I started these WriteBlogs back in October, mostly as a way of creating imagined mass peer-pressure and encouraging me to finish my damn novel edits. Since then, they’ve gone through a range of topics, including thoughts on comics writing and moaning about my near-misses with writer’s block.
Well, this week we came full circle, as I got back into the novel edits hard, and ended up working on the very chapters I was blogging about when I first started the whole cycle. And then… well, I deleted a lot of them. This writing shit is brutal.
To be fair, a lot of this mass word genocide was in line with what I said I’d do – my new Chapter 12 is my previous Chapter 10, and as a result, a huge amount of it needed to be deleted to get it to fit its new place in sequence. I just hadn’t quite anticipated how much purging there would need to be – all of the twelfth chapter is more or less gone.
I managed to bring forward a couple of scenes from Chapter 15 (the rest of which no longer exists) to ease my burden, but the rest I wrote from scratch. And yes, this does make Chapters 13-14 a little awkward.
It’s not all grim news though – the new Chapter 10 I wrote during that last round of shuffling was excellent. Liked that a lot. Also, one particular scene in Chapter 11 might be one of my favourite things I’ve ever written in terms of comedy. I laughed until people in the cafe glared.
Yes, laughing at your own jokes is a bit lame, but they were lines I wrote five or six months ago, so basically completely new.Anyway, the point being: the editing is back on, and it’s proving brutal (more than I expected), but it is happening, which is good. I’ve had serious trouble identifying and making big changes in the past, so it’s a massive relief to see it start coming naturally.
Ow My Face
After writing from about 10AM-6PM for two days running (with a break for lunch), I was feeling pretty smug about my achievements, but also mentally dead inside. I spent the whole of Tuesday night playing this Doctor Who 2048 game – not only is it a complete waste of time, I didn’t even get beyond the Ninth Doctor.(I just played another twenty minutes after opening it up to paste the link in here, and only got to the Eighth Doctor. Dear God, I’m receding.)
Then on Wednesday, I went to writing group and lost the will to think fairly early on. Too much caffeine, then some alcohol, then a trance. There’s some adage about candles burning at both ends or snakes eating their own tail here, isn’t there?
Still: on Thursday night, I write this blog post which is clearly amazing, so there’s still hope.
Truth be told, part of me is tempted to say Fuck it! and continue just because I’m getting so much work done, but that would probably be stupid. Eventually the candle flames out or the snake finds itself eating its own teeth, and then you’re screwed.
Plus: it is my thirtieth birthday next Tuesday, and real-life people may expect me not to spend it ignoring them and typing. But I imagine you’ll hear about that on here/Twitter in the next few days, so I’ll spare you for now.