Writing Strategy Update: a Week of Fail

I had a great start to my write-a-lot-of-little-snatches experiment last weekend. I managed to keep the momentum up through Tuesday over my lunch break. Then I just got slammed with a series of evening events and busy days at work and cases of the after-the-day tireds so bad I didn’t even remember I’m writing a novel, much less attempt to work on it.

This weekend I tried again, managing to accomplish about 3K of words with very little time spent “writing” that wasn’t actual words onto screen. So, in the sense of words-per-minute-at-my-document, efficiency is up. In terms of overall words produced, about standard for me on a weekend that I am not doing anything else particularly, but also one that I did not particularly devote to writing.

The story is over 18,000 words now, about a quarter of the way done based on my initial word-count projection. The place I have reached in my rough outline jibes with that, as well, so I feel good.

A quarter through does mean that I am about to enter the mushy middle third. At least this time I should be able to entertain myself with the sexual dynamic between the couple, since this is a story that starts with marriage rather than leading up to it.

A surprising refrain has popped into my head when I feel stuck – just write the next sentence. Not one of DWS’s more helpful aphorisms, on the surface, but yet…it is in practice.

I am also taking another piece of DWS advice and stating (to myself) a particular thing that I am practicing with this story. This time I am practicing pacing, how to keep from getting bogged down in endless detailed scenes. For some stories that’s appropriate, but not for all, and this one has enough events that I want to get to that I don’t want to waste time moving at a molasses-like crawl. Perhaps, as well, having actual events in the middle instead of extended set-up will also help keep that part from going so slowly.

Remains to be seen. Tomorrow I try anew at writing in short bursts at lunch and after work. Expect in another week a post hissing about how awful the middle act is, how I can just scrawl “Lucifer Emerges” over that part of my outline, how I am treading water in a stagnant plot-lagoon, etc., etc. But for today, this story is cruising and me with it, and I am pleased.

Searches and Spam

“The film’s scandal centred mostly on an anal sex scene featuring the use of butter as a lubricant.”

I wish I knew what film the spam-bot was referring to – it sounds arthouse rather than pornographic. I, however, know better than to run a search on “anal sex with butter” even WITH a boolean “not pornography” addendum.

File these following searches under Came To The Right Place:

• human squid porn
• i hate this means war/hated the ending of this means war movie
• primogeniture in history and story
• intj romance
• intj female characters
• intj female existence
• intj women one in a billion
• where are all the intj women

File these search terms under Come Back Later, I Guarantee I Will Address This Eventually

• bad faith sex scenes
• romance novel with masturbation heroine
• red riding hood romance novel

 And file these under Not Sure How You Ended up Here at All, But Thanks for the Laugh

• scapegoating and negative energy dumping
• why romance is pointless
• hotasex
• naughty girls with knickers taken down

And Now for Something Completely Different

I am putting off diving into Revision Hell for a time. 

Part of this decision is emotional – I am just tired of the story and the characters. I need a break from them. More than that, I need a break from the grind of writing in long-form scenes I had previously created. I would like to go back to the purely creative side of the process, where I am brainstorming and excited and perhaps a bit manic.

Part of the decision is also practical:  Given that I have to backshift the beginning of the story to match how it ends, I am going to need to run through the entire novel at once on the re-envisioning pass to make sure I can keep hold of all the plot threads and change them all to the final version of the plot. Such a project is going to require the ability to concentrate completely on what I’m doing. Probably for no more than a couple days, but that is still long enough to require planning. It is one weekend, yes, but one that is absolutely inviolate. It might happen if my husband is called away for work, and otherwise I will take a weekend sometime this summer and drive to my parents’ house in the woods and tell them to leave food outside my bedroom. Perhaps I will take the Friday after July 4th off and have a 4-day weekend to work with.

So, where my exhaustion with this story and my decision to move on to a new story rather than immediately revising leaves me is needing to pick a new project.

The one that I am planning to complete  next – I say “planning to” because my muse may decide he has other ideas; that has happened many times before – is one of the stories that made me write my Twelfth Night novellas. Not because this story is related to them or in any way inspired them, but because I was having such trouble getting anywhere on the story that I had to stop and write something shorter just to prove to myself I could write romance and could finish a story other than fan-fiction.

I have about 7500 words written to open the novel and maybe two scenes from later in the story sketched. These passages go back to the creation of the novel’s Word document on December 8, 2010. Yes, This novel has sat, barely begun on my hard drive and in my mind, for two and a half years.

The reason I picked it up, out of all the stories I have begun on page or in my mind, was a conversation I had about a week ago over dinner. I was telling my friend – the only one of my in-person friends who reads romance – about Dear Author’s post suggesting the historical romance genre be allowed to die because she sees it as being stagnated beyond rescue. I was outlining several reasons I disgree with her assessment that self-pub can’t redirect it, and one of them was my own work, particularly this story that I have yet to write. 
(I don’t mean to tease, but I never discuss particulars of my work before it is ready for publishing, so I’m not going to say what the specific moment is, but it’s a politically incorrect and more than a little brutal opinion the hero has, that I think is absolutely realistic and that would also be absoutely unpublishable from a major publisher.) Talking about the story with her reminded me how much it had engaged me when I thought of it originally. Our conversation made me want to write it.

A week ago, I assumed I would put off going back to this story for months – the months necessary for finishing the novel I was working on, then revising it, then writing the two side-shorts that accompany it.

Yesterday, I changed my mind. Partly it was the practical considerations of fatigue, lack of time to focus, and being too close to the draft to make hard decisions about revising. Partly it was listening to a (different) friend enthuse about how much fun she is having with a new project, one that had called to her and seduced her away from the project she had let her reason choose to come next.  But mostly, I am jumping to this new old story because right now, it’s the one calling to me the loudest.

I am going to do my best to dive in and not look back. I am going to do my best to finish this one sooner than 20 months from now. I am going to attempt to roll Dean Wesley Smith style and not outline so heavily as I sometimes do, put in lots of little writing sessions to add up quickly to big totals, and just keep writing until it’s done. I am not shooting for a full draft in 10 days, but 2 months might be doable.

All right, muse. Let’s see what you can do when you put your mind to it.

Le Fin

I just typed the last five words of my first long-form novel.

20 months of writing, on and off.

245 single-spaced pages.

132,444 words on the roughest hewn draft I have ever produced.

1 subplot to remove from the first half of the draft.

1 plot point to re-envision.

5-10 scenes to rewrite based on the dropped plotline/new scene.

1 scene I intentionally skipped when drafting.

1 epilogue to write and then decide whether to use.

The novel is by no means FINISHED, but I am finished writing the thing.

Tell me, and, remember, this is for posterity, so, please, be honest: how do you feel?

Things I Am Feeling (Illustrated Edition)