” in a novel, it’s a potential problem.  It may still work.  Again, it boils down to are you answering a question that the reader is dying to know about.  If so, they’ll read those 75 pages,[in reference to Jonathan Franzen's Freedom] and be blissfully happy that you gave them what they wanted.  But I think you have to earn it.  You can’t just say, “So and so author can do it, therefore so can I.”  You must get the reader to want those 75 pages.  They must be at a point where if you didn’t give them that data, they might put the book down for that reason.  Then, it comes across smoothly.

So back to the drawing board on some of these flashback scenes, and rework scenes that will get the reader wondering why Corinne does what she does.

That’s all for now. Need to get my cup o’ Joe and start writing!

While I continue my research on all the numerous topics that Julius touches upon, I’ve taken the presumptuous luxury of daydreaming of what the book’s cover would look like if I actually finish it and if it ever gets published (presumably if you envision your goals, it helps with achieving them.)

Pretty spiffy, Huh? But what’s it all about? I’ve been dreading to write the synopsis because it’s about so many things. However as Keith Recker, editor, founder, my boss, and colleague at HAND/EYE Magazine wisely said, “Don’t be afraid of what you have to do.”

So here goes . . .

Set in New York City’s Lower East Side in 2006 and 2007, Julius is the story of Corinne Sand and Jake Wells, a marketing communications executive and an attorney, who hate their lucrative occupations and dream of publishing a political and literary journal modeled after the defunct New Masses. Told from Corinne’s point of view in the first person, the reader soon learns that Corinne has a chockful of obsessions that include her family’s views on the Spanish Civil War, the Rosenbergs, the CPUSA, the Hollywood Ten, Alvah Bessie and his memoir Men in Battle, and the movies.

After a series of events occur, Jake and Corinne decide that it’s time to pursue their dream. With their life savings, the financial backing of four elderly communists, and staff of two, Jake and Corinne launch Julius, named after the left’s martyred hero Julius Rosenberg.

Running a Marxist magazine during the height of the Bush and Cheney years in money mad New York City does have its problems. Liberal friends either mock the venture or reactionary ones are afraid to be associated with Jake and Corinne. Sticking to their beliefs, the couple move forward and successfully launch Julius. Although it all seems too easy, there are conflicts. Jake and Corinne publish articles very critical of the Lower East Side’s gentrification, real estate developers, City Hall, and new businesses in the area, putting them under the public scrutiny of potential enemies. On top of that, Corinne philosophically wrestles with Jake’s propensity to mix tenets of capitalism with Marxism, while she, a classical Marxist, questions her own dedication to the cause. Then there’s the ghost of Alvah Bessie who haunts Corinne, gives her unsolicited advice about politics, love, life, and writing, and persuades her to become personally involved in a labor story she’s covering.

The story escalates when Jake and Corinne vacation in Paris and they meet a mysterious writer who shares the same ideologies and is planning to return the US. Jake impressed with the man’s credentials hires him as a freelancer. When the mystery writer borrows a laptop from and absently leaves it behind in Battery Park, the case is mistaken as a bomb. When the police discover that it’s simply a computer they find a worrisome short story on the machine’s desktop. Called in for questioning by the FBI, Jake and Corinne learn they’ve been under surveillance since the beginning of their relationship primarily because of Corinne’s background as the daughter of a former blacklisted academic and his politically radical Spanish wife.

Concerned that a blacklist might be resuscitated, and that they’ll be harangued by the government, Jake and Corinne put Julius on hiatus and leave for Paris. In Paris, Jake works as a photojournalist with the idea of turning his essays and photos into a coffee table book, but Corinne seems lost. She had become accustomed to the ghostly Alvah’s visits and their conversations, but after the FBI’s questioning he no longer appears to her. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Corinne once again finds solace in Bessie’s memoir Men in Battle, and takes her obsession with film and the book, adapting it into a screenplay. Jake pushes her to send it to a famed and exiled director whom she admires and has a crush on, but Corinne is too embarrassed and afraid of getting turned down By chance, in a café near the director’s home, they see him and Jake boldly makes a move to strike up a conversation and mentions the screenplay. The director politely expresses interest to read both the book and the adapted screenplay. A few days later, he calls and says he want to make the film.

