To Wait Or Not To Wait?

This past week I hardly got any writing done. I've had huge plot holes in New Novel for a while now, and I spent the week brainstorming and percolating on things.

I still don't have concrete answers to my plot holes. But I did discover something equally important.

Voice.

My WiP is in two POVs. One POV I pretty much have down, as far as voice goes, but the girl protagonist has been harder to nail. I'm about 40k into the story now, and she still seems kind of flat. It's been frustrating, but I figured I'd come to understand her eventually. And apparently, eventually is now.

All of my brainstorming helped me to understand my girl protag in a way that I hadn't before, and now I'm super excited to start writing in her voice. Except...I realize that everything I've written so far will need to be re-written. I know this is all part of the process, and I'm all for anything that will make the story better.

But now the question is: Do I rewrite the beginning now, or wait until I finish?

Now, hear me out, guys! I know almost all of you will say that I should finish the draft first, and then go back and fix whatever needs to be fixed. I completely agree with that, and would probably do that under normal circumstances. Except, like I've said, I have huge plot holes, so I'm kind of stuck at the moment. I'm wondering if writing the from the beginning in my girl protag's newly found voice might help me to get unstuck. It'll definitely push back my goal date of finishing, though.

Hmm, decisions, decisions.

So, let me ask you--do you usually edit as you go, or wait until the end? If it's something big--like a whole beginning that needs to be fixed--would you fix it immediately or still wait?

Any Day Can Be A Perfect Day

I don't know about you guys, but I'm pretty obsessive about my To Do list. Like, yeah, I enjoy making lists and crossing stuff off and whatnot, but if I don't FINISH my list...I get cranky. I get mad. The more productive I am, the more fulfilled and happy I am. The less productive I am, the more angry and down on myself I am.

I know that I can't do everything, all the time. I know that sometimes things come up, or something takes longer than I'd anticipated, or I'm just feeling blah and don't want to get to certain things on my list that day. I know it's not always in my control. But still. Not completing The List can turn a relatively good day into a bad day.

Especially when it comes to writing.

If I don't make my writing goals, I'm instantly in a bad mood.

But the thing is...that kind of ruins everything else for the day. Obviously, I try as hard as I can to reach my goals and complete my List, but if I know something isn't going to get done, being in a bad mood the rest of the day won't fix it. It only steals the good moments and turns them rotten.

It's hard for me to let some stuff go, to not complete EVERYTHING that I set for myself to do. But it happens. And I'm learning that it doesn't have to ruin everything else. In fact, whether everything gets done on my To Do list or not, it can still be a wonderful day. A lot of it is about mindset and stealing those perfect moments--finding them and holding onto them, and not letting guilt or anything else get in the way.

So today, this ordinary Tuesday, is going to be a good day. Maybe you have work, or chores, or word count goals, or other responsibilities. Let's try our best to get it all done, but if something slips through the cracks, it will still be a good day. Today I'll savor my coffee, enjoy the warm weather, spend time with my husband,  and re-read The Hunger Games (Oh yes, I'm preparing for this weekend!). And I won't feel guilty about letting myself enjoy these things if I don't get everything done. Like the quote says, today is a perfect day for a perfect day.

I'm determined to enjoy it. :)

Do you ever get down on yourself for not completing everything you want to get done?  What are you going to let yourself enjoy today, no matter what?

Lucky 7 Meme

So, I got tagged for this meme by David P. King, yay! (I think?)

Here are the rules:

1. Go to page 77 of your current MS.
2. Go to line 7.
3. Copy down the next 7 lines/sentences, and post them as they're written. No cheating.
4. Tag 7 other writers.


This will be...interesting...because my WiP isn't completely in order right now. Like I've said, it's a blob. So this is from page 77, but it might not be the *actual* page 77 once I put everything together.

Anyway, here goes. This is from Leonel's POV in New Novel:

What bothers me the most is that Roslyn told me to come back today, as though she thought they would still be there. Like she didn’t even know. I don’t think she did know, which is just weird. Wouldn’t they have to prepare for something like this? Wouldn’t Byron have told her?

