Progress and Vanity

After three summer months of writers block, I’ve finally gotten some work done on my novel! When I got back to it, I was at about 130 pages, and now I’m almost at 160!

I know, I know, quality over quantity. I say this every time, but I can’t help my obsessive preoccupation with page counting. It’s a good feeling, even if those pages you’ve written are absolute crap, you’ve still written. That’s certainly worth something. Sometimes you only get one good sentence from a rough draft of ten pages, but it’s one more sentence than you had before. Previously it was about 150 pages, and due to some major changes, I chopped it down to 130. It was painful, but necessary.

Currently I’ve been working on adding three new characters which I think are necessary. I’ve been having a difficult time with showing not telling, and these new characters serve that function. I don’t know if my new 30 pages or so will stick around, but I know at least two of my characters will, and my head is in the creepy haunted island where my story is set/an alternate future reality where my published book is being adapted into a mini series in which I am able to work on. That itself will produce more pages even if these ones get cut.

I know lots of writers are against editing anything until their piece is completely done, but that’s not my deal. It’s that whole obsessive thing I mentioned in an earlier post. It doesn’t cause writer’s block for me; in fact, it usually gives me even more ideas to make it better than it already is.

The reason I got blocked in the first place didn’t actually have much to do with writing either. To put it plainly: I was having a bad time. In fact, I’m still having a pretty bad time. So how did I start writing again? Daydreaming. Specifically, about my success. That and about Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but that’s a different story. There’s nothing like a little self indulgence and vanity to give you the drive to get back to what you know you’re meant to be doing.

The cool thing is that right now I feel like the writing I’m doing is just some colouring around the edges; the main plot points are already written. With some fine tuning, I have almost the whole first part done and after doing a skim through today, well, it’s damn good. It just needs a bit of shoe polish.

My goal for the next little while is to work on said polishing of the first four chapters or so, and then I will put those chapters into the hands of a writer friend to critique. This is pretty big as I deemed my last three novels not worthy of ever seeing the light of day by anyone else ever (I still stand by this. They’re crap).  I’ve had about two of the chapters from it critiqued in creative writing classes, but it’s changed so drastically since then that it wasn’t really even the same story that it is now. Either way, the point is…it’s almost ready to be read. Not as individual installments from a larger piece, but actually as the larger piece. Terrifying. Exciting. Crazy. I’m going to be famous.

Side note: every time and every day should totally follow the footsteps of something and anything. Amirite?