“Four minutes, seventeen seconds.”

[mugenmine]

Stuck: Day 3?-
Chapters: 1-5 (draft 2)
Total @13.7K

I started the edit today, well I started it yesterday, after holing up in a Starbucks and reading the first draft from end to end while not piking up a pen. Then I walked for an hour to think more on the draft. Then I edited a bit of chapter one. The draft as a whole is not bad, it's not very good either, it's kind of fair to middling. I feel secure in that the story is okay, but my telling of it is still lacking. And the start of it was not good.  So I've done some more scene shuffling, and realized that I have an entire scene to redraft. It's an important one so it can't suck. (I suppose the goal is for none of it to suck!)
So today was an attempt to rewrite the scene. It was also national channel my inner procrastination baby day as well. I didn't know it was a thing. My internal mantra was "Noooooooo, But I don't want to write anything!!!" All day, I said this. Not aloud, thankfully. Well not aloud in public. I might have said it a few times in my apartment..  Every time I sat down to write, other things magically happened... I started my taxes, texted a friend, made a mark gatiss gif, cooked lentils, found a Nero Wolfe novella to read for research, washed my hair, stared at tumblr and finally made 500 words. So painful!  But the thing is, I can't not write if it's just cause I feel like being a lazy person for the day. Mind you lazy is my usual resting state... But I just can't let it be an excuse for me. Because I'm currently at 50% of my entire output for 2013 and that kinda freaks me out.

I want to save my not writing days for things like, my back dies again like last year or I get the stomach flu or some reason more than I'm just not feeling it. But I think the big thing is that if I don't write I'll never finish the story, or it will take me one more day longer than I want. So I wrung out 500 really slow going and mediocre words, one by fucking one, and it was sucky... BUT the good thing is that the scene is now about 1/3rd done, and that's one-third less of a slog I have to deal with tomorrow. Not that this story is a true slog, it's just that I really want to have a draft that I don't have to completely rewrite anymore. I really want to be carving away, not still throwing clay.

Comments

[tenderly-wicked.livejournal.com]

Any chance to see your Mark Gatiss gif? :-) I'm doing very much the same at the moment, fiddling with more or less unimportant things instead of what I've been actually planning - finishing a novel I've started long ago and then abandoned (or at least considering if I can do it).

My only excuse is that I'm kind of perplexed - it seems that I'll have to cancel a trip to England in spring. I was looking forward to it, and now it turns out that my friend's not going :-( I can't decide if I should go alone - or not go at all... Which would be a pity.