Flip it, flip it, flip it. Like a pancake. In other words, TURN IT ON ITS HEAD.
Right now I’m plotting a scene where O (O is short for Olesya, TUBE’s main character) is calling the hospital in Moscow to find out if her mom has died (everyone is telling her that, but she refuses to believe it).
Before I write down a single word of this scene, I think about major plot points, then I block it out, then I write it.
Read MoreYo my loves, how is it going? So I have bad news and good news for you. I’ll start with the bad news.
March 17th for TUBE launch isn’t happening.
The deeper into Draft 8 I go, the more I realize that I don’t know squat about the structure of writing a novel. The more I try to force it out of me, the more I see that forcing won’t do squat either because I have to break my bad habits of just writing by the seat of my pants (journaling, which is how I started writing).
Read MoreIt's here! It's done! It's ready for you to feast your eyes on and wonder what hellish hilarity it has inside! Because it has. I'm into revising Act 2 of TUBE, and I think by end of May I should be done with the whole thing.
I suppose I should ask you if you want your words to appear on the back of the back cover, as quotes. So I'm asking you. Let me know if you want to beta read the final draft and send me a quote or two. I don't guarantee that I'll pick your quote, but I might. It will be anonymous, in the section called "From readers," just like on my other books, unless you want your name listed there. Or, actually, do you think it'd be a great idea to list names? Thoughts?
Read MoreIt's scary to go by your gut when you hardly have experience writing and consider yourself a rookie and tend to look up to the masters and doubt your every decision and agonize, agonize, agonize. You really start to bloom when you stop agonizing, and you don't stop agonizing until you learn to trust your gut. And that is very hard. How can you trust it when there are all these other writers who know better? You think they know better because they've been writing longer than you, they wrote more books than you, better books than you, and so on. You can drive yourself crazy thinking these thoughts.
I'm certainly nowhere near trusting my gut fully yet, but it comes in waves and it happens more often. The latest test of that trust is happening right now in the shape of me hacking and slashing and cutting and ripping at the second draft of TUBE whilst making it into Draft 3, which is resulting in prose that is so lean and minimal and bony that it makes me scared, and yet somewhere in the darkest farthest corners of my gut I feel that what I'm doing is right.
Read MoreI'm writing again, at last, and many things are new. The calm is new. The lack of anxiety is new. It's weird. I don't know where it's coming from. I no longer force myself to produce 2K words a day, though I count daily words still, as a way of giving myself an idea of how much I wrote. I write about 5 hours a day, roughly from 9AM till 2 PM, and for the first time I'm writing into a new clean file, occasionally glancing at the old file for Draft 2. It's curiously liberating. I don't have to adhere to the old structure nor do I have to write over old stuff and fix it. I can write fresh.
This is something, I tell you. I'm loving it. At the pace I'm going, this draft should be done in about 2 months, and it will need one more draft (to polish it) before publishing. I'm cutting out A LOT and simplifying A LOT. So far 89 pages are gone, and I'm only on page 31.
If you want to read my daily writing, pledge $1 per month on Patreon, and voila! YOU WILL BE PLAGUED BY NIGHTMARES. So here it is for you, the opening.
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