February 3, 2021
Day 121, Week 17
- Words: 70,848
- Chapters: 34
- Point in Book (Save the Cat!): Break into Act 3
- Ego Size: Chia seed
- Emotional State: Numb
Today I’m wondering what the point is of writing this book. It snowed this week, a lot. More than it has in the past 3 years we’ve lived in this house. In fact, we normally get around 6 inches and then it melts. We’ve shoveled snow twice already this winter because we don’t have a snowblower, because we moved here technically from Los Angeles via a stopover in Canada and it never snows here. (Side note: Seriously, the snow can stop now. I need to get to the grocery store and while the Jeep has 4-wheel drive & can drive over most of it, it can’t get over the mound the plows keep shoving at the end of the drive.)
Why am I waxing on about snow? Because it fits my mood. While I know intellectually my book is a unique snowflake, I feel like you can’t or won’t see it in the giant pile of snow covering my lawn and drive, aka the ginormous amount of books being published and written right now. And that’s why my ego is the size of a chia seed, because frankly, I’m feeling part of the multitude and not a party of one.
Why am I writing a book, why am I promoting a book in a sea of people all doing the same, why am I publishing a book when thousands of other people are doing the same? Really, why am I doing any of it?
Over the past 6 days, I’ve been chewing on a chapter, or rather, two. The first mistake I made was to play it out in my mind on multiple days before I wrote it, which meant that when it came time to write it, I didn’t want to – been there, done that. But I plowed ahead. Dark Night of the Soul Chapter written for one MC, which was the trickiest because she doesn’t interact with anyone but my other MC and my other MC wasn’t playing. But I figured it out…I think…and moved ahead.
Dark Night of the Soul chapter for my other MC, my primary character, started out alright. I tip-tapped away, came up with some great dialogue and an epic fight with her best friend (words, not physical) that lasted over 3000 words. Awesome. And then I went into the next chapter which is where she starts learning and coming out of it so that she can roar into Act 3 and fall on her face before triumphing. But I wasn’t done with the argument from the previous chapter, so I kept going and then had her ponder her life and her mistakes, followed by a make up conversation with her best friend and I now had two chapters at around 3900 words, with a break in the middle of the action.
Back to the drawing board. I chewed on them and chewed on them, moving words around, cutting out unnecessary dialogue to get to the heart of what needed to be there, even though I really liked the full fight the most. And then I chewed on them some more. And yeah, I finally got to where they may be okay (not really, they kinda suck) and then just shoved them at my editor and walked away.
I still have my Break into Act 3 chapter for my secondary MC to write and I just…can’t. I’ve lost the passion for the book. I’m still writing scenes in my head that happen in books that I haven’t even outlined out yet, but I just can’t seem to sit down and plonk down any more words on this book.
So for now, I’m going to clean my house, shovel the driveway or do ballet, play some WoW, do some cross-stitch and debate my husband on some topic over multiple bottles of wine during date night.
Speaking of my husband, aka my world builder, he’s now decided my book is going to have some whovian aspects to it. It won’t change this book at all and does nothing really but fill a hole he saw in the world building that no one else would ever see because I’m not writing a high or epic fantasy. But now he’s created a reset for my Bodach, my Judge and secondary MC, which wipes them out when they get tired, similar to Dr. Who, but not. Physics caused him to write it – you can’t have a character as old as the Universe and not have some large world-building issues with it. I guess. I didn’t really see the issue, but then that’s why he’s the world-building and I’m the writer. I often don’t see holes where I should. I may need to do some serious world-building stories and backstories and I have a lot of them rolling around in my brain, but not right now.
And I did have one triumph this week. I finally figured out for both our PCs (we built desktop towers H2 of 2020) how to get the mic and headphones working at the same time for both Windows (mainly his & mine) and Linux (mine and only mine). I beat the stupid software choices Windows and our motherboards were forcing on us to finally use the all in one headsets we both have with our new towers.
So maybe life isn’t so meh after all.