When last seen I had only 17% more to go on draft 1 of the book, and it was fun. Now there's just 8% to go and it is not fun. I think my problem now is that 1) I realize that finishing means I am going to go over my word goal, so all these percentages mean nothing, and 2) what's left is hard.
I haven't been writing in chronological order, so I am writing the post-middle. These things still need to happen:
She needs to hit bottom. She needs to be Scarlett after her mother's dead and her father's deranged, but still before she declares she'll never be hungry again. Circumstances have put my heroine at the bottom, but she hasn't faced it. Because I haven't written it. Because I don't wanna. Even if I give myself permission to write a really crappy version, I still avoid it.
She needs to cover a lot of time. The beginning covers three months, the next section covers days, this part I'm writing now covers ten weeks, and the last section tears along over a weekend. In this last ten week bit either I have to detail what she does every day, yawn, because she does very little except try not to starve, or I have to summarize it all and I think that makes things too easy on her. I suppose I need to find a balance.
She needs to get out of a hole. My girl is on the street and I have to get her fed by bartering off a pair of shoes, two dresses, soap, two spoons, a fork, and a knife. Oh, and damnit, a deed to a farm. That means she could sell the farm and get out of her jam, which would be an early end to the book. Now I need to go back and put the deed in the husband's pocket again.
(Moments later) Done. The bastard takes the deed when he leaves. That wasn't so hard.
Anyway, I realize now that I can still fill in the shift away from the dark night of the soul, when things take a turn for the better. But after that 3% there will be no escape.
As God is my witness, this thing will be finished Thanksgiving week.
Maybe vignettes where she crashes against new lows or has a realization of how lousy her realities are? (like when other people refer to how sick you're looking or how terrible something is, you face it down again if you'd been sort of... acclimated? Or when you find yourself doing something *absurd* but necessary and have the gallows-humor reaction to it? Or when your "at leasts" are really *sad* at-leasts and then one gets broken? [i.e. when I said, "well, at least I haven't blacked out for a couple of years" when that status is exclusively because my lifestyle is tuned to 1. avoid getting near to blacking out through a variety of frankly ridiculous measures, and 2. when I notice I am starting to get dizzy, I rapidly sit down on the floor instead of arriving there non-consensually... and then two weeks later I did black out cold, floor was a surprise, all that jazz.)
I guess, a compare/contrast (her remembering Former Life Instance while dealing with Current Life Instance) or external observers that shock her back to realization, or "well, I may eat from a plate of someone's leftovers after trimming off the part they bit from, but I'd never..." "oh, wait, here I'm doing the never because there wasn't anything better and I'm hungry enough..."?
Good luck.
Posted by: KC | November 12, 2021 at 11:45 AM
KC - I think I'm just going to charge in to it and do a bad job, only so I can turn it around the next day. Because that's what Jerry did wrong, he did a bad job just to get a draft done and then died before he could improve it.
Posted by: TheQueen | November 12, 2021 at 09:20 PM