Listening to: Hybrid’s new album, Disappear Here. (Extremely worth it, BTW.)
Drinking: Crystal Light (giving coffee a rest)
Working on: WIP4, YA UF, untitled at the moment
And here I am, about halfway through the early planning stages of The Next Big Thing. It feels good. There’s still a lot of work to be done before I feel confident this plot will hold water, so to speak, but it’s turning out fairly interesting, if I do say so myself. And I’ve always wanted to try my hand at YA.
Now I just have to not screw it up, right?
Beginnings are delicate things for me. I bitch and moan about the middle, because that’s where my subconscious takes the wheel and I’m left twiddling my thumbs while I wait for it to sort out all the stuff I’ll need to use at the end of the book… but beginnings are all conscious effort, and probably too much of it at that.
Does this first paragraph have enough hook? Will this first chapter be enough of a character intro while giving enough of a sense of the world? Does that town name sound vaguely phallic, or is that just me? How many new people can I introduce in one scene?
Oy.
If you’re thinking I overthink most things about this process, you’d be right. There’s a reason I use Write Or Die so often: self analysis is useful at many points, but mid-creative process, not so much.
So, Write or Die it is: once a day I pull up that wonderfully cruel program, paste in the last sentence I was working on, and give myself 30 minutes to come up with X amount of words under the gun. Red flashy screens, loud noises and the occasional threat of deletion (word deletion, that is, not Amy deletion: there’s no Kill setting that I know of) may not be serious threats, but they’re enough impetus to keep my head out of the process for at least a little while.
Yay for beginnings!