Note to self: let it go; do your work.

Put other crap aside. Deal with it later. For now, do your work.

Still very busy, but once in a while I think about the new ms. Yesterday while out with Tyson I figured out a bunch of stuff I want to explore re. conflicts between personalities. Also some situations/flashpoints. I also think I'm going to go back and add a character into the first chapter/scene, which means switching from all internal narration to some dialogue. I'm thinking this will present my MC as more fully rounded from the get-go, but we'll see. Dunno when I'll have a chance to do any of this. I wrote down a page or so of notes so I can remember the stuff I thought of.

No time to work on my own stuff, but I did glance at the first scene of the new ms last night, just to see how it reads. I was wondering exactly what I'm going to need to figure out as far as voice in my head vs. voice on the page, because it's already clear to me that this is going to take some juggling. Transcribing dialect straight to the paper is usually not a great idea because it trips up the reader's eyes. What we hear in our head is not how other people are going to read it. Often a good way to handle that is to spell everything normally, and let the grammar and sentence structure carry the dialect.

So I looked over the first scene and saw right away that I do need to spell everything correctly, even though it's a long step from how you'd actually hear the guy in person. But I also saw that I probably need to clean up the sentence structure some, too, because transcribing him straight gives an immediate impression that he's stupid. Which he's not. I don't want stupid, I want laconic, removed, with a touch of menace. So...this should be interesting. No time to think about it much right now, though.

I was very bad a few days ago, because I worked a little on my own stuff as a break from the other writing-related projects I need to get done. Sometimes you think so much about one thing that it wears a groove into your brain and you have to switch gears to clear your head out so you can come back to your task with fresh energy. I should have switched to one of the other writing-related projects; that would have been the responsible thing to do.

Instead I opened a new file and started in on this idea my agent had--or rather, I took a couple of ideas Agent had and mixed them together and came at it from an angle that appeals to me. When you start something that way, you never know whether it's going to sputter out and die, or whether there's so little meat to it that you'll get it all out of your system then and there, or what.

I didn't get it out of my system, and today I checked out of curiosity, and in that one sitting I wrote nearly 3000 words in a few hours. That's a lot for me, on anything. And then last night I had to get out of bed and write stuff down that was coming into my head. I don't have time for this right now, but it looks like it'll be a book at some point, with any luck. I may turn to it after this time crunch is over in a few weeks, and see if I can pound the whole thing out, since it's pretty simple and fun and appealing (to me; not necessarily to anyone else).

Suddenly swamped. Multiple projects, overlapping deadlines, and everything has to be carefully handled with full attention. Yow.

Two things seem pretty clear to me today.

One, I'd better be vigilant about keeping up with whatever writing tasks need to be done, whether they're mine or someone else's, or I'm going to be in deep sh*t very quickly--like, within a week. And once I get vigilant, I have to stay that way during the periods when I have multiple writing tasks pending. I can't afford to put things off, because there are going to be too many in the queue, all with people waiting to hear back from me.

Two, my WIP really is weird and probably doesn't have much of a future. It's a luxury, writing-wise. Just saying.

I've been working on my own writing about every other day. Sometimes it's just an hour or two crammed into everything else that has to be done, but that's fine because I've got a lot of little pieces that I can pull up at any given moment. Yesterday I started a tiny new piece of another section from the difficult middle, writing it from within scene from the first time.*

Hmm, just checked. I spent over two hours getting a very rough draft of 203 new words. That sounds pretty pathetic. But it's actually terrific, because I'm finally starting to cover this territory that must be covered. However, it could be end up being pathetic after all, if this ms is as boring as I'm afraid it might be.



*as opposed to just sketching some dialogue, or writing a main point out for future reference, or jotting down an image. I set the scene in my head and went through it from the MC's pov, thinking what to dwell on for the reader, what to point out, what needed to be mentioned to carry ideas that I want to echo slightly in the reader's head. Basically I spent two hours getting my MC to walk halfway across a room. I haven't even gotten her to the other side yet.**

**So I can't complain if I finish this ms then find out it truly is boring. I'm the one who's making it be about walking across a room. You reap what you sow.