So the holidays kicked me pretty hard this year, and I don’t mean too much eggnog or cookies. As I mentioned in my post Setbacks and Forging Ahead, I lost 10 chapters to my work-in-progress Rule of Fire, the sequel to Born of Water.
Capturing all that writing before my brain managed to lose the file as well has been my focus for the last two weeks. Every spare second, I am writing. BUT, I’m happy to say that I’m half way through chapter 13! That means I’m only one and a half chapters from being back to where I’d been before my laptop decided to go loopy. And I actually like the way it sounds so much better now than the first run through. Writing those chapters again was like a primary run through combined with editing. The world and the characters traveling through it are so much more . . . rounded?
I won’t say the result is worth deleting whole chapters, but it does give me an idea. If I’m every terribly unhappy with a chapter, I think I will rewrite it without looking at the original rather than trying to do a huge edit off of something I don’t like. The end result will be much crisper, I think! Who knows, I might have to give that a try with Rule of Fire yet. I hated chapter 12 the first time through. This last version shows some improvements, but it could be better. I know it.
So this push to recreate what was lost is nearly at and end. I need to keep moving forward, but I’m also ready to expand my focus to other projects, like cover art, logos, blogging, oh and that marketing thing. For some reason hitting chapter 13 really lit a fuse under me to pick up the slack in all of my work. Just this morning I’ve worked on a logo for this blog, read some marketing tips, made edits to multiple profiles, and now I’m blogging! I hope to write some this afternoon and maybe work on a cover tomorrow.
I will admit part of what got my brain clicking and aligned with a desire to do something came from an article at slate: Do You Think Like Sherlock Holmes? Before reading that, I would say I had great focus. I don’t
watch regular TV (just Netflix no more than once a day), I’ve written several books, I draw, I built a house . . . I fill my time.
But everyone has some room for improvements I guess. Recently, even with the writing spree, I’ve been surfing the web before switching over to writing. Something which usually resulted in me staring at my open page and thinking about going and finding an article to read. Tsk. The article at Slate called me out. I’m not going to put a limiter on my computer (after the corruption that made me lose so many chapters, I won’t load ANYTHING for quite awhile), but I’m much more aware of what I’m doing and why. Which means, I’m working more and procrastinating less!
I didn’t do a New Year’s post, so I guess this one will have to fit the bill. Here is to a New Year and may it bring not only success, but well utilized TIME!