Today is one of those crazy mornings where everything seems to be moving through a glaze of syrup, or something. Of course, “Today” is sort of a misnomer, when I’ve been up since 4:22 AM, and it’s just a little after 5 AM now, and The Clash is playing Pressure Drop this very moment, and my mind is swirling around from the effects of a little too much cognac.
I don’t know why I decided to have just a little bit more cognac than I had last night. I know it’s not good for me, but . . . yeah, couldn’t help myself. So I woke up with the mind a little fuzzy, and the brain sort of refusing to admit I’d done something to my body that I shouldn’t have.
This is probably why the computer is running so slow this morning. I think it’d doing index rebuilds; it’s done this before, and it can get very annoying, because the disk light stays on the whole time, and every time I want to access something, the browser freezes, and you don’t know if you’re going to get what you want, or not.
At least it didn’t happen while I was editing last night.
I finished editing the penultimate chapter of Her Demonic Majesty last night, and that chapter . . . boy, do I remember it. I had “won” NaNoWriMo about a week before, and I was this close to finishing the novel. I knew what I was going to say in the last chapter, and all I had to do was get through this one–
And damned if Chapter Twenty Three was one of the hardest I had to write.
I knew what the problem was: I had a picture of a local where I was going to stage a battle between two of my characters, and I was working up the words I was going to need to make the scene work–
And I had the hardest time getting the words to come out right. I couldn’t. I don’t know why that was the case, but I remember getting very frustrated looking for the words that would make this sucker sing.
It wasn’t singing; it felt like it was warbling Let’s Get Crazy in the shower.
The one thing that did come out of this chapters was my take on how to do combat. This was my showdown between my antagonist and protagonist, and fur was going to fly. Magic would get slung, fireballs cast, shit was gonna blow up real good . . .
Bah. After I had so much trouble writing the first part of this chapter, I thought about what would really happen when you get to very powerful magic users together, and let them start throwing thaumaturgical energy at each other. One would either get (A) a Micheal Bay Craptravaganza, or (B) something that wouldn’t last that long, because one person would get p0wned pretty quickly.
I went with the later. I had my main character launch an attach that messed up the other character very quickly, then had her create an energy sword and go all Ryoko on the witch’s ass. That taught me that sometimes, shorter is better, because dragging things out for dramatic effect isn’t always desired.
Sometimes you just want to get to the point.
The edit cleaned it up. It’s not a perfect chapter, but it’s better than it was. And it’s still short and sweet with the combat. It gives me what I need, and what I hope the reader wants.
There’s only one more chapter to do, and I can move on to new material–
And a query letter.
Hey, this sucker’s been laying around long enough. It’s time to put it to work.
