Dear Reader,
I know I said I was going to blog less while working on this novel draft, but I can’t. I just can’t.
Word Raccoon, half helper, half menace, will not listen to me. She just keeps typing!
Tuesday is booked solid (with good things) so I have added a writing day to my September calendar to make up for it.
(We would’ve worked more on the novel than we did today if only we had managed to get more sleep and hadn’t wound up at the gym before dawn. One other person was there, and another came in a bit later, but please tell me why we were there before five? I didn’t ask. But I’m paying for it with tiredness now.)
The café where we wrote today has new red chairs, and WR gushed to the owner that she LURVES them. They’re taller, which helps with the writing, and they’re super cute.
We’re only 15 pages into a third thread of the novel, one that is currently 105 pages. We hope to work on it at the salon tomorrow while our hair is processing, although truth be told we are feeling blinky about this section, too: some fine bits, some that are melodramatic and making WR gag.
But it’s sequenced correctly so now I just need to combine the scenes that I wrote more than once. (Why?) I need to add scenes where I have too much narrative summary. But that’s just it…how to fix this? Word Raccoon is currently striking for an editor. She wants, please and thank you, a mythical committee of critics to descend from on high and sort these 105 pages from chaos to progress, at the very least. We miss the days of workshop critiques where a single non-red pen could point you toward the exit.
Anyway…
The glare at the café was so intense today that my laptop screen turned into a literal mirror. I spent half an hour just staring at my own blinking silhouette, mistaking reflections for reality. WR says when the sun gets that high, your eyes start playing tricks on you. Best to look down at the keyboard and ignore the street. We brought out our sunshade for the Macbook, which passersby deemed “brilliant.”
But at least one kind woman said WR and I looked like sunshine today. Must’ve been all the yellow.
WR says a hundred pages is too long to wander without a compass. (Hell, she thinks a day is too long, greedy animal.) It turns out that writing, even at its most vibrant, still feels a bit hollow when you’re the only one who knows how the story is supposed to end.
Word Raccoon says she will be fine if I promise to order her some Asada fries if the food truck is back just outside her hair salon as it so often is on her appointment days. WR won’t admit it, but I suspect she times her appointments to coincide with Taco Tuesdays.
Oh my foolish but funny WR. She just won’t give it a rest.
Drema