Stuck in a lull

Another rainbow quilt in the making, more or less.

After a rather giddy ten days of writing, I have hit not a stumbling block, just peering ahead at the final bend in the road. Suspense has built for the big payoff, about which I have mulled over EXTENSIVELY in my mind, ahem. It's not that I don't know what comes next, only that having approached it, mild trepidation has emerged. Once I write the next chapter, basically it's done, and then....

Then comes a few days of perhaps an immediate read-through or I merely set it aside, breathe deeply, then jump right into the next book in the series, which already sits at sixty-six K, but needs plenty of reworking and another twenty-thirty thousand words added. I wrote it first, the book that had been going well until it came to a grinding HALT, then a dorky final chapter was slapped upon it, but that nonsensical conclusion opened the door to what has turned into a series, at least within my own mind. LOL. Gotta have a sense of humor about it all, let me tell you.

So here I literally sit at my computer, mildly stumped in the 'Okay gang, let's write that three thousand word chapter, then one more and be done with this baby!' vein. The oddness strikes me as slightly amusing, because I truly have been pounding out this tale, the word count popping up like weeds I've been trying to keep to a minimum. The last couple of days I've been grinding through a chapter that JUST WOULDN'T PLAY WELL. O-kay chapter, whatever! Fortunately I'm mostly patient (LOL) and I out-waited that chapter's namby-pamby efforts not to be written, hah! Patience and weeding and sewing and voila, this morning I wrapped it up, nudging a somewhat whiny twenty-three hundred words to a more respectable twenty-seven hundred, oh yeah. Yeah, I'm the writer mostly in charge of this story, uh-huh, yup. I'm the writer, all right, being led like a bull with a ring through my nose by a pesky cast of characters and a couple of surly aliens. Well, one is surly, the other taking charge. And now I'm staring at the path all those folks have created, seeing in the distance where I want them to be. Like herding cats is writing sometimes, corralling all the right people (and aliens) into their proper places whether they want to be there OR NOT.

This could be an element of writing that doesn't get discussed enough, how a book can veer off, at times much to its benefit (though not always), an author's intended course. I tend to land in the camp that permits such detours, within limits, because I also tend to write from the hip, editing later. It's a matter of trusting the muse, which often leads to good results, hurray! This particular novel required a few rewrites early on, then dude! The word count went bloop, bloop, BLOOP in what seemed the blink of both eyes. I'm now kinda BLOOPED OUT, ha ha, but hey, it's Friday, time to have a weekend off, or maybe just this day. I am definitely not in the camp of 'I will write X amount of words every day.' For me, writing is extremely Spirit-led, and that cannot be rushed or overruled. The souffle is gonna rise or it's not, one of the two.

That's a quote directly from Benjamin Sisko, although he attributes it to his father Joseph; it's a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine thing. Which is apropos in that my current mood is definitely sci-fi with an extra scoop of drama. It's also in accepting one's beloved pastime and its limitations. It's admitting that art cannot be hog-tied and served neatly on the best china. It's embracing the wacky nature of a most precious gift that appeared kind of like a present from heaven in the hands of my then seventeen-year-old eldest child who said to me, "Hey Mom, there's this writing thing I think you might be interested in, it's called National Novel Writing Month."

Out of the mouths of babes (and sometimes aliens or Federation captains who are also part alien), so goes another day in the life of this writer.