Abysmal progress last week. I hang my head. I beat my breast. I don sackcloth; I cover myself with ashes.
I’m really dragging my feet on the rewrite of “Gone Black.” Every time I sit at the keyboard, I invent ways to distract myself–classic avoidance behavior. It’s frustrating.
I started the week reasonably well. I began the rewrite, lopping off a significant chunk of the opening scene, and feeling pretty good about it. Then I hit a brick wall.
I knew the second chapter of this novella was going to be problematic. It’s all setup, all of it. I knew this when I did the first rewrite of the story, and tried to address it by working on a conflict between my protagonist and a key secondary character. But it still doesn’t work. That conflict is really a False Crisis. Like the rest of the chapter, it’s still just setup. Not a single story event occurs in this section. Not one. And all the gussying up in the world isn’t going to change that.
It had to go, the entire chapter. And upon reflection, I realized that even the opening scene, the one I had just trimmed, had to go, too. That’s 5K words, about 1/4 of the story’s length.
The hell of it is, I already knew this. I even mentioned it here a couple of weeks ago. But of course, there’s a difference between knowing a thing and rolling up the shirt sleeves and doing it. I can’t simply amputate those 5K words. A lot of that stuff will need to be worked back into story; I have to figure out exactly how much and where.
So I started again. Again.
If there is any positive news in all this, it’s that I have committed to a path. I know what I need to do. I just really don’t feel like doing it. Cue the violins.
In slightly better news, I also did a bit of a rethink on my impending rewrite of Petra. I had originally intended to leave it aside for about six weeks or so, then go through the feedback from my beta readers (one of whom has already submitted her comments–thanks, D!) and get started on the next draft. That would have meant I would have begin around the 4th of July. But I took a look at my schedule for the next few months and reconsidered. I’m going on a canoe trip on the 13th, traveling to Denver in early August, then hitting Dragon*Con over Labor Day weekend. It seems wildly impractical of me to take on the rewrite at this time. There would be too much stop-and-start, real momentum killers. I realized I was trying too hard to conform to an arbitrary timeline.
So I might wait until after Dragon*Con to begin the rewrite proper. That gives me some extra time to digest the feedback I get, anyway. And it relieves some of the pressure I was putting on myself to finish “Gone Black.”
That said, I’m not going to spend all of July on the novella. If Petra is going to wait a bit longer, I’d like to take a swipe at some new work. Not sure just yet what that new stuff will be, but something should come up. It usually does.
Several updates for Write Club:
Tier one rejection from an agent on a query for The Watermasters.
YFOP from Doug for “The Judgment of Harris,” with nice comments. Too Lovecraftian for Realms, as it turns out. Response time, about a month.
Tier one rejection from Dark Recesses for “A Walk in the Woods, with Voices.” Response time, five days.
Fantasy called “What Really Happened That Night” well written, but it didn’t win them over completely. They’re now closed to submissions until November, BTW.
Tier one rejection from Withersin for “A Walk in the Woods, with Voices.” Response time, three days.
One final note: Tomorrow I see a guy about a thing.
Cryptic enough for ya?
Later daze . . .
