where am I?

{39,000ish words
5/9 rough chapters done}

Stuck in the middle with Portox

Right now, I am sitting at our harvest table, on my lil'netbook, thinking about what to write here. In the background are the barking/slashing noises of J. taking a well deserved 'wolf on a spaceship' video-game break.

And where am I in the old novel?

Right in the middle of chapter six, aka 'The Real Numbers'. This chapter is turning out as I expected: it should be the longest in the book. What I did not expect though is that it would be coming out this sloooooow. Its this slowness which is making me feel like I am really ready to be done with this novel already.

I want to be done because I know that I am nowhere near being done. With no end in sight it feels like this process could go on forever. And at this pace it just might. But at the same time, I am pretty sure that once I am really close to being done, or maybe having just finished, I will start to miss it all. Like the wonderful feeling that comes along with 'figuring out' a part of the story.

By 'figuring out' I just mean the moment where you have taken something that has been bothering you about the story for weeks and making it work. For example, a thing that took me months to figure out was comrade's voice. I cannot tell you how many times I thought I had finally started to capture the way she spoke and thought, only to come back the next day and see how far off I still was. I do not remember the exact moment I figured it out, but after months of her voice stalling my writing, I found a method for her speech that finally felt right. Her voice was finally weird enough to be interesting but sane enough to make sense, with a little effort. All was right in the world (of my book). It is this sort of 'figuring out' turns out to be the hard work of writing.

Just like anything difficult your first instinct is to avoid it. Do something else. I have been doing a lot of something else lately. Summer job, current job, working out, planning events, but not so much with the writing. While you are doing all of this something else though, the hard work stays with you, a nagging itch that only goes away by sitting down at these keys and pounding out a solution.

Which brings me back to wanting to be done with writing. Think of writing a novel as like the opposite of reading one. I am at the point in the book where, hopefully, my readers will be sucked in and will not want to put the book down. Me on the other hand as the writer, I have to make sure that my readers do feel sucked in by the story. In other words I have to make the story really good. That means putting it all together letter by letter, and then rearranging all of those letters over and over, until, finally, once again, all is at peace.

Where am I right now?

I am in the middle of the night. The day has been long and I just need a good sleep before I can start once more.





Wait, that metaphor was kind of lame. Let me try an analogy:


Where am I right now?

I am in the middle of the trail, with a friggin canoe over my head, circa last summer. At first it was fun: look at me! I can carry a canoe over! long distances! all by my lonesome! I even got a superhero nickname out of it: Portox. The body of a man, the head of a canoe.

The point is by the end of the day Portox and the gang got hungry, tired, and just wanted it to end. Portox wished he could see more then just the trail at his feet and the inside of a canoe. That and his body hurt. And his buddies were kind of mad at him for planning such a long day of canoe-carrying, and also he kind of misreading the map a few times, getting their hopes up. And the sun was low in the sky.

I am at the point where I have to remember the end. That when we finally hit that last portage, ready for it all to be over, we found the most amazing waterfall I have ever bathed in. It literally massaged the pain out of my back.

All was right in the world (this one) once more.