All Things Aster

Eighteen Things I Ended Up Thinking While Working On My Current WIP Today

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , ,
  1. This would all be easier if it was done already.
  2. This will probably be okay, but it’s not really the best I could do, is it? I should pull everything down and start over, from scratch. I swear I could do better if I just started everything over from scratch.
  3. Life would have been much easier if I’d just said, way back at the beginning, that the setting for these novels was The Gold Coast, 2007, instead of pretending they were some mystical Ur-City that exists in every hardboiled novel.
  4. Because of Raymond Chandler, all hardboiled novels are set in San Fransisco or Los Angeles. Even the ones that are’t. 
  5. It’s hardboiled, not noir. Stop calling it noir. Noir is a colour. It only applies to film.
  6. I’d really like a hotdog. With mustard. A good hotdog would be nice right now.
  7. If you’re writing a series about a character who has returned from the dead twice, you’re kinda in a jam every time you write a plot that has nothing to do with the character returning from the dead. It’s one of those details that’s too big to ignore.
  8. Seriously, motherfucker, would it have hurt you to plan ahead with this?
  9. I don’t care if it’s a good hotdog, really.
  10. Oh, I like this bit. 
  11. That character isn’t bad either.
  12. You know, that baby shark song is incredibly heteronormative?
  13. I’ll fix that bit when I sit down and edit. Yes, even though I don’t really edit. I’m pretending that I do, so I can get on with things and build this up to the point where a rewrite will actually fix things.
  14. Do not start signing the fucking baby shark song. 
  15. The weird thing about Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series is the way it transforms anxiety into a superpower. Everything about the way those books are written suggests the character is hyper-vigilant and disconnected from humanity, but he never actually suffers the negative effects of those two things. They’re like bizarre mental health pornography.
  16. I do not need to write the story that just came to mind.
  17. No, really. Do not write that story. You’ve already got a story that needs to be finished. Sit the fuck down and finish it.
  18. Or, you know, go get a hotdog.

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Twenty-Two

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , , ,

Context: Solid writing sessions this morning, charging towards the end of a specific scene. Stuck now, ’cause there’s a multiplicity of things that could come next, and they all seem to be leading me off into an expansive approach to the narrative that’ll lead me into writing a novel.

I am not writing a novel.

Which is why I spent 51 minutes messing around with the opening part of the next scene and wrote pretty much nothing; I’m about to engage the Kress protocol and go back into the previous scene to chance something and see how if affects the narrative. I need to be bounced off into a new direction.

Session 22.1 (7:56 AM – 8:24 AM)
Word Count: 610

Session 22.2 (8:36 AM – 8:50 AM)
Word Count: 385

Session 22.3 (8:03 PM – 8:54 PM)
Word Count: 191

Total Daily Writing Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes
Daily Word Count Total: 1,186

Total Manuscript Writing Time: 22 hours, 4 minutes
Total Manuscript Word Count: 17,458

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Twenty-One

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , , ,

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Twenty-One

So last night I stayed up late, writing a moderately detail plan for the scene I wanted to get done this morning. It was a pretty good plan. Laid out a lot of stuff.

This morning I woke up and wrote a completely difference scene. Potentially invalidating all the stuff I’d planned.

This is why I’m not, by inclination or any real practical process, a plotter.

Session 21.1 (7:18: AM -7:28 AM)
Word Count: 107

Session 21.2 (8:03 AM -8:23 AM)
Word Count: 470

Session 21.3 (8:35 AM – 8:57 AM)
Word Count: 542

Total Daily Writing Time: 52 minutes
Daily Word Count Total: 1,119

Total Manuscript Writing Time: 20 hours, 31 minutes
Total Manuscript Word Count: 16,283