Ok. I came home and futzed with this instead of the actual words. Oi.
I am so very happy with this one. It’s a keeper! The black bar, you ask? That’s the space my menu bar takes up on my desktop. It was irritating me to have my pictures cut off by it so I inserted a spacer, if you will. Pretty damn ingenious, no?
OK. Onward to actual writing. I swear.
In anticipation of finally dragging my ass over the finish line on the DLD draft, I decided to revamp the collage JB put together for me. It was something I could do at work, would not make me all verklempt, and had the bonus of getting me to really thinking about what images really represented where the story has gone and how I want to refine it.
So here is the rough that I did in MS Word at the office:
And here’s the Photoshop version:
This is by no means the finished product. I have a couple photos that need to be swapped out since I found ones I like better. But essentially this is a good representation of whats in my head.
Collage. Huh. Who knew?
Anyone else tired of coming here to check on my progress and getting only lolcats and freaking hilarious videos for your trouble? Come on, show of hands.
Yeah, me too.
I am making progress. It’s just been really slow going. I have a target of 50k words – and I’m only 12k away from completing my very first manuscript. I even have the remaining scenes broken out into a bulleted list covering the basics of “who, what, where”. I should be able to jot those words down with lightening speed now, right? Not so much as you’d think.
I’m about 4 words away from the Dark Moment, the stage of the story where everything goes to hell, with or without the handcart. I’m finding that it’s really difficult to write. Not because I don’t know what to happen or how to portray it, because that’s far from the case. I think it has more to do with wanting to get it right, make sure that the reader is as involved in the FUBAR as the characters and to do that I have to get involved in the FUBAR, too. Since I’m writing mostly at work, it’s been tough to write an emotionally charged scene, get all verklempt and worked up and then have to spin on a dime and answer the phone in a perky but professional manner. It ain’t easy.
So I’m trying to remind myself that this is the “don’t look down” draft. I need to get the sketch on the page. Period. Then I can go back and layer in the subtleties and stuff. Which, btw, I’m really looking forward to. It is so hard for me to not go back and start the rewrite now. I mean, I’ve got the ending plotted, right? I should be able to skip back to the beginning and begin the “beta” draft. Right?
Wrong. If I’ve learned anything through this process – and I’ve learned quite a bit actually – it’s that I need to finish the end, see what pops up that I hadn’t anticipated, before I can go back for the second pass. Kind of like finishing all of my dinner before getting dessert. I’m really looking forward to the dessert. Just need to get these veggies out of the way.
Keep moving forward.
obtw – My reward (other than a job well done) for finishing my manuscript is a new laptop. I’m having trouble deciding bewteen these two:
TinkerDell
thin is in
This alone should be all the motivation I need. Right? Oi vey.
