writer's ADHD?

OK, so that idea I posted about last week, it's making it impossible for me to work on The Current Book. I'm consumed, CONSUMED by the idea of Book Two. I've invested a year of my life in The Current Book, and I'm afraid I won't be able to finish it now. That will be a serious bummer, if it happens.

However, I'm assured by people who should know about these things that the situation I find myself in is infinitely preferable to the obverse, and that I am not alone in being hit with the all-consuming Next Big Idea whilst still trudging through a work in progress. It is, I'm told, a luxury problem, and not to bitch.

This writing biz. Feh.

more words to live by

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

--  W. Somerset Maugham

it IS spooky

So the other day, in the middle of a shower, a thought wandered lazily across the old Brain: what if The Book was set in an earlier time period? I almost just let it mosey on along, but it got stuck on something, and I ended up spending some time with it.

Cut to an hour later. I'm in the grip of a mental fever, seriously considering rewriting The Book (yes, the mostly finished Book) and putting it in another time period. I'm not talking a couple of years, here, I mean another historical era entirely. I couldn't put the thought away, but I was utterly hamstrung on one issue. The Book's entire plot hangs on the time period that it's already in -- I won't spoil it and tell you why, but it would have to become an entirely different story if I moved it to this other era.

This is how I know I'm not a genius. It's another book, you moron, not the one you're working on now. The Brain could really have saved me a lot of angst by telling me that up front, but no. It hadda drag me through the mud. Spooky bastard.

Anyway, another blurb should occur shortly on my 'novels' page. Stay tuned.

visualizing your soul

If you don't already read Shapely Prose, all I can say is 'why?' The comments on  today's post are a motherlode of creative imagery.

nitty and gritty

I'm down to the scene level now -- editing scene by scene -- and I can see the word-for-word period coming. Now I believe those people who said writing a book is something like real work.

To cleanse my palate in between spasms, I'm reading Stephen King's book on writing. I'm not really a fan of his novels, but King creates atmosphere like nobody's business, and, judging by the small percentage of books I've read that do likewise, it's not easy. I've always wished I could do it. I can't. Not yet, anyway.

I'm only about halfway through A Memoir of the Craft, and it's already on my must-buy list. I love the things he says about writing enough to hope that they're really true. Like: if you're a merely competent writer, you can turn into a pretty good one with practice, but forget being 'great.' The Greats are born, not made. There's something bracing and optimistic about that, to me. I'll never be Raymond Chandler, but I might be Pretty Good someday. And reading; that you have to read to write. This might sound absurdly obvious, but I've actually talked to 'writers' who don't like to read. Note that I haven't read any of them...

I also dipped into Norman Mailer's book on writing, The Spooky Art. Again, not a fan of Mailer's novels, but oy, his writing style. Wish I could do that.

Meanwhile, The Book. Well, it's pretty sucky, but I'm still enjoying it. The storyline seems to have finally untangled itself, so now I can see all the dull and stupid things I've done with the characters. Whether I can repair those faults without torpedoing the plot remains to be seen. Stay tuned.

...and the winner is...

OK, enough mystery. My plus-sized protag is 'just fat' (option #3 in the poll).  That is, it's not something she spends a lot of time gnashing her teeth about, publicly or privately.

Someone asked me why I made her so, and here's how it happened:

One of my beefs with current crime literature/film/TV is the ass-kicking dame who weighs less than a bale of hay. She can disarm a seasoned cage fighter twice her size with a single blow. Versmilitude? Pah. So, I wanted to make my protag big and strong enough that the reader doesn't blow a lobe trying to suspend their disbelief when she pops a guy in the face and he hits the floor. Then I realized that most of the women I know who meet that criteria are classified as 'fat' by people who do that sort of thing, and, having a personal interest in the issue, I decided it was high time to write a book with a character who was 'just fat' -- a character whose size isn't shorthand for all the demeaning things that the word 'fat' has come to mean in modern culture.

When you get right down to it, though, the answer to the question of 'why?' is 'why not?' The average adult American white chick is 5'-4" and weighs 163 pounds, but she's regularly reading books about women who are 5'-9" (or more) and 120 pounds (or less). I realize that fiction is in many ways a form of wish-fulfillment for readers, a way to vicariously engage in life experiences we'll never have in reality, but when I read, I'm looking for experiences slightly more meaty (no pun intended) than the fantasy of fitting into smaller clothes.

Finally, here is an embarassing truth: I originally conceived of the book as a sort of 'fat'-girl revenge fantasy. My personal vicarious reading experience was starting to suffer demonstrably from the frustration of not finding books with average-sized (i.e., 'fat') characters who weren't slobs, idiots, psychologically damaged, morally depraved, derisively comical, or otherwise inferior to their uncommonly thin co-characters -- so I decided to write one myself, serving the central theme of a 'fat' (i.e., average) person winning out at the end. That lasted about a draft and a half, at which point I realized that not only was I just moving the same damned pieces around on the same damned chess board, it was boring. Julia (my protag) kept wanting to do more interesting things. So I let her, and the book turned -- thankfully -- into something else.