No writing today. At least, not on my WIP--worked instead on other writerly obligations. Didn't even think about my WIP. However I did think about Gerard Terborch's use of the exact same image in two of his paintings:

http://www.abcgallery.com/T/terborch/terborch10.html

and

http://www.abcgallery.com/T/terborch/terborch5.html


The girl is copied, down to the folds of her dress! I think maybe Dutch painting, at that point, was still considered more of a craft than an art--or perhaps it was starting to break off?

What's interesting to me lately is the idea of artists in a community influencing each other. With the advent of the Internet, writers are also influenced by the way their art is received, and the way they themselves are perceived--or believe themselves to be perceived. I wonder if the Internet is having an effect on writers' creativity, taking the place of how writers used to provoke and challenge each other to change or experiment. And, if so, whether that's good; are writers tending to boldly stretch their comfort zones because they see others doing it? Or is the Internet perhaps squashing writers because it shows them a worldwide picture of the market and their potential readership?

No writing for three days. Today I picked up where I left off on Thurs., and as I was revising one of the characters did something that surprised me. It's not a huge event; he just says something that previously was said by another character. However, if he is the one who says it there will be ripple effects down the entire ms--so I had to go back, reluctantly, and reread from the start to try to make sure he really would say that at this point in the story. The jury is still out; my writing time has been a little curtailed lately so I didn't get all the way through. Maybe tomorrow I will figure it out. If not, I don't know what to do, because if I start guessing about character now it'll throw me off for the rest of the book.

Worked today even though my head wasn't in it, mostly. Sometimes it feels like I've forgotten how to write. I string words together, and they look stupid on paper so I restring them again. And again. But you know, it's still progress of sorts. I worked through it anyway, moved the character forward and got a few pages farther. And I guess I'm slowly getting a different spin on tone.

Worked today, picking up where I left off yesterday. Redid some of yesterday's, and inched forward a bit. I hope to g*d I'm on the road to making this better, because it's going to be an utter b*tt-r**ming drag if I look back in a few months and find that I made the ms even worse.

Pludged through some of chapter nine, not sure how much. I keep realizing that I'm too much in the character's head, so I try to fix it. Then I realize that I'm not enough in the character's head--so I try to fix it. And now I'm coming up on a part where I have to rethink an entire confrontation because the style, depth, and meaning of the story have changed. I was getting in all this info in, but I have to go back and gut it--and, now that I think about it, redo the skeleton of the scene, too. Pull out the guts, decide which bones get to stay, and figure out how to put those together. Then put some new guts in. Yow.

And now I have to help son with homework about "linking" verbs and "helping" verbs. Only I don't know what they are. I have the worksheets in front of me, and I still don't know what they are. It's like they're asking you to explain why the cursor moves when you move the mouse. Dude, I don't know--it just does. Some smart person figured it out way back when and the rest of us get to bask in the results of his genius.

Pludged all the way through the chapter, which turns out to be Chapter Eight. Will it stand up to later scrutiny? I doubt it; nothing else has. Nonetheless, it is done for now, except I think I left one transition unfinished. Still, it is a relief to see the blank white chunk of space that says this chapter is over. I think at one point that sucker (Ch. 8) must have had a billion pages of cr*p to sort through, select and put in some kind of order. Now it doesn't look like my dog chewed up 15 pages of dialog and barfed it into a pile. No, now it looks like a second grader was making a collage and pasted a bunch of mildly related snippets together. That's the kind of thing I have to call "progress," at this stage of the game.