The Write State of Mind: February, week DONE

Winter decided to happen all at once in Kentucky.

We’ve had a very mild winter, up until now. On the plus side, being snowed in has led to LOTS of good writing time. 🙂

We’d hit a point in the Asylum edits where the events simply did not happen the way we had written them – nothing that couldn’t be overcome, but, well, they did need re-writing. And that takes time. And The Write State of Mind.

I’m not gonna lie, I love editing. I love generating new content, but I love editing more. It is sooooo much easier to take a word pile and fix it, to take a story line and tighten it, to take an existing character and flesh it out than to start from scratch. In fact, starting from scratch is kind of like pulling teeth. It’s exciting, and an adventure- and if any of you have ever actually read a real adventure, you know 90% of adventure is SUCK. Sleeping in the elements, lots of walking, lots of trying to be killed. First drafts are like that. The only thing that keeps me going through them is the NRE of new characters, and the excitement of being the reader and needing to know what happens next.

I don’t have that anymore with Asylum.

Don’t get me wrong- I will have that again with Asylum, once we get back to truly generating new material. But needing to generate new stuff in the middle of old stuff? This has been the greatest hell I have ever faced as a writer.

Yes, it’s been fun. Writer Hell is still something I willing subject myself to, because it’s fun. This just isn’t the funnest of the fun. Trying to marry one scene to another, trying to keep the characters in line with who they should be, trying to work forwards and backwards at the same time to make sure nothing I’ve written now means I should change something I’ve written then, let alone will need to write afterward-

It’s a bit like being a Time Lord, really, only without the actually having a gift for time travel. Maybe being a Companion is a better analogy.

At any rate, that’s where we’re at. I think (I hope, I pray) we’re past the new generating work (for now) and can go back to polishing and tweaking and making great headway like we were before. Thank goodness for Snowmageddon giving us the dedicated time to write it, cause we needed it.

• The Asylum
• Write State of Mind
• Writing about Writing
• writing goals