Writing Log: 9-15-09

Well, if anything, today was worse than yesterday. Wrote for a little over one hour, starting chapter 1 from scratch. Produced a whopping 676 words. Don't feel really great about them, either.

Two things have happened.

First, I decided that the setting that I was using wasn't quite cool or different enough. I've had some interesting concepts worked out for some time now and I thought that if I was going to write a novel, I should put those ideas to use. Who knows when someone else might incorporate really similar ideas into their own novel? (Don't laugh, it has happened to me before.)

This decision caused a ripple effect, distracting my attention from the story and making me uncertain about how to describe certain details of environment and place.

Second, I came to the realization that stuffing the Awakeners and the city-god Okanos into the first three chapters was overkill when they don't resurface in the story at all. At the same time, the Faerie are mentioned only third-hand, yet a Faerie artifact plays a key role in the ongoing story.

So it makes more sense to slot the Faerie into the scenes that once involved the Awakeners, so that the reader only has to grasp one new culture, not one and a half, and will learn something about a civilization and its magic that matter to the later events of the narrative.

Unfortunately, as I noted yesterday, this means blowing up several already completed chapters. That means that thus far this week has shown negative progress: I've actually dumped more words than I've written.

Possibly as fallout from this, my confidence in the story outline and the story itself has taken a hit. Maybe the smart approach is to try and write short stories, but I just don't think much of the short stories I've already written.

It all comes down to a continuing crisis of confidence combined an ability to come up with ideas that I have trouble applying. I want to write something that really interests me, something that I'm impressed I could come up with. And it's damned hard.