Hey, guys. We got some e-mails from people who thought my last blog entry was a little depressed. I didn't think so, but hey, reading back over it, it does seem a little down. Thanks to everyone who wrote in to tell me to buck up. I finally realized that I'm trying to treat the books the same way I treated them when six hundred pages was a really, really long book. Now most books average around seven hundred plus pages. INCUBUS DREAMS is going to be over a thousand pages. I'd make it shorter if I could, but the book has to be as long as you need to finish the themes, plot, whatever of the book. But back in the day when books were four hundred pages, five at the outside was when I finalized how I write. My schedule, my habits, etc . . .
I'd been wondering why the last few books I couldn't find one single album to get me through the entire book. The answer is simple. I like to listen to the same music over and over, so that when I hear that album it puts me in the mood to write that book. There are still some songs that evoke certain books or characters for me. I can't listen to the music without thinking of the writing. I can listen to the same album for five hundred pages, then somewhere between five and six hundred, I get tired of the album. I just simply want different music. When I next sit down to write a book, I will know that if the book is going to be six hundred pages or more, that I simply need to plan for two different albums. Either switch them back and forth early on, or be prepared with a back-up album when I get to the last third of the book. See, perfectly logically, once you think about it.
I also used to immerse myself into my books. I would write and write, and barely eat, or sleep. I threw myself into my make-believe-universe like jumping off a cliff, trusting my words to catch me. That works great when it's a four hundred page book. It's even doable at five, but you get much over that and you just can't disappear from the rest of your life for so long. Especially with children, and a spouse, and dogs, and friends, and hell, just everyday life. Your life doesn't run itself. So this total immersion technique that worked great for the first four books or, so. (There was some problems with it when my daughter was born and I went back to work when she was three months old. Babies take up an amazing about of time and energy.) But I stubbornly tried to keep writing as if I was still childless. I gave that up. Impossible. Babies change everything about your life. You're still you, but your time is not really your own. Not for a very long time.
But when I do write, when the kiddo is in school, or my lovely husband is doing child duty, I still try for the immersion technique. But now the books are seven hundred pages, eight hundred pages, nine, a thousand. I simply can't immerse myself into a book for that long, and neglect everything else. It just isn't doable. Even I don't write that fast. But because I was still opearting as if the books were half this long, I was mentally beating myself up. Thoughts like, I used to be able to work like this. What's wrong with me? Why can't I do this the way I've always done it? The answer, is so obvious, but only if you notice it.
I've in effect been trying to do the equivelent of three to four of my old books in a year's time. No wonder I can't do it. Who could? As the books have doubled, or more, in length, I've cut myself no slack in my schedule. I've treated the idea that I want to write two books a year, as gospel. When I set this goal the books were around four hundred pages, close to five, a piece. Eight hundred pages a year is doable for me. Even a thousand pages is doable with effort. But what I've been trying to ask of myself is between sixteen hundred and two thousand pages a year. That is not doable. That is like insane.
It also explains why I get tired of a book before a book is finished. I always am tired by the time I finish, no matter what book it is. I always like getting to the end. But the last several books I've gotten tired sooner. I've had this niggling feeling that the book should be done, and it's not. It's like only three quarters done, but my body, my mind, my habits, tell me we should be done. Because I developed all these habits, trained myself to write a book about half to three-quarters the length of what I'm writing now.
I'd been thinking I was doing something wrong, but it's simply that I hadn't made room in my schedule for the growth. It would be like trying to treat your child like they're still in elementery school when they're about to graduate high school. All the strategies that worked when they were little, just don't work now that they're eighteen.
I've been putting off vacations; trips to the zoo; you name it, it's all on hold. Because I have to finish to the book first. No, I've decided, no I don't. I will continue to work on a regular schedule, and I still turn out more pages per day than most writers do. I am blessed in that way. But I have to find a way to write that reflects the length and complexity of the books now. I have to figure out what of my engrained work habits I can change, and what I can't. Extra music, and probably go back to a page count that is smaller than my usually, so I pace myself better. I keep hitting days of twenty page plus, and that would be great if the book was actually that close to the end, but it isn't. I have almost two hundred pages still to go. I broke it down yesterday to a chapter by chapter outline, and that's about where we're at. Now would be the time to go into the tweny page a day run, but I did it too early. Like running a marathon and doing the last kick too far away from the finish line. You make it across, but you make it across slower.
Now that I've had my revalation about why things aren't working as smoothly with the writing as they once did, I can fix it. I can try to rework how I work, but until I realized the false logic, or maybe outdated logic, I was working on, I didn't know what was wrong. It's an old saying, but a true one; don't work harder, work smarter. Which is what I will be trying to do from now on. Bye for now.
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Posted by
LKH on 04/06 at 12:00 PM
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