Magpie Novelwriting

 

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Saturday at 8:43am Pacific, I finished the first draft of my new (as-yet-untitled) novel. This is exciting, because the novel begins today, no earlier than 6:30pm Mountain (probably more like 9pm Mountain).

When I started the original short-story version of this tale in fall 2024, it was set in April/May 2025. The goal was to get it into the world before the events occurred.

But it never was a short story, so I’ve spent the last year expanding it into a novel that begins April 28, 2026 and ends Monday May 4, 2026. It had to be then (now) because the protagonists needed to graduate from BYU and get married before things start, as you can see from the first page of my MS:

Temples are closed on Sundays and Mondays. Can’t get them married then. And we need a couple days of action before the weekend hits. Tuesday, April 28 it is.

Pre-dating is standard operating procedure with me. Byuck takes place in the 2000–2001 school year. I started writing it in 1999 and finished the first draft in 2004. Just Julie’s Fine takes place fall 2005. I started in in 2004 and finished its first draft in 2012.

I guess I want my books to take place the exact same moment their first readers read them? If so, I haven’t pulled it off yet. And it would take a miracle for this book to appear even next year. Tuesday’s out of the question.

Anyway, at least I got the rough done before the novel starts this time. I’m feeling good about that. I’m undecided if I should dig into the rewrite immediately or follow Stephen King’s advice and sticking it in a drawer until I’ve written something else. We’ll see.

To celebrate draft one though, I wanted to share a bit of how the short story became a novel.

First, it always was a novel. It was apparent from go that I was trying to cram way too much into 6,000 words (ultimately almost 12,000, notwithstanding my efforts at brevity). But still—how did that grow into this?

(Incidentally, mystery novels should generally land between 70,000 and 90,000 words and I was aiming for the upper count. Nailed it!)

How did I get to 89,035 words? Well, of course, I filled in the parts that had gotten short shrit before. But another part of it was simply taking what surrounded me and shoving it into the novel. Here are some examples.

I probably stole more ideas from this book than I remember. I would already own my own copy of this (remember: I loved it) if Lady Steed wasn’t so freaked out by the cover. And, if I did, I could then thumb through its pages and see what else there is to admit to, but here’s one thing I definitely took from Chuck:

He said add a dog.

I added a dog.

I was at Stuff, gosh, two or three months ago? As per usual, alongside the LPs and tiki crafts and midcentury political buttons and funky furniture, there were piles and piles and piles of Playboys. On the top of one of these piles was an issue that didn’t look much like the other issues. For one thing, it didn’t star a buxom beauty on the cover. If I remember right, there was one of these but she was small and up in the corner of her issue’s orange-brown cover that otherwise was just a list of authors interviewed within. Ray Bradbury. Joyce Carol Oates. I think Normal Mailer and Joseph Heller were on there. Dozens of names.

I didn’t think much about it at the time—it was just one more Playboy in an antique consignment shop—but I kept thinking about the issue. And thus the issue came to play an important role in an extended flash back I intended to write. I wasn’t worried about being able to learn more about this issue when the time came because, as I believe I mentioned, there are endless Playboys in Stuff and this one had a particularly unsexy cover. It would still be there whenever I got around to returning.

Well, I didn’t get around to returning until I was ready to insert it into the plot. First, I did some looking around online but couldn’t learn the details I needed. In fact, I couldn’t even prove the issue existed. So I went back to Stuff and went through every single pile of Playboys without success. I took a deep breath and asked the proprietor and he was like, uhhhh, do you have any idea how many Playboys we have in this place? I took his point and went home sad (albeit with my wife’s birthday present in tow) (which I should mention is neither LP nor tiki nor politics nor furnishing nor Playboy) (and only cost me three dollars) (plus tax).

Anyway, back the internet. Searching and searching and searching. Playboy is a hugely popular brand and you can find anything you want. Except evidence that this orange-brown (special?) issue I saw with my own eyes exists in this timeline.

The issue was, gulp, out of the novel.

Yes, I could make up details, but that’s cheating. So now the two interviews I needed would have to come from individual issues. Wikipedia helped me out here, and luckily the interviews I wanted did exist and I did find them online. But now I had to rethink how the scene would play out. In the end, the differences weren’t that great and Playboy diehards will have fewer reasons to send me angry correspondance.

I didn’t read East of Eden recently (it’s been over five years), but I keep trying to capture its multigenerational epicness in shorter form. Now in the form of a mid-novel digression. I’m not sure what first gave me the idea but it may have been

Carla Kelly’s amazing novel about Utah coal mining or

a fascinating little article I read from a free magazine we picked up at Smith & Edwards last summer about prostition among said miners. (Ends up, I could’ve pushed the prostitution angle much longer than I did!) Both of those certainly had influece on my creation of Copper, Utah. But while they provided suggestions for the early years of my mini-multigenerational-epic, what would bring it into the present day?

An early assist was given by Murderland. This gave me information about the end of the first era and it provided context for the decades preceding now. Stuff from Murderland fit in nicely with the already extant history of Copper and provided help building out the nature of the place—a place that now had a suitable number of red herrings.

But the middle years were still missing.

Red Harvest is incredible. Maybe my favorite hardboiled noir. The Continental Op is cold and dangerous but moral in his own strange way. But that much is true of all the noirs I’ve been reading of late. What Red Harvest did separate from the rest is provide a template for Copper during the same era the Continental Op. Copper isn’t identical to Personville but aspects of the Continental Op’s discoveries absolutely influenced the way the mini-epic plays out.

If the book were being published this month, I would have got some things slightly wrong. Nothing fatal, but man—the price of gas matters here!

In December, on our way back from the Charles M. Schulz Museum, we stopped to see the holiday lights at the Marin County Civic Center. And, as it ends up, visit a churro truck. And, as it ends up, enjoy rooms filled with the work of local photographers.

Straight into the novel.

Around the same time as the Playboy crisis (and possibly engaged in because I was avoiding the Playboy crisis), I decided to name a character who had not yet made her appearance (and would be appearing just moments before the Playboys). I looked around here and there for options. Nothing felt right. What about naming her after a Norse goddess? Maybe.

This page convinced me that both Freya and Skadi were deserving namesakes. But would this character prove more a “goddess of love, beauty, fertility, and at the same time, war and death” or a “goddess of winter, mountains, and hunting”?

I liked the name Freya better and it definitely would work for the little I knew about the character. But Skaði was more precisely accurate. Given the, like, two tiny traits I knew about her.

In the end, the name made a huge difference. I altered the name to Scandy (it may change again, but she will remain Skaði’s namesake regardless) and with this new name, she because someone quite different than I had imagined. Ho boy, but did things get interesting with a Scandy in the house. Don’t know how similar a Freya-based high-school girl would have turned out. And now we’ll never know.

Anyway. You pick things up. You set them down. Some of them work their way into the story. Some become vital.

And the same thing will keep happening in the rewrite process. Who knows what silly YouTube video will result in a completely new scene.

But I made it. Draft one done.

On we go.

700 words at a time.