Really, this only represents about half a week, thanks to Dragon*Con. And my weekend was bloody awful for writing, what with two birthday celebrations to attend–and a Nebraska game to watch. Good thing I didn’t have to mow the lawn.
Tired of banging my head against a short story that just didn’t want to crack, I decided to set it aside and focus on my Petra read-through. And I noticed a funny thing: I’m proceeding much more slowly through these chapters all of a sudden.
That’s to be expected, I suppose. After all, I’m not just reading, I’m also going through
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‘s line edits and end-of-chapter notes, and making my own notes in the process. What’s more, I’m trying to track everything in both the electronic and hard copies of the novel. So every time I see something worth noting, I have to add a new comment to the Word document and jot a note in the margins of the hard copy. (I don’t know exactly why I’m going to this much trouble. I guess I want to be sure I don’t miss anything.)
But the thing is, I’m finding myself making a lot more notes in these middle chapters. I breezed through the early chapters of the book, but now I’m putting line edits on nearly every page. I sincerely doubt that I just forgot how to write when I got to the second act. Much more likely, I think, that my editor brain, after months of neglect and disuse, took a little while to shake off the rust. Which probably means I’ll need to go over those opening chapters again at some point.
Turns out my editor brain has lost none its edge in the interim. It’s as salty as it’s ever been. I am perversely relieved to learn this.
And just when I set that Halloween story aside, I realized why I hated the opening I’d already written: it bores me. It will be boring no matter how well I write it. And the words of Elmore Leonard sprang to mind: “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”
Right. So I’ve decided to skip this opening, and go directly to the point where I get interested in the story. I might be able to knock this one out yet.
Write Club updates:
“The Multiplicity Has Arrived” garnered a quarter-finalist finish in Q3 2007 of the Writers of the Future Contest. Very soon, thanks to IGMS, I will no longer be eligible for this one. (Edmund Schubert told me at Dragon*Con that he delights in doing this.) I’m debating whether I have time to submit one more entry. One last hurrah . . .
Tier one rejection from Analog for “Gone Black.” Response time, three and a half weeks.
And I’m outta here. Party on.
