Carolyn's Blog

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Progress continues as does nuerosis

Worked on the Rake today. Cleaned up most of one of the chapters. I'm feeling panicky about this even though at the moment there is no reason for panic except of the typical neurotic sort. I have no deadline or anything. But at the moment, the issue is that I want the rest of the book to match up to those first 3 chapters. The other issue is that I am feeling plotting challenged. Why? It's a long convoluted explanation. My synopses, when submitted when the book isn't written yet, have little resemblance to the finished product. That's because I really have to know my characters and that means I have to write them. And they change during the course of a book. And so I had to explain this to my agent who felt that the historical project description was plotless. Well, yes. It was. It's just an itty bitty idea. Hardly a paragraph. It's her job to sell books that have plots and all so of course she zeroed in on that. Sigh. Reminder: She liked the idea for Dark Elf (which was several pages, chapterless but with bits of plot thrown in that probably won't be in the book should it get written.)

But the whole thing has left me feeling convinced I can't plot. But I can. When I'm writing the damn book. I think. Now, I'm working on fixing up the Rake, something I'm typcially very good at, and now I keep thinking, "This is probably the wrong thing to have happen because, of course, as the whole world knows, I can't plot." Argh!!

Someone suggested I should be writing proposals for the project descriptions, and of course that is right. But I'm afraid if I leave the Rake too long it will be stale. Sigh.

Lastly, Instiki is still working. I wrote a little command file that invokes the correct path etc and that seems to have done the trick. It's cool. So far, I can say I'm pretty happy with it. But I need a full development cycle to really see if I'm right about the richness of the wiki as opposed to word processing.

Edited to add: I forgot to mention that on Friday, I saw the elf. He was in the middle of a conversation about some work he's doing at the gym (I think) so I couldn't do much but think, wow, he is just a really really handsome elf. I was on my way out, all sweaty and icky (I go to the gym after work, pick up my son and then go home to shower). Great. I probably looked like Godzilla on a bad hair day.

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