So I got up to work this morning but still wasn’t feeling the love. There are scenes in this book that I suspect are snowstorms, which– –years and years ago, my writing partner Sarah/ and I wrote a book together. I wrote a wonderful snowstorm scene. It was a chapter long. Sarah cut it to two pages. Then it got cut to a page. In the end, it was two sentences. My beautiful snowstorm! So: in writing terms, a snowstorm is a scene (often a travel scene, as the snowstorm…
Tag: writing
not usually
I won’t usually post two of these a day but it makes more sense to my brain to post it at the end of the day instead of the beginning, so today gets the Announcement Of Writing post and now the End Of The Day Wordcount Post. 5100 / 70000 words. 7% done! Holy crap it’s hot.
book in a week. or two.
I am sitting out on the back patio of a small house in southern France. To my right is a garden tended by a sweet, charming, small old man who tried earnestly to communicate with us even after we admitted to having not a word of French, and by a redheaded youth I have cast as his grandson. Behind me is L’Aude. It is a quarter to 8 in the morning, which means the temperature is about 70 and perfect. I have 70K to go, two weeks to write it…
further on rookie mistakes
In comments on that last post, someone said: “I would like to read what you think should be thrown away. I’m not sure I’d agree.” Here’s the thing: you’re right. You wouldn’t agree. But you would be wrong. I have written entire books without plots. I am a good enough writer that I can almost get away with that, and without an editor who wouldn’t let me, in one case, I would have. And that’s what’s wrong with what I’ve been working on: I had something that looked like a…
rookie mistake
For the past six weeks I’ve been working on starting a new book. Now, it often only *takes* me six weeks to write a book, and although there have been some distractions, taking six weeks to get started is really a bad sign. Usually when I don’t want to work on a new project, it means I’ve done something wrong. I *know* that, so I kept looking at it, trying to figure out what I’d done wrong. I reached 75 pages on the manuscript twice, and the first time, I…