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…The Writing Magic, that is. After some slogging days of making quota but not feeling the thrill (“But I’d rather sit out by the water garden and watch dragonflies…”) I started a scene on Tuesday that grew…and picked the right place to stop for the day.
Yesterday the rest of it took off at a gallop. A snowy night, intrigue, danger, swordfighting that started on the roof, involved fighting down a flight of stairs, and in a courtyard…thrusts and parries and draw cuts and slips and falls and so on. (By the time Book III comes out, I hope you’ll have forgotten this bit, so you don’t see it coming too soon…but if you do…sit deep in the saddle, because it doesn’t stop until it’s over.)
It’s also got its funny side. A strong clue to which of the POV characters has center stage at this point.
Today I overslept (yesterday included making bread and choir practice as well as the scene) and my brain feels full of wet cotton wool. Choir was particularly exhausting as the AC was out in the church and it had heated to the point where we were all sweating (but it was still over 100F outside.) But it’s a work day, so…(writer vanishes behind the curtain again. Loud squeals and grinding noises from the machinery as she tries to get it going…)
Comment by ajlr — August 19, 2010 @ 1:53 pm
I hope the machinery has freed up a bit and is running smoothly. Though it sounds as if it was working in a most satisfactory way yesterday. 🙂
I am so looking forward to Books II and III.
Comment by elizabeth — August 19, 2010 @ 2:11 pm
The machinery likes to think it needs a long rest when it’s been working fast.
Today is being Very Slow indeed.
Comment by Neil — August 19, 2010 @ 9:40 pm
At times I’ve thought of the writer’s life.. seeing your struggles I don’t think I could handle it. Well done Elizabeth on Paks’s first series and the Oath of Fealty.
Comment by elizabeth — August 19, 2010 @ 10:50 pm
The thing is–so much of it is fun. Work, yes, but the kind of work that has the writer going “Hey…YEAH…wow, lookit that!” Three of us were sitting around this evening–two writers whose first works will come out sometime next year, and me. The non-writers in the bunch at the start soon drifted away, because writers in full spate about writing are oblivious. There was bouncing up and down in chairs, and “Yes! Exactly!”
In the process we discovered the hilarious (to me, anyway) fact that in reading a flash fiction one of them had written, there were more literary reference in it than the writer had suspected. (The writer was aware of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. I….pulled up Peter Pan. And third writer had yet another…all for the same image in the very brief story.)