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nano, sort of
Sigh. It’s Day 8 of Nano and I’ve done nothing except stare miserably at a manuscript that isn’t working. I’ve known for some time that it wasn’t working, but it’s been such a busy month that I’ve been desperately hoping it was the busy-ness and not the book. But no, it’s the book. I already struck about a thousand words out of the manuscript (in half an hour, which was literally the only half hour of work I did in the month of October :p)
So today I’m staring miserably at the book and … well, I’ve stared enough now that I’ve probably figured out how to fix it. Now I have to accept the fact that I’m going to have to throw out several thousand words on a book that’s only 16K to start with.
You’d think that after 25+ books a person would find that easier to do, because it happens all the time. The truth is it never gets easier, at least not for me, and the one time in my life that I’ve had a short turnaround on recognizing I had screwed up, throwing it out and starting again, I was on desperately short deadline and just didn’t have time to dither about it. That time the entire process took about 3 minutes. Usually it takes days but it can easily take weeks and if I have the luxury of time, months.
Stupid writing. Stupid writer head. :p
Going to go kill more of the stupid book now. :p
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*sigh*
I am not feeling up for it today. This is ennui; this is the Novelist’s Event Horizon at its peak. The book is done except that niggling rewrite of the prologue, and doing it seems completely overwhelming. Even my walk this morning was uninspiring (although it did involve cygnets, and if I can find the right camera attachment I’ll post a picture at the end of this entry), and my friends list is full of less-than-brilliant medical news (except my lj-writers friends list, on which one of the communities there was a less-than-enthusiastic review of URBAN SHAMAN, which is okay except for the part where I’m already suffering from ennui and OH GOD THEY HATE ME doesn’t help … and, see, I can’t even wallow well, because I’ve made myself snicker with that…), and the frakking rental agency people didn’t turn up yesterday (nor did they call, the #$^&wits), so where I might otherwise drag myself out of the house to hand-write this prologue and have a nice cup of hot chocolate, I’m stuck here waiting on these bozos for another day. And the dishes need doing. Man, I’m just Ms. Whinybutt.
Meh, the wee little camera didn’t take a good enough picture of the ugly ducklings to bother. Have a picture of the River Lee instead:
All right, it’s 5am on the east coast. Surely I can get this prologue rewritten and the spellcheck done by 5pm their time. *slogs off*
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pattern recognition
Those of you who’ve been reading along for a while may have deduced a certain … unreasonably high level of expectation placed on me by my own self. There’s a Longfellow quote which summarises this nicely: “We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.”
I am *mired* in this problem right now. My expectation of myself is that really, I can do a 6400 word chapter in a day. I *know* I can. I’ve done it any number of times in the past. I can’t do it for more than about a week, but I don’t *need* to: five days or so at that rate would finish the book. And so dammit, I *know* I can do it, that I *need* to do it…
…and yet *damn* my brain is tired. Even typing up yesterday’s 3K pretty much felt like a day’s work today. And while I recognise this pattern, I can’t stop myself from thinking that, well, okay, *tomorrow* I’m going to be able to pull off my 6400 words, and that’ll just get me on the road I need to be on: one good day can lead to four or five more, and then this last awful push will be over. I *recognise* that I’m apparently more accurately capable of 3K a day right now, but 3K a day doesn’t finish the rough draft until the end of the month, which gets the book in *over* three months late, and I cannot get past the idea that if I would just get my shit together, I could push through these last 25,000 or so words and could take a couple days to unwind, then do revisions and get the damned thing in by the beginning of May.
Not really in need of reassurance or anything here, just getting my frustration down in words, in hopes that it’ll do…*something*…to my brain.
ytd wordcount: 168,000
miles to Minas Tirith: 281.4