Still Slogging On Seven

Oh, good grief! I looked back through these blog entries and saw that way back on 9 February I was about to start a revision of Chapter 7 of my novel. It's exactly a month later, and I'm still working on Chapter 7. That is just sad. Pathetic. As in Puts Me In Dumbfounded Despair kind of pathetic. I used to break into tears over the fact that I had no life, that all I had was my writing, day in and day out, all I did was write, write, write. A chapter a week.

Now, what have I discovered? I have so much life going on that I have no time to write. I've been desperate to squeeze in a few paragraphs in a four-hour stretch here, a two-hour snippet there. And a month later, I've still not reached the end of Chapter 7. I'm never going to reach my deadline.

Olympics Fans?

I am not a sports fan, never have been, never intend to be, but since I can remember, I have been enthralled with the Olympics. I think it was Mary Lou Retton that hooked me for life. What an impact she and her victories had on a five-ish year old girl. So, I guess the point is, my writing, reading, and other projects are doomed for the next two weeks. While I'm rooting for the Flying Tomato and other young American heroes (yes, they all look like babies to me now), I hope to make a little more progress on Chapter 7, but I'm not counting on it. It's nice to have some pressure taken off the drive for progress for a few days, at least, to enjoy some peaceful cultural exchange and human excellence. The games only happen once every two years. The novel will be waiting when they're over this time around, too.

New Face

Well, I decided it was time to explore new looks for my journal. Added some more pics, and brightened things up a bit. It's like makeup. Some women wear the same color of eye shadow every day. Me, if my eyeshadow doesn't match the shirt I'm wearing, I'm not sure how I can cope. So, in short, you never know what I'll be wearing next time you stop in.

About writing... I'm far happier with the revisions to "The Bone Harp." One of my critters said Experiment, so I did. Several said, It's incomplete, I didn't feel for the main chick, It needs a twist at the end, so I added 1600 words to a 2200 word story. The results, I must say, please me greatly. I loathe chasing word counts for anthologies or magazines. I'd rather write a story, then find the market that takes that length. So I've learned that I'm happier with stories that dig down inside a character, inside a world, and that means longer pieces. I have yet to master the moving flash masterpiece. Meh, nor have I interest in doing so. Give me meat, enough to sink talons into.

So I'm about to undertake a full revision of Chapter 7 of the novel, meaning, I think I'm going to have to add a character that I hadn't envisioned before, which means a full rewrite of several chapters all the way back to the beginning. I usually add too many characters and have to edit some out. It's good to have useful folks floating around, waiting in the wings, but this time -- chasing that lean word count -- I've not added enough, which means that word count is about to expand. Unless I can think of another way to punch up the villain interest.

Also about to go over "Swords of Glass" again. I've only submitted it to three places, but it's been nearly a year since I wrote it, so it's time to give it a new eye. Maybe find places that could suffer improvement. I greatly prefer editing over writing rough drafts. Rough drafts hurt ...

What?!

A new month already? Life has sped up suddenly, and it's February.

I'm not going to make that May deadline for my novel. No way, Jose! I've come to a stuttering halt somewhere in a nasty rough draft of Chapter 7. Only Chapter 7! That's just about 100 handwritten pages. *sigh* I remember the days of my energetic youth when I could write 15 pages a day, with a quota of 6. That amounted to an epic of almost 300k words in six months!!! And I accomplished that feat, not once, but twice! The quality may have been crap, but the content was out of my tortured brain. My quota has slipped to 3 pages a day. I'm thrilled if I get in 3 measly pages. Maybe, since I'm aiming for 100k (120k at the most), I'll still be able to finish the rough draft by May 31. What happened to that irrepressible writing spirit? That unquenchable frenzy of the imagination?

Answer: It got repressed. It got quenched.

Well, while I'm still groaning over Chapter 7, I have had just about enough of rejections over a particular short story called "The Bone Harp." So this weekend, I started a heavy rewrite, taking the advice of several editors who were kind and generous enough to take the time to respond with more than the dreaded form letter. The story also received a couple of helpful crits at LegendFire, for which I'm grateful. When I'm satisfied with a story, but no magazine seems to understand that I am satisfied with a story, how am I to know what's missing, where I went wrong? My critiquers and those generous editors become invaluable.

I just hope the rewrites work.

Resolutions

Yes, it's 2010 ... a space odyssey, anyone? Amusing to see where some folks projected we'd be by now. A bit frustrating to muse on what may be holding up the show. Not that I wish we were all zooming around in egotistical spaceships with superiority complexes and control issues, but you get the idea.

Anyway, about those resolutions. . . . Dare I make a few, only to find myself halfway through the year without having made any progress? Finishing this current novel, selling a few stories, keeping LegendFire up and growing, those are pretty good places to start, and resolutions I'm fairly confident I can keep. Oh, yeah, and those ten pesky pounds I'd like to shed? Meh. Having a head cold is a great way to start. Nothing tastes good anyway. I have a love-hate relationship with food, and a hate-hate relationship with my treadmill. Tummy crunches by themselves just don't get the job done. Oh, well. Back to writing. . . .

To everyone at Blogspot,

Merry Christmas
and
Happy Holidays!

Quill And Ink

Sometimes when I sit down to write a rough draft I find myself dragging my feet. The mind wonders, I sit pondering too long how I want to take control of a particular scene, and by the end of the day, I may have written only a couple of pages. I believe I just found an interesting way to help me push through those particularly trying attempts at writing.

This past May when I was touring the old prison/castle complex in Paris, I purchased an appropriate souvenir: an old style writing quill, the kind with a metallic nib that you dip into a bottle of ink. When I got home I bought a bottle of black India ink with the intention of scribbling out a few letters and poems with it, but the quill has largely remained untouched on my desktop. Until today. I was having one of those moments where I just couldn't force the scene onto the paper (yes, I write every rough draft longhand in a fat 5-subject, college-ruled notebook), and out of an attempt to avoid writing anything else, I dragged out the ink bottle, dipped, and started tracing the few sentences I had managed to write over the past hour. Well, once I dipped that quill, I was worried that the ink would dry or drip and be wasted, so I just kept writing. What I wrote was rushed and likely VERY nasty, but before I knew it, I had plunged through a page and half of stuff that likely would've taken me the rest of the day.

So my new method of conquering these fruitless hours of sitting and staring at the page will be to open my bottle of India ink and write, write, write before the ink can dry on the nib. It's all about slogging through the sections you're not so sure about to reach the sections you feel sure about, to just get the idea out already and not worry about the finer details until that first draft is complete.

I hope this method continues to work...