Writing update, and a strange sense of history.
posted in Updates From the Void |June was a bad bad month for the writing. It was a great month for learning what not to do, though. Let’s see if I can apply the lessons in July.
I’m going to skip past the section I was stuck on, and start up at the next scene I feel confident about, and just crazy-write, whatever seems like a good idea, within the boundaries of what I already know. I was torn between skipping the stuck part and rereading what i’ve written so far in the hopes of getting unstuck, but I’ve had bad luck with rereading in the past, and I haven’t skipped a hard part since, oh, a long time ago. Ten years? Possibly ten years.
Wow. Remembering the story in which I skipped a hard part triggered a rush of memories about the house we had in New Mexico. I apparently visualized a scene right before the scene I skipped as being set in the hallway of that house. It’s been… 14 years since I was there? It was the last house of my family that felt like home. It doesn’t seem that long ago. 12 years since I left college… And so few stories I’ve really developed since then.
That’s one thing I’ve learned, or tested and confirmed, anyhow. I need to write my stories fast. I need to work on them everyday, including weekends and holidays. I don’t quite know how to manage that, but I know that every weekend I allowed myself (and I did allow them in my planning) made Mondays hard.
I need to outline a bit more than I did for this story, too. I did a ’snowflake’ outline for Citadel, but I skimped for this story. And it just means I’ll have to do more rewriting and revision. And additions. I may even add another point of view.