Get Back on the Horse

gday gentle readers (a long post)

It took more time that I would have imaged to get back to work. Finishing the first draft of the trilogy did me in. I could not get my head around not have that goal and deadline in front me

As I moaned on facebook, I felt lost. 

A couple of fellow writer's comments were, as I already knew, spot on - the writing equivalent of 'get back on the horse' but as I pointed out that's easier said than done.

I could give a list of extenuating circumstances why I was still on the ground staring up at the beast: It was the end of a 10 year project, Xmas/NY, heat wave, new grandson, pizza bar, hospitalisation etc etc ad nauseum - improper Latin but it works for me - I might even get a sympathy (or pity) vote but my  'extenuating circumstances' would still be bullshit excuses.

Now that I'm back at it, I've figured out why I had the problem  (me personally I mean - each writer will have their own way of dealing with falls)

I need to know the end. 

That's only half of it but let's start with that. My usual approach for short stories is to start as close to the end as possible. But to do that I need to know where it ends. I have discovered that the same approach helped get my fingers on the keyboard.

Lets step back a bit. When I reached that magic moment of finishing the third and final book in the trilogy after 10 plus years at it, the light up ahead was suddenly behind me, there was nothing in front.  The concepts of editing it and writing something new were vague notions in the back of my mind, things that I would do someday when I finished. They weren't real. I was wholly focussed on the finish line, crossing it threw me.

Obviously I needed a new goal, a new end point to aim at, except what I had just finished was only first draft. It needed editing or it would never get submitted - Heinlein's rule 3.

put succinctly: 1 write.    2 finish.    3 submit.    

I plunged into editing - sort of: I made character sheets, birthday calendars, time-lines  and detailed maps. I then put the three books into one file, stripped out the chapter breaks and divided it into scenes. That's when the real edit started, that's when the hurdles appeared, (plot holes posted in The Tyranny of Distances and I cringed that so many scenes/paras/sentences/words written a decade ago were simply not up to scratch. I fell off again.

Why? Well that has to do with the numbers game I played to get finished. The goal for the final book was one year, 180,000 words. (Roughly matching Vol 1 and 2) Simple maths gave me a good measure of progress; 3500 words a week, 500 a day, easy. It worked. I worked. I finished on time on target and I enjoyed the journey as much as the accomplishment.

I wasn't getting the same joy or sense of achievement from the editing. Something was missing.

Under the pressure of my deadline I always had to move on, to add to the story, to invent new characters and situations. I figured the joy of creation was the missing something.

Ergo I started a new story. This also gave me a better sense of progress, my daily word count. (counting edited words is close to a zero sum game.)

But the editing-which-must-be-done was always in the back of my mind and I hadn't started he story with an end. I was writing for the sake creating and feeling guilty that my massive finished trilogy was not being readied to submit. I needed to do both. I needed a goal that was half creating, half editing. 

Half creating equates to 250 words a day.(this blog is more than twice that already) 250 can be done in hour or two leaving the rest of my writing time for the big edit yet 250/day still adds up to 90,000 words a year; 5 hefty short stories or a good sized novel. That prospect excites me.

The tall story above is the result of being thrown and getting back on the horse.

week 1_________Languishing.

week 2___Goals set ~ write.

week 3_____Write some more.

week 4___Back on the horse.

At the same time the editing now progresses - as at right. The orange line is a refinement point, abandoning the fruitless editing word count (except for new scenes). 22,161 is the total of words edited before scenes 26-27. Thus I am now 23,500 words into the edit with roughly 540,000 to go, ie 4% done.  

Tomorrow I'll add my 250 plus words to the current story (which now has a known end) and start editing from scene 28 (of 1300 and something)  It feels good to be wriding again.   

until my next post 

ooroo RoB

Finished - where to now?

The Prologue

This post was drafted ages ago but not posted. Why is a mystery. I guess I was just emerging from the mind-numbing blank time after finishing the trilogy as noted below.   
 

gday gentle reader/s 

The problem with finishing a big project that took a long time is where to now?  In writing the problem is exacerbated by the fact that finishing is a relative term. Ive had several of them: finishing Bk1 Feb 2000, Bk2 aug 2010 and the Bk3 last week aug 2011. 

All dates refer only to finishing the first draft. Book 1 has gone through three, losing 30,000 words in the process. Book 2 its hard to say with all the stops, starts and backtracking - the original start is now in the middle of the book - a real dog's breakfast. Book 3 is the only one written from start to end with only superficial editing.

This how finishing went on my Face book page. Towards the end I was writing furiously with no time to blog.

