rowyn

I was thinking the other day (again) about how long stretches of free time don't tend to translate into lots of writing output for me. I get more done with a time limit, be that artificially-created with pomodoros, or genuine like carving out time . The toothpaste doesn't come out until you squeeze it.

(As writing metaphors go it's not the best, because right away I got bogged down in counterpoints like that you have to take the cap off first, and is equating fiction with mint-flavoured fluoridated detergent paste really the best path in the first place, blah blah ad nauseam...)

Anyway! My point! Is that once again, putting zero pressure on myself proved less successful than putting a little pressure on myself. I rested and gamed and incubated vague thoughts about the bits of my plot that were bothering me, but eventually the time came to acknowledge that I knew what to do and just had to push myself to do it.

I usually have at least one 'editing crisis' per book, and it's usually in the second half, when I decide to rework or entirely rewrite at least one whole chapter. This time the rework was some heavy-duty cutting and pasting, moving one scene quite a bit earlier and changing its POV, and then adding two chapters to play out a transition live that I skipped over the first time.

I've mused before about how with all the editing-as-I-go that I do, I'm not so much a 'pantser' as a 'knitter:' I can't proceed with the next stitch until I'm satisfied with the stitch before it, because the pattern is, in large part, being created live by those stitches. I do understand the appeal of all the advice to just write a horrible swiss-cheese first draft as fast as possible and fix it up later, and I'm sure that works very well for some folks, but I'm just not one of them.

All of which is to say that book 5 is proceeding apace, more apace in a busy September than it did during a leisurely-in-comparison August. I've got two major story beats left that I want to get to, and then it will be time for the final edits, cover agonies, etc. I'm letting myself feel a bit of excitement for the approaching high of releasing a new book, and in that spirit of excitement and with Halloween just around the corner, I want to share a snippet:


It's a protagonist's lot in life that everything happens so much... but some of the everything is good :-D