Going Under

Posted by Merry in Merry's Blog

Nov
6

As I mentioned in a previous entry, much of my writing process takes place in my head, usually when I’m trapped in a boring place I don’t want to be (like the car) and most of the “big” scenes of the book tend to work themselves out there long before I ever get them written down.

I should be grateful that I’m making progress on my newest book at all, though. Every other paragraph, it seems, I have to stop and plot out some part of the subsequent novels before I can move forward. I have to be my own fact-checker, too, and I’m constantly having to pull out my copy of Sword of the Guardian and re-read what I’d previously written there before I commit to the sentence I’ve just typed out. I’m not very good at the whole rough draft – revise – revise – revise method. Which is not to say that I don’t do a TON of revision after I’ve finished a manuscript, it’s just that my perfectionist side won’t allow my creative side to keep going until I’ve ensured that the preceding sentences are satisfactory. The joys of being Gemini, I suppose. By the time I do write the final sentence, most of the novel is already pretty much at a second-to-third revision stage.

For this reason, as much as I appreciate Nanowrimo for its motivation to squeeze in some time for writing every single day, I doubt I’ll get the full 50K words written this month. I feel lucky to get 1000 words written in a day, and that’s assuming I’ve had many hours to sit and focus solely on Ithyria.

Anyway, the purpose of this entry was to mention that a couple days ago I had one of those breakthrough moments while I was driving home from work and listening to my Prayer of the Handmaiden playlist (I promise, I really will write up a separate blog about it sometime soon.) One of the songs that I was beginning to regret having put on the list, because its mood and sound doesn’t really fit with the others, started playing. Usually I hit the skip button, but I was merging in traffic and didn’t want to distract myself by fiddling with the stereo. And a couple bars into the song I got hit with a very vivid mental picture of PotH’s climactic scene – resolving quite a few of the logistic issues I’d been struggling with, and doing so with such simplicity and beauty that I was smacking my forehead for not having thought of it before.

Anyway, I want to avoid spoilers in my blog as much as possible, so I won’t go into a description of what happened, but I’ll tell you what the song was: Evanescence’s “Going Under.” Enjoy!