the medium is the messy

{word count: 23, 002
rough chapters done: 4/9}

This post has been baking in the mind-oven for awhile now...

DING!

It's done.

By 'it' I mean the pair of chapters I have been working on since January. Not only are these chapters done to the point where I don't feel the overwhelming urge to read them again and again making many minor changes, but they have also done me the favour of teaching me the process by which I will write the rest of the book.

It all started with a dead machine. As I mentioned earlier these chapters got off the an amazing start because my computer said goodbye. That forced me to write by hand in here:

umm... Megs, comrade calculator is a calculator woman.

This was an super-wonderful early Christmas gift from this amazing lady, which also came with a beautiful calculator (to be featured later). This notebook, to my surprise, is now nearly full. Once it is full I will move on to the notebook given to me by this lovely lady. What can I say, ladies like to give me notebooks?

The point here is that writing in a notebook changes everything compared to writing on the lappy. It's like the difference between walking and driving. Walking is slower and more contemplative. Driving is faster but makes you a lot more moody. So now whenever I need to start slowly, drafting out ideas for the next chapter, I walk over to the old pen and paper notebook. And I think. HARD.

After I've scribbled in page after page of weird diagrams and totally illegible handwriting, only then will I start punching it in to my little computer. In the same way that cars make me more likely to curse at someone, the computer makes me more likely to rip apart my words. So by having the bare bones of a hand-written story that I can type-in, I have a little breathing room to edit, re-shape, and add some meat.

This brings me to these last two chapters who have unexpectedly become an odd couple. First of all, they both burst out of me into the notebook at pretty much the exact same time. Second of all, they have become interchangeable. As in I switched one for the other, in terms of order in the novel. All because of the notebook.

It all comes down to bursts of creativity. To make said burst I need to get my mind in a very active state. So a few weekends ago I was sitting on a park bench somewhere in Hamilton with my notebook and this book trying to write to stay warm (which does not work btw). Then it hit me like a bag of metaphors: one of my diagrams pointed out to me that the 3rd and 4th chapters needed to be switched. I was reluctant at first, but I tried it tentatively.

And then Boom.

A week later the third and fourth chapter had done the old switcheroo was here to stay. But why did they need to be switched?

Well I don't want to give away too much but I have a non-traditional chapter numbering system. For example, the fourth chapter features negative numbers, which is a change from the rest of the chapters that focus on positive numbers. This is what forced the chapter switch. I realized that the negative chapter had to be the one that was written from comrade's perspective, because she is not the normal narrator of the novel. In fact you might go so far to say that she is the opposite (-,+) of the narrator!

But that's not quite true.

Through this switch I was able to keep all the positive chapters from the perspective of the main narrator. It cleans things up quite a bit.

Who is that main narrator?

We'll have to save that on for next time...