Thursday, November 20, 2008

Meet my epiphany

Epiphany, this is everyone.
Everyone, this is my epiphany. (Yes she's a little scrawny but don't tell her that.)

Alternating chapters with a different time line! A fiction book about the failing economy is asking a lot of readers. It's demanding and tedious to get the ideas down, throw in examples, instances where dynamics are at work. It's a little dull, I'll admit it. My novel is dull.
How to spice it up? It's not like I don't have a huge word count goal to work with here, what to do besides throw in some sex? There's a whole after the climax/ending story that makes the slow tedious build up worth it.

So I'm going to interlace in the story chapters from the future tracing back to the big climax while the alternating storyline of the past ticks forward toward the climax and they culminate in the wham bam present! Structurally it make sense to me, but I'll be surprised if I can pull it off. What the hell, it's worth a try. Also I found a hell of an opening line so at least that's going well.

Meanwhile Epiphany's ugly cousin, Belated Realization, has been lurking around and this is what she told me: It's time I let go of the fantasy of agent-man reading my manuscript and falling in love with it or passing it along to someone who could love it.
It was a nice fantasy but really it's not getting me anywhere.

That said, you can only have one first time. No matter where I go with the writing he will always be the first agent to read my work. I don't want to sully that relationship by nagging emails asking if he's read it yet or forgotten all about it. Like the one night stand that keeps calling afterward I don't want to be that girl. Busy man, reading manuscripts that need to become books. I'm on his desk somewhere, he'll find the time eventually, and with a little patience I'll still have my self respect. Seriously if he doesn't write back by December I'm going to go nuts. Maybe it's taking so long because he's tediously listing how each sentence truly sucks. Ack.

To keep my mind off it, I focus on my word counts with nanowrimo and trying to hit my goals. Which for some reason reminds me of the title of a book, Run Rabbit Run.

In other news we're trying to pick art night back up though it's harder to get out of the house in the winter, it's worth it to see Mary as she's recovering from surgery. This is my latest project with her, called an expanded square. There's rules with it and it feels kind of restrictive at first, but once you start breaking the rules, like with most things it becomes more fun.

Friday, November 14, 2008

words, words, and then a whole lot more of them

I couldn't help it. I'd missed last year, I'd forgotten that November was coming around again and now it's here. Nation Novel Writing Month. Ack! http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Now the problem is that I already have half a novel that I'd been tinkering away on and I didn't want to cheat -that's just not the spirit of the whole thing. I didn't want to start a new novel and abandon my original idea -I have so few good ideas that I follow through to fruition. So I made myself a deal. The goal of Nanowrimo is to make it to 50,000 words by the end of the month. I made it to that total yesterday, so now I'm going to start counting towards the next 50,000 and that will give me just oodles of material to slash and burn when I go to editing. I might not make it, but what a rush to try.

And as a newbie to the whole process I'm making some classic mistakes like jotting down some ideas for another story and wasting precious words on that. So if you look at my word counts and it doesn't seem impressive just remember I've got another 50,000 in my back pocket. So phooey on you.

No seriously, I've got to get back to work.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Happy Election Day!

This is Tully's constant companion lately. He's had a few different names. For the longest time I thought it was just, my creature, but apparently it was Emaleash first, then there was a super hero phase where he was Super Red, and now he is named Magnetscrew. She takes the cake in the quirky kid competition.

Eric and I are like zombie people lately with head colds that seem to bar all but truly critical functions of day to day life. The only silver lining is the big happy of election day.

I realized today that this is like a holiday for me in the way Xmas used to be when I was a kid. When I wake up in the morning I have no idea what's going to be waiting for me under the tree. I hope I've been good and I don't have a piece of coal to look forward to.

I voted, did you?