So I keep mentioning that Mark and I had great conversations in the car, but not telling you about them….let me address that.
Among the many things that twenty or so hours in the car leaves room to talk about, there is, of course, writing. (Because we can’t write in the car: might as well talk about it!)
I’m thinking hard about my writing. I’ve been immersed in Hobgoblin periodically, yet utterly estranged from it in between times. I have the sense that if I really sat down and engaged with it for an extended period of time, I could pull it together and make a great novel of it….yet when life distracts me away, it’s like it’s just dead to me. Forgotten.
I’m feeling the lure of writing new stuff, and resisting the urge. I don’t like to leave things unfinished. It feels flighty and unprofessional and immature.
Yet, at the same time, I have the contradictory sense that continuing to toil at something that doesn’t have life or energy is a waste of time, and ultimately will make writing feel like a chore, not the joy that it should be.
So, when I laid all that out to Mark, he started asking questions (as he does). He asked what it is I’m trying to do in my writing, what I’m trying to say. What this book is about. What my other books, and stories, have been about.
A theme emerged, as I thought about it. Something I keep wrangling with, story after story. It’s a theme I’m grappling with in my life, of course; and, having spent the last year really struggling with it, facing it overtly for the first time in my life–well, maybe the book I wrote last year just isn’t addressing it the way I’d address it now.
Interestingly, some of my earliest books (all unpublished, thus far…) took the issue on more overtly than my later efforts. I found myself talking a LOT about the Nightcraft books–the books about Callie, the witch from San Francisco.
I like that character. I’m sorry those books never went anywhere–but, just talking about them, I immediately saw that Callie’s story could be so much sharper, so much better told, so much better thought through….
….and, yeah, I’ve been spending the last few days envisioning a complete rewrite of Callie.
I wouldn’t even reread the old stuff, much less use it. It’s horribly overwritten, and poorly conceived, with a ton of world-building stuff that was just spackled in to cover plot holes, and characters doing things because it was necessary for the story to go where I wanted it to go, and villains being evil because, well, they’re evil and that’s what villains do; no, I think I’d just write a whole new story, with the essence of who Callie is and what matters to her. New plot. New setting, even. New situation. New conflicts.
I am ALL excited about this. New thoughts keep popping up. And yet I still have no idea what I’m going to do about it. I don’t know if I’m abandoning Hobgoblin (or setting it aside, or whatever). Heck, I might just go back and forth between the projects, if that seems to work. I don’t know!
What do you all think about the tension between finish what you start and work on what grabs you?
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This was all in the mental realm today; the day itself was filled with busy. Four loads of laundry; yoga class; swimming; orchid-watering; freelance work; email-answering; putting-away-of-things; manuscript critique for OryCon’s workshop; proofing a story for an upcoming Morrigan Press anthology; meal prep and cleanup and whatnot….you know. The exercise felt wonderful, but I’ll be sore tomorrow, I’m sure. And I don’t care. It’s just nice to be back in the routine.
I do so love being home.