A New Chapter

I started work on Chapter 21 a few of days ago and it is coming along. I struggled along at first, rewriting a section of what had been Chapter 19 in the previous version. I'm still sawing away at that section.

I made some changes yesterday that seemed to help. All I can do is blunder forward.

The Story of Chapter 20

Okay, so I've been rewriting and writing Chapter 20, and I pulled it up on Google Docs on Wednesday with an eye toward finishing it up. Anyway, I pull it up and scroll down to the last line line and think to myself, "What comes next? What comes next?" And then I looked at that line again and realized that it was finished.

Except that it isn't. It's still just a draft. It's a decent draft, but it needs polishing. It is also a tiny thing, barely more than a thousand words, and I suspect that the polishing will mostly involve spinning out some of the notions already extant in it at greater lengths. (This is something that is often true of my initial drafts. Most writers spend their time cutting. I end up expanding.)

The problem that I find myself faced with now is one of deciding whether to start this revision right away or perhaps soldiering on through the rest of the new ending first and going back to revise the whole section once that's done. I'm not sure. Both approaches have their plusses, and I have to assess which method will serve the book better. My guess would be that pressing on is the most likely winner, but I never know until I find myself at work on something.

Part of the fun is in the surprises.

I'd Rather Be a Percolator Than a Drip

Chapter 19 is done. It took a little over a month. It came out a decent size and accomplished what I wanted to accomplish.

Now, on to Chapter 20, which is such a substantial rewrite of a portion of the previous draft that it will be like starting from scratch. I doubt I'll have time to start it until Monday, which gives me the weekend to ponder it and let it percolate.

My only regret in all of this is that I have to write on the sly, in moments both stolen and cribbed. It would be nice to be able to concentrate on it and to enjoy each small victory to its fullest. Writing well is difficult. This has become a truism among its practitioners. However, the counterbalance to that, the thing that encourages you to pull yourself off the mat after each time you've been decked, is the sublime satisfaction that comes from getting any part of it--a sentence, a phrase, a word--absolutely right.

I don't get much chance to savor the victories right now. Each one comes amidst a blizzard of other obligations and priorities. The satisfaction is still there, but it is truncated and worried. There's always one eye turned toward the next step, the next challenge.

And the only way to deal with that is to, from time-to-time, stop and ponder and let it percolate.

Westward Leading Still Proceeding

Actually, I'm not headed westward at all. No, we're all headed east, spinning like a screwball across the strike zone of space. Or maybe not.

The point is that I am still making progress on Chapter 19. Patches of it come blurting out every few days, and I spend the days in between fixing that which gets blurted out. In other words, I'm rewriting as I go along.

It seems to me (and I haven't made too close a study of this) that I'm finishing chapters at about one per month. Given that trajectory, I should have a draft ready by Groundhogs Day, although such a deadline is not mandatory. The closest thing I have to a deadline is April, when the ten finalists for the contest sponsored by the Creative Writing Department at the university at which I work will be announced. Part of that step would be to submit a complete manuscript, which would mean having it done by then. Assuming that mine was one of the final ten.

In the meantime, all I can do is to continuing spinning eastward, always chasing the next morning.

You Gotta Have Faith

The rewrite of Chapter 19 has been proceeding apace. This is not one that has gone ahead at a gallop, but instead vacillates between a cantor and a crawl. That's all well-and-fine, and just part of the game.

The writing itself, I think, is going well. There is a kind of music to the words and a literary quality as well. The endless refining--Google Docs has tracked 303 changes--are making it, slowly but surely, better.

A large portion of the chapter takes place in a Catholic cathedral during a funeral. The problem that this has raised is that I want it to be authentic, but only remember so much off the top of my head. Research on the Internet has provided some info, but not everything, so I'm left to guess most of the time.

So now I'm put in the position of either doing direct research by attending a funeral or two somewhere in the Atlanta archdiocese, which seems a little creepy, or contacting a priest or two that I knew back in a former life. The second option might seem like the better one on its face, but that would involve explaining why I've lapsed and getting into a whole going-back-to-church-it's-never-gonna-happen-my-friend kind of thing.

Damn research.