#ROW80 Check-in 11/11/15

Nano is in full swing, and I was typing away yesterday on Ever Touched when I came to a horrifying conclusion: it was just not working. No matter how I framed it, this story sucked. I know Nano is all about the wordcount and I believe in that to a degree, but the sick feeling in my stomach would not go away. Especially after last night’s work. I’d thought maybe it was pressure related (book 3 of a series), maybe it was because I was pantsing it and felt like I was floundering….but no matter what I told myself, the feeling continued to get worse. And I can’t continue on a project if I feel this way, Nano or not.

So I made a decision. I would start over. I’ll keep my words and wordcount intact (after all, I did write them!), but I’d start at the very beginning. I’ll do that for a few days. If things didn’t improve, I’d choose another novel and start that. It is still early in the month and I could probably get a good 15-20k in before the 30th.

So today I started it and…so far, it feels better. I feel like my character is acting and narrating in character (that was one problem) and I’ve changed her secret/problem a bit and I like it better now. I’ve also changed the way she and the male lead interact and again, much better.

Whether or not this is the answer to the problem I don’t know yet. But I have a long history of needing to restart stories. Fey Touched I started twice, and Grave Touched three times (not counting the rewrites! Counting them, probably five!). Sometimes you have to go where your heart goes, and I believe my muse was not quite on board. This is one case where brute force was the wrong thing to do.

Did I waste the first 11k? Hell no! I may reuse some of those scenes (with tweaks, of course!) and even if I didn’t, they started me on this path and needed to exist to bring me to this point. It’s all good.

Stats!

Words written: 12,871
Words remaining: 17,129
Word wars: 9
Word wars with myself: 2
Chapters written: 0
What’s happening: An uncomfortable conversation (again!)
What’s next: Brianna needs to make a decision
Feeling: Better!

Chocolate: Not a lot! I had a chocolate-covered caramel from the hubby, and I ate a WW Sundae with chocolate syrup, yum!I lost a pound and a half!

#ROW80 Check-in 10/7/15

Today is the 9-year anniversary of he day I met my hubby. 🙂 Boy, how time flies!

Here’s my update:

I haven’t written anything, due to the freelance project I’m working on. Things are percolating, and the first sentence of Before the Stars Fall revealed itself to me. Thank you, muse! Like I need any more WIPs…

Physical activity: walked for 15 minutes yesterday and today. One more day to go!

I’m tentatively planning on shooting my test roll this weekend, if things aren’t too nuts. I missed the window for summer flowers (boo!) but since I have the automatic I should be good to go for indoors stuff. We have two animals, a cat and a dog, that always are good for pictures. (If the roll turns out and the pictures are really good, they can be made into Christmas presents).

That’s really about it.

Oh! Chocolate consumption! Everyone’s favorite part! How could I forget? I…haven’t had much chocolate in the past few days. I think I’m slipping! Must remedy that immediately! (she says as she eats a piece of chocolate….)

#ROW80 Check-in 3/15/15 – Stuckity stuck

The hamsters in my brain have decided to stop doing their thing, and I am horrendously stuck on Survivor. Like, I-can’t-figure-this-out-there’s-no-way-to-fix-this-and-everything-I-think-of-sounds-stupid-and-why-did-I-decide-to-work-on-this-book-anyway stuck.

I’ve considered starting the book in a slightly different place, but Grave Touched starts with the MC waking up in the hospital, so I don’t want to duplicate that. It needs to be…ambiguous. It needs to be unclear as to who exactly is in the hospital and what exactly happened to put her there (I’m trying really hard not to give spoilers). So, it’s told in first person POV. I love first person because it’s a way to dig deep into a character’s head, and that’s how I wrote it originally.  Third person isn’t possible due to the aforementioned situation. The narrator is an unreliable one, which complicates things a bit.  And everything I think of isn’t working.

Unfortunately, I need to do this linear. I suppose I could jump ahead, but that’s how this book got so messy — because I kept jumping around and not doing anything in order.

It’s a freaking mess.

The good news is that I believe I may be done with the Grave Touched cover and blurb. Possibly. Yay. Final edits start in April, and I’ll need to work on getting it ready for release. Need also to look for reviewers (hint, hint). It does stand alone so you could theoretically read it before book 1.

On the Ever Touched front, still noodling.

I reread Fireborn yesterday and I’m a bit stuck on that as well. I had a very loose outline I was following, and I stopped in a weird place, so that’s a thing.