I’m figuring out a bridge to my new song when someone starts banging on the door. I stop playing and jump up.

“I know you’re in there! I can hear your music!”

“Hell, it’s the landlord,” I say. Scott nods solemnly, his eyes shifting around the apartment. “You’re fine. Just stay here.”

...aaaaaand, that's it!

Here are the next Lucky 7 :)

Cristina Dos Santos
Steph Sessa
Jessie Humphries
Jeff O
Hannah Hounshell
Shelley Sly
Emily R. King

Thursday Things

Some random things for this fine Thursday:

1. If winning $20 in Fandango Bucks to see The Hunger Games sounds like something you'd like (OF COURSE that's something you'd like!),  click here to go to Jessie Humphries's blog, because she's doing a giveaway :)

2. We are moving...again. HAHAHA...HAHA...ha... *collapses*
Seriously, we just moved in December. I'm taking this MaRcH MaDnEsS thing to a whole new level, apparently. Anyway, The Husband and I are going to be saying goodbye to Connecticut and hello to Long Island where we grew up! It will be a fun adventure, I'm sure. I just have no idea how I'm going to keep up with my writing goals while packing and then moving. I think the answer is lots of caffeine and little to no sleep, which sounds so appealing, doesn't it?

3. Speaking of MaRcH MaDnEsS, I totally made my week 1 goal of 7,500 words! Woo! This week...um...not yet. Not YET, I say, because even though things are crayzay at the moment and I'm totally behind on word count and it's basically the end of the week, I'm going to seriously try to catch up! For realz. I promise. :) (I'm suddenly reminded of some of you who can write thousands of words in one day. TEACH ME YOUR SECRETS!)

4. OMG YOU GUYS, DAMON The Vampire Diaries is back on tonight after a short hiatus that felt like an enternity!! I'm...slightly excited about it.

*I could rip your heart out with my Vamp brutality*
*Or maybe I'll confess my undying love for you*
*But probably, I'll just smolder*

5. I've been listening to this song constantly, non-stop, all the time since January. Why? Because it's the song that encompasses the mood of New Novel. And I'm still not sick of it! I love Florence so much! I have other songs in a playlist that I made for New Novel, and especially for when I'm writing in a different character's POV, but this song is still totally the theme song. :)


How are you guys doing with your monthly goal if you have one? Do you watch The Vampire Diaries? (TELL me you do! Seriously. If you don't, then you need to start, STAT.) Is there one song that seems like it's made for your novel?

The Blob

You know The Blob?

It's basically a formless...um, blob...that just eats and destroys things. Have you even seen the movie? It's kind of hilariously bad, and the whole premise is just, well...Giant, oozing Blob terrorizes small town!

But anyway.

There's a point in my drafting process when I realize my darling WiP is The Blob.

Around 30,000 words or so, I'm far enough in where subplots are happening and I'm trying to keep things interesting and usually, I'm still trying to figure out what's going on. So I throw stuff in there to see what happens. Or I jump around and write scenes out of order. Or I have a completely new idea for a plot twist and I start writing in that direction.

Right now, my draft is not a cohesive story. It's bits and pieces hemmed together and broken apart. It's messy, formless, and growing.

My draft is the FREAKING BLOB.

And you know what? That's okay. It might be a huge glob of mush that sometimes terrorizes my brain, but eventually it will start to take shape. Even now, when it moves just right, I can almost see what it will look like later on. It makes me love it even though it's hideous right now, and makes me feed it even though sometimes I just want to spray it with a fire extinguisher and freeze it (uh, movie reference).

But it's those sparkling moments of glory when you can see what your draft is supposed to be that make you keep going, keep pushing through the Ugly. One day it will be a shiny, gorgeous piece of art, and you'll love it even more knowing that you made it pretty when it used to look like this:

My first WiP pretty much had a cohesive plot the entire way through. It needed a lot of restructuring, but it was still a story with a beginning, middle, and end. But this draft? Not so much. Funny how different books can have such drastically different processes.

So somebody, for the love of all that is pink and glittery, tell me that your drafts are like The Blob sometimes, too? Am I the only one who's writing a crap-tastic first draft?

