Some weekends are more productive than others, and sometimes I end up being more productive than it seems like I was at the time.
This was one of those weekends when I felt like I wasn’t accomplishing much with respect to my writing, but when I look back on it now it wasn’t so bad. I wrote, revised and polished a review for Cemetery Dance, wrote 4/5 of my next Storytellers Unplugged essay for tomorrow and finished the first draft of the short story I’ve been working on for the past week or so. On Friday I had 1500 words and as of this morning the final count was 4200. Beyond writing 2700 words, I did a lot of editing to the first 2500 words. In fact, I sort of got stuck in a loop. I’d go to the top of the document, edit my way through to the place where I’d left off and then get distracted by something else. When I went back to the story, I went back to the top and ended up in the same place again. I did this several times over the course of the weekend.
I allowed myself to be distracted by such things as football games and Sunday night television. After Grey’s Anatomy, I went upstairs to check e-mail and finally found the inspiration to write another 700 words. Then I went to bed, and suddenly my head was swimming with the rest of the story. Not only the general course of events, but sentences and phrases that seemed right to me. I got up, grabbed the spiral notebook from my nightstand and wrote by hand nearly four more pages, which I transcribed and revised once this morning.
The story is now in the hands of one of my first readers awaiting feedback. I have no doubt I’ll revise and edit it several more times, but I need to put it to bed and move back to Missing Persons. I had a terrific, inspiring hour-long talk with my agent about the book on Friday afternoon. His main criticism of this draft is that there are four threads that go off in their own directions and are resolved or not without ever tying together. I can see his point, how the book would be much stronger if I manage to weave these threads together into a more cohesive tapestry. He says the first 200 pages are rock solid, so now it’s mostly a matter of wrestling with the last hundred or so pages to see if I can implement some of the ideas we bandied about. I’ve noticed that I tend to get in a rut with this book, like a record needle in a groove, where I find it difficult to bounce out of the track in a new direction. This is the way the story goes, the way it has gone for the past couple of years, and now I have to think about it in different terms.
I encountered a similar experience with The Smell of Fear from the Corpse Blossoms anthology. The story had been around for a couple of years before I sent it to the Sevins, so it was firmly entrenched in my mind. Then the editors came back and asked me for some changes and I had to wrestle myself out of my mental conception of what the story was. Maybe this is something that will get easier as I work with editors more. I hope so. It hurts my mind sometimes.
