Updates

This week has been pretty good.  Scholastically, I’ve had two (well, three) midterms, a paper, and other assorted homework.  I managed to pull it off surprisingly well, and now I feel like I have a bunch of free time.  Yay!

I still seem to be in a rough spot, though, with my writing.  It’s starting to appear that this “rough spot” is more than a minor bump.  I don’t know what it is exactly–maybe I’ve overextended myself, maybe I’m just not organizing my time efficiently enough (probably it’s a combination of both)–but I feel like I’m not writing as productively as I could.

It’s not a lack of ideas problem.  I’ve got tons of ideas for my stories.  It’s usually a daily thing where I’ll come up with a new idea for the plot of one of my stories, or a cool thing about the setting.  Thinking up this stuff is the easy part–it’s the writing that’s difficult.

In Phoenix, the trouble is that I’m coming to sections where I have to throw out 90% of what I’ve got so far and synthesize the remainder into something more workable.  That is a very daunting thing.  Yesterday, I only did about two pages before calling it quits.  Today I haven’t even worked on it at all.  Blegh.

Because I’ve been paying so much attention to that project, my other project, Hero in Exile, hasn’t got the momentum it needs to carry through the hard stuff.  I spent three hours of my free time today writing that novel, but in all that time I only got through 1,000 words.  That’s progress, true, but it was very slow and painful.  I don’t know why.

Ugh.  This lack of progress is getting to me.  It doesn’t help that the semester is half over by now.

I’m hoping that once I get through the current slow spot in Phoenix, things will pick up.  I was really surprised when I edited this one scene in like half an hour.  The scene worked largely as it was, I just had to polish it up, and in just about half an hour (or maybe an hour, I forget), I’d run through almost ten pages of manuscript.  Not bad.

I just hope the rest of the novel is like that.  Otherwise, I’m just going to have to start cutting stuff out.

In other news, almost all my friends have read The Hero of Ages, but I’m still in the middle of it.  It’s way good, though!  Very dark and depressing at this point, and most of the characters have almost given up, but not entirely.  Nobody ruin this book for me please!