Slogging Through

The last time that I had a chapter that I just didn't feel like writing, I didn't write at all for a couple of months. I knew what I wanted to say in the chapter, I just didn't feel the like writing it. It's not that the chapter was a bad chapter, it dealt with things that needed to be said and happen, but they were not directly related to the main plot. Of course, most novels have side stories and the main plot line can have effects that can widen out the breadth of the narrative, but that doesn't always mean that the author feels the urge to work on those sections as much as other sections.

Last night, I made myself finish up another chapter that I just didn't want to write. Normally when I write, I will sit down and write complete chapters at a time. But, when I don't really want to write for some reason, I'll end up writing just part of a chapter. Over the last week, I sat down four different days and was only able to get part of this chapter written each time. Once again, I knew most of the details before I even started the chapter. I had thought about a lot of the specifics of what would happen in this chapter a number of times over the past month or so. I knew what would be covered in this chapter before I made all of that progress on the book over the holidays. But, I just didn't want to write it down for some reason. However, I am pretty far along in the book and I want to try and finish up the initial draft relatively soon, so, I knew that I didn't want to waste a couple of more months due to a chapter not wanting to be written. Thus, I slogged my way through writing the chapter.

The new chapter ended up being longer than my average chapters, so I didn't scrimp on words, but when I read it to my best friend on the phone (as I have done with all of the chapters of this book), it just sounded awkward. Forcing myself to get through writing it resulted in text that did not flow like my writing normally does. I always smooth out edges as I go back and edit the chapters, but this chapter is going to take a lot more work when editing than normal to clear up all of the choppiness. But, don't worry, I will smooth it out. Just not right now. I'm sure that it will be easier coming back to clean it up after I've written a few chapters that don't have me looking for any excuse to step away from the keyboard.

Writing Once Again (Again)

I had not written anything for about the last two months. This was due to working on the lighting for a couple of plays, increased load at my day time job, not wanting to write the second half of a particular chapter, and I'm sure I can come up with some more excuses.

However, I have been getting back into writing mode over the holidays. I'm close to finishing up my fifth new chapter, and I still have a few more days off from my day job, so I am hoping to get more done. The sequel to Infused is close to 60,000 words long at this point.

Hopefully I can keep writing at a good rate after the new year begins. It would be nice to finish writing the book in the next couple of months. Of course, there's no telling how long editing it will take. That will be cleaning up the grammar and punctuation mostly, but still, that takes time.

Chapter Twenty

I've now finished writing through chapter twenty of the sequel to Infused. Chapter twenty is the longest chapter in the book (so far at least), but it is no where near as long as the very lengthy chapter seventeen from the first book. The word total for the first twenty chapters is very close to 50,000, and I am certain that it will be over 50,000 once I make my first editing pass on chapters seventeen through twenty.

The past few nights, as I have been trying to fall asleep, I've found myself thinking about a scene that is going to happen a few chapters after twenty. Before I was able to complete my writing of chapter twenty, I ended up having to type in a very rough version of the later chapter with all of the specific details that I kept thinking about so that I could get the thoughts out of my head and not stay awake thinking about them anymore. So, because of that, I have most of an additional chapter written, but I will have to go through it line by line and re-write them so that they are proper sentences and in the correct tense and style. I'll wait to do that re-writing until I have filled in the chapters that lead up to those events.

Sixteen Chapters

I've filled in the missing pieces and the sequel to Infused now has sixteen completed chapters. The word count is now up to around 37,400. I have also gone through my first edit pass of the new chapters. In my last post I stated that what I had written as chapter fifteen might be moved to chapter sixteen and that did occur.

With Infused, my favorite chapter was the fourth chapter. In that chapter, Geoff actually talked to a girl (which was a very rare experience for him up to that point in the story), and he lost himself as he looked at (and held) the girl's leg. To me, it just told volumes about Geoff, how he was isolated from companionship and how much he longed for it.

In the new book, chapter sixteen is my favorite. I won't say what happens in it, but it is a very exciting part of the story. I have been reading chapters to my best friend on the phone as I finish them and I was gratified when I heard her gasp while I read chapter sixteen to her.

Insomnia

Sometimes I will lay in bed thinking about how a chapter in my book should be written. This will happen night after night until I actually write it down (or type it in actually).

When I went to a a few seminars presented by local authors, they told the attendees that they should make themselves write every day (or just sit in front of the computer if they can't think of anything to write). But that method seems like it would make the process less enjoyable and also lead to writing inferior prose because you are more likely to force something out to feel that you are making progress. However, it is true that if I made myself actually attempt writing more that I would be further along in this book, but since I don't have people clamoring to read my next novel, I don't always have the motivation to work on the story. Still, when I start having problems getting to sleep because of thinking about how a part of the story should be written, I know that it is time to sit down and write.

There were a couple of times when I was writing Infused when the late night thinking caused me to write a few chapters out of order, and that is also the case with the sequel. In this case, it involves skipping parts of chapters to work on parts of the main story line that is interspersed with other story lines.

So, since my last update, I have completed chapters eleven, twelve, and fourteen. Chapter thirteen only has a few hundred words in it so far, and chapter fifteen is half written fully, and half written in notes of what it needs to say. Also, there is a chance that chapter fifteen may become chapter sixteen instead. We'll see.

More Editing

I was able to complete the first pass of editing chapters six through ten in the sequel to Infused this week. There will still be more editing passes later on in the process, but the initial one is the one that smooths out the flow of the wording the most. This mainly involves looking for repetition of word usage and then finding synonyms for the words or re-wording sentences to avoid using the same word over and over.

When I have completed the first pass of editing on enough chapters, I format them with Microsoft Publisher and print them out in booklet form so that a few select people can read them at that point and provide feedback. So, I now have the first ten chapters printed in this format.

Now I am at the point where I have to spend time thinking about how the story is going to proceed before I can start writing again. I know the main thread of the story going forward, but I need to decide on what the big tapestry is going to be that my thread is going to be woven into. I don't expect to figure it all out before I start writing again, but I will have to consider a number of things about where the story is headed to ensure that it will provide enough meat to build off of.

Vacation Writings

I was able to take some time out of my vacation over the last week to get some writing done. It was nice to have the free time to write another two chapters of the sequel of Infused. I am now up to ten chapters and over 25,000 words. It's getting there!

Writing in a journal instead of directly on a computer does change the process some. Fortunately, I don't rearrange a great deal while I am writing, so I only have a few words here and there that I had to mark out. It does keep me from doing some basic editing of sentence structure from time to time though, but most of the changes that I would have made I'm sure that I will notice when I read back through these latest five chapters for editing. I even made a few changes when I was typing into Word what I had written in the journal, but most of my concentration was spent trying to decipher my scribbles - I don't have very neat handwriting and it was even worse since I did most of it while reclining on a couch in a ship.

I also spent time thinking about some pieces of the story that are going to be spread out through the next section of the book, so I am at least partially prepared for the next round of writing to be done.