The Third Cut is the Deepest

When I surprised myself by how quickly I was writing Dark Water, I honestly thought that it could possibly be published by the end of this year. Assuming someone would want to publish my novel in the first place.

I started writing this crime fiction mid to late March and finished the first draft by the beginning of August. For me, it shattered a record for writing a book, especially since I had taken more than two weeks off to travel to Peru and several more weeks to work on photos from that vacation, and to put together kayaking videos for my YouTube channel, too.

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When I finished the first draft, I took a few days to empty my head of the story. Though I was done, I knew that I wasn't done-done: there would be errors to fix, facts to check, and storylines to verify—to make sure that I didn't contradict things that I wrote in one place and mess up later in the story.

When I read through the novel, I did find some mistakes that I needed to clean up. There were also some things relating to police work and the legal system that I glossed over on the first draft but needed to tighten up, fix, or elaborate on.

Upon finishing the second draft, I shared the Google Docs files with DW and friends who were interested in reviewing Dark Water. I left the manuscript with them at the end of August, before DW and I headed out on our vacation in the Laurentians and the Saguenay Fjord.

During that time, I tried to not think of the book but it was tough. Plus, I had already started work on The Watcher, the next Calloway and Hayes murder mystery. I've had these characters in my head for some time now and couldn't wait for feedback.

The only critical feedback I had hear by the end of September was from DW. And though she hadn't finished reading the story, she gave me something at the start that got me thinking of more changes.

Last week, I started work on the third draft.

Image: Perplexity

I'm being brutal on the story, this time. It's very hard for a writer to look at sections of his or her creation and think, nope, that's not necessary to the story, and start ripping them out.

DW saw a crack in the story very early on and I've totally changed that section, adding new content and creating two new—though minor—characters. It's funny how one idea that seems so small at first becomes even bigger when you start working through it and how the detectives would deal with the new information.

I thought I'd be cutting out sections and here I was, adding more pages.

There are pages that I've also removed entirely. Early into sharing with you the opening chapter of Dark Water, I wrote about a retired couple that discover the murder victim in the Rideau River while kayaking. On my third draft, I've cut so much from that chapter that when I was done cutting, the book was five pages shorter.

There was too much backstory to minor characters and it didn't move the story forward.

I'm taking more time to go through this draft than I did with the second one. I want this to be the final draft before I submit it to a publisher. And while I'm sure that the publisher will edit more, I want to give that person as lean a story to start with.

Deleting words from a novel is hard. I had to say goodbye to parts that I enjoyed writing. But in the end, writing too much is just too much. Things had to go.

Wish me luck while I finish work on this third draft. Hopefully, it'll leave me with a work of which I can be truly proud.

Happy Friday!

Beer O'Clock: Manguito

Throughout our trip in the Laurentians—it's hard to believe we've already been back for more than a month—DW and I managed to find lots of great places with fabulous craft ale. And while our vacation was about kayaking and exploring this beautiful region of Québec, we didn't think it was going to be a beer road trip.

And yet, it kind of turned out to be one.

From our first night out, away from our campsite, we found lots of microbreweries and pubs that sold local craft beer. And on one night, in Tadoussac, after a fabulous dinner at an upscale restaurant where we both decided that we didn't want to drink alcohol, we still managed to find some interesting beer after our meal.

Earlier in the day, after some kayaking in Baie Tadoussac and the mouth of the Saguenay River, DW and I got cleaned up and went for lunch at Microbrasserie Tadoussac, overlooking the bay and next to our hotel. There, we shared a pizza and a sampler of their brews.

We were going to pick up an interesting gose that we tried but unfortunately, they were sold out of the cans. Our server told us that the local grocery store carries it, so that's where we went after our dinner outing.

Sadly, while the store had lots of their beer, as well as a couple of brews from La Souche, they didn't have the Krill gose that we wanted. But while we were searching, we did decide to pick up a couple of cans from other microbreweries and bring them home.

