Some days the writing is unglamorous. That was today’s work, which was more editing than writing.
Because I am a “messy” writer (it is what it is), my plan for the day was to take one of the timelines of my novel and sequence it chronologically. It was 111 pages long, so it took a minute.
Should it already have been sequenced?
Maybe.
Is that how I write?
Absolutely not.
Was I dreading it?
Absolutely.
What I actually did was copy and paste sections and begin putting them into something resembling order.
Some of the scenes are doubled and tripled, because I tried to say different things about the same moment at different times. That is fine. That is part of how I find my way into a scene.
Some of the material ended up in the scraps folder.
Some of it, not much, I deleted, because I know when something is inherently not useful.
Then (and this matters to my process), I highlighted in the original document the text I had already transferred over so I would not move it twice.
One section completed.
A whole section.
Am I frustrated with myself that it even has to be done?
Absolutely.
But Word Raccoon has been over here making armpit noises and reminding me that it is not that serious.
And also, the work itself is strangely fascinating. It is like holding a negative up to the light. You see triples of a scene. You see it leaning in one direction, then another. You see what wanted to be said before you knew how to say it.
Sometimes you’ve discovered you’ve said it three times already.
It is laborious.
It is absorbing.
All of this and no revising. Okay, truth be told, there were a couple of sentences I just could not let stand and WR gnawed on them. (Anything to keep that trash panda into the novel so she won’t go wander off into a poem .)
I feel more tired than I think I should from it all. But maybe that is not my fault. Maybe that is Word Raccoon’s fault for staying up late and nibbling at the website. She said she was going to, and while The Beast in Me played in the background, another show recommendation from my hair stylist, I let her loose.
(What she doesn’t know is I washed two loads of laundry today, and if she wants to finish that episode, she’s going to be folding towels while she watches.)
Was updating the website partly an excuse to stay up late and watch a gripping series with one eye?
Sure.
Still, I am not mad about the new look.
P.S. I let WR watch part of another episode during lunch. I am fairly certain I caught her making notes for a poem during it, even though I told her it was not time for poetry. Maybe later. She pouted, agreed, and demanded chocolate. I gave it to her.
You do not want an angry raccoon getting hold of your writing.
Just another sentence I would never have imagined I would write.
dremadrudge.com 