But short of taking down any reference to my type, which I’m not about to do – it just explains too much about me to hide – I will just have to deal with getting attention because I talk about my type. Hopefully I have written something on the topic that is interesting or helpful to the people searching for answers. I think I am just uncomfortable getting hits on that search term because I don’t think I’m the droid they are looking for.

So, if you found me via a search for “female intj” and came away disappointed…well, now you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

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.

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?

Short answer: I love them.

Slightly less short answer: I love them when they are used, as Tim Gunn would say, thoughtfully.

Essay answer, basically taken out of my email and edited to remove personal examples/callbacks there is no context for in this blog:

I hate  how the “don’t use a prologue” thing is in vogue right now on writing advice sites. I suppose that soundbite is more effective at checking the irresponsible use of prologues than saying “they are good if you know what you’re doing,” but the uptight thinking and blanket ban on them really upsets me. I love prologues.

…when they are prefacing the story for a good reason. I intensely dislike the kind of prologue that is basically an authorial hand-job to create a false tension about the coming events that would not have been supported by the beginning of the book (cough *Twilight* cough).

But an actual prologue? A piece of action that is self-contained, separated from the main text by years or by happening to different characters, that sets up something important for the problems to come or explains a pertinent past event with more emotional punch than a summary in the “current” timeline ever could? THOSE prologues are AWESOME. The opening chapter to A Game of Thrones is a perfect example: it tells the readers one very important thing that would otherwise have not been revealed for hundreds of pages–the white walkers are real. As readers of the story, we need the dramatic irony created by our knowing the white walkers are real when the characters do not.  It creates a minor tragedy in the opening scene of Ned beheading the deserter, and every time a character laughs at the legends we cringe and know better and get a little more tense waiting for the inevitable revelation. 

The Lies of Locke Lamora is a book that, to me, epitomizes “show, don’t tell” by literally showing the past events that matter. I forget if it had a prologue or merely started way back in the past and jumped forward and then back again, but the story FELT like it had a prologue. All the “interludes” from Locke’s past are there for the reason I’m talking about–to create tension and drama (and, ultimately emotional payout) that would not exist if you were merely told about the past events rather than seeing them happen. Show vs. tell, and a good prologue is all show.

Prologues, used properly, enhance a reader’s fundamental understanding of a situation and sometimes add significant tension to their reading experience. Proper prologues are good things.

One way I look at a story where I think I want to use a prologue, to determine if a prologue would be appropriate, is this: would telling the events covered in the prologue in the story be more of an info dump than just showing them as a prologue? If yes, show what happens as a prologue.

Is the prologue itself an info dump? If so, ditch it. Info dumps work better integrated into the narrative proper.

Another angle is emotional impact: will this scene/decision/choice have a bigger emotional impact if it is shown rather than told as backstory? Will the reader’s perception of this character be influenced by seeing this event happen instead of just hearing about it? If yes, then it’s a good prologue candidate.

What about writing a prologue but then just calling it Chapter 1? You can do that, right? Astrea also asked.

 Theoretically, yes.  If you are really twitchy about prologues that are called prologues, you could just write the events as the first chapter. If you are doing “parts” to the book like, for example, Tolkien did, the Chapter 1 (prologue) could be its own part, where Part 2 picks up in a different place in the overall narrative with Chapter 2. That is the point of part divisions, after all.

That said, personally, I would still put that part of the story in as a prologue, because ultimately the point of calling something a “prologue” is to make it easier for a reader to navigate the story. The standard for including it as Part 1, or Chapter 1, or a prologue, or whatever other division you decide to use, is the same standard you should be using for all the scenes of the story–does it justify its portion of the word count by showing the reader something they need to know (about either plot or character or setting) and do not get from another scene? If the answer is yes, then the story needs that scene. and whether you insert it as a prologue, or a part, or a chapter, or an interlude, or an epigraph really doesn’t matter. Those are just semantics to frame the scene for the reader to help them keep their bearings in your story. If the scene is necessary to the story, put it in–and call it whatever you want to, so long as it makes sense to a reader.

Welcome to my collection of conflict resolution quotes. I update it regularly and if you have conflict quotes to recommend, please drop me a note.

Wut.

My breakthrough was not about the ending. It was about the beginning. I have known, also for a while, that the beginning would need to be rewritten. One particular scene, I knew even when I wrote it, would need to be not merely revised but reimagined, and that was the sex scene that happens early on and is the start, rather than the culmination, of the couple’s journey. The original draft was a little too cerebral–by which I just mean the characters spent too much time thinking–and not desperate enough for the situation.