DW picked up a sour ale from La Souche, which I'm hoping she'll share and let me review. I saw an interesting beer from a brewery on the northwest shore of the St. Lawrence, across from the island of Montréal.

What caught my attention was that the beer was a mango IPA. It was also low in alcohol for an IPA. All too often, as I stated in a past review, Québec brewers tend to put out brews with high alcohol levels: it's nice to see the opposite of that.

I absolutely love mangoes so I grabbed a couple of cans, finally opening one this week.

Manguito IPA à la Mangue (4.4% ABV; 33 IBUs)
Simple Malt Brasseurs
Saint-Eustache QC

Appearance: a dense, apricot-pink colour that was like a pale ruby grapefruit juice. The fizzy, white head settled within seconds to a fine lace, and then just tiny pearls that churned at the surface.

Nose: fresh oranges and mangoes.

Palate: a light, watery start that has the lightest body. On the first sip, I could have been convinced that this was actually a non-alcoholic beer but on the next sip, a bitter grapefruit rind came through with just a hint of orange and even fainter mango. The finish is medium, with the grapefruit rind lingering whilst all other characteristics fading away.

Overall impression: after my first sip, I was sure that I wasn't going to like this IPA. It didn't look like an IPA with it's hazy fruit-punch appearance. The lack of any sustained head seemed a bit of a concern. The fruity nose was nice but didn't stand out. And when it initially tasted like a non-alcoholic beer, I was sceptical as to whether I'd even finish my pint.

But after a few mouthfuls, the grapefruity-mango flavours grew on me. The bitterness was IPA if not the body. While I don't think this is a particularly good IPA, it's a nice, light, fruity beer. I won't likely purchase it again but I'll enjoy the second can of what I have.

Beer O'Clock rating: 🍺🍺

I still have a couple more brews from our vacation to share with you, so stay tuned.

Cheers!

Imagining Characters

Okay, I was reading and making changes to the third draft of my crime novel, Dark Water, last week, and I got tired, so I took a break.

I was thinking of the characters, putting imaginary faces to them and trying to not associate any of them with real people. This is fictional, after all.

Even though some of the characters were loosely based on real people, I tried to picture them differently so that I could honestly say that they are truly made up. The main detectives in the story, Mickey Calloway and Erin Hayes, weren't based on anyone at all. There were no real-life people or characters from other fictional writers that I drew from in imagining them.

As I've written in other posts, I've used AI to generate Calloway and Hayes, based on descriptions I had written in my novel. And while my AI tools created a perfect DS Hayes, I still think my Inspector Calloway needs work.

Anyway, last week, while I was taking a break from my rewrite of the story (I've chopped a lot and added some new stuff, which I'll talk about more for this week's Friday Fiction post), I thought I would us Perplexity to flesh out some more characters.

The first person that I got the AI tool to create was the murder victim, Emily Fraser. She's an investigative reporter who covers Ottawa municipal affairs. As I've already shared in the synopsis, Fraser is found in the Rideau River only days after she and her fiancé, Ottawa City Councillor Daniel Whitmore, failed to board an Air Canada flight that crashed shortly after taking off.

Initially, when I was trying to picture a strong, confident reporter, I thought of Rachel Gilmore, but I didn't feel comfortable having her likeness as a murder victim (I mean, really, I don't like picturing anybody as a victim of a violent crime). I wrote Fraser as a pretty woman with long red hair and gave more description to Perplexity, not mentioning Gilmore at all.

Here's who it gave me on the first try. (Actually, this is the second try, as you'll see.)

Emily Fraser

She was perfect. In the original image, the AI tool tried to place the CBC logo on the building of the background but it was awful. It was also yellow instead of red, so I asked it to remove the logo but keep Fraser exactly the same.

Next on my list was Fraser's fiancé, Daniel Whitmore. There were a couple of tweaks I had to make, like removing a beard (I didn't mention one in my description but Perplexity felt the need to add one), and not making him platinum blond.

I like the third image and that's the one I've kept.

