More time, less words is exactly opposite of my plan, but yesterday, that’s exactly what happened. I made very little progress on my word count for this book, but I did make progress. I don’t like rewriting stuff, but that’s what happened with the scene where I’d like to just ax everything and start fresh (but that’d mean losing 35,000 words and some of them I don’t actually want to lose).
I didn’t ax it, and I tried to avoid rewriting sentences in the vein of just trying to make things sound better, because that wasn’t the kind of rewriting it needed at all. It was about the scene itself. It’s just never really worked for me, and I gave some people some additional dialogue, tried to clear up some actions and movements, and stuff like that.
I’m actually still going to be working on this same scene this morning, at least for a bit, because I still need to finish that part up. I’ll be expanding a bit on an element I ignored so that I can tie things up at the end of the book. Honest to God, I don’t actually know what this is yet, and that’s why this is dragging so bad, but I’m going to come up with something if I have to gut this damn scene. (I’m actually very close to the end of this book, I think, but this scene takes place 35,000 words before where I’m at with the writing. If I don’t want to have to drag out the ending to clear all this stuff up, I need to set something up here so I can more easily deal with it there.)
Maybe I should just say I tried to fix the scene to do more of the things I want it to do—even if I don’t know what those things are yet, because I definitely didn’t go at it worried that the writing was bad, except in the sense that the actual scene didn’t read right to me. It doesn’t carry its weight and doesn’t do much but take up space, and yet it can’t be excised because it does have a purpose.
Gah. It’s all so hard to explain. Anyway, time to get to it. I have some enthusiasm going for the writing this morning and I plan to take advantage of it. I have one quick post to write about accountability and then it’s on to the writing. See you later for an update. :D