(I had a sneaking suspicion that my muse is tapped out. And that’s why all of this is like pulling teeth. We’ll see.)

Other than that, nothing else to really report. Been consuming lots of chocolate (white chocolate too! Yum!) and have been doing a ton of thinking. May do a freewrite to see if anything pops out at me.

#ROW80 Check-in 4/27/14

Still revising. I’m very close to being done. Still stuck on the ending, though.

I decided to take out the memory loss part. It would be tough to resolve it in a satisfying manner without bloating the wordcount more. Soooo, there’s that.

Today I have decided to at least start the ending — get something written, good or bad. I’m running out of time. My muse does not like this.

Stats!

Words written so far: 19,739 / LOL, less than 40 more words. Actually, I’ve cut some things and added a few others.
Words remaining: Just not going there!
What’s happening: The end. I hope.
What’s next: Being finished. I hope.
Eye report: Slightly twinge-y.
Feeling: Anxious to finish.
Chocolate consumption: None so far, but I’m sure that will change.

#ROW80 Check-in 4/16/14

Well, here we are again. I’ve been making some awesome progress on Reaper Girl. Last night, I hit the climax and then…my wrist went all twinge-y. (And I know what happens when I ignore it..so…I was done for the night). So today, pending any more twinging, I should be able to get close to the end. There’s only one teeny tiny little problem: I’m not sure how to end it. Well, let me rephrase. I have an idea of how to do it; I’m just wibbling over the execution of it. I don’t want a deux ex machine ending or an ending that sucks. The ending I want to write involves getting from point A to point B in some unknown way. That’s the real problem.

Now, technically, I could start revising anyway. The deadline is in 2 weeks. I have a ton of ideas on how to make it better and maybe, just maybe, something might jump out at me as I’m revising. (I did this with both Fey Touched and Grave Touched. It seems to work well for me). Soooo if I can’t come up with something pretty soon, I might just hold off till the revision is done.

So that’s what’s going on in my world.

Stats!

Words written so far: 15,307 words total/2,951 words since the last check-in
Words remaining: We’ve gone waaaaay over the limit, here.
What’s happening: His Highness, the King of the Underworld, is proclaiming his decision on [redacted] things.
What’s next: An epic, thrilling conclusion I have yet to dream up.
Eye report: Twinge-y
Feeling: A bit tired.
Chocolate consumption: 1 Weight Watchers snack. I’m also eyeballing a ice cream bar for later. We’ll see.

#ROW80 Check-in the Fifteenth – and Grave Touched, I’m cheating on you

Ugh, not much progress on Grave Touched. It’s just not happening as fast as I would like. I left my poor characters in a weird spot and I want to finish this scene, but I’ve been avoiding it for days for reasons I don’t understand.

It might have something to do with a resurrected project I am kinda sorta working on (although not a single word has been written yet — it’s all plotty stuffs and worldbuilding stuffs). The original novel was my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel, Soulfire which is dark fantasy/dystopian featuring muses and the eradication of creativity (did I mention the world is dark?). That part is being used for a different project I’m calling The Last Muse. But in the original Soulfire, I veered way off from the seedling of the idea, which I am using for this version which going to be New Adult. With me so far?

So the name is staying but the seedling idea is what I’m pursuing. It hit me so hard and so fast that I’ve been trying like hell to keep up. Today I was getting scene ideas. And naturally, I shouldn’t be working on this because I’m supposed to be working on Grave Touched. I feel guilty about even thinking about it, but it won’t leave me alone! Soooo I might do a bit of writing on this, but my work on GT must be done for the day before I even think of working on this.

Novels, how you wound me.
Muse, how you spite me.
Brain, how you devour me.

(…not sure where that ^^ came from).

Ahem. Stats!

Running total: 24,068 words (creeping, I tell you, creeping!)
Words remaining: 10,932 words
Body count: We’re all alive at the moment.
Feeling: Torn in two. #sadface
Eye report: Twinge-y. No loopy pills were taken during the composition of this post.

#ROW80 Check-in the Fourteenth

I’ve gotten stuck and I haven’t made as much progress as I would have liked. It’s a new scene, and there are several things that need to happen. And integrating them all without confusing things is what’s tripping me up. Yesterday, I think I wrote around 100 words. That I hate. So, not going so well.

