Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Going to my happy place.


WHEN IN DOUBT, SCREAM AND SHOUT.

As unadmirable as it may sound, I just nearly broke my $1700 laptop in a sudden fit of rage that had me slamming my fist into the walls and screaming all seven deadly words irascibly. I had to take a cold shower to calm down. Now I just feel dejected.

You see, I just lost about an hour-and-a-half's worth of writing to an accidental keystroke that took me away from the Blogger post editor. The real issue wasn't even that. It was that the auto-save feature, for whatever reason, failed to do its job. So the two new scenes, the new dialogue, and the grammatical and editorial changes for Chapter 2.3 have all been lost.

Frustration, as many writers will say, is understandable in this situation. "What you really need to do," they'll tell you, "Is think about it in a positive light. You can rewrite whatever you did, and perhaps even better." I've had this happen to me before, so I know this. I've lost more work to silly screw-ups like this in the past.

It still sucks though.

Anyway, I apologize that this is all taking so long. I forgot how long it can take to put edits into effect, even with notes in hand. I guess part of the reason I'm so determined to get this done first is so that I can create a stronger base to build off of when I move to finish "Tributaries". Generally, writers wait till a work is finished before editing the whole thing, but I think it'll be better if I do things this way. My issue is that, despite having an outline and notes and all that nonsense, I still tend to write solely with the last chapter in mind.

Now this may not sound bad, but just imagine it like building a jenga tower. Each level has a piece missing, and you place pieces with consideration to those gaps. But as you build, you only take into account the level you are building off of. So as you go further up, the tower starts to tilt more and more to the side, until it falls over. I really was feeling like the paths of Nyx and Elmiryn's character were beginning to stray a little from how I introduced them and how I intended them to be. The same went for their adventure.

Bottom line: I felt like I was losing perspective, so I wanted to regain that before I went on toward the finale.

To me this is extremely important. So important that I'm willing to put the story on hiatus for a while. I'm tempted to do fillers and/or side stories in the meantime. Maybe post up excerpts from the book Tobias gave Nyx, or do abstract 'backstage' skits with the characters in the story. I'm not really sure. These won't be posted on a regular schedule and they likely won't be long pieces. If I can get the help, I might ask a guest writer to share their work on the site.

So will there be an update Friday? Probably not. Maybe a filler, but it'll be posted on THIS blog, under the appropriate category.

I'm feeling a bit better. Writing this post was a little cathartic. I'll stop now, as I have to go get ready for a lunch meeting, but know that I'll resume work (maybe not today) and the story will continue.

Till the next update, hope everyone takes care. I'll leave you all with a colored pencil drawing I did while I was in Panama. My only wish was that I didn't do it on lined paper.

1 comment:

Kyt Dotson said...

I saw the tweet about this!

Hast thou considered using Google Docs to prepare manuscripts and from there dumping them into Blogger? I know that it also has an autosave feature—and it might be equally fragile to bugs that would cause to stop operating—but the lovely thing about that is that it avails a second savior should one or the other become inoperable.

Want filler help? I’ve got some stuff that I’ll gladly offer up.

I … have suffered my share of setbacks where entire manuscripts have gone up in smoke. An experience I don’t care to repeat. I guess that there is that whole “silver lining” speech, but really it’s the “shoulder to the grindstone,” that drives most of us onwards anyway. The show will go on.

I think that I’ve developed a singular distrust of web page interface free-typing myself. I have a strange tendency to prepare everything in Word or Notepad before copy/pasting it into the comment field. I believe, perhaps, I’ve been burned too many times by the browser.