What is that saying, an author is someone who hates writing more than other people? Yeah. Like that. :p
I’ve cut about 15 of the 45 pages I had on this stupid book, and probably have more or less figured out how to fix the next bit, which will return us to our regularly scheduled whatever, not that there’s been any regularly scheduled writing this year. (I said something about writing and my father, ingenuously, said, “Oh, writing? Is that what you do?” :/)
On the positive side, I guess, is that I’ve probably got it figured out and I’ve cut a lot of dead weight out of the opening chapters, and also, as my mother points out, this is pretty well par for the course. Most books take some kind of miserable rejiggering, although the first need to refigure usually comes a bit later in the book for me.
Also on the positive side is that a friend of mine who normally writes comics made sympathetic noises while I was whinging about this on Twitter, and said she’d stubbed her toe on a plot hump in her own (first) novel and had been afraid to go anywhere near it since, figuring that she’d just flat-out broken it because she didn’t know what she was doing, so we’re gonna have a brainstorm about that because of course it’s not really hopelessly broken, it’s just a different kind of writing than what she’s used to and she’s unaccustomed to the usual lumps of novel writing. So at least my muttering and sniveling has actually proven helpful to someone.
(x-posted from
The Essential Kit)