Matthew S. Rotundo's Pixeltown

Inching forward with the Apocalypse Pictures Presents rewrite, closing out chapter fourteen and beginning an almost entirely new chapter fifteen.  Some 1200 words brings Magic Meter here:

In case anyone’s wondering, drafting a new chapter when you’re in the middle of a second draft is . . . something other than easy.  No wonder I’ve been avoiding this for so long.  I knew it wasn’t going to be pretty.  Or fun.  As Jeff Goldblum says in Jurassic Park, I hate being right all the time.

Man, the things we writers do to ourselves.

Anyway, a snippet:

[A]ll the scrabbling through this dusty, scratchy land, sliding down steep clefts and clambering back up the other side, had left him sweaty, footsore, and thirsty.  He’d had nothing to drink since the lake.  The hot sun hammered him, and the landscape provided very little cover.

Eddie glanced skyward.  The sun swung toward the west in a pale blue sky.  A haze hung in the air.  And three large birds, black against the sky, circled directly overhead.  Condors.

Eddie sneered and extended his middle finger toward them.  If they thought they’d found a meal, they were in for bitter disappointment.  The ridgeline to the east led straight to his destination:  the Hollywood sign, still glorious white, atop Mount Lee.  He was maybe half a mile away from it.

No updates for Write Club.

Up ahead:  more words.  And they won’t just write themselves, drat them.

So.  Um.  Did I mention that I was traveling for a lot of last week?

Yeah.  I was traveling for a lot of last week.  Why I neglected to mention that little tidbit at the beginning of last week, I can’t really tell.  I guess it just kinda sneaked up on me when I wasn’t looking.

So needless to say, negligible progress on Apocalypse Pictures Presents.  I’ll do better this week.  Promise.  Unless something else sneaks up on me.

Life’s like that, sometimes.

Anyway.

No updates for Write Club.

And I’m out.

Having escaped the vile clutches of chapter twelve, our hero is now inching forward into previously uncharted territory with the Apocalypse Pictures Presents rewrite, logging about 1400 or so words.  So sayeth Magic Meter:

It’s difficult to get an accurate count, because much of this is freshly drafted, but augmented with cut-and-pastes from the first pass.  It’s a bit of a juggling act, really, stitching new and old material together.  Chapter fourteen, for example, is being almost completely redone.  I’ve saved the original chapter in a separate file, however—not being completely dim.  So as I’m writing, I’m also flipping back to the deleted stuff, finding places to insert certain useful bits, and retooling them as needed.

So yeah.  Kinda difficult, and slow going.  But progress is being made.  And does it feel good to be doing some drafting?  Oh, yes, it does.  Maybe I haven’t forgotten how to write yet.

A snippet:

It was most assuredly not about obsession, regret, the inability to let go of a dead past.  It was not.  No matter what the rest of them thought.

They had gotten scared, lost faith.  But they would come back.  It was meant to be.  And they would figure out this current mess, finish shooting here, and move on.

He caught a faint whiff of smoke on the air, but ignored it.  He had more important concerns.

Write club update:  Giving up on a novel submission to an agent, after 6 months with no response.  And that was on a requested full, too.  Agents.  Go figure.

Further into the unknown . . .