Writing

Why Do I Do This To Myself?

"Torture Chair in the Fortress of San Leo, Italy" © 2009 by Anguskirk
Torture
I’ve been so busy with The Project that Ate the Summer™ at work that I’ve had little time to write for the past few weeks. I’ve written some, but not a lot. Most of what I’ve written has been ideas, of which I’ve had a plethora.

Yesterday, after a meeting of the Lawrenceville Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Group, I sat down to work on my novel, and discovered that this was the sentence I had left for myself a couple of weeks ago when I stopped.

Chuck could see [Nick’s] jaw clenching and unclenching, and she realized he was angry. But angry at whom?

Now, I’m sure that when I wrote that, I had some idea who Nick was mad at, and probably even why.

BUT I HAVE NO IDEA, TODAY. None. Zip. Nada. Zilch.

<sigh>

In fact, I have no idea where the 621 words of these scene were headed.

When, when, WHEN am I going to learn to make notes to myself when I stop in the middle of a scene?

In other news, though, I read back over the entire story (54,710 words so far) and was surprised at how much of it I liked. Sure, I’ll have to gut sections of it, and I have several new characters that will have to be inserted into the first part, and I have to give them some side plots and such, but on the whole, I’m still fairly happy with the writing.

And that’s actually a pretty good feeling. Several times I’d find something I wanted to fix and start to edit only to find out that I’d already written myself a note to edit that same section in the same way. So at least I’m consistent.

Now that the æstivorous1 project has been turned over to the capable hands of the QA department, maybe I can concentrate on making some headway in this novel.

And on some other things I’ve got planned, as well.


  1. One of these day I’m going to coin a word that sticks (alas, ‘grammudgeon’ has as yet gained no real foothold), but this is not the time. In Google books, there’s a discussion about primate behavior that uses the word, although spelled without the ‘æ’. Theirs probably means feeding during the summer, while I’m using it in the sense of actually devouring summer itself.

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Gary Henderson is an amateur author who lives in the Greater Atlanta Metropolitan Area with a chef housemate. By day he is a mild-mannered software developer working for a major health-care company. By night and on weekends, he occasionally creates and destroys worlds.

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