Plodding Along

Or maybe that's supposed to be Plotting Along. It's hard to say at this point. I still maintain that Bo's Novel is hovering about the 50k word mark... even though I just hacked over two thousand words out. It's for the good of the novel, but I steadfastly deny that the novel has only 48k in it. I wrote 50,000 words. Hmph.

After I wrote the now-hacked Chapter, I realized that 1) I didn't like where I was going and 2) I didn't know where I needed to go, other than it wasn't where I was heading. So, I got out my trusty notebook-- with the collage of magazine images on the front cover-- and starting writing the questions. And in between cobwebs and unused nuerons in my brain, I found some answers. I know where I want to go. And what I want to do.

But it sure looks like an awful lot of, well, *work*. =P Up until this point it was more fun, in a story-plotting and writing way. Hey, I'm a writer, that's what's fun to me. But sometimes fun writing isn't great writing. And I have to go back and hack, slash, burn, rebuild, recast, remold some significant parts.

It's like anything that's for one's own good. It's a hell of a lot easier NOT to do it.

And don't get me started on those nagging thoughts about synopsis, summary, taglines, and other marketing shit. I'm trying to keep those out of my head as I finish with the quesitons of "Who drugged Melanie?" and "What does Emily really know?" and "Where the hell did Jackie go, anyway?" Write first, ask questions later!

But, in the mean time, I have been doing some other things that are for my own good. One of those includes reading more. I'll be posting about some of my reading and observations later. Usually when I should be working on my novel and figuring out how to write Bo out of a sitaution where she has a gun to her head.

• Story in Progress: Still Bo's Novel #1
• Last Story Finished: Skeletons of Past Loves
• What I should be doing: Grading papers (or working on the novel)
• Current Song: The World is Not Enough by Garbage (heh-- when this title came out as a PS1 game, it was abreviated on the top as TWINE and stuck in my head as thus.)
• Musings: What's the difference between writing in a style or imitating a style? Can a writer write like Chandler but not be trying to be another Chandler?