One Step Back, Many Steps Forward?

[dr_pretentious]

The strangest thing has been happening. I seem to have taken a break from writing.

This hasn't happened since...hm...17 May 2003.

For most of the past week, the only writing I've been doing has been extensive annotation in the margins of the book I'm reading to prepare for the next drafting pass on Traitor of Imlen. It's indisputably a writing-related task, and it's absolutely necessary if I want my little prequel not to suck, but it doesn't feel like real work. Odd that it doesn't, since in my other life, research was half of my job.

Anyhow, yesterday I really started to feel like I was losing my mind from not producing pages. My thinking on Traitor of Imlen is simply not at the writing stage right now.

Here's what my self-doubt has to say about today's work:
I did the unthinkable. I spent today working on Big Book, Volume 2. It's not dumb enough that I wrote an unpublishably large book, or that it's the start of a series of unpublishably large books. No, I have to interrupt work on a publishably small book to work, not even on the first excessively large volume, but on its excessively large sequel.

Wow. That must be the post-bookum depression talking. I wondered whether the novella was important enough to me to set it off. Looks like the answer is yes.

Last night, it really bothered me to think that the minor character who was in jail in the last scene I wrote of the Big Book before I split it in half was still in jail. In my very first lj post, I announced to my lj-addicted friends that I had to drop forward progress on the storytelling to try to pull the first volume into publishable condition. At the end of a spoilery catalog of awkward positions in which my characters were now frozen for the duration, I said:

Ateket is still in jail, suffering drug withdrawal. It's Ateket I feel worst for, really, because at this point I've left him in solitary confinement in a windowless cell since July. Yes, I know how it all ends, but you deserve to see it. Actually, you deserve to see it more clearly than I've yet shown it to you. Hang on. It's coming.

He's only supposed to spend about a month in jail, Beltresin time. In writing time, he's been in solitary confinement for 20 months. The overpowering feeling came over me that I was not going to be able to write anything worthwhile until I got that poor boy out of prison. So today, I reread the last few chapters I roughed out for Vol 2. I was surprised at how much I still like them. Tonight, I'm sending Ateket home, dammit.

Then, if I have to spend another year or two on the short Stisele prequel, I won't feel nearly so bad about neglecting the characters in the Big Book.




In entirely unrelated news, sporos has just started up his new blog. Those of you who've been reading mine since the beginning may remember him from this post, in which I describe his habit of titling all his first drafts, "Bite Me: I Rule." Those of you who were at the Bad Poetry Party may remember the stupendously awful poem about he sent for me to read, since he couldn't attend this year. The one called "Ode to Sven, My Pet Glacier, Being a Reminiscence upon the Time before the Great Melting Took My Veray True and Goode Companion, Who Was Named after My Nephew's Newt." It is both the best and the worst poem I have ever read on the subject of defrosting one's freezer. His opening lj post, however, is lovely. So go bite him. He rules.

Comments

[anghara.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of the time that I simply quit writing at a completely pivotal point THIS close to the ending of what eventually became "The Hidden Queen" and "Changer of Days". It must have been a subliminal shying away from finishing the beast and then having to say goodbye to it - but the unfortunate side effect of this is that I quit at the point where three of my major protags were sitting there on horseback on teh side of a mountain in mid-winter and hock-deep snow... and sitting there... and sitting there... and sitting there. FOr some three or four months they sat there.

Until a friend who had been following the story up until then begged me to do something before they all died of terminal frostbite.

(moral of story, if there is one: if you don't resolve the hard scenes that lead to endings, you will never finish the story. If you never finish the story, it will bloody well HAUNT you. And you won't be able to think about getting published, assuming that is part of your goal for it.)

So - get your poor boy a get-out-of-jail card. Soon.

[luck!]

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

It pained me terribly to cut off the forward progress of the first draft, but once I realized I had to cut the ms in half to have any chance at publication, it didn't make sense to spend six more months on what was now part of the second volume. I would love to pick up where I left off. The Great Love of the Century was about to get underway, after several hundred pages of slow, subtle hinting.

I once spent six weeks writing a character's funeral before I worked up the resolve to backtrack and write his death scene. Oh, I really, really didn't want to write his death scene. I was so fond of him, it took me three glasses of scotch to do the deed. Being an infrequent drinker, a veritable lightweight, I indulged in some very odd momentary procrastination efforts while I worked on that death scene. Halfway through the third glass of scotch, when I was a few sentences shy of the fatal blow, it suddenly seemed like a very good idea to write a message to president@whitehouse.gov, taking Bush to task for his misreading of Machiavelli. Why, I asked, was Rumsfeld's head not yet on a pike? The loathsome viceroy is supposed to be the fall guy, I explained, and you make yourself look good by putting his head on a pike, after which you can install any minion you like, and he'll look like an improvement. Of course, I added that nothing so icky as a literal beheading or a literal pike would be necessary, but demanding a resignation would do just fine.

So, having no doubt secured my place on some interesting Secret Service lists, I went on to write the rest of the character's tragic demise. I don't seem to be on any no-fly lists, so far.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

Heh. Note to self: resist urge to go near computer with scotch in hand...

(how can you misread something you'd probably never heard of, though...?)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Not surprisingly, Karl Rove is a big Machiavelli fan. He says so frequently, or used to anyway, so it seems likely he's mentioned The Prince to the President. Whether Bush himself has read it...well, they say he does read a few books a year.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

You have just cheered the both of us up immensely. I have had a really good chortle :)