Okay, where was I?

I'm finally down to only three things on my writing-related to-do list. This respite will only last a few days, but with any luck I can do better at keeping up when the pile increases again. This past couple of months has been hellacious, what with family stuff going wrong, and a serious misjudgment on my part re. the w-f-h novel. I thought that since I'd written an 80K word novel in two months, pounding out a 40K one in the same amount of time would be a piece of cake. Here's what I didn't realize:

1. The 80K novel was from my own outline; this one was from somebody else's.

2. The guidelines I had to follow for more than half the scenes formed an intricate web of minutiae. This meant that I couldn't write so much as a sentence without flipping through reference books and going back through the ms to make sure everything hung together and I wasn't f*cking something up. This took time, and it also meant that I couldn't get any writing momentum going in those scenes, which in turn meant the whole thing took even longer.

3. Almost all the scenes had 4-5 main characters present, each of whom had to be actively involved in the scene; I couldn't "lose" any of them for any length of time.* It doesn't sound like any big deal, but juggling more than 2-3 characters in a scene takes some doing. And these people were in every freaking scene, participating as equals.

Anyway. That ms will be back on my desk shortly. I hope I can stay more on top of it this time. I guess that depends on how off-point the version I sent them was. I bloody well tried to get it as on point as possible.

I'd like to try to get something done on my dystopian ms before the w-f-h comes back, but I'm scared to look at it because I'm afraid it really sucks. Right now I'm deciding whether to actually look at it, or just starting writing in the general vicinity of where I left off without taking a peek. I know that part needs to be rethought anyway, so I'm leaning toward diving in blind. I can't even remember what all I had in there, the last time I worked on it.




*Now that I think about it, this is probably one way I could have worked faster, by just letting everybody say generic stuff that needed to be said, and not worrying about personalities. I ended up doing that some, anyway.