The thing that writing and exercise has in common to me is that when I'm doing them, I enjoy them.  I feel good, I feel productive, I feel accomplished.  But I always have to fight my way through the resistance.  I always don't want to before I start.  I have to hoist my self into a place where I start.  I know I've said this before . . . writing means get your ass in the chair.  It also means stop procrastinating on the net and don't let yourself get distracted by other stuff.  It means make a priority of it--it may not be the most urgent thing on the table, but it is the most important (usually, catastrophic events not withstanding).  It should be the thing you make a point to do every day.  Every day.  And the more you work at it, the better you get.  I don't mean just skills, but I mean your imagination, your ideas, your lizard brain, all wake up and start working more--even when, especially when, you aren't actually in front of the computer writing. When you are lazy, they get lazy, and then things are even harder to do, the resistance harder to overcome. 

So guess what I've been doing this week?  Avoiding.  I've been getting some written, and sure, I've got reasons, one or two even good reasons, but still.  I don't get to allow myself to stop.  In a little over a week, is start back to class, which means developing classes, teaching, grading, responding to students, etc.  My husband will also be taking classes, so I'll have care of the kids for part of the day too.  So what that means is I'll have even less time to write.  If I haven't hit a groove by then, if I haven't developed a solid habit by then (again, that is), then I'll struggle.  So.  That's what I'm going to do.  Work on getting my ass into the chair, and writing.  Getting words onto the paper.

But that also means I'll have to scrape up any extra bits of time and put them to purposeful use. Which I'm about to go do right now.

Di

I'm a linear writer.  I have a very difficult time writing scenes out of order, and if one isn't working, I don't let it go and move on until later, but flog the dead horse (which incidentally, is sailing terminology), until it works.  That is a system that works in kneading bread, and so I generally apply it to writing.  With varying degrees of success.  But this is why the current scene is bothering me.  I'm pushing through it only slowly.  And I have a feeling the pace is lagging, but I won't really know until the scene is done and I can read it as a whole.  My impression of the lag could come from how long it's taking to write and how painful it is to write.

I have noticed this about the drafting process. I tend to get things on the page as fully as I can.  What's usually missing is nuance.  I like a lot of the small details of how things look and smell and peoples faces and mannerisms.  I also like to give a sense of how they're feeling, more than just what they say.  If I didn't like to do that, I'd go with a very distanced third person limited, and I like a closer narrative distance, more personal to the characters.  Anyhow, on the second pass, I try to cut out the repetitions and add in some of that nuance to give the scenes a richer feel.  That means for longer books, and you'll have noticed my books ahve been getting longer.  I've been shooting to keep the Cipher below 130K.  I might make it.  But I just don't know.  

After I get it back from my editor (once I turn it in next week) I'll go through with her notes in mind, but also I'll have not looked at it for at least a month and will be able to re-see (the heart of re-vision) and then I'll probably make some fairly substantive changes.  I know other authors would pretty much rather die than turn anything that wasn't super polished, but I've come to the conclusion that my editor's eyes at the not-so-polished stage really helps form the work as a whole and is better earlier than later.  (cause later I start feeling entrenched and possibly defensive, and that just doesn't work well in the process.)

And now, back to the work at hand.

Di

So here's what happens when a) you're more tired than you ought to be when you're writing, b) when you're in more of a hurry than you ought to be, and c) when you forget to go look at what you've written in order to get sufficiently into the groove.  I'm rereading over the chapter I finished last night, and noticed a couple of minor glitches.  First, my magical beasty that I just introduced had nasty talons, and then a couple of paragraphs later, we learn he has no legs upon which to attach those sharp slashing talons.  Okay, solution: add legs.  Then there was a fire.  Chairs burned up.  A couple of pages later, characters are sitting in same (now-uncooked) chairs.  Um, no.  So, put fire out, remove chairs, open windows, bring in new chairs, sweep up mess. 

Di