Time: Enemy To All
Life has been busy.
I’ve moved in with my girlfriend since last I posted! A process which occupied most of my thoughts and time. Like they say, moving is never as easy as you think it might be — no, especially when you’re moving in the middle of the summer in Florida, i.e., “the swamp,” i.e., “hell.”
After back-breaking work, sweating like crazy and eating takeout for days on end, the move is over! The settling in process starts. It has been a crazy ride, and a fun one, but I think I’m finally settled in enough to get back to being around the great big ol’ Internet — oh, and writing. Writing is a thing that I do.
At the moment my mind is a little too muddled to process getting back into work on the novel. I’m trying to do it in stages. Opening the document every morning, going through a paragraph at a time and refining what I have until I’m ready to jump in and make massive additions again. It’s a process. You have to approach slowly so as to not spook the book! Or maybe that’s just an excuse because right now I feel that I simply can’t process working on a long, complex work.
Instead I’m back to editing and writing small stories and working on the Word of the Day again.
Oh, and still needing to hang things up in the new apartment.
But hey, I’m alive!
Congratulations!
I know how you feel–sometimes staring at the 60K words already written and trying to write more just makes my brain liquify and start spilling out my ears.
Hi Trinza, was wondering where you had gotten to. Glad to hear you are alive and still working on the book.
I agree that revisions can be DAUNTING (and moving doesn’t help). Not only are you trying to refine the work to make it better, but things get added, removed, rearranged, and edited. Constantly running the risk of derailing good flows, messing with plotlines and other problems that can arise when you lose sight of the entirety of the story amidst all the various distractions of work, family and other entertainment.
My book about a character named Hestea Hammerblood keeps evolving–mostly for the good–but when I was reading a couple of the early chapters to my wife recently, I could not stop myself from cringing at the severe infodumps and horrible over-explanations that ensued. Ugh!
It was good to cringe though: I think it finally hit it home for me that as much fun as it can be to devise the backstory, it is no fun to read all of it in one massive steaming pile. So I’ve now written a new prefacing chapter, and am going through my early chapters to try and slim them down. More importantly I realized that many of the things I am dumping on readers right away don’t need to be. I have no interest in them being secrets, but they can be parceled out to the reader slowly to make it more digestible and evolve the story in a way that makes it more interesting as new things are always being discovered.
It will be a lot of work.
But, then, anything worth having is worth fighting for. I believe in the story, so it is work I will persevere on. Now off to slay some hideous infodumps.
Good luck on yours.