writing

[dragonlady7]

To sum up, Scrivener is the best thing ever. It is precisely what I have been missing all this time, it is just what would have saved me in 2003, it is something I have been needing since about 1992, and I am officially asking for a paid license for it for Christmas because I cannot live without it.

So anyway, that's my NaNoWriMo-- I didn't really write much that's new, but I combed through my hard drive and found everything I've ever written on Barbarians_Novel, including the first scribbled notes, and all the abortive drafts since. One document alone is over 190,000 words long, and is utter nonsense, but contains some compelling scenes, which are not usable in any way but may go into another book in another life, and are immensely useful in delineating for me precisely why I no longer participate in NaNoWriMo and similar foolishness.
I might mention there are over 75 documents, ranging in length from about 50 words to the one above. Not many on that low end, either. Most I'd say hover in the 30,000-word range. I'm serious about that, by the way. In 2003 I went through all my writings and tallied them up and counted over a million words, of fiction. Not counting journaling, which I did intensively. Over a million words.
I do not need NaNoWriMo.
I need a fucking editor.
It is fascinating to watch the development of the kernel of a tellable story. It is fascinating to follow the innumerable dead ends. It is a bit heartbreaking to see where sheer disorganization did me in. I have poured so much work into this thing, and at this point the usable, final draft stands at somewhat under 5,000 words.
Five thousand words.
The rest is... well, optimistically I can mine it. But the usable portions don't even constitute a skeleton. But they do have enough points to plot a line, so I at least can scout the direction.
Still not sure if it's a romance. Or what. Lots of sex and violence. The stuff I like. The new draft is going to be a little less conversation and a lot more action. I'm asking myself What Would Martha Wells Do, as she's one who really keeps things moving; I'm also asking myself what Jennie Crusie would do, as she lets her characters chatter like little birds, but makes all the chatter serve something. (I have to say, I love her writing and hate her books. Hate is too strong a word. But I love all the components of it; I love her writing about writing, I love her self-awareness and her wit; I love how she puts a book together. And then I read it and throw it across the room. I feel terrible about that last bit and I just can't figure out why it's true. I've bought several, which is more than I ever do. But I don't love them, and I feel cheated, but I don't blame her one bit for it. Obviously she's got an awesome system and tons of fans, and I don't resent that at all. She's not alone-- there are tons of authors whose blogs I follow ravenously, whose books leave me cold. Weird!)
Anyway.
Things have to happen in this book, and weirdly that's meant adding in more POVs, and cutting down on the chatter from the main ones. Fine by me and I'm enjoying it a lot and Scrivener is making it so easy.

Which was all a long aside.
All of this posting was to say, I have a writing roadblock, and would love to ask you, O Internet, whoever has not deserted me for Facebook, for help.
I have this character.
He is an adorable and sincere and valiant young man. Not the 'hero' but a good guy nonetheless. When the protagonist (female) first encounters him, he says something along the lines of "Where the hell have you been?" to the hero. They are speaking the heroine's language, which is not their native language, because they are polite even in extremity (the hero may be getting stabbed at the time). He speaks it very well, but of course, he learned it from a tutor and not on the street, and so he speaks it sort of, well... he sounds like that guy who spoke in between the beeps in health class. He's got the equivalent of vintage 1962 academic English.
So he doesn't know any actual swear words. So what he actually says is approximately, "Where the dickens have you been?" in the sort of crisis where a really emphatic swear word would be called for.

Buuuut... I don't want to say "the dickens" because a modern English reader is going to say, "Charles Dickens?"
It's important, because he doesn't introduce himself (action scene!), so the POV character, the heroine, a native speaker of the language they're speaking, refers to him as "the dickens boy" in her head for the rest of the scene, and may do so for the rest of the novel. And "the dickens boy" is going to read like "the Dickens boy" and so... you know, a proper name like that is just going to be too jarring.

So I need something like that. Not a rustic thing-- not "Where in tarnation have you been", for example, because him sounding rustic isn't going to work. He has to sound antiquated, out of touch, silly, and harmless. (The harmless part is really important; people are getting stabbed, and his antique quirky accent changes the tone a great deal for the terrified and injured heroine, who hears him before she can see him.)
I'm drawing a blank on non-swear-words that are charmingly retro without being rustic.
Help?

Comments

[forodwaith.livejournal.com]

Um... "good heavens, where have you been"? "where the excrement have you been"?

Wow. Over 190,000 words? I am officially in awe.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I wrote the vast majority of it in 2003 or 2004, whilst unemployed, following a decision that The Way To Write A Novel was just to Let The Characters Speak, etc. I went through a phase while ostensibly job-hunting wherein I'd devote about 100 hours a week to writing this thing. It got very out of hand and ... still isn't a novel.
So when I'm "writing" it, I'm really pruning through a very dense jungle of disorganized character development and trying to find some kind of plot to speak of.

