Archives: January 2009

not done, and that’s okay

actually, whether or not it’s okay, it’s not done.

i really thought i might have a chance: just bite the bullet and grind through to the end, come hell or high water; but i’m an old and persnickety man, and late nights and rush jobs are not for me.*

nonetheless, i feel extremely good about the work i have been able to do. perhaps the typing in process should be considered a separate draft itself, as i spend nearly as much time either confirming or further revising the revisions i’m entering. while this may not be the cleanest method, i feel the result is stronger than before, so i’ll stick with it for now. i’ve already tightened a number of passages and actually gotten an ear for that character’s voice which has been so elusive until now (and this time i mean it!).

in a related aside, i spoke to my brother-in-law on the phone, today, and he helped me remember and appreciate the work i have done, not simply focus on what i have not. i expect to be done within a week or so, and in the larger scheme, that’s pretty darn close to on time. besides, if the work is stronger for this extra time, which i certainly believe it is, so be it.

now, all of this positive spin is good, but it certainly doesn’t absolve me of not working more aggressively earlier on, so i wouldn’t have been in this last-minute race to be done. today’s deadline wasn’t unrealistic, if i had been better focused.

for example: i officially started the pencil revision on january second, and finished on the 29th, but in those four weeks, i actually put in perhaps two weeks of work. i had a few very strong days, and then a handful of steady ones. two weeks for almost 500 pages isn’t too shabby, and i feel betterabout not getting it all typed up in two days; however, right now i would be writing a blog about how it feels to be finished if i’d stayed on task.

on that note, it’s time to make up for some serious lost sleep.

* in fact, i was born old. i think i pulled one all-nighter in high school and three in college, all of which ended in varying degrees of disaster, for both my grades and my health. as for rush jobs…see the title of this blog.

ay, ay, ay, ay!

okay, it’s half past midnight, i just put in another four hours, and i’m still only up to page 70. it’s not looking good at this point for making the self-imposed deadline. i’d have to cover 16 pages per hour for the next 24 hours to make it, and at the current rate, i’ll probably land closer to 250, if I’m lucky.

why so slow? well, the obvious reason is the re-revising going on. i know, i know, i shouldn’t be doing it, but it’s all but impossible to keep my fingers out of the pie. another reason, though, is it takes a bit of time to figure out some of what i scribbled down in the first place.

but, enough babbling. it’s well past time for bed, if tomorrow’s going to be even remotely productive.

tonight’s revision music: “Canción del Mariachi (Morena de Mi Corazón)” from the Desperado soundtrack (yep, just the one song)

slow start

so i only got through about 30 pages, this morning, but it takes a little for me to get back into the mindset of just typing things in and not re-re-revising. still feeling hopeful for this evening and tomorrow.

now to a paying job…

revision 2 is done! (-ish)

just a short note to say i finished the pencil revisions for No Good Deed! of course, i still have to type them all in to actually make my deadline of this saturday, but it’s within reach!

less than 50 pages…to go!

32 pages more this morning, buts me at just over 40 pages left, and it’s very hard to stop, even to let myself go to the bathroom (okay, maybe that was a little too much info, but you get the point, right?). however, there’s actual paying work to be done this afternoon, and a foot of snow to get off the back roof before the next storm in a couple days.

it’s great to be this wired again, though. i’m into the final events and getting caught up all over again, re-experiencing it. you’d think, because i wrote it, and finished less than a couple months ago, that i’d have it all in my head. maybe my memory’s just poor, but, while i certainly remember the events and the conversations and all that, it’s the details, the word choices, the smaller twists and turns along the way, that surprise me.

true, sometimes it’s not a good surprise, but that’s why i’m revising, and even in these cases there are good surprises, as i work out (or discover) a much better way of doing or saying whatever it is. more often than not, though, especially in these last pages, the surprises are quite nice. admittedly, it may not take much to lift me, the use of a specific word here, the distillation of an unnecessary paragraph into a single powerful sentence there, the imagery of a moment, the sound of a character’s voice, that sort of thing.

we’ll see if anyone else agrees soon enough, but for now, and, ultimately, forever, if i’m not jazzed about it, what am i doing here?

here’s to dreams.

53 pages!

before and after classes, and an early night, to boot!

yep, 53 pages of revision, today, which is more an indication of the quality of this section than of my skills at revision. free of the recent blockage, i found myself cruising through, with almost complete pages without an edit. there’s a bit more dialogue in this section, though, which also helps the pages go by. especially when double-spaced. but i’ll take it!

74 pages left. look out tomorrow!