Daniel Whitmore

Next, I was thinking of the police superintendent of the Serious Crimes Unit, Conner Watkins. I've never mentioned him in previous blog posts but it stands to reason that Calloway and Hayes have a boss.

This one was tricky: the AI tool generated some pretty goofy looking bosses, even though I said that Watkins was serious and by-the-book, but also cared about his team of detectives. I had it think of a coach of a sports team, but images made him almost comical.

It wasn't until I removed the reference to a coach that it got closer to my idea of what Watkins looks like. And I also had to get rid of the idea of him wearing a uniform because the AI image always made the uniform look more military or would have some pretty awful spellings of Ottawa and Police.

In plain clothes, the tool came to a very good rendering of Superintendent Conner Watkins.

Conner Watkins

One person who is a supporting character that has already made an appearance in the sequel, The Watcher, is Chief Pathologist Dr. Leslie Abbot. She is a no-nonsense person that is also willing to let her personality come through and show that she's human, too.

AI had trouble with her age, which is actually rather fitting. When I first introduce her, she appears "older than Calloway by a few years, maybe by as many as ten. Though, because of her line of work, seeing so much death, natural or otherwise, she could have been younger by as many years, her career aging her more quickly."

Here's the image I settled on:

Leslie Abbot

In sharing the next couple of characters, I have to be careful. I don't want to reveal anything or cause any future readers to draw conclusions. There are some people who appear throughout the story and are driving characters, and here they are.

Jason School is the Ottawa Councillor for Riverside South Ward. Perplexity got his description bang-on: he looks more like a school teacher than a representative for the people in his ward, though he's well-respected.

Jason School

He sits on the Committee for Infrastructure Development and is working with Whitmore, who is the councillor for Barrhaven East and sits on the transit committee, on overseeing the expansion of Ottawa's light-rail system from Riverside South to Barrhaven, where residents of these two wards would have easy access to transportation to the Ottawa airport.

When Whitmore goes missing after the death of Fraser, police turn to School in the hopes that he knows where Whitmore is.

Councillor School also is a supporter of Rick Byers, owner of the construction company that is building the transit stations for the expanded LRT line. Both he and School were being investigated by Fraser before her death.

I gave Perplexity a description of Byers that I wrote in the book. It had some issues and cited that it was creating a character that represented a real person, so I asked it to make Byers fictional, and it finally gave me what I was asking for.

Rick Byers

That's all I want to say about these characters. You'll have to read the story to learn more about them.

But my distraction from writing gave me good ideas of the main characters in Dark Water. What do you think?

Happy Wednesday!

Improving My YouTube Channel

I've been looking at ways at improving my status on YouTube. I mean, I don't think I'm going to make outstanding videos that everyone is going to watch, or that I'll ever make money from my channel, but I think it would be nice to have at least a thousand subscribers.

To that end, I've been watching videos from successful YouTubers who are sharing tips on what to do to gain subscribers and to improve the search-engine optimization (SEO) of my channel. Some are great tips and others I just plain question.

For example, it's recommended by many YouTubers that when you upload a video, you don't make it available to the public immediately. As soon as you've uploaded your video, you should make it unlisted or even private for at least 24 hours to give the algorithms time to analyse your content so that it can direct it to a relevant audience.

Letting the automated processes work without others randomly looking at the channel apparently gives it a better chance to get your video to the right people.

I've also started adding hashtags in the description, as well as improving the description so that keywords are repeated. This also apparently helps the algorithm.

Other tips include adding your own comment and pinning it, adding links, using the same title as the file name, and more. I've done all of these: we'll see if, in time, it helps my channel.

One thing that I've heard one YouTuber claim that others have not is to not share your video with friends and family. His reasoning is that these people aren't necessarily your target audience and may skew the algorithm in finding the right target.

When I've been releasing my kayak videos, I let my Paddlefolk friends know about it. Whether they were paddling with DW and me or not, they seem to be genuinely interested in our kayaking adventures and how I've put those videos together.

But I've also shared these videos on my blog site and I think that's fine.

