grahambinns.com

333 / 333 (100.0%)

Done. And now onto other things.

313 / 333 (94.0%)

I'm procrastinating, but I think I'm allowed to procrastinate just a little. I have but twenty pages of manuscript left before the first pass edits are done on the project-formerly-known-as-Muse (let's just call it The Novel and have done with it; I haven't got a damn clue what title I'm actually going to imbue it with), which I have every intention of getting through tomorrow morning. If that works then I might try to get a story written for Halloween (natch) or Samhain (same date, different slant on the story). At the moment, the story I've got in mind might be more suited for the latter. The Novel is, to be brutally, soul-rendingly honest, a mess. There are many bits of it that are cohesive, but for every one of those there's a bit that's so far out on its own it doesn't even register as part of the story. It needs a lot of work, and I don't see myself starting on Novel The Second until the new year (at least). I'm going to take a break from the manuscript for a few days, but I'll come back to it soon enough, if only because I hate leaving things half finished. It's as though I've got half a novel in the manuscript, mixed in with muck and dirt and muddy water. It's a bit like looking at a mirror buried in a peat bog; all I have to do is scrape away the crap and I'll be left with something like the shards of a good story. After that it'll be a case of finding the literary equivalent of Aryldite (which sadly doesn't have a Wikipedia entry) to join all the bits together. As I've said before, it feels like I'm going about this all the wrong way round, writing the story and then taking it apart and rewriting it again... Assorted clever writers would be spinning in their grave. But this has always been a learning curve for me. Having approached the novel with the NaNoWriMo attitude of "No Plot No Problem," I then discovered that having no plot was, in fact, quite the problem once you get outside of NaNo and try to turn your 50,000 words into a full story. Still, c'est la vie. If it takes me another couple of months to get the story right (that's a conservative estimate, alas) then that's reasonably fine and dandy. At least when I start the next one I'll have a better idea of how to go about it.

The muse is, rather ironically, ignoring me tonight. Not in the sense that I'm suffering from what I've rather tediously referred to in the past as writer's block; more accurately in the sense that I can't seem to find any real desire to work on the Muse manuscript this evening.

It's probably because I got little sleep last night. Sarah, bless her, is suffering from a nail bed infection (this is not, I should note, an infection gained from sleeping on a bed of nails), and as such struggled to find a position in which she was able to fall asleep. A trip to the doctor, resulting in a lanced nail bed, a course of antibiotics and a recommendation to take a cocktail of codeine and diclofenac sodium before bedtime should hopefully help with that tonight. For myself, lots of peppermint tea is probably the key.

I did think about finishing off a story that I started in Nero yesterday lunch time about a woman who wins someone's soul in a charity raffle, but I honestly don't think I could concentrate on it. Tonight, I think, is a night for music. I'm off to find a guitar.

222 / 333 (66.7%)

After last night, when I did no editing whatsoever because I was, to put it mildly, in a blue funk, tonight came as a pleasant surprise. Tonight I got to edit one of the really good bits, one of those bits that doesn't need a lot of editing because it's almost perfect but which nevertheless shines out like a well-polished gemstone when you're done tweaking and shaping. I've finally realised what the big problems with this story are:

1. I wrote the first half of it too quickly (probably because of the pressures of NaNo) and so didn't think hard enough about what I was writing and how it would affect the story later.
2. The first half happens too slowly. I spent so long trying to make it mysterious that I forgot I actually needed to move the plot along. As a result the first half of a book is a very stop-start affair, full of unnecessary fluff that could be dispensed with and replaced by something slicker and more enjoyable.

Fixing those problems, though, is a task for later. I've got to finish the first round of edits first, then I'm going to write the plot out scene by scene and shuffle it around until it's the best it can be. That's the plan anyway. Whether I should do that before or after starting on the second novel I don't know. My gut tells me that I should do it before, get it out of the way, and not start writing novel number two until I've got Muse out to (gasp of fear) its first readers¹; maybe after Christmas, depending on how things take shape. So, no NaNo for me then. But this is good. It feels like a turning point, one of those nights where I can say that I really am a writer and I really did write this novel. And I realise now what I need to do differently the second time around. Know the plot for a start. ¹ I don't actually know who these people are yet. Watch this space.

Writing is far easier when you don't have to think about how to start.

It's true, it's true. For the past three nights I've sat at my desk and stared first at the computer screen, then at some blank A4, then at one notepad, then at the A4 again. Finally, I've stared at my little Moleskine notepad and then given up and played around on t'interweb, which is much, much easier.

And yet at some point in the not all that distant but rapidly receding past, I managed to write a 100,000 word (or thereabouts) novel manuscript (which is also going ignored. Shh, let me finish my chain of thought before starting on a new one). The funny thing about that was that I started it without any real expectations in mind, having a deadline - 50,000 words in 30 days - and a very vague plot to start with. On the first night I wrote over 1,000 words. I haven't written that more than a handful of times since April.

Writing is easier when you don't have to start a story because you're already committed to the piece you decide to work on, whether by a large amount or a small one. It doesn't matter if you've only written a few paragraphs and then put it to one side. If you can pick those paragraphs up and add some more then you're doing your job. Eventually you get a whole story, one word at a time.

But beginnings are hard. This one is particularly hard, because I can't see where the beginning begins.

I'll let you know.