I saw Bloc Party play tonight, and it reminded me that one of their songs is in my inspiration for writing playlist.
Usually the songs I post are for Callie, but this one’s all for Dane.
Fantastic show.
Author: Nicole Bross Page 13 of 19
I was going over my outline yesterday and realized that while I do have my point-form notes on all the remaining scenes, I hadn’t blocked them out into chapters. After a bunch of hemming and hawwing I think I have it all laid out, and I was very surprised to see that it looks like I only have about two and a half chapters left! I’m partway through 19 now, and I have it marked down that 21 is the last one. For so long the ending has felt like a forever time away, but I usually get through about a chapter a week, a chapter being 5-7,000 words, and that means I could be done in three weeks’ time. I can even have a bit of a break from the story before I start revising in early November!
I’m a little bit excited and a little bit sad about the prospect of being done. Making your old words better isn’t the same as making new words, and I think my heart is mainly in the ‘making new words’ camp. Who knows? Maybe the shift will be good for me. I’m also very relieved to see that it doesn’t look like I’m going to be over the 30,000 words I estimated from my 100,000-word goal. It looks more like fifteenish. I can find 15,000 words to cut, no problem.
Now, with all that said, it’s not going to be easy writing to the finish line. Things are about to get very, very difficult for Callie over the next 50 pages. Poor girl. I like her so much, it’s hard to break her down like this. She’ll thank me in the end though.
“Fuck,” Dane cursed, grabbing me by the arm and pushing me behind him. “Of all the people…”
“Who is it?” I asked, trying to look around him.
“Remember when I told you that the Keres weren’t the only dangers you needed to worry about in Paris?” he asked, the howling of the wind whipping the words out of his mouth. I nodded and he indicated the man, who had also stopped his approach. “That’s who I was talking about.”
***
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Sometimes I have a confidence problem. I think that I’m not good enough, my writing isn’t good enough, that no one will ever want to read something I created. I look at all the time I’ve spent over the past seven months – hundreds of hours – and wonder if it’s all a waste of time, if I could have spent it better with family and friends, doing paid work, or hell, maybe cleaning up a bit around here.
And then something inside me, the part that made me start in the first place, that won’t let me keep this story inside my head, says who the hell cares?
Today I got this to remind me of that, in the dark moments when I wonder if I should give up.
Part of a quote from French writer Emile Zola: “If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.”
I will not be silenced by my own self-doubt. I will not live an ordinary life by failing to try to achieve what I’m capable of. I will be bold.
Quit moping and make some words.
So I’m outing myself as a total noob here, but I’m going to do a little happy dance for a minute because I just achieved a very important goal to me, one that a year ago I would have thought was entirely impossible. For all those longtime authors with a few books under their belts this is totally going to be nbd. But for me it’s like, squeeee!
Crazy, hey? I was hoping I’d get it done tonight, and I did, adding about 1,400 words. I can smell the end now, it’s so close (and by close I mean within 20,000 words). I kind of hate to stop where I did tonight, but it’s late and tomorrow’s a school day for the grom. I’ll go to bed happy though, knowing I hit a milestone that I’ve been working toward for over six months.
Exciting! Yay! Exclamation points everywhere!!
I looked around the store, searching for distraction. Without Dane’s input, the herbs and other plants in the jars held little interest for me, and I’d examined all the posters by now. The old-fashioned cash register caught my attention for a minute, with its round buttons and tarnished brass plating, but that soon grew old too. Hopping down from my perch, I added ‘for X-Men auditions’ to the ‘closed’ sign and set it back in the window.
“Leave the sign alone, Mia,” Dane growled from the office.
“What sign?” I called back, tiptoeing away.
***
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My tomatoes are done – 190lbs put in jars for the year in five whirlwind days.
This photo is so artfully composed. You have the empty jars. The full jars. The produce. The giant pot. The tomato splatter on the floor. It’s everything about canning all together. Courtesy my lovely husband.
A lot of canning is repetitive and doesn’t require much brain activity. Chop, peel, scoop, stir, ad infinitum. That leaves a lot of time for thinking and plotting and shaping scenes. Last night I finished my last batch and today I’m ready to write. To hell with cleaning the kitchen.
I realized with some dismay today that I won’t be doing NaNoWriMo this year. Come November, I’m committed to having a finished first draft on deck to start editing. I certainly won’t be in any frame of mind to start Book 2 at that point.
Doing NaNo last year was the kickstart that got me believing I could give writing fiction a go. I’ve been doing freelance journalism for close to a decade now but had always wanted to write a book. Various things kept me from trying in all that time – we’ll out fear as the top one, and belief that I didn’t have the time as the second. Then last year a friend and I basically double-dared each other to do NaNo, and I found out that there definitely was time in the day for it once I conquered that fear of starting (my hands were literally shaking when I typed out the first few sentences). I went a little crazy last November, neglecting myself, my family, friends and all other writing commitments shockingly, but around the 27th I “won,” penning my 50,000th word. And it felt so good to do it that a few months later when this idea came barrelling into my brain, I actually had the confidence to sit down and start to write it out. Six and a half months later I’ve learned so much about how I can be a better writer and grown this little kernel of an idea into a thorny bramble of a story, so it’s kind of a drag that NaNo won’t be a part of my life this year since I feel I owe it so much.
Next best will be cheering on my friends who do take on the challenge, and hopefully scrounging up a few bucks to donate or spend in the NaNo shop, and that’ll have to do until 2013 when hopefully the timing works out a bit better.
“I don’t go rummaging around in other peoples’ minds, thank you,” I said. “You’re reading too much into all this, Dane, so I pick things up quickly, big deal. I’m just a normal girl, other than the whole empath thing.”
“Is that really how you think of yourself? A girl?” he asked.
“What the hell else would I think of myself as?” I said, baffled.
“A woman,” he said. I flushed.
***
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(I missed the deadline to submit the link to the site this week, but I’m putting up my six anyway)