I'm up to where I stopped on The Early Fox. I've been trying all week to do a top-to-tail read. I kept having to stop for something, and by the time I got back I'd lost the flow.
I've been fighting off the weakness thing that comes over me on a regular basis. Didn't take any time off to rest this time. Meant it stretched on longer.
Today, finally, I read the whole thing. Reading as a reader would (or at least trying to). What are their questions, what might they misunderstand? Always important, but critical in the early chapters where you are lying out where we are, who our characters are, what they are up to, and why we should care. The last being, well, the plot. What is at stake; is the plot of the book I see, the handle toward my hand?
Okay, almost all the way back. I have the last scene to straighten out still. It works, but I changed a bunch in the last rewrite (kicked several plot beats down the road). I was struggling anyhow to get this pressure relief thing going, where Penny is basically in trouble at her job and she sort of turns that around to get sent out on an investigation.
Those beats still aren't quite happening. But my brain isn't there after a long so I'm heading to bed.
I no longer have confidence in writing. In anything I'm writing, in anything I will write. I passed my peak; I'm still learning new things, but I'm less and less able to apply them efficiently.
Detail is still part of it. I got sort of walked into a level of detail on this series. Now it is an expectation. And it is the process that is slowing me down. Not exactly the research (although I always want more time than I have), but what having all that to handle does to my writing sessions. It sort of infects everything, meaning I have more plot beats and character nuances and other things going on. Which I all have to juggle.
There's a place here and there, especially on the latest book (because I planned to do exactly that) where most of the distractions are pared away. Her first walk into the desert, I also kicked the beat of realizing the desert is a flourishing ecosystem until I do the bigger walk out to the test bed.
A sequence I am looking forward to, mostly because that has the first scene with Jackson and Sanchez.
The desert stroll I did is now pared down to Penny taking a walk and slowly kicking the impression other people gave her of White Sands as this bombed-out military wasteland. That's it.
I also realized today, in the read-through, that I don't have to dread the archaeology research. It is basically done. The detailed description of Penny working her first dig...that's written. Her late-night attempt to nail down the chronology of the thrice-dug grave is mostly going over the same ground.
Like I said, I don't believe in any of this. But I enjoy the process. Even if almost nobody is going to read it (and absolutely nobody is going to comment), I am still looking forward to the -- call it a technical challenge -- of writing some of those scenes.
Writing. As much as I still have a stack of research I already started and feel obligated to finish (reading a history of nuclear weapon secrecy right now), and as much as I know there's things ahead I will have to learn more about before I write those specific scenes, I am at the moment a lot more interested in writing the scenes themselves.
If only it were faster. I'm boiling over on ideas for the next book already. It is taking so damned long to write the current one!
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