The story ends a year later in Spain with Corinne on location, serving as a historical consultant on Bessie and the Spanish Civil War. She watches the director’s multiple takes of a key scene, Alvah reappears, admitting to her that he had been watching her since grad school, knowing that her obsessions about him, Men in Battle, Spain, and film that she would be the one who would turn his book into a movie, but she needed a push and had to go through all the steps to get there, and now he had another project for her…

The end.

Well, I left out a lot of things, but that’s the general plot of the story. Obviously it needs work, but it’s a start.

Wow. Once you get it in your head that you need to climb out of the pit and actually do it, you wonder what the was it that held you back in the first place?

I am on a roll. The feedback has been very good in terms that doesn’t leave me discouraged. Some things need to be fixed here and there, but that’s what I expected.

What’s next on the agenda? Book One is finished–I know what needs to be changed and cut. I’m plowing onto Book Two. Ritz, may accountability partner, offered some great advice on back story or flashbacks and I’ll experiment with that. I’m actually quite excited by playing around with it. The back story in Julius is important, and without it, you really can’t understand why Corinne thinks the way she does.

As for revisions, although I am itching to make the changes now, I’m going to hold off. All of my writer friends are telling me to keep writing until the momentum wanes. Sensible advice. However in between these panster sessions, I’m reading Elizabeth Lyons Manuscript Makeover, which I’m finding very enlightening. I’ll go into further detail about  the book once I’m through with it and revise further my manuscript.

So,  I gotta keep rolling. It’s time for some more writing!

There’s been a lot of email exchanges recently about writing insecurities and how to overcome them, and I was happy to note that I’m not the only person who’s plagued by the negative self-talk. What got me out of the rut? Well, self-talk can also be encouraging and persuasive. I suppose my Just Do It post played a part, but also reading the FaceBooks updates of two of my writer friends pushed me forward.

Where am I now with Julius? I managed to climb out of that self-pity pit and revised chapter seven. It still has issues, but it’s now moving in a direction that makes sense. Or I least I hope it makes sense. I’ve rewritten chapter eight, and this evening I’ll be ready to submit it for critique.

In terms of sticking to a schedule, I spoke yesterday with my accountability partner and we’ve agreed we’ll have our respective chapter nines completed by the end of the month, and at least three chapters finished by the end of May.  Another writing assignment we’ve given ourselves is to write 500 words of our novels daily. That can be a little tough, especially if you’re working on other writing projects, but the purpose is to keep us in the habit to work on the novel daily. I know it’s all very elementary, but when you write for a living and you’re writing more than two articles and book reviews per week it gets overwhelming. Usually something gets dropped, and for me that’s  been Julius.

So. . . Rebeca has gotten her groove back and she feels good. And on that note, it’s time to write those 500 words.

As I wrote in Doubting Thomas I wondered whether I had a book in me or not, but after listing all the books that I’ve used for research and my rant about self-publishing, I’ve become motivated again, and I’m rethinking or, better yet, analyzing Julius. The premise will remain the same: a former power couple, Jake Wells and Corinne Sand quit their well-paying jobs to launch a Marxist political-literary magazine, based on the New Masses. which they name Julius (after Julius Rosenberg). The magazine’s scope centers on the Lower East Side’s fast gentrification and the issues that come with it.

This all takes place during Bush’s second term–a time when it was all about money, and anything reeking of socialism was considered evil (as it still is today thanks to those tea party imbeciles, but thats another story). The thread weaved throughout the story is what Marx wrote, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, historical facts and personages occur, as it were twice.  He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” And that’s what Julius is all about. A quasi-tragic farcical story of idealists who think they can make a change, but find themselves battling complacency, bureaucracy, greed, personal agendas, but also self-doubt.

It’s a good story, if I do say so myself, but it’s difficult one to write. Why? As you may have seen by the bibliography, its taken a lot of research on topics that tie-in with Corinne’s (the MC and narrator) obsessions: The Spanish Civil War, The Hollywood Ten, Alvah Bessie, Marx, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the movies. I think I’ve been able to weave the history, but now the challenge is to delve into the contemporary issues (pre-Obama and Great Recession), tie those with the past, and create a tight story that makes sense. It’s this juncture that I find myself floundering. Why? Because the past and the concerns of that time–to me–make better reading and writing than modern day matters.

This discovery I’ve made about myself as a writer–a liberating one at that– is that I enjoy writing historical fiction. And it makes sense because I’m a firm believer that you can’t fully comprehend the concerns of the present without having a strong understanding of the past.

So with that breakthrough, I think  it’s time for some writing.