Putting back the snark.

I was waiting for my tech guy Aaron to show up yesterday, to help get started the process of making an e-book, when a light went off in my head.

It's early, but I really believe I may have found the 'third wave' improvement for I'M ONLY HUMAN.

I need the main character, who is the narrator,  to be absolutely over the top.  Crazy, weird, strange.  Make him sloppy and messy and constantly having to fix the messes he gets into and ... just ramp him up to 11, man.

I started getting excited by the idea.  For one thing, it adds a lively tone, for another it gets me involved --- Cobb is me, in the end -- and it gives me motivation to make the book better again.

I thought I was done a few days ago, at least for the time being.  I was going to make a couple of copies and try to get a couple people to read it, and then set it aside.  Come back in a few weeks or months, or whenever I came up with something that I thought would improve it.

The book is O.K.  It's as good as I can do.  It all flows, and it's got some interesting ideas. But it just wasn't THERE.   In the course of rewriting and making it work, I'd also kind of flattened it.

That's the safer route.

I think the prospect of actually putting the book out made me analyze what I was expecting.  And I decided that, ironically, what might be good enough to send to publisher needed to be better for an e-book.

In other words, the opposite of what I expected.

The e-book would be immediately judged, therefore it need to make an impact.  It's better to take the chance of it being too much, of it being over-the-top,  than of having it be too little, too staid.  I was trying so hard for consistency, that I'd lost some spark.

I decided I could just let the character remark on everything in the strongest terms, even if it contradicted other things, or didn't seem appropriate, or whatever.  Because I set the terms of what the character is, and explained why  he's acting that way. 

So anything goes.   Anything.

What did I have to lose?

So what was I missing?

My sub-conscious had already been working in this direction -- I had already decided that I needed a stronger narrator voice in the third wave, whatever it was.  What I didn't realize was, the stronger voice WAS the third wave.

I'm guessing, I'm betting if I'm right, that many of the incongruities of the plot that I wasn't able to smooth out will be explained by the new tone.

Yesterday, I decided that not only did the main narrator/character need to be stronger, but it needed to be CRAZY, erratic, unpredictable, SURPRISING, all over the place --  and so on.  He's trying to be human, and mostly failing, and while he's at it he's making remarks about people and things.

Anything goes, I decided.  Just be a loose cannon.

So I preceded to rewrite the first chapter right then and there, and damn if I don't think it improved it dramatically.  What had seemed an 11 when I wrote it -- over the top -- once it was actually incorporated, actually seemed to fit right in.

The trick I used was to not refer to the original manuscript, but to think about what the chapter was about and have him riffing on it, then mixing it in.

As it happened, I had just read the same chapter at writer's group last time because I thought it was the most polished of all the chapters I had.  So I took the newly written chapter.

They liked it much better.  Thank goodness.  Sometimes I get these enthusiasms where I think I've made a dramatic change, and I get shot down.  Here, I got the reaction I needed and wanted.

"I just went for the original snark," I said.

"Can you keep it up?" they asked.

"I can be snarky all day..." I said. 

I hope it's true.  That will be the test.  Maybe there are only so many ways to be Snarky.  But even that can part of the process -- as he becomes more human, gets it right more often, feels the appropriate reactions, I can still have a strong narrator voice remarking on those very things.

Ironically,  the second chapter, which used to be the first chapter, had become a bit of a problem while rewriting because I had started the book originally with a strong narrator voice, and kind of a snarkey tone. 

Until yesterday, I was thinking that tone didn't fit the rest of the book. 

But you know what?  The rest of the book didn't fit that tone.  I had it right the first time.  And I think that everyone who read that first chapter more or less responded to it.  Everyone had liked my little asides, my snarky comments.

That response was what I was missing.  The story read, and the plot now makes more sense, and everything was hunky dory -- but it was missing the original narrator voice.

Anyway, back to the drawing board for one last try -- hopefully moving up that third level I'm always talking about.

All the work I did to try to improve the book is still there.  The plot was improved significantly, and changing the narrator voice doesn't really change that.  (Here and there, it will, but the basics are all there:  the background, the characters, the plot.)

Finally,  since I'm trying to punch the book up, I've decided I'M ONLY HUMAN is  too generic for the final title.  I need something better.  Something less generic and more memorable and catchy.  So I'll be thinking about that, too.

So this has turned into a two year process -- something I thought I could knock off in a couple of months...