Raining, raining
Sep. 28th, 2005 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ksmithIt's raining now, a nice, big wodge of stuff--we've had more rain in the last couple of weeks than we had in the previous couple of months.
It will green up the grass nicely and lead to weekly mowing for the last few weeks of the season. Too late to help the autumn colors, though. The early sugar maples, that usually turn a heartbreaking vermillion--yes, color can break your heart--are this year shedding leaves of dull salmon pink. My oak trees have already shed a few bags full of crinkled brown, as well as acorns aplenty. To walk across areas of my backyard was to feel like one was walking down a gravel road. I don't know if the drought was responsible, or if last year's deadwooding provided a boost of energy, but I don't recall ever being able to fill lawn bags to the halfway point with acorns.
Learned while doing this that acorns are Heavy.
Read![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
truepenny's and matociquala's posts on their respective writing processes. Many of matociquala's tics apply to me, up to the point. I handwrite very little--the Mead Fat Li'l Notebooks that I used to fill with scraps of dialogue and notes and such no longer play much of a role, maybe because I finally realized that I only used about 5% of what I wrote down. Thing was, I had to write it down so that I would remember it, because if I didn't write it down, I'd forget. After I wrote it down, I was then free to forget it. No one ever said that logic had anything to do with it.
I've written more out of sequence scenes for the current book than I did for the previous four. Usually, I write linearly, with no scene-skipping. This time, I think to get myself started, I wrote what I wanted to write--Lucien scenes, fight scenes, heart on sleeve scenes, confrontations. Anything with an emotional jolt. Now I'm finding as I return to linearity that most of that stuff will fall by the wayside. The moods leading up to those scenes will have changed sufficiently so that they will no longer fit, and I will have come up with something else to fill in the gaps.
I write to music. Some characters have specific soundtracks. Lucien's is Depeche Mode with occasional influxes of Bronski Beat. John's is Peter Murphy. Ok, so only Jani's two love interests have soundtracks--everyone else gets what they get. Ivy. Stereolab. St Etienne. Belle and Sebastian. Mellow stuff with zippo chairbopping quotient. If it makes me bounce in my chair, it's too distracting.
I use a rolling rewrite system, tweaking yesterday's work as a springboard to today's. If I feel I have really gone off the rails--as I usually do about 200 pages into the draft--I have to scrap and start over. Haven't done that with this book, even though the first 200 need a lot of work. This one, I want to get to the end.
I have to outline as a condition of my contracts. I hate them. Even this last one, which I felt was the best I ever did. The better they are, the more I feel that I have already written the book. Nothing kicks the skids out from under the will to write more than when part of your brain thinks the book is already done.
Five pages a day, I'm happy. I can hit eight to ten if I've really hit stride. The best I did in one day was 23 ms pages, but my brain felt like a wrung-out rag afterwards. I don't think I wrote much the next day.
It will green up the grass nicely and lead to weekly mowing for the last few weeks of the season. Too late to help the autumn colors, though. The early sugar maples, that usually turn a heartbreaking vermillion--yes, color can break your heart--are this year shedding leaves of dull salmon pink. My oak trees have already shed a few bags full of crinkled brown, as well as acorns aplenty. To walk across areas of my backyard was to feel like one was walking down a gravel road. I don't know if the drought was responsible, or if last year's deadwooding provided a boost of energy, but I don't recall ever being able to fill lawn bags to the halfway point with acorns.
Learned while doing this that acorns are Heavy.
Read
truepenny's and matociquala's posts on their respective writing processes. Many of matociquala's tics apply to me, up to the point. I handwrite very little--the Mead Fat Li'l Notebooks that I used to fill with scraps of dialogue and notes and such no longer play much of a role, maybe because I finally realized that I only used about 5% of what I wrote down. Thing was, I had to write it down so that I would remember it, because if I didn't write it down, I'd forget. After I wrote it down, I was then free to forget it. No one ever said that logic had anything to do with it.I've written more out of sequence scenes for the current book than I did for the previous four. Usually, I write linearly, with no scene-skipping. This time, I think to get myself started, I wrote what I wanted to write--Lucien scenes, fight scenes, heart on sleeve scenes, confrontations. Anything with an emotional jolt. Now I'm finding as I return to linearity that most of that stuff will fall by the wayside. The moods leading up to those scenes will have changed sufficiently so that they will no longer fit, and I will have come up with something else to fill in the gaps.
I write to music. Some characters have specific soundtracks. Lucien's is Depeche Mode with occasional influxes of Bronski Beat. John's is Peter Murphy. Ok, so only Jani's two love interests have soundtracks--everyone else gets what they get. Ivy. Stereolab. St Etienne. Belle and Sebastian. Mellow stuff with zippo chairbopping quotient. If it makes me bounce in my chair, it's too distracting.
I use a rolling rewrite system, tweaking yesterday's work as a springboard to today's. If I feel I have really gone off the rails--as I usually do about 200 pages into the draft--I have to scrap and start over. Haven't done that with this book, even though the first 200 need a lot of work. This one, I want to get to the end.
I have to outline as a condition of my contracts. I hate them. Even this last one, which I felt was the best I ever did. The better they are, the more I feel that I have already written the book. Nothing kicks the skids out from under the will to write more than when part of your brain thinks the book is already done.
Five pages a day, I'm happy. I can hit eight to ten if I've really hit stride. The best I did in one day was 23 ms pages, but my brain felt like a wrung-out rag afterwards. I don't think I wrote much the next day.