I may need to see if I can find any vintage educational materials online to read so I can really get that tone down. The one example I had clearly in my head, as I thought more on it, turned out to be the guy in NYC's subway system who says, with mechanical cheer and way too much inflection, "Stand clear of the closing doors please!" So that's not it at all. I need filmstrips. I need educational scripts. I really need a corker here, that's way off the wall. It's got to be book-perfect but completely unsuitable for use by a native speaker in the wild.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Also I just read your icon properly for the first time and laughed my posterior off.

[besina-sartor.livejournal.com]

My suggestions were very similarr to forodwraith's. I was thinking "where in heavens have you been?" And I like the "where the excrement..." (made me chuckle). If you want to shorten that up a bit you could also use the word offal.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Mmm... I do like the idea of using clinical terms instead of vulgar ones, inappropriately, and I shall certainly remember to work that in elsewhere in his speech. After all, he spends most of the novel speaking this not-his-native-language. I think I will also experiment with a misuse of idioms-- like in some languages, "shit" isn't a curse word, it's just what comes out of your butt, and so saying "Oh shit!" is a really weird thing to say. So I may have him literally translate expletives from his own language, which don't mean anything in this one, and so it's really bizarre and jarring.
Of course, this just means I need to research expletives in other languages. And that won't be a weird, weird string of search terms in Google at all. LOL.

[buschibaby.livejournal.com]

I said it on Facebook but I'll say it here too: where in blazes have you been?

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

Where the deuce have you been?

I feel like that over Nano. I only have maybe 75,000 words that I will never use as a result of NaNo, but I think it's enough to teach me that it doesn't really work for me. Without time to figure out where stuff goes, I end up producing stuff that doesn't go anywhere.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

The deuce! Oh yes, that's a funny one too. I knew I could count on you British types. Y'all have a better instinctive and cultural grasp of obscenity and its shades than Americans, and it's a little-appreciated fact. (I was gobsmacked consistently during my UK sojourn as a teen to discover the myriad grades of vulgarity, obscenity, and overall color available in the UK dialect that the US one simply doesn't possess, as well as by how thoroughly versed in different registers of communication everyone was. Americans just don't use the language as hard, on average.)

It's not for me that NaNo rushes me, it's that it frees me rather too much, and I feel perfectly justified in ardent pursuit of every wordy and labyrinthine possibility remotely suggested by the plot, as well as freeform dives into alternate universes before the primary one is even established. It's awful, because I really don't need that-- I'm capable of it on my own, thanks. Six years on and I'm still trying to clean up some of the mess from NaNo 2003... I did all right in '04 I think, or maybe it was '05, on discipline and producing a readable output, but it's still not optimal for me-- that readable output is so uninteresting I've made only the slightest attempts since to revise it, and have consistently failed to make anything remotely salable out of it.
Oh well. I'm glad NaNo helps others, though. And I have had so much fun with it in the past. Maybe I'll be in a place again to need it, someday.

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

LOL! I think that apart from the middle classes we do all rather enjoy a bit of profanity. And it probably does help to grow up being trained to hear class differences from (for example) whether someone says 'that bugger' or 'that wanker'.

I did OK in 2007 on NaNo - I managed to do the first draft of False Colors. But I suspect now that that was a fluke due to me having got the story firmly established in my mind already through having done a short version in drabbles first. I'm beginning to think that a great deal of the work involved with writing is the concept wrangling that happens before you even start. If it doesn't happen, then you get stampeding ideas and not a lot of forward progress.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Blazes is an excellent one. :) I may wind up using that one!!

[jennnlee.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it sounds like NaNo isn't really for you. To me, NaNo seems to be about making people get things down on paper, who either think "oh, I can't do it, it's too hard" or "I don't have time" or similar. But you obviously don't have that problem. :-)

I had an amazing month with NaNo, starting with hardly anything at all and ending up with a mostly cohesive plot that may actually Be Something. Of course it needs heavy, HEAVY rewriting, but it always does. NaNo was really good for me because I had lost the fun in writing a long time ago. I haven't had fun with writing since my fanfic days.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Oh-- absolutely!! I don't mean to shit on anyone's parade about NaNo. It's a wonderful thing and I'm very glad it exists. In fact just last night I told a co-worker about it, and he was delighted to hear it existed and made much of writing down the URL. (He's a part-time librarian in his fifties and had just recited the very witty opening line to a crime thriller he said he would never write but liked to think about writing. OMG he is a textbook needer-of-NaNo.)

I just have never had trouble with production. It's organization I need, and NaNo is the opposite of helpful with that. I was reading your NaNo updates with considerable pleasure-- if there is anyone who does not need to have lost the joy of writing, it's you, and I'm so glad you've got it back.