Monday, January 03, 2005
I am near to wit's end with Chapter One, which, if nothing else, bodes ill for Chapter Two. Daughter of Hounds is hardly begun; this sort of crap is usually reserved for Chapter Three, at the earliest. I'd hoped to have Chapter One done by New Year's Day, so that I could set the novel aside long enough to attend to other projects (a Marvel script, revisions for To Charles Fort, With Love, etc.). Now I feel like I have to hang on to DoH until the words start to flow again and see the chapter through before beginning anything else. If I stop now, the gulf between me and what happens next will only grow that much wider.
I'll try to write today. For the time, I'm sticking with the original plan, to devote this chapter to Emmie, Deacon, and Sadie (in that order), then move back to the central character introduced in the prologue. If left entirely to my own devices, I'd write this book another way. But I fear it would lose impatient readers who've been coddled by "easy reads." In the past, I've had people complain because I'll spend a chapter on a character, then switch to another character, then switch back, and so on, claiming this made for a story which was "hard to read." It's difficult to fathom the lack of reading comprehension such people much possess, much less how little experience they must have had with novels. I want to build vast machines of light and darkness, intricate mechanisms within mechanisms, a progression of gears and cogs and pistons each working to its own end as well as that of the Greater Device. That's what I see in my head. But, too often, I sense that many readers want nothing more complex or challenging than wind-up toys. It's dispiriting.
Yesterday, despairing and aware of my infidelities, I wrote the first eight pages of the "winter" manga I'm doing with Leh'agvoi for Nebari.net. There's no denying the guilt at ignoring the novel for fan fic, but, on the other hand, I enjoyed writing those eight pages of script, and these days it's a rare thing when I can say that I've enjoyed writing anything. They were written for me, for me alone, with no regard for any imagined, necessary, longed-for reader. Just me telling a story to myself (and if others want to listen, that's cool, but it was still for me). There may be writers who imagine or inisist it should all be this way, that an author should never set about her work with anything less than absolute passion for the task at hand. I admit, that would be wonderful, but it has not been my experience. Anyway, that's what I did yesterday. Late last night, I read "Mercury," found an annoying number of typos that should have been caught in the proof, then read another couple of chapter's of the Shirley Jackson biography.
It's a good thing I can write, because I obviously can't count. As has been pointed out already, my list of the Seven Virtues of Writing was eight virtues long.
I am scant hours away from having DSL again. Some days, this dial-up thing has driven me half mad.
Okay. I've realized I have nothing else to say. I'm only stalling.
1:17 PM
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