Simple Mystery

Three days before my deadline.  Time to get this story done.

What I’ve got: Ten and a half pages, about half of which are up to my standards

What I need: About ten more pages, plus a good deal of polish

3:11 PM: Sitting here at Borders, ready to get started.

3:12 PM: Got my Strawberry Fruitkula.  Now ready to get started.  Side note: am I the only one who sort of resents having to order things with goofy names?

3:25 PM: Sometimes it is so hard to throw away text that is almost-but-not-quite-good-enough in order to search for something genuinely good.

3:52 PM: Ok, I am now freezing.  Stupid Strawberry Fruitkula!

4:10 PM: All right.  Time for Harold to be clever again.  Man, this guy is hard to write.

4:15 PM: I think I need a flashback.

4:17 PM: Sometimes I have to remind myself of something one of my profs said in college: “When you have this wonderful, perfect, amazing story idea and you start to write it down, it often comes out a lot clunkier than you imagined it.  And then you feel like you’re ruining it.  But you’re not ruining it.  You’re making it exist.”

4:38 PM: My sister called!

4:44 PM: Kate was looking for a recommendation for a book about writing.  Happily I’m at Borders, so I just walked over to their writing section and called out my favorites.

5:29 PM: Break for dinner

5:49 PM: At Panera now.  Salmon club FTW.

6:39 PM: Ugh.  This is so not going well.  Here’s the thing: there’s a certain immersion point I need to reach before I can be clever or meaningful.  I can do set up and grunt work any old time, but good prose and dialogue come only after that point.  And for some reason I’m having a hard time reaching immersion today.

6:41 PM: So, I think the answer is a much more detailed outline of the next three scenes.  Which is really all I need, just three more scenes.  I’ll try doing a graf-by-graf outline for a while and see if I can sink in.

9:07 PM: Lengthy break to come home and take a shower.  Now ensconced in a corner of the office, still working on a detailed outline.

10:04 PM: Ok, solved one big logical issue.  Hallelujah.

10:28 PM: Mark and I just had an argument about which one of us dislikes late night talk show host Chelsea Handler (it’s him).

11:03 PM: Ok.  That was an insanely hard scene to plan.

11:31 PM: Hahahahah! Remember when I called this blog entry “Liveblogging, Fin?”  Well, that was dumb.  Back for more, probably on Thursday.