Wednesday, November 07, 2007
My Cup of Tea
My son's school did this fund-raising thing that involves holding parents up at guilt-point and forcing them to buy stuff that costs too much for what you get. (sarcasm alert) But the kids get prizes!! -- that are broken five minutes later or else unusable straight from the plastic bag (which is NOT a toy, by the way) and (sarcasm over) now I have to report on one of my purchases. It's a visual report, too. Grin.
I bought this coffee mug, see, but the surface is a chalkboard. So if the cheap chalk that comes with it was any good, you could write stuff on it over and over. Like this:
Yeah, it's kind of hard to read, but I wrote I am not a rat -- Banallt on one side and Yes, you are -- Sophie on the other because that's the essence of my hero and heroine in Scandal. Or you could write other stuff. Which I'll do tomorrow. It's kind of fun.
In writing news, even though the above qualifies as writing news, Scandal is going almost all right. I've fought my way through several chapters, reordered several more and am reasonably pleased with the result. I wrote two new ones, which was good because I deleted a bunch of crap, too. Now I'm closing in on the ending. I'm hoping that by next week sometime I'll have a crappy but complete draft and a month to tear it apart and put it back together. It's funny how I always have an ending in mind but it keeps slipping away; like a wave, it's there, and then it's gone and I keep trying to pin it in place and I just can't. Then somewhere around 60 or 70 thousand words I realize that the ending of my story is actually in the "middle" (those are air quotes, by the way) and all the time I've been spending stressing over the fact the my middle is moving further and further away from the actual middle just means the "middle" is actually more like the end. Which is what happened with Scandal two days ago. My outline had an ending blocked out, a good thing because it gave me a direction, but the book would have to be 175,000 words in order to get there. And then I realized I'd already written everything but the end, which was just at a different place than I thought. And it's a gosh-darned relief, too.
Back to work.
I bought this coffee mug, see, but the surface is a chalkboard. So if the cheap chalk that comes with it was any good, you could write stuff on it over and over. Like this:
Yeah, it's kind of hard to read, but I wrote I am not a rat -- Banallt on one side and Yes, you are -- Sophie on the other because that's the essence of my hero and heroine in Scandal. Or you could write other stuff. Which I'll do tomorrow. It's kind of fun.
In writing news, even though the above qualifies as writing news, Scandal is going almost all right. I've fought my way through several chapters, reordered several more and am reasonably pleased with the result. I wrote two new ones, which was good because I deleted a bunch of crap, too. Now I'm closing in on the ending. I'm hoping that by next week sometime I'll have a crappy but complete draft and a month to tear it apart and put it back together. It's funny how I always have an ending in mind but it keeps slipping away; like a wave, it's there, and then it's gone and I keep trying to pin it in place and I just can't. Then somewhere around 60 or 70 thousand words I realize that the ending of my story is actually in the "middle" (those are air quotes, by the way) and all the time I've been spending stressing over the fact the my middle is moving further and further away from the actual middle just means the "middle" is actually more like the end. Which is what happened with Scandal two days ago. My outline had an ending blocked out, a good thing because it gave me a direction, but the book would have to be 175,000 words in order to get there. And then I realized I'd already written everything but the end, which was just at a different place than I thought. And it's a gosh-darned relief, too.
Back to work.
Labels: endings, plotting or the lack thereof, Scandal, writing
posted by Carolyn @ 11/07/2007 07:39:00 PM Permalink
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