Since January 1st I have plunged into a novel. All the novellas be darned, I wanted something that people would READ. It’s strange, but here people very rarely buy short story/novella collections – or so various publishers keep telling me. Actually I suggested translating some wonderful fantasy short story collections, but most of them told me paople just don’t buy anthologies and such. Sucks.
Anyway, that is beside the point. I had started writing a novel. During the writing process, I realized I couldn’t have anything smaller than duology. Or a VERY thick novel, whatever of the two. Sideplots started developing and overdeveloping. I made mistakes. No, I made a LOT of mistakes. Some motivations weren’t good enough. The characters were MOSTLY all right, but plot has always been my weak side, so I bended the characters to fit the plot I had constructed, and got occasional small catastrophes. But when I bended the plot to fit the characters I had grown to love a lot, I got a real disaster.
I hadn’t touched my disaster for the past two months. I have 100 pages in MS Word, LOTS of notes, sidenotes, scraps of ideas written on bus tickets and other unlikely places. I had stopped writing not because I was stuck )the realization I was stuck came later on) but because I was a bit fed-up with the whole thing. I had put too much pressure on myself.
Don’t misunderstand me, a certain amount of pressure is good, it stops me from lazying around and makes me work. But I actually engaged in all that crap with wordcounts and stuff. I have to write this much words every day, so that I’d have this much words every week, so that I could fullfill my monthly quota. Duh. May work for some people, I suppose. But I hate pressure. Whenever I tell myself ‘You have to do this’, my first response is ‘I don’t bloody HAVE to do anything’.
So. I have had my rest, and now I’m warming up to the idea again.