5/8/11

word target reached 11:18 Friday 5/8/11 ~ 17 days ahead of schedule  180,000 words in 50 weeks - yaaaah!

finishing the book 3 itself is close and might just get done in the next 17 days

20/8/11

I've just started work on the last scene, of the last chapter, of the last book of my thrilogy (Freudian slip or wishful thinking?) begun Sep 1995. ( that date is true but misleading, the work has been intermittent as I will blog when the whole damn thing is truly really actually finished - excluding the editing)

The blog promised above has been a long time coming. when i stopped writing the trilogy I stopped writing. Almost a month went by until I appeared drunk in charge of a keyboard.

10/9/11

Iam in a delightfil state of imnebriation 

deamn fingeres

this is waht happen when you have nothing to do you waste your face on life book.

And eventually to this  attempt to rationalise what was happening to me

16/9/11 

I, like nature, abhor the vacuum left after finishing the trilogy. Ten plus years with a single focus leaves a whacking great hole that the editing (absolutely necessary) and a new project don’t seem to fill. I feel lost. I fill the time with trivial pursuits. like this.

This drew a few comments from fellow strugglers-with-the-muse. to which I eventually replied  

26/9/11 

what I am doing is reshaping the chaotic sprawling tome/s into something resembling a story - Severne's tits - the contradictions, misdirections, blind alleys, bad science, and crap sentences are as numerous as stars ...

just completed my "master character sheet" which shows the trilogy has 141 named characters

Now its all done it has to be edited. 

ooroo

It’s a Monday kinda Tuesday

G'day dear reader/s

I posted ‘Mice and Me’ in good faith Saturday and shut down. When I started up Monday my computer refused to cooperate. I’ve sent it in for re-education.

So now, Tuesday, I’m sitting at the kitchen table writing on a laptop, an Intel atom inside and windows7starter. Very basic but I still managed to add 800 words to Arch yesterday despite the anger producing frustrations. Let’s not go there.

 

The story proceeds. Last time I blogged about the process I was at Ch.4 (20K words) now at Ch.10 (50K); a lot has happened in the story, as in life.

The main characters (I still have 5 POV) are gathering in Deep Creek where it all began for the crisis that ends part one (at about 90K words). Something that worries me at the moment is my villain Hyatt has a better tale to tell that the dual personality heroine Rowena/Severne. He has and is overcoming more obstacles than they (or me) which tends to make him a better character. 

I shall have to seriously up the stakes for Rowena/Severne 

Unfortunately that's all I have time for folks, back to the writing and more on story next post.(fingers crossed)

Ooroo 

  PS I'm considering shorter more frequent posts to give a better idea of what this writer's writing process is really like.

The Writing Comes First

G'day dear reader,

       My time, thought and energy is divided equally among the three things I most value in life, my relationship with my wife, my health and my writing. My health took top billing recently (to be the subject of my other blog - if time permits)  and put a dent in the writing, the real writing, the novel; blogging is a luxury.

My self-imposed target was to  finish book 3: Arch, a 180,000 novel,  in one year. That's 3500 words a week.  two weeks ago I spent 3 days in hospital and though I wrote on my laptop,  I end up 1100 words short that week - no time to blog the process.  Last week - catch-up - I'm now 200 words short of  where I should be over all,  now I can blog it.

So where am I, 12,000 words into Arch and all over the place. 

keeping track

Chapter one - done.  Half of the prologue and  a third of chapter 3 and  I'm working on chapter 2.  It should be obvious that the numbers at the end are the chapter's word count - I aim for around 5000 words per chapter - it suits my modus operandi.

The part of chapter three that got done was  because a scene involving POV character (Hyatt - a villain in the sense that he opposes the aims of heroine Rowena) got way too long and was split.

The Jorgena of chapter one is the mother, lover, mother-in-law or grandmother of almost all the important characters (nothing like keeping it in the family)  At the start of Break, she is a mysterious figure but never with a  POV, she almost disappears in Face but will play a pivotal role in Arch; time she spoke up for herself.

Lee (now Lee Proctor and upgraded from acolyte to Server) who I introduced as a  villain to kick off Arch is changing sides.

The process is difficult to describe. I was writing Lee's second scene where he reports to his superior  and was looking for a nifty ending.  A sudden thought had me hitching him to one of  Jorgena's twin daughters who have also been waiting since Break to play a part. Jorgena in chapter 1 mentioned them as traveling so I put them in Lee's home town.

 I had no idea I would do this until it was done.  This is what I mean by a difficult to describe process - as Forrest Gump would say - it happens.  It happens as I write it, arising spontaneously from a restless mind in tune with the created world  and its characters - I think? 

However the twins are Sarah and Lisa and I paired him with Sarah. So now I have a couple called Sarah and Lee which is no better than Lisa and Lee (I did Roden and Rowena in Face, another same first letter double act  is one too many)  Methinks Lee needs a new first name - principle of  last on first off.

I have also give Sarah a POV (I have in my sketchy overall plan a sacrificial role for one of the twins - which is as yet undecided).

Who knows what will have happened by my next blog?  I don't - yet.

Ooroo