Monster Scene

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." --Douglas Adams

Well, I'm behind schedule. Life has really not been polite and respectful of my writing time this last week. But, there's good news: 1) this is The Son's first full week of school, and since I don't have many tutoring gigs going yet, I should have plenty of time to write; and 2) I'm anticipating that the scene after this one will be far, far easier to write. So I have high hopes of being back on schedule by the end of the week.

I'm almost done with the dialogue. This is a very talky scene, so writing the actions shouldn't take nearly as long as writing the dialogue has. I hope.

Linky Friday

Today's tidbit comes from author Holly Lisle, with this article about how to decide when to scrap a writing project. I've been doing some idle thinking about EN lately, applying what I've learned from plotting TSE to the raggedy areas of EN's plot, and re-reading this article just reaffirmed for me that EN has great potential and that I do not want to give up on it entirely.

I'm still writing the dialogue for Climax #1. Between my evening tutoring gig starting up again, evening meetings at The Son's school, and one nighttime visit to the ER to remove a crafting supply from The Son's nose, I'm exhausted and scattered. But I have a giant cup of coffee and almost two hours left of nursery school, so I'm going to buckle down and try to finish the dialogue this morning.

Climax #1, Day 4

Yes, my book has multiples climaxes. Go ahead and giggle. Pervert.

Man, this scene is going to be a total bitch to write. It's long, with tons of dialogue, by far the most characters onstage of any scene in the book, lots of da-da-DUM! secrets revealed, and a small but dramatic fire caused by an oil lamp knocked to the ground by an antagonist in the grips of a personal and religious epiphany.

Just filling in the scene sheet took forever, since I kept having to stop to figure out what the hell happens. Nothing like writing the climax early on to shine a huge spotlight through all those plot holes you thought you'd done a fine job filling. I stared at the wall a lot, and scribbled new problem/solution chains in my notebook, and then just hoped for the best and plowed ahead with the spin. I swear, that spinning down the page thing is magic, far better (for me) than any other free-write method I've tried. I worked out so much more about the scene in just a half hour of typing incomplete sentences.

Tomorrow I'll take a stab at the dialogue.

Linky Friday

Here's a blog post by author Lazette Gifford that illustrates how almost any idea-- even a story a friend tells you about her cats-- can mushroom into a novel.

Ahead of Schedule? What's That?

I finished the closing scene today, for a total of 3,183 words on TSE so far. It's pretty good, actually. The writing is cheesy, but the bones of a powerful ending are there. It did feel a little strange to write the resolution of the romantic storyline before I've written the scene in which Irsa and Akenam meet.

So I'm a few days ahead of schedule. Good time for it, because next week's scene is Climax #1 and a lot of it is still a big question mark in my mind. And it's got TONS of dialogue. We'll see if the scene sheet helps to sort it all out.