You know, my week starts on Mondays. So this week is a day short.
I have the Coldplay song in my head that goes, “Nobody said it was easy…but nobody said it would be this hard.”
For me, this is about the place where the doubts start to creep in. I’m not at the point where I think I’m a terrible writer and I don’t deserve to live. That’s usually later on in the game, where I can’t remember anything other than “one foot in front of the other.” No, now is where I start second-guessing myself.
“What were you thinking?”
I question my basic ideas about the book. “Oh! You should have thought of X ahead of time, because you’re just going to have to write around it now.” Or, “This book was stupid; it was always a stupid idea.” Or, “This book was a perfectly fine idea, but you are not the right person to write it.”
That’s the one that’s getting me right now: I keep thinking, “How could a non-mathemetician possibly hope to write a Lewis Carroll book? You’re such an idiot. Okay, parts of it are fun, but you’re a twit. A complete twit.”
I’m a Zelazny reader, and for some reason, it’s really striking me this year that he could have been talking about writing when he was writing about walking the Pattern in the Amber series. In short, if you don’t know it: Amber’s a magical world with a magical Pattern down in the basement of their castle. If you walk the Pattern, you gain the power to move through various Shadows, or sub-worlds of less “reality” than Amber. Our world is one; the world of Camelot is another. There are an infinite number of these worlds. Walking the Pattern is dangerous; if you don’t finish it, you’ll die. It’s hard to walk; it’s like walking with lead boots through a thunderstorm. There are three “veils”–places where the Pattern is dramatically harder to get through. –And before the Pattern existed, all was chaos.
Here I am, at the first veil. If I can push through, it’ll be easier for a while.
It doesn’t matter if I’m not a mathematician. This book is not from Carroll’s POV, but from Alice’s, and she’s not a mathematician either. APL probably knew more about mathematics than most mathematicians could shake a stick at, but I don’t need to deal with that now.
I like that analogy (even though I haven’t read any of the Amber books)!
I need to return to my novel today, or I might write myself a bloody ending in my own zombie story. (Then again, that might be fun, so that most definitely will not work as a punishment…) I’ve just been busy with articles and editing another story for submission, so the poor novel has taken a backseat, even though it’s supposed to be my priority this month. It just might be myself subconsciously procrastinating, because I’m definitely in the “this novel sucks, why am I even bothering? Clearly I didn’t finish it two years ago for a reason,” stage.
Maybe I should have done regular NaNo.
You cannot definitively say your novel sucks until AFTER you’re done with it. There might be a reason you didn’t finish it two years ago, but it may be that you need to rethink the rest of the book rather than chucking it: if you’re not excited about the book on some level, it won’t be fun to read.
hang in there!
Oh, thank you 🙂