October 02, 2003
80K and Writer's Retreat
God. It took me over two weeks to get the last 10,000 words of manuscript out. If I keep slowing down like this, I'll never finish. :P I'm really hoping to be over this rough patch soon. Like, before I finish the novel even. Still, 80,000 words. Whoa. That's pretty cool. I had a few moments of "I hate everything about this stupid novel" this morning, but they seem to have passed with little scarring.
That said, I'm so ready to be gone for the weekend, off to write and laugh and eat and write and maybe sleep a little, all on the shores of a lovely lake in a lovely little house. I'm taking a camera, Julie's taking down the quotes--prepare for lots of incriminating evidence.
I'm sure I'll post all about it Sunday or Monday.
I'm not going to say 'I suck', because that's against the rules...
And now's the time when Lisa starts seeing all the flaws in the first draft of this beast. Problems in characterizations, worldbuilding issues, plotholes you could drive a truck through... grar. For now, I'm resisting the urge to try to fix them all right now, settling for just writing them in my little notebook in hopes of letting them go for now. But that, as much as anything, is stalling me from finishing the draft. I keep thinking back over the whole thing and deciding that it's all fucked up.
It's not. It's not. It's a first draft, and I can fix it. The basic structure and story are sound--even in this massive attack of novel-loathing, I know that much. Everything that I think might be wrong with it (and in a more rational moment, I may not see all these flaws) is something that can be fixed with a good, solid edit. Or two. It's worth fixing. But before I fix it, I gotta finish it.
Keep going. One word after another, one word at a time. Hell, one syllable at a time, if necessary.
So ready for this weekend.