But, I will give it another try today or tomorrow. Gotta keep moving forward with this.

Running total: 23,173 words
Words remaining: 11,827 words (SO CLOSE UGH)
Body count: Everyone’s still alive and well, although the MC is feeling rather strange (*evil wink*)
Feeling: Hopeful. And sleepy. Great combination.
Eye report: Some terrible pain yesterday that carried into today. Took my nerve pain meds a few minutes ago, so I’m hoping they kick in. If not, it’s loopy pill time!

#ROW80 Check-in the Seventh

Feeling some better, but not 100%. I was able to get some work done last night. However, my muse is being uncooperative about this. I can’t get her/my subconscious/whatever to get excited about this project. I think some of it is due to some other things that are depressing me, and being sick and having medication issues isn’t helping matters. I’m hoping I can snap out of it and make some great progress soon.

(I may have to resort to a trick I use when everything I can throw at my muse doesn’t work. I pretend that I’m just goofing off. I use Notepad, and I write in a different tense. This somehow tells my muse that it’s okay. It’s playtime, not Serious Writing. Stay tuned. May need to do that.)

Stats:

Running total: 9,337 words/ Update: 9,886 words
Words remaining: 65,663/Update: 65,114 words
Body count: Still alive and breathing. For now. 😉
Feeling: frustrated/Update: A bit better.
Eye report: Not too bad, but that remains to be seen — I’ve had to start lowering my nerve pain medication dose. (It needs to be done).

Perfect is the enemy of the good.

This is one of Holly Lisle’s concepts in her How to Think Sideways class.  Something I seem to have forgotten in my quest to get published.

Lately I’ve been feeling out of sorts and frustrated with my writing.  Darklight has been stalled, the poems I wrote for Turtleduck Press were like pulling teeth, and every time I sat down to write I was paralyzed by the fear that whatever I write won’t be good enough.  That anything I wrote would be crap and no one would want to publish any of it.  That everyone else would be successful but I wouldn’t be because my writing sucked and wasn’t publishable.

Talk about a head case.  I started thinking more positively, that no, my stuff didn’t suck and yes, I would be published someday, and that was that.  And I remembered how I used to write when I first started 10 years ago (!)  : I wrote with joy.  I didn’t worry about anything on the page.  I kept moving forward.  I didn’t analyze anything to death and I rarely, if ever, rewrote anything during drafting.  But as time went on, this perfectionism crept in through the cracks.  It was insidious.  Just a “that first scene isn’t right.  Maybe you should rewrite it?”  became “wow, that whole first chapter sucks.  Let’s start again.  And again. And again.”  And this is why Darklight‘s first two chapters have been rewritten no less than 5 times.  Head. Desk.

I worried too much about making it perfect — the mood, the hook, the main character — and I completely derailed myself.  I’m not even supposed to rewrite while drafting.  It used to be an ironclad rule.  Now it’s more of an afterthought.

So I decided to bring the love back.  I will write and not worry about anything anymore.  I’ll let the story unfold the way it’s going to unfold, and I will follow my muse.  NO REWRITES.  I can make notes.  But that’s it.

And I will continue to work at getting published.  I’ll edit and revise and rewrite when it’s time.

And lastly, I won’t ever tell myself that I’m not good enough, because I AM.  And I know that deep down.  Sometimes it gets lost in the daily shuffle.  No more.

As Holly Lisle says, write with joy.

This is tough.

I’m writing poetry again, and it’s like a half-remembered dream.  It disappears when I get too close to it.

Why am I torturing myself so?

Well, Turtleduck Press is putting together a winter-themed anthology, and since I can’t write a short story, it was suggested I write poetry.

Easy, right?

Oh sure, I can wax poetic on love, winter, Christmas.  But for it to sing, to move me, not so much.  I tried a new form, too, called the rondeau.  It’s French, and it involves repetition in a certain pattern.  I love poems with repetition and have been successful with both sestinas and pantoums.  And I’m normally very edgy about formal poetry, but this speaks to me.

Oh my goodness.  I feel like a novice poet — as if the past 15 years of poems haven’t been written.  I feel like a stranger in my skin.  What the heck happened?

I suspect I’m out of practice.  And writing to a theme is really tough.  I keep trying to write sad love poems.  And the Christmas poem I wrote was also sad.  I’m not sure that’s going to work.

But, gonna keep poking at it.  Maybe something will come.