Man, I am sick.\u00a0 It sucks.<\/p>\n
I’m also at a low spot in writing this novel.\u00a0 That sucks too.<\/p>\n
When you get towards the last third of the book you’re writing, you start to have doubts about the whole project.\u00a0 Is this really any go0d?\u00a0 Is the story really holding out?\u00a0 Things slow down a lot, and you lose most of the enthusiasm that carried you through the first half.\u00a0 The daily drudgery of writing becomes harder and harder, and pretty soon you can’t see beyond the chapter you’re presently writing.\u00a0 It’s not a whole lot of fun.<\/p>\n
Then, as you get into the final stretch, the ending comes into sight and you start to regain a little bit of the enthusiasm.\u00a0 Your goal isn’t too distant, and you start to see how things wrap up to bring you to that final climax and ending.\u00a0 You find yourself believing in the story again, and excited to see it to the grand finale.<\/p>\n
Of course, the actual writing gets harder and harder, exponentially, right up until the last page, but you’ve regained the motivation and you have at least a portion of the drive.<\/p>\n
Right now, I’m kind of at the low point.\u00a0 It doesn’t help that school is starting to get busier, too.\u00a0 It certainly doesn’t help to be sick, even if it does give me more time around the house (man, I need to get out…I need to get out…).\u00a0 But I’m almost at the end of the second act–one climactic battle, one huge and tragic development, one major try-fail cycle, and then I’m on the final stretch.\u00a0 I’m currently at 64,250 words, so I should wrap up part two by about 68k and finish up the novel at around 100k.\u00a0 Perhaps a little longer, but I don’t think part three is going to be much longer than part two.<\/p>\n
One of the major doubts I have about this novel is that it’s too predictable.\u00a0 All of my readers from English 318 have been making their predictions, and…really, most of them are correct.\u00a0 In fact, they’re correctly predicting stuff that happens WAY later, stuff from part three that I haven’t written yet.\u00a0 If this story doesn’t have any surprises, I worry that it might not be as good.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, it has some ideas and concepts that are really drawing in my alpha readers, particularly with the Hameji.\u00a0 Over and over again, that’s the comment I get–they want to find out more about the Hameji.\u00a0 This is something that might help me to carry the book, even if it is a bit predictable: show this barbarian spacefaring culture at their most brutal, make them the key antagonists, and then slowly humanize them until the readers understand exactly<\/em> why they do what they do, and even come to agree with them.\u00a0 That is pretty fun.<\/p>\n So we’ll see how that goes.\u00a0 In the meantime, I’m going to go to bed early–9:30 or 10:00.\u00a0 This sickness is just killing me, and I don’t know of anything more effective at curing it than sleep.\u00a0 G’night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Man, I am sick.\u00a0 It sucks. I’m also at a low spot in writing this novel.\u00a0 That sucks too. When you get towards the last third of the book you’re writing, you start to have doubts about the whole project.\u00a0 Is this really any go0d?\u00a0 Is the story really holding out?\u00a0 Things slow down a… Continue reading Ugghhhhh…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[68],"tags":[108,88,42,8,39,100,599,77],"class_list":["post-466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsh","tag-climax","tag-doubts-and-fears","tag-frustrations","tag-writing-in-general","tag-schoolwork","tag-the-hameji","tag-thoughts-reflections","tag-three-act-structure","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s7iXK-ugghhhhh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":467,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466\/revisions\/467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}