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Monday, November 30, 2009

Stepping It Up

I have been lax.

There, I've admitted it. The funny thing is I have been writing, pretty much every day.

So why am I a full chapter behind?

Well, that would be because I have developed a strange new procrastination technique. For some unknown and ungodly reason I have been trying to get rid of every WAS in my last chapter. Seriously. I have no idea what that sad little verb did to piss me of, but suddenly I am obsessed with killing them. I spent two full days going through it sentence by sentence and trying to rewrite to pull the verb out.

Wow, now is that procrastination or what? When I gave serious thought to going through the chapter backwards and trying to rework all those sentences I couldn't kill the WAS in the first time--well that's when I knew I was in serious trouble. So I wrestled my muse to the ground and sent the chapter off to my crit partners before she could shoot off another procrastinators attack like trying to get me to murder all of those innocent little dialogue tags. . . wait.

That bitch.

I think she already got me with that one.

As I get further and further into this book ( I am revising chapter four now) it is becoming increasingly clear that I need to take my sneaky little Muse to lunch and have the "It's not you, it's me" chat with her. I need to find me a new Muse. One who is not obsessed with perfectionism. One who knows when to let go. One who will let me move on.

One who will not keep harping on that poor harmless verb was.

11 comments:

  1. Poor "was". Such a innocent little word. I gotta tell you, that's a new one on me. :) I think we all have our single words that irritate us. I had my own wrestling match with "that". And now, by some miracle, it seems to be scarce while writing this ms. I think I scared it. ;)

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  2. That's like me with "even" and "but". Usually, my muse gets set off on a find+replace rampage when I read a book on writing which gives advice not to use "kind of", "used to", "still", "just", "well", "there", "very", etc.

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  3. I'm a gerund girl, myself. Those repetitive phrases and words are such sneaky little buggers!

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  4. Jodi, *That* is another one I wrestle with. But I've trained myself to keep any eye out for those now. I try to destroy them as they come out of the computer. lol

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  5. Oh. . . well. . .

    Thank you SO much Cindy.
    Way to give my muse more words to obsess over.
    *carefully writing down *even* *but* *kind of* *used to* *ect, ect*

    I'm not sure you're EVER gonna get chapter four now.

    :lol:

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  6. Rebecca have you noticed if you use the same phrases in your writing as you do when you talk to people.

    I have certain phrases that I tend to repeat over and over in the fiction (both books) but I never say it in real life.

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  7. My writing is very close to the way I speak normally. That can have some advantages when I'm speaking with my faculty, but doesn't always make for the most interesting fiction. LOL I also write contracts and gov't correspondence all day long, which sneaks into my writing, too. Ugh.

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  8. Theresa, I don't know why I'm not getting your blog posts in my Google Reader. I'll have to resign you up again.

    Most of the time I'm okay with "was." Now. At one point I was obsessed with them, too. I know one of your favorite writers is Linda Howard. She uses a lot of introspection, so I'm guessing she uses "was" a lot. Hard to keep it out of introspection.

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  9. Hey Edie,

    It's funny you should mention Linda Howard, I just finished a book of hers this weekend and noticed all the was(s)(es) lol

    But I didn't notice it the first read through, just when I went back and purposely looked for them.

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  10. Sooo.... any words left after you cut all the redundant ones? ;) LOL How're things going? *poke poke*

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  11. Hey Becca,

    Strangely enough I'm at almost the exact same word count after revisions as I was before. Of course I'm only up through chapter five. Still, that's about 30% of the way through the book.

    And yes, I know I need to update the blog...which I am planning on doing today--but after my daily word count is finished. Then on to blogging.

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