The good:
I finished “The Collapsing Hills” (a 5K-ish short story) and passed it on to my crit group and have gotten some very useful feedback. Maybe a new light bulb is starting to glow in the murky depths of my writing brain, because I do feel like this is the most “done” first draft of a story I’ve ever managed to produce. Honestly I feel like one more iteration oughta do it and then I’ll be able to (gasp!) submit it somewhere.
The bad… well, the slow and the time-consuming, anyway:
This past weekend, I managed to write some stuff for Sweetheartcatalyst that I’m calling “Scene 3″ (wherein I describe how my character was recruited to help solve a very dark & scary problem that’s plaguing Katro City). When I then tried to go back and work on “Scene 1″ again (where my character first meets the other people trying to solve said problem, & they don’t like him, trust him, or want him there), I once again ran up against a wall.
I finally realized that I needed to spend the time that I didn’t wanna spend, in order to narrow down what the frell I’m trying to write about before I sit there racking my brain trying to write it. (I know, what a concept. LOL)
So the next thing I know, I ended up spending the better part of this week working on what the Writing Excuses crew calls a “story bible”. And it’s long and uber-detailed. But it’s totally what I needed. Now I can write the actual Scene 1. w00t!
The funny thing is when I was listening to the podcast episode where they talk about creating “story bibles” and whether to put them in wiki’s or text files or whatever, I remember thinking, awww that sounds like a lot of work, I don’t really need to go to all that trouble, do I?
Apparently, for my big complicated full-length novel, the answer is “yes”. Who woulda thought?