This morning I was putting off writing any more of the end (right now I can definitely feel myself dragging my feet on writing, now the number of scenes to go fits on one hand) by reviewing the beginning to see if I could get a better grasp on how to revise it.  As I was reading through the first scene from the hero’s perspective, I realized that I had the answer for how to approach the sex scene already written: what the hero fantasizes about doing while they dance, and yet did not do in the original (or revised) version of the scene.

I was dumbfounded to think I hadn’t seen it earlier. My thinking about this case had gotten way too uptight, indeed.  I am dumbfounded now to see where I planted a seed carelessly, without paying the slightest bit of attention to it, only to then find it a full-blown idea when I most needed it.

Now the only question is: do I let the hero reference how he approaches the encounter before it takes place?… 

Anyway. I have discovered this trip what one of my deepest and most visceral fears in the real world is and, like I do, am now wondering if it also applies to my writing patterns.

We went on a cave tour. I have not been in a cave since I was a child, but I remember them being beautiful and a source of wonderment. I expected no problems. I was wrong. I had a moment of near panic when we were at the deepest point, when I realized that I didn’t know the way out. That I was utterly dependent on the lights, and the signs, and the guide, and if anything happened I would be lost there in the underground, helpless and trapped.

My husband had a similar moment, but his came when we were walking down a narrow tunnel. He couldn’t stand the constriction, the press of stone around him. My issue was different. It was not the claustrophic sense of being enclosed, and it was not the darkness that lurked just beyond the light. Had the lights gone out the darkness would not have frightened me. What had me shaking was the sense that I could not save myself. I was ignorant of the layout, and I am ignorant of general survival skill for spelunkers. I didn’t know the way out, and I would not be able to find it on my own – I was trapped.

What made me realize this is probably the fear that leaps out of the boggart’s cabinet at me were the following two consonant experiences:

(1) The time I got locked in a walk-in cooler with the lights out was terrifying not because of the dark or the cold or the thought that no one would find me, but because I could not find the door and then lost all orientation. My cave panic was similar to the cooler, because what made me fear was that I could not get out of the situation on my own.

(2) The only recurring nightmare I have ever had is that I am in a car and it falls, either because it is going up a hill too steep to climb or down a hill to steep to brake the descent, or over a cliff on some mountain pass. Sometimes I am driving, sometimes someone else is, but the terror is always the same – once that fall begins, I can no longer change what happens to me.

All of this together made me realize that my phobia is not being able to control what happens to me.

It explains why my reaction to religious or philosophical ideas based on fate is to want to shoot myself, if I believed them to be true. If I were shown that everything is preordained and nothing I think or do or say is my own, then I would as soon not go through the motions. (This matters, by the way, because I cannot actually see any real-world circumstances – torture porn scenarios are excepted from this discussion – in which I would choose to end my life. I simply love being alive too much to see wanting to end it sooner than it already will.)

I like to order my world according to my own culpability. I understand that things will happen that I cannot predict and cannot control, but I am also very much aware that I control how I react, and that my choice of action and reaction is going to affect what happens to me in the aftermath. I get annoyed with people who play the victim of fate card – everyone is, just grow a pair and deal with it. I am not afraid of life events but rather of being put in situations where I have no options to act, where I must simply accept what happens because I cannot change a thing.

So all of this makes me wonder, with my writing – is my getting stuck and paralyzed when I don’t know what happens next related to my need to have at least a little influence on my life? Do I feel at the mercy of something and unable to direct my writing? Or is it merely a fear of not being perfect?

Hard to say. Perhaps next time I am stuck I will try to analyze what I am feeling through this lens and see what I think then. In the meantime, no more caves for Lily.

Do you have a good way to overcome your psychological need for immersion in work? What I mean by this is, I struggle to find large blocks of time (like hours of time) in my life to focus on writing. But when I sit down knowing I have only 30 minutes or something, I often find working impossible.

For various reasons that seem impossible to change right now, my life is fragmented. I won’t have entire Saturdays to just write for the forseeable ever.  I have been opening docs and staring at them in confusion, trying to orient myself in a story, focused mostly on the fact that I have a finite amount of work time, and getting nothing done. Or at best a handful of sentences that get written over the next day because they were useless.

Part of this is just life stress. Work has been stupid lately, and hubs and I are about to take a trip out of the country so I am stressing out about making sure everything is ready for us to be gone, caught up at my desk at the job so someone else can step in for a couple weeks, etc., and one of my ghostwriting gigs has changed so it’s not a comfortable column anymore but articles I am really struggling to start, much less finish. I feel like my brain is flying in a hundred directions and about to explode at all times, and it has been getting more and more frenetic, wound tighter and tighter, by the day. I haven’t been able to focus on words either at night after work or even first thing in the mornings–it’s like English is Klingon. The words just don’t fucking make sense.

