Sooooooo, I went back and took the average of how much I was handwriting on Guardian Angel at each sitting (because I date it in the margine each time I start writing), and it comes out to about one whopping page for each day I write. Heh. That being said, I've got fifty pages written so far. Not really a lot, but more than it feels like to me. And I guess a page for each bout of writing isn't terribly bad considering I get about fifteen minutes at a time in which to write GA these days. Argh. Well, it's something. I hope after I finish the last chapter of my fanfiction, Oligo, I can sharply increase that average. Though admittedly Oligo has nothing to do with my slow progress on the novel, because I haven't even looked at the fanfic chapter until about two days ago. For some reason when I write fanfiction, I post a chapter and then like to take a "brain vacation" in which I have nothing to do with the story for several days. Then, all of a sudden, the mood to write it again will hit me really hard, and then I will become obsessive and think about nothing else until it's done.
And that's the stage I'm at now. So hopefully I can manage to finish it somehow this week, so I can be through with it and turn my obsessive brain over to the novels. 😀
I have been missing Cheetah on the Roof lately, out of nowhere. Strange, but welcome. After Oligo is finished up I'll crack the CotR notebook open again and attempt to write both a fantasy and a scifi at the same time! ^_^ Woot. That will be interesting…..
Funny thing, yuki_onna just posted a very lovely and very true essay on the differences between writing fantasy and scifi the other day. I feel lucky that I'm used to writing both – not to say it's necessarily easy to switch mindsets back and forth all the time – but I can do it without too much time sitting frustrated in front of a blank screen.
Speaking of frustrated… I have noticed that when I am not entirely certain how to proceed in a story, whether original or fanfiction, I chew off all my nails and give myself hangnails. 🙁 Not a good habit. Grrr. My nails are particularly mangled today after scowling at the fifth chapter of Oligo over lunch. Bah. Why is that damn thing giving me so much trouble!?!?!? I think I finally got past the part I was stuck on. I hope.
I still think it's so strange how an original story can just keep going even though I really have no clue what precisely will happen next. For example, I know how GA starts, and ends, and pieces of the middle. I know what each character wants in the end, and who is after who, and who is friends with who, and where everyone came from. But I still really have no idea how each person is going to get where they need to go. After six years of writing purely fanfiction, these gaps held me back. I didn't want to start on the novel until I had all the holes filled in. Because I never had such gaping holes in my fanfiction. Once I thought back to the days of my obsessive novel-writing though, I realized I often had no idea what would happen in the next chapter, yet I kept writing anyway. That was extremely hard to let myself do again at first, but now that I'm into the swing of it again, it's sooo much easier.
Like the current scene in progress. Tiller was on Alpha Station to meet someone, I knew that. I didn't know who, though I knew what the person had to offer Tiller. So I wrote about Tiller waiting, and then Portman popped in my head (he was from the very very original version of GA) and I was like PERFECT. So Tiller was waiting for Portman, that made total sense. I thought Portman would arrive of his own free will, but instead he was brought from the docks by International Security. THEN I pictured Tiller using his ANGEL status to retrieve Portman from the IS agents, and I fully expected Portman to make a run for it. But while I was actually writing the part, Portman didn't run after all, and one of the officers refused to back down even after Tiller flashed his badge. That, I did not expect. THEN I thought for sure Tiller would use his skills to retrieve Portman by force, but instead he agreed to fill out the transfer forms. Wow.
And that's just one scene. But stuff like that has been happening all over the place in that story. It feels like a good thing, like my intuition for the characters is taking over my sometimes action-and-drama-obsessed "thinking" mind, lol. Obviously it will need an extensive rewrite and editing after the rough draft, but seeing how things connect in ways I had never intentially planned originally is very cool… and reassuring, because I remember it doing this before, however vaguely. I can clean things up and be doubly sure they actually make good sense in the second draft, but for now I sure as hell am enjoying being taken along for the ride. 😉
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