(no subject)

So, I'm not officially doing the Clarion West Write-a-thon. But I am sort of unofficially doing it--trying to get a substantial chunk of work done on the novel every day, and not allowing myself to do that thing you do, where you get up and check email and say, "Oh, there's so much other stuff to do today and I don't really have a lot of energy, so I'll just do other stuff today and..."

You know, that thing. None of that. Week 1 has gone fairly well. For certain values of fairly well. I have, indeed, written every day. I did some revisions on chapters three and four, things I had to fix before I could move ahead. Then I spent two days forging into chapter five, then realized that really, the beginning of chapter five needed to be the end of chapter three, and that took some surgery--most of my writing time that day--and then, of course, I needed a new start for chapter five, and I just couldn't see any of it, and whenever I can't see something, that can only mean one thing--I need to do research. Research always leads to more research, actually, until I can finally see what I'm trying to see. And that took most of my time the next day.

So the end result is, after a week of steady work, I'm only five hundred words into the chapter I'd meant to make headway with. Paidhi Boy was very impressed--five hundred words sounds like quite a lot, to him. And the truth is, I worked really hard for those five hundred words. I can do a couple thousand an hour at top speed--and there are times when that kind of blurting out is really, really helpful, Goddess knows--but this isn't a top-speed kind of project. So there it is.

At least it was directly helpful research. Sometimes, when a story is in that weird, pre-formation state, I find myself reading things almost at random, trying to coax it into some kind of shape I can work with, and I can read for hours and days with seemingly no useful result. The research itself is actually cool, and fun, but there's something very satisfying about saying, "Okay, I need this information," and then going and getting it. "Okay, so that implies I need to know about this other thing." And I get that. And everything falls into place, and suddenly I have it, I know where my character is standing, what the weather is like and exactly what the temperature is (because she always knows exactly what the temperature is) and what sort of terrain, what kind of buildings are around...and when I know that, for some reason, her actions, and everyone else's, are clear to me, and feel right.

I can sketch through a scene without those things, if I have to. There are a lot of things I can put in square brackets. But it never feels quite right. It's very satisfying, when I can get those details nailed down.

(no subject)

So, I'm not officially doing the Clarion West Write-a-thon. But I am sort of unofficially doing it--trying to get a substantial chunk of work done on the novel every day, and not allowing myself to do that thing you do, where you get up and check email and say, "Oh, there's so much other stuff to do today and I don't really have a lot of energy, so I'll just do other stuff today and..."

You know, that thing. None of that. Week 1 has gone fairly well. For certain values of fairly well. I have, indeed, written every day. I did some revisions on chapters three and four, things I had to fix before I could move ahead. Then I spent two days forging into chapter five, then realized that really, the beginning of chapter five needed to be the end of chapter three, and that took some surgery--most of my writing time that day--and then, of course, I needed a new start for chapter five, and I just couldn't see any of it, and whenever I can't see something, that can only mean one thing--I need to do research. Research always leads to more research, actually, until I can finally see what I'm trying to see. And that took most of my time the next day.

So the end result is, after a week of steady work, I'm only five hundred words into the chapter I'd meant to make headway with. Paidhi Boy was very impressed--five hundred words sounds like quite a lot, to him. And the truth is, I worked really hard for those five hundred words. I can do a couple thousand an hour at top speed--and there are times when that kind of blurting out is really, really helpful, Goddess knows--but this isn't a top-speed kind of project. So there it is.

At least it was directly helpful research. Sometimes, when a story is in that weird, pre-formation state, I find myself reading things almost at random, trying to coax it into some kind of shape I can work with, and I can read for hours and days with seemingly no useful result. The research itself is actually cool, and fun, but there's something very satisfying about saying, "Okay, I need this information," and then going and getting it. "Okay, so that implies I need to know about this other thing." And I get that. And everything falls into place, and suddenly I have it, I know where my character is standing, what the weather is like and exactly what the temperature is (because she always knows exactly what the temperature is) and what sort of terrain, what kind of buildings are around...and when I know that, for some reason, her actions, and everyone else's, are clear to me, and feel right.

I can sketch through a scene without those things, if I have to. There are a lot of things I can put in square brackets. But it never feels quite right. It's very satisfying, when I can get those details nailed down.