Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Outlet

Ok, I need an outlet and since this was originally a writing blog (temporarily a reading journal for grad school), I'm going to use it.

I'm pissed. That, in short, describes what is going on with my story. It's pissing me off. I've never had to work this much to get past something, I've never had to muscle through so many chapters before when compared to the past 4 books I've written. Maybe it's because this time it's serious, this time there are deadlines, this time once I'm done with grad school there isn't any more school and I've got to either sell a fucking book or I don't know what. That's a slight understatement, but you get the idea.

I have a headache, even now. I've read my mentor's comments, and the shitty thing is that I already know I have an issue and I'm having problems getting over it. Here's the thing. I want to start from Point A: Humans discovering portal and get all the way to Point B: We help to win a huge planetary war. The problem isn't so much the idea, it's just that there's so much boring bullshit that occurs following Point A that it's hard to get to the good stuff that leads up closer to Point B. Humans learning this and that, smalltalk to get between little conflicts that are so minor they don't even have much reason being there. Again; pissing me off. I've waded through the boring stuff before, but it's been okay, necessary boring stuff that doesn't last too terribly long. The thing here is that I know readers would easily get bored and toss my book away in favor for something better where they can get to the meat much sooner. Hell, as a reader, I would toss my book away in order to get to something better. That can't be said for my other ones. Good stuff happens in them. Conflict arises quickly. Characters have issues to work through during said conflict, blah blah and all that good stuff. Here they're just wandering around like a bunch of idiots. NOT what I want my characters to be doing.

So I finished a brief "Adjustment" list which basically is a short version of how I'm going to revamp my story. I'm going to be cutting the shit out of it, that's for sure. Fuck the prelims, fuck all that boring crap and rambling useless nonsense. I'm going to put the trust into my readers and characters; that the readers will understand and my characters will do their thing without a lot of explaining. I'm getting too bogged down with info dumps or stuff that is info dump-like. Time to smack them around, toughen them up. I'm tired of muscling through this thing and being pissed off that nothing is going the way I want it to.

Time to make it go my way and have a bit of fun.


Currently: Fuck you story!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just scream at your books and throw them down like in "Mirrormask" and maybe they'll float away.........