Interview!

Happy Monday, friends!

The lovely Cristina Dos Santos at Once Upon A Time... was kind enough to ask me to do an interview. She's super awesome, so if you aren't already following her, you must!

So, if you'd like read an interview where I basically answer questions about myself (don't get too excited--I'm not very interesting!) then you can read it here.

And that's all for today, folks. Have a lovely day!

<3

That Other Moment...

That other moment when you realize your draft doesn't have the atmosphere you wanted, and you also don't know how to get from Point A to Point B, and your brain feels like this:

And like this:

...yeah, those moments aren't fun.

Funny that I'm in a funk a few days after having such a great high.

*sigh*

Anyway, I won't allow myself to wallow for long. I'm either going to A) Come up with a solution, or B) Barrel through until I'm unstuck. I really hope option A happens, but either way, this funk is going DOWN. Actually, I'm not going to think of it as a funk. Nope, it's just an obstacle that I need to overcome. A problem that I need to find a solution to. I'm going to figure this thing out, one way or the other. And, um, I hope it's soon :)

It's all in the attitude, people. All in the attitude. (I'll just keep repeating that to myself...)

On a totally unrelated note, I bought a GORGEOUS new notebook that I don't even want to call a notebook because it's so pretty--actually, maybe it's a "journal"--and it's just begging me to fill it! It's as thick as a book, which makes me want to write an entire draft in it.

Yeah, an entire draft. Longhand. In a journal.

I'm not ready to do it yet, though, what with New Novel still unfinished. But maybe my next draft. Would that be...crazy?

That Moment...

That moment when you write a scene or a page or a piece of dialogue, and suddenly, unexpectedly, it's just so, so perfect and exactly what you didn't know you wanted, and you literally shed a tear because your characters did something seemingly on their own and it's like magic.

That's why I write.

This actually happened yesterday. I was having trouble getting started (which is always the hardest part for me), and when I finally mustered the motivation I only wrote 281 words, because that ended the scene I had started the day before. Only 281 words, but really...wow.

I'm not saying that I'm the best writer in the world, but I was just waiting for this thing to happen between these two characters, and suddenly in those 281 words IT HAPPENED. And I was just like OMG I did not see that coming at this point but I LOVE IT SO MUCH!

Yay for writer's highs!
(Um, except I'm not in a pant suit. Make that sweatpants.)

And that made me realize that when characters come to life and things come together, that's my favorite part of writing. I'll admit that it's rare for me, which is why I had a mini tear-filled freak-out when it happened yesterday. I actually couldn't write for awhile afterward because I was too excited about those 281 words (Heh. Me = Crazy), and when I did start writing again I was in a funk because I didn't plan my next scene and was just winging it. I'm starting to realize that there are endless highs and lows when writing a novel.

But the highs are so worth it.

MaRcH MaDnEsS!

Happy MARCH! Can you believe it's March already? This year is flying by and I'm trying desperately to keep up with my writing goals. I did end up making my February New Novel word count goal, which I'm quite pleased about, but only started a short story so I'll have to finish that this week. But I do have plans for this month. Writing goal plans. Plans that I shall call:

MaRcH MaDnEsS!


I've been talking about MaRcH MaDnEsS (can't type that out without the alternating caps) with a friend of mine who is joining me. Basically, I'm giving myself a crazy (well...not SO crazy) goal for the month...hence the MaDnEsS! The goal is to really push myself and what I think I can do, and add a nice chunk of word count to the New Novel. But it is NOT meant to make me feel like a failure if it ends up being too much for me. My minimum goal is to write 15,000 words this month, just like my past monthly goals, but I'm going to strive for my MaRcH MaDnEsS goal really, really hard.

Here's a little list I made for myself, which I'll be filling in every weekday (and possibly adding some lines for weekends if I feel like doing more or if I need to catch up from the week):

It's going to be awesome, guys! I'm really excited for a productive month, even though it's going to be super hard sometimes.

Is anyone with me?

Let the MaRcH MaDnEsS begin!