If you're brave enough to fly

This has been a tough week for forward progress on Never.

Bear in mind that I’m still dealing with the effects of the stupid cold/flu (I’m inclined to say it was a cold, but it lingers like the damn flu) and my brain isn’t working efficiently.  And yeah, the peanut gallery can just shut up right now

By Wednesday I was floundering.  And I realised something – I’d removed a plot thread from the last draft, which meant that I effectively have to rewrite most of the second half of the book completely.  Which means that I was writing without an outline.  And I was just meandering and scenes weren’t making sense and argh the whole book is broken.

I’ve become an outline writer.

I’m as surprised by it as anyone else.  I used to love pantsing, but it’s just not efficient any more.

So yesterday I sat down and hammered out a rough outline for the second half of the book.  Printed it out this morning (all 25 pages!) and hopefully we’ll get decent forward motion again and I can get this draft finished.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

It always feels kind of strange to sit here at 1:30pm on a Friday and declare that my writing week is done.  Technically, it is and it isn’t.  I’ve finished the part of the week where I sit with Scrivener open and work on Never, but I have a lot of other work left.

As an aside – I still kind of love that reading is pretty much work to me.  It means that I do end up reading some things that I wouldn’t always (I like to keep up with what’s popular, for one thing, just to try to figure out why, even when the book or series isn’t something that I’ll actually enjoy completely.  Hence the recent reading of the 50 Shades of Grey books, which you’ll have seen if you follow me on Goodreads.  There will be a post on them coming up soon, once I organise my thoughts).

And that was a long aside.  Heh.

I’m working slower on these Never rewrites than I’d like, to be honest.  I’ve crested 10k on this draft, but I feel like I should be about double that.  I do rewrite in a time-consuming manner though, by retyping the whole draft (am I the only weirdo who does that?) and I am making a good deal of changes to the beginning of this book.  I’ve been pushing my daily wordcount from 1k to 1.5k consistently, which is awesome.  I’m aiming to get that up to 2-3k if I can.

I also caved and joined the Online Writing Workshop, which I’ve been toying with for far too long.  I have one awesome beta reader reading along with me as I write Never, but I kind of wanted some new eyes on it.  Plus working on my own reviewing skills is also a good thing.  I’ve posted the first chapter of Never and gotten one really lovely review.  Just need to review a bunch of stuff so I can post more now

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

From where I sit writing (where I am now), I can see the shelf holding books in which I have been published.  A shelf to which my copy of Epilogue was added this morning.  It’s a small shelf, but it’s growing.

I wish I wrote more short stories.  I wish I was more of a natural short story writer, I should say.  I think I am learning to write better ones, but I think the novel length is always going to come easier for me.  And I’m still learning there, too.

Still working on my outline for Never.  I think next week may be spent outlining as well – it’s taking longer that I’d hoped, but I want to get it done properly.  I’m having a lot of fun inserting little bit and pieces, adding layers and foreshadowing.  I have a very slow and drawn-out process, but it’s my process.  I’m feeling really confident about Never, and I am looking forward to the point at which I can start sending it out.

Huge storm last night – serious downpour of rain, which led to a lovely leaking kitchen roof, with a bunch of thunder and lightning as well.  The kidlet was pretty amazing and didn’t let it phase him, but the poor kitty was freaked out.  Today has been overcast and foggy, but no rain to speak of.  The human suit is protesting both variants of weather vigorously (made worse by the fact that I didn’t get any exercise yesterday due to the aforementioned rain), and I am looking forward to getting out for a walk later on today, all being well.

And it is somehow almost the weekend again.  Long weekend, too, which is nice.  Writing group to look forward to, and massage and hopefully a swim.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

And lo, there was great celebration in the land, for the draft of Never was finished.

Well, not really.  This is draft 1.5, which is my way of representing that it’s the second draft of the first half of the book and first draft of the second half.  Brain broken now?  ;)  I should just call it draft one of this version, I guess, since so much has changed since my earlier drafts.

And now I take a day off from fiction writing tomorrow, and I have the weekend off, and Monday I come back to it and try to figure out how to fix all of the broken bits.  I know I should probably leave it a bit longer, but I want to at least get my outline for the next draft in order while everything is fresh in my mind.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

The first rose of spring.

It felt like spring again today, so of course it’s supposed to be raining at the end of the week.  There were showers predicted for today, but I saw nary a drop of actual rain.

Today saw me slipping back into Never, which is both daunting and enjoyable.  I didn’t get a huge word count – just over 1,000 words – but it’s a start.  I have a lot of work to be done on this book.  It does feel very unmanageable when I look at it as a whole, but I’ll just take it a piece at a time and hope the pieces make sense.

I finished We Have Always Lived in the Castle yesterday (which I may have mentioned) and am somewhat at a loss as to what I’ll read next.  I’ve had a few nonfiction books on my currently-reading pile for too long (as well as a few other books), so I’m going to make an effort to finish those, I think.  And I think I have just been convinced via Twitter to finally read Soulless and the following books after that

We watched the season finale of True Blood last night and I was quite underwhelmed.  I still have a fondness for the show, and I do think that the TV adaptation from the books is incredible.  But I do wonder how long it’s going to last for.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

See that ragged pile of paper?  That’s the first draft of Never.

It’s very short and messy and is going to require a lot of cleaning up in edits.  But I love editing, and am looking forward to it.  I shall make copious notes and set it aside for a little while, and maybe see if I can do something about fixing up The White Raven in the meantime, or maybe work on some short stories.  And I have a bunch of research I need to do in order to enrich some of the mythology of the story.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

The Nebula Award winners have been announced.

Congrats to all of the winners, but I have to send out a special congratulations to Catherynne M. Valente, who is not only an incredibly talented writer, but a hell of a nice person to go along with it.

Cat is a huge inspiration to me.  She is dedicated to her work, to writing things that matter to her, no matter what else other people think.  I really, really admire that.  She’s also freaking gorgeous, but that’s neither here nor there in terms of her writing ability

I’m coming off a couple of nights of much better sleep, thanks to the sprog actually not waking every 1-2 hours at night.  Perversely, I actually feel more tired physically, but my brain is starting to wake up again.  Which leads to one thing and one thing only – I want to write.

I need to try to eke some time out, probably in the evenings, to start work on Never again.  At the very least, I want to continue my series of vignettes exploring the world.  For which I have a sekrit vignette planned, inspired by another amazing artist I know.  Watch this space.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.

Something for Kate – Song for a Sleepwalker from Bart Borghesi on Vimeo.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.