Hit 20K on HOUSE OF CARDS again. I’m about 300 words further along in wordcount than I was last time I hit 20K, and at the same place in the story, except it’s MUCH MUCH BETTER now. MUCH MUCH better. I thought the proposal was crap when I turned it in, but I thought that might’ve been because I was so freaking tired of the HoS ms that I just had no feel at all for what I’d done on HoC. No, I was right, it was crap, but now that it’s all fixed and I have new ideas that cropped up during the last (please please god let it be the last as in final as opposed to last as in I haven’t had to do another one yet) revision of HoS and I’m actually kind of excited about this book. I think it has the potential to be good.
I was muttering to people earlier about this scene I had to write. Rather, this scene I wanted to skip, which is difficult to do legitimately when you’re telling a story from a relatively tight 3rd person POV. I do have a second POV character, but I couldn’t bow out of the scene by switching to him because he’s asleep, and the only way to switch to him would be to jump several hours forward in time, and I really needed at least one more scene with the main POV character before I did that. (These books do not hop back and forth that much in time.) So whine whine whine because I feel like implying or announcing that a scene in which vital information is going to be passed on is about to happen, and then not letting the reader see that scene because it has information I don’t want the reader to have yet, but that the character needs, is cheating. (It’s not, really. I do feel that it’s basically a convention of storytelling that one ought not cheat a reader out of information like that by dropping the relevant scene in order to have it come up later, but if it’s a rule, great, ok, fine, I know about it and now I’m breaking it.)
I’ve now handled it to my satisfaction, but bitching about it reminded me of Mom being bemused at me getting in a futher over things like that. She reads a lot (mysteries, mostly, so none of the writers I know who are reading this need feel impunged), and consequently reads a lot of bad books, and she thinks I must be working a great deal harder than many of those authors, because I *do* worry about things like that.
Dithering between watching The Aviator, which is our !netflix movie, or De-Lovely, which soundtrack I’ve been listening to much of the day, this evening. It’s a hard life. :)
ytd wordcount: 187,300
Au contraire. It is true I read a great deal, and it is true that as a consequence I read a lot of poorly written books which have, apparently, reached the shelves without the benefit of a good editor. However, I appreciate a carefully crafted book. Just because some writers get published despite poor writing doesn’t mean that I want or would encourage my daughter to write, er, crap.
So there.
I read a ton of romance, mainly but not entirely historical (hi, my name is Linda and I have a 3 book a week habit… ;) and I can sympathize with your mom’s issue. It seems that every three or four books I get there’s at least one that has no plot or characters that don’t act consistently or you can’t tell who the main character is within the first two or three chapters, etc ad nauseum. I wonder sometimes how those authors get published with such boring or lame or confusing or what-have-you stories.
Of course, then there are authors like you. I love hearing about your progress so I can start drooling for publication dates. ;)