2010

The other day, I advised a friend to ease up on himself for being who he is. I think I'm going to take my own advice, where The Book is concerned. I'm the writer that I am -- I can't be any other writer, even if I think I should.

writer's quote of the day

"No one ever gets farmer's block." -- J. A. Konrath

today's gnash

God damn it, I suck. The Book sucks. I could re-write the fucking thing forty-seven million times and it would still stink with the stink of the rotting carcass of the hubris that told me I could write it.

The worst part is that I can't leave it alone. It's like a festering wound. I know I should put it down and work on something else; I know I should demonstrate my professional writers chops by 'knowing when to let go,' but I CAN'T. It's like a bad case of OCD.

christmas word count

Rewriting is fun. I'm re-using a lot from the last version, so the words are piling up quick, giving me a cheap sense of accomplishment.

I've also left out one of the red herrings -- the one that was causing me major gnashing on the last draft -- and I already feel like the story is cooking better. Of course, I've only just gotten to the end of chapter 2. I can practically guarantee that the gnashing will resume as I get closer to the end.

in which i whine about my job

I am not a details person. Ask anyone who knows me. I remember nebulous information with personally relevant content, not facts. Yet I make my living, via my Day Job (tm), in a field RIFE with prickly little details that are very important to know and remember. Thus, I screw up on a fairly regular basis.

I am also a Highly Sensitive Person (tm), and making anyone unhappy -- even people I barely fucking know -- absolutely kills me. You can see where I'm going with this. Hell. That's where I'm going.

Today's one of those days I feel like I should pay my clients for the inconvenience of having me as their designated professional. Then get in bed and stay there.

Fortunately, I had a pretty good day with The Book yesterday -- I realized that I need to write away from all distractions; in bed in the afternoon with my laptop works well. Here at my desk with the internet on and the phone ringing does not. That's why things were moving so slow a few days ago. I was attempting to multi-task, which is not only ineffective, it annoys the shit out of me when I try to do it. So we'll have no more of that.

Ugh

Gah. SO SLOW. It's like cold butter.

facing the truth

If you're a writer, and you haven't discovered the motherlode of Timothy Hallinan's writer's pages, go there now and bookmark it. His wise cousel has brought me back in from the ledge more than once, and I think he's done it again.

What I'm currently struggling with in The Edit appears to be an architectural problem. When my protag encounters her first 'crisis,' she does the wrong thing -- 'wrong' in the sense that she spends a lot of energy on one small part of the problem and ignores the rest of it. You know, the kind of thing that makes you scoff out loud when you're reading a crime novel or watching a crime program and go 'Why the hell didn't she (insert sane response here).'

The rest of the story builds from that mistake. So...yeah.

There's a lot I can salvage, so I don't think I'm looking at a starting from blank page one, but it's going to be foundation work: expensive, messy, and painful. And you lucky dogs will get to read all about it! Have you thanked the gods of blogs yet today, for sending me to you?

Just to reiterate, both for myself and any poor bastard who may be reading this, I started writing this novel purely for my own entertainment, and I swore to stop when it stopped being fun. It hasn't stopped being fun; in fact, maybe I'm nuts, but the prospect of another re-write is actually making me sort of happy. Now if I could just quit my Day Job and do this full-time. Imagine the exponential increase in fun! And blog rants! It would be spectacular.

...and swings back again...

OK. It's not that it's awful -- well, yes, it is awful, but there's a reason: IT'S NOT FINISHED.

Right now all I'm trying to do is get the story untangled. I'm not paying much attention to style or character development; that is, I'm not putting in a lot of what I know about the characters now, because I need to get the plot firing on all cylinders before I can know what the characters will do in response to the story and events. I understand from many many books about writing that this is ALL WRONG and that I should let the story 'evolve' from the characters, but this is a murder mystery with a complex plot (shut up), and things in the story have to line up correctly or the book will have no reason to exist.

So, no bullets in the head today. Maybe tomorrow.

...and the pendulum swings...

It's Dark Night of the Soul time over here in novel-editing land -- the thing reads like something you'd find pasted up on a telephone pole in the Land of Idiots. It's just awful.

Awful or not, I'm going to finish it. I'm just worried I'm 'overwriting' it, although I'm not really sure what that means. It just seems to get worse the more I work on it. Tonight. Tomorrow it may not look so bad. I certainly hope that's the case, so I won't have to put a bullet in my head.