And this is killing me. I feel neutered or bound in a straightjacket or something. I want to cry when I think about what I want to be doing (writing) and how for whatever reason I just can’t do it right now. I hate that I can’t just pick up a story and write a few words and let them add up. Instead it’s this stupid “If I can’t have too many bon-bons then I will have none” mentality, only by bon-bons I mean hours to just simply focus on my story.

Part of the problem, undoubtedly, is that I am having to imagine all the current scenes from any project I could pick up as I write them. In fact maybe the primary problem is that my brain is so focused on other things–work, while I’m there, and getting ready for this trip while I’m home–that I haven’t been free to just imagine anything lately, and that’s really what’s upsetting me.

I don’t know. I just need a way to stop myself from dwelling on the fact that I only have a finite amount of work time and instead just do the work.

I’m the same way when it comes to sewing projects, so I know this is not just a matter of writer’s block or something like that. It’s something in my psyche. Maybe it’s a subconsious acknowledgment of my ability to hyperfocus away the usual ADD, which is a process that takes me out of my own mind for hours.

The sticking point is, if I am in the regular routine of working and in touch with the characters daily, I don’t need to have the hyperfocus to get to work…but right now because I don’t have the time to do a hyperfocus writing marathon, I am not able to work even in small doses. I am banging my head against a wall.

In the past when I have had this, the problem solves itself when I have a day that words just come pouring out in a flood, and then I’m back in the groove and all is gravy. But I don’t have that day right now. It won’t happen for at least 3 weeks. And I can’t deal with waiting three entire weeks to write something.

I should probably just say, “I am not writing again till we get home,” but I want to cry at the very thought. I am just in despair and making writing a source of stress for myself at a time when I need less stress, not more, but the fact is that I tend to define bad in terms of whether I got anything done. If I have a shit day at work and my husband is away and none of my friends will come out of their caves to see me and even the cat won’t talk to me, it’s still not a bad day if I got good words down. I have had a lot of bad days (in all ways) lately, and I could really, really use the balm of at least writing well to make them better.

So, anyone else struggle with this? What do you do?

So…cause I’m weird like this, would you be interested in dressing up as French ladies going to a bals des victims with me?

Madame, fear not: I am just that weird and delighted by the macabre.

Also, I have been looking for an excuse to make an empire/Regency gown but have not had an Event push it to the top of my costume-making list. Just wanting to is, alas, not quite enough for me to prioritize something.

I had never heard of this phenomenon (or 200-year-old urban legend) called bals des victimes before, nor had I heard of women wearing red ribbon necklaces. All of these commemorations of the terror make sense to me; I would actually find it more difficult to believe such balls didn’t happen than that they did. But even if these were only rumors, the idea has power.

As FIELLE blog put it so very aptly,

It is extraordinary to see illustrations of women of this period with shorn hair, in complete contrast to our ideas of the fashion of that time. Dresses were in the style of underclothes, as this was how one met with Madame Guillotine – and a red ribbon was worn around the neck, grimly recalling the manner in which the aristocracy met its end. Even jewellery in the shape of the guillotine was worn.

I will comb my hair up in the back and make curls out of my front, and if I can lay hands on a guillotine charm then I will wear that…somewhere. Not sure yet whether as a pendant or a bracelet or earrings.

As to the dress…I will probably cheat the period just a bit and go more 1810 than 1795. I like the chemise dress intensely more than the round gown style from the turn of the 19th century, and most of the particularly delightful versions of it I have seen were from a few years later. But since those were British we can always make a Gallic shrug and say, “But of course Parisian ladies had it first.”

Don’t worry…my journey to making this dress will be fully documented here. I will have to research the styles, then find an historical costuming book that has either the particular style I want or several similar styles that I could amalgamate into what I want, then pattern it, then find fabric (that might be the hardest part!), and then at last construct it. Oh, yes, and decide if I will be making stays to go under it or just a chemisette. Regarding construction, there is a possibility that I will choose to hand-sew the gown. I have been wanting to make a dress by hand for a while now, and for some reason Regency gowns seem like they would lend themselves to that pretty well.

Regardless, I now have my next historical costuming project. After, that is, I finish my spencer. And a couple 1950s vintage Vogue summer dresses. And a couple pairs of pants a friend commissioned, and the 18th century gentleman’s/pirate shirt I’ve been slowly sewing (by hand) for over a year (working less than infrequently!), and half a dozen other things. Wow. My creative ADD really is as bad in my sewing as it is in my writing….