Know that point in a story ...

... where you're kind of grasping for something, anything, to just keep the book going forward until you get your momentum back and get the thing back on track and going in a direction its actually supposed to go?

Yeah, that's where I am right now with my current book, Deception.

I almost feel as if I've lost track of the story and just need to keep writing and things will start to fall into place again, and then I can get rid of the crappy stuff when revision comes around.

Altogether, though, knowing that writing the last word on the last page does not, in any way, shape, or form mean that this book is complete does not make me feel better about how lousy the story is right now. The writing itself isn't bad, I don't think, save for the fact that the story is just rambling along aimlessly and completely without direction.

This is why they say padding a story shows. It does. I'm not trying to make it longer at the moment; given that it seems to me that little has happened and I'm already halfway through, length is not a concern of mine. If anything I'm probably going to have to cut out a lot. But what I'm writing now is, really, filler. It's to fill in the blanks, get something down on paper, until I can pick up the action again and tie the story back together.

Does anyone else have this issue? (I'll refrain from linking yet again to Holly Lisle's piece on middles, which always makes me feel much better about my inability to write the middle of story coherently.

x-posted to my LJ

Revision Time

Well, I'm about to start revising my first book, the first Taggert Twins mystery. Anyone who'd like to read the draft and give me feedback, please leave a comment.

To tell you the truth, I'm really sort of scared to start. I'm going to use Holly Lisle's guide to revising a novel as sort of my guidebook, but with a few changes. You wouldn't know it to look at my apartment but I'm really big on organization -- at least when it comes to my writing. For the book I'm about to revise, I have four documents. And that's low. For the book I'm working on now I have, I believe, at least 9. I have things for the synopsis/outline, characters, plotting notes, the actual text, tracking my progress, tracking my scenes and chapters, etc. And I know that as I go through revision, I'm going to want separate lists for notes about plot lines, notes about my characters, notes about ... I don't know what but you get the picture. A single-subject notebook like she mentions in the linked page will just not do for me.

I'm completely anal about some things. What can I say? *shrug*

I'm also scared because, in the writing of the draft, I had a couple of characters and a whole plot line that, because I didn't know what to do with them in the end, I let completely drop off. The characters disappear and the plot line stops at a big ol' brick wall. Goes nowhere. So I know I have to either figure out where to go with that plot line or take it all out -- which is going to leave a massive hole smack in the middle of my story. (Sort of like Holly's dancing bears and clowns or whatever -- if you haven't read her article on Middles, I suggest you do. It's quite amusing.) And I'm no closer to figuring it out now than I was before.

I'm also worried I won't be able to keep up the current pace I have on my current book once I start revising the original.

But it's time for a trip to Wal-Mart so I can get my pretty notebook and my pretty colored pens. And sooner or later I need to get a filing cabinet or file box or something for the fifty bazillion notebooks I have floating around my apartment. They have fic from at least seven different fandoms and are in varying states of disarray. They need to go hide somewhere before they drive me insane. Hmm. Maybe something else to buy at Wal-mart.

On another topic, I totally didn't realize how thick 208 pages can be. And, dummy that I am, I didn't realize until I'd already printed 60 pages that I hadn't put in page numbers. Pray to god that I don't drop the damn thing or hold it too close to a fan. (Yikes)

I've decided that I like middles

I adore Holly Lisle, because she has done just so much with her site (click here) to try to help and educate hopeful writers. I can't say how much I learned about writing and about the business from reading that site. I highly recommend it to everyone, regardless of your preferred genre. And this paragraph, from her article on "Middles," makes me laugh every time I think of it.

So here I am, right at the end of the middle, finally remembering all the things I intended to do at the beginning (but didn't do), with a bunch of tap-dancing clowns singing the Star-Spangled Banner and a dancing bear who refuses to eat the clowns (though I wish he would), and my fireworks are exploding in the wrong places and at the wrong times, and I'm on that tightrope that now consists almost entirely of Celtic and Gordian knots, but they're tied around my ankles so that if I cut them I fall and if I don't cut them I'm stuck.

Boy, do I hate middles.

I used to feel that way myself; I could get started, and wrap things up relatively well, but in the middle I'd lose direction and work in all sorts of things that I didn't need, that really didn't work with the plot, etc. (No dancing bears yet, though.) But with this current book, I have decided that I much prefer middles. I have struggled so much to get this damn thing going, but tonight I wrote over 3,300 words. Only twice since I started writing this have I met my goal of 2,200 words per night, and tonight was the second time. It just flows so much better for me when things start happening. All the introduction, set-up, etc. just kills me.

So I hate beginnings and Holly hates middles (*makes mental note to read one of Holly's books - they are fantasy and look quite intriguing*).

I am now feeling much better about my book than I have of late, despite being very far behind where I'd like to be.

I've decided that I'm going to print a couple copies of whatever I have written by the time Thanksgiving comes around and bring them with me to my father's and my mother's and see if I can't convince (read: coerce, threaten or blackmail) people into giving some sort of (even broad) feedback.

Now if only I could visit Germany and actually see the places I'm writing about.

Ha, right. Maybe with my first movie advance.