Working on the next section, trying to get it honed down and put in a working order.

Sent first 20 or so pages to a writer friend for a reality check as to whether this is starting to be halfway readable, or if I'm like Russell Crowe out in that shed in A Beautiful Mind, with all that weird cr*p on the walls that made sense to him but was totally insanity to everybody in the real world.

Where Russell Crowe gets to hide in his shed as long as he can manage, writers must emerge and show their weird cr*p to somebody at some point. I figure the longer I hide in the shed, the weirder the cr*p could get and the more I could start to believe it's real. We don't want that.

Was thinking about how all this stuff I'm working with now is the exact same stuff I was working with in a vaguely similar form a few years ago, and in a totally different form last year. Now it's taking on yet another form, but it's still the same material. It's the same story, same characters, same stuff happening. The presentation just keeps changing. Writing is deciding how to present something. If I present it in one way it's literary. If I present it another way it's clunky. Or excruciatingly drawn out. Or light and funny. Or snarky. Or touching. Or shallow. And at any second, my presentation can make the material explode in a giant flaming mass of suckiness. Every second is about making choices: which parts of this do I choose to put down, how much emphasis do I put on them, how much space do I spend on them, what spin do I put on them?

Then I look at my other WIP, the swordfighting one, and it's like, what am I thinking--that it's just a matter of sitting down and learning to tell a story? If it is, I missed both the memo and the meeting.