Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Hump Day Thoughts
I just now wrote two sentences in the erotic historical (EH), then got rid of the passive verbs and replaced the two sentences with one better sentence. That's all the writing I've done today. I almost didn't write the one sentence because I was sitting there staring at this white screen... Nothing to edit. Oy. And I was dithering about where to start and actually considering putting the hero several miles from the heroine until I remembered that I need to start smack in the middle of his problem. Which I realize now I still haven't done yet. Darn. Guess I'll go back and put my hero in his dilemma.
Yesterday was my first day of school. I'm taking Engl 530, a fiction workshop seminar thing. There's a lot of people in it. Should be a cool class. Here's an observation: We were asked to state briefly what we would be working on and how much we had written so far. All I mentioned was that I was working on a paranormal and had about 40,000 words with a need to totally rewrite the back half of those 40K. I was allowed to get away with that. (Whew!) Except for those with nothing written yet, everyone struggled to figure out how much they had so far and everyone expressed their progress in number of chapters or double or single-spaced pages.
Except me. Because I know pages are meaningless unless word count is at the root of the page calculation. I was sitting there mentally translating everyone's pages into word count so that I had a more meaningful notion of how far they were. A couple of people are pretty far along. Very few people thought of their work in terms of its genre or target market. Exceptions were the obvious ones, Sci Fi and mystery. I was getting really impatient and wanted to say, people, just do a word count! Word count is impervious to font choice, chapter breaks, line spacing and the amount of dialogue that may be present.
We have reading assigned and, I am now ashamed to admit, I groaned when Freud's
Introductory Lectures turned out to be the main text. And now I must take back almost every hateful thought I've ever had about the man (and there have been a lot). Damn. You have no idea how this pains me as I have deep issues with Freud and the way he's been used to frame a misogynistic view of the world. But, we were told to read him as if the writing were a writer's manual. Oh.
Insert profound silence here, while I struggle with having to say this:. It's brilliant.
OK, there, I said it. And, yes, it hurt. Damn. But if the lectures continue in this vein, my writing will improve a lot.
I am NOT looking forward to having anyone read my stuff. I hate that. Says the woman with four proposals with two editors (and yes, this time it's for real!) and five agents.
I won't have time to look at the DX revisions until Friday, I think. I want to get through it all in one pass, and since today was my son's first day of school (6th grade!) there was a lot of paperwork to fill out and a lot of helping him get organized. He's excited about the fortune in school supplies we bought today. As he should be. So, I should be proud of my one sentence. Maybe I'll have time for a couple more before I'm too tired.
