Replacement Therapy

December 12, 2012 by Cassidy Frazee | 2 Comments

We move into the evening, and enter the part of the performance where I’m feeling like I’m about to drop dead on my feet.  Maybe that’s just the tired talking.  Probably.  But I’ll get this post out before I crash, just so I can post it to the waiting masses–that’s you–later.

But there has been writing this evening, more or less.  Replacements has been and ongoing work, and I’m about half way through it, and looking at the possibility of adding another chapter.  Not right now, thought, which is the nice thing about Scrivener:  you can set up the card, continue on doing something else, and come back to it when you feel like working on that part.  If you don’t need it, though, just delete the card and move on with the rest of the story.

Right now I think I need the chapter.  I’m still thinking, and I’ll have a better guess about things after I do the edit on Chapter Six tomorrow.

For a story that I didn’t have feel for, it’s suddenly taken off.  Tonight I added one hundred ninety-nine words; last night I added about one hundred and forty to it.  I’ve been adding things here and there to make things just a touch clearer, and rewriting things that were way too clumsy when I did the first draft.  If this goes on I’ll probably end up with about fourteen thousand words without a new chapter; add that to the mix, and I’ll easily top fifteen thousand.

I can’t say for certain what’s happened, but the story seems to have a new life–or maybe the writer does.  Before I was completely bummed to look at it, now I’m thinking about what could happen with it to make it better.  What I’m doing now it the clean-up; the next pass through will, I hope, strengthen the story even more.

One of the things I’m considering is putting back in a scene that I was originally told not to write.  The advice I was given at the time was, “You’re going to trigger someone,” so it’s probably not going to stretch your imagination as to what I was considering.  (Hint:  it’s cheesecake.  Lots of cheesecake.  Actually, I just had an idea for the new chapter . . .)  I may put that in; I may just edit the chapter as is, then add another note card in Scrivener and rewrite the chapter with the idea.

It’s not going to hurt me to do so, you know?

It’s funny how I was so down on this just a week or two before, and now I’m cruising through the story.  It could be that NaNo had me down, because I went over some of my blogging from last year at this time, and I wasn’t in the best of moods, either.  Writing a novel in thirty days can do strange things to you, and given my current schedule, I’d be very hard pressed to crank out two thousand words a night next year.

But I’m not going to start thinking about what I’m going to write next year, as some people are already doing.  I have projects I want to develop, but getting something for NaNo isn’t on the table right now.  It’s like all the talk about the next election in 2016:  we just got over this last one, how’s about giving that shit a break, ‘kay?

I’ll see what pops up in the morning.  For all I know I’ll have a strange dream and I’ll suddenly want to write about how I look in purple–

Yeah, like that’s never happened before.