Mar 12 2017

Stuff. Plus: other stuff.

Rosemary

I’ve been spending a lot of time sorting through the discussions and insights from the most recent meeting of my writer’s group.  I was in the hot-seat that time, with the current version of Book 5 (of which there is now about 25,000 words, since I had already surgically excised  a bunch of crap that Did Not Belong).

A lot of good and useful stuff was said,  and it all made sense at the time.  I certainly agreed with most of it, and it ought to have been very helpful indeed.

And yet…

I found myself dithering,  a lot.   It seemed that something was missing.

I tried hitting the new scenes from different angles, and got nowhere; then tried to get myself moving by all sorts of methods, eventually including sheer dogged determination — and I still just kept getting stuck.

Absolutely, something was missing, and it was something that, apparently, I could not do without.   And I had no idea what the hell it was.  Largely, I suspect, because it wasn’t there, and I therefore could not actually look at it.  Right?

In fact, (rather like Rowan in the dragon fields) I was looking for a hole.  And since a hole is only visible when the system is in motion, I had to make things move.

So, in sheer frustration I threw together a slap-dash of a scene (which I will not actually use in the book), in which three characters just argued with each other.   I just wound ’em up and let ’em go at it.

Eventually, one of them won the argument.

But it wasn’t the one I expected.

And that fact was the missing piece.   It made things so much more interesting…

So, now I’m all smugly self-satisfied, and sort of rubbing my hands together, gloating.  Heh.

You know, my sister once said to me, after reading something I’d written: “You don’t plot — you scheme.

Yep.

In other news:

The temperature got up to, what, 60 some-odd last week?  (That’s 15 Celsius.)   Until it suddenly snowed.

 

A stream off of the mighty Quinnipiac, just outside my office.

Now it’s 17 F (-8.3C) outside.

And they’re saying another 8 to 10 inches on Wednesday.  Yow.

Fortunately, I live exactly two miles from my office.