I sat down last night to read over the 80,000 words I had carved out for the current work in progress; hell, that's novel length all by itself, other than the storyline has not wrapped itself up yet. By the time I was done reading, however, I was left with roughly 63,000 words, because 17,000 of those words frankly kinda sucked.
Well, it wasn't suckitude on the scale of sucking so hard that the moon was in risk of being pulled out of orbit, but there were large chunks that did nothing to move the story forward. A lot of it I found amusing, but only in a this-is-only-funny-in-my-head kind of way.
So I did some literary surgery, set the offending matter aside (I didn't totally delete it because, hey, it might work later, or in something else) and went to bed, where I actually fell asleep quickly and had weird dreams about Max being the size of a Golden Retriever and one holy-hell-this-could-happen dream about being on the SGK 3 Day and getting lost because I didn't pay attention to the signs along the way and didn't notice that there was no one else walking with me until I was back near home, circling the park.
Now, that's a hell of a long walk and a very long time to not notice the lack of other walkers. And since it involves walking across the Bay Bridge, which is decidedly not foot-traffic friendly, I figure I must have been on crack or something at the start of the dream. Dream crack, folks. I don't do drugs before bed.
Well, other than the Benedryl.
And sometimes Vicodin.
So I woke up this morning, a little wary of Max, who was sitting on top of me, staring holes into my face as he projected feed me feed me feed me into my brain, and headed for my laptop, determined to make up for some of the 17,000 words I sliced and diced last night.
Since this morning I've added, oh, 1200 words to the manuscript; it's not that I don't know what to write, or what comes next. The problem is that I do. There's a bitter-sweetness to this story, and even though I (and anyone who has read the first 4 books in the series) know how a big chunk of this turns out, I'm having a problem going there.
I have to break a couple of hearts, and I really don't want to now that I've explored their relationship.
It has to happen, though.
It won't make sense if it doesn't.
Hell, maybe I can introduce a Golden-sized cat into the mix. At least that would distract me, if not feed a few more really funky dreams...
4 comments:
You, more than anyone I know, appreciate the need to lose words when they're just not doing the job. Learning to not marrying myself to anything I've written has been a tough lesson - probably the hardest one I've ever had to learn as a writer - but you make it seem realistic, attainable.
Time will give you the structure you need to move things to where they need to go. You've already laid out the path, which is half the battle.
We will be able to stand the heart break if it makes sense!
That was one weird dream. I am sure you will work things out to your satisfaction in time.
I was going to say something encouraging. Possibly even witty. Instead, I'm just going to say that life is full of broken hearts. Life is not about how a heart was broken, life is about what you learned and how well you fixed it.
(Yeah, I know, real zen-like coming from someone who hasn't seen sleep in almost two days. Work with me here, ok?) :)
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