Monday, September 12, 2011

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.

Friday, September 9, 2011

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.

Monday, September 5, 2011

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.

Friday, September 2, 2011

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.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

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.