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I climb and I stumble and I crawl.
Aug. 30th, 2009 11:25 pmTonight I am bitchy. I am bitchy because I looked upon my second chapter yesterday and realized that I'm doing the thing again, the thing where I tidily establish a world, people, several lines of budding conflict ending in a nice, moody bit of tension at the end of the first chapter, and then I back the hell off it and people go have lunch. And I do this because the alternative is opening up those lines of conflict and inquiry to start the motor running on The Plot (TM), and I don't know well enough what The Plot (TM) is yet to throw it open like double doors.*
That's bad.
So the upshot is that I have to stop, and sit back, and maybe doodle around with some diagrams and draw braided lines of conflict and knit my socks and watch more Hustle and avoid and let my brain chew, because if I go any farther now? I'm just putting down more stuff I'll have to rip up later, when I figure the whole thing out for real.
So I am bitchy, because this is driving me a bit nuts. Saturnalia and my brain are on the fifth date at least, and have been sending each other lovey little text messages every day from under their desks when they're supposed to be working. Half my head, for the past week or two, has been off in those dark little spaces between crumbling concrete buildings and the pulleys and gears that run them. I catch myself humming bits of the soundtrack songs while I'm making tea at work, or closing my eyes and just getting flashes of the smell of steel strings and rust and machine oil. I sit up in bed in the middle of the night to scribble down things like Sybil/Mina Harker inversion? and Is there something here about how Z & G aggressively do not act their ages? and then I have to decode them later, because my handwriting is terrible in the dark. This may sound like hyperbole or the ever-hated big-R Romantic creative process***. It's not. My head's in love, and this is what it does when it's in love: it siphons away mental resources. It makes me distractable and slow. It agitates to see its boyfriend all the time. And it doesn't quite understand today why, since we've nothing else major to do, I won't let it go to town on this book.
Which is all a very long version of: ohGodIwanttobewritingandIcan't.**
I suppose this, this exactly, is why it's important to know your own individual process. Because when you know you're going to do this every time, that you naturally incline to screw up in the same ways, like a horse that always leans a little to the left, you can at least call a halt to it early, step back, circle and examine and think and then mop that shit up before you're 40,000 words in and wondering why the hell this book isn't working, why it's crashed on the ground.
But I still reserve the right to be extremely bitchy about it.
On a non-bitchy, non-process note, there is also new Shadow Unit tonight. It has a pot pie innit. Go read.
*For a variant of this particular personal disease, see The Royal Commission on the Plot.
**Also, I still have a head cold.
***We hate that shit. If ever there was an excuse for people to behave badly, or for people who don't behave badly to be treated badly. See also: Artistic Temprament.
That's bad.
So the upshot is that I have to stop, and sit back, and maybe doodle around with some diagrams and draw braided lines of conflict and knit my socks and watch more Hustle and avoid and let my brain chew, because if I go any farther now? I'm just putting down more stuff I'll have to rip up later, when I figure the whole thing out for real.
So I am bitchy, because this is driving me a bit nuts. Saturnalia and my brain are on the fifth date at least, and have been sending each other lovey little text messages every day from under their desks when they're supposed to be working. Half my head, for the past week or two, has been off in those dark little spaces between crumbling concrete buildings and the pulleys and gears that run them. I catch myself humming bits of the soundtrack songs while I'm making tea at work, or closing my eyes and just getting flashes of the smell of steel strings and rust and machine oil. I sit up in bed in the middle of the night to scribble down things like Sybil/Mina Harker inversion? and Is there something here about how Z & G aggressively do not act their ages? and then I have to decode them later, because my handwriting is terrible in the dark. This may sound like hyperbole or the ever-hated big-R Romantic creative process***. It's not. My head's in love, and this is what it does when it's in love: it siphons away mental resources. It makes me distractable and slow. It agitates to see its boyfriend all the time. And it doesn't quite understand today why, since we've nothing else major to do, I won't let it go to town on this book.
Which is all a very long version of: ohGodIwanttobewritingandIcan't.**
I suppose this, this exactly, is why it's important to know your own individual process. Because when you know you're going to do this every time, that you naturally incline to screw up in the same ways, like a horse that always leans a little to the left, you can at least call a halt to it early, step back, circle and examine and think and then mop that shit up before you're 40,000 words in and wondering why the hell this book isn't working, why it's crashed on the ground.
But I still reserve the right to be extremely bitchy about it.
On a non-bitchy, non-process note, there is also new Shadow Unit tonight. It has a pot pie innit. Go read.
*For a variant of this particular personal disease, see The Royal Commission on the Plot.
**Also, I still have a head cold.
***We hate that shit. If ever there was an excuse for people to behave badly, or for people who don't behave badly to be treated badly. See also: Artistic Temprament.
