Just a drive-by...

On my way to the text.

I realize I need to blog more regularly, but my first drafts tend to be all-consuming...at least when I'm doing it right. I stopped, dropped and rolled for Easter - it's frightfully similar to Christmas when you have little people in your life, of which I suddenly have more than a few - but after I kicked the bunny in the tail, I crammed all my appointments and errands into one day, freeing up the rest of this week to write.

I'm having a great time with book4, though it still constantly amazes me (but probably shouldn't) how much time is spent sitting and thinking, sitting and staring, sitting and dreaming ... and wondering and discarding and re-evaluating. It sounds reasonable enough to say "I'm going to write 2-3K a day until the book is done!" but it doesn't work that way for me in practice. Because no matter how much I've planned, if I'm doing it right the book veers off track in places both big and small. I also leave plenty of room for development as I go, which helps to keep things fresh. 

For example, in anticipation of a scene I'm writing now, I "outlined" the following: "Jo enters this room to find Diana, who stole her wallet." 

This tells me the who and the why...but it doesn't tell me what sort of room this Diana would inhabit. It doesn't describe the surroundings or tell me who else is there. So as I think and sit, and think and stare, and think and discard, I discover more about the setting and more about the character, finding that each influences the other in small increments until I can see the full picture. I jot these images in the text as they come to me, delete some of them as better ones arrive, and once the place is defined and I can see clearly enough, then I'm ready to write. 

So what was in that room with the wallet thief and Jo? Well, here's what I emailed my writing buddy who was helping me brainstorm a bit: 

BTW, my simple water room has turned into a scene with a dowsing chinaman, and an underground joss temple. WTF?

Remember, I write fantasy. {G} 

So this is one more reason why I have no use for the playful idea of a (non-existent) muse. Inspiration is found by digging deep enough and long enough and hard enough into your own psyche that you finally discover what - of course! - you were looking for in the first place. It feels like it was there all along, that the conclusion was inevitable, the story already written somewhere. That feeling is my dowsing stick, and how I know I'm on the right path and ready to set off around the next  bend.

And now I must go research joss temples and dowsers and let Diana tell Jo - in a way that won't get her her ass handed to her - why she stole Jo's wallet. 

I see more sitting and thinking in my near future. Hopefully there will be a few thousand words by the end of the day as well.