Holly Lisle: Writer

Should Have Kept Going Yesterday

In the Hawkspar revisions, the small wreck I hit on the last page of yesterday’s section exploded into a big, painful disconnect from the rest of the book today. I’m still five pages short of my halfway mark on the day’s required sixty pages, and at this rate, unless the mess clears, I’m likely to be working into the wee hours just to break even today.

On the up side, though, I haven’t had a headache. I think being able to give my eyes some hours of much-needed rest yesterday helped. So did hoping that the revision would be smooth sailing from that point out — a hope that has been bitterly dashed today.

I haven’t run into a single scene or page so far today that has excited me. I’m hoping that this rough spot is just a few days of missing my footing while I was writing before I got rolling again, and not an indicator of what lies ahead.

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3 responses to “Should Have Kept Going Yesterday”

  1. PolarBear Avatar
    PolarBear

    Some people want dead people to rise from the dead, but HAWKSPAR isn’t one of those novels. Repetition is fun to remove, but live people rendering themselves indistinguishable from dead for no good reason, that’s tough to fix. And absolutely no fun at all. Hugs.

    Ah. The TC scene. I need to overcome my fear of dealing with that and get back to Twilight…

    Reply
  2. Holly Avatar
    Holly

    It was pretty bad. There are parts of this where I’ve managed to be painfully repetetive — those parts have been easily fixed by simply ripping out text. In other places, though, I’ve written way too tight because of space limitations (and I know 200,000 words doesn’t seem to be a space limitation, but for this story it is. A severe one.), and where I have, in editing through, TCed* an entire scene that will have to go in to create a coherent flow.

    Dead people have risen of their own accord, live people have made themselves indistinguishable from dead people, and I have had to delete scenes that made me hate the main characters, to replace them with scenes that allowed me to give a shit whether they made it to the end of the book or not. It has not been pretty. And much remains.

    *TC (abbreviation for “to come”) To TC a scene is to bracket in a single sentence covering what the scene will be about, rather than writing it at that time.

    Reply
  3. PolarBear Avatar
    PolarBear

    Ouch! I hate it when that happens! Hope it isn’t as bad as you think it might be.

    Reply

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