2 steps forward, 1 step back, 2 steps forward…

“it was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

well, perhaps not so dramatic as that, but the last several days have been busy. sometimes good-busy, sometimes bad-busy. it’s all coming out in the wash, though, as i managed to revise 125 pages in 2 of the last 4 days, bringing me to within almost a hundred pages of the end!*

it started with a marathon day of 86 pages, which felt awesome. a whole day devoted to the book, first thing in the morning to almost the last thing at night. i even got a bit of a head start since i was awake at 3 am (thanks to my stomach, but anyway). the day felt really good, and i was making some tremendous progress.

i even managed to chop out nearly fifteen pages of unnecessary exposition. i’ve written before about the need to drop things i might personally really like in a story because they simply don’t fit. it’s something i’ve trained myself to accept and keep an eye out for, to avoid playing a turn of phrase purely for the turn of phrase, and i’ve been pretty good at it, i think, all thing considered.

however, when i hit the end of the day that day, i was in a section that had to go, but i had no such reservations. in fact, it was just the opposite. i was embarrassed i ever wrote the material i was looking at in the first place. it felt pedantic, heavy-handed, awkward, and ultimately unnecessary. so i chopped it. the chopping was easy. accepting that i had written such drivel was not.

however, i did it. i was having a banner day and this wasn’t going to stop me. i’d hardly looked out the windows all day, but i was making progress!

until the next morning.

up again well before dawn, i found myself slipping backward through the pages. i was discovering oversights and gaps and poor revisions from the last burst of ‘progress’ the night before. what i had considered drivel turned out to be necessary. let me clarify that point: while i was still very unsatisfied with how i’d written it, i felt the core content was strong and, it turns out, necessary for certain other elements.

so, i tried to wrestle with those revisions of revisions, but my brain wasn’t functioning from lack of sleep. after a couple hours, i napped until breakfast, but yet another hour of fruitless, hair-pulling, and infuriating effort, i gave it up. i was useless, and needed to let go.

that was the single smartest and most productive thing i did that day, which is a bit depressing. a good night’s sleep is a wondrous thing, however, and the next morning found me much clearer and excited to figure this thing out.

which i did.

the root of my initial chop, it turns out, was my dissatisfaction with the pace in that section. it was going too slowly. i was dragging out exposition and conversation where it wasn’t necessary, and i had spread events across a longer timeline than i needed to. i can actually recall the initial writing process when i got to this section and thinking to myself that i needed to fill a section of time, so i shuffled some events across a longer period and had the characters start talking. a lot.

big red flag. ‘i needed to fill a section of time’? why? what on earth for? why spread something out when it was working fine as it was? because i wanted it to last a certain amount of time. no other reason. and that, of course, is a bad reason. i’d gotten the timeline into my head and forced the events to it, rather than letting them play out as they should. as i said, i can recall the writing of it, and my subconscious was perfectly aware, but my conscious continued to beat down the obvious barriers i kept running into, in order to ‘make it work’.

ah, hindsight. well, there’s a lesson i don’t expect to have to relearn, anyway.

with that realization, i made my way through the mid-level plot re-shuffling**, cutting and slicing unnecessary chunks, and realigning the scattered pieces into a solid, unified, coherent whole. the rearrangement brought the energy back into what had become a leaden and sluggish section, and i was jazzed again, sending me on to complete another 40+ pages that day, and bringing me to my present state, at page 347.

i really love this stuff.

now, according to my personal deadline, i have 5 days left to finish the last 130 pages, in pencil, and then type them all in. previous to this last burst, i was beginning to give up, but now, with the progress and the recent success, i think it’s better than 50/50.

of course, it also means i have to get to sleep!

*or to within almost a hundred pages of typing the bulk of the revisions in, but one thing at a time…

** if woody had gone straight to the police, none of this would ever have happened…

still focused

another 24 pages this morning, which is good. i want to squeeze a few more in before the inauguration speech and then work, but i have to first shovel out our mailbox so the postal carrier will actually deliver our mail, and pick up the letter to my niece, instead of passing by because the snowplows swamped us; after i shoveled it out the first time, of course.

yeah, having to shovel out mailboxes can be annoying, but when the day comes that my body simply can’t shovel out the mailbox, i will be deeply distressed. and it gets me outside where the sun is shining, the sky is clear, and the snow is beautiful.

focus

is all it takes, really. 9 pages revised between classes, today, and another 14 this evening.

hopefully, an early to bed night means a good strong start in the morning, first thing.

one measly fantastic page

it’s way past bed time and i need to keep this short, but i thought it worth noting that today i only managed barely more than a page of revision, and that is great.

why? because i did it at all. because that 1 page came at the end of the day, when i was turning off the lights and heading up to bed. after i’d loaded the woodstove and turned off the computer and made sure the doors were locked and i was right on the bottom stair, when i remembered that i hadn’t done any work on the book.

instead of writing this morning before work, i did some family stuff, and then did my school work in preparation for next week, rather than waiting putting it off until sunday. it was a tradeoff, but a good one. while i didn’t get anything on the book done,  now the work is done, and the rest of the weekend is anxiety free.

on the other hand, work went a little longer than expected this evening, but that’s okay, because my wife was a little late home, and, no less, surprised me with take out chinese for dinner. i mean, come on, how cool is that?

and what goes better with take out than television (i know how bad that sounds, but it’s fairly true)? so we did a Slings & Arrows (an excellent Canadian tv show about a theatre company struggling with the bizarre and the mundane – humanity, pathos, outright laughter, it’s all here), season 2 marathon, and loved it.

then, at the end of the night, at the bottom of the darkened stair, i remembered the book. i’d made the trade off for real revision progress to get the school work done and free up the rest of the weekend, so that was fine. i could have just gone to bed and still felt accomplished and ready for a good weekend.

but i hadn’t done my five minutes.

and, yet again, these five minutes were gold (and turned into a half hour). i still only got a page or so, but it clicked, it felt good, and i can’t wait to get started tomorrow.

so much for keeping this short.