Dear Reader,
Word Raccoon and I are preparing for All Novel All August, our month-long pledge to finish a rough draft of Novel Number Three. Which means we’re racing around trying to finish projects and obligations now so August belongs, as much as possible, to the book.
Are we still intrigued by the ghost of Novel Number Four?
Yes. Yes, we are.
Is Word Raccoon still finding poems under pinecones and watching baby squirrels pelt the street with leaves?
Absolutely.
I had a hard time coaxing her away from the porch today because she was so enthralled. But if we’re going to finish this novel, she’s going to have to slow down just a little.
I’m hoping to keep blogging through August, though I admit I’m wondering what those posts will even look like. I don’t want to spend a month reporting, “Today I wrote 1,000 words. Today I added two scenes.” Since it’s not a book I can speak freely about, I’ll have to see what makes sense to share from inside the writing cave.
We do not like to bore our beloved readers.
Then again, I may blog simply because I love blogging and sharing my thoughts and obsessions with my Dear Readers. If you can tolerate a month that’s a bit…monothematic.
That being said, Word Raccoon has already found four places she’d like to submit poetry to today alone. (I let her choose two. One was a journal asking for nature poetry, and one wanted a micro chapbook. Surprise, surprise, we had the raw materials for that, too. Actually, we reduced God Blinked to its essence and submitted it.)
She is currently squawking that she’d still very much like to place a chapbook this year and cannot imagine voluntarily shutting down any aspect of the poetry machine for an entire month.
Slow down, little one.
Let’s make a deal. You work on the novel enough every day that I feel good about where it’s heading. Don’t wander into purple prose. Don’t race down winding roads five miles away from the plot. Don’t write the same scene three times, and I’ll let you write a little poetry every morning and send out submissions on the weekends.
Deal?
She’s thinking.
She also finished scraping most of the trim on the front of the house today, and tomorrow, weather permitting, she’ll finally begin painting. One more project crossed off the list before disappearing into the writing cave. Unless it rains…
As for the novel itself, I don’t know whether this is the right way to do it, but it’s the way I’m trying.
I’m going back through all three (possibly four) threads of the novel and numbering every scene, along with writing a one-line description of what happens in it. Since I insist on writing scenes out of order like some sort of literary raccoon, I’m hoping I’ll finally be able to see where everything belongs.
Then I’ll discover I’ve written the same scene twice.
Or maybe I’ll realize two scenes should become one.
Or perhaps one belongs as a flashback after all.
Once I can actually see all the pieces, I’ll start dealing the scenes from each thread into the deck of the novel, trying to discover the order they wanted all along.
I swear we’re going to write Novel Number Four in a clean, orderly fashion from the beginning, Word Raccoon.
Yeah, right.
Drema