So I hit the 50% mark on my targeted 75,000 words for Sunlight today, having a better-than-average day (especially since it’s not even 1:00 yet) in the process of doing so. I am therefore firmly in that stage of writing a book where I am completely convinced that the entire thing sucks and words suck and writing sucks and I suck and did I remember to take my meds this morning? no that’s just what being a writer is like.
The funny thing is the unintentional support I’ve been getting from Twitter all morning; Kevin Hearne and Chuck Wendig are both Real Writers who don’t know me from Adam but judging from their feeds they’re both in exactly the same place in whatever they’re working on at the moment. Apparently the occasional extended burst of self-loathing is just part of the process? I dunno.
I do know that my wife stayed home for a couple of extra hours this morning to avoid the roads (the dusting from yesterday has finally evolved into a legit snowstorm) and I went from complaining to her in the dining room that I’d just written an entire scene and I had no idea why any of the characters in it were acting that way or where the overall narrative was going or why any aspect of the scene made any sense at all and by the time I’d gotten back to my office I’d fixed it all in my head. I’ve said this before; while I champion the “get it on the page, then fix it in second draft” approach to writing all the time, I don’t actually work that way, and it’s very frustrating to me to write something down that I know doesn’t work because generally that bit never makes it to the page. It gets rejected in my head during the long stretches of not-writing that I do in between the actual writing.
Anyway.
Point is, halfway done on wordcount, and while the book feels like it might be a teeny bit farther along than that in terms of the plot it’s close enough. The book is definitely not going to be ready for C2E2. I’m holding out for April at this point; we’ll see.
Hopefully by the time I release it I won’t think it sucks any more. 🙂
Just ignore this part.
Not helping at the moment: I haven’t sold a book since December 29, and while I managed to give away some copies of Benevolence Archives for free this week, all it led to was a two-star review on Goodreads. I have, in general, been pretty lucky with the reviews I’ve gotten– to the best of my knowledge Skylights and BA both have a two-star review with no text appended and everything else has been positive. And it’s January and last January was shit and blah blah blah blah. But god damn it would be nice to get 2016’s first sale out of the way now that it’s the damn twelfth, for crying out loud.
I’m kvetching. Like I said, ignore me.
If we were having coffee… that would be really odd, actually, because what I’m supposed to be doing right now is getting ready to head up to Michigan for– wait for it– a baptism. The religious ritual is secondary to finally meeting my new baby semicousin, but y’know. I’ll take what I can get.
I have, I think, read all of Tana French’s books, or at least I’ve read all of her Dublin Mystery Squad books, and if I find out she’s got novels outside of that series I’ll be picking them up with a quickness. The series is interesting; each book follows a different detective in the Murder division of the Dublin police force across a single case, frequently introducing the protagonist of the next book along the way. Folks keep showing up, of course, and one of the key witnesses in this book is the daughter of the protagonist of the third book in the series.