Practice to Deceive (AKA Housesitting) excerpt: dressing for success

Practice to Deceive (AKA Housesitting) tells the story of Billy, a young teenager who has an unusual obsession: he likes to cross dress... as his mother. When Billy is left alone for a week, a realistic mask and his uncanny disguise skills allow him to actually become his target - but even while exploring a double life, Billy is still a teenager with teenage responsibilities.

In this excerpt, having completed his transformation into Linda once more, Billy begins to dress for a meeting with Kate's parents.

Remember, by reading this excerpt you may spoil yourself for the final novel.

Practice to Deceive (AKA Housesitting) excerpt: fantasies at school

Housesitting (working title) tells the story of Billy, a young teenager who has an unusual obsession: he likes to cross dress... as his mother. When Billy is left alone for a week, a realistic mask and his uncanny disguise skills allow him to actually become his target - but even while exploring a double life, Billy is still a teenager with teenage responsibilities.

In this excerpt, Billy tries to keep his mind on the mundane realities of school life, when his fantastic other life is so much more distracting...

Remember, by reading this excerpt you may spoil yourself for the final novel.

Practice to Deceive (AKA Housesitting) excerpt: home from school to mask

Housesitting (working title) tells the story of Billy, a young teenager who has an unusual obsession: he likes to cross dress... as his mother. When Billy is left alone for a week, a realistic mask and his uncanny disguise skills allow him to actually become his target - but even while exploring a double life, Billy is still a teenager with teenage responsibilities.

In this excerpt, an excited Billy begins to transform himself from a teenage boy into a mature, older woman - his own mother. (This is just one of the transformation scenes in the book.)

Remember, by reading this excerpt you may spoil yourself for the final novel.

Getting closer

My readers are still reading Housesitting, so I sit and I wait and I hope for feedback. I've had some great feedback already that I've already acted on - one scene is staring at me defiantly, waiting to be hacked from the main narrative (which may end up in a 'deleted scenes' section, or something), and there are other things I'm thinking about.

But really, I just want to get this thing published.

I've been thinking about various options for publishing; I will definitely be using Amazon, no question on that, so there will be a Kindle version. I'll probably also use another couple of services - Lulu.com is possible and I've found at least one that will sell a watermarked individual PDF. While I know the mask fiction reading community is very small, there's a little bit of paranoia in me that fears the possibility of piracy, because let's face it - everything's pirated. Ultimately I can't do a lot about it except trust you, but in a community that's just about 100% anonymous, that's a big thing to ask.

Anyway. I've got a lot going on personally so I can't guarantee publication soon, but I'm crossing my fingers that I'll get some more feedback, polish off the thing and get things moving.

In the interim - be very happy to hear your requests for excerpts. What will get you to buy this thing, I wonder....

Editing, he thought, is tricky

Editing Housesitting has been an on-off task the last couple of months, but now I'm trying to get serious.

For me, editing involves re-reading what I've written (which is pretty obvious I guess, but it's step one) and then usually seeing if anything jumps out at me as being grammatically shoddy or just clumsy. Bad habits are easy to get into while writing, and it's hard to see this stuff in the heat of the moment.

Housesitting contains a lot of inner thoughts, as it's a very personal story, told almost entirely from one point of view. Because of that, I guess I felt it was necessary to delineate the main character's thoughts a lot. In some novels, writers use stylistic tropes to indicate thoughts. Frank Herbert, for example, famously had all of his characters think in italics. As there were lots of telepathic conversations in the Dune series, it made some sense.

I've done the italics thing myself, but I'm not a fan of it. I'm also not a fan of consistent 'muttering under the breath' or actual sentences being quoted as thoughts. So while writing, I found myself using the words 'he thought' a lot; but over time, and especially while re-reading, I discovered that I'd started to use it as punctuation, almost. Looking over the 'final' draft it's apparent now that frankly, most of the time when I use the phrase 'he thought' it's not needed.

So now, I'm editing the whole thing to try and remove it wherever it doesn't seem to be necessary. Take this random example with 'he thought' included. Billy is fantasizing about being exposed to... well, you'll find out:

He knew this was dangerous too, foolish even, but the idea of being exposed here somehow fitted with his fantasy scenario, where in front of Kate, his deception known, he would reach up and strip away his wig. She would gasp, he thought, her hand raised to her face in shock, but he wouldn’t stop there, he would dig his fingertips into his scalp, and find the edge of his mask... and pull downwards. Kate’s eyes would widen even further, she couldn’t possibly believe what she was seeing - and then the mask would be off, Linda would be gone, Billy would be exposed - 

It's easy to miss, but somehow, subtly, that he thought breaks the flow of the paragraph. It's also completely unneeded; I've already established, through words like 'knew' and 'fantasy scenario' that we're inside his head. So the same para without the 'he thought':

He knew this was dangerous too, foolish even, but the idea of being exposed here somehow fitted with his fantasy scenario, where in front of Kate, his deception known, he would reach up and strip away his wig. She would gasp, her hand raised to her face in shock, but he wouldn’t stop there, he would dig his fingertips into his scalp, and find the edge of his mask... and pull downwards. Kate’s eyes would widen even further, she couldn’t possibly believe what she was seeing - and then the mask would be off, Linda would be gone, Billy would be exposed - 

... works a lot better, no? It's subtle, for sure... but it helps. Of course, this doesn't mean every instance of 'he thought' is being cut from the book. There's plenty of places it's required. But, hopefully, by making sure through good writing that the reader knows we're inside the character's head... I can stop telling them that's the case every few paragraphs.

Timelines are funny things

Today, out of the blue, I realized the timeline on Housesitting was out of whack. Or at least, I thought it was.

Funny thing: Housesitting, in very first form, was written in 1999 or so. One of the main characters - the mother - was supposed to have acted in a half-remembered TV show from the early 1980s. Today I realized that couldn't work, if I still wanted her to be the age I wanted. Luckily, moving the fictional TV show ahead by 10 years or so didn't affect the plot at all.

Moving up the timeline so the story takes place in the 'present day' has also opened up things considerably, plot wise - to allow things like smart phones, the internet, laptops and so on, very few things that were so pervasive in 1999!

Time flies, right? I never expected to be finishing up a short story from 1999 in novel form...