It’s that time of the week again. What are you up to? In your writing life? Non-writing life? Sloth life? Snowflake life?
I’m judging the last of my RITA panel. I saved the biggest book for last, and now I’m glad I did. I still have lots of time to finish reading and report my scores.
I’ve really enjoyed judging the RITA for the first time this year. However, next year, I think I’ll ask for different categories. Not that I don’t appreciate the categories I received this year. But I received 8 entries in one category and only 1 in a second. I’d rather judge more of a mix-up, and I think I can solve that issue by requesting different categories next year.
How about you? Are you judging RITA or the Golden Heart? How’s it going?
In other news, I just created a new group at Facebook called Muse Interrupted Guest Bloggers. The sole purpose of this group is so I can easily send email notifications to members who wish to receive them (read that, if you’re a member, you DO wish to receive them, otherwise there’s no point in joining) regarding my guest bloggers and book give-aways. I sent out the first notification on Sunday for Susan Gable’s blog yesterday. The next notification will go out a day or two before Natale Stenzel’s blog occurring February 25th. If you’re a member of Facebook and would like to sign up for the group, here’s a link. If that doesn’t work, just log in to Facebook and search for Muse Interrupted Guest Bloggers. It’ll come up.
Writing wise, I hit a bit of a block last week (horrors!). I had this wonderful love scene already fast-drafted set in a dark room. However, no matter how much I wanted to, no matter how hard I tried, once I reached that very lumpy portion of the book, the scene no longer fit. I thought it would work, but after a lot of research, re-plotting and re-plotting, and soul searching, I realized it just didn’t work. And that’s okay. That’s one of the dangers of writing scenes out of order. When you get to revising them, you might not need them anymore! Or, in the case of this scene, it no longer made sense that my characters would make love in this setting at this time.
Once I plucked the scene out of the file and tucked it away for safekeeping in a Book Fragments file, my mind opened up and I suddenly realized another fast-drafted scene I thought was coming much later needed to fit in now. So I’m working on that scene, and the wonderful dark room love scene will have to wait for another book…maybe one of Penny’s stories. Oh, my hero and heroine still have some fun awaiting them, so all my research hasn’t gone to waste. It’s just taken on a different life.
Hi-
I’m down to my last RITA book as well- whew-had nine this year.
I don’t write out of order-because I don’t preplot… I simply get up every day and ask-what happens next. But that doesn’t mean I don’t go back and take out scenes on revisions…because prewritten or not- some scenes just don’t work.
Like you, I save them away in a clips file…I mean, you never know. 🙂 Cheers.
Like Nancy, I don’t write out of order either. I’m an organic writer.
I’m going to a get-together with WisRWA members at a library about an hour away. Lori Handeland, Liz Kreger, Shari Anton and a few others will be there. It would be fun, though we’ll have to drive around Milwaukee during rush hour.
Another member is coming to pick me up. In case she comes in my house, I have to vacuum.
Hi Nancy and Edie,
Usually, I don’t write out of order, either. Like you, Edie, I consider myself an “organic” writer. Each scene grows from the ones before it.
The book I’m writing/revising now, after I wrote the first three chapters, I decided to try something different, and I fast-drafted any scenes for which I had vague ideas for NaNoWriMo, I think it was 2 years ago. Then I put everything away to focus on other projects (Penny’s). When I went back to this book, I’d hoped that having those NaNo scenes (one of which was the love scene I talk about in this post) would help write the book faster. Not so! However, I’ve been amazingly surprised at the number of scenes I fast-drafted out of order that have remained in the book, albeit after heavy revising.
And, I must say, this is the first book I’ve written where I have a lot of confidence that the ending scene that I’ve already drafted will remain basically the same, just more nicely written. Usually, I have no clue what the setting, etc. of the last scene will be until maybe I’m up to writing 2 scenes previous to it. 🙂
So…my experiment was helpful in a lot of ways. And…this book has a mystery component, so needed more pre-plotting than I usually do when I write.
The thing about NOT writing out of order, my usual process, is I rarely have to eliminate a scene. Because they’re organically grown from the preceding ones.
I don’t know that I’d ever try fast-drafting chunks of a novel again. Like I said, it hasn’t made writing the missing scenes or revising the drafted ones any faster. But it does give me a feeling of confidence that the book will turn out pretty much how I wrote the original synopsis.