Posted 23 Aug 2016 editing
Last week my process post was not very happy. Sometimes you just feel more of the struggle than the shine, and that's how it is. The trick is not to give up on those days. Get MAD at those days, swear revenge, shake your tiny angry fists, and announce that You'll Show Them! Then keep working. The night before my last post, I was lying awake in bed, frustrated with a thousand things. One was that I'd written to a cover artist a couple weeks prior, one that I was steadily realizing I had my heart set on, and hadn't heard back. Stuck in bed in the middle of the night, once of the voices in my head got fed up with me and said, "fercrissakes, woman, you used her WEB FORM. You're getting upset, assuming the damned form actually WORKED." (I've worked on enough websites and with enough forms to know they break 75% of the time. The other 25% of the time, they break 95% of the time.) So I resolved to write a quick email the next morning, since the artist's email address is on her site. I did so after that Sad Panda Asimov hour that day. Two hours later, my day had moved on. I was at work, and I had resolved to correct the path my mood was on. I believe in the Law of Attraction, and being a dumpbrain wasn't going to help me get where I wanted to be. Two hours later, I had an email back from that cover artist, and it looks like everything is going to work out swimmingly. I was walking on a cloud for the rest of the morning. The fog of my misery completely burned off by lunch. I wrote to my editor and set up a coaching session, which we scheduled for this past Thursday. He brilliantly (and with rehearsing!) condensed the twelve pages of notes he had on my MS down to 50 minutes so I could grab it all within the time constraint of our session. I super appreciate his efforts to do that. Knowing I 'got it all' makes me feel much more confident in moving forward. We reviewed the character arcs, and I have instructions to push and pull some tension between characters to improve the course of the story. And tips to bulk up the flatter characters. We reviewed action vs. world-building and I was assigned to count my world-building occurrences so I can make sure these aspects are balanced 2:1. We reviewed overall structure a bit, and my editor told me that based on its current structure, my story has room for another twenty to twenty-five thousand words. That just TICKLES me, because I would definitely be happier if the story came in at that length. So the coaching session went wonderfully and aided my refreshed outlook. Friday morning I made a table and marked out which characters got developed in which chapters, and where the action and world-building units were found. I reported my count of WB units to my editor and got confirmation that was roughly what he found (he did warn me he got multiple counts). The local writing group I head/herd met on Saturday for a write-in, and I spent that time re-reading (and fiddling with) the opening of my story to get my brain back in the context. It's so hard to keep straight what you did or didn't write, after so many iterations of a draft! I didn't want to add text to a section an eighth of the way into the story only to find it was entirely redundant to another section - which I have done. So I decided that hell-or-high-water, I'm going to keep regular coaching sessions with my editor to keep everything moving forward at a healthy pace. Our next session is the morning of September 1st. That places my goal marker for 25,000 new words, and that's roughly 2700 words per day for the days in between. I'm actually aiming to finish up earlier than that, so he can get a chance to read the revised MS before we meet. Sunday I installed NaturalReader Free and listened to it robo-read my draft to me. If I re-read my draft using only my optics, I can't guarantee I will catch missing or repeated words, plus I'm already in the file so I'm far more likely to edit a phrase that might be fine. So NaturalReader, awkward as it was, got me going through the intro much faster than when I'm left to my own devices. And I have to say that it got me super excited to hear this as an audiobook one day. Sometimes the robovoice (I used the default Alex, because the other voices didn't pause for punctuation) got a portion of a sentence just right and I'd get chills. I did hit that 2700 word goal yesterday, thanks to a road trip in which I was a passenger, rather than driver. Today I'll be more challenged to hit that, thanks to oversleeping (it was a long day yesterday, and a super comfy chilly morning today), but I did squeeze in 180 words before work even though I didn't think I'd have time for that. We'll see if I have a chance to round that up to 2700 tonight. Either way, I'm getting to bed on time so I can get up for the proper hour tomorrow morning. Hell or high water. I feel like I ought to get "Hell or High Water" tattooed where I can see it every day.Next Snippet: Beckoning