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Progress report
I love breaking new words most of the time. I love the sense of exploration and surprise. I dislike it when I have to fight the book for every single sentence, but that's part of writing novels. I also have the nagging sense that I'm not doing anything productive if I don't produce new words on something. This is, of course, entirely writer-neurotic.
What's harder with multiple projects on the go is that much of the 'writing' process doesn't involve new words -- it involves the necessary iterations that follow them.
Cast in Chaos was two weeks late. It was also way too long. Cutting is difficult because it requires me to evaluate the necessity of whole scenes objectively right after I've just finished writing them.
There are two types of 'necessary' in a Cast novel. The first, and most obvious, has to do with the individual book itself: Will the book make sense without this scene? The second, however, is less obvious. If the answer to the first question is yes, the second question to ask is: will it weaken the overall series if I cut this?
Part of the difficulty with a continuing series is that relationships form--and change--from book to book. If there's no change, or no reference to anything that might otherwise cause a large change, there's no sense of continuity and causality. But much of that sense of change and growth is secondary to the main plot-line of any particular book, and, well -- it takes up pages.
I did finish the cutting. I did send the book in. Sometime in the future, I will review line-edits and copy-edits on this book, and then Harlequin's version of page-proofs. Which are not, of course, new words.
Page proofs for City of Night then landed. Page proofs are the very last thing I have to do before I have a book in my hands. They're also, therefore, the last chance I have to fix anything I might have missed in any other of my numerous read-throughs. I always find things I missed, no matter how carefully I read the final revisions. This makes me feel moronic. (I swear someone went through the book an added bunches of extraneous commas.) Feeling like a moron for a full week is not a recommended mental health activity, btw. And, again, this adds no new words to works-in-progress.
One more revision is incoming, and I did a readthrough of every single word of House Name because at this point, I need it. This last part took five days, and involved me cursing and cutting and rearranging because I wasn't in reading mode -- I was in page-proof mode. This also adds no new words.
But today, for the first time in what feels like eons, I wrote new words (on House Name, in case anyone's keeping track). And I'm now writing more new words on an entirely different project, which at the moment is voluntary, and which I had to set aside entirely while I met various deadlines.
This, on the other hand requires me to reread everything & read the notes I've been jotting down about the project overall. So I'm going to go do that now.
What's harder with multiple projects on the go is that much of the 'writing' process doesn't involve new words -- it involves the necessary iterations that follow them.
Cast in Chaos was two weeks late. It was also way too long. Cutting is difficult because it requires me to evaluate the necessity of whole scenes objectively right after I've just finished writing them.
There are two types of 'necessary' in a Cast novel. The first, and most obvious, has to do with the individual book itself: Will the book make sense without this scene? The second, however, is less obvious. If the answer to the first question is yes, the second question to ask is: will it weaken the overall series if I cut this?
Part of the difficulty with a continuing series is that relationships form--and change--from book to book. If there's no change, or no reference to anything that might otherwise cause a large change, there's no sense of continuity and causality. But much of that sense of change and growth is secondary to the main plot-line of any particular book, and, well -- it takes up pages.
I did finish the cutting. I did send the book in. Sometime in the future, I will review line-edits and copy-edits on this book, and then Harlequin's version of page-proofs. Which are not, of course, new words.
Page proofs for City of Night then landed. Page proofs are the very last thing I have to do before I have a book in my hands. They're also, therefore, the last chance I have to fix anything I might have missed in any other of my numerous read-throughs. I always find things I missed, no matter how carefully I read the final revisions. This makes me feel moronic. (I swear someone went through the book an added bunches of extraneous commas.) Feeling like a moron for a full week is not a recommended mental health activity, btw. And, again, this adds no new words to works-in-progress.
One more revision is incoming, and I did a readthrough of every single word of House Name because at this point, I need it. This last part took five days, and involved me cursing and cutting and rearranging because I wasn't in reading mode -- I was in page-proof mode. This also adds no new words.
But today, for the first time in what feels like eons, I wrote new words (on House Name, in case anyone's keeping track). And I'm now writing more new words on an entirely different project, which at the moment is voluntary, and which I had to set aside entirely while I met various deadlines.
This, on the other hand requires me to reread everything & read the notes I've been jotting down about the project overall. So I'm going to go do that now.