Never, Ever, Ever Give Up!

This morning, I started writing at 7:30, and didn't stop until I finished the scene I was working on. It felt GREAT. I'm making it my goal to get in the habit of writing first thing every day, because if I don't keep working on this novel rewrite, you know what?

It's never ever ever going to get done.

And that's unacceptable.

The last few months, I've been really discouraged on the writing front—the glacial querying process, the feeling of ramming my head against a brick wall with this novel, the fear that I'm never going to get to the next step. But I've come so far since I started getting really serious about writing in 2005. I've written six complete novels and three incomplete ones, and I've REwritten a few of them, too. I've written query letters and synopsises (synopsi? however you spell it, they're awful!!) and read up on the publishing industry—I've even gotten feedback from some pretty awesome agents.

And all that aside, even though it's frustrating beyond imagining sometimes, I love writing. I always have.

I'm not going to give up. I'm going to keep plugging away at this novel, and when I finish it I'm going to write another one.

I am writer! Here me RAWRRRRRR!!!

Down the Rabbit Hole

Phew, well it's been a little while since my last post…

I've been musing about stories and writing and re-writing, and I have a lot of profound thoughts floating around in my head, but they never quite seem to make it to paper. :-) I'll give it a shot.

I love stories that matter and mean something, that make you think and feel, that earn their triumphs or tragedies in a satisfying way. I love being swept up into fictional worlds and getting so lost in the story that I don't quite know what to do with myself when I reach the end. I love beautiful prose, the sound of words, the flow of language, perfectly crafted sentences and paragraphs.

Writing is so interesting to me. It's always changing. Sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's the hardest thing in the known universe. Re-writing is my arch-nemises, and yet at the same time it's not. The most difficult thing, I think, is allowing myself to re-imagine a story, to break away from what I've already written and be able to see it from a different angle. That's where I'm at in my current re-write. I'm slowly leaving the keep-the-same-basic-scenes-and-reword-them-a-little frame of mind and tentatively making RE-writing my way of thinking. It's truly remarkable to be able to recreate something, to shape a story into what it was meant to be in the first place, something you couldn't quite see in the beginning. It's a long, slow, hard process, something I'm having to relearn every single time I go to revise anything.

I've been working on this rewrite since April, and I don't have very much to show for it. I've written a lot—over 20,000 words, in fact—but most of it has ended up in my "Deleted Scenes" folder. As of yesterday, I have two chapters that I'm fairly happy with. Two. But I'm slowly sinking into the world of this novel, and I'm beginning to see, if not a light at the end of the tunnel, a rabbit hole I can tumble down and explore for a while.

And that's a good thing.

I think I'm going to go explore.