Rocket Scientist

I didn’t write anything here yesterday.  I can’t say I feel bad about it; I finished a chapter and a half in my Bete novel, which is still in desperate need of a title.  I’m not the kind of writer that slogs a page or so a day, every day, when writing.  That’s a process that doesn’t work for me.

Forcing writing leads, in my case, to crappy writing.  I have been pressing on, though, on the chapter before because it was a chapter for setting up what was coming, introducing key characters to each other, laying groundwork.  That, for me, tends to be dull.  I expect it reads dull right now, but it’s a first draft and it’s better to have at least a placeholder than letting it sit, which is what I’d done for some time.  I managed to finish off the last bit of that yesterday.

And then it was to battle.  I’d set up my enemies rather carefully here.  My protagonists are pretty badass so I can’t throw something halfass at them.  The attackers need to be scary, they need to be dangerous, enough so that my characters have to reveal their shapechanging capabilities, but not so much that the “bad guys” can’t be beaten.

Whereas I struggled all last week to finish the 2300 or so words of Chapter 17, last night I wrote Chapter 18 in about 2 hours for about 2000 words.  And that wouldn’t have taken so long except I took the trouble to set the scene more than I tend to.  I know what the battle looks like, but the reader doesn’t.  I needed to make sure the reader didn’t get distracted trying to figure who was where while man-sized mantises and dragonflies got their butts kicked.  It will need refining, but I think I have the important aspects there.

But it also demonstrates why I write like I do.  When I get to the part of a book where things are happening, where my characters have rehearsed it because it’s a pivotal moment, I don’t need encouragement or to make time.  I can sit down and beat out ten thousand words in a weekend.  It’s the bits in between that glue all those pivotal moments together, that show characters interactions and build up the elements that will make those pivotal moments seem real that bog me down.  They’re necessary but not what I write for and, I suspect, not what the reader reads for.

In the end, though, it’s how well I pulled off both that will determine whether my book is as good as I wanted it to be.  Here’s hoping.

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