Sunday, December 13, 2009

Avalanche of Manuscripts

If you've been around here long enough, you may have realized that I tend to attack my writerly problems by posting about them.  Today is one of those posts...

Okay, so here's the deal.  I'm just not that into editing Nano right now.  Oh, I still like the book, but every time I try to get my head around where I need to go with it, my creativity curdles.  Part of the problem, I know, is that there is a get deal of work to complete in order to get this book finished.  I've got chapters to rearrange, Villain #1's POV to fix...  I need to make the heroine more sympathetic, and I need to figure out if there really is supposed to be a romance between the hero and the heroine.  Is the cat really necessary or is it just a distraction?  Oh, and I need to introduce that secondary character way earlier in the book so when he becomes important in the middle no one will be shocked...

The other part of the problem is that while I'm trying to focus on Nano, the book I wrote last month keeps creeping into my brain.  DLN wants me to finish it.  I have new names for Nigel and Nelson (I must've been living on Sesame Street - N is for November), I know what needs to be rewritten to fix the beginning...  I keep seeing the characters in my head, and they aren't happy about waiting.

And now, several other past books are demanding to get some face time, too.  I need to rework Caldera, I have to do some fine tuning on Manhunter.  I think I need to rework the beginning of Blink (again).  I need to polish RTL some more.  Hell, I caught myself this morning wondering if I needed to rewrite the beginning of Spectacle, and thinking about the fact that I never requeried that book after the last rewrite.  I could query it, you know, after I take some of the things I learned over the past couple years and polish it a bit more.

Avalanche of manuscipts, anyone?  My brain is buried under at least a foot of fluffy white pages.

Is it any wonder I can't focus on Nano?

And if I sit here too long, all those stories I started but never finished will jump into the waters and drown me.  Jordan keeps shouting "You promised me a three book series, and you still haven't finished book one!!!" in my ear.  Eddie's in the corner whining about the fact that I wrote the beginning and the end of her story, but not the middle.  At the back of my head, Dennis is shooting me dirty looks because I wrote all of his story, but I never edited it and now the conspiracy I threw into the secondary storyline during the last rewrite is giving him fits.

Insane much? 


Soooo...  I'm going to put Nano aside, again.  I'll work on editing DLN, and hope it's powerful enough to shut the rest of the stories up - at least until I get through the first round of edits. 

Wish me luck.  If I'm not back soon, send a search party.  I'll be the voice babbling from under a mountain of paper.

 *All images deleted to avoid any chance of copyright infringement*

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