Most of my readers, I would think, share an interest in the topics that I write about on The Brown Knowser blog. Maybe not every topic but enough to have you read another post or return to the site.

I thank you kindly for that.

Because I do talk about travel and kayaking a lot on my blog, I assume that people read my blog because they like travelling and kayaking, too. Let me know if I'm wrong; if I am, what interests you about my blog?

So, I share my YouTube videos here. I think of my channel as an extension to my blog and that anyone who is interested in the content here might also be interested in the content on my channel.

What do you think?

Anyway, last weekend, I released a video of DW's and my kayaking adventure in the Saguenay Fjord. It's a continuation of our trip in the Laurentians, of which I had already shared two videos from Parc National de la Jacques-Cartier. I had shared those videos before I saw the video where someone said that I shouldn't be sharing my videos with family and friends.

It's now been more than a week since I made that video public and I feel that if the YouTube algorithm analyses the content to seek out the best audience that they would have done that by now. And I'm counting on the people who access my videos from my blog do so because you're legitimately interested in that content.

Here's that video: give it a watch if exploring the Saguenay Fjord and kayaking interest you.

And if my videos interest you, please subscribe to my channel. I'd like to reach at least 300 subscribers by the end of the year, so if you know anyone who might also be interested in the content on my channel, share the videos with them and tell them to subscribe, too.

I'll continue to seek out videos that give me advice for growing my channel. I'll just take some of that advice with a grain of salt.

Happy Tuesday!

Hunting

After nearly seven months of being 'retired' (that is, my company of almost 19 years laid me and my entire department off), I've decided that I'm not quite ready to be fully retired.

Within a day or two of being laid off, several people reached out to me for much-appreciated support, some even letting me know that they would keep an eye out for employment opportunities in my field of expertise. One person told me that she often has writing contracts with her company, and did I want her to reach out when such an opportunity arose.

Yes, I told her. Thanks very much.

Another colleague that I worked with at Motorola, who had been laid off many months earlier, contacted me to let me know that his new company was looking for a writer, and would I be interested. I thanked him for thinking of me but that I was going to take the spring and summer off to work on a novel, that if another opportunity arose down the road to think of me again.

I was touched by the number of people who told me that they had my back and would reach out if another writing job came in their sights. It's good to know that there were those who believed in me.

Image: Perplexity

When we returned from our Laurentian-Saguenay vacation, DW suggested that it was time that I started looking for work. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do but I agreed that I needed to return to the workforce, needed to interact with people again.

I've activated job notifications on LinkedIn and have let my followers on that platform know that I'm looking for work again. So far, it's been pretty quiet but I've been pretty low-key about applying to anything.

I want to do something that brings me joy.

DW suggested that I even apply to Costco, and I considered applying to work in their electronics department. But when I started the online application process and learned that my data would be stored in the United States, I backed out of the site.

Yes, I'm sure the U.S. has information on me already (Motorola is an international company but it's headquartered in the States) but I don't want to voluntarily give them more information, especially in this political climate.

When thinking of jobs that interest me, I thought back to some of the jobs I've had in the past. I thought of my days of teaching English in South Korea. For the most part, I enjoyed it—I loved most of my students and being in a different part of the world, though it came with its fair share of stress.

I thought of when I worked in retail and remembered that I thrived in the jobs I had, from selling paint and wallpaper to selling cameras and photo accessories.

I've started applying to retail stores, though I've focused on Canadian-owned companies. I've even applied to a camera chain, thinking that my 45-plus years of experience with photography would be an asset.

And, I'm good with people.

I think.

While I don't have to have a job, I think it would be good for me and it would be good for whoever hires me. I would be there for them because I wanted to be, not because I had to be.

Whatever I end up doing, I'll give it my all until I finally retire, for good, which was originally when I turned 63, but may end up being when DW decides to retire, herself.

Know of someone in the Ottawa area who is hiring? Check out my LinkedIn profile and reach out to me if you think I'd be a good fit.

And wish me luck in my hunt.