So — Have you noticed how often people start telling a story with the word “so”? Do people realize the word isn’t necessary?
So I moved the scenes that I’ve deleted (for now) from Jeep Thompson and the Lost Prince of Venus to a separate place outside the main manuscript (It’s easy to do stuff like that in Scrivener), and all of a sudden the book is nearly 2,500 words shorter, and instead of being 14,000 words away from finishing a 40,000-word novel, I have more like 16,500 words to go.
Even though I plan to reinsert those 2,500 words at a more strategic point in the story, it still feels like a step backward, even though I know I had to go back so things can move forward better and faster.
I frustrate myself all the time: I know what I need to do, and often I know how to do it, but a little piece of me just up and refuses to do it. I probably lingered a month knowing that I needed to excise those scenes before I pulled the proverbial trigger. And now I’ve only tinkered around the edges of resuming the story instead of plowing ahead.
It’s like at some point I finally realized that I am the boss of me but then decided the purpose of my life is to defy the boss. The novel could have been written, polished and published years ago, but that obstinate little rascal in the back of my brain goes, “Sez you,” and parks himself in from of the TV or picks up the guitar or writes books of essays and prose poems or anything except writing, polishing or publishing the novel.
Who is this guy? I now have almost 20 years recorded on various iterations of this blog bemoaning my tendency to procrastinate, and while I’m pleased to say I’ve procrastinated my way to publishing 12 books as an author and nine more as an editor, the original idea was to write and publish 12-21 novels. And don’t get me started on the “learning how to market my books, making a plan and executing that plan” part of the equation.
Yawn. I’m bored with this part of me. I’m going to set the whine down and fire up the story teller guy for a while.
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