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the new thing
I'd meant to start Falling From Ground and Financial Wizardry at the same time, and work on them more-or-less simultaneously. FFG is expected to be grim enough that I'll need a breather periodically, whereas FinWiz should be relatively light -- and I've found that if I write unrelentingly light for too long, I start craving angst big-time. So they'd balance each other well. Unfortunately, FinWiz needs research, and I'm having trouble finding the sources I need; it's gotten semi-involuntarily back-burnered.
Meanwhile, FFG is turning out to be hard. Not just the usual difficulty of plots-are-hard; every sentence is a battle, even when I know exactly what needs to happen. Which is doubly frustrating, because it's my fourth novel, and this was supposed to be the one where I knew what I was doing! Granted I had high expectations, but the reality is being a real struggle. It doesn't help that I'm finding myself justifying and shoring up every choice the main character makes, countering every imaginable objection in advance. (I have theories as to why that is, most of which I hope are wrong.) The alpha reader assures me that the end results are actually good, but the process has been a misery. And a slow misery at that, as it's seeming to take two or three days of percolating to get even a few hundred teeth-pulling words at a time.
It's probably just as well that FinWiz is back-burnered, since it's a mystery plot and that's something I'm still learning how to do; I don't need my respite from the hard thing to be another hard thing. But those multiple days of percolating on FFG are days I'm not writing, and that many days of not writing is bad for me. (Especially when even the writing days feel brick-wall-ish.) I need something else to work on during the lag times, but even the short prompt-fic I was playing with is sticking; the main character is developing a nicely snarky personality and I quite like the tiger, but I've no idea where it's going.
So.
A few days ago, I woke up with an idea for a new novel in my head. Unlike with Highway of Mirrors, I immediately lost all the proper names and a fair amount of the premise upon waking, but there was enough left to go on. It's a bog-standard fantasy setting, though I may mess with that as it goes along, with a young man on what turns into a small-q quest and an accreting collection of not-entirely-helpful animal companions. Nothing revolutionary, but it has the potential to be fun. Working title is The Green Ring.
And, so far at least, it's easy. I gave myself permission to play with it and see what happened, and I'm a couple thousand words in already. (Which is a lot, for me.) I had to figure out a name for the main character, but once I got that, other things fell into place as fast as I could type them. Faster. And when I've had to stop and work out how something happens, the answer's come in minutes, not days.
It's strange, but neat, to be working on a novel right after coming up with the idea; usually they have to queue for years.
The real test, though, was whether I could shift back to Falling From Ground once the percolating was done, or if this was just an avoidance technique. Well, I'm happy to say that after a few days of Green Ring, the solution to the next FFG-obstacle popped into my brain yesterday, and I got a few hundred more words done there. Still every bit as teeth-pulling as before, but words nonetheless. I don't want to write the whole novel at that pace, but I can if I have to.
And in the meantime, young Teb is about to receive the first check on his simple little task, and a couple of complications that he doesn't even know are complications yet....
Meanwhile, FFG is turning out to be hard. Not just the usual difficulty of plots-are-hard; every sentence is a battle, even when I know exactly what needs to happen. Which is doubly frustrating, because it's my fourth novel, and this was supposed to be the one where I knew what I was doing! Granted I had high expectations, but the reality is being a real struggle. It doesn't help that I'm finding myself justifying and shoring up every choice the main character makes, countering every imaginable objection in advance. (I have theories as to why that is, most of which I hope are wrong.) The alpha reader assures me that the end results are actually good, but the process has been a misery. And a slow misery at that, as it's seeming to take two or three days of percolating to get even a few hundred teeth-pulling words at a time.
It's probably just as well that FinWiz is back-burnered, since it's a mystery plot and that's something I'm still learning how to do; I don't need my respite from the hard thing to be another hard thing. But those multiple days of percolating on FFG are days I'm not writing, and that many days of not writing is bad for me. (Especially when even the writing days feel brick-wall-ish.) I need something else to work on during the lag times, but even the short prompt-fic I was playing with is sticking; the main character is developing a nicely snarky personality and I quite like the tiger, but I've no idea where it's going.
So.
A few days ago, I woke up with an idea for a new novel in my head. Unlike with Highway of Mirrors, I immediately lost all the proper names and a fair amount of the premise upon waking, but there was enough left to go on. It's a bog-standard fantasy setting, though I may mess with that as it goes along, with a young man on what turns into a small-q quest and an accreting collection of not-entirely-helpful animal companions. Nothing revolutionary, but it has the potential to be fun. Working title is The Green Ring.
And, so far at least, it's easy. I gave myself permission to play with it and see what happened, and I'm a couple thousand words in already. (Which is a lot, for me.) I had to figure out a name for the main character, but once I got that, other things fell into place as fast as I could type them. Faster. And when I've had to stop and work out how something happens, the answer's come in minutes, not days.
It's strange, but neat, to be working on a novel right after coming up with the idea; usually they have to queue for years.
The real test, though, was whether I could shift back to Falling From Ground once the percolating was done, or if this was just an avoidance technique. Well, I'm happy to say that after a few days of Green Ring, the solution to the next FFG-obstacle popped into my brain yesterday, and I got a few hundred more words done there. Still every bit as teeth-pulling as before, but words nonetheless. I don't want to write the whole novel at that pace, but I can if I have to.
And in the meantime, young Teb is about to receive the first check on his simple little task, and a couple of complications that he doesn't even know are complications yet....