A Tangled Blog

I just broke 20,000 words on Wings of Song! I've been planning on it being somewhere between 40-50,000 words, so I am either already halfway there or nearly so. I'm so pleased!

It's changed enormously from Meggie of Green Gables. The main character is now named Julie, and in personality she's much more like a younger Gwen than Meggie. I've given her the three siblings, like Gwen, too - Jamie, Maisie, and Nicky. AND a living mother. No more twins, no more dead parent - I'm trying to move away from MG cliches.

She's half Mexican-American (her maternal great-grandparents moved from Mexico to California in the 1800s) and half Scottish-Canadian (her father's many-times-great-grandparents came to Canada from Scotland), and it's been interesting having a main character of an ethnicity different from my own, without making it a book about being Hispanic in the 1930s - because that is definitely not the point, just as the Depression is present but not the point of the story. It's a juggling act, but so far I think I'm keeping all the balls in the air.

Peter, Bran, and Polly are still there - I couldn't do away with them. And Peter and Julie are friends much as Peter and Meggie were, though I'm trusting it's a bit more realistic given the age gap now than it was before.

Johnny will be showing up, too - he's actually making his appearance in the chapter I'm writing now. I'm trying to tone down the melodrama with him, too, without losing much of his personality.

It's been so much fun combining the two stories and from there coming up with something of the flavor of each, but a new story all its own.

I still haven't decided on Will or Tryg for Julie's eventual suitor (or Oliver or Hawk for the rejected one, for that matter) - but those are questions for later stories. For right now, I'm just having a blast writing a wholly MG story.

Cathy, how is your new Bertha story coming? Adrienne, I STILL haven't seen Frozen, so I haven't been following your Frozen fic, but if I ever do see the movie, I'm planning on reading your fic right after.

I've started a Pinterest "inspiration" board for the new Meggie story (working title, hopefully the final title: Wings of Song). Right now it's just filling up with actors, but I do have a few other links in there as well. I've never done this for any other story (at least not this specifically, because most of my other writing boards are geared more toward research), and it is FUN. Definitely doing its job to inspire me!

In other news, it is HARD finding information about life along the St Lawrence River any time after Jacques Cartier. Especially during the Depression. For the US side, most info is centered more toward either NYC or the Midwest, and for Canada, it seems more focused out west.

Thankfully, I have my grandfather's memoir of growing up in the Thousand Islands region in that era - he was born in 1925, the same year I have Meggie and Matty being born. It's not thick with details, but it does give a vivid image of what everyday life was like for farmers then and there. And I'll keep looking for other resources as well.

Cathy, have you thought any more about adapting some of your fanfic? It would be so fun to think someone else was going along this journey with me! And anyone else getting their creative juices flowing from this enterprise? We could make it a whole Tangled Web project!

(Oh, also - I have Helen Mirren picked as the inspiration for Grandmother Linwood, the Anne alter-ego. But I'm stuck for Gilbert's doppelganger. Any suggestions?)

... a house!

Many of you know that I plan to rewrite my Meggie of Green Gables series, take away all the LMM references, and publish them as original novels. I have a fresh setting ... the Canadian side of the Thousand Islands (my dad's family is from Clayton, along the St Lawrence on the American side, so I have family roots in that area, and it's also a whole lot closer and more accessible for me to visit than PEI, to get a feel for the setting). I have fresh names for the Blythes (and also eliminated some of the periphery characters ... weep, weep!). I've even already planned to split Weeping May Tarry into two books, since it stands right now at over 100,000 words and still feels rushed in parts. The plots of all the books will stay mostly the same, since they are not reliant on Anne at all, and I've already made notes on where they will need adapting.

What I don't have? A name for the new "Green Gables"!

It needs to be something a little old-fashioned, definitely comfortable and homey feeling, but not cheesy or trite or eye-rolling-inducing. That's not too much to ask, right?

Unfortunately, I'm almost as bad at coming up with house names as I am with book titles - which is to say, really bad. So any suggestions from my fellow LMM fans would be so helpful!

Need added incentive? If I pick your suggestion, I'll name a character in the first book for you!

And ... go!

How do you all work out your plots? Is everything meticulously planned beforehand, or do you just go with it as the writing happens? Do you find that sometimes the plot direction changes partway into the story?

When I started writing "Meggie of Green Gables," I had actually planned for Meggie and Johnny to eventually marry. The more I wrote about them, though, the more I sensed that they would not be at all well suited to each other. I hadn't decided who would replace Johnny, though, until partway through "Weeping May Tarry," when Will arrived unexpectedly on my pages, and I realized I was looking at Meg's one true love.

In "The Sound of the Sea," I'm working on the final chapter now, and even though I had pretty much every major plot point mapped out beforehand, I veered away in some big ways: one major character who was supposed to die I just couldn't let go; one who was supposed to have a romance informed me in no uncertain terms that s/he much preferred being single; and an unexpected reconciliation happened a few chapters back that really pleased me, but was not planned at all until I started writing the chapter.

So now I'm curious: does that happen to you? Do you find your heros and heroines, like Anne's Averil, "unmanageable," or are you able to keep them reined in and obedient to your dictation?

I am so enjoying Elouise's latest Meg story, The Sound of the Sea, and I hope she won't mind me creating this thread to discuss it, like we used to at the old forum.

I have a confession to make ... I actually have the first six chapters of Meg's next story written! I am determined not to post anything until I have at least half the story written, though, because I don't want to get bogged down in the middle and leave the readers hanging, or have issues trying to make first part and second part reconcile if it ends up going a different direction than I originally expected (both problems I had with WMT).

I also finally have a name for it: The Sound of the Sea, taken from a poem of the same title by Longfellow.

I also have a few pictures of some of my characters, and since you laides have been kind enough to share some of your character choices, I thought I would do the same. Consider this your teaser trailer!