Monday, September 19, 2011

A New Obsession on My New Toy

Hello, lovely readers. Happy Monday!

Ordinarily I would cross out the happy because I almost always come down with a serious case of the Mondays each week, but today is a special day.

Via someecards.com

That's right. It's my birthday. I have two rules on my birthday. I am not allowed to get angry (deep breaths and pushing it to the back of my mind might make me explode tomorrow, but not today!) and I am allowed to repeatidly request that other people do what I want because it is my birthday. Maybe I go too far (I've said "Please, it's my birthday 4 times today and it's only 10:30) but it's one day a year and screw you if you don't like it.

So this weekend, I received a laptop from my wonderful and newly employed boyfriend, hereafter referred to as Boyfriend. Unfortunately, I have to wait for my discounted copy of Microsoft Office (Boyfriend's company has AMAZING perks like discounted software) so I went ahead and downloaded Storybook, which I heard about through another writers blog, forgive me that I forget who told me about it.

3 hours later, I still hadn't made any forward progress on editing Arieties (which I have saved in portions that I can access online) but I was having so much fun playing with Storybook that I didn't even notice. See, when I write, I'm a Pantser. You tell me to plan out a story and I'll give you a detailed outline that ends up in the bottom of a drawer somewhere probably never to be used. But if I have an idea that I let marinate long enough to have a substantial beginning, middle, and end, I'm on it.

My problem is, once I get everything written, I have a hard time tackling 80,000 words to edit it down into a coherent manuscript. My mind is very methodical and I like organizing things out, just not when I'm writing. Now, I already see weaknesses that I missed on my first two edits and plugging in a story thread gave me a totally new direction to take a portion of the plot (not the whole plot but it clears up one of the weaknesses). I'm kind of a little bit obsessed.

My only issue right now is that I have a job that I need to pay my billz and it's totally getting in the way of my storybook time. Do you think my boss will accept the "It's my birthday" excuse?

Yeah, me either.

How do you get through editing walls?

1 comment:

  1. My best way to get through editing walls is to give it to someone else to go through. I know it's a bit of a cop out, but there you go. I've also found lately that reading it out loud (to someone or yourself) like you might at a book reading really helps me decide what to get rid of and what to keep. Hope that helps!

    ReplyDelete