Restart

This always happens to me. I start a story. I have the ending plotted, I know my characters and world. The middle usually ends up a haze for me till I've written the beginning and then started to plot my way backwards. But somewhere in the middle something happens that stops me dead. With Spandex it was finding out that Maisie would work better as Matt. I discovered that plot twist somewhere in the second third of the first draft. In that case I ignored the first part of the novel and wrote the last of it as if Maisie was male. Then I edited, and edited, and edited.

Wren's song stopped me early and although it's demanding a new beginning, the change isn't nearly as drastic. I've dumped some scenes, put a few in a file to see if they fit in later, and rewritten the first 2k to line up mostly with my middle. I've got about 8K of words to edit tomorrow and then most of it should be able to fit in. I'm hoping to unoffically Nanowrimo this story, which should put me at about 60k coming into the Dec. That should put me at about 3/4ths of the way through the text. That is a happy point to be. Since I'm not ditching everything I have to start fresh on Nov 1 I am not joining any of the official things but I'm hoping it will be fun and press my word counts to a new height.

What do you say?

I was at a convention this weekend, it wasn't a writing con but it was a place where a number of writers and aspiring writers were in the crowds. Naturally the conversations turned to writing and publishing a few times. Most of the people I spoke with were great. There were a few pros and mostly people who researched and knew about the industry. Unfortunately that left a gentleman who was clueless to an extreme. I endured a long rambling diatribe about his work and the state of publishing as a whole. I think that state might surprise people, evidently books don't get published anymore. Self publishing is the new only way! After all he'd sold ten copies of his book just last year. After the third attempt to interject sanity into the conversation I slide away and hid from him the rest of the convention. He wasn't going to listen to me. But what do you say to that kind of delusion?

A day....

That's lasting far into the night. Writing has been more sparse of late because finding time (yes I know, I very much have needed to make the time and I haven't been) and opportunity in the same moment has developed into absurd levels. I have a lap top. It's about twenty pounds of outdated Pentium three technology with a cracked case and a disturbing tendency to shed plastic bits from the hinge whenever opened. This is what I do the majority of my writing on as it is semi portable (if there is a power source) and has MS word. I haul this beast over to the children's house where I have been sitting along with a padded lap desk so that I don't burn my thighs in extended sitting sessions. I live in terror that the not quite two year old will someday grab the screen and wrench it into a pile of steaming plastic goo, leaving me to try and rewrite several years worth of novel excerpts and manuscript pages. Yesterday I changed this.

I bought a netbook. It is tiny and dark blue and marvelous. I bought the EEE 10.2 inch model (using all of my sitting money but it is wonderfully worth it.) The keyboard is very nearly full size, I can type with ease. It has wireless intertubes, an itty bitty screen and just enough memory to run MS office and save a few documents. I'm in love. It's so tiny and light! I can run with out plugging it in for at least 3 hours (nearer to four) and it's tiny enough to fit in my purse. I've already transferred my novels. They might be on hold while I start composing odes to the greatness of this miniaturized machine. Or I could just make my word counts.

Ever notice...

that the longer you wait to say something the harder it is to say it? This last month has wrung me out, for a lot of the reasons. Most of them are things that I won't put into this blog, although the babysitting has been on that list. Hopefully in November things will settle back into a routine. There has been writing happening, mostly in small spurts of story and mostly on Wren's song.

The difference in writing Wren's song and Spandex diaries is enormous. For the Spandex diaries characters were my plotting vapor. Characters shifted mid story because they weren't firmly rooted when I started writing. I had more issues moving the emotional arc then the plot arc.

Wren's song is a 180. I know Wren, I know her down to my core. This character has been in my head since I was 16. I know the characters around her. What I don't know are the solutions to the problems. It's been coming out of the chronological order. I know the end, I know some of the middle, I have a jumble of scenes that keep shifting order. And nearly all of them are the emotional story. The plot points... still working on it.

I'm sitting for another month then things change. Hopefully that will lead to more increase in the word counts. Till then bear with the changes and I will try to get back to my old commitments soon.