Attention Diversion

I've been even more distracted from novelling than usual lately. On the non-novelling front, we are about to split off all of our non-publishing business activities into a separate corporation. Not terrifically difficult to do, but gathering/presenting/discussing financial info and options with a new accountant (on top of wrapping up '07 results for tax season) has seriously diverted my attention from right-brain creative stuff to left-brain number stuff. Next up, I have to learn how to use QuickBooksPro and get it all customized and set up for the new business. Soon, too. Can't say I haven't seen that one coming for a while, but the days of putting it off are officially over.

In other words, I haven't written squat in over a week, but have continued a little bit of playing around with the alternative POV/voice/narration to fit in/around/between 1st person. Just fell (again) for "why don't I order a few more books about writing from Amazon if I feel stuck". In the same spirit (pun intended) I decided, if I'm going to have a ghost in my novel, it would be nice to read "the Lovely Bones" again, so that's on hold for me at the library as soon as I get around to picking it up.

So much easier to read about writing than to discipline the brain and butt to work in gear and stick to the chair seat (butt) long enough to write something (brain).

Dream of having fairly polished novel done by b'day #50 has been downgraded to "maybe I can at least fill in the plot holes and buff it up a bit by then." Hope springs eternal, and all that.

Baby Steps

Not bad for a slacker... I've actually written something more days than not this week. That's some kind of progress. Can't say I've had any plot breakthroughs, or really done anything more than play around with a new "eye-in-the-sky third person" narrative voice, which I want to use to sneak in some perspective beyond the MC's first person which is the bulk of the book. This may or may not turn out to be a success. At the moment its reading like "The Lovely Bones" as written by Janet Evanovich chanelling Virginia Woolf. Personally I think the rather overblown and self-mockingly pompous tone is funny and just what I was aiming for, but am not sure anyone else will get it. Perhaps not the best way to open the book?

Feels good to have a toe or two back in the groove, though. And since I am still in the process of stumbling toward a complete draft, I'll let editorial decisions wait for later. More important is to keep slogging ahead at something resembling a steady pace.

Too much "not writing" going on around here

Seven months and 10 days until I turn 50.

If I'm gonna have any hope of meeting my goal of completing a (reasonably polished) draft of a novel by then, I'd better stop slacking off and get with it...

So I've decided to go public with my efforts. Fingers crossed that regular updates here will inspire me to keep plugging away at it at a more regular basis.

Not that I'm starting from a blank page. Far from it. I have two years of National Novel Writing Month efforts to pull together (and slash and burn) into some kind of shape. So far there's lots of good stuff heaped up, but still too many:
- Plot holes large enough to swallow small planets
- POV decisions not yet made
- Characters stubbornly refusing to be named
- Scenes, paragraphs, sentences and extraneous words destined for deadly encounters with the delete key

... and, last but first: too many days passing without any kind of novelling activity whatsoever going on.

How is it that I allow so many other things to distract me from this long-held dream???